Queerness explained to my mother

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Content QUEERNESS EXPLAINED TO MY MOTHER by Diego Costa A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment in the Requirements for the Degree DOCTORATE (MEDIA ARTS AND PRACTICE) August 2015 Copyright 2015 Diego Costa 1 2 by DIEGO COSTA 3 Le Tombeau Ouvert: Matricídio, or Queerness Explained To My Mother “I am never more present to myself than in erotic relation (…) [T]he erotic in its materiality can only transpire in what philosophy calls the ekstases of temporality, in the nothing-but-nowness of the Now – in the ecstasies of music, dancing, play, and in what is called sex – in the ‘free time’ that is the very motility of movement, the very transitivity, of be-ing, in the time that is at once the impossible ground of the possibility of time and the surplus or excess of every constituted temporality.” William Haver, The Body of This Death “im so horny right now jus typing this stuff. Hahaha” 18c69e50ec3231958201cfee70107473@reply.craigslist.org 4 When I first moved to the United States to study filmmaking, my relationship to my homeland was filled with disavowal. It was as though if I were able to make art that was devoid of a national imprint I would, in turn, rid my body of its Brazilian-ness and the horrors of a queer childhood besieged by what felt like a set of decidedly Brazilian phallic obsessions. If there was no space in Brazil for my queerness, there should be no space for Brazil in me. That approach proved unsustainable and paralyzing. If I denied myself access to the very archive of images, words, and experiences that had spawned me into being, where was I to cull my ideas from? In order to embark in a film project that felt honest I had to come to terms with that which was undeniable about myself, that is, what had actually happened to myself. Or, rather, what had happened so that there could be a myself: the stories, the photographs, the recounted anecdotes and dreams passed on from generation to generation. What was left out, on purpose and not? This, it turns out, involved re-visiting, re-signifying, and re-enacting, the disgraceful elements that structured my personal narrative once I was asked to do something with all that symbolic inheritance, just not something else. Psychoanalysis, like filmmaking, proved to be as great a tool for making sense of the images that had become me. Both of these fields of knowledge and practice became intimately intertwined as my work progressed from the more strictly cinematic experimentation in 16mm film and domestic video ethnographies of my MFA years to the deeply theoretical musings on representation and sexual practices of my two-pronged PhD project. 5 Immigrating to the United States alone and at a young age got me stuck in a rather groundless position, but also a privileged one, as I was able to look back, or down, at “Brazil” as a thing separate from myself, Brazil as an image, and discover the qualities and textures of my own kinship to it. A similar process happened in relationship to the mother, whose physical distance enabled me to explore different positions in relationship to her, positions that respected my desire more so than the desire-for-myself that a child presumes the mother has for her child, and which is a necessarily dangerous misinterpretation. In the film, I reach back into images I had shot in my childhood, relentlessly aiming my Hi8 camcorder at my parents to unsuccessful demands that the child put the camera down, as a basis for present-day performances involving my real-life mother, spinster aunt, and their drag doppelgangers. In Matricídio, femininity is re-lived via psychodramatic reenactments. They are largely script-less, observational, and collected slowly through several years of filming -- like the brewing of a tealeaf, or any other process of aging, whose meaning depends precisely on the endurance of time, and whose nuances are borne out of the dead time that accumulates between one event and the next: “an unhurried crystallization.” 1 My approach was driven by filmic rules and constraints shared with the (non-)actors who were then allowed to play and speak back to the filmic rules themselves. This recipe aimed at making room for the excess of the film’s concepts without accounting for them in a calculated manner. I might ask my mother to speak about the happiest day of her life (when her mother and father took her to the doctor to have her throat operated on, it turns out), and simply watch what she does with the prompt. At 1 That is how Bernadette Bricout refers to an authentic encounter between lovers, which 6 times I simply film her at home, like an outspoken Jeanne Dielman of sorts, rolling pineapple candy or hanging clothes to dry while complaining, and laughing at, her domestic labor. When I film my aunt, an omnipresent figure in my childhood as a blond and more-permissive non-married double of my mother, I simply ask her to exist, eat, or open the window. Existing for her means taking care of the former family servant, Domingas, who she “inherited” when both of my grandparents died. Domingas was, essentially, a slave of the family since she was a little girl, later upgraded into the official title of “adopted sister,” finally becoming the inheritance nobody wants once her care- taking skills could no longer be put to good use. The interruption in the flow of what is inherited reveals a sense that to go off- script, to queer the family narrative, is to be stuck with an unwanted body lonely and drunk in a big apartment, as the aunt in the film, or dead, which is how my supposedly 7 queer(ed) uncles ended up before I was born. One, Mário, went swimming in a river whereas he didn’t know how to swim, and drowned. He was 17, right before external demands for heterosexual coupledom, and internal ones for whatever else, would have begun to arise, or to be rendered insurmountable. The other, Emerson, was arrested, tortured for joining the anti-dictatorship militia in the 70s, and eventually killed in a car accident. Living one’s life, with the coffin open (“le tombeau ouvert”), as the French say, and as Lacan himself lived, hasn’t paid off. Or has it? 2 The fact that my filmic position hasn’t changed from the inadvertent archives of family intimacy accumulated in my childhood, which work as the film’s spinal chord, to the present-day capturing of these performances of Brazilian femininity is nothing short of uncanny. The queer child is still there, obstructing his/her face with the cinematic apparatus, and while my mother was reluctant to partake in the film at first, the actors are largely cooperative in the making of Matricídio. Even the father seems jealous for occupying the mere margins of the frame – more so than for being portrayed, despite my best conscious efforts, as a disarmed macho in depressive hibernation. And while my face is effaced here too, it takes on a feminine persona – blonder, whiter, desired -- and is, then, not my face at all, or perhaps, too much of my face to actually count, or feel, as itself. 2 Moustapha Safouan recalls that Lacan “decided from the very beginning of his life to live with, as you say in French, 'le tombeau ouvert' – with the coffin open.” Safouan recounts experiencing an armed robbery at Lacan’s house when the two had an appointment. At that moment of crisis, Lacan allegedly told the robber, defiantly, “What do you want. My life? (…) If it’s my life you want then take it.” Safouan, “Interview with Colin MacCabe,” Zamyn, http://www.zamyn.org/interviews/maccabe-safouan/interview.html 8 A fundamental part of this process was to treat the present-day filming of these images with the camera as a kind of educated sponge, allowing the material captured to dictate its narrative. In this ludic game, the camera was to be an informed receptacle for what was before it. Like a cum dump, it accepted everything as if it could accept, and even invite, violence as a way to not be surprised by it, and only to release what it takes in -- although not without keeping a part of it inside the body, for one’s self. Like a token, or totem. A more premeditated sense of control was to be deployed only later, in the editing room: a ludic scene in its own right, and with its own tools for re-signification. This way of organizing the images, of producing them, aimed at taking the unconscious as method, object of study, and intimate archive – a similar relationship occurs in my theory work. It also echoes Julia Kristeva’s concept of childhood within the relationship between lovers: a type of polymorphous currency that is only found in an aftermath, as an after taste, “in the encounter that makes it anew.” 3 I wanted to wait and see what the shot images told me, how they stacked up against the imagined ones. Whether I’d wait 20 years, as in the images of childhood, or a few months, the process was the same. The process was to bear witness to what had already been concocted for myself, in order for myself to be. This is the psychoanalytic process, at its best: making room for the unintended to occur, following spontaneity with a symbolic gleaning while listening well, that is, listening queerly, to what comes up and comes out – and to what doesn’t. 3 Kristeva and Sollers, Du Marriage Considéré Comme Un Des Beaux-Arts, p. 44. My translation. 9 In the film, the unconscious is supposed to speak when licensed by a filmic space coded by a mix of rules and impulses: intelligible drives. In disrupting how we think about filmic rules and the filmmaker’s own perverse position vis-à-vis her subjects, particularly the documentarian, I highlight the presence of the researcher and the media- maker as always already subjects of the artifact – film or text. The space for the unconscious to speak, and to, in at least one scene, scream, is both ludic and rigorous, like the unconscious itself. Its rules come to the surface once it is allowed to roam, and we are prepared to listen. One’s methodology is, of course, in a constant state of flux. The time spent trying to figure out the patterns and equations that lead up to one’s work is akin not just to the attempts at recognizing the structure of one’s desire in analysis but also to analysis’ own interminable cure. A cure that I can only associate with the interminability of HIV/AIDS 10 itself in 2015, both as virus and fantasmatic device. A methodology, in this manner, is a way of speaking whose shifts allows for new absorptions while never completely ridding itself of its inheritances. It is the way symbolic inheritances delimit, sway, and radically rig subjectivity that interests me: the internal objects that we can count on when the external ones are disagreeable or unavailable. 4 In my written dissertation, which nourishes a strange methodological and thematic kinship with the film, I deploy digital cruising and new media platforms as innovative ways of listening to the unconscious, and thus, contemporary desire -- akin to playing and drawing in the child psychoanalytic clinic, and to the dream, the slip of the tongue, and the symptom in classic psychoanalysis. Through a theory of the self, which sees the theorist’s own archive of sexual remnants (personal ads, emails exchanged between potential lovers, s/text messages, GPS-based cruising apps profiles) as the raw material for Theory to cull from in order to tell Its story, I analyze the manifestation of three desires that digital technology makes emerge in particularly symptomatic, and readable, ways: barebacking, (non-)private transvestism, and the gangbang. I contend that an essayistic examination of desire through the public articulation of the researcher’s own processes of digital intimacy we can gain unprecedented access to the dynamics of human sexuation and develop a new methodology for thinking out the chasm between sexual theory and sexual practice, or theory and practice more broadly. 4 Jamieson Webster argues that we must deal with internal objects since external objects may not always be available or agreeable. Webster, “Interview with Tracy D. Morgan,” New Books in Psychoanalysis podcast, December 16, 2011, http://newbooksinpsychoanalysis.com/2011/12/16/jamieson-webster-the-life-and-death- of-psychoanalysis-on-unconscious-desire-and-its-sublimation-karnac-books-2011/ 11 The dissertation explores the way psychic architecture governs the relationship between sex and digitality, but also what digitality can make us see about psychic functioning and the experiencing of sexuality. Although it focuses on the interplay between desire and the digital, I open the text by looking back at one of my earliest and long-lasting visual references for what counts as valuable about a human person that I should strive to be, or to have. Brazilian Television superstar Xuxa represented the ideals of race, gender, citizenship, and class of my childhood (all those plagues that some parents “fight so strongly and transmit so well”), while, as it turns out, also making room for an active relationship with queerness -- through a certain kind of contact with, and ludic usurpation of, the very ideals of post-colonized hetero-normative Brazil. 5 Although this first session may stick out like a sore thumb in the context of the other sessions in the dissertation where virtuality is literal, its presence and placement seem fundamental for carving out the intellectual terrain that allows me to bind the researcher to the research erotically, from the beginning. Here the body of the dissertation, its “somateca,” finds its pendular backbone, swinging through its different times, or sessions, and highlighting the orgiastic confusion between source and symptom, inheritance and authenticity. 6 While the televised figure of the blue-eyed star has been presumed to fit effortlessly in the Brazilian family picture, the text teases out the queerness of Xuxa and 5 Tony Duvert, Le Bon Sexe Illustré (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1974), p. 128. My translation. 6 For Beatriz Preciado, the body is a “somateca,” that is, a political and cultural archive, as fictitious as it is alive. In Andrea Valdés, “Encarnar Disidencias, entrevista a Beatriz Preciado y Teresa Forcades,” Parole de Queer, http://paroledequeer.blogspot.com/2014/10/encarnar-disidencias-entrevista-beatriz.html Last accessed November 29, 2014. My translation. 12 the ways a queer(ed) child could have looked to her for pleasures of play beyond what a traditional Oedipal interpretation accounts for. Evoking Gilberto Vasconcellos’ notion of the first Brazilian having been the accidental product of a mix-raced rape between colonizer and native, the session imagines how a child’s fantasies of Xuxa as the original mother would abate anxieties around colonial violence, instead of love, having founded the child, and the nation. 7 The session, then, sets up conceptual threads that traverse the dissertation, such as the generative power of rape, the anxieties around the hole, fantasies of symbolic belonging, feigning passiveness, the queerness of desire, the periphery of the object, and semblance. This is also an opportunity for intervention in the field of Brazilian studies, for whom Xuxa has been an overlooked figure in general, let alone a queer one. The idea of Xuxa’s botched lenticularity, she performs as anti-housewife whore (“rapariga ante- dona de casa”) and (non-passable) child at the same time, is also the kernel for an important thread on the impossibility of the object of desire to ever completely pass for/as itself if it is ever to materialize or to move. Questions around the importance of the still image over the gesture arise in Session 2, along with the idea of the object’s impossible task to properly perform as its own idealized self, on barebacking. In this session, I ask whether the foregoing of the condom can be a queer bid to re-name oneself as a way to forge a legitimate ontological status. Instead of reading barebacking as literally subversive, I wonder if its fantasmatic mechanisms aren’t driven by a desire for normativity. Here I also probe the digital as a particularly suitable site for fantasies of the absolute hetero-masculinity of the other (and 7 Gilberto Felisberto Vasconcellos, Eu & a Xuxa: Sociologia do Cabaré Infantil (São Paulo: Editora Leia Mais, 1991), p. 107. 13 the disavowal of femininity in the self) to play out through the withholding of the human face and bodily movement, as well as the perennial delay for the object of desire to become fleshly (“the ‘non-actualization’ that seems inherent to the digital cruising interface itself”). The death drive as a resting drive fueling the digital cruising economy, perversion, and my musings on the figure of the flake, who cruises without being duped into thinking that a physical encounter will actually take place, culminate in Session 3, where I explore the idea of trans not as an identity, but as a technological device for enjoyment. The idea here is that subjects who may have settled for gayness as an identity category, along with being duped by the idea that gay “men” desire other gays (the laborious barring of femininity at all costs being their only encounter), can find in the digital an access point for making contact with objects of desire that are more aligned with their own fantasy -- rather than the fantasy of “gay desire” that a heterosexist society has reserved for them. The digital makes possible, and practical, the unlikely contact between heterosexual man and gay “man”-cum-t-girl to occur: but what do we do with such luxury? This session unfolds through self-ethnographic accounts of not-so-private transvestism, where the researcher is, through a digitally enabled ontological coup, finally allowed to entertain the idea of a (sexual) relationship with an object that seemed, before the digital, categorically barred. The digital, then, teases this particular cruising subject into believing the existence of and access to an object that suits her desire, which is, of course, only ever found to be missing. In examining digitally-enabled transvestism, this session allows for the emergence of some major elements of the dissertation, including 14 the notion of heterosexuality as an infectious rape-like violence, and barebacking as a shortcut to fantasies around the invincible phallus responsible for and capable of such generative brutality. In Session 4, the queer fantasy that an access to what Lacan calls “the enjoyment of the other,” that is, the enjoyment of the white heterosexual gender-conforming normative other can be forged, is enacted, or projected, in the gangbang. If the 1980s and 90s television spectacle of Session 1 allowed the child to dream of being something else altogether (something whiter, blonder, taller, non-Brazilian, and holeless), the digital comes to make promises it cannot keep so that what once felt impossible, could now be achieved. If only… In Session 2, these promises take the shape of an any-whatever-male who appears to respond to the queer cruising subject’s demands for mere male-ness. In Session 3, the digital has proven to be an unreliable well of objects that end up “lacking” -- in masculinity, for instance. The object is ultimately ill-suited, insufficient, and unfaithful…to their image. In Session 4, the multiplicity and frisson of the gangbang, easily assembled through the digital interface, perform a deceiving antidote to the difficulty of there being a proper object (a properly holeless object), of the survival of the object beyond the digital, or at least, the virtual. Here the sheer number of men working together as a brotherhood not only aims to play out the work of the phallus in a kind of collective mirage, it also appears to repeat the most ancient and foundational technology of phallic production: The symbolic killing of the Father by the band of brothers, that is, the primary parricide that bred civilization’s constitutive brotherhood, which Freud calls “the great misdeed.” This symbolic occasion 15 marks the beginning of, among other things, “social organization, moral restrictions, and religion,” as what “began in relation to the father ends in relation to the community.” 8 Through the gangbang, as it unfolds particularly around the body of the digitally- enabled t-girl, I read a strategy of phallic production through male multiplicity in a time of phallic crisis that the digital inaugurates, when the penis is asked to be exposed, exchanged, and lived up to its phallic pledges – an impossible undertaking. I speculate that man has not been in such vulnerable position in relationship to his body – to the fictitious conflation between penis and phallus that his survival depends on -- since “erecting himself from the earth” and adopting an upright position, “which made his genitals, that before had been covered [by a bent-over gait], visible and in need of protection” against feelings of shame. Freud describes this moment as “a time when visual stimuli became paramount,” and a new life form began. 9 The dissertation, like the film, functions as a compass, a structure, and a testimony to the dissonance, and impossible distance, between desire and its object(s), a dissymmetry made more obvious, if not literal, in the case of the geographically exiled subject, for whom the mother tongue is always a still-warm cadaver. 10 If my unconscious has been structured like the language of my ghostly childhood, which scripts to this day, hauntingly, the Brazilian objects available to its now American disposal. This non- encounter between the literally exiled subject and the object, which Maria Ester Maillard 8 Freud, Totem and Taboo (Freud Press, 2013), p. 136, p. 129. Freud, Civilization & Its Discontents (Martino Publishing, 2011), p. 121. 9 Freud, Civilization & Its Discontent, p. 66. 10 Kristeva refers to her own analysis as an examination of “the still warm corpse of my mother tongue.” Kristeva, Leur Regard Perce Nos Ombres (Paris: Fayard, 2011), cited in Kristeva and Sollers, Du Marriage Considéré Comme Un Des Beaux-Arts, p. 103. My translation. 16 calls a “symbolic disorder,” is what animates the impossibility of the sexual relationship for Lacan, but can also be an appropriate site for questioning the supposed “order” that such disorder presupposes. It is an opportunity for the subject to “create another truth, another scene,” something else altogether. 11 Throughout the sessions, I have attempted to demarcate complex concepts clearly while maintaining and respecting a degree of ambiguity, desire’s most basic element. This series of self-reflective and self-inflictive critiques try to bring to the surface the queerness in psychoanalytic theory and the psychoanalytic in queer theory, placing the digital as the most necessary site, archive, and arsenal for developing a new kind of knowledge around desire. If some degree of obscurity and abstraction remains, it is a direct product of both my inability to speak plainly – perhaps vestiges of the class- policing Brazilian mindset that to speak plainly is to speak poorly, as in, like the poor, and a purposeful response to the fashionable, and horrifying, idea that everything should be seen, laid-out, and turned not only into data, but big data, big visual data. While the most visible aspect of this fetishization of making everything sharply discernable, obvious and locatable is the question of what exactly one expects to find, at last, desire is certainly not going to be it. Along with the conceptual and rhetorical resources of my theoretical influences, I also hope to have preserved the very poesis that makes me drawn to them, holding the notion of the theorist as an artisan of language as a badge of honor. In many instances, 11 Maria Ester Maillard, “Entrevista com Maria Ester Cristelli Drumond Maillard,” A Diretoria na Rede http://www.diretorianarede.com.br/extimidades/extimidades009.asp. My translation. 17 the purpose of these sentences is their own selves. Most importantly, besides the pleasure, if not enjoyment, that I hope the text can produce, and without which this endeavor will have been a failure of the non-queer kind, it has been my intention to restore the unconscious as the primary site for research that preoccupies itself with gender and sexuality. I attempt to deploy the unconscious as the workroom of the researcher, one that is “porous to certain brutalities,” emanating the kind of warmth “impossible to record in termometers,” and conducive to the evocative, not the affirmative. 12 12 Rachel Kushner describes her workroom as having that kind of porosity. Kushner, "The writer's room," T The New York Times Style Magazine, March 29, 2015, p. 146. Elizabeth Bishop speaks of a “queer light” that is “neither warm, nor cold, of a temperature impossible to record in termometers,” in her poem “The Man-Moth.” 18 Works Cited Duvert, Tony. Le Bon Sexe Illustré. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1974. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization & Its Discontents. Martino Publishing, 2011. Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. Freud Press, 2013. Kristeva, Julia and Sollers, Philippe. Du Marriage Considéré Comme Un Des Beaux- Arts. Paris: Fayard, 2015. Maillard, Maria Ester. “Entrevista com Maria Ester Cristelli Drumond Maillard.” In A Diretoria na Rede http://www.diretorianarede.com.br/extimidades/extimidades009.asp Safouan, Moustapha. “Interview with Colin MacCabe.” In Zamyn, http://www.zamyn.org/interviews/maccabe-safouan/interview.html Valdés, Andrea. “Encarnar Disidencias, entrevista a Beatriz Preciado y Teresa Forcades.” In Parole de Queer, http://paroledequeer.blogspot.com/2014/10/encarnar-disidencias- entrevista-beatriz.html Vasconcellos, Gilberto Felisberto. Eu & a Xuxa: Sociologia do Cabaré Infantil. São Paulo: Editora Leia Mais, 1991. Webster, Jamieson. “Interview with Tracy D. Morgan.” In New Books in Psychoanalysis podcast, December 16, 2011, http://newbooksinpsychoanalysis.com/2011/12/16/jamieson-webster-the-life-and-death- of-psychoanalysis-on-unconscious-desire-and-its-sublimation-karnac-books-2011/ 19 20 The Sexual Lives of Brazilian Children 21 “The infantile is the sexual, undifferentiated, where tenderness and sensuality coexist, masculine and feminine, active and passive: not subordinated to a function, not linked to specific organs, it is completely ignorant of the reality principle and perhaps even non- subjected to the pleasure principle so as it means a certain finality. The infantile is the sexual without limits -- or age, or place, or time.” J.B. Pontalis, Ce Temps Qui Ne Passe Pas 22 A pink spaceship descends into a Brazilian television studio. A 5-foot-10-inch blonde woman is inside the spacecraft. She is wearing knee-high boots, a short, tight- fitting ensemble and pigtails. The landing of the pink aircraft is prolonged as to maximize the euphoria from the children below it, non-paid non-actors who chant, scream and cry as they look up at the giant woman inside the pink blob of a shuttle, which is accented by enormous red lips (surely the spacecraft’s windows). The door opens very slowly and upward, revealing the lenticular figure being summoned: is she a child, a woman, a doll? Where does she come from? Xuxa [Shoo-sha], the Aryan alien stepping out of the pink spaceship, is too tall to be ordinarily female, too white to be ordinarily Brazilian. The contrast between her lanky body and the small brown bodies of those welcoming her arrival from below suggests that she must be an extraterrestrial not to be feared, but worshipped. As reported by the press, the children are often shocked to find out that Xuxaactually pees. In her next life, Xuxa says, she would like to come back as a black woman so she can have more hair and more ass. The excitement is so manic you would think Xuxa’s landing were a rare affair akin to a Virgin Mary appearance, or the apparition of a comet. Yet, this scene, and its continuation, repeated itself every single morning, from Monday to Saturday, for five consecutive hours on Brazilian television from 1986 until 1992. Perhaps she hails from a crystal-made Moon, as goes one of her hit songs, “Lua de Cristal,” in which she describes a place devoid of evil where one’s dreams actually come true, and those who already know how to shine shall be turned into stars. Although even in such a place, where everyone is invincible, lucky and happy (if only one 23 believes), such wonders (“anything I want”) will be granted by “the man up above,” Xuxa’s nickname for God. Some say she won’t refer to God by His name because of the pact she made with Satan to be famous, and that if you listen to her LPs backward you can hear her sing, “I want blood.” Oblivious to this gossip, or perhaps all the more mesmerized by it, the children on the set don colorful pompoms and handmade banners expressing their unwavering devotion. Some say they dropped out of school so they could write Xuxa love letters all day. They burst into tears in anticipation for her extended exiting from the shuttle. Such exit, and the emotions it elicits, echoes the soothing apparition of something from the otherwise cryptic insides of a vagina, which turns out to be non-dentata (the thick lips surrounding the spaceship do away with any expectation of there being teeth). Instead of the babies, feces, and the father’s penis of a child’s fantasy for what lies inside “there where there is nothing,” 13 this vaginal slit of a door reveals a beautiful white woman in her mid 20s who, if you believe the magazines, still has all of her baby teeth. Like Barbie, her body has no cavities. She could never be a mother. 14 13 Melanie Klein, “Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in The Creative Impulse (1929)” and “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego (1930),” in The Selected Melanie Klein, edited by Juliet Mitchell. (New York: The Free Press, 1986), p. 92, 96. In psychoanalytic theory, the moment the little boy catches sight of the female genitals and realizes the woman doesn’t have a penis is a particularly traumatic one (giving way to castration anxiety), which he will try to handle in a variety of ways, from the unconscious establishing of a fetish that blocks such literalized lack from view (a foot, a shoe, a transvestite’s penis) to the reiteration of sexism as a way to probe-cum-seize woman in a confined and non-threatening space. Israël, La Jouissance de L’Hystérique, (Paris: Éditions Arcanes, 1996), p. 98. My translation. 14 “Beyond the hints of a special relationship with God, Xuxa does function as an agent of transcendence.” Amelia Simpson, Xuxa: The Mega-Marketing of Gender, Race, and Modernity. (Temple University Press, 1993), p. 75. 24 Gilberto Felisberto Vasconcellos describes Xuxa as an anti-housewife whore (“rapariga ante-dona de casa”), the perfect embodiment of the family’s fantasies: The one who will do to father all the sexual things the housewife won’t (in child drag, nonetheless), a role model for daughter’s heterosexual dreams of replacement and incestuous seduction, and something for the heterosexual(ized/zing) son to look forward to, as his turn will come sooner than later. 15 This leaves the queer child, or the child’s queerness, without recognition, but certainly not without a place – albeit not a readymade one. The sartorial in Xuxa is a multivalent currency, able to prop up a variety of identificatory and sexual investments from children and adults, and needs to be analysed in its potential modularity and resignification. I here, then, fall back into the place of the queer child watching Xuxa in my native Brazil in the 1980s in order to flesh out such an analysis. If the father can fondle Xuxa with his very eyes in the present, in her massive entirety rendered manageably visible by the television frame (we first see her from below, as though we could peek under her skirt), the children’s investment seems linked to a deferral (I can have her/look like her later), until they are able to purchase Xuxa’s products (her line of clothes, sandals and knee-high boots for kids) and experience her erotic promises in the present, in the flesh. But if the father’s perception can function as a kind of fondling in the present, the queer child, or the child tout court, can also touch Xuxa, and perhaps even wear her, now, by looking at her, dreaming of her, or imitating her, depending on who is around. 15 Gilberto Felisberto Vasconcellos, Eu & a Xuxa: Sociologia do Cabaré Infantil (São Paulo: Editora Leia Mais, 1991), p. 107. 25 Since Xuxa’s toys are geared toward little girls who can make the deferred whitening eroticness of the Xuxa experience a (mock-up) reality, for themselves and for the adults looking at them, through consumption. The heterosexual/ized boys are left to consume Xuxa through the father’s visual investments, as in Freud’s theory of perception, in which the eyes are basically tentacle. These boys are also able to sublimate and re-encounter the pleasures of looking at Xuxa not as a sexual object (or, rather, an object to have sex with – or so the rationale goes for boys engaging with Xuxa) but for the clothes themselves. It turns out Xuxa isn’t just apt material for the queering of queer(ed) boys, but for heterosexual boys’ falling backward into queerness as well. The gender-conformant Brazilian boy can look at her since she is the only thing to look at (in morning television). He can enjoy femininity’s excess without getting blood on his hands owing to Xuxa’s televisual omnipresence as electronic babysitter on the most watched network in Brazil, Rede Globo. Looking at Xuxa that boy is able to take in the pleasures of the sartorial, a feminine and feminizing affair since the great masculine renunciation in dress of the 18th century, without compromising his masculine position. It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that the legitimate cathexis of bodily exhibition migrated toward a prerogative of a specific gender, along with the surrendering (of woman) to the gaze of the other (man) that we have come to associate with it. The naturalization of ornate dress as a domain of woman guarantied by the l/Law -- juridical and symbolic -- is, then, a relatively new process in history, and one filled with anxiety for boys who must give up the objects that have served as signs, shortcuts, substitutes, and even proof for Mother, whereas girls don’t. When Xuxa comes out, some 26 of mother’s properties that had to be forsaken as objects for cathexis fall back into the frame as possibilities, or technologies, for pleasure. Of course, boys’ imperative to give up the pleasures of the sartorial is only of a certain kind, for while they may not be allowed to wear the clothing or speak about it, they can, in many ways, control it in their manifested resignation (but latent omnipresence). In this sense, Xuxa serves as the mother who goes along with the child’s ludic disposition, willing to not only put on but to model the sartorial for him. Xuxa began her career as a fashion model, after all. The appearance that collapses the look with the self as an unquestionable given echoes the illusion akin to the fictive merging of the phallus with the penis. What is put on is read as skin. In the formation of man’s self-display as unsheddable realness (while accoutrements make the woman, the non-detachability of the penis itself makes the man), there is nothing, really, to take off if there is nothing to put on; it is woman whose visible artifice renders her susceptible to loss. Xuxa fosters a re-claiming of what has been renounced by boys, the pleasures of the sartorial (coded as feminine), as, despite the specificities of one’s desire, the child is radically confronted with the clothing and what it (un)settles, while assuaging it. 16 When boys “usurp” Xuxa’s iconography, to use D. W. Winnicott’s term, are they not usurping “the mother’s position and her seat or garments” 17 ? The queer boy is granted 16 Kaja Silverman, “Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse.” In Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, edited by Tania Modleski (Indiana University Press, 1986). 17 Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 85. Freud links sight to touch, viewing perception as the “sending out of feelers, of sensitive tentacles, at rhythmic intervals.” Jean Laplanche, “To Situate Sublimation,” October 28 (Spring, 1984), p. 15. 27 access to Xuxa through an imaginary usurping (rendered possible by the secretive extensions, and aims, of his ludic disposition) or through the literal stealing of the Xuxa products, or props, including a doll that is at least three times Barbie’s size, that might belong to his sister(s). 18 Without a symbolic system that accounts for his presence in the world, this is the queer boy’s dynamic for life: usurping the other’s object through fantasy. The queer boy must constantly take, with his eyes, if not his hands, making of the fantasmatic not just the equation for his desire, but a very familiar home. The Sexual Logic of (Colonial) Intercourse Jean Laplanche describes sublimation, which appears as a doing “something else” with sexual energy, sometimes in opposition, sometimes working together with sexuality, as an instinct of “excessive strength [that] triggers the earliest childhood sexual theories,” the first of which revolves around: “Where do babies come from?” 19 Not from Xuxa’s pink spaceship, nor from her hole-less body. Laplanche gives the example of the mother’s pregnancy of another child as igniting that puzzling question. It provokes an investigation linked to a fantasy of construction faced with the parents’ refusal to come up with an adequate answer, establishing a connection between sublimation in the form of having-to-know and “turning back.” 20 Xuxa’s erotic anxiety-soothing powers, her hole-less-ness – her myth takes away from her the possibility of pores and orifices (though she comes out of one every morning 18 Freud describes Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings as “props” for his anatomical investigations, an alibi-practice that enables other kinds of practices and discoveries. Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957). 19 Laplanche, “To Situate Sublimation,” p. 20. 20 Ibid, p. 17. 28 on TV), may soothe similarly primal fantasies of origin for Brazilians. As Vasconcellos argues, the first Brazilian was mix-raced, the child of a European father and an Ameraba (Native Brazilian) mother; perhaps not unlike the child Xuxa would have had with legendary soccer player Pelé, “the black millionaire celebrity” she dated before rising to stardom: “Pelé and Xuxa represent the extremes on the scale of black and white. Pelé’s features, hair, and complexion are what Brazilians consider truly black, while Xuxa, whose grandparents come from Austria, Poland, Italy, and Germany, is even whiter than the white of Portuguese origin.” 21 A central part of the genesis of Xuxa’s myth (of hole-less-ness) is that she was a virgin, at age 17, when she started going out with Pelé, who was 40, and allegedly refused to deflower her, leading Xuxa to lose her virginity with someone else first, and then go back to Pelé. For Amelia Simpson, their relationship offers “a kind of proof of immunity to racism, which then functions as a license to exploit the appetite for the blond and blue-eyed ideal in a country with the largest black population outside Africa.” 22 Although the primal question that both produced and terrorized the first Brazilian child, Who is my father?, isn’t exclusively Brazilian, such a child’s question was sustained by a very geo-politically specific narrative. From the beginning, this child’s question was not just triggered by a genealogical-ontological curiosity but brought forth by a colonial act of rape. A series of inquiries torment the first Brazilian child as she wonders about the mother-father coitus in that April of the year 1500, visualizing, or rather, constructing with her very eyes-cum-hands the mise-en-scène of the nation’s primal scene: 21 Simpson, p. 14, p. 32. 22 Ibid, p. 39. 29 Was it love at first sight? Or did they leave it for the morning after? Was there no love, only sex? If my father spoke a language that my mother did not understand, how did their communication take place? Or was there copulation without linguistic communication? Voices, gestures, moans, whispers, yet no dialogue to speak of? Was there only a transmission of the signifier, but not of the signified: each one’s words addressed to their own selves, or to the sky of Bahia’s coastline? 23 This child is thus, not only a “ballet dancer” due to the “ludic disposition” such not-knowing (yet knowing) must have inaugurated, as Vasconcellos has it, but an accident. 24 An accident that Xuxa would have perhaps avoided, either because a doll without orifices would never get pregnant, or because in the advent that she did, her biological aesthetics would have matched the European father’s, at which point the child may become a sign of (parental) desire. The trace of the colonial rape that founds the nation would have been either inexistent or invisible. A fantasy of Xuxa as the original mother would certainly work to abate anxieties around what Christopher Bolas calls “the sexual logic of intercourse.” Xuxa’s dollish impenetrability, akin to the not-yet-deflowered young girls watching her show, would have meant the child no longer has to deal with the problematic constitutive penetration between his parents and their racial mismatch. Despite the history of violence inherent to 23 Ibid, p. 45. My translation. 24 Ibid, 45. The Portuguese term is “disponibilidade lúdica,” which Vasconcellos borrows from Brazilian historian and anthropologist Luís da Câmara Cascudo. Ibid, 49. 30 this particular set of parents (the original Brazilian non-family), “intercourse” appears as a disruptive key figure in “any” three-year-old child’s sexual epiphany that, “apart from Jesus (or ‘the Holy Family’), the child did not enter existence through maternal immaculate conception.” 25 In this moment of epistemological crisis, the child realizes that instead of being the center of the universe, she might just be “an after-effect of parental sexual passion sought after for its own sake.” The crux of such narcissistic crisis represented by the notion of the “intercourse,” as opposed to some kind of divine alignment of the stars to produce a child God, is the idea that the self may be mere fallout from an act not meant to be productive, but merely conducive. This disruption takes the child away from the position of an effect of desire and closer to the embodiment of a barebacking accident. We know the child has a mandate, a symbolic attribution of role handed down from generation to generation down to her own (body) courtesy of the parents – “(…) all those plagues that they fight so strongly and transmit so well.” 26 But imbricated with the family’s, the nation also has a mandate for the child, for these children of a European father and an Ameraba mother with the word Xuxa written with red lipstick across their cheeks and forehead. 27 Some kids chant repeatedly in unison “Xuxa-Eu-Te-Amo!,” Xuxa I love you. They want to touch her, they want to kiss her, they want to smell her skin, her wealth, to be sheltered by her overflowing femininity. They want her to take them to the Casa Rosa 25 Christopher Bollas, Hysteria (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 169. 26 Tony Duvert, Le Bon Sexe Illustré (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1974), p. 128. My translation. 27 For Serge Lebovici, the real “tree of life consists in drawing a trans-generational tree that clarifies the mandate that was implicitly handed down to the child.” Lebovici, En L’Homme Le Bébé (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), p. 119. My translation. 31 (Pink House), which is how she calls her mansion. They want to feel the texture of her delicate hair and the shiny flamboyance of her clothing: a style that could only be described as camp, the meeting point where carnavalesque infantility meets spectacular lasciviousness. There is no one like her! Is she Michael Jackson in Japan? Madonna at the Roxy? Is she Superwoman or She-Ra? Is she Jesus Christ? When the dry ice produced by the spaceship’s touchdown clears out, and its door reveals a radiant Xuxa, she descends the aircraft’s steps flanked by two prince charming- like young men wearing tuxedos, her Paquitos. The distance between the pink spaceship and the stage is enough to give the audience ample time to probe her outfit, which is never repeated. Smaller teenage versions of Xuxa, her Paquitas, help contain the mass of children from invading the stage to grab the star and make sure that she is actually “real,” or rather, that she isn’t. Xuxa, then, lip-synchs to one of her songs (a message about believing in one’s dreams, the importance of a hearty breakfast, or an anthem against the killing of pink dolphins in the Amazon), and begins her morning of attractions: dancing, presenting cartoons, musical acts, speaking with a fan on her stiletto-shaped telephone, drawing prizes from a pool filled with fan mail, and conducting games – inevitably boys against girls. Xuxa’s iconic cry “Menino contra menina!” (“Boy against girl!”) follows the “Ready, Set, Go!” signified by her blowing a whistle so the games begin. Her voice cracks into a girlish prissy-ness when she screams. It’s a moment of great excitement, this high-pitched wailing that leads to a kind moaning, which she mimics at times when she sings. The erotic-ness of the wailing seems safely couched in the infantility of the situations in which it is performed. While it’s difficult to recall if she’s ever said “girls” 32 before she said “boys” (“Menina contra menino”), she is never shy about expressing a partisan relief, if not surprise, when the girls win. The set of the show, Xou da Xuxa, is filled with carnival rides, a blinking sun, pink neon hearts, a massive Xuxa bust that makes her look like a Viking warrior, and the Christ of Redeemer statue, the iconic Rio de Janeiro figure. Although Xuxa grew up in a small town in the South of Brazil, Santa Rosa (Rosa is both a proper name and the Portuguese word for “pink”), she has an extremely strong and distinguishable Rio de Janeiro accent. In Xuxa’s world the letter “X” of her name functions as a distinguishing mark, or signature, for the numerous merchandising associated with her and her show, as well as a symbol of belonging (to her club). In Xuxa-speak, the letter “X” takes the place of the letter “S” in Portuguese to signify a linguistic attachment. Besides playing off of the English word “Show,” “Xou da Xuxa” is a play on the Portuguese “Sou da Xuxa” (“I belong to Xuxa.”) Xuxa only cedes the center of the stage to a musical act (whose songs are usually about adult romance and heartache), but even then the camera seems to be more interested in Xuxa’s reactions to the singers’ performance than singers themselves. Is Xuxa dancing? Is she mouthing the words to the song? Will she get the words right? Is she having a good time? When the performance ends, Xuxa approaches the artists and asks them a few questions. Here again, the pleasure is in the little humanity we can infer from Xuxa’s interaction with a “commoner.” One of the biographical anecdotes supporting Xuxa’s mythology is that she is allergic to several foods that are derived from “the cruelty of men” (meat, eggs) 33 exemplified in the cruel fishermen of her hit song (“Boto Rosa”) who won’t leave her beloved pink dolphins alone. She is said to only drink coconut water and to swim in one of her many swimming pools filled with imported French water or coconut milk. A fundamental part of what makes Xuxa a star is the way her nobility is portrayed as unintentional. Before any ethical stance about red meat, it is her very body that rejects its intake. It’s as though she’s been chosen for the mission to be a superstar. Superstardom is her cross to bear. A fundamental part of Xuxa’s image is not only her failed attempts at being ordinary, her refusal to accept the superiority bestowed on her by her destiny, but also the renouncing of her past, which includes blocking from circulation the “soft core” movie she was in before having a kids show, in which she seduces a 12-year-old boy, and having posed nude for various adult magazines. 28 Under The Aegis of Omniscience Xuxa’s goodbye, five hours after her lengthy and spectacular arrival, is just as dramatic and ritualized. The children’s desperation in face of her departure is akin to a child’s reading of a parent’s going away as desertion. Xuxa’s farewell is an unbearable interruption like that of a dream, like that of intercourse. It’s a little death. When the show is over, real life begins, in one’s own skin. The children bawl and beg her to stay. They profess their love for her with gifts, pleading that the banners they hold with loving messages for Xuxa be read. 28 The film is Walter Hugo Khouri’s Amor, Estranho Amor (1982). It must be noted that, in Brazil, posing nude for magazines such as Playboy has been a common practice even for bona fide actresses, carrying much less stigma than it might in the United States, for example. 34 At this moment, Xuxa also acts as though she has been put in that situation, in her own show, out of her control. She reads some of the banners with loving messages often begging the director (of the show, and of Xuxa’s career and finances), Marlene Mattos, rumored to be Xuxa’s lesbian lover -- Xuxa is the body, Marlene is the head, the saying goes -- to allow her to read more banners before she is forced to hop into her pink spaceship and fly back to the Pink House. She asks, “Marlene, one more banner, please.” And begs, “Zoom in on that one, too, please, please.” It is significant that while the children’s pleading for this towering alien to stay is directed at her apparition, Xuxa’s own pleading (Please show one more banner) is addressed to the disembodied authority of Marlene, whom no one gets to see. Without ever having seen Marlene, we know, from press accounts and gossip, what she looks like, and it’s enough to scare us into accepting, and understanding, her controlling role: she is mannish, she is ugly, she is dark-skinned, she comes from the poor Northeastern part of Brazil, she is the anti-Xuxa, One of the collectible stickers for Xuxa’s album, sold in newsstands at the time and featuring the various elements of her show, featured Marlene’s back, her sitting on a director’s chair. All that was visible was her curly black hair and non-lady-like pose. If the children beg Xuxa to stay, the star’s coup de théâtre involves her own imploring to daddy’s authoritative omnipresent absence. Contrary to Winnicott’s child- rearing advice that the Father be present “at breakfast,” for Colette Soler the Father is much more present when he isn’t actually there, and thus, remains un-vulnerable to the eventual contradictions that grant him his status as Father, risking an un-masking. If the Father surrendered his clothes in the name of an irrevocable naturalization of his standing 35 in the great masculine renunciation of the 18 th century, as Silverman argues, by now his body can (must?) be safely taken out of view to guarantee and guard his position. 29 Xuxa’s phrasing -- whether she is saying goodbye or highlighting the cuteness of something - “Ai, que amooor!” ( “How cute!”), symptomatizes the type of femininity associated with a little child’s scream or a woman’s orgasmic sounds (the latter probably a simulacrum of the first). This is a very particular articulation of a feminine orgasm, of course. Not the one that leads Lacan to read jouissance in the face of Gian Bernini’s Saint Teresa sculpture, an orgasm that overcomes the feminine subject, and may perhaps paralyze her face were she not already a statue. 30 Xuxa’s high-pitched moaning echoes a performance of an orgasm directly addressed to the other who is supposed to have provoked it. 31 It’s a calculated cue, not an unintentional excretion of overpowering emotion. Xuxa’s orgasm is the kind that confirms the act of the other (in provoking the orgasm) as functional and encourages it to continue. This is an orgasm of acknowledgement that at once commends the other for having accomplished his desired effect (on the feminine body) and recognizes the other’s position of power vis-à-vis the feminine. Xuxa’s orgasm sanctions and notarizes object 29 We will see in the Sessions that follow not only the effects of this metastasizing paternal absence, but the repercussions of the digital’s demand that man actually be seen, and repeatedly so. Colette Soler’s presentation at the Research Group of Clinical Formations of the Lacanian Field seminar, “The Names of the Father and Fathers.” Paris, July 6, 2013. 30 Ellie Ragland describes Lacan’s somewhat difficult concept of jouissance as “the libidinal energy that collects at points of loss in response to the cut and holds together the unconscious fantasy material that makes of human inert, defensive, resisting creatures.” By “cut” she means the alienation from the primary feeling of oneness -- with the world, with the (m)other – that is exacted by language. Ragland, Essays On the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 87. 31 Jacques Lacan, The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 20: On feminine sexuality: the limits of love and knowledge, encore (1972-1973). Bruce Fink, Trans. (W. W. Norton, 1998). 36 from agent. Xuxa’s orgasmic sounds represent, in fact, the very opposite of what Mary Russo calls the startling and feminist possibilities of laughter, of old and ugly women (“old hags”), in particular, laughing at men. Yet a fantasmatic usurpation of Xuxa’s moaning by a queer/ed child may, if not qualify as feminist laughter, be just as startling for the other and pleasurable for the subject. 32 If we follow Simpson’s description of Xuxa’s ethos as fundamentally capitalistic - - the injunction to buy her products behind Xuxa’s every sign –we could call this capitalism’s orgasm, or the orgasm of the capitalist demand to enjoy more. Perhaps a compensation for heterosexuality’s own sexual demand for the subject to enjoy less (queerly). The injunction to enjoy through the purchasing of goods is just the beginning of a more complex, less literal package for Beatriz Preciado, who recognizes ours as a biocapitalist and pharmaco-pornographic era that, despite its deep investments in a rhetoric of reproduction, actually produces “nothing. (…) As much as we are used to speaking about a society of consumption, the actual objects of such society are nothing but confetti of a psycho-toxic virtual production.” Femininity of the kind symptomatized to cartoonish levels in Xuxa can be an example of this “nothing” produced by pharmacopornographic biocapitalism, even if, or rather, especially if femininity’s nothingness (its register of intangibility) always turns into something, or something into nothing. 33 The hybridization of woman and child, the bringing together of the one who, we could say, turns nothing (the hole) into something (hole-less-ness), is a staple of Xuxa’s 32 Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (Routledge, 1994), p. 73. 33 Beatriz Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sexe, Drogue et Biopolitique (Paris: Grasset, 2008), p. 48. My translation. 37 image and behavior. It is what animates Xuxa, drives the criticism against her, and makes her mesmerizing. A Child is Cumming Very little has been said about Xuxa’s bacchanal. And virtually nothing from the point of view of the child such bacchanal has helped produce. For if stars are fabricated by a complex and contradicting network of signifiers -- from the hyper-controlled concoction of her idealized image (her image in theory) to the non-diegetic images that befall alongside it (the image in practice), so are the children, the baixinhos (“small ones”), as Xuxa calls them. 34 Yet, since the position of the child qua child keeps her from speaking, or, rather, keeps us from listening, to talk about children is often to talk down to them, to reiterate the very infantilizing fantasies (of inherent purity and innocence, for instance) that have manufactured “the child” as we know her. Xuxa’s relationship to children has always been based on the refusal to treat them as children. Her refusal to use baby talk, addressing them as though they were adults, just physically smaller, has often been read as a violence she performed against them. Simpson’s 1993 book Xuxa: The Mega-Marketing of Gender, Race, and Modernity remains the only lengthy academic text devoted to the Xuxa phenomenon. Simpson thoroughly contextualizes the glorious Xuxa years right before her decline (in the late 1990s, when she has a child of her own, defying her hole-less-ness, and cuts her blond locks short), locating the star as the materialization of a perfect storm onto which 34 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (Routledge, 2003), p. 7. 