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Soft openings

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Soft openings

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Soft Openings

by

Joshua Wade Rains

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS

August 2018

Copyright 2018
i
Table of Contents

Abstract.........................................ii
Soft Openings…………………....1
The Rim………………………….4
Penetration……………………….8
The Hole………………………..12
Waste…………………………...15
Bibliography……………………20
List of Figures ………………….21

ii
Abstract

The terrestrial globe has retained its enormity like a bald head, in the middle of which
the eye that opens on the void is both volcanic and lacustrine. It extends its disastrous
countryside into the deep folds of hairy flesh, and the hairs that form its bush are
inundated with tears. But the troubled feelings of a degradation even stranger than death
do not have their source in a typical brain: heavy intestines alone press under this nude
flesh, as charged with obscenity as a rear end—one that is just as satanic as the equally
nude bottom a young sorceress raises to the black sky at the moment her fundament
opens, to admit a flaming torch.
1

This is an essay inspired by the analogical language of Georges Bataille, the formative images I
drew as a kid, contemporary anal theory, and queerness as place.

1
Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R.
Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1985: 84
1
Soft Openings

The dramatically-lit room, flooded in yellowed-out light, looks nondescript: a white-
bricked back wall, out of focus, is reflected in the shiny, sealed, concrete floor. Along the
back wall, to the left, sit a row of “Big C” shoestring potato boxes, stacked like sugar
cubes. To the far right, multiple copies of a pastel brown, pink, and blue pony sit and
wait, glittering along the floor—a miniature army of ceramic doppelgangers picked up
from a suburban thrift store. In the foreground, further out of focus than the boxes and
ponies, a fleshy mound sits centered, its mass protruding upward. Harsh lighting casts
abstracted shadows across the form, while its symmetry implies a possible human figure.
Just behind the mound, sitting in sharp focus, in contrast to everything around it, a dusty
white plastic mirror is propped up against an unseen object, as if levitating on its own.
The mirror’s knobby white oval frame is flanked on the right by a ceramic Killer Whale
arcing backward, bulging past the mound of flesh in the foreground like a poorly-painted
phallus. A thick dick. Just off center in the mirror, visible past the dust and scratches
across its surface, bright highlights and dark shadows fall across an ass as it is offered up
to the viewer’s gaze. Faint hints of hair catch the light at the apex of the ass while
obscuring more intimate flesh as the eye moves downward. The white elastic bands of a
jockstrap constrict around legs that are spread wide; the back is arched, strained, in a
failed attempt to expose this intimate flesh. Flesh marked by violence, pleasure, filth,
desire, queerness, power, humiliation, dominance, and submission. The asshole is meant
to be centered: in the penetrable soft opening of the light; in the mirror; in the plastic
frame; in the room; in the photograph.
2
The desire to center the asshole in this work was, in fact, the point of the entire
solitary performance. The resulting image, Soft Openings (Figure 1), was taken within the
first couple of months after beginning my MFA program. It was the first time I had
access to any kind of photography or film equipment and I was immediately obsessed
with documenting explorations of the physical landscape, and limits, of my body. I was
particularly interested in time-lapse photography because you could set the camera to
take a picture at intervals. My thinking was, if the interval were large enough, I couldn’t
keep track of when a photograph would be taken, allowing me to lose myself in the
performance. I started the camera, and for over an hour, I tried to perfectly frame my ass
in a cheap plastic mirror, attempting to expose the flesh of my asshole.
This nascent documentary work, Soft Openings in particular, has become the
foundation on which my current body of work is built. There was a raw desire to expose
my asshole in that performance. I felt it. I wanted to sit in a critique while a room of
predominately (if not exclusively) heterosexual artists, across generations, attempted to
address the “hole on the wall” within the context of art school rhetoric.
The result: Hundreds of photos of me staging my ass for an absent audience,
toying with the idea of full anal presentation, timid in the beginning with thoughtful
explorations of light on the skin, to full-on double-handed ass-spread by the end of the
shots. A clear progression that surprised even myself. Yet, when it came time to critique
the work, I couldn’t do it. I actually wasn’t able to stomach the idea of being in a room
where the topic of conversation literally revolved around my asshole. Every memory of
being called a faggot, every fear of being chased down and taunted for how I sounded,
who and how I fucked, felt like it would be just as exposed as that soft, penetrable skin.
3
The embodiment of my own queerness concentrated into a singular physical point, a hole,
that took in beauty and pleasure as easily as it spewed forth shame and humiliation. The
rawness I felt at that moment is what I’ve held onto since making Soft Openings. It’s
what I’ve been using to guide me through the physical and mental practice of making art.
My practice has become the exposure of this hole, as queerness, through a self-taught
visual language that utilizes banal materials to lay bare the beautiful and pleasurable, but
often humiliating, desperate, and painful textures of queer sexuality.
In this essay I will analyze the conceptual elements of my work through the lens
of anal theorists like Paul Preciado, Leo Bersani, and Jennifer C. Nash. Using Bersani’s
seminal text, “Is The Rectum A Grave?”, I want to think about the ways in which queer
anality has been associated with destruction and how that residual mental trace shaped
my personal experience of “otherness” as a working-class gay boy in small-town
Oklahoma. I turn to Preciado’s “Contra-Sexual Manifesto” and Nash’s “Black Anality”
to counter the limited perspective with which Bersani approaches anality. I’m particularly
interested in engaging Preciado’s “universality of the anus” with Nash’s concept of
“spatiality” as a new analytic through which to theorize the asshole as a window into
another space. Slowly, gently, I open this space up with José Muñoz’s ideas on queer
utopia and Lauren Berlant, and Michael Warner’s thoughts on queer worldmaking. Using
these readings as a conceptual foundation and the personal writings and artwork of queer
artist/activist David Wojnarowicz to engage with my own personal experiences, I hope to
expand on the idea of queerness as a “space” that I access in and through my workings
with the anus.
4
The Rim

