Specifics of the Contemporary Czech Homosexual Community: History, Evolution and Ambivalences (2010)

Edited by

Gemma Clarke, Fiona McQueen,

Michaela Pnacekova, Sabrina Sahli

Examining Aspects ofSexualities and the Self

Series EditorsDr Robert FisherDr Nancy Billias

Advisory Board

Dr Alejandro Cervantes-Carson Dr Peter Mario KreuterProfessor Margaret Chatterjee Martin McGoldrickDr Wayne Cristaudo Revd Stephen MorrisMira Crouch Professor John ParryDr Phil Fitzsimmons Paul ReynoldsProfessor Asa Kasher Professor Peter TwohigOwen Kelly Professor S Ram Vemuri

Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E

A Critical Issues research and publications project.http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/

The Transformations Hub‘Sexualities: Bodies, Desires, Practices’

Critical Issues

Examining Aspects ofSexualities and the Self

Edited by

Gemma Clarke, Fiona McQueen,Michaela Pnacekova, Sabrina Sahli

Inter-Disciplinary Press

Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2010http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/

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ISBN: 978-1-84888-020-7First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2009. FirstEdition.

Table of Contents

Preface viiGemma Clarke, Fiona McQueen, MichaelaPnacekova &Sabrina Sahli

PART I Examining Aspects of Homosexuality

Specifics of the Contemporary Czech HomosexualCommunity: History, Evolution and Ambivalences 3Zdeněk Sloboda

Recognition and Regulation of Same-sex Couplesin the United Kingdom: An Exploratory Study ofCivil Partnerships 21Mike Thomas

Forms of Resistance to the Organisation’s SymbolicHeteronormative Order 31Beatrice Gusmano

Deconstructing Sexual Identities in Daniel MacIvor’sA Beautiful View 45Michaela Pňačeková

PART II Examining Aspects of Heterosexuality

What Drives the Human Sex Drive? Peering into thePortals of Virtual Sex 59Derrell Cox II

Uncomfortable Territory? The Relationship BetweenGender, Intoxication and Rape 69Gemma Clarke

Sex in Transition: Anti-Sexuality and the Church inPost-Communist Poland 87Alicja A. Gescinska

The Embodiment of Female Sexual Pleasure:Body as Object and Body as Instrument 95Fiona McQueen

PART III Narrative Discourses

Spatial Sexualities: The Private, the Social, andthe Distinctively Deadly in Othello on Screen 111Eleni Pilla

Feminine but Macho: Erotic Reshaping of theSelf in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album 119Illaria Ricci

I Simply am Not There: Sadism and (the Lack Of)Subjectivity in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho 129Sabrina Sahli

Sade’s Doctrine of Creative Destruction 141Caleb Heldt

Memory, Excess & the Fictional Self 153Andrew Markham

Preface

Gemma Clarke, Fiona McQueen, Michaela Pnacekova & Sabrina Sahli

*****

In PART I: Examining Aspects of Homosexuality, the four chapters

examine constructions and deconstructions of homosexuality and its meanings in various settings as well as from various points of view. There are historical, sociological, and linguistic approaches applied on media discourses, narrative discourses and art discourses. What they all have in common is the post-modern approach to discursive and societal constructions of sexuality; whether it is the post-modern model of community that is being deconstructed as a whole, or whether it is looking at sexual identities as discursive processes as well as discursive products. Foucault and Butler become crucial starting points for these authors, who not only apply these theories to very different fields but who also defy these theories in order to shed new light on homosexual identities and their constructions, contestations and deconstructions.

In his chapter ‘Specifics of the Contemporary Czech Homosexual Community: History, Evolution and Ambivalences’, Zdeněk Sloboda focuses on the specifics of the Czech homosexual community that he sees as a post-communist, transitional type. Sloboda describes the history of the gay community in the Czech Republic in the last 20 years, its formations and representations in society and the media. He questions the actual characteristics of the Czech homosexual community applying binary and contrastive concepts to this ‘community’, such as visibility/invisibility, tolerance/homophobia and activism/inactivism. Sloboda therefore poses an important question and that is whether the Czech gay community is really a community and in what ways it differs from ‘western’ gay communities.

Mike Thomas’s chapter entitled ‘Recognition and Regulation of Same-sex Couples in the United Kingdom: An Exploratory Study of Civil Partnership’ discusses his exploratory analysis of civil partnership in the United Kingdom. Through examining attitudes held towards civil partnership Thomas considers issues such as control, discipline and the promotion of normative behaviours to analyse civil partnership from a Foucauldian perspective. Narrative analysis of interviews with gay couples highlights the multiple ways in which understandings of civil partnership are created and mediated both within couples and in their relationship to the wider social world. This article provides valuable insight into the awareness couples have of the potentially normalising role of civil partnership, raising new issues

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around the political role of civil partnership and what this can mean for those gay couples deciding whether to make a legal commitment or not.

Beatrice Gusmano’s chapter entitled ‘Forms of Resistance to the Organization’s Symbolic Heteronormative Order’ discusses the ways sexual minorities are constructed at work and their challenges to institutional heteronormative settings. Gusmano presents five forms of resistance to the institutional heteronormative order based on rich data collected from interviews she conducted with Italian employees in various organisations. Through their narratives the employees express their attitudes towards sexuality policy in their job environments as well as their own attitudes towards being out at work. Gusmano says that coming out is a process that should involve not only workers who perform it but every subject in the institutional setting. Thus, she reads sexual identity and coming out at work as performance through which heteronormative discursive power relations are subverted.

In the last chapter of this chapter ‘Deconstructing Sexual Identities in Daniel MacIvor’s A Beautiful View’ Michaela Pnacekova takes a rather different stance with regard to explorations of the homosexual self, sexuality and identity, focusing on the discourse of the lesbian protagonists in MacIvor’s play. By means of discourse analysis, Pnacekova investigates how - by refusing to label their homosexual relationship - the two protagonists actually not only deconstruct their sexual identities, but even their sexualities. This chapter thus represents a thorough and conclusive discussion of dynamics of homosexual identities in MacIvor’s play, but it also offers valuable insight into the relationship of communication and (homo-) sexual identity in general. The chapters selected for PART II: ‘Examining Aspects of Heterosexuality’ represent the exciting diversity and depth of current scholarship on heterosexual desire and practice. The authors explore their varied topics across global multi-media representations and within national discourses and material realities. Their analyses reveal both the pleasures and the pains, and the conflicts and celebrations of contemporary heterosexuality. In ‘What Drives the Human Sex Drive? Peering into the Portals of Virtual Sex’, Derrell Cox II presents the findings from an empirical examination of internet-based sexually explicit materials (iSEMs). His survey of online sexual materials provides a valuable insight into this under-researched area. In contrast to previous studies, Cox II’s significant results reveal that most of the content of iSEMs involves the heterosexual pairing of two partners. This crucial finding sheds new light on evolutionary and sperm competition theories of human sexuality. Gemma Clarke’s chapter entitled ‘Uncomfortable Territory: The Relationship between Gender, Intoxication and Rape’ presents empirical data

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collected from reported rape cases in the London Metropolitan Police Service between September 2006 and August 2008 to investigate the relationship between gender, intoxication and rape. Through examining and comparing reports of both female and male rape Clarke highlights gendered differences in the reporting and interpreting of rape cases and proposes explanations for these differences. By examining this rich data, Clarke has been extremely successful in highlighting stark gendered differences in attitudes to intoxication and how these affect both patterns of victimisation and reporting behaviour. Alicja Gescinska’s chapter named ‘Sex in Transition: Antisexuality and the Church in Post-Communist Poland’ presents antisexual discourses that hinder free sexuality discourses in Poland as a post-communist and transitioning EU country. She looks at these discourses through the concepts of sexual literacy and positive liberty as social liberalising processes. In the second part of her chapter, Gescinska examines the role of the Catholic Church and its representatives, such as Ksawery Knotz, a theologist and monk, who wrote a ‘so-called’ liberalising book about sexuality for young Catholic Polish couples. Gescinska however argues that these Catholic discourses only strengthen the homophobic and antisexual attitudes in Poland. In ‘The Embodiment of Female Sexual Pleasure: Body as Object and Body as Instrument’, Fiona McQueen considers how models of embodiment contribute to understandings of women’s experiences of sexual pleasure. Drawing on rich data gathered using in-depth interviews with women in the UK, McQueen deftly reconstructs categorisations of the female body. By re-formulating the body as object and instrument, she highlights the difficulties of experiencing female sexual desire and pleasure within a culture of sexual propriety and objectification.

While the first two parts of this book focus on various aspects of homosexual or heterosexual relationships and identities respectively, part three does so on a fictional level. These chapters investigate how both homosexual and heterosexual identities and practices can be negotiated on a fictional level. The authors explore topics such as gendered identities, violent love and sexualities or sadism in novels, plays or film, hereby covering disciplines that range from philosophy over English studies to performative writing.

In her article ‘Spatial Sexualities: The Private, the Social and the Distinctively Deadly in Othello on Screen’, Eleni Pilla proposes a reading of Oliver Parker’s screen adaptation of William Shakespeare’s seminal work on jealousy Othello. The main focus of this chapter lies in the connection between space and the inner turmoil of the film’s main protagonist Othello and how the film represents this. Centring on the bedroom as the site of Othello’s anxieties, Pilla demonstrates how Parker’s film ‘constructs a

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distinctive spatial sexuality’. With its stress on the cinematic adaption, Pilla’s chapter represents an important contribution to Shakespeare Studies, as well as to film studies.

Moving from the domain of film into that of the novel, Ilaria Ricci’s ‘Feminine but Macho: Erotic Reshaping of the Self in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album’ analyses the ‘erotic education’ of the black protagonist Shahid. Focusing on aspects such as power, gender identities or the consequences of sexual repression, Ricci suggests that it is the protaginist’s relation to his white female university teacher Deedee that encourages him to accept both the fluidity of his own identity as well as that of society. With her sensitive article Ricci contributes to both the field of gender issues and to that of the relation of sexuality (ies) and identity (ies).

Sabrina Sahli’s chapter entitled ‘I simply am not there’: Sadism and the Lack of Subjectivity in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho’ reflects upon the nature of the perverse subject and its relationships to ‘the Other’ in the classic novel American Psycho written by Easton Ellis. By examining the ways in which the main character Patrick Bateman fails to undergo a complete process of subjectification, Sahli considers how Lacanian psychoanalysis can shed light on understanding how the social and sexual space interlink. This interesting chapter discusses the nature of sadism in this novel, the benefits of using Lacanian psychoanalysis to interpret this sadism, and the importance of the central relationship between the main characters sense of self and the Other’s position. While Sahli’s chapter focuses on sadism from a literary perspective, Caleb Heldt’s ‘Sade’s Doctrine of Creative Destruction’ takes a philosophical stance and hereby investigates Sade’s writings as the fictional manifestations of his own philosophy of destruction. Challenging the commonly held opinion that Sade’s denial of the Other’s subjectivity equals freedom of the subject, Heldt suggests that this reduction of the Other to a mere object represents ‘the ability to create in its most purified form’. This chapter not only sheds new light on traditional modes of reading Sade as a novelist; it also proposes a way of reading Sade as a philosopher of libertinage.

Andrew Markham’s chapter ‘Memory, Excess & the Fictional Self’ represents a creative departure from the other chapters of the conference. Using an innovative blend of narrative, fiction and theory, Markham highlights the fluid nature of sexuality and desire in a memorable and engaging way. Acts of remembrance form the basis of his research document, which he uses to explore constructions and experiences of a person’s sense of their queer sexual Self.

PART I

Examining Aspects of Homosexuality

Specifics of the Contemporary Czech Homosexual Community: History, Evolution and Ambivalences

Zdeněk Sloboda

Abstract In my chapter I would like to introduce, highlight and conceptualize some specifics that Czech homosexual minority exhibits. I will focus on specific factors of and ambivalences in gay and lesbian identity and the community. I will discuss these with reference to specific Czech historical circumstances, development and the current situation in the Czech Republic today. I will emphasize ambivalences in the Czech homosexual community such as visibility and invisibility, tolerance and homophobia, and inactivism versus activism, focusing mainly on male homosexuality. I will elaborate on an analysis of media representations of male homosexuals and an analysis of selected gay-politic agendas. The purpose of this chapter is to open a discussion on the topic of the existence and structure of the gay community in the Czech Republic and how it differs from the evolution and current state of homosexual communities in ‘western’ countries. I would like to offer interpretations and a standpoint that leads to the conclusion of the non-existence of a homosexual (respectively gay) community or a bustling creation of post-modern one.

Key Words: Activism, Czech Republic, gay, homosexuality, homosexual community, homosexual history, homosexuality in Eastern Europe, tolerance.

***** 1. Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to summarize the few theoretical and empirical texts dealing with aspects of the homosexual community that arose during the aftermath of the collapse of communism 1989, which also brought up the topic of homosexuality in Czech society. 1

The motivation behind my work on this chapter is to draw on specifics – contemporary and partly historical – of the Czech homosexual minority, because during my travels to west European countries, such as Denmark, Germany or England I witnessed and experienced notable differences with the Czech situation. One of the most crucial points to deal with is whether or not there is something like a community. In the discussion of the non-existence versus existence of a Czech homosexual community, I will compare the concurrence of Czech homosexuals with the ‘western’ evolution and current state of the homosexual community. The knowledge

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about the Czech situation I will frame with two influential concepts of how a homosexual community can be identified. This frame is not comprehensive but as it will be visible later, it can show notable differences and specifics. The first concept is from Mark Blasius, who regards the homosexual community as political. The characteristics I will further address he mentions in his article An Ethos of Lesbian and Gay Existence.2 The second concept is Jeffrey Weeks’ four elements of the homosexual community that he described in his essay The Idea of Sexual Community.3

On the following lines I would put together various pieces and create a mosaic that could be called ‘homosexuality in the Czech Republic’. The mosaic certainly would not be a complete picture of this topic, but in my opinion could offer an optic, a lens to look at, a Czech, perhaps if it is possible to do such simplification a ‘post-communistic’ optic based on specific historical experience and current dynamics. I am also aware of the post-modern shift in the understanding of community and identity generally, and also the deconstructive approach that melts and erases any social categories and certainties. On the contrary, I think that when dealing with the resemblance of the contemporary Czech homosexual ‘community’, assumptions can arise that can contribute to current, post-modern discussion on the topic of homosexuality. 2. Gays-and-Lesbians or Gays and Lesbians?

The first considerable difference in the Czech environment is the strong division between gays and lesbians not only in the level of lifestyle and shared culture, but mainly in the level of political activism. I am aware of the idealisation of the relationships of gays and lesbians in ‘western’ societies, but mainly the beginning of this shared history and political activism dating back to late 1960’s – which did not occur in the Czech Republic – there can be an ‘ongoing creation of a common lesbian and gay male culture [that] includes the construction of a history, an anthropology and, more generally, a scholarly and public discourse about lesbian and gay existence (besides crone-ology)’4 despite the discussed separatist tendencies of lesbians. It is also worth mentioning the view of Jeffrey Weeks who admits that there are differences between the identities and lifestyles of gays and lesbians. However, he argues that there are key similarities such as: stigma, prejudice, legal inequality, a history of oppression, etc.5 I would argue that these similarities are not that similar, with perhaps the exception of stigma, but the prejudices, the history of oppression and the like have different qualities and form, mainly based on gendered dissimilarities.

During the political changes of 1989 Sdružení organizací homosexualních občanů (SOHO in 1990; Association of Organisations of Homosexual Citizens) was established, but as Věra Sokolová notes, shortly after it’s founding, discrepancies emerged in aims of gay-men (led by Jiří

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Hromada) and lesbian-women/organisations.6 It led to the abandoning of SOHO by lesbian organisations and led to the media, political and public invisibility of lesbians. SOHO later (in 1994) changed its name to GayIniciativa.

Another specific detail contributed to this – the gender order of the post-communistic and transitioning Czech Republic. Sokolová writes about non-feministic (to the feminism disregardful) or even anti-feministic positioning of not only the whole society, but also gay men and gay activists themselves.7 Therefore lesbians were not only as women, the unfavoured gender, but also unfavoured as homosexuals by homosexuals themselves. They experienced double invisibility. In comparison to the ‘west’, Czech homosexuals refused to use the synergy effect of slowly appearing feminism after 1989 as ‘western’ homosexual movements did in the 1960s.

As Weeks explains, scholars and scientists debate (LGBT Studies etc.) is the argument of co-establishing gay-and-lesbian community, in contrary the few Czech scholars that are concerned with this issue agree on the practical (and theoretical) division of gays and lesbians.8 Gay men and lesbian women do not have much in common except: different gendered experience with heterosexual dominance and homophobia; political interest in the Czech Republic has reduced since Civil Partnership was enforced, and the topic of homosexual parenthood was just recently opened and is articulated only by lesbian women. The shared history was not invented in the last 15 years because of absent common political aim due to separation of gays and lesbians. This division was slightly reduced in the last year of the ‘fight for Registered Partnership’ in 2004/2005, thanks to the systematic setting-on of lesbian spokes-women and gay spokes-men to the media by the movement GL Liga, only established in the beginning of 2004 as an alternative to the male-centred movement, exclusively by Jiří Hormada represented GayIniciativa. But this one year of common political activity was not constitutive, in my opinion, for the label of ‘homosexual community’ or ‘gay-and-lesbian community’. This specific is visible also in comparison to the consistency that is articulated, organised and (at least a little bit) lived in the ‘western’ countries such as Denmark, Germany or the USA.

The situation of lesbians is described as Miluš Kotišová and Věra Vampolová as ‘far from a movement, far from feminism’.9 They argue that since 1989 there were informal groups in all bigger cities but they usually survived only thanks to the initiative of individuals. In Prague culture festivals are organised, the first one took place from 1998 to 2003 and was accompanied by problems in communication and cooperation. In 2002 there were attempts to join small lesbian groups and individual activists and actively participate in the politic issue of Civil Partnership but with a lack of effect. As Vampolová and Kotišová note, activists at this festival articulated the awareness of the double discrimination of lesbians. One of the festivals,


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eLnadruhou, has been taking place since 2005 and it was here that the informal L-platform was established and became part of GL Liga. 3. Czech Homosexual History?

As I mentioned above, for the Czech Republic there is significant absence of historical evolution and continuity as is described in the ‘West’ by authors such as Blasius & Phelan or Chauncey.10 Indeed there can be, thanks to the influence of one of the first sexologists Magnus Hirschfeld and Czech sexologist from the 1920’s Kurt Freund, some homosexual history dated to the end of 19th century, but the totalitarian regimes of 2nd World War and Communism have severed all continuity for the present time.11 Maybe paradoxically Czechoslovakia was one of first countries in the world to decriminalise homosexuality in the mid of 1960’s, but as many authors note, this decriminalisation was more or less only a legal move or re-labelling, because with the new Criminal Code any homosexual displays in public could be criminalized as a public offence.12 This legal change could be interconnected with the ‘warming’ of the communist regime in the 1960’s and sexological lobby, but after the Prague Spring in 1968 with the accession of so called ‘normalisation’ homosexuality became totally invisible for a whole society. The totalitarian apparatus also did not allow the establishment of underground or a dissident homosexual environment (except one bar and sauna, and monitoring two cruising areas, all solely in Prague) that could have been then important for the establishing of homosexual community and/or culture after 1989. Only to 1988 can the first gay activism be dated. On the pages of SOHO’s magazine SOHO Revue there was an attempt to contextualize homosexuality in the world and only slightly Czech (mainly cultural – writers, actors) history. These articles were published later as Fanel’s Gay History and symptomatically, as the title itself reveals, lesbians were totally absent.

The ruptured continuity and history in 1990’s (and still in the year 2009) and articulation of biological normality as a key concept for obtaining public tolerance for homosexuals – their lifestyle and Civil Partnership – and with inaccurate but functional argumentation of ever presence of homosexuality (accurately homo-sexual behaviour, from our contemporary point of view) since Ancient Greece, there could not have come, in my opinion, the reestablishment of homosexual history and sense for it, not even among homosexual people, nor for the general population.13 4. Non/Activism

The establishing and factual activity of the homosexual movement and organisations can be dated back to the year 1989 when SOHO was founded14. But the political activism only involved a small group of people (mainly gay men), whereas in the ‘West’ there was a more positive

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relationship between political activists and the wider homosexual population, or at least an awareness of political activism that was crucial to gain the understanding of the homosexual community. Among the characteristics of the homosexual community is one that Blasius calls institutional completeness within the community. The organising of collective action in the Czech Republic could be described as very passive and the presence of institutions or actions as very rare. Not until 2008 did something like ‘gay pride’ or ‘CSD’ (as in Germany) take place. It was attended by a few hundred LGBT people, but only exceptionally attended and supported by the rest of the population. This late emergence of such action, and as Kristýna Ciprová notes ‘their unconceptionality’,15 as well as the fact that they were not held in the Czech Republic’s biggest city, Prague, resulted in small media coverage and a lack of awareness among the wider homosexual population. This can be seen as symptomatic.

Generally, the participation of the Czech population in political and public life has not been very high. This relates to a delayed and slow evolution of civil society in CR and, as Jiří Kabele points out, the ‘impetus of passive loyalty’ of the population that is dragged from the time of ‘normalisation’.16 Blasius mentions the deliberate voting of minority candidates (i.e. black, Asian, disabled, or even women etc.) are not documented and therefore monitoring the Czech political environment as regards vote preferences and political inactivism of the general population is very difficult.

Public coming outs could be seen as a specific form of activism. Here it is important to point out that there were practically no public (or media) coming outs of political or sport personalities, only few culture personalities. Here are two notable points: the first is the ‘unwritten pact’ between journalists and celebrities (and also political and sports personalities) that they will not ask questions about someone’s private or sex life and reciprocally they will be provided with other information. The second is that in the artistic (or show business) sphere a higher proportion of homosexuals (mainly gay men) is stereotypically expected, the environment is itself liberal and coming outs of such celebrities is acceptable for the general population. Whereas politics and sports are seen as masculine – in a heteronormative society such as ours, this refers to male heterosexuality, and therefore the presence of homosexual men (or even women) is unacceptable and considered to be very endangering. Such coming outs could be very influential. In contrary coming outs of actors, singers or television personalities, despite making homosexuals visible in the society, do not contribute to the normalisation and toleration of homosexuality because they can be seen as expected, unimportant, stereotypes, extravagant or laughable.

The absence of activism and of personal responsibility for the homosexual community or so called gay pride (as often mentioned in the


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‘West’ and seen, not only, by Weeks as elements of community17) can in the Czech Republic lead to the reproduction of non-activism of homosexuals and can lead to the invisibility of homosexuality and also to the internalisation of homophobia by homosexuals themselves. In Czech politics, with exception of the election of Václav Fischer as a senator (2nd Parliament Chamber) in 1999, where his probable homosexuality, which he never confirmed, nor disproved was discussed coming out was never an issue.18 Even former Minister of justice (2006-2009) Jiří Pospíšil was never confronted about his homosexuality.

Related to activism and gay pride is the presence of themes or issues that activism and pride provoke. Besides the ‘struggle for gay-marriage’ the HIV/AIDS epidemic is widely mentioned in ‘western’ literature.19 This activism around some issues relates to Weeks’ element of community – social capital. It must be stated that in the topic of the threat of HIV/AIDS can be traced and led to sexological-sociological research and small media activity, but it never receives a wider social (or media) response. 20 In 2008 a cultural activity called Art For Life arose, which tried to collect money for anonymous HIV testing with art exhibitions and other cultural events. Nevertheless HIV/AIDS is and never was an important issue for the Czech homosexual minority.

As a last area I would like to mention in this discussion the non-activism of the homosexual and general media in the Czech Republic in reference to issues concerning homosexuality (and other LGBTQ issues). Recently, except in the internet as I will discuss later, there was no lifestyle or community medium though there were some in the past or were and still are attempts to create one. From 1990 until 1996 SOHO Revue was published, it was the only community addressing medium. During this time it had various problems with financing, contents (short on topics) and in attracting interest from homosexuals (gay men respectively). Later there were a few more attempts to re-establish a community or ‘informative and personal ads’ magazine but with marginal interest.

From 1998 to 2007 a weekly magazine for lesbian and gay people called BonaDea was broadcast weekly on public radio (Český Rozhlas 1). In the first approx. 5 years it had a certain impact in the community but in later years it had a negligible audience. Czech public television (Česká televize) broadcast a program program for LGBT minority called LeGaTo from 2004-2005. It ended due to disfavour from the broadcaster and because it had also reached its limitation on topics and of people willing to appear in such a program. Ironically a rather alternative program called Q has been broadcasted on public television since 2007 with focus and also certain popularity among a general audience. 21

A specific space for the homosexual community is the internet. Regrettably I can not go into detail here, because it needs special analysis and

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conceptual insight. Generally it can be said that in the last few years there has been a lasting shift from more or less informative, enlightening websites (such as Kluci.cz, 004.cz, Lesba.cz) to entertaining content such as ‘gossip’ (Honilek.cz, Gaynet.cz, Luklife.cz) and dating/chat (iBoys.cz, iGirls.cz) sites, where Colourplanet.cz is an example of an attempt of a gay lifestyle website. 5. In/Visibility

The In/Visibiliy of homosexuality and homosexuals in public, social or political life and also in media representations is, in my opinion, of a circular character. On the one hand the above-described lack of activism means the homosexual minority causes its own invisibility that is manifested in the public arena (politics, media etc.). Reversely, the invisibility in the public arena has an influence on the homosexual minority itself. A small (marginal) presence of homosexuals in media and public life is characteristic of this ambivalent visibility. Without the above mentioned lack of activism, without any radical or visible political action without bold public coming outs of respected personalities, or without larger media responses to homosexuals in the cultural, sport or political fields, homosexuality and homosexuals will remain invisible for the majority of the population and marginalised by the media and politicians.

The media and political discussion during the time of passing of the Registered Partnership Act could be seen as an exception, namely the last and last but one attempt in the first half of 2006. This increase of interest, supported also by the boom of television reality shows where a few homosexual people appeared, did not last long.22 The debate on same-sex marriages was also co-shaped with, as I call it, a ‘competence fight’ between the then, newly established prime minister and the president, each from different sides of the political spectrum. The conservative president vetoed the Act. Therefore the more liberal prime minister ordered his party members to outvote the veto. That meant to support the Registered Partnership not from beliefs, or for the good of homosexual people, but in order to go against the president. Even the presence of homosexual people in fiction media content is ambivalent.23 Here again the representations of homosexual characters in original Czech fictional content does not offer a greater variability of models of homosexual life, homosexuals are mainly either persons to be laughed at or to feel sorry for. Despite this there can be, exceptionally, characters that can contribute to the normalisation of homosexuality in society. But, these exceptions can be also taken as the ones that create the rule. Regarding the topic of in/visibility and concerning Blasius’ characteristics, it is worth noting that outside the media space, in everyday life we can trace slight assessments of the geographical concentration of homosexuals. Unequivocally Prague, as the biggest city, and Brno as the


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smaller city and partly also Ostrava, are destinations of mobility of homosexuals. 24 There is an area of Prague where there is a concentration of gay clubs, bars, saunas or gyms, and partly also (thought restricted by specific Czech property market) to residential concentration. However, it cannot be compared to districts as they can be found in some ‘western’ cities. 6. In/Tolerance

Another ambivalence can be linked with the above mentioned invisibility – the tolerance of homosexual people and homosexuality. From the beginning of the 1990’s, Czech society articulated quite a significant tolerance of homosexuality. But looking at research on public opinion, dissimilarities can be found. From 2000, the rate of tolerance of homosexuality oscillates between 40 and 60 percent (last number from 2008 shows 53 %).25 On the other hand 56 % of the population think that coming out would cause problems for the homosexual person in his/her neighbourhood.26 Slowly (from 42 % in 2003) the reluctance of having homosexuals as neighbours is sinking (29 % in 2008).25 Constantly high is the acknowledgement of partner rights, where so called Registered Partnership is supported by more than 70 % of population sample. This high score is partly counterpoised by only less than 50 % (in 2009, but 36 % in 2007 shortly after passing of the Registered Partnership Act) acceptance of possibility that marriage would be accessible for homosexuals also. Here is an eminent correlation of the acceptance of homosexual rights and personal acquaintance of a homosexual person. Almost half of the population noted that they know someone who is gay or lesbian (still 45 % in 2009 and 53 % in 2007 doesn’t know any).27 Adoption rights are unacceptable for almost 65 % of the population (thought slowly sinking, not at the account of acceptance but on uncertainty).26 Homosexuality is constantly occupying 4th place of intolerance (per sé or as neighbours) after drug and alcohol addicts and people with a criminal past.25 Data about the discrimination of homosexuals (LGB people respectively) are not very reliable. Only three lots of research has been carried out on this topic; in 1995 by Stehlíková, Procházka and Hromada, Procházka in 2001, and in 2003 on the sample of 267 individuals who voluntarily replied to a questionnaire via email or mailed a printed copy. In 2008 similar research was carried out by Olga Pechová with the sample of 497 respondents (of those who emailed the questionnaire back; 63 % were gay or bisexual men). In 2003 two thirds of respondents stated that they were discriminated against, 15 % of them physically insulted.28 Rates in Pechová’s sample are somehow lower: 35 % had encountered verbal or other discrimination in their life (more than 50 % repeatedly), 11 % experienced physical aggression.29 Two things are typical for all the research completed: men (gay or bisexual) were more often targets of physical or symbolic

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discrimination, and there is very low if any announcement of such discriminating behaviour to police or anywhere else. Thought concerning all the positive results from the public polls, but taking to account indices of ambivalent meanings, moment of stylisation of respondents and mainly concerning everyday life experiences of homosexual people and gender order of the Czech Republic, a ‘conditional tolerance’ as Věra Sokolová in her research on gay mens parental desires writes, can be discussed.30 This mainly bears upon homophobia in the Czech society and its internalisation by gay and lesbian people. If we take in to account also the above mentioned relative invisibility of positive homosexual lifestyles and trajectories (in everyday life or media production), the concept of internalised homophobia is a possible answer for staying in the closet. This could then correspond with results from Weiss and Zvěřina’s research on the sexual behaviour of the Czech population, where (in 1998) only 0,4 % men and 0,3 % of women identify themselves as gay or lesbian.31 Both sexologists consider these numbers as very unrepresentative. Maybe symptomatically, the label of bisexuality can be considered as a practical way of hiding one’s homosexuality. In Weiss and Zvěřina’s sample 6,2 % men and 4,4 % identified themselves as bisexual. 7. Note on Czech Social Transition after 1989

In my point of view an important factor in the problematic of non/activism, in/visibility and in/tolerance can be crudely defined as ‘typical Czech nature’ or ‘inherited moral’ from the period of communist so called normalisation (1969-1989) deformed and accelerated by transition years of 1990’s.32 The period of Normalisation taught Czech people to go with the flow, not to step out of line, on the outside pretend to be active (go to parades, or local party meetings) but live their private, true livesbehind closed doors (or at their weekend houses). Holý writes about Normalisation as people’s alienation from creational and active socialistic moral ideals and society: ‘Czech this alienation characterised as ‘inner emigration’33 as deficiency of ‘self-fulfillment’ in the public sphere and full ‘self-fulfillment’ in the privacy of friends and family circle. Or as an ‘escape’ or ‘withdrawl’ into privacy.’34 The long period of invisibility of homosexuality during the communist era, the internalisation of homophobia (i.e. as illness) and the specific construction of sexual and gender relations, feminity and mainly masculinity (as non-feminity), together with the withdrawl into the private sphere and quiet living behind closed doors; could all be (at least part of) the explanation of articulated tolerance and implicit (and internalised) homophobia – invisible but still somehow little present in the homosexual minority. It could also be an aspect of absent activism and production of pride in homosexuality. Homosexual people during Normalisation just went


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with the flow and lived their life behind their closed door (not to be watched by secret service and committed neighbours). The bustling time of transformation after 1989 had not only its economic but also more importantly its social dimensions. The main characteristics are: individualisation in the environment of so called wild capitalism (or neo-liberalism), almost zero evolution of civil society in the first decade, as well as day-to-day relieving of sexual morale, commodification of sex, boom of sexual tourism in the Czech Republic and, in the sphere of homosexuality, an ‘effort’ to catch up the lost years. This all couldn’t motivate people – inclusing homosexauls – to enter the public sphere and take part on public, communal, local and also community life. 8. Conclusion

Going shortly back to both Blasius’ and Weeks’ concepts there are not many points that can be acknowledged for the Czech homosexual situation partially or specifically. As a conclusion I afford a radical explanation: Though particular communities or sub-communities and lifestyles of homosexual men and women exist that are situated among internet chats or dating sites, sports activities or other interest groups, among single civil groups (mainly university or discussion groups), among single bars or clubs that often experience small fluctuation and overlapping of their members; one cannot refer to a single Czech homosexual or only gay (or lesbian) community. Not in the way that it is understood, seen and lived in Western countries. Yes, all these members of single sub-communities have one thing in common – sexual and partner preference on people of the same sex. They might but also might not, have been through the experience of ‘coming out’, being part of such sub-communities they can have prefix of ‘gay’, they often get called homosexual, homo (homouš), gay, fag (buzna, buzerant) or with female names, they have a gay (or homosexual) identity, but for the most part they are not proud of it, they are hiding it (in the family, school or workplace), they are not motivated to lobby for homosexual rights, they do not feel a belonging with each other across their sub-communities and their individual lives. They are missing a common history, pride and shared identity. From such a statement that is in a way extreme and vulnerable to criticism, but attacking in account all facts that I tried to sketch above in four ambivalences (gay/lesbian, non/activism, in/visibility and in/tolerance) arise four questions: 1. Will the Czech homosexual minority evolve into a homosexual

community as we know it in the ‘West’? Will it re-invent its historical continuity and gay pride?

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2. Or is this what I have described in my chapter as a specific – post-communistic or transitional – type of homosexual ‘community’; different from the western one?

3. Or considering the post-modern shift in contemporary societies that lead to individualisation, pluralisation and blurring of borders of any social phenomena earlier taken for granted or given, including the community and with transformation of intimacy or gender order. Could this be an example of post-modern homosexual community?

4. Or is there any community at all, and will there be one? When society itself is shifting and individualised, homosexuality is – after gay marriages, adoption rights – quickly losing its political potential, and acceptance of homosexuality as normal way of life leads to the inclusion of homosexual people and homosexuality itself, deconstructing the heteronormativity. And, my most heretical thought, who needs a homosexual community at all when Czech homosexuals, living their content small gay lives, articulate their non-necessity of change, visibility or activisation?

Notes

1 This article is based on my conference chapter that I presented and was published in Czech as a CD preceding at 2nd international scientific conference Sexualities II held in Nitra, Slovakia, 31st Sept. – 1st Oct. 2008. Following article went during my translation through certain reviewing and adapting for outlandish audience. This article and some of its containing analyses could have been done thank to the financial support of Grant Agency of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (GAAV, IAA70280804) and Development programme for young researchers of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Charles University in Prague. For patient language review and text reduction I would like to thank my good friend Kathryn Williams. 2 M Blasius, ‘An Ethos of Lesbian and Gay Existence’, in Sexual Identities: Queer Politics, M Blasius (ed), Princeton University Press, Princeton/Oxford, 2001, p. 154. 3 First published in journal Soundings in 1996; reprinted with revision in J Weeks, Making Sexual History, Polity, Cambridge, 2000. 4 Blasius, Ethos of Lesbian and Gay Existence, 2001, pp. 153-154. 5 Weeks, Making Sexual History, 2000, p. 183. 6 V Sokolová, ‘Representations of Homosexuality and the Separation of Gender and Sexuality in the Czech Republic Before and After 1989’, in Political Systems and Definitions of Gender Roles, A K Isaacs (ed), Universita di Pisa, Pisa, 2001.


