At Oscar Wilde’s
sentencing, Justice Wills, the presiding magistrate, claimed that the crime of
homosexuality “is so bad
that one has to put stern restraint upon one's self to prevent one's self from
describing, in language which [he] would rather not use” the feelings “in the
breast of every man of honor who has heard the details of these […] trials” (http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/wilde/sentence.html).
If Wilde’s love dares not to speak its name, then I am curious why the law
cannot name it either, even at the moment of Wilde’s punishment. Why is it
that, while the criminal species of the homosexual was being constructed
actively by sexologists, criminologists and psychologists, the law could only fail to state a judgment that would do
justice to the criminal aberration that queerness came to signify?
This piece will be too short to answer this question. But
the judge’s rhetoric at sentencing is illuminating for two reasons: (1) it
reveals that the law recoils from Wilde’s queerness even as it strives to
incarcerate his unruly body, and (2) it reveals that Wilde is rhetorically
positioned as irredeemable—that queers are, as a class, irredeemable before the
law. Justice Wills claims that “It is no use for […] to address” Wilde, for “people
who can do these things must be dead to all sense of shame, and one cannot hope
to produce an effect upon them” (http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/wilde/sentence.html).
This irredeemability is structurally similar
to a condition of fallen-ness, of sinfulness before God; Wilde is therefore a
being fit only for punishment, not for social rehabilitation; as a queer, he is
good only for spectacular punishment. Wilde must be made into a canvas onto
which an antiqueer society can write its judgments; his body must be made
available to their punishments.
It is because queer people are “dead to shame” that the law has nothing
to offer but its harshest punishments. Justice Wills imposes the maximum legal
penalty on Wilde, but concedes “it is totally inadequate for a case such as
this” ((http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/wilde/sentence.html).
Because Wilde’s love is unspeakable—unimaginable—Justice Wills is forced to
concede that no criminal sentence would be appropriate to remedy the violation
of law in the eyes of the law, because the crime is one that is shameless and
which the (queer) criminal is unable to be rehabilitated from. Queerness is
excessive to any criminal category; something shameful in the act of queer
loving is wholly irreconcilable with the justice of straight societies. We might
tentatively conclude then that queers are not ‘equal’ before the law at Wilde’s
trial, but are rather ‘vulnerable before the law,’ made available to the law’s
judgment in a way that straight people would not have to experience.
Your take forces us to go back to the Middle Ages. The so called "nefarious sin" -ie. sodomy- was deemed to be a "crimen inter christianos non nominandum", that is, a crime that ought not to be spoken or mentioned among Christians. For the Catholic authorities, sodomy was literally unspeakable. In Spain, for instance it was equalled was a crime of "lesa maiestatis": "the crime of violating majesty, an offence against the dignity of a reigning sovereign or against a state". We need to think about how Western Culture demonized Queerness to the extent that it did all the way to the present day.
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