quotes about sexuality in another country by james baldwin

(212)ģAs the only character in the novel who rather seamlessly moves in and out of sexual relationships ( ostensibly without guilt, shame, or embarrassment), Eric has much to teach his friends as well as the reader. There were no standards for him because he could not accept the definitions, the hideously mechanical jargon of the age he had to create his standards and make up his definitions as he went along.

There were no standards for him except those he could make for himself.

His life, passions, trials, loves, were, at worst, filth, and, at best, disease in the eyes of the world, and crimes in the eyes of his countrymen.

He knew had had no honor which the world could recognize. Eric, an expatriate living in France, functions as the voice of resistance to oppressive discourses that silence and marginalize non-hetero sex and desire. The dangers of discourse are welldocumented throughout Another Country, as Baldwin roundly resists categorizing sexual practice and identity. Rather than exclude models of sexuality and sexual otherness in favor of the hetero-model, Baldwin moves sexual otherness from a position of silenced marginalization to the forefront of canonical literature, illustrating the confines of sexual identity politics and concomitantly revealing the gravity of race relations in America.ĢIn The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault suggests that, “Discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy” (101). Throughout the novel, Baldwin builds a mosaic of layered stories, allowing him to entertain competing and often contradictory ideas. Baldwin’s rearrangement of the unaccounted-for potential of attraction is a disruption of focused, one-directional sexuality and a challenge to socially constructed identities offered by the cultural discourse. By not “fixing” his characters’ attractions in a singular direction, Baldwin offers alternative, fluid, and flexible potentialities for sexual desire. Baldwin tells a story of sexual desire without form and in doing so, subverts socially prescribed notions of sexual desire as concrete, definite, and static. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”ġIn confronting the limiting confines of social construction, James Baldwin’s Another Country offers itself as a touchstone for the re-imagination of gender, sexual identity, and sexual aim. To claim that is what I am is to suggest a provisional totalization of this “I”. One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one’s own reactions are always canceling each other out…One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene.James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

Quotes about sexuality in another country by james baldwin