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7 V Sokolová, ‘Identity politics an the (b)orders of heterosexism’, in Mediae Welten in Tschechien nach 1989: Genderprojektionen und Codes des Plebejismus, J van Leeuwen-Turnovcová and N Richter (eds), Verlag Otto Sagner, München, 2005. 8 Here see historian and queer studies scholar Věra Sokolová 2001, or sociologist Kateřina Nedbálková, ‘The Changing Space of the Gay and Lesbian Community in the Czech Republic’, in Beyond the Pink Curtain: Everyday Life of GLBT in Eastern Europe, R Kuhar and J Takacs (ed), Peace Institut, Ljublana, 2007; or even the Analysis of Situation of GLBT minority in Czech Republic, Úřad vlády ČR, Prague, pp. 9-10. 9 M Kotišová, V Vampolová, ‘Far from a movement, far from feminism’, in With More Words: Negotiating of Women’s Spaces after 1989, H Hašková, A Křížková (eds), Sociologický ústav AV ČR, Prague, 2006. 10 M Blasius and S Phelan, We are everywhere: A historical sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics, Routledge, New York/London, 1997; or G Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940, BasicBooks, New York, 1994. 11 Attempt to re-invent he history was made on the conference on Homosexuality in the Humanities organised by Charles University in March 2008. Notable is work of young historian Jan Seidl on homosexuality in the so called First Republic (1918-1938) and Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia (1938-1945). The 20th Century history of homosexuality will be published at the end of 2010 in Homosexuality in history and present time (working title) edited by J Himl, J Seidl, F Schindler; some subtle and eclectic notes can be found in J Fanel’s Gay historie, Dauphin, Prague, 2001. 12 Also noted on the conference and will be published in the book Homosexuality in history and present time. See also Analýza situace lesbické, gay, bisexuální a transgender menšiny v ČR, 2007. 13 see i.e. V Sokolová, ‘Otec, otec a dítě: Gay muži a otcovství’, Sociologický časopis. 2009. Or K Ciprová, ‘Reprodukční a sexuální práva – Proměny postavení LGBT komunity’, in Gender a demokracie, L Sokačová (ed), Gender Studies, Prague, 2009. 14 As activist I will subsume organising and participation on an action that leads to drawing attention to issues connected with homosexuality, mainly political ones or encouraging so called gay-pride, also individual involvement in homosexual issues that have wider public impact, i.e. public coming outs, support of Gay Rights etc., also media activities, marches or political lobbing. 15 Ciprová, 2009. 16 For evolution of civil society see i.e. P Rakušanová and B Řeháková Participace, demokracie a občanství, SOU AV ČR, Prague, 2006, and Jiří

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Kabele’s work From Capitalism to Socialism and Back, Karolinum, Prague, 2005. 17 see Weeks 2000. 18 Fanel, 2001, p. 459. 19 see only as few examples Weeks 2000, Blasius 2001, or Mendes-Leite and de Zwart, ‘Fighitng the Epidemic: Social AIDS Studies’, in Lesbian and Gay Studies: An Introductory, Interdisciplinary Approach, T Sandfort, J Schuyf et al. (ed) Sage, London, 2000. 20 Stehlíková, Procházka et al., Homosexualita, společnost a AIDS v ČR. SOHO, Prague, 1995; Procházka, et al., HIV infekce a homosexualita. Česká společnost AIDS pomoc, Prague, 2005; Procházka, Janík and Hromada, Společenská diskriminace lesbických žen, gay mužů a bisexuálů v ČR. Gay Iniciativa, Prague, 2003. 21 Q as queer but using it more as a re-labelling of homosexual, plus transgender or gender topics. As Kristýna Ciprová, 2009, mentions, the creators and authors of the program themselves are not aware of the meaning of queer. They see queer more as a performance and avant-garde of gays and lesbians. 22 Though everyday presence and the victory of quite ‘normal’ gay man in the first VyVoleni show, the reality shows, full of extraordinary homosexuals, could not contribute to normalisation of homosexuality, in contrary, it led to the petrifaction of stereotypes. 23 Concerning homosexual characters in film and series see my chapter from the Sexualities III, held in Nitra, Slovakia 5.-6. 10. 2009 that will be published in the conference proceedings in 2010 (Z Sloboda, ‘Homosexualita v současných českých seriálech’, in Sexualities III: Collection of Chapters from the Second International Conference Held on 5. – 6. Oct. 2009, D Marková (ed), UKF, Nitra, unpublished/2010). 24 Some aspects of homosexual ‘community’ in Brno were described by Kateřina Nedbálková in her ‘Subkultura homosexuálů v Brně’, Sociologický časopis, 2000. 25 Data from Press Release of CVVM (Centrum for Public Opinion Research), Czechs and tolerance, 2008. 26 CVVM’s population’s attitude towards rights of homosexual couples, 2009. 27 CVVM’s data from 2009 Attitudes to homosexual rights and 2007’s research on tolerance. 28 Procházka, Janík and Hromada, 2003. 29 O Pechová, ‘Diskriminace na základě sexuální orientace’, in E-psychologie, 2009, pp. 1-16. 30 Sokolová, 2009.


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31 Sexologists P Weiss and J Zvěřina book on Sexual behaviour of Czech population, Portál, Prague, 2001, based on results from quantitative representative research from 1998 (and previous 1993). Based on personal communication on colleague of both researchers, sexologist Ivo Procházka there are no big differences in the results of researches done in 2003 and 2008 that were still not published. 32 see Kabele’s From capitalism to communism and back, p. 336ff. 33 B Wheaton and Z Kavan, The Velvet Revolution, Westview Press, Boulder 1992, p. 9. 34 L Holý, Malý český člověk a skvělý český národ, SLON, Prague, 2001, p. 31.

Bibliography

Analýza situace lesbické, gay, bisexuální a transgender menšiny v ČR. [Analysis of the situation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender minority in the Czech Republic] Úřad vlády ČR, Prague, 2007.

Blasius, M., ‘An Ethos of Lesbian and Gay Existence’, in Sexual Identities: Queer Politics. M. Blasius (ed), Princeton University Press, Princeton/Oxford, 2001, pp. 143-177.

Blasius, M., Phelan, S., We are everywhere: A historical sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics. Routledge, New York/London, 1997.

Ciprová, K.., ‘Reprodukční a sexuální práva – Proměny postavení LGBT komunity’, [Reproductional and sexual rights – Changes of the situation of LGBT community] in Gender a demokracie. L. Sokačová (ed), Gender Studies, Prague, 2009. Chauncey, G., Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940. BasicBooks, New York, 1994. CVVM, Postoje české veřejnosti k právům homosexuálních párů. [Attitudes of Czech public rights of homosexual couples] CVVM/SOU, Prague, 2009, viewed on Dec 8, 2009, <http://www.cvvm.cas.cz/upl/zpravy/100933s_ov90707.pdf>.

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CVVM, Češi a tolerance. [Czechs and tolerance] CVVM/SOU, Prague, 2008, viewed on Dec 8, 2009, http://www.cvvm.cas.cz/upl/zpravy/100780s_ov80430.pdf CVVM, Jak jsou na tom Češi s tolerance? [How are the Czechs tolerant?] CVVM/SOU, Prague, 2007, viewed on Dec 8, 2009, http://www.cvvm.cas.cz/upl/zpravy/100676s_ov70413.pdf Fanel, J., Gay historie. [Gay History] Dauphin, Prague, 2000.

Hašková, H., Křížková, A., Linková, M., Mnohohlasem: Vyjednávání ženských prostorů po roce 1989. [In Multiple Voices. Negotiating women’s spaces after 1989] SOU AV ČR, Prague, 2006.

Holý, L., Malý český člověk a skvělý český národ. [Small Czech man and great Czech nation] SLON, Prague, 2001.

Kabele, J., Z kapitalizmu do socializmu a zpět. [From capitalism to socialism and back] Karolinum, Prague, 2005.

Mendes-Leite, R., de Zwart, O., ‘Fighitng the Epidemic: Social AIDS Studies’, in Lesbian and Gay Studies: An Introductory, Interdisciplinary Approach. T. Sandfort and J. Schuyf et al. (ed) Sage, London, 2000, pp. 195-214.

Nedbálková, K., ‘Subkultura homosexuálů v Brně’, [Homosexual subculture in Brno] Sociologický časopis, vol 3, 2000, pp. 317-332.

Nedbálková, K., ‘The Changing Space of the Gay and Lesbian Community in the Czech Republic’, in Beyond the Pink Curtain: Everyday Life of GLBT in Eastern Europe. R. Kuhar and J. Takacs (ed), Peace Institut, Ljublana, 2007, pp. 67-80. Pechová, O., ‘Diskriminace na základě sexuální orientace’ [Discrimination based on sexual orientation] in E-psychologie, vol. 3(3), 2009, pp. 1-16, viewed on Dec 8, 2009, <http://e-psycholog.eu/pdf/pechova.pdf>. Procházka, I., Společenská diskriminace gay mužů. Sexuologický ústav 1. LF UK/VFN, Prague, 2001, viewed on Dec 12, 2009, <http://gay.iniciativa.cz/www/index.php?page=clanek&id=11>.


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Procházka, I., et al. HIV infekce a homosexualita. Česká společnost AIDS pomoc, Prague, 2005.

Procházka, I., Janík, D., Hromada, J., Společenská diskriminace lesbických žen, gay mužů a bisexuálů v ČR. Gay Iniciativa, Prague, 2003.

Rakušanová, P., Řeháková, B., Participace, demokracie a občanství. [Participation, democracy and citizenship] SOU AV ČR, Prague, 2006.

Sloboda, Z., ‘Homosexualita v současných českých seriálech’, [Homosexuality in contemporary Czech TV series] in Sexualities III: Collection of Chapters from the Second International Conference Held on 5. – 6. Oct. 2009. D Marková (ed), UKF, Nitra, unpublished/2010. [CD-ROM] Sokolová, V., ‘Otec, otec a dítě: Gay muži a otcovství’, [Father, father and child: Gay men and fatherhood] Sociologický časopis, vol 45(1), 2009, pp. 115-146.

—, ‘Identity politics an the (b)orders of heterosexism’, in Mediale Welten in Tschechien nach 1989: Genderprojektionen und Codes des Plebejismus. J. van Leeuwen-Turnovcová and N. Richter (eds), Verlag Otto Sagner, München, 2005, pp. 29-44.

—, ‘Representations of Homosexuality and the Separation of Gender and Sexuality in the Czech Republic Before and After 1989’, in Political Systems and Definitions of Gender Roles. A. K. Isaacs (ed), Universita di Pisa, Pisa, 2001, pp. 273-290.

Stehlíková, D., Procházka, I., Hromada, J., Homosexualita, společnost a AIDS v ČR. [Homosexuality, society and AIDS in Czech Republic] SOHO, Prague, 1995.

Weeks, J., Making Sexual History. Polity, Cambridge, 2000.

Weiss, P., Zvěřina, J., Sexuální chování v ČR - situace a trendy. [Sexual behaviour in Czech Republic – current stand and trends] Portál, Prague, 2001.

Wheaton, B., Kavan, Z., The Velvet Revolution. Westview Press, Boulder, 1992.

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Zdeněk Sloboda is a researcher at the Centre for Social and Economic Strategies of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Charles University in Prague where he received his Masters in Media Studies in 2005 and continues studying towards a Ph.D. in Sociology. Simultaneously he is a doctoral student in Media Pedagogy/Education at the University of Leipzig. From 2008 to 2009 he was a junior researcher at the Department of Gender & Sociology, Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences. He publishes and teaches in the area of gender and sexuality studies, media studies, media education and qualitative research.

Recognition and Regulation of Same-Sex Couples in the U. K.: An Exploratory Study of Civil Partnership

Mike Thomas

Abstract This chapter offers an exploratory analysis of civil partnership as a form of legal recognition for lesbian and gay couples in the United Kingdom. Although presented by the UK Government as a matter of equality and fairness, civil partnership carries a number of apparently contradictory messages around control, discipline and the promotion of highly normative behaviours and attitudes. A Foucauldian theoretical framework, drawing upon concepts of sexuality, discourse and discipline, makes clear that civil partnership submits same-sex couples to unprecedented levels of state intervention and social scrutiny. This theoretical framework is applied to data gathered through interviews with seventeen same-sex couples, offering an engagement between government objectives and couples’ own motivation in seeking official recognition. Narrative analysis of interview data suggests that lesbian and gay couples are aware of the numerous and contradictory themes within civil partnership and are able to demonstrate both acceptance and resistance with regard to disciplinary discourses. A Foucauldian policy critique combined with narrative analysis of qualitative data presents a highly nuanced examination of civil partnership as a form of social regulation that implies moral responsibility as well as financial and legal entitlements. With the number of countries offering same-sex marriage and other forms of recognition increasing year on year, the findings of this research offer a timely and highly relevant assessment of contradictory and unforeseen aspects of recognition as applied in the United Kingdom. Key Words: Civil partnership, lesbian and gay studies, same-sex marriage, same-sex relationships, recognition, sexuality, social policy

***** 1. Introduction This chapter presents an exploratory analysis of civil partnership as a form of legal and social recognition available to lesbian and gay couples in the UK. Civil Partnership is defined as, ‘a relationship of two people of the same sex… which is formed when they register as civil partners’. 1 The Civil Partnership Act, 2004 extends a package of rights and responsibilities with regard to financial maintenance, taxation and benefits, family law, immigration and next of kin rights. These rights are functionally identical to those available to heterosexual couples in the UK through civil marriage.

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Between December 2005 (when the legislation came into force), and December 2008 some 34,000 civil partnerships were formed.2 Civil partnership is one of a number of sexual orientation equality reforms introduced by successive New Labour governments. Since 1997, pro-gay reforms have included an equal age of consent, access to joint adoption of children by lesbian and gay couples and anti-discrimination legislation in employment and access to goods and services. Sexual orientation is also a key strand for the United Kingdom’s overarching equalities body, the Equality and Human Rights Commission. In offering positive legal recognition, civil partnership can be seen as extending a comprehensive form of sexual citizenship to lesbian and gay couples. The prospects for recognition for lesbian and gay couples in the United Kingdom have been transformed within a relatively short timeframe. There is a particularly clear contrast between Section 28 of the Local Government Act, 1988 which dismissed homosexuality as ‘a pretended family relationship,’3 and civil partnership as a vehicle for, ‘publicly valuing same-sex relationships’.4 However, legal recognition for lesbian and gay couples is by no means a British innovation. Since Denmark was first to legislate in 1989, governments in all continents have extended legal protections to same-sex couples, with a small number of countries including Spain, South Africa, Canada, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium, going further in extending full marriage equality to lesbian and gay couples.5 Queer critiques of recognition have drawn attention to its potentially oppressive effects in encouraging conformity and facilitating the dominance of heterosexist norms.6 However, in terms of public policy, the international spread of recognition suggests that contrary arguments highlighting the social significance of marriage rights and the importance of legal recognition have won the day.7 2. Theoretical Framework The popularity of recognition as a policy choice does not diminish the usefulness of queer critiques in offering illuminating insights into its broader implications. This exploratory research draws upon a Foucauldian framework to develop a critical analysis of civil partnership as a policy intervention, highlighting Michel Foucault’s theorisation of sexuality, discourse and discipline. Taking these elements of this theoretical framework in turn, Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality presents a critique of modern notions of sexuality as a fixed identity. Foucault traces the transposition of homosexual acts onto a new species; the homosexual individual:

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It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions… The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexuality was now a species.8

Foucault traces this discovery of homosexual identities back to the nineteenth century and highlights this process as a means of exercising control through the criminalisation of homosexual acts and the promotion of heterosexual models of family life. Foucault sets out this creation of deviant homosexual subjects as an oppressive use of power aimed at disciplining and shaping desire. Although the idea of sexual identities as a form of oppression might appear incongruous in the current era of identity politics and lesbian and gay pride, it is worth recalling that the marginalisation of LGBT people in the UK has itself been made possible by the framing of sexuality as both a personal characteristic and a matter of legitimate government interest. Although offering an apparently more progressive approach to the regulation of sexuality, civil partnership can be seen as a more recent outcome of these same processes and forces that, at different points in history, have been used to imprison, punish and pathologise homosexuals. Foucault also highlighted the role of discourse, or language practices, in cementing new truths and extending the penetration of power into new areas of social life. In terms of civil partnership, this new form of recognition can be seen as enabling a range of new discourses, or regimes of truth, about what it is to be gay or lesbian in twenty-first century Britain. In policy terms, civil partnership defines what it means to be a socially responsible, caring, monogamous, financially independent same-sex couple. The normative nature of this new regime of truth leads on to Foucault’s exploration of the disciplinary society. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault asserts that the exercise of absolute, monarchical authority, with power over life and death, has become both impractical and untenable. Instead, Foucault conceives of a modern form of disciplinary power achieved through surveillance, or rather the possibility of surveillance. Foucault reasons that an awareness of being under the gaze of others is a sufficiently powerful tool of control as to instil self-discipline. In the contemporary context, this is perhaps most clearly illustrated by the role of closed-circuit television cameras in public spaces. The rationale for the presence of these cameras is that if a subject is under the impression that she or he is being watched, they will refrain from criminal activity. This of course is irrespective of whether or not they are being watched; it is the possibility of surveillance that instils discipline. In terms of applying this theoretical framework to civil partnership, it is clear that this reform means that same-sex couples have suddenly become both visible and identifiable in terms of public policy. With regard to the notion of instilling discipline, civil partnership can be seen as a highly


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moral, normative instrument of public policy. For example, government guidance makes clear that civil partnership is intended for permanent relationships and civil partners are required to perform particular roles, including caring roles and providing for each other financially.9 In public policy, civil partnership can be seen as raising the visibility of same-sex couples to unprecedented levels. This visibility is created through the public ceremony and through the inclusion of couple’s names, dates of birth and addresses on official databases. This heightened visibility is maintained by the mundane disclosure of one’s relationship status in daily life, for example when discussing one’s civil partner with family, friends or work colleagues or accessing public- or private sector services. This visibility is accompanied by clear moral messages about the conduct expected of same-sex civil partners. In this respect, same-sex couples are to be made more visible and subject to surveillance from others. The moral characteristics of this new legal relationship suggest that although the state’s response to homosexuality can no longer be expressed through physical punishment or medical intervention, the creation of state-sanctioned, ‘acceptable’ homosexual identities may serve to establish an equally powerful regime of control. 3. Methods In terms of a methodology for applying this critique, I carried out in-depth, qualitative interviews with eighteen lesbian and gay couples in the UK during 2007 and 2008. One of these couples was about to have their civil partnership ceremony and all the other participants were already civil partners. All couples were interviewed jointly as a means of enabling couples to work together to construct narratives of their experience of civil partnership. The data extracts set out below, reflect the joint approach taken by couples in the research sample to constructing and interpreting narratives on civil partnership. In terms of accessing the meanings contained within the interview data, narrative analysis, following, offered a relatively naturalistic means of deconstructing the stories related by the couples and highlighting the meanings that they themselves attached to their experience of civil partnership.10 4. Couples’ Perspectives on Civil Partnership The next section of this chapter will consider the articulation of Foucauldian themes of regulation, discipline and control as revealed in the research data. In this first extract, Bella and Mary are discussing their visit to the register office at the town hall to arrange their civil partnership:

Bella11: That was a funny experience. I thought it was hilarious, that whole thing about waiting. And also I felt really self-conscious about being in the waiting room. And

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because a lot of people were there to register births and deaths and marriages, I felt like I was the only gay person and then everyone can hear, you know, when you go up to the desk. I remember feeling really self-conscious. And it unleashed this stuff about, how open are we going to be. Mary: And I felt a bit differently actually. I felt, wow, this is amazing that I can come into this place and say, you know, we’d like to (.) make an appointment about being civil partnered. I can pick up a brochure and say, look, there’s a brochure about it, it really is ok.

Bella and Mary present two very different narratives about attending the register office to arrange their civil partnership. Although Bella recalls this experience as being hilarious, there is a clear sense of discomfort at being in the straight space of the register office as a member of a same-sex couple. Her account of the visit betrays a feeling of difference and a sense of unease at a new and particular kind of visibility. Bella makes it clear that she feels a loss of control in disclosing her sexuality in this context and being marked out as different. Mary responds with her own narrative that seems to be more positive about being in the register office. Indeed, she seems to relish going into the register office as a lesbian woman and sees this as a form of empowerment. Mary’s comment about the brochure is particularly interesting. In terms of Foucault’s analysis of discourse, the brochure that Mary refers to can be seen as setting out a new truth; that same-sex couples can achieve formal recognition and a new social status. For Mary there appears to be a sense of legitimation here, and her account suggests that the brochure is somehow acting to bring same-sex couples into being; as if this form of recognition extends same-sex couples a kind of permission to exist. Recalling the moral aspects of civil partnership around the qualities that civil partners are required to display, this new regime of truth has explicitly disciplinary overtones. The moral aspect of these disciplinary overtones is witnessed in this next narrative:

Peter: Most of our friends really are straight (.) men, straight women and we’re completely open with them. And (..) the acceptance there is that I think we’ve broken the stereotypical model they had of a gay man or a gay couple. Martin: I think so. Peter: And what our friends have witnessed or have been


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getting to know over the years is that actually we’re just like everybody else. At the end of the day, the fact that I’m waking up next to a man and not waking up next to a woman, you know, our activities are no different from anybody else.

In this extract, Peter is talking about the impact of his civil partnership within his largely heterosexual social network. Civil partnership appears to be a vehicle for tackling homophobic stereotypes around promiscuity. When Peter speaks of acceptance, this seems to be defined by conformity with particular norms. In the context of civil partnership, these are straight norms. There is a particular implication here that acceptance is something that is earned by rejecting stereotypical behaviour. Thus, acceptance is linked to a narrow definition of what it means to be a ‘good’ gay couple, apparently reflecting Peter’s own view of his relationship with his partner. At the same time, Peter seems to express a desire to be seen as being like everyone else. This assimilation appears so total that Peter maintains that there is no difference between him and his partner’s relationship and a straight relationship. This kind of erasing of the sexuality and the gayness of their relationship can once again be seen as a response to moral norms that rule out sexual diversity and narrow the parameters of acceptability. Whereas Peter accepts and appears to welcome inclusion within the mainstream, another couple in the research sample were much more critical of this aspect of civil partnership. This more critical approach is reflected in the next extract:

Sue: It was quite an opportunity for some people, I think, to say ‘I’m fine about it.’ Jane: To say ‘we’re not like that, we’re really fine about it, we know about you and we’re really OK about it.’ Which was really, really quite lovely actually. People falling over themselves to be thrilled for us. Yes, you’re really not so different from us, are you, really? And we’re like, YES WE ARE. (laughs). We’re really different. But you know, yeah. (…) It was lovely, really.

This exchange brings out the seductive nature of recognition and acceptance for couples who have historically been excluded and marginalised. Here, Sue acknowledges that their civil partnership was an opportunity for affirmation, though her partner Jane interrupts, apparently seeing a potentially negative side to this kind of affirmation. Despite Jane’s critique of apparently assimilationist aspects of civil partnership and the

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erasing or negating of the couple’s lesbian identity, it is clear that the affirmation which civil partnership implies is seductive and hard to resist. This is another key strand of civil partnership, in terms of same-sex couples being drawn closer into the straight world. Although Sue and Jane appear to be aware of some of the identity risks associated with civil partnership, and are prepared to resist them, this kind of assimilatory process is clearly a powerful force. At the end of this extract, Jane appears to give in and concede the sense of affirmation that her civil partnership offered from within her social network. As has already been implied, the disciplinary aspects of civil partnership extend to sexual behaviour. This final exchange betrays a number of apparently contradictory statements on the degree to which civil partnership ceremony can be seen as extending equality and recognition to lesbian and gay couples:

Mark: We just want to turn up on the day, get it done and over with, I mean, there’s certain things we’re not going to do on the day. We’re not going to kiss on the day because of Joe’s parents, because (.) you know, Joe: I think my mother always knew, but initially (.) they, you know, they want me to be happy and [addressing Mark] they accept you. I think that’s more us, probably out of respect for them, not wanting to do that. My parents are quite traditional and you don’t talk about that, you know, that kind of aspect of the relationship. But I don’t think, I don’t think they’d be shocked by it at all. Mark: Yeah. Joe: And I don’t think that comes into it, I think that’s more us, probably out of respect. Mark: Mmm. I just think (.) it would purely be the embarrassment factor.

Mark and Joe appear to have ruled out a kiss at the end of their ceremony, even a peck on the cheek, for fear of causing offence to others. This discussion reveals that the taboo on lesbian and gay sexuality in the public sphere remains a powerful one, even to the extent of showing physical affection. Joe and Mark appear to be aware of the limits of the acceptability of their sexuality. Even within the context of their civil partnership ceremony, physical contact that might betray sexuality is seen as disrespectful to others. This is perhaps hard to reconcile for Joe and Mark, talking about their big day, the affirmation that the ceremony will bring. In this context, the couple’s civil partnership ceremony can be seen as a social occasion that accommodates homophobia, reinforces heteronormativity and reminds the


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couple of their secondary status as gay men. Here, there is a no suggestion that this discipline is being imposed by others; for example Joe’s parents are not calling the shots, or at least not explicitly. Indeed, Joe and Mark are using their understanding of acceptable conduct to restrict their own behaviour. They are therefore disciplining themselves; a task that same-sex couples are routinely required to perform in public spaces. This exchange recalls Foucault’s understanding of the disciplinary society, where the mere awareness of potentially being under the gaze of others is enough to provoke a disciplinary reaction. 5. Conclusion This exploratory research study suggests that civil partnership as a form of recognition for same-sex couples presents a number of ambiguities. Although civil partnership has been presented as an instrument of equality and recognition, it is clear that civil partnership can also present a focal point for control and disciplinary behaviours. There are highly moral expectations about the roles and responsibilities attached to civil partnership in terms of caring, financial provision and the stability of relationships as shorthand for monogamy. These expectations are made clear to civil partners through government documents aimed specifically at lesbian and gay couples and are reiterated through the civil partnership ceremony, by means of the making of commitments witnessed by family and friends. This awareness of lesbian and gay couples’ new status as civil partners is reinforced constantly in daily life through social interaction with colleagues, friends and family and in their dealings with public and commercial service providers.

Although offering opportunities for recognition and social affirmation, couples in the research sample also highlighted the process of entering into a civil partnership as an occasion that brought heteronormativity and homophobia to the fore. This suggests that recognition offers an uneasy, contested form of citizenship. The civil partnership ceremony is merely the starting point for an ongoing process of negotiating and performing couple identities through interaction with the state, public and private service providers and within their social networks comprising family, friends, neighbours and work colleagues. In a wider context, civil partnership is still in its infancy as a social institution and is likely to provide a highly fruitful context for further sociological research.

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Notes 1 Civil Partnership Act, 2004 Section 1(1). 2 ‘Civil partnerships down 18 per cent in 2008’, Office for National Statistics, 4th August 2009, viewed on 30th October 2009, http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/cpuknr0809.pdf 3 Local Government Act, 1988. Section 28. 4 Department of Trade and Industry, Final Regulatory Impact Assessment: Civil Partnership Act, 2004. HMSO, London, 2004, p. 17. 5 Lesbian and Gay Rights in the World. International Lesbian and Gay Association, 2009. viewed on 30th October 2009, http://www.ilga.org/Statehomophobia/ILGA_map_2009_A4.pdf. 6 R Auchmuty, ‘Same-sex marriage revived: feminist critique and legal strategy’.Feminism and Psychology, vol 14, issue 1, 2004, pp. 101-126. 7 C Calhoun, , Feminism, the Family and the Politics of the Closet: Lesbian and Gay Displacement, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. 8 M Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1: The Will to Knowledge, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1980, p.43. 9 Department of Trade and Industry, Final Regulatory Impact Assessment: Civil Partnership Act, 2004. HMSO, London, 2004, p. 17. 10 W Labov, Language in the Inner City, Philadelphia University Press Philadelphia, 1972. 11 The names of all participants in the research study have been changed to maintain anonymity.

Bibliography Auchmuty, R., ‘Same-sex marriage revived: feminist critique and legal strategy.’ Feminism and Psychology, Vol 14, Issue 1, 2004, pp. 101-126. Calhoun, C., Feminism, the Family and the Politics of the Closet: Lesbian and Gay Displacement. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality, 1. The Will To Knowledge. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1980. Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish. Allen Lane, London, 1977. Labov, W., Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia University Press Philadelphia, 1972.


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Mike Thomas is a Doctoral Candidate in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. The research study reported in this chapter is part of an ESRC-funded comparative study of legal and social recognition for lesbian and gay couples in the United Kingdom, Canada and the U. S. State of California.

Forms of Resistance to the Organization’s Symbolic Heteronormative Order

Beatrice Gusmano

Abstract This chapter presents five challenges that non-heterosexual workers pose to Italian public and private workplaces in order to counteract the heteronormative hegemony of organizations. The empirical background is based on 34 narrative interviews conducted with self-defined non-heterosexuals who had come out with at least one person in their workplace. Following the stories’ analysis about challenging the symbolic gender order in organizations, I identified five ways of resisting the heteronormative order of workplaces, taking into consideration three features characterizing non-heterosexuals' narratives about work life (the degree of visibility, the commitment showed towards work, and the centrality of sexual identity in the workplace).1 Key Words: Coming out, heteronormativity, Italian workplaces, narrative interviews, sexual identity.

***** Although workplaces could be meant as heteronormative contexts

from a structural, discursive, normative and practical point of view, sexual orientation is still an under-researched area in work organizations due to the difficulty accessing information around themes connected to sexuality.2 The framework provided by this research produces a significant contribution to our understanding of how minority sexual identity is constructed and managed at work because this chapter’s aim is to give voice to every individual that does not recognize her/himself in a heterosexual definition of her/his orientation, desires, behaviours, emotions, and identities. In order to do so, I will present five forms of resistance to the organization’s symbolic heteronormative order that represents the bias of workplaces. 1. Theoretical Background

The field of organizational studies offers an interesting starting point in dismantling taken-for-granted notions about sexuality, since ‘organizational cultures are sexualized and their claims not to be it derive from the fact that they have a moral commitment toward an ethic of universality’.3 In Gherardi’s book, Gender and Organizations, it is clear how in organizations sexuality becomes neutralized in a double meaning: it is erased and made neutral, that means taking heterosexuality as it were

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universal. Researchers have bonded gender and sexuality into one, shaping ‘a concept of gender overloaded with meaning while sexuality is rendered invisible and heterosexuality is normalized’.4 The questions at this point are: in an organizational culture, what is the meaning attached to sexuality and gender, and how are they shaped? Following Ward and Winstanley5, there has been little research focused upon the construction of sexual identity in relation to the organizational context: the majority of the studies has considered the term ‘sexuality’ along with other acceptations of the umbrella term ‘diversity’, analysing it as an individual property rather than a process determined by the context in which it takes place.6

One of the topics correlated with my chapter is the matrix of domain that permeates relations within organizations, made by three levels: individual, of the group, of the system.7 Following Foucault, I deem sexuality not as an individual property, but as an available category and a discursive effect of power relations.8 This is why Foucault suggests to analyse the genesis of a certain knowledge about sexuality in terms of power, breaking with previous conceptualizations that took into consideration sexuality as a result of repressions and laws.9

Therefore, a model of sexual orientation does exist, legitimized within society, that is learnt and acted within organizational contexts: sexuality - meant as corporal desires, attractions and erotic behaviour - is underwritten within organizational discourse following the norms that organize it within social context, that are heterosexual rules. 10 Organizational studies have pointed out how ‘organizational cultures differ one from the other according to the way in which they conceive gender’11 and how ‘gender and (hetero) sexual practices are thus organizational resources to be activated and mobilized in everyday working life,’12 even though sexuality still represents a taboo argument in organizational contemporary theories.13 Recent studies on gender and sexuality in organizations have underlined how individuals enter their workplaces with a set of corporal desires and attractions that are sewn into the fabric of everyday working life. At the same time, though, ‘the individual agency involved in these performances is, of course, constrained by a social system of economic imperatives and the patriarchal power structure which constructs male and female unequally’.14

Following the assumption of many studies in organizational research,15 I deem gender and sexuality as components of identity and as social productions that stand out during daily interactions: ‘individuals ‘do gender’ and simultaneously ‘do sexuality’ with an awareness of the dominant societal norms and in anticipation of the judgments of others’.16 It is possible to affirm that the hostile attitude of the society towards sexual minorities moves to workplace, making it difficult to come out for people carrying a different kind of sexual orientation, and to make research in this particular

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field of studies, since sexual orientation is an invisible stigma that a person can decide not to reveal. 17

Studying how sexual identity is created, constructed and maintained implies referring to the wider reference setting, that is the Occidental culture, where homosexual experience is still considered a transgression from THE norm: the heterosexual norm. This goal becomes even more essential since we are witnessing an attempt to keep quiet, as patterns of existence different from the heterosexual ones did not exist,. This prevarication rests upon non-explicit power dynamics that need to be revealed since ‘we are struck by the intractable and enduring nature of organizational power structures and the shocking inequalities they perpetuate in our society’.18

Heteronormativity is defined as the practices and institutions ‘that legitimise and privilege heterosexuality and heterosexual relationships as fundamental and ‘natural’ within society’.19 The assumption of every research about sexuality in the workplace is that the context in which workers are embedded is shaped by heteronormativity and heterosexuality: in organizational studies, heterosexuality is presented as ‘the natural order of things’20 that reinforces the domain of ‘compulsory heterosexuality,’21 whose power is given by a principle of ‘non examinated heterocentrality’.22 This assumption of heterosexuality means that, unless it is demonstrated to the contrary, every individual that interacts in the workplace is considered to be heterosexual. Therefore, the construction of other sexual identities brings to light the heterosexual character of workplaces, making it necessary to analyse ‘the ways in which heterosexuality, discursively, structurally and institutionally, is reproduced and perpetuated in the workplace’.23

One of the approaches undertaken by my research is that of queer theory, which explores ‘what has been rendered ‘abnormal’ during processes of normalization’.24 With the concept of ‘normalization’ I refer to those notions of normality that manage the daily life of people’s activities and expression of selfhood. Thanks to queer theories it is then possible to discover ‘diverse reading strategies and multiple interpretative stances’ that facilitate ‘resistance to regimes of the normal’.25 Sexual identity is then studied as a performative act (staged by non heterosexual workers with the collaboration of other actors) that has effects on the organizational culture by producing some kind of change, as it will be showed in the findings section of this chapter. 2. Research Design and Methodology

The empirical background of my PhD research is based on 32 narrative interviews conducted with non-heterosexual people working in the public and private sectors. According to Glazer and Strauss,26 this research has followed a theoretical sampling: this non-probability sample was not representative in a quantitative sense, but nor it intended to be, given the

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qualitative approach of the study.27 Thus, sampling was selected trying to collect qualitative data concerning different ways of constructing and managing sexual identities at work. Through snowball sampling, people were selected because they have come out at least once in their workplace. Moreover, I interviewed two gay men who had not come out in the workplace, this was realized during interviewing. It was after the research was finished that I realized the importance of this two interviews: they represent the ‘point 0’ of the process of coming out conceived as a continuum. In fact, this kind of analysis is possible if we conceive coming out not as a single event that happens once, as Seidman explains it in Beyond the closet. 28 Coming out is defined as a process, being a performative act that does not happen just once but is reiterated,29 following Butler’s definition of performance as a reiterated ritual.30 This is one of the reasons why, following Spradley, the interview design consisted of a wide open generating question about the subject’s working life, followed by framing and focused questions; nevertheless, a high degree of flexibility was retained in order to allow the conversation to flow in directions decided by the person interviewed. 31

All transcriptions were manually coded and analysed along narrative criteria that aimed to unveil how people construct and manage their sexual identity at work in the constant process that is commonly called coming out. 3. Challenges to the Workplace’s Heteronormative Order

I use a reading described by Gherardi and Poggio’s analysis about challenging the symbolic gender order in organizations.32 This is a challenge raised against the way in which the members of the organization define specific domains of gender reference. When women enter male workplaces, they activate a double challenge to the symbolic order represented by hegemonic masculinity since they perform a challenge predicated on diversity: they identify themselves as women, supposing a distance with male colleagues, but at the same time they distinct themselves from women in the same organization but with lower positions. I have then interpreted my interviews on the basis of a double challenge that non heterosexual subjects pose when they enter a heteronormative workplace: they have to constantly negotiate an ambivalence toward their sexual identity, and this ambivalence is translated in forms of distinctions and identification with the identity that represents a rupture with the heteronormative symbolic order of the workplace. As Goffman taught us, at this point the concept of moral careers is useful: to have a stigma doesn’t mean to become stigmatized since it depends on the relations that any of us is able to construct. 33

First of all, I have recognized three distinctive features characterizing non-heterosexuals’ narratives about working life:

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a. the degree of visibility (coming out stories); b. the commitment showed towards work; c. the centrality of sexual identity in the workplace.

As it is possible to see from the diagram above, there are two challenges that are at opposite sides of the continuum, and they are the challenge through professionalism and the challenge through struggle. In the middle, the challenge to the workplace’s heteronormative order is made possible simply by the symbolic presence of non-heterosexual workers. This symbolic presence can be defined as peripheral, temporary or constant, as we will see more in detail below. 3.1 Challenge through Professionalism

This challenge characterizes men occupied in managerial positions that give value to a sharp division between private and professional sphere. They usually try to silence their sexual identity at work, while presenting a high level of commitment and alignment to the heteronormative structure of workplaces, showing a stereotypical vision of homosexuality: they openly declare to be different from ‘other’ homosexuals.

People can accept homosexuals like me: I get up at 7 to go to work and I come back home at nine in the evening after 15 hours of work. They see that I’m honest, that I’m a good seller, that I have a quiet way of living. (Christian, entrepreneur, 28)

This is a strategy of legitimacy and self-representation of the self as belonging to the norm. A central issue of these narratives regards the fact of

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‘knowing how to present oneself’: to be accepted, men whose challenge is made possible through professionalism adhere to the hegemonic masculinity of the workplace, that is heteronormative masculinity. This attitude, though, contributes to create a hierarchy between honourable and unrespectable homosexuals and it reproduces the discourse of exclusion underpinned by the concept of sexual citizenship. Talking about rights, this attitude is at the core of the debate about sexual citizenship, which main lack is represented by this taken for granted primacy of subjects whose desire is homologation to the hegemonic discourse.

At the same time though, resistance is made possible thanks to the creation of a community of practices based on sexual identity: this process will be better understood through the concept of ‘sexuality switching’.

Following the concept of gender switching used by Bruni and Gherardi, I suggest the notion of sexuality switching, meaning those situations in which non-heterosexual people have to engineer their identity ceaselessly, according to the community (professional or sexual) to which they feel to belong.34 I consider this sexuality switching as a way of resistance to ‘the onus upon lesbians and gays to leave their homosexuality at home and to ensure that their professional clothes double up as personal closets, in order to preserve the heterosexual hegemony of the occupation’.35 3.2 Challenge through the Peripheral Symbolic Presence

The second challenge is characterized by the scant importance of sexual identity in the working sphere: interviewees retain that workplace is not the right location to perform sexual identity.

[The advice I would give to a homosexual colleague is] not to come out because it is not necessary. It would be provoking. I can’t see the need to come out. (Marta, technical saleswoman, 50) This challenge is performed by workers that have a high degree of

commitment who try to manage both professional and relational satisfaction by coming out only with colleagues they trust. The strategy adopted is that of a ‘selective coming out’ performed only with few colleagues that are considered friends. These workers have been able to cleave the workplace into two spheres based on the type of relationship they have been able to weave together: coming out is then experienced not as a political choice, but as a way of talking about private issues.

When there is the opportunity, sexual identity is used as a practical knowledge to carry on educational projects in the workplace, as it has been narrated by teachers.