The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus. Although
this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails. Those
contents shoot out with a racket and fall back, streaming down the sides of the
jesuve, spreading death and terror everywhere.
2

When I try and talk about my work, it’s difficult because I make work about a dark and
nebulous part of me. Within me. About something that festered and boiled in the
crevasses of my mind, my body. Unconsciously tucked away, calcified over, walled-off
and hidden from the rough hands and fists of the heterosexual, normative blue-collar
world that shaped my childhood and adolescence. At its core, constricted within cords of
sinew, bone, and blood vessels, pulses a wet, raw queerness. In all its facets. Therefore,
when I’m asked to explain my work, I am indirectly being forced to decode a mode of
existence that, so eloquently put by José Muñoz, functions “outside the dominant public
sphere’s visible historical narrative.”
3
Queerness, as a mode of survival, almost rejects
identification. As Muñoz continues,
Queerness is often transmitted covertly. This has everything to do with the
fact that leaving too much of a trace has often meant that the queer subject
has left herself open for attack. Instead of being clearly available as visible
evidence, queerness has instead existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting
moments, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those

2
Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, 8
3
José Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women and
Performance 8, no. 2 (1996): 5
5
within its epistemological sphere—while evaporating at the touch of those
who would eliminate queer possibility.
What Muñoz is pointing out, which I often refer to as the “understoodness” of being
queer, when mobilized as an integral aspect of your work, often becomes the work’s
biggest obstacle. Its language is as delicate as much as it is invisible. Its history has been
erased and a wave of death took its teachers, leaving you to stumble through it alone.
The pursuit of this “evidence,” this evaporated mist, consumed me as a kid
because I knew that I was different. I also knew that I didn’t know why. I feverishly
desired to know what made me different because I was afraid. I was growing up in small-
town Oklahoma during the 1980s and 90s where any alternative to a heteronormative
existence simply didn’t exist. I lived in the country. I was shy. Small. Effeminate. Few
friends. No cable. My house was at the bottom of a hill from a large Southern Baptist
congregation appropriately named Church on the Rock. Its billboard extolling the sadistic
fate of those that participated in the many sins of the world in catchy metaphors and
rhyming quotes. It was blinding at night and cast a long shadow during the day. I had a
long list of things I didn’t want to be.
Learning about sex only complicated my understanding of identity. I was
introduced to sex early. As a child, actually. And shortly after, almost fortuitously, I
found my dad’s substantial stash of porn magazines. I was immediately drawn to the
adult bodies on those pages, the way they were twisted around one another. How they fit
together. Naked bodies became the format in which I explored difference. At first, a
simple practice in sneaking peeks at “dirty” magazines evolved into longer tracing
sessions of the bodies. Over time, these sessions began to form the foundation of an
6
extensive mental inventory of the human body: posed, bent, wet, dominated,
subordinated, grotesque and beautiful. I have been drawing sexual imagery ever since.
But I wasn’t satisfied. I didn’t understand these images as representational of my
own difference. I wasn’t there in the image and I wasn’t there in the trace. I wanted to see
myself. So, I started making my own figures. On scraps of paper stolen from my mom’s
office, I made crude sketches of the human form pressed up against other forms.
Sketches that could be easily disposed of at the bottom of the trash should anyone walk in