38 Brazilians could project their much-needed fantasies of escape from that country’s exit of a series of coups d’état into a hopeless socio-economic reality in the 1980s and 1990s. But Simpson offers little nuance in her reading, which is mostly based on popular press accounts and interviews with Xuxa. She often demonizes the star as an emblematic cog in the reactionary machinery of Brazilian self-delusional fantasies of racial, gender, and economic harmony, democracy, and progress toward a First World-like modernity that promises happiness through consumption: The star functions as an agent of transcendence, who performs a magic healing of fissures in Brazilian culture by reinforcing a variety of conflicting views of the dominant society, especially those regarding gender and race. Through Xuxa, the public achieves a sense of relaxation of the tensions generated by the gradual but real and public questioning of traditional gender roles, by the deeply troubling and largely denied racism in Brazil, and by the disjunctive experience of inhabiting a society in which the first and third worlds exist side by side in discordant competition. 35 Simpson ignores the possibility for imaginary usurpation from the child producing and being produced by Xuxa, downplaying the child’s own (queer) agency and overestimating Xuxa’s, as well as the ways her performance lends to such (queer) usurpations. The star is an agent of transcendence, but what of the (queer) child who doesn’t coincide so hermetically with the hetero-capitalist Brazilian project aimed at Anglo-Saxon mimicry? What of the child who falls short, or behind, and is left to grow 35 Simpson, p. 6. 39 sideways, or whatever-other ways? How might such child (re-)signify Xuxa, even if the star were, in theory, the product of a perfectly post-colonial storm conspiring toward fantasies of what First-World progress must look like? It must be noted that while Xuxa may embody several ideals around which Brazil is constructed, and toward which it faces, and for which it bows, her properties are so excessive, so transcendent, so alien that she can only be identifiable as such (as not-this and not-that, as exceptional, as something else altogether) – an invariably queer figure perennially in the horizon. Unseizable. A crucial element of Xuxa’s charisma is precisely her tendency to overdo things, to go slightly off-script, to laugh too much, to defy calls to go to commercial break, or for the show to be over altogether, to ask for more. This over- excitement, when she bursts at the seams, illustrates the way surprise and spontaneity (and the re-significations that those may activate) can slip away from the grip of even the most calculated performances spawning from the most well concocted fantasies of modernity that tap into Brazil’s most primary insecurities and anxieties: the queerness of excessive feeling leaks out. Serge Lebovici reminds us that identification is a way of resolving an infantile conflict. Identification in Oedipus, for example, involves “being like” (daddy) in order to have (mommy, or someone like her). Given that a queer(ed) Oedipus would leave a child left out of a clear alignment with that being-and-having scheme, Xuxa’s alienness could function as a signpost for something else altogether: A non-mommy, an anti-mommy without orifices, still able to seduce daddy – without leaving traces. Xuxa can appear, then, against her own project of post-colonial magnetism, as an assuaging figure for the violent schisms of childhood’s queerness. 40 In reading Xuxa as a symptom for Brazil’s post-colonial tendencies, Simpson never turns to the Brazilian child whose queer growth coincides with her country’s own miraculous emergence from a baixinho in the 80s and 90s to a major global economic player in the 2000s, at which point Xuxa’s stardom and virtual baby-sitting services are largely dismissed as passé. Simpson follows the familiar way in which work that directly involves children fails to actually hear them, or make room for their presence as children, not as an adult fantasy of them. Simpson, for instance, highlights the status quo-supporting contradictions that Xuxa symbolizes, and re-iterates en masse, but overlooks how such child-effacing readings may also help produce retrograde ideas about the inherent wholesomeness of the child who arrives into the world only to get spoiled by a system ailing with post-colonial inferiority complexes. In this logic, Xuxa would represent little new in the landscape of Brazil’s fascination with a “civilized” and “modern” ideals of a nation based on hygienic fantasies of North American and European “progress.” Besides the primal anxieties around the origins of the first Brazilian due to the unbearable ontological distance between his parents: the civilized European who raped the Native Brazilian woman to produce the un-desired child that is I. The I as the unwelcome corollary of violence – rape, namely. Brazil’s eugenic ideal was packaged from mass consumption from the early days of cinema. The history of film in Brazil can be described as yet another kind of rape, with the invasion of “the offices of large yankee companies” which monopolized movie distribution and exhibition after the First World War, and gave rise to several publications that specialized in the dissemination of feminine images produced abroad. It 41 also helped create a national cinematographic industry that aimed to display a particular kind of Brazil that did away with objectionable elements that were incompatible with the images of modernity imported from the cinema of the “civilized world.” This promotion of a whitewashed national image involved an assimilation of “the eugenic ideals accompanying the aesthetic standards of cinema of the United States and Europe, especially in regards to the ‘aryan’ model of screen personalities (…) The nation should be represented on screen by the image of the pure, white woman, symbol of moral integrity as well as racial eugenics.” 36 While Xuxa’s erotic modeling past may seem to distance herself from “the image of the pure, white woman,” she is exactly that: The image, if not the woman – if there is an actual difference, playing off of the lenticular iconography of child-like innocence with the welcome side of a little “modern girl with lots of rouge on her lips and lots of malice in her eyes…Not much sense in her little head and not much material in her skirt (…) …Coquettishly malicious…Elegantly spicy…A warm kiss in the Capital building, a smile in Copacabana,” as a writer for a 1920s Brazilian cinema journal described Gracia Morena, a light-skinned and pouty-lipped Brazilian star modeled after cinematic types taken from American cinema. 37 The description of another Brazilian star, Nita Ney, in that same journal, Cinearte, as representative of a new trend in Brazilian cinema of the late 1920s (closer-to-life, more cosmopolitan, even vamp-like female characters), also echoes Xuxa’s aesthetics and 36 Maria Fernanda Baptista Bicalho, “The Art of Seduction: Representation of Women in Brazilian Silent Cinema,” in Luso-Brazilian Review XXX, 1993. p. 22, 24. 37 The text was part of a letter signed with the pseudonym Jack Quimby (notice the American first name and a strange mixture of an English-sounding last name that begins with the letters “qu,” a decidedly Brazilian/Portuguese letter combination), in Cinearte, October 9, 1929. Cited in Bicalho, p. 27. 42 cultural function: “provocative, full of life, playing a modern girl, for whom life can be summed up as merely the best way of enjoying it, without thinking of the consequences.” 38 A Child Heard At All Is A Child Heard At Last One of the greatest critical responses against Xuxa at her peak is that she spoiled an entire generation of kids by sexualizing them too early. The assumption here is that kids aren’t inherently sexual. Yet we know the opposite is true. We know this from looking and listening to children as children, both from a science-centric approach (fetuses have erections and masturbate in the womb) and from the body of knowledge, theoretical and clinical, borne out of children’s psychoanalysis. 39 We can say that this logic (the sexual in the child) functions as one of psychoanalysis’ main pillars. From Freud we can also surmise that the construction of a child’s sexuality begins way before conception, through the symbolic inheritance (the history of the child’s family and nation, for example) that predates the child’s birth and will certainly serve as raw material for the constitution of her subjectivity. Freud recognized not only the ability of babies and children to self-inflict pleasure, but their incredible investment in it as a masturbatory venture, whether or not the corporal area of choice was genital. Even, or perhaps most significantly, “the retention of the fecal mass” could serve a masturbatory stimulus. “Thus the quality of the 38 The description is in Cinearte, August 21, 1929. Cited in Bicalho, p. 28. 39 Katie Halper threw some sort of reason into the panicky debate in “Yes, Fetuses Masturbate,” on Salon.com: http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/the_science_of_masturbating_fetuses/ (accessed July 1, 2013). 43 stimulus has more to do with producing the pleasurable feeling than has the nature of the part of the body concerned.” 40 We also know that kids are sexual in the sense that they have, perform, and are driven by a sexuality, even if they aren’t having sex – although some are. Adults can take a round-about pedophilic pleasure in looking at kids, one that is put in motion by, for example, the very discussions about whether Xuxa, Calvin Klein ads, Mary Kay Letourneau, or Josh Duggar are doing the unthinkable and mixing childhood with sex. 41 Panic over the possibility of a sexual child, contradicted by the avid production of the sexy child, emblematizes a culture bent on presuming that sexuality comes from outside the child, imposing on her, always as an unspeakable and inauthentic violence, as though we weren’t all inextricable to a child-loving culture that projects the link between sexuality and the infantile into a perverse other (the homosexual, the sexual predator, and Xuxa, for instance) so that it can “save” the children from a sexual threat that could never come from ourselves. An interventionist re-calling of Xuxa would thus require from its maker an unabashed exposure of herself as (an always already queer) sexual child. We can think of Joon Oluchi Lee’s “The Joy of The Castrated Boy” as one intervention in the way the child’s purity is guaranteed by her muteness. Lee structures his reading of Toni Morrison’s novel Sula through the child (s)he once was. His self- centric reparation attempt involves a re-reading of his gender-assigned-at-birth, and 40 Sigmund Freud, The Three Essays on The Theory of Sexuality (Basic Books, 2000), p. 52, p. 49. Beatriz Preciado takes Freud’s point on the latency of any body part, “real” or phantom, as an erotic zone further in Manifeste Contra-Sexuel (Balland, 2000). For Preciado, any body part can also be, or work as, a penis, which makes the penis itself a mere dildo. 41 On anxiety over children’s exposure to pedophiles, see Amy Adler, “The Perverse Law of Child Pornography,” in Columbia Law Review, March 7, 2011. 44 policed thereafter at penalty of getting his “pee-pee” cut off if he didn’t “stop acting like a girl,” and whose favorite objects could only become part of his ludic disposition through usurpation. They included his little sister’s beige coat (“which I wore once with a sash”), lipstick (“addicted from the moment I slathered my mother’s on in bathroom secrecy”), and “books for girls, filled with love stories starring medusa-curled girls with huge galaxy for eyes, filled with stars and rainbows and tears, of happiness and depression.” 42 Lee’s falling back into queer-childness illustrates what Heather Love describes as “feeling backward,” a non-hagiographic scavenging of the (queerness of the) past. It is also predicated on Kathryn Bond Stockton’s concept of the ghostliness of the queer child, or the child who is always queer: A child can only speak, or be heard, in remembrance (re-member-ance), in the precarious act of re-appearance, après coup. 43 Lebovici links memory, or life’s events in general, to a necessarily retroactive play that makes sense. It could be said that such play is more interactive (as in a dialogic game of call and response between temporalities) than retroactive given that “memory doesn’t exist without its awakening by contemporary events. It [memory] couldn’t manifest itself, then, except by being ‘impregnated’ by a new situation.” 44 42 Joon Oluchi Lee, “The Joy of The Castrated Boy,” in Social Text 84-85, Vol. 23, Nos. 3-4, Fall-Winter 2005, p. 35. Also see this Lee’s ghostly intervention/reparation take shape in his blog, lipstickeater.blogspot.com. 43 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and The Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press, 2009). Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press Books, 2009). 44 Lebovici, En L’Homme Le Bébé, p. 43. 45 Lee’s deployment of the child’s voice, and sensorial experiences (“castration grew on me” 45 ) are evidently a re-dramatization of what was once inescapably lived in the flesh without the luxury of becoming-adult retrospect. While such inevitable strategy of producing knowledge is obvious in Lee, it becomes a different device, albeit triggered by a similar disposition, in G. Winston James’s Uncle, a short story about a boy fascinated by his uncle’s physical presence, experienced with the anxiety-giving precariousness of the apparition we see in Xuxa’s dramatic arrival and departure. James’s’ story is completely told in the first person. A child speaks. Now. We hear a child. His sexuality is not yet to come. It’s being experienced. It’s boiling. It overflows. The child is cumming. This is certainly not the child whose innocence must be saved from the predatorial other, or whose innocence must be created ad inifinitum so that the predatorial other can live. This is a child invested in the thickness of his uncle’s eyebrows (“so thick I can’t even tell if there’s skin underneath”), the smooth darkness of his skin, and the way his eyes go from light brown to blue when exposed to the sunlight (“It’s kinda scary, but kinda nice.”). 46 This is the child I was once, and who, when (s)he wasn’t repressing his/her fascination with the thickness of his/her own uncle’s eyebrows, was urgently daydreaming of the smooth paleness of Xuxa’s skin, the surely appeasing fluffiness of the yellow ponytails that adorned her microphone to mimic her own, which could perhaps attract the thickness of the uncle’s eyebrows. A contrast that seemed so natural, even super-natural in Xuxa. 45 Lee, “The Joy of The Castrated Boy,” p. 36. 46 G. Winston James, “Uncle” in Shaming the Devil: Collected Short Stories (Top Pen Press, 2009), p. 2. 46 James’s child, and mine, is in touch with what touches him/her, and what he would like to touch. This child’s ludic usurpation is a form of telekinesis: she can touch very little and very little can touch her. So she must make due with looking, and with remembering, remembering differently, saving the images for later and remixing them into something else altogether. Our burden, and our blessing, is the urgent need to outsmart the readymade paths for horizontal growth that have been paved and signposted as devoid of alternatives. Ours is a haptically aware child (“His fingers and his lips kinda tickle my ear when they brush it.”), a sexually aware child articulated into being, as child, through James’s literary device, revealing to the reader the ways in which, in some register, a child is like a small adult, a baixinho, negotiating the tension between sexual desire and ability to have the (supposedly satisfying) object (of desire) as James might be at the age of his actual writing. While we may think of sexual and innocent as antithetical terms, the child’s so- called innocence itself appears as particularly sexual in James, as it does in Xuxa, and in the queer boy mimicking her in the bathroom for his uncle to (never) see. James’s child’s older brother, Vince, “always brushes his…thing back and forth on my face like a razor.” 47 Here we feel backward with the child as though we were becoming child (again) as the language of the child is preserved as spokesperson for the child himself, verbatim. James’ child’s account also shows how the ludic re-signification, or the usurpation of the original meaning of its cultural injunction, cuts both ways: a banal object can be turned into the object of desire (a conditioner bottle as a Xuxa mic) and the object of desire can 47 Ibid, p. 3. 47 be disarmed into a trivial manifestation, making it more confessionable in the conscious, and through language: the brother’s penis is a razor. If affect only exists in the present, and the voicing of the child’s affect can only take shape afterwards, after the affect, whether it is evidently performed as a return (Lee) or disguised as a live account, simultaneous to the act of the reader’s reading (of) it (James), the speech of the child is necessarily a temporal drag. This drag(ging) of the child’s word – whose now is contingent to an archival/archeological after-the-fact/affect finding, or a simulation of its present-ness – echoes the condition of the child in psychoanalysis as symptom of the parents, and of the parents of the parents (and so on, ad infinitum), heir of the symbolic legacy of every generation that came before her -- before the affect. For Maud Mannoni, the child’s contingent condition as symptom-of-the- (m)other(s’ relationship) resembles a psychosomatic organ that plays out the un- articulated drama between father and mother. Mannoni’s term to describe a child so pathologically invested and enmeshed in the parental knots (Lebovici’s term is “interactive pathology”) 48 , is quite telling. She titles her collection of case studies, in which an analysis of the child is an analysis of that child’s parents, L’Enfant Arriéré et Sa Mère, translated as The Backward Child and His Mother. Within our context, “a backward child” is/has been a redundancy if she is to speak, or be heard – at last. 49 The child always comes later, as the aftermath of her own death, having made way for the adult. One of Freud’s main points in The Three Essays on The Theory of Sexuality is precisely that pleasure itself is always “a search for some pleasure which has already 48 Lebovici, En L’Homme Le Bébé, p. 40. (my translation) 49 Maud Mannoni, L’Enfant Arriéré et Sa Mère (Seuil, 1981). 48 been experienced.” 50 The condition of the child as a subject to speak her own desire, or to make it heard, costs her own life. Is the child’s ability to speak, or to be heard, or to not muffle the capitalist/orgasmic/girlish sounds her voice makes when it cracks, then, bound to be a choreography of corpses animating a “finished event” or a “tomb of his past desires,” like the contents of the dream? 51 For Mannoni, death permeates the relationship between mother and child from the moment of birth, when the fantasy of the child gives way to an actual baby, who never corresponds exactly to the mother’s expectations. “The love relationship between mother and child will always have, in this sense, an aftertaste of death, of denied death, most of the time transvestied in sublime love, sometimes in pathological indifference, sometimes in conscious rejection; but the idea of death is always there (…).” 52 The Child in Theory, The Child in Practice Xuxa’s rise as non-Brazilian Brazilian royalty in the 1980s and 1990s coincide with Brazil’s own trajectory of emergence, from a global baixinho to the world’s sixth largest economy, “expected to move up to 4 th place ahead of Japan” by 2050. 53 Brazilians’ emergence, from childhood into the presumed adulthood of capitalist-style progress, involves socio-economic growth and a symbolic unsettling that amounts to 50 Sigmund Freud, The Three Essays on The Theory of Sexuality, p. 47. 51 For Lucien Israël affect only exists in the present, while the drive’s domain is the future (it heads forward), and object (of fantasy) is always expired, obsolete, and out-of-date. Israël, p. 149. 52 Mannoni, L’Enfant Arriéré et Sa Mère, p. 26 (my translation). 53 PwC report, “Would in 2050. The BRICs and Beyond: Prospects, Challenges and Opportunities,” January 2013. http://www.pwc.com/en_GX/gx/world-2050/assets/pwc- world-in-2050-report-january-2013.pdf (last accessed June 12, 2013). 49 what we could call a positive crisis. Like Stockton’s ghostly queer child, these changes are also achieved through sideways growth, as when one is unable to develop according to the dicta provided by the normative molds/modes of growing – upwards. Taking the emerging country-child analogy further, we can say that the price for Brazil’s emergence (upward emergence, sideways emergence, re-emergence of the repressed) has been the death of the child – of its child(ren) and itself as child, particularly if we take television programming as an emblematic symptom for a country “of illiterate folk” where, according to Vasconcellos, “what isn’t television has no cultural value.” 54 The string of events that can illustrate Brazil’s multi-pronged emergence (vertical, horizontal, diagonal, jagged, and in ways we can’t yet map) largely involve an investment, financial and symbolic, of properties (of aesthetics, class, race) that do not line up with what Xuxa represented. If Xuxa’s zenith was built on a certain stoking of post-colonial inferiority complexes and anxieties about ambiguous lines dividing the Brazilian class system (Brazil explicitly divides its classes in alphabetical letters with “A” corresponding to the very rich, “C” to the new middle class and “F” to the very poor), 55 the post-Xuxa years are characterized by an embracing of what counts as Brazilian, or a fantasy of what constitutes the lower class in the higher classes, which are still the 54 Vasconcellos, Eu & a Xuxa: Sociologia do Cabaré Infantil, p. 118. My translation. 55 The utilization of letters of the alphabet as a key for class-cum-race categorization echoes one of Xuxa’s most popular songs, “Abecedário da Xuxa,” whose lyrics consist of the star’s associating each letter to a particular word. In this letter schema A isn’t for rich, but for amor (love), B is for baixinho (little kid), C is for coração (heart), D is for docinho (candy), E is for escola (school) and F for feijão (bean). Most of the associations seem to stand for basic elements of life that a large part of the population lack, the material of their dreams coinciding with basic human needs. 50 producers of television content, having ceded some of the place within the television frame to the dark-skinned representatives of the (previous) lower classes. What used to fall under the category of bad taste, that is, poor folks’ taste and thus deemed un-televisable now occupies center stage in TV shows dominated by Brazilian country music artists, a much larger amount of brown and black actors in soap operas, and, for the first time, series set in the poor slum-like suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, instead of mansions and modeling agencies. One of the most prominent settings of the highly popular soap Avenida Brasil (2012) was a miserable part of town literally called Lixão (“Big Dump”), and a fictional poor suburb named Divino, filled with stereotypical lower class characters who love to dance to Brazilian funk and use “ghetto” linguistic expressions. The music and the linguistic expressions that would have been the object of mockery in the 80s and 90s are now objects of desire that become popular commodities. It must also be noted that although the figures of bad taste-cum-good taste embodied by the new middle class do take center stage on television nowadays, they are often accompanied by signposts of the old good taste of white intellectualized and/ wealthy “serious” artists and characters. The popular variety show Esquenta!, for instance, is built on an “everything mixed and everyone together” (“tudo junto e misturado”) motto, encouraging the fusion of genres, styles, races and classes. Its stage shows a diversity of people interacting, but it relegates the role of dancers, hot women, and funny common folk to dark-skinned people from the favelas, while reserving the role of the intellectual who will translate the spectacles that take place on stage to white male academics. 51 We can follow the traces that lead to this shift in taste, and thus, in the specificity of objects deemed televisable, in a series of surprising cultural shifts that gave Brazilians the sense that things were, at last, changing for the better. These include the 40 million people pulled out of poverty in the Lula years (2002-2010); the election of its first female and gender-nonconforming president, Dilma Rousseff, in 2010, winning the rights to host the Olympics in 2016 and FIFA’s World Cup in 2014, the approval of sex reassignment surgery to be paid for by the state, the occupation of the Rio de Janeiro favelas by the police and the Army in 2010; and the ruling by the Brazilian Supreme court that same- sex couples are legally entitled to civil unions in 2011. These indicate not the fostering of ghostly apparitions from abroad that land in Brazilian territory to fill its lack, but a literal changing of position and meaning, with an unexpected investment of what was once seen as shamefully Brazilian into the poster children (and here the children are precisely not literal, for they are absent) of the new Brazil. The raw material sustaining this new country had already been “used” in a very different way, and for very different purposes, in the aesthetics of hunger of Glauber Rocha’s cinema of the 1960s, which portrayed Brazilian misery as misery, not as happiness despite its conditions, in the hopes of ringing a revolutionary alarm. For Vasconcellos, Rocha’s death in 1981 was felt like a relief by the cultural industry, largely controlled by Xuxa’s network, Rede Globo -- the same network which would appropriate the hunger of the new middle class (the 40 million new Brazilians who went from miserables to consumers) into soap opera material: “(…) now we don’t have to hear that 52 old crap about hunger, porno-chanchada, the Third World anymore. Now everything is possible.” 56 For Vasconcellos, Rocha’s death marks the end of the dictatorship years, and the engaged critical responses (“that old crap about hunger”) they had triggered, as well as the beginning of an opening at the end of the 1970s, when the Brazilian intellectual was invested in doing whatever it took not to seem like a moralist. “It thus follows that Xuxa would come about as the epitome of such de-sublimating in-video tendencies,” whose performance wasn’t seen through the framework of repressive/obscene, but under the rubric of modernization. 57 This propensity was able to sustain Xuxa’s phenomenon despite the criticisms hurled at her. Modernization, at the time, was only a dream, exactly the stuff Xuxa was made of on daily television, and as purchasable goods – a dream that wouldn’t catch up with Brazil, albeit in maladroit ways, for at least two more decades after Xuxa’s first apparition. In the mean time, Xuxa was entrusted with the chore to make childhood “as brief as possible.” Vasconcellos refers to her as a “comedian” -- for Freud, the comic is an awakening of the infantile 58 -- doing Hollywood’s colonizing work, and her show as a televised brothel whose mission was the production of adults through the killing of the children, “and the compulsory elimination of kids’ qualities.” 59 56 Vasconcellos, p. 98. Rocha was, for Vasconcellos, the number one enemy of Rede Globo’s cultural monopoly, established with the help of the military officers in power during the dictatorship years. Ibid, p. 114. My translation. 57 Ibid, 101. My translation. 58 “‘(…) he does it as I used to do it as a child’” is the logic that Freud recognizes in the making of the comical, that is, in the difference between the subject’s way of doing things and the other’s. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (W.W. Norton & Company, 1990), p. 279, 280. 59 Vasconcellos, p. 113, p. 107. My translation. 53 Whether we call Brazil’s new phase modernization, progress, or emergence, this encounter of the actual with the imagined nation, the moment and aftershock when Brazil embodies aspects of living that could only have been fantasized as a life beyond its borders, it is not only a (unevenly distributed) new class mobility, but in the desire for more. Feeling like the future has caught up with the present, however belatedly, spawns the unsettling of positions that had been naturalized as stationary. Brazil’s surprising and massive wave of protests that began in June of 2013 and that culminated in the street protests against newly re-elected President Rousseff (including calls for the return of the military regime) is a (re-) emergence of a new/old “crap about hunger.” This emergence points to Brazil’s trajectory of “progress” as hardly linear, but in constant communication with its ghosts and traumas, weaving itself in uncommitted and oscillatory fashion. It also makes evident the oceanic way desire arranges itself, always volatile to changes of form, and tending toward an excess that is bound to leak, drown, wash up and wash away. Something Else Altogether For Beatriz Preciado, (queer) multitudes “oppose themselves to traditional political institutions that present themselves as sovereign and universally representative, as well as to the hetero-centric sexual-political epistemologies that dominate scientific production.” 60 The Xuxa-loving multitudes are not presumed to be queer ones: girls want to be like her, boys want to have her. Boys and girls are taken as properly functioning seeds of a post-colonial capitalist machinery of meaning successfully reproducing itself 60 Beatriz Preciado, “Multitudes Queer: Notas Para una Política de Los ‘Anormales’,” in Compléments de Multitudes 12: Interrogar al Feminismo: http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Multitudes-queer,1465 (last accessed June 12, 2013). My translation. 54 with no lacunae between its iterations, no room for non-horizontal growth. These lacunae come to the surface, uncomfortably like a symptom (a symptom like hunger), if one looks intimately, as though the speaking child were alive. Xuxa, as the elected object of adulation representative of a system of idealized race, gender, class, body, and nation, harbored the queerness in/of/through her hysteric multitudes of followers by way of her excess (of femininity, of whiteness, of better-than or beyond Brazilian) which brought together – in the same specter – the excess of desire and the excess of Brazilian capitalism itself. Freud recognizes a fundamental relationship between the excessive, or the exaggerated, and pleasure in the child, who ignores quantitative relations, which she will come to know later than qualitative ones. “The use of moderation and restraint, even in the case of permitted impulses, is a late fruit of education and is acquired by the mutual inhibition of mental activities brought together in a combination.” When such combinations are weakened, as in dreams, or in the hysteric frenzy of mediatized fantasy worlds, the child’s lack of moderation re-emerges. For Freud, this rebellion against the compulsion of logic and reality often takes the shape of “liberated nonsense.” 61 If the multitude is to be a queer one, then, it must be driven by what Lacan calls “the third way of taking truth.” That is, not taking truth as meaning, which we associate with the normative adult (So and so is right), nor as its contradiction, associated with teenage rebellion (So and so is wrong), but taking truth at the logical level, which excludes meaning (So and so is something else altogether), associated with the ludic 61 One of Xuxa’s most famous songs, derived from one of her signature expressions, is titled “Libera Geral,” which could be translated as a cross between “let’s flame out” and “knock yourself out.” Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, p. 281, p. 154. 55 nonsense of the child. 62 For Barthes, Bataille goes beyond the structural agreement between contesting forms and contested forms, their senseless (but not nonsensical) dichotomy, through a ludic disposition teeming with a sense of play and untenable erotism. “Bataille doesn’t set sexual freedom as the opposite of freedom, but … laughter.” 63 Although it may seem as though Xuxa embodies all of the signs that lead toward a cathexis of the ideals that comprise a racist, sexist, classist, homophobic (and so on) post- colonial society, it would be a presumption of hermetic normativity in the child not to imagine how Xuxa could also compromise what she comprises. By respecting the constitutive queerness of the child, we can acknowledge the queerness behind Xuxa’s allure, whose most crucial element may perhaps be her disguising as the very embodiment of normativity’s fantasmatic object. Despite capitalism’s own tentacles, omnisciently (non-)represented by director Marlene Mattos absence-presence, conspiring toward the production of particular kinds of meaning and investments in Xuxa with very specific end goals of consumption, her nonsense fosters the possibility of the unaccountable, the lacuna, the something else altogether. Its abundance makes room for something much closer to the unmanageable excess, and childishness, of desire – which renders the presumed object of satisfaction, unlike capitalism’s, much blurrier, opaque, slippery and indefinite. 62 Examples of this something else altogether are (childish) nonsense, the silence of the analyst, James Joyce, and Georges Bataille, Colette Soler’s presentation at the Research Group of Clinical Formations of the Lacanian Field seminar, “The Names of the Father and Fathers.” Paris, July 6, 2013. Barthes offers Bataille as an example. Barthes, Le Plaisir du Texte, p. 74. 63 Barthes, Le Plaisir du Texte, p. 74 (my translation). Frantz Fanon: “psychoanalysts say that there is nothing more traumatizing for the young child than with his encounters with what is rational.” Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Grove Press, 2008), p. 118. 56 The nonsensical in Xuxa is presented visually and linguistically. It is in the colorful and incongruous juxtapositions that make up her clothing, styling, accessorizing, which escape categorization, rendering her age, class, and provenance perennially elsewhere. She may reiterate certain idea(l)s about race, class and gender expression, but she herself remains a kind of hors-human apparition unable to fit into any world but her own (any world but Brazil’s), which requires the production of new codes, new language, new openings, new holes. For Barthes, openings, at the level of the clothed body itself, are what most produce the erotic: there where the garment splits, turning the supposed nothing of the there where there is nothing (of the vagina, of the anus) into a there where there is something: “(…) it’s intermittence, as psychoanalysis has well argued, that is erotic: that of the skin that shines between two pieces of fabric, between two edges (the opened shirt, the glove and the sleeve) (…): the mise-en-scène of an apparition- disappearance.” 64 Xuxa’s sartorial presentation, her non-passable child drag (ambiguity makes the star), disrespects reasonable dress. It borrows from too many sources –the Lolita, the whore, the clown, the supermodel, the princess, but also the prince, as Xuxa often dresses like a man to perform in sketches, and famously wore a suit and tie to pose alongside Michael Jackson for the cover of Manchete magazine in 1992. Xuxa’s world is built around what Freud calls jest or play, which is a simpler mode of the mechanics of a joke – a joke without clothes on, or a bare joke -- that requires no value. It is a form of pleasurable fun without aim or assumption of a payoff. The pleasure of this jest or play is a “useless” one, yielded due to the enabling of a certain 64 Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du Texte, p. 17-18. My translation. 57 act that would not be permissible under less ludic circumstances. “In jests what stands in the foreground is the satisfaction of having made possible what was forbidden by criticism.” It is easy to see how Xuxa’s world, then, and the enjoyable unnecessary-ness of her jest would be particularly useful for a child queered beyond the general queerness of the child tout court. 65 Xuxa’s nonsense is also present in her songs, along with the hyper-feminine crack of her voice – exactly the type of queer slippage a queer boy may (unwittingly?) announce his queerness as and be punished for. This is the nonsense Freud associates with linguistic pleasure in its most literal way, as when a child first enters language and derives incredible enjoyment in experiencing it for its own sake, even if, or especially if, they don’t hold “real” meaning. For example, the pronunciation of loose syllables that may lose direct meaning when cut out from their original word, onomatopoeia or the repetition of words in contexts where they technically don’t fit. Xuxa’s own name supposedly came about through her brother’s inability to pronounce her actual name, Maria da Graça. That brother’s very name seems, Blad, seems to have been the result of a misspelling, or misunderstanding, of Vlad. Various choruses of Xuxa’s songs include nonsensical neologisms, or amalgamations of syllables that make reference to Xuxa’s name, along with an accented stress on the last vowel of the word (ê, á) that is associated with Native Brazilian names: remelêxuxa, xuxuxu xaxaxa, twistxuxa, ilariê, palo palo paloê, oleoleleá. The songs often bring together contrasting and anachronic elements, mixing in the same narrative childhood and adult themes, as though the frame of reference for what is pleasurable 65 Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, p. 161, p. 158. 58 were to be found in the adult and Xuxa appears as the agent to bring that shortcut to jouissance down to the baixinhos. It’s as if Xuxa could collapse time, simultaneously cruising from the perks of adulthood (consummated love, as it turns out) to the benefits of childhood (permissive play without the burdens of responsibility). In one song, “Leitura,” Xuxa is a little girl in an ecological mission to save alligators in the rainforest who also boasts about living a love story under the moonlight. The title of “Ilariê,” a Xuxa anthem, which also serves as its chorus (“Ilari lari lari ê”), doesn’t have any particular meaning, it’s a loose signifier just as the “ô ô ô” that follows. In another popular song, “Doce Mel,” she sings about a fantasy world where we can be whoever we’d like: Human or rag doll, boy or girl, because “everything that is free has superpowers, and smells like candy, hay and foot odor.” The imagery of the innocent child engaging in make-believe in a field of hay and eating candy verges toward the erotic as Xuxa sings that life is so sweet, “like honey dripping down from your lips.” In “Salada Mista,” Xuxa borrows from a traditional children’s language game in Brazil, using the nonsensical term Uni Duni Tê/Salamê minguê, which essentially translates to “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” to describe the game of the title. Here Xuxa tells kids to pick the name of a fruit, each of which corresponds to a particular act of intimacy: pear means you hold hands, grape means you have to hug someone, apple is a peck on the cheek, and salada mista is French kissing. In the mouth?, she asks, mimicking the voice of a naïve little girl. The chorus responds: Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! Then, Xuxa explains that if you don’t play this game, you’re missing out, because if you close your eyes, you won’t even know who you’re kissing, which means shy kids are in luck. 59 Ludic Anthropofagy Twenty years after the last Xou da Xuxa aired in December 1992, the child as presumed audience is virtually absent from Brazilian television. Xuxa’s morning spot has been replaced by cooking, health and talk shows aimed at stay-at-home moms led by bourgeois white female hosts in their 50s and 60s who mix serious conversation led by white intellectuals and popular musical acts associated with the previously bad taste of “the new middle class” in a kind of mission civilisatrice from within. If Brazil’s fantasies of futurity once took the shape of impossible deities from abroad, twenty years after Brazil’s first democratically elected president, Fernando Collor de Mello (impeached mid-term), the same year Xou da Xuxa last aired, the materialization of so many of its dreams of progress have driven Brazilians inward, to fetishize, market, and instrumentalize the bodies of the familiar poor other: the de facto emerging body of those who have moved up a notch or two in Brazil’s class hierarchy. Poet Oswald de Andrade’s legendary Cannibal Manifesto, from 1928, was a call for Brazil to reject cultural dependency and look at its own self in order to produce a modernist and cosmopolitan culture through the eating, processing, digesting, and then excreting of European cultures that would evacuate themselves into something authentic and new, the something else altogether that Brazilians recognize as their creative métier: giving a queer twist to the handed-down scraps of abroad. If the eating of the other functioned, for de Andrade, as a post-colonial metaphor for shedding the imported so one could discover something truly Brazilian, the endogenous turn of the post-Xuxa period has Brazilians eating their own flesh as a way to re-assert that through its consumption such flesh ceases to be theirs and goes back to being the other’s. The anthropophagy is 60 here a desperate attempt to block the potentially democratic effects of Brazil’s positive crisis. It aims at differentiating those who eat from those who shall forever embody “that old crap about hunger.” “The commodification of Otherness,” as bell hooks reminds us, “has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling.” Ethnicity, or class, or whatever, becomes “spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.” 66 This trend of “othering” through internal means finds its most extreme arrangement in the recent wave of inter-family killings in Brazil, the kind of crime until recently thought as the luxury of “developed countries.” A recent example that gripped the nation is the case of a 13-year- old, Marcelo Pesseghini, who killed his father and mother (both police officers), his aunt, his grandmother, then went to school before killing himself in 2013. Others include businessman Marcos Kitano Matsunaga, whose wife, Elize, murdered and dismembered him before stuffing the body parts in suitcases in 2012, as well as Suzane von Richthofen, a teenager from an affluent family who helped assassinate her parents with her “lower class” boyfriend in 2002. 67 For those of us who were aware, on some level, of the queerness of our own desire, Xuxa symbolized a tool kit for the childish masturbation of body parts we did not apparently have, love stories we would never have, and the animating of a specular body- in-apparition (can the other ever actually be experienced as something other than just 66 bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (South End Press, 1992), p. 21. 67 Felipe Frazão, Casal de Policiais É Morto em Chacina em São Paulo, Revista Veja. http://veja.abril.com.br/noticia/brasil/policiais-sao-mortos-em-chacina-na-zona-norte- de-sao-paulo (last accessed September 28, 2013). 61 that?) 68 that was ours through ludic usurpation. This may not seem like a revolutionary dynamic – it interrupts none of the evils of capitalism nor the gender system on which it depends to prop itself up. But the child’s queerness may need to forge some entrance precisely within the evilness of such set of systems, if it is to ever cum as a child, that is, before the benefit of adult knowledge, retrospective and lifelong experience. A child may be able to cum through limbs, bodies and costumes she does not (yet) have, but usurps, before it can forge a something else altogether to cum with or from. In fact, something else altogether is produced by the very usurpation of the something like all else that a normative object represents, which in Xuxa’s world, and certainly not only hers, can be a masquerade for the something else altogether of a queer object, or of the object’s queerness. 68 For Lacan the answer is no. Jacques Lacan, Les Quatre Concepts Fondamentaux De La Psychanalyse (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973). 62 Works Cited Adler, Amy. “The Perverse Law of Child Pornography.” In Columbia Law Review, March 7, 2011. Barthes, Roland. Le Plaisir du Texte. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973. Bicalho, Maria Fernanda Baptista., “The Art of Seduction: Representation of Women in Brazilian Silent Cinema.” In Luso-Brazilian Review XXX, 1993. Bollas, Christopher. Hysteria. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Duvert, Tony. Le Bon Sexe Illustré. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1974. Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. Routledge, 2003. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and The Death Drive (Duke University Press Books, 2004) Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, 2008. Frazão, Felipe. Casal de Policiais É Morto em Chacina em São Paulo, Revista Veja http://veja.abril.com.br/noticia/brasil/policiais-sao-mortos-em-chacina-na-zona- norte-de-sao-paulo Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. W.W. Norton & Company, 1990. Freud, Sigmund. Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1957. Freud, Sigmund. The Three Essays on The Theory of Sexuality. Basic Books, 2000. Halper, Katie. “Yes, Fetuses Masturbate.” Salon. June 20, 2013. http://www.salon.com/2013/06/20/the_science_of_masturbating_fetuses/ hooks, bell. “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation, South End Press, 1992. Israël, Lucien. La Jouissance de L’Hystérique. Paris: Seuil, 1999. James, G. Winston. “Uncle.” In Shaming the Devil: Collected Short Stories. Top Pen Press, 2009. 63 Klein, Melanie. “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego (1930).” In The Selected Melanie Klein, edited by Juliet Mitchell. New York: The Free Press, 1986. Klein, Melanie. “Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected In a Work of Art and In The Creative Impulse (1929).” In The Selected Melanie Klein, edited by Juliet Mitchell. New York: The Free Press, 1986. Lacan, Jacques. Les Quatre Concepts Fondamentaux De La Psychanalyse. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973. Lacan, Jacques. The seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book 20: On feminine sexuality: the limits of love and knowledge, encore (1972-1973). Bruce Fink, Trans. W. W. Norton, 1998. Laplanche, Jean. “To Situate Sublimation.” In October 28 (Spring, 1984). Lee, Joon Oluchi. “The Joy of The Castrated Boy.” In Social Text 84-85, Vol. 23, Nos. 3-4, Fall-Winter 2005. Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and The Politics of Queer History. Harvard University Press, 2009. Lebovici, Serge. En L’Homme Le Bébé. Paris: Flammarion, 1994. Mannoni, Maud. L’Enfant Arriéré et Sa Mère. Seuil, 1981. Preciado, Beatriz. “Multitudes Queer: Notas Para una Política de Los ‘Anormales’.” Compléments de Multitudes 12: Interrogar al Feminismo: http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Multitudes-queer,1465 Preciado, Beatriz. Manifeste Contra-Sexuel. Paris: Balland, 2000. Preciado, Beatriz, Testo Junkie: Sexe, Drogue et Biopolitique. Paris: Grasset, 2008. Ragland, Ellie. Essays On the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan. Routledge, 1994. Russo, Mary. “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory.” In The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. Routledge, 1994. 64 Silverman, Kaja. “Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse.” In Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, edited by Tania Modleski, 139-152. Indiana University Press, 1986. Simpson, Amelia. Xuxa: The Mega-Marketing of Gender, Race, and Modernity. Temple University Press, 1993. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Duke University Press Books, 2009. Vasconcellos, Gilberto Felisberto. Eu & a Xuxa: Sociologia do Cabaré Infantil. São Paulo: Editora Leia Mais, 1991. Winnicott, D.W. Playing and Reality. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. 65 66 Bareback Theory∞ Fucking and Fucking with The Symbolic in The Phamarco-Pornographic Age 67 “May 24, 2008 Bracelets for key rings wrapped around our ankles like weightless shackles, we roamed around Sun City with a sense of normalcy my Brazilian skin still cannot absorb. Bodies lying in cubicles, bodies lying on the ground, bodies panting on reusable pleather mats. Bodies without shame. Or with shame but freshly pissed on nonetheless. Or with shame and pissed on precisely because of it. This is a world. Trying to make the most out of the entry fee, there was nothing awkward about saying no after a yes, or saying yes again after a yes to somebody else. Some had their iPods on, some brought their bathroom pouches, some brought juice in little packages with straws. Practice makes perfect. Only one kept his shirt on. What is he hiding? We all know. Would straight men ever go to work were Sun City tailored to their boners? The woman on the radio says, ‘Je ne fait rien de façon tiède.’ We can’t seem to do well in lukewarm spaces either. Sun City really is what ‘humanity’ has worked for thousands of years to hide and destroy, only to return – in the form of an itch, a restless leg, a rite, a song, or a cancer. And then we recover it and make it into a business. At Sun City everything conspires against alienation. It may take shitting in the public shower while standing up because getting fucked like a slut by four or five or more at once while the old fat tourist snores in the Balinese room calls for some kind of excretion. I eject as fast as I take in to make room for more, as if there was never ever any interruption. In fact, the actual fucking bores me, as it promises nothing. Whereas wondering around the rooms and the various floors I always discover a new nook or a new drawer, even if it does not open. ‘The one’ must be here somewhere, and when he gets a good look, he will surely stop me in the nick of time and invite me to the south to eat fruit at the beach, pick baby names and make love for two weeks without stopping. Like the Adriana Calcanhoto song, Whoever and wherever you are, you have 30 minutes to save me. Here my staring isn’t hopeless. And it doesn’t denounce me or strip me naked, because I already am. Does this make me a woman? Jim Krusoe may have shed light on the question of why in the world, why in this world, the question ‘With or without (a rubber)?’ can be casually uttered – with a straight face. When speaking of why serial killers keep on killing he argued that the repetition was rooted in the unconscious wish to undo the previous act by doing it again. As if to extract the sting of the trauma by turning it into a banality. Like faggot, like tranny, like nigger. Can a Brazilian say nigger and claim post-colonial sisterhood? The fat black guy from Plenty of Fish didn’t seem to mind. ‘Call me a nigger, bitch. And make me lick your feet.’ In the locker room I see a promising Algerian/Tunisian/Moroccan who looks back, but I’ve been fucked so many times I think I’m bleeding.” 68 The Researcher is Present “been on the sidelines of the bareback revolution for too long. I think about it all the time and think about jumping in and starting to take cum, but the old safe sex police fucked up my head really really effectively! That said, I've dipped my toe in. Ten loads so far - fucking amazing, as good as everyone says. I see what men mean when they say it only takes once to turn you into a bber for life. Travel a lot for work.” ShouldIdoit, on BarebackRt.com “(…) disaster is the magical way of removing an oppressive technological order that otherwise seems immovable.” Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground 69 This cannot help but be a corporeal essay. A horny text. A sext. The body of the text is the text of the body of its maker. The re-presentation of the excess-cum-lack of its maker’s desire, and the always partial awareness of its structure, itself a network of mis- glimpsed/gleaned images of its history and/in/cum time. Mis-glimpsing, gleaning…the next alliterative association that comes to mind is garimpar, the Portuguese word for digging, specifically for gold. This text cannot help but roll out what it doesn’t know about itself and still governs it. Part of its conscious wants is to highlight that which sways the researcher– theorist-practitioner to and from her pre-meditated object of study, for this weaving precisely constitutes the object in all of its precariousness, instability, and immateriality. The usage of feminine pronouns is to be inconsistent throughout the text in order to somatize the impossibility of doing justice to the queerness of desire in an attempt to translate it linguistically, as well as the researcher-theorist-practitioner’s own hesitant and ephemeral claims of her/his/et al (gender) identity. What we know about her object (of desire), is also hesitant and ephemeral, despite its abiding to a different logic of latitude, and notwithstanding the one certainty that props it up: it is missing. To study the chosen object (of study) is to wonder queerly and to write with Lacanian ink. It is to speak the language of psychoanalysis through Queer Theory’s pitch – or what Lee Edelman calls Its “appropriately perverse refusal.” 69 It is to follow, with the eyes but also with the hands, the mouth, and other orifices, a dynamic that so often bears the circularity of a ring, or rather, a series of them. A bracelet, perhaps, or pulseira 69 Edelman speaks of Queer Theory’s refusal “of every substantialization of identity, which is always oppositionally defined (...).” Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 4. 70 in Portuguese, the a in the end revealing the gender of/in the word, its girlishness. The girlishness that my mother tries to cover up by referring to it, the pulseira, as an aro (or “hoop”) when suggesting it as a toy for a child. The o of the latter’s ending providing it some neutral, that is, masculine drag, while still unable to efface the object’s conventional function: to adorn, to make pretty, to make woman. The Mother here, burdened with the task to make culture go very right, or very wrong, but to go on nonetheless, transgenders the word, if not the object, ingeniously maintaining the cultural imperatives whilst allowing the child, dead and queer, to play with her (apparel). Trans appears, then, as early as then, as early as language – when the researcher-theorist-practitioner still needed the mother’s help to choose objects of play and to name them, as a device for granting prohibited objects access. For a price. The dead queer child gets to play with the corpse of the original signifier (pulseira), promptly slain by the Mother’s contradicting desire to let the child play with her (stuff), and to bar him from playing with the object in its raw state. The object becomes playable through the queer arbitration of the Mother. Through its transfiguration. To develop a critical theory around barebacking is to rest one’s bearings in the quicksand of the contradiction. It is to be reminded that a split founds the subject, not cohesion. That the subject wants one thing at the same time that she doesn’t. That the psyche “doesn’t obey the principle of non-contradiction formulated by science – and by the discourses that present themselves as rational – in which a proposition cannot be right and wrong at the same time.” 70 Lacan might consider this founding subjective split as 70 Pierre Bonny, Homosexualité et Prises de Risques: Le Sujet Divisé, VIH.org, http://www.vih.org/20100826/homosexualite-et-prises-risques-sujet-divise-16857, p. 2. (last accessed August 26, 2010). My translation. 