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This is a strategy that does not posit a direct challenge to the heteronormative order, but there is an attempt to negotiate their sexual identity only with some colleagues.

3.3 Challenge through the Temporary Symbolic Presence

This challenge is characterized by a lower commitment, since work is presented as a way of obtaining economic independence, not as a path to personal fulfilment. In these narratives, the concept of ‘luck’ often occurs as a way of shrugging off the challenge created by the symbolic presence of non-heterosexual workers: the subversion of the heteronormative organizational culture's norms is an implicit but not pursued aspect of their working life. Usually, these workers say that they didn’t want to change the organizational context: they were just luck in finding such great colleagues to talk with. These workers have come out with everybody in the organizational context because they hope for a surpassing of gender and sexual identity (more from an egalitarian point of view than from a queer approach).

I don’t like to put a line between homosexuals and heterosexuals. The most wonderful thing is when you start to be nothing; that you are considered as anyone else. Then you realize that people have accepted you, you are invisible as the rest of humanity, and it is a great experience. (Eva, call centre employee, 33)

From the interview’s excerpt it is clear how Eva, a call centre

employee, hopes to become equal to heterosexual workers: this process is what mainstream homosexual associations have made in Italy, trying to give an image of homosexuality that follows the same paths of heterosexuality. In this discourse, the only homosexual that can be accepted is the one that reproduces heteronormative rules such as monogamy, the desire for a family, the everlasting love, a form of sex that can be inscribed in the norm, an appearance that can be defined as conventional, and so on. 3.4 Challenge through the Constant Symbolic Presence

The challenge through the constant symbolic presence aims to completely change the organizational culture through practice and explicit reference to non-heterosexual way of living.

I tell you something…we usually say that there are three phases in homosexuality: the ‘?-phase’ is when you ask yourself which sexual orientation you have; the ‘!-phase’ is when you would like to tell everybody; the ‘…-phase’ is

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when you get used to it, and it is the best phase ever! (Lino, cruise ship’s shop manager, 46)

Visibility has been reached gradually after evaluating how

workplace could have reacted to coming out: at the same to time, as you can imagine from the excerpt, there is a gradual path of self-acceptance. The commitment is high because work is invested with an emotional meaning, as well. The conflict with the heteronormative workplace is not direct, but is constantly carried out through irony and daily work oriented to spread the positive reading of homosexuality. 3.5 Challenge as Struggle

The challenge through struggle is carried out by workers who take a stand daily toward discriminations. Coming out has been completed by everybody in the organization because these interviewees do not want to silence any aspect of their identity, especially at work: coming out is a need since silence is deemed as compliance with the heteronormative context.

How do I consider my attitude? Of struggle. If a person attacks me, I react. Because if you don’t react, you’ll die. It’s my experience. (Alberto, policeman, 29) I live my being lesbian as a daily struggle. (Viola, public sector employee, 34)

The level of commitment presented by these interviewees is high,

since work is considered as an important and satisfactory sphere of their life: thanks to work, these workers have been able to become economically indipendent and, consequently, to affirm their identity. 4. Conclusive Thoughts

The empirical field that I have discussed is Italy, a country where a clear anti-discriminatory legislation against homophobia does not exist: this is the reason why the majority of respondents report having looked for personal solutions such as interactional strategies instead of posing an open political conflict. In order to avoid these personal strategies, coming out should be read as a process that regards not only workers who perform it, but as a process that involves any subject that works in the organization.

In this sense, my contribution aims at reading sexual identity not in terms of a property but in terms of a performance in order to counteract the discursive construction of sexual identity based on the dichotomy of heterosexuality/homosexuality. In fact, this essentialist reading reproduces the disposal of power that defines the second term as hierarchically inferior.

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To me, reading the process of coming out as a performance is a way of surpassing this dichotomy.

Notes

1 S Gherardi, B Poggio, Gendertelling in organizations: narratives from male-dominated environments, Liber, Copenhagen Business School Press, Copenhaagen, 2007. 2 J H Ward, D C Winstanley, ‘Watching the watch: the UK Fire Service and its impact on sexual minorities in the workplace’. Gender, work and organization, vol. 13, 2006, pp. 193-219. 3 S Gherardi, Gender, Symbolism and Organizational Cultures, London, Sage, 1995, p. 24. 4 J K Pringle, ‘Gender in management: Theorizing gender as heterogender’. British Journal of Management, vol. 19, 2008, p. S110. 5 J H Ward, D C Winstanley, ‘The absent presence: negative space within discourse and the construction of minority sexual identity in the workplace’. Human relations, vol. 56, 2003, pp. 1255-1280. 6 Ward and Winstanley, Gender, work and organization. 7 J Martin, ‘The Organization of Exclusion: Institutionalization of Sex Inequality, Gendered Faculty Jobs and Gendered Knowledge in Organizational Theory and Research’. Organization, vol. 1, 1994, pp. 401-431. 8 M Foucault, La volontè de savoir, Gallimard, Paris, 1976. 9 Ibid. 10 J Brewis, ‘‘When a body meets a body…’: experiencing the female body at work’, in Organizing bodies: institutions, policy and work, L McKie and N Watson (eds), MacMillan, London, 2002, pp. 166-184. 11 Gherardi, op. cit., p. 4. 12 A Bruni, ‘‘Have you got a boyfriend or are you single?’: on the importance of being ‘straight’ in organizational research’. Gender, Work and Organization, vol. 13, 2006, p. 303. 13 P Hancock, M Tyler, Work, postmodernism and organization, Sage, London, 2001. 14 M Jackson, ‘Heterosexuality as a problem for feminist theory’, in Sexualizing the social: power and the organization of sexuality, L Adkins and V Merchant (eds), MacMillan, London, 1996, p. 18. 15 S E Martin, N C Jurik, Doing justice, doing gender: women in criminal justice occupations, Sage, Thousand Hoaks: CA, 1996. 16 S L Miller, K B Forest, N C Jurik, ‘Diversity in blue: lesbian and gay police officers in a masculine occupation’. Men and masculinities, vol. 5, 2003, p. 357.

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17 Ward, J.H., Winstanley, D.C., ‘The absent presence: negative space within discourse and the construction of minority sexual identity in the workplace’. Human relations, vol. 56, 2003, pp. 1255-1280. 18 M Macalpine, S Marsh, ‘‘On being white: there’s nothing I can say’. Exploring whiteness and power in organizations’. Management Learning, vol. 36, 2005, pp. 429. 19 C J Cohen, ‘Punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queen: The radical potential of queer politics?’, in Black Queer Studies, E P Johnson and M G Henderson (eds), Duke: Duke UP, 2005, p. 24. 20 J C Humphrey, ‘Organizing sexualities, organized inequalities: lesbians and gay men in public service occupations’. Gender, work and organization, vol. 6, 1999, pp. 134-151. 21 A Rich, ‘Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’. Signs: journal of women in culture and society, vol. 5, 1980, pp. 631-660. 22 A Rich, ‘Forward to ‘Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’’, in Feminist frontiers II: rethinking sex, gender and society, L Richardson and V Taylors (eds), Random House, New York, 1989, p. III. 23 E McDermott, ‘Surviving in dangerous places: lesbian identity performances in the workplace, social class and psychological health’, Feminism Psychology, vol. 16, 2006, p. 194. 24 H Lee, M Learmonth, N Harding, ‘Queer(y)ing public administration’, Public Administration, 2008, vol. 86, pp. 150. 25 D E Hall, Queer theories, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2003, p. XXVI. 26 B Glaser, A Strauss, The discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research, Aldine, Chicago, 1967. 27 D Silverman, Interpreting qualitative data: Methods for analysing talk, text and interaction, 2nd edition, Sage, London, 2001. 28 S Seidman, Beyond the closet: The transformation of gay and lesbian life. Routledge, New York, 2002. 29 J H Ward, D C Winstanley, ‘Coming out at work: performativity and the recognition and negotiation of identity’. The sociological review, vol. 53, 2005, pp. 447-475. 30 J Butler, ‘Critically queer’, GLQ, vol. 1, 1993, pp. 17-32. 31 J P Spradley, The ethnographic interview. Wadsworth Group/Thomas Learning, Belmont, 1979. 32 Gherardi and Poggio, op. cit. 33 E Goffman, Stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity, Prentice Hall, New York, 1963. 34 A Bruni, S Gherardi, ‘Omega’s history. The heterogeneous engineering of a gendered professional self’, in Mapping professional identities. Knowledge,

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performativity, and the ‘new’ professional, M Dent and S Whitehead (eds) Routledge, London, 2002, pp. 174-198. 35 Humphrey, op. cit., p. 146.

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Lee, H., Learmonth, M., Harding, N. ‘Queer(y)ing public administration’. Public Administration, 2008, vol. 86, pp. 149-167.

Lyotard, J.F., La condition postmoderne. Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1979.

Macalpine, M., Marsh, S., ‘‘On being white: there’s nothing I can say’. Exploring whiteness and power in organizations’. Management Learning, vol. 36, 2005, pp. 429-450.

Martin, J., ‘The Organization of Exclusion: Institutionalization of Sex Inequality, Gendered Faculty Jobs and Gendered Knowledge in Organizational Theory and Research’. Organization, vol. 1, 1994, pp. 401-431.

Martin, S.E., Jurik, N.C., Doing justice, doing gender: women in criminal justice occupations. Sage, Thousand Hoaks: CA, 1996.

McDermott, E., ‘Surviving in dangerous places: lesbian identity performances in the workplace, social class and psychological health’. Feminism Psychology, vol. 16, 2006, pp. 193-211.

Miller, S.L., Forest, K.B., Jurik, N.C., ‘Diversity in blue: lesbian and gay police officers in a masculine occupation’. Men and masculinities, vol. 5, 2003, pp. 355-385.

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Pringle, J.K., ‘Gender in management: Theorizing gender as heterogender’. British Journal of Management, vol. 19, 2008, S110–S119.

Rich, A., ‘Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’. Signs: journal of women in culture and society, vol. 5, 1980, pp. 631-660.

_______, ‘Forward to ‘Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’’, in Feminist frontiers II: rethinking sex, gender and society. L. Richardson, V. Taylors (eds), Random House, New York, 1989, pp. I-VII.

_______, Beyond the closet: The transformation of gay and lesbian life. Routledge, New York, 2002.

Silverman, D., Interpreting qualitative data: Methods for analysing talk, text and interaction. 2nd edition, Sage, London, 2001.

Spradley, J.P., The ethnographic interview. Wadsworth Group/Thomas Learning, Belmont, 1979.

Ward, J.H., Winstanley, D.C., ‘The absent presence: negative space within discourse and the construction of minority sexual identity in the workplace’. Human relations, vol. 56, 2003, pp. 1255-1280.

_______, ‘Sexuality and the city: exploring the experience of minority sexual identity through storytelling’. Culture and organization, vol. 10, 2004, pp. 219-236.

_______, ‘Coming out at work: performativity and the recognition and negotiation of identity’. The sociological review, vol. 53, 2005, pp. 447-475.

_______, ‘Watching the watch: the UK Fire Service and its impact on sexual minorities in the workplace’. Gender, work and organization, vol. 13, 2006, pp. 193-219. Beatrice Gusmano is a PhD researcher in Sociology at the University of Trento, Italy. She is interested in queer studies, the deconstruction of gender, sex and sexuality applied to organizational studies and in the narrative methodological approach.

Deconstructing Sexual Identities in Daniel MacIvor’s A Beautiful View

Michaela Pňačeková

Abstract The chapter analyses linguistic deconstruction of sexual identities in the text by Daniel MacIvor A Beautiful View. The author looks into the way the characters’ relationship is indexed in their language as well as the deconstruction of their sexual identities by refusing to label them, which consequently deconstructs their sexualities, both contextually and discursively constructed. The relationship, which functions as a context co-creating their characters’ sexualities, gradually becomes a problem; it is sabotaged by the pressure of its own definition as well as the pressure of the definition of one’s own sexual identity, which is constructed via language. Yet, does the refusal of defining and labelling sexual identity as well as one’s relationship deconstruct the concept of sexuality itself? Sexuality is discursively constructed, words carry performative force and therefore they co-construct or deconstruct sexual identities and sexualities - they deconstruct the concepts themselves, which is due to discursive cyclicality. This chapter will research this premise on MacIvor’s dramatic text as it is an example of linguistic deconstruction of sexual identity and consequently the deconstruction of characters’ sexuality. Key Words: Context, discursive cyclicality, heteronormative discourse, language, sexuality, sexual identity.

*****

Contrary to the mainstream media, i.e. television and film, theatre has nowadays become an alternative sort of medium that can subvert stereotypes by pointing at them and thus it also has the power to shift viewers’ concepts of these stereotypes. This chapter focuses on linguistic deconstruction of sexuality and sexual identity in dramatic discourse based on a study of Daniel MacIvor’s A Beautiful View.1

In the play the main theme is a relationship between two women, through which feminine gender and homosexuality are addressed. This theme essentially becomes the plot of the play, and it develops as the two protagonists enact various scenes from their relationship from the beginning to the very end. The two characters - Liz and Mitch - ‘perform’ a show about their relationship: i.e. their first encounter, first lovemaking, first fight etc.

Their relationship gradually becomes a problem, and it is sabotaged by the pressure of its own definition, as well as the pressure for Mitch and


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Liz to define their sexual identity. Yet, does the refusal to define and label sexual identity deconstruct the concept itself? Does it also deconstruct sexuality? From a Foucauldian point of view, our understanding of sexuality ‘is always dependent on the kind of discourse about sex that circulates in a given time and place’.2 Thus, if sexuality is discursively constructed, the question that arises is: if a woman has a relationship with another woman, does she deconstruct her sexuality by refusing to sexually define herself, by denying her desire? I will focus here on linguistic features in the dramatic text that deal with sexual identities and their labelling and the issue of performativity, as well as on the interaction with heteronormative discourse that becomes the reason for the characters to break-up.

Linguistically, some speech acts create context, which becomes a crucial factor in constructing sexual identities. In the play, the context is their relationship while heteronormative discourse is what forces them to refuse labels like ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’ (in positive as well as negative ways). The denial of naming one’s relationship as well as one’s own sexual identity means deconstructing it.

For this analysis, there are a few crucial terms that need to be clarified. First of all, let us clarify the terms sexuality and sexual identity. Sexuality might be understood as generically encompassing sexual desires and basic biological drives, but it can also be understood from a Foucauldian view as a discursive construct; a factor that influences our personal identity, i.e. sexual identity. I will use the following meanings of sexuality here: sexuality as desire and practice and sexuality as discourse about sex. Our personal identity might not be defined around our sexuality but it sometimes is defined around it. Secondly, identity is a social act. Zábrodská defines identity as, ‘...complicated social activities…Identities are performative, always acted out through the subject positions created by language…’.3

Therefore, the premises are: identity is a social act, it is performative and it is co-produced by language. The question that is posed here is: why do we need to deconstruct our sexual identities then? Answers are to be found with the help of a discourse analysis of MacIvor’s text.

Secondly, context and discourse are crucial terms that need to be clarified. Discourse is used in both senses - in the linguistic sense (discourse analysis) meaning language in use. ‘The way language is used in particular contexts for particular purposes’.4 On the other hand, the term discourse will be used in critical sense to refer to, ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’.5 The above mentioned heteronormative discourse is used in the Foucauldian sense as ‘the linguistic apparatus through which the articulation of knowledge becomes an expression of power’.6

Now let us look at the term context and what it means in dramatic discourse analysis. In the play, context is the show itself - the two characters perform their relationship; basically they construct the context throughout the


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play. At the beginning, the reader/viewer does not know what is going to happen; nonetheless she/he is given cues, as in the following example: ‘LIZ. We should start./MITCH. From where?/LIZ. From the very beginning’.7

Hanks says, ‘verbal deixis is a central aspect of the social matrix of orientation and perception through which speakers produce context’.8 The two characters are going to depict the story of their relationship to the audience. In the example above, the three speech acts9 presuppose certain context, i.e. their relationship; they index the context via ‘secondary’/‘indirect’ deictical means10: ‘From where?’, ‘The beginning’. In this way they create their relationship through language (it is not produced in Nebentext only) and consequently the story of their relationship functions as a certain context in which sexuality is constructed as the relationship is based on sexual desire and practice.

I used the word Nebentext and so let me explain how this term functions theatrically. In Fischer-Lichte’s terminology, the dramatic text is divided in Haupttext (the main text) - the dialogue itself (speech acts); Nebentext11 - the extra-dialogic text which contextualizes the dialogue. Nebentext comprises the names of the characters and stage directions which create extra-linguistic reality of the text being produced on the stage and the context the characters produce by their speech acts (context 1).

Then in Pavis’ terminology, there is metatext, which comprises the author’s and the reader’s and finally the viewer’s contexts (context 2).12 These contexts work dialogically. ‘The concretisation is not given beforehand in toto by the performance text; it is the result of a directorial concretisation that proceeds from the directorial metatext, and then is confronted by the spectatorial metatext. Both metatexts have something in common: the socio-cultural context’13 - context 3. In this analysis, context 1 and 3 will be important.

At the beginning of the play, both characters consider themselves ‘straight’ and they consider the other one ‘lesbian’.

LIZ. (to the audience) …And so she's trying to pick me up. Big deal. Not my thing. But you know, who cares? I'm off people generally, not even hiring in the friend department. Plus I once had a guy I met at a play who came out to the airport ‘for a drink’ and that was a bit strange. And anyway I don't know for sure that she's a lesbian.14

Liz explains to the audience that she is not a lesbian and also that

she is uncertain about Mitch’s identity. From the heteronormative point of view, it seems that if Mitch was straight, it would be all right if Liz went for a drink with her. If she is homosexual, a problem might arise. However, Mitch figures out Liz’s sexual orientation in the same situation, ‘And I think, oh my


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god, she is a lesbian!’15 Although Mitch comes to the airport to see Liz, she does not consider herself a lesbian. Though they both feel a certain attraction, they can never call themselves ‘lesbians’. They do not define their identities around their desires and sexualities. It might be said that this reluctance to label one’s own sexual identity is due to the performative force of labels, therefore the label would make it ‘real’.

Let us look at speech acts that include labels and their performative force. Every utterance pronounced by the character is a speech act; and ‘within speech act theory, a performative is that discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names’.16 A speech act can thus produce that which it names, however, only by reference to the law (or the accepted norm, code, or contract), which is cited or repeated (and thus performed) in the pronouncement. The characters arise via speech acts, and thus in drama, speech acts are performative. They not only change the world but also re-create it. As theatre is an imaginative system where the characters ‘act’ and ‘the stage is the world’, speech acts are acts in their very existence. In Butler’s theory of performativity, speech acts construct gender (and identity as Zábrodská states) and reality itself; but on the other hand, they are a series of repeated discursive acts. If we work within these terms, the speech acts constitute dramatic discourse and sexual labels create characters’ sexualities. Cameron and Kulick say,

The classification of sexual desires, practices and identities does two things simultaneously: it produces categories and it labels them, gives them names.17 Consequently, according to queer theory, gender and sexual

identities are performative and therefore it can be said that they are constituted through discursive histories of repeated acts of identification. In that case, does it suggest that not labelling one’s own identity also means deconstructing one’s sexuality?

The pronunciation of a character’s identity is performative and therefore both of the characters refuse to label themselves as lesbians because they do not want to ‘produce’ their homosexuality. After the ‘sexual act’ between them, Mitch says,

MITCH. …The music was a sign that I should, you know, let go, for a second, for a minute, for a night. And so, well, I did and it was... I mean, I wasn't thinking about it, it just was, and it was.... But then when I did think about it later on, at four in the morning, I just couldn't. I mean. I couldn't go getting bisexual on myself. I mean that might work for


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some people but trust me I do not have the constitution for it.18

After the sexual intercourse with Liz, Mitch does not want to admit

any other sexual identity than heterosexuality. Interestingly she mentions ‘bisexuality’, not ‘homosexuality’, which is less marked and more socially accepted. Her speech act constitutes a certain context (the night they spent together); nonetheless, she does not want to admit that she might be ‘bisexual’. Again, this fact demonstrates the performative force labels carry, and here the heteronormative discourse comes into play. Although McConnell-Ginet states that ‘lesbian has been the least marked designator of homosexual women,’19 there are negative ideological connotations to the ‘L’ word. These connotations are produced by the heteronormative discourse and sexuality discourse; and gradually, they can become the core meaning of the word. McConnell-Ginet stresses this social production of meaning when she says, ‘meaning is a matter of not only individual will but of social relations embedded in political structures’.20 Because Mitch is afraid to use the word ‘lesbian’, which encompasses the social stigma of negative and heteronormative connotations (e.g. lesbians are frigid and man-haters), she uses the word ‘bisexual’ - although she cannot identify with that either.

Later on, there are other examples when the characters deny sexual labels. After they sleep with each other, they do not see each other and then they meet again and Liz is married:

MITCH. Have you switched over entirely?/LIZ. To what?/MITCH. …Men?/LIZ. I never left men, I mean, there was you./MITCH. What do you mean? There was more than me./LIZ No./MITCH. I thought you were a lesbian./LIZ. No. Does that matter?/MITCH. Well. No./LIZ. Do you only sleep with other lesbians?/MITCH. I’m not a lesbian.21

In the dialogue above both characters realise that none of them

perceive themselves as a lesbian and that the sexual experience was probably a first time experience for them. Although both deny having slept with other women before and therefore they do not have a ‘solid reason’ to call themselves lesbians, both of them feel desire for other women and a strong urge to refuse labelling.

There is a female character called Sasha that the viewer never sees. At first, she is just a drummer Liz knows but both of them gradually develop an interest in her, ‘MITCH. What did Sasha think? What did Sasha think?/LIZ. About what? /MITCH Ukular? /LIZ She said it was fun’.22


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Continuously, Liz and Mitch get closer again; they set up a ukulele band and become friends with Sasha. Despite spending more time together, their relationship is ambiguous. Liz tries to be more open about their relationship; she talks about it with Sasha:

LIZ. She wanted to know who seduced who./MITCH. Of whom?/LIZ. Me and you./MITCH. She knows about that?/LIZ A few people know about that.23

Interestingly, Mitch refers to their sexual experience (was it only

once?) with the deictical demonstrative ‘that’ – which presupposes a certain context (the sexual act), on the other hand by being incapable of naming it, Mitch sabotages it and in the end the relationship is destroyed.

As they are unable/unwilling to identify their own sexual identities, they are unable to identify their own relationship and in a way, they question their own sexualities. The next dialogue takes place before a Halloween party and Mitch dresses as Anne Shirley from Green Gables.

LIZ. We're like a couple, aren't we?/MITCH. A couple of what?/LIZ. What are you afraid of?/MITCH. That everyone's going to think I'm Dorothy.24

As we can see, Liz tries to be more open about their relationship and

also her sexuality; she tries to define their relationship although she hedges it, ‘we’re like a couple’ means not really a couple but something like a couple. Mitch ignores the logical connotation and asks Liz to complete the question (a couple of friends?). However, this time Liz addresses the problem straight ‘what are you afraid of?’ But Mitch changes the subject and responds referring to her Halloween costume. What gradually happens is that by refusing to label their own sexual identities, they refuse to label their relationship, to name it in a clear way so that both of them can identify with it and in a way they question their sexualities. Mitch’s sexuality is depicted only once through the sexual act with Liz, since then Mitch does not show her sexuality and it seems as if she slowly deconstructed it. The deconstruction of labels is performative in such a way that it deconstructs the context itself. The relationship ceases to exist. There are no clear rules (is it a friendship, a love affair?) and so what happens is that Liz sleeps with Sasha in the end:

LIZ. I'm upstairs./MITCH. With Sasha./LIZ. With Sasha./ MITCH. And they're not just talking./LIZ. We ended up having sex./MITCH. ‘Ended up?’ Whatever. And I walk in. It's dark but I can make out two people on the bed. One of


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them is Sasha and the other one is her. Her hair is a mess and her shirt is pulled way up. And all I can think to say is: ‘Pull your shirt down I can see your nipples.’/LIZ. What are you doing in here? Get out. Get out. Get out.25

Liz’s behaviour is the consequence of not setting up rules, which

comes along with defining relationships. Although the original idea is to deconstruct one’s sexual identity by not naming it to get rid of the negative connotations the words carry in themselves (to be what we are); it slowly deconstructs the context by which it is originally constructed, which means their relationship and Mitch’s sexuality who is the resilient one in the end. Her utterance, ‘Pull your shirt down, I can see your nipples’ means that she actually does not show signs of jealousy, it is embarrassment of the other’s nakedness. Mitch hides (deconstructs) her sexuality. This is due to the discursive cyclicality of sexuality. Liz and Mitch are literally products of discourse - the dramatic discourse, as well as the socio-cultural discourse - as they are dramatic characters, nonetheless as figures that mirror reality, they seem to fall victim to their own struggle because of the cyclical discursive processes. According to Butler,

the distinction between the personal and the political or between private and public is itself a fiction designed to support an oppressive status quo: our most personal acts are, in fact, continually being scripted by hegemonic social conventions and ideologies.26 Liz and Mitch try to escape the heteronormative discourse by trying

not to label their identities on the one hand, on the other, they are products of the discourse as they are unable to get out of the vicious cycle - they cannot define their own relationship and therefore they break-up.

After Liz sleeps with Sasha, Liz and Mitch stop talking (they cannot break up because they were never together). After some time, they accidentally meet again. Liz reproaches Mitch for being quiet then, which was one of the reasons Liz cheated on her:

LIZ. Why didn't you say anything?/MITCH. What did you want me to say?/LIZ. Whatever you were thinking?/MITCH. What did you want me to think?/LIZ. ‘I wonder if she's lonely’?/A moment./MITCH. I'll see ya./LIZ. See ya.27

In one of the last scenes, we hear Liz talking about labels and names

and her attempt to stop using them:


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LIZ. …if I had to say something - and since I can, I'd have to say, stop naming things. ‘I am a,’ ‘We are a.’ ‘She is a.’ If we could only let it be what it is and be what it is and be okay with that. ‘A friendship.’ ‘A love affair.’ ‘A soulmate.’ Those are just names so other people can feel comfortable…It's not about other people. Or maybe... I guess for me it was about her, at this point anyway…28 MacIvor’s text shows us that trying to escape labels - hence

deconstructing one’s sexual identity - is a complex issue. Although one’s sexuality might be created in a context outside language, words carry performative force and therefore by defining their sexual identity, the characters co-construct or deconstruct their identities and thus they deconstruct their sexualities. Liz and Mitch try to escape the heteronormative discourse by trying not to label their identities and let their sexualities be for what they are with no need to define their identities around them; however, because their relationship is defined around sexual pleasure and desire, by deconstructing their sexual identities, they fall victims to the performative force of labels and by deconstructing them they deconstruct their own relationship.

All in all, the language deconstructs the concepts in the same way as it creates them. Even though the cyclicality of discursive processes seems inescapable, there are always attempts to escape the discursive constructs and live outside words and concepts.

Notes 1 In this case dramatic discourse means written dramatic text, a script to be played. For the lack of space, I am not concerned with the performance aspect although it plays an important role. 2 D Cameron, D Kulick, The Language and Sexuality Reader, Routledge, New York, 2006, p. 10. 3 K Zábrodská, Variace na gender, Academia, Praha, 2009, p. 13. 4 D Cameron, D Kulick, The Language and Sexuality Reader, Routledge, New York, 2006, p. 16. 5 M Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, Pantheon Books, New York, 1972, p. 149. 6 J MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts, University of Manchester, Manchester, 1995, p. 18. 7 D MacIvor, ‘A Beautiful View’, in I Still Love You, D MacIvor, Playwrights Canada Press, Toronto, 2006, p. 206.


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8 W F Hanks, ‘The Indexical Ground of Deictic Reference’, in Rethinking Context, A Duranti and C Goodwin (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p. 44. 9 A speech act is ‘a communicative activity, defined with reference to the intentions of the speaker while speaking and the effects he achieves on his listener’ (D Crystal, The English Language, Penguin Books, London, 2002, p. 285). 10 Deixis is the means by which the relationship between language and context is expressed in the structure of language. The grammatical features it uses are demonstratives, first and second person pronouns, tense, specific time and place adverbs like now and here. 11 E Ficher-Lichte, Semiotik des Theaters, Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen,1983. 12 P Pavis, Dictionnaire du Théâtre: termes et concepts de l'analyse théâtrale, Éditions sociales, Paris, 1980. 13 F De Toro, Theatre Semiotics: text and staging in the modern theatre, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1995, p. 110. 14 D MacIvor, ‘A Beautiful View’, in I Still Love You, D MacIvor, Playwrights Canada Press, Toronto, 2006, p. 213. 15 D MacIvor, ‘A Beautiful View’, in I Still Love You, D MacIvor, Playwrights Canada Press, Toronto, 2006, p. 214. 16 J Butler, Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of ‘sex’, Routledge New York, 1993, p. 13. 17 D Cameron, D Kulick, The Language and Sexuality Reader, Routledge, New York, 2006, p. 24. 18 D MacIvor, ‘A Beautiful View’, in I Still Love You, D MacIvor, Playwrights Canada Press, Toronto, 2006, p. 220. 19 S McConnell-Ginet, ‘Queering Semantics’, in Language and sexuality, contesting meaning in theory and practice, K Campbell-Kibler, R J Podesva (eds), Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford, 2002, p. 144. 20 S McConnell-Ginet, ‘The Sexual (Re)Production of Meaning: A Discourse-based Theory’, in The Feminist Critique of Language, D Cameron (ed), Routledge, London, 1998, p. 199. 21 D MacIvor, ‘A Beautiful View’, in I Still Love You, D MacIvor, Playwrights Canada Press, Toronto, 2006, p. 220. 22 D MacIvor, ‘A Beautiful View’, in I Still Love You, D MacIvor, Playwrights Canada Press, Toronto, 2006, p. 226. 23 Ibid, p. 227 24 Ibid, p. 236 25 Ibid, p. 237


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26 D Felluga, ‘Modules on Butler: On Performativity’, Introductory Guide to Critical Theory, 2003, viewed on 3 March2009) <http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/genderandsex/modules/butlerperformativity.html>. 27 D MacIvor, ‘A Beautiful View’, in I Still Love You, D MacIvor, Playwrights Canada Press, Toronto, 2006, p. 240. 28 Ibid, p. 241

Bibliography Butler, J., Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of ‘sex’. Routledge, New York, 1993. Cameron, D., Kulick, D., The Language and Sexuality Reader. Routledge, New York, 2006. Crystal, D., The English Language. Penguin Books, London, 2002. De Toro, F., Theatre Semiotics: text and staging in the modern theatre. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1995. Eckert, P., McConell-Ginet S., Language and Gender. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003. Felluga, D., ‘Modules on Butler: On Performativity’, Introductory Guide to Critical Theory, 2003, viewed on March 3, 2009 <http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/genderandsex/modules/butlerperformativity.html>. Ficher-Lichte, E., Semiotik des Theaters. Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen, 1983. Foucault, M., Archaeology of Knowledge. Pantheon Books, New York, 1972. –––, History of Sexuality, An Introduction. Vintage Books, New York, 1990. Hanks, W. F., ‘The Indexical Ground of Deictic Reference’, in Rethinking Context. A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 43-76.


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MacIvor, D., ‘A Beautiful View’, in I Still Love You. D. MacIvor (ed), Playwrights Canada Press, Toronto, 2006. MacKenzie, John M., Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts. University of Manchester, Manchester, 1995. McConnell-Ginet, S., ‘Queering Semantics’, in Language and sexuality, contesting meaning in theory and practice. K. Campbell-Kibler, R. J. Podesva (eds), Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford, 2002, pp. 137–160. –––, ‘The Sexual (Re)Production of Meaning: A Discourse-based Theory’, in The Feminist Critique of Language. D. Cameron (ed), Routledge, London, 1998, pp. 198-210. Pavis, P., Dictionnaire du Théâtre: termes et concepts de l'analyse théâtrale. Éditions sociales Paris, 1980. Zábrodská, K., Variace na gender. Academia, Praha, 2009. Michaela Pňačeková is a PhD candidate at the Department of English and American Studies at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. She is interested in interdisciplinary studies and focuses on linguistic reconstruction and deconstruction of gender in dialogic discourse.

PART II

Examining Aspects of Heterosexuality

What Drives the Human Sex Drive? Peering into the Portals of Virtual Sex

Derrell Cox II

Abstract Internet-based sexually explicit materials (iSEMs) continue to attract millions of viewers around the globe on a daily basis. The types of websites visited and the content viewed provide a window into the erotic souls of millions of people worldwide. There have been few studies of what these millions of viewers are seeking and why they are seeking iSEM. These websites cater to individuals seeking erotic entertainment for many reasons, such as: curiosity; to vicariously fulfil sexual fantasies otherwise unattainable, including novel behaviours, novel partners, and harem fantasies; to participate in a virtual form of voyeurism and exhibitionism; to facilitate arousal and sexual release; to reduce boredom; to enhance or incite foreplay between intimates; a source of sexual information; and others. This paper examines the popularity, content, and viewer demographics of three of the most popular websites featuring iSEMs, Youporn.com, RedTube.com, and Pornhub.com. Two hundred and sixty videos are analysed based on sex acts, number and gender of the participants, geographic region of origin, theme /plot, location of the scene (outdoors, office, bedroom, et cetera), and whether or not a condom was used. The total number of views of these videos exceeds 1.7 Billion. In addition, the total number of views of free videos alone on these sites exceeds 110 Billion! Though viewers peruse these websites from diverse regions of the globe, the videos they upload and watch reveal sexual behaviours and erotic desires which are common to humanity, but also have regional distinctions. Based upon data obtained from these videos, a comparison is made with previous research conducted a decade ago, which explored the evolutionary motivations for sexual arousal. The results of this present study are statistically significant and in distinct contradiction to those found in the previous study, which have significant impacts upon contemporary perspectives of evolved sexual desire. Key Words: Online sexually explicit material (iSEM), PornHub, pornography, RedTube, sex, sperm competition theory, Tube8, YouPorn.

*****

1. Introduction: Porn and Sperm Competition Theory In the introduction to his paper, Pound provides a background of the

theory behind the production and use of pornography, which is in essence to allow men (or women) to experience their sexual fantasies vicariously.1

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Women have a limited supply of ova and bear the high cost of reproduction. As such, women generally prefer to mate with males of high gene quality and who are willing to invest in their offspring. They often do not come in the same package though. Men, on the other hand, have a virtually unlimited supply of sperm and would increase their reproductive success by mating with as many fertile women as possible with minimal investment. Mosher suggests that a key feature of pornography is to facilitate sexual arousal and it does this by catering to the sexual fantasies of its intended audience.2 Malamuth argues exactly this case and that male targeted pornography includes cues which appeal to the evolved interests of males by depicting “multiple, low-investment matings with highly fertile females”.3 Having described what many assume to be true, Pound introduces the tension that gives intrigue and interest to his paper. He sets out to investigate if these assumptions are, in fact, correct. The remainder of his paper discusses the different data that were collected in the form of online photographs and videos, and which suggest this intuitive knowledge is false. He writes:

a cursory examination of commercially produced pornographic videos and photographs reveals that depictions of situations in which a man gains exclusive sexual access to multiple women are, in fact, relatively rare. Moreover depictions of sexual activity involving a woman and several men appear to be much more common. In extreme forms, this type of orgiastic sexual activity can involve one woman and a very large number of men.4

From thence, Pound gives a literature review of the evidence for sperm competition among the animal kingdom. Among many species, when males experience competition for mates, sperm competition is evidenced by an increase in testes size. Besides discovering copulation in the act, males from the animal kingdom will infer sperm competition by the presence of other sexually mature males, amount of time spent with a particular female and even sexual disinterest in a rival male while in the presence of fertile females. Some species inseminate the female with more sperm when mating occurs in the presence of rivals and at times this increase is proportionate to the number of rivals present. Baker and Bellis found that men would inseminate more sperm in an established partner when the risk of sperm competition is high and when they have spent more time apart from a mate.5 Drawing from this evidence and from the sperm competition demonstrated in the animal kingdom, Pound argues that the presence of rival males will result in sexual arousal. It is from this point of view that he seeks to explain the findings from his survey of

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online pornography. While acknowledging that "harem fantasies" will be a common occurrence in male-centred pornography, he generates three hypotheses that suggest that men will actually prefer pornography with multiple males and a single female.6 Pound analysed 169 videos that contained 737 scenes where all individuals along with the type of sexual activity could be identified.7 Of these, 8.7% involved one participant, 56.0% involved two participants, and 35.3% involved three or more participants. Of the video scenes with three or more participants, 12.3% involved multiple females, 51.9% involved multiple males and one female, 21.5% involved multiple females and one male, and 14.2% involved another combination.8 A chi-square test confirmed (what was clearly obvious) that the four different categories were not equally represented (χ2=105.4, df=3, p<0.0001).9 I argue that, while these results are statistically significant, they likely reflected a historical trend of emerging online sexually explicit material (iSEM) which specialised in providing anonymous access to novel sexual behaviour, but they do not reflect what men desire in the norm for SEM. 2. Porn and Sperm Competition Theory Revisited

Compared to Pound, I found very different results in an analysis of the types of sexually explicit videos favoured by viewers of the websites YouPorn.com, PornHub.com, RedTube.com, and Tube8.com. Each of these sites is an online service, which allows individuals and commercial sources to upload videos of sexually explicit content. On each site, there is a section (from which this study draws its data) that is available free to the general adult public, and a premium adult section, which is not considered here.

I analysed the contents of the top 260 ‘most-viewed’, videos in late September and early October of 2009.10 While many of these videos had multiple scenes, similar to those analysed by Pound, I did not separate these scenes for analysis. All of these videos were categorised as ‘straight sex’, though there are 13 (5.0%) all-female videos and 2 (0.8%) videos featuring at least one transsexual. Eighty of the videos were from YouPorn, and sixty each from the remaining three sites. These 260 videos have total views in excess of 1.7 Billion. Across the websites, the total number of free-access videos numbered more than 92,000 and had total views in excess of 110 Billion!

