Confessing Skeletons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po4mSUU15O4

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault attempts to complicate the idea that confession is a way to achieve freedom or liberation, claiming that we only see it this way because we have internalized the “obligation to confess” so much that “we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us” (Foucault 60). According to him, confession is always attached to a power dynamic, where the person who speaks (or does the confessing) is in a subordinate position while the person who listens (or does the exonerating) is in a dominant position. It is within this power dynamic, he argues, that sex is turned into discourse.

After thinking further about our class discussion and the What’s Underneath Project video, I was reminded of this video, which was released by the Ad Council at the beginning of March and almost immediately went viral. The premise is simple—two or three individuals kiss behind an X-ray screen, appearing merely as amorphous skeletons to an audience, and then literally “come out” and reveal their “true identities” to the audience before them. As they stand before the crowd, phrases such as “love has no gender” and “love has no race” come up on screen.

Although we might not immediately define these “reveals” as confessions, we can think about how they function similarly to Foucault’s conceptualization of confession. In class, we discussed how confession is fraught in terms of liberation and repression. As Foucault says, “confession frees, but power reduces one to silence” (60). The form the performance in this video takes is a perfect example of this, because the audience’s and participants’ feelings of joy and liberation that come with their “confessions” rely on the fact that the participants are initially hidden. When the first two “skeletons” who kiss behind the screen walk out and the audience gasps in delight, it is because they recognize that something supposedly “transgressive” has come to the surface. This becomes the pattern of the entire performance.

Additionally, it is clear that the audience (in this case in the seeing position rather than the listening position) holds the “agency of domination” (Foucault 62). The success of the whole project—and the success of the confessions themselves—depends on the audience’s positive reaction, their acceptance of the “truth” they see coming to the surface. One can imagine that the meanings constructed around gender, sexuality, race, and disability, would be vastly different if the audience had reacted with anger, or had walked away, instead of smiling and clapping. But the audience does respond positively, which seems to be wrapped up in an implicit argument about how progressive and accepting mainstream America has become. Meanwhile, much like the critique many have made about the need for queer-identified folks to “come out,” we can look at this performance as yet another illusive way of disciplining the normative by making a spectacle out of the relationships still viewed by many as “other.”