Male Trouble: Masculinity and The Performance of Crisis

Male Trouble Also by Fintan Walsh CROSSROADS: Performance Studies and Irish Culture (co-edited with Sara Brady) Mal...

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Male Trouble

Also by Fintan Walsh CROSSROADS: Performance Studies and Irish Culture (co-edited with Sara Brady)

Male Trouble Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis Fintan Walsh Post-doctoral Research Fellow, School of Drama, Film and Music, Trinity College Dublin

© Fintan Walsh 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–57969–9

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walsh, Fintan, Dr. Male trouble: masculinity and the performance of crisis / Fintan Walsh. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–57969–9 (alk. paper) 1. Masculinity. 2. Masculinity in popular culture. 3. Men—Identity. I. Title. HQ1090.W34 2010 305.3109182'1—dc22 2010012003 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Figures

vi

Acknowledgements

vii

1

Introduction: Performing Male Trouble

2

Sacrificial Masculinity in The Passion of the Christ

36

3

Impotent Masculinities in Made in China and InterMission

58

4

Homosexuality and Subjection in Shopping and Fucking and Faust is Dead

84

5 6 7 8

1

Wounded Attachments in the Live Art of Ron Athey and Franko B

109

David Blaine, Fathers 4 Justice, and the Spectacle of Heroic Masculinity

146

The Jackassification of Male Trouble: Incorporating the Abject as Norm

160

An Ethic of Fragilization

182

Notes

191

Bibliography

218

Index

229

v

List of Figures 2.1 2.2

Queer Satan in The Passion of the Christ (2004). Courtesy Newmarket Films/Photofest.

46

Jesus in The Passion of the Christ (2004). Courtesy Newmarket Films/Photofest.

53

3.1 Detective Lynch (Colm Meaney) and Lehiff (Colin Farrell) in InterMission (2003). Courtesy IFC Films/Photofest.

77

5.1

Ron Athey, Judas Cradle (2004–5). Courtesy Manuel Vason.

129

5.2

Franko B, I’m Not Your Babe, ICA London (1996). Courtesy Nicholas Sinclair.

137

Franko B, I’m Not Your Babe, ICA London (1996). Courtesy Nicholas Sinclair.

138

David Blaine, Vertigo (2002). Photographer unknown.

151

5.3 6.1

7.1 Johnny Knoxville wearing a ‘beekini’ in Jackass (2000–2). Courtesy MTC/Photofest. 8.1

Taylor Mac, The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac (2007). Courtesy Taylor Mac and Lucien Samaha.

vi

166 189

Acknowledgements I am grateful to all those who have directly or indirectly assisted me in the writing of this book. Some of this project was developed as part of a PhD dissertation at the Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College Dublin, and I would like to thank my supervisor Matthew Causey for his intellectual insight and guidance during this time. Also, thanks to Adrian Kear and Brian Singleton who offered helpful comments for development. Other formative mentors include Anna McMullan and Steve Wilmer. I acknowledge the receipt of funding in the form of a travel bursary from the Samuel Beckett Centre, a postgraduate scholarship from Trinity College Dublin, and latterly a post-doctoral research award from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences which assisted me in the final stages of bringing this study to print. Portions of this book have appeared elsewhere, and I am thankful for the permission to use developed versions of the work here. Parts of Chapter 2 initially appeared in Trinity College Dublin Journal of Postgraduate Research, 2005–6. Sections of Chapter 3 have been published in Deirdre Quinn and Sharon Tighe-Mooney (eds), Essays in Irish Literary Criticism: Themes of Gender, Sexuality, and Corporeality (Mellen Press, 2009). A good deal of Chapter 4 has been published in Gender Forum, 18 (2007). I am also grateful to those who have given me permission to reproduce images, especially Nicholas Sinclair, Manuel Vason, and Taylor Mac. I would like to express sincere thanks to Noreen Giffney, Michael O’Rourke, and Anne Mulhall for convening ‘The(e)ories: Advanced Seminars for Queer Research in Ireland’ since 2002. The(e)ories has been an incredibly important forum for the dissemination and development of queer theory in an interdisciplinary context in Ireland since its inception, and it has had a significant impact on queer scholarship internationally. I have been fortunate enough to participate in rich, intensive seminars with Lee Edelman, Sara Ahmed, Bracha L. Ettinger, and Leo Bersani (among others), thanks to the organizers of The(e)ories. I am especially grateful to Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke who gave me invaluable advice on how best to shape this research, and I am particularly indebted to Michael who generously shared his expertise at later stages of the book’s gestation. Laurence Scott also offered very valuable feedback on earlier drafts of certain chapters. vii

viii Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to Christabel Scaife for commissioning the book, and for guiding it through to completion. Manuscript reviewers gave helpful recommendations, as did the eagle-eyed copy editors at Palgrave Macmillan. I would like to thank friends for encouraging me with the book, or more importantly still, for distracting me from it. A special word goes out to Aileen, Áine, Brian, David, Laurence, and Phillip. And finally, thanks to my parents, for their trouble. Fintan Walsh Trinity College Dublin, 2010

1 Introduction: Performing Male Trouble

At the beginning of the twenty-first century it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that men are in serious trouble.1 Anthony Clare, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis [T]rouble sometimes euphemized some fundamentally mysterious problem usually related to the alleged mystery of all things feminine.2 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [T]o leave masculinity unstudied, to proceed as if masculinity were somehow not a contingent form of gender/sexuation, would be to leave it naturalized, and thus to make it necessary, to reproduce contingency as necessity, to protect masculinity from change.3 Calvin Thomas, Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory To think of ‘crisis’ as a performance is to imagine that the disruption it signifies is actively or even carefully produced; or, to extend the theatrical analogy, even affected. Understood from this perspective, we might infer that there are active agents of crisis, and agents in whose interest crisis acts. We might even deduce that crisis somehow distributes agency, or that agency involves the distribution of always already critical terms and positions. To think of masculinity as an embodied, social, and political domain in which crisis might be performed is to conceive of gender and sexuality as a performative arena of sorts, where ostensible 1

2

Male Trouble

disorder does not simply signal the radical dissolution of form but rather its reorganization. This book is concerned with the performance of so-called masculinities in crisis, where the term ‘performance’ denotes both a doing of gender and its representation in drama, theatre, live art, guerrilla performance, public spectacle, and film. Since the 1990s, men have increasingly appeared across a range of social and aesthetic practices as troubled subjects, with Western masculinity repeatedly reported to be in a critical state. Situated at the intersection of performance and cultural studies, this book is committed to exploring the emergence of the discourse of critical masculinity, while looking to a pertinent selection of performative practices mainly drawn from American, British, and Irish contexts, in order to examine the articulation and negotiation of that trouble. Discrete analyses are bound by the understanding that the discourse of masculinity in crisis is itself highly performative, in a manner that both shapes and illuminates a wide spectrum of cultural activity. The title of this book alludes to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), which marked a watershed in contemporary thought on gender and sexuality upon its publication, and was widely received as one of the most important interventions in preceding discourse. Unlike previous critiques, Butler’s scholarship sought to reconsider the heterosexual assumptions of feminism that limited the category of gender it seemingly sought to expand. An initial provocation for Butler’s research was the idealization of certain categories that merely reproduced gender hierarchies, often with homophobic consequences. With this in mind, Butler’s writing worked to undermine the presumed primacy and consequent privileging of heteronormativity, in order to expose the field of gender to radical rethinking without prescription. While Butler’s reconceptualization chiefly took the form of philosophical interrogation, her writing was spurred on by social realities. In the preface to the republication of Gender Trouble in 1999, for example, Butler asserts of the original text: ‘[I]t was produced not merely from the academy, but from convergent social movements.’4 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, these influences included the growth of the gay and lesbian movement, dominated by concerns for equal rights and responses to AIDS; ongoing feminist debate, including the stirrings of Third Wave Feminism; and masculinist backlash, and the growth of masculinity studies as an academic discipline. It was in response to these social, cultural, and theoretical conditions that Butler launched her critique of all claims to gender naturalness by exposing the

Performing Male Trouble 3

tenuousness of gender categories that nonetheless exert violence on individuals. Analysing identity as performative, rather than innate, Butler’s criticism performed a radical queering of the grounded presumptions of heteronormativity. The initial publication of Butler’s text gave shape to the gender trouble felt during preceding years. Its republication in 1999, along with the release of Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993), underscored that questions surrounding acceptable gender and sexuality were increasingly pertinent. While many gay, lesbian, and feminist scholars readily embraced Butler’s writing for mobilizing a new wave of intellectual focus, its reception in the field of masculinity studies was more considered. Torn between resistance to gay, lesbian, and feminist accusation, the fear of emasculation, and also a real desire to reconceptualize notions of masculinity outside limiting homosexualheterosexual distinctions, the deconstruction of masculinity within its own academic field was a more tentative process. While I am not claiming that Butler’s work had a direct impact on these developments, it certainly exerted significant influence, and there is a synchronicity between its release, urgent critiques of heteronormativity, and reports on the critical condition of masculinity that qualify it as a key reference text in any study of gender and sexuality surrounding this period. While a range of minoritarian voices had been declaring their own troubled positions most vehemently since the 1960s through developments in identity politics, these reverberations instituted a similar troubling of masculinity ‘from within’, most notably, from the 1980s onwards. As the title Male Trouble suggests, gender could no longer be seen as the problematic domain exclusive to female subjectivity: masculinity was equally in need of attention.

Popular resonances Contemporary discourses of dysfunctional masculinity cite a number of reasons for the condition of the typically heterosexual, white, Western male. In the social sciences, researchers have described this figure as the ‘redundant male’,5 a product of years of economic, social, and biological marginalization. More specifically, he has been understood as the victim of decades of gay, lesbian, and feminist insurgence, and concomitant changes in the gender and labour orders. Writing in The Irish Times in 1999, for example, John Waters earnestly hoped that in the coming years men would ‘finally start to stand up for themselves […] to confront the sources of the propaganda which makes

4

Male Trouble

possible their marginalisation from home, family and society, to challenge the bully-boys and bully-girls, the misandrists and the feminazis’.6 Similar concerns were frequently expressed in the decade’s phenomenon of men’s lifestyle magazines, with Men’s Health Magazine, launched in the United Kingdom in 1995, for instance, regularly encouraging its young, international readership to ‘Give yourself an MOT’.7 Talk shows, which grew exponentially during this time period, often debated changes in the role of men, with variations of topics such as ‘Too Many Bad Dads Around’,8 often stimulating discussion. John Beynon identifies the year 2000 as a high point of the debate in the West, claiming that it ushered ‘the masculinity in crisis summer’: ‘While bookshops across the United States were full of boy-crisis books, the press in the United Kingdom carried endless articles on the subject following the publication of Anthony Clare’s book.’9 In the work in question, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis (2000), Clare provocatively asks: ‘It is true that patriarchy has not been overthrown, but its justification is in disarray […] In a world of equal opportunity for the sexes, can men renegotiate the relationship with themselves and with women?’10

Figuring troubled masculinity Of course, representing masculinity extends well beyond the turn of the twenty-first century. René Girard suggests that one of the central messages of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, for example, is that ‘all masculine relationships are based on reciprocal acts of violence’.11 What differentiates the representation and study of masculinity in the 1990s from preceding eras, I argue, is the systematic focus on the gender order as an issue in itself: masculinity’s contingency, its violent conditions of construction, its precarious modes of operation, and the effects of its expectations on male individuals. Further, the complex and often fractious relationship between a range of masculinities and femininities is forced into sharper relief. We might say that the defining feature of masculinity became its dysfunction. This book is dedicated to examining a selection of emblematic performances and representations. While the study primarily considers masculinity in a cross-disciplinary, Western context, it is perhaps useful to map further the foregrounding of ostensibly disaffected masculinities within discrete traditions. In drama and theatre, for instance, the works of Sam Shepard (True West, 1980) and David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross, 1983) in the US have been widely noted for spearheading


representations of troubled masculinity at the latter end of the twentieth century. So too have the early works of British playwrights Harold Pinter (The Homecoming, 1965) and Edward Bond (Saved, 1965), and Irish playwrights Tom Murphy (A Whistle in the Dark, 1961) and Brian Friel (Philadelphia Here I Come, 1964). Dramatists in the 1990s continued this tradition by exploring problems around divergent masculinity, while simultaneously experimenting with aesthetic and form. In the United States, the works of Edward Albee (Three Tall Women, 1991), Terence McNally (Corpus Christi, 1998), and Tony Kushner (Angels in America, 1991–2) addressed matters of male gender and sexuality, in particular, homosexuality. With reference to the latter, Christopher Bigsby notes, ‘Gay playwrights, once forced to express their concerns and commitments obliquely, if at all, increasingly staked out their territory in the American theatre.’12 In Britain, so-called In-Yer-Face theatre also foregrounded these matters, led by writers such as Anthony Neilson (Penetrator, 1993), Sarah Kane (Blasted, 1995), and Mark Ravenhill (Shopping and Fucking, 1996; Faust is Dead; 1997). Reflecting on this period’s unique preoccupation with fraught masculinity, Aleks Sierz writes, [W]hen drama dealt with masculinity, it showed rape; if it got to grips with sex, it showed fellatio or anal intercourse; when nudity was involved, so was humiliation; if violence was wanted, torture was staged […]theatre broke taboos, chipping away at the binary oppositions that structure our sense of reality.13 During the same time period, the work of Irish playwrights Conor McPherson (This Lime Tree Bower, 1995), Gary Mitchell (In A Little World of Our Own, 1997), and Mark O’Rowe (Made in China, 2001) consistently explored marginalized masculinities.14 Although perhaps less popular than drama and film (for reasons of practical and even aesthetic accessibility), live art is arguably the most immediate of all forms of performance, its close affiliation with identity politics ensuring that it never veers far from such concerns as they arise. This is especially true of developments in 1990s performance, with Lois Keidan of the Live Art Development Agency in the United Kingdom noting: During the late 90s live art has proved that it is uniquely positioned to articulate and represent seemingly problematic issues through

6

Male Trouble

alternative strategies and that it is one of the most flexible and responsive artistic tools there is to pursue new ways of representing and responding to these shifting and uncertain times.15 Although much of the form’s earliest stirrings as performance art were mainly associated with feminist politics, as in the work of the French artist Gina Pane (The Conditioning, 1973), the American performer Carolee Schneemann (Up To And Including Her Limits, 1973), and the Yugoslaviaborn Marina Abramovic´ (Thomas Lips, 1975), the 1990s witnessed an increase in performances which explored the relationship between male identity and masculinity. Building on a tradition of visceral experimentation led by artists such as the Austrian-based Viennese Aktionists since the 1960s, the work of the Italian-American artist Vito Acconci (Trademarks, 1969) and the American-born Chris Burden (Shoot, 1971) explored the relationship between masculinity, sexuality, and violence. In Bob Flanagan’s Visiting Hours (1994), for example, the American performer who suffered from cystic fibrosis staged his own hospitalization, prompting questions about the relationship between masculinity, sexuality, and illness. Flanagan continued with similar projects until his death in 1996. In later works by the American-born Ron Athey and the Italian-born Franko B, this experimentation was continued in more explicit ways.16 Although arguably working within much more hybrid forms, I suggest that the endurance practices of the American performer David Blaine, and even the performative protests of the UK-based Fathers 4 Justice, might also be situated alongside, if not within, this tradition. While film has an equally long history of privileging male characters and their perspectives, as most stringently critiqued by Laura Mulvey in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975),17 the time frame under analysis is notable for its deconstruction of long-circulating myths of masculinity. Manohla Dargis writes that Hollywood film, long fascinated with spectacular masculinity, is notable for its softened representations of male gender during the 1990s, a trend she attributes to the impact of Second Wave Feminism: The second wave of feminism helped wash away these damaged men, and in their place emerged new paradigms embodied by Mr. Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Douglas and Harrison Ford. Age and evolving audience taste would in time make relics of Mr. Stallone and Mr. Schwarzenegger’s cartoon macho, while Mr. Douglas and Mr. Ford mellowed, their edge blunted. The


stars who have stayed the course – Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves, Will Smith and that apotheosis of eternal boy-man, Tom Hanks – remain freshly young in look and attitude, their masculinity carefully sublimated.18 Also during this time, the films of Quentin Tarantino often parodied, or interrogated, representations of the macho-male aggressor, as in Pulp Fiction (1994), and revealed – not without irony – that even the most violent men have feelings. At the height of the decade’s deconstruction, David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk) explored the centrality of masochism to the stability of heterosexual male identity.19 In the United Kingdom, films like The Full Monty (1997) saw men openly admit their social marginality but also exploit their masculinity as a commodity for financial gain. More recently, Billy Elliot (2000) imagined a new generation of less narrowly defined, however sentimentalized, men and masculinities. In addition to these popular works, the art house films of Derek Jarman, who died of AIDS in 1994, explored the social position of homosexuals often by comparing them to Christian martyrs who were also sacrificed for their beliefs. Jarman’s The Garden (1990) juxtaposed homosexual men next to Christian iconography, much like his earlier films Sebastiane (1976) and Caravaggio (1986). In Irish cinema, films like When Brendan Met Trudy (2001), InterMission (2003) and Adam and Paul (2004) screened the socially marginalized Irish male.20

Heteronormativity, masculinity, and the Western imaginary Acting in counterpoint to these intimations of crisis, certain voices have highlighted the discrepancy in discursive and institutional realities. If the condition of men and masculinity is so critical, such individuals ask, why is the world we live in still so patriarchal? The gender theorist Lynn Segal sees the link between heterosexuality, men, and power firmly in place and argues that it needs to be made clear that not all men are failing, unemployed, or unhappy.21 Pamela Robertson suggests that men are busy creating a litany of wrongs in order to claim rights. The notion of crisis, she suggests, is nothing more that a discursive strategy circulated by men in order to reoccupy centre stage and reclaim patriarchal privilege.22 While Robertson is correct to point out the discursive-institutional disparity, her perspective is too pervasively suspicious. Robertson’s reservation does not acknowledge that there

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Male Trouble

are many masculinities within the gender order, not all of which are necessarily privileged by patriarchy. As leading thinkers in masculinity studies such as Robert William Connell have pointed out, in a given moment in history, any male subject who does not conform to the hegemonic norm of masculinity is relatively peripheralized. Of interest to the Euro-American breadth of this project, Connell figures twenty-first century hegemonic masculinity as essentially globalized and transnational,23 and not easily reducible to nation-based terms of understanding. His perspective on Western masculinity finds resonance in the work of Charles Taylor who in Modern Social Imaginaries (2004) conceives of modernity not as homogeneous or coherent, but ‘that historically unprecedented amalgam of new practices and institutional forms (science, technology, industrial production, urbanization), of new ways of living (individualism, secularization, instrumental rationality), and of new forms of malaise (alienation, meaninglessness, a sense of impending social dissolution)’.24 While societies may differ in the exact way they modernize, Taylor argues that they do share certain characteristics. These features constitute a ‘modern moral order’, which sees society as comprising individuals who exist for their mutual benefit, rather than for the sake of the state itself. In this, the desires of ‘man’ – that is, the modern subject – can be seen to supersede all other potential social and political goals. For most Western cultures, the question of identity and individual desires is of central social and political importance.

Que(e)rying crisis While remaining mindful of the reservations espoused by Segal and Robertson, my primary concern here is to illuminate blind spots in the production and circulation of these discourses. Or, to put it another way, I suggest we might see the discourse of masculinity in crisis as a cultural performative in its own right, rather than an epistemology, as such. Further, I look to a specific selection of case studies to discern how these dynamics are played out. It is interesting to note, however, that discourses of crisis rarely concede to the condition’s reconstitutive dimension. In place of this presumption of stasis, or failure, I suggest that crisis is not an end in itself but a period of disorder that precedes and precipitates a longer period of productivity, restructuring, and redevelopment, which may even lead to the reestablishment of the temporarily agitated norm. In fact, crisis is to be seen as a constitutive element of all social, political, and economic systems, a fact that seems pertinent during the current global recession. Further to this, indeed


following on from it, we should appreciate that certain kinds of crises are also constitutive of subjectivity. Writing specifically on masculinity in theatre, Michael Mangan draws attention to this condition by claiming: Crisis is […] a condition of masculinity itself. Masculine gender identity is never stable; its terms are continually being redefined and re-negotiated, the gender performance continually being re-staged. Certain themes and tropes inevitably reappear with regularity, but each era experiences itself in different ways.25 Corroborating this recuperative thesis, recent studies have revealed how throughout the twentieth century, national crises and trauma (translated as emasculating) have been quickly followed by periods of remasculinization. George Mosse, for example, identifies the rise of Fascism in 1920s Germany as the assertion of a fanatical, militaristic masculinity in response to national humiliation in the Treaty of Versailles following the First World War.26 Leon Hunt understands the ‘uncertain maleness’ of 1970s Britain as an effect of working through the disintegration of the Fordist heavy industries, deteriorating labour relations, the impact of First Wave Feminism, and the rise of the gay movement.27 Susan Jeffords identifies a rise in macho-masculinity in the United States throughout the 1980s, as exemplified in the figure of Rocky. Jeffords equates this development with a form of masculinization in response to 1960s hippy culture, and the allegedly weak leadership of President Jimmy Carter.28 Writing this introduction in 2010, in the wake of an economic crash, I am painfully reminded of the relationship between vulnerability and violence via numerous news reports that attest to the rise of nationalism and racism, undoubtedly followed by other forms of insidious exclusion. What seems important to note here is that there is nothing new about troubled masculinity. However, at the turn of the twenty-first century, this trouble has been foregrounded and congealed in a proliferation of performative practices that might be seen to signal if not an ontological crisis, then something of a creative impasse. In Masculinities and Culture (2002), John Beynon identifies the emergence of four main themes in the representation and study of masculinity in the past decade: (1) the New Man and the Old Man; (2) men running wild; (3) emasculated men; and (4) men as victims and aggressors.29 While examples of each of these types are readily identifiable across culture, this book is chiefly concerned with the relationship between so-called emasculated, victimized, and aggressive men. Moreover, I am interested in examining how overlapping positions of abjection, emasculation,

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Male Trouble

masochism, sacrifice, victimization, and corporeal im/penetrability work to articulate and negotiate trouble. However, the study maintains that when masculinity is repeatedly articulated through troubled positions, the endurance of subjection, or gender trouble, works to secure identity. The book understands the selected performances and representations of masculinity to operate within a normative-queer continuum, the former term denoting the standard cultural proscription for male behaviour and the latter denoting its deviant Other, which includes homosexual as well as all non-normative masculinities. The analysis examines how heteronormative, heterosexual white masculinity is disturbed by its inherited claims of authenticity and naturalness, repeatedly compelled to recuperate and reassert its terms. The examination also considers how gay masculinity relates to this heteronormative expedient. Compared to normative male subjectivity that affirms itself through endurance, the study reveals how gay subjectivity is represented as ‘naturally’ abject, self-destructive, and willing to self-sacrifice, and also seemingly compelled to mimic the terms of heteronormativity and not necessarily to subversive effect. Moreover, the book understands the frequent and often frenetic reiteration of gender norms, or what Butler refers to in ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ (1991) as the panicked performativity of heterosexuality,30 as self-subjugating performatives towards mastery, insofar as the rigorous disciplining of desire, and the display of aggressive male prowess, ensure the subject’s certain stability. If identity crisis is revealed in these terms, the book asks is this the inescapable deadlock of subjectivity, or are there alternative/futural possibilities for performing the subject?

Mapping trouble In Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics (2008), Samuel Allen Chambers and Terrell Carver expand the concept of ‘trouble’ as it resonates with/in Butler’s writing: Our goal in this book is to explore the types of trouble that Butler has got herself and her readers into, to investigate the manner in which she has made trouble and to track the effects that her troubling has had on politics and the political. In so doing we seek to bring Butler into clearer view as a political thinker – to bring to light her political theory as a politics of troubling and troubling of politics.31 Chambers and Carver are keen to situate trouble within a wider political field, emphasizing the connection between troubling gender(s) and


troubling politics. Similarly, I assert the importance of considering how certain performances and representations dialogue with discourses of masculinity in crisis, mindful that troubled and troubling masculinities retain the capacity to upset, or conspire with, political spheres beyond the immediate spaces of performance and representation. The chapters that follow create psychoanalytically inflected queer conversations with examples from drama, theatre, live art, guerrilla performance, public spectacle, and film in order to consider how male trouble is performed and typically managed. The performative practices examined not only exemplify male trouble, but in taking place within public spheres (or, as with dramatic texts, intended to take place within such spaces), are shaped by the desire to have masculinity widely register as traumatized and traumatic.32 Crucially, however, I think of male trouble as a performative practice, or a set of performative practices, perpetuated through discourse, performance, and representation. I choose varied case studies not to deny local resonance, but to reveal something of the ubiquity of this phenomenon. The work discussed here has broadly emerged between 1991 and 2007, and although this time frame is neither fixed nor finite, it shares temporal co-ordinates with Butler’s Gender Trouble, subsequent urgent critiques of heteronormativity, and widespread claims to masculinity in crisis. I maintain that male trouble should be considered as a conglomeration of performative practices with no easily measured relationship to the reality of male experience or masculine ontology. Even so, given the particular foregrounding of troubled masculinity in the time period in question, we might consider the work to emerge during significant local sociocultural junctures: Reaganite backlash in America, and the mobilization of a religiously inflected War on Terror under two Republican administrations; the legacy of Thatcherite Conservatism in the United Kingdom and the modernization of the Labour Party; the economic acceleration of Celtic Tiger Ireland in the 1990s following the recession of the 1980s. While unique histories shape the geographical loci that I conflate into a Euro-American context here, I also think that global capitalism is a central defining force in the regulation of identity politics. This is not a sociological book, but it nonetheless proposes that bearing such a context in mind is useful for beginning to conceptualize the West’s cultivation of a specific range of masculinities that matter during this period. In addition to these parallels, further resonance might be found in thinking about the male body as a social synecdoche, the limits of which mark the limits of hegemonic norms. It is worth noting that the

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Male Trouble

turning of the twenty-first century has coincided with great anxiety in the West, marked by increased concerns over the penetrability and violability of masculine Euro-American borders. While this anxiety may be said to have culminated in the September 11th terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center, the fear of the feminine Other (mainly in the form of the Middle East) pre-existed and has persisted since 2001. Although none of the work analysed in the book directly refers to such a macrocosmic politic threat – perhaps with the exception of the performances of Taylor Mac which I look to in brief in the last chapter – as masculinity serves and is privileged by patriarchy, I suggest that the fear may be seen as an implicit context of the Western imaginary that binds the work together, manifest in the will to shape, discipline, and empower the male body. In defining the boundaries of the body politic, and in confirming the resilience and resistance of that body through endurance, the work considered here may also be seen to explore the necessity of such subjection in the service of the political body. On many levels then, this is a book about the questioning and testing of borders: the borders of the body, the borders of masculinity, and the borders of heteronormativity. In Chapter 2, I consider how the performance of sacrifice works to inscribe the law of heteronormativity through a reading of The Passion of the Christ (2004). The study situates the film within the normativizing family discourse that has inflected debates surrounding homosexuality and gay marriage in the second half of this decade, while revealing how anxieties surrounding normative stability are central to the film’s narrative and visual modes. The chapter argues that these phobias find embodiment in the androgynous figure of Satan and the evil children that s/he engenders, all of whom must be destroyed through Christ’s crucifixion. The role of sacrifice in the reproduction of heteronormativity is explored by considering the contributions of René Girard, Georges Bataille, and Slavoj Žižek. The management of castration anxiety, or as Calvin Thomas would have it, scatontological anxiety, is explored in Chapter 3.33 This section examines how masculinity is structured around fantasies of hypermasculine idealization that demand extraordinary displays of power, authority, and violence. Focusing on the play Made in China and the film InterMission, both written by Irish writer Mark O’ Rowe, the chapter traces the operation of matrices of desire and identification that shape this system of expectation, and argues that even when male characters fail to materialize fantasy phallic figures, they celebrate impotence, abjection, and victimization. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s


writing on abjection, the chapter argues that the texts illustrate the pliability of the laws of heteronormativity, by mapping how male authority is recuperated through the reification of processes of endurance rather than active achievement. Chapter 4 analyses the relationship between homosexuality, subjection, and fears of social degeneration in British playwright Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking and Faust is Dead. In reference to Shopping and Fucking, the chapter examines how self-destructive behaviours, which culminate in fantasies of penetration, posit subjection to ‘the father’ as a performative strategy for redirecting feminine and homosexual identifications, and by extension, alleviating social disarray. In the case of Faust is Dead the chapter investigates how selfdestructive desires (as exemplified in the self-mutilating gay character Donny, who kills himself) are related to the absence of stable father figures, with self-harm signifying a desire for the interdiction of paternal Law to effect the masculinization of unruly homosexual subjectivity. In these analyses, Jacques Lacan’s paternal paradigm and Fredric Jameson’s theorization of late capitalist culture and schizoid subjectivity are engaged. Continuing with the question of gay subjectivity, Chapter 5 explores the performativity of self-harm in the live art of Ron Athey and Franko B. The live performance, visual, and photographic work of these artists stands out for its grotesque violence, chiefly manifest in self-mutilating and bloodletting practices. While puncturing the gay male body is historically a provocative response to homophobic reactions to AIDS, it is also fraught with limitations. Complementing previously introduced theories of sacrifice with the contributions of José Esteban Muñoz and Amelia Jones to performance studies, the chapter suggests that while the work under consideration is expressly motivated by identity trouble, the centrality of biography, selfhood, and bodily integrity ultimately reify male authorial prowess and bolster the impenetrability of the male body. Chapter 6 analyses spectacles of heroic masculinity as they relate to the high-risk endurance performances of David Blaine and the public protests of Fathers 4 Justice. The chapter explores how these performances begin at a point of male trouble and, drawing on the work of Jean Baudrillard and Lacan, considers how the public, heavily mediatized nature of the work functions to elevate and resignify that crisis in reconstitutive ways. Chapter 7 situates Jackass within discourses of recuperative laddism. Focusing on the film Jackass: The Movie (2002), with reference to the

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MTV television series, the chapter explores how the discursive strategies of laddism might be seen to involve a calculated transposition of masculine norms, designed to licence a whole range of misogynistic and homophobic behaviours. The examination considers how masculinity is constructed through masochistic acts, presented as rites of initiation, that involve the abjection, figurative castration, and penetration of the male body. It also explores how, through various acts of playful mimicry, males performatively control their abject other(s) in the service of affirming a stable masculine core. In the last chapter, I primarily think through the contributions of Leo Bersani and Bracha L. Ettinger, alongside the work of the New Yorkbased performer Taylor Mac. I do so to advance an ethic of fragilization that would involve borderlinking with trouble, so as not to foreclose other relational possibilities in being and becoming.

Critical interventions Male Trouble finds impetus in a range of scholarly interventions into the area of masculinity and queer studies. In addition to Butler’s philosophically textured research, for instance, the book owes much to the sociological writing of Lynne Segal, Susan Faludi, Robert William Connell, and Michael Kimmel. Segal’s Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (1990) is an important early exercise in troubling masculinity, by addressing its pace of change and the manner in which masculinities are produced at complex historical and social junctures. Similarly, Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991) explores the reactionary politics of the feminist movement, while Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (1999) seeks to account for the troubled and troubling response of men to their social disenfranchisement. Equally formative has been the work of Connell whose Masculinities (1995) and The Men and the Boys (2000) continue to inform our understanding of the construction of masculinity at the intersection of power and labour relations. Kimmel’s Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996) remains a significant addition to the development of an antimasculinist approach to the study of masculinity that considers how the gender order is a constantly changing social construct, while his edited collection with Michael Messner, Men’s Lives (1989), explores how working-class men, men of colour, gay men, older and younger men construct different versions of masculinity. Within the context of American literary and cultural studies, David Savran’s Taking it Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism and


Contemporary America Culture (1998) traces the genealogy of the fantasy of the white male as victim in American culture, beginning with the 1950s’ hipster and ending with more recent figures like Iron John, Rambo, and Timothy McVeigh. Pressing Freudian theory to cultural materialism, Savran considers poetry, drama, biography, legal documents, media and popular discourse to argue that victimization became a means by which white masculinity qualified its legitimacy and regulated its hegemony in this period of American culture. Additionally, Kaja Silverman’s Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992) analyses representations of ‘“deviant” masculinities – masculinities whose defining desires and identifications are “perverse”’.34 Using psychoanalytic theory to read literature and film, Silverman explores ways in which male identity has been represented as fractured and marginal through various strategies, including masochism and victimization. However, in pitting these strategies chiefly as examples of ‘phallic divestiture’,35 the trajectory of Silverman’s work differs from mine. Further, Calvin Thomas’ theoretically sophisticated readings of masculinity in the fields of literature, mass culture, and film in Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety and the Male Body on the Line (1996) and Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture, and Film (2008) have, through focusing on the relationship between abjection and writing, signposted alternative critical possibilities for thinking about masculinity, representation, and the reproduction of heteronormativity. Further, Thomas’ work foregrounds how productive such a project might be for feminist and queer scholarship, as well as for critical masculinity studies. Although not strictly concerned with gender and sexuality, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986) offers sharp insight into the operation of transgression, a key dimension to the question of trouble. Analysing a wide variety of texts from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, using literary theory, history, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, the authors explore the hierarchical dynamics between high and low culture in four symbolic domains: psychic forms, the human body, geographical space, and the social order. One of the central assertions of Stallybrass and White’s study is that the relationship between the high and the low is ambivalent and contradictory, with the lower order of things ‘both reviled and desired’. The writers expand on this peculiar dependence, noting: Repugnance and fascination are the twin poles of the process in which a political imperative to reject and eliminate the debasing

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‘low’ conflicts powerfully and unpredictably with a desire for the Other […] A recurrent pattern emerges: the ‘top’ attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon that low-Other (in the classic way that Hegel describes in the masterslave section of the Phenomenology), but also that the top includes that low symbolically as a primary eroticised constituent of its own fantasy life.36 Of crucial significance is the authors’ insistence on the contradictory interplay between the high and the low, the socially elevated and the socially marginal, insofar as it parallels the relationship between the normative dominant and the queer ‘subordinate’. If we are to follow Stallybrass and White’s psychocultural thesis, all subjectivity ‘is a mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear and desire […] a psychological dependence upon precisely those Others which are being rigorously opposed and excluded at the social level’.37 For this reason, the writers continue to suggest that ‘what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central’.38 This critique is useful for this project insofar as it suggests that the Symbolic and the abject enjoy a dynamic, often self-serving relationship, and that this is discernible in the ‘highest’ and the ‘lowest’ of cultural forms. Their elucidation of the complex relationship between the sociocultural centre and the margin provides a way of thinking about the normative and the queer as it relates to male identity, in addition to underscoring the value of looking to examples of so-called high and low cultural practices as I arguably do here. Given the picture they paint, we might query how, if at all, transgression or social transformation is possible? Or, to put it another way, we might ask if there are queer relational modes that are not defined by the jouissance of transgression which ultimately sustains and reproduces the system of relationality ostensibly being challenged? I cannot claim to answer all of these questions in this book, but they are timely for queer studies.

Psychoanalytic inflections While the preceding paragraphs sketched a sociocultural context and provided an overview of this book, the project’s main methodology is woven from psychoanalytically inflected queer theories, or rather, queerly inflected psychoanalytic theories. Precisely because these discourses are complex, it is useful to explicate them at length at this stage. Accordingly, the following pages are dedicated to rehearsing some of the


central frameworks which will be engaged further in individual chapters, in particular those theories that elaborate upon the relationship between subjection and the production of male subjectivity. Again, it is worth reiterating that discourses of crisis can be understood as potent performatives inseparable from other modes of cultural activity, and because of this, equally in need of interrogation. Psychoanalytic theory centralizes the role of identification in the development of subjectivity. In foundational Freudian and Lacanian accounts, identification lays the very foundations of subjectivity, with works by Butler emphasizing the additional role of enactments. In his introduction to the edited collection Psychoanalysis and Performance (2001), Patrick Campbell’s elucidation of the interplay between psychoanalytic interpretation and the performing arts has implications for the study of the practices considered in the book: [I]f performing is a process in which individuals, physically present on stage, think, speak and interact in front of other individuals, then that very activity must throw into relief crucial questions about human behaviour. In making the hidden visible, the latent manifest, in laying bare the interior landscape of the mind and its fears and desires through a range of signifying practices, psychoanalytic processes are endemic to the performing arts.39 While Campbell’s critique is primarily of live performance, I suggest that his claim is also true of any representation that is performative, or illuminates something of the performativity of identity, in that these can also be seen to have interiority, latency, and signifying value.40

The lost object Sigmund Freud’s paper ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) seeks to account for the self-punishment displayed by those who lose loved ones. Freud believed that such self-attacks might lead to hysteria, obsession, or depression, and sought in his analysis of these experiences to understand the structure of the psyche and the role of identification to these phenomena. In this paper, Freud differentiates between experiences of mourning and melancholia. While the lost object of mourning can be readily named and accounted for, this is not true of melancholia: The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking in mourning – an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an

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impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale. The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished. He abases himself before everyone and commiserates with his own relatives for being connected with anyone so unworthy.41 Freud goes on to suggest that when the subject loses a loved one, the ego internalizes that other into its structure, taking on attributes of that other and sustaining it through imitation. The process of an objectdecathexis is overcome through an act of identification, designed to incorporate the other in the self. While mourning is typically overcome with the psychic ‘release’ of the lost love, ongoing melancholia can be seen as a way by which the other, psychically internalized, is reproached for its loss. In The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud makes the claim that the harbouring of lost loves is not just significant to adult life, but also formative in the initial construction of the ego and its object-choice: [W]e have come to understand that this kind of substitution has a great share in determining the form taken by the ego and that it makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called its ‘character’ […] When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego[…]42 Further, he suggests that while an adult may possess the capacity to resist the influences of abandoned object-cathexes, childhood identifications are usually fixed, and are related to the formation of the ego ideal as it is governed by identification with the father and the mother in the Oedipus complex. In a ‘positive’ complex, as the story goes, the male child rejects the object-cathexis established with his mother in favour of identification with his father. Freud maintains that the success of the Oedipus complex and the assumption of masculine and feminine positions are also dependent upon the resolution of ‘the constitutional bisexuality of each individual’.43

Fractured reflections Jacques Lacan’s systematic reading of Freud is heavily influenced by post-structural linguistics, an intersection which sees him conceive of


the subject as having no fixed relationship to the external world, as with the sign to its referent. Deconstructing popular theories of the subject as essential and knowable, Lacan conceives of the subject as a discursive construct, fragmented and unstable. Subjectivity is not an innate disposition in Lacanian theory, but a position occupied within language, precipitated by the social interpellation of individuals. Social interpellation takes place across three main stages of development which also roughly correspond to orders of consciousness, known as the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic orders. Central to the Imaginary is what Lacan refers to as the ‘mirror stage’, a moment/phase when the infant joyously apprehends its reflected image and misrecognizes itself as separate from its mother, a total and integrated identity. In ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ (1949), Lacan describes the mirror stage as a critical phase of identification(s) in the development of subjectivity: ‘We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image [...]’44 This instance anticipates the child’s assumption that there is an objective ‘I’ to others and that this image is what ‘I’ am like. The incongruity of the child’s sense of self with its idealized stable representation, or méconnaissance, predisposes the ego to fiction and illusion, and precipitates the assumption of the signifying position of ‘I’ within the Symbolic order.45 The shift from the Imaginary to the Symbolic stage comes about as a result of the wielding of paternal Law. While the child has, up until this point, not differentiated between itself and its mother’s body, it now becomes aware that its father has some degree of precedence over the right to enjoy the mother. Known as the Oedipus complex, this stage sees the linguistic interdiction of ‘No’ by the Name-of-the-Father disrupt imaginary identifications in favour of symbolic ones, forcing the child to suppress its desire for its mother, and take up a position within the Symbolic register. In the Lacanian model, it is the Symbolic order of language that offers the subject identity, in particular gender and sexual identity, by affording it access to its various signifying systems, orders, and laws. Insofar as entry is dependent upon paternal interdiction, however, the Symbolic is also the realm of male authority, a fact that perpetuates the privileging of male symbolization over female. This is primarily due to the child’s relationship to the phallus during the Oedipus complex. In ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ (1958), Lacan figures the phallus as ‘the signifier

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intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signified;’46 the master signifier at the centre of the Symbolic sphere which gives it stability, by anchoring the play of signifiers, and by facilitating the generation of meaning. As such, the phallus also plays a central role in the formation of sexed subjectivity. According to Lacan, this involves the installation in the subject of an unconscious position without which he would be unable to identify himself with the ideal type of his sex, or to respond without grave risk to the needs of his partner in the sexual relation, or even to accept in a satisfactory way why the needs of the child who may be produced by this relation.47 Although Lacan claims that both males and females are constituted by lack, from the moment in the mirror stage when they identify themselves as separate from the mother’s body, he claims that boys and girls perceive this lack differently. While eager to point out that the phallus is not the same as the penis – ‘the phallus is not a phantasy […] It is even less the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes’48 – the psychoanalyst maintains that the signifier is modelled upon such cultural associations: It can be said that this signifier is chosen because it is the most tangible element in the real of sexual copulation, and also the most symbolic in the literal (typographical) sense of the term, since it is equivalent there to the (logical) copula. It might also be said that, by virtue of its turgidity, it is the image of the vital flow as it is transmitted in generation.49 Lacan refrains from naturalizing male dominance by suggesting that boys only think they can possess the phallus because they have penises, and so do not acknowledge this lack to the same extent as girls. In ‘On a Question Preliminary to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’ (1955–6) he remarks that females, in lacking penises, serve ‘as objects for the exchanges required by the elementary structures of kinship’.50 Following on, we might say that something of profound misperception rather than biological determinism is responsible for the construction of heteronormative masculinity as the most dominant and powerful gender order. This is most clearly evidenced in the supremacy of patriarchy, which seduces the male subject with the promise of plenitude. Lacan’s explication of the relationship between the phallus and male


identity has also informed subsequent gender theorists to coin the term ‘phallic masculinity’ to describe its most aggressive manifestations. While the mirror stage is the realm of imaginary identifications and the construction of the ideal ego, the Oedipus complex is the realm of symbolic identification with the father and the formation of the ego ideal. In this account, subjectivity is constituted through a process of recognition and misrecognition, identification and disidentification. However, the perpetuation of male dominance through the construction of masculinity and patriarchy demands certain sacrifices from its would-be subjects. That is to say, the success of the male subject within the Symbolic is dependent upon his compliance to certain normative codes of behaviour initially encountered in the Imaginary stage. First, in order for the male subject to be fully assimilated by the Symbolic order and later privileged by its ruling system of patriarchy, he must submit to the Law of the Father and be symbolically castrated. He must extricate himself from the mother’s body, and all associated experiences, and do as the father demands. From this moment on, male subjection – the (willing) submission to paternal Law – is established as a central feature of normative male identity, organized around a sacrificial economy of exchange: the reward for subjection is the assumption of a privileging ‘masculine’ position within the Symbolic. The subject’s contract with the Law is regulated in the denial of the lack inaugurated by maternal separation in the Imaginary, and in the excessive production and sublimation of desire in efforts to master law, language, and culture, those defining features of the Symbolic. This involves the male subject who conforms to normative masculinity continually misperceiving, or overestimating his entitlement to patriarchal privilege. While female subjectivity also necessitates the repression of desire in the Oedipus complex, the girl does not misperceive her relationship to the phallus to the same extent, and resigns herself to trying to be the phallus for the male (by having children, for example). Lacan accounts for this sex differentiation in terms which revolve around ‘a being and a having’ of the phallus.51 Further, the female subject is not compelled to completely repress her pre-Oedipal experiences, for in childbearing, she maintains affinities to the Real and Imaginary orders. Regarding these distinctions, Coppélia Kahn observes of girls: Her femininity is reinforced by her original symbiotic union with her mother and by the identification with her that must precede identity, while his [a boy’s] masculinity is threatened by the same union

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and the same identification. While the boy’s sense of self begins in union with the feminine, his sense of masculinity arises against it.52 Not only is male identity figured as sacrificial in the Oedipus complex but in the Symbolic too where if he wishes to be privileged by patriarchy, the male subject must control deviant desires by adhering to specific, normative codes of masculinity. In this polarizing arrangement, masculinity is defined as a rigorous sacrificial regime, characterized by the necessary self-disciplining of desire. As Elisabeth Badinter writes, ‘To be a man signifies not to be feminine; not to be homosexual; not to be effeminate in one’s physical appearance or manners; not to have sexual or overtly intimate relations with other men; not to be impotent with women.’53 Or, as Butler suggests in The Psychic Life of Power (1997), ‘Becoming a “man” […] requires repudiating femininity as a precondition for the heterosexualization of sexual desire and its fundamental ambivalence.’54

Abject potentiality A number of feminist thinkers such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Jacqueline Rose have pointed out that the Symbolic order is premised upon the repression of experiences of the female body. For Rose, abject violence is made most vividly manifest at the rational pinnacle of Symbolic Law.55 Kristeva, in particular, highlights how this repression is revealed at the level of the social in her writing on the semiotic and the abject. In a bid to interrogate the perceived phallocentrism of prevailing psychoanalytic models, Kristeva reimagines the order of the Real and its relationship to the Symbolic. In Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), she conceives of the Real as the semiotic, a pre-Oedipal stage and order defined by the sensual experiences of the female body: ‘the drives, which are “energy” charges, as well as “psychical” marks’.56 For Kristeva, however, the complete repression of semiotic drives is impossible, for in being discursive effects, subjects are always subjects-in-process, the interplay of ‘both semiotic and symbolic’ laws.57 In this formulation, even a ‘positive’ Oedipus complex is never fully secure, for identification with the father is continuously disturbed by identification with the mother. Kristeva claims that the semiotic has the power to disrupt the Symbolic, by drawing attention to it as an incomplete signifying process. In Patrick Campbell’s elucidation, this is owing to the semiotic’s capability of ‘disrupting the “status quo” [of the Symbolic], allowing the feminine to re-enter discourse through its very exorbitance, its


transgressing of the phallocentric signifying process’.58 To illustrate this point, Kristeva draws on the disruptive function of art: ‘In “artistic” practices the semiotic – the precondition of the symbolic – is revealed as that which also destroys the symbolic, and this revelation allows us to presume something about its functioning.’59 The semiotic’s troubling potential is most vividly and violently demonstrated in encounters with the abject. In the seminal work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), Kristeva figures the abject as that which ‘disturbs identity, system order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’.60 In being ‘opposed to I’ the abject draws the subject ‘toward the place where meaning collapses’,61 to the point of the subject’s annihilation. Kristeva relates responses of abjection to the repression of pre-Oedipal or semiotic experiences of the female body. The feelings of disgust incurred by encounters with blood, excrement, and the skin on milk, she suggests, are expressions of the Symbolic order’s insistence on system, order, and boundary-making; and of the prohibition on transgressing the Law. In resisting symbolization, the abject defies the Name-ofthe-Father; it exists as a père-version.62 This père-version also takes the form of the père-vert, the abject human whose life resists (or is refused) assimilation to the Symbolic realm. Such a figure continually challenges the subject’s coherence by arousing the feeling of ‘the impossible within […] that it is [the subject] none other than abject’.63 In disturbing the chain of socially acceptable Oedipal identifications, this figure constantly questions the Symbolic domain’s convention, as ‘a deviser of territories, languages, works’.64

Performative displacement Butler further investigates the dynamic of Kristeva’s abject within Lacan’s Symbolic register, in the context of gender and sexuality. Crucially, Butler attempts to think outside the heteronormative framework of Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva by conceiving of gender and sex not in terms of biology but citational performativity. In Bodies that Matter Butler describes a performative as ‘that discursive practice which enacts or produces that which it names’.65 Like Lacan’s theory of interpellation, but with an added emphasis on acts as well as identifications, Butler claims that the production of gendered identity occurs through the citation and reiteration of social norms, conventions, or laws. Their assumption is not a single act or event, but the effect of an iterable practice, and identity is only secured as stable through seamless repetition.