I analysed the top 260 videos based on all-time viewership and noted the number and sex of the participants in the videos, the types of sexual activity (up to 12 different scenes per video and up to 140 different sexual activities), the scene or plot (23 different possibilities), the geographic origin of the video (13 geographic regions), the location of the sexual activity (11 different locations based upon an indoor-outdoor dichotomy), the production


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source of the video (amateur, semi-commercial, and commercial), whether a condom was used (yes or no), and the site of ejaculation (for the males, 14 different sites or combinations). In choosing the coding for each of these different data points, I tried to strike a balance between risk-taking and novel sexual behaviours to weight the overall scores. For example, an erotic strip tease was considered low-risk with minimal novelty, while a Male-Female-Transsexual threesome with double-anal penetration was considered high-risk and significantly novel sexual behaviour. I am fully aware that there are far more novel and higher-risk sexual practices, and for many, an erotic striptease would be scandalous bedroom behaviour, but the evaluations and coding variations are based upon the types of activities actually demonstrated in the videos and a skewed norm based upon internet porn. In most videos, sexual activities were repeated multiple times after a new behaviour. Most commonly, fellatio was the transitional sexual act between new behaviours. However, I recorded a particular sexual activity only once per video regardless of how many times it actually occurred.

In seventeen (7.0%) of the videos depicting heterosexual sex, the ejaculation site was not noted; these videos ended before ejaculation occurred. Safe sexual practices are somewhat subjective to judge. Eighteen (7.4%) of the males in the videos used condoms. While some of the videos of dyads only may have been monogamous couples, it appears that most were not. Out of the 260 videos analysed, 191 (73.5%) were heterosexual dyads. Fifty-four (20.8%) of the videos were comprised of multiple sexual partners. Since the possibility of a sexually exclusive triad, or other multiple partnering configurations is highly unlikely in these videos, it is possible that these multiple partner sexual encounters are risky. This may in fact be relevant to the popularity of the video as well as sperm competition theory. Risk is erotic and condoms essentially eliminate sperm competition.

Condoms were rarely seen in any of the videos. I noted condom use if one was seen in the video, not just if they were used consistently and correctly. In nearly all cases where they were used, they were not used in such a way to insure safer sex. This may have implications for the failure to practice safer-sex techniques among young adult couples and the epidemic of STIs in the global population, since many viewers of video SEM reference its educational merit. Condom use was infrequent among professional porn actors and actresses.

However, this does not mean that professional adult performers are practising unsafe sex when they do not use condoms. The Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation (AIM) has been administering free testing for adult performers since 1998.11 Since then, the overall STI rates have dropped from about 12.0% to 1.9%-3.4% in any given month, while HIV infections between performers have been reduced to zero since 2004.12 Likewise, individuals who participate in swinging communities are conscientious of the

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risks of STI exposure and routinely require recent STI tests from or condom use by potential partners. Polyamorous relationships are theoretically at no more risk for STI than are monogamous couples.

Some of the findings of these analyses reveal significant differences in the geographic regions from which individual sites draw visitors, unique socio-cultural patterns of erotic preferences within the different geographic regions, as well as some commonalities across the globe. For this paper, space does not permit a detailed discussion of the information recorded from the video analyses. Rather, it will summarise some of the findings and highlight some general trends of what young adult males around the globe seek out for erotic entertainment. 3. Discussion

At the time of this writing, these 260 videos had a total in excess of 1.71 billion views and growing. In Pound’s findings, 56.0% of the video scenes were of two participants. In the videos viewed in this analysis, 77.3% (201) were of two participants. The most commonly viewed (73.5%, n=191) types of videos were between one man and one woman. Four single females and one transsexual were viewed in 1.9% of the total, nine (3.5%) videos were comprised of female dyads, and one (0.4%) was of a male dyad.

Next, videos with three or more participants comprised 20.8% (n=54) compared to 35.3% in Pound. In contrast to the findings of Pound; only 38.9% (n=21), compared with 51.9% in Pound, of these videos chosen were of multiple males with one female. Again in contrast with Pound's findings of 21.5%, 38.9% (n=21) of the videos with multiple partners were of one male with multiple females. While Pound found that 12.3% of videos selected were of multiple females, only four (7.4%) of the 54 videos with multiple participants from this study featured multiple females. Pound documents that ‘other combinations’ comprise 14.2% of the video scenes in his study. In this study, other combinations comprised 22.2% (n=12) of the video scenes. Of these twelve other combinations, one (1.9%) was of a male-female-transsexual triad and the other eleven (20.4%) were combinations involving 2 males and multiple females. Overall, 51.8% (n=28) of the 54 videos with multiple participants were in sexual situations where the females outnumbered the males. This argues against Pound’s hypothesis that sperm competition theory suggests that men will prefer SEM with multiple males and a single female.

I performed a chi square test comparing the percentage of expected types of participant arrangements in the scenes based on Pound’s previous research with what was observed in this present study. (See Table 1 below.) The distribution of the number of sex partners in the videos observed were significantly different (χ2=50.186, df=2, p<0.0000) than what was expected based upon Pound’s findings. Likewise, there was a statistically significant


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difference (χ2=12.803, df=3, p=0.0051) in the frequency of multiple females, single male-multiple female, single female-multiple male, and other sexual couplings. I also calculated a chi-square test comparing Pound’s results of the frequency of multiple male-one female and multiple female-one male scenes (not shown in table 1 below). The results were statistically significantly different (χ2=9.317, df=1, p=0.0023).

Table 1

Participants Pound Present χ2 Df p

Single 8.7% 1.9%

Dyad 56.0% 77.3%

3 or more 35.3% 20.8% 50.186 2 <0.0000

>2F 12.3% 7.41%

1F-2+M 51.9% 38.9%

1M-2+F 21.5% 38.9%

Other 14.2% 22.2%

12.803 3 0.0051

Thus, Pound’s findings, which are counter intuitive, were not

replicated by this study. In fact, the results coincide more closely with what might be expected in natural selection theory; that is, males seeking out actual (or, in the case of iSEM, vicarious) matings with multiple females. In this survey of online erotic materials, the large majority of what these young adult, single males seem to prefer is more mundane than might be expected; sex with only one female partner at a time. However, since it can be assumed that the visitors to each of these sites make multiple visits and view multiple pages (which includes a variety of females), it could be argued that these young men want multiple partners, but only one at a time.

It is interesting to note that the most explosive video in terms of increasing views during this study was a video labelled as depicting a “real couple having real, passionate sex”. This video was exceptional in that it was clearly professionally filmed and produced with artistic lighting and choreography, took place in an aesthetically pleasing bedroom environment, with an attractive, fit, and young couple. The video was less sexually explicit than the others, and much more time was given on film to caressing, kissing, and affectionate foreplay than other videos observed in this study. In addition, this video clearly portrayed gender equity and was free from coercive and non-consensual sexual activity. It was one of a handful of videos that simultaneously appeared on more than one site, which suggests its popularity is more global and resonates across many cultures.

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One way in which evidence is given for sperm competition theory associated with the use of pornography, regardless of the type of scene or number of participants (or even sexual behaviours engaged in), is that the mere act of voyeurism provides a type of cognitive sexual foreplay. Several research studies have demonstrated a positive correlation between time spent viewing SEM and the number of sperm, as well as a higher proportion of normal, motile sperm, in ejaculate.13 It appears that there is an advantage in sperm competition conferred upon men who seek out visual and other erotic cues and then proceed to ejaculate by whatever means possible at the time. By masturbating, the quality of the sperm, which will be ejaculated at the next copulation, will be improved. Alternatively, if the erotic cues lead to successful copulation with a female, then the deposition of sperm into the vagina significantly increases the odds of sexual reproduction. 4. Conclusions From evidence discussed above and in other literature it is likely that sperm competition has played a role in natural selection. Indeed, sperm, semen, and human genitals have evolved as a result of natural and sexual selection via sperm competition. In birds and insects, and even other primates, the evidence for sperm competition is much clearer than it is in humans. Based on the ratio between human testes mass to body mass, humans have experienced significant sperm competition throughout our history. Females have also played a significant role in selecting for males whose sperm are more competitive. It is also likely that men have evolved to become sexually aroused by scenes, which are reminiscent of sperm competition, at least as the sole motivating factor. Men who seek out visual cues for erotic behaviour and either masturbate or copulate with females are more likely to be reproductively successful. The finding of this survey of the most viewed, all-time 260 videos confirms the fact that male ‘harem fantasies’ remain a significant source of psychosexual arousal, and this fits well with the male’s evolved desire to mate with as many novel females as possible with the least investment. Another overlooked element of both this analysis and that conducted by Pound was the fact that by far, the most sought after source of erotic visual stimuli was not related to multiple partners at all. Rather, they were male-female dyads involved in fellatio, cunnilingus, various positions of penile-vaginal penetrative sex, and anal intercourse. Perhaps just observing any erotic behaviour promotes reproductive success. However, in only eleven (4.5%) of these 260 videos was conception or sperm competition a possibility. 211 of 226 (93.4%) observable ejaculations were on the face, mouth and tongue, breasts, vulva, bum, or other areas of the torso of the women. For the remaining four known ejaculation sites, the place of deposit was intra-rectal.


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It seems that the search for sexual variety, for erotic rumination material, for a quick release to relieve stress or sexual tension or even for premature ejaculation prevention when a male anticipates actual sexual activity with a partner, or even to participate vicariously in sexual activities otherwise unavailable figures prominently in the motives behind the search for iSEM. Another possibility is that ancient voyeuristic and smaller males found reproductive success and reduced chances of injury by waiting and watching for the larger male to complete sexual intercourse with a receptive female. This would require the smaller males to be ready to quickly penetrate and ejaculate. This dovetails well with sperm competition theory and it aligns with Pound’s argument that the presence of rival males will result in sexual arousal. However, it may be the presence of any one rival male, rather than only multiple males, that produces this reaction. Finally, this survey cannot tease out the actual demographics of those viewing these video clips, which number into the billions of views for the websites as a whole. What percentage of these viewers are women, couples, men, or others is not known. Women’s consumption of SEM has increased over the past decade and more, but how many women visit these sites and how their choices of iSEM affect the ratings and popularity of these videos is unknown. Since it involved such a large number of people both in the consumption and production, further investigation is warranted to examine the connection between iSEM use and STI infection rates, iSEM as educational tools for promoting risk-reductive sexual practices, and for improving sexual relationship skills.

Notes 1 N Pound, ‘Male interest in visual cues of sperm competition risk’. Evolution and Human Behavior, vol. 23, 2002, pp. 443-466. 2 ibid., p. 442. 3 ibid., p. 444. 4 ibid., p. 445. 5 ibid., p. 448. 6 ibid., pp. 449-450. 7 ibid., p. 453. 8 ibid., p. 452. 9 ibid., p. 453. 10 SPSS® version 15.0 was used to complete the statistical analyses of these data. 11 S Mitchell, ‘Has the Whole World Lost Its Mind? We Think So!’. Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, viewed on 6 November 2009, <http://www.aim-med.org/news/2009/07/17/1247872245/ >.

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12 ibid. 13 K Shakelford, N Pound, and AT Goetz, ‘Psychological and Physiological Adaptations to Sperm Competition in Humans’. Review of General Psychology, vol. 9, no. 3, 2005, p. 236.

Bibliography Alexa, the Web Information Company, Alexa Internet, Inc., An Amazon Company, viewed on 12 October 2009, <http://www.alexa.com/>. Alexa, the Web Information Company, 2009, google.com site info, viewed on 12 October 2009, <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com>. Alexa, the Web Information Company, pornhub.com site info, viewed on 12 October 2009, <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/pornhub.com>. Alexa, the Web Information Company, redtube.com site info, viewed on 12 October 2009, <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/redtube.com>. Alexa, the Web Information Company, tube8.com site info, viewed on 12 October 2009, <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/tube8.com>. Alexa, the Web Information Company, youporn.com site info, viewed on 12 October 2009, <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/youporn.com>. Mitchell, S., ‘Has the Whole World Lost Its Mind? We Think So!’. Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, viewed on 6 November 2009, <http://www.aim-med.org/news/2009/07/17/1247872245/>. Pound, N., ‘Male interest in visual cues of sperm competition risk’. Evolution and Human Behavior, vol. 23, 2002, pp. 443-466. PornHub.com, it makes your dick bigger, 2009, viewed on 12 October 2009, <http://www.pornhub.com/ >. RedTube.com, 2009, viewed on 12 October 2009, <http://redtube.com/>. Shackelford, T.K., N. Pound, and A.T. Goetz, ‘Psychological and Physiological Adaptations to Sperm Competition in Humans’. Review of General Psychology, vol. 9, no. 3, 2005, pp. 228-248.


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Tube8.com, 2009, viewed on 12 October 2009, <http://www.tube8.com/>. YouPorn.com, 2009, viewed on 12 October 2009, <http://youporn.com/>. Derrell Cox II is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology, at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA.

Uncomfortable Territory? The Relationship between Gender, Intoxication and Rape

Gemma Clarke

Abstract This chapter explores the relationship between gender and intoxication within reported rape. Drawing upon a sample of 1,743 allegations of victim-intoxicated rape made to the London Metropolitan Police Service over two years between September 2006 and August 2008, it is established that patterns of reported rape are significantly divided along gender lines. The findings show that men and women who report intoxicated rape differ in terms of age, vulnerabilities and type of intoxication. Using gender and gendered discourses as lenses with which to view reported rape, the chapter explores the way in which rape myths, victim-blame and ambivalent attitudes towards sex and intoxication affect men and women differently, engendering differences in patterns of victimisation and reporting behaviour. Key Words: Alcohol, drink-spiking, drugs, drug-facilitated sexual assault, gender, intoxication, police, rape, reporting behaviour, sexual assault.

***** ‘It wasn’t rape-rape’1

Whoopi Goldberg on Roman Polanski’s 1977 conviction

‘Drunken consent is still consent’ 2 Judge Mr Justice Roderick Evans

1. Introduction What is - and what isn’t rape - has become a controversial topic. It is a distinction that becomes particularly contentious and emotive when alcohol and drugs are involved. Whoopi Goldberg’s recent declaration that Roman Polanski’s conviction for unlawful sexual intercourse in which he admitted to drugging and raping a thirteen-year-old girl, ‘wasn’t rape-rape’3 has focused media attention onto the issue. Four years earlier Judge Mr Justice Roderick Evans created much legal and public confusion when he ruled, ‘drunken consent is still consent’.4 These continuing controversies expose the deep cultural entanglement of sex with substance intoxication in contemporary Britain and the US. Moreover, the public and media discourse surrounding these controversies reveals deep-seated attitudes about women, men and appropriate sexual behaviour. While the sexual victimisation of women under the influence of alcohol and drugs is not a new phenomenon, the cultural backdrop has

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changed. In Great Britain, the increased pattern of drug and alcohol consumption among both men and women5 and a turn towards the analysis of risk in victimology6 has focussed attention on the role of intoxicants in rape. The drink-spiking panic of the 1990s and a series of high profile drug and alcohol related rapes have attracted further debate. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 sought to deal with the new cultural context. The definition of sexual consent now contains a requirement for ‘capacity’. However, a lack of guidance on meaning, and a series of contested legal decisions - such as ‘drunken consent is still consent’7 - have created confusion. The line between normal sexual behaviour and criminal activity has become a contested and uncomfortable territory. In this chapter I will explore the ambivalent and often uncomfortable discourses about gender, intoxication and rape in one area of the criminal justice system: rapes reported to the police. Using an official police data set of reported rapes, I investigate the differences for men and women who report rape. I discuss these differences in light of the different gendered cultural norms for men and women. Finally, I suggest directions for future research on this topic. 2. Researching Reported Rapes Using police data as a method for investigating rape is controversial. The difficulties of working with official data have been noted and debated since the 1960s. There is an iceberg effect with data collected on crime: only a small portion is visible while the majority of offences remain below the surface; invisible and unreported. This persistent problem of the ‘dark figure’8 is yet to be resolved. Critiques of official crime data have been traditionally divided into two broad schools: the realists, who question the reliability of official data and seek to bridge the gap between recorded and actual crime;9 and the social constructionists, who question the validity of crime statistics, regarding them - not as neutrally observed facts – but as revealing of the organisational processes which create them.10 Official figures on the crime of rape present further difficulties. It is widely acknowledged that most rape goes unreported, but the extent is unknown. British Crime Survey (BCS) figures report that about one in twenty women said they had been raped since age sixteen, an estimated 754,000 victims.11 However, only twenty per cent of these incidents were reported to the police.12 Academic studies have revealed wildly varying rates of reporting to the police depending on the population studied. Two studies from the USA demonstrate this disparity: a review of rape victims admitted to hospital found that the police were aware of seventy-five per cent of the cases in the study;13 while a study of young female victims of rape or attempted rape found that only one per cent informed the police and forty-two per cent told nobody.14

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Despite limitations, police data on rape should not be dismissed. Evidence collected by the police needs to stand up to the levels of plausibility and corroboration required by the courts and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Police investigative procedures are subject to review, scrutiny and reform to enable the best possible methods and practices. Problems with police data and procedure have been well documented and open to scrutiny in a way in which many private or academic studies have not been. All of which means there is a good level of reliability of the information collected and a good knowledge base of where the problems and gaps lie. Using this data also offers ethical benefits, providing an excellent source of data which can be utilised without re-interviewing victims. Police files can supply useful baseline data on rape. They are ‘…a suitable and valuable starting point for establishing basic descriptive information about victims, the offender and offence behaviours’.15

Recently in the UK, research into rape has come under much criticism. Charities and women’s action groups have been critical of the amount of research, which has taken place without any associated follow-up or action. A spokesperson for Rape Crisis stated:

We are concerned that as we receive the recommendations from this review in 2010 we will be in exactly the same position - with more promises, when what we really need is change.16

This criticism could be further extended to research on rape relying

solely on police victim data. The excessive focus on the behaviour of victims in studies of rape can create a space in which there is an easy conceptual slippage between identifying risk factors and identifying victim behaviours or characteristics which have produced the rape. This subtle slippage can be easily co-opted into essentialist discourses of rape and victim blame, both of which are lent more credence if no action is taken by the criminal justice system to change the current state of affairs. However, many researchers in this area have refuted these claims arguing that: … a risk factor is not the same as the cause of the violence since it might be correlated with something else that is associated with the underlying cause.17

Additionally, and as stated earlier, others have argued that victim-based research is important because it utilises what data is available to help prevent future rapes.18 All of these critiques are valid. In this chapter I hope to bridge the gap between them; utilising police data for victim based research and engaging with the criticisms rather than disregarding them.


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Using gender and gendered discourses as a lens through which to view reported rapes: I aim to unravel and dispute victim blaming myths as these are applied differently to men and women. For example, by examining men - as well as women - as victims of rape, I aim to disentangle dominant rape myths which view men only in relation to perpetration. 3. Method

London was selected as the research site to provide access to the widest possible research population. The London Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) is the biggest police force in England and Wales and London is the largest city. The MPS covers an area of 620 square miles and a population of 7.2 million people. The MPS were also chosen because of their special focus on investigating claims of rape. Project Sapphire teams are located in every borough and have specially trained officers dedicated to investigating allegations of rape. Additionally, the MPS has one of the most advanced and comprehensive crime recording databases in the UK; the Crime Report Information System (CRIS).

A two year sample of rape allegations made to the MPS involving an intoxicated victim was taken using the Crime Report Information System (CRIS).19 Data from CRIS is made up of victim reports based solely on victim statements. Therefore drug and alcohol use is not substantiated by toxicology, it is only reported. To focus on adult victims, crimes that were being investigated by child protection were excluded. Through initial literature searches it was decided that the nature and etiology of sexual offences against children would be substantially different enough to warrant exclusion. Data was collected on: victim age; victim ethnicity; victim gender; relationship to suspect; offence location; date crime was committed; report date; and victim intoxication. The data was sanitised, duplicates were removed and the variables were recoded. Case exclusions were made on the basis of: missing gender data; withdrawn cases; and age.20 The final sample contained 1,743 allegations reported between September 2006 and August 2008.

The key research question is: Is there a gendered difference in reporting rape when the victim is intoxicated? The data was explored using SPSS. A non-parametric statistical significance test - the Chi Square test - was selected as non-parametric methods require fewer assumptions about a population or probability distribution and are applicable in a wider range of situations 4. Rape, Intoxication and Gender The vast majority of those who reported rape whilst intoxicated were female (ninety-two per cent). A small percentage of victims were male (eight per cent). Comparing the gender distribution of victims in this study to

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other studies of rape is difficult because male rape is an under-researched area. Most studies of rape focus solely on female victims. However, some general statistics on the gender distribution of reported rapes are available. The proportion of men and women reporting intoxicated rape in this study is comparable with the gender proportions revealed by other studies and in official rape statistics. In England and Wales the official crime statistics reveal that seven per cent of victims of any type of rape were male in 2008/2009 and eight per cent were male in 2007/2008.21 In an internal review of rape allegations which examined all types of rape reported in London, the London Metropolitan Police Service also found that around eight per cent of victims reporting rape were male.22

Figure 1 Histogram illustrating age of female victims in a two-year sample of rape allegations involving an intoxicated victim (N= 1604).


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The distribution of ages for female victims produced noteworthy findings (see Figure 1). As this study is examining only adult cases of rape, the full probability distribution of victim age cannot be examined.23 However, even though child cases of intoxicated rape have been excluded the probability distribution still reveals a positive skew towards the younger age range (Figure 1). The modal age for female victims is eighteen years, the median age is twenty-four and the mean age is twenty-six (N= 1,604). This may mean that younger women are more vulnerable to drug and alcohol intoxicated rape than older women, or it may mean that older women are less likely to come forward and report their victimisation to police. In either case it means the majority of female victims who come into contact with the criminal justice system are of a younger age and this has specific implications for the police and CPS.

Following the Home Office report on vulnerable witnesses and victims; Speaking Up For Justice in 1998, some general police service guidelines were issued by the Home Office that defined victims and witnesses under the age of seventeen as ‘vulnerable’.24 It is understood that victims and witnesses identified as vulnerable may need greater assistance from criminal justice professionals at both the pre-trial and trial stage. For those recognised as vulnerable, special measures are put in place to ensure equal access to the justice system and adherence to the standards outlined in The Victims’ Charter (2005).25

In a study of the attrition of rapes reported to the London Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), Stanko and Williams examined vulnerability in detail.26 In the context of their research they defined vulnerable to mean; ‘the context of the rape which occurs in situations where the victim is disadvantaged - in terms of social believability - as a witness’.27 Pertaining to the age of victims they defined victims under eighteen years as vulnerable. The study found that eighty-seven per cent of victims had at least one or more vulnerabilities, which increased the likelihood of attrition.28 The findings from this research reveal that the majority of female adult victims reporting intoxicated rape would not be classed as vulnerable by Home Office guidelines or the MPS research by virtue of their age.29 However, despite this, the findings reveal a very large number of young women reporting rape, very close to an age where they would be classified as vulnerable and receive special police measures. The modal majority of the female victims is eighteen years old. In fact, in cases of rape in which the victim is intoxicated, it could be argued that eighteen-year-old victims may be more vulnerable. Eighteen year olds may not necessarily be more vulnerable as victims and witnesses within the criminal justice system, but may be more vulnerable to becoming the victim of an intoxicated rape. The legal drinking age in England and Wales is eighteen years old. Therefore, large numbers of young women (and men) are more likely to be out

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consuming alcohol and attending licensed establishments such as pubs and nightclubs for the first time. Consequently, they may be more inexperienced in these locations and situations than older people would be.

The need to retain a distinction between vulnerable and non-vulnerable victims is understandable. So, while it is recognised that there will always be individuals who fall close to the cut-off point for special provisions - a line which cannot be infinitely moved - it is still worth considering the young age of most victims who report they have been raped while intoxicated. Moreover, the unique vulnerability of individuals who are eighteen years old to victim-intoxicated rape is something which criminal justice professionals may want to consider when dealing with allegations.

The histogram of the ages of the male victims reporting intoxicated rape reveals a different probability distribution.

Figure 2 Histogram illustrating age of male victims in a two-year sample of rape allegations involving an intoxicated victim (N= 139).


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As Figure 2 demonstrates, the distribution of male victims is bimodal with slight positive skew. There are dual modal ages for the male victims; eighteen years and twenty-nine years old; the median age is twenty-eight years and the mean age is twenty-nine years. Overall, the male victims were of an older age with fewer close to an age where they would be classed as vulnerable victims within the criminal justice system. Due to the small number of male victims in the sample (N =139) it is harder to draw conclusions from these findings. The dual modal ages of eighteen and twenty-nine years may mean that there are two age-risk points for men becoming victims of an intoxicated rape or it may mean that men are more likely to forward to the police at these ages. Regarding the latter proposition, it is possible that the distribution of male ages should more closely resemble that of the female victims with a larger number of younger victims at age eighteen but younger men are simply not coming forward.

There is some support for this in the research literature, indicating that younger men do not have the same levels of trust in the police that younger female victims do, particularly young men of ethnic minority population.30 Regarding the former hypothesis, it is also reasonable to theorise that there may be something about men’s drinking and drug use that increases their risk of rape in their late twenties in way in which women’s patterns of intoxicant use does not. It is clear that this is an area in need of greater research. Examining the relationship between the gender of the victim and the type of intoxication they reported proceeding victimisation produces some interesting results (see Figure 3). If this is formulated as a research hypothesis: ‘there is a relationship between the gender of victims and the self-reported type of intoxication in rapes reported to the police’, a Chi-square distribution test reveals that the null hypothesis can be rejected and the research hypothesis accepted at the 0.05 level of significance. However, in accepting the research hypothesis it is important to note several things: that this study only includes victims who have chosen to come forward and report their rapes to police and that the level of intoxication is self-reported and not externally verified.

One of the most noticeable findings is the proportion of men reporting that they were under the influence of both drugs and alcohol when they were raped. This proportion is substantially higher than the proportion of women reporting both (see Figure 3, third column on the X axis). The cross- tabulation reveals that the observed count of men reporting both drugs and alcohol (32 men) is much higher than the expected count (20 men). In fact it is over 50 per cent higher. This finding could be interpreted in several ways. Primarily, it may mean that men are at greater risk of rape when consuming both drugs and alcohol than is currently recognised. More research would be needed to establish this connection.

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Bar chart illustrating intoxication status by victim gender in a in a two year sample of rape allegations involving an intoxicated victim (N=1,743) (Figure 3)

However, as these studies do not compare men’s rape victimisation directly with women’s, more research is needed to establish this connection and its strength of association. Alternatively though, there are two other ways of interpreting this finding: that women are under-reporting rape which occurs when they have

Female – Male -


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consumed both drugs and alcohol; and/or that men are over-reporting rape which occurs when they have consumed both drugs and alcohol. Firstly, hypothetically; why might women be under-reporting rape which occurs when they have voluntarily consumed both drugs and alcohol? In this interpretation of Figure 3 it is assumed there is data missing from the bar chart in the third column on the X axis. What has happened to this data? The consumption of either alcohol or drugs - and particularly both - is more stigmatising for women than for men. Voluntary intoxication is seen as unfeminine and more risky for women. Women may be choosing to play down any intoxicating substance they consumed, as they may fear being blamed or not believed. There is much research evidence which supports this conclusion. If a woman has voluntarily consumed alcohol or recreational drugs, they are more likely to be held as partially accountable for what happened. A survey conducted by ICM on behalf of Amnesty International in 2005 found that thirty per cent of respondents believed being drunk makes a woman in some way responsible for being raped.31 As Margaret Malloch surmises, for women who in engage in ‘risky’ behaviour such as drinking or drug-taking; ‘the harm of sexual victimisation is denied by legal agency and society in general’32 in a process of delegitimisation. Indeed ‘a woman’s right and indeed, her portrayed ability, to withhold consent is dependant on reputation and status, on her perceived ‘respectability’’.33 So in this interpretation of the findings, where might the missing data from column three have gone? The women coming forward to the police to report they have been raped may be under-reporting drug use, stating that they have only drunk alcohol instead of admitting to both. Or the data may be missing because women who have consumed both kinds of intoxicants are not coming forward at all. The role of intoxicants and female victims of rape sits in an ambivalent position with the criminal justice system, and indeed criminal justice research. On the one hand, the police and criminologists are collecting increasing information about intoxication and rape to assist in crime prevention efforts; on the other hand the intensive focus on collecting data on intoxication is involved in the process of delegitimising women’s claims of rape and may - as in the case of the missing data - be preventing women from coming forward or making them feel as if they have to lie to police officers. The second interpretation of the finding is that men may be over-stating the role of intoxicants. In effect, this interpretation assumes that there is too much data in the men’s bar in column three of the bar chart in Figure 4. So why might men be over-reporting the role of intoxicants? First, it is important to note that this is not implying that men are simply lying. Rather, it may be the case that they are emphasising the role that intoxicants took in their victimisation, in a way in which a woman might not. For instance, they may be mentioning any prescribed drugs they were taking and the way in

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which this increased their intoxication when combined with alcohol. Or they may be mentioning drugs which women considered irrelevant to their victimisation, such as cannabis or other recreational drugs. Moreover, men might only be coming forward to report rape, if they have consumed both drugs and alcohol. This would create an effect in the data in which the proportion of men reporting rape after they were consuming both drugs and alcohol is falsely inflated because men consuming just one type of intoxicant are not coming forward. Contemporary discourses of hegemonic masculinity emphasise the role of self-reliance and self-protection and autonomy for attaining full adult manhood.34 Becoming the victim of rape impinges deeply on personhood and the right to sexual and personal autonomy. It would be wrong, and misleading, to suggest that becoming the victim of a rape is more damaging to the personhood of men than that of women. However, contemporary discourses of hegemonic masculinity mean that rape victimisation is more destructive for men’s gendered identities ‘as men’ than for women’s identities ‘as women’. Men may feel they will be perceived as less masculine if they report they have been raped. This is often one of the cited reasons for the under-reporting of male-on-male rape,35 it may also partially account for the situation here. Men may want to emphasise the external factors in their victimisation i.e. the influence of intoxicants rather than factors they may see as internal or more deeply imbricated with their masculine-self i.e. being unable to defend themselves. Moreover, men are not stigmatised by drinking or drug-taking in the way in which women are so they may feel more comfortable talking about these issues. 5. Conclusions: Uncomfortable Territory Gender is essential to understanding victim-intoxicated rape. The analysis of reported rapes indicates that there are gendered differences in patterns of age and intoxication type. These differences are in need of further action and investigation. The vast majority of victims are young women of age 18 years. The bulk of rape-prevention resources should be targeted at this group. The vulnerability of men under the influence of drugs and alcohol needs further research using toxicology to identify whether this is a pattern in victimisation or reporting behaviour. It is important however, not to essentialise these differences and let understandings of gendered difference merge into gender stereotypes. As highlighted in this chapter, crude gender stereotypes circulated in the media and popular discourse may affect patterns of reporting. So how can the application of gender stereotypes be avoided whilst recognising gendered difference? This is a difficult question. The first step, and a good start, might be to begin to deal more openly and honestly with the uncomfortable territory of sexuality, gender and intoxication. The psychologist David Canter,


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working in the contested area of criminal profiling, has asserted that an offender’s behaviour during the commission of an offence will mirror other aspects of their everyday life.36 This assertion from criminal profiling has an uncomfortable resonance when considered in relation to victim-intoxicated rape. Rape, which occurs while the victim is intoxicated, sits in ambivalent space on a continuum between drinking on romantic dates and drug-facilitated sexual assaults. The normalisation of high levels of alcohol consumption by young women continues to rise,37 yet police figures show young women are the most at risk for victim-intoxicated rape and women are more likely to be blamed for their own victimisation if they have consumed any intoxicant. Discourses of intoxication and rape operate differently for male victims. Men remain invisible in much legal and media discourse, and consequently may be less likely to come forward and report their rape at all, or they may feel less stigmatised by the discourses surrounding victim-blame and intoxication if they do come forward. It is in this uncomfortable territory, in space created by the ambivalence towards gender, sex and intoxication that circumstantial and extra-legal factors gendered stereotypical assumptions and myths about rape come to influence what constitutes a real victim and who can access justice. Until these attitudes are openly addressed and debated little progress can be made. Such inconsistencies are revealing of the uncomfortable contradictions at the heart of gender relations and contemporary attitudes to intoxicants. Coherent strategies for policing cannot be drawn up for an area which in itself is fundamentally incoherent.

Notes 1 M. Kennedy, ‘Polanski was not guilty of 'rape-rape', says Whoopi Goldberg’, in guardian.co.uk, The Guardian Media Group, London, 29 September 2009, viewed on 8 October 2009, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/sep/29/roman-polanski-whoopi-goldberg > 2 C. Dyer, ‘Call for inquiry after rape case collapses over 'drunken consent'’, in The Guardian, The Guardian Media Group, London, 24 November 2005, p.4. 3 Kennedy, op. cit. 4 Dyer, op.cit., p.4. 5 National Statistics Online, ‘A summary of changes over time: Drinking’, Office for National Statistics, last updated 20 April 2004, viewed on 25 September 2009, < http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=829 >

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6 G. Mythen, ‘Cultural victimology: are we all victims now?’, in Handbook of victims and victimology, S. Walklate (ed), Willan Publishing, London, 2007, pp. 464-483. 7 Dyer, op.cit., p.4. 8 F. McClintock, ‘The Dark Figure’, in Collected Studies in Criminological Research, Volume 4, Strasbourg, Council of Europe, 1970, pp. 7-34. 9 c.f. D. Glaser, ‘National goals and indicators for the reduction of crime and delinquency’, in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, volume 371, issue 1, 1967, pp.104-126. 10 c.f. A. Biderman, and A. Reiss.‘On Exploring the ‘Dark Figure’ of Crime’, in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, volume 374, number 1, 1967, pp. 1-15. Also c.f. J. Kitsuse, and A. Cicourel, ‘A note on the uses of official statistics’, Social Problems, vol. 11, 1963, pp.131-39. 11 A. Myhill and J. Allen, Rape and sexual assault of women: findings from the British Crime Survey, Development and Statistics Directorate Home Office, HMSO, London, 2002. 12 ibid. 13 J. Jones et al., ‘Why women don't report sexual assault to the police: The influence of psychosocial variables and traumatic injury’, in Journal of Emergency Medicine, vol. 36, issue 4, May 2009, pp. 417-12. 14 V. Rickert, et al., ‘Disclosure of Date/Acquaintance Rape: Who Reports and When’, Journal of Pediatric Adolescent Gynecology, vol. 18, issue 1, February 2005, pp.17-24. 15 M. Horvath, Drug-Assisted Rape: An Investigation, PhD thesis, University of Surrey, 2006, p. 80. 16 A. Gentleman, ‘Government rape review fails to convince women’s groups’, The Guardian, The Guardian Media Group, London, 22 September 2009, p. 14. 17 S. Walby, and J. Allen, Domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking: Findings from the British Crime Survey, Development and Statistics Directorate Home Office, Home Office Research Study 276, Home Office, London, 2004, p.73. 18 Horvath, op.cit. 19 This study uses the legal definition of rape in England and Wales. This definition determines that rape can only be perpetrated by a male but can be against either a male or a female victim. The current legal definition of rape according to Section 1(1) of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 is as follows: (1) A person (A) commits an offence if— (a) he intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus or mouth of another person (B) with his penis, (b) B does not consent to the penetration, and (c) A does not reasonably believe that B consents.


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20 Seven cases in which the victim was under thirteen years old were found by the search. Child protection cases being investigated by the police had already been excluded from the search criteria. It is therefore unknown why these cases involving young children were not being investigated and were found by the search. As they involve young children, it was decided that an age criteria should be applied to the search results and all cases with victims under the age of thirteen years were excluded. As stated above, the nature and etiology of sexual offences against children is substantially different enough to warrant exclusion. The age of thirteen years was selected as the cut off point because Sections (5-8) of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which deal separately with offences against children, define a child as being under thirteen. 21 A. Walker, et al., Crime in England and Wales 2008/09 - Volume 1: Findings from the British Crime Survey and police recorded crime, Home Office Development and Statistics Directorate, Home Office, London, 2009. 22 B. Stanko, and E. Williams, ‘‘Real’ rape and ‘real’ rape allegations: What are the vulnerabilities of the women who report to the police?’, in Rape: Challenging contemporary thinking, J. Brown and M. Horvath (eds), Willan Publishing, London, 2009, pp.207. 23 As stated above, adult cases have been defined as those not being investigated by the Child Protection Teams or other parts of SCD5 Child Protection Command Unit. 24 Action for Justice, Vulnerable Victims: A Police Service Guide, Home Office, London, 2006, p.5. 25 Criminal Justice Service, The Victims’ Charter: A statement of service standards for victims of crime, Home Office, London, 2005, viewed on 6 October 2009, < http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/victims-charter?view=Binary > 26 Stanko and Williams, op. cit. 27 ibid., p. 210. 28 ibid. 29 As defined earlier in Section 3: Methods. 30 Much of the research into police legitimacy and young men of ethnic minorities is based in the USA (cf. C. Solis, ‘Latino Youths’ Experiences with and Perceptions of Involuntary Police Encounters’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 623, number 1, 2009, pp. 39-51. Also, R. Brunson, and J. Miller, ‘Young Black Men and Urban Policing in the United States’, The British Journal of Criminology , vol. 46, issue 4, 2006, pp. 613-640.). 31 ICM, Sexual Assault Research Summary Report, prepared for Amnesty International, ICM Research, London, 12 October 2005.

