The Penetrated Male

Front matter

Jonathan Kemp punctum books * brooklyn, ny

THE PENETRATED MALE © Jonathan Kemp, 2013.

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Introduction

1. The Madness of the Penetrated Body 2. The Limits of the Body

Acknowledgements

This book is based on a PhD thesis, and as such is greatly indebted to the insightful supervision provided by Professor Johnny Golding and Doctor Carolyn Brown. In addition, Pd like to thank Roy Woolley for his helpful feedback on the manuscript. Thanks to Matthew Stradling for permission to use his painting All Fours (1998, oil on canvas) on the cover.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my sister, Louise Kemp (1964-1992).

“The text is (should be) that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the Political Father” - Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

“Movement always happens behind the thinker’s back” - Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues

“Philosophy will always come in by the back door” - Derek Attridge, introduction to Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature

Introduction

“,..the man who does not feel his body will never be in a position to conceive a living thought...” - E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form” - Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

This book scrutinizes literary representations of the male body in what is perhaps its most estranged form: in the process of being penetrated. It does this both in order to suggest that penetration is a condition of modern masculine subjectivity, and to reclaim the male body as a penetrable body. It will argue that the submission by which masculinity registers within the socio-symbolic order is effected by a process of penetration that remainders the male body, marking it as waste and associating it with a pejorative femininity.

Taboos not only against anality and anal intercourse, but, by extension, against so-called passivity and powerlessness, come into play in our traditional understanding of the penetrated male body. Through the traditional cultural associations that exist between the concept body and the concept woman, the name feminine is given to any breach of the taboo against penetrating the male body. As will be shown, the chain of equivalences binding these two abject bodies significantly includes the notion of psychosis and waste. Through close readings of various texts from the period 1860-1947, this book aims to show how the penetrated male body figures as a site of ambiguity hovering behind the protocols of representation that govern its emergence.

THE POLITICS OF THE ANUS

Michel Foucault’s work on the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome has demonstrated how male-male eroticism was governed by a strict understanding that the penetrated partner was a non-citizen: that is, a slave, a woman, or a young boy. The civic status and political power of the adult male citizen was contingent upon his body remaining impenetrable, for it was understood that “when one played the role of subordinate partner in the game of pleasure relations, one could not be truly dominant in the game of civic and political activity” (Foucault 1992, 220; see also Dover 1989, 140-7; Boswell 1981, 50, 53, 184): to be penetrated was to cease to be fully human. This pattern was to re-emerge throughout Europe after about 1700, as Randolph Trumbach’s work on eighteenth century sexuality shows. The only remotely acceptable form of male-male sodomy became that performed by an adult male upon an adolescent boy, who was seen to exist “in a transitional state between man and woman” (Trumbach 1993, 255), and therefore neither fully male nor fully human. Trumbach’s research reveals a consolidation of gender difference taking place in the 1700s by which effeminacy became associated with anal passivity: “Adult men were deemed effeminate only when they allowed themselves to be sexually penetrated” (Trumbach 1995, 255).

By focusing on the penetrated male body, this book is thus not only highlighting the “repudiation of the feminine”! upon

' This phrase is from Jessica Benjamin’s The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination (London: Virago, 1990). She argues that the boy’s identity as male must which traditional, patriarchal and heterosexual masculinity is predicated, but is also making a claim for a reappraisal of masculine pleasure, reclaiming that body as something other than grotesque or unthinkable; it might understand the penetrated male body as something other than feminine, and feminine as something other than submissive, powerless and vulnerable. But how has it come to represent these things in the first place, if not through its interpretation by a perceptual system which always already equates these terms with a highly pejorative femininity, that is, a system of mimetic identification and conceptual foreclosure?