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To illustrate this point, Butler describes how the act of naming sex – for example, ‘It’s a girl’ – sets in motion a process of ‘girling’: This is a ‘girl’, however who is compelled to ‘cite’ the norm in order to qualify and remain a viable subject. Femininity is thus not the product of choice, but the forcible citation of a norm, one whose complex historicity is indissociable from relations of discipline, regulation, and punishment. Indeed there is no ‘one’ which takes on a gender norm. On the contrary, this citation of the gender norm is necessary in order to qualify as a ‘one’, to become viable as a ‘one’, where subject-formation is dependent on the prior operation of legitimating gender norms.66 Invoking Kristeva, Butler argues that this process of constructing viable subjects is premised upon the existence of ‘abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects”, but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject’.67 And given that the ‘normative phantasm of “sex”’68 is a creation of a heterosexual discursive matrix, Butler identifies homosexual non-subjects as the abject correlatives of heterosexual subjectivity. Such figures represent what is unliveable, unthinkable, and unintelligible to Symbolic Law. And yet, as Kristeva suggests of encounters with the abject, Butler claims that these abject non-subjects have disruptive potential. In defining the limit of the subject’s domain, they continually threaten to expose the fragility of normative subjectivity, ‘the self-grounding presumptions of the sexed subject […]’.69 The abject non-subject constantly threatens to puncture the borders of the subject and the heteronormative regime it depends upon for signification. Moreover, Butler questions the identification readings offered by Freud in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ and The Ego and the Id, Lacan’s writing on the mirror stage and Oedipus complex, and Kristeva’s theory of primary semiotic drives. Notably, she challenges the fixity presumed by these readings. In her examination of Freud in Gender Trouble, Butler questions the psychoanalyst’s claims of object-cathexis and paternal identification. In The Ego and the Id, Freud understands the femininity of boys to relate to bisexuality, claiming that this primary condition ‘makes it so difficult to obtain a clear view of the facts in connection with the earliest object choices and identifications, and still more difficult to describe them intelligibly’.70 Butler suggests that Freud is compelled to introduce the Oedipus complex in order to explain


why the boy must reject the mother and identify with the father, but not only that, choose masculine or feminine positions. Butler argues that the imperative to reject the mother might not solely function to resist castration, but possibly a homosexual cathexis: That the boy usually chooses the heterosexual would, then, be the result, not of the fear of castration by the father, but of the fear of castration – that is, of the fear of ‘feminization’ associated within heterosexual cultures with male homosexuality. In effect, it is not primarily the heterosexual lust for the mother that must be punished and sublimated, but the homosexual cathexis that must be subordinated to a culturally sanctioned heterosexuality.71 In Identification Papers (1995), Diana Fuss takes similar issue with Freud’s topography, which aims to draw a line between identification – ‘the wish to be the other’ – and desire for the sexual object – ‘the wish to have the other’. Desire and identification are problematically and improbably presented, according to Fuss, in a way that renders Butler’s offering conceivable: For Freud, desire for one sex is always secured through identification with the other sex; to desire and to identify with the same person at the same time is, in this mode, a theoretical impossibility […] The two psychical mechanisms, which together form the cornerstone of Freud’s theory of sexual identity formation, work in tandem to produce a sexually marked subject [… however ] psychoanalysis’s distinction between wanting to be the other and wanting to have the other is a precarious one at best, its epistemological validity seriously open to question.72 In Gender Trouble Butler also queries the distinctions and psychic typologies presented by Freud in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. She points out that when the lost loved-object (the mother for boys in a positive complex) is internalized, it is not given up, just preserved within the ego. There it resides alongside paternal identification, which is the realm of the ego ideal. Acting as a policing agent in the consolidation of masculinity (and femininity), through guarding normative sanctions and taboos, the ego ideal turns against the ego (of which it is a component), to ensure success. Unravelling this psychic presupposition, Butler suggests that gender identification itself is best understood as a kind of

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melancholia, with the sex of the lost object becoming psychically internalized as prohibition: Because identifications substitute for object relations, and identifications are the consequence of loss, gender identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition. This prohibition sanctions and regulates discrete gendered identity and the law of heterosexual desire. The resolution of the Oedipal complex affects gender identification through not only the incest taboo, but, prior to that, the taboo against homosexuality.73 If the relationship to the lost object is actually homosexual rather than heterosexual, as Butler suggests it may be (lost because of the taboo on homosexuality, which precedes the incest taboo); and if gender is a kind of melancholia which results in the internalization of that lost object, then the prohibition against having a same-sex love object might be seen to precipitate a desire to become that lost object. The original prohibition ultimately effects a desire to reproduce the gender of that sex. Through this model, Butler suggests: [I]dentity is constructed and maintained by the consistent application of this taboo, not only in the stylization of the body in compliance with discrete categories of sex, but in the production and ‘disposition’ of sexual desire […] dispositions are not the primary sexual facts of the psyche, but produced effects of a law imposed by culture and by the complicitous and transvaluating acts of the ego ideal.74 If, in the works of Freud and Lacan, gender identification is based on prohibition, Butler strongly questions the possibility of its successful consolidation. (She also questions the maternalist discourse of Kristeva for its heterosexual assumptions.) The excluded term in both accounts, she asserts, is ‘an excluded sexuality that contests the self-grounding pretensions of the subject as well as its claims to know the source and object of its desire’.75 If heteronormative, heterosexual subjectivity depends on the implementation of the taboo on homosexuality, then Butler argues that certain identities that fail to internalize this taboo inevitably fall outside of heteronormative intelligibility. Fuss echoes this problem, noting the difficulty of singular, stable, complete identification to settle in her reading of Freud: ‘The astonishing capacity of


identifications to reverse and disguise themselves, to multiply and contravene one another, to disappear and reappear years later renders identity profoundly unstable and perpetually open to radical change.’76 Butler gestures towards looking to troubled identification, manifest in the failure to imitate, repeat, and reproduce coherent gender, in order to dissemble the presumptive heterosexual matrix: If ‘identifications’, following Jacqueline Rose, can be exposed as phantasmatic, then it must be possible to enact an identification that displays its phantasmatic structure. If there is not radical repudiation of a culturally constituted sexuality, what is left is the question of how to acknowledge and ‘do’ the construction one is invariably in. Are there forms of repetition that do not constitute a simple imitation, reproduction, and, hence, consolidation of the law […] What possibilities of gender configurations exist among the emergent and occasionally convergent matrices of cultural intelligibility that govern gendered life?77 In Bodies that Matter, imagining the political ramifications of disidentification brings Butler to consider the affirmation of that slippage, owing to the fact that ‘the failure of identification is itself the point of departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference’.78 In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), José Esteban Muñoz embraces both Fuss’s and Butler’s work (in addition to that of Michel Pêcheux79) for paving the way towards ‘an understanding of a “disidentificatory subject” who tacitly and simultaneously works on, with, and against a cultural form’.80 In Gender Trouble Butler invokes the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok to further extend this question of where to locate and how to analyse the subversive possibilities of identification. In the collected essays of Abraham and Torok, titled The Shell and the Kernel (1994), the psychoanalysts claim that Freud’s theory of identification pertains to the realm of incorporation with ‘the prohibited object settled in the ego in order to compensate for the lost pleasure and failed introjection’.81 While introjection belongs to the work of mourning, incorporation belongs to the work of melancholia. Crucially, however, incorporation is not a process but a fantasy that imagines an object into an interior space. Where, Butler asks, is the incorporated space that sustains identifications through melancholy? ‘If it is not literally within the body’, she suggests, ‘perhaps it is on the body as its surface signification such that the body must itself be understood as an incorporated space?’82 Butler’s interrogation

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of this locale is understandable, given that Abraham and Torok maintain that incorporation is ‘magic’ and ‘must remain’ concealed. After all, ‘it is born of prohibition’ and ‘the ultimate aim of incorporation is to recover, in secret and through magic, an object that, for one reason or another, evaded its own function’.83 As a naturalized site, Butler’s look to the body is not surprising. Certainly Abraham and Torok maintain the operation of incorporation in the field of representations, affects, and bodily states.84 But similarly, fantasies of incorporation become another way through which the lost love object is acknowledged and symbolically recuperated. Unless there is ‘an openly manic crisis’85 which would amount to a blatant, hysterical acknowledgement of the lost object, incorporation is a subtle, secret act that signposts the graveyard in the ego. This dynamic might be seen to resonate with the external and internal body explorations of Ron Athey and Franko B discussed in Chapter 5. Butler unites her theory of the psychical structure of gender identification with Abraham and Torok’s elaboration of incorporation. In doing so, she suggests that gender identification is accomplished with the denial of loss and the encryption of loss in the body: As an antimetaphorical activity, incorporation literalizes the loss on or in the body and so appears as the facticity of the body, the means by which the body comes to bear ‘sex’ as its literal truth. The localization and/or prohibition of pleasures and desires in given ‘erotogenetic’ zones is precisely the kind of gender-differentiating melancholy that suffuses the body’s surface.86 In this account, incorporation is an act that reveals and literalizes loss in or on the body. Incorporation is act/moment/sign of gender trouble.

The subject of subjectivity What emerges in these writings is a picture of subjectivity as inherently melancholic, effected through repression, prohibition, and selfpunishment; marked in, on, and through the body. And this body, despite the best efforts of the ego-police, can never completely conceal this loss. Within these narratives, subjectivity is constantly haunted by loss, although it must be denied in order to lay claim to stable identity. Even apparently secured or normative identity is not safe. The more stable the gender affinity, Butler warns, the less resolved the original loss, with rigid gender boundaries merely serving to conceal that loss.87


At this point it is important to note that these readings of subjectivity are neither exhaustive nor exclusive. It is equally worth asserting that while many of these hostile frameworks do not sit easily with this author, it seems necessary to press them to further analysis, not least of all because they go some way to explain the sacrificial bond that secures subjectivity in our cultural imaginary, and which is traced throughout this book. While this is the picture of identity that emerges through classical psychoanalytical writings, it is embellished by other works that address more specifically the relationship between sacrifice, subjection, and male identity. Freud goes some way to describing the relationship between subjection and subjectivity. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) is his first explicit attempt to account for masochistic dispositions. Described as ‘the most common and the most significant of all the perversions’,88 sadism and masochism are deemed to upset the Oedipus complex, not least of all because of their pervasiveness. At the same time, Freud blurs the common distinction by suggesting that sadistic and masochistic leanings psychically co-habit: ‘The most remarkable feature of this perversion is that its active and passive forms are habitually found to occur in the same individual.’89 Freud continues his investigation of sadomasochistic dispositions in ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ (1919). Chiefly based on case studies (four females and two males), this paper accounts for female-beating fantasies in a three-part structure: (1) ‘My father is beating the child whom I hate’;90 (2) ‘I am being beaten by my father’;91 (3) ‘I am probably looking on’, typically at other boys being beaten.92 Freud notes that the first and third of these stages are similar and conscious, the second stage is ‘never remembered’,93 most likely because it has been repressed owing to the ‘unambiguous sexual excitement attached to it’.94 Typical of his Oedipal configurations, Freud impresses that ‘none of these incestuous loves’ – the desire to be beaten/fucked/ loved by the father – ‘can avoid the fate of repression’95 and the female subject’s desire in the second sequence is even too difficult to represent. Desire is consequently displaced into the final fantasy, in which the female appears as a sadistic spectator. Although phases one and two of these fantasies appear to be sadistic, this is only true in their formal construction as the self-identified spectator is vicariously masochistically satisfied, by virtue of the fact that the boys in the final scenario are ‘nothing more than substitutes for the child itself’.96 Guilty desire for the father, then, is transformed into a theatricalized fantasy of being punished by the father, this disavowal resulting in ‘punishment for the

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forbidden genital relation, but also the regressive substitute for that relation’,97 the final phase converging a sense of guilt with sexual love. The female subjects under Freud’s analysis reveal a fracturing of sexual normativity. As David Savran points out, Freud’s analysis reveals ‘a subject who is radically divided, both spectator and victim, producer of desire and recipient of punishment, sexually aroused and desperately guilty’.98 As this study is concerned with masculinity, I want to read the Freudian topography specifically in light of male subjects. What is particularly interesting with female fantasies, when set in dialogue with their male counterparts, is the centrality of the dominated male – invariably a father figure – in spite of the sex of the confessing subject. For Freud, this fantasy construction precipitates a masculinity complex, which sees girls ‘only want[ing] to be boys’.99 In other words, it is through her subjugation that the female desires to be a boy, and spur masculinization. Savran draws attention to the homosexual investment in Freud’s beating scenario owing to the fact that the males are seemingly punished for loving the father: The female is thus reconfigured as a male homosexual. According to Freud’s analysis, normative constructions of both gender and sexuality are thus severely disrupted by the masochistic scenario. The female subject is rendered both homosexual and heterosexual, masculinized and feminized, her passivity at once affirmed and contradicted by its projection on to a male homosexual subject.100 While Freud initially brushes aside males with ‘beating-phantasies in men are connected with another subject, which I shall leave on side on this paper’,101 his commentary on the shifting positions of female fantasies seemingly leads him to do just that. In his account, normative positions are similarly challenged in male-beating fantasies. Freud suggests that the male subject imagines three phases to his subjection: (1) ‘I am being beaten by my father’;102 (2) ‘I am loved by my father’;103 (3) ‘I am being beaten by my mother’.104 As in the female scenario, the beating corresponds to sexual love: ‘being beaten also stands for being loved (in a genital sense), though this has been debased to a lower level owing to regression’.105 The unconscious fantasy of stage two is thus repressed in favour of the conscious third stage. Even so, the male beating fantasy figures the male as inherently passive: not only in stage two with its blatant homosexual investment but in stage three, where the mother figure is endowed with ‘masculine attributes and characteristics’.106 In both female and male masochistic fantasies (termed feminine, reflecting


the assumed naturalness of female passivity), normative constructions of gender and sexual identity are radically disrupted: The boy evades his homosexuality by repressing and remodelling his unconscious phantasy: and the remarkable thing about his later conscious phantasy is that it has for its content a feminine attitude without a homosexual object-choice. By the same process, on the other hand, the girl escapes from the demands of the erotic side of her life altogether. She turns herself into a man, without herself becoming active in a masculine way, and is no longer anything but a spectator of the event which takes the place of a sexual act.107 In his analysis of both male and female subjects, Freud identifies a repressed desire to be beaten by the father, which ‘lives on in the unconscious after repression has taken place’.108 While Freud’s observations in Three Essays and ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ serve to build a theory of masochistic subjectivity, his argument strives for an ontogenetic explanation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Here, the death drive is positioned in contrast to the pleasure principle, or Eros. Freud suggests that libido functions to neutralize the death instinct, by redirecting it outside the individual.109 However, if this primary sadism is bound up libidinally, the individual becomes the subject of its own aggression. Freud continues his investigation towards a primary masochism in ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ (1924). Here, not only does he claim a primary, or ‘erotogenic’ masochism – ‘a condition imposed on sexual excitation’ – but two derivative forms: feminine masochism, ‘as an expression of the feminine nature’ in male subjects, and moral masochism, ‘a norm of behaviour’.110 Although all forms are related, owing to the claimed masochistic primacy, this is particularly true of erotogenic and feminine strains. Feminine masochism, labelled as ‘the most accessible to our observation and least problematical’111 is an exclusive perversion of male subjectivity, the female understood to be naturally masochistic. Freud describes masochism as something of ‘performance’, or ‘the carrying out of the phantasies in play’,112 which typically relate to desires of ‘being gagged, bound, painfully beaten, whipped, in some way maltreated, forced into unconditional obedience, dirtied and debased’.113 Considered at various stages of the book, these desires are given expression in The Passion of the Christ, the performances of Ron Athey and Franko B and Jackass, for example. Similarly, Freud notes the occurrence of mutilation and torture, while claiming them to be less frequent. He impresses

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that in male masochistic desire, the male assumes the traditionally female role of ‘being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby’.114 Moral masochism is less explicitly concerned with sexuality and fantasy than with a behavioural norm, or the mental suffering considered in this project, most explicitly in InterMission. Freud typifies this strain as a turning of the other cheek, irrespective of one’s relationship to the masochist (erotogenic and feminine relate to being beaten/loved by the father). Moral masochism is due to the demands of the ego for punishment by the introjected parental voice of the super-ego, or the actual parental powers themselves. Inevitably, Freud injects it with libidinal significance, however, owing to the fact that guilt takes an unconscious position in the sealing of the Oedipus complex. Its conscious emergence marks the resexualization of the identity matrix once more: ‘Conscience and morality have arisen through the overcoming, the desexualization of the Oedipus complex; but through moral masochism morality becomes sexualized once more, the Oedipus complex is revived and the way is opened for a regression from morality to the Oedipus complex.’115 The moral masochist, then, creates scenarios for which he must be punished by his sadistic conscience or ‘the great parental power of Destiny’.116 He is compelled ‘to do what is inexpedient, must act against his own interests, must ruin the prospects which open out to him in the real world and must, perhaps, destroy his own real existence’.117 Central to Lacan’s paradigm of subjectivity is a masochistic relation, with castration (submitting to the Law of the Father) ultimately affording the male a masculine position within the Symbolic. While this pact is first forged on a subconscious level, it is also practised in the misperceptions, over-estimations, and over-determined identifications of normative masculinity and patriarchy. It is also revealed in what Butler refers to as performative slippages,118 or those acts that reveal a subject’s failure to fully internalize its social contract. Butler associates this manifestation of incoherence with the disconnect between the call of the Law and its articulation – similar to Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance, ‘the structured and differing origin of differences’119 – in which presumptions of gender naturalness are undermined. Lacan also observes evidence of this incomplete identity formation in analysis. In The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in The Technique of Psychoanalysis (1954–55) for instance, he equates the death drive with the Symbolic’s tendency to produce repetition: ‘the death instinct is only the mask of the symbolic order […] The symbolic order is simultaneously non-being and insisting to be.’120 In The Psychoses (1955–6) he understands compulsive,


repetitious behaviour as an insistence on the signifier, or ‘the insistence of speech’121 that binds the subject to the Law. Later still, in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969–70), Lacan relates this repetition to the death drive, and the desire to go beyond the limit of knowledge, that is, the return of jouissance,122 or the will to exceed the pleasure principle and seek death. At various points in The Family Complexes (1984), he identifies the death drive in the re-enactment of the complexes – the weaning from mother; the intrusion of other children into the child’s life; the Oedipus complex – which works to secure socialization and symbolization.123 Against Freud, who gives the death drive biological roots, Lacan positions the drive as intrinsic to the Symbolic order, not only as a disruptive force, but as a constitutive feature. Although his view slightly changes over time, all nuances are useful towards understanding the role of self-subjugation and the destructive drive as part of the Symbolic’s imperative to signify presence. Less indicative of joyful resistance, as Kristeva maintains of the semiotic surge, Lacan associates the drive with being bound to the Law. This is the deadlock that he is led to when discussing the interdependency between death drive and jouissance in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–60) when he asserts: ‘We are, in fact, led to the point where we accept the formula that without a transgression there is no access to jouissance, and, to return to Saint Paul, that that is precisely the function of the Law.’124 Slavoj Žižek highlights the sacrificial component to Lacan’s ordering, which is a central structuring motif within the case studies considered in this book, suggesting that ‘a sacrifice enacts the disavowal of the impotence of the big Other’.125 The subject does not sacrifice to gain himself, but rather to fill in the lack in the Other, ‘to sustain the appearance of the Other’s omnipotence or, at least, consistency […] one sacrifices oneself (one’s honor and future in respectful society) to maintain the appearance of the Other’s honor, to save the beloved Other from shame’.126 However, he suggests that there is also a more ‘uncanny’ dimension to Lacanian sacrifice, in which the Other is duped to think one is missing something it once had: [O]ne sacrifices not in order to get something from the Other, but in order to dupe the Other, in order to convince him/it that one is still missing something, i.e. jouissance. This is why obsessionals experience the compulsion repeatedly to accomplish their compulsive rituals of sacrifice – in order to disavow their jouissance in the eyes of the Other.127

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Dennis King Keenan reads Žižek to succinctly suggest that the primordial sacrifice of the Thing (das Ding) does not simply involve the loss of the Real, rather that the Real (as drive) is the ‘driving force’ of desire: It ‘is’, rather, nothing but loss, nothing but radical negativity, nothing but radical sacrifice, nothing but the sacrifice of sacrifice (nothing but a surplus that is the condition of the possibility and the condition of the possibility of the symbolic order.) As such, the primordial sacrifice (which is the emergence into the symbolic order) is not an act of exchange that ultimately pays. The subject gets ‘nothing’ in exchange […]128 While the subject might get ‘nothing’ in exchange for castration, the symbolic fiction maintains that the ability to play with the Real is a heroic act that might afford the subject centrality within the Symbolic. This is especially true for males who are doubly removed from the Real – ‘totally-outside and too-early that it is forever-too-late to access’129 in Bracha L. Ettinger’s words – and because of this have more to gain, and simultaneously more to lose. This heroic playing with the Real, I suggest, is observable in the performances of Fathers 4 Justice, but especially David Blaine. While Freud suggests that masochism disrupts coherent identity, later Lacan reimagines Freud’s Oedipal desexualization as a trauma in subject formation. However, as suggested in the previous paragraph, he reads the repetition of seemingly destructive, compulsive behaviours to signify a will to resolve the trauma by being successfully bound to the Law: in the ostensible absence of Law, the subject literally issues it upon himself. This is what the desperately decentered gay characters in Mark Ravenhill’s plays illustrate so effectively. Given this, wilful abjection, emasculation, masochism, sacrifice, the resistance to destabilizing bodily penetration, and victimization – terms and positions which inevitably fold into each other – do not simply announce moments of gender trouble, but the performative construction and delimitation of identity. Although I have taken something of a theoretical detour, it seems necessary in order to unravel the complex discursive relationship between masculinity and subjection. At this point, however, I would like to weave a gentler, contrapuntal voice into the conversation. In Derek Jarman’s monochromatic film Blue (1993), a speaker imagines ‘An infinite possibility/Becoming tangible.’130 While the work specifically deals with serious illness due to AIDS, it fundamentally draws attention to the relationship between aesthetic invention and human becoming.


The words find resonance in John Caputo’s exposure of the limitations of the language of identity: For when we speak of the ‘I’ or the ‘we’ or the ‘self’, we are employing a certain shorthand that glosses over the complexities, that hastily summarizes the current state of an inner archaic conflict in which there are numerous competing forces, constantly shifting, and unsteady alliances and unexpected turns yet to be taken.131 The landscape Caputo depicts is turbulent but mobile, and not inflexible to change. While this book seeks to examine performances and representations of troubled and troubling masculinities interlinked with performative discourses of crisis, it does so not to present this condition as fixed. Rather, the book ultimately seeks to expose, if not destabilize, the phallic, sacrificial model of subjectivity to which masculinity seems so heavily indebted, and in which it remains often violently immured. If trouble has been a central mode of male signification in recent years, then perhaps now it is time to take seriously the infinite possibilities of our becoming: possibilities which are always almost tangible, but never fully realized to the point of being firmly fixed.

2 Sacrificial Masculinity in The Passion of the Christ

When the father is no longer an overbearing patriarch the son looks everywhere for the law.1 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred Christ’s Redemption is not the ‘negation’ of the Fall but its accomplishment, in exactly the same sense that, according to Saint Paul, Christ accomplishes the Law.2 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity Long before its cinema release on Ash Wednesday, 25 February 2004, The Passion of the Christ attracted media attention.3 Much of this owed to the fact that Director Mel Gibson is an outspoken Roman Catholic and was keen to air his strong personal opinions on the subject of the film. More specifically, Gibson belongs to a conservative Catholic group known as Traditionalists, who have rejected the Church’s efforts in relative modernization ever since the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) in the 1960s. Further, the same group is understood still to hold the Jews accountable for Jesus’s death, an anti-Semitic sentiment deemed as incendiary and rejected by Vatican II. The anticipatory interest was also cultivated by Gibson’s public assurance that his Passion would be like no other version screened before. His contemporary interpretation would eschew the saccharine quality of early Hollywood religious cinema, notable in films such as King of Kings (1961), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), and Jesus of Nazareth (1977),4 while avoiding the postmodern stylizations of more recent offerings such as The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Jesus of Montreal (1990). Drawing inspiration from all the synoptic Gospels, as well as from extra-biblical material in the 36

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form of Sister Anne Emmerich’s devotional book The Dolorous Passion of Christ,5 Gibson avowed that his film would provide the most explicit and ‘realistic’ representation of the last twelve hours in Jesus’s life that the world had ever seen. Gibson’s resolute beliefs, coupled with the film’s grotesque violence, became the main contexts for critical debate upon the film’s release. In particular, The Passion was quickly accused of being grossly anti-Semitic in its depiction of Jewish involvement in Christ’s arrest, torture, and crucifixion. Commentators claimed that the Jewish leader Caiaphas and the High Priests of the Sanhedrin are depicted as brutal and bloodthirsty in their relentless pursuit of Jesus, and demonized next to the mild-mannered Roman governor Pilate and the laughable King Herod, who are both presented as relatively indifferent to Jesus’s activities. Writing in The New Yorker, David Denby sensed a deliberate manipulation of fact in the film, ‘making the Jewish leaders more, and the Roman leaders less, responsible for the death of Jesus’,6 and consequently saw the film at risk of heightening the ethnic unrest that characterized the post-9/11 climate. Responding to one critic, Gibson suggested that he was mindful of such sensitivities while making the film, deliberately not subtitling Caiaphas’s blood libel that is spoken after Jesus’s death – ‘Let blood be on our heads’ – for fear that ‘they’ ( Jews) would come to his house and shoot him.7 In defence of these imputations, other respondents were quick to point out how both the Jewish Veronica and Simon of Cyrene assisted Jesus at the height of his torture, and how it was ultimately the Roman soldiers’ ferocity which stood out in the film. This ethno-religious interest appeared to culminate when the animated American comedy series South Park released its own version of the film later the same year, titled The Passion of the Jew (2004), in which Gibson is represented as a zealous sadomasochist, and his film is compared to a piece of Nazi propaganda. In this chapter I do not wish to solely focus on the (anti) Semitic inflections of The Passion. Rather, I seek to foreground the film’s representation of gender and sexuality by resituating it principally within resonant cultural debates surrounding homosexuality that have dominated Western religious and political agendas before, during, and indeed since the film’s release, not least of which include concerns over gay partnership and queer familial configurations. The analysis offered here illuminates how anxieties surrounding heteronormative stability are central to the film’s narrative and visual modes, and argues that these phobias find embodied exemplification in the androgynous figure of Satan, pitted in opposition to the eroticized, normative masculinity of Jesus.

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The study suggests that queerly rendered Satan represents the alignment of sexual difference with an evil, death-driven force that threatens the family and terrorizes the film’s socio-Symbolic order. Reading Jacques Lacan and Saint Paul, Slavoj Žižek maintains that the Christian story enacts ‘the ultimate assertion of the Law’.8 Following on from Žižek’s argument, this chapter examines the relationship between masculinity, sacrifice, and the performative regulation of heteronormativity as panicked responses to the queer (as) threat.

Homosexuality and the Christian right In Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (2003), Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini explore the relationship between religion, politics, and sexuality within the rhetorical and social procedures underpinning hegemonic American culture: ‘As we argue […] assumptions about religion, values, and public life are crucially connected to sexuality and its regulation. The secular state’s interest in regulating sexuality is an interest in maintaining religious – specifically Christian – authority.’9 Although the argument specifically refers to the decade preceding the book’s publication, it retains a current urgency. In the aftermath of one of the most contested presidencies, led by a Republican, Born-Again Christian (George W. Bush) it is not altogether surprising that the relationship between religion and politics has remained especially intimate in the United States. In the aftermath of 9/11, political rhetoric in the United States has been especially invested in framing the protection of the nation as coterminous with the preservation of Christian values. Only a couple of days after the attacks on the World Trace Center, for example, Jerry Falwell of the CBN’s 700 Club (a right wing Christian television programme) spoke the thoughts of a moral majority by naming the domestic factors he saw as contributing to the event: ‘I really believe that the Pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians […] the ACLU, People For the American Way – all of them who have tried to secularise America – I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen”.’10 Writing in The New York Times in 2004, Frank Rich identified a growth of conservatism in American society. Also paying heed to the marriage of politics, religion, and cultural production, he observed, It’s not just Mr. Bush’s self-deification that separates him from the likes of Lincoln, however; it’s his chosen fashion of Christianity. The president didn’t revive the word ‘crusade’ idly in the fall of 2001.


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His view of faith as a Manichaean scheme of blacks and whites to be acted out in a perpetual war against evil is synergistic with the violent poetics of the best-selling ‘Left Behind’ novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and Mel Gibson’s cinematic bloodfest.11 Implicit in Rich’s discernment of a militaristic, apocalyptic American culture (of which he sees The Passion to be a part) is a critique of its perceived masculinism, cultivated in order to defend the nation against destabilizing forces from outside and indeed inside its geographical and imaginary margins. Quoting a Newsweek poll that reported 17 per cent of Americans expect the world to end in their lifetime, Rich also suggested that such a worldview was becoming increasingly popular among base population demographics, chiefly comprising those who share an antipathy to stem-cell research, abortion, condoms for HIV prevention, and gay civil rights.12 While such perspectives may seem radical to a liberal reader, they are by no means isolated. Increasingly a discursive swell has worked to consolidate the causal connection between religious, gender, and sexual diversity, and national vulnerability. Most recently, these ideas have found focus in Euro-American debates surrounding the constitutional qualification of the family and gay partnership rights. Most objections to the legal recognition of gay unions have predicted a grave threat to the heterosexual family unit, and by extension, to the future of the social order itself. In this fight to preserve traditional family structures and values, a number of organizations have relentlessly fought to prevent the recognition of same-sex and alternative family partnerships. In this regard, a letter published by the Campaign for Working Families urges its readers: ‘If you still think homosexual “marriage” won’t affect you, think again. Your job may be at stake! Once the state approves of homosexual “marriages”, the full weight of the law will be brought down against men and women of faith who believe in Judeo-Christian values.’13 In a similar vein, the American Family Association protests: For the sake of our children and society, we must OPPOSE the spread of homosexual activity! Just as we must oppose murder, stealing, and adultery! Since homosexuals cannot reproduce, the only way for them to ‘breed’ is to RECRUIT! And who are their targets for recruitment? Children!14 This association between national stability and gender and sexual normativity is explicitly foregrounded in the following statement from the

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American Society for the Preservation of the Family: ‘The family unit is under attack by dark and conspiring forces who desire to redefine the bond of marriage to include same-sex partners. This design is an abomination of nature and, if adopted by society as normative, will ultimately lead to society’s downfall and destruction.’15 For the purposes of contextualizing The Passion further within this climate, it is worth noting Mel Gibson’s own contributions to these homophobic circulations. When asked about gay men as part of an interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais, Gibson responded, ‘They take it up the ass.’ Bending over to point to his behind, he concluded, ‘This is only for taking a shit.’16 This homophobic outburst might be seen to find resonance in other disparaging representations of homosexuality across Gibson’s directing oeuvre, most notably in The Man without a Face (1993) and Braveheart (1995). Although largely overlooked in immediate responses to the film, I suggest that The Passion of the Christ exemplifies this homophobic tendency in so far as queer subjectivity figures as and through Satan, the Father’s fallen angel. Like the ‘dark and conspiring force’ of homosexuality referred to by the American Society for the Preservation of the Family, Gibson presents Satan as an uncanny, contaminating presence of doubling and inversion that threatens to destroy the film’s socio-Symbolic order. It is this menace that compels Jesus to submit to his father in order to institute the homogenizing, normalizing discipline of paternal Law, and to eradicate queer alterity.

Separating the men from the Jews Although this chapter eschews an ethno-religious critique as such, the film’s representation of various male groupings – Jews, Romans, and Jesus and his disciples – is specifically gender-codified and in need of pre-emptory attention. While it is arguable that the Jews are especially demonized in the film, it is more certain that they are feminized next to other male groups. Reading Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939), Daniel Boyarin explores the historical feminization of the Jew by refiguring the psychoanalyst’s statement that circumcision ‘makes a disagreeable, uncanny impression, which is to be explained no doubt by its recalling the dreaded castration’.17 Boyarin reverses Freud’s terms, such that ‘castration recalls a dreaded circumcision – dreaded because the act cripples a male by turning him into a Jew’.18 Whereas the Jewish tradition of brit milah (the covenant of circumcision) confers perfection on men within the Jewish tradition, in the film this practice is given the opposite meaning of symbolic castration and effeminizing otherness.


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As Jonathan Freedman has observed of anti-Semitic idioms elsewhere, ‘the sign of Jewish masculinity, circumcision, signifies castration, and the male Jew is identified as castrated or feminized or both – in other words, as a man-identified-as-woman’.19 The film’s Jewish community first appear when their militia arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Despite the capacity for physical force that they demonstrate in this early scene, those who accost Jesus are effeminately dressed with feathers. Aside from the militia group, the Pharisees are represented as sly, spindly, slightly epicene old men, who wear elaborately gilded gowns, in contrast to the simple dress of the Romans, Jesus, and his disciples. In addition to the emasculating semiotics of costuming, both the Pharisees and the Jewish militia are usually presented in sepia hues, which deprive their actions of the immediacy and potency of full colour representation. Further, the Jews are repeatedly shot from a downward angle relative to the Romans, a dwarfing strategy that frames them as nagging pests rather than as intelligent voices or active political operators. Indeed, even when Jewish authority is recognized, it is enacted indirectly, as though the Jews do not wish to be associated with the unappealing aspects of power. Any punishment that Jesus might receive must first be sanctioned by the Roman authorities, a historical fact that the film renders as a form of scapegoating. When Pilate asks Caiaphas, ‘Why don’t you judge him according to your own laws’, Caiaphas answers, ‘Consul, you know it’s unlawful for us to condemn any man to death’. A grimace accompanies this reply, suggesting that Caiaphas is shirking his responsibility. Such a portrayal of Jewish ineffectualness is compounded by the fact that, aside from the earlier scenes of Caiaphas speaking to the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Pharisees and crowds are usually screened as a unanimous group, as distinct from the more heterogeneous Romans. Collectively, these representational strategies erode Jewish capacity to exert control. Jay Geller argues that ‘in the Central European cultural imagination, male Jews are identified as men without penises, that is as women’.20 His observation implies that Central Europeans presumed their privileged on the grounds of phallic authority. A similar ideology inflects the film, where the Romans are portrayed as normatively masculine next to the effeminate Jews. With simple dress, tightly shaved hair, and muscular physiques, the Romans seem to be a practical, ‘manly’ group, whose appearance suggests a physically active lifestyle. In public at least, the Roman governor Pilate is presented as a more rational and measured leader than the quick-tempered, ostentatious Caiaphas to the extent that the film dilutes Pilate’s historical reputation for brutality and bloodlust. It is only under extreme pressure from the Jewish community that

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Pilate sanctions Jesus’s beating, and he is extremely reluctant to hand him over for crucifixion. Pilate’s face shows none of the conniving gestures that characterize Jewish expression; rather he initially appears to be genuinely concerned for the fate of Jesus. He seeks help from his wife Claudia on the matter and she initially nurses and counsels him like a child. It is to her that he confesses his fears of an uprising: ‘If I don’t condemn this man then Caiaphas will start a rebellion’, and this becomes the main motivation for eventually permitting Jesus’s killing. So, while Pilate’s masculinity is more tempered and uncertain in private, in public he performs it coolly without question. The masculinity of the Romans is further emphasized by the fact that the camera usually screens them from underneath, or shoots downward from where they stand. And, unlike the Jews who huddle together in small groups in restricted spaces, the power of Roman authority is highlighted in the simplicity and expansiveness of their mise-en-scène. In contrast to Pilate, the Roman soldiers are presented as brutal hypermasculine men, with insatiable appetites for violence. They beat Jesus with a pleasure that verges on sexual arousal, characterized by the studied choice of phallic flogging instruments, marked physical excitation, and the ejaculatory splatter of bodily fluids. In this frenzy, coupled with the apparent eroticism of Jesus’s reactions, their actions mirror the all-male beating fantasies described by Freud in ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, understood as fantasmatic dramatizations of the transmission of paternal Law.21 Significantly, it is this pleasure, rather than the brutality of the action, which is foregrounded in the film, through the use of close-up camera shots and slow motion. Crucially, however, this homoerotic violence operates within a patriarchal economy of desire, where the pleasure in disciplining only reveals all that has already been disciplined, consciously and subconsciously, for normative masculinity to take shape. The instance in question also affords a cartoonish quality to Roman punishment, thus ensuring that beyond this garish sadism, the locus of evil remains with the figure of Satan. On this, Robert Smart draws attention to this downplaying of Roman violence by describing the soldiers as ‘burly underlings’ and ‘goons’, created in the tradition of Medieval representation: ‘With their hulking bodies and cruel faces, [they] look as if they stepped out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. In Bosch’s “Ecce Homo” and “Christ Carrying the Cross” the features of Jesus’s brutal captors and mockers are so distorted they almost become caricatures of Evil.’22 Not every Roman is represented as a model of hypermasculinity. When Pilate sends Jesus to King Herod for consideration, for example, the


43

latter is constructed as a drug-taking, sexually promiscuous homosexual. He wears make-up and highly ornate costume, and a wig tilts imperfectly on his head, suggesting a certain gender and sexual decentredness. Less a macho king than a drag queen, Herod’s quarters are populated by semi-clad individuals, most of whom also appear to be deliberately queered. Incapable of controlling their physical urges, and unlike Jesus who readily submits his body to the Law, these deviant figures engage in orgies, devour food, guzzle drink, and laugh hysterically at their indulgences. When one man falls to the ground from exhaustion or intoxication during Jesus’s questioning, Herod and his immediate circle appear grossly inept. Owing to the fact that Herod’s defining feature is his queerness, his inefficacy can only be seen to stem directly from his implied homosexuality. This association is not supported by historical reference, however, which contrarily suggests that Herod was a shrewd and callous ruler. Rather, Gibson’s depiction is a directorial invention that understands Herod’s return of Jesus to Pilate as an unmanly indecision.

On the fringes: Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene Despite variations in the representation of masculinity in The Passion, male characters are all afforded centrality in the film’s narrative and visual modes in a manner that allows us to consider the film to be, at some level, primarily about masculinity. In contrast, the few female characters screened are confined in word and deed to the margins, a phallogocentric representational strategy that bears witness to Lacan’s statement in ‘God and the Jouissance of the Woman’ (1972–3) that ‘There is no such thing as The woman since of her essence […] she is not all […] There is woman only as excluded by the nature of things which is the nature of words’.23 This is especially true of Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene. The exclusion of female subjectivity is signified in the film by an act of indiscriminate figuration: both characters in question are simply referred to as ‘Mary’ and they both look physically alike in costume (black gowns) and facial appearance (pale skin, dark eyes, defined bone structure). When first screened, they have been sleeping in the same room, only to be awoken by a premonition of Jesus’s arrest. And although John informs them as to what has happened, they remain marginal during Jesus’s trial, beating, and crucifixion, relegated to the borders of the male world. Denied of any real agency, they run through the streets or push through the crowd, unsuccessfully attempting to connect with Jesus. In their circulation, they appear like those lifeless objects

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of exchange referred to by Lacan in ‘On a Question Preliminary to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’, and as critiqued by Luce Irigaray in The Sex Which is Not One (1981): not subjects, as such, but objects existing only in relation to the masculine.24 While Jesus proceeds into, and even inaugurates, the symbolic register, both the Mary characters are ‘left behind in the imaginary, as [a] negative value expressed only by lack’.25 Aside from their indiscriminate depiction, the issue of female-male separation is of crucial importance to the film, as it is in psychoanalytic readings of male subjectivity. In effect, the film plays out Žižek’s concise elucidation of Lacan’s symbolic ordering: the submission of ‘the desire of the Mother (which is the order of the Thing) to the law of the Father (which comprises the totality of the signifying system, the structure of the symbolic order)’.26 Mother Mary’s separation from Jesus as an adult is highlighted by numerous flashbacks of his childhood. In such instances, the film reveals the close physical relationship that Christ had with his Mother, a connection that he had to relinquish in order to enter the adult male world. While carrying his cross to Calvary, one of Jesus’s falls is intercut with a flashback of his tripping as a child. However, while his mother could protect him in his youth, she is unable to do so now. This necessary separation is most poignantly represented in a scene where Mary is drawn to the place above where her son is chained underground, their bodies apart but searching. Despite the unspeaking and untouching nature of their latter interaction, they retain an affective intimacy that draws them towards each other, even though they may never physically connect in order to facilitate the issuing of the Law that is at stake in Jesus’s successful crucifixion. Jesus reminds Mary of the redemptive dimension to his suffering on his way to Calvary with ‘See Mother, I make all things new’. As a result, Mary does not try to stop his torture, but in the interest of reproducing normativity, she is compelled to support him through it. While the male characters are chiefly concerned with disciplining the body, or having the body disciplined (as in the case of Jesus), the female characters are chiefly concerned with its protection and healing. Pilate’s wife Claudia advises her husband not to have Jesus killed – ‘Don’t condemn this Galilean. He’s holy’ – and she secretly delivers cloth to Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene. They use the fabric to clean up Jesus’s blood after his scourging once the courtyard has emptied. Although John is in their company throughout most of the film, he does not assist them in this cleaning. Later, Veronica also wipes the blood off Jesus’s face on his way to Calvary, before being pushed out of


45

the way by the Roman soldiers. These depictions symbolically reinforce the connection between female subjectivity and abjection, male subjectivity and discipline, as critiqued most notably by Kristeva in Powers of Horror. Indeed Kristeva emphasizes the exclusion of women in the Judaeo-Christian world to such an extent that she refutes Freud’s theory, outlined in Totem and Taboo (1913), that religion represses a primal parricide, with the suggestion that it is premised upon an abhorrence of the mother – ‘an unnamebale otherness’.27 This connection is most boldly made in the film in the case of Mary Magdalene. In a flashback of her stoning for adultery, she crawls on the ground like a snake before Jesus intercepts to humanize, or subjectivize her. And during his crucifixion, she maintains a similar pose, always in grounded obeisance, awaiting His signification of her. Despite the fact that female characters are kept on the sidelines of the action, they are constantly desired for by the male characters. However, female presence never destabilizes the male project. It might be even said that female characters willingly embrace their own repression in order to facilitate Jesus’s identification with, and post-mortal incarnation of, his father. This is signified by the manner in which Pilate is nursed by Claudia while deciding Jesus’s fate, even though her advice is ultimately ignored; and also in the long, lingering looks that Jesus casts to Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene during his torture and crucifixion. In both instances, if the Law is to be instituted and consolidated, feminine identifications must be rejected in favour of subjectivizing masculine ones.

A threat to the centre: Queerly-rendered Satan It is not only female characters who are relegated to the edges of the action, but also, and perhaps most significantly, the figure of Satan. As with the females, it is Satan’s gender and sexuality that confines him/ her to the peripheries, in particular Satan’s gender and sexual ambiguity or queerness. Satan’s undefined gendering disrupts the prescribed politic of normative masculinity in the film, opening up the possibility of a radical disarticualtion of the Law of heteronormativity. It is for this reason that s/he figures as an evil threat, and it is for this reason that s/he is destroyed through Jesus’s sacrifice. (See Figure 2.1) Although possessing a deep masculine voice, Satan is dressed like a woman and has androgynous facial features, even though played by a female actor. While the female characters exert a relatively positive influence on Jesus’s suffering by striving to comfort (if not save) him,

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Figure 2.1

Queer Satan in The Passion of the Christ (2004).

queer Satan exerts a constant threat to the state and also to the success of Jesus’s sacrificial project. S/he first appears from the shadows in the Garden of Gethsemane while Jesus is praying, crucially, for strength. From this position, Satan taunts Jesus by casting doubt on his ability to follow though with his sacrifice. S/he discourages: ‘Do you really believe that one man can bear the full burden of sin? No one man can carry this burden I tell you. Saving their souls is too costly. No one. Ever.’ During this provocation, Jesus is clearly distressed, as indicated by his heavy breathing and profuse sweating. As soon as Satan finishes speaking, maggots curl from his/her nostrils and a snake creeps out from between his/her legs, in a move that implicitly correlates gender and sexual indeterminacy with a primal evil, and posits this queerness as the greatest threat to the social order. The scene also references the Genesis story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In this double coding of the primal scene, Satan’s tempting of Jesus is laced with a homosexual subtext. When Christ grinds the snake to death with his foot, he signals that he will endure his Passion in order to eradicate the threat of gender and sexual ambiguity. Satan’s physical appearance is strikingly similar to both Mary characters. All three wear black headdresses and have similar facial characteristics. Oftentimes, Satan travels the same route through the crowd as do both the Mary figures, and (aside from Jesus) Mother Mary is the


47

only other character actually to see Satan. Despite the parallel, Satan’s role is antithetical to that of Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene, and indeed to other female characters that remain on the fringes. Whereas women try to support Jesus, Satan attempts to spoil his sacrificial plan, either through promoting Roman vitriol or by tempting Jesus to give up. Whereas the women move through the crowd to assist Jesus, Satan travels rapidly like a corrupting virus, appearing and disappearing, asymptomatic and full-blown. According to Judith Butler, because homosexuality is understand as ‘boundary-trespass’,28 queer subjects are automatically understood as polluting persons, an association compounded by media reactions – and, not least of all, rightist Christian responses – to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Such is the association that informs much of the ‘pro-family’ statements documented at the outset of this chapter. There are also moments in the film when the physical similarities between Satan and Mother Mary are pointedly exploited to emphasize their opposing functions. During Jesus’s flogging, Satan directly mirrors Mother Mary in the crowd. In another instance, Satan walks through the mob holding a deformed, demonic baby who smiles menacingly at the suffering Christ: a diametric representation of the Holy Family. In this alignment, the film once again presents Jesus’s self-sacrifice as the action necessary to alleviate the queer threat figured in Satan – a force that seeks to invade the heterosexual (Christian) family structure and wreak deformity on mankind. While Satan is screened holding his/her child anti-Christ, queer blood also infects other familial lines. Shortly after Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss – a gesture more heavily inflected as homosexual rather than homosocial here – he is approached by a small group of children who morph into demons and attack him. Subsequently a larger group of young boys gather together and, led by Satan, chase Judas into the hills where they provoke him to commit suicide. These are male subjects undisciplined by the Father’s Law: the grotesque, unruly, destructive offspring of queer Satan. Within the climate of the film’s production and release, these creatures might also be seen as fantasmatic projections of the horror which queer families would inflict, given they were afforded social recognition and encouraged to engage in their own reproductive practices. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Lee Edelman maintains that the image of the child, bound to the concept of heterosexual futurity, is near-worshipped in Western culture, and pitched in opposition to the figure of the queer. Edelman argues that the child

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marks the horizon of every acknowledged politics, ‘the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention’.29 He identifies anti-abortion rhetoric to epitomize this fetishization of the foetus as unborn child, where reproductive rights are invariably framed as ‘a fight for the children – for our daughters and our sons’ and thus as a ‘fight for the future’.30 Given the centrality of the child in political rhetoric, Edelman wonders what it would signify not to stand by or for the figure of the child? What, or whom, stands in opposition to the child and the stable reproductive futurity that the child has been forced to signal in heteronormative rhetoric? For Edelman, ‘queerness names the side of those “not fighting for the children”, the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism’.31 Edelman’s disquisition finds ample resonance in The Passion in so far as Satan’s queerness, which like a virus, rapidly reproduces itself in the figure of a child anti-Christ and in the queer corruption of the extant community of children, wherein the ‘facism of the [normative] baby’s face’32 to which Edelman refers is placed under attack by a queer death drive. Via flashbacks, this queer genealogy is pitted in unheimlich opposition to the idealized images of Jesus. When the thief who mocks Christ has his eyes pecked out by a crow towards the end of the film, we might also associate the animality of the bird with the monstrosity of the children, as Edelman does in his reading of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), linking them both to the queer as death-drive: As dozens of birds swoop down with hoarse cries, inducing a sort of echoing screech in the children, who panic and run, the film implies that the ravaging birds are too like the children to like them and too much, or to like them as more than the objects of a murderous, and murderously derealizing, drive.33 While most representations of the Passion story demonize Judas, in this film Satan takes on a distinct form to wreak revenge on the betraying disciple for mobilizing Jesus’s Passion, a Passion that will eradicate queer alterity. And, in the grotesque children, the film charts a dehumanization process at the hands of queerness such that Christ’s sacrifice primarily functions to control the force of this disruptive subjectivity.

Sacred cuts Throughout this chapter I have been suggesting that conflicting forces in The Passion are characterized by variance in gender and sexual


49

normativity, with Satan, demarking the space of the queer as evil, representing the greatest social menace of all. Faced with this danger, Jesus demonstrates the expectations of the idealized male subject, who ritualistically enacts the terms of participation within the Symbolic by submitting to the Law of the Father. Before any action is screened in the film, a quote from Isaiah directs the viewer to focus on the redemptive power of Jesus’s suffering while viewing the action: ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; by His wounds we are healed.’34 While the reference is specifically biblical, as Freud and his many successors have pointed out, this expectation has long formed the basis of most non-Christian, as well as Christian, patriarchies. Following this premise, the film opens with Jesus praying in Gethsemane, his immediate surroundings lit with blue light. Although Jesus is clearly distressed by what lies ahead, and by Satan’s appearance, the camera refuses to record his vulnerability for long, as if doing so would risk overshadowing his capacity for endurance. Thus, when he is arrested moments later, the film proceeds to focus almost exclusively on Jesus’s ability to withstand the torture he experiences, rather than his frailty in its wake. Of this suffering, detail is really of little importance. Rather, in an almost Artaudian way,35 it is the silent, eroticized spectacle of Jesus’s prolonged torture in the name of his father which is of significance, an importance underscored by an aesthetic resistance to psychologize Jesus (through linguistic complexity, for instance) but to present him as body willing to be disciplined. Christ does not rebuke his attackers nor question their motives but endures the torture to which he is subjected. And although it is the Roman soldiers who conduct the prolonged beatings, the brooding clouds towards which Jesus frequently stares, and which are interspersed with flashes of sunlight, suggest that Jesus’s endurance of this attack is related to his identification with the Father. In this aspect, the film emotively plays on Georges Bataille’s reading of sacrifice as a disruption of the restrictive forces of law (nomos) that engenders a kind of anthropological intimacy through the entry of the sacred via the excesses of eroticism and death.36 Jesus’s suffering is recognized as a sacred act (sacrifice) by the Father in his full surrender to extreme suffering. Further, the degree of torture withstood is not necessarily an indication of the film’s anti-Semitic underpinning, but a measure of Jesus’s commitment to alleviate the terror posed by Satan as life-negating Other. In addition to those mimetic indicators of the father’s role in Jesus’s suffering, flashbacks offer some diegetic explanations. As Jesus carries

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his cross towards Calvary, he recalls a period in his preaching when he spoke, ‘I am the good shepherd. I lay down my life for my sheep. No one takes life from me but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down and power to take it up again. This command is from my father.’ This missionary statement, which explains the relationship between the son’s self-sacrifice to the father’s will and the continuation of the patriarchal line, is presumably uttered in order to spur him on in last the last stages of his Passion. Other flashbacks during this period of the film reveal the relationship between Jesus’s suffering and the transmission of the Law to his disciples. When he arrives at Calvary, Jesus remembers his last Passover with his male followers. This scene, which juxtaposes the beating of Jesus’s body in present-time with the symbolic division of his body (as bread) a few days previously, underscores the sadomasochistic impulse which structures Christian law, but also the homosexually inflected cannibalism inherent in consuming the body of Christ; that is, the literal incorporation of the father. The wound and the process of wounding are central to Bataille’s conceptualization of ritual sacrifice, eroticism, and mysticism. Wounding involves the opening of the body at the level of matter, and the mind or psyche at the level of desire and identification. For Bataille, ‘Excess, laceration, and loss of substance’ amount to a ‘will to loss’, whereby ‘two beings are lost in a convulsion that binds them together. But they only communicate when losing a part of themselves. Communication ties them together with wounds, where their unity and integrity dissipate in fever’.37In this formulation, the one who sacrifices is present in masochistic identification with his victim. As a result, he too experiences a little death – une petite mort – and, on a symbolic level, is ‘cut open’ from sealed individuality to sociality. Here, it is also worth remembering the distinction Giorgio Agamben makes between bare life (zoë ) and political life (bios politikos) in his writing on sovereignty and exception. Under ancient Roman law, a man who committed a certain crime had his rights revoked to become homo sacer (sacred man). As a result of being placed outside law, he could be no longer fully protected by law, and as a consequence was exempt from sacrifice in ritual ceremony: homo sacer corresponded to an obscure figure of ‘bare life […] who may be killed and yet not sacrificed’.38 This figure stands in contrast to the sovereign figure (king, emperor etc.) that exists both within the law (so he can be condemned) and outside of the law (since he has the power to suspend law for an indefinite time). In The Passion, however, Jesus’s power resides in his double articulation,


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which engenders an ability to manipulate his positioning both as bare life, under Roman law, and sovereignty, under divine law. Ultimately, however, divine law reigns to resignify his ‘bareness’ through the performance of suffering and endurance. In On Belief (2001), Slavoj Žižek offers a consideration of the relationship between Christianity and the law in a manner that resonates with the film’s depiction of sacrifice and masculinity, turning our attention away from the sweepingly liberational politics of Bataille. With regard to the former, Žižek contends that sacrifice is structured around an economy of exchange, whereby something precious is ‘offered up’ to the Other in the hope of acquiring something that is even more vital. While sacrificial practice may consciously desire an actual return from the Other, according to Žižek the more basic purpose is to ascertain that there is, after all, some Other that is able to reply to the sacrificial entreaty: Even if the Other does not grant my wish, I can at least be assured that there is an Other who, maybe, next time will respond differently: the world out there, inclusive of all catastrophes that may befall me, is not a meaningless blind machinery, but a partner in a possible dialogue, so that a catastrophic outcome is to be read as a meaningful response, not as a kingdom of blind chance.39 The willing subject in this instance obviously does not aim to profit from his own sacrifice, but to fill in the lack in the Other in order to sustain the appearance of the Other’s omnipotence or, at least, existence.40 Reading The Passion along this line of argument we might understand Jesus’s sacrifice as an act intended to plug the gap in the other (his mortal community) by effecting the Other’s (God’s) omnipotence, through playing it as his own. Crucially, his sacrifice aims to convince the other that it is ‘still missing something’ and that he possesses ‘the precious ingredient’.41 Staying close to Lacan, Žižek emphasizes that the subject possesses no special amalgam in the first instance and consequently is unable to successfully fill the other’s lack through sacrifice, despite his best performance. On this ‘something’ which is ‘missing’ in man, Žižek discusses Christ’s particular divine-human hybridity. More specifically, he argues that because there is no God-Other, Christ cannot be thought of as man plus God, but as man plus divine supplement – jouissance – which is everyman. In this respect, Christ’s sacrifice does not make way for the God

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of Beyond, but an aura (Holy Spirit) which sustains the community of believers once the body is gone: [T]o put it in Freudian terms, once it can no longer rely on the Anlehnung (the notion of leaning on Christ’s body), in the same sense as, for Freud, the drive which aims at unconditional satisfaction, always has to ‘lean on’ a particular, contingent material object which acts as the source of its satisfaction.42 What makes Christ’s particular sacrifice unique, however, is that he effectively chooses to act on this supplement/remainder that appears ‘too much’ to man. Christ intervenes to resignify man’s excess. Within the context of The Passion, however, the excess to which Christ responds is figured as queer in the satanic morphs. Given that this queerness dehumanizes and thus, de-divinizes man, Christ sacrifices himself in order to take responsibility for the ‘“too much” of life which cannot be contained in any life-form, which violates the shape (morphe) of anthropomorphism’.43 Not only does Christ’s self-sacrifice function to ‘resolve’ this queer excess, but the gesture is structured as a performative process of masculinization. Even though Jesus’s suffering is portrayed as extreme and violent, it is also lovingly and erotically charged. During the height of his torture, Christ’s glowing brown eyes often look fondly to the heavens, presumably the place of his father. In addition, his falling on Calvary is frequently presented in slow motion, which frames the action as much as a complicit, sexualized tumble as a ferocious assault. Again, it is Bataille who draws the sexual and the sacred into close relation, claiming that ‘all eroticism has a sacramental character’,44 in so far as it ‘jerks us out of a tenacious obsession with the lastingness of our […] separate individuality’.45 But for Bataille, the sacred, like the erotic, is always ‘beyond’ the law rather than intrinsic to its functioning. (See Figure 2.2.) The same erotic attachment to subjection is notable in scenes that document the slow nailing of Jesus’s hands and feet to the cross. And when his blood posthumously converts a solider, as well as when a drop of water falls from the heavens to baptize the arid soil, the redemptive quality of the suffering is accentuated. This regenerative dimension is dramatically underscored when, shortly after this baptism, Satan dematerializes on the point of the drop’s contact with the earth, with a maniacal, defeated wail. So, as Hugh Urban has noted, while Bataille aligns the entry of the sacred with a transgression that ‘violate[s] the utilitarian


Figure 2.2

53

Jesus in The Passion of the Christ (2004).

values of society through non-productive excess, violence or pleasure’,46 in the film the apparent sacred is central to the rule of reproduction. The glorification of this structure more accurately reflects Žižek’s claim that Jesus’s suffering is a triumphant implementation of the Father’s Law: ‘Christ’s Redemption is not the “negation” of the Fall [of Adam] but its accomplishment, in exactly the same sense that, according to Saint Paul, Christ accomplishes the Law.’47 Certainly, it is hard to argue that Gibson’s Passion does anything but fetishize torture and elevate suffering and pain as the only way to a full assertion of life.