on me unexpectedly. Vestiges of this practice can be seen in some of the earlier drawing
studies for my current body of work as my mind began to lightly probe the outer rim of
my subconscious (Figure 2). Minefields of disproportionate legs covered breasts while
turgid dicks pointed straight up to the sky, littering the surface of cheap tracing paper,
crudely drawn for maximum visual efficacy and easily disposable. Over and over again,
like a leakage of demons, pouring out onto the paper like waste.
As I got older, and sexual imagery became easier to obtain, the more I used them
as reference material to visualize the desires that circulated within my head. Bodies,
drawn from memory, or traced from comic books, became multi-dicked gods and
goddesses who fucked their way across a sheet of printer paper, tossed into the trash as
soon as it was completed. I felt I needed to make these images. I was also deeply
ashamed of what I was doing. But not alone.
This practice of restructuring reality through popular images as an attempt to
develop a vocabulary for desires and experiences, and the fear and shame that threatens
to obliterate that practice, is mirrored in the early practices of the American multi-
disciplinary artist David Wojnarowicz. His work, ranging from painting, photography,
7
writing, filmmaking, and performance, often dealt with the realities of being gay and HIV
positive during the first wave of the AIDS pandemic in New York City during the 80s
and 90s. As Wojnarowicz writes in his memoir, Close to the Knives:
I remember having curiosity about sex and wondering why there was no
sex in the world of Archie–the world of Riverdale. I remember taking a
razor and cutting apart some Archie comics and gluing pieces of their
bodies in different places so that Archie and Veronica and Reggie and
Betty were fucking each other… After hours of cutting and pasting I had a
comic that reflected a whole range of human experience that was usually
invisible to me. But at the first sound of the key in the front door I’d throw
everything away. I was curious, but I wasn’t stupid.
4

Two faggots creating imagery of what they desired to see in the world, and immediately
destroying it before someone caught them red-handed. Like Wojnarowicz, I was curious,
but not stupid: being caught with such material carried the threat of physical and
emotional violence. In such a context, I was already perfecting the historical
ephemerality, the “fleeting moment” as Muñoz described it, of a queer existence.

4
David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (NY: Vintage,
1991), 157
8
Penetration
…the anus is the night.
5

To give context to this practice, I want to explain the terrain in which I was navigating
my own sexuality at the time. My cycle of image making and erasing began in the late
80s and continued through the mid 90s. I was coming of age, sexually, while the AIDS
pandemic was in full swing. New York City was far away and its problems even farther.
AIDS was something you worried about in big cities. Where fags lived. Like everyone
else around me, I knew two things about faggots: they got fucked in the ass and they died
of AIDS.
Three things: People said I was faggot.
I find Leo Bersani’s canonical piece, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”, useful when
thinking about the degree to which the physical act of anal sex (fucking in the ass)
between homosexual men (faggots) was attached to death and disease at the time. Written
in 1987, Bersani dissects the public representation of gay sex during the height of the
AIDS Crisis in New York City while paying particular attention to, “a certain aversion,
an aversion that is not the same thing as a repression.”
6
Throughout the essay, Bersani
critiques this coupling of gay sex with disease while also drawing attention to what he is
referring to as the “aversion” of discussing gay sex amidst the hysterical fear building
around AIDS. He bristles at the overall portrayal of the general public as:
“Innocent victims.” It is as if gay men’s “guilt” were the real agent of
infection. And what is it, exactly, that they are guilty of? Everyone agrees