71 inherent to both the individual and the collective as, when it comes to the notion of a whole, he relegates “the one and the other to the status of mirages.” 71 . To approach the subject of barebacking is to accept the risk, akin to the throw of a dice in a game where the chips are not all on the table (les jeux ne sont pas faits), of finding oneself to be the subject of one’s own interrogations. To consider the subject of barebacking is, and this is crucial, to consider the subject tout court. By which I do not mean to evoke a sense of ontological universality, but the notion of a common set of effects, or trails, in the lives of subjects who are not-yet-conscious of the queerness of (their) desire, even if their own bodies might be, and in those who already are. Lacan may call this an ontological “generalizability,” which considers things not as they are grounded, but as “they happen to work out.” 72 This approach doesn’t aim to produce a conclusion but to foster a space for the subject (matter) to speak and for the researcher-theorist-practitioner to listen well. The central question shall not be, Why do gay men bareback?, or even, Why is barebacking so easy to want? Rather, we might wonder what barebacking wants from us. And what it can do for us. Does barebacking have an object, or is it an intransitive verb? It is imperative to recognize barebacking’s multivalence, and the permeability of the various investments for which it functions as fantasy – of symbolic belonging, of oneness, of phallic invincibility, of survival through surrendering, of institutionalized sexual purity, or of the subject’s virtual immortality through the fantasy of a human race 71 Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Écrits (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), p. 242. 72 Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” Écrits ((New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company), p. 649. Lacan refers to the unconscious as undergirded by a trail “left by that which operates to constitute the subject.” Lacan, “Position in the Unconscious,” Écrits, p. 829. 72 that can reproduce ad infinitum – despite evidence to the contrary when it comes to the orgiastic usage of evidently finite resources. Barebacking’s various investments also give way to a panoply of forms, from its most literal signification, fleshly (queer) bodies indiscriminately penetrated without prophylaxic mediation, to its more furtive ones: linguistic masturbation via what we can call the co-authoring of barebacking’s script by strangers who may end up never taking flesh – let alone penetrating each other. José Esteban Muñoz’s question, “Can we afford to redirect our critical energies away from bodies that are infected by a physical virus toward uninfected bodies that are caught within a psychological epidemic?” would not be a part of this logic, for no body is immune to the sign of barebacking, if not to its viral-bacterial effects. 73 The already- infected bodies are still being infected with other bodies and bacteria, even if they may think they have been released from AIDS as a psychological terror, into its very demystifying inhabitance, by having turned its threat from an exogenous to an endogenous one that the subject herself can supposedly manage. The not-yet-infected bodies’ claim of non-infection is, in this conjecture, weak, temporary, if not fictitious, given the impossibility of truly knowing one’s antibody status, and the precarious endurance of such knowledge. The only certainty is that, provided fantasy become praxis, one can always be infected. To address the fantasmatic logic of queer barebacking is to address the role of heterosexual barebacking. It’s to consider heterosexual sex as barebacking, or sex tout court as heterosexual barebacking as far as the symbolic is concerned. Kay S. Hymowitz cites the work of sociologist Kathryn Edin to suggest that unprotected sex becomes a 73 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York and London: New York University Press, 2009), p. 47. 73 marker of official coupledom, particularly for “younger, low-income women who tend to stop using contraception several weeks or months after starting a sexual relationship.” Hymowitz doesn’t delve into the psyche of that woman’s male partner, perhaps accepting that as a man’s “natural” default position. 74 Barebacking becomes, then, the beyond and the “it” of heterosexual sex, which places the man in a sanctioning position of power (he may or may not pull out), and the woman as victim – of a default kind of sex un-queered by the rubber, a derailing cog that the symbolic cannot recognize as part of its code. Leo Bersani refers to the “initiative of interrupting the invading male in order to insist that he practice safe sex” as unfeminine. 75 For Bersani, prostitutes represent “the inherent aptitude of women for uninterrupted sex.” The repression of such presumed aptitude is sine qua non for the non-prostitute woman. Bersani describes a certain heterosexual fantasy around AIDS transmission as binding the figure of the female prostitute and the gay man together, as spreading “their legs with an unquenchable appetite for destruction.” An unquenchable thirst that a condom could only cock-block. 76 Even if the non-prostitute woman does interrupt the “natural” flow of the sexual act, she highlights barebacking as the event’s very horizon necessarily, further acknowledging, or co-producing, the man’s instinct (i.e. cultural imperative) for going further, for taking more than he is granted, for raping. Barebacking may function as the intersecting knot, or linguistic node of comprehension, where heterosexuality and heterosexuality meet, or fall – a fertile place 74 Hymowitz, “How Single Motherhood Hurts Kids,” in The New York Times, February 9, 2014, Sunday Review, p. 5. 75 Leo Bersani, “Is The Rectum a Grave?”, in Is The Rectum a Grace? And Other Essays (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 8, p. 17. 76 Ibid, p. 18. 74 for the queer subject to seek umbrage and for the researcher-theorist-practitioner to interrogate the inevitability of heterosexuality, not just as a symbolic mode, or the model of the symbolic, but as a hermetic praxis: we all end up doing it. The barebacking subject’s performing sex (fleshly or s/textually) may point to a mutual and constant transmission between these two leanings that are actually one: we are all borrowing from the same symbolic cloud. The symbolic, after all, is called upon as blueprint for existential praxis in the case of non-normative and not-yet-queered subjects alike. What keeps barebacking hidden as such in a hetero-normative realm, and what fuels its seductive force in a queer one, is thus intricately bound by a rape culture in which heterosexual sex (in the symbolic, when not in practice) is always a kind of 75 violence. This violence aims to re-enact the supposedly inherent strength of man – the theatrical glue that allows us to equate the penis with the phallus in a trompe l’oeil fashion (aided by a literalist perception of the biological body). This performance of gender difference re-encloses man and woman in the ontological realm they are after, pushed by the repetitive indoctrination of the symbolic code. 77 Beatriz Preciado argues that barebacking was never just “a political dirty trick invented by a handful of San Francisco kamikazes,” but a way of dealing with the fact that soft dicks can’t wear condoms. Barebacking props the penis up, in phallic drag, in the most literal way: “The problem was to continue to get hard, in the winter days, for dead lovers, and for unwritten books. To remain hard, that is what’s so good about dildos, being able to stop worrying about erections (…).” Barebacking, then, eases the pain of loss: of erection, of a penis-phallus conflation, of the supposed link between the soft thing as a hard thing. Barebacking saves face. Preciado also suggests a dichotomy between “raw” and “biotech,” the latter being the condition of the pharmaco-pornist subject. Rawness becomes a synonym of bare-ness, appearing as a rehearsal, a ludic faire semblant that things aren’t so, that one isn’t completely caught, coded, pre-determined, or castrated by the symbolic(’s effects) within a de-humanizing pharmaco-pornographic economy. 78 An intervention that a Queer psychoanalytic approach to barebacking can exact is to refuse the taken-for-granted obviousness of the subject-object relationships that make 77 “The phallus is not an organ,” Éléonore Pardo reminds us, but the “signifier that designs the position of the subject in relation to desire.” Pardo, “L'asexualité, phénomène contemporain?”, Recherches en Psychanalyse, 2010/2 n° 10, p. 252. My translation. 78 Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sexe, Drogue et Biopolitique (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2008), p. 370, p. 46. My translation. 76 up the sexual and its categories in a way that even the queerest Queer Theory hasn’t. This includes not just placing barebacking within a context of digital perversion that isn’t exclusive to gays, but making room for the invisible geography of bodies and the questionable existence of the (sexual) relationship between them. 79 The dissonance between the no-longer-normative subject and the heterosexual symbolic spreads itself across not-yet-queer subjects and their presumed object choices. Following this logic it becomes nonsensical, in many registers, to differentiate – in theory – between heterosexuals and queers (the queerness of desire is always present, and acting out), not- yet-HIV-positive and no-longer-HIV-negative subjects (sero-negativity is always besieged, just one act or test away from undoing itself). 80 Preciado describes the Freudian unconscious precisely as an imagined “invisible geography,” that is, “a virtual space at once underneath and parallel to the body, where the subject’s desire, affects and sexual identity play [out].” We quickly meet the limits of our sensing and articulating the invisible geography of the body if we don’t situate it within hetero-normativity’s highly intricate machinery for hiding…machinery – a move that requires a Queer Theory qua Queer Theory sensibility to supplement Lacan’s. 81 79 Bersani, Is The Rectum a Grave?, p. 17. 80 Bersani cites Simon Watney to suggest that the fantasy of gay men as killers, and the source of AIDS, is actually a heterosexual fantasy “to kill them all – the teeming deviant millions.” Placing barebacking within the limits of homo-sexuality in a time where explicit homophobia is increasingly unaccepted as externalized speech by the general public (in the United States) may be a strategy to outsource the drive to “kill them all” to homosexuals themselves – a kind of fantasy that they will kill themselves off and spare us the guilt. This strategy also works to project the contradicting dynamics (teeming with pleasurably destructive dispositions) not only of the death drive but of jouissance onto a specific group of people – not me, even if “no human subject is entirely free” of being governed by such dynamics. Bersani, “Aggression, Gay Shame, and Almodóvar’s Art,” Is The Rectum a Grave?, p. 69. 81 Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sexe, Drogue et Biopolitique, p. 142-143. My translation. 77 Preciado also describes Freud’s analytic process as “a patient linguistic excavation.” The analogy properly retains the simultaneous interplay between the word and the body, the symbolic and the somatic, the impossibility of a split between them. The barebacking subject is here pictured as a cruising subject, enmeshed in a perverse web of masturbatory gadgets, steeped in North American normosis—as that is the condition of the “connected” subject of the 21 st century. The sense that barebacking, in its fetishized form (often aided by pharmacological substances of imagined priapism), is a particularly American phenomenon, can help us understand the seductive power of barebacking, perhaps made even more seductive for non-American subjects dreaming of the very fantasies of invincibility America is built on. It also points to the irresistibility of re-appropriating the symbolic as the subject’s go-to response to loss. Christopher Bollas describes normosis in a way that brings its subject in extreme proximity with the subject of capitalism and the anti-abstraction, anti-intellectual, and anti-psychoanalytic American subject. Such subject abides by a “particular drive to be normal, one that is typified by the numbing and eventual erasure of subjectivity in favour of a self that is seen as a material object among other man-made objects in the object world.” 82 Bollas’ idea of the normotic is perhaps best understood in the way such subject may intersect with the conveying of anti-knowledge in the borderline subject, which aims “to break the link between psyche and reality, so that the mind can evade emotionally unacceptable recognitions.” Borderline patients make only manifest sense, as though they haven’t subjected daily experiences to inner reverie. 83 82 Christopher Bollas, “Normotic Illness,” in The Christopher Bollas Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 23. 83 Bollas, Hysteria (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 174. 78 We would do well in choosing a certain Lacanian blindness, a strategic presumption of illiteracy, over where science sees tangible matter, epidemiologists see numbers, and queer theorists who love to hate psychoanalysis see all sorts of things – except desire. Ultimately, we must look for what barebacking can tell us about sexuation in the symbolic, which pre-cedes, pro-duces, and re-verberates the skin. A queer Lacanian approach, thus, refuses the literality of the object, distrusts its “evidence,” and acknowledges the cruising structures that lead the Subject there as the crux of the problem much more than the there itself. 79 A Self Theory/A Theory of the Self My barebacking intervention doesn’t stop with Lacan, but utilizes the language of Lacanian psychoanalysis to speak (of) desire whilst borrowing from a Queer Theory that isn’t so eager to change the world right now that it forgoes analysis of its invisible- libidinal geography. Such an analysis can only claim its Queer Lacanian ethos if it is willing to color its researcher-theorist-practitioner in the scene of analysis. Like Preciado’s intentions in Testo Junkie: a self-theory though not a theory of the self – although one may lead to the other. A theory that recognizes the self as the de rigueur channel, container and filter through which all else flows, meets, disseminates, accumulates, and contaminates: the subject’s desire to be “infiltrated, absorbed and completely occupied” by Power. 84 This isn’t a manifesto nor a journal intime. Its sources are citable and not, admittable and barely – and the only way for them to open up a bit “is by calling from the inside.” 85 Its archive cannot always be referenced because, like Preciado’s 21 st century panopticon, it has been swallowed (yet, like a creampie, it leaks out): Grindr screen grabs buried in dead hard drives, Craigslist-enabled e-mail correspondence accidently tagged as spam, forgotten Fetlife forum threads, Adam4Adam messages by users who are no longer there, Manhunt mail from when one’s account was still yet-to-be-deleted, unrequited glances exchanged in Parisian sex clubs and the Louvre gardens in broad daylight, anonymous gangbangs in the Valley, text messages to and from unmanageable amounts of numbers, marginalia on Stickies, tricks’ forgotten objects (gum, work badges, 84 Ibid, p. 162. 85 Lacan uses the expression to evoke the unconscious, a place that “will never be popular with tourists.” Lacan, “Position of the Unconscious,” Écrits, p. 711. 80 Meth pipes), sperm, and rarely a kiss. Such theory couldn’t be anything other than a theory of sex and sexuation: 86 A theory of acknowledgement of the erotic in the researching body and its link with the bodies and pleasures of the epoch that animates it. This theoretical proposition is in line with Bersani’s imagining a queer studies that sees “modalities of desire” as the “core of our very imagination of the political and the social[.]” 87 Preciado’s self-application of testosterone leads to questions around what kind of feminist she subsequently becomes, and to accepting the operating changes in her body as “the mutation of an epoch.” This recognition brings about the regulatory model of Foucault’s panopticon present in women’s contraceptive pill boxes, like a lenticular 86 Sexuation, Lacan’s term for the Subject’s positionality vis-à-vis the real of Desire, relates to but also against the more commonly used term sexuality, which is borne out of “the classificatory ambitions of nineteenth-century sexology.” James Penney, “Concluding (Un)Queer Theoretical Postscript,” in The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and The Impossible Absolute of Desire (SUNY Press, 2006), p. 216. 87 Bersani, “Gay Betrayals,” in Is The Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays, p. 42. 81 ghost, both in its design and ominous effects, with the temporal contradictions made out of the accumulated effects of a history of “social orthopedics” attempting to keep the subject from growing sideways. While Kathryn Bond Stockton deploys her concept of sideways growth mostly as an effect of the queer child’s inability to grow according to the dicta provided by the normative molds/modes of growing, I think of non-vertical growth as signaling that which a heterosexist system stunts, to various degrees, in the subject more broadly: desire’s queer leanings and geographies. 88 Preciado argues that the pill has replaced the control tower. A system of oral self- administration has replaced the whip. Control has been outsourced to the subjects themselves. If the normative pill-taking woman isn’t aware of that, the pervert is – if not in theory, in practice, as he looks to the very cultural tools that undergird normative subjectivity (pills, whips, and rape, for instance) and turns them into props to set his enjoyment into motion: UDT-Rhino, from Fetlife, tells me, to my delight, although not complete believability, “I spit, choke, spank and fuck you until you can’t move. Love deep throating until u gag while I’m choking you. Also have spreader bars, cuffs and bondage equipment. If u want extreme pain, I’ll bring my bamboo cane.” 89 If our task includes an extrapolation of Preciado’s arguments, we must wonder of which pill – or cocktail of pills, or color of pills, we speak when we speak about the “pharmacopornographic mircroprosthetics.” If the pill has served as a fundamental tool to build and control the modern biowoman, not so “bio” after all (Preciado speaks of biodrag, or somatic-political transvestism, as the synthetic processes that mimic 88 Preciado, Testo Junkie, 21, 159. My translation. Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press Books, 2009). 89 Fetlife private message (March 30, 2013). 82 supposedly natural and original ones), how has the condom been used to build and control the figure of the faggot in the late 20 th century, and then, re-signified as pastoral fetish-refusal – going back to nature, and breeding, in the early 21 st century? 90 If the pill has, one version of the story goes, given biowomen sexual freedom, or its impression, while also being the objects (agents?) of their subjection (of reproduction, sex, and gender identity), can we situate the condom in a similar fashion, from ablation to reconstruction” 91 ? Can the foregoing of a particular investment be a queer(ed) subject’s attempt to re-name himself, albeit to re-name himself after the symbolic Itself (which shuts him down, from the beginning), as a way to forge legitimate ontological status, to be read as easily as he himself can read? Holes and Knots: The Symbolic’s Counter-Prophylactic Function For Sol Aparicio, naming is an operation by the Father that scripts the child into a fantasy of (adult) continuation. It is His function, and it makes holes. The symbolic makes holes, since when we have different signifiers we have holes. It’s a piercing device, that is, a counter-prophylactic technology. It is also a breeding, or creampie- making machine, considering the name comes out of a hole. The name is put in place of a hole, that is, a hole spits out the name. The hole is a precondition of the name (of the Father). Does a hole only spit, or can it also swallow (so that it can, then, spit back, in fort/da-like regurgitation)? 90 On French cruising lingo, to bareback is to engage in “natural relations.” 91 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 164. 83 Aparicio’s reading of Lacan also links the hole to the prohibition of incest, “A hole is always needed for a knot to be possible.” 92 Curiously, the quee(red) subject, or rather, the subject queer(ed) to the point of homosexual status, has a singularly troubled relationship to incest as a foundational fantasy, whose prohibition is meant to precisely keep the subject from being overwhelmed by her drives. If the normative subject knows the latency of the incest to hover over the parent-child relationship (there would be no prohibition if there was no desire), such latency (and whatever pleasures it can grant the child) isn’t true for the homosexual subject who wouldn’t be an object of desire for the parent (even) in the event that their kinship were effaced. The Father and the Law are central to the perverse structure, which the cruising subject-cum-barebacking subject seems to follow. Perversion here occupies the possible psychic human structures as far as psychoanalysis is concerned, along with normosis, neurosis, and psychosis. In Ellie Ragland’s reading of Lacan, a subject’s encounter with a lacking mother (lacking in the ability to be all for the child) is what marks that person’s position in language as normative, neurotic, perverse, or psychotic: The normative male or female acknowledges the sexual difference while bemoaning it, extolling it or making of it a cause célèbre. But fundamentally he or she is satisfied by symbolic order conventions. The neurotic denies castration – that the sexual difference makes a difference – making a life theme out of ‘It ain’t necessarily so.’ The pervert disavows knowledge of castration, claiming the place of both sexes: both/and. In psychosis – the position of greatest disenfranchisement from the social masquerade – the 92 Sol Aparicio, presentation at the Research Group of Clinical Formations of the Lacanian Field seminar, “The Names of the Father and Fathers.” Paris, July 6, 2013. 84 subject bears the burden of being neither one sex nor the other, the sexual difference having been foreclosed in the unconscious. He or she is without a place in the Other.” 93 For the pervert, jouissance is not a right but a filial duty. And although I am not suggesting perversion as a psychic structure to be a pre-condition for barebacking-aimed cruising subjects, I am arguing that there is something about perversion that speaks to the trajectory of such subjects around their object. The prohibition of incest, the hole for Aparicio, is short-circuited, in perversion, in order to avoid the Law by the founding of a new (perverse) law, which demands (theoretical) desire to be put into practice. 94 Does barebacking, then, with its inevitable associations with the natural, and the impregnable – barebacking as the beyond of cruising (Hole2Breed describes himself as a “Totally open hole for taking loads (…) looking to go beyond just getting bred.”), 95 as there where cruising ends up, that is, circling back to the cultural injunction of normative barebacking, namely, heterosexuality-cum-the-human-race’s most fundamental pre- requisite for continuation – does it not literalize an exogenous poking of a hole back to the symbolic, a violent and reparative knocking on/off its door: let me (back) in? 96 93 Ellie Ragland, Essays On the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 104. 94 These are Piera Aulagnier-Spairani’s points in response to Guy Rosolato, “Études des perversions sexuelles à partir du fétichisme,” in Le Désir et La Perversion (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), p. 48. 95 He doesn’t mention what this beyond would entail, except to say, “No 100% Bottoms.” Barebackrt http://www.barebackrt.com/members/view.php?id=191880 (last accessed, March 1, 2014). 96 For Lacan, “Fecundity is phallic forgery.” Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII: On A Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance (1971), Trans. by Cormac Gallagher from unedited French manuscripts, p. 18. http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/THE- SEMINAR-OF-JACQUES-LACAN-XVIII_d_un_discours.pdf (last accessed September 1, 2014) 85 The pervert essentially exploits the law, cooking the various effects of the symbolic to get to its very core, to its skeleton, to its spine, to its original bones. The pervert fucks and fucks with the structural. We could say the queer cruising digital pervert turns the symbolic into a masturbative and reparative device. He fucks “the whole network of symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop” in a perhaps more literal way than in Edelman’s call for a refusal of reproductive futurism. 97 Perverse cruising’s barebacking bent resists “reproductive futurism” inasmuch as it highjacks it as a social prescription, as a claustrophobic ideological, and political stature of limitation, for the sake of personal jouissance. Although such move(ment) is a symbolic intervention in the “absolute privilege of heterosexuality,” it may not aim toward any social resolution, and it may render the (cruising) subject lost, wallowing in the botched (de-)bugging of the symbolic code, in another compulsion apart from normativity itself, a compulsion for normativity in its most fantasmatic register. 98 We can see through the cruising subject’s exploitation of the symbolic a sameness not amongst homo-sexuals who are ordered to desire one another, but between the pervert and the normative – both making do with the same old code: Queerness, therefore, is never a matter of being or becoming but, rather, of embodying the remainder of the Real internal to the Symbolic order. One name for this unnamable remainder, as Lacan describes it, is jouissance, sometimes translated as ‘enjoyment’: a movement beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the distinctions of 97 Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and The Death Drive, p. 29. 98 Ibid, p. 2. 86 pleasure and pain, a violent passage beyond the bounds of identity, meaning, and the law. 99 The researcher is here, then, not only present, she is moving, she is loving, she is in pain, she is depressed, she is confused, she is narcissistic in her altruism, she is lazy in her activism, she is activistic in her abstractions, she is mediocre in her genius, she is ignorant of her knowledge, she is careless, she is childish, she is ruthless, she is disciplined, she is an artisan, she is ill, she is dying, she is speechless, she is horny, and she swallows too. But, mostly, she masturbates – which (re-)places her in a democratic coincidence with those of whom she speaks and those to whom she addresses the t/sext. This is the subject’s condition in the pharmaco-pornographic-compulsive-interactivity of everyday life, after all: a libidinally (over-)charged child and her toys, bracelets and hoops, all over again. 99 Edelman describes jouissance as dissolving “fetishistic investments” around the notion that an object can bring the subject satisfaction. Jouissance undoes, then, the putative “consistency of a social reality.” Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, p. 25. 87 “August 17, 2009 K. seems interested in our coupledom once again. He talks about dogs, vacuum cleaners, and about next summer. As if five months ago he weren’t cruising the Internet to get fucked in the ass for money. As if he hadn’t just confessed in the car in Brasília that he wasn’t sure if he was with me 100 percent. As if his manifested wish for me to wear high- heeled boots and a French Maid outfit weren’t just pitiful ways for him to make up for the fact that what he actually wants is to swallow the cum out of a real man. The one he wishes to be. His brother’s. Little by little he’s been letting his feminine urges drip out. He can even verbalize them now, imperatively: Fuck me hard. Quick learner for someone who just a few months ago couldn’t believe he had kissed a guy. He now questions his bisexuality, looks for gay bumper stickers online (going through his computer history has become my favorite activity), and follows his requests for getting fucked with a false courtesy, ‘You can say no.’ Since these increasing bouts with femininity mirror my own, anything other than his complete silence stings me. His whistling, his questions while I read, the uninteresting comments that Daniel used to make before he met Meth, anything he says ends up as a set up to reveal the inappropriateness of my own voice: always too motherly, too authoritative, too professoral, too conservative for someone who would be getting gang-banged by eight straight men a night were this nuisance of a faggot not sharing my space. He was not supposed to envy me. If he envies me he wants to be like me and, thus, woman-like, and, thus, repulsion-triggering. As when your boyfriend wants to get fucked in the ass just as much as you do and his willingness to mimic masculinity is wearing thin. He is giving up because being a woman is so much easier, he thinks, and actually possible. You don’t have to make any choices, there is only one option: to lay there and hope and wait and suffer and swallow and receive and postpone getting AIDS. At the health clinic I speak to an actual gay doctor for the first time. The warning before his every line: ‘Not to judge you, but…,’ He compares promiscuity with over-eating and asks me when the last time I got tested for HIV was. I say one year ago. Lies, lies, lies. He asks me what I went to psychoanalysis ‘for,’ and calls me a ‘young guy.’ There is envy in his kindness. I remember reading that ‘gift’ also means poison in German. Since he thinks psychoanalysis is ‘for’ something I switch doctors. The new one probably doesn’t know what psychoanalysis is either, but she is funny and has a daughter who keeps calling her cell phone throughout the entire appointment. ‘Loreta, what is it that you want?’ Most importantly, she doesn’t think I have AIDS. ‘I want you to think about going from A to B, not A to Z.’ It’s the stupidest advice I’ve ever heard. But I quite like the idea of having a stupid doctor. Which probably makes me very stupid.” 88 The Sperm Is Synthetic But The Thirst Is Real “I fuck hard! And I don't cum till you cum over and over and over….sex to me is more then sex....its my testimony” 16462728910@tmomail.net “Repetition’s a whiplash, it forges eternity in the spine.” Drago Stambuk, Bamburgh Beast It’s not a grand risk to acknowledge the 21st century as producing a post- cinematic subject whose relationship to media coincides with her relationship to desire more broadly: perennially excessive, marred by anxiety, and difficult to articulate. The subject of our time is invested (that is, interactively implicated, and repetitively engaged) in the latent-cum-manifest, symbolic-cum-palpable, imaginary-cum-real pornography of everyday life. This subject not only consumes or produses pornography, 100 she swallows it, and it may indeed be hard to swallow the symbolic with its wrapper on. 101 Preciado’s pharmaco-pornographic comes in the micro-prosthesis of a pill, an app, and perhaps, the fort/da wrapping-on and yanking-off of the condom, which, in its un-used state also resembles the regulatory circularity of the contraceptive pill box, as well as the anal rim 100 Pikone, Ike. “Produsage as a form of self-publication. A qualitative study of casual news produsage.” New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. Vol. 17, No. 1, April 2011, p. 99-120. 101 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 153. 89 and the harmonious circularity of the symptom, whose movement buys its stillness. The death drive, after all, isn’t necessarily a drive to die, but to rest. Like a lazy, albeit diligent, bottom. A critical reading of the movement of images in digital pharmaco-pornograhic sexual economies suggests that despite the widely available technology of moving images, the digital cruising subject holds on to the still image as a currency for self- representation and excitation – for swallowing. The pharmacology cuts through such economy with pills that may buy the body a sense of keeping up with the priapistic fantasy of a other who is always readily available (always coming), and a self who is always performing (and yet-to-cum). We see the amalgamation of drug use and sexual practice (Viagra, Cialis, methamphetamines, poppers) among strangers – partying and playing, when the intransitivity of digital cruising unaided by the pharmacological, driven by endless deferral and a masturbatory dithering onto place, gives way to the (false) selection of a specific and tangible object (a drug). Such prosthetic aid reduces the circling around the object of this porno-pharmacological subject to a simple trajectory between need and satisfaction that can actually be achieved – as the other is instrumentalized onto a literally ingestible thing. If only we could swallow the other in their entirety, anthropophagy- style… The movement of choice in the pharmaco-pornographic cruising economy is not the movement contained by the ever smaller and more individualized frame, for which we certainly have the technology, but the movement around it. The subject refuses to record himself moving, despite the technological ability and the omnipresence of video in 90 less literally sexual platforms where nudity isn’t even allowed, like Instagram. The too- revealing movement of the moving image in this subject’s transactions of desire would expose the space between one pose and the next, risking the disclosure of that which the subject may not control, that is, what there is of most compromisingly subjective about her. One wants the least amount of finitude imaginable when it comes to the possibilities invested in the image: no Skype, no Facetime, no voice verification (“millennials” are also said to nurture a horrific relationship to voicemail 102 ). We want our otherness static, or dead, so we can build our fantasy around it without surprise or negotiation. Asked if Grindr would ever feature video chat, its founder Joel Simkhai answered that, “we have to ask our users if they think that that’s a plus. Which isn’t really a sure bet.” 103 Such movement is avoided in the name of another kind of undertaking. Not just the one associated with the death drive, but with the sexual excitation in children caused by what Freud calls passive movement. Freud exemplifies it by mentioning “swinging,” the games that children insist be “incessantly repeated,” and “being thrown up into the air” – the sling often used in gangbangs so the penetrated bottom swings onto place while the tops wait for their turn to penetrate comes to mind. 104 102 Teddy Wayne, “At the Tone, Leave a What?”, The New York Times, June 13, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/fashion/millennials-shy-away-from-voice- mail.html?_r=0 (last accessed April 8, 2014) 103 Patrick Thénevin, “Grindr, Ça Tien Dans La Poche!”, Miror/Miroirs 1, 2013, p. 56- 57. 104 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Basic Books, 2000), p. 67, 68. 91 In this interplay between the specificity of objects at first demanded by the unconscious and the impression of an inextinguishable factory of such objects presented by the digital, cruising works like a masturbatory prosthesis capable of turning the supposed continuity of time (in which each instant dies to give way to the next) into the circular repetition of the neurotic (in which each time feels like the first time). Which presents the subject a platform to stage old modes of being that feel very new, and newer at each repetition. The unconscious still abides by ancient rules and regulations vis-à-vis the object it deems necessary for the production of enjoyment – and without which the subject would occupy a psychotic position, 105 whereas the external/virtual reality promises so much more than the predictable boundedness of an analogue world. Like the swinging of one’s body, the repetition of the same act (looking, cruising, browsing) renders its promises (of pleasure) anew despite evidence of the contrary: no matter what the digital promises, or what the subject promises herself in the digital, the object is always missing. Yet, as much as the unmoving image might promise the subject a manageable object for her endless fantasmatic seizing and exploitation (a face pic discarded always giving way to another face pic), it (the image) too will let the subject down, while still getting her hooked into the dynamic that gets build around it. No matter how motionless the image is, or ephemeral (a Snapchat image can be broadcast for up to 10 seconds), something about it, something that doesn’t conspire toward the enactment of the subject’s fantasy, can always leak. Taking the still image for completely dead is an impossible 105 The psychotic’s jouissance is devoid of the mediation of fantasy, making of his body “a pure enjoyment machine (…)” Pardo, “L'asexualité, phénomène contemporain ?”, Recherches en Psychanalyse, 2010/2 n° 10, p. 253. My translation. 92 project which echoes the notion of the category attempting to contain, or maim, the chaotic/oceanic/excessive queerness of desire. And, perhaps, in the way Gerhard Richter argues the anti-fascist properties of the human face, with its too-many muscles, too-many nuances, too-much latency for movement even when it is not literally moving. As much as it can play along with the demands of the subject’s desire, pre-determining the object- to-come, the face plays dead. The face is un-catalogable, un-seizable, even when it poses: (…) the truth of the face is revealed precisely when it does not remain what it is. It assumes its proper self most fully in the moment in which it is shifting toward something else, another face, another identity. This moment of the shift is the proper self of the face. The language of truth, as it is staged upon the scene of its face, is always already traversed by its other. 106 No wonder, then, that within a digital sexual economy of pledged bodies (the subject’s body is always yet-to-cum, the body of the other always yet-to-arrive) that avoids the very movement that animates them into being one would find the consistent withholding of the human face even from the still images put forth. The interface itself induces such dynamic. Private photos, which can be unlocked for selected viewers, are a common feature. To not have an easily available face photo is to either not be legible online, or to invite an immediate demand for it. In the heterosexual platform Plenty of Fish, only females are allowed to have private photos (“This feature was removed for men because of nudity.”). Tinder users can’t survive without producing a clear face photo right away, as the swipe-based app 106 Gerhard Richter, “Benjamin’s Face: Defacing Fascism,” in Walter Banjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Wayne State University Press, 2002), p. 109. 93 doesn’t lend itself for the browsing of someone’s particular profile. The pleasure is in the swiping, which is only finite because after a certain amount of likes the user has to pay a fee to keep swiping. Most mobile cruising apps do not allow nudity in public photos, requiring that to remain in the private register. Laurent Chambon calls this a product of “Californian prudishness” (pudibonderie californienne). Simkhai, Grindr’s inventor, blames it on Apple’s and Google’s rules: “no nudity, no profanity, no swear words.” 107 In gay platforms like Adam4Adam, where it’s common to entice other users with a headless body photo with the assumption that one’s face photos are locked, but easily unlocked, the digital cruising subject can thus hold on to a faceless, still and fragmented version of the self that blocks the sex-in-theory from becoming sex-in-practice. He withholds the face while making desperate demands to see the face of the other, creating a tension that delays the still images of bodies from becoming bodies in motion and time, subjected to the unaccounted-for that human contact warrants. Freud establishes a relationship between civilization’s progress and “the progressive concealment of the body,” which works as a form of st(r?)oking curiosity. 108 The longer one can go with the face missing without spoiling the dynamic altogether, the more intact the object of desire seems to remain. The demand for the face of the other can only be compared, in frequency and intensity, to the demand for masculinity, both contingent to a pledged face and masculinity of the self – the first the presumed guarantor 107 Plenty of Fish, Help Center, FAQ, http://www.pof.com/helpcenter/helpcenter_faq.aspx (last accessed February 17, 2014). Laurent Chambon, “La Nouvelle Socialisation par Géolocalisation,” Miroir/Miroirs 1, 2013, p. 48. Thénevin, “Grindr, Ça Tien Dans La Poche!”, Miror/Miroirs 1, 2013, p. 54. All translations mine. 108 Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, p. 22. 94 of the latter. For Lacan, “the pervert imagines he is the Other in order to ensure his own jouissance(…).” 109 Muñoz’s reading of Giorgio Agamben establishes the gesture, perhaps the moving image’s utmost pre-requisite, as “a modality of movement that resists modernity’s totalizing political scripts (…),” as well as “a valuable interruption in the coercive choreography of a here and now that is scored to naturalize and validate dominant cultural logics such as capitalism and heterosexuality.” The cruising subject’s predilection for the still image is, within this logic, a non-resistance to the “overwhelming frame of a here and now,” which Muñoz links to heterosexuality. Instead, the clinging on 109 Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Écrits, p. 699. 95 to the still image enacts a protective shield against the alternatives and the unpredictability that comes with movement. The cruising subject’s stillness -- of representation, if not of cruising (swiping and clicking become too automatic to be considered gestural in the Muñozian sense), highlights his strategy to find solace in the established immobile fictions and myths of the heterosexual symbolic and the imaginary, which for Lacan, is not really about imagination, but the imagetic. 110 The difficulty in distinguishing movement from stillness has been, of course, a pre-condition for the cinematic to come to be. We see a mirror-like version of such confusion, and its exploitation, in both analogue and aimless cruising (the traditional non- digital sort, for Tim Dean), when the subject moves around in space like a calculating flâneur, seeking for an effigy of a hermetic (hetero-)masculinity that could only last, convincingly, as such: in darkness and in stillness, safe from the queer latency of the lacunae between iterations. 111 The demand for a performative hetero-masculinity of queer bodies is, of course, not a digital exclusivity. Muñoz notes, via Jonathan Bollen, how femmephobia works in the enclosed space of the dancefloor in gay clubs, for instance, “where those who break the gay-clone edict to act like a man are de-eroticized and de-moted to second-class citizenship.” 112 Consider Bersani’s description of the gay bathhouse as “one of the most ruthlessly ranked, hierarchized, and competitive environments imaginable.” Aimless and 110 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, p. 162. 111 Dean uses the term “aimless cruising” to describe as the democratic way of seeking the objet that doesn’t foreclose chance (“contact” is possible here) which “digital cruising” and its relationship to the privatization of desire (only “networking” is possible here) seems to foreclose. Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking. 112 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, p. 77. 96 digital cruising may coincide whenever safety is forged, that is, whenever queer subjects are ensconced from the general public, but not from the symbolic system that governs it. At the bathhouse, Bersani writes in 1987 in what could just as well be a description of gay cruising digital apps, “Your looks, muscles, hair distribution, size of cock, and shape of ass determined exactly how happy you were going to be during those few hours, and rejection, generally accompanied by two or three words at most, could be swift and brutal, with none of the civilizing hypocrisies with which we get rid of undesirables in the outside world.” 113 When cruising happens through digital interfaces, the subject’s (non-)movement becomes even more calculated, and exclusionary, Dean argues, but less literalized, as the body is lost to its fragmented and generic avatar, a much more hermetic effigy. 114 On his essay on the potential subversiveness of digitally rendered animals in cinema, Cyril Béghin writes, “How could the separation between animals and their image not create a sort of melancholy? That’s the moment when the paths change direction, where human destiny becomes different from the destiny of the image. Why, then, not sacrifice the image?” 115 The digital condition does involve the re-staging of particularly archaic sacrifices, as we will see in Session 4, devoted to the gangbang. It also involves a repetitive and traumatic loss of the body, or of a body – and with cruising, the infinite, and infinitely seductive, deferral of its resurrection. Digital cruising as a technology of jouissance (re- 113 Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave?, p. 12. 114 Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009). 115 Cyril Béghin, “L’Animal Sans Image,” Cahiers du Cinema, June 2014, p. 77. My translation. 97 )dramatizes the experiences of alienation that, according to Lacan, the child experiences even before she is born, as language describes the infant’s place in the world prior to birth, “thus imposing a primordial split between culture and nature in the causality of being.” After that, at age two, the child will suffer a second experience of alienation, which Lacan calls a castration, as language cuts up the body into parts and organs through meaning, all potentially laden with the symbolic investments inherited from the parents (“You have Uncle Joseph’s nose,” “Grandpa’s legs,” or “Auntie Joan’s hot blood”). Here the potential for a subjective work of re-construction could put an alienating function, the carving of the body through meaning, in line with a project of enjoyment tailored to fit the peculiarities of one’s own fantasy. Whether on Grindr (having to download the app visibly and permanently onto one’s screen is akin to the petrifying and oppressive fiction of the category) or the more chaotic and permeable Craigslist’s Casual Encounters section (where posts are short-lived and easy to re-edit), limbs are cropped out of context and gain a generality, a blankness (when the face is finally put forth it is often a poker face), that allows for the whoever-other to project the whatever-fantasy that will make for a rejection as unlikely as possible. A rejection is, after all, an interruption. With all bodies looking alike, mimicking the idealized effects of the heterosexual symbolic to similar degrees of success, it’s easy for the subject to keep on cruising, to never feel compelled to get off. 116 116 Ragland, Essays On the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan, p. 118. In his study on the relationship between heterosexually identified Brazilian hustlers and their gay-identified clients, Argentine essayist Néstor Perlongher speaks of the fragmentation of the body as a machination for the production of intensities between limbs “bit-by-bit” (“por partes”). The hustler seems aware that the encounter is a technological concoction 98 For Arnaud Alessandrin, Grindr renders the figure of the closet both intact and mobile (“Grindr doesn’t need a place (…), it needs displacement.”), where public homosexual contact can be made privately whenever and wherever. Grindr “deterritorializes meeting spaces, or rather, it multiplies them.” Along with the erasure of place, or borders of private, public, and the closet, comes an erasure of the/a body – the face, in particular, and for David Le Breton, the other as well. Curiously, on interfaces such as Adam4Adam and Manhunt, one has to constantly log out and then log back in to be able to be seen, that is, to make one’s profile appear to others on one of the first pages of the Who’s Online? section. 117 Lacan describes, in adding “privation” to Freud’s notion of “frustration” and “castration”, the way objects are inscribed within a place of lack, which serves as the symbolic backbone for the digital cruising subject’s repetitive experience of finding nothing behind the image, or rather, when the image is translated into something other than itself. The rendering of the sexually arousing digital still image into something other than itself (from moving image to the fleshly presence of a three-dimensional human being) turns out to be lacking (enough masculinity), which makes the cultivating of the image in a state of gesture-less immobility a survival strategy for the subject(’s cruising). The temporal extension between the fort and the da, which pushes the object away from the subject only to pull it back toward her, becomes a cherished guarantor – if not a that inhabits the domain of fantasy, not personhood: “When I am with a client, I am not myself: I am the client’s fantasy. There is a technique to make that happen, which is to put yourself mentally in a blank so you can capture the fantasy and work the other’s body.” Néstor Perlongher, “Avatares de Los Muchachos de La Noche,” Prosa Plebeya: Ensayos 1980-1992 (Ediciones Colihue S.R.L., 1997), p. 49. My translation. 117 Arnaud Alessandrin, “J’Aimerais Bien Mais T’es Trop Loin,” Miroir/Miroirs 1, 2013, p. 17, 18. My translation. 99 partial object in its own right, of a perennial delay of the inevitable unsuitability, or absence, of the object. The object is thus only ever good enough, or sufficiently fantasmatic, while virtually still. 118 The moment when the object acts itself out beyond mere semblance (“to bring the semblance onto the stage”), or when it makes a material claim before the subject, is what Lacan calls passage à l’acte: a space that is carefully avoided and “only happens by accident.” Lacan also refers to this moment, when “something real” turns up despite the subject’s meticulous maneuverings that it doesn’t, as “passion.” 119 It is worth noting that the extension of this spatio-temporal chasm that seeks to maintain cruising cruising has accompanied health technologies’ own extension between the contracting and the experiencing of the HIV virus’ effects – presumably the gravest fallout to come out of cruising, or barebacking (apart from an unwanted child, perhaps). This pharmaco-produced delay too becomes the time and space of the subject’s jouissance. For those who are no-longer-HIV-negative, the ultimate sacrificial swallowing of power (an entrapment of the always premature threat of death) only allows for cruising to happen even more smoothly, without the interruptions that infection anxiety begets, or the practical putting on of the condom itself. For some, the having- swallowed of the virus may function as a nano-technological connection to the symbolic and, if not the Father, then the State, quite literally. In New York City, having full-blown 118 Ragland, Essays On the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan, 120. 119 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII, p. 47. 100 AIDS can mean getting a roof over one’s head, basic services, “and all this other stuff.” 120 Corporeal Promises and Other Cheap Pleasures Milking the temporal chasm between the semblance of the object and its unsatisfying materialization, or movement, appears to be connected to a generalized and (homo-)sexuality-defining dread of a masculinity bound to be exposed as fake. Deferring the object’s tendency to become animated, or alive, can keep out the dread of a haunting femininity bound to turn up and spoil everything. For Bersani, gays’ obsession with 120 Maral Noshad Sharifi, “The Men Who Want AIDS – And How It Improved Their Lives,” in Out, August 8, 2013. http://www.out.com/news-opinion/2013/08/02/men-who- want-aids-bronx-new-york?page=0%2C0 (last accessed August 8, 2013) 101 masculinity signals “a profound respect for machismo itself.” 121 Yet how can such obsession be deemed a gay man’s exclusivity and not an inheritance of the general culture – another persistent, and persistently fetishized effect of its symbolic coding? Bersani suggests this relationship of symptomatic inheritance when speaking of gay man’s phobic relationship to femininity as “a way of giving vent to the hostility toward women that probably afflicts every male (and which male heterosexuals have of course expressed in infinitely nastier and more effective ways).” 122 This phobic position vis-à-vis the feminine enables us to see in gay man’s acting out that which may have become so naturalized by the general culture we have grown blind to its lack of inevitability. That is, the idea that powerlessness cannot be a legitimate position of enjoyment, and that its acceptance must also mean a consistent identity that spreads to all areas of a subject’s relationship with the world. “Phallocentrism is exactly that: not primarily the denial of power to women (although it has obviously also led to that, everywhere and at all times), but above all the denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and women.” 123 For Lacan, there is no such thing as object fulfillment even if some experiences and objects are pleasurable. Drives, all of which are “death” drives in so far as they aim for a kind of harmonious constancy, “aim for something more than pleasure.” They aim to “repeat the sense of wholeness that constituted them in the first place (…).” 124 Being thus becomes a sort of aimless cruising in and of itself, the (hopefully) unending quest for 121 Bersani, Is The Rectum a Grave?, p. 13. 122 Ibid, p. 14. 123 Ibid, p. 24. 124 Ragland, 107. Her italics. Lacan himself says that “every drive is virtually a death drive.” Lacan, “Position in the Unconscious,” Écrits, p. 719. My italics. 102 the object, and the impossible coincidence and coherence between its image and the actuality of whatever turns up to bear its name (or semblance), that will restore the sense of oneness he/she once had with the Mother. Lacan notes the imaginary motive driving “most of the male perversions” is “the desire to preserve the phallus – the one that interested the subject in his mother (…).” Elsewhere he describes desire as not only “the Other’s desire,” but as a fantasy that props itself up with “at least one foot (…) in the other, and precisely the one that counts, even and above all if it happens to limp.” 125 Such is the “libidinal-subjective” dynamic that the digital proposes in its catalyzing, enlarging, and enhancing potential (“a fantasmatic virtual fact, like that of a partial object”): the dynamic of being-cum-cruising as a strategy to cope, and re-cope (ad infinitum), with loss through (repetitive) loss. Irresistible, seductive, familiar, but also uncanny, as Slavoj Zizek’s analysis of a scene in Proust’s The Guermantes Way, when the narrator uses the telephone for the first time to call his grandmother and experiences a dreadful separation, but also her sweetness. Zizek quotes, “(…) it seemed to me that the voice was crying to me from depths out of which one does not rise again, and I have known the anxiety that was one day to wring my heart when a voice should thus return (alone, and attached no longer to a body which I was never more to see).” 