Jesus: A man with muscles Theological discourse has received something of a queer modulation in John Caputo’s dialogues with the philosophy of Jacques Derrida.48 Caputo’s engagement with Derrida invites a rethinking of notions of weakness, passivity, suffering, and emptiness in a manner of significance not only to the disciplines of theology and ontology, but also to identity politics. Inverting atheistic presumptions of deconstruction, Caputo claims that Derrida ‘speaks of God all the time’ but that his work features religion without religion’s God, messianism without the Messiah: ‘Day and night Derrida has been dreaming, expecting, not the

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possible, not the eternal, but the impossible.’49 Further it is Caputo’s approach to Derrida that prompted him to frame the paradigm of ‘weak theology’ and the weakness of God, in contrast to dominant notions of God’s manly authority. In his work, God is displaced of power to figure as an undeconstructable, non-intervening claim without force. In The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (2006) Caputo considers how the crucifixion might be seen to institute, and exemplify, this rather queer understanding of God: God, the event harbored by the name of God, is present at the crucifixion, as the power of the powerlessness of Jesus, in and as the protest against the injustice that rises up from the cross, in and as the words of forgiveness, not a deferred power that will be visited upon one’s enemies at a later time. God is in attendance as the weak force of the call that cries out from Calvary and calls across the epochs, that cries out from every corpse created by every cruel and unjust power.50 Caputo’s theology calls us to contemplate the weakness of Christ at the site of the crucifixion, where ‘the logos of the cross is a call to renounce violence, not to conceal and defer it’.51 In Gibson’s film, there is an intense focus on this very weakness. However, it never functions as an opening to queer alterity, but as a reaction to it that ultimately demands a powerful, masculinizing resistance to invasion. Whereas Caputo’s weak theology does not take the enemy by surprise, ‘to lay them low with real power’,52 this is precisely the ruse of the The Passion, whereby the endurance of weakness is fetishistically celebrated until the enemy is indeed ‘taken by surprise’ via Christ’s incarnation. While Christ’s posthumous moments described in preceding paragraphs indicate the regenerative power of Jesus’s self-sacrifice, the most arresting indication of Christ’s ‘return to power’ comes at the end of the film. Traditionally, as in the gospels, Mary Magdalene makes the discovery of Jesus’s empty tomb. In Gibson’s version of events, however, these characters are omitted in favour of focusing exclusively on the reincarnated Jesus. From inside the tomb, the camera reveals his resurrected body, initially focusing on his glowing, determined face before panning downwards to show a gaping hole in his right hand and his muscular legs. As he moves in the direction of the outside light, Jesus’s naked, athletic body is exposed, revealing the empowering effects of his submission. Mel Gibson’s Jesus is thus the embodiment of the figure described by Jerry Falwell in the 1980s: ‘Christ was a man with muscles.’53


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Commenting on this masculinized depiction, the theologian Stephen Prothero suggests that in the closing images of the film Jesus is no longer a passive-submissive, but akin to a macho Arnold Schwarzenegger. The author of American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (2003) goes on to suggest that the representation reflects the proliferation of evangelical Christian groups over the past 30 years and the decline of liberal Protestant denominations.54 Commenting on the same topic, Richard Kirkpatrick claims that the portrayal is also rooted in the eschatological spirit of our times, which produces the desire for a saviour who has all the answers to ‘the apocalypse around the turn of the millennium, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the two wars with Iraq’. He also notes that a hypermasculine son of God ‘fits with President George W. Bush’s discussions of a godly purpose behind American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq’.55 Such anxiety can also be discerned in Gibson’s glorification of a powerful Christ, who not only endures attacks from the Other by enduring the masculinizing discipline of his father, but who can protect as well: For Gibson, a man without muscles is no man at all, and God cannot be less than a ‘real’ man. From this point of view, you’re either one or the other, and God cannot be that kind of other. I see this link between fundamentalism and a fear of queerness as revealing the psycho-dynamics of most religious conservatives. That psychology is based on a need to think in terms of either/or, to divide the world into mutually exclusive dichotomies.56 This reification of binary dichotomies is evidenced in the film’s eradication of queer ambiguity, achieved through Jesus’s act of sacrifice. It is this submission which ultimately results in his final masculinization. Drawing on Greek tragedy as an example, in particular on the loss of sexual differentiation that characterizes The Bacchae, René Girard suggests that it is not community difference that gives rise to violence, but the lack of clear distinctions: ‘it is not the differences but the loss of them that gives rise to violence and chaos […] This loss forces men into perpetual confrontation, one that strips them of all their distinctive characteristics – in short, of their “identities”.’57 In The Passion of the Christ, the loss of difference that threatens the community relates to gender and sexuality, and it is exemplified in the figure of queer Satan – or, Satan as the very condensed figuration of queerness – that must be destroyed, or straightened into normative perfection. To abate the crisis engendered by this loss of difference, Girard suggests that the sacrificial victim – in this case

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Christ – must function like a conductor by ‘attracting the violent impulses to itself’.58 This reading enlightens how and why Satan is drawn towards Jesus in the film’s visual trajectory, until, through Christ’s sacrifice, s/he is destroyed. In this process, Satan’s queer menace is resignifed: ‘the victim draws to itself all the violence infecting the original victim and through its own death transforms this baneful violence into beneficial violence, into harmony and abundance.’59 Outside of the film text, Girard’s writing on sacrifice also allows us to assess the cultural significance of the explicit example of male trouble played out in The Passion. Resonating with the link I wove between conservative Christian rhetoric and Euro-American politics at the beginning of this chapter, Girard suggests that ‘when the religious framework of a society starts to totter, it is not exclusively or immediately the physical security of the society that is threatened; rather, the whole cultural foundation of the society is put in jeopardy’.60 As homosexual, and other queer modes of relationality, have been increasingly framed as a threat to the family and the dominant social order, it is no surprise that queerness and evilness – that is, queerness as social death – are inextricably linked in The Passion. If the film politicizes Christ’s life and death, we might add that queer life read in and through Satan resembles bare life incapable of signifying social value or symbolic meaning: What defines the status of homo sacer is therefore not the originary ambivalence of the sacredness that is assumed to belong to him, but rather both the particular character of the double exclusion into which he is taken and the violence to which he finds himself exposed. This violence – the unsanctionable killing that, in his case, anyone can commit – is classifiable as neither sacrifice nor homicide, neither as the execution of a condemnation to death nor as sacrilege.61 Neither fully outside nor inside the law, queerness and the possibility of queer or homosexual identification is posited as a perilous danger, and so the film enacts one of the most violent articulations of normativizing Law ever seen on screen. In addition to its narrative organization, we might address the film’s emotive politics: the haunting music, the raspy Aramaic, the ‘divine’ James Caviezel who plays Jesus. These affective dimensions are crucial to securing compassionate engagement with the material and render spectatorial resistance near impossible. Lauren Berlant has observed how the twenty-first century US Republican party brands itself with the phrase ‘compassionate Conservatism’ in a bid to foster a moral imperative


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among citizens to engage in specific kinds of labour, and to develop particular cultural attachments: [C]ompassion measures one’s value (or one’s government’s value) in terms of the demonstrated capacity not to turn one’s head away but to embrace a sense of obligation to remember what one has seen and, in response to that haunting, to become involved in a story of rescue or amelioration: to take a sad song and make it better.62 Berlant’s analysis of compassion’s political agenda leads us to consider The Passion’s emotive rhetoric as, how can you turn your back on your children, your family, your nation, and your God by so weakly embracing the queer? This compulsion to feel for the painful straight and narrow is grounded in a fear of religious and sexual liberalism. As Girard observes, ‘When the father is no longer an overbearing patriarch the son looks everywhere for the law.’63 The Passion might well be seen to respond to the crisis in masculinity described in the introduction to this book, but more specifically to fundamentalist Christian beliefs and conservative politics which have rallied against gay rights by perceiving queer subjects as threatening, destabilizing forces who revel in the borderlessness that the post-9/11 West fears so much. Glorifying the figure of Jesus as the ideal male subject, The Passion of the Christ can be understood as a hypermasculine endorsement of the submission to the Law in the service of bolstering the borders of heteronormativity against such destabilizing forces. The film explicitly celebrates the unquestioning submission to this normativizing Law during a cultural moment when traditional norms seem gravely under threat.

3 Impotent Masculinities in Made in China and InterMission

[It] is always to be noticed that the attempt to establish a male, phallic power is vigorously threatened by the no less virulent power of the other sex, which is oppressed […] That other sex, the feminine, becomes synonymous with a radical evil that is to be suppressed.1 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection The boundary between the inner and outer is confounded by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes outer, and this excreting function becomes, as it were, the model by which other forms of identity-differentiation are accomplished. In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit.2 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity When normative masculinity is threatened, the disruptive element must be rejected or incorporated for (the) order to be restored. Owing something to sacrifice’s economy of exchange, the performative resignification of encounters with the abject – and in particular, experiences of the male as abject – are important responses to repairing abjection’s emasculating and dehumanizing impact. Julia Kristeva draws attention to the manner in which that which is expelled ‘does not cease challenging its master’,3 by fuelling a drama of repulsion and attraction: ‘a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you.’4 Even as this dynamic shapes the conditions on which identity is constituted and relationality is 58

Performing Impotence

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mobilized, the symbolic crisis that the abject heralds must be contained in an effort ‘to establish a male, phallic power’.5 As Judith Butler implies, in order for normative masculinity ‘to figure on its surface the very invisibility of its hidden depth’,6 that which is physically and psychically excrementalized must always be excluded or performed with added value, while Others are routinely turned into shit.7 The work of Mark O’Rowe offers interesting insight into the relationship between impotence, abjection, and masculinity. Most of his scripts for stage and screen focus exclusively on this dynamic by exploring what is excluded from microcosms of normative masculinity, what disrupts these groupings, and how men secure ‘stable’ identifications and social positions.8 While much of his work explores Dublin working-class experience, often with dark humour, the performative construction of masculinity remains one of the writer’s most persistent concerns. In this regard, O’Rowe reflects the interests of a generation of Irish writers who almost exclusively explored similar issues throughout the 1990s (for example, Conor McPherson and Gary Mitchell), leading one critic to bemoan that theatre-going during this period was like watching ‘the same old show’ over and over again.9 This chapter will focus on O’Rowe’s play Made in China and the film for which for which he wrote the screenplay, InterMission. My primary aim here is not to read Irish culture through the works as such, but to illuminate how masculinity is performed around positions of impotency, abjection, and victimization.

‘Up-yer-hole theatre’: Scatological masculinity in Made in China10 When first produced on the Peacock stage of Ireland’s National Theatre in April 2001, Made in China notably transgressed the institution’s tradition of staging literary dramas of ‘ancient idealism’.11 Not surprisingly, the play was initially greeted by mixed reviews, with most commentators praising the actors’ performances, while criticizing the degree of violence depicted. Such was the spirit of the review proffered by Stephen Di Benedetto in Irish Theatre Magazine. In his critique, Di Benedetto drew attention to the representation of aggressive masculinity in the play world, while also noting the popularity of this kind of representation outside of an Irish context. That which he observed seemed to be like any number of urban wastelands, stripped of geographical specificity. Di Benedetto also emphasized the centrality of misogyny and homophobia to the play’s male order, suggesting that

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O’Rowe ‘reflect[s] the misogyny, homophobia, violence and lack of morality that is brewing underneath American and Irish societies, which glorify the action of murderers, thugs and the mentally ill’.12 This violent underworld to which Di Benedetto refers is occupied by the characters Hughie, Paddy, and Kilby. It is a realm controlled by the sinister Puppacat, head of the so-called Echelon gang to which Hughie and Kilby belong. Puppacat’s threatened arrival to audition Paddy for gang membership forms the dramatic backdrop to the play, and structures the plot around male performance anxiety. However, the core action principally centres around Kilby’s efforts to persuade Hughie to carry out a brutal attack on a character named Bernie Denk, who supposedly attacked Nancy (Peg-leg), Puppacat’s disabled astrologer. Hughie refuses to carry out Kilby’s request, as he has become disillusioned with Echelon life. In response, Kilby primes the younger Paddy for joining the Echelon group, seducing him with violent anecdotes. As the plot unfolds, it emerges that Kilby has recently been sexually assaulted by Puppacat, with assistance from Hughie, in order to control him and to delineate his position within the male hierarchy. Retributively impelled, Kilby marshals the plot to a violent climax, assaulting Hughie and Paddy. Fortunes take an unexpected twist, however, when Kilby is himself demobilized through the joint efforts of his colleagues. This chapter looks to Made in China to consider how the hypermasculinity that characterizes the play world signifies masculinity’s performative ambition and conceptual instability rather than its ontological authority. Exposing masculinity as a performative aspiration, this reading highlights how its would-be subjects must submit themselves to the gender’s specific violent laws if they are to be accommodated within the male order. Moreover, this critique illuminates how those subjects who fail to realize gender cohesion must willingly subject themselves to violence at their own or others’ hands in order to be assimilated by the group. Hypermasculine performativity An analysis of the performative ambitions of masculinity first requires a description of the normative benchmark against which it is regulated. In Made in China the gender that male characters perform (or at least aspire to perform) can be described as hypermasculine or compulsively masculine in nature, typified by the demonstration of aggressive behaviour and hyperbolic physicality. According to Lucy Candib and Richard Schmitt in ‘About Losing It: The Fear of Impotence’ (1996), hypermasculinity also involves excessive emphasis on physical strength, a belief


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in the legitimacy of male violence in certain interpersonal interactions, misogyny, and homophobia.13 In O’Rowe’s play, this behaviour is established as a norm among the Echelon associates by Puppacat, the leader of the gang with whom characters must identify and emulate. Not only does Puppacat commit the most heinous act of violence referred to in the play by raping Kilby, but as the central authority figure, he instructs the Echelons on how to conduct themselves. Correspondingly, all the characters desire his validation, in one way or another. In demarcating the parameters of acceptable male behaviour, all male desire circulates around Puppacat. Despite being the centre of power, however, Puppacat never materializes on stage. In this sense, he is less a dramatic character than a symbolic device or master signifier in the generation and stability of meaning in the play world. In its will to mastery, the masculinity associated with Puppacat’s influence is distinctly phallic in nature, insofar as it enacts a possession or a will to possession of the phallus. Of course, as Jacques Lacan is keen to remind us, because the phallus only signifies itself, it can never actually be possessed.14 In exaggeratedly affecting possession of the phallus, hypermasculinity or phallic masculinity always runs the risk of exposing the incompleteness of gender’s masquerade. Judith Butler has extensively analysed the saturation of the body with expectation, which results in the internalization of naturalized constructions of gender. In ‘Imitation and Gender Subordination’ she argues that gender ‘is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself’.15 She explicates: As a social construct, gender is a performance that produces the illusion of an inner sex or essence or psychic gender core; it produces on the skin, through the gesture, the move, the gait (the array of corporeal theatrics understood as gender presentation, the illusion of an inner depth).16 Although Butler’s ideas are not grounded within dramatic or theatrical contexts as such, her thinking has been instrumental in forging a link between performances and representations of gender and everyday social conditions. Taking cross-dressing as an example, Butler illustrates how drag reveals the imitative nature of gender by exposing it as a falsely naturalized entity. The mapping of gender theatrically across the body, Butler suggests, highlights its contrivance as the sum of a ‘stylized repetition of acts’.17 In drawing attention to moments of deregulated play

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Male Trouble

or slippage, Butler imagines gender as the consolidated effect of the recurrent citation of a set of gender conventions. While this analysis is not concerned with cross-dressing, Butler’s ideas create a theoretical space for the investigation of the performativity of masculinity in the play. In Made in China, masculinity’s tacit expedient to substantiate its authority is first exposed when the male body fails to repeat those stylized acts or normative codes about which Butler writes. Secondly, it is revealed when these ‘failed’ men are subjected to violence, or willingly subject themselves to aggression, in order be assimilated by the social order. In all of these instances, the resignification of relative impotence is posited as integral to the reproduction of stable male identity and heteronormative masculinity. From the moment Made in China begins with Paddy removing his wet clothes, the play establishes itself as a drama of undressing. The subtlety of this encoding is concretized as the play gains momentum, with attention being focused in text and in the performance mentioned towards physical appearance and clothing, signifiers of male masquerade that are interrogated and often viciously undone. This association is maintained throughout, with instances of dress paralleling reconfigurations of status: when Kilby’s jacket, which bears a Chinese inscription said to translate as ‘Brotherhood of the Guard’, is sold to Copper Dolan, this exchange pre-empts Kilby’s downgrading, and the corrupt policeman’s social ascension. Moreover, Paddy longs for a jacket that might afford him the authority of Kilby, and the masculinity of Dolan is profoundly corroded by the deciphering of the jacket’s signature to actually mean ‘Made in China’ and not ‘Brotherhood of the Guard’. Indeed most of the pre-emptory consternation between the male characters, building up to the final gruesome attack, arises from debates about suitable clothing. Paddy’s trademark accessory is a snorkel jacket which conceals his face when zipped up. It is no coincidence that he is the least experienced of all the Echelon members, a position reflected in Act One when he enters cosseted in swaddling attire. Paddy is generously helped with his catching zip by Hughie, a more established, though recently reluctant, Echelon comrade. The eventual shedding of his stubborn wet clothing may be read as a symbolic baptismal gesture marking his initiation into the tribe, but it is by no means the end of his process of becoming. Forced to stand in his underwear until his clothes are dry, Paddy’s state of undress is consistently correlated with a tempered and attenuated masculinity by both Hughie and Kilby, and this motif becomes the touchstone for a process of excoriation. When Kilby (an apparently committed Echelon) eventually enters the apartment, he


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establishes this connection with his suspicion of homosexual activity between Paddy and Hughie, an accusation he substantiates with the accidental protrusion of Paddy’s penis, who is in his underwear. His relentless attention to the impromptu emergence is initially met with unease, although this perceived weakness is quickly exploited for the potential to reconstruct Paddy into a valuable Echelon member. As Hughie recoils from gang activity, Paddy is primed to become Kilby’s next subject of masculinization. After Hughie leaves the apartment in Act One, Paddy’s induction begins as Kilby regales him with the history of the prized Chinese jacket. Paddy recalls the garment with envy, admitting, ‘See you walking down the street, think, Jaysus! I wish I had a fuckin’ chink writin’ jacket’,18 revealing how he had thought it ‘said somethin’ Karate’.19 Kilby claims that Copper Dolan stole the jacket from him in the hope that its branded references would confer him with a similar authority. Following the loss of the garment, Kilby invested in a new, impressively crafted leather jacket, also bearing Chinese inscription. During Kilby’s frequent trips to the toilet, Paddy admires and eventually tries on Kilby’s coat, a gesture reflecting his mounting desire to emulate Kilby’s masculinity. Paddy is not the only character whose masculinity is paralleled by changes in physical appearance. Hughie conveys his new-found conservatism with a penchant for John Rocha designer clothing. When Paddy offers him his snorkel coat to protect him from the rain, Hughie rejects the gesture with ‘snorkel! I’d rather get up on Obboe the fuckin’ Abbo’.20 This rebuke not only criticizes Paddy’s appearance, but correlates his dress sense with emasculation and an attendant sexual transgression. In turn, Hughie is accused by Kilby of knowing nothing about clothing, in a remark that similarly connotes his dress sense with his feminization: ‘Got the values of a woman, he has. Woman’d walk six miles nippy through a blizzard, you know?’21 Kilby, the leader of the group as we know it on stage, is not excluded from this dress-gender-power matrix of signification, so much so that the play’s title foregrounds its importance. As indicated earlier, the glorification of his original leather jacket is the primary means by which Kilby seduces Paddy. Envied by many and eventually stolen by a figure of the law (or so Kilby claims), the jacket represents physical strength and social status. Throughout the play, as the masculinity of both Hughie and Paddy is agitated and recast by Kilby, O’Rowe engages the reader/audience in an ancillary seduction plot. Little by little, suspicions are aroused as to what exactly happened to the famous coat until

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Hughie eventually ‘outs’ Kilby. Contrary to his claim, Kilby actually sold his prized coat to Copper Dolan, who thought that ‘it looked alpha’22 having copied the label off his current coat. Unfortunately for Kilby, Copper Dolan discovered the writing’s correct translation. Following on, the problem of dress and appearance become part of the larger problem of identification, and the problem of shaky identifications becomes part of the problem of securing normative masculinity. To become a member of the Echelons is to identify with and embody its codes of masculinity, but the problematization of these codes institutes a radical disruption of male authority and sociality. In Identification Papers Diana Fuss maintains that manifold identifications implicitly trouble subjectivity, observing: ‘The astonishing capacity of identifications to reverse and disguise themselves, to multiply and contravene one another, to disappear and reappear years later renders identity profoundly unstable and profoundly open to radical change.’23 Equally, in the play world, once identifications with ‘Brotherhood of the Guard’ are brought into question, male identity is dutifully destabilized. As already illustrated, most of the play is dedicated to aligning physical appearance and cohesive gender enactment with male positioning. Identification with these codes is necessary for gang participation. Allied to this performative aspiration is the rehearsal of martial arts, a pedagogical bonus gleaned from the men’s enthusiasm for action films. In this sense, China itself also becomes embroiled in this gender negotiation, with the male characters coveting the hypermasculinity represented by martial art films in particular, which lies in direct contrast to the country’s historical effeminization by the West. The emergence of the truth about Kilby’s jacket, however, precipitates a systematic problematization of all essentialized positions in the play world. As the coat does not read ‘Brotherhood of the Guard’, the sovereignty of Kilby and Copper Dolan’s masculinity is simultaneously brought into question through an inferred masquerade. Hughie explicitly draws attention to this unravelling of normative identity by saying that the disclosure of the insignia’s meaning had the effect of ‘queerin’ things up.’24 While Fuss understands identification as a psychic process that involves the ‘internalization of the other’, the physicality of the characters in the play also exposes a degree of gender dysfunction. Writing on masculinities in literature, Peter Middleton examines the popular representation of male characters in comics: The action-comic image of the male body is one reduced to its basic motor functions. These bodies kick, punch, stretch, with the


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maximum use of the limbs and maximum occupancy of space […] The exaggerated emphasis on motor functions seems to lead naturally to super-human attributes in many of the action-comic narratives.25 Such representations of masculinity are similarly reflected in the Hollywood action hero, such as the kind worshipped in Made in China. Middleton’s observations could equally be used to describe the Peacock production, notable for the formidable physicality and at times virtuosic performances of the male actors who dominated the entire stage, at times almost encroaching upon the audience. The most striking acknowledgement of the performative aspect to masculinity is staged in Act Two, with Kilby coaching Paddy for his meeting with Puppacat, arranged to assess his suitability for Echelon membership: ‘This’ll be your chance, see. Your audition piece. Audition for Puppacat, demo first hand in person, man, your focused viciousness, willin’ness to inflict.’26 If Paddy stands any chance of being accepted into the Echelon group, he must adhere to certain gender conventions, which not only involve executing violence on others, but a willingness to endure it himself. As Middleton’s observation infers, the male body is the principal tool that strives to achieve hypermasculine idealization. In Made in China this is most obviously revealed in the case of Paddy and Kilby. Their hyperbolic movements and striving energy reveal a will to realize an identity in excess of their ostensible reach, through straining identification with the omnipotent Puppacat. In this, they resemble Fuss’s description of identification as ‘a desire to be as or like the other […] identification is fundamentally a question of resemblance and replacement’27 Unlike the comic book heroes of which Middleton writes, however, O’Rowe’s characters are not parodic constructions, despite their initial hyperbolism. Once a range of failed men has been identified, the endurance of suffering is refigured as a strategy of symbolization. Addressing the abject In revealing normative masculinity as a kind of triumph over impotence, Made in China also identifies a number of characters that fail to secure this identification from the play’s outset. These abject beings are marked out in the relentless pursuit of normative appropriation. In O’Rowe’s play, the abject emerges in a number of forms: as scatological reference and representation, misogyny, and homophobia. One of the most startling characters described in the play world is Nancy, otherwise referred to as Peg-leg. A one-legged astrologer who gives consultations

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to Puppacat, Nancy is Lacan’s ‘not whole’ woman par excellence: not only is she missing a leg, but she never appears on stage.28 Her ‘wanting’ physicality is frequently recounted in order to create a vertical line of desirability, with Puppacat at the top and she at its reviled base. Recently, however, criminal Bernie Denk is reputed to have fractured her functioning limb, rendering her completely immobile. Kilby later reveals to Paddy that Nancy and Bernie are actually lovers: Paddy: Kilby: Paddy: Kilby:

So did Bernie Denk not cripple the peg-leg? Everything but, man, ’Costed her, broke in, wrecked her gaff … Why? They’re lovers. What d’you expect. They were lovers an’ they had a tiff, she dumped him an’ that’s not the issue.29

Kilby garnishes this revelation by reporting that Bernie called Nancy ‘Ma’ during sex. In Act Two he persists in aggrandizing Nancy’s monstrosity by chronicling a reported raucous sexual encounter between her and Bernie during the funeral ceremony of Hughie’s mother, which ended with Nancy toppling to the ground. Once suspected of getting ‘up on his oul’ one’30 (his mother), Bernie can now vicariously fulfil his incestuous fantasy with a willing Nancy, who allows him to address her as ‘Ma’ during sexual intercourse. Nancy’s character, which represents a fusion of mother, whore, and monster, constructs woman as illegible deformity. In turn, Nancy is portrayed as one of the greatest threats to male characters and to the cohesion of the heterosexual male order. By allowing Bernie to refer to her as his mother, Nancy also permits the kind of Oedipal transgression of which the Echelon order is fearful and intent on preventing: she actively encourages her partner to actualize a (repressed) desire for the mother. In ‘Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’ (1910), Sigmund Freud links homosexuality to a complex matrix of maternal desire and identification that resonates with the threat posed by the couple’s sexual habits: In all our male homosexual cases the subjects had had a very intense erotic attachment to a female person, as a rule their mother […] the child’s love for his mother cannot continue to develop consciously and further; it succumbs to repression. The boy represses his love for his mother: he puts himself in her place, identifies himself with her, and takes his own person as a model in whose likeness he chooses the new objects of his love.31


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In the play world, the resexualization of maternal attachment is a defining moment of male trouble. Discussing Freud’s Moses and Monothesism and Totem and Taboo, Kristeva addresses what she refers to as ‘the socially productive value of the son-mother incest prohibition’, while also holding up the taboo as a fear of the feminine as abject, undifferentiated, and without order.32 The symbolic menace of the sexual arrangement becomes materially evident towards the end of Act Two when Kilby reveals that he stole Nancy’s prosthesis in order to teach her a lesson. He proceeds to use the dislodged appendage in violent combat with Paddy and Kilby, in the gruesome foregrounding of female abjection. At the same time it is worth noting the leg’s metonymic function. While it figures Nancy as abject, its centrality in violent processes of male identification qualifies it as a phallic signifier. As it lords over male characters in combat, its phallic connotations are conspicuous, denoting an ambition for mastery by male characters while simultaneously illustrating the difficulty of such an embodiment. If we follow Hughie’s explanation, Copper Dolan’s prostitute is responsible for mobilizing the play’s action. When he does not adhere to her codes of sexual conduct (against her will, he ejaculates in her mouth), she publicly announces the meaning of his Chinese inscription. This revelation then becomes the greatest hazard to male identity throughout the play world. The only female character drawn with positive connotations is Hughie’s mother, and her illness (and concomitant desexualization) due to a car crash, motivates Hughie to abandon his unlawful ways. Her death marks the removal of a role model, and when Hughie rejects Paddy’s final plea for assistance on the grounds of his mother’s memory, he implicitly consolidates this process of othering and tribal foreclosure. While this chapter has so far revealed how certain identifications, desires, and practices upset normative constructions of masculinity, homosexuality and the suspicion of homosexual desire are the most threatening of all. Kilby is constantly suspicious of sexual relations between Hughie and Paddy. His accusation that Paddy keeps ‘gayin’ Hughie up’33 is the principal tool he uses to exert control over the pair and it ensures that the ‘machosocial’ arrangement never collapses into the annihilative realm of the homosexual, as in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s description of the organization of homosocial relations.34 However, if such an injunction is threatened, Kilby himself facilitates it. His incessant allusion to homosexuality raises suspicions about his own sexuality. Writing about masculinity in Irish theatre, Karen Fricker, suggests that

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Kilby is a classic closet case.35 Certainly, we might say that he signifies the point where identification with his male peers blurs as desire for them. Writing on the Freudian subject, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen argues that identification always anticipates desire: ‘Desire (the desiring subject) does not come first, to be followed by identification that would allow the desire to be fulfilled […] Identification brings the desiring subject into being and not the other way around.’36 Kilby’s obsession with anality, marked by his repetition of phrases such as ‘touch-hole’ and ‘dirtburger’,37 in addition to his constant uttering of gay innuendo, figure him less as a knowing homosexual and more as a man desperately trying to forge a stable identity. In the attempt to resolve this tension, he repeatedly defines himself against the abject. Eventually, the motivation behind Kilby’s scatological fixation is disclosed. As described earlier, the climax of the play occurs with Hughie’s revelation that the Chinese symbols on Kilby’s jacket read ‘Made in China’ rather than the presumed ‘Brotherhood of the Guard’. It was also emphasized that this discovery marks the end of a symbolic undressing and redirects focus towards the male body. Enraged by the deception, Copper Dolan and Puppacat, assisted by Hughie, have Kilby anally raped with a snooker cue. After he has been severely injured, Puppacat and Copper Dolan shake hands in Kilby’s blood and excrement as a sign of solidarity. In The Psychoses (1955–6) Jacques Lacan maintains that the organization of body materiality actually structures identity: ‘The bodily, pregenital, exchanges are quite adequate for structuring a world of objects, a world of complete human reality, that is, one in which there are subjectivities.’38 In Powers of Horror, Kristeva ciphers abjection as a state of insecurity, even antipathy, towards that which both is and is not part of the self, incurred by the recognition that that which has been perceived as the other becomes too intrusive upon the subject. Since Kristeva conceives of humans as subjects-in-process, the abject is that which threatens identity by drawing the subject to the ‘edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me’.39 While she understands the object as a constitutional term of the ego, the abject is concerned with the realm of the punitive superego where it exists as a ‘père-version’ and is rationalized as the desire of the other: ‘I deposit it to the father’s account (verse au père – père-version): I endure it, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other.’40 As a père-version, the abject is implicitly related to the stability of the Law, as an organizing principle of identity and culture. The sadistic assault on Kilby in Made in China reveals something of the expectations of the


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Law on male subjects. In shaking hands in Kilby’s excrement, Puppacat and Copper Dolan also reveal the centrality of adding value to abjection in the service of securing masculinity. Such is the dynamic between the ‘high’ and the ‘low’, described by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression: [T]he ‘top’ attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon that low-Other, but also that the top includes the low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life.41 In accepting his assault, Kilby’s position within the Echelons is ultimately reaffirmed: his submission allows him to be assimilated back into the group. Sadomasochistic desire The sadistic mastery of Kilby, carried out by the hegemonic males and sealed in his waste, problematizes intimations of his homosexuality, if only through the disavowal of reciprocity. The act is an unequivocal rape that allows Puppacat and Copper Dolan to consummate their relationship and to reconcile the endangered male order. While the violation may be read as a brutal effort to humiliate Kilby, it also draws attention to the sadistic dynamic that propels the play. Not only is this impulse revealed in the actual attack, but also in Hughie’s pleasure at regaling Paddy with the tale in the present: Hughie: Welters of gore, there was, fuckin’ geysers of blood spurtin’ sprayin’ out of both ends of him, hole an’ mouth. That right Kilby? Gurglin’ like a blocked drain.42 As Hughie delivers his animated account of the evening, Kilby confesses to arousal and yearns to satisfy his excitement through sexually assaulting Hughie. As he brandishes a baseball bat over Hughie’s disabled body, simultaneously undoing his trousers, Kilby exclaims, ‘Incapacitate your opponent single pawed, leaves the other free for whatever you want. It’s popular with faggot rapists an’ berserk sodomites.’43 Although Kilby also endeavours to rape Paddy in order to satisfy his ‘rage horn’,44 he is prevented from doing so by the intervention of Nancy’s prosthetic limb. In ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ (1915), Freud’s notion of sadomasochistic reflexivity dissolves the sadist-masochist distinction, while

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also situating these mobile desires within a highly performative scene of exhibitionism and voyeurism. Reflexive sadomasochism is structured around the premise that the sadist is also a masochist, and vice versa. In this paper Freud understands masochism as a reversal of sadism: ‘The active aim (to torture, to look at) is replaced by the passive aim (to be tortured, to be looked at).’45 For Freud, however, satisfaction is not actually derived from being tortured. The masochist identifies with his torturer, deriving his pleasure through this identification. Although the masochist may submit to a father figure, he does so in relation to male desire fulfilment, reproducing and consolidating the Law, despite its temporary eroticization. Viewed in this light, sadomasochistic relationships might be seen to reinforce the Law (and thus gender norms), not only by submitting to it oneself (masochism), but by subjecting others to it as well (sadism). Kilby is the most obviously sadomasochistic character in Made in China. Not long after his entrance, he draws attention to this by miming an attack on Paddy while exclaiming, ‘step outside the law prevents the dispensin’ of swift justice. Just below the ribcage. Fuckin’ rupture you. Would you like that? Don’t think you would.’46 He continues to air a multiplicity of sadistic pleasures with an unnerving degree of glee. He advises Hughie to avenge his mother’s death on the driver involved in the accident saying, ‘Mangle the cunt like he mangled Dolly’,47 and later figuratively dominates Nancy through stealing her prosthesis. Kilby’s behaviour soon foregrounds a collapse in the sadist-masochist distinction as he enthusiastically imagines how he would like to give Copper Dolan a ‘good buggerin’48 in order to teach him a lesson. His fantasy is quickly disrupted by Paddy’s alarm, which is abated by Kilby’s qualification: ‘An’ not in a sexual way, now. Not in a way he’d like it, pansy an’ all as he is, but in a violent way. Disable him with a wing-chun flurry.’49 Paddy is attracted by Kilby’s imagined scenario, and joins in the frenetic role play to administer sexual punishment to the ‘subservient’ Kilby. In a moment where fantasy and reality become indistinguishable, Kilby calls to the thrusting Paddy: Kilby: You feel the potential, there, man? Paddy: Potential for anguish. Kilby: You feel it? (Mimes arse slap.) Huh? Gonna stop you destroyin’. Treaty or not, man. Treaty or none, gonna make you create’ Paddy: ‘Or suffer’ Kilby: Yep. Paddy: ‘Create or suffer, man. Create or endure. Your choice’… Buggerin’ or needlecraft.50


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In this exchange, it is interesting to note how creation is implicitly associated with ‘buggerin’, while real endurance and suffering is to be found in ‘needlecraft’, or other similarly banal domestic (female) pursuits. However, the philosophy expounded by the Echelons has never been to create or to suffer, as Paddy suggests in an interrogative tone. As elucidated so far, it is more accurately defined as suffer in order to create, to prove male worth through the submission to violence. Or, to put it another way, to bugger in order to create. It is this which consolidates the group’s authority. Kilby confirms this doctrine when he proclaims, I am the alpha male of youse fucks ’cos I can take it an’ have took it to the fuckin’ hilt, man. Yous’re only twopenny strong, twopenny true. Your convictions’re two penny … I took cue stick stoic an’ acceptin’ an’ me will was forged tenfold stronger in, yep, shit an’ guts! 51 In this manifesto of sorts, ‘shit an’ guts’ are elevated as currencies of exchange. This expression of what Calvin Thomas refers to as ‘scatontological’ anxiety, or the feeling that ‘I’ am nothing but excrement – is abated by being given value within the tribe.52 Jacques Lacan suggests something similar when in The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis (1963–4) he argues that faeces might stand in for the phallus: The anal level is the locus of metaphor – one object for another, give the faeces instead of the phallus. This shows you why the anal drive is the domain of oblativity, of the gift. Where one is caught short, where one cannot, as a result of the lack, give what is to be given, one can always give something else.53 Not only does waste have currency, then, but Lacan points out that the game of mastery and subjection is constitutive of selfhood: ‘It is in so far as the subject makes himself the object of another will that the sadomasochistic drive not only closes up, but constitutes itself.’54 Some characters, however, are unable to align themselves with this excremental (i)deal. Hughie, who relinquishes his Echelon membership, expresses an inability to sustain any more beatings. In warning Paddy of the requirements of Echelon participation, he says, ‘Don’t wanna get battered. That’s right, right. Tell I’ll get head smacked, so I’m … or fuckin’ worse, man, so I’m not gonna. Suffice to say but. Shit you can’t hack. Know what you can hack an’ you can’t hack this.’55 In light of this admission, and in the context of his eventual departure from the apartment, Hughie’s rejection of the Echelons is concomitantly

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a repudiation of its subjectifying imperative. Hughie’s departure is not glorious, however, for the play intimates that he will eventually be traced by Puppacat, and duly punished for his transgression. When he arises after being beaten, his final resurrection is the most vivid testament to the perpetuation of a politics of suffering in male identity formation. Viewed in this light, Hughie’s eventual departure does not mark a triumphant escape but a failure of becoming. The final image of the play – Paddy menacing a threatening baseball bat over the stirring Kilby along with the promise of Puppacat’s arrival – suggests that the endurance of violence is not necessarily destructive. Rather, as a performative refusal of the self as abject, a refusal effected through a kind of wrestling with the abject, the process also works to inscribe the male subject within the Law, to perpetuate that same Law, and to ensure male dominance.

‘I fought the law and the law won’: The performativity of male authority in InterMission As with Made in China, InterMission (2003) explores a pocket of urban working-class masculinity.56 Set in Dublin, the main plot pivots on the male characters’ hypermasculine ambitions and behaviours, cultivated and pursued in order to compensate for relationship and employment failings. The guiding motif of the film is the transformation of the ineffectual white, working-class heterosexual male into an aggressive assailant, in a bid to ignite his self-esteem and to avenge his perceived injustice. In this, the film presents an excellent example of how cultures of victimhood, as Wendy Brown maps out in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995) become so invested in their own subjection that identity itself is constituted as and through a form of immobile, uncreative ressentiment.57 Bearing in mind the tendency of postmodern representational modalities to fetishize genuinely marginal social groups, the analysis offered here also considers how a victimized male logic can triumph over criminal law through reifying a kind of bodily endurance that supports phallic Law.58 Farrell/Lehiff and the macho standard It would be difficult to consider masculinity on an organizational level without devoting some preliminary attention to the protagonist in this film, played by Colin Farrell. Lehiff, the first character screened, is the masculine ideal with whom other males first identify, and later desire. In a role analogous to that of Tyler Durden in David Fincher’s film


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Fight Club, Lehiff unites assorted storylines with the promise of remasculinizing the disaffected males. From the opening scene of the film, he establishes a hypermasculine standard for other male characters to follow, and he continues to be the principal perpetrator of violence throughout. As is often the case with celebrity actors, Farrell inflects the character with his own well-established media persona. Toby Miller elucidates something of how the persona and the role overlap in his suggestion that film stars operate and are sustained by the following divisions: character is ‘a notational entity’, personality a ‘private biographical reality’, and persona ‘the public image of the actor as a concrete person that is inferred from his or her screen presence and associated publicity’.59 For Michael Quinn, celebrities bring to new roles ‘an overdetermined quality that exceeds the needs of the fiction and keeps them from disappearing entirely into the acting figure of drama’.60 While I am not claiming Farrell to be a misogynist, a homophobe, or a thief as is his character in InterMission, his Hollywood film roles and media persona converge at a particular male stereotype that inflect and resonate in the character of Lehiff. A brief outline of Farrell’s career reveals some connections between his onscreen roles and offscreen persona. The actor readily made his mark on the movie industry with his first major film, Ordinary Decent Criminal (2000), soon after which he appeared in Premiere’s list of the ‘100 Most Powerful People in Hollywood’ (April 2003). Celebrated for his ability to work and play hard, Farrell has held macho roles in films such as Tigerland (2000), S.W.A.T. (2003), Daredevil (2003), as well as Alexander the Great (2004). In addition to being a leading man on screen, Farrell’s off-stage virility has been frequently confirmed by media reports that draw attention to his multiple lovers and sustained partying. The following profile by John Hiscock in the Mirror newspaper is typical of Farrell’s popular media representation: ‘He is a wild Irishman with a huge appetite for life. His lusty late-night exploits with booze and women are legendary in clubs and bars from Dublin to Hollywood.’61 Farrell has also actively attempted to cultivate this wild Irishman image, primarily by denying his middle-class upbringing in a middle-class Dublin suburb in favour of marketing himself as a working-class man with a strong regional accent, who is from a less affluent area.62 In 2003, the year of InterMission’s release, Farrell became the centre of a media frenzy for dating the pop star Britney Spears, and since then, his reputation as one of Hollywood’s most notorious lotharios has been repeatedly reinforced. Thus, I suggest that Farrell’s persona as a sexy, successful, working-class idol done good, constantly supplements the character of Lehiff.

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With cropped hair and an unshaven face, Lehiff opens the film flirting with a waitress. He confesses diffidently to having been ‘around the block; sowed me oats; acted the rapscallion; ran wild, ran free’, but claims to have overcome this phase, with ‘Time comes, you have to leave behind the old hell raiser, man. Take some responsibility for your life. Prepare the ground work’. To this end, he advocates ‘nest building’. For a moment his words are plausible; the object of his flirtation is certainly endeared. Unexpectedly, however, Lehiff lurches across the counter, thumps the girl in the face and plunders the cash register, therein establishing himself as an aggressive thug and instituting a hypermasculine standard for other male characters in the film to follow. Simultaneously, this moment heralds Lehiff’s conflict with institutional law represented by Detective Jerry Lynch. The incident also polarizes the ‘legal system’ of the film into the outlaw Lehiff on one side and the ‘in-law’ Detective Lynch on the other. However, the terms of institutional law and Symbolic Law are constantly at odds, and the plot is chiefly concerned with their mutual interrogation. This is chiefly explored in the context of male identity and masculinity. Disaffected masculinity In order for this conflict between institutional law and Symbolic Law to be resolved, a number of ancillary characters and subplots are introduced. Of these, the male figures are burdened with work and relationships, with each man identifying himself as a hapless victim of external forces. In reality, however, victimization emerges as more of an elected subject position. This is chiefly revealed in male expressions of mental and physical subjection. The character John has a job in the local supermarket, which he frequently claims to detest. Like Freud’s moral masochist, John is compelled ‘to do what is inexpedient, must act against his own interests, must ruin the prospects which open out to him in the real world and must, perhaps, destroy his own real existence’.63 Recently separated from his girlfriend, he discovers in the course of the film that she is now dating a married bank manager, Sam. At the beginning of the film, John mourns his loss with co-worker Oscar, who similarly complains of feelings of sexual inadequacy. From the moment they are screened, both characters do well to endear the viewer through their apparent vulnerability, identifying as victims rather than as villains. However, it is not long before the veracity of their attested subjection is brought into question with Deirdre’s revelation that, contrary to John’s claim, it was he who actually terminated the relationship.


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In addition to his self-portrayal as something of a romantic victim, John is also represented as professionally subjugated. His time in the supermarket is spent either complaining about his failed relationship or arguing with his boss, Mr. Henderson, whom he views as another oppressive force in his life. Having rejected his girlfriend, he proceeds to abandon his job by hurling a tin can at his manager’s head during work. Surprisingly, the customers who witness this violent interaction are not shocked by Henderson’s disablement. Rather, in presuming the guilt of the manager – the representative of legitimated business authority – they applaud the assault. Pleased with his popularity, John takes an athletic leap onto a nearby counter, as if a podium, to revel in the popularity which his stunt has afforded him. Although neither the customer nor viewer has any reason to credit John’s attack, his own identification as a victim is clearly championed in this scene. It is not long before he unites with Lehiff in the hope of avenging himself on those he believes to have maltreated him in the past, namely, his ex-girlfriend Deirdre and her new boyfriend Sam, through the robbing of the latter’s bank. When thirty-something Mick is initially introduced, he too is portrayed as a moral masochist, agonizing about family responsibilities. Anxious of his wife’s expectations and displeased with his job as a bus driver (he complains to a colleague that they are both dogs), Mick is primed for rejuvenation by Lehiff. This opportunity comes, somewhat convolutedly, following a rock being thrown at his bus which results in its crashing. Although he insists on his innocence, Mick is sacked on accusations of negligence. While he is not directly responsible for the incident, there is a reasonable suspicion of recklessness owing to his propensity to gossip with passengers. Nevertheless, he becomes the film’s second victimized male who retires to a pub to defer his wife’s wrath. It is not long before Mick, like John, is co-opted by Lehiff to help in the bank robbery, through an introductory mark of sympathy followed by the promise of financial gain, retribution, and masculinization. Although John’s co-worker Oscar resists this regenerative route in turning down Lehiff’s offer to participate in the heist, the path he takes reveals a similar preference for self-affirmation through pain. At the beginning of the film, Oscar’s victimization, like that of John and Mick, is attributed to feelings of social and sexual inadequacy. Ultimately, however, his fractured masculinity reveals itself in masochistic sexual practices, like those fantasies Freud describes as characterized by the desire to be ‘painfully beaten, whipped, in some way mal-treated, forced into unconditional obedience’.64 This power position is made

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particularly clear in Oscar’s relationship with Noeleen (the rejected wife of Sam) whom he meets at the nightclub he attends in the hope of remedying his impotence. The morning after they sleep together, Oscar sports the back lacerations he incurred at Noeleen’s hands. He identifies his wounds as badges of virility with: ‘Rough man […] a bit of pain slash pleasure, you know. Cock’s killin’ me. Me bones, me muscles but I’m energised.’ While he is initially pleased with his encounter, identifying in its pain a source of pleasure and fortification, Oscar is eventually unable to withstand the intensity of Noeleen’s physical attacks, which culminate in her beating him up. Although he flirts with victimhood briefly, and masculinization through the endurance of pain, Oscar’s inability to entertain the masochistic scenario heralds a rejection of this popular identity. And yet even the finality of this repudiation is questionable given the relationship he develops later with Sally. While Lehiff, John, Mick, and Oscar are most clearly at odds with legitimated authority, even Detective Lynch, its supposed enforcer, delights in his own victimization, as if aware that the hard Law of the Father (as it is manifest in the film’s dominant male subjects, Lehiff, John, and Mick) is more powerful than institutional law. From the moment he accosts Lehiff by the throat at the beginning of the film, and urinates on him in order to mark his territory and figuratively signal a prospective power dynamic, one is suspicious of his claims to hardship (see Figure 3.1). It soon becomes obvious that Lynch does not strive specifically to eradicate local crime but to represent himself as a victim of the outlaw; as a martyr whose authority is affirmed not by his achievements, per se, but by his endurances. The detective’s determination to ensure this strategic representation is most vividly underscored in the documentary made by and of Lynch in conjunction with the reporter Ben. The filming of Lynch at work is as parodic of his ability and authority (and the judicial system that he represents) as is the film’s robbery scene of hypermasculine ideals. Not only does the device reveal that the detective does very little on the streets, but also that he is almost incapable of functioning without being recorded and acknowledged for his community service. Here, Laura Mulvey’s ‘determining male gaze’65 does not project its fantasy onto a female figure; rather, in the action of Lynch in this male-dominated world, it projects circuitously back onto itself. What was intended to be a shadow documentary of the detective becomes a highly manipulated construction whereby Lynch orchestrates scenarios for the benefit of his own representation and reputation. In a scene where he breaks into an apartment to challenge its occupant with accusations of drug dealing, Lynch insists that


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Figure 3.1 Detective Lynch (Colm Meaney) and Lehiff (Colin Farrell) in InterMission (2003).

Ben record him beat the man unconscious, ending his frenetic assault with ‘See what I mean? Scum’. Similarly, during his final showdown with Lehiff, he ensures that Ben is recording the whole event before he approaches his nemesis. Lynch’s need to affirm his macho prowess through a documentary of himself serves to highlight the detective’s incompetence but also his desire to be more powerful than he actually is. Lacan’s writing on the scopic drive which inspired Mulvey delineates how this nexus of desire operates: [A]t the scopic level, we are no longer at the level of demand, but of desire, the desire of the Other […] the relation between the gaze and what one wishes to see involves a lure. The subject is presented as other than he is, and what one shows him is not what he wishes to see. It is in this way that the eye may function as objet a, that is to say, at the level of the lack.66 Via the documentary construction, the ‘Other’ of Lynch’s desire is deemed to be his imaginary self, and this narcissistic looping of desire

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works to undermine his stability as a subject and as his command as a figure of authority. In this uncompromising exposure Detective Lynch joins the ranks populated by the other failed men in the film. Rather than interpreting this male victimization as a mark of terminably critical masculinity, it seems more accurate to understand it as a performative route towards securing symbolic centrality, which playfully transposes the codes of normative masculinity. This trajectory is mapped early on in the film when the male characters actively choose their seditious identities in order to justify a hypermasculine reinvention: they are homosocially reinforced by virtue of their marginality. This is equally the case for Detective Lynch who assumes that he will accrue public support by displaying his suffering. This analysis is bolstered by the fact that the masochistic scenario is orchestrated exclusively in relation to male desire fulfilment. Viewed in this light, victimized identifications in InterMission surreptitiously reinforce and validate aggressive masculinity, that very social hierarchy those positions endeavour to conceal. Rejecting females and faggots Central to the justification of male discontent is the demonization of other characters in the film. Women and homosexuals are constructed as Other and abject in a manner that draws attention to the vulnerability and permeability of the borders of hegemonic masculinity. In their treatment and referencing of those abject bodies, normative males are constantly threatened with the disturbance of their own identities, in dramatic realization of Kristeva’s premise: ‘[I]t [the abject] does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it – on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it [the subject/male character] to be in perpetual danger.’67 The opening scene of the film not only establishes a hypermasculine standard in the film but it simultaneously positions woman as an obstacle to this realization that needs to be violently removed. Only after the female cashier has been assaulted and jettisoned to the margins of the homocentric narrative can Lehiff mobilize his ambitions and the plot proceed. This configuration tacitly correlates male desire fulfilment with female subjection and exclusion. As the plot unfolds further, we learn that Deirdre’s sister Sally has suffered grotesquely at the hands of male violence. Her low self-esteem and indifference to her appearance are legacies of a brutal relationship that ended with her boyfriend tying her to a chair, telling her she was a ‘shit lay’, and defecating on her chest. Left in this condition for three days, Sally was eventually discovered by her mother. While this event


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is not screened, the foregrounding of Sally’s ‘ronnie’ (moustache) is a pervasive reminder of female abjection in this world. This positioning is all the more insidiously construed by figuring her ‘badge of mourning’ (as her mother refers to it) as a central focus of humour in the film. In a similar vein, Deirdre is held hostage in her home while Lehiff, Mick, and her ex-boyfriend John attempt to rob her current partner’s bank. She is also beaten by Lehiff when she tries to retaliate. Despite the fact that John is involved in her attack, Deirdre reunites with him at the end of the film, without significant hesitation. In this, the film ultimately naturalizes male violence and places the onus upon females to wait-out male abuse. Implicitly, this resolution plays out the dangerous domestic abuse maxim that it was, in fact, the woman’s fault all along. While Sally and Deirdre are both abjected in this way, their mother is omitted from the main action and confined to the family home, where she repeatedly promotes her daughters’ obligation to the domestic sphere. In addition to the abjection of female characters, homosexual slurs and intimations abound in the film, used to question male authority and the stability of masculine identifications. Detective Lynch makes this position clear when he defines his mission as to ‘separate the men from the faggots’. At different moments in the film, similar insinuations are used to undermine male characters who deviate from an aggressive normativity. Similarly, when the editor of ‘Little Big City’ (the local news station) initially prohibits Ben from making the documentary of Detective Lynch, his sexuality is brought into question. In a telephone exchange, Lynch correlates this refusal with an inability to appreciate his work and aligns the perceived defection with homosexuality. Jerry: Has no one any balls these days? Ben: That’s what I said to his face. I agree with you one hundred percent, Jerry. Jerry: The faggot. Is he a faggot? Bet ya he is. One of those fucks who tries too hard to be one of the ladies, ya know. The detective’s recourse is for Ben to produce his own show called ‘Hard as Nails Cunts’, starring himself. Although many male characters are intent on defining the correct boundaries of male subjectivity and masculinity through a doctrine of self-victimization and the construction of the Other and the abject, these same figures ultimately reinforce the manifesto of endurance by celebrating their own abjection. It is at this point that Freud’s notion

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of feminine masochism, defined by the male desire to be ‘dirtied and debased’ may be more usefully reimagined, in Kristevan terms, as a correlative of semiotic abjection. Kristeva’s theorization of pre-Oedipal antics suggests that entry into the Symbolic domain of language and culture necessitates a repression of maternal authority. In contrast, the journey taken by male characters in InterMission reveals a steady rejection of all dominant cultural (paternal) authority in favour of performed castration and an Oedipal carnival. For ultimately, having flaunted masochistic tendencies and parodied hypermasculine ambitions in dressing up to rob a bank, these characters not only eventually embrace the abject body (as in the case of Oscar and Sally’s union), but teeter on the threshold of abjection themselves. This is most notably highlighted when Oscar congratulates the hospitalized John for being shot during the failed robbery and when Detective Lynch sports the colostomy bag he had fitted following his shooting by Lehiff, as if a military insignia. It is also foregrounded when Mick celebrates being mutilated, paralysed, and wheelchair-bound, owing to the fact that his debilitation allows him to escape police punishment, a sign that the Symbolic Law informing masculinity supersedes institutional law in the film. Although the performed jouissance may imply a weakening of the Law of the Father, and its particular demands on masculinity and male supremacy, I contend the implausibility of such an outcome by virtue of its strategic choreography. In contrast, this self-abjection is merely a mechanism that flirts with ‘monstrous feminine’68 by mimicking lack and subordination, those marginalizing representations that many of the same male characters have been so intent on perpetuating. The representation of Mick in the film’s penultimate scene explicitly reinforces the glorification of male impotence and subjection. In a bar, the temporarily wheelchair-bound Mick is challenged to a race by a wheelchair-using regular in order to settle the hierarchical equivocacy with ‘Think you’re the King on wheels? I’m the King round here’. Although the anonymous client is almost completely immobilized, he celebrates his condition with ‘The body compensates. Instead of mobility I have increased perception. Sight and Sound. Smell of Course. It’s a fair trade. I wouldn’t go back.’ Eventually Mick agrees to the challenge and emerges victorious, exclaiming, ‘I’m King of the World!’ to the applause of other customers, in a moment reminiscent of John’s supermarket glory. Even while deriding abjected females, abjection as endurance becomes a useful strategy to counteract male impotence. For the masculine to survive, its (repressed) constitutive abjection must be strategically collapsed into the glamour of the wounded hero.


