Affect Theory and Homophobia

My question is primarily for Don Nathanson; my background is in the humanities, where Silvan Tomkins is just beginning to be read and integrated, and I've just finished reading Eve Kosofky Sedgwick's and Adam Frank's article "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins" (Critical Inquiry 21:2, Winter 1995), where the authors celebrate what they interpret as Tomkins's lack of heterosexism, the friendliness of his theories toward gay and lesbian readers (one of the authors is a noted writer in queer studies):

"Tomkins's resistance to heterosexist teleologies is founded in the most basic terms in his understanding of affect. A concomitant of distinguishing in the first place between an affect system and the drive sustem that it analogically amplifies is that, unlike the drives (for example, to breathe, to eat), 'any affect may have any "object." This is the basic source of complexity of human motivation and behavior' (AIC 1:347)." (P. 503)

However, the authors proceed to point out in a footnote: "His resistance [to heterosexism] is founded in [his understanding of affect], but is hardly guaranteed by them; it is sobering to see how effortlessly, in the absence of Tomkins's own care, the heterosexist teleology can make itself at home even in work explicitly based on his. An example is Nathanson's Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self, dedicated to Tomkins, that includes such passages as the following, inconceivable in Tomkins's writing:

"Just as most life forms can be divided into groups by their gender, mature individuals tend to form couples because of these sexual differences. Inherent in the system that causes us to be different on the basis of gender is also the force that creates attraction .... Sex refers to the passionate attraction between two opposites, to the active process that begins as the coupling of male and female, unites them in sexual intercourse, and results in procreation and the maintenance of the species. [P. 260]

"These are adults whose inner lives are the screaming face of an Edvard Munch painting, the hell of Picasso's Guernica, the nightmarish agitation of Leonard Bernstein's Age of Anxiety. These are the tortured men who sought surcrease in the bath houses that served as homosexual brothels but died horribly of AIDS. [P. 426]" (P. 503)

Not only does one of these passages appear to conflate the drive and affect systems in a homophobic return to something resembling Freud's Id, but neither seems therapeutically responsive to the gay and lesbian population. Are these authors being fair to you, Don? If given another chance, would you write these passages differently, in a way that affirms homosexuals' affects rather than shaming them as deviants?

Thanks,
John

• Tell me more by Don Nathanson, 5/28/98
  • Shame in the Cybernetic Fold by John R. Crary, 6/9/98
• Why the attack mode? by Sharon Willoughby, 6/1/98
  • Serious questions by Don Nathanson, 6/2/98
• Inventing Fallacy--Parts I and II by Jim Duffy, 6/7/98