The finitude of the flesh from which transcendence is attempted through the traditional process of disembodied masculine subjectivity is clearly linked not only with death, but also with sexuality, desire, eroticism: le petit mort. Erotic submission is a limit-experience. In the words of Steven Marcus, “sex ... serves as a kind of metaphor for death” (Marcus 1970, 29). The dialectic of death and desire has a tortuous and tangled history in Western thought, and it is not my intention to map it here (see, for example, Bataille 1987; Dollimore 1997). But from late nineteenth-century sexological tracts through to Leo Bersani’s reflections on AIDS in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (Bersani 1987), the anus has been explicitly linked to death and negation, not least because it is the site of decay, the egress for waste matter. The anus is permitted a single function: ejecting, not receiving; it is a way out of the body, not a way in. In the Victorian homosexual pornographic novel Teleny, for example, penetrative anal pleasure culminates in literal death’. The model for a receptive sexual orifice within our thinking remains the vagina - and this despite that orifice’s own duality of functions. Yet, whilst D. H. Lawrence’s remark that “Sex is a creative flow, the excrementory flow is towards dissolution” (Lawrence 1961, 69) indicates the horror inevitably involve a rejection of the mother and all she represents and in this sense masculinity is a reactive process of dis-identification.

> Teleny’s authorship is attributed, in part at least, to Oscar Wilde. See Winston Leyland’s introduction (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1984).

of mixing these two flows, it ignores the excrementory function of the genitals. As Freud remarks:

Where the anus is concerned it becomes still clearer that it is disgust which stamps that sexual aim as a perversion. I hope I shall not be accused of partisanship when I assert that people who try to account for this disgust by saying that the organ in question serves the function of excretion and comes in contact with excrement ... are not much more to the point than hysterical girls who account for their disgust at the male genital by saying that it serves to void urine. (Freud 1977, 64)

And while Freud’s words still strike a revolutionary note, they are themselves couched in terms that serve to signal Freud’s anxiety over whether he himself might be accused of partisanship, accused of knowing subjectively the anal eroticism it is only his intention to explore under the rubric of an objective science. Rupert Davenport-Hines, commenting upon the media representation of AIDS as a punishment against homosexuals for “abusing their arses”, argues that:

Objectively the discrimination between penises and rectums is nonsense; given the greater horror that shit commands over urine in our culture, the distinction is understandable; but nonsense is still nonsense, whether acculturated, atavistic or adopted as an excuse for journalistic bullying. (Davenport- Hines 1990, 336)

Whilst the horror of shit is clearly central to the phobia surrounding sexual use of the anus, this book maintains that an equally nonsensical (though equally powerful) gender discrimination is at work, rendering the male anus a particularly problematical site of such anxiety. For example, the reference in some gay pornography to the male anus as a boy-pussy or man-cunt bears witness to a clear gender ambiguity attending the penetration of that orifice. Mario Mieli, an early gay liberationist, called passive homosexuality a form of feminine sexuality (Mieli 1980, 148), using an idealized concept of woman as the model for a more liberal sexual politics.

Guy Hocquenghem worked with a more usefully undifferentiated model of desire, derived from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. In that book, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the privatized anus symbolizes a more molecular approach to desire, the organic flows of the body more conducive to the amorphous manifestations of corporeal pleasure. They shatter the human body into myriad parts, and expose these parts to a multiplicity of sensations and intensities the overall experience of which results in what has been called the subject. For Deleuze and Guattari, subjectivity is the immediate residual outcome of bodily sensation.

The masculine subjectivity that has emerged within Western capitalist discourse is seen as the result of reducing bodily sensation to a programmatic model of procreative sexuality centred on genital differentiation. The penis transcends into the phallus, following the model of the privatized anus. Consequently, the phallicized penis is the only permissable site of pleasure on the male body. In this sense, a binary is established by which the penis is secondary to the concept of Phallus, just as the body is considered secondary to the mind. The anus is thus excluded altogether from the male libidinal economy, such that its erotic use immediately carries with it the threat of castration. Erotic investment in the male anus is hegemonically disavowed by branding its owners as symbolic women; a kind of castration is performed. Because “seen from behind we are all women’, because “the anus does not practice sexual discrimination” (Hocquenghem 1990, 101), the role of the phallus is to affirm sexual difference through its presence. As such, homophobia and misogyny, as Craig Owen (1987) has argued, serve the same social function, stemming from the same fear of the penetrated/penetrable body - which thus becomes an index of femininity. Taking its cue from Anti-Oedipus, Hocquenghem’s Homosexual Desire (1972) argues that the privatized anus, as employed in male homosexual intercourse, can assist in the battle against the entire armature of Western capitalist patriarchal power. Whilst similar in many respects to Mieli, Hocquenghem is far less humanist in his approach, preferring, instead of a unified notion of the homosexual, to explore the polymorphous potential of desire. In a later essay, for example, written in 1987, he states that “homosexuality is baroque, dramatic, it is an ‘effect’, not a principle”, claiming that the term expresses “a certain ‘attitude towards life’ rather than an ‘identity’”” (Hocquenghem 2000, 71), prefiguring one of the tropes of later Queer Theory (see, for example, the introduction to Warner 1993).

