revisiting the rectum & its grave

9 August 2023

in a study group for jewish liturgy i'm attending rn, we were translating the asher yatzar word-for-word. it was a great discussion; among other things, we were talking about the relation of the words נְקָבִים and חֲלוּלִים (n'kavim and chalulim) to their literal meaning of bodily orifices/bowels; their gestural meaning of pipes/channels/perforations/openings/holes; and then the root and verb-form meanings relating to desecration, breaking vows, profaning, blaspheming, etc. we were talking about how this makes sense intuitively in terms of the relation to the bowels, but also that the connection directly from openings/liminal spaces to desecration makes a lot of sense-- like, openings to something external from something internal as a (the?) potential channel to both sacredness and profanity. and i, oBvIoUsLy couldn't resist the temptation to bring up is the rectum a grave? and then afterwards reread it in full as i seem to do every few years.

lots of thoughts. much of it doesn't age well, much of it simply speaks to an earlier time, much of it is actually really incredible. it has in particular a rather thin understanding of social violence as something which seems to paradigmatically happen to "blacks" and "jews," the blueprints for all other violences for bersani, in a very 1980s white theorist sorta way that is nonetheless an embarrassment.

but a rather shocking take of bersani's seems to kind of be arguing that femininity is not sexualized in a gay context, only macho shit is? which is a truly stunning take. in a bathhouse context this makes sense to me. but like, trans women are famously Around in this period in urban gay scenes, hypersexualized, and not as distinct from Gay Male Identity as compared to today (partially as a result of AIDS era shifts in policy and politics). so it's rather stunning to see the complete and seemingly oblivious elision in a piece talking about uh, the resemblence of "gay male" sexuality to "female sexuality." like! sir!

a quote from later on in the piece, to show you what i mean:

[blah blah blah] the infinitely more seductive and intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman

like. sir. some people don't even try to refuse that suicidal ecstasy, and that image is famously at the root of several major genres of pornography because of its intolerableness. which bersani does Not seem to clock--- his reference is narrowly to masc4masc gay male scenes.

this quote on queer desire is rather evergreen however, and feels incredibly familiar when interpreted in a trans context i think:

The dead seriousness of the gay commitment to machismo (by which I of course don't mean that all gays share, or share unambivalently, this commitment) means that gay men run the risk of idealizing and feeling inferior to certain representations of masculinity on the basis of which they are in fact judged and condemned. The logic of homosexual desire includes the potential for a loving identification with the gay man's enemies

to skip an analogy to "blacks and jews"' respective subject formation processes that i don't think quite holds up, he goes on to say

[I]nternalization is in part constitutive of male homosexual desire, which, like all sexual desire, combines and confuses impulses to appropriate and to identify with the object of desire. An authentic gay male political identity therefore implies a struggle not only against definitions of maleness and of homosexuality as they are reiterated and imposed in a heterosexist social dis- course, but also against those very same definitions so seductively and so faithfully reflected by those (in large part culturally invented and elaborated) male bodies that we carry within us as permanently renewable sources of excitement.
. . .
If, as Weeks puts it, gay men "gnaw at the roots of a male heterosexual identity," it is not because of the parodistic distance that they take from that identity, but rather because, from within their nearly mad identification with it, they never cease to feel the appeal of its being violated

EVERGREEN statements on queer/trans subject formation.

The pastoralizing project could be thought of as informing even the most oppressive demonstrations of power. If, for example, we assume that the oppression of women disguises a fearful male response to the seductiveness of an image of sexual powerlessness, then the most brutal machismo is really part of a domesticating, even sanitizing project. The ambition of performing sex as only power is a salvational project, one designed to preserve us from a nightmare of ontological obscenity, from the prospect of a breakdown of the human itself in sexual intensities, from a kind of selfless communication with "lower" orders of being.
. . .
But what if we said, for example, not that it is wrong to think of so-called passive sex as "demeaning," but rather that the value of sexuality itself is to demean the seriousness of eflorts to redeem it?
. . .
The self is a practical convenience; promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence.

evergreen, i say!

and of course, couldn't neglect to shout out the perfect one-liner:

Women and gay men spread their legs with an unquenchable appetite for destruction.

if i hadn't transitioned over an atla slashfic this line would have done it at some point or another. criticisms aside, i am eternally in debt to the generations of gay sluts who have decided to write about the thing. their insights, even when radically opposed to my own understandings, are such a window into how much of my understanding of sex is not something i arrived at ahistorically and is rather a product of long, embarrassing debates about sex and desire that happened relatively recently.