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When these men fail to accede to Lehiff’s hypermasculine signification, or indeed to the economic leaders as represented in Mr. Henderson and Sam, they valorize their own failure. The destruction of Lehiff Once Lehiff’s would-be accomplices have retreated from the aborted crime scene to embrace the fruits of their failure, Detective Lynch chases Lehiff from the city into the countryside. The setting signals a primordial engagement with the two most dominant males vying for supremacy. Lynch confirms the primal significance of the location by suggesting that they resolve their differences with a fist fight ‘man to man’. If Lehiff wins, Lynch claims that he will release him without charge. In place of a fist fight, however, the men draw guns and Lehiff is killed. Of course, this is the only possible outcome for a film which has steadily been intent on valorizing male impotence and suffering. Lehiff’s power invokes a phallic sublimity that threatens other male characters unable to emulate him. Having consistently revealed this ineptitude, Lehiff must be destroyed. Most interesting about Lehiff’s death is that it is the direct result of desire in overdrive, rather than recognizable vitriol. While male characters initially seem to identify with Lehiff in the film, identification gives way to desire. In the reading of Made in China, I referred to BorchJacobsen’s notion that identification precedes desire. He elaborates upon this dynamic through a discussion of rivalrous mimicry, stating, ‘[W]hat comes first is a tendency towards identification […] which then gives rise to desire; and this desire is, from the outset, a (mimetic, rivalrous) desire to oust the incommodious Other from the place the pseudosubject already occupies in fantasy.’69 This destructive aspect of desire is certainly evident in InterMission, and it finds further illumination in the work of Lacan who construes desire in ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ as a desire of the Other’s desire, wherein the desired object/person, termed the objet a, represents the absence that structures signification: ‘The fact that the phallus is a signifier means that it is in the place of the Other that the subject has access to it. But since this signifier is only veiled; as ratio of the Other’s desire, it is this desire of the Other as such that the subject must recognise.’70 This concept is borrowed from Georg W. F. Hegel, via Alexandre Kojève, who states, Desire is human only if the one desires, not the body, but the Desire of the other […] that is to say, if he wants to be ‘desired’ or ‘loved’, or, rather, ‘recognised’ in his human value […] In other words, all

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human, anthropogenetic Desire […] is, finally, a function of the desire for recognition.71 The desire of the objet a, then, is a tautological relation caught up in the endless pursuit of presence, made impossible by the Symbolic’s metonymic ontology. Kojève proceeds to argue that in order to achieve desired recognition, the desiring subject must risk his life in a struggle for prestige, a battle arising from the fact that the other also desires recognition. This combat must be a fight to the death for it is only by risking one’s life for recognition that one can prove one’s humanness. The struggle ends at the brink of death when the vanquished recognizes the victor as his master and becomes his slave. This scenario is evidenced in InterMission in the resolution of Lehiff’s position. As the one around whom desire conflates – by the men who seek his masculinizing influence, by the detective who seeks to control him and at the same time be recognized as a viable male threat – Lehiff corresponds to the master in Lacan’s adaptation of the Hegelian paradigm. Correspondingly, John and Mick, his desiring accomplices, may be conceived of as his slavish counterparts, who initially desire him and the masculine prowess that he signifies, although in recognition of the impossibility of this ascension, seek to destroy him. This destructive component to desire is expressed by Lacan as ‘I love you, but, inexplicably because I love something in you more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you.’72 After ‘mutilation’, the male characters in InterMission seemingly succumb to victimization and defeatism. They instate a new paradigm of male identity, built from the fragments of their own destruction, in apparent deference to phallic signification. This rejection is further consolidated by the eradication of all hierarchical threats: not only is Lehiff killed, but the bank manager Sam is forced into subservience when he eventually reunites with his wife, and Mr. Henderson ends the film by crashing his car. Collectively, these resolutions serve to privilege absence over presence, failure over success, victim over victor, and a communal glorification of male subjection. However, at the same time this male endurance-testing, which reveals and conceals the bonding strategies of patriarchy, serves as a mechanism of cultural reproduction which does not abnegate male power but renegotiates its terms. Generic shadows In its marketing blurb, InterMission is referred to as a ‘comedy drama’ and an ‘urban love story’.73 While the film has many comic scenes and is concerned with the dynamics of intersecting relationships, these


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elements are superseded by the film’s focus on masculinity. Comedy features sporadically in the film, and it is usually deployed by males to make palatable their abjection of female and homosexual identities, and also to celebrate their own ‘marginality’. Comedy only appears as parody when the men dress up in masks to rob a bank, and in Detective Lynch’s documentary, but this double-coding of hypermasculinity is also part of the celebration of male endurance and impotence. Even though the trope of celebrating the male underdog may be well established in Irish cinema, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson caution how, in genre films, ‘the familiar characterizations and plots of genres may also serve to distract the audience from genuine social problems’.74 While representations of aggressive masculinity on film has oftentimes been understood as a postcolonial strategy of Irish empowerment, as suggested by Lance Pettitt in Screening Ireland,75 in its narrow focus on gender, sexuality, and extreme violence, InterMission exceeds this tradition, and in so doing warrants a critique that considers the film’s symptomatic meaning in a wider context. At the outset of this analysis I proposed to interrogate the characteristic amalgams that the film presents, particularly those of victor and victim, law and outlaw. While I have exposed these contradictions in the plot by revealing how authority is undermined, the film’s closing song ‘I fought the law and the law won’, sung by Lehiff/Farrell initially seems to deny such ambiguities. Through the exposition of Lynch’s corruption, it is clear that institutional law is not victorious. As a maverick, the detective highlights a legal shortcoming, embellished by the revelation that Ben (who was recording the showdown) killed Lehiff, and not himself, as professed. That law has clearly failed. This invites an alternative interpretation of the posthumous declaration. While the disavowal of desire, consolidated in the annihilation of Lehiff, would suggest an abnegation of phallic Law and its particular demands on heteronormative masculinity, I suggest that this is a misleading configuration. Rather, I argue that the winning law is in fact phallic (paternal Law) rather than statutory (law), effected through the reimagining of normative masculinity. For ultimately, the wallowing in impotence and the endurance of self-abjection are figured as productive positions and performative routes towards masculinization. For despite the male characters failings, they ultimately remain the central narrative foci and occupy the main power positions within the film world. InterMission’s closing images, scenically fused by the wheelchair race and a cheering crowd, clearly revels in this mode of signification for its capacity to accommodate, celebrate, and elevate a multiplicity of victimized male subjectivities.

4 Homosexuality and Subjection in Shopping and Fucking and Faust is Dead

I am there, there means pain.1 Antonin Artaud, Œuvres Complètes Man is in fact possessed by the discourse of the law and he punishes himself with it in the name of this symbolic debt which in his neurosis he keeps paying for more and more.2 Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses By all normative accounts, gay men are failed men. Although the word ‘failed’ might imply gender trouble past the point of rescue, even homosexuality is not without its own performative agency. This chapter explores this recuperative dynamic by considering how homosexuality is rehabilitated through acts of violent subjection within a heteronormative imaginary. Focusing on a selection of plays by British playwright Mark Ravenhill, the chapter investigates how homosexuality negotiates late capitalist culture’s economy of exchange. More specifically, the study analyses how homosexuality is aligned with an array of postmodern ills in Ravenhill’s work, and examines how the abject homosexual performatively manages his socio-Symbolic debt.3 Thinking through the plays Shopping and Fucking and Faust is Dead, the chapter pays attention to the manner in which the homosexual functions as ‘code-breaker’ within a heterosexual economy of gender relations. In addition, it considers how this figure must punish himself for his ‘transgression’ in order to be resignified within the Symbolic order; how, as the character Donny puts it in Faust is Dead, he must ‘take the pain’ in order to ‘get the gain’.4 84

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Shopping and Fucking Principally set in a worn-down London flat, Shopping and Fucking documents the interactions of a group of four despondent characters – Robbie, Mark, Gary, and Lulu. The male characters are named after the members of Take That, one of Britain’s most successful pop bands in the 1990s, who collaborated with the 1960s singing icon Lulu around the time the play was written. As the title provocatively suggests, this play is about consumerism and sex, and their connection in capitalist culture. In the world depicted, insatiable desire and a principle of transaction govern both shopping and fucking, resulting in individualism, alienation, and social disorder. Although the play’s characters are seemingly aware of this dynamic, they are locked in cycles of isolation and self-destruction: Mark is expelled from a drug clinic for having sex with another client; Robbie is sacked from his job in a burger restaurant for inciting a customer to attack him with a plastic fork; Lulu strips for middle-aged Brian, and Gary hungers to receive ‘a good hurt’ with a knife. Characteristic of Ravenhill’s work, gay characters (Robbie, Mark and Gary) dominate the drama’s bleak territory. The play opens with Lulu and Robbie attempting to feed their friend Mark fast food. The character entreats the pair to stop with ‘I’m so tired. Look at me. I can’t control anything. My … guts. My mind’.5 Mark’s resistance establishes him in conflict with his friends and the consumerist culture that they represent. Although they persist in encouraging him to eat by regaling him with tales of their rampant partying, Mark refuses. Upon persuasion, he agrees to repeat the story of the group’s first meeting, a tale that frames the relationship of all three characters in consumerist terms. Mark reminds Robbie and Lulu of how he first saw them both in a supermarket, shortly after which he purchased them from a ‘fat man [with] … hair and lycra’. He recalls the man approach him, offering to sell the couple: See the pair by the yoghurt? Well, says fat guy, they’re both mine. I own them. I own them but I don’t want them – because you know something? – they’re trash. Trash and I hate them. Wanna buy them? How much? Piece of trash like them. Let’s say … twenty. Yeah, yours for twenty. So I do the deal. I hand it over. And I fetch you. I don’t have to say anything because you know. You’ve seen the transaction. And I take you both away and I take you to my house […] And we live out our days fat and content and happy.6

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Although somewhat ironically imparted, the anecdote distills some of the worst indictments of consumerist culture into a few sentences. Simultaneously, the characters’ eagerness to hear the tale repeated accentuates their compulsive attraction to such excessive consumerist modalities. So too does it warn of things to come, by framing their relationships to each other entirely in terms of economics. By the end of the play, when the three characters feed each other in the same apartment after subjecting each other to great cruelty, the prophetic nature of the story and the inescapability of the social malaise it evokes are emphasized. Having disclosed the tale, Mark reveals that he is to attend a treatment centre for drug addiction, insisting that he deliberately isolate himself from his friends, including his lover Robbie. Mark’s desire to overcome his addiction mobilizes a similar impulse among his friends and they also try to regain control of their lives. Lulu secures an interview for a television sales position and Robbie resumes work at a fast food restaurant. It soon becomes clear that their efforts for self-improvement will come to nothing. Robbie is sacked for urging a customer to be more decisive in his life and Lulu resorts to shoplifting food and dealing drugs. Although these characters articulate a wish to take control of their lives, they are unable to do so. This is largely due to the fact that they are represented not simply as victims of circumstances, but rather symptomatic perpetuators of the conditions presented. Moreover, the queer men are loci of uncontrollable desire. Manifestations of social alienation become more frequent and severe in Ravenhill’s play. Mark’s return from a brief rehabilitation period signals a definite acceleration in their occurrence. He refuses to kiss his boyfriend or, more generally, to ‘form an attachment’,7 favouring transaction over interaction, sex in place of emotional reciprocity. Although Mark enunciates this doctrine, he confesses to having had sex at the clinic. He justifies this by denying it had any emotional investment: ‘I told them: You can’t call this a personal relationship … More of a … transaction. I paid him. I gave him money. And when you’re paying, you can’t call that a personal relationship, can you?’8 Mark’s credo is the first explicit link made between capitalist individualism, consumerist isolationism, and homosexuality in the play. This connection is subsequently fortified by the fact that the two gay characters are unemployed and extort Lulu, who works. Although she earns her money illegally, Lulu is set apart from her gay counterparts who parasitically live off her income. The homosexual indictment is additionally embellished with the introduction of Gary.


In ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ (1983), Fredric Jameson suggests that the dynamics of late capitalism, or postmodernism, like those that characterise the themes and textually prescribed production aesthetics of Shopping and Fucking, are schizophrenic in nature. Drawing on the example of MTV aesthetics, typified by the rapid succession of disconnected signifiers, the erosion of a sense of temporal continuity, and the destruction of material stability, Jameson describes the late capitalist world as a montage, comprising ‘isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence’.9 Following Jacques Lacan, Jameson suggests that the subject’s experience of such a world can have disorienting effects, and may contribute to the egolessness characteristic of schizophrenia. Drawing on Lacan’s correlation of Law and language with the Symbolic order, Jameson defines the schizophrenic as one who fails ‘to accede fully into the realm of speech and language’.10 In other words, the schizophrenic lies outside signification. He writes, ‘The schizophrenic thus does not know personal identity in our sense, since our feeling of identity depends on our sense of the persistence of the “I” and the “me” over time.’11 In Out of Joint theatre company’s original production of Shopping and Fucking at the Royal Court Upstairs in 1996, for example, this schizophrenic condition was evidenced in a range of production aesthetics, including flashing neon lights to emblazon scene titles, juxtaposed against a drably decorated living room, and booming dance music in between scenes, dissonant to the characters’ efforts to communicate. In the drama this schizophrenia is also conveyed in the lives of the characters that desperately search for meaning. Like Jameson’s schizophrenic, they exist in the absence of a regulatory Law. However, the postmodern schizophrenic in Ravenhill’s world is exemplified in the figure of the homosexual. Within the Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis, the male homosexual is broadly defined as one who fails to internalize the paternal function, in favour of feminine identification. In The Psychological Society (1978), Martin Gross draws attention to this conventional account of homosexuality: Freud and many of his modern successors saw homosexuality as the penalty for the boy child’s failure to win the Oedipal battle against a seductive, overbearing, over-affectionate mother – the classic Mrs. Portnoy. Instead of finally identifying with the hated father at the resolution of the Oedipal rivalry, the child identifies with the

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mother. Thereafter, the now homosexual male seeks other men as his love object.12 In Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Jameson reads Lacanian psychoanalysis alongside Saussurean structuralism to elaborate upon schizophrenia ‘as a breakdown in the signifying chain, that is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers which constitutes an utterance or meaning’.13 In Shopping and Fucking, I maintain that the homosexual embodies this ‘breakdown’ in signification characteristic of the schizophrenic condition, and he is called upon to bear the burden of late capitalist dysfunction. Ravenhill’s characters are strikingly similar to Jameson’s ‘decentered’, ‘free-floating’, and ‘impersonal’ signs, and the male homosexual is the site on which late capitalist symptoms of ‘isolation’, ‘discontinuity’, and ‘disorder’ conflate and intensify.14 If, however, the fundamental feature of postmodern culture is ‘the consumption of sheer commodification as a process’15 as Jameson suggests, then the homosexual can also be seen to embody a crisis in cultural reproduction itself. The abject homosexual In their abject figuration, gay characters in Shopping and Fucking are also agents of social pollution. The work of Julia Kristeva once again proves to be a useful reference point in analysing this construction of homosexuality. In both Powers of Horror and Strangers to Ourselves (1994) Kristeva considers abjection to suggest how unconscious dynamics generate and manage fears and aversions. Her conjecture is helpful in assessing the explicit staging of the homosexual body in respect of social otherness. Viscerally defined as a feeling of loathing and disgust precipitated by an encounter with certain matter, images, and fantasies – the horrible Other – Kristeva develops abjection as [a]n extremely strong feeling which is at once somatic and symbolic, and which is above all a revolt of the person against an external menace from which one wants to keep oneself at a distance, but of which one has the impression that it is not only an external menace but that it may menace us from the inside. So it is a desire for separation, for becoming autonomous and also the feeling of an impossibility of doing.16 In this explanation of somatic and symbolic revolt, the feeling of abjection is associated with the unconscious fears of being lost in the body of


the ‘ambiguous other’, and therefore vulnerable to abandonment, loss of power, and individual identity. In Shopping and Fucking, male homosexuality is represented as abject, and not just a figural, but a literal threat to social order. This is primarily achieved through the explicit staging of the homosexual body. The overt attention directed to corporeal borders, fluids, and permeability in the play positions the gay body as excessive and uncontrollable, like Jameson’s reading of late capitalism itself, and posits that same body as lacking stability and meaning, and in danger of disrupting other (straight) bodies. This association is foregrounded when Mark rims Gary, and even more so when he suddenly bleeds; actions that take place centre stage in Out of Joint’s performance, for instance. It is similarly highlighted when Robbie and Mark smear their hands and penises with saliva before penetrating Gary. Further, it is fantastically accounted for in Gary’s wish to be anally violated with a screwdriver or corkscrew. In Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), Iris Marion Young expands Kristeva’s theory of abjection towards a more concrete understanding of its social implications. Young suggests that although many societies are committed to respect and equal rights, routines of practical consciousness, forms of identification, and interactive behaviour, rules of deference clearly differentiate groups, privileging some over others. Hence there exists a dissonance between group-blind egalitarian truisms of discursive consciousness and group-focused routines of practical application. This discord, Young claims, creates ‘the sort of border crisis ripe for the appearance of the abject’.17 She elaborates, Today the Other is not so different from me as to be an object; so discursive consciousness asserts that blacks, women and homosexuals are like me. But at the level of practical consciousness these groups are affectively marked as different. In this situation, those in the despised groups threaten to cross over the border of the subject’s identity because discursive consciousness will not name them as completely different.18 Young draws on homophobia to embellish her hypothesis, owing to the fact that since a greater number of homosexuals have affirmed their sexuality in public, it has become obvious that homosexuality has no specific characteristics: no physical, mental, or moral character that marks it apart from heterosexuality. It thus becomes increasingly difficult to assert any difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals except by their choice of partners. She continues, ‘Homophobia is one

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of the deepest fears of difference precisely because the border between gay and straight is constructed as the most permeable; anyone at all can become gay, especially me, so the only way to defend my identity is to turn away with irrational disgust.’19 Young’s explication of the relationship between homophobia and abjection further enables an understanding of the representation of queer characters in Ravenhill’s play. The drama not only foregrounds rimming and anal sex as abject rather than pleasurable sexual experiences, but it correlates capitalist excess and inutility – as evidenced in the abundance of fast food, empty food cartons, and the giving away of three hundred ecstasy tablets – with the unruly homosexual. In constructing this alignment, we might even say that Shopping and Fucking contributes to the spectacle of the ‘boundary-trespass that is homosexuality’,20 a perception stabilized, according to Judith Butler, by the media’s homophobic response to AIDS as a gay disease, its victim a polluting person. Building on the work of Mary Douglas, Butler also draws attention to the homosexual body as social synecdoche, suggesting that ‘[s]ince anal and oral sex among men clearly establishes certain kinds of bodily permeabilities unsanctioned by the hegemonic order, male homosexuality would, within such a hegemonic point of view, constitute such a site of danger and pollution’.21 In the title of Ravenhill’s play, as well as in the plot and performance, a direct line is drawn between consumerist culture and the violent, polluting impropriety of the homosexual. Perhaps more seriously, the nihilism of the gay characters literally inverts them towards death, compounding the discursive relationship between ‘the male homosexual […] whose desire is somehow structured by death, either as the desire to die or as one whose desire is inherently punishable by death’.22 However, unlike in the writing of Lee Edelman, where the queer as death-drive exerts something of a recalcitrant, critical force on the dominant Symbolic, in the play, gay characters willingly submit to violence in order to symbolically reinstate a lost paternal authority, and precipitate social regeneration.23 To put it another way, if for Edelman homographesis is a reading and writing practice that both codifies identity, and is ‘intent on de-scribing the identities that [a conservative social order] has so oppressively inscribed’, then the male trouble figured here contains this latter potentiality through a violent compression or congealment of subjectivity.24 Violence and the male sublime Brian is the only representation of heterosexual masculinity in the play and it is he who employs Lulu to sell drugs. As the most commercially


profitable hegemonic male, drawn in the likeness of Robert William Connell’s corporate hegemonic,25 Brian reflects most extensively on capitalist functioning. He speaks compulsively about the Disney animation The Lion King, drawing particular attention to the ghostly reflection of the dead King’s face to Simba. His excitement at the appearance of the King’s face might also be understood to signify a desire for the renewal of stabilizing Law. The Lion King has been critically noted for paralleling Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which Lacan considers in ‘Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet’ (1959). In this paper Lacan reads the play as a ‘tragedy of [the Prince’s] desire’.26 He goes on to suggest that ‘the principal subject of the play is beyond all doubt Prince Hamlet. The play is the drama of an individual subjectivity, and the hero is always present on stage, more than in any other play’.27 Lacan argues that the tragedy is foremost a dramatization of the desire of the subject in ego-formation, a process dependent upon Hamlet encountering and internalizing an external image. In Lacanian thought, selfhood arises out of the misrecognition of self in idealized otherness, as evidenced in Hamlet’s encounter with his ghostly father and Simba’s with his. It is only with this misidentification that the self may distinguish itself from others and from objects and enter the Symbolic order: ‘The privilege of the subject seems to be established here from that bipolar reflexive relation by which, as soon as I perceive, my representations belong to me.’28 Central to this interpretation of subjectivity is the role of the father, as the ideal point of identification, who interpellates the individual as subject. Read in this light, Simba’s (mis)recognition of his self in his father is also the moment of subject formation which ensures that the circle of paternal authority remains unbroken: it is this very relationship which propels the ‘Circle of Life’. Consequently, Brian’s enthusiasm for this scene in the Disney animation may be understood to mirror his desire for the reinstatement of paternal authority in society. Later in the play, he attempts to articulate this desire more clearly. Watching a video of a schoolboy cellist, he is moved to say, ‘You feel it like – like something you knew. Something so beautiful that you’ve lost but you’d forgotten that you’ve lost it. Then you hear this.’29 Despite his wish to rectify the disarray of contemporary life, Brian’s actions are more ambiguous. Ultimately for Brian, commerce is Law. As the dominant male of the play, Brian is the normative benchmark against which gay male characters gauge their masculinity complexes. These efforts take place in a web of violent negotiation that culminates with the introduction of Gary. Before analysing his function in detail, I wish to attend to other leading incidents of violence. Scene Seven,

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set in an Accident and Emergency room, sees the injured Robbie being tended to by Lulu. As she tentatively applies ointment to his wounds, Lulu assures Robbie that his injuries are badges of honour and virility, saying, ‘Yes, suits you. Makes you look – well … tough. I could go for you. Some people a bruise, a wound, doesn’t suit them. But you – it fits. It belongs.’30 Her comment is striking for a number of reasons, not least of all because Robbie’s character has been hitherto so lightly drawn. It is even more startling by the end of the play, when little else has been revealed about his character, and it appears that he is foremost a queer cipher. Lulu’s comments serve to bolster the recurring association of gay masculinity with a need for subjection to violence. Robbie’s wounds are attractive insofar as they masculinize or heterosexualize him. This correlation is compounded when Lulu urges him to divulge a violent account of his attack, while simultaneously masturbating him: Lulu: Robbie: Lulu: Robbie: Lulu: Robbie: Lulu: Robbie: Lulu: Robbie: Lulu: Robbie: Lulu:

Tell me about them. Who? The men. Attackers. Them. The attackers. Muggers. Well. Sort of describe what they did. Like a story … There was only one. Didn’t you say gang? No. Just this one bloke. A knife? No. Oh. So. He pinned you down?31

Robbie eventually claims that he incurred his injuries while selling the three hundred ecstasy tablets that Lulu acquired from Brian. Instead of selling them, however, he confesses to having given them away free to attractive gay punters. It emerges that he was beaten for exhausting his supplies, unable to give his assailant the free drugs he demanded. We might say that Robbie queers capitalist relations by donating the drugs, instead of selling them. Unlike the figure of the schizoid in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who is celebrated for his achievement in ‘the decoding and the deterritorialization of flows in capitalist production’,32 Robbie is condemned for his excesses and harshly territorialized by the Law for his attempted transgression. When he fails to deliver the violent, erotic fantasy that Lulu craves, she stops masturbating him.


The specifics of the assault, his failure to identify with macho masculinity, and his inability to abide by capitalist tenets collectively provoke Lulu to abandon her affection and proceed with an attack on Robbie’s sexuality: Fucking fucker arsehole. Fuck. Pillowbiter. (Hit) Shitstabber. (Hit) Boys grow up you know and stop playing with each other’s willies. Men and women make the future. There are people out there who need me. Normal people who have kind tidy sex and when they want it. And boys? Boys just fuck each other. The suffering is going to be handed out. And I shouldn’t be part of it. But it’ll be both of us. And that’s not justice.33 Lulu’s retort directly correlates Robbie’s behaviour with an immaturity rooted in his homosexuality. She constructs this alignment with an intimation of Oedipal dissolution, urging him to mature and resolve the defection incurred by his failed complex. Her accompanying physical attack simultaneously invests violence with rectifying potential; her final blinding with ointment suggesting that castration may have already taken place. In Sublime Surrender: Male Masochism at the Fin-De Siècle (1998), Suzanne R. Stewart examines the discourse generated by and about certain men between 1870 and 1940 in the German-speaking world. Drawing particular attention to the work of Leopold Sacher-Masoch, Richard Wagner, and Sigmund Freud, Stewart argues that masochism became a ruse by which men constituted their own marginality in order to refigure and reinstate their hegemonic status. Owing to its subcultural practice, Stewart claims that masochism has subversive power vis-à-vis mass culture and consumer capitalism. She writes, Paradoxically, however, such a critique is achieved precisely through a staging of those same commercial relationships, on the one hand, and the mass consumption of masochistic scenarios on the other. The masochistic contract between slave and dominatrix is the most capitalist of all relations because the masochist insists on the right to sell himself.34 Although capitalist/consumer relationships and master/slave models exist in the play world (Brian/Robbie, Mark/Gary, Robbie/Gary), they are not played out to the subversive effect that Stewart describes. In presenting violent subjection as a route towards masculinization and social regeneration, the play centralizes the importance of masochistic

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dynamics to positive socio-Symbolic functioning. There is no sense of what we might think of as queer possibility. This dynamic is most clearly revealed in the fantasies and sexual practices of Gary. In Out of Joint’s performance, he sits beneath Mark as soon as he enters Scene Four, this physical arrangement denoting the passive-aggressive power balance Gary favours. This orchestration is further elaborated as the play progresses. Mark meets Gary via a sex phone line in order to fulfil his need for sexual transaction devoid of emotional intimacy. From the outset, Gary is adamant of his sexual passivity, insisting, ‘You’re in charge.’35 He corroborates this predilection by recounting previous sexual experiences and desires. When Mark offers him thirty pounds for sex, Gary indignantly retorts that he knows a rich older man, desperately offering to look after him. It turns out that this man is someone he encountered solely online, but the revelation does not detract from Gary’s chimerical investment. His imagined description of this figure is especially indicative of Gary’s desire to be dominated into recognition: ‘He’s a big bloke. Cruel like but really really he’s kind. Phones me on the lines and says: “I really like the sound of you. I want to look after you.”’36 The man may be fierce, but for Gary this quality is construed as a route towards happiness. It is not long before Gary’s interest in actual, as opposed to fantastical masochistic scenarios, is exposed. Later in the play, Gary candidly describes the sexual violence he has endured in the past, most notably at the hands of his stepfather who repeatedly raped him. Gary reiterates earlier sentiments by declaring that he hungers to discover the cruel man of his earlier imagining. When he discloses that he is only fourteen years old, the brutality of his past and the contentiousness of the representation are heightened. Although Mark now claims to love Gary, the sentiment is not reciprocated, with the latter convinced of his preferences: ‘I’m not after love. I want to be owned. I want someone to look after me. And I want him to fuck me. Really fuck me. Not like that, not like him. And, yeah, it’ll hurt. But a good hurt.’37 Gary’s fantasy to be dominated is realized at the end of the play through role enactment initiated by Robbie. Not surprisingly, his desire is to be a slave, and Robbie willingly facilitates the realization of this fantasy by assuming the role of master/father. In this capacity, he helps Gary tessellate his narrative and embody the specular man of his desires. This process begins with Robbie removing Gary’s trousers and penetrating him. He then admits Mark to take over, who violently intercedes. As he does so Gary calls out, ‘Are you my dad?’38 and begs for the encounter to climax, as it recurrently does in


his mind, with his ‘father’ penetrating him with a knife or a corkscrew. When he calls out, ‘Got to be fucking something. That’s how it ends’,39 it is obvious that Gary’s fantasmatic identification is bound up with a desire to gain control over his queer, haphazard life. Jacques Lacan describes the father in symbolic, imaginary, and real terms. While, as Dylan Evans has pointed out, he is particularly obscure on what he means exactly by ‘real’ father,40 in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–60) Lacan emphasizes that the real father is the agent of castration; the figure and effect of language (in Freud’s 1909 account of Little Hans, for example, the father is not physically present), whose intervention prevents the child from developing phobic substitutions. Lacan describes the interplay between the real and imaginary father thus: [T]he real father is elevated to the rank of Great Fucker […] Yet doesn’t this real and mythical father fade at the moment of the decline of the Oedipus complex into the one whom the child may easily have discovered at the relatively advanced age of five years old, namely, the imaginary father, the father who fucked the kid up.41 This father that Lacan discusses might well be seen as the very figure Gary fantasizes about in Shopping and Fucking. Essentially, he desperately desires the father to fulfil his role of Great Fucker, to castrate him by fucking him up properly, as it were. While Gary’s activities might be seen to mirror a capitalist bind, I am reluctant to agree that the behaviour is socially subversive, as Stewart suggests of masochism in another context. His longing to incarnate the violent man is more like a fantasy to return to the Oedipal scene. This scenario promises identification with a fiercely masculine figure, the straightening out of feminine identifications, and the restoration of order. Essentially, he wants to be rescued by a ‘real’ man. This dramatic construction finds resonance in some of the theories of subjectivity mapped out in the introduction to the book, in particular Freud’s identification readings and subsequent interrogations by Judith Butler and Diana Fuss. In The Ego and the Id (1923), for example, Freud asserts that a positive Oedipus complex is dependent upon the rejection of identification with the mother, in favour of the father. This relinquishing process, he claims, results in the internalization of that abandoned identification in the ego: ‘When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego.’42 Butler questions Freud’s description of the child’s fear of feminine identifications, suggesting that what might well be prohibited in the

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Oedipus complex is a primary, homosexual cathexis. She also claims that the ‘lost’ loved-object is never really given up, just preserved within the ego, alongside paternal identification, which is the realm of the ego ideal. With the ego ideal patrolling the consolidation of masculinity (and femininity), through guarding normative sanctions and taboos, it turns against the ego (of which it is a constituent), to ensure successful ‘gendering’.43 But, as Lacan points out, the lost father ‘which is the basis of the providential image of God’ is condemned to be mourned through the subject’s self-punishment, and this mourning is essentially ‘for someone who would really be someone’, for a father who would really be ‘a Great Fucker’.44 In certain ways, Gary’s fantasy in Shopping and Fucking mirrors Butler’s interpretation of Freudian subjectivity, wherein male homosexuality is troubled by desire for and identification with the father. This tension is precisely what Fuss takes issue with in Identification Papers which compels her to collapse the Freudian distinction between desire and identification, which she describes in terms of ‘wishing to have the other’ and ‘wishing to be the other’.45 Gary desires a father figure, but only so that he might become a father figure (a heteronormative male) himself. In this construction, Gary differs from the heterosexual characters considered in Made in China, for example, whose identifications only teeter on the brink of desire. Gary longs to the brink of self-destruction, but in the hope of stabilizing his identity. Gary is not the only character who reveals self-destructive patterns of behaviour. Mark’s drug usage similarly denotes a powerful urge to gain control over his life, or perhaps more accurately, a will to alter his perception of it. He reveals this most vividly in the closing moments of the play in the telling of yet another anecdote. Set in the year three thousand, Mark imagines that the Earth has died and is inhabited by mutants who have been deformed by radiation. He discovers one such creature, owned by ‘this fat sort of ape-thing’ who defies the aesthetic norm by being ‘tanned and blond and there’s pecks and his dick […] I mean, his dick is three-foot long’.46 The character he describes is reminiscent of Cosmo in Philip Ridley’s bleak Pitchfork Disney (1991): ‘eighteen, pale, with pale hair, and a menacing angelic beauty’.47 The monstrous owner in Mark’s story confesses to hating the boy and so sells him to Mark, who offers liberation. However, the beautiful boy has never been independent before and begs, ‘Please. I’ll die. I don’t know how to … I can’t feed myself. I’ve been a slave all my life. I’ve never had a thought of my own. I’ll be dead in a week.’48 His plea falls on deaf ears, and Mark intends on taking the risk.


Essentially, this closing tale is an adaptation of the play’s earlier story of how the three friends met. As with Gary, the attractive blond man from Mark’s story feels unable to operate outside of mastery. Although Mark asserts that he is willing to risk the boy’s death by freeing him, the closing vignette suggests the impossibility of the characters realizing this ambition in their own lives. In the absence of order and Law, Mark, Robbie, and Lulu huddle together on stage, feeding each other with fast food, as in the opening scene. Prophetically, the play has come full circle, and the characters are slaves to their own appetites, unable to mobilize desire outside of shopping and fucking. As most clearly illustrated in the analysis of the hospital scene, homosexuality is related to a failed heterosexuality in Ravenhill’s play. This is substantiated on a number of levels, not least of all in Gary’s pursuit of a cruel paternal figure to look after and normalize him. As Aleks Sierz reflects of 1990s’ British theatre, Ravenhill’s work shares an interest in the impact of a collapse of authority: ‘Young people have been abandoned. However funky and uninhibited, they are dazed, confused and boiling over. With all adults corrupt, there is little to relieve pain and the tedium except shopping and fucking.’49 As with Sierz’s reading of the play, there is certainly a lack of authority in Shopping and Fucking. But this absence of Law, as suggested by Gross’s earlier remark on homosexuality, is pathologized in and perpetuated by the representation of homosexual masculinity. In the play, self-destructive behaviour is bound up with homosexuality and the struggle for masculine identifications: the desire for the interdiction of paternal Law in order to rectify the disruptive homosexual subject, stem pollution, and restore social order.

Reality bytes: Faust is Dead While Shopping and Fucking dramatizes some negative conditions of consumerism, Faust is Dead is a startling theatricalization of the most hyperbolic nightmares of Jean Baudrillard. A postmodern rendition of the Faust legend, Ravenhill’s play was originally commissioned by Nick Philippou of the Actors’ Touring Company, and developed with the company during workshops in October 1996. Drawing inspiration most specifically from Nikolaus Lenau, a German Romantic poet who penned his version of Faust in 1836, Ravenhill’s play is also informed by Nick Phillipou’s and Stewart Laing’s project Brainy, which examined the activities of Michel Foucault in California, reputedly marked by sex and drugs in Death Valley. Although Brainy was performed as an independent show in Glasgow in 1995, there are strong parallels between it and Faust is Dead.

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While Shopping and Fucking depicts the most base conditions of late capitalism, Faust is Dead is less contracted in its scope. Ravenhill works within the context of a more powerful and privileged social sector, and he also appears to be more unambiguously critical of that group. The play features Alain, a French philosopher who bears an obvious resemblance to Michel Foucault, who is touring American television chat shows in order to advertise his new books on the death of man and the end of history. When he loses his university lectureship, Alain spends his time with Pete, the son of a computer tycoon, strongly intimated as Bill Gates. The pair travel the Californian desert, indulging in sex and drugs, in a manner which reimagines the flower-power hipster as a postmodern nihilist. The couple makes contact with Donny, a teenager using an Internet chat room, and arrange to meet him in person. This moment marks the fracturing of the play’s casual buoyancy, with Donny’s subsequent death precipitating a sharp critique of postmodern conditions. The centrality of Alain’s book, The Death of Man – which owes its origins to Foucault’s declaration in The Order of Things (1966) – posits the postmodern collapse of authority and troubling of centered subjectivity as fundamental to Ravenhill’s play. As is typical of his work, gay masculinities are central to Faust is Dead. My reading addresses the relationship between homosexuality and what appears as the play’s broader sociocultural critique. While suggesting that gay characters are not as explicitly abject here as they are in Shopping and Fucking, I argue that the play also constructs a relationship between homosexuality and a range of postmodern ills. This route invokes the writings of Baudrillard, as well as Foucauldian notions of subjectivity, power, and resistance. Finally, this critique considers how violence as self-harm affords homosexual characters corrective potential. The death of man and hyper-reality Scene Two of Faust is Dead opens in the United States where Alain is being interviewed on the David Letterman television show about his recently published books. His co-interviewee Madonna admits to having read ‘The book about sexuality’.50 The scene unites two of the most influential, if radically different, postmodern icons in preparation for a deconstruction of contemporary culture. Although Madonna herself is not on stage for a long time (Rude Guerrilla’s 2003 production represents Madonna as a cardboard cut-out), she nonetheless furnishes the play with cultural import. The performer’s early music videos, for instance, uniquely included a proliferation of marginalized identities and a plethora of subcultural practices.51


As indicated earlier, the title and inferred thesis of her co-interviewee Alain’s book refers to Foucault’s archaeology of the human sciences in The Order Of Things, particularly to his explication on the finitude of man. In this study, Foucault figures man as a complex conceptual figure, a discursive space opened by philosophy, biology, economics, and philology. His meticulous polemic suggests that Man, as ‘he’ has been thought about since the eighteenth century, did not exist in the Classical period, where representation and analysis were one: The profound vocation of Classical language has always been to create a table – a ‘picture’: whether it be in the form of natural discourse, the accumulation of truth, descriptions of things, a body of exact knowledge, or an encyclopaedic dictionary. It exists, therefore, only in order to be transparent […] the essential consequence is that Classical language, as the common discourse of representation and things, as the place within which nature and human nature intersect, absolutely excludes anything that could be a ‘science of man’.52 The modern period drew close to this condition, precipitated by the advent of the human sciences, and the figuration of the human body as an object of knowledge. Foucault charts the historical emergence of man along the following lines: When natural history becomes biology, when the analysis of wealth becomes economics, when, above all, reflection upon language becomes philology, and Classical discourse, in which being and representation found their common locus, is eclipsed, then, in the profound upheaval of such an archaeological mutation, man appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as a subject that knows.53 In this disquisition, man is conceived of as a space of knowledge, a set of relations between ‘knowledges’. As such, he occupies an ambiguous position that establishes him as both object and condition of his own knowledge. It is in this bound construction that Foucault locates man’s finitude: a figure who faces two directions ‘towards, domains of life, labour and language whose determinations are represented in his being and towards philosophy where the status of the knowledge of those determinations is itself determined and fixed’.54 Man’s finitude or death as it is expressed in Faust is Dead, relates to his limited external

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determinations and to the problem of characterizing the knowledge of that finitude in the postmodern world. It must be said that Alain is not exclusively a Foucauldian mouthpiece, for he also expresses ideas of the latter’s sometime critic, Baudrillard. In Forget Foucault (1977) Baudrillard dissociates himself from certain trends in French intellectual thought by castigating Foucault’s genealogies as attempts to produce the effects of truth while simultaneously denying the possibility of truth.55 Baudrillard does not offer clearly identifiable alternatives to Foucault’s concepts of power and society. Rather, he allows values such as mobility, dispersal, irony, and scepticism to emerge, notions that Alain espouses in the play. While the demise of the centred subject resonates with Foucauldian philosophy, the notion of the end of history and the impossibility of a stable, referential universe is more directly rooted in the theories of Baudrillard. His essay ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ (1981) is a startling evocation of the accession of the real to the hyper-real in contemporary culture: Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyper-real […] It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.56 Baudrillard draws attention to culture’s obsession with imitation, duplication, and parody, practices seemingly accelerated by simulation and hyper-reality, as exemplified by Disneyland. His concern for the maintenance of fictions of the real in American culture are played out in Faust is Dead on a number of levels, most explicitly through the representation of homosexuality as it figures in the character Donny. Before examining this representation in detail, it is worth identifying some of the tensions that exist between the real and the hyper-real in the play world. Alain emphasizes ambivalence towards these distinctions through a number of anecdotes that call to question the relevance of theory over practice, and the postmodern obsession with deconstruction over tangible materiality. One of the characters’ favourite stories relates to a Dutch woman who, while having lunch with a Japanese businessman and reading him poetry, is shot and subsequently eaten by the man. Telling his lover Pete this story, Alain asks who is at fault in this scenario, ultimately conferring blame on the Dutch woman because, unlike her colleague, she understood metaphor. Alain confesses to having been cautioned by a university representative for regaling a Japanese


sponsor with this story over lunch, due to it being offensive to women, religious, and ethnic groups. In response, he told his superior to ‘go fuck herself’ and abandoned his post to ‘live a little’.57 Living a little meant travelling to America to escape the trappings of bourgeois Europe. Alain broadens his politically incorrect brainteaser with a further analogy. He poses the scenario of a woman who asks a man which part of her body he finds the most attractive, to which he responds her eyes. The following day he receives a parcel containing the gouged organs. Alain then combines his disparate stories into one central question: ‘Who was the seducer and who was the seduced?’58 In light of the play’s titular reference, this question may also be seen to apply to Faust and Mephistopheles: who of Faustus and Mephistopheles is the tempter and the tempted? It seems to me that the philosopher’s question here is foremost concerned with issues surrounding subject autonomy and complicity. His overall comments point to a subject that is at once the seducer and the seduced; the subject and object of his own knowledge; the villain and victim of malaise. This double bind is evidenced in the degree of reliance that characters in the play have on those very conditions that they also repudiate. Pete protests against the loss of the real while pursuing avenues of protection from its implications, a strategy most notable in his relationship to media technology. He insists on recording Alain talk, and even Alain himself perpetuates this alienating strategy when Donny arrives in their apartment. Also, at the beginning of the play, Pete agrees to have sex with Alain if he arranges a record contract for his friend Stevie. He sings a sample song to impress the potential producer: Got a killer in my VCR Killer in my ROM Killer on the cable news Killer in the floss I use Killer in the floss Killer in the floss Killer in the floss.59 Pete’s lyrics express concerns over the loss of stable identity and knowledge, and the pervasiveness of death in the contemporary world. He qualifies his reflection by confessing that his father Bill is planning to release chaos on the world via a computer programme. In order to delay these plans, Pete confesses to having recently corrupted the programme with a virus while keeping an original copy himself. At the end of the

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play he rescinds his pursuit of the real and defies Alain’s claims to the death of man by making a Faustian pact with his father. He purports that Alain’s theorizing did not prevent Donny’s death, and that the boy’s insistence on reclaiming the real over the virtual resulted in his demise. In the closing scene of the play, imbued with scriptural overtones, not only does Pete raise the subject from death in a virtual other world, but a new paternal Law is instated: the virtual law of Bill Gates: ‘My dad built this house. Well, hundreds of guys built this house out of my dad’s … vision. And in my father’s house, his vision of the future, of perfection is realised […] I hate my dad. But you offer despair, you know that? And it may be true, but it doesn’t get us anywhere.’60 Although Pete ultimately surrenders to the inevitability of his life and succumbs to the virtual paradise of his father, his decision is not made without divergence. In fact, most of the play is concerned with his and Donny’s difficulty with living in the contemporary world, leading them to explore the possibilities of the flesh, and press the materiality of their bodies to the limit. Invoking the real Scene Fourteen sees Pete and Alain log onto an Internet chat room to which the former has subscribed. As soon as they do so, an image of Donny appears on screen: a naive teenage boy who evokes one of Baudrillard’s most troublesome postmodern grotesqueries, the body as an ‘object of salvation’.61 Donny confesses to his virtual counterparts that he used to hate his body, but is growing to love it through selfmutilation. When he removes his t-shirt, his philosophy, ‘you take the pain, you get the gain’62 is literally etched across his torso in scars. Donny proudly introduces them: ‘Look at these beauties. Look at that. Did it all myself. So come on, guys, you got anything better to show? I love these beauties, love these little babies and I’m feeling so good.’63 Alain is quick to diagnose Donny’s mutilation as a desire for ‘control over the self’,64 an act of authentication designed to challenge, if not remedy, postmodern claims to the dissolution of the subject and the loss of the real. Pete is especially suspicious of simulation – or what Slavoj Žižek calls the effect of the real, ‘the cobweb of semblances which constitutes our reality’65 – and in calling Donny a ‘fucking actress’66 challenges him to transcend his electronic mediation and visit in person. Pete voices his own fears of contemporary depthlessness and substantiates his desire to reclaim and affirm the reality of embodied experience by revealing his own self-inflicted scars: ‘Everything’s a fucking lie, you know? The food, the TV, the music … it’s all pretend. And this is the one thing that’s for


real. I feel it, it means something. Like suffering, like cruelty. I did it like you said. I did it for you. You don’t need Donny.’67 Implied in this attack is a suspicion of the discursively produced subject, with an assault launched at the body designed to verify the materiality of identity. In The Body in Pain, The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985), Elaine Scarry considers the sociopolitical importance of torture and mutilation in times of cultural crisis, claiming that ‘to have pain is to have certainty’.68 She elaborates her argument by suggesting, At particular moments when there is within society a crisis of belief – that is, when some central idea or ideology or cultural construct has ceased to elicit a population’s belief either because it is manifestly fictitious or because it has for some reason been divested of ordinary forms of substantiation – the sheer material factualness of the human body will be borrowed to lend that cultural construct the aura of ‘realness’ and ‘certainty.69 Scarry’s analysis directs us to think of the play’s violence as a challenge to postmodern uncertainty, but also, anxiety surrounding male identity. In the play, this protest accelerates when Donny arrives at the apartment. Pete and Donny decide to have a cutting competition to establish who is the strongest and the most ‘authentic’ individual among them, while Alain records proceedings on a video camera, in a gesture that suggests that even ‘authenticity’ needs to be mediated to Alain, and perhaps even the audience. Slicing his chest, Pete claims to feel ‘Pure. Clear. True’.70 Desperate to prove himself, Donny responds by cutting his jugular vein and dies. Observing this in live performance, the collapsed body and scarlet gush of blood are arresting testaments of actuality, a state acknowledged by Pete who attempts to stem the flow. Alain, by contrast, defers action and responsibility in favour of philosophical musing: ‘At some point, at a moment at the end of the twentieth century, reality ended. Reality ended and simulation began […] And we have to live this dream, this lie, this simulated existence.’71 His suspicion towards the recorded death is reminiscent of Baudrillard’s predication in Libération in 1991 that the Gulf War did not take place owing to the permutations of possibility rehearsed by the communications industry.72 Pete’s abrupt retaliation ‘Reality just arrived’73 is an attack on Alain’s (and by extension postmodernism’s) perceived epistemological and ideological indulgence, a perspective he substantiates at the end of the play by rejecting intellectual analysis for the inevitability of the subsuming of reality by the virtual.