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32 M. Malloch, ‘Risky' Women, Sexual Consent and Criminal Justice’, Making Sense of Sexual Consent, M. Cowling and P. Reynolds, P. (eds), Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004, pp. 112. 33 ibid. 34 R. Connell, and J. Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’ in Gender & Society, vol. 19, number 6, 2005, pp. 829-859. 35 M. Mulkey, ‘Recreating masculinity: drama therapy with male survivors of sexual assault’, in The Arts in Psychotherapy, vol. 31, issue 1, 2004, pp.19-28. 36 D. Canter, Criminal Shadows, Harper Collins Publishers, London, 1995. 37 National Statistics Online, op. cit.

Bibliography

Action for Justice, Vulnerable Victims: A Police Service Guide, Home Office, London, 2006. Biderman, A., and Reiss. A., ‘On Exploring the ‘Dark Figure’ of Crime’. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, volume 374, number 1, 1967, pp. 1-15. Brunson, R and Miller, J., ‘Young Black Men and Urban Policing in the United States’. The British Journal of Criminology , volume 46, issue 4, 2006, pp. 613-640. Canter, D., Criminal Shadows. Harper Collins Publishers, London, 1995.

Connell, R. and Messerschmidt, J., ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’. Gender & Society, volume 19, number 6, 2005, pp. 829-859. Dyer, C., ‘Call for inquiry after rape case collapses over 'drunken consent'’. The Guardian, The Guardian Media Group, London, 24 Nov 2005, p.4. Gentleman, A., ‘Government rape review fails to convince women’s groups’. The Guardian, The Guardian Media Group, London, 22 Sept 2009, p. 14. Glaser, D., ‘National goals and indicators for the reduction of crime and delinquency’.The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, volume 371, number 1, 1967, pp.104-126.


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Horvath, M., Drug-Assisted Rape: An Investigation. PhD thesis, University of Surrey, 2006. ICM, Sexual Assault Research Summary Report, prepared for Amnesty International, ICM Research, London, 12 October 2005. Jones, J., Alexander, C., Wynn, B., Rossman, L and Dunnuck, C., ‘Why women don't report sexual assault to the police: The influence of psychosocial variables and traumatic injury’. Journal of Emergency Medicine, volume 36, issue 4, May 2009, pp. 417-12. Kennedy, M., ‘Polanski was not guilty of 'rape-rape', says Whoopi Goldberg’, in guardian.co.uk, The Guardian Media Group, London, 29 September 2009, viewed on 8 Oct 2009. < http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/sep/29/roman-polanski-whoopi-goldberg > Kitsuse, J., and Cicourel, A., ‘A note on the uses of official statistics’. Social Problems, volume 11, 1963, pp.131-39. Malloch, M. ‘Risky' Women, Sexual Consent and Criminal Justice’, in Making Sense of Sexual Consent, M. Cowling and P. Reynolds, P. (eds), Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004, pp. 111-126. McClintock, F., ‘The Dark Figure’. Collected Studies in Criminological Research, Volume 4, Strasbourg, Council of Europe, 1970, pp. 7-34. Myhill, A. and Allen, J., Rape and sexual assault of women: findings from the British Crime Survey. Development and Statistics Directorate Home Office, HMSO, London, 2002. Mythen, G., ‘Cultural victimology: are we all victims now?’, in Handbook of victims and victimology, S. Walklate (ed), Willan Publishing, London, 2007, pp. 464-483. Mulkey, M., ‘Recreating masculinity: drama therapy with male survivors of sexual assault’. The Arts in Psychotherapy, volume 31, issue 1, 2004, pp.19-28.

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National Statistics Online, ‘A summary of changes over time: Drinking’, Office for National Statistics, last updated 20 April 2004, viewed on 25 September 2009. < http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=829 > Rickert, V., Wiemann, C., and Vaughan, R., ‘Disclosure of Date/Acquaintance Rape: Who Reports and When’. Journal of Pediatric Adolescent Gynecology, volume 18, issue 1, February 2005, pp.17-24. Solis, C., Portillos, E., and Brunson, R., ‘Latino Youths’ Experiences with and Perceptions of Involuntary Police Encounters’. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, volume 623, number 1, 2009, pp. 39-51. Stanko, B. and Williams, E., ‘‘Real’ rape and ‘real’ rape allegations: What are the vulnerabilities of the women who report to the police?’, in Rape: Challenging contemporary thinking, J. Brown and M. Horvath (eds), Willan Publishing, London, 2009, pp.207-225. Criminal Justice Service, The Victims’ Charter: A statement of service standards for victims of crime, Home Office, London, 2005, viewed online on 6 October 2009. < http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/victims-charter?view=Binary > Walby, S. and Allen, J., Domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking: Findings from the British Crime Survey. Development and Statistics Directorate, Home Office Research Study 276, Home Office, London, 2004. Walker, A. Flatley, J., Kershaw, C., and Moon, D., Crime in England and Wales 2008/09 - Volume 1: Findings from the British Crime Survey and police recorded crime. Development and Statistics Directorate, Home Office, London, 2009. Gemma Clarke is Doctoral Researcher at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. Her doctoral research examines drug and alcohol related sexual assaults.

Sex in Transition: Anti-Sexuality and the Church in Post-Communist Poland

Alicja A. Gescinska

Abstract This chapter offers a critical evaluation of several aspects (of legal and social kind) of sexuality in postcommunist Poland. Special emphasis will be put on the role of the Church in the spread of antisexual opinions and attitudes in Poland and the threats and challenges this poses to a striving for sexual literacy and positive liberty. Contemporary attempts, like those of theologian and priest Ksawery Knotz, to refute these antisexual attitudes, will be dismissed as neither renewing nor really liberalising. Key Words: Catholicism, Ksawery Knotz, positive liberty, sexual ethics, sexual literacy.


In the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Central-European countries went through a period of transition in which the economic foundations of society were completely changed. Although economic phenomena unmistakably exercise an influence on our sexuality, the case of Poland shows that this economic transition hardly affected sexual relations and standards. The entire society was changing and developing towards a liberal democracy, but in the bedrooms of the Poles not much liberalisation could be noticed. As H. David wrote in a voluminous study of sexuality in the Central-European countries:

The Polish experience shows that economic development, processes of urbanization and modernization, as well as achievements of legal and educational equality by women, are not necessarily synonymous with or a guarantee of an enlightened sex life.1 In the first part of this chapter I will briefly sketch the inadequacy of

the ‘sexual transition’ in Poland. The emphasis will be put on abortion policy, homosexuality, and the conservative - Catholic resistence against sexual education in schools and any sexual liberalisation and liberation. I will critically evaluate these phenomena from the perspective of the concepts of sexual literacy and positive liberty.

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In the second part of this chapter I will talk about the way the Catholic Church has recently tried to formulate a less rigid sexual ethics in Poland. Especially the popular writings of Ksawery Knotz, theologian and monk, are significant in this regard and have caused quite some fuss in the media. However, a critical reading and evaluation of Knotz’ writings reveal that Knotz is not at all an advocate of a more liberal sexual ethics. 2. What is Sexual Literacy?

Before I continue, I would like to clarify what I mean with the term sexual literacy. In general, I think we, as a society and as individuals should strive towards more positive liberty: personal mastery, ability, autonomy and an active stance in moral life, accepting that external limitations can increase your freedom, as freedom without limits is anything but freedom at all. A merely negative freedom, defined as the absence of external limitations and restrictions, does not suffice to be really free. And it certainly does not contribute to any moral uplifting of society.

I have previously tried to argue that positive liberty is what we should aim for, also when it comes to our sexuality.2 I have defined sexual literacy as the aim of our sexuality and defined it from the perspective of positive liberty. Sexual literacy is about personal mastery, acquired through conscious and unconscious learning, in which personal autonomy and an active, dynamic stance are of the utmost importance. I will now try to argue that the abortion policy, views on homosexuality and sexual education in Poland pose great threats and challenges to these principles. 3. Abortion, Homosexuality and Sexual Education

In 1956 Poland legalised abortion. Already in the seventies, but especially in the eighties (as communist power diminished) catholic resistance against this free abortion policy grew. This ultimately resulted in an anti-abortion law in 1993 after the system had collapsed. What is remarkable, is that an explicit antisexual discourse from the church and conservative catholics went hand in hand with this blunt resistance against abortion; an antisexual attitude which is above all evident in the fact that the church argued against any sexual education at schools and advocated abstinence only.

Although one can doubt whether abortion policies have any direct influence on the quality of people’s sex life, the antisexual attitude which was stimulated with the anti-abortion policy in Poland is definitely opposed to an enlightened sexual life. Sociological research has for example shown that during the transition there was a significant increase of women in Poland who no longer wanted to have sex with their husbands; a phenomenon which was subtly described by Maria Nurowska in her novel Grzy malzenskie (1994). The main character of the novel sinks into an antisexual attitude which brings

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her to kill her husband. Although the novel is not a sociological or psychological study, Nurowska sometimes expresses a sharp insight into Polish society and public opinions:

In Poland everybody is sexually underdeveloped; we are about hundred years behind compared with the West. We live in the 19th century when it comes to our mentality and on the field of love we live in the Stone Age.3 This is of course literary hyperbole, but it shows how the antisexual

attitude was or still is a real issue in postcommunist Poland, and that a critical evaluation of it is desirable from the perspective of sexual literacy. I could also refer to statistic research which has shown that Poland stands at the bottom of the ‘frequency of lovemaking’ in Europe, which obviously also relates to the problem of antisexuality.4

This antisexuality does not contribute to an enlightened sex life and sexual literacy at all, as it hinders the active stance and dynamic process of learning which precedes all true positive liberty.

Neither does the negative public opinion about homosexuality in Poland contribute to an enlightenment of sexuality. A pluriform society with respect for others and their sexual preferences (as long as they are legal) is a main characteristic of a modern liberal democracy, and a precondition for sexual literacy. When a significant percentage of our citizens is limited and hindered in the exercise of their own sexual preferences and desires, this cannot be conducive to a more enlightened sexuality.

From the perspective of positive liberty and sexual literacy, especially the principle of autonomy – so central and sacred in positive liberty – seems to be threatened by a severe resistance to homosexuality: everyone should be able to pursue his or her own good; not only as a mere formal right (negative liberty), but as a real ability. And what are rights, when one is unable to enjoy them?

Autonomy is a crucial feature of sexual literacy. It is reflected in Anthony Gidden’s assumption that a democratization of intimacy is necessary and that autonomy is the pillar of this democratization. Autonomy will provide and guard the personal boundaries necessary for an enlightened citizenry.5

An intolerant attitude towards homosexuality hinders this democratization and this forms an obstacle on the road to sexual literacy and true liberty. And there are of course many examples of the extremely negative attitude towards homosexuality in Polish society: the Polish gay-parade is known as the ‘march of the barbarians’, the Polish philosopher of law and senator Maria Szyszkowskawa - who has argued for more legal protection and advantages for same-sex-couples - has been threatened more

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than once, feminist and homosexual demonstrators were violently attacked during a manifestation in Poznan in 2004, and one could go on. Homosexuality is not only considered as reprehensible, but it is actively suppressed. This seems all the more astonishing, knowing that Poland had quite early legalised homosexuality. In 1932 it was decriminalised; however ‘this legal situation has not changed perceptions of homosexuality as deviant’.6

The antisexual attitude of conservative Catholics, and the negative effect this has on sexual literacy, is above all evident in the fact that they try to oppose the spread of contraceptives and sexual education. The anti-abortion law of 1993 also stipulated that the availability of contraceptives should increase as well as the amount and quality of sexual education in schools. Due to pressure from conservatives, these aspects of the law were never implemented. In 1997 a new law was voted to restrict all sexual education:

Sex education has been replaced in schools by ‘family life education’ which exhorts young people to remain sexually abstinent until marriage, while perpetuating myths and misconceptions related to gender, sexuality and family planning.7 This situation of course reminds us of what happens in the US and

which was critically sketched by Simon Blackburn: Within the United States, the federal government spends some $ 100,000,000 a year of American tax dollars on abstinence-only programs of sex education. This in spite of the fact that abstinence-only programs markedly increase young peoples’ health risks by making sporadic, furtive, and unprotected copulations their only option.8 I assume I don’t need to argue that a lack of sexual education and a

simplistic stress on abstinence cannot be conducive to sexual experience. The importance of education in sexual, positive liberation and the development of ‘sexual literacy’ cannot sufficiently be stressed. Like any ability and mastery, sexual literacy is the result of a learning process. This process is in Poland entirely curtailed by the Catholic Church and conservatives. What counts as sexual education in Poland are the obligatory meetings with a priest for those couples who wish to marry in which they are told about natural birth control and their ‘marital duties’.

So the lack of sexual education can be identified as yet another aspect of Polish post-communist society and legislation which is anything but

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conducive to a more enlightened sexual life. The need for change grows, and in the following section I will question whether the writings of Ksawery Knotz really give in to this need for liberalisation and change, as is often and generally assumed. 4. The Problem of Unnatural Sex

The books of Father Knotz on sexuality got a lot of attention from the media; not only in Poland, but also abroad. An English translation of his latest book should appear next year, and one could speak of a real hype. His latest book was received as ‘the Catholic Kamasutra’ and the first part of its title – Sex like you didn’t know it – does also arouse high hopes. But the books of Knotz do not meet these hopes and expectations. They definitely have some relevance: Knotz argues against anti-sexuality and says Catholicism should function as an excuse for not having sex. Knotz stresses the importance of sexuality as part of our condition humane, and he explicitly states that it is incorrect to assume sex can only be justified within Catholicism from the perspective of procreation.

But is all this really that renewing for a catholic thinker? Certainly not, and I would like to mention especially the name of Nikolaj Berdjaev, the greatest Russian philosopher of the 20th century, whose role in Polish thought is not insignificant. Already in 1916 Berdjaev criticised Christian anti-sexuality and abstinence-only discourses and in many ways Berdjaev was much more progressive than Knotz, while almost 100 years have gone by since! This is above all evident in the fact that Knotz more than once talks about natural and unnatural sex, dismissing as unnatural or abnormal sex those activities that for example imply the use of contraception or anal penetration.

Not only how Knotz defines ‘natural sex’ / ‘normal sex’, but the fact that he talks of ‘normality’ as a criteria to condemn certain activities, is a proof that Knotz is certainly not way ahead of his time. Once more I can refer to Berdjaev who wrote in The Meaning of Creation that normality is not applicable to sexuality, and certainly not to condemn certain sexual activities or to force one’s own views upon others. In a way one could say that Berdjaev - although he was a conservative Christian philosopher - was an ideological predecessor of many modern thinkers who sought to define perversion and who came to the conclusion that it is almost impossible to define what is perverse and what is normal. As Berdjaev wrote himself:

Scientifically, nothing allows in fact to establish such a strict division between that, which is in this regard, ‘normal’ and ‘natural’, and that, which on the contrary is abnormal’ and ‘unnatural’. From a philosophical point of view, the category of ‘the natural’ must be rejected.9

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5. The Sanctification of the Vagina and Other Arguments Knotz’ definition of ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ sex does not approve of

anal sex, the use of contraception, homosexuality, masturbation, and so on. Obviously Knotz does little to contribute to a reconciliation of catholic teachings on the one hand, and those sexual activities which are part of every daily life of many people but which the church does not recognise.

Knotz’s view on good sex is almost solely defined by the penetration of the vagina. Any orgasm which does not result from the vaginal penetration of the woman, is incomplete, unsatisfactory, and ultimately, not worth much, according to Knotz. It even leads to a ‘falsification of the love between man and woman’.10 These are harsh words for lovers who think they come closer to each other through mutual masturbation and oral sex, while they apparently undermine the love that exists between them through those acts.

In order to obtain more persuasiveness, Knotz makes use of much false information concerning the influence on people’s health of these activities which he defines as inferior and quite worthless. He states that orgasms which do not result from the penetration of the vagina are unsatisfactory and this dissatisfaction leads to mental problems. Such way of argumentation is of course very typical of the catholic way of thinking on sexuality.

The most remarkable of Knotz’s ‘medical arguments’, is probably his claim that sperm is a source of vitamins, works as a natural Prozac, prevents breast cancer and improves the quality of the female skin.11 That is of course, if this ‘miracle drug’ is taken vaginal, and certainly not oral or certainly not anally!

There are many such statements in Knotz’s writings which are either morally or scientifically objectionable. He uses cheap, stereotypic, strange and sometimes even totally reprehensible arguments. One could perhaps find it amusing that Knotz claims that religion works as an aphrodisiac and increases the sexual urge. That may seem amusing, not very convincing, but it does not do much harm. But when Knotz writes that certain diseases aren’t that frequently sexually transmitted as is often said, in order to condemn the use of contraception, we must find this less amusing and all the more worrying.

5. Conclusion

The fact that Knotz is not at all that renewing, and certainly hasn’t written anything that could come near a ‘Catholic Kamasutra’, is perhaps most evident in the sources on which he grounds his views: the encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968) of pope Paul VI and the thought of Karol Wojtyla / pope John Paul II. The influence of the latter was of course very big in Poland in many ways, and his antisexual views have obviously determined

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Knotz’s own views. The fact that Knotz’s thought is derived from such an explicit antisexual discourse, shows he cannot possibly be the liberator of catholic teachings relating to sexuality, as he is often said to be in Poland.

I have argued how certain legal and social phenomena in Poland hinder the development of sexual literacy and positive liberty. Antisexual discourses do not contribute to the dynamic process of learning which is inherent to sexual education and sexual literacy. The harsh and intolerant attitude towards homosexuality does form a threat to the principle of autonomy, so important in positive liberty, and therefore also to sexual literacy. The writings of Knotz do little to contribute to a change and improvement in this regard. There are far too many internal paradoxes, morally and scientifically objectionable statements in his writings. Whether there is a real process of liberalisation within the Catholic Church regarding sexuality in Poland, is therefore more than doubtful.12

Notes

1 H David, From Abortion to Contraception. A Resource to Public Policies and Reproductive Behavior in Central and Eastern Europe from 1917 to the Present, Greenwood Press, Westport, 1999, p. 187. 2 I refer to my article From Sexual Liberty to Sexual Liberation which was presented at the Interdisciplinary.net Good Sex / Bad Sex conference in Budapest (May 2009) 3 M Nurowska, Het huwelijksspel, De Geus, Breda, 1997, pp. 106-107. (My own translation from the Dutch edition.) 4 H David, op. cit., p. 186. 5 A Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, Polity Press, Oxford, 1993, p. 189. 6 M Baer, ‘Let Them Hear Us! The Politics of Same-sex: Transgression in Contemporary Poland’, in Transgressive Sex: Subversion and Control in Erotic Encounters, H Donnan & F Magonan (eds), Berdhan books, 2009, p.133. 7 F Girard. & W Nowicka (2002), ‘Clear and Compelling Evidence: The Polish Tribunal on Abortion Rights’. Reproductive Health Matters, vol. 10, no. 19, 2002, p. 23. 8 S Blackburn, Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, pp. 6-7. 9 N Berdjaev, Le sens de la création, Desclée De Brouwer, Brugge, 1955, pp. 234-235. (My own translation from the French edition.) 10 K Knotz, Seks jakiego nie znacie: Dla malzonkow kochajacycj Boga, Swiety Pawel, Czestochowa, 2009, p. 81. (My own translation from the Polish original.)

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11 ibid., 146.

Bibliography Baer, M., ‘Let Them Hear Us! The Politics of Same-sex: Transgression in Contemporary Poland’, in Transgressive Sex: Subversion and Control in Erotic Encounters. H. Donnan and F. Magonan (eds), Berdhan Books, pp. 131-151. Berdjaev, N., Le sens de la création. Desclée De Brouwer, Brugge, 1955. Blackburn, S., Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004. David, H., From Abortion to Contraception. A Resource to Public Policies and Reproductive Behavior in Central and Eastern Europe from 1917 to the Present. Greenwood Press, Westport, 1999. Giddens, A., The Transformation of Intimacy. Polity Press, Oxford, 1993. Girard, F. and Nowicka W., ‘Clear and Compelling Evidence: The Polish Tribunal on Abortion Rights’. Reproductive Health Matters, vol. 10, no. 19, 2002, pp. 22-30. Knotz, K., Akt malzenski. Wydawnictwo M, Krakau, 2001.

–––, Seks jakiego nie znacie: Dla malzonkow kochajacycj Boga. Swiety Pawel, Czestochowa, 2009. Nurowska, M., Het huwelijksspel, De Geus, Breda, 1997. Alicja A. Gescinska is a PhD-candidate (FWO) affiliated to Ghent University and the Center for Ethics and Value Inquiry. She does research on the concept of moral responsibility and its anthropological foundations in the thought of Max Scheler and Karol Wojtyla and how moral responsibility relates to human freedom and autonomy, which she also applies to the domain of sexual ethics.

The Embodiment of Female Sexual Pleasure: Body as Object and Body as Instrument

Fiona McQueen

Abstract This chapter will consider how models of embodiment can contribute to an understanding of the experience of sexual pleasure. Data was collected from thirteen women aged 21 to 53 years based in the UK, interviewed in a semi structured style about their experiences of their sexuality. This research proposes that in empirical work, models of embodiment which categorise the body as made up of three bodies: the objectified body, the experiencing body and the experienced body could be more usefully reconstructed only two female bodies. By re-formulating the female body into the body as object and the body as instrument, the difficulties of experiencing female sexual desire and pleasure within a culture of sexual propriety and objectification is emphasised. Specifically highlighted was the importance of the situational and relational context in which sexual pleasure can be achieved for women, this was paramount in understanding what factors were conductive to attaining a positive sexual self-image. This research highlights important points of connection between the body as: object of desire; site of experience of emotion and sensation; as well as the vehicle through which the sexual is defined. These three competing roles of the sexual body reflect the multiple ways in which bodies are required to re-invent themselves daily through their role as both source of contact with the material world, and site of interpreting and constructing the social world. By connecting these two worlds, sexual pleasure is conceptualised as being reflexive; influenced through social interaction and experiences, leading to female bodies being reconstructed in multiple ways in the pursuit of sexual pleasure. With those women who have achieved their own state of sexual pleasure, they have experienced this as a point at which the self-conscious body as object is dispelled so that the sexual body as instrument can be fully enjoyed. Key Words: Embodiment, female, sexual pleasure, sociology.

***** 1. Background Through time female sexual pleasure has been a highly politicised issue, medicalised as long ago as the 5th century BC when the definition of hysteria was agreed upon. Aspects of women’s sexuality which do not serve

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men’s desires, or are not wholly related to reproduction, have been consistently denied in public discourse.1 It has been argued that historically women are seen through the male gaze as the object of desire, their bodies devoid of subjectivity, lacking their own separate sexuality, contingent upon male desire and competing for male approval.2 This leads many feminists to consider the objectification of women as a process undergone from childhood whereby girls are made aware of the need to control their bodily movements from a young age.3 Some researchers go so far as to say that one of the first lessons taught to women in a patriarchal society is to view oneself as an object in a process of self objectification.4 Young has concluded through her phenomenological research into female bodily movement, that women experience their bodies with an “ambiguous transcendence” aware of themselves as objects under the male gaze of unwanted attention.5 Masters and Johnson, leading sex researchers of their time, described a process of ‘spectatoring’ as “the loss of sexual agency through viewing oneself as a sexual object” which “impedes sexual functioning because it distracts women from their own pleasure”.6 The connection between the objectification of women, self-objectification and sexual pleasure will be explored in this chapter.

Jackson and Scott argue that in order to interpret one’s own body (as well as the bodies of others) as sexual, we need socially agreed norms defining what is sexual.7 The term ‘sexually schizophrenic society’ describes the ways in which Western societies hold sexuality to be both a source of dirt, disease and denigration as well as a gateway to ecstasy, enlightenment and emancipation. This conflict has been argued to be more acutely felt by women, needing to be both chaste and pure, as well as sexually available and attractive at the same time.8 Women are expected to walk a ‘very narrow tightrope’ of sexual propriety that controls the expression of female sexual desire or pleasure.9 So that despite our society being proliferated with messages of sexualised women there is a ‘missing discourse of desire’ for women whereby they have little awareness of what constitutes their own desire or sexual pleasure. Socialised to be sexually attractive and available women are encouraged to present an appearance of socially approved female sexuality.10 This chapter considers gender and sexuality as empirically related but analytically distinct categories in line with Gagnon and Simon.11 By viewing sexuality as socially constructed, it must be seen as produced through the production of gender, so that “sexual pleasure is socially mediated and embodied selves are reflexively constructed and reconstructed through social interaction in specific social settings”.12 In this way all interaction is embodied as well as gendered, and all sexual relations occur in a nexus of social relations.

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2. Embodiment Embodiment theory highlights the centrality of the body in experiencing and communicating with the social world, making it impossible to dismiss the body when theorising the social world.13 However the question of how to conceptualise the body is a complex one, McNay states the nature of this problem within sociology:

As the point of overlap between the physical, the symbolic and the sociological, the body is a dynamic frontier. The body is the threshold through which the subject’s lived experience of the world is incorporated and realised and, as such, is neither pure object nor pure subject. It is neither pure object since it is the place of one’s engagement with the world. Nor is it pure subject in that there is always a material residue that resists incorporation into dominant symbolic schema.14

This fundamental difficulty in reconciling the binary of bodies being both subject and object within the social world makes embodiment theory illuminating in researching sexualities, and specifically sexual pleasure. As stressed by Jackson and Scott, bodies in themselves are not meaningful within sociology, rather they are embodied within a specific social context which “profoundly affects both how we see our own and others’ bodies and how we experience our actual embodiment”.15 Sexual pleasure can provide a point of connection between competing aspects of embodiment wherein the subject and body become blurred within practices such as being aware of being viewed in a sexual way, perceiving situations as sexual and feeling sexual. This article will go on to explore the relationship between the subject and body through examining the three part model of embodiment proposed by Lindemann.16

In constructing a three part model of the body, Lindemann describes the objectified body; a visible and concrete gestalt, the experiencing body which perceives through the senses including sight, touch etc. and; the experienced body which feels a sense of self without conveying sensory perceptions.17 While this model was primarily concerned with addressing embodied issues surrounding the everyday reproduction of human gender, specifically considering the body to be a spatial phenomenon, it can be useful in highlighting areas of interest within the construction of the embodiment of female sexual pleasure. As adapted by Jackson and Scott,18 Lindemann’s model highlights how the objectified body and living body are reflexively linked, stating that how the objectified body is perceived effects how the living body is experienced and vice versa. This interpretation states that sexual experience can change both how objectified bodies are defined as


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sexual, as well as how experiencing bodies experience sexual encounters. This highlights the potential for discontinuity between perceptions of what appears to be ‘sexy’ (in the objectified body) and what is experienced as sexual (by the living body).

This three-part model has many strengths, including the ability to acknowledge the potential distance between portraying an objectified appearance of sexual behaviour and experiencing this as sexual, and the potential for reconstructing interpretations of what is sexual. However, following on from the findings of this research there is one important element missing from the model discussed by Lindemann and Jackson and Scott which is the role of agency.19 In this model the experienced body represents the sense of one’s own body, experienced without conveying any signs of sensory perception. While the experiencing body feels through the senses including touch, taste, sight etc. The combination of these into the living body leads to the body knowing where it is located, in an absolute location without the need for spatial relations or relative distances from other objects, in other words it has a discrete sense of self. However, this awareness of self does not go on to then be aware of the objectified body in any meaningful way, but is limited to only being oriented towards the construction of the objectified body through cultural formation. So that conscious awareness of the body is alienated from the objectified body and located solely in the living body. The discussed research uses the experience of female sexual pleasure to question this understanding of embodiment. 3. Methods In exploring the issue of embodied sexual pleasure, qualitative methods were employed in order to discuss this topic with sensitivity in an open and reflexive manner. Semi-structured interviews were used following a loose life-time trajectory with all thirteen participants, aged between 21 and 53 years, discussing their memories of their sex lives beginning from when they first became aware of themselves in a sexual way. This method allowed participants to reflect on key stages in their live when their sexuality was influential in their self-identity, or specific incidents which changed how they experienced this. The interview data collected was very detailed and personal with all, bar one respondent, discussing their pleasant surprise at the level of insight they had gained from taking part in the interview process. Interviewees were recruited through word of mouth and therefore most lived in or around the researchers home town of Edinburgh, with a small number being based the north of England. The convenience sampling method led to a sample of seven middle class and six working class participants, with women deciding their own class based on their life trajectories to date, all of whom chose pseudonyms with which to be identified in the research. While the interview

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structure was concerned with life-time trajectories of factors affecting women’s sexual pleasure, the theme of embodiment, a theory which has been widely recognised as very difficult to directly investigate, was focused on through the specific question asked in the interview context: ‘have you ever felt alone during sex?’. This question gave rise to a high level of response, with all respondents citing specific occasions or relationships in which they had felt alone during sexual activities, with detailed accounts of how this felt and under what circumstances this occurred provided to the researcher. However, in order to investigate the nature of the embodiment of female sexual pleasure, several areas of convergence from among the thirteen life trajectories must be taken into account. 4. Research findings Starting from the point at which women first became aware of their own sexuality, a central issue of communication at home arose. This was recognised as contributing greatly to how women valued their sexuality. This research found that the more a daughter is encouraged to think of her sexualised body in a positive way by her mother, the more likely she is to go on to experience sexual pleasure. This correlation between attitude at home towards female sexuality and, subsequent ability to experience sexual pleasure was very strong. In contrast, women reflected on conflicting messages they received from the media as regards their sexuality, stating their need to appear sexually available, often expressed through messages about body image, and being sexually attractive. Research into the sexual content of primetime television has revealed “women, can, do and should objectify themselves, exploiting their bodies and looks were portrayed as important, if not necessary, to attract male suitors”.20 These messages contained in television often directly contradict messages young women received at home, both explicit and latent. The resulting discrepancy between mass media and family values led to the women feeling confused about their newly sexualised bodies and how they should behave in sexual contexts. Talking about how they had experienced great conflict as regards how they ‘should be’; either as a physically attractive, sexually available, passive object to allure men, as presented to them in the media. Or a ‘good girl’ who is careful not to present herself as sexual at all, as encouraged by their family background in most cases, was presented in most life trajectories. Sexual desire or potential for pleasure from sexual activity were not messages discussed by the women when describing their youth, supporting the concept of a ‘missing discourse of desire’ for young women.

Women who received positive sexual messages at home in contrast, exhibited a greater sense of control over their bodies when they went on to experiment sexually. The central issue of control is shown primarily through two women who felt able to refuse, avoid or get out of sexual situations they


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did not want or were not enjoying. However, as found by previous research, the first sexual experiences of most women in this study were not enjoyable.21 The conflicting messages received by young women from media and family, highlighting the ‘sexually schizophrenic society’ led to them feeling confused in what they wanted to achieve with their newly sexualised bodies.

This research found that the impact of early sexual experiences on future ability to enjoy sexual pleasure is great. Those women who had less control over their first sexual encounters have gone on to have more difficulties in experiencing sexual pleasure. Sexual harassment from leering to rape was cited as a very common experience for the women interviewed, especially when young. These experiences resulted in women sensing their sexualised bodies as problematic, leading to several women creating a deliberate distance between themselves and their sexuality. Every woman in this research gave a description at some point of receiving unpleasant sexual attention and or enduring negative encounters over their life course. Through these incidences many women came to conceptualise their sexualised bodies as a source of betrayal, pain and unwanted attention, as highlighted by Tinkerbell when she says:

When it comes round to the whole dressing and being and feeling, because quite a lot of feeling sexy makes me feel quite uncomfortable. I guess because it triggers, it’s such a double‐edged sword, in my head I’m very ambivalent, is the word I would use, to my sexuality. I can love it or loathe it, and if that’s not something in my head when I’m doing things then I can be much more confident.

Research into sex workers found that they develop coping mechanisms to manage the tensions of negative sexual situations. These coping mechanisms largely involve ‘separating the body from ‘the self’’ so as to manage difficult emotions which surface through their day-to-day working lives. This finding was supported by the discussed research that found that women who have had more of these negative experiences find it much harder to expect sexual experiences to be pleasant. Instead these women experience their bodies as remote objects out of their control, as described by Chloe Taylor discussing a one night stand:

When I was drunk I thought oh, he’s really funny, and he’d be a great laugh in the bedroom, and it’s not turned out like that I’ve just felt like, well, I don’t know why I’m doing this, but it’s not that bad, so I’ll just drift off.

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Or Claire discussing sex in a long term 5 year relationship:

Being in relationships, I was just kind of going through the motions, as opposed to it being something that I was terribly into. I very often found myself sort of absent, and having sex very much aware of my responsibility as a girlfriend, as opposed to it being something I actually wanted. And I think I would even say I’ve had times when I actually felt violated because I was doing it because it was expected, but I really didn’t want to (pause) I think you just kind of separate yourself, just go ahead just kind of zoned out.

In considering this experience of ‘drifting off’ within the context of Lindemann’s three part model of the body, this example highlights that there is a connection between the objectified body and the living body. Rather than the body being made up of two discrete entities sharing the same space and time, by pointing directly at the point at which an awareness of self distances itself from the body as an object. This process highlights that the living body as described by Lindemann has an awareness of the connection it has to the objectified body in a reflexive way.22 It is this awareness of the objectified body by the living body that leads to the reformulation of Lindemann’s model into two constituent parts: the body as object and the body as instrument.23 This example of women choosing to ‘drift off’ during unpleasant sexual encounters in order to escape negative sensations and emotions, can demonstrate how the proposed two part model of embodiment can more successfully conceptualise the experiences of these women. In contrast to Lindemann’s model, the proposed two part model questions the necessity of differentiating between the ability of a body to experience physical sensations (the experiencing body) and the ability to have a sense of one’s own body without conveying sensory perceptions (the experienced body).

The findings of this research suggest that women experience their bodies in a more cohesive way, unable to separate their awareness of physical sensations from their sense of self, but with a discrete ability to discern between whether they are fully engaging with their physical bodies or not, essentially with a sense of presence. This leads to the breaking down of Lindemann’s model, stripping components of each of her three bodies and reconstituting these into two bodies: a body as object; aware of emotions, sensations and pain but unable to actively define situations as sexual, and: a body as instrument; able to perceive through the senses, including an ability to experience desire, a sense of agency and control over its actions and able to actively define situations as sexual. This reformulation is able to


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accommodate the experience of women drifting off during sexual encounters as it facilitates the distinction made by these women of being at one point present in a sexual encounter, in their body as instrument, fully engaged and present mentally and physically, but then deliberately distancing themselves from their body, leaving the body as object behind in order to avoid intense negative emotions.

This model can be further illustrated by considering the experience of female sexual pleasure, and the main factors which can affect this. The issue of performance becomes key in this example, as these women were effectively performing a version of their own sexuality, yet not experiencing desire or pleasure, highlighting their ability to self-objectify their sexualised bodies. This model of two bodies highlights the role of agency within conceptualising female sexual pleasure. Agency in this sense is defined as:

The ability to define one’s goals and act upon them. Agency is about more than observable action; it also encompasses the meaning, motivation and purpose, which individuals bring to their activity, their sense of agency, or the ‘power within’. 24 Within a sexual context agency relates specifically to actions such as

to be aware of and act upon personal sexual desires, to take the initiative in sexual situations, choosing to not engage in certain behaviours. Agency refers to the motivation and thinking behind behaviours and actions as well as any actions carried out. This highlighting of the non-physical, and potentially unspoken, elements of agency are important in researching sexuality. The ability to express sexual pleasure is seen as evidence of sexual agency as the circumstances and conditions required for women to be able to experience this were found to be contingent on a level of control over their sexual encounters. The main areas identified in this research as predicting the ability to experience sexual pleasure are communicating about sexual issues, trusting your partner emotionally and feeling equal to your partner.

A major finding of this research is that women who regularly communicate what they want in bed with their partner orgasm more easily and value orgasm more highly than those women who did not communicate with their sexual partners. While orgasm is not definitive of sexual pleasure, it is a strong indication of this. This finding is congruent with the expected influence of agency - women who are able to recognise and communicate their sexuality find it easier to experience their own sexual desires and pleasure. Additionally, trust was cited as the most consistent element necessary to sexual pleasure, with all female participants mentioning the importance of this to their relationships. The relevance of emotional trust seems to be directly related to the body as instrument once again: women

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who trust their partner to listen to them, take their time and be open emotionally do not feel it necessary to perform an idealised version of their sexuality or ‘act sexy’. Trust in a relationship negates the need to perform as a sexual object, enabling women to stop self-objectifying and experience their body as an instrument of their own pleasure.

In order to understand the impact sexual pleasure has on women we must consider firstly the impact this has on their relationship with their partner and the relationship they have with themselves. Many women described how good sex can make them feel closer to their partner. In focusing on the role of sexual pleasure in women’s sense of sexual self identity, many women described sex making them feel relaxed, chilled or at peace. This calm and peace was described as rare moment when women can be devoid of an awareness of the body as object, when women can simply be in their body, at one with their potentially conflicting sexual identity as described by Biker Chick when she describes her sexual pleasure:

It’s that feeling of being totally and completely in your own body, in your senses, in this moment now. And there is no thinking, or buzzing on whatever. But the ideal moment is afterwards when you just, it spreads through your body, every sense, every pore, every cell in your skin feels like you fit your skin completely.

The process of reconciling the binary of the body as object and the body as instrument is centrally the reason why sexual pleasure is powerful and important to women. It provides a site at which women can reclaim and redefine their sexuality, sexual desires and sexualised bodies in a continually reflexive way so that positive sexual encounters can enable women to re-conceptualise their bodies in less objectified ways. By no longer feeling a need to perform an idealised version of female sexuality as attractive and passive, women can assert their agency and interpret their own desire and pleasure in their own terms. 5. Conclusions The embodiment of female sexual pleasure is a highly complex, socially mediated process. Women construct and reconstruct their sexuality from many sources of interaction within a ‘sexually schizophrenic society’ wherein they experience their bodies as both instrument through which to act in the social world with agency, and as object, through which they enact a passive performance of female sexuality, able to flick between these at any time. However this research concludes that the experience of sexual pleasure is only possible through the body as instrument, as the body as object is overly self-reflexive rendering it distant to the senses. Objectification and


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self-objectification ensure that women are alienated from their inner self, constrained within social norms that expect them to perform rather than experience desire and pleasure. These conclusions highlight the importance of challenging social norms which encourage the objectification of women or perpetuate the missing discourse of desire experienced by some of the women in this research. Through encouraging women to reclaim and redefine their sexuality, out with the confines of the popular media messages of appropriate female sexuality, female sexual pleasure can be recognised as liberating. This chapter raises questions about the complicated nature of sexuality and specifically sexual pleasure. It highlights the need for greater attention to be paid to the ways in which we all experience our bodies and how this is socially constructed, and can thus be reflexively reconstructed through life experiences.

