'Victims of desire' and other fragments toward a genealogy of the sexual subject: Rethinking the ethos of gay liberation discourse within the rhetoric of homo/hetero sexual distinction

This dissertation consists of a series of critical essays on moments in contemporary American culture through which I investigate particular ethical strands of gay liberation discourse. I am interested in these strands of gay liberation discourse insofar as they constitute a legible ethos of the (homo)sexual subject and, moreover, in how such an ethos might function to reinscribe homo/heterosexual distinction. My general aim is twofold: To demonstrate the way in which homo/heterosexual distinction is rhetorically constituted in particular contexts while exploring the ways in which select features of gay liberation ethos function to reassert such a fundamental distinction in these instances. Thus, the dissertation is situated squarely within the interdisciplinary inquiry into the sexual subject, particularly as it aims at a comprehensive critique of (gay) identity politics.; The project's critical essays are preceded by an introduction in which I discuss how my approach contributes to an emerging critique of some of the core ethical informed academic inquiry. The persistence of such a liberationist ethos in contemporary queer theory, I argue, forms the core of a relatively uncultivated theoretical dispute which deserves our further scrutiny.; The remainder of the dissertation consists of a series of critical essays, gathered together under three broad thematics of the "liberated" gay subject. In Part I "Victims and Saints," I trace the ethos of the gay subject as an always and already victimized subject through moments in academic, scientific and political discourse. In Part II "Geographers and Journalists," I trace the ethos of the gay subject as a "situated subject"--situated both in terms of its physical geography and its psychic locales--through moments in journalistic and educational discourse. Finally, in Part III "Soldiers and Sadists," I trace the ethos of the gay subject as a male subject through moments in discourses of masculinity, sadomasochism and power.