Becoming Male
Be what you are becoming, without clinging to what you might have been, what you might yet be. Never settle. Let’s leave definitiveness to the undecided; we don’t need it (Irigaray 1985b, 214).
The Deleuzian notion of ‘becoming’ (adapted from Nietzsche) unhinges the subject from ideals of a natural, true, achieved self, and instead positions subjectivity as variable, ever-changing, in continuous flux. As “a multiple and constant process of transformation” (Braidotti 1994, 111), becoming is about the process of the (ever-transforming) self, rather than self as substance (Lorraine 1999). The self achieved, or arrived at, implies an end point. But the ‘becoming’ subject never becomes. It never reaches a final destination, unlike the becoming agent of psychoanalysis – that maps out the development of men and women. The Deleuzian subject lacks foundation, and denies traditional notions of the self and desire.
Deleuze and Guattari look at the body in light of what it can do, its potentiality, rather than what it means (Williams & Bendelow 1998, 107). Through their theories, the body represents a “complex interplay of highly constructed social and symbolic forces” (Braidotti 1994, 112). In other words, it is not tied to an essence or a biological foundation, but “is a play of forces, a surface of intensities; pure simulacra without originals” (ibid.). It is a site of infinite possibilities.
Deleuze and Guattari reject the basis of psychoanalysis that privileges the role and influence of parent figures in the subject’s psyche:
How could this body have been produced by parents, when by its very nature it is such eloquent witness of its own self-production, or its own engendering of itself? (Deleuze & Guattari 1983, 15).
The Oedipus complex itself can be considered a social construct, as something grounded in, and configured through, Western philosophical thought (Deleuze & Guattari 1983). Deleuze and Guattari view Oedipalisation as “a predominantly European (bourgeois) phenomenon that distorts and represses the productive nature of desire” (Williams & Bendelow 1998). For them, desire is not about lack, as Lacan would have it, but it is productive – the human is a ‘desiring-machine’ (1983).
The desiring-machine is hosted by the body without organs (BwO), a concept that exists beyond material bodies, refusing the nature of anatomy, refusing the body that lacks. The BwO is an assemblage, an ongoing production of desire. The body, as desiring-machine, assembles – everything is an assemblage, “[e]verything is a machine” (Deleuze & Guattari 1983, 2). The BwO is a site of domination as well as resistance and refusal (Fox 1999, 123), where the subject is decentred, and in constant flux. It “refers indistinguishably to human, animal, textual, sociocultural, and physical bodies”(Grosz 1994, 168), highlighting the interconnectedness of all matter and all bodies. It does not reject the existence of organs, but rather, the organisation of organs/ the organism (ibid. 169-70). It also evades propriety – it cannot be owned by the subject, or by anyone. For it is not an object, a tangible body, but the connection point between desiring-machines and desiring-production. The subject:
…is not at the center, which is occupied by the machine, but on the periphery, with no fixed identity, forever decentered, defined by the states through which it passes” (Deleuze & Guattari 1983, 20).
The unstable subject allows an ongoing becoming and refutes any sense of being. Deleuze and Guattari speak about becoming-woman, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible – becomings that challenge categories of self, and distinctions between self and other. As a constant process, the BwO allows a nomadic existence that is unhinged and ever-changing (Deleuze & Guattari 1983 and 1987). Nomadology is seen “as a process, as a line of flight which continually resists the sedentary, the single fixed perspective” (Fox 1999, 133).
The work of Deleuze has many similarities to that of Irigaray, in that neither rely upon foundational structures of identity and reject ideas of a core, natural, true, self. Neither of them can accept the maps of psychoanalysis, history by repetition. It is not that they deny history, but they reject ideologies that contain, shape, and position the character of ‘being’ – as a certainty, an achievement of Oedipalisation.
…the process of oedipalisation produces male bodies as virile, phallic, active and aggressive, and restricts male pleasures to a singular, goal-directed, genital and orgasmic form. The price paid for his identification with the phallus is the abandonment of his corporeality (Grosz 1989, 118).