126 The telephone also turns up in Freud’s exposition of his main question in Civilization and Its Discontents, “Why is it so hard for humankind to be happy?” He 125 Lacan, “Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality,” Écrits (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company), p. 618. Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” Écrits, p. 658. 126 Slavoj Zizek, “The Grandmother’s Voice,” Lacanian Ink 38: There Is No Sexual Relation (2011), 154. 103 notices that despite technological advances that purports for fostering happiness, this “newly-won power over space and time” has done little to fulfill “age-old longings.” Freud then calls scientific advances, from the ability to listen to “a child living hundreds of miles away” through a telephone to the reduction of the mortality rate, “‘cheap pleasures’” that further complicate humanity’s problems. Each simplification becomes a further complication since “[i]f there were no railway to make light of distances my child would never have left home and I should not need the telephone to hear his voice.” 127 The eradication of the body from the libidinal-subjective equation is thus one inherent to thinking, or dreaming, but a move that technology, digital and not, renders increasingly practical, constant, and necessary. The digital, however, makes such eradication the very condition of the contemporary subject. If Zizek asks “what happens to the body when it is separated from its voice, when the voice is subtracted from the wholeness of the person”, and answers via Mladen Dolar to describe ours as “a world out of joint,” we can say that the digital as a contemporary condition makes of our structures not Hans Bellmer doll-like anomalies, but turns such out-of-jointness as the contemporary age’s new body-in-waiting. If the normative subject accepts this scenario as her reality, the digital cruising pervert – knowing something that the normative doesn’t and enticed by the promises of a barebacking beyond – turns it into a pleasure-seeking scheme. She isn’t just slotted into the social media economy, she re-routes it to serve an immediate pattern of circular enjoyment tailored to her own fantasy. If the telephone, for Zizek, takes the body out, leaving us with a frame-less voice, the cruising subject’s handling of the digital takes the body and the voice out, despite the 127 Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 2011), p. 46-48. 104 ubiquity of the technology not to, offering the promise of a body, and a voice, that will come later. 128 Given that the promise of the digital body that will materialize itself in all of its life-saving flesh has been around for a few years since the popularization of digital technologies, this subject-cum-body has already aged. It has followed a trajectory, one whose mise-en-abîme layers may include both a line, or a vector, dotted with repetitive nodes that shoot forward (as though it meant to arrive somewhere), and one akin to visual artist Joseph DeLappe’s drawings “Playing Unreal” (1998), and “Work/Play.2” (2008) (depicted below). The first recorded DeLappe’s mouse activity while playing the titular first-person shooter computer game, and the latter mapped the artist’s mouse activity while in a six-month residency program. The dates of creation of the works mark an initial moment of digital cruising when photographic representation of the body was rare (on Gay.com in the late 90s and early 00s), making the fleshly body as a live spatial presence a somewhat necessary appearance for cruising to go on (the drawing goes back and forth but still resembles a forward-shooting line). They also sketch a second moment in digital cruising, when representations of the body are so hyper-prevalent, the fleshly body becomes the nuisance that breaks the spell of fantasy, exposes the unsuitability of an actual contact with the object, and the ultimate breaking down of fantasy when faced with an always unbearable direct reality. 128 Alessandrin links these “corporeal promises” (des promesses de corps) enabled by machines to the love letters of yore, both technologies enacting an encounter through distance. Alessandrin, “Grindroïdes,” Miroir/Miroirs 1, 2013, p. 11. 105 Joseph DeLappe, Playing Unreal (1998) Joseph DeLappe, Work/Play.2 (2008) 106 If digital cruisers bought the promise of a sufficiently phallic penis to arise from the digital, they have by now learned that if the body is to depend on such promise, the body will never really come – not theirs, not the other’s. Vincent Bourseul highlights the centrality of the figure of the flake, that despised cruiser who cruises for the sake of collecting photographs with no intention to actually meet in person – and how much hatred is aimed at such figure (which so often coincides with our own selves). 129 For the flake, the body-in-pixels actually suffices. He isn’t duped by the promises of the digital. He disavows them. He is after something other than what digital cruisers call real. The flake seems to be “the one who actually knows” what actually drives the economy in which he is steeped. He is realistic and fatalistic. He dithers in the absence that constitutes the fantasy instead of entrusting a saving other to come along and fill in where it lacks. The flake dances around the object, knowing not to run toward its actual encounter. He is also a cynic and a pragmatist, instrumentalizing the other with no hopes this other will ever pull him out of his own hole. He is an unabashed masturbator who thrives in the “non-actualization” that seems inherent to the digital cruising interface itself, as no fleshly experience could compete with the oneiric possibilities of a virtual economy. The flake surrenders to the impossibilities, incongruities, and contradictions of the cruising economy like a good pervert – not subverting the rules of the game, but “making good use” of them: “i dont play safe, i play smart,” says Adam4Adam user, TotesMaGoats. It seems as if the perversion in the flake makes intolerable the idea of 129 Vincent Bourseul, “Grindr, Le Sexe Sans Sexualité?”, Miroir/Miroirs 1, 2013, p. 25. 107 wearing a condom with someone who may ultimately have been unable to transmit any diseases. 130 Lucian Israël reminds us that the pervert, as a psychoanalytic character, contrary to popular belief, is no transgressor of laws – he actually respects them. He knows something that the normative subject doesn’t, for example, that certain sexual practices largely thought of as unsafe, or lethal, aren’t necessarily so, or that sexually transmitted diseases can be less long-lasting and obnoxious than the common cold. 131 Bourseul links the pleasure of the user (particularly the flake) to the pleasure of the application itself, namely Grindr, both of which profit from a satisfaction that comes through the unwillingness to step outside of fantasy. He associates this with the pleasure of gambling, where the holding of the lottery ticket, for example, produces more pleasure for the boundless possibilities that it triggers (in the imagination) than the result itself, “which is always negative.” 132 Instead of mourning the absence of the body and trying to desperately cover it up with the promise of a body-in-the-real, the flake accepts such absence and fills it up with the digital body’s very bio-drag-ness. What interests the flake is the passing of these digital bodies-in-fragment, the continuous rhythm of their procession, not their passing for the masculinity they attempt to emanate. He gives in to that which drives the non- flake cruiser miserable because the non-flake believes (despite all evidence to the 130 Adam4Adam, http://www.adam4adam.com/?p=TotesMaGoats (last accessed October 11, 2014) 131 Lucien Israël, La Jouissance de L’Hystérique, (Paris: Éditions Arcanes, 1996). 132 Bourseul, “Grindr, Le Sexe Sans Sexualité?”, Miroir/Miroirs 1, p. 26. My translation. 108 contrary) he is driving forward, whereas the cruising economy (of the interface, and of the psyche itself) traps them in an “endless bug,” in “a structural cul-de-sac.” 133 This cul-de-sac-like structure – “an irritating automatism,” for Didier Lestrade, stands in for an off-road sexuality devoid of the normative devices that support its disorder with a sense of narrative and purpose – i.e. sociality. The structure of the digital cruising interface, however perverse, may actually – in its tendency to clash so severely with its users’ non-diegetic movement, end up revealing to this particular subject that the rubric he is under (with the mandate that homosexuals desire one another) is a farce, and that he must seek refuge elsewhere – inter-orientationally, for example, making contact with self-identified straight men through transvestism (as we will thoroughly explore in Session 3), or making do with the pleasures of language (sexting ad nauseum). 134 For Bourseul, Grindr’s structure is that of a short-circuit, although its promises are akin to a short-cut (to jouissance), where no offer can live up to one’s demand – and vice-versa. This seems to be the perfect recipe of code to guarantee that the subject will utilize the other to masturbate without ever having to touch him, or otherness more broadly. The other remains trapped in/as his image – hence the desperation for his face to be produced, but not gestured. Bourseul suggests such structure assures that the subject will never fall in love, considering love is predicated not on what we see, but on what we do not. 135 When Samuel R. Delany describes the “numberless silent sexual acts” happening between parked trucks on Christopher Street as a frenetic ballet of uninterruption(s) we 133 Ibid, p. 27. My translation. 134 Didier Lestrade, “De La Solitude des LGBT,” Miroir/Miroirs 1, 2013, p. 75. 135 Bourseul, “Grindr, Le Sexe Sans Sexualité?”, Miroir/Miroirs 1, 2013, p. 27. 109 can see the soothing rhythm of the death drive performed in the flesh. His descriptions animate what we see today as the digital’s ability to mimic that, in the exchange of images and texts, in the toggling between interfaces and gadgets, promising that idealities could become actualities – later. The self and the object of desire attached to it are always already failed attempts at actuality. They both live in the register of semblance and ideality, culminating in the bio-drag of the execution (of their failure): “the signifier only bestows a sort of promissory identity, one with which we can never succeed in fully coinciding because we, as subjects of the signifier, can only be signifiers ourselves.” The Internet comes to, then, literalize our own pre-digital inherent virtuality, the virtuality of the unconscious, and that of all-else which is never within our reach, even if within our sight. While aimless cruising exposed the subject to the failure of the object to remain faithful to its claims, the digital affords the cruising subject the possibility to live inside the very space between the object’s appeasing semblance and its unsettling realness. Lacan characterizes the effect of realizing the gap between ideality and actuality as an aggressiveness akin to that of “a slave who responds to being frustrated in his labor with a death wish.” Such frustration, of course, wouldn’t have to be an exclusivity of “a slave” of the sort we might easily imagine as attached to a minority status (factual and imaginary), when we consider the subject tout court as always already a slave of language. And of desire, which is subjected and appropriated, “even in its very 110 normality,” as Lacan calls it, even in the best of all scenarios, by “the accidents of the subject’s history (the notion of trauma as contingency) (...).” 136 136 Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Écrits,zp. 208. Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Écrits, p. 687, 700. Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and The Death Drive, p. 8. 111 The Finished Event and The Sacrificial Offer “into something less than what was sought empty habits cure the needs solely to concede” Profile of static_thoughts, on Adam4Adam.com “Forgive me if I say I love you: the powerful/are always lied to since the weak are always/driven by panic.” Louise Glück Engagement with the sexual through digital interfaces can produce the masturbatory repetitiveness, scripting, and screening that a pervert needs to get caught in, and rub against, his symptoms. Recognizing the repetitive labor of such cruising, one of Grindr’s main tools is a “Saved phrases” feature, which allows user to build an archive of canned questions and answers for others, and to quickly speak through a click instead of having to (re-)type at every interaction. Barebackrt also has a “Canned mail” section, which allows users to send the same message to everyone with the click of a button. The steady miniaturization and privatization of the gadgets themselves also enable the digital cruiser to place his world of perversion with his non-perverse world (the pervert must craft and tend to both) in pragmatic parallel lanes: cruising, sexting, consuming, and produsing pornography can co-exist in lenticular fashion with the more quotidian tasks beyond the screen. 112 We must, of course, distinguish perversion as the fundamental quality of desire and perversion as a psychic structure or psychoanalytic character. Perversion as the very fabric and condition of desire, is, as Joan Copjec argues, a universal non-coincidence between all subjects and their statements, the “democratic” opacity, anti-normativity, and unverifiability of desire. 137 Perversion, as desire’s basic condition, is the inevitable trajectory of failure between libidinal investment and the object. Whereas perversion as a psychic structure is the one responsible for the attempts at coding/crafting/trapping and accounting for the object before it comes along. If the digital cruising dynamic can welcome, and even incite the perversion of desire, its queerness (invoking its theoretical possibilities and precipitating the inherent queerness of its practice), to become fuel for perversion as a psychic code (“Perverse familiarity is entirely objective and programmatic” 138 ), the question remains: Why is the cruising subject of which we speak so invested in keeping the masturbatory from becoming contact, and yet his ultimate fantasy seems to precisely be one that halts (prophylaxic) mediation? 139 This cruising, as a novel fantasmatic device, introduces new cruising subjects who may never have taken to cruising had this technology not been available (the digital’s queering function comes to the surface), and a host of new options for queer(ed) subjects who may have cruised anyway to hone the cruising skills for which any cruising would already have been a symptom in the first place. The fact that, unlike Dean suggests (as he focuses on cruising and barebacking for gay men), digital cruising can be “aimless” (a 137 Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and The Death Drive, p. 8. 138 Bollas, 170. 139 Ibid,18. 113 straight-identified male may now simply happen across, say, transsexual porn and respond to it) and as such, queer objects may hit normatively intentioned subjects by surprise – a pervert’s worst nightmare. There is, then, a perverse and perverting function to digitality, which allows for the constricting codes of fantasy to thrive whilst breeding the queerness of the object, particularly for subjects who don’t necessarily account for it, such as heterosexually identified males, the most vulnerable figures in the digital sex economy. Or rather, for subjects who are used to the queerness of desire and its objects passing by them, without necessarily infecting them. Escaping risks is the pervert’s métier – the flake is, thus, perversion’s ultimate digital figure. Death is the only risk the pervert cannot escape, the only obstacle that, no matter how he structures his jouissance, still risks interrupting his repetition. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to imagine that the bearing of death in the form of a virus, caged inside the subject’s very body as its swallowed symbol (for Lacan, the symbol is a pact) 140 would be such a seductive strategy for the pervert to make a mockery out of the unconscious -- to use Israël’s term. Like the swallowed panopticon not out of a blind obedience to the injunctions of the pharmaco-pornographic era, but as a resistance to an object living outside of one’s self yet to surreptitiously penetrate him. Eve Sedgwick recognizes this aversion to surprise in the paranoid. “Paranoia proposes both Anything you can do (to me) I can do worse, and Anything you can do (to me) I can do first – to myself.” She also 140 Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Écrits, p. 225. 114 notes that, “the way paranoia has of understanding anything is by imitating and embodying it.” 141 Lacan distinguishes death as empirical certainty, “end date of the individual’s life,” which the barebacking subject cannot swallow, and, recalling Heidegger, death as “that ‘possibility which is the subject’s ownmost’.” 142 This latter death, which is unconditional, unsurpassable, certain, and indeterminable, is one the cruising-cum- barebacking subject may, in fact, render if not, determinable, determined in and by the conscious. Curiously, death doesn’t exist for the conscious subject, for if he is (dead) he won’t know. Here the barebacking strategy may be to know death before it knows you, or at least, to convince oneself that such knowledge, whenever it comes (in the form of a illness, or test results), hasn’t caught the subject but that the subject caught it first. The subject is thus able to exploit dissonance between these two kinds of deaths. Lacan illustrates this latter point when, explaining Sade’s concept of “the second death,” he describes crime as a kind of assurance: a way of disrupting “the awful routine of nature.” 143 We can see perversion’s resistance to surprise in hetero-normativity itself, in the way that it “always anticipates (…) a realization of meaning” through language itself and naturalized cultural rituals that simply become the narrative of life.” 144 Ragland points 141 Israël, Pulsions de Mort: Séminaire 1977-1978 (Paris: Arcanes Rech. Psychanalytique, 1999), p. 46. My translation. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You,” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 131. 142 Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Écrits, p. 262. 143 Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” Écrits, p. 655. 144 Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, p. 24. 115 out one major problem with normativity as follows, “(…) when a symptomatic plea is treated behaviorally by advising the patient to adapt to social norms—Get married; Have a baby; Be a better person; Be successful—that person may indeed get better. Later, when the same person dies an untimely death, no one connects the disease of cause to a failure to treat the specificity of cloistered desire in that person’s life drama.” 145 For Israël, the married couple embodies the epitome of perversion, since one of the most fundamental pillars of it is the need for a risk-free guarantee bound by a contract, which is literalized and notarized in marriage by and for the State. If this contract is broken, the pervert’s scenario is disrupted and her fantasy is exposed as simulacrum, leading to the depression of the pervert. That is why Israël claims that the psychiatrist never meets the pervert, she meets the depressed, considering the pervert seeks help when she finds herself in post-breach-of-contract depression. 146 If perversion is the condition of desire itself, hysteria is the pre-condition of analysis – and knowing its elements can help us situate the cruising subject leaning toward barebacking. The structure of hysteria is the condition for any speaking being, no matter his or her clinical structure, to enter analysis. The discourse of hysteria is the formula of the analytic scene: There must be “a complaint, a symptom, transformed in a demand to know which hides itself in an unconditional demand for love addressed to the one who is supposed to know what we ignore.” 147 145 Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Dearth, p. 141. 146 Israël, La Jouissance de L’Hystérique, (Paris: Éditions Arcanes, 1996), p. 114, 115. 147 Nestor Braunstein, “La Jouissance Dans L’Hystérie,” in La Jouissance, Un Concept Lacanien (Paris: Erès, 2005), 202. My translation. 116 While the pervert produces a carefully coded closed field to put his fantasy at play, one that involves a ready-made dynamic aiming to eliminate risk or surprise, the hysteric gives herself as a malleable perfect gift to the other, the master who can sculpt her. Braunstein calls it a “sacrificial offer,” in line with the ethos of so-called conversion parties, where a supposedly not-yet-HIV-positive bottom is sacrificed, like a totemic animal, by several no-longer-HIV-negative tops who work to turn his (sero-)negativity into a plus. For Braunstein, the hysteric, a figure largely associated with femininity, tends to follow her sacrificial offer (a falsely selfless coup de théâtre) with acts of scolding, accusation, self-pity, and violent complaints that prove that the other is deceitful, that the deceit is in the other. Then the hysteric moves on to another other, who may seem worthy of her sacrifice, and may finally bring her plenitude. The hysteric is always awaiting the figure of the Ideal Father, beside whom everyone else falls short. It’s easy to read the hysteric(’s) strategy of the sacrificial offer in the dynamic of gay men’s obsessive, and obsessively articulated, search for the completely masculine other in digital cruising. The chorus is pervasive and loud in its drive to build a master 117 out of the other only to unveil his inability to masterfully occupy such position. No fems, Masculine Only, Masc 4 Masc, Masculine for same, and their various versions, form the very crux of this digital cruiser’s demand and complaint. An expression of an ideal, the Ideal Father immune to the femininity that signals lack, simultaneously stated with a horrific (paranoid?) dread of a femininity that lurks and risks surprising the self, and exposing the chasm between his tightly composed fantasy-object script (a ready-made) and the objects that he has actually found. The demand for an all-encompassing masculinity borrowed from the ready-made ideal of hetero-masculinity is interpellated as hysterically as the fear/knowledge that such figure is there to simply (cock-)block the view of literalized lack: There where there is nothing. Bersani takes up the contradicting complications that arise between our best feminist intentions and the “narcissistic investment in our objects of desire,” which tend to clash. “A more or less secret sympathy with heterosexual male misogyny carries with it the narcissistically gratifying reward of confirming our membership in (and not simply our erotic appetite for) privileged male society.” I argue this gay male propensity is more aligned with a pleasurable sense of belonging that places him in the position of the female and in the kind of male privilege we associate with the hysteric position. The fact that the privileged masculinity of this other always turns out to be missing confirms the hysteria scripting gay man’s circling, and production, of his object (of desire) in this manner – avoiding its horror, its gesture, at all costs. In the space of the digital, with the sense of boundlessness that it offers, all sorts of perfect objects can be cathected as 118 latencies that, if only we linger a little longer, might just save us from our lack. Yet that very boundlessness could breed the most dreaded horrors, so one must be prepared. 148 The pervert and the hysteric, then, coincide in their auto-erotization. The pervert vector instrumentalizes the other in order to avoid otherness altogether. The digital can serve as an otherization of the instrument in which there seems to never be room for someone else. Bourseul notes that the language in some personal ads and profiles are so 148 Bersani, “Gay Betrayals,” in Is The Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays, p. 42. A recent front-page article of The New York Times Magazine sheds light onto the lack of harmony between what we want socially, and what we want sexually. It suggests a relationship between gender equality in a non-sexual context as triggering lack of sexual interest: less gender differentiation, less sexual desire. It cites Esther Perel, “most of us get turned on at night by the very things that we’ll demonstrate against during the day.” Lori Gottlieb, “The Egalitarian-Marriage Conundrum,” The New York Times Magazine, February 9, 2014, p. 29. 119 thorough when it comes to the cruiser’s pre-requisites it’s as though the ultimate aim of the ad were its mere articulation to an imagined addressee – not unlike the analysand’s speech in the scene of analysis. This dynamic silences the other into an echoing board whose singularity does not matter. “What could he add if all has already been said?” 149 There is a relationship of mutual failure in the hysteric and her objects too. She is never perfect enough, the master is never master enough, and the jouissance that she attempts to cause in the other never quite echoes back at herself. And if the lack (of masculinity) is demanded and pre-emptively produced/projected as lacking in the other in digital cruising, this may displace the self’s own (history of) inadequate masculinity, so common in gay-identified males. The fantasy of sameness, masculine for masculine, makes the fantasy of an ideal masculinity of the self (which it presumes, hysterically, to be what the other desires) contingent on the ideal masculinity of the other. In a contract of fiction (or fixion 150 ), I believe you are It, if you believe I am It too, the repetitiveness of such game, and the expendability of the other, provokes more jouissance because it remains in suspension. Within the scene of sexual practice the condom is itself as much an interruption (of ontological proportions) as the contraceptive pill would be were it necessary to be taken in situ, in spatio-temporal coincidence with the sexual act, and witnessed by the other as an assemblage that taints the affair with (its) artifice and a sense of reason that kills jouissance. If we are speaking about homo-sexual sex, knowing the necessary chasm between ideality and actuality, of virility or otherwise, the self’s strategy is to bank on the masculinity of the other being a ruse before it even announces itself, to avoid being found 149 Bourseul, “Grindr, Le Sexe Sans Sexualité?”, p. 27. My translation. 150 Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death, p. 140. 120 out as a ruse himself. Like a game of Narcissus reflections where the other is pre-emptied in favor of a razed subject-less encounter with the technology (of the psyche, of the interface) itself, as Bourseul puts it, the homo-sexual cruiser – or rather, the cruiser under the homo-sexual rubric, is driven by “the image of the other, which, if gone missing, would hinder the exchange, an exchange of reflections, the reflection of the self in the image of the other.” 151 Marielle Toulze calls attention to the piercing qualities of the “digital look” (le regard numérique), or looking digitally. Instead of seeing cruising interfaces like Grindr as a game of foggy mirrors, she compares its windows to Edward Hopper’s 1962 painting, New York Office and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) for the very absence of reflection they display – an absence that the cruising subject penetrates, “in a tight framing that recalls the zooming in porn films.” Citing Gérard Wajcman, she links this viewing compulsion to a post-9/11 (and post-Shoah) world full of dread where one must make everything visible (from video surveillance to reality shows) in order to make everything predictable. Through my own sexual and romantic experiences, I would dare calling this a particularly Anglo-American dynamic, given its diligent refusal to occupy the defenseless position of emotionally engaging with a other, in something like love, which would necessarily grant the other a powerful arsenal that the subject cannot always, or ever, see. 152 151 Bourseul, “Grindr, Le Sexe Sans Sexualité?”, p. 28, 27. 152 Marielle Toulze, “Regard Sur La Ville Ou L’Hypertrophie Numérique,” Miroir/Miroirs 1, 2003. 121 hammersmith Approx Distance From You: 2.3 miles White | 32 | 5' 9'' (175 cm) | 150-159 Lbs (68-72 Kgs) | Average |Auburn/Red / Short | Brown | Ask Me My uncle, prompted at the meaning of life, once told me the goal was to "cum in as many beautiful women as possible." He may've only been half-right. I have been with men (and women) who thought that I carried some kind of creampie fetish, but men who know me know that I breed because I am dominant and I like to claim my sexual territory by inseminating women and men without putting my health in serious danger. That means tested partners only. I am disease-free, HIV negative, no STIs, no history of HPV/warts/Herpes. HepC neg, on PrEP and try to make mindful choices despite my preferences. We can see in the movement of hetero-normative sociability, which homo- normativity aims to replicate, a similar rhythmic compulsion – albeit naturalized – to that of queer cruising. Cruising compulsion of the queer kind might precisely be a way of making up for a lack of (queer) sociality, what Muñoz calls “the affective disjuncture of being queer in straight time” 153 and Lee Edelman refers to as “the constitutive gap in the 153 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, p. 49. 122 subject that the signifier necessarily installs,” 154 by mimicking hetero-normativity’s rhythm, which is naturalized into what we may think of the narrative of everyday life. 155 Muñoz’s concept of queer time, however, is so full of hope (its deploying predicated in the future tense) that it can only be described as a making up for or a re- signification of the lack of a queer code to undergird it – besides the self-naturalizing linearity of straight code and time themselves. Following Lauren Berlant, Muñoz speaks of the “dead citizenship” of heterosexuality as something that is formatted -- through the sacrifice of the present for a deferred future symbolized by the child. 156 I argue that while queer(ed) subjects, or those for whom queerness (not of the hopeful kind that is always in the horizon, for Muñoz) has acted itself out (onto consciousness even if not praxis) may live “outside of straight time,” perhaps thankfully (despite the “nervousness and fear” that such contingency may produce) they are actually stuck with the stranglehold of straight code. That is, such queer subjects are wedged in the always already heterosexual white symbolic that has constituted us and maintains itself as the ur-field of idealities – like a tainted well of subjectivity-making assets. 157 Munõz reminds us of the promising and utopian possibilities to be derived from this out-of-placeness (a doing something else that he links to queerness, poverty, blackness, Asian-ness, Latino-ness, disability, “and so 154 While Muñoz speaks of the particularly queer subject, Edelman refers to the human subject more broadly. The advantage, or privilege, of the latter’s possible normative pact with the symbolic may come in the fact that its fantasies of stable identity and coherent recognizable form are undergirded by a naturalized system of both material and immaterial networks. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, p. 49. Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, p. 9. 155 “Cruising is sexual sociability.” Bersani, “Sociability and Cruising,” Is The Rectum a Grave?, p. 57. 156 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, p. 49. 157 Pardo notes that “only the symbolic register is universal.” Pardo, “L'asexualité, phénomène contemporain?”, Recherches en Psychanalyse, 2010/2 n° 10, p. 253. 123 forth”) in terms of temporality. Such out-of-placeness, it seems to me, has to do with an out-of-sync-ness, a lack of rhythm, in relationship to the heterosexual symbolic, of which temporality is only one of its effects. 158 In Bersani’s reading of Georg Simmel, the price of sociality, a certain effacing of individuality (of queerness, really), is pleasurable because it sheds frictions. Here the fort will always lead to a da ad infinitum – as in compulsive cruising’s investment in avoiding the interruption of physical contact with the soothing-yet-suspect mirage of digital masculinity. Like cruising, sociability is “an intransitive pleasure,” and “it testifies to the seductiveness of ceaseless movement (…).” 159 Freud actually suggests heterosexuality to be a general diversion of an original homosexual drive toward objects. Heterosexuality, following his logic, deflects subjects from the possibility of actual satisfaction by mediating, and delaying, the (homosexual) relationship between subject and that original object (i.e., another man) with another object altogether (woman). This original drag (the newer object is a biodrag gimmick, woman is the original transvestite, passing for another man) grants the subject the possibility of more “permanent” social ties, which are bred inside the staging of a deceit and a deferral: the original object is homosexual and never to be found. 160 The fact that this is another man doesn’t necessarily mean that, despite its etimology, there is an intrinsic sameness to homosexuality (we may think of the 158 Ibid, p. 25, 91, 182. 159 Bersani, “Sociability and Cruising,” Is The Rectum a Grave?, p. 48. 160 Ibid, p. 51. For Freud, “the asocial nature of the neurosis springs from its original tendency to flee from a dissatisfying reality to a more pleasurable world of fantasy. This real world which neurotics shun is dominated by the society of human beings and by the institutions created by them; the estrangement from reality is at the same time a withdrawal from human companionship.” Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 68-69. 124 distinction between difference and contrast). Despite Bersani’s recognition of “the immense range of differences that can be accommodated in homosexual love, there still is in his account, and in the accounts of most, an assumption of intrinsic sameness in homosexual attraction. I argue that the queerness of an attraction that doesn’t coincide with the hetero-normative code of the symbolic is not only too multiple to bear a generality of sameness, it is of the utmost urgency that we recognize that another kind of difference doesn’t necessarily mean sameness. Freud’s remarks on the homosexual general aptitude for “social feeling,” add to my point of a queer impetus to make up for a lack of pre-fabricated social code by developing an intense investment, perhaps not necessarily in its content, but in the actual rhythm that it forges. This drive for the rhythmic (in the relational field) is, thus, a universal human drive which specific kinds of humans will find where/how they can. Bersani points out that the link Freud evokes between homosexuality and the “particularly active share in the general interests of humanity,” is actually a heterosexual link, which is camouflaged (through sublimation – in friendship, sports, marriage rituals) in heterosexuality’s naturalization processes but made evident in homosexuality’s queerness. Heterosexuality’s code, however, seems to have the bonus, or onus, of biology (or its semblance), which lends itself to its code, as a kind of material harness. 161 Following Foucault’s belief that improbable sexual practices can beget improbable alliances and new positionalities which haven’t been sanctioned by the dominant culture, Bersani sees in “the deliberate avoidance of relationships” the potential 161 Bersani, “Sociability and Cruising,” Is The Rectum a Grave?, p. 50, 51. Lee Edelman sees the “willingness to insist intransitively – to insist that the future stop here” as what is queerest about queerness. Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and The Death Drive, p. 31. 125 for “major relational fields” in the practice of cruising (a praxis of impersonal intimacy that he distinguishes from normativity’s identity-subtracting sociability), but finds barebacking to be a less-than-promising practice out of which “nothing good can come out(…).” He likens barebacking to a failed queer strategy of vicarious survival or social cohesion – gay men’s botched attempt to forge a sense of community through the accumulated transmission and harboring of viruses. Barebacking here betrays the refusal to relate latent in cruising and the re-imagining of the relational field, by precisely attempting to forge social ties via the (fluid) materiality of bodies themselves. For Bersani, barebacking is a “freakish elaboration into adult categories of thought of infantile fantasies about the life within us, about what goes on inside (as well as what goes into and what comes out of) the body’s holes.” Part of Bersani’s positive investment in cruising, before it reaches barebacking status, seems predicated on an erroneous assumption that the other is “a body without attributes” simply because he is wearing just a towel around his waist -- or has been reduced to a few cropped limbs. According to Bersani, the bringing together of bodies we don’t know and “certainly don’t love” can be a fruitful encounter with actual otherness. These bodies, however, are never as name-less and “identity-free” as he claims, for by the time the cruising subject arrives at the bathhouse, or opens his app, he is already loaded with an intricate set of fantasmatic attributes to peg onto these others that might cruise him by. Just as in the pervert’s reaching the analyst depends on the expiration of his perversion, by the time the 126 queer(ed) subject cruises, the chips are down, strangeness has been harnessed, and barebacking is in the horizon. 162 “December 31 2006 On the last day of the year I meet a man at three in the morning who sent me a photo that wasn’t his. I watch through the peephole and don’t recognize the image. He is thin and tall, not quite black, not quite Middle Eastern. He touches my crotch as he fucks me, like it isn’t surrounded by a penis. I ask him if he is bi, he lies and says yes. And then ‘Why do you ask?,’ to which I say, ‘because you fuck me like I’m a girl.’ I am afraid he will stop fucking and go limp, like the Israeli guy at the Four Seasons, who asked me to leave after my first moan, saying ‘you’re so…’ But he stops, closes his eyes for a second: ‘do you like that?’. I say I do. So he does too. There is something untrustworthy about him. When he puts his hand inside the pocket of his jacket you don’t know if he will pull out a gun, a knife, a bottle of poppers, or ether. He tries to fuck me without a condom and, then, asks me to turn off the light before it even occurs to me his body is too thin for brightness, or perhaps his dick too STD-ridden for a clear view. He says his name is Markus but it’s a lie. He says he works and cruises from home at the same time. He claims he is a musician who owns his own techno label. He doesn’t want to disclose his complete identity. Are you Tricky? No, I’m not Tricky from Massive Attack. He says New York is the gateway to Europe. I look at the lube he brought. It says “City Clinic – San Francisco.” I ask if he is from California. He stops and wonders and worries, and dreads. And says yes, only subsequently realizing where I got that piece of information from. When he leaves I say, ‘Have a good year.’ He doesn’t disappear down the hallway before looking back twice. I go online and try to find Markus on iTunes. They can never truly disappear these days. I admit that it felt good because he looked like a Jihadist when he furrowed his eyebrows. I actually text him that. To which he replies, ‘Who is this?’” 162 Bersani, “Sociability and Cruising,” Is The Rectum a Grave?, p. 59, 61. Bersani, “Shame on You,” in Intimacies (Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 2008), p. 49-50. 127 Works Cited Alessandrin, Arnaud. “Grindroïdes.” In Miroir/Miroirs 1, 2013. Alessandrin, Arnaud. “J’Aimerais Bien Mais T’es Trop Loin.” In Miroir/Miroirs 1, 2013. Béghin, Cyril. “L’Animal Sans Image.” In Cahiers du Cinema, June 2014. Bersani, Leo. Is The Rectum a Grace? And Other Essays. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. Bersani, Leo. “Shame on You.” In Intimacies. Chicago and London: The Chicago University Press, 2008. Bollas, Christopher. “Normotic Illness.” In The Christopher Bollas Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. 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Zizek, Slavoj. “The Grandmother’s Voice.” In Lacanian Ink 38: There Is No Sexual Relation, 2011. 130 131 Playing Dead: A T-girlhood Manifesto 132 “July 5, 2007 On the 6 th day I was a woman in my bedroom I had two men over who referred to me as a she and believed in my she-ness more than I ever could. ‘Because they need to,’ Emily said. At first I thought that the fact that men, real men, were so easily convinced to make love to another man provided there be a few feminine props- I thought it incomprehensible. But is it not just as naïve to think a gay bottom sees manhood where there is nothing but an external version of himself? A week of faux womanhood has gone by and my head is over-boiling with good ideas, bad theories, and an uncontrollable need to take advantage of all that’s been denied before. It’s difficult to sleep. What if I miss the ones who only peruse the ads during the wee hours? A Puerto Rican boy came through my door saying, ‘you’re sweet’ and left saying ‘good night, sweetheart,’ and in between arrival and departure he made me believe that what he was doing to me was making love. Brazilian-style. He immobilized my head like it was a brick on a pavement that he really needed to step on. He only stopped once. So that he could continue, alternating a look of murderer with a tooth-gap kind of sweetness. I decided to surrender even if that meant premature death. Even if it meant awaiting and bad news and judgmental doctors that ask you how many sex partners you’ve had (last night?) and badly executed public health videos from 1991 inside loud free clinics where the few white people present haven’t slept in five days. And ass cheeks that remain sore for days, not due to penetrations but injections, and a secret that holds no political power… When the Puerto Rican with the deceiving sweetness, like all sweetness, caresses me and leads my hand to the back of his body, I realize I cannot bear the thought of him as a child. To think that his body was ever something else, something smaller, something lesser…His touch feels maternal, his legs spread apart and my fantasies begin to rot. Quickly. Like filmstrip burning on film projector and the audience going ahhhhh…The quick disappointment adjusted to the sympathy for the projectionist. What a difference twenty minutes makes. He wants me to fuck him and I want him to go back to being someone else. I want him to match what the dragon tattoo on his chest promises, what the prominence of his chest demands, his never having left his New York City, never having been to mine. I can’t help but resent him for knowing what I would want, knowing he could give it, and yet demanding something else altogether. I tell him ‘I don’t really…do this.’ He smiles, and it is unclear if he is going to overlook our lack of synchrony, or concede defeat. The answer is in the tying of his shoes and in his prompt exit, which he makes as I try to cast my spell via verbal acumen: ‘I am kind of in an existential limbo,’ as if intellectuality could be sexy and calculated skill could win this battle. ‘I am not attracted to gay men. So if I go to a gay bar, there is nothing to do there,’ I tell him. ‘No, no. You need something else,’ he says. ‘You need something else.’ His logic is refreshingly mathematical: ‘You are a girl. And you need a boy,’ he continues. I smile without meaning to and it’s my first knee-jerk reaction in about 20 133 years. He adds: ‘Well, to me you are a girl.’ And it’s enough to take me back, physically, to my first self-inflicted orgasm. The one you get not by stroking your penis as if it were a mast. The one you get somewhat inadvertently, by pressing your entire frontal zone against a mattress and your penis isn’t a dick anymore, but a squashed balloon. And the orgasm doesn’t spurt out of one channel, but spreads over the entire area for an entire minute, like a wave making a thick strip of sand very moist, or a metastasis of remedy, not illness.” 134 “The writer is someone who plays with the body of the mother (…): to glorify it, embellish it, dismember it, wear it to the limit of what can be recognized as body.” Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text “It begins quietly in certain female children : the fear of death, taking as its form dedication to hunger, because a woman’s body is a grave ; it will accept anything.” Louise Glück, Dedication to Hunger “We don’t sing anymore. We eat, we piss, we shit, we sleep. No one enjoys anything here. Especially the mother.” Abdellah Taïa, Un Pays Pour Mourir 135 The Non-Duped Cruise: Digital Transvestism as Symbolic Drag I recently caught myself posting online ads in which I impersonate a husband looking for a “bull” to come over and play with my transsexual wife (performed by myself) while “I,” the husband, am gone. Not only that. The bull is to borrow my wife in front of a webcam so that “I” can watch the act of cuckoldry remotely and record it. Since the wife will probably ask for the bull to wear a condom, the fantasy goes, I ask him to try and discretely pull the condom off during sex, without her noticing it. The bull originally responds to an ad that says nothing about the transsexual condition of the wife, but also doesn’t seem to mind when that detail is revealed, soon after the first email correspondence. The bull, it turns out, must be hailed away from his normative trajectory toward the female qua female object so he can still be reeking of it when he comes over. Is it not what the bull brings, then, that residue of a different kind of narrative within which I myself have no part that makes the bull so attractive? And could I provoke such profitable detour from the bull’s original pathway without the digital? When the bull arrives, with the husband’s blessing and thorough directions, I am lying in bed as if caught, despite my will, in this game between a man I know, and who only exists in my remote impersonation of him, and a man I don’t. I have spent 45 minutes becoming hairless, and beating my face with half a bottle of NW20 MAC concealer. I lie there, stupidly, like a little lamb, and I let them carry out their plan. That is, my plan. I feign oblivion and obedience to a pleasure that is outside of myself and my control. This is about their pact. I am wedged in the middle of their dealings. I am their currency. I am their buffer zone. I am their language. 136 If the bull asks to speak to the husband, he is not there. He is in San Diego, in Las Vegas, in London, in his graveyard shift. Isn’t that the privilege of the phallus? You can summon it as much as you like, “it will always say nothing.” 163 Its presence that much more ensured when missing in action. The sex thus unfolds as a kind of rape, authorized by an absence and carried out by a prosthetic proxy. With my head glued to the mattress, turned just so, I catch glimpses of ourselves in the mirror and the computer screen. It’s like I am lying face down in the snow, that “most expedient strategy of survival.” 164 In order to mask my authoring of the scene, I pretend to be overcome by a rush I could not have accounted for. This can be an exhilarating stance, to be bent over with one’s head down, hungry for vision yet conveniently obscuring one’s ability to see. One can imagine all sorts of shapes by seeing shadows and fractions. Lydia Davis relates the bent over posture of a cow, with its head down as it grazes, to a compulsive position, “Just as it is hard for us, in our garden, to stop weeding, because there is always another weed there in front of us, it may be hard for her to stop grazing, because there are always a few more shoots of fresh grass just ahead of her.” 165 I try to keep my head as down as possible, bovine style, whilst gathering enough visual information to feed my fantasy of the scene that actualizes itself by looking back 163 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII: On A Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance (1971), translated by Cormac Gallagher from unedited French manuscripts, p. 12: http://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/THE-SEMINAR-OF-JACQUES- LACAN-XVIII_d_un_discours.pdf (last accessed September 13, 2014). 164 Avital Ronell says, “sometimes ducking into stupidity offers the most expedient strategy of survival” as she gives Nietzsche’s example of Russian fatalism: dealing or not dealing with a crushing problem “you just lie face down in the snow.” Avital Ronell, “The Question of Stupidity: Why We Remain in the Provinces,” Stupidity (University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 43. 165 Lydia Davis, “The Cows,” Can’t and Won’t (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), p. 131. 137 as if by mistake, not out of a need to know. The camera, I hope, will catch what I will miss. The bull’s ignoring the fact that the one being tricked is actually himself seems to enhance his size, his weight, his force, his presence. As far as he knows, my knowing of the scene is limited to what I actually see, that is, as much as a cow does while grazing in the dusk. I need to give him an opportunity to seal the deal and take the condom off without my knowing it. Except that he is the one who doesn’t know. Or does he…but still? At the moment he begins pulling off the condom I am moaning like a creature too innocent to know how to contain herself in matters like this. When he sticks his penis back inside, with no protection, I turn around and ask where the condom is. I catch him red handed. I disarm him, once he’s proven himself capable of murder, or at least, rape. I’m not mad. I try to convey that I am sincerely wondering where the condom is. We have to find it. It must be here somewhere. This is where the fantasy ends: With the disappearance of the condom, for which no one is willing to take responsibility. The slipping of the condom is the limit of the fantasy and yet its very crux, it is where it begins and where it ends – which is, for poet Herberto Helder, the ambiguous of the poetic par excellence. 166 In this scene – of fantasy, of sex, of deception, and, now, of analysis, unauthorized violence is heterosexuality’s most fundamental totem. Rape appears as a shortcut to heterosexual enjoyment, to enjoyment as a fundamentally heterosexual 166 For Portuguese poet Helder, a poem is the site of simultaneous order and disorder, genesis and demise, magnificence and terror. Luís Miguel Queirós, “Morreu Herberto Helder, a voz mais fulgurante da poesia,” Público, March 23, 2015, http://www.publico.pt/culturaipsilon/noticia/morreu-herberto-helder-a-voz-mais- fulgurante-da-poesia-portuguesa-1690151 (last accessed, March 28, 2015). 138 fantasy. 167 Rape is what provides the mimicry of a heterosexual scene of enjoyment believability when the fictions of a settled biological difference that purport complementarity (of a sex and its “opposite”) aren’t offered up as givens or ready-mades. The anxieties around a difference between sex partners that isn’t settled is overcome by the arrangement and movement of heterosexuality’s original bones. This is the logic of the unconscious, which slips out in moments such as a recent transphobic attack in São Paulo, Brazil, when three men tried to rape a feminine-looking 19-year-old self-identified boy while shouting, “You want to be a woman? So you’re going to get beat like a woman.” 168 To gain female status, my Brazilian unconscious tells me my body must be raped. It is in the position of the abused, of the one who derives less pleasure than the other, if any pleasure at all, that (heterosexual) difference is staged in my bed. Rape appears as “a sealing act as well as a penetrating one, that both collapses and shuts identity,” which is how Rodrigo Parrini describes the figure of “the horse” in the Chilean male prison system, the one who sacrifices not his life, but his masculinity, for the sake of the group. His bottoming, or his surrendering to rape, allows for the relations between men in prison to circulate as if unscathed and for their identities to feign intactness. 169 167 It is important to note the performatic quality of fantasy, which is an expression of desire. Fantasy is, for Lacan, “this something that resists, that is not permeable to every meaning.” Nestor Braunstein, La Jouissance, Un Concept Lacanien (Paris: Erès, 2005). Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII, p. 42. 168 According to the victim, Gabe Kowalczyk, he wanted to scream, “but my body was so hurt all I could do was whimper.” Ana Ribeiro, "Você Quer Ser Mulher? Então Vai Apanhar Como Mulher", Dizem Agressores a Gabe,” Igay, September 25, 2014. http://igay.ig.com.br/2014-09-25/voce-quer-ser-mulher-entao-vai-apanhar-como-mulher- dizem-agressores-a-gabe.html (last accessed September 29, 2014). My translation. 169 Cited in Javier Sáez and Sejo Carrascosa. Por El Culo: Políticas Anales (Barcelona and Madrid: Egales, 2012), p. 121, 122. My translation. 139 Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach gave me the clarity of this suspicion: to feel sufficiently placed in the position of woman – the woman of my Brazilian unconscious -- I would have to lie and to lie (there). Given my position outside of the Chilean prison system and the traditional markers of female-ness, I couldn’t simply surrender to rape. I would have to fabricate the conditions for such rape, which digital technology’s ability to conceal and muddy my materiality, at first, helped me stage. 170 In McEwan’s novel, man (Edward) and woman (Florence) play out the script of their identity transactions in its absurdity and thoroughness. The edicts are clear and, despite bouts of unexplainable impulses toward ad-libbing, man and woman respect the boundaries of their matching slots. Romantic complementarity – obsession fusionnelle, for Michel Onfray – is a myth that heterosexuality depends on. McEwan unravels its gaucheness so coldly one would think this was an algorithmic process. The bodies engage in no fusion at all but in a one-way transaction, which, as Luce Irigaray and others have noted, will only see the exchange of one thing: Woman. 171 Creating the conditions to become the currency of such exchange appears, then, as an appealing entryway into such an economy. Before the digital, or without it, carving such entry point seemed only possible through a clunky and unfathomable process of surgical transformations in my flesh or in dreams of reincarnation. McEwan’s woman dresses in a way that traps her and possesses thoughts that don’t seem her own. 172 “They were piped down to her.” She is always “automatically” certain of things, mostly that everything is her fault. She makes her wanting disappear 170 Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach (New York: Anchor Books, 2008). 171 Michel Onfray, Théorie du Corps Amoureaux: Pour Une Érotique Solaire (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2000). 172 McEwan, On Chesil Beach, p. 101. 