OK. So explain what you meant so I'm sure I understand you.
>What I mean to say is it's about what people are thinking about race and
>racialization. I was trying to segue to the Zizek interview excerpt I
>posted. Maybe it didn't work.
Here's why Zizek (and I object to some of his ramblings in that piece -- intensely!) cannot be used to illustrate what Michaels is saying. The problem with talking about gay culture, Michaels says, is
"not that gay people are different from each other in the same way. (shag: by which he means that they do not all participate in gay culture such as bodybuilding) In fact, gay people are *not* different from each other in the same way.; they all have at least one thing in common: they're gay! Which is to say, they want to sleepwith people who belong to the same sex they do. Wearing boxer briefs may sometimes be a sign that you are gay, gay-rights activism may be a slightly more reliable sign, but desiring people of the same sex is not a sign; it's the thing itself, the thing that the boxer breifs and the gay rights activisms are signs of. So if we ask the question what is it that makes gay people gay? (what is it that constitutes their being gay? -- not what causes it?), we have an answer. We're not stereotyping gay people by saying they all want to sleep with people of the same sex; we're defining them."
This is just a further elaboration of Michaels litcrit argument: "against the idea that the things you do and the beliefs you hold can be justified by a description of who you are."
I don't think Zizek would ever make the argument that "desiring people of the same sex is not a sign; it's the thing itself." If someone thinks he would, I'd love to know more. Zizek is someone I'll read here 'n' there, but I have serious problems with his work, so raising the sign Zizek, for me, never induces in me some kool-aid drinking state that will make me say, "Oh my god! Zizek says the same thing. I was sooo wrong about Michaels."
And, in any event, Zizek isn't saying the same thing. Some of what he says overlaps, but he comes at it from a different theoretical framework, one that Michaels would probably find problematic given his argument that text can only mean what authors intend them to mean. Given Zizek's engagement with Lacan, declaring that the author is not dead hardly seems to be Z's schtick.
Shag