Hocquenghem argues for anal pleasure not as a specifically homosexual activity, but as a way of undermining all sexual categorizations. The symbolic role of the anus is pitted against that of the phallus, the latter’s private status correlated with the former’s function as the public marker of sexual difference. If “the body gathers round the phallus like society round the chief” (Hocquenghem 1993, 96), it unravels around the anus. Whereas only approximately half the population havea phallus, everyone has an anus, its universal possession overriding its privatized and individuated function. In Hocquenghem’s view sexual use of the anus is therefore revolutionary,’ not simply in terms of overturning sexual categorizations but also by undermining the economic sublimation equating faeces with money.

Along with Robert Mapplethorpe’s (in)famous photographs of gay fisting, and his self-penetrating self-portrait with a bullwhip unravelling like a demonic tail from his behind, the work of Mieli and Hocquenghem can be located within a geneaology throughout the 1970s and 1980s that worked alongside gay activism’s promotion of sexual freedom. The advent of AIDS, however, cast a shadow within which this discourse on pleasure became viewed pejoratively as highly utopian, if not downright irresponsible. By 1987, for Leo Bersani at least, the rectum had become a grave, once more a

>In a later essay, Hocquenghem declares, “Our assholes are revolutionary”. “Towards an Irrecuperable Pederasty”, trans. Chris Fox, in Jonathan Goldberg (ed), Reclaiming Sodom (London & New York:

signifier of negation, dissolution and death. In his essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?”, Bersani refers to the “seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman” (Bersani 1987, 212). Why intolerable? Why suicidal? And why a woman? This book offers a reading of the penetrated male body that suggests another way of seeing it - one which resists the noncontradictory nature of such identity thinking.

In Negative Dialectics, Theodor Adorno attacks identity thinking by arguing that: “objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder ... they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy”, and that this contradiction “indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived” (Adorno 1996, 5). In other words, it signifies a rupture between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’, a gulf or inadequacy between representation and the reality it claims to represent: a gulf of ideological mediation. Put yet another way, the nonidentical is a break between the singular and the multiple, the universal and the particular. In terms of certain contemporary thinkers, this gap or aporia takes on the names of pharmakon, differance, differend, even ‘poetics’. This book argues that the concept man remainders the body, as something excessive and wasteful, in the manner described by Adorno. It maintains that central to that denial of the flesh is the conceptual attachment of the body with woman, and the status of woman within binary logic as man’s other, resulting in men’s inevitable detachment from and domination of the body/woman/nature. Such detachment finds its apotheosis in the anxious impenetrability maintained by the German Freikorps, a vigilante military group who took it upon themselves to wipe out the ‘red terror’ of Bolshevism between the wars, and whose writings have been analysed by Klaus Theweleit in his two-volume work Male Fantasies’. The male body, according to this mode of analysis, must remain something impenetrable and unknown.

4 See Chapter One for an account of Theweleit’s work.

But such absolute detachment of the body is not possible, and the male body remains inherently penetrable, inherently knowable. By focusing on the penetrability of the male body - a penetrability, as this book shows, considered both fearful and fascinating - the texts analysed challenge this tradition of masculine impenetrability and detachment. In them, the male body is opened up in ways that open up masculine subjectivity, thus debunking the abstract conception of the male subject as unified and self-enclosed.

THREE SPECIFIC LEVELS

The book works with three specific levels.