Notes 1 R Maines, Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria”, the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction, London, John Hopkins University Press, 1999. 2 H Crowley and S Himmelweit (eds), Knowing Women: Feminism and Knowledge, Polity Press in association with The Open University, Cambridge, 1992. 3 I M Young, ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ in Throwing like a Girl and Other Essays, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1990. 4 B L Fredrickson and T Roberts, ‘Objectification theory: Toward understanding women’s lived experiences and mental health risks’. Psychology of Women Quarterly, vol. 21, pp. 173-206, 1997. 5 Young, op. cit., p. 153. 6 W Masters and V Johnson, Human Sexual Inadequacy, Little, Brown, Boston, MA, 1970. 7 S Jackson and S Scott, ‘Embodying Orgasm: Gendered Power Relations and Sexual Pleasure’. Co-published simultaneously in Women and Therapy, vol. 24, no. 1 /2, pp. 99-110 and A New View of Women’s Sexual Problems, E Kaschak and L Tiefer (eds), Biningham, NY, The Haworth Press, 2001. 8 C Queen, ‘Sex Radical Politics, Sex-Positive Feminist Thought, and Whore Stigma’, in Whores and Other Feminists, J Nagle (ed), Routledge, New York, London, 1997, p. 130. 9 F Attwood, ‘Sluts and Riot Grrrls: Female Identity and Sexual Agency’. Journal of Genders Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, 2007, pp. 233-247. 10 L Irigaray, ‘The Sex Which is Not One’, in Feminism and Sexuality: A Reader, S Jackson and S Scott (eds), Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1996. 11 J Gagnon and W Simon, Sexual Conduct, Hutchison, London, 1974.

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12 Jackson and Scott, op. cit., p. 100. 13 S J Williams, The Lived Body: Sociological Themes, Embodied Issues, Routledge, London, 1998. 14 L McNay, ‘Gender, Habitus and the Field’. Theory, Culture & Society vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 95-117, 1999, p. 98. 15 Jackson and Scott, op.cit., p. 102. 16 G Lindemann, ‘The Body of Sexual Difference’, in Embodied Practice: Feminist Perspectives on the Body, K. Davis (ed.), Sage, London, 1997, pp. 73-92. 17 Ibid. 18 Jackson and Scott, op. cit. 19 Lindemann, op. cit. 20 J Kim, L Sorsoli, K Collins, B Zylbergold, D Schooler, D Tolman, ‘From Sex to Sexuality: Exposing the Heterosexual Script on Primetime Network Television’. The Journal of Sex Research, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 145-157, 2007. 21 C E Welles, ‘Breaking the Silence Surrounding Female Adolescent Sexual Desire’. Women & Therapy, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 31-45, 2005. 22 Lindemann, op.cit. 23 Lindemann, op.cit. 24 N Kabeer, ‘Resources, Agency, Achievements: Reflections on the Measurement of Women’s Empowerment’. Development and Change, vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 35-464, 1999, pp. 438.

Bibliography Attwood, F., ‘Sluts and Riot Grrrls: Female Identity and Sexual Agency’. Journal of Genders Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, 2007, pp. 233-247. Crowley, H. and Himmelweit, S. (eds), Knowing Women: Feminism and Knowledge. Polity Press in association with The Open University, Cambridge, 1992. Fredrickson, B. L., and Roberts, T, ‘Objectification theory: Toward understanding women’s lived experiences and mental health risks’. Psychology of Women Quarterly, vol. 21, 1997, pp. 173-206. Gagnon, J. and Simon, W., Sexual Conduct. Hutchison, London, 1974 Irigaray, L. ‘The Sex Which is Not One’ in Feminism and Sexuality: A Reader. S. Jackson, and S. Scott (eds), Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1996.


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Jackson, S. and Scott, S., ‘Embodying Orgasm: Gendered Power Relations and Sexual Pleasure’. Co-published simultaneously in Women and Therapy, vol. 24, no. 1 /2, 2001, pp. 99-110 and A New View of Women’s Sexual Problems. E. Kaschak and L. Tiefer (eds), The Haworth Press, Biningham: NY, 2001. Kabeer, N., ‘Resources, Agency, Achievements: Reflections on the Measurement of Women’s Empowerment’. Development and Change, vol. 30, 1999, pp. 435-464. Kelly, L., ‘It’s everywhere’: Sexual Violence as a Continuum’ in Knowing Women: Feminism and Knowledge. H. Crowley and S. Himmelweit (eds), Polity Press in association with The Open University, Cambridge, 1992. Kim, J., Sorsoli, L., Collins, K., Zylbergold, B., Schooler, D., Tolman, D., ‘From Sex to Sexuality: Exposing the Heterosexual Script on Primetime Network Television’. The Journal of Sex Research, vol. 44, no. 2, 2007, pp. 145-157. Levy, A. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Pocket, London, 2005. Lindemann, G. ‘The Body of Sexual Difference’, in Embodied Practice: Feminist Perspectives on the Body. K Davis (ed), Sage, London, 1997, pp. 73-92. Maines, R., Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria”, the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction. John Hopkins University Press, London, 1999. Masters, W. and Johnson, V., Human Sexual Inadequacy. Boston, MA, Little, Brown, 1970. McHugh, M. ‘What Do Women Want? A New View of Women’s Sexual Problems’. Sex Roles, vol. 54, 2006, pp. 361-369. McNay, L. ‘Gender, Habitus and the Field’. Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 16, no. 1, 1999, pp. 95-117. Queen, C., ‘Sex Radical Politics, Sex-Positive Feminist Thought, and Whore Stigma’, Whores and Other Feminists. J. Nagle (ed), Routledge, New York, London, 1997, pp. 125-135.

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Sanchez, D., Kiefer, A., Ybarra, O., ‘Sexual Submissiveness in Women: Costs for Sexual Autonomy and Arousal’. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 32, 2006, pp. 512-523. Tolman. D., ‘Female Adolescent Sexuality: An Argument for a Developmental Perspective on the New View of Women’s Sexual Problems’. Women and Therapy, vol. 24, 2001, pp. 195-209. Welles, C. E., ‘Breaking the Silence Surrounding Female Adolescent Sexual Desire’. Women & Therapy, vol. 28, 2, 2005, pp. 31-45. Williams, S. J., The Lived Body: Sociological Themes, Embodied Issues. Routledge, London, 1998.

Young, I. M., Throwing Like a Girl: And Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1990.

Fiona McQueen is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. Her main interests include sexuality, sexual pleasure, heterosexuality, embodiment and gender identities; she is currently working on a doctoral thesis in sexual communication

PART III

Narrative Discourses

Spatial Sexualities: The Private, the Social and the Distinctively Deadly in Othello on Screen

Eleni Pilla

Abstract With the technological resources at their disposal, modern film directors can present sexuality spatially in innovative ways when adapting Shakespeare's Othello for the screen. In Shakespeare's early modern domestic tragedy of Othello the bedroom articulates a complex form of spatial sexuality. Othello kills his wife on their marital bed ‘else she’ll betray more men’ (5.2.6) and then commits suicide when he discovers that he has wrongfully murdered her. Concentrating on the configuration of the bedroom in Oliver Parker’s 1995 cinematic version of Shakespeare’s early modern tragedy, this chapter explores the complex interweaving of sexuality and space. The discussion demonstrates how spatial sexualities are constructed through the interpenetration of a myriad of discourses relating to identity, authority, hegemony, gender, race and sexuality. The analysis highlights how Parker’s erotic thriller constructs a distinctive spatial sexuality relevant to the genre of the film. The chapter puts forward how the debates established through the dialogue between sexuality and space are not resolved at the end of this cinematic adaptation of Othello. Key Words: the bedroom, gender, Othello, passion, sexuality, space.

*****

In Shakespeare’s early modern domestic tragedy of Othello the bedroom marks a deadly intimacy. In an act of eroticised violence, Othello kills his wife on their marital bed ‘else she’ll betray more men’1 and commits suicide upon discovering that he has murdered her erroneously. With the technological resources at their disposal, modern film directors can present sexuality in innovative ways when adapting Shakespeare’s play for the screen. Concentrating on the configuration of the bedroom in Oliver Parker’s 1995 cinematic adaptation of Othello, this chapter explores the complex interweaving of sexuality and space and demonstrates how spatial sexualities are constructed through the interpenetration of a myriad of discourses relating to identity, authority, gender, race and sexuality. Embedded in this intersection are distinctive spatial sexualities relevant to the genre of the film.

The scenario of the 1995 Othello is fuelled by desire and passion. The director, Oliver Parker, re-conceived Shakespeare’s tragedy as follows:

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I saw the play as an erotic thriller, and that is what I wanted to translate onto the big screen. Passion is the driving force of the story. Each character is motored by desire. There’s an extraordinary fusion of people boiling with different passions.2

Iago’s overriding passion and desire - Cassio has been chosen in his stead as Othello’s lieutenant - takes over and violates and despoils the space most explicitly associated with the love and desire of Othello and Desdemona: their bedroom. Whereas the bedroom appears only in the final scene in the play, almost a third of the action takes place in the bedroom in the film as indicated by the production notes of the film, thus emphasising the erotic element of the play. The representation of the events in the bedroom allows the director to articulate issues related to sexuality.

The bedroom both as a real space and as metaphorical space (in Othello’s visions) is a space of negativity. As a real space it explores the transformation of Othello and Desdemona’s relationship due to Othello’s sexual jealousy. It becomes a locus of possession and violence. As a metaphorical space it demonstrates Othello’s perturbations and his feelings that he has been shamed by Desdemona’s infidelity. The characters try to establish what Henri Lefebvre calls ‘a true space of pleasure’3 but they are hindered from doing so. Overall, the film emphasizes the destructiveness and violence attached to desire. Lefebvre suggests that society is a space ‘whose abstract truth is imposed on the reality of the senses, of bodies, of wishes and desires’.4 The film can be considered as an illustration of the destruction which occurs when desire attempts to impose itself on space.

The bedroom is the closest thing to an ideal space, the first time it is presented, because it is briefly a space fulfilled by bliss. The presentation of the couple’s wedding night is the most sexually passionate scene between Othello and Desdemona. Othello’s desire to possess Desdemona shatters the possibility of the existence of a ‘true space of pleasure’5 because he speaks of ‘the purchase made’, which tinges the scene with male acquisitiveness. The word ‘profit’ may suggest buying, investment, profiteering. Othello’s words mentioned above - the only words in this scene - express not only his sexual desire for his wife, but also his wish to own her. As Desdemona has no corresponding speech, Othello’s sexual power and authority over Desdemona is emphasised. Pierre Bourdieu’s suggestion: ‘Language is not only an instrument of communication or even of knowledge, but also an instrument of power. A person speaks not only to be understood but also to be believed, obeyed, respected, distinguished’,6 applies to Othello’s behaviour. Othello’s desire to dominate and overpower the other is not only registered verbally. It is also communicated visually through an emphasis on his physicality. The montage offers an arresting spectacle of a ‘militant sexuality’ by beginning

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with a concentration on the powerful upper part of Othello’s black body, panning up his bare feet towards his trouser legs, and then offering a medium close-up of his hands removing his belt. Robert F. Willson, Jr. remarks, Othello ‘marches towards [Desdemona] like the conquering soldier’.7

Othello is no longer the strong warrior and the powerful man who made love to Desdemona the next time we view him in the bedroom. His vision of Desdemona and Cassio very close to each other smiling, which is immediately followed by a shot of an Othello sitting on the bed coughing and then falling on the bed, illustrates his physical illness which is due to his inner turmoil. Iago’s eye invades the bedroom as he spies on Othello, who is unwell, from the door of the bedroom. He is witnessing the crippling result of his insinuations to Othello about Cassio and Desdemona. Othello’s discourse is no longer overpowering but is pervaded by a fundamental distrust of women and feminine sexuality: ‘we can call these delicate creatures ours and not their appetites’.8 Lawrence Danson explains Othello’s thoughts:

‘we’ men cannot call these delicate creatures’ appetites ‘ours’ not only because ‘we’ can never be sure ‘we’ fully own or control a property that can’t be seen, but because ‘we’ define a woman’s appetite as something always alien, the defining attribute or property of the other, the always not ours.9

As a result of his doubts about Desdemona’s sexual fidelity, Othello’s identity has disintegrated.

The discontinuous use of space in film can elicit visions which create a ‘radically altered world’10 as Susan Sontag points out, and is illustrated when Othello who is asleep in bed with Desdemona has a nightmare of her having sex with Cassio. The film transports the viewer into Othello’s id and specifies the nature of his fears. Othello approaches the bed, the diaphanous curtains which enclose it move, while naked bodies can be seen vaguely behind them. Opening the curtains with a knife, Othello sees Desdemona naked holding Cassio in her arms. Her laughter in this explicit sexual scene endorses the idea that Othello feels derided and mocked because of his wife’s sexual promiscuity and sexual fidelity. The bedroom rather than being the site of intimate happy values becomes a site of shame. Ewan Fernie writes on the primacy of the passion of shame in the play, but he does not to relate it to the bedroom in the way the film does:

[Othello] is remarkably indifferent to the supposed seducer, Cassio, and though he thinks about Desdemona and her imagined adultery, his most recurrent and vehement feeling

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is that he has himself been degraded and defiled. [...] The soul of Othello’s jealousy is shame.11 By giving no indication that Othello is imagining the sexual

encounter between Cassio and Desdemona, the film implies that Othello’s visions are more than real for him; they supplant reality. Othello’s dreams are ‘ocular proof’ for him of Desdemona’s adultery.

The bedroom is more than the site of Othello’s sexual jealousy as evoked when the sexually jealous Roderigo, who has not ‘enjoyed’ Desdemona, bursts violently into the bedroom and expresses his sexual dissatisfaction at the scene where it is frustrated. The idea that other men entertain sexual desires for Othello’s wife in his own bedroom -Iago promises that Roderigo will ‘enjoy’ Desdemona - erodes the couple’s marital privacy and sexual life and gives a strange reality to Othello’s suspicion that other men have been where he has ‘garnered up [his] heart’.12

Imaginary space becomes more fragmented and chaotic as Othello’s jealousy increases as evoked by the use of fragmented editing (excessively rapid shots of parts of the body) when Othello visualises Cassio and Desdemona having sex during his epileptic seizure in the dungeon. The exclusive and suffocating emphasis on body parts makes us experience Othello’s self-tormenting visions but at the same time it also alienates us from him. The fragmented montage conveys that Othello can no longer fully articulate a ‘whole’ idea of his wife as a single coherent being. For him, both his sexuality and hers have fragmented. His visual syntax, as it were, has disintegrated in the same way that his verbal language has become confused and disjointed in Shakespeare’s text:

Lie with her? Lie on her? We say ‘lie on her’ when they belie her. Lie with her. Swounds, that’s foulsome! Handkerchief-confessions-handkerchief. To confess and be hanged and then to confess! I tremble at it. Nature would invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and lips! Is’t possible? Confess? Handkerchief? O devil!13

It is not words, but images of Cassio and Desdemona having sex which shake Othello in the film. His visions of Desdemona’s adultery may indicate his anxiety about Desdemona’s choice of him as marital partner and his fear that Desdemona and Cassio might be a more ‘natural’ couple. Arthur L. Little, Jr., commenting on the play, suggests that the coupling of Cassio and Desdemona would be acceptable by Venetian standards so this ‘social legitimacy’ would give them ‘cultural invisibility’.14 Little implies that the

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interracial union which is unacceptable to Brabantio is socially illegitimate and culturally visible. The supposed adulterous union of Desdemona and Cassio, evoked by Iago, offers ‘only a monstrous and grotesque parody of Othello’s union with Desdemona because, given Desdemona’s (obscene) marriage, the proper coupling of Desdemona and Cassio is now recoverable only as a scene of sexual adulteration or deviance’.15 In his anxious unconscious, Fishburne’s Othello may be recovering the ‘socially proper’ coupling of Desdemona and Cassio.

By realising the innocent Desdemona’s supposed adultery so vividly, the film dictates our response a little too forcefully, aligning us with Othello’s visions. An imputation of sexual guilt is forced onto Desdemona. As Carol Chillington Rutter writes:

Parker’s sensationalizing literalism requires spectators […] to see what Othello sees, the fantasy become reality, so it makes Fishburne an Othello who has ingested, incorporated Iago’s suggestions which his imagination then literally writes on to Desdemona’s body in a series of images that work, perversely and reductively, to instantiate and validate the misogynistic stereotypes (‘she must have change, she must’) that Shakespeare’s play circulates. This Othello sees Desdemona in bed with Michael Cassio - and so do we.16

But what Othello sees is not simply unreal. The film embodies the complexity of Othello’s love and passion. Othello has an instinctual need to be perversely gratified with evidence of Desdemona’s infidelity but the film also addresses the sensational and perverse appetite of its audience. Are we forced to draw back and recognise our own complicity in Parker’s erotic thriller? All the heated sexual activity we have seen on the bed in the course of the film, makes way for a cold scene of death in the last scene. The bed contains the bodies of four characters: Othello, Desdemona, Emilia and Iago, revealing a negative and deadly experience of domestic space. Though we might see the bedroom as the sacred centre of the male and female union, it is criss-crossed by other relationships and desires. The desires and passions of the individuals have energised and activated the space of the bedroom and have now destroyed it. In the bedroom there is, metaphorically, insufficient room for all these passions.

Only Iago’s desire has been fulfilled. The bed appears contaminated, not as a result of Othello and Desdemona’s interracial union, but as a result of Iago’s malevolently contaminating presence. Iago receives a strange and disturbing elevation through his living presence on the bed. This kind of bestial animation in a general context of death epitomises Iago’s

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serpentine erotically tinged hatred of Othello on a bed that is not just a marital bed but also the bed where Othello and Desdemona have died. Iago appears to have triumphed over the others and is now ‘evened with [Othello], wife for wife’.17 Iago, who has given his meaning to the bed by linking it with death, has the cultural power and control that Andrew Hiscock attributes to those who assign meaning to a particular space.18 It is Iago, above all, who makes Othello an ‘erotic thriller’ in that it is his passion which takes over in the film.

The throwing of the bodies of the lovers in the sea may indicate that Venice is burying, leagues under the sea, its complicity in the couple’s death. A more sinister question arises: are we complicit in this outcome? Parker’s film has implicated us voyeuristically in the sexual life of Othello and Desdemona and in its destruction. This final image of the bodies submerging in the sea may be meant to challenge us not to repress what we have experienced in the film. Perhaps the film unconsciously articulates its own nostalgic desire for passion and sexuality to have enough space to flourish.

Notes

1W Shakespeare, Othello, The Arden Shakespeare, E A J Honigmann (ed), Thomas Nelson, 1997, 5.2.6. 2 Othello Production Notes by Castle Rock International (as found in the BFI micro jacket), dir. Oliver Parker, prod. Luc Roeg and David Barron, p.9. 3 H Lefebvre, The Production of Space, D Nicholson-Smith (trans), Blackwell, Oxford, 1991, p. 167. 4 ibid., p. 139. 5 ibid., p. 167. 6 P Bourdieu, ‘The Economics of Linguist Exchanges’. Social Science Information, vol. 16.6, 1977, p.648. 7 R. F. Willson Jr, ‘Strange New Worlds: Constructions of Venice and Cyprus in the Orson Welles and Oliver Parker Films of Othello’. Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 20.3, 2002, p.38. 8 W Shakespeare, op.cit., 3.3.273-274. 9 L Danson, ‘ ‘The Catastrophe is a Nuptial’: the Space of Masculine Desire in Othello, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale’. Shakespeare Survey, vol. 46, 1993, p.70. 10 S Sontag, ‘Film and Theatre’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, G Mast, M Cohen and L Braudy (eds), 4rth edn., Oxford University Press, New York, 1992, p.367. 11 E Fernie, Shame in Shakespeare, Routledge, London and New York, 2002, p.136. 12 W Shakespeare, op. cit., 4.2.58.

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13 W Shakespeare, op. cit., 4.1.35-43. 14 A L. Little Jr., ‘‘An essence that’s not seen:’ The Primal Scene of Racism in Othello’, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 44, 1993, p.314. 15 ibid., 316. 16 C C Rutter, ‘Looking at Shakespeare’s Women on Film’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, R. Jackson (ed), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp.255-256. 17 W Shakespeare, op. cit., 2.1.297. 18 A Hiscock, The Uses of this World: Thinking Space in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cary and Jonson, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 2004, p. 179.

Bibliography Danson, L., ‘ ‘The Catastrophe is a Nuptial’:The Space of Masculine Desire’in Othello, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale. Shakespeare Survey, vol. 46, 1993, pp. 69-79. Fernie, E., Shame in Shakespeare. Routledge, London and New York, 2002. Hiscock, A., The Uses of this World: Thinking Space in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cary and Jonson. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 2004. Lefebvre, H., The Production of Space. D. Nicholson-Smith (trans), Blackwell, Oxford, 1991. Little Jr., A. L, ‘ ‘An essence that’s not seen’: The Primal Scene of Racism in Othello’. Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 44, 1993, pp. 304-324. Othello Production Notes. Castle Rock International. BFI microjacket. Dir. Oliver Parker. Prod. Luc Roeg and David Barron, pp. 1-31. Rutter, C C., ‘Looking at Shakespeare’s Women on Film’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film. R. Jackson (ed.), Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 241-260. Shakespeare, W., Othello. The Arden Shakespeare, E.A.J. Honigmann (ed.), Thomas Nelson, Walton-on-Thames, 1997. Sontag, S., ‘Film and Theatre’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. G. Mast, M. Cohen and L. Braudy (eds), 4rth edn. Oxford UP, New York, 1992, pp. 362-374.

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Willson Jr., R F., ‘Strange New Worlds: Constructions of Venice and Cyprus in the Orson Welles and Oliver Parker Films of Othello’. Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 20.3, Summer 2002, pp. 37-39. Eleni Pilla is Adjunct Professor in English at Northern Arizona University. She employs interdisciplinary frameworks to English Studies by focusing on theories of space and developing spatial methodologies for screen adaptations of literary texts. Her monograph Shakespeare: Space and Screen is currently in preparation. Eleni has also published on the history of the translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Greek.

Feminine but Macho: Erotic Reshaping of the Self in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album

Ilaria Ricci

Abstract Hanif Kureishi’s second novel, The Black Album, freely portrays sexual behaviours such as pornographic affairs, casual sex under the effect of drugs, abstinence and masturbation highlighting the social as well as the private dimension of sexuality. This essay, focusing on the sexual relationship between Shahid Hasan and Deedee Osgood, attempts to demonstrate how Shahid comes to accept the fluid, mongrelised condition of both the self and the contemporary society he lives in through his own erotic reshaping. The Black Album, set in 1989 and named after a Prince album, draws parallels between Shahid and Prince, Deedee and Madonna. By scrutinising the furore around The Satanic Verses in the cultural context relating to these two icons of pop, Kureishi explores power, censorship and pornography and shows how attitudes to violence and to sex are not unrelated. While sexual deprivation, represented through the characters of the Muslim Brothers, can lead most repressed individuals to violence, pornography can be seen as a mode of playing with and thus subverting phallic power. Sexual role reversal is central to Shahid and Deedee’s relationship. Untied to any sexual stereotypical role, they accept the eroticism involved in the wrestling for male and female power and lose the didacticism of gender politics. Deedee and Shahid become much more dynamic lovers. Sexual fantasy and political role reversal coexist. The sexual fantasy involves the same sort of gender-bending that Shahid admires in the persona of Prince. Putting women's makeup on and cross dressing as a woman are ludic experiments of reinvention of one’s body, while sex on stage is transposed to the stage of life. London becomes a liminal space for transformative theatrical display where Shahid and Deedee can re-invent their bodies, their desires and their lust. It is through the power of a free, uninhibited, creative and fluid sexuality that Shahid finds his own identity and develops his talent as a writer. Key Words: censorship, gender-bending, Hanif Kureishi, identity, pop culture, pornography.

*****

Hanif Kureishi has been one of the first writers to take sub-cultures seriously, recognising pop as comparable in value to more established ‘high’ cultural forms. On the one hand, in Kureishi’s works, pop is always associated with pleasure, particularly sexual and drug experimentations. On

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the other hand, pop is also prised for its intermingling in political protest and for its democratising drive. Despite the fact that the author never underestimates the fact that pop music is a global commodity, he strongly supports Dick Hebdige’s1 argument that pop music has pointed the way towards more tolerant and flexible conceptions of sexuality, gender roles and class identities.

The inclusive value which Kureishi attributes to pop in The Black Album is personified by the icons of Prince and Madonna. Prince, with his music, physical appearance, makeovers and aliases, represents for Kureishi the intersection of different cultural influences and the meeting point of plurality of identities - be it at the level of ethnicity, class, gender or sexuality. During the 1980s Prince, like Marc Bolan, Boy George and David Bowie, re-invented the concept of masculinity through the phenomenon of gender-bending. Prince deconstructed the complex issue of gender, no more considered as a biologic matter but as an essentially cultural one. He wore heavy make-up and eccentric clothes, including feminine lingerie, representing himself as a new sexual category, totally hybrid and sharply contrasting with the rockers’ male chauvinism. He gave rise to various personas of sexuality, broke sexual taboos in his songs, and simulated pornography on stage.

Madonna did the same. Both hers and Prince’s public simulation of sex were inscribed in their spectacle of masking. Bringing the obscene on-scene, they provided a public context where the performance of sexuality was mantled in an image of glamour.

According to Sonya Andermahr, Madonna represents ‘the quintessential female icon of the 1980s’.2 The critic observes that:

She has transcended her particular roles as popstar, dancer, actress and [...], with the publication of Sex, porn queen, and captured the popular imagination in a way no woman has achieved since Marilyn Monroe.3

Madonna has a strong sex-appeal in the male imagination, but she also has independence and self-determination. Qualities that many sexual icons lack. She has re-written female sexuality, within mainstream popular culture, as both power and pleasure for women. She has boldly acted out the feminist concept of sexual liberation, showing women how to enjoy pleasure and make it woman-centred.

Madonna has the ability to both exasperate her femininity and transcend gender classification. She represents sexuality as a sort of transvestism, a performance, a game of indeterminacy where multiple roles can be played. She constantly blurs the boundaries between aggression and tenderness, decent and indecent, male and female, straight and gay, sacred

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and profane. Through her postmodern eclecticism she wittily deconstructs sexual difference.

The Black Album is a portrait of Shahid Hasan, a second-generation Asian immigrant who, in 1989, moves from Kent to London in order to go to University. Torn between a love affair with his white postmodern lecturer DeeDee Osgood, and his political work with a group of Muslims involved in fighting racism, all through the novel Shahid looks for a sense of identity and cultural belonging. In the narrator’s words:

Shahid was afraid his ignorance would place him in no man’s land. These days everyone was insisting on their identity, coming out as man, woman, gay, black, Jew - brandishing whichever features they could claim, as if without a tag they wouldn’t be human. Shahid, too, wanted to belong to his people.4 The Muslim Brothers, lead by Riaz, are initially described as anti-

racist people who provide the confused Shahid with friendship and solidarity. Yet, as the narrative develops, they turn out to be a group of fanatics aiming at building up a new pure world through absolute control over the private life of other people. The Islamic Brothers in The Black Album seek to repress sexuality by repressing music, literature and art, intending to control politics by censoring what is read and discussed. They see the West as bawdy, consumerist and celebrity-obsessed. Their idea of love is strictly connected with respectability and submission. The power of sexuality is seen as subversive; it breaches boundaries, disrupts order and calls into question the fixity of inherited identities. Their choice to abstain from sex, pleasure and entertainment reflects a strong element of self-hatred, a desire for the masochism of obedience and self-punishment. Riaz’s group is unable to tolerate difference and denounces all pop culture as equivalent to pornography.

Deedee Osgood, in her devotion to sex, drugs and music embodies the seductions of liberalism. Her relationship with Shahid includes intimate physical and emotional involvement, intellectual examination of high and low culture, as well as drug taking and going to raves. Shahid sees his lecturer as an exciting experienced woman who turns both academic and bedroom skills into popular culture. He’s terribly attracted by her but fears to be perceived as inexpert and awkward, as the narrator notes in the following passage:

He felt inept, only wanting to stick his dick in her; he couldn’t feel or touch like her. She’d said he hadn’t quite

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located his sensuality. He was keen to know if, by practicing, it might be winkled out.5 While Shahid admires Deedee and is impressed by her familiarity

with ‘what his mother called ‘wrong things’, pop music and drugs’,6 the Islamicists feel threatened by her overt liberation politics. Describing something as pornographic is, for them, profoundly insulting and, for this reason, they call Deedee ‘pornographic priestess’.7

Deedee’s open condemnation of the fatwa and of the campaign against The Satanic Verses led by Riaz’s group at the University transforms the mutual enmity between herself and the Muslim Brothers into an open collision. Riaz moves his followers to acts of violence against the book and anyone who might defend it. The repressed eros and the severe self-control of the free and easy pleasures of the body are turned here into a deadly violence. For the author of the Satanic Verses punishment means death. At this point of the story Shahid cannot continue keeping his foot on both fields. He is compelled to choose where his commitment lies: Sacred or profane? Certainty or doubt? Protection or risk?

Embracing uncertainty and renouncing a secure sense of belonging and identity can be hard choices, yet Shahid knows that violence, censorship and severe self-repression cannot be the way to fight Western imperialism. Shahid chooses to be an artist, not an activist. He realises he has to depart from Riaz’s group and he begins to discover his sexuality and creativity. Shahid wants to become a writer and his memories of his sexual encounters with Deedee bring his creative energy to the top. He can sense Deedee’s body beneath his fingers while he types. Thinking of her lover is, to him, an ecstatic experience comparable only to his favourite music, art and literature. Shahid definitely belongs to pop culture.

Sharing several characteristics of Prince and Madonna, Shahid and Deedee in The Black Album, perform and politicise their sexuality. Shahid likes Prince because, as Deedee suggests, he’s:

half black and half white, half man, half woman, half size, feminine but macho too. His work contains and extends the history of black American music, Little Richard, James Brown, Sly Stone, Hendrix.8 At the beginning sexual role reversal is central for the relationship of

Shahid and Deedee. She, not he, is the dominant partner, and likes to play the role of the masculine aggressor. The remembrance of the first time they had sex is described like this:

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she had really screwed him, getting on top, not sitting up, but lying on him, legs straddling his, shoving down on his cock. He had thrown his arms out, saying, ‘I want you to fuck me.’ ‘Don’t worry’, she had panted. ‘Leave it to me’.9 As Bart Moore-Gilbert notices: The sexuality of the ‘Oriental male’ in Kureishi’s novels [...] plays ironically [..] off the figure of the colonized male subject as over-sexed, even a potential rapist of white women, which is an enduring trope in metropolitan literature of empire [...].10 Kureishi, in fact, subverts this trope by enhancing the vigorous

sexual desire of white women for oriental ‘others.’ In The Black Album Deedee is depicted as an exploitative lover longing for enjoying Shahid’s exotic body:

She had said she liked him naked while she was dressed [...] she sat up and licked her lips. He shrank back. ‘You’re looking at me as if I were a piece of cake. What are you thinking?’ ‘I deserve you. I’m going to like eating you. Here. Here, I said.’ On his knees he went to her.11 Shahid’s posture is representative of his submissive role in the

liaison and, in Bart Moore-Gilbert’s words ‘while the affair conforms in some respects to the conventions of an éducation sentimentale [..] Deedee’s attitude to her lover nonetheless reinscribes certain elements of Orientalist discourse’.12

Right after this section of the book, Deedee convinces Shahid to let her make up his face. She wants to make him look like a woman. She confesses to her lover she has wanted to do it from the first time she saw him. At first this troubles Shahid but soon he begins to enjoy the experience of having a new female face: ‘He could be demure, flirtatious, teasing, a star; [...] a certain responsibility had been removed’.13

Deedee does this while Madonna’s song What are you looking at? from her CD Vogue is playing in the background, and she continues directing the show making him pose and walk like a model. Shahid enters into the spirit of the masquerade: ‘[...] he swung his hips and arms, throwing his head back, pouting, kicking his legs out, showing her his arse and cock. As he went she nodded, smiled and sighed’.14

Most of the times these practices of transformation can be considered as different modes of identification with otherness, a process of

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aestheticisation in which the boundaries between reality and play are fuzzy and unclear. Of course Deedee temporarily turns Shahid into a commodity, a sexual object at her display but so does Shahid with her. Their desire for objectification is mutual. In fact, Deedee, who like Madonna, represents herself as male desire, in the eyes of Shahid turns herself into a pornographic item even if she does so ‘without losing her soul’.15 She satisfies all his voyeuristic desires and turns him on by confessing him her sexual fantasies:

She would be walking around the city in high heels, lipstick and a long transparent dress, her nipples and cunt visible, not being touched, but looked at. And as she walked she would watch men watching her; and as they masturbated she would stroke herself.16 Deedee also tells Shahid that she likes to masturbate while reading

James Ballard’s Crash and Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O. Both novels portray master/slave fantasies, artificial poses, rituals and some sort of weird aestheticisation of the body; these are all elements that recur in Shahid and Deedee’s sexual liaison.

Deedee’s ‘naughty girl’ attitude alludes to a mode of self-construction by emphasising the performative and changeable nature of identity. In this context, self-sex is not to be seen as detached sex. It is part of the show just like the performances of self-sex simulation given by both Prince and Madonna during their concerts.

Shahid and Deedee prove that sexual fantasy and political role reversal can coexist. The two lovers accept the eroticism involved in the wrestling for male and female power and lose the didacticism of gender politics.

As Shahid exits from the private dimension of his and Deedee’s alcove, he realises that London itself represents a liminal space for transformative theatrical display, a place where people can re-invent their bodies, desires and lust. As the narrator describes:

He could see that today, although the secrets of desire were veiled, sexual tension was everywhere. [...] People dressed, gestured, moved, to display themselves and attract. They were sizing each other up, fantasizing, wanting to desire and be adored. Skirts, shoes, haircuts, looks, gestures: enticement and fascination were everywhere, while the world went to work. And such allure wasn’t a preliminary to real sex, it was sex itself. Out there it was not innocent. People yearned for romance, desire, feeling. They wanted to be

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kissed, stroked, sucked, held and penetrated more than they could say. The platform of Baker Street Station was Arcadia itself. He had had no idea that the extraordinary would be alive and well on the Jubilee Line. Today he could see and feel the lure. She had turned the key on his feelings.17 At the end of the book we realise that the story has just begun.

Shahid is now ready to try to fulfil his personal and professional ambitions. Like in many other books by Kureishi, the protagonist of The Black

Album comes to maturity when he accepts the unstable, shifting, developmental nature of both selfhood and contemporary society at large.

Notes 1 See D Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Routledge, London and New York, 1987. 2 S Andermahr, ‘A Queer Love Affair? Madonna and lesbian and gay culture’ in D Hamer and B Budge (eds), The Good, the Bad And the Gorgeous, Pandora, London, 1994, p. 28. 3 Andermahr, op. cit., p. 28. 4 H Kureishi, The Black Album, Faber and Faber, London, 1995, p. 92. 5 Kureishi, op.cit., p. 140. 6 Kureishi, p. 56. 7 Kureishi, p. 228. 8 Kureishi, p. 25. 9 Kureishi, p. 112. 10B Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 2001, p. 123-4. 11 Kureishi, p. 117. 12B Moore-Gilbert, op. cit., p. 142. 13 Kureishi, p. 117. 14 Kureishi, p. 118. 15 Kureishi, p. 119. 16 Kureishi, p. 124. 17 Kureishi, p. 124-5.

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Bibliography

Bhabha, H., The Location of Culture. Routledge, London and New York, 1994. Bracewell, M., England is Mine. Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie. Flamingo, London, 1998. Chambers, I., Urban Rhythms. Pop Music and Popular Culture. MacMillan, London, 1985. Gans, H., Popular Culture and High Culture. An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. Basic Books, New York, 1999. Hamer, D. and Budge, B. (eds), The Good, the Bad And the Gorgeous. Pandora, London, 1994. Hebdige, D., Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Routledge, London and New York, 1987. Kaleta, K., Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller. University of Texas Press, Austin, 1998. Kureishi, H., The Black Album. Faber and Faber, London, 1995. Martino, P., Down in Albion. Studi sulla cultura pop inglese. Aracne, Roma, 2007. McRobbie, A., Postmodernism and Popular Culture. Routledge, New York, 1994. Middleton, R., Reading Pop. Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. Middleton, R., Studying Popular Music. Open University Press, Buckingham, 1990. Moore-Gilbert, B., Hanif Kureishi. Manchester University Press, Manchester/New York, 2001. Pollo, P., Prince. Gammalibri, Milano, 1987.

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Prato, P. (ed), Prince. Tutti i testi con traduzione a fronte. Arcana Editrice, Milano, 1988. Ranasinha, R., Hanif Kureishi. Northcote House Publishers, Tavistock Devon, 2002. Rushdie, S., The Satanic Verses. Penguin, London, 1988 Said, E., Orientalism. Vintage, New York, 1979. Sandhu, S., London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. Harper Perennial, London, 2004. Sibilla, G., I linguaggi della musica pop. Strumenti Bompiani, Milano, 2003. Strinati, D., An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. Routledge, London and New York, 2004. Young, R. J. C., Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. Routledge, London, 1995. Ilaria Ricci is a PhD Student in the Department of Germanic and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Udine. Her main interests include Postcolonial Studies and Cultural Studies.