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Foucault’s deconstruction of the enlightenment subject is related to Jameson’s notion of the problem of ‘micropolitics’,74 marked by a postmodern recognition of a plurality of subjectivities. This concern is principally foregrounded in Faust is Dead through the staging of masculinity and male homosexualities. Pete offers to kiss Alain in order that his friend might get a record contract, although he does not claim to be homosexual: ‘It’s not like I have a prejudice or, or a problem, you know … with the whole gay thing. It’s just like it’s not totally me, okay.’75 In performance, his dress and physicality, heavily encoded with stereotypical gay signifiers (effeminate gestures, tight clothing, etc.) attest to the contrary. This is further emphasized when Alain fellates Pete in the desert, although the latter can only perform when he records the event: ‘I don’t have a prejudice here. You filthy little weenie-feeling heap of shit. I believe in Affirmative Action. I believe in a multiplicity of sexualities within our society.’76 Pete is reluctant to claim a definitive sexual identity, and can only cope with intimacy by framing the event, or as he reveals later, by conducting his relationships with males online. Pete’s corporeal signifiers and willingness to engage in sexual activity with Alain suggest that he may be homosexual, his insistence on recording pointing to a fear of ‘real’ sensations. This is made explicit when he has to ask Alain if he (Pete) has ejaculated or not. Alain unabashedly pursues Pete. In fact, there seems to be a direct correlation between the philosopher’s dark promulgations and Pete’s sexual willingness, as if a growing (pessimistic) understanding of the world seduces Pete to homosexual activity. It should be noted, however, that although the representation of homosexuality in this play may not be as viscerally abject as it is in Shopping and Fucking, a similar link is forged between homosexuality and a range of postmodern ills. Pete and Donny are both victims and agents of this pathology. They do not merely cut themselves in order to verify the materiality of existence under the experience of pain. Rather, in the presence of father-lover Alain, cutting also functions as a castrating mark on the body that works to resignify homosexuality. Indeed, while not explicitly dealing with homosexuality, the mark of castration is precisely what Ravenhill explores in his later play, The Cut (2006). Fuss’s criticism of Freud’s polarization of desire and identification also resonates with this representation of male subjectivity, where Donny and Pete (as with Gary) appear torn between desire for the father (associated with homosexuality), and an identification with the father (associated with heteronormativity). Fuss queries why the sexed subject of Freudian psychoanalysis must choose between the two terms (desire and identification), contending,


‘[W]hy assume, in other words, that any subject’s sexuality is structured in terms of pairs? […] For Freud, the mistake is a convenient one. It allows him to theorise homosexual desire as inherently contradictory, since desire can only be for the other and never for the same.’77 It is this very confusion that is played out between the homosexual characters in Faust is Dead. Rather than interrogate or undermine this construction, however, Ravenhill’s play holds subjectivity in this same deadlock, where violent subjection functions to symbolize homosexuality within a heteronormative economy. Fuss’s critique applies to Faust in that the play represents homosexuality as an instance of identification gone awry – ‘identification in overdrive […] this overdrive is also implicitly a death drive’.78 Accordingly, homosexual identifications and desires must be painfully fashioned into utility. When Donny dies, we are initially led to believe that his self-harm has been unproductive, although his final resurrection points to the regenerative potential afforded by his actions. Pete, on the other hand, redirects his desire by forging a Faustian pact with his father, therein hurling himself into a postmodern hell. One of the most interesting dramaturgical devices in the play is the use of a chorus. While the original production included college students, the production at the Samuel Beckett Centre at Trinity College, Dublin (2003) represented the chorus in one actor who, like Pete, adorned his body with stereotypical gay signifiers (effeminate gestures, tight clothing, and jewelry). As in Greek drama, the chorus reveals an omniscience that transcends the understanding of other characters. It exists before and after the events chronicled, constantly commenting on what it sees. For Lacan, the chorus in tragic drama also functions to takes a certain pressure off the spectator: ‘Your emotions are taken charge of by the healthy order displayed on stage. The Chorus takes care of them.’79 In the introductory speech, the chorus confesses to having cried as a child for the state of the world, eventually learning to conceal its hopeless dejection from its mother: ‘I pretended to sleep and my mom went off to bed. And after that I taught myself to cry in a special way that meant she wouldn’t hear me ever again.’80 Towards the end of the play, the chorus admits to having once longed for Armageddon, though now, as ‘an adult’, it is desensitized to the world’s pain. Like Pete, the chorus surrenders to the inevitability of the world’s condition. The chorus also reveals that Donny’s death was documented on all the major chat shows, including Oprah and Ricki Lake. Further, it claims that Donny’s friend Stevie released a song which was played three times an hour on MTV: ‘Which seems to say to me that maybe Donny wasn’t so

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pathetic after all and he knew what was happening in his life and figured out a way to make something good come from it.’81 Like Pete, who ultimately shoots Alain, the chorus rejects the despair of theoretical rhetoric in resigned acknowledgement that the world’s Faustian pact has already been forged. Virtuality seems to prevail at the expense of ‘real’ experience. As Baudrillard captures so powerfully in The Illusion of the End (1992), ‘Our Apocalypse is not real, it is virtual. And it is not in the future, it is here and now […] It circles around us, and will continue to do so tirelessly. We are circled by our own end and incapable of getting it to land, of bringing it back to earth.’82 In the final moments of the play, Pete delivers a box containing Donny’s eyes to the hospitalized Alain, ironically positioning him as a subject in his own favoured philosophical tease. As he opens the container and peers inside, the eyeless Donny is resurrected on stage. He confesses to having been sent back to earth by his mother to redeem Alain from hell. The closing tableau sees Donny nurse the older man on stage. Donny’s resurrection, however, cannot be seen in isolation from his submission to an extreme act of violence. His rebirth is encoded in Oedipal signification, his gouged eyes an indication of castration. Donny’s efforts to affirm his identity prove useless in the new virtual order, where the Law is issued within virtual matrices. He also reveals that Pete is planning to subscribe to this new world order: ‘He’s gone now. Gone to his daddy and they’re gonna take over the world.’83 While Ravenhill’s play problematizes the conditions of postmodernity, most notably in respect of the collapse of authority, subject autonomy, and complicity, he conducts his critique within the context of gay masculinities. Ravenhill’s representation of homosexuality is not as sexually explicit in Faust is Dead as it is in Shopping and Fucking, although oral sex and self-mutilation do take place on stage. The relationship between homosexuality, the loss of stable identity, and postmodern dysfunction similarly remains a constant theme. Alain is a nihilistic philosopher who escapes to the desert to have sex with the young Pete. In the wake of Baudrillard we might even suggest that he escapes to the real of the desert, in his own search for purpose. Ultimately, however, his musings infuriate the boy who shoots him for his dystopian vision of the dissolved subject and the end of reality. While Pete attempts to subjectify himself through self-mutilation, he finally adheres to a somewhat transposed paternal Law by working with Bill (Gates), the representative of virtual Law. On the other hand, Donny surrenders completely to subjection, to the point of killing himself. While he emerges as a spectre at the end of the play, to nurse a


wounded Alain, this is by no means a consoling representation. On the one hand, it implies that a great act of sacrifice may be the only way of dealing with a world troubled by ceaseless plurality and virtuality, and on the other hand it suggests that even the dead are recuperated by the virtual, that the virtual recycles death. It is worth noting that in Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment (1990) Lacan claims that ‘suicide is the only completely successful act’, insofar as it marks the conscious assumption of the unconscious death drive.84 The action of the play also suggests that even though philosophy might announce the death of man, man will continue to haunt the virtual realm, perhaps as a bio-virtual, traumatic trace. This chapter has primarily explored how homosexuality as failed masculinity is performatively symbolized within the selected plays of Mark Ravenhill. In Shopping and Fucking and Faust is Dead, the male homosexual figures as both a symptom and perpetuator of a range of postmodern ills. Moreover, following Lacan, we might say that the male homosexual figures as the subject of the drive – which is always a death drive – whose oral (eating), anal (excretion and fucking), and scopic (pornography) fixations amount to ‘a violence that the subject commits, with a view to mastery, upon himself’.85 This ‘looping’ of the drive is both directed at ‘catching the jouissance of the other’ but also at constituting the object of the drive (the homosexual) as subject.86 But another cultural fantasy is also at play here, which does not just describe the structure of the drives, but which imagines the male homosexual in an over-determined relationship to jouissance. In an essay titled ‘Homosexuality and the Problem of Otherness’ (2001), Tim Dean draws attention to a heterosexual fantasy that imagines gay men as having greater access to forms of pleasure than other social groups: Gay men are often pictured as having access to forms of jouissance – more sex, more disposable income, freedom from the ties of family and tradition, et cetera – that responsible law-abiding citizens are denied. From this perspective it is not the failure to imagine others, but, on the contrary, the avid willingness to do so that leads to violence against them.87 Emphasizing the general danger of imagining others, Dean draws specific attention to a heteronormative envy-complex that sees the overdetermined pleasure-seeker on a road destined for violent retribution. In Ravenhill’s play, these heteronormative fantasies inflect the representation of homosexuality as a problem of appetite, satisfaction, and

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consumption, whereby an inability to incorporate and internalize the authoritative paternal function precipitates an insatiable pursuit of fulfillment through substitute objects, and the literalization of the Law as eroticized male-male violence on the body. In Ravenhill’s construction, the homosexual who disavows the Law is condemned to seek it out cannibalistically, even to the point of his own annihilation.

5 Wounded Attachments in the Live Art of Ron Athey and Franko B

In its emergence as a protest against marginalization or subordination, politicized identity thus becomes attached to its own exclusion […] In locating a site of blame for its powerlessness over its past – a past of injury, a past as a hurt will – and locating a ‘reason’ for the ‘unendurable pain’ of social powerlessness in the present, it converts this reasoning into an ethicizing politics, a politics of recrimination that seeks to avenge the hurt even while it reaffirms it, discursively codifies it.1 Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity Thus even when the body artists have tried to expose the relations between theatre, violence, and law, they have sometimes ended up accomplishing the opposite of what they set out to do.2 Anthony Kubiak, Stages of Terror In his book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, José Esteban Muñoz emphasizes the role of the solo performer in radical queer performance. For Muñoz, this figure is in a unique position to articulate ‘the reality of being queer at this particular moment’.3 Following the initial outbreak of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, which devastated gay communities, Muñoz sees in the solo performer an ability to press queer concerns into razor-sharp relief with great immediacy: ‘More than two decades into a devastating pandemic, with hate crimes and legislation aimed at queers and people of color institutionalized as 109

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protocols, the act of performing and theatricalizing queerness in public takes on ever multiplying significance.’4 Muñoz convincingly describes some of the ways in which solo performers might disidentify with heteronormative culture, but ten years following its initial publication, his position warrants at least some redress. Indeed, I think Cruising Utopia: The Then And There of Queer Futurity (2009) is a fitting follow-up, not least of all in its insistence that ‘Queerness … is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future.5 Nonetheless, the statement I previously quoted touches upon two presumptions that have prevailed within certain strands of queer and performance studies for some time that are in need of further investigation: (1) the idea that solo performance is more socially and politically efficacious than other practices or representational media, a notion which owes much to the fetishization of the ‘live’ and the ‘personal’ within certain strands of performance studies, and (2) that the solo performer is incapable of ‘failing’ in his/her dialogue with normative culture, inadvertently reifying the system s/he presumes to challenge. In Autobiography and Performance (2008), Dee Heddon celebrates the same aspects of solo performance that Muñoz enjoys, emphasizing that ‘[a]utobiographical performances can capitalize on theatre’s unique temporality, its here and nowness, and on its ability to respond to and engage with the present, while always keeping an eye on the future’.6 But Heddon is keen to impress that such performances are also subject to certain limitations, and while they may always carry unique ‘potential’, they are not always guaranteed to ‘do’ anything in particular: ‘Focusing on the “potential” of autobiographical performance, I recognize its potential also to do harm or to fail in its transformational objectives. This is precisely the liminal quality heralded by the word “potential”; it can always go both ways.’7 Heddon goes on to suggest that solo performance might be seen to ‘fail’ for a variety of reasons, with the result that the audience, and possibly the performer him/herself, is reinscribed within the oppressive power dynamics ostensibly claimed to be under interrogation: Some performances might well ‘fail’ to communicate, or ‘fail’ to move us, teach us, inspire us, challenge us. Some might prescribe to essentialist notions of self and identity, thereby further repressing or constraining us. Some might speak ‘for’, rather than ‘as’, while others might be appropriated in unexpected ways or might appropriate other’s stories in inappropriate ways. Some performances might use the politics in a less sincere way, recognising that ‘the personal’

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functions as a useful marketing tool in today’s culture where the personal is a popular and cheaply manufactured commodity.8 This chapter furthers the book’s analysis of masculinity by considering the work of two primarily solo performers, namely, Ron Athey and Franko B.9 Building upon the last chapter, this study is interested in exploring the relationship between homosexuality and trauma in the performers’ biographical oeuvres. The analysis considers how victimized dramaturgies of this kind approximate what Wendy Brown has referred to as ‘wounded attachments’, that see politicized identities become entrenched in their own exclusion. More often than not, though not exclusively so, I write on singular performances, not assuming their inherent stability and reproducibility, but their representative value for the purposes of examination here.10

Ron Athey and the body in crisis Ron Athey’s performance practice stands out for its explicit violence, chiefly manifest in self-mutilating and bloodletting procedures. Since the late 1980s, Athey and his collaborators have staged sadomasochistic enactments, with pieces like Four Scenes in a Harsh Life (1993), Deliverance (1994), and Incorruptible Flesh (1997)11 all featuring cutting, bloodletting, piercing, beating, figurative castration, and hanging. While some critics have responded to Athey’s work with the language of psychopathology, body-objectification, and in the context of HIV performance (Athey is openly HIV positive); many have assumed the queer radicality of his performances without interrogating what precisely constitutes a performance as either queer or radical, or how this might or should change over time. Certainly, as I mentioned in the introduction to the book, puncturing the HIV positive gay male body in public is significant in the history of performance art, but it is also troubled by limitations which perhaps seem more apparent over time. Mary Richards suggests that Athey’s work ‘underscores and parodies binary notions of masculinity and femininity’ and ‘offers a number of provocative means of resisting traditional representations of masculinity’.12 Reflecting the assumption that self-mutilation uncomplicatedly operates as a statement of sociopolitical resistance, Richards suggests that Athey’s performance work, in ‘using masochism as a key element, achieve[s] a poignant critique of the structuring mechanisms of patriarchal power and patriarchy’s influence on notions of fixed subjectivity, particularly desirable masculine subjectivity’.13

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In interviews, critical writings, and performances, Athey repeatedly states that damaging childhood experiences inspire his work, which were the result of growing up within a female collective and a fanatical church.14 Born to and raised by a Pentecostal family in Groton, Connecticut, who were deeply involved in the charismatic movement, Athey is very clear on the objective of his work, intended as in Sigmund Freud’s description of the analytic process, to ‘work through’ these early traumatic experiences: ‘[the] Grapes of Wrath darkness that was fatherless, an institutionalized schizophrenic mother, a decade of drug addiction followed by 15 years of HIV infection’.15 In performance, these anxieties are chiefly played out through self-wounding practices that are ostensibly intended to reflect and resignify the wounds inflicted by others. However, I am reluctant to concur with Richard’s assertion that Athey’s self-harm amounts to uncomplicated ‘gender parody’ and ‘patriarchal assault’. Rather, in this chapter I explore the idea that the underpinning anxiety of Athey’s work pertains to feminine identifications that connect his maternal abuse with his sexual identity and the performance of trauma in the ‘present’. Understood in this light, we might discern a strong misogynistic current within his oeuvre. In Joyce (2002) and Four Scenes in a Harsh Life, for example, Athey only self-harms when he has invoked some of the damaging matriarchs from his past through fetishistic drag performance. In such instances the misogyny is evidenced by negatively imagining women as threatening spectres without the presence of the women in question. To a similar effect, in Deliverance Athey primarily executes violence on the bodies of the female performers. Further, in Incorruptible Flesh the effects of Athey’s childhood matriarchs are aligned with the contaminating effect of his HIV infection, with the performer’s climactic self-harm marking the simulation of a rebirthing process. In other instances Athey’s self-harm unmistakably connects with issues of religion. While Christian iconography is often referenced in many of his live art pieces (Martyrs and Saints, 1992; Deliverance), so too is Dionysian ritual (Four Scenes in a Harsh Life, which might also be seen to refer to Gertrude Stein’s and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, 1934). When not representing the female figures from his past as monstrous via cross-dressing, Athey positions himself as a sacrificial Christ or Dionysus who endures mutilation in the hope of a second birth. In this, wounding may be seen to amount to the performative symbolization of traumatic (feminine) others, rather than a radical articulation of queerness, as such. And in this bind, the phallic mother, or her onstage proxy, is also understood to exert a significant, maligning influence on

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Athey’s identity. As in Melanie Klein’s writing, this mother figure is both an object of love and hate, ‘both desired and hated with all the intensity and strength that is characteristic of the early urges of the baby’.16 In my mind, this root context problematizes the queerness of Athey’s work, – or at least its particular ethical bent. Immured in the biographical, and entrenched in a system of selfhood, many of Athey’s self-harming practices can be seen to reify the notion of an essentialized identity, whose traumatic origin can be traced and worked-through in performance. For Friedrich Nietzsche, whose notion of ressentiment Brown elaborates upon, this is the measure of troubled identity over-invested in its own victimization to the point of foreclosing revolt: ‘The slave revolt in morals begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and ordains values’, whereas ‘slave morality from the outset says no to an “outside”, to an “other,”, to a “non-self”: and this no is its creative act.’17 Similarly, I think that the sacrificial aesthetic with which Athey works forecloses other valuable, politicized interventions. Painful past: Four Scenes in a Harsh Life Four Scenes in a Harsh Life is the title of the second part of Athey’s Martyrs and Saints trilogy, which primarily explores the relationship between the performer’s traumatic childhood and his adult identity. The piece begins with Athey referencing his Pentecostal upbringing, guided by his family’s belief that he had a religious vocation. The title of the piece, along with Athey’s opening remark – ‘I was born with a calling on my life’ – demands that the audience acknowledge the biographical nature of the work, while at the same time establishing him as the protagonist in the ensuing drama. Interviewed on The South Bank Show in 1998, Athey admitted, ‘Of all the work I’ve done it’s probably the most autobiographical.’18 This context in place, Athey sets out to interrogate authority figures from his past, by conjuring up an array of disturbing characters, violent scenes, and bloody rituals. While authority positions are questioned in this performance, they are not the obvious upholders of the Law. Rather, central to Four Scenes is the representation of female figures from Athey’s past and the performer’s subsequent effort to assimilate/exclude – where both terms signify a form of disavowal – these abject and abjecting others through the endurance of self-harming enactments. The piece begins with the illumination of Athey, who stands centre stage in drag, wearing a white see-through dress, and a wig. A scantily clothed female performer flanks him on stage left, whose raised right arm and back are pierced with quills. In a rumbling voice, Athey

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sermonizes on two visits he took to see a holy woman as a child, reputed to have had ‘the miraculous gift of stigmata’. In conclusion to this anecdote, he anoints the woman to his side and beckons audience members forward. Those who step to the altar-stage and are anointed by Athey collapse backwards into their ushers’ arms. Once three participants have been ‘blessed’, Athey removes the quills from his fellow performer and pierces them into his belt. He releases her from her bind and carries her body into darkness off-stage. Initially, one might presume that this opening scene is concerned with questioning patriarchal institutions such as the church. It soon becomes apparent, however, that Athey’s cross-dressing is less concerned with destabilizing patriarchy or heteronormative power structures than with ridiculing the attributes and practices of his childhood matriarchs. While critics like Judith Butler have espoused the subversive potential of drag performance, Peggy Phelan, speaking within the tradition of outspoken critics Marilyn Frye and Janice Raymond, has noted how drag can also be a highly misogynistic enactment, by fetishizing ‘woman’. In Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), Phelan contends: ‘Gay male cross-dressers resist the body of woman even while they make its constructedness visible. This is in part why the misogyny which underlies gay male cross-dressing is so painful to women.’19 The traces of this misogyny run deeper, as revealed in Athey’s account of travelling to see the religious woman who is recalled not to have bled on either of Athey’s two visits, compelling the young boy to castigate her as a fraud. His embittered childhood reaction was to take his sister into their back garden, slice the tips of her fingers with a razor blade, and do the same to his own, ‘to show her [his sister] how insignificant the wounds were and to make her stop crying.’ These opening recollections of female figures in Athey’s life are bound by the centrality of bloodletting processes. Athey more positively recalls an encounter with his sister, compared to the holy woman, by virtue of the former’s ability to produce, or have coercively produced, the blood he desired to see. This introductory correlation between woman and blood, culturally indissociable from menstrual blood, is a recurring motif throughout Athey’s work, and it refuses to allow female subjectivity to escape from derisory notions of abjection. Using self-harm, Athey exploits this association in order to incriminate his female minders. The next scene in Four Scenes is longer and more complex than the first, beginning with the illumination of a butch woman, with short hair and tattoos, on stage right. Her surly demeanour and khaki clothes suggest that she might be a solider or a prison officer. The performer sits,

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legs spread apart, smoking a cigar and slugging alcohol from a bottle. The dark setting, complemented by discordant jazz music, suggests she might be in a seedy bar. After moments elapse, a figure enters from stage left, entombed in multicoloured balloons, with only a pair of dark high-heeled shoes protruding from underneath. After some brief wandering about the stage, the female figure on stage right stands up abruptly and proceeds to burst the balloons with her cigar, one by one. The outburst ends with the eventual exposure of a large black man in drag – Athey’s collaborator, Darryl Carlton, who typically performs as Divinity Fudge. Suddenly, he is grabbed from behind by the aggressive female who grinds into his back before wrestling him to the ground. Lying there motionless, he is roused by another man who removes his clothes, puts him on all fours, and dresses him in a diaper. A monitor reveals the man’s back being sliced by the recent arrival, with each cut being covered with pieces of tissue, which are subsequently raised on a wire over the audience’s heads. It was this scene that provoked media attention in 1994 after it was reported that the spectators were sprayed with HIV positive blood during a performance in the Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis.20 Multiple layers of identity are signified in this scene. The woman is phallicized through the exposure of her muscular physique and aggressive movement. The black man is feminized through his drag performance, then degraded and infantilized. Common to this identity play, however, is a palpable hypermasculine constancy, reflected in the female performer and in the formidable body of the black male. But this is not a parodic enactment. Rather it seems to function to denigrate traditionally ascribed feminine qualities. As in the first scene, the drag performance here may also be read as an effort to conjure and master abject and abjecting female subjectivity. The bloodletting that follows would seem to confirm this correlation, for once the feminine is evoked, the cross-dressed performer’s back is cut numerous times by another male figure, and the tissues held up for viewing. Contemptible femininity continues to be performed in following sequences, with the action fading to commotion on stage left, where Athey writhes on a bed. His earlier recollection about cutting his sister’s fingers is hauntingly replayed in the present with a disembodied voice, while rumbling synthesized music effects a pre-Oedipal or semiotic gurgle, which imagines the foetal performer in a womb-like receptacle. Like trauma’s ‘incubation period’ described by Freud in Moses and Monotheism to explain the successive movement from an event to its repression to its return,21 this scene pitches past, present,

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and unconscious experiences together in a bid for resolution. And while this recovery depends upon a figurative return to the womb, it is by no means a welcoming space. Phrases which echo and repeat with nightmarish unease, such as ‘I hated myself as a child’ and ‘I was stuck in my own private hell’ reinforce the connection between womb and tomb and the performer’s mothering as damaging, even though Athey subjects himself to a comparable process again in order to work through the trauma incurred. As if in a trance, Athey stirs to wipe his body with a damp cloth. He reaches to the side of his bed, takes numerous syringes and injects them all along his left arm, before removing them again, an enactment that addresses both his drug addiction and medicinal dependency. Athey’s own recorded voice drones, ‘I wanted to slash my face’, and so he does, by plunging numerous steel pins into his forehead. With blood rivulets streaming down his forehead and arm, Athey appears Christ-like. He lies back to twist some more on the soiled cotton, before covering his face in a sheet. This scene sees Athey respond to the articulated childhood trauma by figuratively returning to the deemed problem source. The recorded voice of the older, present-time Athey, which interjects upon the in vitro state like a disembodied paternal function, infers an Oedipal trauma while reminding the spectator that the staged mutilation is a kind of rebirthing process necessary to resignify his sense of victimization. As with the crucified Christ which the pose references, the aim of Athey’s self-harm is to engender a form of resurrection. In listening to his own voice, the piece evokes Jacques Derrida’s claim that the desire for absolute presence ‘can be expressed as a will-to-hear-oneself-speak’,22 to suspend ‘the natural attitude and the existential thesis of the world’,23 with ‘attitude’ and ‘thesis’ referring to poststructuralism’s claim of primordial non-presence. In this effort to extricate himself from his monstrous birth bond, woman is identified as a spasmic, unsymbolizable abject, ‘the unspeakable condition’24 of Athey’s enactments. Herein the problematic bind of Athey’s work is again manifest: the performer does not wound himself strictly in order to attack patriarchal systems or decry the Law, as such; but to express a personal trauma which can only be overcome via repeated processes of self-wounding. For this reason, the self-hatred of youth changes tone as Athey identifies in mutilation the opportunity for self-redefinition, as expressed in the concluding words: ‘In that dream I stood strong. In that dream I was to turn my life around.’ As he finally grasps hold of an umbilical-like rope, to the echoing phrase ‘Elation washed over me’, it is as if Athey is reaching for his own voice, having performed a masterful control of his abject others.

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In this bid for resolution, Athey’s performance focuses on controlling this and associated disturbances. He rises, quicker than Christ, to bow to the crowd. These sacrificial associations are continued into the next scene, which begins with two men in long red robes walking on stage. They place a red sheet on a bed, on top of which they lay a young tattooed man who has spikes ground into his head. The two figures knit the spikes together to more obviously effect a crown. The young man falls back onto the bed and convulses, much like Athey does in the preceding scene. The performer from Scene Two re-enters, now dressed as a bride/nurse figure, complete with a white dress and veil. He lifts the young man from the bed to a bath. Making the bleeding man stand, he removes his veil to wrap it around his torso. This complete, he eases the man back down into the bath and pours water all over his bloodied head. The crossdressed figure then removes the spikes from the younger man and, striking a Pietà pose, begins to sensually massage the dripping blood onto his face. One might consider the scene’s gender and racial play, achieved through the Virgin Mary being played by a cross-dressing black man, to contest patriarchal religious narratives and depictions of who Christ and his mother were and what they represented. However, given the autobiographical context of the performance, the blurred identity of the Virgin character may well be seen as a dramatization of the masochist’s strong and commanding fantasy female, who in Freudian terms, is a mere cover for homosexually inflected desire.25 Athey himself understands the seductiveness of female figures who tend to suffering men in religious art to relate to their masculine qualities: For instance, in a new piece I do, Deliverance, we are often asked, why are the women always tending towards the men; why are the men sick and the women strong. I think of the images of religious paintings and it’s always this hard woman tending some broken down man. In depiction of women saints they’re never tended. They’re just left with their cut off breast or their poked out eyes, in a sort of more dignified state. Men are collapsed all over the place being held up by three or four women.26 While the dominant female may typically hold appeal for the male masochist, as notably described in Gilles Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty (1989), this allure is two-fold in the scene’s exploitation of Christian iconography, for Christian faith is fundamentally guided by a doctrine

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of regeneration and rebirth through suffering. The men who initially bring the younger man on stage, dressed in red robes, at once evoke Roman soldiers and queens. This identity confusion continues as they twist the spikes and the audience may wonder if this is also a conflation of woman as torturer/dominatrix . If doubts exist here, they are clarified somewhat in the ensuing action. The man who established himself earlier as a female substitute now reappears in bridal or nurse’s costume to aid the young man. When he removes his veil to expose his musculature, however, he is clearly male. Continuing by smearing blood all over the young man’s head and face, it is obvious that this is not a familiar version of the mother of Christ, but the hijacked image, reappropriated as nurturer-torturer. Via cross-dressing, the male performer grounds his own articulated trouble in female abjection, and exploits this status in order to symbolically ‘nurture’ the suffering man. Like Christ, his endurance of suffering will ultimately lead to his own glorification. The concluding scene of this piece is the longest of all, and it is seemingly concerned with Athey’s attempt to resolve previous interrogations of authority. The episode begins when Athey stands behind a podium like a preacher, wearing a shirt and tie, to all intents and purposes the judge of his domain, like the author-creator derided by Antonin Artaud.27 Once again, Athey recounts his childhood anguish before continuing to conduct a ‘commitment ceremony’ on the three ‘bull daggers’ (lesbian performers) to his right. When illuminated, the daggers are veiled in cocoon-like receptacles. Athey removes his preaching clothes, walks to the daggers and peels off their wrapping. The women’s bodies are adorned with multiple piercings and small bells. Athey anoints the figures with black ash before energetically banging a drum, which initiates the most frenetic aspect of the piece. The women instantly assume a trance-like state and begin groaning and shuffling about the stage. The naked Athey accompanies them dancing, and he is joined by four other naked male musicians. Two of these men carry hand-held drums and the other two, tambourines. They play their instruments to encourage the female performers to dance, and when the daggers’ energy wanes, their bodies noticeably inflamed from the friction of the piercings, the musicians encroach upon them, insisting that they continue dancing. And so they do – howling, jumping, and gyrating, like Maenads worshipping the Dionysian Athey. The most striking aspect of this section is the relationship construed between the phallicized lesbians and the male performers. Butler’s questioning of the possibility of symbolization through body parts

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other than the penis is useful in understanding the implications of this portrayal. Such a move, Butler suggests, in defiance of heterosexist discourse, would facilitate greater Symbolic access: ‘[T]he displacement of the phallus, its capacity to symbolize in relation to other body parts or other body-like things, opens the way for the lesbian phallus.’28 Butler is primarily referencing Jacques Lacan here, who in ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ claimed that the phallus ‘can play its role only when veiled’.29 Indeed, this observation takes on a literal quality here given that the lesbian performers are actually veiled phallic symbols – daggers. Butler proffers that disturbing the signifying relation between phallus and penis, in favour of aligning the phallus with the lesbian body ‘suggests that the signifier can come to signify in excess of its structurally mandated position; indeed the signifier can be repeated in contexts and relations that come to displace the privileged status of the signifier’.30 She expands, When the phallus is lesbian, then it is and is not a masculinist figure of power; the signifier is significantly split, for it both recalls and displaces the masculinism by which it is impelled. And so far as it operates at the site of anatomy, the phallus (re)produces the spectre of the penis only to enact its vanishing, to reiterate and exploit its perpetual vanishing as the very occasion of the phallus. This opens up anatomy – and sexual difference itself – as a site of proliferative resignifications.31 While Butler’s explication somewhat optimistically points to the possibility of phallic displacement, the lesbian performers here do not resignify its meaning. Rather, they are afforded a lower status next to the powerful, penis-flaunting men. Considering that the male performers control this ritual, and that it is undertaken in the service of ‘worshipping’ Athey, there is an overall sense that all women – heterosexual and homosexual – are denigrated by their muscled, penis-bearing counterparts. This reading of gender and sex relations in performance finds resonance in Jill Dolan’s seminal The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1991) in which the author claims, ‘A male nude onstage makes women’s lack – particularly when the nude female shares the representational space – more pronounced.’32 Although Mary Richards suggests that Athey’s work ‘questions whether the penis, with its attendant economy of sexuality/pleasure, is necessary for a “complete” experience of the body’, and hypothesizes that penis-play ‘makes parodic reference to the machinations and

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assumptions of phallic power’,33 the link forged in this piece between possession of the penis, phallic power, and Symbolic dominance is rarely questioned. Like other instances in Athey’s work, this enactment is propelled by an apparent will to enact and performatively secure this association. Moreover, these acts take place in a context already troubled by the centrality of Athey’s biography and by the collaborative nature of the work. Not only must the lesbian daggers wait to be unveiled by Athey, but they are goaded in their dance ritual by the male musicians, and seemingly prevented from slowing down, even as their piercings obviously irritate. Despite Athey’s homosexuality and HIV status, a phallic authority is asserted in his treatment of females and his centrality to all of the performances. Bloody redemption in Deliverance Deliverance extends many of the issues explored in Four Scenes, but as the title suggests, the performance is more bound to a regenerative tract. Set in a Philippine psychic surgery hut,34 constructed with a split horizontal stage, Deliverance begins with performers wandering about on the lower level, carrying wooden crutches on their backs, overlooked by a large man on the upper stage. Three performers surround a gyrating naked figure on the lower stage, before the movement is interrupted by a butch woman strutting centre stage from the left. Looking directly at the audience, she authoritatively recites, You exist in a dream-world where there are no absolutes. You talk of healing, psychic surgery and new help, but still you come to me not believing; still with guilt and shame. I cannot offer help if all you seek is atonement. Should I be the flagellator in this deliverance that you seek? You will pay something. Haven’t you ever heard that nothing in this life comes free? As the third piece in the Martyrs and Saints trilogy, it is no surprise that the opening statement of Deliverance is imbued with the language of forgiveness and redemption. Athey’s redemption is not to be achieved through prayer, however, but through subjecting himself to a variety of injurious enactments. His exultant response ‘Could I ever have imagined such a beautiful place?’ indicates that he is overjoyed at the prospect of his own regeneration through wounded investment. This process of deliverance is set in motion with two men being washed on either side of the stage – Athey lying between them. After the energetic opening, the atmosphere becomes serene and reflective

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in preparation for the transformative events. In light of the title of the piece and Athey’s religious background, the washing is evocative of biblical rites of induction and initiation, and the spectator is prompted to think of the Last Supper and the ensuing events of Christ’s Passion. This association is carried through in the prayerful murmurs of an unseen speaker, whose demands are no less severe than those of the first orator: ‘There will be no deliverance unless you surrender all that it demands […] You must come open, trusting, not knowing like a child. Be painful and ugly, nothing less will do.’ These lines pre-empt Athey’s own Passion, which begins when he is laid on a bed, wiped down, and maneuvered onto his hands and knees. A masked figure moves towards him, and extracts a string from his anus before inserting an enema. In literally purifying Athey’s faecal ‘contaminants’, the gesture also signifies the purification of other ‘contaminants’, in particular those relating to his HIV positive status . The scene also elevates the typically privatized anus into a public arena. It is worth noting that in Homosexual Desire (1993), radical queer theorist Guy Hocquenghem sees the public repositioning and reimagining of the anus as a fruitful gesture towards destabilizing the phallic principle,35 and indeed Amelia Jones has gone so far as to claim that Athey’s anus has its own place in the history of art.36 Following this cleansing, monitors are switched on above Athey’s head to reveal the mediatized action to the audience. In fact, multimedia of this kind is often used in Athey’s work to assist visibility. In this context, Philip Auslander’s problematization of the domain of liveness seems especially apt, as not even those present have direct access to the experience.37 It now becomes clear that Athey has hooks and ropes attached to his arms and legs, in response to which he screams and tosses around. Athey’s torture continues by having his scrotum stapled over his penis to effect castration. This is performed by a woman in military costume, similar to the opening speaker and reminiscent of the female performer in Four Scenes. With this climactic moment, the stage lights briefly extinguish, after which Athey reappears wearing a tinsel wig and an orange robe. The accompanying opera music suggests that Athey has realized the castrato performer that he refers to at the beginning of the movement. This scene is something of a reimagining of Christ’s crucifixion. In this adaptation, Athey once again correlates his own suffering with the sacrifice of Jesus. For this suffering, he is rewarded with rebirth as a burlesque performer. While this might appear as an amusing parody of the Christian story, it also remains close to picture of homosexuality mapped out in Freud’s writing. In this performance, Athey is literally castrated for his over-identification with his defiling maternal figures.

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Standing before a microphone, Athey seems not only to mock Christian teaching, but those women deemed as responsible for his victimization. This is evidenced in his representation of woman as castrated man – wo/man – and fetishized sex object. When Athey calls out ‘Was it necessary that I be castrated in order to receive this healing?’, his voice is charged with anger. Simultaneously, the statement suggests that selfmutilation has offered relief. Athey has mastered his traumatic others through withstanding a physical castration designed to have symbolic import. The performance continues with Athey suggesting that deliverance might be achieved through sexual pleasure. He begins by kneeling on a mat facing another man. Against a large monitor backdrop of rapidly alternating pornographic images, the men kiss, rim, and penetrate each other with dildos. As the sex show continues, Athey speaks into a microphone about a friend who directs pornography, another who died of AIDS the previous week, and the dangers of reinfection through unprotected sex. In spite of these warnings, Athey is provocatively defiant. Although he reiterates sexual prohibitions, Athey rejects this ruling and satisfies his urges instead, seeming to revel in the dissolution of bodily unity that he enacts, or as Slavoj Žižek suggests of the spectator of pornography in Organs Without Bodies (2004), Athey’s delight is in beholding the male body ‘as a kind of vaguely coordinated agglomerate of partial objects’,38 rather than as a fixed, impenetrable (w)hole. The piece is drawn to a close when the man who has been lording over events from above, walks on stage. He cuts the double-ended dildo that both men have been using in two, and puts a part in each of their mouths. Although Deliverance seems to take a detour from its Passion analogy, in referencing the removal and entombment of the bodies of Jesus and the thieves the final scene is more recognizable to its Christian inspiration. When the scene begins, three male bodies are suspended upside-down on stage from a bar. Once their bodies are wiped down, their arms are pierced and they are wrapped in white sheets. In turn, the figures are placed in black bags that are interred in shallow mounds of clay. On to each of these three mounds straddles a naked female performer. They each sit, facing the audience, moaning and writhing over the corpses. They also sensually rub the mounds, finger the clay and release it through their fingers from a height. The positioning of the women in this scene is inflected with the gynophobic suggestion that they are giving birth to the corpses. The psychoanalytic thought of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok redirects the work of Freud, through emphasizing concepts of the

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phantom, the secret, incorporation, and encryption. While Freud’s notion of latency paints a psychic landscape where the unconscious erupts into signification when repressive defences are relaxed, Abraham and Torok use the term encryption or cryptonomy to describe the way traumatic family secrets are submerged, or ‘preservatively’ repressed, and sealed off from one’s own life, in order to conceal the traumatic event. In ‘The Lost Object – Me: Notes on Endocryptic Identification’ published in The Shell and the Kernel (1994), the authors describe the process of encryption thus: Between the idyllic moment and its subsequent forgetting (we have called the latter ‘preservative repression’), there was the metapsychological traumatism of a loss or, more precisely, the ‘loss’ that resulted from traumatism. This segment of an ever so painfully lived Reality – untellable and therefore inaccessible to the gradual, assimilative work of mourning – causes a genuinely covert shift in the entire psyche. The shift itself is covert, since both the fact that the idyll was real and that it was later lost must be disguised and denied. This leads to the establishment of a sealed-off psychic place, a crypt in the ego. Created by a self-governing mechanism we call inclusion, the crypt is comparable to the formation of the cocoon around the chrysalis.39 This concept of encryption resonates with the entombment scene in Deliverance. While Abraham and Torok describe the encrypted as a ‘wound [which is] unspeakable, because to state it openly would prove fatal to the entire topography’,40 I maintain that Athey’s piece suggests that this unspeakable wound is woman, or the feminine. From waste to worth: Incorruptible Flesh As with Deliverance, the resignification of trauma marks the performative thrust of Incorruptible Flesh. In particular, the piece is concerned with refiguring Athey’s relationship to issues of illness, morality, and mortality. Not surprisingly, Incorruptible Flesh blatantly sources this abject status in childhood experiences, with blame falling on the shoulders of the women who raised him for religious vocation. This piece is also very clear on the purposes of Athey’s self-mutilation. The performance begins with the artist Lawrence Steger, Athey’s collaborator, delivering a manifesto of intent: What we are to do in a very small amount of time is to build another paradise, a mirror image of the real and the historical worlds. The

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task is to build an image in which the human condition is recast and the quality of life is brought to a plateau of complete and total reflection. This is an upside-down world where illness is banished, hunger is forgotten, the corruptibility of the flesh abashed. Steger’s prologue pre-empts a challenge to those laws that legislate Athey’s socio-Symbolic exclusion. This protest will take the form of a materialization of a pre-Symbolic state, akin to Kristeva’s semiotic order, which will privilege the sensual experiences of the body – ‘the drives, which are “energy” charges, as well as “psychical” marks’.41 Removed from the word-bound Law, Steger promises that the multisensory body of this world ‘will enjoy as it never has before all that it craves after. It is a body which will enjoy all the fruits of all the ages […] the maturity of strength and the decorum of old age. It is a body which is unlike a body. It is a paradox’.42 The plan is mobilized with Athey appearing on stage wearing a black rubber corset, a blonde wig, fake eyelashes, and make-up. His mouth is pierced with pins, the flesh peeled back to create a cavernous mouth and pouting lips. When jazz music is played, the cross-dressed Athey dances like a showgirl, before removing his underwear to reveal a stapled scrotum. In this unveiling, the paradoxes of Steger’s manifesto become more obvious. With a pinned mouth, it appears that the promised sublime body defies the Symbolic register’s logocentric imperative; the gender confusion effected by cross-dressing and figurative castration indicative of a refusal to comply with heterosexist proscriptions. Richards suggests that this form of body mutilation by male performance artists questions the totality and stability of the male body, which is not typically associated with seepage and leakage, unlike its female counterpart. As such, she hazards that the cut, pierced, or tattooed body enters a temporary or even a ‘permanent’ (genital piercing) liminal zone which may arguably be aligned with the feminine and its association with the flowing of various body fluids. In this way, these practices represent a rupture in the accepted understanding of the male’s bodily integrity.43 However, owing to the biographical information furnished by Athey, and to the recurring trope of mimicking female figures from his childhood, the performance is not easily subversive. Like other occasions of cross-dressing in Athey’s work, the representation may also be seen as a derisive depiction of woman as castrated and indeed castrating, with

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Athey’s ‘usurpation’ of the female form signifying an attempt to dominate and assimilate/exclude those smothering figures from his past. Athey hints at this motivation himself when he confesses on stage: I’m coming to an awareness that in a round about way I mimic the very foundations I rebelled against. For years I’ve tried so hard to reinvent my ideology, my history, my whole way of being, yet in many ways I’ve ended up just like them, the matriarchy of the poor white trash dustbowl refugee family much more than my conservative brothers and sisters. In the attempt to reconcile his past, then, I suggest that Athey actually enacts something closer to fetishistic misogyny. Sitting on a swing, now wearing a black Victoriana dress, the performance continues with Athey vocalizing the centrality of his matriarchal upbringing to the piece, by recounting the relationship in terms which associate the obsessive cleanliness of his female minders, in respect of morality and hygiene, with the purifying function of his self-harm now. He recalls having to help his grandmother with her suppositories and douching, and remembers how his sister had to endure similar cleaning, and relates these practices in terms of ‘three generations of female incest’. Athey’s cleaning is not sanitized, however. Rather, abjection precedes regeneration, a trajectory highlighted in the assertion ‘I get obsessed with rinsing out all the filth. I enjoy watching it run down the drain hoping that at next rinse, the water will run out clear’. While such a concatenation undoubtedly relates to the performer’s HIV status, it also connects self-mutilation with the exorcism of childhood trauma, the purification of bad blood in every sense of the term. In Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (1997), Timothy Murray offers a way of thinking about masochism as mimesis in the field of familial relationships. For Murray, all familial arrangements are produced through the introduction of the blood of the Other into the blood of the native, and mimetic process. Murray writes, ‘The mimesis of familial anteriority […] circulates blood that is always already as Other as it is natural.’44 For Athey, purification is a matter of familio-viral concern. His surmise that ‘In more ways that one, I have carried out the family tradition of cleanliness’ is another spoken reminder that his performative objective is self-creation by way of the wound. Once Athey materializes those troubling female characters in his crossdressing, his performance aims to master them further by transcending

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the corruptibility of his own flesh. This process begins with the performer lying naked on a table, his body illuminated by an overhead light, as if about to be operated upon. Steger’s voice intones that Athey resists his own abjection, with, ‘He energetically refuses to play the role that the questioners are trying to impose upon him.’ Suddenly Athey’s disembodied, seemingly recorded voice resounds, guiding him down ten steps to a state of ‘incorruptibility’. These stages also evoke Kristeva’s semiotic, a realm of sensuality which resists complete symbolization. The stairway metaphor that Athey adopts to describe this psychic journey suggests a vertical descent from the high rungs of Law and order to the lower rungs of the senses. The deeper down the steps he travels, Athey describes entering a pre-Symbolic world, with his voice echoing, ‘Your flesh shall be fresher that that of a child’s. You shall return to the days of your youth.’ Entering this terrain, Athey’s blood becomes ‘more than blood. It radiates an abundant transcendent love’,45divorced as it is from the Symbolic’s obligations, the reality of his HIV status, and also his bloodline. By the final stage, the voice of Athey describes how ‘Light has become the only thing present in my inner vision’. Through the invocation of a pre-Symbolic state, the performer engenders a rebirth of sorts. And this transfiguration precedes Athey’s assimilation by the Symbolic order, as his guiding voice – like the interjecting voice of the Lacanian Father – from present-time testifies. Here Athey can be seen to exhibitionistically perform a transition from abjection to intelligibility; a movement which seems to enact more than it parodies the panicked performative towards heterosexuality, identified by Butler.46 After moments elapse, Athey rises, smiling, to face the crowd. Judith Butler’s assertion that heteronormativity is a system governed by rules of intelligibility certainly offers one way of understanding Athey’s relationship to abjection in this piece. So too does the Freudian concept of ‘working through’. In the paper titled ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’ (1914), Freud addresses the problem of patient resistance in psychoanalytic treatment. What cannot be immediately remembered in treatment, he argues, is expressed in repeated actions: [W]e may say that the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it. For instance, the patient does not say that he used to be defiant and critical towards his parent’s authority; instead, he behaves in that way to the doctor.47

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Freud saw it as the analyst’s role to lead the patient through acted resistance to conscious remembering, and he described this treatment process as ‘working through’: One must allow the patient to become more conversant with this resistance with which he has now become acquainted, to work through it, to overcome it, by continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work according to the fundamental rule of analysis […] This working through of the resistances may in practice turn out to be an arduous task for the subject of the analysis and a trial of patience for the analyst. Nevertheless it is apart of the work which effects the greatest changes in the patient.48 In Incorruptible Flesh, Athey might be seen to perform his own working through. However, unlike Freud’s proposition, acting out does not give way to unearthing repressed memories here, but his recollections are presented as synchronic, mutually productive, and, of course, repeated every time the performance is restaged or documented through photography or film. Nonetheless, the piece ends on a note of resolution, as if Athey has overcome his expressed trauma. But Freud also recognized the reconstitutive dynamics at play in forms of acting out. In ‘PsychoAnalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia’ (1911) he gives further attention to this process, noting ‘[that] which we take to be the pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction’.49 In his paper on ‘The Dead Mother’ (1986) – a subject of certain relevance to Athey’s work – André Green also emphasizes the role of reparative performance in response to the loss of the living, but psychically dead mother: Performance and auto-reparation go hand in hand to coincide with the same goal: the preservation of a capacity to surmount the dismay over the loss of the breast, by the creation of a patched breast, a piece of cognitive fabric which is destined to mask the hole left by the decathexis, while secondary hatred and erotic excitation teem on the edge of an abyss of emptiness.50 More recently, psychoanalysts Joachim F. Danckwardt and Peter Wegner impress that for Freud, symptoms did not just index trauma but also restitution of the self: Freud’s view that symptoms represent not only signs of illness, but simultaneously the self healing restoration of health, seems to have

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been forgotten. Freud borrowed the concept implicitly from physical medicine: following an injury, the skin shows the consequent symptoms of inflammation, pain, redness, loss of function, not merely as a sign of injury, bit also as a sign of the healing process. As a rough analogy, Freud recognised, for example, that the tormenting certainty of being persecuted can not only represent an instant projection of one’s own aggressive-destructive responsiveness, but that the symptom must also count as an attempt at restitution.51 Given the biographical context, all of Athey’s work might be seen to owe something to the phenomenon of working through. But it should not be seen as working through in the clinical sense, but a theatricalized construction of the process invested in a performative mastery of the self. Athey’s repeated acting out does not mobilize the articulation of repressed memories, rather he asserts full knowledge of his claimed traumatic past from the outset. Perhaps more accurately, then, what Athey’s oeuvre amounts to is the repeated representation of a working through scenario – the acting of ‘acting out’ – where resolution is not achieved through the ‘working through of the resistances’, but via the spectacular representation of his suffering self. Betraying the other: The Judas Cradle Most of Athey’s live art is concerned with resignifying feminine and associated homosexual identifications through masochistic enactment (feminine and homosexual deemed as linked, through the autobiographical context provided). However, one of his most recent performance pieces, The Judas Cradle (2005), marks a different turn in his work. This piece is a self-described exploration of historical torture and suffering, supposedly marking a new, outward-looking trajectory. The multimedia collaboration with singer Julia Snapper incorporates music, voice, movement, and self-harm. A Judas Cradle is medieval torture device, shaped like a sharply pointed pyramid, onto which victims were forced to sit and endure compressed penetration. A real Judas Cradle is the central prop in this performance, which Athey willingly mounts (see Figure 5.1). Juxtaposed against this self-torture are extracts from Inquisition hearings, various opera librettos, and Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love (1986). In addition to these more subtle contexts, the performance’s pivotal reference point is American military torture devices, such as those reportedly used in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. The hour-long piece culminates when Athey straddles the Judas Cradle while scenes of military torture are projected onto a back wall. In one

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scenario, a man wearing an orange prisoner uniform, like that worn by Guantánamo detainees, wanders through a desert. In another scenario, a female prison officer abuses a male prisoner, in an orchestration reminiscent of the images taken of prisoners in Abu Ghraib. This connection is bolstered by the sight of Athey sitting on top of the large pyramid, in a manner that evokes the images of human pyramids also to emerge from Abu Ghraib. Although not initially clear, it is eventually revealed that the man featured in the projected footage is Athey. In a largely persuasive article, Amelia Jones celebrates The Judas Cradle, and suggests that unlike some of Athey’s other work, it is profoundly queer. She suggests that the piece offers an example of ‘erotic ethics’, and demonstrates an ‘ethics of embodiment’ that seduces the spectator to ‘its multisensual texture to reclaim us as bodies with holes: permeable to the potential violence and pleasures that surround and inhabit us’.52 Of Athey’s anal exposure in particular, she contends that ‘[e]xposing the hole(s) in the body is exposing the hole(s) in the self is pointing to

Figure 5.1

Ron Athey, Judas Cradle (2004–5).

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the ultimate source of human aggression on both personal and political (global) levels’.53 Jones continues to suggest that Athey’s ‘manly’ body is ‘brought to feminine excess’,54 in a manner that ‘dehabituates’ the body and recalls ‘a general sense of socially bonded suffering.’.55 While Jones is correct to point out that this piece is more outward looking than Athey’s earlier performances, certainly in the way it presses the body towards a radical openness that is not premised solely upon violent self-harm, it seems to me that its queer ethics do not extend beyond this dimension. Despite the fact that Athey references suffering beyond himself in this piece, productive engagement with any suffering subject and its violating other (other than himself) is foreclosed by his over-identification as victim. Instead, real victims of torture appear to be exploited in the service of representing Athey as a kind of transhistorical subject of oppression: he is at once the medieval torture victim, the abused soldier, and the onstage victim. Further, Athey’s potentiality as a representative oppressed everyman is limited by the heavy biographical context that he has furnished throughout his career, which I argue cannot be ‘read out’ of any of his performances. But perhaps more fundamentally, we might question the value of Jones’ affirmation of ‘socially bonded suffering’, if only for the presumption it makes on the transformative potential of empathic identification. There must be other ways of articulating injustice and instituting change that do not rely upon an elaborate sacrificial aesthetic.