5
Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, 9
6
Leo Bersani. "Is the Rectum a Grave?" October, vol. 43, AIDS: Cultural
Analysis/Cultural Activism (Winter 1987): 198
9
that the crime is sexual, and [Simon] Watney, along with others, defines it
as the imagined or real promiscuity for which gay men are so famous…
Since the promiscuity here is homosexual promiscuity, we may, I think,
legitimately wonder if what is being done is not as important as how many
times it’s being done. Or, more exactly, the act being represented may
itself be associated with insatiable desire, with unstoppable sex.
7

What’s interesting here, which Bersani is clearly working to unearth, is the way in which
gay sex became the vilified behavior that seemed to be inextricably tied to the virus
ravaging queer, brown, and black communities in New York City at the time.
Simultaneously, gay sex was being erased from the public discourses about sex
and desire. In fact, the public’s conversation about homosexuals since the AIDS crisis
began still aligned itself with 19
th
century representations of female prostitutes, “as
contaminated vessels, conveyancing ‘female’ venereal diseases to ‘innocent men.’”
8

Bersani makes this comparison to, “help us specify the exact form of sexual behavior
being targeted, in representations of AIDS, as the criminal, fatal, and irresistibly repeated
act. This is of course anal sex.”
9
For Bersani it is the actual act of anal penetration, or
more specifically, the act of being penetrated by another man, and its destructive power,
that became so feared that it rendered itself unmentionable. Invisible.
Both Bersani and Wojnarowicz were creating work during this extremely volatile
political moment in queer history. In both their writings, as well as Wojnarowicz’s visual

7
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” 210
8
Cited in Ibid, 211
9
Ibid, 211
10
art, they attempted to address the inability of society at the time to articulate gay sex in
any form other than invisible or an act of violence and destruction. Bersani, using popular
discourse around AIDS during that time, highlights the degree to which Americans were
unable to confront the very idea of gay sex. As thousands began to die in New York City,
what became important was drawing the division between “innocent victims” and those
that, by marginalization, weren’t so innocent. Wojnarowicz screams for attention to be
paid to the collateral damage of such a practice. However, as evident in his 1990 piece
Untitled (One day This Kid…) (Figure 3), Wojnarowicz turns the blame from the activity
of anal sex to the systemic failures of a system that stigmatized queer people. Sentences
pour out over an image of the artist as a child, engulfing him in harsh statements about
the reality of being a faggot at that very moment. In his memoir, Wojnarowicz writes, “I
know I’m not going to die merely because I got fucked in the ass without a condom, or
because I swallowed a stranger’s semen. If I die it is because a handful of people in
power, in organized religions and political institutions, believe that I am expendable.”
10

Faggots fucked in the ass. Faggots died of AIDS.
Even though I was far removed from New York City, these were the details that
sifted down to me. These matter of fact statements were stripped of any context,
sharpened, and spat out so confidently and with so much hate that I feared questioning
them. It was in this space that I built my understanding of queerness. Not necessarily as a
sexuality, but as a mode of existence in which you navigated through the constantly
shifting landscape around you. On this shaky ground, as it attempts to expose itself, to
present, queer sexuality is penetrated. When asked to define itself, it has to use a

10
Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, 230
11
language that has historically ignored or displaced it. In this muted state, it is asked to
define itself in dominant imagery and narratives. And when these images are consumed,
forced inside, they inevitably spew back out into the world, dissolved and repurposed in a
vain attempt to create a form in its own queer likeness. Something to be ashamed of. A
body to be quickly buried without a trace. Expendable.
I view my current practice as an interrogation of this cycle.
12
The Hole
When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene. It
betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a
demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.
11