I Simply am Not There: Sadism and (the Lack Of) Subjectivity in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho

Sabrina Sahli

Abstract Sadism is commonly assumed to be differing from what is considered normal.1 Ironically, Ellie Ragland-Sullivan’s, Lacanian, definition of a sadistic subject is that, failing to complete the Oedipus complex and thus stuck in a state of disavowal of castration, he/she ‘believes he/she is the phallus, the object of desire that can fill the Other’s lack and thus speaks the word of law’.2 Thus, the perverse subject probably tries harder to become part of society than the ‘normal’ subjects. However, this chapter argues that the relationship between the perverse subject and society is more complicated: for him/her, perversion is a way to act out his/her hatred for the Other, in this case the Symbolic order, as will be shown by means of the example of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. Due to sadism’s relation to the invocation drive, the perverse subject conceives of him-/herself as being the instrument by which the Other can hear and make itself heard. This accounts for the protagonist’s (Patrick Bateman’s) desperate need to be part of the society in which he lives, which in this case may be considered equal to the Symbolic order. At the same time, precisely because of his perversion and the ensuing incomplete Oedipus complex, he fails to undergo a complete subjectivation, a fact that causes his hatred for the obviously lacking Other, as it fails to incorporate subjects like him. By means of torturing and/or killing representatives of this society, he can act out this hatred. Proposing a reading of American Psycho grounded in Lacanian psychoanalysis, this chapter shows how this conception of perversion can serve as a useful analytical tool to understand how the social and the private - sexual - space interlink. Key Words: Lacanian psychoanalysis, perversion, sadism, subjectivity, the Other

*****

The chapter I am going to present evolved as part of my doctoral thesis, which is situated within the field of perversion and US literature and film. What I intend is a chapter that developed out of my chapter on sexual perversion, as Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho figures as the core text of that chapter. I will argue that the perversion of Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of the novel, a sadist in the Lacanian sense of the word, entails an incomplete subjectivation of this protagonist. Moreover, I plan to

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demonstrate that - at least in this novel - perversion actually functions as an erotised form of hatred, but that this hatred is two-fold: it is at the same time directed against an Other that fails to incorporate the subject, and against those subjects that are, so to speak, ‘living proof’ of this failure of the Other.

Permit me to begin with a brief excursion into the theoretical background that is essential to this argument. What is sexually deviant behaviour? According to Freud’s ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’, all behaviour is perverse which differs from the heterosexual norm.3 This statement, however, contradicts his own thesis of the polymorph-perverse character of any sexual behaviour.4 Hence, it seems to make more sense to adhere to Jacques Lacan who solved this incongruity by considering sexual perversion as a ‘clinical structure’ and not simply a form of behaviour. Yet, according to Evans, Lacan also insists on the fact that the clinical structure of perversion does not necessarily make itself visible through a perverse act.5 The term ‘structure’ comes from Lévi-Strauss and can be described as follows: a structure consists of relations between positions, which stay the same no matter what elements these positions are filled with.6 Lacan identifies three different clinical structures, which are mutually exclusive and therefore situate every subject definitely in its relation to the Other. The dividing feature is the mechanism they use: neurosis functions by means of Verdrängung, i.e. repression, psychosis by means of Verwerfung, i.e. foreclosure, and perversion by means of Verleugnung, i.e. disavowal.7

What the perverse subject disavows, is castration: stuck in the third stage of the Oedipus complex, it is confronted with the fact that mother does not have a phallus, but refuses to accept this. The subject thus seems to regress to the preoedipal stage, identifying either with the imaginary phallus or with mother.8 Yet, in identifying with mother, the subject desires the imaginary phallus, and if it identifies with the imaginary phallus it is confronted with mother’s desire for this phallus. Moreover, this means that this disavowal of castration coexists with the realisation of this castration.

But beside its position with regard to the phallus, perversion is also connected to the subject’s relation to the drive: the subject considers itself as the object of the drive. It makes itself the instrument of the volonté de jouissance of the big Other; it thus does not act for the sake of its own jouissance, but for that of the big Other, which in the present analysis is the Symbolic order.9 In the case of sadism, the perversion that is present in American Psycho, the drive to be considered is the so-called ‘invocation drive’, i.e. the drive of hearing, hearing oneself and making oneself heard.10 It is this strong dependence on drives in which the present thesis that perversion is, after all, an eroticization of the death drive is grounded: due to the incomplete Oedipus complex, the perverse subject does not accept the pleasure principle, which is located in the Symbolic order, but is intent on going beyond the pleasure principle, striving to achieve a maximum of

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jouissance. However, this is also where the death drive is located, and according to Lacan, every drive is actually a death drive, because every drive is excessive, repetitive and in the end destructive.11 Put simply, this means that the sadistic subject identifies with the voice of the Other, i.e. it perceives itself as the instrument, by means of which the Other can hear, hear itself and make itself heard.

When talking about an incomplete Oedipus complex, one question seems to come up inevitably and will prove vital to my argument, namely that of the development of the superego, as it depends on the completion of the Oedipus complex. Ideal ego and superego evolve at the same time, namely in the mirror stage. But while the mirror image on the one hand suggests a future unity to the child, its result being the ideal ego12, the child realises at the same time its fragmentation, leading to the development of the superego through identification with the father.13 However, even though perversion arises due to a faulty third stage of the Oedipus complex, it nevertheless seems viable to assume that the superego develops all the same, as - according to Eve Ragland-Sullivan - both masochism and sadism are related to the invocation drive and the gaze, which also create the ideal ego and the superego, and disavowal means that the perverse subject realises castration while at the same time disavowing this same fact.14

When talking about the superego, it is crucial to stress that notwithstanding its location in the Symbolic order and the ensuing symbolic and regulating function of the superego, it is still not equal to Law because of its unreasonable and blind character, as Jaques Lacan says: ‘[es] ist reine Verordnung und Tyrannei’15, i.e. it is pure tyranny. The reason for this is that the superego fills the ever-incomplete signifying chain’s gaps with imaginary substitutes, thus distorting the Law by misunderstanding it. Slavoj Žižek explains these confusions by saying that the superego emerges where Symbolic Law ‘fails’.16 Thus, the ‘[s]uperego is the obscene ‘nightly’ law that necessarily redoubles and accompanies, as its shadow, the ‘public’ Law’.17 He gives the example of the members of Ku-Klux-Clan, who, though behaving illegally, nevertheless acted not only according to a special ideology, but even in tune with the ideology of the ruling white people.18 What is particularly interesting for my argument, is that this author defines sadism as dependent on ‘the splitting of the field of the Law into Law qua ‘Ego-Ideal’ - that is, a symbolic order which regulates social life and maintains its social peace - and its obscene, super egotistical inverse’.19

The consequence of this splitting of Law can be seen in American Psycho in that Bateman, the protagonist, identifies with his social environment and its rules and regulations, but that he is, at the same time, dominated by what we might call the ‘superego of the Other’, i.e. its hidden agenda. These two are inseparable, as Slavoj Žižek points out; in fact, the superego is the public Law’s ‘illegal enjoyment’20 that comes into being


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where public Law fails. This is the reason why the perverse subject is an instrument of the Other’s, Law’s, jouissance and the object of its invocation drive, i.e. its voice. And in order to fully grasp what Law actually is, I would like to introduce Žižek’s concept of ideology: according to him, every community is based on an ideology, which is in turn based on a shared guilt, or rather on the ‘fetishistic disavowal of this guilt’.21 This ideology lies at the heart of society because it covers the lack in the Other and consequently also governs what we consider Law, i.e. the codes, rules, regulations and laws that organise social life. It will be shown later on why this concept is so important for the present discussion of Ellis’ novel.

In American Psycho, henceforth AP, the ‘instrumental nature’ of the sadistic subject, both to the demands of the Ego-Ideal and the superego of the Other, becomes very clear, as will be shown as I go on. For those who do not know Ellis’ novel, one could describe its content in a nutshell as the story of a serial killer, who is a highly renowned member of yuppie Manhattan in the eighties. Now, obviously, there is not much sense in investigating all his crimes in detail but, nevertheless, a certain pattern in Bateman’s behaviour is more than apparent. Roughly, one could say that these crimes separate into two main groups: those crimes committed against the Other, expressing his erotised hatred for a system that is obviously lacking, and those executed for the sake of the Other, i.e. preserving its ruling ideology.

Let me begin this part with Bateman’s identification with both the Ego-Ideal and the superego of the Other; here, in turn, starting with his desire to conform to the Ego-Ideal of the Other. One striking feature about Patrick Bateman is that already from a physical point of view, he is everything a 26-year-old yuppie in Manhattan of the eighties should be: he goes to the right tanning studios, he uses the currently most fashionable beauty products and he has the perfect ‘hard body’, spending quite a lot of his supposed working hours in the gym. However, there are of course other things that are equally important, as a conversation between him and a few friends of his shows. To McDermott’s question ‘[a]nd what are these girls after, O knowledgeable one?’, Price replies simply: ‘They want a hardbody who can take them into Le Cirque twice a week, get them into Nell’s on a regular basis. Or maybe a close personal acquaintance of Donald Trump’.22 And Pat Bateman, just like all the others in fact, fits these criteria perfectly: he can get into the right restaurants or clubs as often as he likes, he has the perfect body and he is ‘total GQ’23, i.e. he knows exactly what to wear when and with what to combine it. And the fact that not getting into the restaurant of his time, Dorsia’s, makes him feel physically sick and like a complete loser, shows that he has integrated the codes and regulations that form the ideology governing his society to perfection.

However, beside this surface personality of perfect yuppie, there is also the dark underside to Bateman’s personality, which I consider his acting

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out the demands of the Other’s superego. As already stated above, some of his crimes belong to the group of crimes committed for the sake of the Other, and these can actually be further divided into crimes against homosexuals, homeless people and members of ethnic minorities such as African Americans, or Asians. These groups are a constant and clearly visible reminder for Bateman and his peers that the ideology of their Caucasian American yuppie society is defective. It is here, that Žižek’s concept of ideology becomes relevant, especially the fact that it is always based on a disavowal of guilt. Now, even though it is tempting to read the guilt that is being disavowed by Bateman and his friends as a sign of bad conscience, I would argue that these young men and women are not really capable of feeling guilty because of this, as they tell themselves that everybody could live like they do if he/she only tried to get a real job.24 Rather, I would suggest looking for the guilt they share in the fact that they derive a lot of pleasure from separating themselves from these social ‘outcasts’; in fact, they need them in order to feel superior. And the fetishistic denial of this can be found precisely in their continual lamenting about all these disgusting and socially unacceptable people and in their incessant assertion that everybody could achieve what they have, that it is the others’ fault if they do not, in order to hide that these young urban professionals after all do feel superior. What differentiates Bateman from his peers is that he acts on what they all think.

However, despite his desperate need to fit in, or as he puts it in his own mantra, ‘‘I…want…to…fit…in’’25, which manifests itself in a number of ways, Bateman continuously fails to adapt fully. As he says himself:

…there is an idea of Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist.26

Bateman’s desire to fit in completely and his continuous failure to do so, also become apparent through seemingly negligible facts, such as his descriptions of his most recent electronic equipment or his descriptions of the music he likes. In both cases, his narration differs notably from what the reader is used


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to. In fact, he sounds more like an advert for these products than like a person listing the benefits of this or that product. Another, much more ironical, aspect of this can be found occasionally in his daily speech in public. For example, Bateman gets annoyed at a joke of one of his friends because it is racist.27 In another scene he claims as a short aside: ‘‘I just want everyone to know that I’m pro-family and anti-drug’’.28 Obviously, what makes these statements so utterly ironical is that Bateman very clearly does not think so in the least. He tends to kill people of other races, just as he does not care anything about family; and he is doubtlessly a drug addict. Consequently, I would suggest reading these moments as ‘slips’ in which the voice of the Other comes through. Thus, it is reasonable to interpret this as another sign of Bateman’s need to be a part of the masses even though he obviously lacks the required mental, or rather emotional, faculties.

In fact, it seems viable to suggest that Bateman’s faulty subjectivation lies precisely in his excessive identification with the Other. As Mladen Dolar points out, in the process of subjectivation there always remains some rest, a kind of ‘‘pre-ideological’ and ‘pre-subjective’ materia prima…. A part of external materiality remains that cannot be successfully integrated in the interior’.29 It seems that Bateman lacks the capacity to believe in the ideology that covers the lack in the Other. Furthermore, Bateman is also aware that he lacks this external part that cannot be integrated into the subject because he is nothing but a frame that consists of codes and conventions, but with nothing underneath; he is just ‘surface, surface, surface’.30 In the case of a ‘normal’ subject, this external part seems to form the little rest of individuality that remains besides the structure of norms and rules. Without this rest, the individual cannot function as a complete subject. Thus, one could contend that Bateman is what I would like to call an ‘emtpy’ subject that consists only of the codes and rules that regulate his society. Consequently, I would argue that this is also what, mainly, causes Bateman’s hatred for the Other because it is a system into which he fits, on the surface, too perfectly to be able to fit in at all.

The perverse subject’s hatred, as I mentioned at the beginning, goes in two directions: one the one hand, it is directed against those that do not fit into the ruling ideology and which thus lay bare the flaw in the Other, and on the other hand, against the Other itself - this precisely due to the fact that it is lacking because it fails to incorporate the perverse subject. In the case of AP, Bateman gives voice to this hatred in numerous acts of torture. Generally, these acts of violence can again be subdivided into two groups, though all are directed against the members of his own social circle. On the one hand, these killings and acts of torture are relatively logical. For example, Paul Owen, a broker like Bateman, has to die because he managed to score the ‘Fisher Account’, which Bateman would like to tend to himself. Moreover, he has got a gorgeous girlfriend and so on - in short, he is everything Bateman wants

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to be. Thus, one of the key scenes with regard to identification processes is when he wins the business-card-competition among Bateman and his peers, a fact that only adds to his ‘crimes’. On the other hand, in most cases in fact, Bateman’s hatred is aimed at members of his own circle without any obvious reason, for the simple fact that they stand for an Other that Bateman can never fully fit into. A nice example, is his torturing, and in the end killing, of two prostitutes. However, it is important to stress that he asks them to wear specific fetishistic items such as an ‘Angela Cummings silk and latex scarf’ or ‘suede gloves by Gloria Jose from Bergdorf Goodman’31, so that they actually represent members of his own circle to him. He then gradually increases his ‘creativity’ as to how to torture and also the proximity of his victims to his own close circle of peers and even ends up killing his first girlfriend at the peak of the novel. Thus, I would like to conclude from this that his violent deeds offer Bateman a vent for the hatred he feels against an Other he does not conform to, but of which he would desperately wish to be a fully-fledged member.

The proposition here is that what the protagonist actually tries to achieve, is to be recognised as a subject, i.e. to be subjected under its norms and laws. Yet, despite his best efforts, this simply will not happen. It is due to his appearing to be just like, or actually rather even more perfect, than anyone else, that Bateman will never be detected. Actually, he keeps trying to tell his friends various times what he is; they just will not listen because they do not expect it from him. As his fiancée says, Bateman ‘‘is not a cynic,…. He’s the boy next door’’.32 In fact, there is a general problem of recognition present in this novel: nobody really knows who anyone is, people keep confusing their interlocutors with other persons since they all appear rather similar. They wear more or less the same clothes, similar glasses, all have gorgeous girlfriends etc. Near the end of the novel, Bateman’s lawyer makes this even clearer when he will not believe the confession that Bateman left on his answering machine (he also mistakes Bateman for somebody else):

…, your joke was amusing. But come on, man, you [Bateman whom he mistakes for Davis] had one fatal flaw: Bateman’s such a bloody ass-kisser, such a brown-nosing goody-goody, that I couldn’t fully appreciate it. … He could barely pick up an escort girl, let alone … chop her up.33

These quotations show very well that Bateman’s appearance is all that counts. This is what keeps him safe. But, it is also what keeps him from becoming a fully accepted - and subjected - member of the society he cherishes so much.


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But it is not only Bateman’s peers who fail to recognise him for what he is. There are situations in which institutions of authority also fail to acknowledge his deeds and thus his subjectivity. What he needs is an interpellation of the Other to which he can respond, thus turning himself into a complete subject. But what he gets are representatives of Law that are not capable of recognising him either. First, there is a detective supposed to investigate the disappearance of Paul Owen (Bateman murdered him, but spoke a message on his answering machine saying that he had gone to London so that nobody knows what happened to him). Despite being very nervous, Bateman performs the role of concerned loose friend so convincingly that the detective does not suspect him of anything. In fact, one of the core proofs that prevent his becoming a suspect is that he allegedly had dinner with other people on the night of Owen’s disappearance. Moreover, Bateman’s own lawyer claims to have had dinner with Owen in London. An even more striking instance in which the authorities fail to recognise Bateman is after another intentional killing because of which he accidentally kills a police officer. They chase him through the city, but as soon as he is in his office building, he is safe. The public persona of Patrick Bateman cannot be suspected of any crime.

Thus, as a conclusion, one could say that in AP, there is actually only the superego; Bateman has never been ideologically recognised. Yet, it seems that he deeply yearns for this recognition, as his surface personality that corresponds too well to the Ego-Ideal shows. Yet, he just will never attain the recognition because he is only an empty subject and lacks the necessary remainder that would make him human. He suffers from his incapability to believe in the ideology of the Other, being perfectly conscious that it only consists of surfaces, and thus wants to inflict this pain on others. This demonstrates the fragility of the empty subject that only consists of the codes that regulate the Other. All figures of authority, such as his lawyer, the detective or even the police fail to make him answer to the ‘Hey you!’ he yearns for. There is no interpellation for him. His staging of the sadistic acts is his way of gaining access to a reality that he only perceives as a movie. Yet, even then, he cannot fully attain it. In the sadistic scenarios he orchestrates, he reverses the usual functioning of sadomasochistic scenarios: instead of turning instruments of torture into instruments of pleasure, he turns instruments of pleasure into instruments of torture for the victim. He is thus a true sadist who achieves what according to Lacan is the Sadean ‘höchstes-Sein-in-der-Böshaftigkeit’34, i.e. a maximum of being in evil. In AP, then, the protagonist is a pre-ideological subject who yearns to be acknowledged by the Other and to be subjected to its power in order to become a ‘true’ subject.

However, it is vital to stress that even during the acts in which he expresses his hatred for the Other most aggressively, the ‘law’ of perversion still holds true: the perverse subject is always, no matter what, an instrument

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of the Other’s jouissance. Put in Slavoj Žižek’s words, this is where the ‘two aspects of perversion’ come into play: ‘…on the one hand, [there are] arbitrary rules that can be suspended; on the other hand, [there is] the concealed truth of this freedom, the reduction of the subject to an utter instrumentalized passivity’35, i.e. to the function of an instrument of the Symbolic Other. Nevertheless, it is crucial to note that even when the perverse subject believes itself to be superior to the Law, to be able to create its own ‘universe’, it is still an instrument of the Other, despite the hatred for the Other. Thus, Žižek’s two sides of perversion are not only valid in the cases when the subject tries to conform to the Other, but also when he/she tries to rebel against it. But where is the Other’s jouissance in these acts intended to ‘flout’ the arbitrary rules of the Other? Here, it seems reasonable to go back to Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volume 1, in which his argument is that both the authorities and the individuals examined by them gained pleasure from this interplay: the authorities from exercising power and the others from transgressing the conventions when indulging in ‘deviant practices’.36 This is also how I read the Other’s position with regard to the perverse subject’s trying to create its own universe where rules can be suspended. Thus, no matter what the perverse, or here the sadistic, subject does, there is no possibility to escape from its position on the borders of Law, neither into it as a fully recognised subject, nor out of it when suspending its rules. Consequently, I would like to conclude this presentation with the last, and very appropriate, words of AP: ‘THIS IS NOT AN EXIT’.37

Notes 1 B E Ellis, American Psycho, Picador, London, 1991, p. 377. 2 E Ragland-Sullivan, ‘Masochism’ in Feminism and Psychoanalysis, A Critical Dictionary, E Wright (ed), Basil Blackwell Ltd., Oxford, 1992, p. 241. 3 S Freud, ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’ in A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works, J Strachey and A Freud (eds), The Hogarth Press, London, 1953. 4 D Evans, translated by G Burkhart, Wörterbuch der Lacanschen Psychoanalyse, Turia und Kant, Wien, 2002, p. 220. 5 ibid., p. 220. 6 ibid., p. 289 7 ibid., p. 290 8 ibid., p. 221 9 ibid., p. 222 10 ibid., p. 312 11 ibid., p. 314


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12 ibid., p. 239 13 ibid., p. 315 14 ibid., p. 241 15 quoted in Evans, 2002, p. 315 16 S Žižek, ‘Superego by Default’, Metastases of Enjoyment. Six essays on

women and causality, Verso, London, New York, 1994, 2005, p. 54. 17 ibid., p. 54 18 ibid., p. 55 19 ibid., p. 55 20 ibid., p. 54 21 ibid., p. 57 22 Ellis, 1991, pp. 53-54 23 ibid., p. 90 24 ibid., p. 129 25 ibid., p. 237 26 ibid., p. 377. 27 ibid., p. 38 28 ibid., p. 157 29 M Dolar, ‘Beyond Interpellation’ in Qui Parle. Literature, philosophy,

visual arts, history, E Maddock and S Pelmas (eds), University of California, Berkeley, Vol. 6, 2, Spring/Summer, 1993, p. 77.

30 Ellis, 1991, p. 375 31 ibid., p. 173 32 ibid., p. 20 33 ibid., pp. 387-388. 34 quoted in Evans, 2002, p. 316 35 S Žižek. ‘The Matrix, or the two sides of Perversion’,

[email protected], nettime, posted 3 December 1999, viewed 23 November 2006. <http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-I-9912/msg00019.html>, p. 17.

36 M Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction, Vintage Books, New York, 1990.

37 Ellis, 1991, p. 399

Bibliography Brockman, B. and R. Bluglass, ‘A general psychiatric approach to sexual deviation’, in Sexual Deviation: Third Edition. I. Rosen (ed), Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, Tokyo, 1996, pp. 1-42.

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Dolar, M., ‘Beyond Interpellation’, in Qui Parle. Literature, philosophy, visual arts, history. E. Maddock Dillon and S. Pelmas (eds), University of California, Berkeley, Vol. 6, 2, Spring/Summer, 1993, pp. 75-96. Dollimore, J., Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991. Ellis, B. E., American Psycho. Picador, London, 1991. Evans, D., Wörterbuch der Lacanschen Psychoanalyse. G. Burkhart (transl), Turia und Kant, Wien, 2002. Fink, B., ‘Perversion’, in Perversion and the Social Relation. M. A. Rothenberg, D. Foster and S. Žižek (eds), Duke University Press, Durham, London, 2003, pp. 38-67. Freccero, C., ‘Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho’. Diacritics, 27.2, 1997, pp. 44-58. Freud, S., ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’, in A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works, (1905). J. Strachey and A. Freud (eds and translators), The Hogarth Press, London, 1953. Foucault, M., ‘Of Other Spaces’. Diacritics, 16.1, 1989, pp. 22-27. _____. ‘PART TWO: The Repressive Hypothesis’, in The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Vintage Books, New York, 1990, pp. 15-49. _____. ‘PART THREE: Scientia Sexualis’, in The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Vintage Books, New York, 1990, pp. 51-73. James, N., ‘Sick city boy’. in Sight and Sound, May 2000, viewed on 23 November 2006, <http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/89>. MacKendrick, K., Counterpleasures. State University of New York, Albany, 1999. Moser, Ch., ‘Die reinigende Wirkung des Konsums: Kannibalistische Horror-Szenarien im späten 20. Jahrhundert’, in Kannibalische Katharsis: Literarische und filmische Inszenierungen der Anthropophagie von James Cook bis Bret Easton Ellis. Alisthesis Verlag, Bielefeld, 2005, pp. 83-124.


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Ragland-Sullivan, E., ‘Masochism’, in Feminism and Psychoanalysis. A Critical Dictionary. E. Wright (ed), Basil Blackwell Ltd, Oxford, 1992, pp. 239-242. Rosen, I., ‘The general psychoanalytical theory of perversion’, in Sexual Deviation: Third Edition. I. Rosen (ed), Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, Tokyo, 1996, pp. 43-75. Rothenberg, M. A. and D. Foster, ‘Introduction. Beneath the Skin: Perversion and Social Analysis’, in Perversion and the Social Relation. M. A. Rothenberg, D. Foster and S. Žižek (eds), Duke University Press, Durham, London, 2003, pp. 1-14. Stallybrass, P. and A. White, ‘Introduction’ & ‘Conclusion’, in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Cornell UP, Ithaca, New York, 1986, pp. 1-26 & pp. 191-202. Vadolas, A., ‘The perverse domination of the fascist and the Sadean master’, in Perversion. D. Nobus and L. Downing (eds), H. Karnac Booky, London, 2006, pp. 187-215. Wright, E. (ed), Feminism and Psychoanalysis. A Critical Dictionary. Basil Blackwell Ltd, Oxford, 1992. Žižek, S., ‘Superego by Default’, in Metastases of Enjoyment. Six essays on women and causality. Verso, London, New York, 1994, 2005. _____. ‘The Matrix, or the two sides of Perversion’, [email protected], nettime, posted 3 December 1999, viewed 23 November 2006. <http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-I-9912/msg00019.html>. Sabrina Sahli is a doctoral student at the English Department of the University of Zurich, financed by the Forschungskredit of the University of Zurich, and focusing on the Lacanian conception of perversion together with American literature and cultural history. She is also a member of the graduate college ‘Körper, Selbsttechnologien, Geschlecht: Entgrenzungen - Begrenzungen’ at the University of Zurich.

Sade’s Doctrine of Creative Destruction

Caleb Heldt

Abstract Within human activity there exists an indelible drive to create, and this is of course not limited to man’s material existence, in his engagements with worked matter, but extends to interpersonal relations as well. Perhaps the most fundamental of these relations is that which subsists between persons in the sexual act, namely procreation. But the sexual act’s creative potential is not bound by reproduction alone, and this is testified to by the provocative interpretation of sexual activity as put forward by the Marquis de Sade who avidly rejects that the sexual act’s productive possibilities are ultimately procreative. He likewise rejects that sex should in any way be associated with love, which posits the Other as pure subjectivity and as such places that Other in a preferential position in relation to oneself. Indeed, for Sade the Other’s subjectivity must be denied; that is, she must be reduced to pure objecthood. So what underlies this callous refusal of the Other’s subjectivity in Sade’s eroticism? What is at stake? What does he fear losing by affirming the Other’s subjectivity rather than denying it? It is not freedom, as is commonly believed, at least not in the sense in which it has been so vaguely conceived by Sade’s interpreters in the past. Rather, it is the ability to create in its most purified form. It is not man impressing his desires on canvas or stone or wood, but on the human form itself. For Sade, the sexual act is the medium par excellence in which man can express his profound and insatiable desire to create. Key Words: Henri Bergson, creativity, destruction, ethics, evolution, love, reproduction, Marquis de Sade, Max Scheler, sexuality


It is often thought that love is a kind of altruistic form of creativity since it endeavours to foster the elevation of value first and foremost in the beloved and the offspring of sexual love and only subsequently does it focus on the self and one’s personal creative desires. And this is why Sade rejects the very idea of love, for in libertinage the primary beneficiary of the creative act is the self. Indeed, for Sade, sexuality itself is creative in this way. This is why, for Sade, sexuality is not creative in any sort of traditional sense in which sexual relationships aim at reproduction or the expression of love. For Sade, libertine sexuality is creative because it strives only for its own pleasure, however perverse.1 And this means that libertine sexuality is


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creative only insofar as it is free of the aim of reproduction and the expression of love. Thus, libertine sexuality not only stands in direct opposition to the sexual act as a means of reproduction or as an expression of love, but essentially thrives on their negation. It allows them to exist only to destroy them. This is why the marital relation is so denigrated and women are allowed to ripen only to have their fruit decimated. ‘Domestic violence’ does not begin to characterise the conjugal relation, and abortive acts abound. A case in point can be made of Constance in The 120 Days of Sodom who is abused by her husband and father through the discovery of her pregnancy, culminating with the violent act which brings about the demise of mother and child alike. For Sade, the destruction of these two conceptions of sexuality is integral to elevating the value and creative potential intrinsic to libertinage. The sexual act is, for Sade, creative in being destructive. Sade seeks justification for this view by appealing to Nature, as he so often does, maintaining that She has need of both virtue and vice, of creation and destruction.2 Of course, for Sadean Nature, and thus for the libertine, creation requires destruction, even if this destruction is only symbolic. On such a conception of sexuality, creativity is conceived in terms of difference and multiplicity, and this is precisely what Sade endeavours to demonstrate in The 120 Days in his catalogue of over six-hundred sexual eccentricities.

In destroying the Other, either symbolically through acts of degradation or physically through violence - and, at its extreme, murder - Sadean sexuality defines its creative power. Indeed, it can be creative to the extent that it is precisely because for the libertine the Other is merely an object for use.3 As such, the libertine defines his freedom negatively as freedom from the Other which he attains by relegating the Other to pure objecthood. By denying the Other’s subjectivity the libertine affirms his own. In rejecting the notions of the sexual act as creative in either a reproductive capacity or as expressive of love Sade is not simply endeavouring to be provocative (though of course this is an important aspect of Sade’s project as a whole), but rather he makes manifest this relation to the Other which is essential for the type of egoistic creativity characteristic of the kind of libertinage he endorses. Only in destroying love and refusing reproduction can the libertine free the sexual act from a fully positive and, in Sade’s eyes, homogenising notion of ‘virtuous’ creativity. Vice thus becomes the destructive force which drives libertine creativity since its acts of destruction only serve to counteract the acts of the virtuous.

So, let’s first look at the way in which Sade seeks to systematically undermine love and its relation to sexuality. To provide a context for this discussion we will draw briefly on the work of Max Scheler as a kind of foil for the libertine’s derision of love. We will then consider Sade’s views on the reproductive capacity intrinsic to the carnal heterosexual act and show that what underlies these diatribes is a philosophy of Nature akin to Henri

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Bergson’s conception of creative evolution albeit coupled with a much more cynical ethical element than that posited by Bergson. 2. The Destruction of Love

For Sade, romantic love is but a fanciful expression of so-called virtuous sexuality. It is a fantasy which serves only to perpetuate a notion of creation which denies any creative force to its negation. In this sense, love is closely tied to faith, since its power to influence creative action is only as powerful as the belief one has in it. Essentially, then, for Sade love is merely a fiction, an abstraction, an illusion, just as God is. As such, it is deserving of the same derision as that reserved for God and the same kind of violent re-education of the lover is deemed necessary as that reserved for the pious individual.4 Hence the similar brutalities suffered by Sophie and her pious companion Adelaide and later with her lover Céladon at the château in The 120 Days.5 Indeed, what is said of the pious individual can, for Sade, equally be said of the lover:

Piety is indeed a true disease of the soul. Apply whatever remedies you please, the fever will not subside, the patient never heals; finding readier entry into the souls of the woebegone and the downtrodden, because to be devout consoles them for their other ills, it is far more difficult to cure in such persons than in others. 6

For the libertine, both piety and love are but quixotic notions which compel individuals to place their own truth, their own freedom beyond themselves, and in this sense love and piety are forms of alienation. For Sade this alienation is rooted in the fact that for the lover, the Other - the beloved - is not perceived as an object for use or an obstacle to one’s sovereignty, but idyllically as pure subjectivity. In this way, the sexual act as the expression of love makes manifest the Other’s intrinsic subjectivity which is denied by libertine egoism. Pleasure - as a fundamental self-relation - is therefore secondary, and though reproduction is closely linked to love, it is not necessarily to be its end result. Indeed, this is precisely Max Scheler’s notion of sexual love as expounded in The Nature of Sympathy. For Scheler, sexual love not only perceives the Other not as an object for use, something which denies its subjectivity, but as an ideal which it is forever not yet, as pure potential for perpetual elevation of that very subjectivity denied by Sadean libertinage. In Scheler’s eyes, love is a creative movement in which the lover sees in the object loved its latent possibilities for attaining ever-higher values, seeing in the beloved its ideal value and attempting to foster the continual development of the beloved’s intrinsic value toward its ideal essence. Hate, according to Scheler, is that which characterises a movement


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in the opposite direction, that is, toward lower values.7 Thus, the one who hates sees in the hated object its nadiral value and his interactions with this object will tend toward the degeneration of the hated object to the point of its destruction. Thus, for Scheler, the Sadean libertine’s self-proclaimed creativity would be little more than glorified hatred. As Scheler writes,

hatred looks to the possible existence of a lower value … and to the removal of the very possibility of a higher value…. Love, on the other hand, looks to the establishment of higher possibilities of value … and to the maintenance of these, besides seeking to remove the possibility of lower value …. Hate, therefore, is by no means an utter repudiation of the whole realm of values generally; it involves, rather, a positive preoccupation with lower possibilities of value.8

What Scheler acutely draws our attention to here is the fact that a preoccupation with devaluation is itself a positive, which is to say a creative, act. The positivity of the libertine’s hatred of the Other lies in the destruction of the Other’s values, in creating anti-values which contradict the elevation of value in the act of love. And the relation to piety will once again emerge, as Scheler shows that the elevation of value to its highest point culminates in sacred values, that is, those values which testify to a transcendent value above all other values, namely God. The hierarchical relations within a value system governed by the ideal of love is described by Peter Heath in the introduction to Scheler’s The Formalistic Principle in Ethics and the Non-Formal Ethic of Value in the following way:

The lesson of these distinctions is that the realm of values is not a uniform whole, but divided into closed circles, which rise hierarchically above each other and must, in the case of conflict, give way to each other. We ought to sacrifice our physical enjoyments to our duties as citizens of the state; we ought to sacrifice our social well-being to the claims of culture - beauty, justice, and truth; and even these august values should be sacrificed, if the need arises, on the altar of sanctity, on the altar of God.9

But whereas Scheler sees in this hierarchisation of values a movement toward ever higher, ever more transcendent values, Sade sees only a progressively alienating movement, a movement away from the immanent self-relation -

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the self’s relation to its embodiment - toward an ultimate transcendent value which he grants only an illusory status.

In a sense, Sade’s hierarchy of valuation is simply Scheler’s hierarchy inverted, depreciating what is of the greatest value in Scheler’s theory and extolling the value of individual pleasure which in Scheler’s eyes should be the first to be sacrificed to the other types of values. In the end, this means that God, and the motivating force of love which justifies this method of organising one’s values, must no longer be that to which the lower values ought to be sacrificed, but must on the contrary be the first to be sacrificed to the libertine’s most immanent value: pleasure. 3. The Destruction of Reproduction

Let’s return now to the other aspect of traditional sexual creation to which Sade opposes his own, which is to say, the sexual act as aiming at reproduction. For Sade any sexual act which aims at reproduction infringes upon the liberality of the sexual act as a means of personal pleasure and hence as creativity in his sense, for the pregnant woman is no longer able to be used as a mere object from which pleasure is derived - at least to the extent that the avid libertine desires - if one wishes that the unborn child remain unharmed. Indeed, as is testified to by the numerous engagements with pregnant women in The 120 Days, the contrary is the case for the libertine mind; that is, he derives pleasure from the torture of the would-be mother and the destruction of her unborn child.10 For the libertine, the sexual act itself is a creation. His pleasure is derived from turning an imagined possibility into a reality. In this way, the libertine is an artist and sex is his art. He makes of the Other a canvas upon which he paints his desired potentialities and his discharge marks the work’s final brushstroke. The libertine qua artist is gripped by the desire to endlessly create in this way. As Curval says in the The 120 Days, ‘Well, you know, everything’s imaginable and even possible …. I am convinced one can go still further than that …. It seems to me one never sufficiently exploits the possible’.11

And this transgressive exploitation of possibilities is precisely what underlies the most prominent undermining of sexual reproduction in nearly all of Sade’s libertine writings, namely sodomy. Pierre Klossowski, in his seminal study of Sade, perhaps put it best when he said that,

sodomy is formulated by a specific gesture of countergenerality … which strikes precisely at the law of the propagation of the species and thus bears witness to the death of the species in the individual. It evinces an attitude not only of refusal but of aggression; in being the simulacrum of the act of generation, it is a mockery of it.12


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Sodomy in Sade’s texts represents a violent cancellation of the re-production of the sexual act, that is, the repetition of the species in the individual. The sodomite denies the creative potential of the sexual act by pursuing pleasure for its own sake, transforming sexual choice into a form of anti-reproductionism. In libertine psychology, sodomy becomes the ultimate source of pleasure because it destroys the very possibility of sexual reproduction. Indeed, that Sade’s sodomite heroes abhor the thought of reproduction so much can readily be seen in a scene from The 120 Days in which Curval passionately describes the immense pleasure he derives from the idea of watching semen evaporate on a hot shovel: ‘I love the idea of watching fuck burn’.13

But we need to understand what is precisely at issue for Sade in the multiplicity of diatribes he directs toward the reproduction of the human species and why he advocates a ‘refusal to propagate and destruction’14 in his own peculiar manner. Klossowski rightly points to Sade’s unique sense of ‘creative evolution’,15 which posits the sinister underbelly of Henri Bergson’s conception of the pure positivity of life as an evolution of creative acts. There is an ethical element to Bergsonism which posits a kind of imperative of understanding the dynamic potential of other members of the same and different species, flora and fauna alike, with the consequence that life comes to be seen as diverse because of its tendency toward radical self-differentiation. And while Sade’s intuition of the dynamicity of Nature is not at all dissimilar, he places much less faith in the ethical potentiality of the human species. He sees the human species not as Nature’s keeper but as a parasite whose own reproductive acts come to dominate over those of Nature, hindering Her from producing anything new.16 Indeed, for Sade, it is only vice and the destructive acts of the criminal and the libertine which lend any aid to Nature in the diversification of life. In short, life under the domination of humans is homogenising for Sade, a mere reproduction of the same at the cost of Nature’s own creative potential. This is why Sade’s heroes reiterate time and again that Nature has need of destruction as much as of creation.