1) the conceptual level. Primarily, what still characterizes most of our understandings of the male body is phallocentrism and phallogocentrism (Derrida 1987, 191), by which masculinist discourse insists on a binaric logic that subsumes the second term to the first. However critical of the role of the phallus such readings might be, the phallus remains the determining signifier within their economies. The constitution of discourse and sexual difference is still figured by the mark of the phallus. Kaja Silverman (1993) attempted to conjure up an alternative, non-phallic economy, within which to place and regard the male body, but was only able to do so by recourse to tropes of femininity. Challenging the phallogocentrism of traditional notions of masculine embodiment and the feminine paradigm of non-phallic alternatives, this book focuses on anality as another way of looking at maleness. It aims to do this by working on the metonymic register by which the penetrated male body is brought into focus as neither feminine nor psychotic.

2) the literary level. It will be argued that certain aspects of modern literature constitute the male body differently by marking it as a site of penetration. In the work of Schreber, Genet and Joyce this metonymic register finds its full expression as the male body opens up, presents itselfas defiantly penetrative. I want to suggest that these texts delineate a different

- non-phallic - genealogy for the male subject, by focusing on the penetrated male body. I will be considering this body not as the radical other of traditional Western masculinity, but rather as what David Savran calls its “pathologized double” (Savran 1998, 27); as that which lurks behind it like a shadow, though which is in no sense outside it. This pathologization will be shown as inherently coded with a debased and abject femininity that came into play most strongly towards the latter half of the nineteenth century, and which has only been placed under strutiny within the last fifty years.

3) the corporeal level. Why are the body’s openings so disturbing to the concept of unified subjectivity? And why is their penetration considered so dangerous? Is the closed body a result of the foreclosing of language, or is language modelled on the ideality of a safely closed body enclosing a safely closed subject? Can opening one open the other? Can the movements and flows of an opened body be represented, or does representation itself only function upon a foreclosure of such nomadic flesh? On this corporeal level, the anus functions as the behind - as that which cannot be seen, but which can nevertheless be known. In this way, the term behind will make clear the link between the crisis of masculinity and the crisis of reason. In an attempt to characterize a certain anxiety that is common to both corporeal and intellectual uncertainty, the full erotic charge of the term behind - as a homograph that binds together a corporeal vulnerability as well as an epistemological one - will be in play throughout the book. Indeed, writing the behind will be shown to be so inherently fraught with the dangers of this double entendre that the foundations of masculine discourse themselves are revealed as anything but secure. The male behind and its attendant cultural anxieties are linked here to the ‘behind’ of discourse, to what lurks behind, and thus, by extension, to analysis itself. For isn’t to turn one’s back, as Jacques Derrida remarks, both “a very amorous position” and “the analytic position” (1987, 178)? Notice he doesn’t say ‘a’ but ‘the’ analytic position. To analyse, to think, in other words, is always already to insist that in doing so thought invites an act of penetration which occurs behind the thinker. Amongst other things, this book wants to stress the anal in analysis. As such, it is concerned with the claim that thought is embodied, and that, moreover, such embodiment is first and foremost erotic - first and foremost concerned with the body and its sensations.

Given that concepts are often seen somewhat simplistically as belonging in discrete pairs, like animals entering Noah’s ark, belonging on either side of a boundary or division which poses them as not only opposites but also as fundamentally oppositional (a violent hierarchy) - what this book calls the logic of the either/or - then the challenge that such division is neither possible nor adequate gestures to another form of logic altogether: a logic of the neither/nor, a point I will develop throughout this book. The behind, registering as both discursive aporia and corporeal liminality, thus enables and articulates a thinking that moves beyond the either/or of traditional logic.