Franko B: Trauma, infantilization, and self-harm As with Ron Athey, Franko B’s live art has been chiefly concerned with bloodletting and the violation of the artist’s own body. In form, however, Franko’s work differs to Athey’s. This may well be due to the fact that Franko trained as a fine artist, a background reflected in his preference for tableaux in place of energetic movement; image instead of the spoken word; and mainly the use of his own body rather than other performers. Franko describes his work with the assurance of a fine artist: ‘In a way my body is the canvas for me to make beautiful icons, and blood is just like a drip of paint […] the body is the canvas and the blood and everything else that is projected onto the canvas, that is the language that is paint.’56 Further, he explicitly compares his work to painting: ‘I work in a kind of tableau; I like that idea a lot. Every time I perform I am making a series of paintings. You’re looking at an image, the light goes off, and I appear as something else. My work is not theatre! You’re not expected to stop and say ‘when does it finish’?’57 In framing his work in this manner, Franko

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seemingly attempts to objectify his body, despite the performativity of his practice. Before examining discrete performance pieces, I would like to elaborate further a context for analysis. This can be done by framing recurring images, motifs, and points of reference in Franko’s work within the biographical context that he furnishes. The experience of abandonment and institutionalization which Franko claims to have experienced as a child resonates in occasions of maternal address, religious iconography, and medical practice in his work.58 These reference points are generally presented in a concatenated relationship to issues of bio-invasion, vulnerability, gender, and sexuality. Consequently, the narrative context for understanding Franko’s oeuvre relates to a traumatic youth and the impact of these forces upon his identity and performance of self. This crucial premise is expressed by Franko as ‘My main concern is the use of objects, my body with its own history and life.’59 In addition to the information verbally proffered by Franko, the centrality of his childhood to his work is highlighted by his selfinfantilization. With a bald head, pale skin, and soft form, he is babylike, seemingly caught in a war between childhood and adulthood, innocence and corruption. The blue hot-water bottle that he often grasps is the most vivid testament to his infantilization, as is an old rag that he frequently clutches. Combined, these features work to represent Franko as a young orphan, and underscore the importance of this traumatic legacy on his performances. Franko’s doleful eyes and outstretched arms in response to being cut, beaten, and caged all suggest that he is still something of an abandoned figure waiting to be rescued. As with Athey, Franko’s self-abjection might also be seen to theatricalize a working through process in the service of resolving these traumas. Franko claims that his work is not about sacrifice per se, but rather that it is concerned with making ‘the unbearable bearable.’60 Body, voice, conflict Frequently covered in white wax make-up, Franko’s body is the startling incarnation of the figure alluded to in Artaud’s ‘Saint Francis of Assisi’, who attempts to ‘dissolve terror’ through the invocation of a ‘strange Father’ in performance: I have only a face of wax and I am an orphan And yet wherever I go angels come To show me the path of that strange Father Whose heart is softer than a human father’s heart […]

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I am he who can dissolve the terror Of being a man and going among the dead. For is not my body the miraculous ash Whose earth is the voice of the speaking dead?61 Franko’s anaemic appearance foregrounds his blood loss and frames his body as one to be rescued. This sense of infantilization is also foregrounded in Franko’s avoidance of spoken language, a dramaturgical strategy described by Patrick Campbell and Helen Spackman thus: ‘Franko B […] closes his mouth as he opens his body.’62 Related to this, Stephen Di Benedetto suggests that Franko’s work is chiefly organized around a ‘fluid dramaturgy’.63 In the place of words (and in addition to his open body), Franko builds an auditory syntax out of techno-industrial music, the rattle of medical apparatus, and the drip of his own blood. The sharp synthesized sounds of his frequent collaborator, Gavin Mitchell, are privileged over the spoken word. Sometimes this music is no more than a discrete vibration. Other times it evokes a range of menacing scenarios from the clatter of medicine bottles to the spark of electrical machinery to the thunder of fighter jets overhead. Like the flautist satyr Marsyas, who in some versions of the myth was nailed to a tree for contesting the lyrist god Apollo, Franko presents himself as suffering for his act of protest. Franko claims that his refusal to speak is sparked by a society that insists on verbal articulacy, and that words can never adequately express the complete emotional spectrum of contemporary experiences: Society, people are obsessed with being articulate, always being able to express yourself; I don’t think that I am being very articulate now; no, it has nothing to do with being articulate, but with expressing yourself. Being articulate is not the same as expressing yourself, it is a way of justifying yourself, it is a way of showing that you are intelligent, that you know how to do something. I think that being articulate, in practical terms, is a way of getting out of things, a dishonest way of dealing with things. Why should you have to be articulate? How is it possible to articulate the sense of having lost something, whether it is love, people, your parents, or your innocence?64 Significantly, in the above statement Franko associates his silence with loss. This recurring connection between the loss of a parental love object, melancholia, and gender trouble resonates with the dialogue Butler sets up with Freud, whereby the former suggests that ‘gender

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identification is a kind of melancholia’.65 In light of this, we might also think of Franko’s work as being broadly concerned with exploring this sense of loss. Additionally, if Symbolic assimilation is precipitated by entry into language, and the concomitant rejection of the fluidity, motility, and sensuality associated with the female body, Franko’s verbal silence in favour of sensory affect may also be interpreted as a strategy of resistance. The musical scores that accompany his performances certainly contrive the disorganized, inarticulate rumble of Kristeva’s imagining. However, in many pieces these sounds are often threatening, and the maternal connection that they implicitly evoke (through context, title, or content) is figured as inhospitable. Symbols and images The invasiveness of systems of authority on the body is represented in a number of ways in Franko’s work. Most obviously, bloodletting draws attention to the Symbolic’s insistence on a closed, clean body, especially for male subjects. In a mise-en-scène dominated by catheters, operating tables, stretchers, wheelchairs, braces, chemical suits, and scrubs, medical institutions, and the control they exert over the body, are specifically referenced. These distinct institutional forms are united in the recurring image of a red cross, which not only dominates Franko’s performance, film, and fine art work, but is also tattooed on his body. In addition to referencing the Red Cross organization, the sign also evokes the bloodstained Christian cross, and a HIV positive sign, which draws attention to issues of sexuality in his work.66 Titles are also extremely significant, serving to fill in that which cannot be represented fully on stage or in language: his Mother, or an imaginary proxy. Many of the works are either addressed to a Mother, or position Franko as an infant. In this semantic fusion, Franko directs his self-harm either in response to a specific or imaginary injurious parental figure, or in a bid for some kind of parental intervention. As in the Christian doctrine of suffering, Franko’s wounding may be seen as a route towards a second birth. Reproaching the feminine in Mama I Can’t Sing Mama I Can’t Sing explores the idea of childhood trauma. Part Two of the performance, which I explore here, is constructed around a series of flashing vignettes, rather than organically connected scenes. A blue light that slowly fades into darkness illuminates each of the approximately ten minute long expositions. As the violence of each scene becomes more explicit, the light flickers, as if asking the viewer to question whether or not s/he really wants to bear witness to the enactment.

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Adding to this intensity is a shrill musical arrangement, broken by pregnant silence, which seems to forewarn a certain menace. With the release of a piercing note, Franko hazily materializes on stage. He sits on a platform in the centre of a deep tunnel, washed in blue light. After momentary darkness, he reappears, this time huddled in the corner of the structure. Darkness continues to punctuate subsequent expositions, which include Franko standing in the centre of the tunnel, prostrating himself on a stretcher, wearing a blanket over his head and torso, and posing sideways. This structure, from which Franko seems reluctant to move, is evocative of the womb scene in Athey’s Four Scenes. The action moves centre stage where Franko stands, wrapped in bandages and leg-braces, grasping a blue hot-water bottle, again like a child victim of abusive institutional care. After a period of darkness, a bandaged body is presented on stage right, flanked in the shade by two naked male performers on stage left – one lying on a stretcher and another standing at his head. The bandaged body is lifted and placed on a stretcher by two masked male nurses. When they leave, another two figures come on stage, remove the bandages, and reveal Franko’s ghostly white body. One of the figures cut Franko’s chest with a scissors (it is not clear whether this really happens) and begins to poke at the ‘wound’. Not only does this section demonstrate the literal power that institutions exercise on the body, the coming-andgoing of different people who rarely complete a task seems to decry an irresponsibility and complicity in the form of the institutional violence presented. Franko is the principal casualty of this assault, although it is technically administered with his own consent. Once again he stands centre stage, grasping the blue hot-water bottle, his face now visible and in apparent distress. As the stage lights flicker on and off, the bottle is sequentially exchanged for a drinking bottle and some red wire, perhaps symbols of progressive dependency, from childhood comforts to chemical and technical body control. When the segment ends with Franko spitting clots of blood from his mouth (again, we are not sure if it is real), the relationship between institutional policing and his performed affliction is vividly manifest. While simultaneously crossing his arms over his chest, Franko reasserts his status as a victim. The piece builds to a climax with Franko trapped in a cage. Most obviously, the image signifies how institutional authority imprisons, curtails, and animalizes its subjects. Of course, the cage also suggests a child’s cot, and given the biographical context in question, familial and institutional harm. In fact, the title of the piece quite blatantly directs

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the viewer to read Franko’s mother into the piece, as a primary link in the maltreatment represented. Under the uneven pulse of light, Franko faces the audience with a chain around his neck, and then with a white cloth bag on his head, his chest still bleeding over his white body from the earlier incision. Incarcerated, tortured, and blind, Franko stands alone until the nurse-figures return to raise his body into a wheelchair, and position it centre stage. These people offer no help, however, but slap his face before laying him on a stretcher and bandaging his mouth with red cloth. The piece comes to a close with the administering of an injection and the apparent sewing of Franko’s wound. Before leaving, the nurses spray his entire body with red paint, reinforcing his identity as a scarlet, abjected form. Part Three of this performance is also composed of a series of vignettes, broken by periods of darkness, and carried on the uneasy waves of synthesized music. The performance begins with the gradual unveiling of four separate images on stage: a naked man seated on stage right, two naked men on stage left (one lying on a stretcher with the other standing at his head), and a bandaged man in a cage, upstage. The uneasy mood is punctuated by flickering light. When the stage is lit once more, the piece takes up where Part Two left off. Franko stands in a cage, his head covered with red cloth. Under darkness, he changes positions so that his neck is chained to the right, front and left of the cage. Attendants move him upstage in a wheelchair and slap his face before positioning him downstage on a stretcher, under the gaze of spots. This appears to be another hospital scene, and beams of light scrutinize Franko’s body. Like Part Two, his bandaged head is covered with red cloth, his body is sprayed with red paint, and braces are fitted to his legs. Moving the body downstage, the medical staff remove the head bandage to reveal Franko’s face. Trauma theory maintains that the impact of a traumatic event is not felt at its moment of occurrence, but later, repeatedly, and somewhat obliquely. According to Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), for example, trauma might be seen as ‘the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, or other repetitive phenomena’.67 Such a depiction captures well the visual and dramaturgical strategies adopted by Franko B here. In keeping with this repetitive pattern, the second part of Mama I Can’t Sing repeats the hot-water bottle sequence from Part Two, this time with Franko in a cage. He stands centre stage, flanked by a young man in a wheelchair on stage right and a naked couple

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on stage left, comprising a woman standing over a man lying on a stretcher. Once this sequence ends with Franko spitting clots of blood, the opening sequence is repeated, with Franko chained to a cage, put on a trolley, bandaged and slapped. This time he rejects his subjection by ripping out his catheter, dropping the hot-water bottle to the ground, and walking off stage. As the music stops, there is a concluding sense that through processes of self-abjection, Franko has arrived at some kind of reconciliation with his aggressors.68 Resisting the maternal in I’m Not Your Babe While Mama I Can’t Sing is certainly violent and menacing, it features none of the explicit bloodletting of Franko’s other performances, of which I’m Not Your Babe is an example. While the aesthetic may be different, however, similar conflicts underpin the work. Part One begins with the sounding of a signature discordant note, signifying the working through of a tension in the representational imaginary. An overhead light, which shines against a cloudy backdrop of liquid nitrogen, instantly establishes an atmosphere that is ghostly, clinical, and threatening. When the light extinguishes, Franko is discernible on stage, his head a vague outline next to his illuminated body. Presenting himself as a sacrificial offering, he holds out his arms which are bleeding at the elbow joints. He stands motionless while blood spills from his veins like Christ (see Figure 5.2). After a few minutes, his waxy head and body are illuminated more evenly and more vividly. His body twitches and his breathing becomes shallower. After a short time, he falls to his knees, and later curls into at a foetal position with his eyes closed, as if unconscious. All the while, Franko’s struggle is mirrored by the irregular consonance and dissonance of the musical cadences. As his blood circles around his body, it is reminiscent of Athey’s in vitro mutilation in Four Scenes. In the performance series in question, Part Two took place one day later. Encrusted blood served as a reminder of the previous day’s occurrence. It also signified that the process was unfinished. Part Two commences with Franko kneeling down while clutching a hot-water bottle. With his bleeding right arm outstretched for the attention of the audience, Franko repositions himself as a sacrificial offering for the spectators. His gagged mouth suggests that he has been deprived of the right to speak. Following the relatively still opening, a series of repeated movements ensue, which see Franko attempt to performatively recover from the traumatic presentation. This process is set in motion when he drops

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Figure 5.2

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Franko B, I’m Not Your Babe (1996).

to the ground and prostrates himself, while nursing a hot-water bottle close to his chest. Although he tries to get up, he falls three times, therein sustaining the Christ-like parallel (see Figure 5.3). Moving downstage he lies on his front and reaches his hands over the stage edge in obvious address. When no one helps, he crawls away from the blood, seemingly in search of further assistance, but to no avail. As in Part One, this movement might also be seen to signify Franko’s wish to disassociate himself from abjection by being rescued. Although no one immediately assists Franko, individuals wearing medical or chemical suits intervene. One of the attendants binds his feet, Oedipus-like, while another attaches a meat hook to facilitate the suspension of his bleeding body above the stage. This mode of bodily presentation resonates with much of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari critiqued as the ‘dreary parade’ of subjectivization in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972): ‘strung up to stop the organs from working; flayed, as if the organs clung to the skin; sodomized, smother, to make sure everything is sealed tight’.69 Hung like a slab of meat, Franko’s body also references work by the Viennese

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Figure 5.3

Franko B, I’m Not Your Babe (1996).

Aktionists (such as Hermann Nitsch’s 80th Action (1984), which involved the slaughtering and disemboweling of animals over three days), and some of the crucifixion images of Francis Bacon (such as Painting (1946), which includes images from a butcher’s shop). But these resonances do not serve to figure Franko as an anti-subject, but as performatively selfconstitutive. The piece culminates when Franko’s body is taken down from the hook, and the performer is greeted to applause. Mourning and melancholia in I Miss You I Miss You begins with the thundering evocation of fighter jets overhead. Combined with a runway stage, with lights embedded along its sides, one might suspect that this piece is concerned with some kind of military control or policing. However, the stage also resembles a catwalk of sorts, down which Franko eventually parades. The addition of strobe lighting does not clear up the ambivalence, but it heralds the entry of Franko onto the stage. When he steps onto the platform, bleeding hands slightly outstretched, Franko’s body is slowly illuminated. The lights that edge the

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runway light up one by one, as Franko walks to the end of the platform. When he reaches its end, he is greeted by flashing cameras, an action that holds both the contexts of military warfare and the fashion industry in balance. Franko himself suggests that the flash of cameras in I Miss You are suggestive of ‘those machines which you see in certain institutions generally, maybe in the kitchen, or in outdoor restaurants, where insects are attracted to the light and then instantly electrocuted. It was like dying for me, the model walking down to the flickering light; except I stop’.70 Considering the background that Franko furnishes, it is not surprising that this explanation draws on the terminology of medical surveillance. The title also suggests that the piece is about loss and mourning, the recovery from which might be achieved through public displays of selfharm. As he walks up and down the catwalk, his blood dripping onto the white flooring, Franko presents himself as a victim of a range of socio-political systems, while also seeking public engagement with, or affirmation for, his abuse and marginality. Theodor Reik’s theory of the masochist as deeply exhibitionistic and narcissistic resonates with this performance.71 Walking up and the catwalk, Franko demands that his suffering be watched, photographed, and recorded. One might argue, however, that there is a double standard at play in Franko attacking the fashion industry when, with every drop of blood shed, his own artistic profile is raised. The blinding camera flashes and the media attention are testament to this. Perhaps, then, it is only this kind of narcissism – the gaze of others – which can fill the lack inferred in the titular ‘I miss’. Presence and absence in Oh Lover Boy Like I Miss You, this performance begins with music that suggests fighter planes overhead, with Franko lying on a stretcher, or sometimes a platform so that his feet face the audience. His fingers noticeably quiver before the twitches become fists. Through a clenching and release motion, Franko begins to expel blood from his already punctured arms. It flows in a scarlet rivulet in the direction of the audience, and gathers at the bottom of the table. As the ‘planes’ sound overhead, Franko lies for approximately twelve minutes, glistening in white and red, like a wounded soldier waiting for assistance. Like I Miss You, the most striking element of this work is Franko’s exhibitionism. Although he lies still throughout, his stark body insists that the audience focus on his suffering, and his alone. The simplicity of the set and the spot focus refuse to allow the spectators’ line of

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vision to become distracted. Further, the blood that streams down the set and stains surrounding surfaces ensures Franko’s visibility, and marks him as irrefutably present. Following a performance of this piece at the Crawford Municipal Gallery, Cork, in 2005 – staged without a soundscape – it was not the bleeding itself which seemed to attract audience attention (a number of spectators giggled), but the pool of blood that coagulated in a trough beneath Franko’s feet. Once the performer left the stage, a number of spectators took the liberty to approach the performance space in order to inspect the gathered blood and stained canvas. It ultimately appeared than the trace of the man on the canvas, like a latter day Shroud of Turin, generated most interest on the night. Of course the trace marks the fact of being, or of having been, in a way that live performance does not. In a religious context, it is evidence of martyrdom. Seen as part of an oeuvre repeatedly troubled by concerns over identity, the ending to this performance might well be read as an effort by Franko B to crystallize the anxieties of loss and abandonment into a still image, that figures the artist as a martyr. As I see it, this is constructed without irony or subversive effect. While Franko B’s work is clearly troubled by familial relations, positions of authority, structures of perceived oppression, and the implications of these forces on his subjectivity, he has insisted that the work itself is in no way queer or about homosexuality.72 Such a disagreement might seem initially difficult to understand, given the disorganized, decentred world that he presents, and considering that most of his work is related to his body and his identity. In addition to the biographical underpinning of the work, Franko’s oeuvre contains many gay references, imagery, and signifying systems, with the film You Make My Heart Go Boom (2001), for example, building on the imagery of gay pornography. As in the reading offered here, perhaps the work conflicts with queerness is so far as Franko’s violations do not easily figure him as dislocated, fragmented, or becoming, but as an enduring, centred artist-subject. Wounded attachments: Sacrifice and the solo performer Andrea Gutenberg argues that the desire to confirm the realness of the body through its use as artistic material, which characterized performance art in the 1960s and 1970s, has more recently been refigured as a will to politicize and legitimize the endurance of pain. As examples, she identifies Chris Burden’s Trans-Fixed (1974) (which involved the performer being nailed to the bonnet of a Volkswagen Beetle) and Bob Flanagan’s film Sick (1991) (in which the performer is shown nailing his penis to a block of wood). Common to both of these examples is an

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invocation of the image of the suffering Christ in the service of expressing the performers’ own particular sense of trouble. 1990’s live art has witnessed a bold revival in this representational strategy, although often more visceral and theatrical than before. Most notably, Ron Athey and Franko B have consistently associated their performance works with sacrifice. Although these acts may be seemingly irreverent and anti-religious, Elisabeth Bronfen warns that sacrificial imagery is always highly political, particularly in respect of gender and sexuality. She writes, ‘Literally crucified, Christ gives figural expression to the way all human subjects must subject themselves to the Law of the Father and the reality principal he stands for.’73 This is echoed in the writings of Žižek on the Christian doctrine of suffering, when he comments, ‘Christ’s death cannot but appear as the ultimate assertion of the Law, as the elevation of the Law into an unconditional superego agency which burdens us, its subjects, with guilt and with a debt we will never be able to repay.’74 In the wake of Bronfen’s caution and Žižek’s elucidation, I suggest that although the performances examined here claim to critique institutional authority and exercise a degree of gender play, they also enact the terms of Symbolic participation by performatively controlling male abjection. For Athey, I suggest that this is primarily grounded in a fear of feminine identification, and for Franko B, in the pain of loss and abandonment. The performers suffer through the agency of paternal Law in order to performatively resignify themselves against closely conflated feminine/maternal/homosexual identifications. In this process, the work examined here does not simply disrupt the normative through the agency of queer jouissance, rather male trouble is performatively appeased through the affirmation of the authority and durability of the male body. In Violence and the Sacred (1972), René Girard writes about the nature and role of sacrifice in society. For Girard, ‘the purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric.’75 In other words, the sacrificial gesture may be interpreted as a process whereby the Law is reinstated. Girard deploys the term ‘sacrificial crisis’ to describe the failure of the sacrificial structure. This can occur, he writes, for a number of reasons: 1. When the sacrificial victim loses its mimetic relation with the community by being too different to the group.76 2. When the sacrifice becomes impure (uncontrolled violence and bloodletting).77 3. When the rite is not believed in by the community, intended as it is towards protecting it from its own violence.78

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Based on Girard’s account, Ron Athey’s and Franko B’s performances are always in danger of failing as ‘good conductors’ of queer trouble, or indeed for mobilizing queer politics.79 This is especially true of Athey’s work, with the most noted ‘sacrificial failure’ taking place at the 1994 production in the Walker Arts Center as mentioned earlier. While Girard reminds us that blood generates a multiplicity of meanings, he cautions that not all blood can purify: ‘Only blood itself, blood whose purity has been guaranteed by the performance of appropriate rites – the blood, in short, of sacrificial victims – can accomplish this feat.’80 The failure of Athey’s sacrificial gesture was most likely related to a perception that the ‘polluted’ blood made ‘the artist an unacceptable surrogate sacrificial victim for a healthy community’.81 Of course, the rejection of the sacrificial gesture by the ‘healthy’ community cannot be disassociated from the foregrounding of the homosexual body. Such a status disqualifies Athey and indeed Franko B from functioning as sacrificial offerings. Rather, they are more akin to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the homo sacer: an individual who is excluded from civil rights, but who cannot be sacrificed, as sacrifice is a socially important event. In classical thought, ‘Homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificeability, and is included in the community in the form of being able to be killed.’82 Curiously, then, we might think that it is precisely this social position that the performers are trying to resignify. However, despite serious physical mutilation, these figures ultimately appear unkillable. The inviolable male If the performers fail as sacrificial offerings, even as they exploit this aesthetic, what might we take this wounded attachment to signify? For Muñoz, queer failure is generative, the site of ‘a kernel of potentiality’.83 However, this utopian possibility is not something I see in the work of these performers. Jones, writing on male performance art within a modernist tradition, enlightens this problematic best. She suggests that ‘the artist in modern Western culture is a quintessentially phallic figure, one who exaggerates the characteristics of the fictional unified subject of modernism (that subject Michel Foucault has theorized as modern man)’.84 In contrast, Jones suggests that the performativity inherent in performance may destabilize that centred artist, described by Derrida as ‘the figure of the artistic genius who is given surplus value by God’.85 While the live art of Ron Athey and Franko B is performative, the artists ultimately retain many of the phallic attributes of that centred, indestructible male artist.

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This ‘genius’ and ‘indestructibility’ are evidenced in the creation of a distinctly theological and subjectivizing stage. The self-aggrandizing dramaturgy is manifest not only in the way the performers, as divine authorities, direct all attention upon themselves and their particular plights, but in the collaborative nature of the work, which sees other performers assist the protagonists in the working through of their ostensibly personal or personalized struggles. In representing themselves through representatives, ‘interpretative slaves who faithfully execute the providential designs of the “master,”’86 the artists are always in danger of perpetuating the phallocentric representational strategies attacked by both Artaud and Derrida. Athey’s live art includes many performers in addition to himself. However, these figures – including those who self-mutilate under the sign of Athey’s cause – rarely speak. Neither do they control the action of a piece, as it is Athey’s personal narrative that is being publicly presented. Similarly, they are infrequently granted the spotlight. In the work examined in particular the performers subject themselves to violence and/or inflict it upon others, ostensibly for the benefit of the master-of-ceremony’s own sake, a feature noted by Richards in her observation that ‘Athey is using performance to achieve a different kind of ‘divine’ prestige but one that proclaims a parallel message and that still retains him as essential and prominent protagonist’.87 Richards also suggests that by ‘extending the ritualisation of his experiences, ordeals and visions in a way that gave him a masochistic sense of empowerment’, Athey’s performances strive ‘to achieve the confirmation of his own existence and the significance of that existence beyond the designations of identity as either sick or queer’.88 In enduring and executing violence in the name of their ‘acting father’, collaborators take roles in Athey’s personal drama. In this arrangement, the claimed and frequently presumed challenge to authority is reflexively empowering for Athey. Richards’ describes this relationship as ‘[t]he perpetrators of violence are subordinated to their victims, and are even described as being in obeisance to them, in positions of rabid worship the victims of violence are glorified by the violence they suffer, and are presented as well above their captors’.89 In this alignment, Athey resembles the male artist who serves the Law by enacting its disciplining expedient; therein ensuring that man remains the beginning and end, alpha and omega, ‘the origin of the production of meanings’.90 Understood in this light, Athey’s anti-religion is no less a ‘religion’ in its own right; his apparent subversion of gender binaries is questionable, given that he retains many misogynistic and phallic attributes of traditional

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masculinity in his appearance and behaviour; his anti-authority stance is no less authoritarian, with him in control of each performance. In fact, it would seem that Athey’s work is primarily directed towards the constitution of the performer’s own identity as centred male artist. The centrality of Franko B to his own work is ensured by not admitting many other performers on stage. When other people are included in Franko’s pieces, their faces and bodies are covered to guarantee that he remains the central focus of attention. They become mere sadistic representatives of a larger community, which perhaps unwittingly also includes the audience. In Extreme Bodies: The Use and Abuse of the Body in Art (2003), Francesca Alfano Miglietti asserts that ‘chaos is transformed into a rigorous performative presence’ in Franko’s work.91 This perspective marries well with the interpretation I offer here, by inferring that while Franko stages a disordered world with his abject-self at its centre, self-harm also works to assuage trouble. While Ron Athey’s and Franko B’s probing, piercing, and playing with their bodies seems to reveal a performative approach to male identity, this reaches closure at a point of the performing subjects’ indestructibility in the face of self-abjection. In her book Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century (1996), Maurizia Boscagli’s describes Nietzsche’s überman (as figured in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (1887)) as ‘unsutured and castrated […] articulated through a double moment of excess and specularity’.92 Her depiction of popular representations of potent masculinity resonates appositely with the self-styling of Athey and Franko B. The performers’ repeated survival of self-abjection – like the subject’s mastery of the object in the fort/da game documented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle – is also a moment of rebirth or self-definition through talking control.93 The men who emerge at the end of each performance, despite wounds, bleeding, and suppurations, are unlike the earlier victims; rather they are more akin to Kristeva’s figuration of the dynamized artist, who ‘in exporting semiotic motility across the border on which the symbolic is established […] sketches out a kind of second birth.’94 Although Rebecca Schneider suggests that the explicit body collapses the conceptual space between the sign and the signified, imploding across the performer’s body,95 it would seem that in the case of the work of Athey and Franko B, the sign refuses to be erased. Rather, repeated self-harm, and the endurance of that self-harm become the mark of an undeniable presence; the sign of a form which resists the threat of disappearance common to the performing body.96 And this presence is distinctly phallicized and masculinized in contrast to the earlier claims and representations. This is evidenced in

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the final exposition of the performers’ naked bodies, no longer abject but indestructible corps propres.97 By the end of each performance, male trouble seems, however provisionally, to have been managed, if not resolved. In establishing a narcissistic relationship to conventional artistic masculinity that exploits the phallic attributes of male authorial prowess, both Ron Athey and Franko B ultimately build up an image of the male body as an inviolable vessel with male subjectivity as capable of controlling the psychic intrusions of its traumatic and abject others as much as the body is capable of controlling its physical intrusions. In this, the performance of wounded attachment is less the queer succumbing to abjection, or indeed the generous opening out to otherness, but more akin to its stabilizing endurance.

6 David Blaine, Fathers 4 Justice, and the Spectacle of Heroic Masculinity

[H]e [Houdini] turned the perennial philosophical problem of scepticism into a performance art (indeed, street theatre, when he would hang chained, from a bank in Manhattan). And by making exaggerated claims on people’s credulity, by encouraging them to believe the unbelievable, he did something very strange. He showed them that the only cure for scepticism was high-risk.1 Adam Phillips, Houdini’s Box: On the Arts of Escape One can do a semblance of surplus jouissance – it draws quite a crowd.2 Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis This chapter examines spectacles of heroic masculinity. Focusing on the endurance performances of David Blaine and the guerrilla protests of Fathers 4 Justice, the study explores how male subjectivity is publicly performed as endangered, and suggests how the spectularized, public, mediatized nature of the work contributes to the resignification and management of that trouble. Unlike with the explicit live art practices of Roy Athey and Franko B, this analysis considers how Blaine and Fathers 4 Justice operate within a seemingly innocuous register of popular performance that enables their work to appeal to many. It pays specific attention to the manner in which the body is staged in high-risk scenarios not strictly to endanger it, but in order to engage the public in questions surrounding mastery, bodily integrity, and masculine authenticity. 146

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While different in many respects, the performances of Blaine and Fathers 4 Justice resonate within a distinctly phallic fantasy of manas-superman, wherein the desire for social recognition is played out through performances of impossible constraint and unnatural freedom. However, even though the performers work within this paradigm, neither Blaine nor members of Fathers 4 Justice expose themselves to such radical vulnerability. Rather, the men’s shared capacity to respond to social and physical contingency is reified, frequently in a manner that replicates the very conditions that the performers are expressly interested in challenging.

The spectacle of the self How does the self become spectacularized? How does the spectacularized self resist spectralization in postmodern culture? For Jean Baudrillard, the hyper-real and its characteristic procession of simulacra are not referential: they belong to a model of the semblance of the ‘real without origin or reality’.3 Similarly, a range of contemporary performative practices can be seen to ask questions surrounding authenticity, originality, and reality. These rank among the questions which enactments by Blaine and Fathers 4 Justice seem to invite us to dwell upon, seducing the spectator into a game of reality and illusion, in a manner that curiously reaffirms bodily materiality and psychic strength. While it is the nature of the spectacle to exceed meaning through the production of a proliferation of signs, given the centrality of solo performers to this interplay as it is considered here, we might reframe this excess within a subjective/psychic economy. Jouissance, the subject’s excess in signification, points to the radical particularity of subjectivity that resists normativizing regimes. Jacques Lacan not only develops this ineluctable dimension to subjectivity, but points to its powerful magnetism. In an interesting extract from On the Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969–70), Lacan describes this allure, cautioning that it can be performed, or affected, to draw ‘quite a crowd’.4 In the performances in question, a certain public performance of jouissance as spectacularized indeterminacy seems to be at stake, and this is articulated though playing the self as torn between the status of victim and hero, whose final position is ostensibly for the public to decide. However, to draw on a phrase used by Jacques Rancière, there is little room for the ‘emancipated spectator’ to emerge in the work of the performers in question, constructed as they are with such reduced opportunities for blurring the line between viewing and acting.5 Despite

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the public and sometimes spontaneous nature of these enactments, the male protagonists carefully stage-manage their performances in order to control their terms of signification. Writing on protests, demonstrations, and parades, Paul Allain and Jen Harvie suggest that the forms often stage a challenge to authority: These are forms of mass group performance that generally take place in public spaces in order to influence public opinion by occupying and exploiting the power of those sites […] protests and demonstrations occupy public space in ways intended to challenge authority, claim freedom of movement and expression, consolidate a sense of counter-cultural group identity, and reclaim a sense of democratic agency for the people rather than the State.6 Similarly, in Radical Street Performance (1998), Jan Cohen-Cruz maintains that such activity ‘draws people who comprise a contested reality into what its creators hope will be a changing script’.7 Further, CohenCruz claims that performances of this kind tend to take place in periods of social flux, ‘during or just after a shift in the status quo’.8 She continues, ‘When one needs most to disturb the peace, street performance creates visions of what society might be, and arguments against what it is. Street performance is porous, inviting participation of all who pass’.9 While many examples of street theatre or protest retain this potential for grating against the normative, the guerrilla performances and public spectacles in question here can be seen to corroborate with the status quo by staging the near disappearance of the subject, only to bring him back to life, in a spectacular coup de thêatre. In this, David Blaine and Fathers 4 Justice resonate more powerfully with Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle as that which resists dialogue among those who encounter it, and whose message might be understood as ‘What appears is good; what is good appears’.10

David Blaine: ‘An everyday hero for an everyday age’ David Blaine’s performance career began with street magic, showcasing card tricks, levitations, and seemingly bringing dead creatures back to life. Following appearances on the Conan O’Brien show, Blaine began to record his act live in front of the everyday public giving rise to the popular television shows David Blaine: Street Magic (1997) and David Blaine: Magic Man (1998). The New York-born performer was accredited with revolutionizing magic by maintaining a strong focus on his own steely persona, and spectators’ reactions to his showmanship. But it was


for his high-risk endurance tests that he earned international attention. While Blaine plays upon fears of disempowerment, dismemberment, and castration in virtually all of his performances to date – Buried Alive (1999), Frozen in Time (2000), Vertigo (2002), Above and Below (2003), Drowned Alive (2006), Revolution (2006) and Dive of Death (2008) – this chapter will focus on select examples that exemplify these recurring motifs. Reading Blaine’s persona against his performance practice as it has taken place and been mediatized, the chapter explores his status, as one reporter described it, as ‘an everyday hero of an everyday age’.11 Of particular interest is how Blaine’s body is positioned as both fragile and impenetrable in his performance work. In Frozen in Time, Vertigo, and Above the Below, for instance, Blaine’s body resists the incorporation of food and often liquids, while also practising a form of social detachment, or performative asceticism, even as he is publicly exhibited. In all cases, his body is quite literally fixed through framing – with a slab of ice, a pillar, and a small glass case – and even though the spectator is engaged in concerns over his vulnerability in these scenarios, Blaine remains remarkably composed and intact. Frozen in Time, Vertigo, and Above the Below On 27 November 2000, Blaine performed a stunt called Frozen in Time in Times Square. Broadcast as a television special, as well as across world news stations, the performance involved Blaine being encased in a large block of ice. The ice was raised on a platform so that Blaine would be easily visible to spectators, camera crews, and photographers. After nearly 64 hours, the performer was removed from the ice, shaky but alert, to greet the audience and media crews. While the event ran rather smoothly – until towards the end when the audience began to chant ‘Get him out’ – in the documentary of the performance Blaine is keen to emphasize the arduous nature of the task. Recalling how even doctors warned him not to follow through with it, Blaine reveals how it became ‘a self-imposed torture, like a living hell […] nobody had prepared me for the mental difficulties I was to face’.12 Further, not only were celebrities present during the performance to afford it a glamorous edge, but on the documentary Kevin Spacey is interviewed to affirm Blaine’s project, by comparing it to his more challenging theatrical roles: ‘What people don’t really believe is that he’s actually going to be in the ice for the full three days […] I did The Iceman Cometh, but I only did that for four and a half hours per night’.13 Moreover, what stands out here is Blaine’s insistence that he is highly visible during the performances, and that the public engages with his

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situation. Such was the reasoning for getting the ice specially delivered from Alaska: ‘The reason we got the ice from Alaska was because when it freezes at cold temperature […] everybody can see right through it. I didn’t want anybody to doubt that I was there’.14 On 22 May 2002, Blaine was raised onto a pillar measuring 27 m in height, and 55.88 cm in width, in Bryant Park, New York City. He was to remain standing on the pillar for the next 35 hours. Vertigo, the title of this performance piece, referred to the intense feelings of dizziness and anxiety that Blaine was likely to experience at such a height, and it also captured the sensation that the viewing public were invited to feel as they looked up at, or thought about, Blaine’s actions. In the documentary which followed Vertigo, Blaine suggests that his primary inspiration for the performance was a group of fifth-century ascetics called Stylites. Saint Simeon was the founder of this group, and he is noted for spending 37 years on a small platform on top of a pillar near Aleppo in Syria in order to separate himself from ordinary people and to grow closer to God. As Blaine summarizes, ‘The Stylites stood on pillars as an act of protest against the decadence of their time. St Simeon believed this brought you closer to God’.15 In Vertigo, Blaine aspires to repeat this form of social detachment, which is also a form of elevation, in order to assert his control of his body, mind, and the world around him. In one scene in the documentary, he reflects, ‘I want to be alone in the world, just me and no other living thing. Myself, alone. No culture, no politics, no time, no breath. And I won’t have nothing to be afraid of’.16 (See Figure 6.1.) One year later, on 5 September 2003, Blaine began one of his most discussed performances to date. Above the Below involved Blaine being sealed inside a transparent Plexiglas case, suspended 9 m in the air on the South Bank of the River Thames in London. The small case, measuring approximately 0.9 m x 0.9 m x 2.1 m had a camera installed on the inside, to allow those present, and those watching on television, the opportunity of getting the best possible close-up view of Blaine. Blaine was to stay in the case for the next 44 days, without eating any food, and only drinking 4.5 litres of water per day. He emerged on 19 October 2003, addressing the crowd with ‘I love you all’, before being hospitalized. All of these performances took place over a number of years and in a variety of locations. During each event, public interest spread beyond the immediate environs through media attention. While the specific dynamics of the execution and reception of the events may have differed, Blaine and his team staged the performances in a remarkably


Figure 6.1

David Blaine, Vertigo (2002).

similar fashion. Most notably, each piece was presented as a time-based endurance practice that involved the public elevation and display of the suffering artist in a manner that expertly managed that presentation of selfhood. Perhaps best summed up by Blaine himself in the documentary of Frozen in Time: ‘Some people think I have a death wish. For me, when I confront death is when I’m most alive’.

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Critical composure Commenting on Blaine’s remarkable composure in performance, particularly in Above the Below, Anita Biressi suggests that he resembles the classical, antiquarian statue that is raised up and set apart from ordinary people.17 For unlike those who behold the spectacle, who are incapable of managing their vulnerability with such efficiency, Blaine’s body is raised up as a source of wonder and awe. Indeed, in a televised interview preceding Above the Below, Blaine suggests that one of his desired outcomes was that his spectators would suffer too, given that this is something he has had to go through in the past: ‘I love making people suffer because ‘cause I had to watch it all my life […] I saw everybody that I know, my mother, my real dad, drop dead in front of my face’.18 In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White explore the distinction between the classical body, and the open, grotesque forms of the carnival sphere. They argue, [T]he classical statue was always on a plinth which meant that it was elevated, static and monumental. In one simple part of the plinth or pedestal the classical body signaled a whole different somatic conception from that of the grotesque body which was usually multiple (Bosch, Bruegel), teeming, always already part of a throng. By contrast, the classical statue is the radiant centre of a transcendental individualism, ‘put on a pedestal’, raised above the viewer and the commonality and anticipating passive admiration from below. We gaze up at the figure and wonder.19 In a sense, this is also the invitation posed by Blaine’s body to the spectators in these enactments. Owing to the fact that he does not openly display any obvious signs of abjection, and medical professionals carefully monitor his physical health, the spectator is primarily invited to ‘gaze up’ at his superhuman achievement. Stallybrass and White describe the classical statue’s invitation thus: We are placed by it as spectators to an instant – frozen yet apparently universal – of epic or tragic time. The presence of the status is a problematic presence in that it immediately retroflects us to the heroic past, it is a memento classici for which we are the eternal latecomers and for whom meditative imitation is the appropriate contrition.20


Similarly, Blaine’s heroism is reinforced in his public performances, and like the classical body which ‘keeps its distance’,21 he always manages to escape close scrutiny, even in the presence of crowds and technological mediation. Moreover, Blaine even manages to sexualize and eroticize his own body, frequently exposing his muscled physique during the enactments and documentary footage. Writing on the nineteenth-century circus performance in Australia, Peta Tait suggests that the transitory nature of the form and the event evoked a social fantasy of liberation from regulatory systems of order. For female performers in particular, Tait maintains that the circus provided an area for public displays of the body that defied social conventions and allowed women performers to explore a freedom of movement that was prohibited elsewhere […] Aerial acts in particular reversed the social practice of restricting the behaviours of female bodies from explicit demonstrations of physicality.22 In Tait’s reading, female aerial performers in particular transgressed ‘the fixed order of gender behaviour imposed on social bodies’,23 not least of all because mastery was understood to belong to a male order. Further to this, aerial performers can be seen to provide the audience with a glimpse ‘of freedom beyond performative states of identity’.24 In this respect, the aerialist is a performer of excess who ‘momentarily acts out the desire of physical bodies to defy the gravity of social categories, before returning to familiar territory when he or she halts the free fall and reinstates gender identity and the material order of bodies’.25 Following on, inversely, we might say that Blaine’s spectacular aerial displays do little to draw attention to his vulnerability, but bolster the association between masculinity and the mastery of self and the laws of nature. Making the public suffer As already mentioned, Blaine has suggested that one of the objectives of his work is to make the public suffer.26 On the issue, Blaine’s Above the Below is especially interesting. Of all the pieces he has performed, the extended temporality of his elevated isolation and starvation in this piece – which was designed to outdo Jesus’s isolation for 40 days and 40 nights in the desert – allowed for the impact of the performer’s endurance to visibly register on his body over the course of the period. As the days went by, many people began to gather under Blaine’s transparent container. The scene became a buzzing site for picnics and

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photo opportunities, television broadcasts, and public interviews. The atmosphere was not always convivial, as some people threw eggs at the suspended Blaine in an expression of disapproval, or less considered revelry. On another occasion, a burger was lifted to his cage as a taunt. As the energy built up on the ground, however, Blaine managed to calmly conduct himself above the people, discreetly performing his toileting and medical necessities. We might say that as Blaine expertly managed himself, the people below became much more disorderly. Biressi questions Blaine’s status as a victim in this performance, by stressing that his starvation was preventable. Emphasizing the integrity of his body throughout, she observes that Blaine had ‘no wounds to show to his audience, no grotesque body as a signifier of damage’.27 She goes on to stress that if this is pain, then it is ‘pain without the markers of indignity of pain, bodily trauma with its offensiveness heavily masked, suffering of an elevated kind’.28 Even though Blaine’s suffering may have appeared ‘elevated’ in more ways than one, his weight loss certainly marked him as someone who had experienced starvation. While his previous endurances in Frozen in Time and Vertigo revealed some momentary effects – visible disorientation as well as reported shock and concussion usually monitored and treated onsite by medics – the impact of starvation on Blaine’s body was given even more detailed, scientific consideration on this occasion. A paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine documented the impact of Blaine’s weight loss on his health, revealing that he lost 25 per cent of his original body weight, while claiming that his greatest danger was re-feeding.29 Unlike some of the body practices discussed in the previous chapter then, Blaine’s suffering seemed to be scientifically authenticated. While science may have intervened to monitor and interpret Blaine’s performance, the event seems indebted to Franz Kafka’s short story The Hunger Artist (1922) for its inspiration. In this piece, the male protagonist – a circus performer – starves himself in order that he might be glorified. He places himself in a visible location so that people might see him, although even then he could not be watched constantly: ‘No one could possibly watch the hunger artist continuously, day and night, and so no one could produce first-hard evidence that the fast had really been vigorous and continuous; only the artist himself could know that, he was therefore bound to be the sole completely satisfied spectator of his own fast’.30 In Above the Below, Blaine seems to challenge this problem of visibility by installing a camera in his cage, although even then his more intimate procedures are unavailable to us. And yet, there is


still something of ‘the sole completely satisfied spectator’ to Blaine. For even though the viewing public is drawn to his performances, curiosity is always tempered with high doses of cynicism. The protagonist in The Hunger Artist experiences something of this too, and even though he continues to starve himself, and recuperate, he senses that no one really takes his trouble seriously; that is, his struggle for self-creation through endurance: ‘So he lived for many years, with small regular intervals of recuperation, in visible glory, honored by the world, yet in spite of that troubled in spirit, and all the more troubled because no one would take his trouble seriously’.31 Even though Blaine stages public acts of endurance, he does so in a manner that allows him to retain an essentially masculine identity. Although the public is engaged in questions of vulnerability and illusion, Blaine’s performance of jouissance is contained by an almost classical mode of self-presentation which serves to reify his bodily and psychic integrity.

Fathers 4 Justice: Superhero dads While David Blaine is a self-identified performer, Fathers 4 Justice is a UK-based fathers’ rights pressure group. Formally founded by Matt O’Connor in 2003, the group has since developed bases in the Netherlands and Canada in 2004, and in the United States and Italy in 2005. While the organization was temporarily disbanded in 2006 following suggestions that some members plotted to kidnap Tony Blair’s son, and has since been relatively inert, during its most active period the group frequently gained media attention for campaigning for father’s rights in a variety of well-known locations throughout London. Unlike similarly invested groups, Fathers 4 Justice operates within a style of guerrilla performance to highlight their perceived discrimination within social and legal systems. Of particular interest to this chapter is not so much the legitimacy of the Fathers 4 Justice cause; indeed, in many ways, the group has been accredited with highlighting real shortcomings in the provision of father’s rights in Britain. Rather, what interests me here is the manner in which the group plays out fantasies of empowerment through appearing as comic book heroes such as Spiderman, Superman, and Batman and Robin during their protests.32 With reference to the socalled Tower Bridge Protest (2003), House of Commons Protest (2004), and Buckingham Palace Protest (2004), the chapter examines how the fathers resignify their attested marginalization and emasculation by filtering

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fantasies of phallic masculinity through the figure of the animated superhero. While on one level we might think that a man dressing up as a superhero somehow exposes his inability to approximate such an embodiment, in the protests by Fathers 4 Justice this very ambiguity is harnessed in the service of appealing to the public. Much of the rhetoric that supports this performance aesthetic is outlined in Matt O’Connor’s Fathers 4 Justice: The Inside Story (2007). In this book, founder O’Connor charts the activities of the group, in a manner that outlines the organizations aims, achievements, and the public response, but more interestingly still the group’s conception of their performance of self. First, O’Connor is keen to point out the importance of theatricality to the group’s activities. On this he maintains, ‘Campaigning can be serious fun. It can also be theatrical and showbizzy’.33 Advising on how to conduct a protest, he writes, Make it eye-poppingly theatrical: Real life can be duller than watching a party political protest. Why else would the nation want to live vicariously through reality TV shows? Everyone likes a little dramatic licence and it’s true that a picture speaks a thousand words. Create something that you know newspapers will want to print. The brighter your plumage, the better your coverage.34 While bright plumage is the ideal mode of self-presentation, equally important is the kind of man – ‘the fully certifiable activist’ who is ‘totally fearless to the point of insanity and beyond’.35 While O’Connor’s book reads like a handbook of macho male stereotypes, often with misogynistic overtones, what stands out is less the activities and the achievements of the group, but rather the way modes of presentation, and particularly dress, are understood to express a particular kind of masculinity. This idea receives pointed development in one section of the book in particular, when O’Connor describes the process of dressing up as a superhero: We discovered that it’s all very well coming up with themed campaigns – men in tights, Lycra lads and caped crusaders – but the harsh reality is that being a fully unpaid superhero requires one secret ingredient: balls. Big brass balls in the summer. Pingpong balls in the autumn. And marbles in the winter. And at the risk of sounding sexist, embarking on a superhero safari is man’s work and once you’ve read this, you’ll be thankful for that.36


Interestingly, despite the somewhat parodic look of the men dressed as superheroes, what becomes the real mark of the men’s masculinity for O’Connor is their ability to deal with the appearance of their penises in the tight costumes. Further to this, he stresses the value of being able to handle the physicality of the protests and centralizes the importance of being able to deal with the humiliation that may come with such self-exposure: As you throw your cape over your shoulder and unleash your inner hero, you’ll be struggling against the enemies of equality while facing extreme discomfort and fear in a pseudo-Jackass act of exhibitionism, whether it be scaling a tall building, clinging to a crane, or simply bringing the traffic to a standstill. But worse, far worse than that is the humiliation that comes with the costumes you have to wear.37 O’Connor continues to describe in detail the process of donning a ‘supersuit’, in a manner that once again underscores the importance of appearing as macho as possible. In particular, he describes how members might enhance the appearance of their penises: 1 Use talc. 2 Put a sock on it: It’s generally fucking cold up there. By the time the wind chill hits freezing, your bits will have shrunk to the size of raisins and your knob will have curled up for some self-loving and warmth. It’s long been suspected that superheroes ‘pad out’ their lunchboxes to compensate, and I can confirm that cosmetic sockenhancements were not unknown in F4J demos.38 Given the centrality of superheroes to the Fathers 4 Justice performance, in particular Batman and Robin, we might consider the construction of these characters in a wider context. Writing the masculinity in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), for instance, Calvin Thomas suggests that ‘Because it deals with a male “superhero” Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman inevitably thematizes certain issues concerning masculinity. Specifically, Burton’s film foregrounds an anxious relation among “armored” masculine subjectivity’.39 Thomas relates this ‘masculinist’ anxiety to the mechanisms of photographic and cinematic representation, positioning it as ‘a constitutive unease about mass cultural “technology of abjection” that both threatens and works to enforce the boundaries of normative heterosexual masculinity’.40 In a sense, we might say that the men involved in the Fathers 4 Justice campaigns are also motivated to

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act by the ‘technology of abjection’ which not only gives them unequal access rights to their children under the law, but which perpetuates the image of men as unequally competent parents; or, to rephrase Thomas, which figures them as ‘ontological shits’.41 The superhero costumes work to allude to this technology of abjection, but moreover they function to enforce the boundaries of heterosexual masculinity, pitting it as infinitely malleable, extensible, beyond human. Baz Kershaw has argued that protest events in the late twentieth century have become integral to the production of the society of the spectacle, the simulacra and the hyper-real. He writes, [T]he synecdochic spectacle of protest challenges a system of authority in its own terms, because in such societies the display of power – its symbolic representation in multifarious forms of public custom, ceremony, and ritual and then their production throughout the media – has become in some senses more important to the maintenance of law and order than authority’s actual powers of coercion and control.42 But if the maintenance of law and order is understood to operate within a patriarchal order that predominantly privileges men, then any spectacular display of masculinity may not easily ‘present a reflexive critique of the foundations of authority’.43 Rather, as in the case of Fathers 4 Justice, such displays also work to recuperate and celebrate a distinctly masculinist kind of authority. Self-made Men While Calvin Thomas suggests that Batman is haunted by the ‘phantasmatic image of having been a passively and cloacally (m)other-made child’,44 he also illuminates the way in which the superhero figure works to produce ‘unimpaired masculinity’, to overcome abjection through active self-creation.45 This will to self-creation in the public sphere binds David Blaine and Fathers 4 Justice together most powerfully. What is being played out here is not the vanishing of the subject, from spectacular centrality to lonely dissolution, as Lacan imagines the function of the analytic process.46 In both cases, the men seemingly put their abjection to test: Blaine through endurance-based performances and Fathers 4 Justice through superhero-inspired guerrilla performance practices. While Blaine has suggested that he performs to make people suffer, and Fathers 4 Justice perform in order to challenge their social and legal marginality, in both cases the performers effectively cast themselves


as contemporary superheroes, rather than magicians or activists, in a manner that relies upon the secure performance of inordinate physical and mental strength. Quite literally elevated in public, the male body seeks recognition not through having its vulnerability recognized, as such, but through showcasing its achievement in being fashioned into a spectacle of centred, heroic masculinity.

7 The Jackassification of Male Trouble: Incorporating the Abject as Norm

Loving to be shattered becomes a self-preservative strategy. Leo Bersani, Intimacies1 Beneath the hysteric’s rebellion and challenge to paternal authority there is thus a hidden call for a renewed paternal authority, for a father who would really be a ‘true father’ and adequately embody his symbolic mandate.2 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology One of the recuperative strains of masculinity politics to emerge in the 1990s became known as laddism or new laddism. A behaviour typically associated with young, heterosexual males, central to laddism’s various discursive inflections was the strategic infantilization of male subjects to the reductive stereotype that ‘boys will be boys’. This infantilization might best be understood as a highly manipulative practice, designed to cultivate the association that laddish behaviour is innate but innocuous, and something that males will overcome with time. The term ‘new laddism’ reframed this behaviour more definitively as a reactionary response to feminism; the prefixing ‘new’ implying that this behaviour pre-existed and was even spurred on the feminist movement. Critics attuned to masculinist backlash in the 1980s and 1990s noted in the discursive strategies of new laddism a calculated transposition of masculine norms, designed to license a whole range of negative behaviours. Commenting on this, Garry Whannel suggests that while new laddism defends and promotes itself as ‘a form of post-modern irony’, it actually 160

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represents a reconstruction of pre-feminist masculinity, replete with ‘masculine fears of the female Other, masquerading as desire’.3 In an equally doubting, tongue-in-cheek tone, Pat Stack observes, The new lad is apparently harmless. Unlike the traditional ‘working class lad’, the new lad is not violent, nor is he racist. He is an educated, middle class, witty character who is only reclaiming parts of harmless masculinity from the horrors of feminism and the terrible wimpishness of the ‘new man’ era. The new lad is, according to his defenders, only reaffirming the fact that men like a pint, like their sport, and find women sexually attractive. The new lad is still ‘alternative’ when it comes to comedy, but is free of the sexual prudishness of the original alternative comedy scene.4 In its variously loud, aggressive, and sometimes comic manifestations, laddism was quick to become a highly marketable cultural phenomenon. In more recent years it has found its greatest support in a range of television shows produced by MTV. At the forefront of this global mediation has been the hugely successful Jackass series (2001–) which has inspired a number of offshoot productions such as Viva La Bam (USA, 2003), Dirty Sanchez (UK, 2003–), and Wildboyz (USA, 2004–), not to mention real-life replications, recorded on phones and camcorders, and uploaded to the Internet. All of these shows involve a large group of young men (many of whom have become celebrities through appearing in a number of the shows listed) carrying out a range of so-called laddish acts, in public and private spheres. Typically of a self-harming nature, these acts structure the homosocial world depicted and function to performatively secure the ‘normative’ masculinity of associated subjects. This chapter is not interested in discussing whether or not the incidents screened in Jackass are ‘for real’. This issue seems less relevant than what categorizations of masculinity are screened and possibly produced by the phenomenon. Instead, I want to focus on the more pressing impact of the Jackass aesthetic. Cintra Wilson draws a comparison between Jackass and live art in this regard, by placing the show’s leading man Johnny Knoxville, as well as David Blaine, in the tradition of the 1970s’ performers Paul McCarthy and Chris Burden. Writing on what she sees as ‘fashionably macho’ acts of ‘simulated crisis’, Wilson comments, If this were the ‘70s, both Knoxville and Blaine would be important conceptual artists (that is, if Blaine didn’t end up a cult leader instead). Many Jackass installations closely resemble the ‘70s

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offerings of artist Paul McCarthy, who would sit in a bathtub wearing a wig, drinking ketchup, and stuffing raw sausages in his mouth and up his ass (the latter with the assistance of handfuls of Pond’s cold cream) to the point of illness. Both Knoxville and Blaine are the intellectual godchildren of masochistic artist Chris Burden who for his MFA thesis in 1971 locked himself in a 2-by-3-foot locker for five days at the University of California at Irvine – the first of many such endurance pieces in his career. Later in ‘71, Burden had a friend shoot him in the arm with a .22, and in 1974 he crucified himself on top of a Volkswagen.5 This chapter seeks to examine Jackass primarily within the context of laddism. I strategically focus on the first film, Jackass: The Movie (2002)6 insofar as it exhibits all the dominant tropes of the television series, offshoot shows, and the sequel, Jackass: Number Two (2006).7 Although the film is of little interest in terms of plot, and my aim is to focus on a range of categorizations of masculinity, certain scenes are necessarily discussed at some length as representative of a particular performative iteration or motif. The study analyses how masculinity is produced through rites of initiation that involve the abjection, figurative castration, and penetration of the male body. It also examines how males performatively control their ‘abject others’ in the service of affirming a stable masculine core. The chapter assesses the role played by comedy in the film, and questions whether Jackass merely signifies the triumph of low culture or if it exemplifies a deeper problem with Western masculinity that demands further attention be given to male trouble, and troubling masculinities.