140 with the diligence of a self-directed Pac-Man, like a bête. There is something of a botched Brazilian antropofagia here, eating the body away until there is nothing left, hoping (in)digestion brings something new. Except that here the anthropophagy is self- inflicted, carving oneself out so that it can be occupied, self-annihilation as a sacrifice to make room for and in the name of the other. On Chesil Beach reminded me that sex, that is, heterosexual sex, that is, heterosexual Brazilian sex (the unconscious has a metastasizing provenance, let’s not forget), is always to be a sloppily disguised rape because from the phallus one is not to expect anything less: “Man’s desire must wound women, make them wilt.” 173 Here is the trap, like the bad mother whose disappearance would hurt more than her cruelty ever could, the phallus is coded as a violence that I am forced to repeat, or produce, if I am to feel its north. Otherwise I am guide-less. The penis, which is “the phallus as people imagine it,” is itself like a stupid bête that “knows no limit, offering one of the rare ‘experiences’ of infinity.” 174 Freud, Irigaray, Helene Deutsch and Marie Bonaparte all claim that rape, “hopefully of the breeding kind,” can work as the “model” for (hetero) sexual relations and as the epitome of “female” jouissance. It isn’t without interest that central to the concept of jouissance is the idea of subjective division, “the paradoxical form of pleasure that may be found in suffering.” While something may feel pleasurable for one psychic agency it may cause pain for another – for example, the ego. Curiously, Tim Dean describes the relationship 173 Virginie Despentes, King Kong Théorie (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2006), p. 83. My translation. 174 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII, p. 100. I am extrapolating Avital Ronell’s claims on stupidity, or “the sureness on which blissful stupidity is based.” Ronell, “The Question of Stupidity: Why We Remain in the Provinces,” p. 43. 141 between pleasure and jouissance as a prophylactic one, since it forms a barrier or a limit to keep the subject from being overwhelmed. Fantasy itself can be inscribed in the domain of the prophylactic in the way that it codes desire into an equation of what counts as enjoyment for the subject. 175 In McEwan’s context, man is to do all the work that will lead up to intercourse. Woman is to surrender. In my condom-pulling fantasy of cuckoldry my agency is blurred by my simulated capitulation. I am playing both roles – I am playing all roles. Until the eleventh hour intervention, when I slip out of the thing-like paralysis that being caught in the middle begets by catching, and promptly berating, the bull in his own pseudo-agency, which is actually the outsourced execution of mine. McEwan’s intervention lies in the sudden implosion of the carefully laid-out structures of heterosexuality, which my fantasy seems to simply instrumentalize, and that the digital makes not only possible, but endlessly repeatable. In the novel, right before letting man (and woman) carry out their fantasy of fusion, through the invasion of woman’s body, the meticulously assembled composition collapses, Jenga-like. Man, having spent his life cooking up coherence of character and mimetic excellence – phallic emulation, performs his own disappearing act by producing progressively thinner squirts of semen. “You can’t even control your self,” she says, outing him and the system that bred his likeness – that bred him as (phallic) likeness. Woman witnesses, or (co-) produces his failure, the gap between man and a man, between phallus and penis. He is as inapt at signing the heterosexual contract as he is at zipping down her dress. 175 Luce Irigaray, Ce Sexe Qui N’en Est Pas Un (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977), p. 62. My translation. Tim Dean, “Lacan and Queer Theory,” The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 248-249. 142 Woman, unlike man, was able to keep her end of the deal. Man made the horrific opening between reality and fantasy palpable: The phallus wasn’t there. 176 She didn’t mind so much touching it (the penis), “What she did not want, not just yet, was see it.” It is the apex of this archetypical priapism – his incessant performing of his phallic drag -- that does him in. 177 In my own cautiously coded fantasy this other kind of (hetero-)sexuality is found as an attempt to mimic heterosexuality’s classic model, which appears in a less veiled fashion in Brazilian culture and the unconscious that it produces:: A woman does not want, a woman yields. The recent displaying of a “No means yes. Yes means anal” sign by an American fraternity condenses the structural pattern, the very slogan, of the Brazilian heterosexual logic of which I am an active product and which can cause uproar in the United States. The fact that “anal” is all I could ever offer places my transexualized body in a default position of “yes,” which I am to fight against if I am to mimic the supposed “No” position of sexual refusal of a “real girl,” whom a “real man” would have to seduce, convince, and dupe into granting him sexual access. Provided he used “only” symbolic violence in order to get it. In this conjecture, my passiveness can only come about through diligent labor, that is, through a constant activeness that places me in kinship, curiously, to the very man whose phallic drag doesn’t ever stop. 178 176 “The matter lay between them, as solid as a geographical feature, a mountain, a headland.” Ibid, p. 170. 177 We will see in Session 4 how the digital’s demand for perennial phallic performance places man into quasi-unprecedented vulnerability. Ibid, p. 125. 178 Tyler Kingkade, Texas Tech Investigating Frat For ‘No Means Yes, Yes Means Anal’ Sign, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/23/texas-tech-no-means-yes-fraternity-phi- delt_n_5865606.html (last access September 23, 2014). 143 Since my rape is authored, not a mere surrendering (I must go after it), it doesn’t simply symptomatize the question of whether there can be heterosexuality without rape, or what would be left of it. It, instead, points to a literalization of such rape as a device qua device, which I can thus (re-)claim. Rape, as a man-making method, is here closer to an “initiation” that opens woman up once and for all, as Virginie Despentes puts it. A sacrificial initiation that leads Despentes, in her own biography, to prostitution, which itself becomes a reparative tool. Working out a logic in which the body could be sold, used, and offered so many times, and yet more times again, meant the body wasn’t so easily breakable. Recognizing and reducing rape as a device without patents can be a reparative instrument that the digital itself has enabled me to use to the bone, “many times, and yet more times again.” In the logic of my own “rape,” a more symbolic, even ludic device, compared to Despentes’ experience, prostitution doesn’t come about in its literal form, but the repetitive banalization of the sex act associated with it does. Instrumentalizing rape-as-device through the digital has granted me a power trip-like enjoyment in my make-believe passiveness akin to that of Isabelle, the middle-class teenage prostitute of François Ozon’s Young & Beautiful (2013), where the ability to repeat sex (same fancy hotels, same old clients) is a comforting and exit strategy from the constraints of family life. 179 While the response to the cuckold ads is decidedly always large, one cannot say that all of the men follow through. Some engage with the fantasy but end up not showing up for its (re-)enactment. Yet this refusal to finally give form to the fantasy feels very different from the gay flake’s inability to act it out, or his tendency to make love to its 179 Despentes, King Kong Théorie, p. 49, 72. My translation. 144 infinite postponement. The gay flake seems to foresee the dissatisfaction that the passage a l’acte will trigger – the gay object is incompatible with the gay subject, whose actual object of desire is a straight one he cannot have, setting him to keep cruising cruising as to avoid the interruption that a physical meet would entail: a loss of fantasy, another reminder of the inaptness of the object. The straight flake who recognizes t-girls as objects of desire seems to know he will like the object too much. Instead of dreading the frustration of an object who is sure be a letdown, he dreads the confirmation that the object’s vicinity fulfills the function of the object qua object just the same, which may put him at odds with his own identificatory position. One Craigslist lover once told me he loved having sex with t-girls but was afraid of doing it often because he didn’t want to get addicted to it. In this manner, the digitally-mediated passiveness that speaks the language of rape is speaking back to a man who is now himself in an overwhelming and precarious position. The pseudo-excess of his phallus is re-routed into actual device (for the t-girl’s enjoyment, which he presumes to be man’s/the husband’s) while the too much-ness of desire leaves him at risk, dis-oriented and mesmerized. In the excess of the pleasure the bull takes in the borrowing of the woman, offered by the man who isn’t there (yet is everywhere), every single performer in the scene has been duped, even the “I,” considering the bull can always disobey the instructions and not pull the condom off, or pull the condom off without me realizing it. In Lacan’s famous play with the sound of Name-of-the-Father (nom du père) concept, which establishes the Father’s prohibitive function, he establishes that les non-dupes errent: “those who do not let themselves be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction and continue to believe their eyes are the ones who err most.” Les non-dupes errent sounds, phonetically, like le nom 145 du père, it is most often translated along the lines of the non-duped err. It can also be translated, interestingly, as the non-duped wander (in circles), or quite simply, the non- duped cruise. 180 Maud-Yeuse Thomas notes that for a regime that exerts control through the regulation of opposites (heterosexuality-homosexuality), the figure of the transvestite occupies the domain of the lie and of dupery (“une duperie pour autrui.”): “(…) the transvestite is the ultimate pariah, especially when he [sic] becomes undetectable.” Thomas also associates the transvestite with the figure of the flâneur, that is, the wondering around (in circles) of the non-duped, which Tim Dean links to the analog gay cruising subject, and the “sex-club patron” in particular, “who readily loses himself in a stream of bodies and whose individuality thus consists in the disappearance of individuality.” Dean speaks here of a general “cruising ethos” that “conduces to this impersonalizing effect.” The digital grants the t-girl undetectable status as the transactions and contact made between her and man are so easily kept away from their lives beyond the bedroom and their screens. Theirs can be an oneiric rape, without traces, evidence or repercussions. Unless disease emergences as a product of their encounter(s). But even then, the sheer number of strangers performing the fantasy guarantees the inability to know culprits or provenance. 181 180 Slavoj Zizek, With or Without Passion?: What’s Wrong With Fundamentalism – Part I, http://www.lacan.com/zizpassion.htm (last accessed September 20, 2014). 181 Maud-Yeuse Thomas, “Éthnologie du Travesti(ssement),” Miroir/Miroirs 2, Issue 1, 2014, p. 55. My translation. Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 36. 146 Unless My Spine Snapped: A Digitally Mediated History of Sex with Strangers It is remarkable to remember that just a few years before this fantasy of recorded cuckoldry and all-around dupery – in which man’s stupidity lies in his belief that woman’s stupidity has been confirmed—the mere touch of a male, any male whatsoever, was enough of a sine qua non for enjoyment to take place. The latitude of the object was so large, any-whatever-male suited my fantasy of/for pleasure. Transvestism had always felt like a shot-cut to a symbolic de-alienation that rendered me desirable and transitive: I had an object that felt like my own. In the beginning, that is, once the dreams of womanhood of my first years of life had been properly dismantled and replaced by a more realistic settling for gayness, even the touch of a gay-identified male whose performed butchness was definitely not as seamless as that of some heterosexually-identified men, was enough to make me feel pleasantly feminized. It’s as though I myself had been stupid enough to see any male-ness, even in its most evident state of drag, as phallically passable. If female attire provided me with an escape route to a leftover heterosexual jouissance, the penis, any penis, could carry me to phallic territory. How had I, through my history of digitality and disease (its circumvention, its flirtation, its imminence), gone from stupidly believing the phallic drag of others to doubting it with such vehemence that the stupidity was placed on them to believe my own drag (of phallic absence)? How does such a simple demand in the coding 147 of what shall count as enjoyable become such an intricate set of equations with so many obstructions, strict rules, and various forms of calculated drag? 182 We can link this evolving code of fantasy to that of the psychoanalytic structure of perversion, which Lacan aligns with “desire per se,” and which is a strategy of psychic survival that may come at the cost of the body. The pervert excels “in exposing the fantasy of the other and the various social lies that such fantasy necessarily enforces.” Perversion, which is at the crux of desire more broadly, is thus “a threat to the social bond.” 183 The pervert acts like a spoiled child who doesn’t want to be happy, but “to discover a law, beyond the mask of the social order, that can bring solace to their torment,” at all costs, and “[i]f he encounters no resistance, he will always push further.” There was always resistance, whose function we may call prophylactic, not only from the symbolic but from the digital code itself, and increasingly so. In the mid-2000s, for instance, I could post ads on the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist as many times a day as desired. I would have to post and re-post repeatedly since other people had the power to block my ads, and didn’t hesitate to do so. By 2014 Craigslist started using a ruthless automated blocking system, whose logic isn’t clear besides its five-posts-per- day limit. The site often flags my ads automatically, presumably associating my IP address with spammers for having posted too much, or punishing me for my recidivism. The two much device of Craigslist’s Casual Encounters code goes ironically against the 182 Serge Hefez, “Petite Leçon de Psychologie: Le Pervers Narcissique et Ses Complices,” Libération.fr, May 6, 2007, http://familles.blogs.liberation.fr/hefez/2007/05/petite_leon_de_.html (last accessed September 15, 2014). My translation. 183 Judith Feher-Gurewich, “A Lacanian Approach to The Logic of Perversion,” The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 191-192. 148 too much of desire, which is what drives traffic to that section of the site in the first place. Its code punishes particularly feminine subjects who tend to preserve the dynamic of being-looked-at/for of heterosexist culture by posting ads and waiting for s men to reply and try to woo her instead of laboriously going through ads posted by men and responding to them individually. The digital made possible for the first any-whatever-male, André, to touch me as a desired object – an object tout court, in 1997. How has the digital interface gone from pragmatic facilitator to a necessary witness 17 years later? How has the digital shifted from a step to be overcome to a crucial partnership, whether as the ghostly attendance of a husband who doesn’t exist or as an instrumental presence in bed, a tool in my very hands mid-act, to line up the next stranger to come over and save me from the disappointing performance of the one who is about to leave? 184 A Brazilian chat room called Gays e Afins (“Gays and Alike”) was the platform for my first experience of (desirable) objecthood. Being on Gays e Afins, whose very name promises a latitude and acknowledges an expandable likeness to desire, was never without anxiety. Someone could always interrupt me, catching me from behind at any moment, and the time spent online was always inevitably short. The digital was a rare, unreliable, and ephemeral opportunity, not an overabundance to be inhabited. The rush that it brought forth (up to 25 males in the same chat room) was troubled by the threat of maternal invasion, in particular. If I took too long on the family computer, whose screen 184 If the digital has worked as an enabling tool for a certain queerness to be stoked and executed, it depended on other apparatuses of luxury, as an increasingly complex network of fantasies could only be carried out with plenty of leisure time and the privacy conceded by living alone in a big American city. The American F-1 graduate student visa to make such a life possible is, of course, also a luxury – one granted by intellectual knowledge (or its institutional recognition, anyway). 149 faced the home office door – perfectly placed so whoever entered the room would see what I was seeing before I could see that they were seeing me see the image, my mother would ground me. The grounding meant the detachment of the keyboard from the computer, which she would yank from my hands, and lodge inside a pile of her folded blouses inside her closet, which she would then lock and walk around the house with its key dangling around her waist. The desktop would sit on the office table dismembered like a limp bomb: A screen with holes and appendages that could attach to nothing. The maimed machine would expose my punishment for the family members to see when they passed the office door, which no one ever dared to close: a reminder that in that house privacy, which meant the opportunity of pleasure for pleasure’s sake, would not be tolerated. In Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter, not a keyboard, but a key, mediates the relationship between two miserable women – a professor and self-described “unnatural mother,” and the uneducated young mother she meets at the beach during their holidays. 185 Leda, the mature intellectual, gets involved in the life of the sad young woman, Nina, after spending her entire vacation watching her and her family interact at the beach, accidently taking home a lost doll that belongs to Nina’s daughter, and never mustering up the courage to return it to the little girl. After all, the giving back of the doll might not make the girl happy since “a child never wants only what it’s asking for, in fact a satisfied demand makes even more unbearable the need that has been confessed.” 186 Leda’s passion for books and confession that she once abandoned her children so she could be a person again awakens in Nina a desire to escape her own hopeless 185 Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter (New York: Europa Editions, 2008), p. 124. 186 Ibid, p. 115. 150 circumstances. By the end of the novel, after having grown attached to the lost (and, by now, hijacked) doll and keeping it hidden inside her apartment like a rotting secret, Nina asks Leda to use her place for a few hours so she can have an extra-marital affair. The professor takes the request as “a dart of bad humor that poisoned my veins (…)” but decides to make a copy of her apartment key so she can hand it over to Nina. The key becomes a form of currency between the women, at least in Leda’s fantasy. A kind of hot potato device aiming to outsource one’s choice about going through with a passage à l’acte of sexual desire to the other: “Perhaps she wanted me to refuse her the keys, so that she could refuse herself a dangerous outlet for her restlessness,” Leda thinks. “Or she wanted me to give her the keys, so that she could feel in that gesture the authorization to take the risk of flight, the road to a future different from the one that was already written for her.” The relationship between the “unnatural mother” and the dedicated one unfolds like a mother-child rapport in which the mother sees through the fictions of happiness and wholeness that the child believes in and perversely stokes the fire of “restlessness” in the daughter to grow into an ungovernable state. It doesn’t take much for the younger woman to give in to her desire, even if she will ask the, as it were, mother’s permission to go through with it. Mother and daughter, then, stage a standoff with the key. Its denouement, as Leda tells Nina she can have the key to the apartment, poses sexual betrayal and sexual pleasure, or sex tout court, as contingent with the mother’s absence from the home. Leda makes a copy of the key to give to Nina, she will not lend her own, making of the 151 maternal absence a temporary relief with perversely unpredictable duration. The mother is never completely kept out. The anxiety over the prowling mother who may surprise the scene of intimacy mirrors, of course, the primal scene, when it is the child herself who catches the parents’ intimacy, even if only in the her fantasy. 187 The mother’s abandonment of the home in Ferrante’s novel is always temporary, whether it happens as a surprise or a request. The mother of my childhood is the foreclosure of abandonment, a lurking threat that can catch me red-handed. She hovers over the scene. It is impossible to know when she will emerge, whilst the father never turns up as a surprise. The father is always there because he never is. His actual disappearance is never mourned, it is never real. His physical appearance is timed. It can be counted on and calculated, based on business hours or because certain childish acts will certainly provoke his aggressive interference. The father is predictable. His possibilities are few. And while the father is home, his interaction with the child must be schemed. The triggering of the father(’s active presence) usually takes place through the stoking of his wrath, as in the child did something wrong, the child must be beaten. Perhaps my most reoccurring memory of paternal presence is precisely that: The father is irate. The father must beat the child who did something excessively, normally involving some kind of technological interface: too much television, too much telephone, too much camcorder, too much computer. The child just wouldn’t stop. The dynamic of paternal interaction in my household was a dynamic of violent intervention. When the 187 “[P]rivacy research in both online and offline environments has shown that just the perception, let alone the reality, of being watched results in feelings of low self-esteem, depression and anxiety.” Kate Murphy, “We Want Privacy, but Can’t Stop Sharing,” The New York Times, Sunday Review, October 4, 2014, p. 4. 152 father’s presence was generated, he would run after me until I made it to my bedroom and shut the door as fast as I could. But there was no key. The mother had all the keys. So I would sit on the floor with my back touching the door, slide my feet across the wooden floor and extend my legs until my feet touched the credenza. My body would thus function as a blocking bar caught between the opening door and the piece of furniture. The price of this deadlock was paid with hard labor: The child had to manage the pain required to block the door in order to avoid the unmanageable pain of being shaken or spanked. Unless my spine snapped, the father should remain outside. If my spine never quite snapped, it inevitably bent enough for my makeshift blocking mechanism to give way for the father’s invasion of the unlockable bedroom. He would pound the door with the fury of a deranged animal, a bête. I recognize a similar look in the faces of the men whose gaze render me believable as an object of desire-cum-rape. The un-prophylactic look that suspends whatever might come in the way between their body and the body of their object. Yelling and screams would be heard from my mother and sister off in the distance, none of which aimed at stopping the father from performing his duty, but to egg him on so that the child would learn to “parar de ser criança,” or “to stop being a child.” While the father’s fists were beating the door, my back glued to it, feeling each pounding echo on my head and trickle down my back toward my tailbone, I stared at the window in front of me and thought: Shall I throw myself out and surrender by my own action or let him in and surrender to his rage? 153 The anxiety around the mother’s imminent cock-blocking (she can show up at any time) or of paternal rape through the failure of the child’s body to act like an unbreakable (cock-)blocking mechanism, can be a courted haunting. If the haunting is coveted, the fear produced by the ghost is undone, in the fantasy. There is nothing contradicting about a child who wants to avoid violence and finds herself creating the very conditions that will result in her being beaten. Just as there is no contradiction in a queer theorist dreaming of rape and laboriously authoring its fantasmatic performance ad nauseam. This presumed lack of synchrony, which could be deduced at first glance, only makes evident “the irreducible character of fantasy” and the fundamental position the unconscious occupies in relation to all subjective phenomena. Jacques-Alain Miller argues that we can be a “perfectly authentic feminist and then, on the couch, confess that we take pleasure in thinking of being beaten and raped. (…) These are two levels of being.” 188 When the child summons, the child surrenders to a particularly phallic deference, in order for her not to be surprised by its advent. This structure illustrates Leo Bersani’s argument on the Oedipal triangle being a “misnomer,” for its dynamic involves a much larger multiplicity of figures orgiastically imbricated in the child’s “shifting sexual dispositions.” Bersani offers “the desired father and the law-giving father,” “the desired mother and the threatening mother” as examples. We can extend this web of ghostly multiples to the sexual scene itself, including its pre-production, as seen in the anecdote of the grounding mother threatening to take the computer apart and render the son digitally castrated, as does Bersani when he cites Freud’s remarks, “(…) I am 188 Jacques-Alain Miller, Christine Angot – Rencontre avec Jacques-Alain Miller, October 21, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOqlTD3cqGg (last accessed October 12, 2014). My translation. 154 accustoming myself to regarding every sexual act as an event between four individuals.” As such, at the level of the unconscious, and to recall Miller’s “two levels of being,” there is room for love in the rape I summon. Or rather, the rape I summon makes room for love. 189 The fear of maternal invasion scripted my digital interactions, but André and I still managed to exchange phone numbers and arranged to meet at a movie theatre before being interrupted. No images were exchanged but based on our physical descriptions and zip codes, enough was inferred. At the theatre, we set in the back and on the floor, with our backs positioned against the carpeted wall so that no one outside our field of vision could catch us in such close proximity. There was no space for the mother’s surreptitiousness. Were she to somehow storm in the room to catch us, we would see her first, as soon as she blocked the film image. Despite the defusing of the mother, we stared at the screen, buffered by the carpeted concrete supporting our spines, on high alert. That anxiety felt like a privilege. A digitally-enabled miracle. The idea that something sufficiently male could want me, that something sufficiently male could be stupid enough to want me, that something was sufficiently stupid to be male, and that I could have produced this event from the besieged space of the smart family home where nothing was unseen, all struck me as a stupidity to take advantage of. I wouldn’t come to the realization until several years later, in analysis, that growing up under the fantasmatic logic that “Father does not love me = man does not love me = I cannot be loved by man” has been one of the most fundamental pillars 189 Leo Bersani, “Against Monogamy,” Oxford Literary Review, Vol. 20, Issue I, 1998, p. 9-10. 155 propping up my psychic (k)nots. Yet if father/man doesn’t love me, father/man’s presence is made itself known through violence, which appears as a second-best replacement for love, or, at least, a guarantor for touch, as in the scene of paternal invasion of the child’s bedroom. It is worth noting that I came of age under the notion, and retained it until just a few years before that night of anxiously ensconced pleasure at the movies with André, that any sexual contact between two whatever-males, whether they were both HIV negative or one of them was positive, would inevitably produce AIDS in both, or at least in me. I grew up, then, telling myself I would only give in to temptation, escape maternal supervision (or give in to it) and have sex with a man twice, once to see what it was like, and the second time to actually enjoy it. Sexual enjoyment was an act of farewell, to be given up as soon as it was felt. Stupidity, it seems, made male contact possible, but also became a currency that was progressively more complicated to find, in me and in others. The closer I got to these manly-enough males the less suitably manly they became. I caught them in their non- sufficiency as I probed for the smallest proof of femininity in their body, their taste, their speech, the way their head set on their neck in their photographs. Femininity was everywhere. The more I cruised, the more I brushed against objects that resembled me too much to pass for the otherness that my fantasies required, to produce some kind of irrevocable difference. In the end, they all wanted to get fucked. They pursed their lips a little too girlishly in moments of betraying spontaneity, they let their queerness slip out in their image, even when it wasn’t moving. The fact that the images exchanged rarely moved is not an accident and, clearly, no technological hindrance. 156 When I spotted their queerness their bodies melded with mine and I wanted to scream in horror. I wanted distance, I wanted contrast, I wanted what they, too, wanted. This was our only coincidence. We had bought the ruse of homosexual sameness – the sameness that stunts the queerness of (homo-)sexuality into place, when, in reality, we wanted a difference we could see, and smell, and fantasize about, but had no access too. We wanted the comforting familiarity of the phallus, which heterosexual men emulated so well, without traces of a process. It became clear that gay men do not desire gay men, but are forced to settle for them. We might be able to say the same about heterosexual men who settle for the material evidence of woman (or a fantasy of it) that they accept only in bio-women. Gay men desire straight men, or something that straight men have, something that straight men resemble, not something that resembles straight men. My cross-dressing move, then, functioned as a slipping into heterosexual territory, tapping into its own semblance, or into its shade – the neighboring zone that preserved so much of its meanings. Dressing like a woman, or rather, like a girl, I am not sure I became a woman, but I became desired. In referring to this feminine position that I acquire, which I grant myself, which I usurp for myself, I will refuse to delineate distinctions in the terms t-girls, trans-, transsexual, cross-dresser, tranny, transvestite, and others. These will indiscriminately evoke a femaleness that isn’t taken for its naturalized biological literalness but the multiple variations, virtualizations and materializations rendered performable, representable, imaginable and consumable through digital platforms. The refusal to settle for one term or to articulate the nuance amongst them aims to reflect the fact that while we know that our bodies change, transform and are perceived 157 “with incredible fantasy and creativity (…), no linguistic form could ever map out these modifications and fluctuations in an exhaustive fashion.” 190 It also echoes the way this ad hoc category is claimed and tossed, in my own t-girlhood, owned and let go. It’s as though I’d learned to floss through the category, exploiting its technological function. And while “the referent is never the right one, and this is what makes a language (…),” as Lacan says, a referent must be chosen for the sake of analysis. Impermanent referents that we can use, “as stupid as anything, but really use them, work them to the bone.” That is, work the referent until it is raw. 191 Making Difference Up, Making Up For Dissonance T-girlhood was precarious, unstable, and confined to the limits of my bedroom, a bedroom whose invasions would be pragmatically yearned, and whose violence would be rehearsed in advance. The guests would be invited, they wouldn’t storm in. In fact, I would often leave my door unlocked so I could wait in bed and watch their entrance into the frame like a long take, without prefaces. I wanted to probe their entirety as though I were at once in and outside of the scene. As though this were, quite literally, a scene to be watched. While there was no guarantee that all heterosexual men online were going to read me as girl-enough, there was no question that lots of them did, and they would bring with them, to this zone where I could bask some of the heterosexual symbolic’s laurels, the 190 Luca Greco in Jérémy Patinier, “La Face Cachée du Genre,” Miroir/Miroirs 2, Issue 1, 2014. My translation. 191 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated and annotated by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 60. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII, p. 61. 158 same code(s of conduct) they would have abided by were they in heterosexual territory proper. T-girlhood granted me access to a pleasure, and to the relishing in the shadow cast by the heterosexual symbolic that had reserved me no slots, which had been, until then, ontologically foreign and un-usurpable. This pass, and passing, made evident Lacan’s famous maxims of the inexistence of the sexual act and of love being a demand for that which the other cannot give. For Lacan, the sexual act doesn’t exist and copulation is a concession, a kind of assisted masturbation. One’s being in the sex scene has to do with one’s own psychic necessities in a way that reduces the other(s) in that scene to supporting help. By the time the sex scene takes place there is only one person actually there, or for whom the scene is dedicated, apart from the various fantasmatic addressees and figures that hover over it. 192 Beatriz Preciado illustrates this when she describes having sex with her lover, V.D., noting that, “I know that at the moment I undress myself, she won’t see anything but one out of these two bodies. This reduction to one fixed image frightens me.” 193 The increasing presence of smart phones in the sex scene literalizes the role of the other as masturbatory aid. Whether one uses the phone to capture the sex act, to interrupt it (“Sorry, I just got an important text, I gotta go…”), or to set up the next sex scene before the present one is over, its presence confirms the excessive role of the sex partner, whose own subjectivity or presence as anything other than a technology is a nuisance for the subject. 192 Braunstein, La Jouissance, Un Concept Lacanien, p. 107. 193 Preciado uses the term “masturbatory cooperation.” Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sexe, Drogue et Biopolitique (Paris: Grasset, 2008), p. 255 (in italics in the original), 83. My translation. 159 In using Plenty of Fish (pof.com) as a cruising platform, I am forced to post my photos as a girl and only reveal my transvestite condition in private messages (Plenty of fish offers no trans option, and announcing my trans-ness in my profile gets me blocked every time). When I ask male users who contact me if they like t-girls, a consistent answer is something along the lines of, “If they give good head.” Here the reduction of the sex partner to a masturbatory device becomes clear. In the sex scene the subjects are always incompatible as subjects, but often speak to each other as technologies of masturbation. A t-girlhood that makes usage of digital tools of cruising for becoming desirable object, while escaping its destiny as a category in the socius, takes the sex partner’s technological status to its extreme, or rather, for what it is: The other in the sex scene is a method, not a partner. The only partnership in the sex scene is staged between the subject’s unconscious and her conscious, her fantasy and the world as (un)available arsenal for its execution. As a (gay) man I was never there in the sex act. And serving as screen for the other (gay man) to project his fantasies of masculinity felt like a cringe-inducing and botched trick. The other too, after a brief moment of novelty (something male touches me), never quite took on the images I’d set out to project. The referent never adhered. Taking the position of woman, which is not the same thing as replacing her, felt like slipping into desire knowing that while I may not be sexually satiated, I would come out of the sex scene having been wanted. Here, too, there was no sexual relationship and the demand was out of synchrony with what the other could give, but we recognized each other. The ruse was hysterically evident (my wig was cheap, my five o’clock shadow 160 never completely concealed), but our positions incredibly clear. It indeed felt like slipping into a sturdy and comfy slot. The anxiety of knowing too much, knowing the other’s masculinity and mine to be a sham, gave way to a soothing repetition. Like giving up on remembering the lyrics to a song that you never actually liked in favor of the humming of a lullaby, which comes to you without effort. Instead of playing a hot-potato game in which my feminine position was never conceded, it was as if the (t-girl) sexual relation had become the performing of a choreography we knew by heart. By usurping this feminine position and pledging allegiance to the heterosexual symbolic through its periphery I was making up for a geographical dissonance between my Brazilian unconscious and my American pool of male options. Whereas woman’s position and the violence that goes along with its assignment seem to withstand the lack of genital difference in the Brazilian gay sex scene, American men mostly only had the presence of their very bodies – cold, distant, shaved, perfumed – to give. Unlike Brazilians, their default was to simply stand there, emoting and initiating nothing, in what I can only call a particularly ungenerous White stance, demanding that I make them cum, offering absolutely nothing. In order for their fleshly presence to gain the status of man as my Brazilian unconscious understands it, a lot of work had to be done. Although that labor is necessitated even in cases where there is no national discrepancy per se – the gap between fantasy and actuality must be covered – my exiled position render the work to be done all the more obvious. The scene of gay sex was a scene of war that both parties waged against the sameness of the other. Sometimes this presumed lack of difference would be successfully administered when I could hold on to another kind of difference that felt, in a Brazilian 161 context, just as etched in stone as genital difference: Black men, poor men, married men, men without identity papers, tall men, toothless men, hairy men, men who weren’t vain, men who didn’t dance, men for whom maternal love hadn’t been excessive. The scene of cross-dressing sex, by comparison, was, for all intents and purposes, a heterosexual sex scene. Difference was metastasized into its fabric. A war had already been waged and I had lost before arrival. All I had to do was revel in the post-mortem stillness of the scene, its marked spots. I could believe the wanting in the man’s eyes. There was a focused aggression and a completely unambiguous impulse to dupe me into surrendering to a pleasure that they thought would inevitably benefit them more than myself. This scene was coded in such precise terms that all I needed to do was show up and lay there, like the doll that I was to him and that he was to me. Drag Feminism: The (Non-)Political Ramifications of Becoming Desirable Object Thierry Schaffauser describes the move to experience the sex scene from gayness to t-girlhood as an act of “drag feminism,” which may not shun the violence of hetero- masculinity, but expose the artifice required for such sex scene to hold itself up. The t- girl sex scene, for Schaffauser, makes evident the aesthetic labor of womanhoodwhilst producing a distinctively queer pleasure, much queerer than gay sex, which “is quite basic: we suck and fuck each other in the ass,” for it not only troubles the category but is inaugurated by the very unstable-ness that is inherent to it. In this set up, the gay man- 162 cum-t-girl is finally able to access, or redeem, the most fundamental of privileges, that is, pleasure. 194 Maud-Yeuse Thomas differentiates this pleasure-seeking t-girl (travesti) from the drag queen by claiming the political importance of the latter and the self-serving privateness of the first. For Thomas, the t-girl avoids the danger of public visibility (she seeks to benefit herself) while the drag queen embraces it (she is interested in the public good), as if there were something shamefully less noble about producing pleasure privately, at last. 195 This premise echoes William Haver’s arguments on how moralism “assumes the pleasures of the body to be unessential, immoderate, excessive, and therefore deniable; it assumes pleasure to be negotiable (…),” to be the product of a consciously controlled process without merit. This differentiation between trans also presumes, naively, that the subject could ever be engaged in a selfless political project at all that didn’t also aim at a less evident pleasure that is also private, perhaps even more so – that there isn’t something furtively self-serving about literal activism. 196 The sartorial pleasures to be had in dressing up as a girl, which used to be so vital in my childhood, feel very small compared to the anxieties that the sex scene qua sex scene begets. While, as a child, the texture, the smell, the look of the fabric and the colors 194 Thierry Schaffauser, “Drag Queen Feminism,” Miroir/Miroirs 2, Issue 1, 2014, p. 90. My translation. 195 William Haver, The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) p. 8. 196 Thomas, “Éthnologie du Travesti(ssement),” p. 64. Michael Bader points out that in psychoanalysis, “[t]here is always something bigger than altruism.” Psychoanalysis is suspicious of one’s investment in improving the welfare of others as though one’s political deeds carried no egotistical sources. Of course, the irony shouldn’t be lost in that analysts themselves are seen as helpers. Bader, “Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth The Psychological and Social Problem of Altruism.” http://www.michaelbader.com/articles_tikkun_altruism.html (last accsessed March 28, 2015). 163 seemed like a self-sufficient cathexis (they were addressed to a foreclosed other destined to remain a other-in-fantasy), now they served the pragmatic function of making this other real, or rather, really there. There is, then, no time for the enjoyment of the accouterments themselves, which are trumped by the materializations of the other to whom they are addressed. It is particularly disheartening that it takes very little aesthetic effort for me to gain feminine-enough status, as it becomes obvious that what man is after is simply someone willing to accept the blame of lack, to wear the sign of there where there is nothing, and to notarize man’s fictions of immunity to a precariousness that is actually universal. As a t-girl, my own object of desire remains the same as it has always been, except that it now looks back at me, recognizing me. I also manage to escape the impermeable doom of the category for I occupy it only while pleasure lasts. The question that many lovers ask me, if “I will go all the way,” presumes t-girlhood to be one stop (short) in the linear process of a passability that stands to gain biological status, or material proof. But my t-girlhood is not about becoming so passable as to become a woman in the socius, or even in the skin. It is about appropriating the category as a sex toy, not as a life sentence. This t-girl will not be operated on. Instead, she herself operates “a radical rupture on the environmental doxa” for private pleasures with political ramifications. If I hadn’t been a child coerced into accepting gayness as my category, I would probably have gravitated toward being a girl – in the socius. That child is dead, but her desire remains – 164 it can be st(r)oked by a t-girlhood who doesn’t commit to a sexual and social, private and public conflation. 197 The idea that this sort of gay man, the kind whose t-girlhood is arrested by the demand for gayness (and the feminine-phobia that goes along with it), occupies a privileged position in a patriarchal system for the fact that he is taken for male is countered by the alienating experience of, precisely, being taken for male but taking oneself for something else – something without an object that can properly work for him as a pleasure-granting device. 198 We could say that the gay man who becomes a t-girl for sex purposes after having already had to mourn his original girlhood (as a child) reduces the violence of hetero-masculinity to a masturbatory aid while gaining exemption from its less welcome violence (in the socius) once the scene is over. Schaffauser argues that even such non-welcome violence terrorizes the t-girl/gay man once the sex scene is over, and before it could ever be propped up. The lived experience of such a man, forced into a relationship of sameness in which the actual object of desire – straight man – is barred is an apprenticeship of heterosexual domination rather than a wallowing in social privilege. The symbolic alienation that it stages is so terrorizing it can be said that the privilege of such man is in a constant and perverse pawned state, like an unredeemable ticket: He has it in theory, but it is always on the horizon. 197 Chantal Aubry, “La Femme et Le Travesti,” Miroir/Miroirs 2, Issue 1, 2014, p. 68. My translation. 198 Javier Sáez and Sejo Carrascosa refer to gay man’s femininephobie as “plumofobia,” or “featherphobia,” and note that “many of these superbuch featherphobes have more feathers than a Norwegian duvet, which begs the question if there isn’t also an unconscious self-hatred in this visceral scolding of the feather of the other.” Sáez and Carrascosa, Por El Culo: Políticas Anales, p. 117. My translation. 165 The shift from gayness to t-girlhood makes visible, even audible (“Hi hunny”, “How are you babe?”), the strategy of sweetness and chivalry man uses to dress up the rape of the heterosexual sex act in a kind of love scene. 199 Whilst the gay sex scene is often one of constraint and absence of chivalry aimed at avoiding that any of the subjects be tagged, or tainted, as the more feminine object out of the two, the heterosexual sex scene involves a certain swindling, or a drag of interests. As a t-girl, these men are quick to offer me things – a drink, a ride, cash, the best moment of my life, a heavy load of sperm, whereas the only thing a gay man has ever given me was syphilis. Straight man’s attempts at conveying sweetness and selflessness aim to reduce the feminine object lying before them to as small and stupid as possible in order to potentialize whatever he himself does as sufficiently phallic. He tends to err on the side of a hollow politeness and a tenderness that reiterates my role as literalized object and his as active agent, a position he hides behind a chivalry that, in the end, is its opposite, as he feigns handing over control to the woman in the scene – since, whatever happens, they have won. My consent will always be partial when compared to the pleasure he is sure to derive from it. His strategy reiterates the masculinist fantasy that disavows the feminine as a position of enjoyment beyond man’s trickery. This is particularly evident when discussing if a condom will be used or not. The absolute majority of men delegates that decision to me, as if only I could lose anything from the act. On the topic of condoms, their responses are: “I don't care if I use one,” “its always up to the woman if she wants it bare or condoms,” “No rules here I follow yours!!;),” “I'll satisfy your needs and desires,” 199 Schaffauser, “Drag Queen Feminism,” p. 91. My translation. 166 “Condom or bare up to you but i do want to creampie that pussy all nite then cuddle up. ”200 Freud describes tenderness as a way of managing hostility and relates such strategy to the relationship between mother and child, and married couples. In both cases, dressing violence up with sweetness reveals the veneration of the person in the position of power, “their very deification” to be “opposed in the unconscious by an intense hostile tendency, so that, as we had expected, the situation of an ambivalent feeling is here realized.” 201 In keeping with the fantasy of sameness that is supposed to govern the gay sex scene, and support the putative difference of the heterosexual sex scene, it is okay for the gay subject to avow his desire for violence. The communication of violence is sometimes done through overt speech or through claims of belonging to certain subcultures whose sartorial signs and other associations (S&M leather, uniforms, gangbang slings) articulate the desire for violence so that the subject doesn’t have to. In fact, the avowal may even be welcome in that it mimics a supposedly masculine interest in aggression, helping render invisible traces of femininity in the scene. The men replying to my online ads that seek to cast a bull to have sex with a wife, who turns out to be a transsexual, who turns out to be me, often utilize violent language as a way to convince the supposed husband that they should be picked for the job. Even if 200 A creampie is the accumulation of sperm inside a vagina or anus, some of which oozes out of the body after unprotected ejaculation. Brandon Schneider 045d30755919315e8ce388d16b3ee4df@reply.craigslist.org (July 6, 2013), Wes P da9e11aee8a03ddaa73e613470f416f1@reply.craigslist.org (December 18, 2014), Dshh 300f190efc2d3415927ded29c0ec4509@reply.craigslist.org (October 15, 2014), Chris Spencer hotscorpio1567@aol.com (February 4, 2013), Cashmeir Polk af008fd3d9ad395b8048d3e423d750a3@reply.craigslist.org (November 15, 2013). 201 Freud, Totem and Taboo, 46. 167 the role of the husband isn’t a physical presence articulated into the fantasy (he is always elsewhere), that is, the competition would take place in the imaginary, proof of violent intent and capability is put forth: “would def take you Down,” “have a black belt in eating pussy,” “beat that pussy up in every way possible,” “experienced Dom here to ruin her...,” “I will damage that white pussy,” “Want a handsome, tall, strong man to throw her around and give you the great fuck that most guys are too scared to give her?,” “I'll put you in your place because i make the rules since I've got the Dick,” and “You could not handle what I have.” 202 Barebacking appears as the ultimate guarantor of this violence. It occupies the sign of unquestionable assault that qualifies the penis as properly phallic. A virus could indeed ravage the body despite the excellence (or lack thereof) of the phallic performance by the “active” sexual partner. If the phallus fails, as it does, the failure of an invisible virus (undetectable in the present) to damage the body in the feminine position will never be known, for even its wrecking success won’t show its marks until some time in the future. This fantasy of violence pays respect to a fantasy that nature will take its course, the achievement of the other’s performance (of masculinity) isn’t even needed when in the end, the biological will take care of it. 202 Mota 9d9b4b59488f3bf9842f2fc3a9b2eb73@reply.craigslist.org (October 2, 2014), BRANDON LAYNE af990cfcb005398eb289c45a7031b3c7@reply.craigslist.org (September 29, 2014), craigslist reply 9aea <9aeacaa40f25305095afac7ebc459670@reply.craigslist.org> (September 29, 2014), craigslist reply c80f <c80f313577a33e8f8b485e4481b2a3ae@reply.craigslist.org> (September 29, 2014), Andrew Pierre 407bc73cd061343bb00323ad002864c2@reply.craigslist.org (October 15, 2014), "Adam K ." a6a847b8613838d096410e188ba003f9@reply.craigslist.org (October 15, 2014), dena guy 011956093a563192a4384bd1ffcd2f79@reply.craigslist.org (March 14, 2014), Jon Parker d7e9b608270f3493a03f0474b567295d@reply.craigslist.org (December 11, 2013). 168 If there is a desire for shattering in bareback-aimed cruising it is primarily a desire for the fantasized invincibility of the phallus to be made evident by not being attestable. By the time the subject knows if transmission took place, she will never be able to match virus to original host. Pharmacological advances make sure that the destructive promises of the virus manifest themselves at some increasingly later date, rendering attractive the way it (the virus) performs phallic destruction, thus, phallic existence, through delay of a proof that will be necessarily out of synchrony with its agent (man, or the active partner). The shattering of the subject, then, is not craved for the pleasures derived for shattering’s sake, but for the sake of feeling the effects of the phallus on or in the body in the future. In The Lost Daughter, Ferrante refers to the shattering of motherhood as the force that depletes a woman’s sense of self and life prospects. In the novel, the intellectual protagonist has a heart-to-heart conversation with the uneducated young woman she has been observing at the beach and who tells her about the “[t]urmoil” of motherhood, wondering if it will ever pass. “She made a gesture to indicate a vertigo but also a feeling of nausea. (…) I remembered my mother and said: ‘My mother used another word, she called it a shattering.’” Here shattering is felt by the subject in the feminine position as a result of a naturalized form of barebacking, which produces a child and legitimizes womanhood. Woman’s disappearance or, at least, her fragmentation, becomes the price to pay for life itself to go on. If life in man is performed through a violence that leaves no fingerprints, the child will be felt, in woman, as nausea, as illness. 203 AEbttmBoi from Barebackrt.com writes on his profile that “BB [barebacking] is natural and i always BB now, Cock belongs in ass bare!” He then expresses his desire to 203 Ferrante, The Lost Daughter, p. 106. 169 “exploit” his “hole & throat by having it stretched, fucked, RAPED, & seeded (preferably by a group of UNCUT guys!).” His ultimate fantasy is “to be gangraped & breeded by enough guys to have my boicunt & mouth leaking nut. Use & verbally degrade this worthless CumSlut // Latinos a plus /.” We can see signs of aggression the user associates with an impotence to guarantee the violence that the fantasy demands. A rape is desired not only by one, but by a group of men, potentialized by their race, the verbal reassurance that one is being degraded, and the visual confirmation of wreckage, as sperm overflows out of his orifices like an ejaculating hemorrhage. 204 For stillnight, from the same site, the need for “natural sex” is enough to constitute an innate identity, if only one is willing to be honest with oneself. He writes on his profile that he struggled with his desire for barebacking until he “finally had enough. took a big step and admitted to myself that i was a total bareback bottom. its who i am and im proud of it and im not going to hide it. i enjoy sex in its natural form and thats why im here. it doesn't mean im irresponsible or stupid or anything; i just happen to be a bareback bottom.” 205 204 https://www.barebackrt.com/members/view.php?id=273460 (Last accessed, October 6, 2014). 205 https://www.barebackrt.com/members/view.php?id=201311 (Last accessed, October 6, 2014). 