To interrogate queerness, as I saw it, necessitated the conceptual, as well as visual,
“recentering” of the asshole in my creative practice. As I’ve mentioned, sex, and its
relation to the body, have been central structures in my creative process as far back as I
am able to recall. As a strategy, as opposed to shying away from this impulse, I’m
interested in the explicit use of anal sex, and anality, as a muse born from the physical,
the social, and the political representations of the asshole as a site of ecstasy, beauty,
desire, regeneration, death, destruction, and obliteration.
I am particularly drawn to the asshole because of its physical potential for
universality. The human body, in all its presentations, has at least one anus. The unifying
potential of this commonality is outlined in Paul Preciado’s “The Contra-Sexual
Manifesto” as three fundamental characteristics:
One: the anus is a universal erogenous centre situated beyond the
anatomical limits imposed by sexual difference, where the roles and
registers appears as universally reversible (who has no anus?). Two: the
anus is the primordial zone of passivity, a centre for the excrement of
excitement and pleasure that does not appear on the list of prescribed
orgasmic points. Three: the anus constitutes a space of technological

11
Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, 8
13
labour; it is a factory for the re-elaboration of the posthuman,
countersexual body. The work of the anus does not point to reproduction,
nor does it ground a romantic nexus. It generates benefits that cannot be
measured in a heterocentered economy. For the anus, it doesn’t give a shit
for the traditional system of representation of sex/gender.
12

We are all able to physically register the concept of the asshole, its texture, how it
responds to touch, what has been in, and out, of its fleshy opening. The asshole becomes
universal terrain that we have all had an intimate and specific relationship. In addition, it
falls outside the “heterocentered” analytics of orgasmic, reproductive, or romantic.
Unrestrained, the asshole is allowed to function, to stand in for, any body. All bodies. A
universal terrain that can open up, exposing the space inside.
It’s at this point, when thinking about the asshole and its relationship to space, I
turn to Jennifer C. Nash’s 2014 article, “Black Anality.” Within it, Nash examines, “how
black women can strategically deploy anal ideologies to expose the kinds of pleasures
black subjects can take in blackness—its hyperboles and painful fictions—or to expose
anal ideologies themselves, revealing how blackness is constructed and produced
alongside (and inside) the anal opening.”
13
For Nash, a shift toward the asshole allows
black feminist theorists to use spatiality as a new analytic to consider how sexuality,
specifically black female sexuality, is imagined to be rooted to particular physical spaces
in the world. The asshole, essentially, becomes a window into these spaces.

12
B. Paul Preciado, “The Contra-Sexual Manifesto,” Total Art Journal vol. 1,
no. 1 (2011)
13
Jennifer Nash, “Black Anality.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies vol. 20,
no. 4 (2014): 440
14
Thinking back to how Bersani drew attention to the ways in which the public
linked anal sex with both disease and the sexual practices of gay men, it’s interesting to
apply Nash’s more inclusive look at the potentiality of the asshole. Not as an unspoken
source of death, but as a window. A look directly into that knotted ball of flesh and bone
to view what Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner call the “architecture of queer space in
a homophobic environment.”
14
But, instead of linking the image of the asshole to a real
geographic space and time, I want to take Nash a step farther, linking that window to a
view of a possible queer utopia.

14
Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Winter
1998): 551
15
Waste
The bald summit of the anus has become the center, blackened with
bushes, of the narrow ravine cleaving the buttocks.
15

I have attempted to track the development of my work in two ways. First, as a child,
through the cyclical process of image appropriation (and proliferation) used to give form
to my queerness, and its unavoidable destruction, reducing its existence to mere
ephemera. Second, I traced the potential of recentering the asshole to subvert this erasure
through theoretical writings on anality by Bersani, Nash, and Preciado. My current body
of work, the Untitled Landscape series (Figures 4-10), unites this image making process
within this conceptual framework.
Each drawing appears at first, from a distance, as a concentration of activity in an
expanse of blank paper. Unidentifiable. Upon closer inspection, the activity seems to take
shape, like a startled school of fish just below the surface, a disruption on, and in, the
paper (Figure 6). These small fish, tiny scratches of black ink on the smooth white
surface, scatter to become hills, canyons, waterfalls, and the flora of a bizarre landscape.
Slabs of earth slide past and into one another as water pours out of mountainsides,
disappearing into caves and sinkholes. Stepping back again, the holes and dark crevices
appear as both the source, and the termination, for the black ink. Off-center and floating,
these landscapes appear as if they are growing, like a wet spot of mold, an island of flesh.
Or maybe they are dying, collapsing in on themselves like a rotting carcass.