In Irigaray’s theories of sexual difference, woman is not determined by man, the other, and nor is she definable as ‘woman’ – “Woman is a common noun for which no identity can be defined” (1985a, 130). For Irigaray, sexual difference is not a fact, or an assertion, but rather a question. Posed as such, it “remains, more or less permanently, to interrogate” (Butler 2004, 178).
While Irigaray supports sexual difference, Deleuze wants to explode categories of sex, dissolving gender into a multisexed subjectivity. He is critical of feminism that defines itself through the feminine, arguing that this is restrictive, and that it would be best for women to “draw on the multisexed structure of the subject and claim back all the sexes of which women have been deprived” (Braidotti 1994, 116). Braidotti states: “Deleuze’s theory of becoming is obviously determined by his location as an embodied male subject” (1994, 122) – such a proposal reliant upon an ignorance of sexual difference that is unlikely to come from a woman. Further, and evidenced by this, it can be said that “any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the ‘masculine’” (Irigaray 1985a, 133).
For phallocentrism to fall, its foundations need to be eroded. Might this be achieved through re-writing, re-situating the male body, as that which cannot represent the phallus? That which rises and falls with desire? Grows and shifts, and is spoken/written/lived through contradiction? The body, as the self, is a process. As is writing the body. As is opening up his body, exploring all that passes through and around him, becoming aware of the mucous that holds him together. That keeps his flow alive and ensures a slipperiness with which the phallus cannot attach itself. It too, becoming liquid, a flow that passes, blends, dilutes its self. The male body as soft and pliable. An ongoing realisation, never realised, unrealisable. A tear in the page of history.
The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo – that is what Virginia Woolf lived with her energies, in all of her work, never ceasing to become (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 276-77).
Abjections
The flesh that men occupy stinks, fucks, shits, is written on, is blown apart, is fetishized, triumphs, fails, and eventually dies. It is so complex and multileveled that the more I approach this exploration the more humbled and silenced I feel in trying to talk about it (Miller 2001, 280).
According to Mary Douglas, everything in the social world symbolises the body and vice versa (1994). In Purity and Danger, Douglas draws parallels between a social body and the human bodies that constitute it, with individuals and society engaged in a continual exchange – each informing the body of the other. Through anthropological studies, Douglas reveals how social threats and dangers are reflected in the ordering and control of individual bodies within that society (1994). From this, notions of purity and danger arise, and bodily anxieties about pollution, invasion, dirt and disease are reflected back into social practices.
Julia Kristeva extends upon Douglas’s theory of defilement, and believes that the subject is constituted on the basis of her/his separation from the abject self – the self that produces waste in the form of faeces, menstrual blood, urine, vomit, pus, spit, etc (1982). According to Kristeva, the abject challenges the unity of bodies, as that which enters and exits the body, extending upon the body, disrupting the separation between bodily interior/exterior. Therefore, one’s subjectivity relies upon a continued distancing and denial of the abject – keeping at bay that which threatens the subject/object division that stabilises the subject within her/his world, enabling them to speak of the self (Grosz 1989, 71).
I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself (Kristeva 1982, 3).
Abjection realises that the improper/unclean/disorderly is never fully eradicated. It is always just beyond the boundaries of the body (the borders of our existence). Kristeva goes on to say that “I” expel, until the “I” is expelled. To expel waste is to live, and it is only when one stops expelling that one ceases to exist, that one becomes a corpse, the ultimate abjection.
Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit – cadere, cadaver (Kristeva 1982, 3).
Both Douglas and Kristeva acknowledge the dangers that exist at the margins of the body, whereby the body’s openings are vulnerable spaces, powerful and dangerous. “[A]ll margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered” (Douglas 1994, 122). Bodily orifices as representative of the subject’s vulnerability can be likened to borders and social thresholds of nations, societies, communities – the fears involving the entry of dirt, disease, the foreign ‘other’.
An anthropological example of the Coorgs (a society of Southern India) is used by Douglas to highlight parallels of social/individual body borders. In this society, the entry and exit points of bodies are heavily guarded, and it is taboo to take in certain foods on the basis of what they symbolise, just as the society itself is wary of foreign matter/people (1994, 123-4). Through her work, Douglas articulates the reciprocity between social and bodily anxieties, and how the body is deeply invested with notions of social cleanliness. This can be seen in contemporary Western cultures through current anxieties about national border control, fears of ‘terrorism’, HIV prevention, and the threat of Avian Influenza (from Eastern nations). Implicit in such things are broader fears of ‘other’ races, cultures, sexualities – others who might be considered ‘abject’ – threatening the decay of Western ideals.