170 “August 20, 2007 It is an image of about twenty boys in a ballet lesson. Their legs crossed, covered in black fabric. Their t-shirts are white and tucked in. They are poised. Only one of them is black, and he is in the center. He also holds the most melancholy expression. As if this was a banal part of the other boys’ afternoons, but the only hour of the black boy’s day when he did not feel under siege. He is the most elegant, the most gracious, the most still. As if ready, perhaps begging in a really small voice, for the photographer to take him away. Or to not let him ever leave the dancing studio. The thing about the black boy is that he could be a black girl. If one were only to abstract the surface. He could be a black girl. If one drew long hair around his head, if one added a skirt, a tutu. No one would ever know the burden he carries between his legs. And inside his heart, and flooded in his brain, and pushing down his bones like phantom joints overriding actual ones, inhabiting his rib cage and only transcending out of his limbs in moments like this. When he is watched only because of the choreography of his movements. I tape the photograph on the wall above my desk like a post-it. Isn’t this what people do? Tape things that inspire them on their wall. Even if it is cut up awkwardly around the edges, even if it cheapens the room, even if it makes it look adolescent, the photograph deserves to be hung. But the boys aren’t really dancing. They are paused, and posing. 171 The white boys have a nonchalance that leads me to believe they will soon forget the picture was taken. But the black boy will remember it. Or, at least, I will remember the black boy. And it makes me wonder what kind of creature I would have become had I been in his position. Not in his skin. In his position. Inside a room full of boys who dance ballet, whose parents purchase them black slippers, and drive them to ballet class, in a room full of boys who will not hear the word ‘faggot’ for an entire afternoon. If this had been my responsibility: to dance. As if I hadn’t even once witnessed what it looks like to be a boy who doesn’t dread.” 172 Incompatible Animals, Accordant Devices: The Infectious Vicinity of the Object of Desire “Just as the child knows the mother has no penis and simultaneously believes she has one (an economy whose validity Freud has demonstrated), so the reader can keep saying: I know these are only words, but all the same.” Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text “What is underneath doesn’t count: all vaginas look alike. (…) Mine, everyone else’s: there’s no difference. It’s like your penis: an object.” Christophe Pellet, “Qui Fait Le Chien?” “(…) we don’t want them to follow us, or to arrest us, or to discriminate against us, or to kill us, or to cure us, or to analyze us, or to explain us, or to tolerate us, or to understand us: we want them to want us.” Néstor Perlongher, El Sexo De Las Locas There is a moment in Returning to Reims, Didier Eribon’s auto-biographical rumination on class shame, when he describes the syphoning function of an insult – the way a word (faggot) can shave off all possibilities of being except for one. For Eribon, the insult slants the history of the subject, ruling out and closing off potentialities in one repetitive linguistic coup. Eribon stresses the haunting quality of this insult, or “injurious interpellation.” 206 The weight of its inheritance presses against the subject while constituting him, as if chiseling his very body so that it is blown toward a specific 206 “interpellation injurieuse.” Didier Eribon, Retour à Reims (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), p. 245. My translation. 173 direction. For Sáez and Carrascosa, too, the insult produces “a negative value that creates the object, not the other way around.” 207 The subject is left with one single destiny. Despite Eribon’s resistance to psychoanalysis, this is the way of the Lacanian symbolic: The authority of words “matters more than the direct reality of the individual.” The word-cum-insult wields, or culls from, the symbolic order like a scalpel that diminishes and discredits “direct reality,” whilst contaminating it as to make its experiencing impossible. It disarms the multiplicity of destinies that are latent in it. 208 Eribon treats his calculated class exile, his seeking in an intellectual future the cure for the shame of his working class roots, as something divorceable from the domain of sexuation. Yet he ends up at the very point where the shame of desire and the shame of social origin expose themselves as interlacing the same knot. By the end of his narrative, he locates the terror that propels the first into the latter (class and sex), hybridizing them beyond any hope for analytical distinction, on the very level of the word, which is at once an inter-generational ghost and a destiny-carving prophesy. “To become gay is to become the target,” or rather, the fleshly entity of the word that defines, architects, and sentences him. Where is the periphery of such target, and how far does it go? 207 The insult is a prevention that creates “a reality without referent, just a floating value, without content,” for Sáez and Carrascosa. What is transmitted to a child through faggot “doesn’t mean anything concrete, it is the negative value that is transmitted (…).” Sáez and Carrascosa, Por El Culo: Políticas Anales, p. 17, 18. My translation. 208 Slavoj Zizek recognizes the logic of the symbolic order (the symbolic mandate of words matter more than the subject’s “direct reality,” whatever that is) in the structure of the fetish. In fetishistic disavowal one knows, but still. One knows, say, that the other bears a penis as genitalia but still counts as feminine-enough to be woman, or fills her function. One knows that one is castrated too but still projects castration onto the female other, a move that gets to the root of the fetish as organizing all sexuality. Zizek, With or Without Passion?: What’s Wrong With Fundamentalism – Part I (last accessed September 20, 2014). 174 In Eribon, the gay subject emerges as a kind of host, allowing (he has no alternatives) the word – faggot – to inhabit and animate him, to (re-)assign him a (non- )place, if he is to live at all. There is no gay subject without the insulting violence that constitutes and sentences him. For Luca Greco, the insult is an “inaugural scene.” 209 Here, the idea of a gay subjectivity that isn’t the result of a linguistic violence that goes beyond the universality of the castration exacted by language tout court is unfathomable. While there are numerous ways of making do with such verdict, the particularity of its wound imposes the trap of an available category that isn’t actually obtainable. There is, for the gay subject, no reserved space and no pre-fabricated logic of relationality when it comes to desire that would be akin to the supposedly undeniable evidence of the biological body as defining answer – an answer for which a question is never to be posed. There is a space toward which the gay subject is thrown, or rather, a space toward which a certain mode of queerness gains gay status, but no singular object to correspond to his desire. An essential variable of the fictive equation is missing. The gay subject is, thus, relegated to a field of sameness without a reserved other to desire him (back): A subject without objects, an object without subjects. The idea that gay desire is fueled by sameness is friendly fire from heterosexuality’s own logical equivocations. Since the gay subject has to accept this fiction, he is doomed to look beyond his field of putative objects, to either mourn his lack of access or believe the hetero-masculine drag that others and himself resort to. An investment in sameness as a guarantor of legitimate hetero-masculinity through a 209 In Patinier, “La Face Cachée du Genre,” interview with Luca Greco, Miroir/Miroirs 2, Issue 1, 2014, p. 21. My translation. 175 dynamic of infection can thus be deployed. Masculinity rubs off: If the other’s masculinity is proper and I am like the other, so is mine. This theatrical strategy (I believe that I am and/so I believe that you are) reaches its zenith in the recently viral emergence of the Brazilian figure of the g0y, a self- described heterosexual man who has sex with other self-described heterosexual men and whose heterosexual claim withstands the threat of gayness (the a of gay is replaced by a zero) through the logic of infectious symmetry of the presumed sameness between partners. The reasoning that sustains the heterosexuality of the g0y is the same non- interstitial logic that renders the figure of the gay possible: An acceptance of a fantasy of ontological sameness as arbiter of the sexual rapport. As in an arm-wrestling match with no winners, the g0y depends on the standstill of forces to render his identity claim justifiable. The standoff guarantees the even distribution of forces between parties, one feeding off of the presumably legitimate hetero-masculinity of the other, and locking them into place. The referent adheres. 210 If the impression of a scale that cannot be tipped persists, castration is successfully disavowed as femininity (and, often, racial markers of castration: no asians) is locked out of the equation. Of course, the stasis is false if ever experienced beyond the level of the image. This zero-sum dynamic is, in reality, a desperate labor of anxiety posing as a congealed set of givens, as any movement on one of the sides may undo the precarious configuration of their pose. That is precisely why the scene teems with a fear administered through a ferocious summoning of the masculinity of the other (no fems) and its prompt conduction to the self. This mirroring impregnation feeds off of two basic 210 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Hill and Wang, 2010), p. 6. 176 fictions: The absolute masculinity of the other which is meant to rub off on the lack (of masculinity) of the self and the presumption that what the other wants is an object whose masculinity mirrors that of himself, which was fictitious in the first place. The deadlock is, then, borne out of and driven by a misunderstanding that echoes that of the Lacanian mirror stage, along with the tense threat of fragmentation that comes with it, vis-à-vis the image in the mirror, which seems whole and bounded. We certainly see a similar deadlock strategy in barebacking negotiations as men attach their own claim of cleanliness to the assumption of cleanliness in the other. Asked if they have sex with condoms or bare, they tend to offer a version of “Well, I am clean, are you?”. This tactic is emblematized by a Craigslist responder’s symptomatic punctuation in his answer to the barebacking question: “If you're clean because I am!! I don't mind going raw.” 211 The stalemate dynamic that guarantees the transmittable masculinity between partners is undone when put into practice, that is, when the movement of bodies betrays the fantasy of balance (of masculinity) through the foreclosure of femininity as a sight/site of difference, or difference as a sight/site of femininity. In practice, someone is eventually placed as an object for a subject, someone is bound to become device, with all of the feminine/masculine associations that arise when power becomes visible. It is in this sense that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship. There is no correspondence: The sexual (non-)relationship is a staging of two monologues addressed to an audience that only lasts until the fantasy is acted out. De-positioning is here more than just a risk, it’s a 211 Zabie Sahial 517d42649d89336fb987407b1434257d@reply.craigslist.org (November 20, 2013). 177 destiny, as any iterative process of self-constitution is one in which “the self vacillates and loses its assurance,” one that he never actually had. 213 G0ys are allowed to masturbate and have oral sex with one another, but no penetration, which would inevitably introduce difference, namely, an unwelcome feminine position, and undo their identificatory claims of horizontality. Perhaps if we ontologized tops and bottoms not as positions but as largely different subjectivities that beget largely different objects of desire, gay-ness could be performed, if not felt, within a place beyond the anxiety of an unwieldy and un-matchable sameness. This would entail an acceptance of the feminine position that the bottom ends up taking, or its re- signification. The new figure of the post-g0y is actually already upon us, and it avoids these linguistic entrapments altogether, disavowing anything other than default heterosexuality as a tool of reference. Some parties in Brazil market themselves as events not for gays nor for g0ys, but “men who dig men” (homens que curtem homens). This reduction to subject and object (who must coincide) disdains the logic of categories beyond that of the naturalized default of the category of man, because “[m]ales who dig males don’t put up with these names.” 214 213 This is a point Timothy Corrigan makes on what he calls essayistic subjectivity in cinema, which can be described as a demythologization of the self as a coherent entity. Corrigan, “About Portraying Expression: The Essay Film as Inter-view,” The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 88. 214 Elverson Cardozo, “Grupo Cria Festa Para ‘Homens Que Curtem Homens,’ Mas Que Garantem Ser Héteros,” Campo Grande News, October 14, 2014. http://www.campograndenews.com.br/lado-b/comportamento-23-08-2011-08/grupo-cria- festa-para-homens-que-curtem-homens-mas-que-garantem-ser-heteros (Last accessed October 14, 2014). My translation. 178 Doing The Phallus Justice: Belittlement Makes The Object The disavowal of the feminine appears as a constant thread whenever queer “male” sex practices announce themselves in language (when presumed parallel lines of desire prove to intersect in praxis), no matter how the issue of the category is administered. Femininity, in whatever version (hetero-)sexuality takes, must be either belittled into recognition or disavowed beyond recognition. Monique Schneider speaks of the belittlement of the desired object as a condition to make its approaching possible. We can clearly see this belittlement in classic hetero-sexist masculinity, for whom the reducing of the feminine object is a sine qua non. It is played up in porn, but stirs the sexual practice of every day life: “a disdainful attitude constitutes a necessary subterfuge for the temptation to love, whether it is addressed to art or women, making oneself protected against the risk of losing (…).” 215 Vladimir Marinov speaks of a certain “mistrust” regarding “direct carnal contact,” which he recognizes particularly in the figure of the artist. Marinov suggests un-mediated contact with the desired object is avoided as a way for the artist to maintain the idealization of his own personhood, which, excessive proximity might “rapidly” undo. He cites Brancusi’s sculpture The Kiss (1907) as the visual rendering of the anxiety of fusion between the subject and the object of desire: There is no demarcated difference between 215 Monique Schneider, “Freud Et Le Combat Avec L’Artiste,” L’Artiste et Le Psychanalyste, edited by Joyce McDougall (Paris: PUF, 2008), p. 52, 53. My translation. Sylvia Payne sees the need to be pregnant in terms of the need to “have control over a feared object…” Burton Lerner et al, “On The Need To Be Pregnant,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 48 (1967). 179 the two lovers depicted in the sculpture. Onfray’s obsession fusionelle is chiseled into form. 216 It can also follow that attainment direct access to the object, without having to approach it, is a way to maintain a safe zone between object and subject. This collapsing scheme presents itself in the language of online ads such as “Pump and Dump,” a sexual encounter in which conversation and other non-sexual interaction are kept to a minimum, including the duration of the sexual act itself: “you just drop your pants around your ankles, I get on my knees, suck you off, you zip up and we part ways.” Barebacking itself can be read as the fantasy of incision that cuts out the trajectory to an encounter between subject and object, skipping the steps that would otherwise get one closer and closer until they meet. The articulation of the need for the condom to be introduced in the sexual act, even the reaching out for a condom without words, can represent an encroaching between object and subject, outed by reason: a condom must be worn, or else. 217 The mediating function of the digital may also be understood not as a belittling device, but one that collapses and confuses distance and approximation in a way that makes new objects newly approachable and old objects newly imaginable – while t-girls bump into/against straight men in the non-digital socius all the time, the opposite is simply not true. This approaching is made possible, and safe for the subject, because it is performed in a circular (i.e. masturbatory) fashion, that is, around the object and its adjacency, not necessarily toward it. 216 Vladimir Marinov, “L’Œuvre d’Art Est Un Crime Parfait,” L’Artiste et Le Psychanalyste, edited by Joyce McDougall (Paris: PUF, 2008), p. 80, 87. My translation. 217 work/wife driving you nuts? Safe Satisfying Blowjobs 4 str8/married - m4m - 27 (hollywood), http://losangeles.craigslist.org/lac/cas/4679623638.html (last accessed September 22, 2014). 180 Barebacking can be deployed as a belittlement device akin to that of hetero- sexism. When it is contained as speech in the digital, barebacking withstands the disappointments akin to the acting out of fantasy, like an unopened magic potion – magic because unopened. The foregoing of prophylactic protection offers the threat, or promise, of fantasmatic violence and finds its biological equivalent in the threat of contamination. Whether in a gay or t-girl situation, barebacking potentializes the insufficiency of the scene into the rape-like force that the idealized heterosexual sex scene assures in the unconscious. Unlike the other-cum-masturbatory-aid in the scene, there is no room for malfunctioning as the virus is a death threat never to be unfounded. It does the phallus justice. This belittlement device creates a psychosomatic relationship between the symbolic violence of heterosexuality itself (or its fantasy) and the literal violence of a viral annihilation of the body. Barebacking can work as a guarantor for exacting difference through the latent and increasingly delayed violence of infection. Barebacking may, in fact, grow more and more appealing as a nourishing scheme for desire in the digital era the longer it takes the virus to become disease. Phallic Virus/Viral Phallus Preciado reminds us that the penis is a genital organ whereas the phallus is a privileged signifier that represents power and desire, sanctioning access to the symbolic order. Hence the dildo occupies a strategic position between the subject and other. The dildo denounces the pretension of the penis in passing for the phallus. It is a sexual technology that occupies a tactical place among technologies of repression and of 181 pleasure. Preciado also notes that in the market of heterosexual sex toys, men are offered the totality of the woman’s body, in the shape of a sex doll, whereas women are left with just one part of man’s body, in the shape of the dildo. This makes explicit the asymmetry between men and women in their access to the sexual. 218 It is also relevant to a critical reading of the cuckold scene of fantasy in the way the entire body of the bull is transformed, in a counter-synecdoche of sorts, into one big dildo controlled remotely by the other man in the room (who happens to be myself, too). The cuckolded husband simultaneously utilizes the bull for his great, big satisfying potential and feminizes him into the scene, where everyone is a (sex) doll whilst he himself is but a figment of my imagination. The fact that a black bull is something of a redundancy in cuckold porn and cuckold fantasies expressed online is, like rape, a “significant [prégnant] and precise cultural device.” 219 Through the sly barebacking element in the cuckold fantasy, sexual difference is (re-)staged not on the basis of genital appearance, and the various fictions that stem from that original fabrication, but through the organizing fantasy of belittlement embodied by the virus that man potentially wields. The fact that one isn’t able to see this virus, that its manifestation is always in the future and questionable, and that it is a surreptitious ghostly presence in the sex scene, makes its phallic force fittingly unlocatable. The phallic virus/viral phallus is never put to the test. When any test is, at last, administered, in its most literal fashion, a matching between virus and culprit is impossible. The agent is missing, but woman bears the wrecking of his doing, a doing whose authorship can be any man. We simply we will never know who exactly actually held that difference- 218 Beatriz Preciado, Manifeste Contra-Sexuel, Paris: Balland, 2000. 219 Despentes, King Kong Théorie, p. 52. My translation. 182 exacting axe, and who was only bluffing, which gives any active partner the default conditions for pulling off phallic drag. While the virus is never quite seen it can make itself known through self- declaration: I am HIV positive. Such articulated knowing lends itself to its own set of fantasies of violence, which are locatable in a particular body through the word, not through “direct reality.” The fact that one could today claim “undetectable” as a status gives this paradox another fantasy figure. 220 New studies suggest that HIV-positive men-who-have-sex-with-men with undetectable viral loads (below 200 copies per millimeter of blood) are virtually incapable of transmitting the virus, rendering the undetectable subject even more of a fantasy quality if, for all intents and purposes, whatever there is to be (un-)detected in the body can only affect his sex partner in the domain of fantasy. 221 This desire-begetting difference of a viral phallic drag is, of course, not just dependent on the fantasy of genital difference. One finds difference where one can. Contrary to popular belief, yet true to popular practice, “the beard and the voice, not the penis and the vagina, nor the X and Y chromosomes, are the cultural signifiers” that determine gender in our society, Preciado notes, suggesting that we “stop speaking of men and women,” and, instead, “simply say: hairy bodies and smooth bodies, bodies with high-pitched voices and bodies with low-tone voices.” This reminds me of my first t-girl experience in public, when I met a Tunisian boxer in France named Mohamed as a girl in a club, but never had to dress up after that, throughout our 10-month relationship. The 220 Zizek, With or Without Passion?: What’s Wrong With Fundamentalism – Part I. 221 Lucas Grindley, “Is Undetectable the New Safe Sex,” HIV Plus Mag, September 15, 2014, http://www.hivplusmag.com/sex-dating/2014/09/15/undetectable-new-safe-sex (last accessed, September 23, 2014). 183 image of me as a girl in the socius from our first meeting was enough to last him thereafter– at a time when I hadn’t even started shaving my entire body. Mohamed once took me to visit an Egyptian transsexual friend of his and, still dumbfounded at the idea that I could amount to a desirable object, I asked her why someone like Mohamed could want someone like myself. She said, “All they need is something feminine and something beautiful.” 222 While the heterosexually identified man whose desire includes transsexuals (as one of them once put it to me, rather romantically, “I just love women in every form”) has yet to be reduced to a bounded identity category, the expression “TS admirer” is often used. The choice of word, “admiration,” is quite fitting as it implies a distance of the (admired) object, not unlike an artist contemplating his muse from a safe and fruitful distance. Specific Objects Without Specific Form: On The Periphery of The Object The gay subject grows into his category après coup, that is, through the artifice of the insult, which is not naturalized nor desirable. The shaping of the gay subject, then, leaves him roaming within the violence of the insult, which anchors and nourishes him, without bodily evidence for the specificity of his desire. Eribon’s “destiny,” then, is to define himself as faggot by virtue of the insult, divorcing his being from others whose existences are to be anchored on genital difference from the beginning, or before it. 222 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII, p. 8. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sexe, Drogue et Biopolitique, p. 178. My translation. 184 While Eribon is pushed into faggotry, there is no other category available to whom he could address himself as a desirable subject and to be read as such. The inherent privilege of the intellectual is precisely that: He is read. The faggot is an orphan of the body, as though the insult evicts him from the domain of genital-centered ontological association toward an elsewhere without desirable matter. Stuck with a body that has been kicked out of the networks of naturalized meaning by which everyone else seems to abide by, the faggot, then, is forced to drag this botched body around until he can mean it anew, restoring the supposed meaningfulness that it presumably bore before the insult – as if there were a before the insult. To accept the category of gay man, a re-signifying chiseling of the insult that leaves its wounds intact, is to accept its intransitivity, that is, to take refuge in a word through approximation, like the rounding up of a number, a number for which there are no correspondences. It is thus fundamental to recognize that there is a vicinity to object selection as its aim always misses its target. One must ask what survives, of the subject’s desire, when the vicinity of the object counts as the object, when the object-like is as object-enough as the object itself (which is always missed). If the object is not a substance, but a relational semblance, there is no less value to its periphery than to its primary fantasies. The object never coincides with its own self. If the subject takes advantage of such object adjacency it doesn’t necessarily mean a sublimation, or a “change of target,” but an exploration of the latitude of the same target without resulting in a change of object or a change of course. 223 The penis, too, has 223 Jacques André, “L’Enfant de L’Amour,” Artiste et Le Psychanalyste, edited by Joyce McDougall. Paris: PUF, 2008, p. 156. My translation. 185 its vicinity, whether it is in the interest of yearning or avoidance, as Craiglist user John Stryker makes it clear when he says, “i dont take cock or anything close to it.” 224 If the vicinity of the object counts as the object, we can speak of specific objects whose form, length, breadth, and reach can’t be predicted, nor stagnant. 225 It’s as though the object of desire were inherently charged, capricious, amorphous, and infectious. Specific Objects Without Specific Form, in fact, is the title a retrospective of Cuban artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose work has been described as nurturing “resonances, echoes, fictions that multiply themselves,” and that bring about “notions of transmission, (that which is produced when an object passes from one person to another (…).” Cyril Thomas sees this form of passing as an opportunity for exchange and dialogue with otherness. He also establishes the work, while wondering how disease might have structured it, as a demand for the right to not only exist and be visible, but “to be cured before death.” Gonzalez-Torres’ piece Double illustrates the notion of a sex scene teeming with a multiplicity of fantasmatic figures, only one of which is not entirely an object: The subject herself. In Double, a pair of mirrors of different forms is placed side by side, making the interaction of the viewer with the piece an unsettling of the double-ness as two mirrors have the potential for multiplying an image much beyond two. Looking at the mirrors at once also exposes the strange state of the object never being just one, 224 John Stryker 5a205b9549523696b0d8715012793f88@reply.craigslist.org (September 23, 2013). 225 If “the skin is a product of a relationship,” as Michelle Ann Stephens argues, so is the object. Stephens, “Interview with Tracy D. Morgan,” New Books in Psychoanalysis podcast, May 28, 2015, http://newbooksinpsychoanalysis.com/2015/05/28/michelle-ann- stephens-skin-acts-race-psychoanalysis-and-the-black-male-performer-duke-up-2014/ 186 considering different angles (in viewing and in the potential slanting of the mirror) produces different sides, different images, different objects. 226 Remarkably, gay men cruising online focus increasingly on a very specific object, an impossibly specific one, as the technology for cruising becomes more sophisticated in promising the possibility for such objects to materialize. Heterosexually identified men, however, tend to explore the neighborhood of their assigned-by-default object of desire (woman) online, as if exploiting the porousness inherent to heterosexuality, its latitude and loopholes (“An escape, more so than a fixation.”), which the digital brings to light. The digital not only performs the actual displaying of his object’s periphery (t-girl), it lends itself so well to an endless masturbatory functioning of the subject’s mechanism of fantasy: There will always be more t-girls coming out of this rabbit hole. 227 Freud summarizes the psychic code of the neurotic, which finds a way to justify his/her prohibitions, no matter the determinants of the circumstances this way, “The net of the determinants was spread out far enough to catch the prey in any case.” We can appropriate the picture of this net of determinants spreading out “far enough to catch the pray in any case” to visualize how the heterosexually-identified man can (re-)discover the depth and breadth of the object of desire – the vastness of its fossilized zone – through the digital, which isn’t unlike the experience of dreams. 228 For Lacan, “the woman doesn’t exist” because what does exist is “the dream of a woman,” that is, “a feminine lucubration.” As such, woman-as-dream can morph into whatever shape necessary to 226 Cyril Thomas, “Sans Titre: FG-T Replay,” La Revue Monstre 3: Indetéctable, January 2011, p. 14-16. My translation. 227 “la fuite plutôt que la fixation” is an expression that Mathieu Larnaudie coined in his book review of Louis-René Des Forêts’ Ostinato. Larnaudie, “Perec et Des Forêts, à Mots Couverts” in Le Magazine Littéraire, Juin 2014, 544, p., 47. My translation. 228 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 89. 187 match the wish-fulfillment driving man’s dreaming. Agador, from the French site Netechangisme, tells me, “you are magnificent a real woman the way men dream of…” 229 While there may be an object scope that is intrinsic to any subject-object relationship, the digital can function as an instigator for this scope to be (re-)discovered. Man’s desire for other forms of womanhood beyond the one spawning from an essentialist fetishization of the genitals – a there where there is nothing…from the beginning – may have been a constitutive part of heterosexual processes of subjectivation all along, yet the digital has enabled the object’s expansiveness to appear, or the subject’s further away roving of its vicinity to be exercised without losing sight of the qualities that constitute the object. Valerie Solanas’ provocation in that man will “swim through a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there'll be a friendly pussy awaiting him” and that “[h]e'll screw a woman he despises, any snaggle-toothed hag, and furthermore, pay for the opportunity” point to the breadth of woman as an extensive network of signifiers that lend themselves to there where there is nothing…there is anything. In this sense, it takes very little to be woman. The ensconcing oneself from the insufficiency of gayness into a t-girlhood whose audience includes these men willing to do anything for your body can become a strategy against aging as a gay man as well. And against AIDS as a gay disease in the unconscious, as if by being posited in a scene of heterosexual-like sex man’s immunity (he is invincible) would infect me. Being a digitally mediated t-girl for sex purposes 229 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII, p. 91. “tu est magnifique une vrai femme comme les hommes rêve...” http://www.netechangisme.com/fiche/2208923?hash= (conversation via chat, on October 11, 2014). My translation. 188 spares the gay subject from the inadequacy of being old in a gay setting while sparing the t-girl from experiencing the ravages of aging et al for a woman in the socius. A sex doll is never too old. 230 The Too Much Of There Where There Is Nothing Lucien Israël uses the expression “there where there is nothing”(“le lieu où il n’y a pas quelque chose”) to refer to the figure that women occupies in the pervert(’s) unconscious. The pervert knows something about this there where there is nothing that the “normal” (that is, the neurotic) subject doesn’t. The fact that woman comes to represent this nothingness is aided by, if not borne out of, a literalist (mis-)reading of her materiality: She has a hole (nothing) there where there should be a penis (something). It is based on this (mis-)reading that Stockton claims that women suffer from “metaphors that become internalized,” castration being a crucial one. 231 For Luiz Costa Lima, silence inhabits the metaphor’s very center. Citing Borges, he describes the metaphor as being “‘the imminence of a revelation that doesn’t come about.’ The emptiness inherent to the metaphor lends itself to a multiplicity of signification.” We can extend Lima’s “multiplicity of signification” to the notion of the object’s vicinity, which still bears its pivotal qualities, like tainted, infected, or simply 230 Valerie Solanas, S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm (last accessed March 30, 2014). 231 Lucien Israël, La Jouissance de L’Hystérique, (Paris: Éditions Arcanes, 1996), p. 98. My translation. Kathryn Bond Stockton, Sexuality and Childhood in a Global Frame: Queer Theory and Beyond seminar, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), July 13, 2011. For Lacan, “nothing of what language allows us to do is ever anything but metaphor, or indeed metonymy. That the something that every word, whatever it may be, claims to name for an instant can only ever refer back to a connotation.” Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII, p. 10. 189 “same” material. The vagina becomes the (mis-)located site for woman’s nothing, or lack, but also the anus, or the mouth – both of which exist in humans independent of genderization, even if the hole-ness of the male anus goes unspoken or repressed. 232 The object is thus a network of associations around the idea(l) of the object, which can be repeated and performed in a myriad of ways. For Israël, the object of the drive is actually of little importance, what matters is the goal of the drive, which is the lifting of a certain excitation. 233 While the acting out of man’s desire for t-girls may literalize this dynamic, it fuels the relationship between man and woman more broadly, including what we have come to call biological women. “Male” transvestism is a double transvestism as the original one is (biological) woman’s. It is thus the transvestism of a primary transvestism that is contingent to the construction of gender – smoothed over and out of sight by the various processes of naturalization. We could refer to male transvestism, then, as tranvestism 2 if we were willing to presume the “male” transvestite( 2 )’s process of subjectivation as posterior to a conscious understanding of woman, thus, giving first dibs, as it were, to woman as a representable category which the “male” transvestite 2 usurps. 234 Judith Halberstam makes a similar point, claiming that what remains unattainable in queer masculinity “is what remains unattainable in all 232 Luiz Costa Lima, “Nós e Eles,” Jornal Valor, EU&, April 11-13, 2014, p. 34. My translation. 233 Israël, Pulsions de Mort: Séminaire 1977-1978 (Paris : Éditions Arcanes, 1998), p.82. 234 I refer to these “males” without the quotation marks for style purposes bearing in mind that what I am referring to are “human beings anatomically identified as male.” Bersani, “Gay Betrayals,” Is The Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press), p. 42. 190 masculinity: all ideal masculinity by its very nature is out of reach, but it is only in the butch, the masculine woman, that we notice its impossibility.” 235 Since there is no essence and no totality, but associations that point toward an ideal, man doesn’t love woman per se but her usurpable (by biological women and t-girls alike) properties. Under this logic, the object and its vicinity are in fact juxtaposed. The object is (in) its vicinity. In elucidating the pleasure principle, Freud claims, via Fechner, that “the aim is attainable only by approximations.” There are, then, contingent tendencies, overlappings and crisscrossings – contaminations – around the object more so than static positionalities vis-à-vis an object firmly sitting on a pedestal. The sense of boundlessness that the digital offers (from hoping that a new and better man would enter the Gays e Afins chatroom in the 90s to the profusion of responses from a Craigslist post), seems to not only point to the vicinity of the object (the object as vicinity) through the practice of cruising, it seems to stretch the extension of such orbit. 236 To figure out what one wants, and what one expects, from the desired object involves knowing, or sensing, what such object wants from one(’s)self. The latter, decidedly an imaginary affair, functions as pre-requisite for the slim possibilities of figuring out the first. If accepting one’s self through the insult sets the gay subject into a dynamic of forced and fictitious endogeny, desiring the un-insulted other (heterosexual man) yet having to settle for the insulted one, the digital has created a practical space for both faggot and heterosexual man to imagine and enact a different kind of destiny. One may question the relevance for others of a text drenched with the explicit sexual specificity of its author and the objects she’s held in intimacy and symptomatic 235 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011), p. 100. 236 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (CreateSpace, 2010), p. 6. 191 brevity. But we can only read fever in the feverish. To write in a state of fever, to write with one’s fever and, in reality, for it – an ode to one’s constitutive pathologies – is to also attest a presence, along with “its games of substitutions, its symbolic variations, ‘an effervescence of signs.’” 237 The question of what one wants from the other is marred with the fact that the other cannot and will not be able to quite produce it. In this web of misunderstandings and failures of expression (of desire) subjects do meet, brush against one other, and become affected/infected. There is, then, a rounding up of expectations and half certainties that become sufficiently readable for subjects to decide that this other wants me – and that the animating of my subjectivity outwards in such a way has an effect on such wanting. That is, articulation of desire matters. But what if the subject is immobilized by the pragmatic impossibility of becoming a desirable erotic object for someone in the symbolic? If the digital has been able to function as a cure for the break between a certain subject (who we may call faggot, gay man, not-yet-tranny, or no-longer-gay) and his/her object of desire (who we will always call man), it has made their encounter possible within a kind of temporal parenthesis. Man finally wants me, but only for as long as my objecthood doesn’t slip into subjecthood. If I have learned to floss through the category like thread passing through a sewing needle, man has learned to floss through the object without knotting himself around it, and with the presumption that the traces of such event could only be imprinted – as disease – in me. Which is, of course, a fundamental part of what renders them so 237 Mathieu Larnaudie’s description of Louis-René Des Forêts’ “biography in lacunae and fragments,” Ostinato. Larnaudie, “Perec et Des Forêts, à Mots Couverts” in Le Magazine Littéraire, June 2014, 544, p. 46, 47. My translation. 192 irresistible. Our contact has been brief. Its effects have been persistent. Although man may dread overstaying the periphery of his object, I too dread the delay of his departure. Objects have a way of withstanding a glimpse and glowing in the instant, but foundering before a gaze that pays attention. Through time and diligence, their cracks and creases seem to trump their hermetic artifact-ness. Were we, man and I, to lock ourselves inside my bedroom after hours, devices would come to life and not much would survive. “January 12, 2007 He told me to be waiting for him on the bed, wearing something that obstructed my penis from his view, and to set a glass of vodka on the rocks on the table. I did as I was told. He exerts his authority with the softest of all voices. Perhaps a bit ashamed of his lack of shame. He tells me to take off his clothes the moment he realizes I am already doing it. He tries to stick his dick inside of me without a condom. I say no, and he says, ‘you know you want it,’ and I say that it doesn’t matter what I want, and he says isn’t this what you wanted, bitch, and I kind of like it, but not as much as when I’m dreaming. He asks me if I could, would I let him knock me up. And I think it’s beautiful. Because it is impossible. And because it has never been uttered. I say yes, because that’s what I’m supposed to say, and he asks if I would carry his child. And then he cums a lot, and I pretend I don’t. And he says I’d look good with tits on. And I do laugh, because it’s funny. And forced. And almost possible. He turns the light on. I ask him if he is married. He says he has a girlfriend. That will do. We say nothing while he puts his shoes back on. Why do they always show up wearing the most difficult-to-take-off shoes? And why do they insist on throwing their belt on the floor, making the buckle hit the ground so loudly, even if it’s three in the morning? They seem unaware of what is actually going on. He gathers his belongings and vanishes from the hallway, already texting her, pedestrian in his walk and wardrobe. And I think it’s funny that love in America is a fetish, not a feeling. How are they so eager to expose themselves to viruses and bacteria but emotional vulnerability is not an option? 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With or Without Passion?: What’s Wrong With Fundamentalism – Part I, http://www.lacan.com/zizpassion.htm 198 “And so in this way, taking courage from one another, they advance, as a group, towards the strange thing in front of them.” Lydia Davis, The Cows “(…) would the presence of artists or products of creativity always hide the representation of a death, and essentially the death of the father? Would it hide it by showing it?” Dominique Suchet, “De L’Invité à La Relique” 199 Matar Fecundando: On The Gangbang 200 “October 16, 2009 When presented with my cold piece of news (‘This is over’), prefaced by a slightly condescending lesson on the stupid ethics of monogamy (ethics nonetheless), he forged a kind of surrender. He was relieved. I was relieved too, but also trembling. He also trembled, and turned an uneven shade of pink. Like in all of our discussions he mostly listened and took the blame and successfully muffled his need to weep a little with thoughts of dicks up his ass and down his throat. He does allow one small moment of bursting out after a long period of sulking: “You broke up with me because I made a friend! Small thing,” proceeded by slamming the bathroom door. ‘Small thing’ is what lingers. As in, ‘I didn’t want your small thing anyway,’ or ‘My thing is already small enough, I need another thing, not another hole.’ Which is fair enough. In less than two minutes he exits the bathroom and apologizes for bursting out. He then says he is breaking up because of the future, not because of the now. As if suddenly he was the one doing the break up. He says he can see how this would bring problems in the future because we don’t agree on certain things. That if his partner wanted to hang out with someone else at night and even sleep at their place it would be fine, provided they sent him a text message. He pre-emptively breaks up so that he excuses himself from feeling anything even when his four-year relationship is being wiped out in one single blow. This was no surprise considering he never shed a tear when we buried his own brother. When it was time to leave I alternated seriousness and guttural bawling. But nothing jolted him into pleading, or embracing me. It took me a few minutes to say the entire sentence, I was stuttering, retracting my methodic façade: It-would-be-nice-if-by- Monday…to which he added: ‘there were no trace of me.’ When he left I cried in bed, face sunk between the pillows that he never helped pay for, ass up in the air so my head would sink in the mattress deeper. The position of those who await a squad of dicks to gangbang her. If he had lingered outside for a minute he would have heard my hiccups or seen my shadow behind the blinds moving up and down, like a child crying so intensely she doesn’t even remember why, but it creates a soothing rhythm as she rocks back and forth. Suddenly he was gone but coming back, just to efface his traces, and the prospect of a gangbang felt the right thing to occupy my thoughts with but not enough to staunch this. This becoming the monstrous mother who kicks her kid out of the house ‘for his own good.’ And to think I probably just constructed all this, or destroyed all this, so that I could have one whole night of peace to dress up as a girl and to get gangbanged without worrying that he might arrive home too soon, but that when this night came – the night to get gangbang without dreading being caught – I was carrying out that desire almost out of duty. The only way to describe my putting on each garment, each coat of make up is: Funereal. It took me back to watching him put on anti-wrinkle cream underneath his eyes, without the delicateness with which I applied my own. He would run the tube across the bottom of his eyes with the pragmatism of a fighter putting on war paint. Either that or I made myself see his gestures in that manner, as to disavow what was clear: He was a faggot himself.” 201 Longing to Be Occupied: The Digital Sex Scene-Sequence-Session In his essay, “Leaving the Movie Theater,” Roland Barthes describes the way he enters and exits the cinematic scene. A scene made up of sequences that unfold during a cinema session. In Portuguese, a film screening is, like a psychoanalytic encounter, a session: uma sessão de cinema. By the time the screening is over, it is “invariably at night” and Barthes, who refers to himself in the text as “your speaker,” finds himself in a post-hypnotic state akin to post-coital tristesse – that melancholy feeling just after sexual intercourse. He is sleepy, his body is “soft, limp,” “a little disjointed,” and even “irresponsible.” He also feels healed, in the sense of psychoanalysis’ original love affair with hypnosis, itself a time when that endeavor was perhaps a little disjointed and irresponsible. Barthes notes how the children who sit as close to the screen as possible share that extreme proximity to the image with the movie buffs: The ones who are supposed to not know alongside the ones who are supposed to know. 238 What happens to Barthes between his arrival and his departure from the “cinema situation” is something of a cleansing, or a violent unsettling. 239 In the face of the “perfect lure” of the image, which is “analogical, total, pregnant,” he is like an animal before a “scrap of ‘lifelike’ rag held out to him,” overtaken by a fascination that “never comes except from artifice, or better still: from the artifact.” 240 When “your speaker” 238 Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater,” The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, edited by Phillip Lopate (Anchor Books, 1997), p. 418. 239 Ibid, p. 419. 240 Ibid, p. 420. Italics in the original. 202 arrives he is vacant and longing to be occupied. His body is “a site of availability.” 241 Barthes’ body opens up, like a horny hole unobstructed by guilt and shame. A hole ensconced by the urban darkness is a hole bathed by a similar condition (of a sense of light, or lack thereof) that produces the digital as a cruising apparatus and makes it last. It is “a veritable cinematographic cocoon,” he says, as though allowing its pores to dilate too wide causes the body to became one big crater – or is it a well? Perhaps a keyhole through which “we all peered, flabbergasted.” When Barthes leaves, he is disoriented, he is re-oriented; he has come unmoored. He has surrendered to the image, allowing it to engulf him, to drown him. But he has also (man)handled the image himself. Like a pervert, he has made “good use” of the image through a gaze that penetrates back, if not in advance, giving way to a conscious tending to the traces of such an erotic experience. He can do something with the image that has just come over him. Its après coup is fertile. The pervert, as we know, doesn’t go against the law but makes “good use” of it. Baudrillard notes the tendency of desire (“desire for code,” nonetheless) to come to fruition not “in freedom, but in the law,” that is, in the heterosexual Symbolic. 242 We could even say that Barthes sorts through the very images that unsettle/seduce him, as cruising subjects (perverse and calculating “devices of sorting” themselves) are so wont to do. 243 241 Ibid, 419. 242 Ibid, p. 420. Cited in Néstor Perlongher, “Avatares de Los Muchachos de La Noche,” Prosa Plebeya: Ensayos 1980-1992 (Ediciones Colihue S.R.L., 1997), p. 55. My translation. 243 Guy Hocquenhem speaks of a “cruising machine” that is also a calculator of sorts, a “value-attributing mechanism,” whose deployment fabricates a sense that “everything is possible at all times.” Cited in Perlongher, “Avatares de Los Muchachos de La Noche,” Prosa Plebeya, p. 49. My translation. 203 Barthes’ articulation of the cinematic scene through the essayistic figure of “your speaker” is an amalgamation of the private and the public that is analogous to the melting of the signified and the signifier of the image in that very scene. His essay echoes the experience of “your researcher,” the one whose research you currently read, in the sex scene. The sex scene in which “your researcher” is at once actor, author, witness, and analyst is also a sequence-cum-session, one teeming with meaning-making computations, urban darkness, imagetic penetrations, and a perversion that takes the traces of its violence as sites, and tools, of masturbation. 244 This sequence is also a session, for a researcher is horny for the experience, for its aftermath, and for the repetitiveness. We keep coming back. We keep coming back. This session is “(…) a narcissistic body which gazes, lost, into the engulfing mirror,” as William Haver would have it, an “inconsolable” perversion, which isn’t a psychic structure, but a politics, an ethics, a queer practice. 245 Your researcher’s sex scene-sequence-session bears not only the veritable cocoon of the cinematographic, and the essayistic, but the strangely private/public conflation of the digital. Here too a certain darkness, or shade, is required so that the screen can be literally seen, its images made out, and a feeling of alienation forged. Néstor Perlongher calls the inhabitants of such darkness “nocturnal nomads,” “melancholic ambers,” and “faint fires,” irrupting in semi-clandestinity precariously. Perlongher refers specifically to the nighttime cruising subjects of São Paulo in the early 1980s: gay men, trannies, and 244 The turn of phrase “your man” is a common expression in Ireland that means, “the man I am speaking about,” or “that guy.” It is curious that the feminine version of such slang is not, “your woman” but “your one,” in reference to women. 245 Ibid, p. 421. Haver, The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. xvi, xvi. 204 hustlers – those bastions of hetero-masculinity around which such libidinal economy unfolds, and who he calls “pleasure’s jellyfish.” 246 Barthes’ cinematic experience works as a lucid hallucination in which the image invades a body that he himself rendered pregnable – as if hollowing himself to make room for the image. His is not a completely pornographic experience if we follow Virginie Despentes’ claim that the pornographic image leaves us no choice: It speaks to you and you go because it’s a relief, “too quickly to allow for sublimation.” 247 It speaks the truth of desire, which rarely coincides with what excites us consciously. In true pornographic fashion, however, the sex scene-sequence-session leaves us no choice while instrumentalizing lack-of-choice into its very raw matter: The roles are clear, everyone speaks the same language, for once everything works out. 248 In this text I take my project of straining trans-man-woman beyond “legitimate meaning” further, by analyzing the function of multiplicity in the sex scene-session-sequence. 249 The darkness of the digital sex scene-sequence-session exorcizes and taunts, dreads and summons its menacing interruption. In a curiously analog interpellation, the digital image risks being spoiled by the interruption of such darkness, that is, it risks being overexposed – burnt – to the point of un-recognition (destruction) where the image within the frame, or the screen, can no longer be made out. Or when the image becomes too moving, too fleshly, and too present for its performing not to be outed as just that, a 246 Perlongher, “Avatares de Los Muchachos de La Noche,” Prosa Plebeya,, p. 45. My translation. 247 Virginie Despentes, King Kong Théorie (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2006), p. 91. My translation. 248 Ibid, p. 91-93, p. 102. 249 Freud speaks of straining “the term ‘repression’ beyond its legitimate meaning” in his discussions on the uncanny. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” Imago (1919), p. 17. 205 miming ruined when it exceeds the confines of digital re-presentation. If it is too real, it is repulsive, it is dead, fantasy loses its grip on the object. Knowledge, non-mediation, direct contact – they seem to lead to disenchantment, for which the only cure is to try again with someone new. By the time the man from the image arrives so the sex session can begin, he is dead – killed for being animate, that is, alive. This is what we saw in Session 2, the digital cruising subject’s strange commitment to disenchantment. Like a friend to the main character of Rachel Cusk’s novel, Outline, a writing professor standing in for herself, “your writer,” who feels driven to provoke the ruptures in her relationships because she doesn’t want to be surprised by their inevitable ending – an ending that is, of course, never final: “Sometimes (…) this process is so quick that the relationship is over almost as soon as it has begun,” or perhaps before it has, as “‘[t]here can be no relationship at all. There can only be people stalking one another.’” It turns out that “your relationship” is ultimately its provoked undoing giving way to its next iteration: “‘I want to know everything straight away,” she says. “I want to know the content without living through the time span.’” 250 The ambivalent position of the subject in the session echoes the ambivalence of desire itself as she is so committed to chase after the semblances of objects, only to toss them away when they actually look back, when they move. The digital sex session is, then, a botched exercise in resurrection, but also a murder scene. Its defibrillating function usurps the corpses produced by sex tout court, as a heterosexual fantasmatic enterprise: For fantasy to unfold by the book, objects can’t be alive. The digital cruising subject’s attempt at resurrection – so the other can die again – is made all the more 250 Rachel Cusk, Outline (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), p. 191. 206 evident when the session makes room for the desire to bareback to be articulated, if not materialized. In this instance, the violence of heterosexual sex is allowed to perform itself alongside its promise of revivification, that is, reproduction. Queer writer and activist Warbear (Francesco Macarone Palmieri) likens the man-making powers of penetration to “an act of killing travestied as an act of creation.” He goes further: “The naturalization of the power of killing while breeding (matar fecundando) and of the task of dying while birthing structures itself in a process of institutionalization called family.” 251 The digital sex session simultaneously revels in and disavows the death that heterosexual sex stages (and of which it is a re-action) – a death dismantled of its sting of finality through the concomitant depositing of the promise of another life: Assassination as impregnation. For Beatriz Preciado modernity has been a thanatopolitical project only able to produce techniques of death, such as “the concept of normative sexual difference, normative heterosexuality, the production of race, the exploitation of the planet…” 252 Such scene-sequence-session is not unlike modernity’s signature technologies, an exercise in death, a way of being able to die again, at last. To die again, to render one’s previous death non-lethal, to make a mockery out of death, to banalize the irreversible by rendering it repeatable. 251 Cited in Javier Sáez and Sejo Carrascosa, Por El Culo: Políticas Anales (Barcelona and Madrid: Egales, 2012), p. 99. My translation. Italics in the original. 252 In Andrea Valdés, “Encarnar Disidencias, entrevista a Beatriz Preciado y Teresa Forcades,” Parole de Queer, October 18, 2014. http://paroledequeer.blogspot.com/2014/10/encarnar-disidencias-entrevista-beatriz.html Last accessed November 29, 2014. My translation. 207 The Phallus as Collective Trompe L’œil: Digitality, Multiplicity, and ‘The Great Misdeed’ “Because there are three, one of them can watch what the other two are doing together. (…) Or, because there are three, two can worry about the third, for instance the one lying down.” Lydia Davis, The Cows “(…) some native populations in South America consider the human fetus the result of sperm accumulated not necessarily from the same father.” Philippe Lefait, “Des Pères En Tous Genres” In the summer of 2009, I attended a conference in France titled The Unconscious and Sexual Identity, organized by a Lacanian research group. The room was filled with renowned panelists, mostly practicing psychoanalysts, and the moderators were celebrities in the field. The ideas raised were theoretically fascinating, but the comments were anodyne, and the discourse rather technical. For an intellectual space whose language was supposed to be desire, nothing indicated that we were, ultimately, speaking about bodies and bodily practices. It was as if in the name of rigor, erudition, or decorum, all concepts had to be handled with latex gloves – no matter, or precisely because of, how messy they were, as if not to taint, stain, or even implicate, the bodies of their handlers. That is until a woman in the audience raised her hand and made a statement that punctured the protocol. The woman’s very physicality felt conspicuously out of sync with the well-coiffed Right Bank mesdames present. Her hair was slightly wild, her skin weathered, her demeanor unapologetic. Without hesitation, she delivered a response 208 about women’s bodies being mediators of sex between men, heterosexuality’s most fundamental schema, by claiming that feminine mediation became clearer, and most literal, in the gangbang. Not in a gangbang, which may give the word an introductory aura. In the gangbang, as if it had been safe to count on the listeners’ previous knowledge of gangbangs as forming an academic a concept, or a cannon. In a conference about sexual identity on its third day that had yet to consider something other than heterosexual desire, apart from its supposedly opposite homosexual counterpart, which simply “confirms” it, the woman’s speech, caused no visible commotion. Yet it worked as a Pandora’s box opening, the kind that makes others feel guilty, if not intellectually dishonest, for not having initiated such move sooner. People felt naked for having spent the afternoon acting as if we were exempted from the words that we had, and hadn’t, uttered. One comment, and its straightforward delivery not only dismantled the set of givens underpinning that happening, it introduced the body as a living organism – potentially ugly, porous, disheveled, disgusting, leaky, horny, smelly, 253 and uninterested in its intactness – into the domain of legitimate object of inquiry. The body is, for Foucault, “a volume in perpetual disintegration.” 254 Its condition as always already disintegrating gains literal, but also mirror-like status with online representation of the cruising body, as it is pulled apart and back together, cropped into limbs and re/de-contexted by the other – the one the disintegrated cruising body is 253 Gayle Salamon, via Merleau-Ponty and Freud, reconsiders identity and the drive, and sexuality more generally, as an atmosphere, an odor, a sound, or a leading towards which points to past and future and spans multiple temporalities. Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) 254 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 148. 209 supposedly addressing. Fictions of intactness are at the center of Guy Debord’s concept of “spectacle,” in a way that echoes the digital sex session as a specular and spectacular technology of disavowing the fragmentary existential condition of the body, evolving “into a world where even the deceivers are deceived.” 255 The woman’s remark itself functioned as a fragment of good literature. Like when the author addresses a feeling that had previously seemed inarticulable, and too shameful to be shared. I recently experienced a similar sensation of belonging and relief, of intellectual kinship, coming across the terms cruising binge and bareback binge when reading an article online, at which point the notion of binging left the exclusive realm of orality (binge-drinking, binge-eating), and found legitimacy in anality. Like a coming out of unavowable fucking practices, the sort of coming out that instead of pushing something outwards actually invites, or pulls, things in-to queerness – and queer legibility. The woman’s comment cracked the limits of the discourse open as its recognizing the gangbangable body – the body as gangbangable – meant a recognition of the body in practice, that is, the body that wants too much, too much and all at once, the body that wants because and despite. To see this body and to speak it is to expose oneself as an animating agent of such body. It is to refuse the omniscience and distance which one can’t help but associate with a masculinist position and tradition. It is also to include 255 Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle: Annotated Edition (Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014) p. 1. 210 oneself in a sexual multiplicity that is loud and obtrusive, and to be in the terrain of the unavowable, the disgusting, “the not-so-catholic noises.” 256 Despentes recognizes in collective male laughter a seminal sign of the brotherhood that enacts a gangbang, the brotherhood on which the gangbang depends, but also the general culture – a methodically arranged gangbang in its own right. Despentes notes that man’s attempts to live up to the myth of the phallus always falls short, no matter the various technologies he may use to mimic a convincing phallicity, such as “artificial limbs” in their literal and symbolic forms. The phallus, too, is a technology, or rather, a concept dependent on a complex network of technologies to hold itself up in a spectacular non-fragmentary fashion. The phallus as a technology-begetting concept also requires other concepts with their own technological needs in order to make the sexual economy flow – as we saw with the technological (re-)appropriations of femininity and the feminine position through trans in Session 3. One way of forging a believable phallus, or a sense of it, is through the coming together of “a number of men” who unite “in strength superior to any single individual and remain united against all single individuals,” which amount to the constitutive dynamic of civilization. For Freud, “artificial limbs, so to speak, [are] quite magnificent when equipped with all his accessory organs; but they do not grow on him [on man] and they still give him trouble sometimes.” Following this logic of “gender configuration,” Preciado sees the impossibility for man to ever nurture a link of solidarity with someone 256 Agnès Giard, “Pourquoi Les Bruits de Sécretion Excitent?”, Libération, “Les 400 Culs,” January 10, 2014. http://sexes.blogs.liberation.fr/agnes_giard/2014/10/il-y-a- toujours-une-forme-de-traumatisme-avec-la-sexualit%C3%A9-on-a-beau-avoir- %C3%A9tudi%C3%A9-les-organes-g%C3%A9nitaux-%C3%A0-l%C3%A9cole- et.html. Last accessed, November 29, 2014. My translation. 211 other than another man. 257 This solidarity, the solidarity of the brotherhood that the gangbang displays so palpably, is exclusionary (as all solidarities), and rests on the inferiority of women, enabling men to laugh among themselves “the loudest laughter” – made louder through numbers. Despentes calls collective rape, also driven by the gangbang ethos of non-consent and masculine multiplicity (masculinity through multiplicity), a “war strategy” that promotes one group’s virilization over another. Man’s soldier-ness is thus literalized in the temporal juxtaposition that the gangbang performs: The battalion is not dispersed through time, kinship, and geography (from father to husband, for example). It is not even housed inside an inbox with thousands of emailed photographs from potential, rejected, and done-and-discarded digital lovers, but all at once in the same space with a clear and tangible target keeping their multiplicity from becoming one. 258 The gangbang is a brutal apparatus in the repertoire of what Haver calls “orthosexuality,” and Javier Sáez and Sejo Carrascosa name “the feathers of heterosexuality,” alongside genocide, nuclear terror, racism, misogyny, sports, engines, alcoholism, gangs, and risk. 259 257 Freud, Civilization & Its Discontents (Martino Publishing, 2011), p. 53, 59. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sexe, Drogue et Biopolitique (Paris: Grasset, 2008), p. 318. My translation. Judith Halberstam notes the complementary relationship between men in his reading of the film Dude, Where’s My Car?, arguing that before the menace of castration and humiliation, the dudes face their obstacles “as a team, a unit, a collective, and each functions as the other’s phallus, or weenie.” Patriarchal power takes, then, at least two: “one to be the man and the other to reflect his being the man.” Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011), p. 66. 258 Despentes, King Kong Théorie, p. 35, 37. My translation. 259 Haver, The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in The Time of AIDS, p. 3. Sáez and Carrascosa also include “shouting,” “pushing” and “spitting” in the roster of the “obsessive rituals” of heterosexual masculinity. Sáez and Carrascosa, Por El Culo: Políticas Anales, p. 119, 120. My translation. 212 What might be dismantled, or usurped, when it is the gangbangable body itself that demands, produces, and stages the gangbang, with the help of and the hyper- instrumentalization of the male other(s)? What might come undone when, for instance, the t-girl conducts the sex scene-sequence-session from the comforts of her own passivity, that is, remotely? Could the gangbangable body truly be (or feel) gangbanged if it were to confess its own desire to the multiplicity of men and its own hand at making the event happen? Must desire be disguised as something other than itself if it is to be legible as emanating from a feminine position? For Jonathan Dollimore, the terrain of the unavowable – the “not-so-catholic” configurations, temporalities, noises, and smells – too often suggest “anxiety if not aversion.” 260 This surfeit of a body (of orifices, blood, piss, vomit, and overpowering hunger), excised from theoretical work and from conference rooms alike, shares a kinship with “one of the most significant repressions of academic writing about sexuality,” namely, disgust, according to Dollimore. Disgust, like the figure of the-body-that-wants- too-much-and-all-at-once, the open gaping body that is a crater and a well, the body of the gangbang, tends to “protect cultural boundaries to indicate vulnerabilities to disruption,” liberating and threatening “almost indistinguishably.” Disgust, which is excessive (it trespasses the limit of good taste), has a critical organizing function for sexual identity, practice, politics and discourse: “the sexuality of some straight men is organized around a barely concealed contempt for, but also a fundamental disgust with, women. Crudely, they fuck them despite – or because of – not much liking them.” In a 260 Jonathan Dollimore, “Sexual Disgust.” Homosexuality & Psychoanalysis. Edited by Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 371. 213 gangbang scenario, the bonding of the brothers is achieved through the establishment of an ambivalent target – it is wanted and reviled in unison, its desire must be explicitly addressed through and for the group, as its annihilation. 261 Antoine Jaccoud recognizes the disgusting in the noises that the sexual scene produces and the anxiety over that aural production being too-much, in its leaving the real of excitation and entering the terrain of disgust. There is, indeed, a silent etiquette that governs sexual noises and academic conference rooms, which not only polices the excitation/disgust divide, but also genders them: Loud moaning feminizes the subject as it signifies the too-much of desire which the subject is simply too weak to contain. The gangbang sees the too-much of desire evenly distributed by the number of men in the space, whereas the feminine body is made extra vulnerable to libidinal excess by being that much lonelier in a room full of strangers. Femininity in female and male bodies is also likely to be read as excessive, disturbing, protocol-puncturing. In the sex session, the articulation of this excess through loudness acknowledges the active partner’s ability to cause such effects on the passive body of the fantasmatic heterosexual sex scene: The feminine body, in its ill-prepared- ness, works as an echoing screen that confirms man’s own bottled-up screams, “the ‘I am not that’ of an essentially paranoid disavowal.” 262 In his reflections on the relationship between fag and hustler, Perlongher argues them both to be aware that when they encounter each other one is no longer in the domain of personhood, but in the domain of fantasy: “When I am with a client, I am not myself: I am the client’s fantasy,” is how a 261 Ibid, p. 367, 368, 371. 262 Haver, The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS, p. 23. 214 hustler puts it. “There is a technique to make that happen, which is to put yourself mentally in a blank so you can capture the fantasy and work the other’s body.” 263 It is, too often, impossible to actually know if the men on top of me have ejaculated, for their poker-face demeanor will remain constant from beginning to end:.It is as if he were just as unscathed as they were unaffected by the experience. In a gangbang setting, however, noises of a specific kind – such as the sound from slapping the (t-)girl, the audible comments to the other men, and laughing with them – are elicited as if to remind the men that they are a brotherhood but also individuals: They have not merged into a oneness that would feel not just incestuous, but homosexual. Catastrophe, or the dreaded failure to abide by the fantasmatic regulations of heterosexual intercourse, is never too far away, it “hovers over, always awaiting or in the process of undermining” the sex scene-sequence-session. 264 The disgust that the figure of the gangbang is supposed to elicit in woman in the general culture is constitutive to her, for she is supposed to yield, not yearn. A properly gangbangable body is pulled into man’s persuasive pitch, or, “lábia,” in Portuguese. The gangbangable body can’t completely long to be gangbanged, or, at least, shall not admit to it. As a gatekeeper to man’s unbridled sex drive, the too-much-ness of desire, its “terrifying mutability” can only articulate itself through her against her will, at least partially, as an effect of man’s 263 The hustler’s function echoes the (t-)girl’s here as the monetary exchange involves a demand that he serve the (fag) client. Yet Perlongher notes that in the context of the fag and the hustler, the bottom-cum-fag pays and the top-cum-hustler profits (monetarily), a dynamic that could be reversed in a t-girl/man dynamic. He also notes that even if the hustler ends up “turning around (“dándose vuelta”) and bottoming, he can charge more for having represented top-ness so credulously in the beginning – in which case, the fag ends up paying for the semblance if not for the product. Perlongher, “Avatares de Los Muchachos de La Noche,” Prosa Plebeya, p. 49, p. 53. My translation. 264 Antoine Jaccoud, cited in Giard, “Pourquoi Les Bruits de Sécretion Excitent?” My translation. 215 prowess. Her loud moaning comes about as the après-coup of man’s ability to make woman speak not her pleasure, but the brutality of his bouncing off of her. 265 Caulking, Shutting, Sealing: The Ass and/in The Frame The introduction of the gangbang in that conference room spawned a new sense of academic integrity for me, one that allowed the body proper, the body in practice, the body of the night before, the body of each and every night, the nocturnal body, my body, to be present, to be available, to be heard, to be smelled. Ironically, this body is missing even in the pornography of every night (in my bedroom and on my screens), obstructed by the ocean of men trying to fuck its every hole, bust her into pieces. In gangbang videos and photographs all one sees are men’s backs and buttocks obstructing the visual evidence that a woman must be there somewhere. The abundance of the male butt(hole) in the frame is excused as it is understood to be in the name of utilizing woman’s own holes. But what is produced is a visual excess of the male hole, and its vicinity. At the level of the very frame, a scene that is meant to perform and enhance the intensity and legitimacy of an invincible phallus – and to confirm he passivity of woman actually produces an undeniably homo-sexual visual spectacle. Through the devouring of woman’s holes (or, of woman into holes), which leads to the curious exhibition of the male hole and its provinces, the fantasy of hermetic masculinity is retold. Since the male ass may serve as evidence of a universal hole, it is thus promptly disavowed through laughter and absence from the field of vision in non-pornographic 265 Ibid, p. 376. 216 conditions. Sáez and Carrascosa argue that male heterosexual subjectivity is based on a body whose mouth can be open but whose ass must be sealed, resulting in a mirror-like effect for women, who can prop their asses open provided their mouths remain shut. 266 There is a porousness to all bodies that is activated by several “zones of exchange.” The anus and its vicinity function as signposts for this universal condition, that is, of the human body as an open wound that transcends genderization. Sáez and Carrascosa note, “The skin has pores and, through them, water is exchanged with the environment. The stomach and intestine walls are also porous, and it is thanks to their porousness that the nutrients of food can be assimilated by the body. As a matter of fact, the survival of living organisms depends that their systems be open.” 267 Control of the anus, which is literally framed by the buttocks, may even mark “something like a point of subjectivation” in the constitution of the subject, which the gangbang aims to shut, like the fixing of a leak. 268 The anus and its vicinity overtake the frame while the men caulk the very “small” anatomic evidence that prop up naturalized fictions of an essentially female lack, as if emptying their own anal-existential anxieties by filling woman up to the brim. 269 As one potential gangbang participant from Craigslist put it, “I can beat that pussy up and I love to DP [double penetration] and really get that 266 Sáez and Carrascosa, Por El Culo: Políticas Anales, p. 73. 267 Ibid, p. 92. 268 This is a point made by Néstor Perlongher in regards to the role that “controlling the sphincter” plays in the construction and development of “the continental subject.” Cited in Sáez and Carrascosa, Por El Culo: Políticas Anales, p. 70. My translation. 269 The heterosexist system hinges on the magnification of “a small genital difference” so that woman function as “’the absolute other’.” Sáez and Carrascosa, Por El Culo: Políticas Anales p. 119. 217 slut airtight.” The organizers of a recent Bay Area gangbang advertised on Fetlife highlighted plans for triple penetration and titled the event an “Airtight Party.” 270 Human Rights Watch published a report on Iraq in 2009, which described a gay extermination technique that involved cementing the victims’ buttholes with a potent glue of Iranian provenance, which could only be extirpated with surgical intervention. The gay men would then be forced to drink diarrhea-causing medicine and implode in a kind of forced fecal self-bombing. The torture and extermination would be captured and promptly viralized through cell phones. Interestingly, the act doesn’t infect the assailants with the annihilating gayness that they impinge on their victim, as if immunity to “lack” could only be granted through its violent pegging onto someone else – ideally by a group. Here infectious lack is contained and performed collectively through a physical projection that literalizes a symbolic – and founding – projection (of lack) already made in the unconscious. A similar logic plays out when Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s fall from grace is itself sealed – and memorialized on video – by rebels shoving a stick up his the ass: “(…) the identification between ‘gay’ and ‘anal sex’ is complete,” but, the torture centers exclusively around the bottom gay, or the fantasmatic labor of containing gayness in bottom-ness (it didn’t occur to the Iraqi militia to castrate top gays). 271 I once brought to the attention of my students that a lot of them felt compelled to preface their blog posts with “as a heterosexual male…” before expressing their opinions. One (“heterosexual male”) student, then, emailed me about the following game, which he 270 https://fetlife.com/groups/18090/group_posts/4526909?escape=false&utm_campaign= newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=new_group_discussion (last accessed February 16, 2014). 271 Javier Sáez and Sejo Carrascosa, Por El Culo: Políticas Anales (Barcelona and Madrid: Editorial Egales, 2011). (private correspondence) 218 described as a common elementary school prank between boys to illustrate his justification for the self-identificatory prefacing: it “revolved around one student placing his hand on a peers [sic] shoulder. For however long the hand was left on the kids [sic] shoulder determined how 'gay' the person was. The game may seem harmless at the time, b/c it becomes a competition to remove the person's hand from the shoulder as soon as possible. But when the punishment for being slow or not reacting determines 'gayness' probably stimulates the crazed out defense mechanism that probably follows kids into adolescence.” 272 In the gangbang, as the men act so diligently to plug woman’s openings, they end up revealing their own, which due to the dynamic of the event, is safeguarded as occupational hazard. The anus as a site of heterosexual undoing, is tamed through the violent mission enacted toward woman, said to be the driving core of the congregation, like a drain, which excuses whatever exposure of normally disavowed (male) hole-ness. The omnipresence of the male ass in the frame points to a flaunting of man’s privileged position, too, which the gangbang authorizes rather successfully. Since the target of their assembly is so evidently inscribed, the practice cuts them some slack, forgiving certain visuals and acts that may, in a different setting, throw them into illegitimate territory. Masculinity is, clearly, not in the genitals or chromosomes, but in the successful (and bound to fail) maintenance of an impenetrable body. In the images that document and represent the gangbang, the heterosexual male body has never come this close to being penetrated, as men boast their unused cavities, brushing them against the very tools that would potentially rupture their sealed holes, and perhaps courting them – as if to 272 Private correspondence (September 27, 2011). 219 display their successful brush with death. They know they will survive because by the time woman arrives she is already dead. Sáez and Carrascosa argue that “[s]exual binarism and the myth of the heterosexual-reproductive couple cannot operate in the domain of the anal, which defies its logic and render it contradicting. It also questions another binarism, the one that divides human beings between heterosexuals and homosexuals.” They refer to Paco Vidarte’s idea of an ethics of anality (“Analética”), a counter-cerebral ethics of solidarity “more urgent, honest, carnal, cruising, animalistic, prone to the basic necessities of those whose asses stick up in the air (…).” For Vidarte, this ethics would suck in everything and give nothing back in exchange, “usurping all that falls in the vicinity of our black hole.” An analethics is thus a bottom-centric scatological contribution to the system – an ethics from the vantage point and for the benefit of the gangbangable body, where “LGBT militancy” would try a very different politics, in which all would go inside, all would be received, all would be allowed to penetrate so that we would “release shit and farts (…).” This new queer politics would refuse “exchange, dialogue, and negotiation.” We might consider the gangbanged body as committed to an analethics of the bedroom, of the body, of the self. We might also imagine how this analethical stance can spill over onto (social) dynamics beyond the sex scene-sequence-session – dynamics that shape the gangbang, but aren’t necessarily infected (back) by it: “stick all that I want inside me and then pick up my shit and smell my farts. I honestly don’t see a different way of relating to the system.” This is an active anality where the ass gets to choose its objects and functions, and it chooses all. The question remains, however, must we politicize the analethics of the gangbang so that its deploying can go beyond a guarantor 220 for individual pleasure, or should we, instead, safeguard certain pleasures from conscious political infection? 273 No Transition: A Woman Is Being Beaten/A Man Is Being Duped In a gangbang, the women are covered and the men are faceless. This is the vantage point of the child witnessing the primal scene, that fantasmatic instance of violent parental sex. 274 The sliver of woman that I can see, lodged between these bodies of men eager to devour their prey before losing focus and devouring themselves, is a woman in part(s). She is also just partially identifiable for me. Where is the body of the t- girl who can get out of the gangbang scene unscathed herself, that is, going from the abject-ness of the gangbanged object in the sex session, back to the comfort of the non- desirable, but also non-abject, body of the presumed-to-be diurnal boy whose only make- up is the remnants of the gangbang from the night before? The t-girl can, after all, be devoured in the evening and wake herself up whole in the morning – a luxury not so obviously granted to what we have come to call biological women. The gangbang enacts the multiplicity of the (male) other, or rather, the (male) other as a necessary multiplicity while revealing, or putting to the test, the multiplicity of my own body, which is devoured into a feminine position but can reassemble itself once the men are gone. Once the promises of jouissance have been extinguished, it is four in 273 Sáez and Carrascosa, Por El Culo: Políticas Anales, p. 56, p. 66-69. 274 In Portuguese, the sex position commonly referred to as “missionary,” is called “papai-e-mamãe,” or “mommy-and-daddy.” 221 the morning and I am by myself, resigned into masturbation, into sleepness. For all its frisson, the gangbang proves to be as ecstatic as it is soporific. The excess of male bodies effaces woman to such barely noticeable form that my own transvestied body can assume its place with little to no jarring effect. There may, in fact, be a purposeful taste of revenge in maintaining the t-girl’s body only barely passable instead of “transitioning” fully, and surgically, to the point of having materiality itself reflect one’s feminine position, instead of simply semblance. Here we might see an unprompted political repercussion, which points to the unconscious itself as a viable source for spontaneous political intervention. If the t-girl embodies the very marker of woman as a construction for man, like a visible scar, the addressee and the message behind this crafting remains clear: Staying non-passable, or barely passable, enables the t- girl to tell man, that is, Father, “See, you like me,” whereas becoming passable to the point of non-difference (vis-à-vis bi-woman) would mean that only she would be cognizant of her own incestuous feat. She would have shown Him nothing. Remaining barely passable arms the t-girl with the perverse power of shoving man’s own stupidity (man as the duped one) in his face just enough for him to still make her desirability undeniable and consummated: He has fucked her, she has the emails, texts, and pictures to prove it. The barely passable t-girl is, then, not said to transition, but to transit. She loots the symbolic. This t-girl exerts a significant interference in a hetero-purist politics of “transitioning” that aims to stop the troubling wandering of queer figures – Néstor Perlongher refers to it as “the itinerant nomadism of faggots,” and of the queerness of 222 desire itself. 275 Those who people the “web of transits” that spawns the digital t-girl’s scene-sequence-session form evanescent clots, or “points of calcification.” 276 The t-girl dupes and assists the men who render her into existence – her audience, her agents, her instruments, who also exceed the confines of their category as they explore, and expose, enough of heterosexuality’s vicinity to render its limits too open to close much of anything in. In fact, it is the men who are left to “transition” into queerness as they enter into a relation with the t-girl. A potential Craigslist lover suggests this transit(ion) when he responds to an MW4M (man-woman looking for man) ad and is then asked whether he “fuck[s] hot TS,” to which he responds, “Not yet.” 277 If man functions as an entryway into the heterosexual symbolic for the t-girl, infecting her with its jouissance (or a fantasy of it), t-girlhood, too, has an important role to play as she infects man back with a head-on queer jouissance that heterosexuality proper could not offer him, or could only offer him in a round-about way. There is a mocking quality to the t-girl’s usage of this transit as an erotic technology, one that playfully disrespects, or ignores, the idea that such device (one that doesn’t accept that the code of the action can be playfully re-writable) could actually be taken for an identity – for it is precisely the t-girl’s ability to move about and around the scene-sequence- session that brings her pleasure, and a sense of control. The t-girl thrives in the very lacuna where others – congealed into position by the symbolic code see no (loop)-holes. 275 Perlongher, “Matan a Un Marica,” Prosa Plebeya, p. 39. My translation. 276 Perlongher, “Avatares de Los Muchachos de La Noche,” Prosa Plebeya, p. 47. My translation. 277 morgan reece <5528ab749bc0392c8815447ab32f4392@reply.craigslist.org> (February 26, 2015). 223 My strategies of hailing the man on his way to the heterosexual qua heterosexual sex scene-sequence-session, diverting him to its symbolic shade, succeeds much more often than not. If I originally post a Craigslist ad for a gangbang on the W4M section, not T4M, and only later ask the male responders whether they also happen to fuck “hot TS,” they are frequently unfazed by whatever the distance there is between woman and t-girl. “Why not?”, “How hot?,” “Sure,” “Hell yes!,” and “Even better,” are some of the responses that outnumber the “No,” “I’m sorry, but best of luck on your search,” and “Dude, you posted in the wrong section” responses. Curiously, whatever distance there is, for these men and between W and T, it can sometimes be mended by the introduction of the condom in the sex scene-sequence- session. Prophylaxis, in the vast majority of time, is not their default requirement while they presume the gangbanged body will be that of a bio-woman. Some men add the condom requirement as a condition to make the transition between gangbanging, or simply banging, a t-girl instead of a bio-woman. We can also see this in porn, as certain actors will wear condoms while performing with transsexuals, but not with bio-women. Condoms are also more prevalent in shemale porn than in traditional heterosexual porn. We can detect associations and fantasies of gayness and, thus, propensity for disease when it comes to a transsexual object, an object turned transsexual, showing how, the transsexual body, that is, the transsexual object, neighbors not only the bio-woman’s symbolic position, but touches its gay male cousins – neighbors in symbolic shade. As one Craigslist responder puts it, “im a ass man so a nice booty goes a long way. ;))) 224 lol.” 278 More often than not, however, these men inherit the default condom-less position they take on in relationship to bio-women’s bodies, showing how the trans body can slide back and forth between provinces of symbolic shade. It is up for grabs, teeming with multiplicity, like a joker card of sorts. In a somewhat oppositional fashion, the male body exposes itself, in the gangbang, as too little a unit to produce the phallic illusion on its own. The gangbang appears as a strategy of phallic production as it recognizes the inability of just one male body to sufficiently enact the phallus. It groups many of them in a chain-like structure that aims to give the group they represent – man – an unstoppable, invincible, and overwhelming source of violence. Even if it is true that, when put to the test, the phallus will always prove to be catfishing itself. For instance, many men in gangbangs will simply not be able to keep an erection, perhaps shamed by the prowess of the others or unable to see the woman before them (the little that is left of her), as enough of a mediating object that guarantees the distance between a man and another. Ruben Östlund’s film Force Majeure (2014) illustrates this unavoidable failure of the penis-bearing subject when he is called upon to produce the phallicity of what he bears. Its premise is that a family vacation at a ski resort exposes the father’s “lack” once an avalanche approaches father, mother and the children while they have their lunch outdoors at a restaurant. As the snow approaches like a slow-motion tsunami everyone ducks down and the father flees instead of braving the storm and saving his woman and offspring. After this episode the family unit begins to flounder as the woman cannot 278 richard love 18c69e50ec3231958201cfee70107473@reply.craigslist.org (Feb. 2, 2015) 225 forget nor forgive the father’s desertion precisely when his (phallic) function was supposed to perform itself. In one scene, outside the family’s hotel room, the father (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) breaks down and tells the wife (Lisa Loven Kongsli), as he bawls, that he's a victim too, "a victim of my own instincts." The snow avalanche, the film's most underlining narrative element, has already taken place. But it's here that the real tragedy materializes, or dematerializes, as the phallic rock that's supposed to prop up a family is spoiled before the woman’s horrified gaze. She feels humiliated and groundless. It was a mirage all along. It seems as if in this penis-phallus conflation, only the t-girl’s pragmatic usage of the symbolic as a provider of sexual pleasure can stand a chance for not being duped, or even, that only she can exert revenge on the original dupery of man. The t-girl’s sex session, after all, only lasts as long as the fiction of a penis-phallus coincidence endures. Once it’s over, it is repeated anew, covering the horror of phallic truth – there is nothing there – with another iteration before the dread can consume her. Male Multiplicity’s Anti-Depressive Function: The Gangbang As a Ritual of Bereavement The strategy of phallic production through male multiplicity is called upon at a time of phallic crisis that the digital inaugurates by demanding the penis to be constantly exposed and exchanged. Man has probably not been in such vulnerable position in relationship to his body since “erecting himself from the earth” and adopting an upright position, “which made his genitals, that before had been covered [by a bent-over gait], 226 visible and in need of protection” against feelings of shame. 279 This demand can only sustain itself through representation, outsourcing, and pre-emptive refusal to perform. The gangbang’s male multiplicity feasting around a t-girl body may, for example, project not just lack, but the penis specifically, as a potentially malfunctioning tool, into woman’s exclusivity: The devouring of a disarmed bomb. A Craigslist lover once put it in a text message, as he inquired about my own penis: “I like to see it flapping out of control while I’m in control!” There may also be a solace in man’s recognition of the very bait-and-switch that haunts the session (penis for phallus), which is enacted by a t- girl’s gangbang, as her penis, that visual guarantor of her being stuck in transit, embodies her own replacement coup: W4T. While pornography itself is based on an erection-penetration-ejaculation circuit, our pharmaco-pornographic society is driven by an erection-erection-erection circuit with the demand for actual penetration anxiously hovering over it. The city, like the digital, is teeming with images that excite, but the relief must always remain problematic, guilt- ridden, if actualized. 280 There are ways of avoiding the priapistic demands that the digital only enhances – Sáez and Carrascosa suggest fisting as a perennially erect genderless member, but not ones that would retain a latent irrelevance of sex difference. Both the fist and the anus show how sex difference, which dominant systems depend so much on, “isn’t so evident, and perhaps not even relevant.” While the clenched fist appears as threatening tool in traditional masculinity, one wielded by the Father invading the excessive son in Session 3, it could be re-signified as a device for pleasure, “pleasant like 279 Freud describes this moment as “a time when visual stimuli became paramount,” and a new life form began. He also associates this with a lowering in value of the sense of smell (…).” Freud, Civilization & Its Discontent, p. 66, p. 78. 280 Despentes, King Kong Théorie, p. 80. 227 an element of love.” 281 Preciado also points to the fist, and any human limb, as equivalent (if not superior) to the penis’ sexual function. 282 The strategy of multiplicity is animated, and instigated (the digital’s demand that an ever-functioning penis be produced, in the frame and in the bedroom, exposes its inevitable lack of priapistic phallicity), by a newer and highly pragmatic spate of digital technologies of cruising. These echo the oldest, most foundational, technology of phallic production: The symbolic killing of the Father by the band of brothers, that is, the primary parricide that bred civilization’s constitutive brotherhood. Freud describes the brothers sticking together to sacrifice and replace the Father, a moment of mourning and celebration, as “the great misdeed.” This symbolic occasion marks the beginning of, among other things, “social organization, moral restrictions, and religion,” as what “began in relation to the father ends in relation to the community.” 283 The coup staged by the brothers led to rituals of gathering that aimed to simultaneously mourn and celebrate that generative landmark. For Russell Grigg, mourning is, in fact, not about losing the object but commemorating it. It is crucial that this commemoration be once private and public, as we can see in the various rituals of bereavement – including, I am arguing, the gangbang – and totems such as the AIDS Memorial Quilt. The gangbang can thus be an opportunity for the gangbanged subject 281 Sáez and Carrascosa, Por El Culo: Políticas Anales, p. 111. Italics in the original. We can see one way of dealing with the digital demands for phallic exposure in how often men post photographs of themselves working out on Instagram with hashtags such as #loading, #beasting, and #beastmode, along with peptalk-like captions that seem to solely address other men. Some of Brazilian men’s hashtags include #esmagaquecresce (“crush it and it’ll grow”), #ficagrandeporra (“get fucking big already”), and #frangonaopai (“I ain’t no chicken, dad”). 282 Preciado, Manifeste Contra-Sexuel (Paris: Balland, 2000). 283 Freud, Totem and Taboo (Freud Press, 2013), p. 136, p. 129. Freud, Civilization & Its Discontents, p. 121. 228 herself to render her position public, to seek legitimacy for it by inscribing it publically (yet privately), particularly when her girlhood isn’t sufficiently passable to be taken out into the socius. The fact that the gangbang can be digitally recorded for posterity and witnessed live by an audience outside of the physical location of the event only enhances fantasies for what we can call a repeatable/re-watchable/re-playable symbolic endorsement of the t-girl’s position (by man). The t-girl’s gangbang is a rite of public inscription as she (re-)enacts and mourns her own (dis-)appearance: “Mourning is every bit about public ritual as it is about internal psychical work.” If, for Freud, melancholia means an inability to get over a lost object, Grigg sees it as the opposite, an inability to let the object be lost. Woman’s mediating the (homoerotic/sexual) relationship between men/brothers may also keep them from getting too close to “the evil other who wishes him ill” – as such proximity would result in what Griggs calls melancholia’s “depressive function.” Grigg stresses the way in which mourning insists in preserving the semblance of the object – considering its materiality may be missing, as in death. Mourning is, then, a preservation of semblance (of smells, of mannerisms), which the t-girl may embody, like woman’s corpse come to life: An opportunity to pre-emptively mourn, whereas mourning normally exists as the repairing après coup of a horror. 284 Freud explains the ambivalent relationship in sacrificing the Father by linking His murder with the death of the totemic animal in clans where the killing of such animal is so occasional that when it happens it is undergirded by a holiday ethos, a ritual of “loud 284 Russell Grigg, Why Freud’s Theory of Melancholia is All Wrong, talk at Kingston University, November 26, 2014. http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2014/11/russell-grigg- why-freuds-theory-of-melancholia-is-all-wrong/ (last accessed on November 28, 2014) 229 festival gaiety” that accompanies the temporary lifting of a prohibition. When the clan is finally allowed to kill the totemic animal, it achieves that in rather cruel fashion and “and eats it raw (…),” pointing to a sense of rawness as a multiplying sign for the absolute violence of the act, and its symptom. 285 The killing of the totemic animal is akin to the original parricide that founds civilization as we know it – and as we repeat it. The murder, or its mourning and commemoration, can only be carried out by the various members of the group, never by one single individual. A sense of kinship is reiterated as these brothers in death celebrate but then lament, as they dread some kind of retribution for having killed the animal. We can see how electing the animal as the object of sacrifice enables the murder to be repeated infinite times, whereas a Father’s death is unrepeatable. Since, for Freud, the totemic animal is a substitute for the Father, this scene of kinship-making murder and mourning illustrates children’s contradictory feelings toward the paternal figure, who is both venerated and despised, “envied and feared.” 286 Freud’s account and expansion of the Darwinian conception of the primal horde suggests that “a new weapon” might have enabled these brothers to finally rebel against a Father who kept “all the females for himself and [drove] away the growing sons.” This new technology would have brought the brothers a feeling of superiority, giving them the push needed to put their feelings (of violence) into practice and eat their victim raw, like “cannibalistic savages.” 287 285 Freud, Totem and Taboo, 128. 286 Ibid, p. 129. 287 Ibid. 230 The Father’s murder is an identificatory feat through which each of the brothers assumes His position as the result of a group mission, as “one cannot advance and overthrow the idol without immediately afterwards taking its place.” 288 There is something fatherly, or father-making, then, about the sons’ murderous revolt, and about the brotherhood. Which, in turn, makes the ability to make such kinship possible, assuming a counter-fatherly position of otherness. Taking on woman’s position of being its glue; the ever-so-thin film that keeps the brothers related but apart, related so long as they are apart – that is, multiple – stokes woman’s sense of existential purpose. She is responsible. This is a position of guaranteed touch, even authorship, and constant friction, as to avoid a direct contact that they are obviously drawn to, men are bound to go against whatever-it-is that keeps them symbolically jointed but physically estranged. The brothers may have joined forces to overthrow the father, but they were still each other’s rivals among women as the post-murder guilt drives them to institute the prohibition of incest, “perhaps the most maiming wound ever inflicted throughout the ages on the erotic life of man,” turning their eyes away from the Mother and toward women more broadly. 289 Feelings of guilt, Freud explains, led the brothers to elect the totemic animal as the Father’s surrogate, prohibiting its killing as a kind of father-son reconciliation. Totemism worked as a palliative settlement, helping the brothers deal with 288 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII: On A Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance (1971), translated by Cormac Gallagher, p. 43. 289 Freud, Civilization & Its Discontents, p. 74. A Facebook posting by from a recent Craigslist lover, ahead of the 2015 Superbowl, illustrates some of these points, “Having played both soccer and football, I recently happened to witness and be a part of something that would not be in my best interest to mention in detail, but what I got out of it is what my coaches, bosses and fraternity have preached to me all throughout my life...no one person is bigger than the team...no one person should ever feel or act as if they are...a team is always one... one focus, one goal, and should always work as one, both mentally and physically.” 231 the anxiety stemming from having killed the Father by keeping His surrogate – the totemic animal – safe, while justifying that had the Father treated the brothers themselves as they treat the totem, they wouldn’t have had to kill Him. It is thus in death that the Father is most obeyed. The brotherhood that arises out of this cannibalistic orgy, the very genesis of the social, teems with tension due to the men’s status as rivals vis-à-vis women, but is also maintained by a general commitment to not letting any one in the band of brothers end up as their Father did: Dead. In this sense, the brotherhood only survives through a camaraderie that acknowledges the domino effect that its foregoing would cause. One brother down, all brothers down. The brothers are themselves not individuals, but fragments of a whole, members of a troop driven toward a goal whose target isn’t an actual object but a general organization set by a highly functional choreography. Their sticking together means conciliation and atonement for the horror that their very existence is founded on. The organizational composition of this totemic system is at work in the gangbang, which enacts “the unsatisfied longing for the Father,” 290 its visceral violence and reparative frenzy as the gangbanged body is feasted on, like a succulent slain beast, and passed around like a delirious joint: “sanctification through participation in the common meal.” 291 In the libertine French site Netechangisme, several of the profiles feature duos and groups of male friends who share the same single account as they look for potential (female and trans) partners together – even if the interface itself only allows for joint accounts featuring one male and one female. Troifoisplus (“Threetimesmore”), for 290 Ibid, p. 135. 291 Ibid, p. 133. 232 instance, presents itself as “3 young men (19, 21 and 23 years old): Mathieu, Sofiane and Enzo for single or group encounters for providing women pleasure.” In the users’ comments associated with their account, where past lovers can leave performance reviews akin to those on Yelp, leagourmande ( “greedy Lea”), a t-girl, praises the men as being “what the people what,” and an “equipe de choc,” that is, “a dream team.” An equipe de choc is, literally, the type of helmet and body armor worn by police forces responsible for dispersing crowds. One of their techniques is to line up along the extremities of a street, as though they formed a wall, and to move slowly toward the congregated men. Bukkorgang is one of several profiles that call themselves organizers, of “threeways, gangbangs [“pluralité masculine”], cuckold sessions, and back-to-back blowjobs [“pipalachaine,” that is pipes à la chaine.” Pipes means “blowjobs” in French and “à la chaine” means “one after the other” but also “assembly-line work”].” 292 The Brazilian roda de samba also illustrates the dynamic behind the gangbang’s equipe de choc in one space laboring woman (and man) into being – an example of what Preciado calls a “cybernetics of power,” in which “power circulates through shared performative fictions which are transmitted from body to body like electric loads.” 293 The 292 Jc-lyon, who organizes regular events feature “one woman + transvestite + 3 or 4 bisexual friends (35 to 60 years old),” claims to have “a stock of about fifteen buddies so it is easy to find some that are available.” http://www.netechangisme.com/d/fiche2/2058694 (last accessed, Feb. 3, 2015), http://www.netechangisme.com/d/fiche2/2130421 (last accessed, Feb. 3, 2015), http://www.netechangisme.com/d/fiche2/903189 (last accessed, Feb. 3, 2015). My translation. 293 Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sexe, Drogue et Biopolitique, p. 317. My italics. My translation. The loads can, of course, be quite literal, as in the bareback fantasies of fluid exchange a potential Craigslist trick expresses in an email: “i wanna fuck you and have my gf suck my cock with your ass juice fresh on my cock when i get home so what do u say.” dionhughes123 4337e83ed7753c1cbaa01c8f4fb1b86f@reply.craigslist.org (October 22, 2013) 233 roda de samba is a manifestation of working class culture, normally associated with the slums of Rio de Janeiro. It traditionally consists of various male musicians sitting in a circle, drinking, riffing and improvising songs not unlike a jazz jam session. The lyrics to these sambas tend to sing the praises of traditional gender roles and the female form with impromptu and rhyming double entendres that lead to male laughter and bonding. While the men sing, women dance in the middle of the roda (circle) of men holding their instruments. The woman’s function in the roda de samba is that of a travelling target, a mobile eye-candy somewhere between a spinning top and a rotating bottle in a truth-or- dare game that keeps men from having to stare at one another. 294 As an excitation and shielding device, she is a reminder and a justification for the men’s congregated multiplicity. She brings them together whilst keeping them from sticking together. Hers is a prophylactic function, maintaining men’s relational status and barring contagion. Illustration of the "roda de samba," featured in an advertisement that claims one does not have to leave "zona sul," Rio's wealthier neighborhood, to have an authentic “roda de samba” experience. http://www.riomaisbarato.com.br/events/mpb-‐e-‐roda-‐de-‐samba-‐em-‐copacabana/ 294 Netechangisme user pachour22 tells me, “my goal is that you become my sex toy for myself and my friends.” Private communication in chatroom. Netechangisme.com, Feb. 20, 2014. My translation. 234 A number of family-oriented variety shows on Brazilian television feature scantily clad dancers behind a male presenter. These dancers that populate the background of the frame so insistently work as a reminder, in a fashion similar to the roda de samba, that while the viewer should identify with the regular Joe hosting the attraction, there is still something that comes between them. That this “something” is in constant motion around its own axis and sliding across the frame is not accidental. The gangbang’s exceptional status – it is an event (at once heterosexual and queer) – speaks to the totemic feast as its excitement also lies in the rarity of its manifestation. We can only think of the gangbang as an unusual event, in its violence, excitement, and frequency. The gangbang is a carnivalesque holiday. As a Craigslist responder told me in Las Vegas once, in order to justify his asking me if he could bring his buddy along to my hotel room, “We are in Vegas, so we are like, what the hell, let’s fuck a shemale together.” The gangbang works as an air pocket in the quotidian chokehold of a system of otherwise draconian maneuvering in which the Father is as dead as He is ironclad in his ghostly presence. Like the lurking Mother in Session 3, the Father haunts and steers the scene-sequence-session between the brothers. His absence is His “deification,” turning him into a coding metastasis, which instructs everything, bringing cohesion from scene to scene into a sequence, in a way that His non-virtual presence never could. To the question, “What is the father?” Freud replies, “It is the dead father.” His annihilation is 235 the guarantee that he will never arrive to botch the qualities of his image. Ironically, a Fatherless society becomes a patriarchic one. 295 The (t-)girl’s body comes to life in the gangbang as the arbiter of male relations while the male multiplicity comes together in a brotherhood-making feast, but it also disappears. 296 In the midst of the agitation between the brothers, she is but a layer of flesh keeping the band of brothers from physical incest. She is at the very center of this brotherly feast, as she is the empty hole around which the brothers form a circle of complicity, as if to beat her into departure. Potential gangbang participants often make their case by responding to ads saying they want to essentially obliterate the gangbanged girl but also that they want to give her a lot of pleasure. We can read this supposed contradiction, or ambivalence (the expression of her pleasure may clue man in on the excellence of his might), as a calculated ploy to be invited to the event, but also as echoes of the aggression and subsequent guilt-driven expiation haunting the primal parricide. The feminine position in the framework of the gangbang is that of the animal in sacrificial customs, which was already a substitute for a human sacrifice, that of the Father – its presence [the girl’s] a formality if barely physical in the end. Once, during a gangbang in the vicinity of Camp Pendleton, Calif., I had run out of condoms, which prompted one of the Marines in the room to turn to the other ones, not to me, and ask, “Do you guys mind if I fuck her raw?” It is also usual for the first man to arrive for a 295 Ibid, p. 135. Cited in Jacques Lacan, Écrits (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), p. 688. It is ironic that one of the few popular sites for smut porn, a particularly “nasty” pornographic mode, that the general consumer may find disgusting (physical abuse, faux incest, puking, scatology), or “too much,” is called Motherless (www.motherless.com). 