15
Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, 89
16
Initially inspired by the analogical language in Georges Bataille’s surrealist text
The Solar Anus, I began thinking of the formative images I drew as a kid as a type of
landscape in which my own archive of imagery could be used as a language. Starting
from one single point, one single hole, I began to work outward, extrapolating a fantasy
world that represented both the flesh in which we rise, and the earth to which we fall. In
the same way that Bataille uses geographic language and poetics to explore anality, I
wanted to use geographic imagery and textures to formulate my own Jesuve, which he
describes as, “The image of an erotic movement that burglarizes the ideas contained in
the mind, giving them the force of a scandalous eruption.”
16
I was interested in forms
that could be both sensual and grotesque. Like nature. Like the body. As I worked,
thinking of land as body, the asshole became a cave. A hole.
A hole with disruptive potential. When this site gets read as an asshole, which
simply “occurs” because of my homosexuality whether I intended it to or not, it becomes
an active site in which we can apply the anal theorizations of both Bersani and Nash.
First, I want to reference Bersani again to speak about the destructive potential he found
in the asshole. As Bersani noted, “If the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal
(an ideal shared–differently–by men and women) of proud subjectivity is buried, then it
should be celebrated for its very potential for death.”
17
This celebration came from the
dual nature of the anus: that which penetrates is destroyed by infection while that which
is penetrated is obliterated through the abdication of power and “the terrifying appeal of a

16
Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, 8
17
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” 222
17
loss of the ego, of a self-debasement.”
18
For Bersani, the anus should be exalted because
of its potential to destroy the “masculine ideal.” Nash adds, “Bersani proposes an anal
ethics where the imagined location of gay male shame—the anal opening—is a site of
productive and transgressive self-shattering, and where the rectum acts as a grave where
ideas of selfhood are productively—and perhaps pleasurably—buried.”
19
For Bersani,
these holes, these graves, mark the death of selfhood.
Nash, on the other hand, suggest we use these holes as a way of thinking about the
real spatiality associated with the asshole. If we are able to think of the destruction of
selfhood as one enters this space according to Bersani, and its potential for universality
via Preciado, does that not open up the space to the possibility for the “unreal”? The
unimaginable? The utopic? José Muñoz, in his seminal queer text Cruising Utopia,
expands on this idea of imagined spatiality, while capitalizing on the shortcomings of
Bersani’s theorizations, by also thinking about utopic spaces.
Bersani’s work does not allow itself to entertain utopian hopes and
possibilities… Utopia lets us imagine a space outside of
heteronormativity. It permits us to conceptualize new worlds and realities
that are not irrevocably constrained by the HIV/AIDS pandemic and
institutionalized state homophobia. More important, utopia offers us a
critique of the present, of what is, by casting a picture of what can and
perhaps will be.
20

18
Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” 220
19
Nash, “Black Anality,” 444
20
José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NY: NYU
Press, 2009), 34-35
18
What does this queer utopia look like? It is possibly what Berlant and Warner
referred to as the, “radical aspirations of queer culture building: not just a safe zone for
queer sex but the changed possibilities of identity, intelligibility, publics, culture, and sex
that appear when the heterosexual couple is no longer the referent or the privileged
example of sexual culture.”
21
This space becomes foreign, unrecognizable because we
haven’t seen it. We have no idea of what it might look like. We have no experience of it
to build our perceptions of its terrain. We can’t look through pictures of it, pull out maps,
or travel across it ourselves. It is not real.
It is this unknown that I am attempting to chart. To explore the potential of this
new space, or as Muñoz said, what can and perhaps will be. New landscapes that begin as
inky black caves on paper. Holes that can simultaneously destroy selfhood as well as give
us a vision of the possible spatiality that might reside on the other side. The inside. Holes
that serve as the beginning points in an expanse of white silence, void of language and
images, marred by a dark and unforgiving history. From this impenetrable blackness
pours hair, grass, hills, breasts, valleys, waves, mountains, peaks, rivers, waterfalls, and
genitals. Space takes form. Minuscule traces of lived experiences litter this unfamiliar
ground, perceptible to some, but missed by others.
Slowly, this white void becomes infecting with a new physical geography. What
didn’t exist before grows out from the blackness, giving rise to a foreign, queer
landscape. Abstracted land that allows for a less prescribed image to find oneself. A
space in which you are uncomfortable, unsure, afraid, yet hopeful. It is at most
undiscovered territory, rife with the simultaneity of beauty and abjection, pleasure and