In the 1980s, sex became more dangerous for many people. In the Western world, sexual fluids became lethal, carrying the power of contamination, and sexual desire became entwined with possible death for many homosexual men (Butler 1996). The ‘battle’ against HIV/AIDS has been fought through stopping the flow of the body’s fluids – desire captured in a condom, disposed of accordingly. The concept of self-protection has been a major factor in gay male sexuality for over twenty years in Australia, as well as among heterosexuals, but to a lesser extent. To what degree might the threat of HIV have propelled social fears of gay men? It may also explain why some people felt that HIV was a necessary social cleanser, filtering out impure citizens, punishment for perversion – a danger found in the impurity of anal sex, symbolised by the dirt therein. To an extent, gay men themselves sanitise gayness (a reaction to HIV discourse, perhaps), shield desires, and downplay the existence of dirty fucking – “The horror of looking at male same sex desire is itself normalised into invisibility. Naturalised” (Hurley 2003, 52).
In Western cultures, women’s promiscuity is often associated with danger, her moral (and bodily) boundaries perhaps aligned with those of a nation – that which is inhabited, and protected (by those that colonise her) from the dangers and pollutions of others. The female body, according to Plato, is but a receptacle – existing only to be filled by men and infants (Irigaray 1993a; Butler 1993). As receptacles, women have the potential to hold, to hide, to incubate disease. Ideas of women as polluting can be found in an Australian study in which young heterosexual males discuss their tactics for HIV prevention (Waldby et al. 1993). To avoid contact with HIV, these men relied upon “an imaginary margin of safety, a cordon sanitaire”, in which ‘clean’ women were sorted from ‘unclean’ women (ibid. 31). Here, ‘unclean’ women were not so much allocated as having diseases, but of being diseased. In this sense, the disease is the woman. Femaleness as a ‘fillable’ vessel allows men to associate women “with the idea of festering putrefaction, no longer contained simply in female genitals but at any or all points of the female body” (Grosz 1994, 206).
As external beings, and beings who project their abject onto other identities, the heterosexual male seems exempt from social anxieties about disease – that which is ‘contained’ within bodies. Seemingly only bodies that open themselves to dangerous desires. Accordingly, it is mostly women and gay men who are equated with risk, via their ability to infect the unknowing man/nation – the potential to destroy populations with the ever-possible diseases that lurk within such ‘open’ beings. As well as through his non-receptivity, the heterosexual male body is external by way of his genitals – as visible, outside the body, somewhat detached. Unlike the body that receives fluid, impurity, and disease, the exterior penis-body can wash the dirt away. The penis is visible, watched, washed, as opposed to the hidden, unwatchable, dirty vagina. That which cannot be washed, dried, and put away like the penis object. “It is not obscene for it is visible” says the female narrator of Pornocracy – “Cocks one can stick under the tap before making love, or even after, cocks that will smell of soap” (Breillat 2006, 11).
According to Kristeva, two bodily fluids which have no polluting powers are tears and semen (1982, 71). Tears are considered cleansing, rather than polluting, and are related to neither digestion or procreation, limiting their ability to symbolise social relations (Douglas 1994, 126). Yet semen is related to procreation, so why might it not be considered dangerous, polluting, abject? Grosz is unconvinced that semen is not as powerfully polluting as menstrual blood. But this is lost in Kristeva’s reliance upon psychoanalysis, whereby excremental and menstrual anxieties that reside in the phallic mother are considerably more threatening (Grosz 1994, 207).
Abjection occurs at the border between self and other, and to distance oneself from abjection (from death and defilement), the masculine subject projects abjection onto others, onto improper selves (Butler 1993). According to Thomas, “the imperative act of excluding abject things functions in the construction of masculinized identity” (1996, 15), and does so through both linguistic and representational aspects of identity. Phallocentrism relies upon the exclusion of the abject, granting a rational and solid basis from which the subject can speak (him)self (Thomas 1996).