296 Let it be known that Lacan’s last words were said to be, “I am disappearing.” Cited in Dominic Pettman, Look At The Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology (Zero Books, 2013), p. 176. 236 group sex situation to engage in what sometimes can be deep conversation with me while we are alone. Once their male counterparts arrive, they direct their words exclusively to the other men. It’s as if my presence is a quasi-absence, simply an opportunity or excuse for male assembly. What Freud calls the “inciting factors” of the primordial disposing of the Father, guilt over the Father’s murder and defiance over His authority, have lasted through generations as a kind of damned inheritance, or a symbolic DNA. Which is illustrated, for instance, in the persistence of religion and monarchies throughout history, with their god and godlike fatherly figures, and the repetitive rituals without end associated with them. For Lacan, the Father’s castration leads to him “being nothing but a number,” which is “indicated quite clearly in dynasties.” 297 The gangbang appears, then, as an uncannily re- appearance. When considering the uncanny, Freud stresses the element of an unsettling return of something familiar, which had been kept hidden. He also relates the uncanny to infantile fantasies of the double (an imagine lost twin sibling a child may imagine), which the gangbang multiplies into triples and more, and which appears as “an insurance against destruction of the ego,” a denial of the irreversible power of death. 298 The manifestation of ambivalence that drove the brotherly rebellion against the Father, as we have seen, simultaneously reconciles and re-enacts the murder for which the brothers seek expiation. As in the law of retaliation in which “a murder can be atoned only by the sacrifice of another life,” which can also work as a blueprint for understanding the addictive function of cruising writ large, and barebacking in particular. In his seminal essay “Matan a Una Marica” ( “A Faggot Is Being Murdered”), Perlongher 297 Lacan, On A Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance, p. 14. 298 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” Imago (1919), p. 9. 237 lists gay hate crimes and AIDS as outsourced rites of sacrifice and penitence that produce a pragmatic eradication of otherness and the “[not so] secret pleasure” that accompanies it. 299 Perhaps the investment in endless cruising accomplishes something for the cruising subject him/herself that is akin to the pleasurable constancy associated with the death drive, as we saw in Session 2, but also the very crafting of his/her object (the “object cause of desire” in psychoanalysis): A cruising that doesn’t stop is like analysis and AIDS, with their respective cures always on the horizon. Analysis approaches a cure the more things become detectable (the structure of one’s desire is mapped out). For AIDS the path is the opposite. The least detectable its virus, the more the sense of a cure can be experienced. Endless cruising is invested in the myth of a phallus that also doesn’t stop, that is, a phallus that must remain undetectable since its penile representative will always fall short – despite the various strategies for dressing up its absence in inextinguishable violence. Like the fantasy of my Portuguese grandfather, which is repeated whenever someone in my family mentions that my grandmother “was pregnant for 24 years.” The sentence evokes a pregnancy that never delivers. Like that of a virus inhabiting a body after it has been “bred,” and whose only hope is to nurture a relationship with its fleshly host, and disappear inside it. The myth of the perennially pregnant grandmother helps make the family myth of the matriarch as the bearer of a never-ending pregnancy with the remark’s conscious intention being an appreciation for how laborious it must have been to never not be pregnant with a child – whether that child survived or not. 299 Perlongher, “Matan a Un Marica,” Prosa Plebeya, p. 36. My translation. 238 In her 80s, my grandmother, who used to tell stories about how her own native Brazilian grandmother was lassoed into captivity by her white grandfather in a forest, took up pottery, curiously only producing statues of very pregnant women. Women who never delivered, their prophylactic function coagulated in red clay. There was never a statue of a woman holding a baby or nursing him. Never a baby outside of herself, another great strategy for avoiding disappointment, when we remember the birth of a child to be the mother’s first big disenchantment. My grandmother’s giving birth, which announces a not-being pregnant, is a lethal interruption perhaps akin to the actual meeting in cruising, one that a child outside the woman’s belly embodies. The logic of the family myth seems to be that the grandmother was pregnant for 24 years, how awful and admirable a deed, but, necessarily, how potent and fertile must the penis responsible for those pregnancies have been! A penis so talented it must be a phallus. Where there is a pregnancy there is the trace of a penis. Where there is a pregnancy that never delivers, the trace of the penis feels infinite. For Freud, “the great misdeed” must have left traces so ineradicable in the history of man that it was bound to manifest itself frequently “in numerous substitute formations.” He illustrates this by considering the repetition of the Christian communion, a spectacle aiming to repeat “the crime that must be expiated.” In such act, the identity of the totem feast isn’t in the gangbanged feminine body but in the form of the sacramental bread. 300 The gangbangable body’s position may, then, appear as a seductive place for rescuing oneself from ontological obsoleteness in this primordial drama (“from the father 300 Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 139, 140. 239 horde to the brother clan”) for those who do not bear the biological marker that can push them into the position of the sacrificed animal by default. 301 After all, where were those whose queerness would eventually amount to some kind of t-girlhood when the primordial parricide took place? They were outside of the picture, not factored in. Just as I argued in Sessions 2 and 3, barebacking can be a practice of and for symbolic belonging, and it appears as though the gangbang, with or without barebacking as its enhancing sign (“a lethal intensification”), can work as a technology for “the production of limb-to-limb intensities,” an exercise in fantasies of ontological kinship harkening back to “the removal of the primal father by the band of brothers.” 302 The two tactics can converge as in the speech of a potential gangbang participant, who replied to a Craigslist ad recruiting men for the event by saying, “I like bare, esp if someone else's wife.” 303 The gangbang may actually hold a fantasmatic barebacking function even when condoms are used, for the force associated with its multiplicity of men can have the effect of symbolically piercing whatever-it-is that prophylaxis (cl)aims to bar. 304 301 Ibid, p. 144. 302 Perlongher, “Avatares de Los Muchachos de La Noche,” Prosa Plebeya, p. 54, p. 49. My translation. Freud, Totem and Taboo. 303 Jon Alexander e90f2464429532969e45b6ae007a9f9b@reply.craigslist.org, November 14, 2014. 304 User sexedomme, from Netechangisme, indicates the condom’s restraining symbolic effect when he says that he wears condoms “to keep you in good health, but (…)” as if to make up for it, he fucks “extremely hard.” Netechangisme.com, chat room conversation, Dec. 12, 2014. My translation. Italics are mine. 240 Responding To a Decoy: On The Contagious Virtuality of The Totem Jamieson Webster’s essay on her analysand Elizabeth, whose “symptomatic intentionality” drove her (the analysand) to not-so-accidently burn her skin severely, echoes the figure of the condom as the materialization of queer alienation from the heterosexual symbolic – an alienation that the gangbang might assuage through its relational re-making and re-iterating. In the case study, the rupturing of Elizabeth’s skin through third-degree burns allegorize her attempt to finally demarcate a line between her mother and herself: “The accident differentiated their pain for the first time.” This belated cutting between bodies, the enactment of difference through the skin – Elizabeth had been too invested in her mother’s pain, “even drowned in it,” also performs their kinship. The rupture of the skin is here analogous to the always-violent withdrawal of the latex from the sex scene-sequence-session. In burning her skin off from the body of the mother, Elizabeth is, at last, related to her. She bears that difference on her skin, as in Denis Villeneuve’s film Enemy (2013), which stages the encounter of long-lost twins, or doubles, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, in all of its “symptomatic intentionality.” The trace of their difference, or sameness, is also the evidence of their undeniable relatedness. It lies on the remnants of a wound they both have on their chest, which resembles Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions – the site of a primordial difference-enacting excision. 305 305 Jamieson Webster, “The Accidents of Psychoanalysis.” The New York Times, December 7, 2014, Sunday Review, p. 5. In that vein, a recent Craigslist hook-up, a Marine from Oceanside, Calif., had “0311” tattooed on his trap muscle area, which he recounted all of the “brothers” from his unit got on the same place on their bodies after deployment. 0311 is the military code for Rifleman, the primary infantry for the United States Marine Corps. 241 The kinship (re-)enactment that the gangbang performs is akin to what Leo Bersani refers to as impersonal sociability, in that it is an encounter of others that doesn’t try to “find out about each other.” Richard Morgan speaks of obsessive social media habits as “an orgy of insistent intimacy,” which the gangbang is not. It is, rather, an orgy of insistent lack of intimacy, or rather, an orgy so bent on forging (a fantasy of) intimacy, so overwhelmed by its yearning, that it could never produce it. As a ritual, its chips are all down, with little room for accidents. Its actors might as well be algorithms, and they often times are. As such, the gangbang is, even when it is literally mediated through condoms, a tool for exceeding it, that is, making up for whatever it is that it aims to safeguard through the violence of male multiplicity. 306 Perlongher points to accidental farting as an aural and olfactory embodiment of the excess of desire that escapes the body (fleshly, genital, or prophylactic), and asks whether the scent of desire – of its fleeing excess – is not precisely in such fart. 307 It is when Freud establishes “primitive men” as antithetical to the contemporary neurotic, in that the first ones act as to substitute thinking and the latter ones’ thoughts carry out the reality of actions, that we see how digitality can blur thinking and doing “like an eye pencil smudging an eye lash in a stroke of camp,” setting the relationship between the two – fantasy and practice – in an orgiastic instability. 308 306 Bersani, “Interview with Tracy D. Morgan,” New Books in Psychoanalysis podcast, http://newbooksinpsychoanalysis.com/2012/03/19/leo-bersani-and-adam-phillips- intimacies-university-of-chicago-press-2008/ (Last accessed, July 4, 2012). Morgan, “Kicking the Facebook Habit,” The New York Times, Sunday Review, September 28, 2014, p. 12. 307 Perlongher, “Matan a Un Marica,” Prosa Plebeya, p. 38. 308 Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 145. Perlongher uses this expression to describe the disappearance of the kind of homosexuality made briefly possible between the sexual revolution and the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, a flamboyant glittery affair withered by 242 The totem, which Dominic Pettman describes as “an empty outline” rendered specific through subjective cathexis and as a “quilting point around which things (…) circle and gather,” is just as alive in the digital pharmaco-pornographic culture of today as when the primordial mob of brothers joined forces to overturn the Father, whose death has outlived any and all lives put together. The totem provides psychosocial coherence, forging a sense of stability to what is a rather chaotic experience: being in a world with others. The totem is dangerous and it spreads by “infection.” Given that it is primarily a virtual figure (“the true totemic moment comes when the child identifies with (…) an absent figure”), it is no coincidence that its force is made prominent in digitality, and that its trickery helps elucidate what the t-girl’s semblance and lenticularity – “The totem is thus an avatar for the true object of veneration” as we are always “responding to a decoy” 309 – and what the male multiplicity of the gangbang accomplishes: “the totem is the figure or refrain which crystalizes an assemblage over time.” 310 An elucidation of the totemic function (as an animal, a god, a king, a commodity, or money) helps us recognize the relationship between bio-woman and t-girl as general “avatars of otherness,” or even “delusional bubbles” men blow “themselves against the void.” 311 Slavoj Zizek refers to man’s ontological status precisely as “that of a void, of a pure gap sustained by the endless sliding from one signifier to another.” The subject’s position is never quite settled. It requires the constant cruising that sets him in a circular disease and the morality police. Perlongher, “La Desparición de La Homosexualidad,” Prosa Plebeya, p. 85. My translation. 309 Pettman, Look At The Bunny, p. 3, 55, 14, 7, 4. His italics. Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), p. 81. 310 Pettman, Look At The Bunny, p. 16. 311 Ibid, p. 55, 61. 243 path which may not allow for roaming very far, yet may lead to confronting the inherent multiplicity of objects and the very shadows that they cast. Such movement can then enable an oblique infection from the symbolic toward the subjects-cum-objects that may otherwise (without the straight man’s off-course cruising, for instance) wither in alienation. These sexual practices point to the digital’s elucidating and precipitating functions, ones that make appear the invisible geography of objects whose shadows expose their very unboundedness. Pettman notes that most totems are “either animals proper, or symbols of nature,” and that if we start looking for them we quickly find that rabbits specifically appear to hold totemic sway. We can think of their general “symbolic role as the mascot of [excessive] procreation,” the Playboy empire, the Energizer bunny, vibrators, and films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), and Donnie Darko (2001). Lacan used the figure of the rabbit and the hat metaphorically in connection to making things appear, as if by magic, from analytic discourse: Something that “isn’t there.” 312 The not-being-there that Pettman identifies in the totemic is actually the property of “man,” for Sáez and Carrascosa, whom they describe as an “an empty space.” 313 Since one is a man by vacating positions one refuses to occupy, one becomes a man through violent and constant negation – a phobic priapism of sorts. Citing Halberstam’s work, they note that to be a man one only has to not be, to be by exclusion, and through the articulation of perpetual loathing (of women, gays, and so on). This is actually a curiously counter-Lacanian view, which doesn’t necessarily negate Lacan’s famed notion 312 Ibid, p. 19, 36. 313 Javier Sáez and Sejo Carrascosa, Por El Culo: Políticas Anales, p. 118. 244 that the woman doesn’t exist as much as it concludes its philosophical equation: Man doesn’t exist either. “February 18, 2009 The first thing my sister did when she got in the car was grab my hand, take off her engagement ring, try to put it on my finger, and say: It doesn't fit you. Then, the day she was to get married, K. pronounced each syllable of my name clearly and asked me to stay in the car so we could talk. He went round and round and round to say he wasn’t with me 100 percent and that he wasn’t sure if that was normal. I feigned little dependence. As if I wouldn’t just get gangbanged by 15 strangers if he actually left. As if he wasn’t already going to leave no matter how much I sneakily made him believe that all things considered, he loved me, needed me, were better off with me than with anybody else, anybody else who would actually fuck him in the ass, who would feign masculinity as intently as he does, who would claim things are ‘grand’ even when brothers were dying on top of their 24-year-old girlfriends’ graves with a gun to their head. In the end I dropped him off at the gym and drove around the city while jacking off. Poor men in buses could probably see me from above, but by the time they could muster laughter and insult I would have overtaken their own vehicle. When I picked him up, he pointed out my flaws, I pointed out the fact that I wasn’t pointing out his. He may actually think I am a boy. What makes me hold on to him despite the obvious fact that although my femininity doesn’t horrify him, even if it doesn’t strike his fancy either, is how effectively he executes his manliness during sex. It makes me wonder how the same person who holds my body as if it weren’t tainted, who licks my crotch as if it bore a hole, how can he also wish to be ravaged and violated just as I do? It makes me wonder but it doesn’t make me forget. Later that night my sister got married and it felt like she was my cousin and my boyfriend was an escort I had been feeding like a Tamagotchi. The photographer took photos of the couples, the heterosexual couples. Brazilian men talked loudly, the word ‘faggot’ is bound to be let out sooner or later and I am not sure how to act as a boy nor as a girl. I film my mother and I in the same frame and she doesn’t mind, for the first time. It’s as if we know this, this thing called autonomy, is all just an act. That my sister will be divorced in one or two years and we will be able to have her back just for ourselves. But we’ll let her enjoy her ugly dress, her tacky in-laws, and her sushi bar for now. When the festivities are over and I am waiting for K. to finish his shower, I read a page of a novel in which one of the characters, a neurotic professor exiled in Athens, says that there should be no men, only mothers and children.” 245 Multiplicity, Mutilation and Mourning: The Gangbang As a Melancholy Response in Post-AIDS Digitality “It wasn’t an adult sensation but a childish one, I’d felt like a frightened child. Distance fantasies returned, false, invented images, as when in childhood I’d imagined that my mother secretly left the house, day and night, to meet her lovers, and felt in my body the joy that was hers. Now it seemed to me that an encrusted sediment that had been lying for decades in the pit of my stomach was stirring.” Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter “For the singular body of this death is simultaneously, and impossibly, multiple. The multiplicity of the body of this death must not be thought, however, to be the degeneration or fragmentation of a prior unity; this multiplicity must be thought to be originary.” William Haver, The Body of This Death The multiplicity that upkeeps the sense of a (mal-)functioning and governing phallus is most evidently exposed in the aftermath of disillusionment. That is, with practice. As when one watches and studies enough films so that that cinematic immersion is spoiled. Or when said absorption is brought to a halt by the accidental appearance of a non-diegetic element, botched continuity, or sheer insatisfaction, making one see the process behind the pose. Unless the approach is purposefully Brechtian, as in Jon Jost’s film Speaking Directly (1973), where the filmmaking process – its authors and devices – make themselves known in the frame, forcing one to zoom-out of the picture and into a 246 more critical domain because one sees too much. At which point we can finally ask, What is it that we are actually watching? It might take a few men down before we also understand that our engagement with man comprises an intricate network of signifiers for which he is but a peon. The moment it becomes clear – and this is a progressive, or rather, degenerative blow – that man is a cooperative sham, is the moment where queerness begins popping up everywhere: “Such is the order, the impossible to satisfy order.” 314 This moment is precipitated by the digital, which then acts as the savior for the bad news that it heralds. If having access to any-whatever-males at age 17 felt like sufficient ontological de- alienation, the practical ability to make use of such access that the digital enabled, and with such promiscuity (in the most literal sense of the word), banalized such males to the too-real point of “intolerable saturation”: No phallus, no penis, just dildos. 315 Like when you zoom too close to an image and realize it isn’t but a multiplicity of dots, strokes, pixels. That it is trompe l’oeil that drew you in, and its awareness that drew you out. Luxuriating in t-girlhood got me past these phallic cadavers, introducing me to the previously unfathomable world not of any-whatever-males, but the bona fide representatives of the phallus themselves: Heterosexual man. What first felt like an unthinkable bout with power and mobility – “Like taking a trip. Locked into place, but in a different dimension,” in Despentes reflection on the benefits of sex work after being raped – became more like the aftermath of snorting a line of coke: “harder to manage.” It was actually the clients’ fragility, for Despentes, that made things difficult to manage. 314 Lacan, On A Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance, p. 20. 315 Perlongher, “La Desparición de La Homosexualidad,” Prosa Plebeya, p. 87. My translation. 247 Her clients, like the ones invited into my bedroom to play out my fantasy (was the fantasy not ours – the symbolic’s – if they kept coming back?), proved to be frail, needy, human. It made her feel guilty. 316 The frenzy of the digital helped this new technology for pleasure and a sense of ontological belonging to die quickly too. Yet, inside the digital I stayed. The fantasy – that the phallus exists, that, in turn woman exists, and that I am, in turn, in a relation with man, with the world – has a tendency to expire quickly. It wants new proof. It wants to be found to be lacking again. Like the levels of a game, whose code become increasingly harder to outsmart. 317 The fantasy, when put into practice, becomes increasingly demanding. When what seemed like a bona fide man stopped feeling like manly enough, inviting a multiplicity of them into the sex scene-sequence-session felt like a good arithmetic remedy. These digital solutions for fantasmatic quandaries weren’t stages coming one after the other. They overlapped, amassing to an archive of bodies one keeps burying to make room for new ones, and then catches oneself unburying the very same corpses to the point where it is difficult to spot who is who: “I've seen you before lol!! Is 316 Virginie Despentes, King Kong Théorie, p. 65. My translation. 317 In Chris Marker’s Level Five (1997), levels of fantasy are intricately bound to a perverse exercise in difference (social-economical in practice, ontological in fantasy), and levels of a computer game. Laura (Catherine Belkhodja) mourns her dead lover, a game developer, as she “confesses to having indulged with her deceased boyfriend in a micro- class system: they categorized sundry acquaintances in ‘levels’ ranging from one to five based on their conversational sophistication.” If someone made an ordinarily ignorant comment, they would turn to each other and say, “Level one.” If someone made a somewhat creative and astute observation they would express their approval by saying, “Level two.” The game turned out to be “a tight stricture,” as nothing ever reached “Level five,” except perhaps for death, Laura wonders. Steve MacFarlane, “Level Five,” Slant Magazine, August 12, 2014 http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/level-five (last accessed, December 16, 2014) 248 this serious?” is how one of these agents of swiftly expiring resolutions to lingering fantasies puts it. 318 Since gays begin at a place of masculinity failure, they need, perhaps more than anyone, to forge a masking Band-Aid that negates phallic lack in the (face of the) other, whether he has admitted (crossdressers) or disavowed (g0ys) that lack in himself. Unlike bio-woman, their lack has no value. T-girlhood is one way of claiming some kind of value for their lack by magnifying it and bringing it to grotesque legibility for man. The deal seems particularly seductive, then, if man is joined by his brothers, so that her coronation can be performed and witnessed, that is, publicly inscripted. If the encounter between t-girl and man is theatrical, and upheld by a dramatic bet, a bet in the man-ness/woman-ness of the other, the gangbang authenticates the hope as fact in its exposition of the very coils that drive the phallic machine, defending it at all costs. The gangbang provides visible evidence of the king’s empire as he shows up with his army. A similar negotiation takes place in the bet that can be made between sex partners presumed to be HIV negative: A bet that the other is negative, a bet that the top’s wielding of the phallus renders him virally impregnable, a bet that the bottom’s lack disarms him/her from infecting the top back – the feminine position’s prophylactic “essence.” This is the immunizing bet of the gangbang, too, where the flow of fluids is unidirectional and the woman only excretes anything when she has already been filled to the brim, with the fluids of man, and the amount of sperm she has housed is too much, oozing out in the form of a creampie. This bet is guaranteed by an immersion, which, to 318 Bernardo Gentil <791209e88c663a34809bd64d0f998d4d@reply.craigslist.org>, March 16, 2013. 249 recall Barthes, is too frantic and too nauseous to be cinematic. It leaves no room for speaking back at the image because it is, precisely, the image’s very symptom. This is a pornographic, and often a pharmaco-pornographic immersion, from flakes who claim that they “just got up and realized i am way too hopped up on pills and booze to drive” to guys who try to get an invite by saying they have “party favors” or a Viagra tablet. 319 The reason-crushing frisson only lets out once the roulette has stopped spinning and the players have gone home. In short, in the end of the session, when the session is no longer. When the multiplicity of men has all come through, one falling approximately as short as the next, then and only then, is my pleasure reduced to the material. I can finally jerk myself off to sleep, with no witnesses to watch – resigned, spent. The multiplicity is exhausting. Perlongher associates “these lined up bodies” (cuerpos en fila) to an “imprecise nausea.” 320 The multiplicity, it turns out, multiplies very little, but it promises a kind of infinity. Its exit brings in a soporific relief and proof that its hard labor has kept me busy but solved nothing, as I am left to my own devices to cum and fall asleep. Curiously, its presence – ghostly, fantasmatic, and literal – is disorienting but its possibilities offer me a sense of alignment. As with Despentes’ claim that part of the pleasures derived from the pornographic is the certainty that, for once, it all goes according to plan, the gangbang’s multiplicity is a well-disciplined militia. Thinking of the male multiplicity of the gangbang as an army echoes Despestes’ own suggestion that female bodies may belong to men, but male bodies belong to the State, 319 TK61552 M tk61552@yahoo.com, November 28, 2013. 320 Perlongher, “Avatares de Los Muchachos de La Noche,” Prosa Plebeya, p. 46. My translation. 250 which ships them overseas to be maimed when it sees fit – an “enterprise” that puts man, woman, and t-girls in “mutilatory” kinship. 321 The encounter with otherness implies risk, but sticking to a familiar and endlessly performed code of conduct can instrumentalize the others’ partaking in the sex session as if disarming them from their unpredictability. 322 This is a perverse kind of solace that ensures harmless repetition but keeps on promising something else, something better, to come along – out of the same code. The seduction of this relief, from the unsettling surprises that otherness can bring, echoes one of the driving forces of “taxicomanias,” which Rik Loose calls an “immediate and radical” movement of exclusion of the other, replacing the risks that he may bear with other risks that may seem more manageable and predictable. We can see the very trajectory of AIDS as a mysterious disease, the fantasy of a gay cancer, to the fantasy of a manageable chronic condition supported by repetitive, and supervised, drug-taking – the kind of soothing protocol HIV-negative people can now pre-emptively indulge themselves with by taking pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). 323 321 Despentes claims this to be what the collective body demands of singular ones, that “women give their children away to war, and that men accept to die in order to save the interest of three or four short-sighted jerks.” Despentes, King Kong Théorie, p. 28-29. 322 For Perlongher, it is the manliness of “the lower classes” that is for sale (he is speaking about hustlers) in the multiplicity of men that the nighttime produces – this brand of manliness may not survive in the broad daylight. In a Brazilian context, or for a Brazilian unconscious, consuming “the lower classes,” or being consumed by it in a controlled and highly choreographed environment, is also to disarm the very agents of unwanted violence who, in the fantasies of the middle and upper classes, would be likely to attack the bourgeoisie – especially at night. Perlongher, “Avatares de Los Muchachos de La Noche,” Prosa Plebeya, p. 46. My translation. 323 PrEP, also known by its brand name Truvada, is an increasingly popular prevention therapy among American gay men that highly reduces the risk of getting HIV (some studies suggest up to 90%) and involves being constantly tested for the virus and taking pills every single day without ever being able to skip a day. One is still told to wear 251 This dynamic recently broke down in what felt like a conspiracy spreading from the digital platforms’ code to my body and the hardware that form the privileges that ensure the very rendition of the digital sex-scene-session. Craigslist started automatically blocking all of my ads (no matter how many email addresses I created and how many phone lines I used 324 ), my iPhone kept freezing for being too full, my laptop crashed, the shower head in my bathroom got clogged, the garbage disposal in my kitchen sink got stuck, and my car battery died. All of this happened in the same week. Rendering this bout with “symptomatic intentionality” more evident, I got into an accident in my bathtub. I was naked and bent over scrubbing it when I hit my lower back on the tub’s faucet while “‘erecting himself from the earth’ and adopting an upright position.” The cut caused a lot of bleeding, leaving me with a red scar above my pale butt. The scar, red like the AIDS-related lesions I dreaded as a child of the 1980s, felt like the culmination of this psychosomatic conspiracy against my body and the usages I had been making of it. When I went to the dermatologist, hoping she would give me a quick-fix prescription as has been offered to me for matters of the psyche in similar doctors’ offices, she said she could not do anything about it because, “scars are what they are, they stay with you.” The constellation of symptoms spread across my body and my technological prostheses felt like the carrying of a message that couldn’t be articulated otherwise, as is the case with psychosomatic diseases in general, of which Lacan includes not only condoms while being on PrEP, but the drug has led many American gay men to use it as a carte blanche for barebacking, which has granted them the nickname Truvada Queens. Loose, The Subject of Addiction: Psychoanalysis and the Administration of Enjoyment (Karnac Books, 2002), p. 146. 324 Craigslist sends frequent users a numeral code to their cell phone via text messaging as part of the process for posting an ad. The phone number becomes associated to a specific email address. One needs a different phone number per Craigslist account. The site limits users associated with those to post, at the most, five ads per 24-hour period. 252 asthma, anorexia, ulcers, eczema and other skin ailments, but cancer. So did the particular site of this symptomatic multiplicity: The hardware that made cruising possible, the faucet that enabled me to clean my body afterwards, the mechanism that crushed detritus…If meanings are soldered onto certain organs, rendering them more susceptible to be non-accidental sites of disease, could digital technologies too, be inscribed by meaning, and shut down like a cancerous pancreas, or a dick that just won’t stay up? 325 For Ellie Ragland, the organ speaks the pain that cannot be spoken to a parent or grandparent, or a marital partner (who substitutes for a family member in an identificatory drama): “vital organs themselves tells stories of disappointed love, thwarted desire, unbearable loss, and faulty nurture. And all family ‘novels’ leave inscriptions on the flesh of their children, inscriptions whose opaque meanings can be deciphered as patients narrate their imaginary histories wherein seeing, breathing, and digesting all refer to the primordial drives that were themselves constructed for meaning as the outside world imposed a story on the body’s parts, cutting it up into a network of signifieds that speak on the side of the real (the unknown, the impasse).” 326 What does it mean to have gotten a scar, in something of a “freak” accident, inside the place where cleaning takes place during the rare event that I actually cleaned it? A scar above the ass, where all the dirt comes out and comes in. The rash-looking red cut, with its faded Kaposi’s sarcoma appearance, tainted the view of an otherwise perfectly smooth and white ass, like a warning – if not for me, for whoever was behind 325 Ellie Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 127. 326 Ibid, p. 137. 253 me: This is where it goes (right under the red line), or this is where you refuse to put it in and flee. As there is always a multiplicity at work, the symbolic circulates through a variety of bodies, agents, objects, and illnesses both “actualized of merely promised.” 327 Haver finds an originary multiplicity in the necessarily impossible object called AIDS. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome refers to “a congeries of opportunistic (that is, radically contingent) infections: so-called ‘active’ or ‘full-blown’ AIDS is not a disease; there is no ‘AIDS virus.’” Haver argues AIDS not to be “a medico-scientific object” but a “discursively constituted” web of “social, political, economic, historical, philosophical, and literary” objects amounting to a fantasy of an “ontological viral plenitude.” 328 It is possible to trace, then, a primordial kinship between AIDS as a discursive army of sorts, and the phallus. There is no outside of either of those fantasy objects. While a subject’s position may result in a different relationship, and inscription, to AIDS and the phallus, they both amount to a very singular (set of) objects in Kinshasa than in New York, they are sustained by a truly global and “integrated viral relationality.” 329 AIDS, as the phallus, are unlocatable objects. Only their material effects can be found and probed. Curiously, their effects are hardly what the subject is normally after. The gangbang appears as a radical, and radically symptomatic, spectacle of the interplay between these fantasy objects, or objects of fantasy: AIDS and the phallus. In said event, the potential material consequences of AIDS are disavowed: One (or more) acts as if 327 Haver, The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS, p. 7. 328 Ibid, p. 3-4. Italics in the original. 329 Ibid, p. 6. Haver calls HIV “cosmopolitan.” Ibid, p. 7. 254 AIDS isn’t there. Whereas what isn’t actually there, with certainty (the phallus), is forged as though it were. The bodily sites that remind the subject of his own lack, that is, of his own death, what Haver calls “the body’s lamellae” (i.e., the ears, the vagina, and above all, the anus) are violently stuffed in another disavowing coup. When the gangbanged body is that of a t-girl, the aim comes clearer into focus, as she represents not only anality, but liminality itself. As a visibly wounded site, the t-girl is the gangbang’s ultimate target as a symbolic and material bearer of the very failure of “corporeal integrity of the so-called self.” The gangbanged body being that of the t-girl is also enhanced, as she represents bodily lamellae (she is a hole, one hole is all she has), by associations with “infection” and “otherness ‘itself’” which Haver links to said lamellae as unsettling “surfaces that are both inside and outside (…).” 330 In the gangbang session not only is the power of the penis, the representative of the phallus in practice – its fictive animation – multiplied by the sheer number of them in the room, the introduction of a third (and forth, and so on) male object in the session renders me a “her,” and not a gender-neutral “you.” That is an event of language with (meta-)physical consequences in which bearing (the make-up, the accouterments, the lack) is being. When one of the men in the scene addresses another man in reference to myself, he has to say “she” or “her,” and at that point my feminine position feels not like a temporary product of an accident, but an irrevocable public inscription. Without an 330 Ibid, p. 12. On the ears as unsettling lamellae, we might remember my earlier accounts on the multiplicity of men’s laughter during a gangbang, and their conversations amongst themselves as though a (t-)girl was not in the room – as if she could not hear them. 255 element beyond “two” (him and I) I am bound within the gender-neutrality of the “you” – language fails to wound me with a violence that becomes me. Like fire starters, the male multiplicity lock my feminine position into place once my mediating presence puts them into relation. 331 As one Craigslist trick said to another right before cumming inside me, “This bitch would be a nigga’s best friend in jail…” Here, “this bitch” holds the gender legitimation function that a “she” guarantees when I am stuck not before man but between men: I am the reason for being for the male multiplicity – not to be confused with Preciado’s “multitude,” a hopeful queer concept set against the either/or ethos of “sexual difference.” 332 This setup authenticates my self as (fertile) woman through the male multitude’s speech. When man addresses another man in reference to me, he performs not only the function of “speaking to or about someone” but, and most importantly, a “way of approaching another such that one presumes who the other is, even the meaning and value of their existence,” as Judith Butler puts it in response to an unarmed black man’s addressing the (police) State with “Black Lives Matter,” a way of saying “You – white police officers – recognize my/our humanity!” In the gangbang, where a multiplicity of man genders me into place by the uttering of “she” or “her,” and by sharing my body as though they would a meal, the tone they use to hail each other reveals a belittlement of the negotiated feminine object. This belittlement reiterates she-ness as a filament, if not a net, safeguarding the men from 331 “The pussy is never yours…It’s just your turn!,” says the Internet meme. http://memegenerator.net/instance/53728866 (last accessed, Feb. 3, 2015) 332 Preciado, “Multitudes Queer: Notes Pour Une Politique Des Anormaux.” http://www.lespantheresroses.org/textes/multitudes_queer.htm (last accessed, Feb. 20, 2015). 256 taking each another for a she. As they negotiate the object among themselves, they negotiate themselves, and I am necessary. 333 333 Judith Butler and George Yancy, “What’s Wrong With ‘All Lives Matter’?”, The New York Times, January 12, 2015. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/whats- wrong-with-all-lives-matter/#more-155504 (last accessed January 21, 2015). 257 “June 27, 2014 When she read Daniel Cordier’s ‘Les Feux de Saint-Elme’ she had an urge to find Mohamed again, whatever the cost. She reached for her sunglasses quickly at various passages of the book because she knew she was about to only partially muffle a sob in public. The story of a regret. A disappearance. A disappointment. A disappointment only after the re-appearance. Cordier said ‘no’ to his beloved friend’s attempt at loving him back at age 9 and never re-covered. When they meet again they are 80 and disappearing seems like the only way out of disappointment. Paris reconstitutes her passion for language. She produces poetry and barely interrupted gangbangs. Scores of men from all over the city and its periphery. The online interfaces here don’t fight against libertinism, they conspire toward it. She doesn’t need to fight against their code to squeeze one or two men out of it. She has them come over nonstop from six in the afternoon until four in the morning every night. They always have something interesting to say, and very often something interesting to do with her body. Mostly focused violence. And they’re sweet afterwards. Especially if they are black. And they bring champagne. They are absolutely never on time, but when they arrive they are also not in a hurry. Which is good news if she is keen on them staying, and a nightmare if they don’t really please her – or if there are other men on their way, or already waiting for the building code downstairs. Unlike Americans, they like to insist. They insist to come over, they insist to keep fucking, they insist not to leave. They are tops. And they have no qualms about performing sex abusively. Maybe that shows more respect for women than the lukewarm sterility of American sex, she thinks, which refuses to offend, but in turn, refuses to give pleasure. Still, none of the over-100 men that must have fucked her in the past month have made the smallest gesture to stick around for non-sexual reasons. Some have managed to express such thoughts before meeting, or during the encounter. But once they leave, they’re as good as dead. And she begins to embrace the certainty that the point of dating is to rack up social points, which makes her ontologically undateable. No matter the quality of her wig, the roundness of her thighs, the girlishness of her voice, or even if she mustered up the courage to venture outdoors as a lady – with her trench coat covering up the slut inside, begging to be gang-raped by a group of Algerians in an alley even if it means they will slit her throat in the end. Before she was finished with the book, she learned to give up on Mohamed all over again, because she could perhaps find somebody else. And because, frankly, he could have looked for her too. And he did use her for money, and the sex wasn’t ever that great. But she wasn’t smooth shaven back then either. It is their language she is in love with. And the smallness of their bodies, the tightness of their clothes, the way their masculinity is so neurotic. The way she is sure to not understand them completely, and vice versa, keeping them both safely at arm’s length, perplexed, marveled, and not disgusted. She was supposed to have written many pages, visited many exhibits, and read many books. But she has produced crumbles, not works. She hasn’t advanced much, but she’s gone around a lot. She has practiced.” 258 Bibliography Barthes, Roland. “Leaving the Movie Theater.” In The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Edited by Phillip Lopate. Anchor Books, 1997, p. 418-422. Bersani, Leo. “Interview with Tracy D. Morgan.” In New Books in Psychoanalysis podcast, http://newbooksinpsychoanalysis.com/2012/03/19/leo-bersani-and-adam- phillips-intimacies-university-of-chicago-press-2008/ Butler, Butler and Yancy, George. “What’s Wrong With ‘All Lives Matter’?” In The New York Times, January 12, 2015. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/whats- wrong-with-all-lives-matter/#more-155504 Cusk, Rachel. Outline. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Debord, Guy. The Society of Spectacle: Annotated Edition. Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014. Despentes, Virginie. King Kong Théorie. Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2006. Dollimore, Jonathan. “Sexual Disgust.” In Homosexuality & Psychoanalysis. Edited by Tim Dean and Christopher Lane. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001, p. 367-186. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Edited and introduced by D. F. Bouchard. Translated by Buchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 139- 164. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization & Its Discontents. Martino Publishing, 2011. Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny’.” In Imago, 1919. Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. Freud Press, 2013. Giard, Agnès. “Pourquoi Les Bruits de Sécretion Excitent?” In Libération, Les 400 Culs, January 10, 2014. http://sexes.blogs.liberation.fr/agnes_giard/2014/10/il-y-a-toujours- une-forme-de-traumatisme-avec-la-sexualit%C3%A9-on-a-beau-avoir- %C3%A9tudi%C3%A9-les-organes-g%C3%A9nitaux-%C3%A0-l%C3%A9cole- et.html. Grigg, Russell. Why Freud’s Theory of Melancholia is All Wrong, talk at Kingston University. November 26, 2014. http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2014/11/russell-grigg- why-freuds-theory-of-melancholia-is-all-wrong/ 259 Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011. Haver, William. The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS. Stanford University Press, 1996. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques- Alain Miller. Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998) Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII: On A Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance (1971), translated by Cormac Gallagher. Loose, Erik. The Subject of Addiction: Psychoanalysis and the Administration of Enjoyment. Karnac Books, 2002. MacFarlane, Steve. “Level Five.” In Slant Magazine, August 12, 2014. http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/level-five Morgan, Richard. “Kicking the Facebook Habit.” In The New York Times, Sunday Review, September 28, 2014. Perlongher, Néstor. Prosa Plebeya: Ensayos 1980-1992. Ediciones Colihue S.R.L., 1997. Pettman, Dominic. Look At The Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology. Zero Books, 2013. Preciado, Beatriz. Manifeste Contra-Sexuel, Paris: Balland, 2000. Preciado, Beatriz. Testo Junkie: Sexe, Drogue et Biopolitique. Paris: Grasset, 2008. Ragland, Ellie. Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. Sáez, Javier and Carrascosa, Sejo. Por El Culo: Políticas Anales. Barcelona and Madrid: Egales, 2012. Valdés, Andrea. “Encarnar Disidencias, entrevista a Beatriz Preciado y Teresa Forcades.” In Parole de Queer, October 18, 2014. http://paroledequeer.blogspot.com/2014/10/encarnar-disidencias-entrevista-beatriz.html Webster, Jamieson. “The Accidents of Psychoanalysis.” In The New York Times, December 7, 2014, Sunday Review. Zizek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London and New York: Verso, 1997. 260 261 Like Analysis and AIDS “Felching is hot, creampies are tastey, and playing safe is dangerous” Boybutt, barebackrt.com “(…) what that realization caused me to feel was not so much disappointment at the situation but astonishment at the fantasy itself.” Rachel Cusk, Outline It is a rather perverse task for a text borne out of the pleasures of endless cruising to have to conclude itself. A work concerned with the interplay between technology and desire is certainly unlikely to find a good final word. It is also doubtful that it could ever catch up with the rapid advancements in the digital domain, as well as in the psychic register in its quest for avoiding to be duped by the very devices that make its enjoyment possible, and repeatable. These sessions have attempted to administer some conscious logic to the apparent incoherence, obscurity, and multiplicity of the unconscious while embracing it as the very non-site where a kind of truth lives. A truth that can be undone and re-membered every time that it is told. The sessions have allowed me to merge the ephemeral insights that happened upon me in the most appropriate and unlikely moments, from the scene of analysis before my own analyst to the climax in my bedroom once these strangers whom 262 I do not love, and who certainly do not love me, but who have inadvertently guided me to find theses words (and for that, I am highly appreciative), have left for the night. Only to soon return, although not soon enough. Instead of seeking the impossible object of the closure, I would like to think of these final pages in terms of a scansion, that most apt instance in the Lacanian analytic session when the analyst tells the patient that it is time for her to leave. That they will be seeing each other next time. Not because the stories have been extinguished, or because the feelings have been properly named. Not because the last words echoed the ring of the first ones quite beautifully, or because an agreement has been reached. Not even because the next analysand is already waiting, trying to listen to the words of the analysand who is still in the room with the curiosity of those who have never really met a other of their own ilk. But because something meaningful is produced if a cut is exacted at this very moment, inside the ricocheting of the last uttered sentence – whether this was a phrase teeming with incredible acumen, or one that let the analyst know that the analysand was no longer being honest, or vulnerable, or serious with herself. The scansion isn’t an ending, it is a cut, and a premature one. Its timing may be symbolically suitable, but it is felt as though it came too soon, or too late. Its arrival is uncomfortable. Its delivery is jarring. Either because the analysand wanted to stay and say more, or because it took too long to happen. It has the ring of an imposing silence, and the taste of well-intentioned abandonment. A tough love whose toughness seems quite clear, and whose lovingness feels trapped in non-actualizable promise. The scansion announces the promise of a next time, in a kind of (re-)signing of the pact 263 between analyst and analysand. The pact of duration, of the always-on-the-horizon cure, interminable like AIDS. The scansion echoes the object of desire too, in the sense that it bears the false impression of a limit, when the truth is that its intervention performs a sort of tide whose effects will last until the next session, and the session after that, and the session after that. It pushes forward, backward, sideways. It is this cutting that allows for a kinship of ideas to emerge, and while the pieces remain “out of place,” the scansion seems to push the subject into recognizing a relationship between whatever-it-is that the scansion is cutting apart. The idea that the next session will be the final one, however, that the next scansion will actually cut the subject off of the scene, the analysand off of the analyst, for good, never crosses my mind. Analytic sessions are open, without aim. There is no destination apart from where one is right now, which is always a mere word away from somewhere else. Sometimes not even that. Not even a word, but a sound, a flushing of the face, an indescribable feeling, or the astonishing realization that one has, at last, begun to do something else altogether with oneself instead of merely understanding that one should go ahead and do so. From the vantage point of this cut, a new phamarco-pornographic development that may be of the utmost importance for desire studies is a little pill called PrEP (pre- exposure prophylaxis), which may or may not embody what William Haver calls a “magic bullet” that would cure AIDS and the “lost object of desire if there ever was one.” Haver argues that even if such fantasy object came about, AIDS will unlikely be the last epidemic of its kind. And even if such “bullet” turned out to survive the litmus test of 264 science, as a panacea at the level of the physiological, it is unlikely that it could endure the demands of an unconscious that, as we have seen, beats to the sound of its own drum. A sound that we insist on not hearing, despite our meticulously choreographed and unavoidable dancing to its very beat. Future research regarding the relationship between desire, technology, and risk, that is, sex, should thus be rooted in a rigorous literacy of the mechanisms of desire, in their most sophisticated abstractions and their most unavowable sexual praxis. 334 If Didier Lestrade’s claim that PrEP has proven to be a commercial failure in the United States is correct, then, we have a good indication that sexual desire, or, desire as it unfolds literally in sex, bears at least one layer of immunity, and foreignness, vis-à-vis the promotion and commercialization of “desire” as a sublimating, displacing, and branding force against sexual Desire Itself. 335 Another conceptual kernel fundamental in Queerness Explained To My Mother that can be of service to the production of knowledge around desire as it plays out in global politics is in the way digital demands for the penis to be put to the phallic test – which it is bound to fail, and it knows – may trigger a panicked response from men (and women) in the shape of the parricide-producing brotherhood in various modes of re- enactment. 334 William Haver, The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 5. 335 Didier Lestrade, “VIH: Pourquoi La PrEP Ne Décolle Pas Aux Etats-Unis,” Slate.fr, April 16, 2015, http://www.slate.fr/story/100405/vih-truvada-pourquoi-la-prep-ne- decolle-pas-aux-etats-unis http://www.slate.fr/story/100405/vih-truvada-pourquoi-la-prep-ne-decolle-pas-aux-etats- unis 265 I see opportunities for the further deploying of this idea in the brotherhood of terror that ISIS ignites and celebrates in its visual spectacles, the literal terrorist brotherhood of Said and Cherif Kouachi of the Charlie Hedbo attacks and Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev of the Boston Marathon bombings, for example, as well as the recent lynching events in Brazil, where an eye-for-an-eye mob approach to justice has been gaining popularity. This trend has been made evident in the public punishment of supposed thieves (celebrated by certain journalists) and the massive right-wing street demonstrations against president Dilma Rousseff (and gays, and leftists, and workers, and trannies, and blacks, and so on), built around unabashed calls for (the return of) a military coup. Can we speak of a gangbang of terror? If so, and the rise in Western youths willing to join the ISIS phallus (is somewhere-else-all-together terrorism its last resort?) seems to indicate so, knowledge around desire – and desire for a particularly “barbaric” phallus that beheads any and all things along its path – should be on agendas that go much beyond that of psychoanalysis and queer theory.

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