MOVING BEYOND THE ‘EITHER/OR’

What does it mean to move beyond the strictures of the either/ or logic that often obstructs critical thinking? How is such a move achieved? This concern is expressed by Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Kristeva who have begun this exploration of a logic that does not reduce to a position of either/or. Thisbookfocusesononeaspectofembodimentsofarignored or misunderstood within critical theory: that of the penetrated male body. Within the confines of a binary understanding of gender subjectivity predicated on sexual positioning, the penetrated partner - regardless of gender - becomes understood as somehow female/feminized. A discourse characterized by high levels of anxiety concerning the visibility of the penetrated male body will be shown to rely most on this feminine paradigm. But that is not the whole picture. As this book also shows, behind this discursively negative figure is another, and another. In other words, there are chains of equivalences that work against the metaphor equating the penetrated male body with femininity and psychosis. The restriction of the metaphoric association by which anus=vagina, or penetrated male body=feminine body, will be shown to be the stimulus for a poetics by which that metaphor is rendered unstable and illogical, exemplary of another form of logic. The use of metaphors such as flowers and suns to symbolize the anus, and the metonymy which links the anus to other openings in the body, all work towards destabilizing that traditional metaphor.

In the novels of Jean Genet, for example, it will be seen how flowers become metonymically linked to the penetrated male anus, suggesting a fertility at odds with the traditional characterization of anality with death. In Schreber’s Memoirs, the male anus equates with the sun, as well as with God, both cultural signifiers of the giving of life. Schreber’s submission to God’s will, and his subsequent transformation into a woman, are in order to create a new world, linking the penetrated male body to a Utopian dream. In Wilde’s Dorian Gray, the male anus equates with the ear and flowers, delineating a process of cross-fertilization centred upon the production or dissemination of discourse. For Wilde, masculine subjectivity is only possible through a process of penetration by which the male body is inseminated. In Baudelaire’s prose poem “Miss Scalpel’, the eyes become the entry point into the male body most vulnerable to such analogy. Here, the ambiguity of the gaze creates an uncertainty about subjectivity and penetrability that becomes the primary condition of his poetics. In A Rebours, Joris-Karl Huysmans offers the mouth as a way into the male body. In a move that renders the mouth and the anus interchangeable, Huysmans inverts the male body and disrupts the notion of a contained and stable self. In each case the anxieties surrounding the penetration of the male body will be shown to be part of a process that also includes fascination and pleasure. The conflict between anxiety and pleasure is focused, for the sake of this book, most intensely upon a body both abjected and desired.

Given that the notion of the abject developed by Kristeva names the process by which the human subject constitutes itself through ejecting the things it does not want to contain, how are we to understand the constitution of masculine subjectivity through denial of the penetrated body? These ejected things are characterized as waste and include, Kristeva argues, the experience of sensuality or jouissance attending the process of abjection. The reduction of anxiety that comes from the removal of those things considered horrific or abject thus comes at a price: all sensuality, all open corporeality, must also be reduced. In order to register within the symbolic order, masculinity must, of necessity, close the body down. As such closure is not possible, what Kristeva calls the semiotic lodges the body/bodily within the symbolic, outlawed by the protocols of representation, though by no means any less real for all that.

What I am calling the protocols of representation are the discursive or logistic terms by which the penetrated male body registers as somehow female; that is, it appears logically within a feminine paradigm. The chain of equivalences which bind the concept of woman to the concept of the body, and which mark the body as inherently penetrable, delineate a discursive field that implies masculine impenetrability. As Susan Bordo argues, “the deep associations of masculinity as active, constitutive (and self-constituting) subjectivity and femininity as a passive, ‘natural’ bodily state underlie the equation of penetrability with femininity” (1994, 288).

What constitutes the protocols of representation will be coterminous throughout this book with what Lacan calls the symbolic order. These protocols establish the terms by which representation registers as meaningful. As such, entry into the normative standard set by the symbolic order requires conformity to its protocols.

What happens, however, when such conformity is rejected? This non-conformity may take many forms. Whilst there is, undoubtedly, stigmatization through abjection, an expulsion from the body politic of those elements deemed worthless, there is also, within modernity or the modern particularly, such a high level of uncertainty over the truthfulness or usefulness of the symbolic order and its protocols, that this stigmatization itself cannot remain stable in its abjection.

As Kristeva points out, “abjection is above all ambiguity” (1982, 9).