…the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation (Butler 1993, 3).
Just as masculine notions of subjectivity rely on the displacement of abjection onto the bodies of females, the heterosexual matrix renders the queer body as abject, in order to maintain the heterosexual imperative (Butler 1993). For Butler, this indicates the power that resides in gay and lesbian bodies, and how the queer body (as abject) is able to challenge ideals of fixed, rational bodies.
The abject male body is brought to light in the work of Leo Bersani, particularly in his essay, Is the Rectum a Grave? (1988). In speaking of HIV/AIDS, Bersani illustrates the tensions between phallocentrism and abjection, in which the male subject oscillates between the two points of hyperbole and death – phallocentrism and abjection. This argument is echoed by Thomas who defines male sexuality as the constant flux between the abject self and the hyperbolic self (1996). For Bersani, phallocentrism depends upon the exclusion of powerlessness, and this causes male sexuality to be in constant flux between these two points. This creates the “self-shattering” of male sexuality, as conceived by Georges Bataille (Thomas 1996, 21).
[T]he self which the sexual shatters provides the basis on which sexuality is associated with power. It is possible to think of the sexual as, precisely, moving between a hyperbolic sense of self and a loss of all consciousness of self (Bersani 1988, 218).
This theory is useful for Thomas’s mapping of “the dark continent of male sexuality” (1996, 16), through which he proposes a male anxiety tied to abjection, rather than (phallic) castration. He proposes that male sexuality is not so much shaped by a castration anxiety, as it is of a ‘scatontological anxiety’ (Thomas 2002, 52). Shaped via fears of abjection, that which underpins the relocation of abjections onto the bodies of others. He cites Lacan’s playful reference to his own publications as ‘poubellications’ (French for ‘waste basket’), positioning his writing as abject (ibid. 51). This resembles Kristeva’s assertion that in order to establish a self, she must spit herself out.
In this sense, writing the male body (as sexed, not neutral/natural) involves recognition of the abject, the instability of the subject, and the impossibility of casting an objective gaze over the world and the self. To write the male body, to write of the self as male, is an abject exercise. In the sense that écriture féminine is cathartic, so too might be the ‘self-shattering’ of man, expressed through living text. A self-shattering necessary for the male body to be sexual, ‘becoming’ sexed, and abandoning any false hopes in neutrality – that which limits the sexualities of all.
Fluidity
Woman does not stop at woman, doesn’t stop, flows, writes herself in parataxes of liquid light, tears, and her style is Agua Viva, the stream of life (Cixous 1991a, 169).
As discussed, body fluids are potent, dangerous, powerful, and the fluidity of bodies is considered a disturbance to rational subjectivity (Turner 2003). If abjection is placed at a distance from the centred, rational self, then body fluids, as symbols of the abject body, must too be othered, divorced from the self, or kept hidden:
…fluids that flow from the inside of bodies to the outside are dangerous and contaminating, because fluids on the outside of the body challenge our sense of order and orderliness (Turner 2003, 5).
Disease, and the fluids in which it travels, threatens the subject’s colonisation of their body, also threatening the borders of the social body and its impurity anxieties (Douglas 1994). What passes in and out of bodies must be monitored, for bodies represent selves, and the self is responsible for bearing signals of rationality, intelligence, control. Maintaining a solidity, a cohesion. This can be seen through the discourse of obesity, which is not simply abhorred for being visually displeasing, but for its representation of a loss of control, a lack of sovereignty over the body (Turner 2003, 3). From an early age, we are taught to control our bodies, and to keep many of its functions private, undiscussed (ibid.).
The object of desire itself, and for psychoanalysts, would be the transformation of fluid to solid? Which seals – this is well worth repeating – the triumph of rationality. Solid mechanics and rationality have maintained a relationship of very long standing, one against which fluids have never stopped arguing (Irigaray 1985b, 113).
Fluid destroys all that ‘man’ has come to stand for. As illustrated by Irigaray, rationality depends upon a ‘mechanics of solids’ (1985b, 107). The subject as core, definable, locatable, true. And from this core, further truths can be seen, stated, built upon. But this truth can only withstand the fluid for so long. Desire, as fluid, is forever pushing against the walls of rationality. The body, as fluid, is always desiring, flowing, morphing, becoming the body irrational.