Indeed, while there is no doubt that at times Sade’s libertines express a desire for a destruction which would be all consuming, in which the universe would destroy itself, such assertions are dwarfed by the staggering amount of destructive acts directed against human life by libertine creativity. Sade’s libertines refuse human reproduction at every turn and advocate the destruction of the species in each concrete act, desiring only the preservation of their own licentious pleasures. Sodomy, infanticide and murder are the violent and violating acts which perhaps best characterise libertine destructive creativity, a creativity which seeks only to disrupt the hegemony of the parasitic and homogenising creativity of a species which considers its creative acts virtuous because they refuse to destroy.

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When the libertine allows one of his victims to live it is only because he believes he has succeeded in leaving the mark of human degeneration in her heart, undermining the smug self-satisfaction of Virtue. Is there any other moral to be found in Justine than this? And what of her sister, Juliette, that impious orphan turned libertine? Juliette is a text which details the education of a libertine, the learning to love destructive creativity. And would there be any other reason than this for the friends to let a single one of their victims leave the château in The 120 Days if it was not that their marathon of violation created new destructive forces, new libertines, to perpetuate the cause of destructive creativity? 4. Sade, Our Conscience

Of course, one might raise an objection often proffered by Sade’s critics, namely that there is an indelible repetitiveness to Sade’s writings which undermines the creativity posited in the acts he describes. And perhaps this accusation is well-earned. However, Duclos’ appeal after her final recitation at the château suffices to respond to such criticism, for this address to the friends is directed as much toward the reader of any of Sade’s works, and The 120 Days of Sodom in particular, as it is to the novel’s heroes. She states,

I would beseech Messieurs to have the kindness to forgive me if I have perchance bored any of them in any wise, for there is an almost unavoidable monotony in the recital of such anecdotes; all compounded, fitted into the same framework, they lose the luster that is theirs as independent happenings.17

The idea here is that if but a single act of such libertinage as is chronicled in The 120 Days - or any of Sade’s other libertine writings for that matter - were to be placed in the midst of a novel with a more conventional storyline, or indeed within an otherwise quotidian day within life itself, the effect that but one of these undoubtedly imaginative horrors would have upon the reader or the witness of such an act - let alone the victim - would be quite different. But this is not Sade’s endeavour. He opens the floodgates upon the reader, inundating her mind with an endless deluge of atrocities, each a masterpiece of perversion in its own right, but piled one on top of the other they ultimately elicit only a sense of redundance and a feeling of callous indifference to the victims’ plight in the heart of the reader. And this is Sade’s art. He makes each of us a little more hard-hearted, a little more cruel and insensitive to the predicaments of Others with each turn of the page. In short, his writings provide us with an education in the creativity which underlies destructive acts; each text is a lesson in libertinage. Every leaf that


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is turned is a victory for Sade, and far from being forgotten as he supposed he would be in his ‘Last Will and Testament’, he lives on as the conscience of an age which prefers not to acknowledge its own capacity for cruelty, its own penchant for destruction. And it is in this sense that Simone de Beauvoir was right to proclaim that Sade ‘deserves to be hailed as a great moralist’. 18 But there lies in Sade’s writings a perhaps more subtle ethical intuition, such that we can say that there exists a kind of sexual ethics intrinsic to libertinage from which much can be learned. I am speaking of the radical emphasis Sade places on our power to control the functions of our sexual behaviour, whether placing it at the behest of love or reproduction, or for our own pleasure. But there is more to it than this; for as Sade never tires of showing, this power to control the reproductive capacity inherent to the sexual act can be exercised not only to maximise our own potentiality for pleasure but perhaps more importantly to curb the homogenising effects which the reproductive dominance of our species imposes upon the creative potential of the rest of the natural world. Our reproductive hegemony has single-handedly hindered the dynamic self-differentiation of other species along diverse lines of evolution. There is thus a kind of sexual ecology at the heart of Sade’s libertine ethics which provides the motivation of sexual pleasure to promote reproductive responsibility. So perhaps there is yet another reason not to burn Sade given the relevance of such ideas to 21st century concerns.

Notes 1 It is important to note that in the discussion that follows, the ‘libertine’ that is posited is that of the ideal type as it appears in Sade’s works, which could perhaps take as its prototype Dolmancé: an utter atheist, an enjoyer of active and passive sodomy alike, a tutor in the ways of libertinage, etc. Many, indeed most, of Sade’s libertine heroes are not of this ideal type but are themselves imperfect models thereof. An example can be made of Saint-Fond who despite all of his other impeccably libertine traits remains a theist, though believing in a Being Supreme in Wickedness. 2 M Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, & Other Writings, R Seaver and A. Wainhouse (trans), Grove Press, New York, 1965, pp. 274-275. 3 The Duc to Adelaide: ‘bear well in mind that, alive though you may be, you are only so in order to obey and let be done to you what we please’. M Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings, R Seaver and A Wainhouse (trans), Grove Press, New York, 1966, p. 530. 4 According to Scheler, ‘love is an emotional gesture and a spiritual act’. M Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, P Heath (trans), W Stark (ed), Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London, 1954, p. 142.

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If love is indeed a spiritual act as Scheler asserts, this does much to explain the similarity which manifests itself in the Sadean libertine’s avid hatred of piety and love. 5 Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom, pp. 403-404, 669. 6 Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom, p. 498. 7 ‘Hatred, on the other hand, is in the strictest sense destructive, since it does in fact destroy the higher values…and has the additional effect of blunting and blinding our feeling for such values and power of discriminating them. It is only because of their destruction…by hatred, that they become indiscernible’. Scheler, Sympathy, p. 154. 8 ibid., pp. 152-153. 9 ibid., p. xvi. 10 Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom, pp. 607, 614, 619, 620, 635, 639, 652, 656-657, 660, 661, 663-665, 670. 11 Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom, p. 470. 12 P Klossowski, Sade My Neighbor, A Lingis (trans), Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1991, p. 24. 13 Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom, p. 522. 14 M Sade, Juliette, A Wainhouse (trans), Grove Press, New York, 1968, pp. 771-772. Cf. Klossowski, Sade My Neighbor, p. 88. 15 ibid., p. 86. 16 Sade, Juliette, pp. 768-769. Cf. Klossowski, p.86. 17 Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom, 568. 18 S Beauvoir, ‘Must We Burn Sade?’ in Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings, R Seaver and A Wainhouse (trans), Grove Press, New York, 1966, p. 40.

Bibliography Allison, D., ‘Transgression and its Itinerary’, in Must We Burn Sade?. D. Sawhney (ed), Humanity Books, Amherst, 1999, pp. 201-227. Bataille, G., ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade’ in Visions of Excess. A. Stoekl, C. Lovitt and D. M. Leslie Jr. (trans), A. Stoekl (ed), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1985, pp. 91-104. Bergson, H., Creative Evolution. A. Mitchell (trans), Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1913.


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Beauvoir, S., ‘Must We Burn Sade?’ in Sade, M., The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings. R. Seaver and A. Wainhouse (trans), Grove Press, New York, 1966, pp. 3-64. Blanchot, M., Lautrémont and Sade. S. Kendall and M. Kendall (trans), Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2004. –––, ‘The Main Impropriety (Excerpts)’, J. Guicharnaud (trans). Yale French Studies, No. 39, 1967, pp. 50-63. Frappier-Mazur, L., ‘Sadean Libertinage and the Esthetics of Violence’. Yale French Studies, No. 94, 1998, pp. 184-198. Klossowski, P., Sade My Neighbor. A. Lingis (trans), Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1991. Lacan, J., ‘Kant with Sade’, J. B. Swenson Jr. (trans). October, Vol. 51, 1989, pp. 55-75. Pastoureau, H., ‘Sado-Masochism and the Philosophies of Ambivalence’. Yale French Studies, No. 35, 1965, pp. 48-60. Paulhan, J., ‘The Marquis de Sade and His Accomplice’ in Sade, M., Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, & Other Writings. R. Seaver and A. Wainhouse (trans), Grove Press, New York, 1965, pp. 3-36. Sade, M., The 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings. R. Seaver and A. Wainhouse (trans), Grove Press, New York, 1966. –––, Juliette. A. Wainhouse (trans), Grove Press, New York, 1968. –––, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, & Other Writings. R. Seaver and A. Wainhouse (trans), Grove Press, New York, 1965. Scheler, M., Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values : A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism. M.S. Frings and R.L. Funk (trans), Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1973. –––, The Nature of Sympathy. P. Heath (trans), Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London, 1954.

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Caleb Heldt is currently a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. His research concerns the ontology of Jean-Paul Sartre and his theoretical influences.

Memory, Excess & the Fictional Self

Andrew Markham

AbstractWhen recalling a sense of a past Self I suggest that characteristics can beidentified - ones that have been discarded as well as some that are celebratedin the present moment. Acts of remembrance form the basis of this researchdocument, where I look to explore the construction, through experience, of aperson’s sense of their queer sexual Self. In exploring common links betweentwo memories, I will look to question the possibility of being able toconsciously and continuously inhabit a space where there is the possibility ofrecognition of something that is not entirely visible to one’s Self. SarahAhmed suggests in ‘Queer Phenomenology’ that ‘things become queerprecisely given how bodies are touched by objects’ and frames these ‘things’or ‘experiences’ and ‘interactions’ in the context of ‘here’, ‘there’ and‘within’.1 It is this sense of queering experience that will look to challengecommonly understood notions that discuss memory as integral to theconstruct of Self. I will suggest that through acts of remembrance, a space iscontinually sought to create a space for an invisible Self - a sexual Self, agendered Self and a Self that is not continually visible, rather, only visible inrelation to Richard Dyers ‘orientation towards others’.2 In considering this,the emphasis will be placed upon the fluid nature of sexuality and desire andtheir ability to move between non-fictional, ‘real’ states of being to thesocially constructed. Furthermore, parallels will be drawn between excess,Deleuzian notions of ‘vibration’.3 Derrida’s ‘under erasure’4 will also beintegral to this research chapter insofar as suggesting that our ‘secret’ Selfgains meaning from its absence.

Key Words: Excess, fiction, identity, memory, multiplicity, Other,orientation, phenomenology, queer, Self.

*****

1. Scene One.As I sit here, in my favourite red chair in the corner of my warm

lounge on the west side of the East End, I peer at a repeated searching forsomething other

5to my Self. Over and over it tumbles I miss what I’m

looking at. My apartment sits on the edge of a busy grey asphalt road withbarely a tree in sight. Here, I’m unable to free myself from the feeling that hewas looking for me and I knew that he’d eventually find me. THE DOOR IS

HERE IN FRONT OF ME. As I daydream, emotional waves caress me, lightly


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tickling, hairs standing on end, bringing focus to two memories.6

I amtwenty-one and fourteen again.

Between what was and what is, the story of my memories is double-sided - double ended - and somewhat strange. The narrative sits rich andlanguid whilst bouncing back-and-forth between symbols and soliloquies thatsting. Surely it’s this, the stinging on my inside that has the ‘capacity toaddress the spectator’s own bodily memory’,

7my bodily memory, and to

‘incite an affective response in the viewer’.8

The patchwork rug before me is the framework of my life with itssoft weaving of the threads of time and place, but it’s only a matter of timebefore word will have spread; systematically beat by the drums of poeticreverence. Like the crisscross of rivers, the fibres reflect my fluidity, showingme that you can see the written upon their faces in telling me that I’m awanted boy.

I sit with my feet snug but firmly on the ground, hands cradled inmy lap and knees slightly ajar. The room surrounding me echoes ‘theinternal’ through my memory’s use of a rich and sometimes opulentlanguage. The iridescent purple vase sitting on the top of a polished oaksurface to my left drips with a lifetime’s experience. Their differing styles,purposefully fuelling the embodied spectator

9- the vase to my memories – is

important to note. ALL I HAVE TO DO IS PUSH IT. PUT MY HANDS ON IT, PALM

DOWN. IT WILL BE HEAVY. I’VE ENCOUNTERED THIS DOOR BEFORE. Perhapsthen, it’s this bouncing back and forth, of semantic-linguistic style, ofwooden grain to superfluous purple that goes some way in moulding thefictional and real both at the same time. I am at once and never to grasp attheir story.

There is it seems, a battle between what I perceive in the here-and-now and in this state of remembrance. My body cringes, developing aconstant craving, a need for action; evasive action. Action was needed but notof the violent kind. I move my foot, then my arm. My eyebrows furrow as Istruggle to see my Self and the walls within which I inhabit. The externalconstruct of femininity

10slides between - push and pull - as the internal

manifestation of my excess sits itself in the fiction of the unreal.But what is this excess I call skin? A barrier between you and me? I

don’t mean trash or rubbish or something that is discardable for my skin iswhat keeps me within - the white picket fence - I mean an amount that ismore than acceptable, expected or reasonable.11 This is a world, my world ofasphalt and few trees where that which is not deemed as appropriate is seenas not maintaining or containing value.

There must be, I say out loud to myself ‘great value in an experienceof excessive acceptance’, particularly when the body’s orientation is broughtabout by a battle between real and unreal, fact and fiction. In unison withdeclaration my fingers begin drum. I come to realise - drum, drum, drum -

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between here and there, that violence never solves but my primal urges havetaken control. A surge of energy takes me deeper, where the darkness tellsme that there is meaning in my relentless indignation. Such grandness and allfor a girl! And the past is asking questions now, making me purr: ‘what does‘a girl’ mean to me?’

It is beyond my reach. It is that which is at the periphery, outside ofmy gaze.12 My sheepish cell, the rich soliloquies, the idea of my skin thatstings is at the periphery. It is clearly what keeps this edge. FIRST YOU ARE

FRISKED. EVERY OUNCE OF YOUR DIGNITY TAKEN, RAPED FROM YOU. WILD

FERAL HANDS PROD.Over there, in front, the edge of the table next to me speaks. HE

STARTS…ARMS, SHOULDERS, HANDS, BACK, BUTTOCKS AND THIGHS…AND

FINALLY, CROTCH! Its shining surface murmurs. Words fall away frommeaning and not quite visible, the table’s edges appear created by theirnearness. I FEEL HIS WARM HAND. I cannot hear the table’s love for me!

Jumbled and at the same time calm, my mind’s eye is the excess too– the apparatus13 of the cinema screen. The projector. The light. The image.And it’s only through this projection that there is an attempt to fulfil theirevery whim…I jump through hoops. As the light of memory bounces backand forth, from edges to corners to the here and now, my attention rests uponwhat is absent; what is not clear. I sense that my other Self begins to‘…centre on the embodied spectator, who is always displaced from this siteof production, (a Self that is) always drawn by the anamorphic structure ofthe instillation into a desire to see beyond the edge of the screen’.

14

THIS BECOMES AN EROTIC EXPERIENCE PIERCED BY PANGS OF

ADULTEROUS TENDENCIES.Yet, what is this screen that I’m trying to see beyond15? I am drawn

to its billowing flatness, its never-ending whiteness, by the structure thisscreen inhabits. Yet at the same time, I am unable to see beyond what ispresented to me

16. She is my best friend, the closest thing I have to my own

reflection. Sadness grows now – she is my shadow. Discarded. Irrelevant.As I close my eyes, drifting, my lips feel again our first tender and

somewhat crudely passionate kiss eights years ago. We have sharedeverything and this everything, this remembering continually disorientates.The table, the chair, the vase show me nothing of the inside of my memories,where ‘…things become queer precisely given how bodies are touched byobjects, or by ‘something’ that happens, where what is over ‘there’ is also in‘here’, or even what I am ‘in’’.

17

Neither am I here nor there, inside or out of, but the need tophysically remove myself overwhelms. I take my body and its parts acrossthe room. I GRASP TENTATIVELY AT THE HANDLE. ITS SHINING SURFACE

CARESSES MY CURLED FINGERS AS I GENTLY PUSH AT THIS GOLD GILT GATE,but this act of pushing, the process of moving from affect to effect results in a


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greater sense of ‘flux’18

. Not quite within my Self or outside of myself,bewildered I am able to recall the room – youthful, dew like in its potencyand distilled of all anger …ASKING FOR NOTHING IN RETURN. ITS GLEAMING

APPEARANCE IS SUBMISSIVE. This is the warmer of my first memories.Perhaps this then, is my ‘…continuity of transition… (the) change itself thatis real’.

19

It opens - twist, clunk, shove - and I move slowly into open air. ABLAST OF WARM AIR HITS MY FACE. IT ASTOUNDS ME. Helpless bodilytwitches are replaced by fluidity because of my Self’s ability to create thepossibility of being able to ‘…proceed from point to point, instance toinstance’

20. SLAM! Yet, at the same time, whilst in the surrounding coldness,

my Self ‘ceaselessly bifurcates…diverges from that path determined by thepath determined by the rule of points’.

21

2. Scene Two.Across town, she stares outwardly from an empty, deserted space.

Closed before it is open, she sits high up on a black leather barstool. Youknow the ones, with chrome legs and white stitching. The lighting is dim, yetfull of clarity and the air crisp on this November morning. Her ginger locksare now tamed and controlled. Her rosy infantile speckled cheeks. Hercheeky red rimmed smile, wicked and brutal.

Curious though, as she sits softly stroking the fabric of her kneelength skirt is her ability to inhabit this space of is, was and will be. The baris of course closed, cleaned once more and ready to welcome the next. Sheconsiders, along with the disinfectant and polish, if these three states of being- is, was and will be - are what constitute the fictional and non-fictionalwhole.

Silent deliberation spills over. She reaches out, arm brushing againsther own reflection. She grabs an ice-cold beer. It is slender and suggestive.Its crisp condensation however, she concludes, is the fictional – this centralLondon bar that was and is now, provides the possibility for the existence ofeffect, in turn bringing what will be. As she turns to face away she isreminded of her past self…A STALE BREEZE FULL OF HORMONES.

She is my temptress within.She clearly remembers her other half sitting at the bar drinking the

usual G&T. As the sharp end of realisation hits - its yellow slice gentlyswimming in the think-rimmed glass - she thinks to herself loudly thatjealousy comes easy to him, consistently appearing green and shrouded infoolish anger. A terrible judgement it may be, but you too would understandthat his condition is ingrained. Some would say intrinsically inbred into hisferal nature. THE SOUND HEAVY AND HUNG WITH THE REALISATION OF OUR

EXPECTATION; IT IS TOO MUCH FOR ME TO COMPREHEND.

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All of this; the thick-rimmed glass, the ice, the stale breeze belongsbecause of having wanted the same person, the same girl at the same time.He had not known and neither she, both at the same time not knowing andonly now can she confess to a mutual lack, a void of untruth. Within this voidshe consciously and continuously inhabits a space, where there is arecognition of something that is not entirely visible to oneself.

22She has

created a safe space for her invisible Self.23

I AM BECOMING SPIRITUALLY ALIVE.‘How safe though was this invisible Self’, she asked out loud to

nobody listening. Where did she stop and this untruth-other begin?24

Already with her back to it, she slides away from her barstool andglides towards the gleaming red and silver coffee machine. A SPLIT SECOND

PASSES. Caffeine. MY EYES ARE STARTLED AND SLOWLY FOCUS. I SEE WHITE,BLUE AND RED FLASHES. I AM PARALYSED. She stands silently watching thenoisy water - swirling, hissing, bubbling, popping, splashing - steamsurrounds her. I CAN FEEL MY PUPILS DILATE IN TANDEM WITH THE PULSE OF

MY SURROUNDING COVER OF DARKNESS. Out of the mist and before her eyesthe worktop vibrates.

25A loud PING! THIS IS MY CLOAK AND MY MATERNAL

PROTECTOR. She is present once again.

3. Scene One Continued.I walk now, moving briskly between city stained pools of rainwater

and piles of autumnal leaves. Step by step. The London skyline. Step by step.Step by step and brick by brick a reoccurring question burns; did I want her?At what point did I say I wanted her or was it that I wanted to be her?

As rain tumbles again, filling once more those city-stained puddles,I watch droplets bounce from nearby windows, one hitting another. I heartheir vibrations, affecting my bodily whole. I CAN HEAR NOW! I CAN SEE

NOW! I AM FREE NOW TO MOVE! This vibration is never pure movement,rather the excess of movement itself.

26The questions never cease. The voice

of my fictional self continues to make itself heard, amplified even: so if Iwish to be her, why does she want him?

There is silence!Boisterous gulls overhead slumber into non-existence and as I pass a

stranger, a gentle-looking man, I am reminded of intimacy. I AM NEVER ABLE

TO RECALL THIS FEELING, A FEELING OF TOGETHERNESS, WHEN SLEEPING

ALONE. The memory of our togetherness causes friction27

as I visualise hisbutch manly way of walking, perhaps that is it! IN HERE, I AM OBJECT AND

SUBJECT: A HUMAN WHO IS A PART OF IT YET OUTSIDE IT. IN THIS PLACE, OUR

PLACE OF SOCIAL WORSHIP, THIS PARADOX DRAWS BREATH. My breathe ofwhat has past billows out turning to wet, warm air. It presses itself against therims of my glasses. Momentarily I am blinded. I rub away the‘condensation’

28to reveal my own reflection looking back at me.


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PUNCTURE THE SURFACE.What I see in return are brown eyes, long lashes and laughter lines.

Are they real? How did they become? Lifetimes have taken their toll, yet asthese pass, the very nature of my eyes, lashes and lines, turn anti-time,traversing between point to point onto the place of the unreal

29and as I fix

my glasses back in place once more the clarity of my vision suggestssyllogism.30 The text of my life embodies the ability to affect me, ‘me’ inreal-time world, affecting the future me

31having travelled from me in the

past.32

Daylight plashes across my face now and my body turns away, runsfrom red brick shadows, for in those shadows my feminine Self sits; external,fictional. But this is not it. The edges of my being are blurred. Soft.Malleable. I consider each step, PARTICIPATING NOW IN THE REALISATION OF

DEBAUCHED DREAMS, IN THE NIGHTMARES OF OTHER’S THAT ARE BROUGHT

BACK INTO BEING. One foot in front of the other I embrace the feeling that inthese there is an ability to affect my Self in the light of the real world thatsurrounds me.

IT FEELS LIKE HOME.A red and silver sign shines ahead, acting as my beacon. Home! IT IS

BEYOND THE LIVING, THIS PLACE THAT STIRS. In slowly meandering Iinwardly wonder if I have been awake as the doorbell of the corner storerings out. THE WORLD THAT CONTINUES ON THE OUTSIDE OF THIS DARKENED

SPACE IS THE BIGGEST LIVING LIE. Like the birds that have passed, the rainthat has fallen and the reflections looking back, their need to exist throughdifference, wholly, touches upon the scars that are not visible to the nakedeye, but somehow seem less.

33

The shop door opens as I ring out now – ding dong – sounding inrespect of my body’s presence. Deep within I now understand that these pastfew minutes have had a need to ‘exist’ and to ‘remain legible’.

34

The movement between one and another / the candy and headlines /the fictional and non-fictional causes yet more friction

35. YET BEHIND THESE

CLOSED DOORS THE WORLD IS OTHER. UNREAL. Our eyes meet - we don’tlook away. He knows that I’ll repeat this journey tomorrow and the next dayand the day after that. I will stand here; present myself to him, at the sametime - 5:25pm. He will smile, ring the till and hold out his hand.

What I offer him on my cyclical journey36 will not be money, ratherthe effects of what is before me; past, present and future. My body willcontinue to act as a constant, nailed to the spot and only through the realnessof its becomings will it be able to continue to position itself (here atNorman’s counter) in the fiction of the non-fictional moment.

37THERE IS NO

SAFETY FOUND IN DIFFERENCE. It is my barricade.

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Notes

1 S Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology – Orientation, Object, Others, edition2007, Duke University Press, London, 2006.2 R Dyer, Whiteness, Routledge, London, 1997.3 C Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, edition 2006, Routledge, London, 2002, p 44.4 J Derrida, ‘Translators Notes’, in Of Grammatology, Corrected Edition, G CSpivak (trans), John Hopkins University Press, London, 1998, p. xiv.5 There is a deliberate use of a lower case ‘o’ as this chapter is not wishing tofix its context in commonly understood notions of Other or Otherness. As analternative, a wider reading of what this ‘other’ to one’s Self is suggested.The reader is urged to consider how the positioning of the body could relateto and/or affect this ‘lower case’ ‘other’. Reference to Nicolas Bourriaud ismade when he speaks about a ‘set of artistic practices which take as theirtheoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations andtheir social context, rather than an independent and private space.’ See: NBourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, S Pleasance and F Woods with theparticipation of M Copeland (trans), Les Presse du Reel, France, 2002, p 112.6 Throughout this chapter there are references made to fictional and non-fictional spaces in relation to memories. What is not being suggested is thatthe memories used within the chapter are fiction or based upon fictionalmoments. The approach to these memories is from an artistic, practice-ledposition. It is interesting therefore, to note an expressed influence ofSusannah Radstone’s thoughts surrounding memory’s relationship to poetryand dreams when saying ‘…memory’s tropes…may be similar to those ofpoetry…memory’s condensations and displacements are similar to thosefound in dreams, memory work does not reduce memory to fiction, to dream,or to poetry.’ See: S Radstone, Memory and Methodology, Berg, Oxford.2000, p 11.7 J Bennet, ‘The Aesthetics of sense-memory’, in Regimes of Memory, SRadstone and K Hodgkin (eds), Routledge, London, 2003, p 31.8 Bennett, op. cit., p 33.9 J Lowry, ‘Performing Vision in the Theatre of the Gaze: The work ofDouglas Gordon’, in ‘Performing the Body Performing the Text’, A Jonesand A Stephenson (eds), Routledge, London, 1999, p 279.10 ‘…my own femininity’ is a recognition of a Self that likes to buy women’sclothing, rather than men’s because the fit is much better or a Self that prefersgin and tonic instead of beer. There is a suggestion that this ‘femininity’ isbeing continually pulled between what feels natural and is real i.e. physicallyputting on women’s clothes and what is perceived as fictional - not tangible,i.e. commonly understood socio-cultural ideologies associated with genderidentity.


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11 ‘…acceptable’ or ‘reasonable’ speaks in the context of a ‘heteronormativeworld’. M Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and SocialTheory, University of Minnesota Press, Chicago, 1993, p 3-17.12 There is a suggestion here that ‘excess’ is within and a part of the ‘blindfield’. R Barthes, Camera Lucida, Edition 2000, Vintage, London, 1980, p57. If understood in the context of ‘Camera Lucida’, this is created or‘divined’ from an image’s ‘punctum’. Furthermore, there is an expressed linkmade between the image and the minds image making ability when recallingmemories. Barthes describes the ‘punctum’ as a result of the ‘blind field’ andas a ‘…sting, peck, cut, little hole – also a cast of a dice. A photograph’spunctum is that accident which pricks me.’ Barthes, op. cit., p 27. In addition,(and in a differing context to this), Peggy Phelan explored blind spot in anattempt to ‘revalue a belief in subjectivity and identity which is not visiblypresent’. P Phelan, Unmarked the politics of performance, London,Routledge, 1993, p 1.13 Here, a specific focus is given to the artist Douglas Gordon and his videoprojections. For example, his submission for the Turner Prize 2006‘Confessions of a Justified Sinner’, 1995, video installation, two parts, each300 x 400 cm. Suggested other works for reference include ‘24 HourPsycho’, 2003 and ‘Between Darkness and Light’, 1997.14 Lowry’s original use of ‘Other’ at the beginning of the quote has beenchanged to ‘other self’ as a means of rejecting commonly understooddiscourses and to further disorientate notions of the viewer, being viewed andof the ‘edge’. Lowry, loc. cit., p 279.15 Reference is made here to a likeness between the cinema screen and body.In this sense, the body is a queer male body and that looking past the body’sedges, recognition of a feminine Self is inferred.16 Notions of Otherness could be discussed in relation to this by exploringSartre’s ideas in and around the subject. For example, Other as eitheralienating or objectifying the subject as part of the collective ‘we’. See: JSartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, H.Barnes (trans), London, Routledge, 2003. Alternatively, the Lacanian notionof Other could be considered in the context of being grounded within thesymbolic order of language. See: J Lacan, Ecrits: a selection, A Sheridan(trans), Tavistock, London, 1977. However, it is felt that it is be unproductiveto explore these as it would result in the coupling of this chapter’smethodological approach to a given and an already well establishedframework.17 Ahmed, op. cit., p 157.18 H Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Anderson, CitadelPress/The Wisdom Library, New York, 1964, p 16.

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19 ibid.20 Y Lomax, An adventure with art and theory: Writing the Image, I.B TaurusPublishers, London, 2000, p 138.21 ibid. Yves Lomax (see: ‘The Photograph and Le Temps and Multiplicity, asagittaran arrow’, ibid., p 121- 151) on the subject of temporality andmultiplicity is interesting in relation to how the narrative of this chapteraddresses the notion Self in relation to the real and non-real, particularlywhen she says ‘Taking up the idea of a continuous multiplicity I may say mybody becomes…in relation to a field of perpetual interaction and transitionbetween ‘all times and all hours’…it is an original complex, woven out of allthe different times that our intellect…or habits distinguish or that our spatialenvironment tolerates’. Claire Colebrook notes these points as ‘translation’when she says ‘Movement does not just shift a body from one point toanother (translation) in each block of movement bodies transform andbecome (variation)’. See: Colebrook, op. cit., p 44.22 ‘…not entirely visible’ is asserted as being the ‘blind spot’. See footnote 8and Barthes, loc. cit.23 What is meant by having ‘…created a safe space for her invisible Self’ inrelation to ‘…having wanted the same person, the same girl at the same time’is the creation of a Self that is not continually visible individually as well asto both characters at the same time. There are explicit relationships drawnbetween disorientation, queer identity and race based identity politics,particularly when Ahmed quotes the work of Richard Dyer in saying ‘We canconsider how whiteness takes shape through orientations towards others.Whiteness may even be orientated ‘around’ itself, whereby the ‘itself’ onlyemerges as an effect of the ‘around’…whiteness is invisible and unmarked,as the absent centre against which others appear only as deviants or as linesof deviations. See: Ahmed, op. cit., p 121 with Ahmed making references toDyer, op. cit.24 Deluezian notions of temporality and becoming are made referenced to,including works that discuss the cinema. See: G Deleuze, Cinema 1: TheMovement-Image, H Tomlinson and B Habberjam (trans), University ofMinnesota, Minneapolis, 1986 and G Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-image, HTomlinson and R Galeta (trans), University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1989.I am particularly interested in what Claire Colebrook states when she says‘Think of time as the power of difference or becoming whereby we movefrom the virtual to the actual…For Deleuze this means that the time weexperience is split in two. The world or life we live is an actual realisationof…impersonal memory, but memory or time…can also interrupt our world.’Colebrook, op. cit., p 126 referencing Deleuze, 1986, op. cit. and Deleuze,1989, op. cit. Also, there is an emphasis with the text here on Deleuzian


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notion of ‘becoming’ as it erases the notion of ‘being’ and is described as ‘allthere is without ground or foundation’ where ‘the supposed real world thatwould lie behind the flux of becoming is now…a stable world be being; there‘is’ nothing other than the flow of becoming. All ‘beings’ are just relativelystable moments in a flow of becoming’. Colebrook, op. cit., p 125.25 Deleuze discusses the relationship between change and movement. Hesuggests that like atoms, bodies cause a similar affect and says: ‘theirmovement which testify a reciprocal action of all parts of the substance,necessarily express…disturbances, changes of energy in the whole…But thequalities themselves are pure vibrations which change at the same time as thealleged elements themselves.’ Deleuze,1986, op. cit., p 8-9.26 There is an alternative way of exploring the effects caused by ‘beings’affecting other ‘beings’, where ‘…all ‘beings’ are just relatively stablemoments in a flow of becoming-life’. See: Colebrook, loc. cit., p 125.27 By way of illustrating this idea of ‘friction’ and eventual ‘displacement’ asuggestion is made towards the movement of tectonic plates. The result oftectonic movement is subduction, ultimately resulting in an earthquake. Thismovement is as a result of displacement - when one plate moves the other(s)surrounding. Aftershocks or tremors are usually felt close to the epicentre ofthe earthquake due to displacement and these can sometimes be as forceful asthe earthquake itself. I place the continuing creation of the Himalayamountain range in opposition to the negative repercussions of an earthquake.28 See: Radstone, loc. cit.29 There is an apparent ability possessed by the memories in this document totraverse the hegemonic construct of time - becoming ‘anti-time’ - as a meansto become non-fictional. Lomax’s ideas on the subject of realness arenoteworthy, where she states ‘More often than not a life time is conceived ofas a journey to and from fixed points or states of being. In this sort of lifebecoming is subordinate to being. Becoming is merely the journey towardbeing. Becoming is secondary, ‘never fully real’. See: Lomax, op. cit., p136.30 ‘Syllogism’ is noted because the memories that are returned are givenmeaning through reasoning between two propositions: fictional and non-fictional space, between real-time and anti-time.31 A reference is made to Ahmed when she writes that ‘You can move a tablehere, there…the purpose of the table relies on your capacity to move itaround…I suggest in…this book that I have followed the table around; yet Ithink this is a misrecognition. Instead, the table follows you around. The tableis an effect of what it is that you do. In a way then, while you furnish ahouse…it is the house that furnishes you’. See: Ahmed, op. cit., p 167.32 As a way of giving meaning to ‘…having travelled from ‘me’ in the past’,the reader is urged to consider a story detailed by Richard Dyer. Dyer writes:

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‘As a child Lange was taken…to hear an oratorio. She was too small to seethe conductor, ‘she could just see his hands’. These made such an indelibleimpression on her that, years later, she read about the conductor LeopoldStokowski and knew immediately that it could only have been his hands thatshe had glimpsed’. See: R Dyer, The Ongoing Moment, edition 2000,Abacus, London, 2005, p 54.33 To explore the relationships between ‘…there need to exist throughdifference’ and ‘…the scars that are not visible to the naked eye, butsomehow seem less’ the reader is urged to consider Heidegger’s notions (usedextensively by Jacques Derrida) of sous rature. The notion ‘…seeks toidentify sites…where key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning undecidable. To extend this notion,deconstruction and the practice of sous rature also seek to demonstrate thatmeaning is derived from difference, not by reference to a pre-existing notionor freestanding idea.’ C Belsey, Critical Practice, 2nd edition, Routledge,London, 2001, p116.34 Derrida, op. cit., p. xiv.35 It is suggested that displacement occurs as a result of a ‘chain of events’.Again, references are being made to the displacement of tectonic plates, theoccurrences of earthquakes and creation of mountain ranges.36 A further reference is made to ‘syllogism’ – see footnote 25. The memoriesand experience of the character contained within this chapter is givenmeaning through two propositions. To further this notion, the movementbetween the propositions – fiction and non-fiction – is suggested as beingmutually supportive. For example, syllogism can be explained by saying that‘all dogs are animals; all animals have four legs; therefore all dogs have fourlegs’. Found in: Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition, CatherineSoanes and Sara Hawker (eds), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, p.1094.37 A direct reference to Lomax when she says ‘A body may appear to benailed to the spot, fixed beyond belief, yet even in such circumstances thereare still becomings’. See: Lomax, op. cit., p. 139.

Bibliography

Ahmed, S., Queer Phenomenology – Orientation, Object, Others, edition2007, Duke University Press, London, 2006.

Barthes, R., Camera Lucida, Edition 2000, Vintage, London, 1980.

Belsey, C., Critical Practice, 2nd edition, Routledge, London, 2001.


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Bennet, J., ‘The Aesthetics of sense-memory’, in Regimes of Memory,Susannah Radstone and Katherine Hodgkin (eds), Routledge, London, 2003.

Bergson, H., The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Anderson, CitadelPress/The Wisdom Library, New York, 1964.

Bourriaud, N., Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and FronzaWoods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland, Les Presse du Reel,France, 2002.

Colebrook, C., Gilles Deleuze, edition 2006, Routledge, London, 2002.

Deleuze, G., Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson andBarbara Habberjam, Univesity of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1986.

Deleuze, G., Cinema 2: The Time-image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and R.Galeta, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1989.

Derrida, J., ‘Translators Notes’, in Of Grammatology, Corrected Edition,trans. G C Spivak, John Hopkins University Press, London, 1998.

Dyer, R., The Ongoing Moment, edition 2000, Abacus, London, 2005.

Dyer, R., Whiteness, Routledge, London, 1997.

Lacan, J., Ecrits: a selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, Tavistock, London, 1977.

Lomax, Y., An adventure with art and theory: Writing the Image, I.B TaurusPublishers, London, 2000.

Lowry, J., ‘Performing Vision in the Theatre of the Gaze : The work ofDouglas Gordon’, in ‘Performing the Body Performing the Text’, AmeliaJone and Andrew Stephenson (eds), Routledge, London. 1999.

Phelan, P., Unmarked the politics of performance, London, Routledge, 1993.

Radstone, S., Memory and Methodology, Berg, Oxford. 2000.

Sartre, J., Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology,trans. H Barnes, London, Routledge, 2003.

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Warner, M., Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory,University of Minnesota Press, Chicago, 1993.

Andrew Markham is Scholar in Residence at Southampton SolentUniversity. A Senior Lecturer in Media & Fashion Styling, Markham’sinterests range from filmmaking to Queer activism to performative writing.His current research and writing is devoted to exploring notions of memoryin relation to identity.

Specifics of the Contemporary Czech Homosexual Community: History, Evolution and Ambivalences (2010)

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