21
Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 548
19
danger, safety and violence. The potential to rebuild here, to create something new seems
almost limitless, bound only by the constrained imagination of the viewer, the artist, the
queers. To make space. To take up space.

20
Bibliography
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Translated by
Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. Edited by Allan Stoekl
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24 (Winter 1998):
547-566
Bersani, Leo. "Is the Rectum a Grave?" October, vol. 43, AIDS: Cultural
Analysis/Cultural Activism (Winter 1987): 197-222.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.
New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009.
Muñoz, José Esteban. "Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts."
Women and Performance 8, no. 2 (1996): 5-17.
Nash, Jennifer C. “Black Anality.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies vol. 20,
no. 4 (2014): 439-460
Preciado, Beatriz (B. Paul). "The Contra-Sexual Manifesto." Total Art Journal vol. 1,
no. 1 (2011). Available at http://totalartjournal.com/archives/1402/the-contra-
sexual-manifesto/
Wojnarowicz, David. Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. NY: Vintage,
1991.
21
List of Figures

Figure 1.

Rains, Joshua. Soft Openings, 2017. Digital Print, 30 in. x 20 in.

22
Figure 2.

Rains, Joshua. Untitled, 2017. Graphite on tracing paper, 30.5 in. x 24 in.
23
Figure 3.

Wojnarowicz. Untitled (One day This Kid…), 1990. Photostat, 30 in. x 41 in.

24
Figure 4.

Rains, Joshua. Untitled Landscape 2, 2018. Ink on cold-press watercolor paper, 60 in. x 49 in.

25
Figure 5.

Rains, Joshua. Untitled Landscape 2 (detail), 2018. Ink on cold-press watercolor paper, 60 in. x 49 in.
26
Figure 6.

Rains, Joshua. Untitled Landscape 2 (detail), 2018. Ink on cold-press watercolor paper, 60 in. x 49 in.
27

Figure 7.

Rains, Joshua. Untitled Landscape 1, 2017. Ink on cold-press watercolor paper, 60 in. x 49 in.

28
Figure 8.

Rains, Joshua. Untitled Landscape 1 (detail), 2017. Ink on cold-press watercolor paper, 60 in. x 49 in.

29
Figure 9.

Rains, Joshua. Untitled Landscape 3, 2018. Ink on cold-press watercolor paper, 60 in. x 49 in.

30
Figure 10.

Rains, Joshua. Untitled Landscape 3 (detail), 2018. Ink on cold-press watercolor paper, 60 in. x 49 in.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This is an essay inspired by the analogical language of Georges Bataille, the formative images I drew as a kid, contemporary anal theory, and queerness as place.

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Conduit/container

Asset Metadata

Creator Rains, Joshua Wade (author)

Core Title Soft openings

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Fine Arts

Publication Date 07/05/2018

Defense Date 08/08/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag anal theory,B. Paul Preciado,David Wojnarowicz,Georges Bataille,Jennifer Nash,José Muñoz,Lauren Berlin,Leo Bersani,Michael Warne,OAI-PMH Harvest,queer theory

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Bustamante, Nao (committee chair), Campbell, Andrew (committee member), Tongson, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email drawjoshdraw@gmail.com,joshuawr@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-510632

Unique identifier UC11267300

Identifier etd-RainsJoshu-6373.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-510632 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-RainsJoshu-6373.pdf

Dmrecord 510632

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Rains, Joshua Wade

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA