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Hannah
Arendt comes out: A queer-Arendtian collaboration to
understand reality and coming out
Johanna
Rothe
History
of Consciousness Department
University
of California, Santa Cruz
(USA
/ Austria / Germany)
Bringing together Hannah
Arendt's theory of reality and the cultural practice of
coming out, this paper is situated in Arendtian philosophy
and queer studies. Within queer studies, coming out is not
a popular topic. Arguably, this lack of manifested
academic interest stems from an inability to theorize
coming out in a way which adequately grasps its
intersubjective/collective and transformative character.
The concept of coming out
seems too heavily bound up in an uncritical understanding
of a self-contained identity. However, coming out is a
fact of life for too many people as that we could
translate our unease with this concept into a refusal to
deal with it in our theoretical (and other) work. Hannah
Arendt's theorization of reality as "something that
is seen and heard by others as well as ourselves", as
formulated in The Human Condition (1958: 50), captures the
intersubjective/collective character of reality very
forcefully. However, it fails to explicitly address the
fact that not all eyes and ears are equally powerful in
the constitution of reality, and that our abilities to see
and hear are structured, amongst others and to varying
degrees, by heteronormativity. In this paper I think
through Hannah Arendt's theory of reality as I think about
the meaning of coming out.
Engaging Arendt allows us
to theorize coming out as an intersubjective or collective
practice of transformation - a transformation in which
queer or lesbian (or other) reality is created through a
process of de-individualization. Conversely, if we take
the possibilities and limitations of coming out seriously,
we can hardly avoid complexifying Arendt's theory of
reality: We are forced to theorize a public which is
structured by unequal relations of power, and a reality
which comes in degrees.
Coming out is understood as
a collective cultural practice, situated in a
late-20th-century and early-21st-century transnational
context (involving at least Austria, Germany, the
Netherlands and the USA). It is characterized by an
evolving formation of heteronormativity, homophobia,
transphobia, and queer collectivities. My writing about
coming out includes personal anecdotes as well as
selections of journals and other literary production
published on the internet.
Rather than "applying"
Arendt's thought to the practice of coming out, I attempt
to stage a less hierarchical encounter between Arendt and
coming out by showing that as much as Arendt helps us make
sense of coming out, coming out helps us make sense of (Arendtian)
reality.
About Johanna Rothe
Johanna Rothe is a PhD
student in the History of Consciousness department at the
University of California Santa Cruz (USA). She grew up in
Austria and Germany and completed her B.A. at University
College Maastricht in the Netherlands. She was the
co-founder of the Maastricht LGBT student association
"Kaleidoscope".
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