But the flow of fluid does not stop, it keeps arguing. It keeps pushing against the boundaries of hard bodies. The bodies sealed off, the bodies of border control – taking stock of all that enter and leave, ensuring the loss is kept minimal. But men’s bodies are at least as fluid as women’s (Young 1990, 193). And between bodies, through sexual connections, we find a wetness that never dries.
[Fluid] mixes with bodies of a like state, sometimes dilutes itself in them in an almost homogenous manner, which makes the distinction between the one and the other problematical (Irigaray 1985b, 111).
Soft is to hard as emotional is to rational – a threat to the self, of losing oneself through desire, through flow. Steady, stealthy, reliable, dependable – a subject infallible. A subject in denial of its fluid beginnings, its flowing interior, the flow of desire between itself and others. Or within itself. A desire that cannot be rationalised, just as it cannot be realised. A desire beyond vision, beyond touch, but a desire that activates all senses of the body.
Could the reduction of men’s body fluids to the by-products of pleasure and the raw materials of reproduction, along with men’s refusal to acknowledge the effects of flows that move through various parts of the body and from the inside out, have to do with men’s attempt to distance themselves from the very kind of corporeality – uncontrollable, excessive, expansive, disruptive, irrational – they have attributed to women? (Grosz 1994, 200).
Seemingly, “the properties of fluids have been abandoned to the feminine” (Irigaray 1985b, 116). Yet, what possibilities might exist for males within a fluid existence? In an amniotic bath of intangible desire that does not express itself in words of reason? A world adrift, a self that ebbs and flows, a body that sways and shifts somewhere between the surface and depths of a river bed?
These movements cannot be described as the passage from a beginning to an end. These rivers flow into no single, definitive sea. These streams are without fixed banks, this body without fixed boundaries. This unceasing mobility… All this remains very strange to anyone claiming to stand on solid ground (Irigaray 1985b, 215).
Irigaray proposes that between solid and fluid is mucous. That which has a viscosity that denies each term. It sticks, like the hand withdrawn from the jar of honey. Somewhere “between liquid and ice – a threshold that is always half-open” (Irigaray 1993a, 18). The masculine subject builds itself out of mucous, but “believes it is based on substances, on something solid” (ibid.109). Mucous is “never merely a material ready for some hand or some tool to use to construct a piece of work. Equally, it is something that cannot possibly be denied” (ibid.111).
Unlike Kristeva, Irigaray believes that semen does offer a potential disturbance to the contained male body – “we might ask (ourselves) why sperm is never treated as an object a?” (1985b, 113). According to Thomas, semen escapes an abject destiny through its invisibility – that which also ensures the power of the veiled phallus (1996). In a heterosexual economy, “[s]perm, that is, if it goes where it is ‘supposed’ to go, is never seen” (1996, 54). In addition, it might be said that phallocentric mechanics enable a conversion of male sperm into a solid, via the process of reproductive heterosexualism, through which the fluid sperm transforms into the “the hard skull of the (preferably male) child” (ibid. 53).
…it is largely (but not only) into the feminine that these abject masculine anxieties about visible production are displaced or projected (Thomas 1996, 54).
In an investigation of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, and his own bodily organisation, Heather Benbow describes the Kantian body as excessively controlled, its openings guarded, the intake of food and air strictly monitored (2003). Kantian breathed only through the nose, fearing that oral breath was depletive of saliva. He ate only one meal a day and used various other techniques for bodily preservation. For the expenditure of body fluids “represent[s] a depletion of finite resources” (ibid. 65). Benbow contrasts the mastered body with ideas of consuming body – consumption associated with “exhaustion, waste, and destruction” (ibid. 67). It might be said that man saves/builds, but woman spends. Her associations with fluidity, with bodily function, see her as uncontained; passive. Menstruation, as an overflowing of excess blood signifies her continual expenditure, her self as a leaky vessel with an excessive appetite (ibid. 68).
Fluids surge and move, and a metaphysic that thinks being as fluid would tend to privilege the living, moving, pulsing over the inert dead matter of the Cartesian world view (Young 1990, 193).