The boundaries of acceptable masculinity While the performance of an outward-oriented aggression is very much part of Jackass’s figuration of masculinity, so too is the rigorous, ritualistic testing of the boundaries of male bodies through acts that involve scatological and fluidic abjection, figurative castration, and the violation of the male body. While these are seemingly anti-phallic gestures, in male subjects’ playful relationship to the processes, and in their endurance and survival of them, the relationship between corporeal resistance (which does not necessarily rely on exertive muscularity) and an essential, inviolable male core is reinforced. The sociologist Tony Jefferson draws attention to the centrality of endurance to masculinity when he suggests that normative masculinity involves ‘a certain indifference to the body’ as well as ‘hardness’,


manifest in a willingness for endurance. He also proffers that this hardness is mental as well as physical.8 Inverting Freudian and Lacanian positions, he expands, Muscular strength has long been associated with masculinity, as a symbol of perfection, a matter of beauty combined with strength in different ways. The muscular body offers both power and pleasure. How does this fit with hardness? The Freudian line suggests that muscular bodies are simply symbolic extensions of the penis and phallic mystique. But this is reductionist, barely saved by the Lacanian notion of the phallus as a symbol rather than an actual organ.9 In his revision of these dominant psychoanalytic positions, Jefferson suggests that ‘hardness’ involves not just strength but a willingness ‘to risk the body in performance’.10 And it is through taking such risks that the so-called jackasses prove their masculine worth. One of the recurring Jackass motifs involves scatological self-abjection. In one particularly long scene from the film, Dave England prepares for a task which involves defecating in a display toilet in a hardware store. Prior to entering the outlet, he and his crew convene in a van where England confesses his desperate need to use the toilet. With that, the men push him around the vehicle and press on his intestines, forcing him to defecate. In response, the group roll about laughing, until some of the men tumble out of the van and others vomit. Later, England returns to the shop and undertakes the task as planned. When reproached by staff, he pleads ignorance, and leaves the building. This occasion of public defection mirrors a scenario from Season Two of the television series that involves Chris Raab defecating on the side of the road, provoking attention from the public passing by, and laughter from his Jackass companions. These instances also resonate with scenes from Season Three, such as one involving Knoxville’s nephew being recorded flatulating and defecating in the living room of his family home, while being watched by Knoxville and his grandfather, as if some kind of male rite of (back) passage. This revelling in scatology is evidenced in numerous other scenes in the film. Steve-O, a figure who stars in a range of similar productions, leads a ‘Tropical Pole-Vaulting’ task in which he vaults around palm trees, volley ball nets, and public spaces. His exercise culminates in an effort to leap across a sewerage-filled river. As expected, he fails to cross successfully and plunges into the contaminated water, from where he laughs aloud to the camera, only to later develop a severe infection.

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The performer’s distinctive penchant for ingesting the abject is further evidenced in his snorting of wasabi in a sushi restaurant, which results in further emesis to his own delight and to that of his fellow jackasses. For Steve-O, this pattern is well established: in Series One, he snorts a live earthworm and coughs it through his mouth. The ‘Yellow Snow Cone’ scene continues this pattern of border testing. Set at night, mainstay Ehren McGhehey eats a urine-saturated snow cone. When he vomits to cheers from his comrades, he is kicked in the testicles by England, only to fall down, and vomit again. England’s enthusiasm is rooted in the fact that he is particularly accomplished at consuming his own bodily waste. In the second season of the television series he eats the raw ingredients for an omelette – onion, peppers, butter, cheese, tomato, milk, and eggs – before regurgitating them and cooking the excretion into an omelette, which he subsequently eats. And in Season Three of the series, England consumes the faeces from dirty diapers. Here, the abject does not devour England, as Julia Kristeva suggests it inevitably does; rather in a bid to master his corporeal impulses, he repeatedly devours and expels it. The jackasses’ relationship to abject substances may be further enlightened by Kristeva’s writing. For her, faeces, urine, and mortification all amount to examples of the abject, as they seem to ‘come from an outside or an exorbitant inside’,11 and they are unassimilable. Although the self (‘I’) typically rejects the abject in a bid for the sense of a definable self, Kristeva suggests that ‘a pole of attraction’12 and repulsion characterizes the self-abject relationship, as it does in Jackass, which finds the self contemplating its relation to the abject in terms of ‘Not me. Not that. But not nothing either. A “something” that I do not recognise as a thing’.13 Despite the feeling of attraction and repulsion which the abject incites, the self faces annihilation when it acknowledges that the abject is actually part of the self. This recognition provokes the experience of abjection, when the subject ‘finds the impossible within; when it finds the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject’.14 In Jackass the men repeatedly seek out the abject within the self. However, they do not recognize the abject to ‘the point where meaning collapses’;15 rather, they ingest and excrete the abject in a mood of irreverence and nonchalance, as if in a deliberate attempt to deny its disturbance of identity. As an example of abjection, Kristeva describes the body’s rejection of spoilt milk: ‘“I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it’.16 And in this process of expulsion, the body rejects itself as it rejects the milk, a dynamic which frames abjection as the simultaneous repulsion of what the self is not and as well as what the self is – ‘I expel myself, I spit myself


out’.17 On the contrary, the Jackass team actively seek out the correlates of spoilt milk, not to confirm the fragility of identity, but through the defiance of a self-abject or self-other relationship, to assert the indestructibility of the male subject. Johnny Knoxville, the show’s leading man, shows a particular affinity for fluidic, above scatological, abjection. In one scene of the film, Knoxville stands on a lawn while a tidal wave is repeatedly released from a chute overhead, forcing him to stand his ground in its consuming wake. Arising from his saturation, the first thing Knoxville asks the cameraman is ‘How did it look?’ in a moment which foregrounds the narcissism of his identity performance. This scene is reminiscent of one in Series Two when he stood in front of an emergency services water hose, emitting water at a rate of 325 gallons per minute. Assuming a range of positions, Knoxville attempted to withstand the elemental force. This will to survive the ‘oceanic’ is understood by Kristeva and Klaus Theweleit as symptomatic of a desire to withstand the threat posed by feminine sexuality. In his study of the relationship between misogyny and fascism entitled Male Fantasies: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (1987), Theweleit sees in recurring phobias of water and fluidic destruction a fear of dissolving the boundaries of male identity, related to a reactive need to affirm the body’s hardness and invulnerability.18 Castration is one of the most recurrent motifs of both the Jackass series and the film. In fact, the first episodes of both Series Two and Three begin with scenes that explicitly play with this notion. In Season Two a group of children are invited to kick Johnny Knoxville’s cupped testicles as hard as they can, encouraged from the sidelines by their mothers and Knoxville himself. Following this exercise, other members of the crew hit Knoxville’s genitals with tennis balls, pool balls, and a sledgehammer. While these scenes play upon the threat of castration, they ultimately work to foreground that (biological) castration has not taken place, as it has with female sexuality in the writing of Freud. It is for this reason that Freud describes the castration complex in Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937) as a ‘rejection of femininity’.19 In this orchestration, the male’s indestructibility as a phallic agent is reinforced, a premise established by Knoxville at the beginning of the Jackass phenomenon when, in the first episode of Season One, he is shot from a cannon and runs around with a large dildo in his pants. (As an example of castration games, see Figure 7.1.) One of the film’s most elaborate and dangerous performances of castration takes place as part of a scene entitled ‘The Muscle Stimulator’. Here, Chris Pontius, Knoxville, McGhehey, and England place muscle

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Figure 7.1

Johnny Knoxville wearing a ‘beekini’ in Jackass (2000–2).

stimulators at high voltage around various parts of their bodies. Sitting semi-naked around a table, they all take turns, with one placing the pads on his face, another on his thumbs and another on his chest. Once the pads are in position, they are activated by the other men, who laugh uproariously at each other’s pain. When one of the men reacts with particular discomfort, Knoxville urges him on with ‘You ok. It’s cool. Come on. Daddy’s got ya. Daddy’s got ya’. And so, reminded by the ‘father’ of the subjection integral to their homosocial bond, he willingly endures the


pain. With that, Knoxville calls for someone brave enough to step forward and have his testicles electrocuted. Both England and Pontius oblige, their pain rewarded with affirming applause and laughter from their male colleagues.

Violating and penetrating the male body While these scenes of castration may play with the idea of male trouble, they ultimately work to signify that castration has not taken place, and that the threat of castration is repeatedly survived. In Jackass, injuring the genitals is a mark of masculine prowess that reinforces the connection between the biological penis and the right to socioSymbolic phallic power. In Jacques Lacan’s writing, the fear of castration is linked to a series of other anxieties surrounding body dismemberment and fragmentation, understood to originate in the mirror stage. During this phase of development, anxiety is provoked by the individual’s perception of difference between its image of synthesis and its feeling of fragmentation, which spurs the development of the ego and the pursuit of specular unity. For Lacan, the subject is forever threatened by memories of the original sense of fragmentation. In ‘Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis’ (1948), for example, he suggests that these fears manifest themselves in ‘images of castration, emasculation, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body’.20 To appease this threat, which seems to be the main objective of the Jackass rituals, the men attempt to confirm the unity of the body through its ability to either resist or recover form violation. Although the male body is typically considered to be closed, secure, and integral, in some respects it is more vulnerable than the female form. According to Alan Peterson, certain techniques, expectations, and social practices render men more vulnerable to physical disability, premature death, and to inflicting violence on others and themselves. While the muscular, controlled, and impenetrable ‘matter’ is a powerful vehicle in the performative articulation of normative masculinity, so too is the ability to react to potential disempowerment through regularly testing the body and mind: Involvement in ‘risky’ leisure and competitive or combative activities provides an occasion for demonstrating one’s ‘manliness’. Sport and warfare are key sites for the disciplining of male bodies, the regulation of the mind, an the undertaking of risk […] Pushing one’s body to the limits in competitive sports and in other contexts of

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risk-taking, and displaying the emotional and physical control, are means of enacting masculinity.21 In addition to revelling in scatology and castration, the physical violation of the male body is also a central feature of Jackass’s construction of masculinity, where the endurance of and recovery from corporeal infraction works to reaffirm male authority. One of the film’s most noted tasks in this regard involves Johnny Knoxville being shot with a beanbag projectile. The act, which references Chris Burden’s performance piece Shoot (1971) involves Knoxville being shot in the torso by a projectile travelling at 250 feet per second. In preparing for the task, an instructor says that contact with Knoxville’s chest will be avoided as it runs a higher risk of mortality. Once shot, Knoxville immediately drops to the ground in apparent agony, and is quickly brought to a hospital. Two days later, he reveals the extensive tissue damage incurred. It is worth noting that this is not the first time that Knoxville has been shot. In the MTV series he shoots himself with a handgun. He has also posed being shot by a paint gun for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, a mark of the iconicity of his suffering. As the leading jackass, it is no surprise that Knoxville undertakes the most dangerous tasks in the film and in the series; it is his very willingness to repeatedly risk his safety and endure pain that secures his position as the dominant male, and has earned him the title ‘the hardest-falling man in show business’.22 ‘Ass Kicked by a Girl’ involves Ryan Dunne fighting the World Women’s lightweight boxing champion Kumagai Naoka, and it is one of the few representations of women in the film. Although Dunne seems to mock his own and possibly even his opponent’s participation by wearing female underwear in the ring, he confides to the camera his fear of being ‘about to get the shit kicked out of me by a girl’. His Jackass friends do not show a similar concern, but excitedly surround the boxing ring in various states of undress. From the wings, in a homoerotic mosh, they chant and cheer as Dunne is repeatedly beaten by Naoka in the ring, even as his jaw bleeds and he is nearly knocked unconscious. Jefferson writes about boxing’s unique power structure, claiming that the sport provides the ultimate arena for the display of hardness because boxers require the ability to ‘soak up punishment as well as dish it out’.23 In the context of the Jackass scene in question, Jefferson’s insight implies that a man’s ability to ‘soak up’ punishment from the female Other, which runs the risk of fracturing the male ego, would not only validate his physical strength but also mental prowess.


This reading finds support in Theodor Reik’s writing, which claims that ‘[t]he masochist is a revolutionist of self-surrender. The lambskin he wears hides a wolf. His yielding includes defiance, his submissiveness opposition. Beneath his softness there is hardness; beneath his obsequiousness rebellion is concealed’.24 While minor, external violations of the male body pose a threat to the stability of normative masculinity, penetrating the male body runs the risk of interminably undermining the law of differentiation. This is largely due to the fact that penetration is a more complete gesture that reveals the actual vulnerability of the body. Moreover, this is due to the fact that certain kinds of penetration of the male body are associated exclusively with male homosexuality. For this reason, scenes involving the participation in and reaction to the puncturing of the male body are most revealing of the boundaries of acceptable heterosexual masculinity. Writing on Freud’s Wolfman study, Lacan states, ‘As soon as the fear of castration comes up for the subject, symptoms appear, located on a plane we commonly call the anal, since they are intestinal’.25 Two scenes focus explicitly on this form of castration anxiety. The first involves Steve-O being challenged to insert a glass bottle in his rectum. Although he does not turn down any other task on screen, he refuses to undertake this one, fearing that his father would disown him. One of the crew, surprised by his response, asks, ‘You said that you didn’t want to do it cause your dad would disown you? […] You drank wine off a dude’s ass crack’. Steve’s only defence of his stance is ‘My dad never saw that; never told him that’. It is worth noting that Steve does not have any problem with inserting fireworks in his anus, as he does in the film and in the series. However, for a dominant male like Steve, prolonged anal penetration, which runs the risk of appearing pleasurable, is a step too far. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that he has his buttocks bolted together in Season Three of the television series. This particular instance of penetration draws attention to the intense anality of the group’s practices, filtered through references to shit and flatuence, or anal exposure and penetration. As I have already suggested, however, a marked anxiety is generated when the line between pain and pleasure becomes unclear, rendering the anus as ‘the privileged site for the persecution of desires’.26 In ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ (1988) Leo Bersani explores what is at stake in the oscillation of power in sexuality and sexual practice: The self which the sexual shatters provides the basis on which sexuality is associated with power. It is possible to think of the sexual as,

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precisely, moving between a hyperbolic sense of self and a loss of consciousness of self. But sex as self-hyperbole is perhaps a repression of self as self-abolition. It inaccurately replicates self-shattering as self-swelling, as psychic tumescence.27 Not only is the danger of moving between hyperbole and loss heightened by the hypermasculine context of Jackass, but also the potential for the eroticization of the anus separates normative heterosexuality from unacceptable homosexuality. The ‘asshole’, Bersani writes, is the ultimate organ/signifer of gay male sexuality for heterosexuality, and anal sex is associated with a ‘self-annihilation originally and primarily identified with the fantasmatic mystery of an insatiable, unstoppable female sexuality’.28 For Lee Edelman too, the orifice represents a whole that defines the part, and it is the sight of this figure which leads to the disavowal of definition, or figuration, itself.29 In Steve-O’s refusal, the task is taken up by Ryan Dunne, one of the more junior members of the group, a gesture that once again frames the action as a preparatory rite. In a bedroom, in the presence of a medic and other Jackass members, Dunne inserts a blue toy car into his rectum. Although he was in fact assisted in this task, some careful editing makes it look like his does it himself, in order for the film to avoid sodomy legislation active in some states in the United States. When, during this process, another man walks into the room, Dunne calls out, ‘Tell me I’m a man!’ He does not get an immediate reply, as the answer is dependent on how he endures the process. In The Shell and the Kernel, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok discuss the nature of psychic incorporation by suggesting that identification belongs to the realm of incorporations, which sees the prohibited love object of the Oedipus complex settle in the ego ‘in order to compensate for the lost pleasure and failed introjection’.30 Addressing a similar issue, Judith Butler wonders where such an incorporated bodily space might be: ‘If it is not literally within the body’, she suggests, then ‘the body must itself be understood as an incorporated space’.31 In the Jackass scene under discussion, the ‘incorporated space’ is literally ‘within the body’. While the toy car is typically an object of masculine identification, its actual bodily incorporation sees identification move dangerously into the realm of desire. However, in presenting the task as an act of endurance, Dunne manages to rescue his heterosexuality in the eyes of his male peers. Once the car is inserted in Dunne’s anus, he attends a doctor for an x-ray. He tells him that he was at fraternity party, fell asleep, and woke


up with pains. When the doctor discovers that there is a toy car in his rectum he calls a colleague and is overheard telling him that Dunne was at a party and that ‘they were having sex with each other, and stuff like that’. Referred to someone else, Dunne leaves the clinic with a caution from the doctor: ‘You just go to the doctor. You don’t talk to anybody […] to your girlfriend, to your boyfriend, to whomever […] You don’t tell nobody, all right. He already knows [pointing to the one of the crew] – that’s too many people’.

The others of stable masculinity: Childhood, old age, animalism In addition to those laddish acts that test and ultimately affirm the masculinity of the enacting male subjects, Jackass includes many less painful, less dangerous, scenarios of a prankster variety. Thematically, these centre on childhood, old age, obesity, and male physicality. Despite their comic rendering, these iterations are constitutive of a larger performative pattern wherein males strive to control states of vulnerability which have, could, or will inevitably undermine their masculine authority. At the outset of this chapter I eluded to the relationship between laddism and male infantilization. In this conflation, it is inevitable that many of the scenarios in Jackass involve an element of apparent juvenility. While this is often used to license bad behaviour, it also amounts to a kind of fetishizing of boyhood and a wish to protect and preserve ‘the child inside the man’, so to speak. This is most clearly evidenced in the frequency of activities that involve children’s toys or games. Many of the Jackass crew are actively involved in skateboarding – in fact the show evolved out of skate culture – and this is reflected in the number of tasks that involve skateboarding and bike riding. In one scene in the film, Knoxville attaches bottle rockets to the back of a pair of skates and rolls down hills. In another, entitled ‘Roller Disco Trunk’, Bam Margera, Steve-O, Pontius, Knoxville, and Dunne dress up in 70’s clothes and roller-skate in the back of a truck. Driven haphazardly, the men are knocked about inside, and fall to the ground, laughing. In another scene, Knoxville tries to skate down the handrail of steep outdoor steps. He falls, but laughs regardless. Similar ludic acts recur in the television series, and include the cast ice-skating over barrels, skating on ice-blocks, snowboarding naked, and rolling down golf courses (all from Season Three). This air of juvenility also permits the acceptable cultivation of hard, sporting masculinity, which, despite its presentation here,

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is based upon ‘muscularity, a lack of sentiment, acceptance of pain’ and a will to ‘reassert a traditional masculinity [… confronting …] dishonourable feminized men’.32 Perhaps more revealing of male anxiety are those scenes that involve the performers dressing up as old men. Wearing customized silicon masks, they carry out a range of unlikely events in public, including rapping in the streets, riding geriatric mopeds down flights of steps, and freewheeling down hills. Another recurring portrayal is that of an ‘old man’ shoplifting, deliberately provoking retail staff and security to confrontation. The punch line seems to be that an old man, assumed by the social majority to be impotent, is extremely physically and mentally competent in defending himself. This pattern of preserving strength in old age is most vividly manifest in a scene which involves Johnny Knoxville, dressed as old man, weightlifting in a gym. Cautious for his safety, the gym instructor asks if he needs assistance. Soon after Knoxville has turned down the offer, he falls on the ground with a weight pressed against his neck, prompting the instructor to frantically rush to his help. Knoxville rises, coughing, amused by his diversionary tactic. I suggest that these performances resonate within a male fantasy of continuous, inviolable presence and strength. As self-harming laddism reflexively empowers the enacting subject, these performances of vulnerability are exploited to assert the indestructibility of the Jackass males. In contrast to these depictions, the film has a particularly negative take on obesity. There are numerous scenes that centre on the comic spectacle of obesity, pitted in direct contrast to the discipline of the jackass’s body. In one scene a morbidly obese man, who is eating on a bench, breaks it. When he falls to the ground, exposing his behind, a passer by goes to help him, but he runs away. In another incident, a BMX cyclist tries to tow away a couch on which an obese man sits. Similarly, in ‘Sweaty Fat Fucks’ Margera and his two friends, Matt Hoffman and Tony Hawk, are padded to appear grossly overweight and skate around a park. Unable to move as agilely as normal, they fall around the ring, injuring themselves and snapping their skate boards. This depiction resonates with one from Season Three, which involves Margera, dressed to appear overweight, repeatedly fall off a treadmill. Against this spectacle of impotent masculinity, the masculinity of Jason Acuña, known as ‘wee man’ on account of his dwarfism, is celebrated. While masculine prowess is typically associated with physical size, as Jefferson notes above, this prowess is also determined by a capacity for ‘hardness’. Acuña validates his masculinity on his ability to endure rather than on his ability to inflict, or rather than on the basis of


his physical size. Further, Acuña’s size is celebrated for it permits him to endure unique circumstances, unavailable to the other men. For example, Acuña dodges crowds while being chased and eventually attacked by a sumo wrestler, hides under a traffic cone in order to obstruct crowded streets, and kicks himself in the head for the amusement of the group. In the recording of a video for the singer Shaq, shown in Season Three, Acuña allows Shaq to repeatedly simulate sex with him. Many of the film’s macho rituals involve animals. On one occasion, Knoxville’s powers of endurance are tested when a baby alligator is deliberately placed in front of his chest until it bites down on his nipple. However, his feat in the film does not upstage his performance in Season Two when he plays matador to a number of raging bulls, or when he covers his face with leeches to contrive Abraham Lincoln’s beard. In another instance, Pontius (dressed in a bikini) tries to ward off alligators in a pond while Steve-O attempts to walk a tight rope overhead. In advance of the action, Pontius speaks directly to the camera, saying, ‘Any of these alligators try to ruin our swimming; I’m going to wrestle them down and probably have my way with them.’ When Steve falls into the water, Pontius helps him get back up safely, but this time he attaches a piece of meat to his underwear, and dangles it over the alligator’s heads. One bites, as the Jackass team looks on cheering, but Steve-O remains untouched. On another occasion, Steve-O and Pontius scuba dive with whale sharks, first filling their underwear with shrimp in order to entice the sharks closer, and foreground the threat of castration. When the sharks only eat the shrimp, the men’s survival is presented as a phallic triumph, despite Pontius’ emerging awareness of the deficit between his physical phallus and its symbolic referent: ‘My penis looks really small right now. I can’t really look cool right now.’ During the same diving expedition, Steve-O and Pontius are told by their diving instructor that sea anemones release white fluid when scared. When underwater, they both grab hold of anemones and rub them in a masturbatory fashion, until they emit the seminal fluid. Clearly, the use of animals reflects the fantasy of a sort of primal engagement. Less than dissembling the ‘different organizational structures of the living being’,33 as Jacques Derrida deems as ethically important, or an anti-Oedipal unravelling coterminous with ‘becoming animal’, as in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s formulation,34 scenarios with animals serve to emphasize male superiority. This attraction to bestial pain might also be undertood as a variation of the attraction to the inanimate object, for both relationships are marked by an indifference towards the structural parameters that create system, order, and

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identity. However, humanity and animalism do not mix here as they do in Mikhail Bakhtin’s grotesque animal-human hybrids, which are capable of negotiating a multiplicity of identities.35 Despite Johnny Knoxville’s threat to inseminate a cow himself in Season Two, males unquestionably supersede animals – ‘the animal is not a subject of law (or therefore of power)’36 – and masculinity is bolstered by distinguishing its phallic prowess from the undisciplined variety of animals.

Points of enunciation and deconstruction Throughout this chapter I have maintained that Jackass: The Movie, like the series, is primarily concerned with the recuperation of male authority within the context of what I term as laddish practices. Jackass plays male trouble as pain, subjection, and abjection but resignifies that same trouble through the reification of endurance. Although almost frivolously presented as a series of fragmented, comic scenarios, Jackass cannot be sweepingly applauded for being parodic of its subject matter or dismissed as merely popular postmodern entertainment, comprised of an excess of signs that avoid precise signification. For although Allan Bloom and Jean Baudrillard have, in the past, accused mass culture of devaluating meaning,37 in the early days of MTV production, before Jackass was ever conceived, figures like Ann Kaplan warned of the dangers of depoliticizing its output: Narrative/non-narrative is no longer a useful category within which to discuss videos. What is important is, first, whether or not any position manifests itself across the hectic, often incoherent flow of signifiers which are not necessarily organized in to a chain that produces a signified, and, second, what are the implications of the twenty-four hour flow of short (four-minute or less) texts that all more or less function as adds […] In line with Baudrillard’s theory, MTV partly exploits the imaginary desires allowed free play through the various sixties liberation movements, divesting them, for commercial reasons, of their originally revolutionary implications.38 Although blatant in its performance of laddish masculinity, Jackass is rarely critical of its constitutive terms. There are very few incidents that reveal the performers’ inability to endure painful rituals, for example, and when this does occur, it is usually affirmative of the codes of heterosexual masculinity, as when Steve-O refuses to insert a bottle in his anus. Rather, Jackass endorses the recuperation of a masculinity


based on endurance rather than obvious productivity; premised on the ability to withstand the Other, instead of opening to it. If any form of masculinity is critiqued in the film, it is the mainly absent kind which rejects the connection between the enduring male body and the accruement of power and authority. In the context of laddism, which critic David Miller has applauded as a genuine ‘attempt by straight men to come to terms with their new position in the world, with the second wave of feminism and the undermining of traditional forms of masculine gender identity, such as jobs in basic industry and full employment’,39 Jackass may well be seen to reflect a ‘real’ moment of trouble in Western masculinity. As is well documented in psychoanalytic theory and practice, masochism is often exploited as a recuperative, masculinizing strategy: Pain, cutting and self-harm, including suicidal gestures, are all attempts at repairing the cohesiveness of the self in the face of overwhelming anxiety associated with intense fears of annihilation and the dissolution of the self, Some people in severe distress put their bodies at high risk, subjecting them to controlled mutilation, because, in so doing, they feel in charge. The pain which they experience helps them to conquer their ongoing annihalatory and nihilistic fears.40 Owing to the fact that the politics of masculinity are so closely related to the politics of governance, Jackass – in a not dissimilar fashion to The Passion of the Christ – might also be seen to dialogue not only with American but contemporary Western culture more generally. Shortly after its US release, which quickly followed the 9/11 attacks on New York, the film became a box-office number one, prompting one critic to write, ‘Last week Jackass was the number-one film in the nation, proof that we have not let the terrorists win. America, as we know it, lives’.41 The type of self-harming masculinity performed in Jackass also allows male subjects to form apparently close heterosexual relationships with other men. In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick examines the boundaries separating sexual and nonsexual male relationships. For Sedgwick, homosocial and homosexual relationships are not diametrically oppositional: ‘“Homosocial desire”, to begin with, is a kind of oxymoron. “Homosocial” is a word [… that …] describes social bonds between persons of the same sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed with analogy with “homosexual”, and just as obviously meant to distinguish from “homosexual”.’42 For Sedgwick, homosocial and homosexual relationships may be seen to

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exist on a continuum, which she sees evidenced in the ‘erotic triangle’ of Victorian literature, comprising two males in active pursuit of a ‘passive’ female.43 However, no female is pursued in Jackass. Rather, the laddism at play functions like the apex of Sedgwick’s erotic triangle – or the ‘total relationship of exchange’ noted by Claude Lèvis-Strauss44 – that affords male subjects access to homosocial relationships that are intimate and sometimes erotic, but ultimately aggressive enough to avoid entering the abject domain of the homosexual. Writing on the novels of Henry James, Sedgwick diagnoses the tension among male social groups as a kind of ‘homosexual panic’, characterized by ‘a male panic in the face of heterosexuality’,45 which goes some way to shed light on the functional urgency of laddish performativity in Jackass. In the omission of female subjectivity, and in the careful guarding against homosexual desire through the use of aggressive buffering strategies, Jackass creatively loosens and licenses the norms of heteronormative masculinity. However, it only does so in order to creatively accommodate its heterosexual male subjects. While I maintain that laddism functions as a masculinizing strategy that simultaneously affords males access to homosocial intimacy, the film concludes with a scene called ‘Son of Jackass’ which, in a genuinely parodic fashion, imagines the behaviour of the cast in 2063. In a reworking of the film’s opening scene, the men, made up to appear old, emerge from the smoky distance to Carl Orff’s O Fortuna. Now, however, they are not aggressively riding in a shopping trolley as they do in the opening scene, but are attached to intravenous drips, riding on geriatric bikes, and holding walking sticks. Like the opening shot, there is an explosion here too, but now the men are not immune to harm. Instead, they are killed by exploding cars, engulfed by flames, and decapitated by shrapnel. This concluding scenario would seem to acknowledge the ultimate destructibility of the male performers; the fact that there will come a time when their endurance testing will not confirm anything about their masculinity, but rather their mortality. And yet, in Steve-O’s final exclamation, lurched at the camera – ‘Yeah Dude!’ – the jackasses seem to relish in this nihilism that gives urgency to their injurious exploits.

Big others and little others In The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (1999), Slavoj Žižek provides a detailed discussion on symbolic authority by considering the Oedipus complex in light of contemporary claims to the decline of paternal power. Of significance to this study, Žižek links


the decline of symbolic authority to the splintering of the Big Other into small big Others. The father is no longer perceived as the ego ideal that provides an (impossible) template for self-creation, Žižek argues, but as a more localized, ideal ego: [A] father is no longer perceived as one’s Ego Ideal, the (more or less failed, inadequate) bearer of symbolic authority, but as one’s ideal ego, imaginary competitor – with the result that subjects never really ‘grow up’, that we are dealing today with individuals in their thirties and forties that remain, in terms of their psychic economy, ‘immature’ adolescents competing with their fathers.46 In this interpretation, the decline of symbolic paternal authority has resulted in a certain infantilization. The subject is condemned to seek definition by competing against imaginary fathers. For Žižek, this questioning of imaginary and symbolic fathers is characteristic of hysterical subjectivity. It is the hysteric that questions his relationship to the big Other, wondering what it wants of the subject, and what the subject is for it: Hysteria is not simply the battleground between secret desires and symbolic prohibitions; it also, and above all, articulates the gnawing doubt whether secret desires contain what they promise – whether an inability to enjoy hinges only on symbolic prohibitions. In other words, the pervert precludes the Unconscious because he knows the answer (what brings jouissance to the Other); he has no doubts about it; his position is unshakeable; what the hysteric doubts – that is, her position is that of an eternal and constitutive (self) questioning: What does the Other want from me? What am I for the Other?47 Žižek also sees the questioning of what it means to be a subject as a consequence of the decline in symbolic authority, revealed in recent calls for men to be ‘real men’, and fathers to be ‘real fathers’; fathers of ‘the uncompromising No!’48 As is well known, there lies the problem of the hysteric: the central figure of his universe is the ‘humiliated father’, that is, he is obsessed with the signs of the real father’s weakness and failure, and criticizes him incessantly for not living up to his symbolic mandate – beneath the hysteric’s rebellion and challenge to paternal authority there is thus a hidden call for a renewed paternal authority, for a father who

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would really be a ‘true father’ and adequately embody his symbolic mandate.49 Žižek’s writing on this aspect of subjectivity resonates strongly with many of the issues explored in this book. All of the chapters collected in this study emerged during a cultural moment framed by gender trouble, and marked by a decline in symbolic paternal authority. The case studies of heteronormative and homosexual masculinity assembled here are precisely concerned, to various degrees, with the questioning of what it means to be a male subject. Complex and contradictory networks of identification, desire, and relationality are evident in all the performances and representations examined that prevent the easy assumption of unified gendered identity. In the examples analysed in this book, the male subject’s often violent endurance of abjection, emasculation, and vicitimization might be understood as a protest against the symbolic father’s weakness, but also a performative gesture of self-creation. To invoke Lacan’s writings on the mirror stage, we might say that the male ‘I’ of these examples is frequently haunted by the threat of his own dismemberment, castration, and emasculation; and it is this anxiety which spurs him towards the testing of his fragmentability against an orthopaedic, ‘rigid ideal’.50 Supporting this reading, Žižek maintains that subjectivity remains in something of a deadlock, despite the postmodern faith in genuine fluidity. He refers to masochism as a prime example of this belief in reflexivity that nonetheless binds the subject to a regulatory regime: [The] ‘masochistic’ reflexive turn, through which the repressive regulatory procedures themselves are libidinally invested and function as a source of libidinal satisfaction, provides the key to how power mechanisms function: regulatory power mechanisms remain operative only in so far as they are secretly sustained by the very element they endeavor to ‘repress’.

Commodifying, commercializing, and containing male trouble While Butler’s writing on performativity and Žižek’s notion of hysterical questioning signals ways in which the mechanisms of heteronormativity might be exposed and agitated, the analyses of performances and representaions considered in this study reveal that positions of abjection, emasculation, masochism, sacrifice, victimization, and corporeal


im/penetrability among ostensibly heterosexual and homosexual masculinities ultimately work to control deviant desire and stabilize male subjectivity, therein sustaining heteronormativity’s regulatory engine. So while the work observed might begin at a point of gender trouble, its performative arc typically ends at a point of resolution. Outside of identity politics, this regulatory function of ‘transgression’ is widely affirmed. In his book of the same title, Chris Jenks claims that while the desire to exceed boundaries is a dominant feature of modernity and so-called postmodernity, transgression is essentially a reflexive process: ‘To transgress is to go beyond the bounds or limits set buy a commandment or law […] But to transgress is more than this, it is to announce and even laudate the commandment, the law or the convention’.51 In affirming the Law, the transformative potential of transgression is limited: Transgressive behaviour does not deny limits or boundaries, rather it exceeds them and thus completes them. Every rule, limit, boundary or edge carries with it its own fracture, penetration or impulse to disobey. The transgression is a component of the rule. Seen in this way, excess is not an aberration nor a luxury, it is rather a dynamic force in cultural reproduction – it prevents stagnation by breaking the rule and ensures its stability by reaffirming the rule.52 In addition to the trajectory of individual cases analysed in this book, this study has a culminating point of its own; a point where queerness is managed as a condition of the normative. Such a culmination, I suggest, might be described as the jackassification of masculinity in contemporary culture, whereby male trouble is turned into a commercial commodity, divested of real social and critical urgency. Reflecting on recent trends in reality television programming, the critic Kent Williams suggests that ‘the essence of contemporary entertainment [is]: sadomasochism. In the old shows, suffering was the byproduct […] Today, it’s the product. Instead of grace under pressure, audiences now crave disgrace under pressure’.53 Many people would suggest that Jackass, and other programmes and films of its particular genre, represents the ‘triumph of low culture and cheap thrills’54 in late capitalist society. Reading Jackass in this light, we might see the phenomenon as a developmental fusion of decades of action movies, sporting obsession, and reality television, carefully constructed here as a series of quick-fix fragments of ‘real-life’ riotous carnival. However, owing to the fact that Jackass has spawned so many similar shows that

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dominate our screens and popular cultural references, and given that it may be contextualized alongside the other examples considered in this book, such interpretations seem reductive. In order to challenge the suggestion that Jackass merely marks the carnivalesque eruption of low culture into the public arena, I wish to return to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque as developed in his study of the works of Rabelais. As Bakhtin saw it, one of the most important features of the Medieval carnival was the absorption of the individual into the collective, the destruction of social hierarchy, and the triumph of equality: ‘Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age.’55 Robert Stam echoes this dimension to the carnival, emphasizing its role in disturbing the status quo: ‘Carnival promotes a ludic and critical relation to all official discourses, whether political, literary or ecclesiastical.’56 Jackass, on the other hand, is not critical of dominant ideologies. Rather, the show is extremely narrow in its points of focus, which almost exclusively relate to issues of male gender and sexuality. Although presented as playful, this relationship is not critically examined in either of the films or the series. Further, while these male bodies are pushed to their limits, they are not the elastic, malleable, unfinished forms of the carnival tradition. Conversely, gender and sexuality are treated without the celebration of alterity which Bakhtinian representation requires.57 It was this very quality of Bakhtinian thought which inspired Kristeva to seek ways of transcending the metaphysical category of difference in her concept of the semiotic, and in her reworking of the concept of the carnivalesque, to the point where ‘discourse attains its “potential infinity” […] where prohibitions (representation, “monologism”) and their transgression (drama, body, “dialogism”) coexist’.58 Reflecting on Bakhtin’s wider contribution to leftist cultural critique, Stam warns of the dangers of co-opting Bakhtin’s theories for the discernment of ‘redeeming elements even in the most degraded cultural productions and activities’.59 Drawing specifically on the example of fraternity films such as Animal House (1978), Stam cautions how some so-called carnivalesque behaviour actually supports the dominant power structures it is presumed to critique: ‘It would be wrong, for example, to see the beer-fuelled carousing of fraternity boys in Animal House as a Bakhtinian celebration of people’s culture, since fraternity boys and their macho rituals form an integral part of the power structure which authentic carnival symbolically overturns.’60 Stam’s comment reads as a timely reservation for those who claim that Jackass is merely an example


of low culture which is funny, foolish, and harmless. Even aside from the gendered signficance, surely nothing produced by MTV can call itself carnival in the Baktinian sense of the term. In Jackass’s near dominance of the channel, reflected in the continual showing of the series and offshoot series, there remains little to suggest that this is ‘the oppositional culture of the oppressed, the official world as seen from below’.61 In ‘Sliding Off the Stereotype: Gender Difference in the Future of Television’ (1988), William Galperin suggests that televised action and sporting events, of which I consider Jackass to be a contemporary example, might be seen to give form to male fantasies, giving men access to a power they otherwise lack. Galperin suggests that such representations cultivate ‘an absorption of men by men’.62 Inflecting a paternal metaphor, Galperin makes a distinction between action sports and soap operas: ‘If televised sports can be said, on occasion, to render the divine incarnate – to mystify the human in the image of the father – soap operas tend rather to retrace this movement back to the very structure that requires God to be a father.’63 Although Galperin refers specifically to sport, his comments are as relevant to other action-based performances, not least of all which include Jackass. In its celebration of the omnipotent male, it also ‘renders the divine incarnate’, and in this it might be seen to exemplify the trend in cultural representation that Galperin identified embryonically in the late 1980s. Žižek suggests that social shifts should be observed in terms of symbolic changes. Significant moments of change, he asserts, incorporate the abject as norm: ‘This moment of change is the moment at which the system restructures its rules in order to accommodate itself to new conditions by incorporating the originally subversive moment.’64 In its pervasion of popular culture, I suggest that this is precisely what the Jackass phenomenon signifies: the assimilation of trouble by heteronormative masculinity such that it is defined, at least in part, by its ability to play with and manage queer desire. Of course, this is very much the work of global capitalism that fetishizes lack and introduces it as commodity. Under such a regime, the possibiliy of an interruptive act or a paradigm-shifting event seems virtually impossible.65 That does not mean that gender and sexuality simply become unproblematic. Rather, they require more nuanced forms of critical analysis and cultural intervention.

8 An Ethic of Fragilization

Am I made man in the hour when I cease to be? Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis.1 The question of the political process is always a question that goes beyond identities. It’s the question of finding something that is, paradoxically, a generic identity, the identity of non-identity, the identity which is beyond all identities […] It’s something like an identity which is non-identity; it’s humanity as such.2 Alain Badiou, in interview Femininity, I propose, transforms from within what it means to be a subject, for it is the kernel of ethical being, the ultimate measure of the ethical relationship.3 Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace This book has analysed performances and representations of ostensible ‘masculinities in crisis’ which inevitably incorporate trouble as norm by operating within a distinctly phallic, sacrificial model of identity. That is to say, subjective violence both reveals and reproduces systemic violence. Male trouble emerges as a network of performative practices that contain the queer disruption that crisis might otherwise signify. While the reading offered here is queer, the plays, performances, and films are less easy to situate insofar as they are so deeply immured in a victimized logic. Rather than rethink restrictive terms of identity and relationality, the works are committed to the reconstitution of a phallic masculinity via a performative politics of suffering. Focusing on a spectrum of 182

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ostensibly gay and straight masculinities, what remains most troubling in these constructions is an underlying fear of women and what we might think of as ‘the feminine’.4 Repeatedly, what we are confronted with is the feminization of trauma and the traumatization of the feminine. Even though this particular structuring of masculinity is pervasive, it is not without being challenged. While this study has worked to reveal how complex, subtle, and sometimes blatant these dynamics function, I would like to follow up my discrete readings with a wishful epilogue that asserts the necessity of moving beyond this crippling understanding and doing of subjectivity and relationality. This oppressive framework may be constitutive of and cultivated by a heteronormative imaginary that privileges patriarchy, but it is also perpetuated – perhaps unwittingly – by many queer rhetorical and cultural practices. In Queer Optimism: Lyric Optimism and Other Felicitous Persuasions (2009), Michael D. Snediker brilliantly draws attention to queer theory’s own debilitating negativity, calling for a reclamation of critical optimism: ‘Queer Optimism asks that optimism, embedded in its own immanent present, might be interesting.’5 Searching beyond trenchant aggression and melancholia, Snediker celebrates a type of lyric personhood configured within poetry. Optimism is not where this project ends, although its end is not without optimism. Rather, it seems most urgent that this book should close with a call to address further the deep-seated phobia towards the feminine on which patriarchal Western culture is built, and which consequently inflects male relationality. While theories of abjection, masochism, sacrifice, and victimization all tell us something of the cultural value of the feminine qua its destabilizing force on masculinity, they do not reveal how that encounter, when met differently, might be less destructive and more productive. To avoid this incessant masculinization and concomitant rejection of the feminine as Other, and the Other as feminine, I would like to stress the need to explore an ethic of fragilization between the subject and culture which has particular significance and urgency for masculinity. Leo Bersani’s scholarship has been especially influential in reclaiming the value of instances of disruption in selfhood. Following Jean Laplanche’s writing on ébranlement or self-shattering, Bersani’s recent writing in particular explores not the sacrifice of desire as such, but the sacrifice of the ego. His writing implies that certain forms of identity crisis do not strictly amount to an undoing of gender or a redefinition of identity, but rather they might signal the violent hyperbolization of the ego.6 In Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (2004), Bersani and co-author Ulysse Dutoit suggest that within psychoanaly-

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sis ‘jouissance “rewards” the illusion of having abolished the distance, and the difference, between the subject and the world’,7 in a manner that renders the world intrinsically destructive. Focusing on Terrence Malick’s film The Thin Red Line (1998), the authors suggest that an alternative to the dark enjoyment of self-shattering might be to engage in willed moments of ‘ontological passivity’,8 which would involve being ‘extraordinarily receptive to the being of the world’, even in the midst of war. This relation might amount to being ‘shattered by it […] shattered in order to be recycled as allness’. 9 This shattering would open up the isolated subject to the world, and allow him to apprehend it as an infinite site of human and non-human correspondences. Insofar as Bersani’s work focuses on male relationality, it is an especially interesting platform from which to think about how forms of crisis might precipitate non-violent forms of self-divestiture that dilute rather than aggrandize the ego. Further, Bersani’s writing, as Jonathan Dollimore points out, has long maintained that ‘phallocentrism is not primarily the denial of power to women but rather the value of the powerlessness in both men and women’.10 Dollimore expands, ‘By “powerlessness” he means not gentleness, non-aggressiveness, or even passivity, but rather the positive potential for a “radical disintegration and humiliation of the self”.’11 In Intimacies (2008), written as a dialogue with Adam Phillips, Bersani asks, ‘Might there be forms of self-divestiture not grounded in a teleology (or a theology) of the suppression of the ego and, ultimately, the sacrifice of the self?’12 He looks to gay male barebacking to exemplify an ethic of ‘impersonal narcissism’13 that would not seek to close the distance between subjects, precisely by debasing selfhood. This comes to pass when the subject ‘allows himself to be penetrated, even replaced, by an unknowable otherness’.14 Despite the ethical value of disrupting the violent games of selfhood, the debasement for which Bersani calls can only be thought of as a reaction to an already fixed symbolic ordering that pressurizes subjects towards moments of psychic explosivity. Yet I think Bersani is correct to pit the capacity to experience an ‘unknowable otherness’ as a fascinating ethical possibility or even imperative. It counteracts the cultural paranoia that forces us to see the world and those in it as constant sources of menace. In Violence (2009), Slavoj Žižek suggests that liberal tolerance towards others actually engenders violence: ‘the respect of otherness and openness towards it, is counterpointed by an obsessive fear of harassment.’15 This obligation to be tolerant of the Other, he asserts, means that ‘I’ cannot get too


close to the Other or intrude on her space: ‘What increasingly emerges as the central human right in late capitalist society is the right not to be harassed, which is a right to remain at a safe distance from others.’16 Today’s predominant mode of politics is post-political bio-politics – an awesome example of theoretical jargon which, however, can easily be unpacked: post-political is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus on expert management and administration, while ‘bio-politics’ designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal […] That is to say, with the depoliticized, socially objective, expert administration and coordination of interests as the zero level of politics, the only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilize people, is though fear, a basic constituent of today’s subjectivity. For this reason, bio-politics is ultimately a politics of fear, it focuses on defence from political victimisation or harassment.17 Žižek’s writing is appealing insofar as it reminds us that the politics of difference can actually produce violent inequality. This is also a concern of Alain Badiou’s universalism that seeks to reveal how ethical ideology that promises to cultivate respect for difference, prevent harm, and protect rights, can lead to ‘the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest, the disappearance or extreme fragility of emancipatory politics, the multiplication of “ethnic” conflicts, and the universality of unbridled competition’.18 Against identity, he argues, ‘Infinite alterity is quite simply what there is.’19 While Žižek’s and Badiou’s politics propose the task of inventing new forms of being that bypass conventional identitarian categories, I have certain reservations regarding the disruptive imperative suggested by their work. In Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (2009) Adrian Johnston elucidates this problematic as one of temporality and rhythm: In its quick dismissal of ostensibly minor actions in favour of awaiting the miraculous event of the major act, this ‘parallax view’ of politics is at risk of being blind to, among other things, the possibility of various dialectical interactions between the multiple speed temporal tracks structuring both the microcosm of subjectivity and the macrocosm of the polis, including immanent self-sundering moments out of and into the planes of varying-velocity movement associated with both actions and acts.20

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It seems to me that the work of psychoanalyst and artist Bracha L. Ettinger is more attuned to the subtleties of transformation by considering the relationship between ‘the microcosm of subjectivity’ and the ‘the macrocosm of the polis’ through their meeting in artistic and cultural practice. Ettinger imagines a radical fragilization of the subject and phallocentric Law over time, grounded in a resignification of feminine specificity.21 If, for Lacan, the ethics of psychoanalysis involves reformulating the relationship to the Thing that avoids the vicious superego cycle of the Law and the desire to transgress the Law, which accounts for the morbid fascination with self-subjection (while at the same time avoiding the claim to a direct relationship with the Real Thing), for Ettinger this ethics can only be realized through encountering the feminine.22 However, the fragile subject of Ettinger’s imagining is not the passive figure of Žižek’s or Badiou’s criticism, or indeed the subject considered in this study. Rather, Ettinger’s fragile subject is characterized by its unfolding multiplicity. Underwriting rather that overwriting psychoanalytic theory, Ettinger challenges the classic position emphasized by Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva in particular, that maintains that the womb can only appear in culture as unthinkable and psychotic, based on the assumption that whatever is thinkable has to pass through the castration mechanism. The result of this cultural cartography, she maintains, is that the womb as abject must be rejected, with violent consequences: It is precisely this mechanism that establishes the mother as an abject or a lack, scarified to the creation of meaning and to the meaning of creation, whose elimination is the basis for the creative process and the Birth of the Hero. This hero perhaps naively ignores the fact that he eliminates and fore-cludes the begetter-mother (and also kills the father, only to resurrect him) and takes upon himself his own birth.23 In this passage, which implicitly critiques Otto Rank’s Genius-MaleHero model, the ‘Hero’ of castration is elevated precisely for forgetting his begetter: for performing the ruse of giving birth to himself. As a result ‘the mother is either an attractive object of father-son rivalry or a nursing object, either a copulating animal or a nourishing animal […] but between copulating and nursing it seems that there is a void’.24 Ettinger suggests that ‘this void […] holds the Genius Hero complex together’.25 This patriarchal fantasy is certainly damaging for women, but the act of ‘fore-clusion’ also does damage to men. The solution


Ettinger offers is not to go beyond jouissance as Bersani advocates, nor is it to be prepared to strike out at the Neighbour Thing, as Žižek proffers.26 Rather, Ettinger’s work seeks to energize the matrixial sphere in order to acknowledge the ongoing cross-inscriptions of the feminine/prenatal encounter which only become ‘psychosis-like when they have no symbolic access whatsoever in a culture that takes them for non-sense’.27 ‘Metramorphosis’ is the term Ettinger uses to denote the ‘originary human potentiality for such reciprocal yet asymmetrical crossing of borderlines between phantasy (the primary mode of tracing) and trauma, and between I and non-I’.28 She suggests that encounters with art can create transsubjective connections, in which ‘instances of co-emergence and co-fading […] transmit[s] the unforgettable memory of oblivion’.29 Art, Ettinger maintains, retains the ability to unleash and process a traumatic memory in the present: When in art a memory emerges, it captures what has just been born into and from co-spasming, and it opens a lane of fragility. It creates both the scar and its wound, the amnesia and its memory, and it makes sense, as an impossibility, as the impossibility of not-sharing the memory of oblivion as the veiled Event.30 While Ettinger focuses on visual art, she is more broadly interested in the manner in which a range of cultural practices and encounters might open up lanes of fragilization that resist foreclosure, by creating ‘a surplus-of-fragility again and again’.31 While Lacan, in his discussion of Hieronymus Bosch, speaks of ‘lines of fragilization’32 as problematically hysterical, Ettinger’s fragilization is predicated on rethinking the womb. She contends that the matrixial space is a real and conceptual site in which the ‘impossibility of not-sharing with the other is profoundly fragilizing; it demands its price, but also gives rise to its own beauty’.33 Because they are radically split from the womb – ‘this archaic site of virtuality and potentiality’,34 – Ettinger suggests that men ‘enter in contact with the matrixial time and site through transference relations and via art, when they are affected, like women, by joining-in-difference with others’.35 She continues, ‘An artistic filter, the matrixial apparatus serves whoever can yield and tolerate this fragile, fragmented, and dispersed mode of co-becoming.’36 If male trouble is to be truly transformative, then the feminine (and its associated others) must be disassociated from abjection and psychosis and, as Ettinger suggests, imagined as the basis for a borderlinking, bordersharing ethical relation. While Badiou’s universalism is strikingly

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attractive, I find it difficult at this point in time to imagine the recognition of multiplicity without at least first encountering the matrixial. This would not simply amount to ‘the recognition of the primary vulnerability in others, one that one cannot will away without ceasing to be human’,37 as Judith Butler stresses in Precarious Life: the Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004); but it would, as she suggests in Undoing Gender (2004), supply the necessary conditions to imagining otherwise: ‘Fantasy is part of the articulation of the possible; it moves us beyond what is merely actual and present into a realm of possibility, the not yet actualized or the not actualizable’.38 *** Throughout this book, I have been mindful not to create a hierarchy of performances or representations that might be better situated to reveal or effect male trouble, not least of all in order to reflect that hegemony indiscriminately operates through a wide range of cultural practices. As I understand it, male trouble indexes a complex interconnected series of performative discourses and cultural practices. As I think about the productive force of fragilization in these closing paragraphs, however, I am aware that no singular ‘object’ can supply immediate answers or signal clear directions. Nonetheless, within the context of queer performance culture, I think that the theatre and film work of the queer cabaret performer Taylor Mac suggests some interesting possibilities which I would like to discuss in brief. Taylor Mac is an especially seductive reference point here insofar as his work to date has been interested in questioning the cultural production of fear, anxiety, and paranoia which distort our relationship to otherness on a daily basis. Much of his work dialogues with a post 9/11 ‘War on Terror’ climate during which mainly American and British administrations urged citizens to be alert to terrorist activity at all times – that foreign figure often reducible to the monstrous, feminine East. Although Taylor Mac uses elements of cross-dressing in his work, he is not simply a drag artist. Rather, he uses costuming and make-up as part of an exuberant dramaturgy that seeks to affectively infiltrate those paralysing lines of thought and feeling about which Ettinger writes. Discussing the idea of the ‘evanescent moment’39 as it appears in Jacques Rancière’s On The Shores of Politics (1995), Patricia MacCormack advances the value of a ‘jubilant ethics’40 to queer projects, which resonates with Taylor Mac’s work. In the performance Walk (2007), for example, filmed by Matthew Snead, Taylor Mac breezes through the streets of London dressed in the most conspicuous stylization of colours and


clothes. As he dances throughout the city, including taking the tube which was the epicenter of fear following the 7/7 bombings, while singing ‘I’m afraid of patriotism and nationalism and jingoism […] there’s nothing to fear but fear itself’,41 Taylor Mac appears like the embodiment of Snediker’s lyric personhood. However, it is a different performance from his theatre piece The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac (2007) that I would like to devote my attention to in these final lines. (See Figure 8.1.) Not the strangely beautiful song that describes the meeting of Lynne Cheney and Saddam Hussein at the latter’s execution, and the imaginary drama that inflects the meeting of two novelists who have replaced feeling with violence, but the performance of a song called ‘Practice’ in which Taylor Mac recalls ex-boyfriends to the audience. The verse about John stands out: John’s father who was manic depressive decided to kill himself instead by asphyxiating on the exhaust pipe from a lawnmower, but not before he wrote in big spray paint letters all along the walls of John’s childhood home: ‘John is a dirty faggot who deserves to die’.42 Not only does the ostensibly real story alert us to the dangers of foreclosure on masculinity and male relationality in particular, but

Figure 8.1

Taylor Mac, The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac (2007).