The conformity of the either/or is challenged by the non-conformity of the neither/nor, a non-conformity which revels in wordplay, ambivalence and radical multiplicity, its suggestion of an unseen behind to every text. This ambiguity within the symbolic order’s primary tool (language) allows for play. Exposing and exploring this ambiguous play of language has been the primary task of the work of Jacques Derrida. In this book, this instability or play will go by the name of the behind. Poetics will mark or signify language’s ability to have a behind. As such, the poetics of the penetrated male body, it will be argued, allow for its reappropriation from the feminine paradigm imposed upon it by the symbolic order.

It is a conceptual excess that cannot be conceptualized in any discourse except through rupture. Put another way, the poetic emerges in the relationship between the commensurability of something and its incommensurability. Barthes describes it as “the violation of a limit to the signifying space” (Barthes 1979, 126). Foucault calls it the thought from outside. Lyotard calls it a differend. Derrida calls it many things: différance or ‘trace’, ‘pharmakon’, ‘hymen’, ‘supplement’, and ‘gram’; “a kind of general strategy of deconstruction” (Derrida 1981, 41, original emphasis). Sue Golding also calls this unsayable something a poetics, “a kind of dirty, bloody poetics, one which insists on, say, bodies and skin and smells and imagination in the face of it all” (Golding 2000, 286). For Golding, it is always dynamic, always political, always a risky and violent place to inhabit (Golding 2001, 52). It insists on a multiplicity or multi-dimensionality irreducible to the consolations of identity thinking and dialectical analysis.

This poetics, then, exposes the conditions of its own emergence at the risk of being rendered meaningless. It takes the substance of discourse (language) and uses it - not always knowingly or deliberately - to scramble discourse’s code, rearranging it into other patterns, other codes. It differs both from Aristotle’s use of the term as a form of textual analysis, and from Todorov’s use of it to name a form of structuration within textual practices. These uses of the term poetics seek to unveil or expose something considered hitherto hidden. They work with metaphors of the visible. The poetics I am attempting to articulate focuses more on how what is known is contoured by what is not.

Significantly, both the ear and the anus are bodily orifices that cannot be seen directly by the subject; they are not immediately accessible through the visual. Chapter Two examines Oscar Wilde’s use of the ear as a site of penetration upon the male body by which masculine subjectivity takes control, functioning, it will be shown, as a displaced anus. This metonymy of the body loosens the grip of metaphor, moving away from a logic of substitution towards one of contiguity. It is a poetic device that can be found operating predominantly in works of modern literature, specifically those examined here.

THE BEHIND

In Derek Attridge’s introduction to Acts of Literature he remarks that Derrida’s work is “more open to anthologizing and translation than most” (Attridge 1992, x, original emphasis), attesting to a certain slackness or openness within the Derridean text. Could this textual laxity have anything to do with Attridge’s confession a page earlier that his selection of material for the anthology “constitutes my singular response, at this particular time, to the many demands - imperious, pleasurable, unfathomable - which Derrida’s texts have made on me” (Attridge 1992, x)?

This confession attests to a relation between these two men in which one submits to the imperious, though pleasurable, demands of another. Similarly, Gilles Deleuze claims to have fucked the philosophers whose work he has penetrated. Explaining his process of writing about other thinkers, his strategy for getting them to say something other than what was generally assumed they were saying, Deleuze admits that the main way I coped with it at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own off-spring, yet monstrous. (1995, 6, emphasis added)

Furthermore, could this strategy of taking an author from behind be what Lyotard had in mind when, in Libidinal Economy, he prescribes a form of non-dialectical thinking the task of which is to “produce a philosophy of sodomists” (Lyotard 1993, 258)? And what is to be understood by Deleuze’s equation of the immaculate conception with buggery?°

This notion of philosophy as buggery also appears in Derrida’s The Postcard, where, contemplating a postcard showing a drawing of Plato standing behind Socrates, who is writing at a desk, Derrida writes,

I see Plato getting an erection in Socrates’ back and see the insane hubris of his prick, an interminable, disproportionate erection traversing Paris’s head like a single idea and then the copyist’s chair, before slowly sliding, still warm, under Socrates’ right leg, in harmony or symphony with the movement of this phallus sheaf, the points, plumes, pens, fingers, nails and grattoirs, the very pencil boxes which address themselves in the same direction. (Derrida 1987, 18)