Passive-Active
In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault discusses the complexities of male sexuality in Greek antiquity, and the difficulties in translating sexual activities and relations into current Western ideals of sexuality (1986). The acceptability of men’s sexual relationships with boys could not be considered as homosexual tolerance, as this pre-dates the invention of homosexuality (ibid. 191). What was important then was not so much the ‘sex category’ of sexual partners as the nature of the acts men engaged in, and whether it might be considered active/passive, (penetrative/receptive).
At this time, according to Foucault, male desire could be located anywhere, and was not restricted to the bodies of women – “they did not recognize two kinds of ‘desire,’ two different or competing ‘drives’” (1986, 188). This was a time when sexual expression (and desire) was a “matter of taste”, as opposed to “a matter of topology involving the individual’s very nature, the truth of his desire” (ibid. 190). There was no homosexual subject position that one must inhabit, or be relegated to, in order to pursue sexual activity with other men.
Foucault indicates that male sexuality in the Classic Greek era has many codes and complexities, yet there was great importance in adult male sexuality to be active, not passive (1986). Here, the concept of passivity is not equated with women, and nor is it shameful. For it was acceptable for boys to take on passive roles with men, and was considered part of their learning. It would however, be questionable if such boys maintained a passive sexual role into adulthood, or if adult men occupied this role. According to Foucault, boys were not desired by men on the basis of a feminine beauty, or their likeness to women (ibid. 200), therefore, passivity was not aligned with femininity. Yet, elsewhere Foucault does allude to a connection between passivity and femininity, indicating that femininity was not valued among men (McNay 1992, 78). Despite this, and other misgivings with Foucault’s work (such as his neglect of women) (ibid.), this work illustrates that sexuality is changeable/ever-changing. And through this work it can be seen that dualistic desires, the partitioning of homo/hetero sexualities, and the heterosexual imperative are inventions of the modern West.
In the modern West, can it be said that the degradation of femininity (and femaleness) relates to a fear of the passive – a subject not controlled, fixed, mastered? Or is it, as discussed, a matter of women cast as abject (the abject self projected onto women) in order to sustain a rational (masculine) subjectivity? Is the consideration of gay male sexuality as a compromised masculinity that which also sustains ‘proper’ masculinity? Perhaps the femininity of gay man is a lie. A femininity that protects the straight man his masculinity. Gay men are not only considered feminine, but (and implicitly so) passive. The gay man is the body penetrated. While this is not an actuality for every gay man, Guy Hocquenghem believes that male homosexual sex is always about anal eroticism, even without anal sex (1993, 103). For the gay/straight framework is built upon mutual exclusion, and the difference of the homosexual man lies in his penetrable body, that which distinguishes it from the rational, sealed, masculine body. His passivity therefore sustains and strengthens the existence of an active and impenetrable masculine subject.
Part of the process of phallicizing the male body, or subordinating the rest of the body to the valorized functioning of the penis, with the culmination of sexual activities occurring, ideally at least, in sexual penetration and male orgasm, involves the constitution of the sealed-up, impermeable body (Grosz 1994, 200-1).
In supporting a dephallicisation of the male body, Grosz gives an example of (some) gay men whose erotics are not solely located in the penis, but also divested in other parts of the body. Such bodies are open to the bodies of others, to other possibilities, and not closed off. Receptive anal sex is one possible way to dephallicise the male body, though Grosz admits that a radical transformation of male sexualities would need to occur for anal receptivity to become common among all men.
I am suggesting that a different type of body is produced in and through the different sexual and cultural practices that men undertake (Grosz 1994, 200).
In looking at the possibilities of dephallicisation, Grosz borrows from Irigaray’s concept of the sex which is not one – a sex that does not reside in one particular organ, but is spread across the surface and folds of the body and its openings (Irigaray 1985b). How might a pluralisation of male sexual bodies look? Could men also have sexual organs all over their bodies?
While Grosz offers possibilities of a multifarious male sexuality, her example of gay men and anal sex could be misinterpreted as a parallel between gay male and straight female sexuality as receptive – an expression of non-masculinity. Yet, the anus is not a vagina. It might rarely be considered a sexual organ. In fairness to Grosz, she is “not making claims for all gay men” (1994, 200), yet there is a danger in positioning gay men as feminine, and like straight women. This leads us to ask: is the non-masculinity of women and gay men only considered non-masculine insofar as it is considered passive?
Using Grosz’s theory, the division between clitoris/vagina, where the former is masculine and active, and the latter is feminine and passive, might translate to the male subject and his penis/anus. Yet, it seems that the masculinity of women (the clitoris) is far less threatening to the heterosexual matrix than the femininity of men (the anus). Even Freud considered it was reasonable for a woman to want masculinity (phallic power) (Creed 1995). But why might man choose femininity? Would it be presumptuous to suggest that the female clitoris is engaged in heterosexual sex more often than the male anus? However, the parallel between woman’s vagina and man’s anus is problematic given that the anus does not belong to him. All people possess an anus – “seen from behind, we are all women” (Hocquenghem 1993, 101). The sexual anus can be activated by all people – whether gay, straight, male, or female. ‘Passive’ anal sex is a possibility for all people.
When considered a sexual organ of men and women, the anus defies the concept of complementary, reproductive, sexual orientations. What might it mean for a woman to use her anus in sexual encounters? How might this differ from a gay man? From a straight man? A lesbian? Sexual receptivity has been aligned to the role of women throughout modern history, yet could anal receptivity be as socially accepted as vaginal receptivity? And if not, why not?
Perhaps it has something to do with abjection, the fear of excrement. Perhaps it has something to do with the role of the hidden anus. According to Hocquenghem, the public phallus is distanced from the private anus, and this is necessary for the continuation of the phallic subject (1993). Yet, this only refers to men. Perhaps, as Irigaray suggests, there is no centre to woman. Of man, however, “[t]he anus is so well hidden that it forms the subsoil of the individual, his ‘fundamental’ core” (ibid. 100). So, to shift the male body out of its dominance requires an unveiling, a demystification, of the male anus – giving it a presence necessary to destabilise phallocentrism. Yet, according to Hocquenghem, this would cost the loss of identity, given that the anus is the core of the self – enabling a masculine self through its invisibility.
Only the phallus dispenses identity; any social use of the anus, apart from its sublimated use, creates the risk of a loss of identity (Hocquenghem 1993, 101).
Pornography can evidence the limitless possibilities of sexual roles and expressions that reveal an impossibility, and impracticality, of relations confined to a passive/active dichotomy. While some pornography may re-appropriate active/passive roles, pornography as a whole does not. Pornography is perhaps a reminder that what constitutes ‘normal’ sexuality is not the only sexuality. In fact, it is just one ‘type’ of sexuality that can be found on the shelves of adult bookshops, and in some realms of the pornography market it might even be considered passé. The study of pornography as a whole explodes the very idea of ‘normal’ with its depictions of sex involving more than two people; a range of homosexualities and/or bisexualities; the non-genital emphasis in body-part fetishes; inter-generational and inter-racial desires; shifting bodily boundaries through the use of toys, costumes, and props; expressions of non-monogamy; and role-plays that contradict, or extend beyond, gendered norms.
Today, Western gay pornography celebrates its porn stars more than ever. Until recently, these ‘stars’ had in common large penises, certain ‘butch’ characteristics, and they were all ‘tops’, as in, they anally penetrated other men (referred to as ‘bottoms’). As a top, the ‘porn star’ rarely took on the role of bottom. Might it be that his unused anus made him a more desirable man? For he did not open himself to desire, was tough, insincere, brutal and detached. Is this the man we all (regardless of sexual preference) want to be? Unaffected, uncomplicated, unapologetically male?
Yet, since the late 1980s, and the arrival of Joey Stefano, the gay porn ‘bottom’ has achieved star status. Stefano gave license to the ‘hungry arse’ – the insatiable anus that engulfed penises of other men, and in doing so, can only be considered active (Simpson 1994, 137). From this point on, the porn star could fuck with his arse, as well as his penis. This shift in gay pornography (somewhat) de-centres the role of the penis. While the ‘bottom’ porn actor always existed, he was never celebrated. But why this shift? Is Grosz correct in thinking that gay male sexuality is closer to de-centring phallic sexuality through its investments in other bodily organs/sites? Or can it be said that the only way for the ‘hungry arse’ to become a star is through an assertion of his active sexuality – as non-passive, he is taken seriously.
It is now apparent that the penis of a male body can be swallowed, shaped, made firm through the actions of another person. Might it be said that the erection does not belong to him? Rather, it belongs to, and is expressed through, desire. A desire that may be shared with others, a desire that may be introduced at any moment, a desire that may be socially owned. That which is read through pornography, consumerism, visual affirmations of desire. A picture on a wall, a phrase spoken, a scent from an unknown source. To what extent can he, the man, control his desires? To what extent may he actually be responsible for the movements within and of his own body? Might the erect penis be passive, given that it does not belong to the male body, but to the grip of desire.
In fact, a woman’s erogenous zones are not the clitoris or the vagina, but the clitoris and the vagina, and the lips, and the vulva, and the mouth of the uterus, and the uterus itself, and the breasts… (Irigaray 1985b, 63-4).
Dephallicisation requires opening up other body sites to erotics, expanding desires across and beyond the flesh of bodies (of the self, and of others). Just as Irigaray repositions women’s bodies as an endless and untranslatable field of erotics, one might say that man’s body is a changing erotic landscape. That man’s erogenous zones are not the penis or the anus, but the penis and the anus, and the testicles, and the nipples, and the buttocks, and the mouth, and…. One might say that men, like women, “have sex organs more or less everywhere” (Irigaray 1985b, 28).
I am wary of transferring Irigaray’s multiplicitous and unbounded sexuality of women onto the bodies of men, as the politics and reasoning behind such concepts are integral to woman’s re-signification of her body and sexualities – those constructed for her, not by her. Such feminist positions are integral to the challenge of a phallocentric order that downplays woman’s existence. It is from a different political foundation that I wish to argue for a male sexuality that is not singular, that is dephallicised. While both arguments share a goal for the de-centring of the phallus, there is much danger in replacing the female subject with the male subject, given the assertion of difference feminists that male and female are not naturally opposable conditions, not necessarily mutually exclusive. Continuing to see them as such, buries them deeper in dualisms. And such a burial ensures that we can continue to speak of ‘a man’ without complication.
Feeling pleasure means losing oneself? Losing oneself is such a joy… (Cixous 1991a, 152).
As illustrated, one feminist argument is that female sexuality, and female sex organs are not passive, but active. That the heterosexual vagina takes hold of the heterosexual penis, embraces it, draws it in, lubricates, and gives form to the erect penis. While Irigaray argues that the female body, as maternal and sexual, gives shape to all that it holds and releases, she does not argue that the female body (or the female herself) is more active than passive (Irigaray 1993a). To do so would be to rely upon an active/passive division. Instead, Irigaray conceives female bodies as both active and passive (and therefore, neither active nor passive). For if one is both, then surely it renders such terms ineffective, redundant. This framework encourages a different embodiment of the subject – a becoming that is neither here nor there, beyond binaries, beyond passive/active. If sex is not of genitals, but of entire bodies, then this binary is impossible. And even sex between two people can be said to not involve just two people. For desires move within and beyond these bodies, encapsulating more than flesh, resonating beyond any single act.
It might be considered that bodies, like sexual desires, are never accomplished. Always in flux, they are never realised, never satiated. Both in and out, open and closed, hard and soft – to the extent that such terms become ineffective. That we no longer speak of fluid/solid, but of mucous, viscosity, honey. My fluidity does not connote a solidity of my ‘other’. My body can reflect more than what it is not.
Phallocentrism is...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 (Bersani 1988, 217).
For Bersani, there is power in powerlessness, as “a radical disintegration and humiliation of the self” (1988, 217). There is something of value in losing oneself, of transcending the threshold of the self through desire. Of ‘self-shattering’. As has been evidenced here in accounts of erotic literature, écriture féminine, pornography, fluidity… As might best be articulated in the writings of Jean Genet.
I was his at once, as if (who said that?) he had discharged through my mouth straight to my heart. Entering me until there was no room left for myself… (Genet 1973, 62).
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