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beautifully relayed through music, voice, gesture, and design, the performance as encounter-event affectively insists that we are fragilized too without being immobilized by negativity, aggression, or melancholia. As the performer leads us through a list of failed love affairs, he punctuates each one with ‘but I love him’, in a move that seems to affirm ‘trouble’ in the widest possible sense as an unresolved, excessive, unravelling temporality of fragilization where all acts of foreclosure come, as in his song, with too high a price.

Notes 1 Introduction: Performing Male Trouble 1. Anthony Clare, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000), 3. 2. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (1990) (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), xxix. 3. Calvin Thomas, Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture, and Film (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 20. 4. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, xvii. 5. Fay Weldon quoted in Rosalind Coward, Sacred Cows: Is Feminism Relevant to the New Millennium? (London: Harper Collins, 1999), 60. 6. John Waters, ‘Prejudice is Right on if Men are the Victims’, The Irish Times, January 12, 1999. 7. Sam Wollaston, ‘With “Xtremely” Healthy Circulation’, Media Guardian, 24 February 1997. 8. The title is taken from the BBC chat show Kilroy which aired on 22 September 1999, BBC1. 9. John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2002), 79. 10. Anthony Clare, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis, 3–4, 8. 11. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London: The Athlone Press, 1995), 48. 12. Christopher W. E. Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 371. 13. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face-Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 30. 14. The dates listed refer to production premieres and not necessarily published scripts. 15. Lois Keidan, ‘Blood on the Tracks: The Performance Work of Franko B’, in Lois Keidan, Stuart Morgan and Nicholas Sinclair, Franko B (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1999), 1–6, 3. 16. The dates listed refer to premieres. 17. First published in Screen, vol. 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18. 18. Manohla Dargis, ‘Russell Crowe’s Special Brand of Masculinity’, The New York Times, 4 March 2001. http://www.murphsplace.com/crowe/ dargis2001.html. 19. The film has already been studied by other critics and for this reason is not considered here. See Lynn M. Ta, ‘Hurt So Good: Fight Club, Masculine Violence, and the Crisis of Capitalism’. Journal of American Culture, vol. 29, no. 3 (2006): 265–77. 20. The dates listed refer to premieres.

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21. Lynn Segal, words delivered as part of the opening address to the conference ‘Posting the Male’, John Moores University, Liverpool, August 2000. Quoted in John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture, 93. 22. Pamela Robertson quoted in John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture, 94. 23. Robert William Connell, taken from ‘Arms and the Man’, a paper prepared for a UNESCO expert group meeting on ‘Male Roles and Masculinities in the Perspective of a Culture of Peace’. See http://www.peacenews.info/ issues/2443/connell.html. 24. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 1. 25. Taken from an unpublished paper by Michael Mangan, ‘Shakespeare’s First Action Heroes: Critical Masculinities in Culture, both Popular and Unpopular’, quoted in Beynon, Masculinities and Culture, 90. 26. This is the thesis forwarded by George Mosse throughout The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 27. Leon Hunt, British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 72. 28. Susan Jeffords explores the relationship between gender and political dynamics throughout her book The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989). 29. John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture. See chapter on ‘Millennium Masculinity’, 122–43. 30. Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, (1991) in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 307–20; 314. 31. Samuel Allen Chambers and Terrell Carver, Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 2. 32. I do not mean to suggest that this desire belongs to individuals such as writers and performers. Rather, I see this desire as culturally produced, in part effected by another desire for men to show repentance or marginality, and reproduced by men to regain power via this public expression of victimization. 33. Thomas underwrites castration anxiety to suggest that there might be, at bottom, a scatontological anxiety that stems from the knowledge that the ‘I’ is nothing but excrement. In Masculinity, Psychoanalysis: Straight Queer Theory he describes the distinction in the following terms: ‘If castration anxiety permits desire to be normatively organized in terms of either being or having, scatontological anxiety concerns the fear of being abjected, of being something not worth having’ (p. 70). 34. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 1. 35. Ibid., 9. 36. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), 4–5. 37. Ibid., 5. 38. Ibid. 39. Patrick Campbell (co-ed. with Adrian Kear), ‘Introduction’, in Psychoanalysis and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 1–18; 1.

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40. Interestingly, writing from an analytic perspective, Joachim Danckwardt and Peter Wegner suggest that we might think of the term ‘performance’ within the clinical space as an ‘attempt at restitution’, drawing on Freud’s notion of ‘acting out’, Winnicott’s ideas of play, and Laplanche and Pontalis’s theory of ‘actualising’. See Joachim F. Danckwardt and Peter Wegner, ‘Performance as Annihilation or Integration’. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 88, part 5 (October 2007): 1117–33, 1119–20. 41. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, (1917) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIV trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 246. 42. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, (1923) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIV, 28–9. 43. Ibid., 31. 44. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, (1949) in Écrits: A Selection (1977), trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 2. From here on in, I will cite Lacan’s seminars in the body of the text with the year in which they were delivered, and in the endnotes for the year in which they were published in English. 45. Ibid. 46. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, in Écrits, 316. 47. Ibid., 312. 48. Ibid., 316. 49. Ibid., 318–19. 50. Jacques Lacan, ‘On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,’ (1959) in Écrits, 229. 51. This Lacanian construction, as outlined in ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ (p. 320), is contested by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, trans. Jacqueline Rose, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 74–85. 52. Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 10. 53. Elisabeth Badinter, XY: On Masculine Identity, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 115. 54. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 137 55. Jacqueline Rose, Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 55. 56. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, foreword by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 25. 57. Ibid., 34. 58. Patrick Campbell, ‘Introduction’, in Psychoanalysis and Performance, 7. 59. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 50. 60. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 61. Ibid., 2. 62. Ibid.

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63. Ibid., 5. 64. Ibid., 8. 65. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London and New York: Routledge, 193), 13. 66. Ibid., 232 67. Ibid., 3. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, 33. 71. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 80. 72. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 11. 73. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 85–6. 74. Ibid., 86. 75. Ibid., 90. 76. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers, 2. 77. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 42. 78. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, 219. 70. Michel Pêcheux is a French linguist who developed a theory of disidentification in response to Louis Althusser’s theory of social interpellation as detailed in ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1970). In Language, Semantics and Ideology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982) Pêcheux considers the constructed subject to be variously good, bad, and disidentifying. 80. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 12. 81. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, Vol. 1, trans. and ed. Nicolas T. Rand (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 113. 82. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 92. 83. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 114. 84. Ibid., 113. 85. Ibid., 114. 86. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 93. Italics in original. 87. Ibid., 86. 88. Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, (1905) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, VII, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 157. 89. Ibid., 159 90. Sigmund Freud, ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, (1919) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XVII, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 185. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid., 186. 93. Ibid., 185. 94. Ibid., 186. 95. Ibid., 188. 96. Ibid., 191. 97. Ibid., 189.

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98. David Savran, Taking it Like A Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 30. 99. Freud, ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, 191. 100. David Savran, Taking it Like A Man, 30–1. 101. Freud, ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, 184. 102. Ibid., 198. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid., 200. 107. Ibid., 199. 108. Ibid., 200. 109. Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, (1920) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XVIII, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001). Explicating his biological example, with a sacrificial twist, Freud writes, ‘Accordingly, we might attempt to apply the libido theory which has been arrived at in psycho-analysis to the mutual relationship of cells. We might suppose that the life instincts or sexual instincts which are active in each cell take the other cells as their object, that they partly neutralize the death instincts (that is, the processes set up by them) in those cells and thus preserve their life; while the other cells do the same for them, and still others sacrifice themselves in the performance of this libidinal function.’ (p. 50). 110. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’, (1924) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIX, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 161. 111. Ibid. 112. Ibid., 162–3. 113. Ibid., 163. 114. Ibid., 162. 115. Ibid., 169. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid., 169–70. 118. The notion of gender slippage recurs throughout Bodies that Matter. Discussing Žižek and méconnaisance, Butler writes ‘it may be that the affirmation of that slippage, the failure of identification is itself the point of departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference’ (p. 219). 119. Jacques Derrida, ‘Difference’, in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 141. 120. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, Book II, 1954–55, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller with notes by John Forrester (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 326.

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121. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses, Book III, 1955–56, trans. Russell Grigg, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller with notes by Russell Grigg (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 242. 122. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Book XVII, 1969–70, trans. Russell Grigg, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller with notes by Russell Grigg (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 15–16. ‘Jouissance’ is a term coined by Lacan to elaborate upon Freud’s notion of a death drive. Charles Shepherdson describes jouissance as ‘the name for a dimension of (unnatural) suffering and punishment that inhabits human pleasure, a dimension that is possible only because the body and its satisfaction are constitutively denatured, always already bound to representation’. Moreover, Shepherdson understands jouissance not as a transgression of paternal law but its eroticization that ensures its reproduction. He writes that jouissance is intimately ‘tied to punishment, organized not in defiance of the repressive conventions of civilization, not through the transgression of the moral law, but precisely in relation to the law’. See Charles Shepherdson, ‘History and the Real: Foucault with Lacan’. Postmodern Culture, vol. 5, no. 2 ( January, 1995). Read at http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/ text-only/issue.195/shepherd.195, paragraphs 40–6. 123. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Family Complexes’, (1984) trans. Carolyn Asp. Critical Texts, vol. 5, no. 3 (1988): 12–29. 124. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, trans. with notes by David Porter, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (London and New York: Routledge 2008), 217. 125. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Response to Jean-Luc Marion’s “Towards a Phenomenological Sketch of Sacrifice” ’. Viewed online at http://divinity.uchicago.edu/ martycenter/publications/webforum/112008/Response%20to%20Marion %20Zizek.pdf. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid. 128. Dennis King Keenan, The Question of Sacrifice (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), 105. 129. Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 142. 130. Blue, Dir Derek Jarman, Basilisk, 1993. 131. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 283.

2 Sacrificial Masculinity in The Passion of the Christ 1. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London: The Athlone Press, 1995), 189. 2. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (London and Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003), 81. 3. The Passion of the Christ. Dir. Mel Gibson, Icon Productions, 2004. 4. René Girard described the film as ‘featuring Jesuses with hair so blond and eyes so blue that they could never be subjected to the abuses of Roman soldiers.’ See René Girard, ‘On Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.’

Notes

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

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Anthropoetics, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 2004). Read at http://www. anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1001/RGGibson.htm Sr. Emmerich was an eighteenth-century mystic German Nun. In The Dolorous Passion of Christ Emmerich records her visions of Jesus’s violent Passion. David Denby, ‘The Passion of the Christ’, The New Yorker, 8 March 2004. Read at http://www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/film/the_passion_of_the_ christ_gibson Richard Goldstein, ‘A Backlash Passion: A Messianic Meller for Your Time’, The Village Voice, February 25–March 2, 2004. Read at http://www.village voice.com/issues/0408/goldstein.php Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 103. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (London and New York: New York University Press, 2003), 4. Jerry Falwell, words spoken on 700 Club, September 13, 2000. Read at http:// online.logcabin.org/talking_points/talking_points_radical_right_quotes.html. Frank Rich, ‘Now on DVD: The Passion of the Bush’, The New York Times, 3 October 2004. Ibid. Gary Bauer of Campaign for Working Families in a letter to supporters. Read at http://online.logcabin.org/talking_points/talking_points_radical_right_ quotes.html. Don Wildmon speaking on behalf of the AFA. Read at http://online.logcabin. org/talking_points/talking_points_radical_right_quotes.html A statement from the American Society for the Preservation of the Family. Read at http://online.logcabin.org/talking_points/talking_points_radical_ right_quotes.htmlon Absolute Astronomy Reference Encyclopaedia. Read at http://www.absoluteas tronomy.com/encyclopedia/M/Me/Mel_Gibson.htm Sigmund Freud, ‘Moses and Monotheism’, (1939) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XXIII, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 91. Daniel Boyarin, ‘What Does a Jew Want? Or, The Political Meaning of the Phallus’, in The Masculinity Studies Reader, eds. Rachel Adams and David Savran (Oxford and Malden Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002), 273–91; 273. Jonathan Freedman, ‘Coming out of the Jewish Closet with Marcel Proust’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 7.4 (2001), 521–51: 522. Jay Geller, ‘A Paleontological View of Freud’s Study of Religion: Unearthing the Leifmotif Circumcision’. Modern Judaism 13 (1993), 49–70. See ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, (1919) in The Standard Edition, XVII and my discussion of this paper in Chapter 1. Robert Smart, ‘The Passion of the Christ: Reflections on Mel’s Monstrous Messiah Movie and the Culture Wars’. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 47 (2004). Read at http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc47.2005/ melsPassion/index.html Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, 1972–1973, (Encore), trans. with notes by

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50.

Notes Bruce Fink, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, (London and New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1998), 72–3. Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), 84–5. Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1991), 13. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 62. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1982), 59. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (1990) (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 179. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 3. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 121. Opening title statement to the film The Passion of the Christ. In Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, for instance, the desubjectified ‘body without organs’ is afforded subversive potential. See The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958). See, for example, Fred Botting and Scott Wilson’s (eds.) elucidation on the relationship between sacrifice and intimacy in ‘Introduction: From Experience to Economy’, The Bataille Reader (Oxford and Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1997), 1–34; 22. George Bataille, Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 250. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 69. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 132–3. Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1962), 15. Ibid., 16. Hugh Urban, ‘The Remnants of Desire: Sacrificial Violence and Sexual Transgression in the Cult of the Kapalikas and in the Writings of Georges Bataille’, Religion 25 (1995): 7–90; 75. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 81. Michael O’Rourke has written on the queerness of this intersection in articles such as ‘Queer Theory’s Loss and the Work of Mourning Jacques Derrida’. Rhizomes 10 (Spring 2005) http://www.rhizomes.net/issue10/orourke.htm#_ ednref116 John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), xviii John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 44.

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51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Jerry Falwell quoted in Francis Fitzgerald, ‘Reporter At Large: A Disciplined, Charging Army’, The New Yorker, May 18, 1981. Read at http://www.newyorker. com/archive/1981/05/18/1981_05_18_053_TNY_CARDS_000336703 54. David D. Kirkpatrick, ‘Wrath and Mercy: The Return of the Warrior Jesus,’ The New York Times, 4 April 2004. 55. Ibid. 56. Robert Smart, ‘The Passion of the Christ: Reflections on Mel’s Monstrous Messiah Movie and the Culture Wars’. 57. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 51. 58. Ibid., 39. 59. Ibid., 85. 60. Ibid., 48. 61. Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 82. 62. Lauren Berlant, ed., Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 7. 63. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 188–90.

3 Impotent Masculinities in Made in China and InterMission 1. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 79. 2. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (1990) (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 182. 3. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2. 4. Ibid., 4. 5. Ibid., 70. 6. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 183. 7. Ibid., 182. 8. Such plays include Howie the Rookie, 1999; Made in China, 2001; Crestfall, 2003; Terminus, 2007. Film scripts include InterMission, 2003. 9. Karen Fricker, ‘Same Old Show: The Performance of Masculinity in Conor Mc Pherson’s Port Authority and Mark O’Rowe’s Made in China’. The Irish Review, 29 (2002): 84–94; 84. 10. While I think that O’Rowe’s plays fit into a trend in British theatre somewhat reductively termed as ‘In-yer-face’ theatre, I also think that in its scatological focus O’Rowe’s drama deserves its own nuance. For instance, in Terminus (2007), his most successful play to date, the climax of the play occurs when the only male character is anally penetrated by a worm demon, at which point he sings Bette Midler’s ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’. 11. Lady Augusta Gregory, ‘Our Irish Theatre’ (1913), in Modern Irish Drama: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. John. P. Harrington (London and New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 377–86; 378. 12. Stephen Di Benedetto, review of Made in China in Irish Theatre Magazine, vol. 2, no. 9 (2000): 67–70;70.

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13. This explanation of hypermasculinity is informed by the term’s explication by Lucy Candib and Richard Schmitt in ‘About Losing It: The Fear of Impotence’, in Rethinking Masculinity: Philosophical Explorations in Light of Feminism, eds. Patrick D. Hopkins, Larry May, and Robert A. Strikwerda (London and Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1996), 211–36; 222. 14. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, (1958), in Écrits: A Selection (1977) (London and New York, Routledge, 2001), 316. 15. Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination,’ (1991) in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 307–20; 313. 16. Ibid., 317. 17. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 191. 18. Mark O’Rowe, Made in China (London: Nick Hern Books, 2001), 26. 19. Ibid., 24. 20. Ibid., 23. 21. Ibid., 26. 22. Ibid., 70. 23. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 2. 24. Mark O’ Rowe, Made in China, 72. 25. Peter Middleton, The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 32. 26. Mark O’Rowe, Made in China, 67. 27. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers, 51. 28. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, 1972–1973, (Encore), trans. with notes by Bruce Fink, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (London and New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1998), 7. 29. Mark O’ Rowe, Made in China, 41. 30. Ibid., 12. 31. Sigmund Freud, ‘Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’ (1910), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XI, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 99–100. 32. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 58. 33. Mark O’Rowe, Made in China, 28. 34. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1. Sedgwick coins the term ‘homosocial’ to describe the basic structure of patriarchy, wherein men attempt to establish intimacy with each other via a triangulated construction with woman. The safeguarding of this arrangement, she claims, is of crucial importance in preventing the merger of the homosocial with the homosexual. 35. Karen Fricker, ‘Same Old Show’, in The Irish Review, 84. 36. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 47. 37. Mark O’ Rowe, Made in China, 41.

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38. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, The Psychoses, 1955–56, trans. Russell Grigg, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller with notes by Russell Grigg (London: and New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 189. 39. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2. 40. Ibid. 41. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), 4–5 42. Mark O’Rowe, Made in China, 73. 43. Ibid, 80. 44. Ibid., 84. 45. Sigmund Freud, ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ (1915), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIV, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 127. 46. Mark O’Rowe, Made in China, 17. 47. Ibid., 22. 48. Ibid., 33. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 33–4. 51. Ibid., 82. 52. See Calvin Thomas’s writing on the scatontological in Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998) and Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture, and Film (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Also, see note 29 in Chapter 1 of this book. 53. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Book XI, (1977) (London and New York: Karnac, 2004), 104. 54. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 185. 55. Ibid., 62. 56. InterMission. Dir. John Crowley, Brown Sauce Film Productions, 2003. 57. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 73–4. See also Fredrich Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment, which inspired Brown, in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 58. I do not disagree that many people in urban areas experience real disadvantage. But there is nothing Marxist about this film, and it certainly does not attempt to document these conditions in any thorough way. If the men in film fetishize impotence, we might also say the viewer is invited to fetishize the toils of working-class masculinities and their communities. 59. Toby Miller, ‘Stars and Performance’, in Film and Theory, eds. Toby Miller and Robert Stam (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2000), 595. 60. Michael Quinn, ‘Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting’. New Theatre Quarterly, vol. VI, no. 22 (May 1990): 154–61; 155. 61. John Hiscock, ‘Colin Farrell on his Passion for Life’, Mirror, 6 August 2003, 5. 62. Farrell frequently affects a strong, working-class Dublin accent in film roles and interview. While he claimed to be from Blanchardstown, a working-class area of Dublin, he is actually from its affluent neighbour, Castleknock. 63. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ (1924), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIX

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64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

75.

Notes trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 169–70. Ibid., 161. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Screen, vol. 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 104. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 9. The ‘monstrous feminine’ is a term borrowed from Barbara Creed who, in The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), construes a link between the female monster in horror films and Kristeva’s notion of abjection. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, 47. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, in Écrits, 319–20. Alexandre Kojève, ‘In Place of an Introduction’, in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’, trans. James H. Nichols, ed. Allan Bloom, ass. Raymond Queneau (London: Basic Books, 1969), 6–7. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 268. Italics in original. Film description featured on InterMission’s promotional material, including posters, and the DVD cover sleeve. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 117. Although InterMission is not strictly a genre film, it is highly referential of genre films, including Heists and Westerns. In Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Lance Pettitt suggests that the postcolonial Irish subject is often screened in ‘a raft of negative characteristics, which include being violent, alcohol-dependent stupid, irrational, dirty, disordered, feminine and infantile’, as evidenced in Ron Howard’s Far and Away (1992). By contrast, the assertion of male authority is associable with ‘postcolonial resistance and opposition’ (pp. 11–12).

4 Homosexuality and Subjection in Shopping and Fucking and Faust is Dead 1. Antonin Artaud, Œuvres Complètes (XXII) (Paris: Gallimard, 1961 and 1976), 153. 2. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III, The Psychoses, 1955–56, trans. Russell Grigg, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller with notes by Russell Grigg (London and New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 242. 3. Ibid. 4. Donny speaking in Faust is Dead, in Plays: 1 (London: Methuen Drama, 2001), 123. 5. Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking, in Plays: 1 (London: Methuen Drama, 2001), 4. 6. Ibid., 5. 7. Ibid., 18. 8. Ibid.

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9. Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Washington: Bay Press, 1983), 111–25; 119. 10. Ibid., 118. 11. Ibid., 119. 12. Martin Gross, The Psychological Society A Critical Analysis of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis, and the Psychological Revolution (New York: Random House, 1978), 79–80. 13. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 26. 14. Ibid., 15–16. 15. Ibid., x. 16. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 135–6. 17. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 146. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (1990) (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 179. 21. Ibid., 180. 22. Judith Butler, ‘Sexual Inversions’, in Discourses of Sexuality, From Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Domna C. Stanton (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 344–61; 346. I should also say that my critique of Ravenhill’s plays does not intend to moralize as to what would be an appropriate mode of representation of gay people. In certain instances, the two plays in question might work to expose commercialized gay culture to its more insidious patterns. However, I do think that there is a lack of queer agency in the plays – both in terms of opening within the play worlds a space of possibility, but also in terms of destabilizing the greater social order. 23. I am thinking here of Edelman’s writing on the queer as death-drive as developed in No Future and discussed in Chapter 2 of this book. 24. Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 10. 25. R.W. Connell, taken from ‘Arms and the Man’, a paper prepared for a UNESCO expert group meeting on ‘Male Roles and Masculinities in the Perspective of a Culture of Peace’. http://www.peacenews.info/issues/2443/ connell.html 26. Jacques Lacan, ‘Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet’, in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 11–52; 11. 27. Ibid., 12. 28. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis XI (1977), (London and New York: Karnac, 2004), 81. 29. Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking, 45. 30. Ibid., 34. 31. Ibid., 35–6.

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32. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 265. 33. Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking, 39. 34. Suzanne R. Stewart, Sublime Surrender, Male Masochism at the Fin-De-Siècle (New York: Cornell University Press, 1998), 2. 35. Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking, 23. 36. Ibid., 26. 37. Ibid., 56. 38. Ibid., 83. 39. Ibid., 84. 40. Dylan Evans, Entry on ‘The Real Father’, in An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Bruner-Routledge, 1996), 63. 41. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, trans. with notes by David Porter, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller with (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 378. 42. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIX trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 29. 43. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 78–89. 44. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60, 378. 45. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York, Routledge, 1995), 11. 46. Ibid., 89. 47. Philip Ridley, Pitchfork Disney in Plays 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 35. 48. Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking, 90. 49. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face-Theatre, British Drama Today (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 132. 50. Mark Ravenhill, Faust is Dead’, 98. 51. For instance, sadomasochistic imagery features prominently in Madonna’s Justify My Love (1990) music video. 52. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), (London and New York: Routledge, 1980), 311. 53. Ibid., 312. 54. Mark Cousins and Athar Hussain, Michel Foucault: Theoretical Traditions in the Social Sciences (London: Macmillan, 1984), 50. 55. Forget Foucault is Baudrillard’s response to Foucault’s History of Sexuality. Baudrillard claims that Foucault’s genealogies amount to ‘mythic discourse’, arguing that desire and power and interchangeable, and so desire has no place in Foucault’s thesis. Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (1977), (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007). 56. Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, [extract from the 1981 text] in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 169–87, 169. Italics in original. 57. Mark Ravenhill, Faust is Dead, 99. 58. Ibid., 105. 59. Ibid., 100. 60. Ibid., 139–40. 61. Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970), (London: Sage, 1998), 129.

Notes 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87.

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Mark Ravenhill, Faust is Dead, 123. Ibid. Ibid., 124. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 12. Mark Ravenhill, Faust is Dead, 125. Ibid., 126. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 13. Ibid., 14. Mark Ravenhill, Faust is Dead, 131. Ibid., 132. Between January and March 1991, Jean Baudrillard published three essays in Libération claiming that the Gulf War was so heavily mediated, that it had greater virtual, rather than material, currency. These essays were published as the book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995). Mark Ravenhill, Faust is Dead, 132. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 17. Mark Ravenhill, Faust is Dead, 106. Ibid., 113. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers, 11–12. Ibid., 77. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60, 310 Mark Ravenhill, Faust is Dead, 97. Ibid., 135. Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 119. Mark Ravenhill, Faust is Dead, 140. Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, trans. Joan Copjec, eds. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 66–7. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Book XI (1977), (London and New York: Karnac, 2004), 183. Ibid., 183–4. Tim Dean, ‘Homosexuality and the Problem of Otherness’, in Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, eds. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 120–43, 129.

5 Wounded Attachments in the Live Art of Ron Athey and Franko B 1. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 73–4. 2. Anthony Kubiak, Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1991), 145. 3. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 1.

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4. Ibid. 5. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (London and New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1. 6. Deirdre Heddon, Autobiography and Performance (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmilllan, 2008), 2. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Please note that I focus on the performers’ earlier practice, and that more recently, Athey and especially Franko B have worked less with cutting and bloodletting. 10. Note that the following performances are used for discussion: Four Scenes in a Harsh Life, performed at ICA Theatre, London, 15/07/1994; Deliverance, performed at ICA Theatre, London, 09/12/1995; Incorruptible Flesh, performed at Cankarjev Dom, Ljubljana 29/07/1997; The Judas Cradle, performed at Gallery 291, London, 19/05/2005 (viewed live); Mama I Can’t Sing Part Two, performed at ICA Theatre, London, 13/01/1995; Mama I Can’t Sing Part Three, performed at ICA Theatre, London, 18/04/1996; I’m Not Your Babe Part One, performed at ICA Theatre, London, 05/12/1996; I’m Not Your Babe Part Two, performed at ICA Theatre, London, 06/12/1996; I Miss You, performed at De Beweeging, Antwerp, 29/10/1999; Oh Lover Boy, performed at Crawford Municipal Gallery Cork, 3/9/2005 (viewed live). Unless otherwise stated, photographs and mediatized performances at the Live Art Development Agency, London, UK were primarily used for study. 11. The production dates listed in this paragraph refer to first runs, and are not necessarily the performances analysed. 12. Mary Richards, ‘Ron Athey, A.I.D.S. and the Politics of Pain’, in Body, Space and Technology, e-journal (Internet Publication: Brunel University, Dept. of Performing Arts, 2003). Read at http://www.brunel.ac.uk/departments/pfa/ bstjournal/3no2/Papers/mary%20richards.htm 13. Ibid. 14. See, for example Athey quoted in Lois Keidan, ed., Exposures (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2001), 6. 15. Ibid. 16. Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation, (1975), (London: Vintage, 2007), 306. 17. Fredrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (1887) trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22. 18. Ron Athey, words spoken in interview on The South Bank Show: Body Art, 12 April 1998. 19. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 101. 20. In 1994 the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was publicly criticized for funding the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, for hosting Ron Athey, after a spectator claimed that the audience was sprayed with HIV positive blood. Athey claimed this was not the case. 21. Sigmund Freud, ‘Moses and Monotheism’ (1939), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XXIII, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 84.

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22. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 102. 23. Ibid., 78. 24. Elizabeth Grosz, commenting upon Kristeva’s semiotic, suggests that women, and in particular mothers, risk being associatively tied to the pre-Symbolic register, to which they are aligned via childbearing. See Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan, A Feminist Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 163. 25. In ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ Freud describes male beating fantasies as being structured around three phases of subjection: (1) I am being beaten by my father; (2) I am being loved by my father; and (3) I am being beaten by my mother. This beating fantasy, Freud suggests, corresponds to sexual love for the father: ‘[B]eing beaten also stands for being loved (in a genital sense), though this has been debased to a lower level owing to regression.’ The unconscious fantasy of stage two is thus repressed in favour of the more socially acceptable conscious fantasy of stage three. As such, Freud maintains that the masochist’s female fantasy is only a veil for a repressed desire for being beaten by the father. For an elaboration of this discussion, see Chapter 1 26. Ron Athey, words spoken in interview on The South Bank Show: Body Art, 12 April 1998. 27. For an elaboration of Artaud’s position, see Jacques Derrida, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 232–50. 28. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 84. 29. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, in Écrits: A Selection (1977), trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 319. 30. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, 90. 31. Ibid., 89. 32. Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 54–5. 33. Mary Richards, ‘Ron Athey, A.I.D.S. and the Politics of Pain’. 34. The precise setting is not obvious in performance, although in writing, Athey identifies it as a surgery hut. See Ron Athey, ‘Voices from the Front’, in Acting on AIDS: Sex, Drugs and Politics, eds. Joshua Oppenheimer and Helena Reckitt (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), 430–44. 35. In Homosexual Desire Guy Hocquenghem argues for a radical queer politics that would involve the social reclamation of the anus in a bid to destabilize the dominant phallic principle. He writes that the ‘the anus does not practise discrimination’, given that ‘seen from behind we are all women’. See Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella Dangoor (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 101. In a sense, I like to think that this anticipates David Wills’ idea of ‘dorsal ethics’ espoused in Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Sexuality, according to Wills, ‘is not, at least not in the first instance, determined as hetero- or homosexual, as vaginal or anal, as human (or indeed animal) or prosthetic, not even as embracing or penetrating but which implies before all else a coupling with otherness’. (p. 12)

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36. Amelia Jones, ‘Holy Body: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper’s Judas Cradle’, The Drama Review, vol. 50, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 159–69. 37. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). 38. Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 184. 39. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, ‘The Lost Object – Me: Notes on Endocryptic Identification’ (1975), in The Shell and the Kernel, Vol. 1 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 141. 40. Ibid., 142. 41. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, foreword by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 25. 42. Lawrence Steger, words spoken in Incorruptible Flesh, performed at Cankarjev Dom, Ljubljana on 29 July 1997. 43. Mary Richards, ‘Ron Athey, A.I.D.S. and the Politics of Pain’. 44. Timothy Murray, Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Ann Arbor: the University of Michigan press, 1997), 15. 45. Steger speaking in performance. 46. Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ (1991), in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 307–20; 314. 47. Sigmund Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’ (1914), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIX, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 150. 48. Ibid., 155. 49. Sigmund Freud, ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (dementia paranoids)’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XII, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 1–82; 71. 50. André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’ in On Private Madness (London: Hogarth Press and the Institution of Psycho-analysis, 1986), 142–73, 152 51. Joachim F. Danckwardt and Peter Wegner, ‘Performance as Annihilation or Integration’. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 88, part 5, October 2007, 1117–33; 1119. 52. Amelia Jones, ‘Holy Body: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper’s Judas Cradle’, 160. 53. Ibid.,168. 54. Ibid., 161. 55. Ibid., 166. 56. Franko B in interview with Robert Ayers, ‘Listening to Franko B: Blood Bravery and Beauty’, in Body Probe: Torture Garden 2: Mutant Flesh and Cyber Primitive (London: Creation Press, 1999), 69. 57. Ibid., 74. 58. Although less forthcoming than Athey about his personal background, Franko admits to certain details that are crucial to understanding the

Notes

59.

60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

70. 71. 72. 73.

74.

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relationship between certain figures and authority systems referenced in his work. Franko spent much of his childhood in a climate of religious fervour at a Catholic orphanage in Brescis in Northern Italy. While he returned to live with his mother at the age of seven, he was soon sent away to the Red Cross, close to Lake Mergozzo. See Sarah Wilson, ‘Franko B: Haute Surveillance, Haute Couture’, in Franko B, Manuel Vason, Gray Watson and Sarah Wilson, Franko B: Oh Lover Boy (London: Black Dog, 2001), Unpaginated. Words spoken in interview with Patrick Campbell and Helen Spackman in ‘With/out An-aesthetic: The Terrible Beauty of Franko B’, The Drama Review, vol. 42, no. 4, (1998): 56–74; 64. Franko B, Shelf Life (London: Two10 Gallery/The Wellcome Trust, 2000), 6–7. Antonin Artaud, ‘Saint Francis of Assisi’, in Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 5. I acknowledge that Sarah Wilson makes this comparison with Artaud in her essay in Oh Lover Boy, unpaginated. Patrick Campbell and Helen Spackman, ‘With/out An-aesthetic: The Terrible Beauty of Franko B’, 64. Stephen Di Benedetto, ‘The Body as Fluid Dramaturgy: Live Art, Corporeality and Perception’, in Journal of Dramatic Criticism, vol. XIV, no. 2 (2002): 4–15; 4. Francesca Alfano Miglietti in interview with Franko B in Extreme Bodies: The Use and Abuse of the Body in Art (Milan: Skira, 2003), 234–9; 239. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 85. While the cross draws attention to HIV, Franko does not claim to be HIV positive like Athey. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 91. It is important to remember, however, that while institutional abuse is staged, Franko directs the piece at his/a mother in the title, ultimately implicating her as a root problem. Unlike Athey, however, Franko’s maternal address is less fraught with explicit concerns surrounding feminine identification than it is with abandonment. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 167. For Deleuze and Guattari, the Body Without Organs is an open, potentialized intensity, ‘full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance’ (p. 167). Franko B interviewed by Gray Watson in Oh Lover Boy, unpaginated. Theodor Reik, Masochism in Sex and Society, trans. M. H. Beigel and G. M. Kurth (London: Grove Press, 1962), 44–91. See Body Probe or Campbell and Spackman interview. Elisabeth Bronfen, ‘The Body and its Discontents’, in Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality, eds. Avril Horner and Angela Keana (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 109–23. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (London and Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003), 103.

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75. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: John’s Hopkins University Press, 1995), 8. I also acknowledge here Dawn Perlmutter’s elucidation of Girard’s theorization of sacrificial crisis in ‘The Sacrificial Aesthetic: Blood Rituals from Art to Murder’, in Anthropoetics, vol. 5, no. 2 (Fall 1999–Winter 2000). Read at http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0502/ blood.htm 76. Ibid., 12, 39. 77. Ibid., 34, 39. 78. Ibid., 12. 79. Ibid., 38. 80. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 36. 81. Dawn Perlmutter, ‘The Sacrificial Aesthetic: Blood Rituals from Art to Murder’ 82. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 82. 83. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 173. 84. Jacques Derrida, ‘Economimesis’, in Diacritics, vol. 11, no. 2, trans. R. Klein (1981): 3–25; 9. 85. Ibid. 86. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, 43. 87. Mary Richards, ‘Ron Athey, A.I.D.S. and the Politics of Pain’. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. Amelia Jones, ‘Dis/playing the Phallus: Male Artists Perform their Masculinities’, in Art History, vol. 17, no. 4 (1994): 546–84; 557. 91. Francesca Alfano Miglietti, Extreme Bodies: The Use and Abuse of the Body in Art, 34. 92. Maurizia Boscagli, Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century (Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), 5. 93. In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Freud suggests that the fort/da game he played with his grandson, in which an object repeatedly disappeared and returned, allowed the boy to manage his anxiety about the absences of his mother. But this repetition of anxiety also has implications for managing ‘trouble’ and securing subjectivity in the long term: ‘each fresh repetition seems to strengthen the mastery they are in search of’ (p. 35). See ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, (1920) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XVIII, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001). 94. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 70. 95. Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 24. 96. See Johannes Birringer, Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 203. 97. Kristeva suggests that the process of separation is fundamental to the corps propre or clean body. However, while the clean body is the opposite to the abject body, the former is dependent upon the latter for its constitution, which can only be secured via repeated processes of othering.

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6 David Blaine, Fathers 4 Justice, and the Spectacle of Heroic Masculinity 1. Adam Phillips, Houdini’s Box: On the Arts of Escape (London and New York: Faber and Faber, 2002), 15. 2. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Book XVII, 1969–70, trans. Russell Grigg, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller with notes by Russell Grigg (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 81. 3. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Shelia Fariah Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1. 4. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 81. 5. In The Emancipated Spectator Jacques Rancière argues for the need to challenge the opposition between seeing and acting which inflects many twentiethcentury ideas concerning what constitutes community/political theatre. Rancière suggests that ‘viewing is also an action, that confirms or transforms the distribution of positions’. See The Emancipated Spectator (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 13. 6. Paul Allain and Jen Harvie, ‘Protests, Demonstrations and Parades’, in The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 194–5. 7. Jan Cohen-Cruz, ed., ‘General Introduction’, in Radical Street Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 1–6; 1. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), trans. Ken Knabb (Rebel Press: London, 2004), 10–11. 11. Scot Lehigh, ‘And for David Blaine’s Next Feat’, The Boston Globe, 10 May 2006. Read at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/ articles/2006/05/11/AndforDavidBlainesnextfeat/ 12. David Blaine, Frozen in Time (Documentary), Dir. Roger Goodman, Patrice Productions, 2000. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. David Blaine, Vertigo (Documentary), Dirs. Michael Dimich and Jacob Septimus, Dakota North Entertainment, 2002. 16. Ibid. 17. Anita Biressi, ‘“Above the Below”: Body Trauma as Spectacle in Social/Media Space’. Journal for Cultural Research, vol. 8, no. 3 (2004): 335–52; 346–7. 18. Blaine interviewed in Above the Below, Dirs. Harmony Korine and Steve Smith, Channel Four Television, 2003. 19. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), 21–2. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Peta Tait, ‘Feminine Free Fall: A Fantasy of Freedom’, in Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. II, ed. Philip Auslander (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 207–15; 207–8. 23. Ibid., 210. 24. Ibid., 211.

212 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

Notes Ibid., 213. Blaine interviewed in Above the Below (Documentary). Anita Biressi, ‘Above the Below’, 344. Ibid., 347. Márta Korbonits, David Blaine, Marinos Elia, and Jeremy Powell-Tuck, ‘Refeeding David Blaine – Studies after a 44-Day Fast’. The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 353, no. 21 (November 24, 2005): 2306–7 Franz Kafka, ‘A Hunger Artist’, (1922) in The Complete Short Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (London: Vintage, 2005), 268–77; 269–70. Ibid., 272. On 21 October 2003, campaigners Eddie Gorecki and Jonathan Stanesby scaled the Royal Courts of Justice, dressed as Batman and Robin. Ten days later, group member David Chick scaled a crane near Tower Bridge, London, dressed as Spider Man. On the morning of 22 December 2003, campaigners Eddie Gorecki, Jolly Stanesby, Michael Sadeh, and Steve Battleshild dressed as Santa Claus and climbed on top of Tower Bridge. Outside the United Kingdom, a protest by a member dressed as Robin the Boy Wonder was held for 12 hours on the Pattullo Bridge in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. On 6 May 2005 the group made headlines after a member dressed as Superman climbed up scaffolding in Old City Hall in Toronto, Ontario. Matt O’Connor, Fathers 4 Justice: The Inside Story (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), 54–5. Ibid. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 80. Ibid. Ibid., 80–1. Calvin Thomas, ‘Last Laughs: Batman, Masculinity, and the Technology of Abjection’. Men and Masculinities, 2 ( July 1999): 26–46; 26. Recounting his earlier book Male Matters in ‘Last Laughs: Batman, Masculinity, and the Technology of Abjection’, Calvin Thomas writes, ‘I suggest that the cloaca theory helps account for the abject or expelled status of that “lost object” that Lacan says is the phantasmatic support of the subject, and I argue that the “instinct for mastery” that motivates the fort/da game may also be motivated by the boy’s desire to overcome his feelings of helpless and abject passivity by symbolizing the mother’s body as a small, passive, controllable object. In so doing, I suggest, the boy attempts to disavow not only his own dependency on the mother as an active subjective agent, but also an anxious feeling of a deep ontological shittiness at the core of the subjective existence itself’. (pp. 26–7). Calvin Thomas, ‘Last Laughs: Batman, Masculinity, and the Technology of Abjection’, 29. Baz Kershaw, ‘Fighting in the Streets: Dramaturgies of Popular Protest, 1968–1989’, in Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. III, ed. Philip Auslander (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 266–92; 269. Ibid.

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44. Calvin Thomas, ‘Last Laughs: Batman, Masculinity, and the Technology of Abjection’, 29. 45. Ibid. 46. In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Lacan states, ‘Shouldn’t the true termination of analysis […] in the end confront the one who undergoes it with the reality of the human condition […] the state in which man is in that relationship to himself which is his own death […] and can expect help from no one’ (p. 373.) See Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, trans. with notes by David Porter, ed. JacquesAlain Miller (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).

7 The Jackassification of Male Trouble: Incorporating the Abject as Norm 1. Leo Bersani in Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 121. 2. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London and New York Verso, 1999), 334. 3. Garry Whannel, ‘Sports Stars, Narrativization and Masculinities’, Leisure Studies, no. 18 (1999): 249–65; 257. 4. Pat Stack, ‘Stack on the Back’, Socialist Review, no. 203 (1996). Read at http:// pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr203/stack.htm 5. Cintra Wilson, ‘Men Who Hurt Themselves for a Living’. Read at http:// www.salon.com/people/feature/2002/05/21/blaine/ 6. Jackass: The Movie. Dir. Jeff Tremaine, MTV and Dickhouse Productions, 2002. 7. It is worth mentioning that Jackass 3D is due for cinema release in 2010. 8. Tony Jefferson, ‘Muscle, Hard Men and Iron Mike Tyson: Reflections on Desire, Anxiety and the Embodiment of Masculinity’, Body and Society, vol. 4, no. 1 (1998): 77–98, 78. 9. Ibid., 80. 10. Ibid., 81. 11. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982): 1. 12. Ibid., 32. 13. Ibid., 2. 14. Ibid., 5. 15. Ibid., 2. 16. Ibid., 3. 17. Ibid. 18. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Polity Press,1987), 244. 19. Sigmund Freud, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (1937), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 211. 20. Jacques Lacan, ‘Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis’ (1948), in Écrits: A Selection, (1977) trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 13.

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21. Alan Peterson, The Body in Question: A Socio-Cultural Approach (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 111. 22. Kent Williams, ‘Their Bodies, Ourselves: What the Growing Popularity of Pain and Humiliation as Entertainment says about all of us’, in Philadelphia City Paper. Read at http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2002-08-08/cover.shtml 23. Tony Jefferson, ‘Muscle, Hard Men and Iron Mike Tyson’, 83. 24. Theodor Reik, ‘Masochism in Modern Man’ an extract from the book published in The Cassell Dictionary of Sex Quotations, ed. Alan Isaacs, (London: Cassell, 1997), 228–9. 25. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique, Book 1, 1953–1954, ed. Jacques Allain Miller, trans. with notes by John Forrester (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 42. 26. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 319–20. 27. Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave’, in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (London and Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988), 197–222; 218. 28. Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave’, 222 29. Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 238. 30. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, vol. 1, trans. and ed. Nicolas T. Rand (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 113. 31. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (1990) (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 92. 32. Garry Whannel, ‘Sports Stars, Narrativization and Masculinities’, 256. 33. Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow … (Standford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 66. 34. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (1972) trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). In this text Deleuze and Guattari outline a nonhierarchized theory of becoming, available to men, women, animals, vegetables, molecules, ad infinitum, that involves Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible. 35. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, (1941), trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 25. 36. Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow …, 70. 37. See Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987) and Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Implosion of Meaning in the Media and the Information of the Social in the Masses’, in Myths of Information: Technology and Post-Industrial Culture, ed. Kathleen Woodward (Madison: Coda Press, 1980), 137–48. 38. E. Ann Kaplan, ‘Feminism/Oedipus/Postmodernism: The Case of MTV’, in Postmodernism and its Discontents, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London and New York: Verso, 1988), 30–44; 33–6. 39. David Miller’s Response to Pat Stack, Socialist Review, no. 204 ( January 1997). Read at http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr204/letters.htm 40. Estella V. Welldon, Ideas in Psychoanalysis: Sadomasochism (Cambridge: Icon books, 2002), 35.

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41. Jerome Doolittle, ‘Desperately Seeking Empire’, in Bad Attitudes journal/ weblog. Read at http://badattitudes.com/MT/archives/2002/10/ 42. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1. 43. Ibid., 21. 44. Claude Lèvi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 115. 45. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic’, in The Masculinity Studies Reader, eds. Rachel Adams and David Savran (Oxford and Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002), 158–73; 164. 46. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 334. 47. Ibid., 248. 48. Ibid., 322. Žižek describes the big Other as the ‘real father’: the castrating agent of the prohibitive ‘No!’ in contrast to the small others, or imaginary father/prohibitions he sees as proliferating the contemporary world. 49. Ibid., 334. 50. Lacan suggests that the mirror stage confronts the subject with his/her own fragmentation, while also spurring him/her to regain the (pre-mirror stage) presumed ‘orthopaedic’ self. See Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Practice’ (1949), in Écrits, 4–5. 51. Chris Jenks, Transgression (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 2. 52. Ibid., 7. 53. Kent Williams, ‘Their Bodies, Ourselves’. 54. Steve Burgess, ‘The Jackass Effect: Why I Watch the Evil Spawn of Candid Camera that Punk’d Our Culture’. Read at http://www.thetyee.ca/ Entertainment/2004/06/02/The_Jackass_Effect/ 55. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 10. 56. Robert Stam, ‘Bakhtin and Left Cultural Critique’, in Postmodernism and Its Discontents, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London and New York: Verso, 1988), 116–45; 134. 57. Ibid., 140. 58. E. Ann Kaplan, ‘Feminism/Oedipus/Postmodernism: The Case of MTV’, 33. 59. Robert Stam, ‘Bakhtin and Left Cultural Critique’, 135. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 149. 63. Ibid., 155. 64. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 328. 65. I am thinking here about the trajectories of transformation suggested by Slavoj Žižek’s notion of the ‘act’ and Alain Badiou’s theory of the ‘event’, that might create productive ruptures in the (postmodern) norm. While both philosophers make provocative arguments for breaking with the established order, which would also include a redefinition of the subject, I am also mindful that the subject that concerns me here is very much the subject who comes, if you like, before the act/event. Also, I remain wary of the kind of violence that such moments might unleash, and consequently

216

Notes in my last chapter I appeal to the act/event of fragilization rather than revolt, which always demands its own kind of sacrifice.

8 An Ethic of Fragilization 1. This is how Lacan frames Oedipus’s questions in the paper ‘Desire, Life and Death’ (1955). See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, Book II, 1954–1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller with notes by John Forrester (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 230. 2. Alain Badiou in interview with Diana George at ‘Is a History of the Cultural Revolution Possible?’ Conference at University of Washington, February 2006. Read at http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/ 002075.php 3. Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 189. 4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick draws attention to the difficult place of the feminine not only in straight male culture, but also in gay culture. She writes, ‘Indeed, the gay movement has never been quick to attend to issues concerning effeminate boys. There is a discreditable reason for this in the marginal or stigmatized position to which even adult men who are effeminate have often been relegated in the movement. A more understandable reason than effeminophobia, however, is the conceptual need of the gay movement to interrupt a long tradition of viewing gender and sexuality as continuous and collapsible categories […] To begin to theorize gender and sexuality as distinct though intimately entangled axes of analysis has been, indeed, a great advance of recent lesbian and gay thought. There is a danger, however, that the advance may leave the effeminate boy once more in the position of the haunting abject – this time the haunting abject of gay thought itself.’ See ‘How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay’, in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed Michael Warner (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 69–81; 72. 5. Michael D. Snediker, Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 2. 6. Leo Bersani in Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 68. 7. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (London: British Film Institute, 2004), 175–6. 8. Ibid., 165. 9. Ibid., 176–7. 10. Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 303. 11. Ibid. 12. Leo Bersani in Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies, 55–6. 13. Ibid., 77. 14. Ibid., 85. 15. Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2009), 35. 16. Ibid.

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17. Ibid., 34. 18. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 10. 19. Ibid., 25. 20. Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009), xxx. 21. The subject of queer temporality has become of great interest to a number of scholars working in performance studies. In her introduction to Feminist and Queer Performance: Critical Strategies (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Sue-Ellen Case imagines ‘a slipstream of time, a wormhole of time, a palimpsest of times in which the past, present, and future intermingle’ (p. 13). Also, in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), José Esteban Muñoz explores queer culture’s anticipatory function, suggesting that art and performance can open windows to the future. 22. Dennis King Keenan, The Question of Sacrifice (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University press, 2005), 127. 23. Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 179–80. 24. Ibid., 172. 25. Ibid. 26. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Neighbors and Other Monsters’, in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, eds. Eric L. Santner, Kenneth Reinhard, and Slavoj Žižek (London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 134–90. 27. Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, 141. 28. Ibid., 167. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 169. 32. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, (1949), in Écrits: A Selection (1977), trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 5. 33. Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, 181. 34. Ibid., 181–2. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), xiv 38. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 28–9. 39. Jacques Rancière, On The Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 19. 40. Patricia MacCormack, ‘Inhuman Evanescence’, in Borderlands: Jacques Rancière on the Shores of Queer Theory, eds. Samuel A. Chambers and Michael O’Rourke, vol. 8, no. 2 (2009): 1–17. Read at http://www.borderlands.net. au/issues/vol8no2.html. 41. Taylor Mac singing in Walk, Dir. Michael Snead, 2007. Viewed on http:// www.youtube.com/wacth?v=cu_1WeDEGTA. 42. Based on a production at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 15/7/2007.

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——— Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture, and Film. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Urban, Hugh. ‘The Remnants of Desire: Sacrificial Violence and Sexual Transgression in the Cult of the Kapalikas and in the Writings of Georges Bataille’. Religion (1995), 25, 67–90. Waters, John. ‘Prejudice is Right on if Men are the Victims’, The Irish Times, January 12, 1999. Welldon, Estella V. Ideas in Psychoanalysis: Sadomasochism. Cambridge: Icon books, 2002. Williams, Kent. ‘Their Bodies, Ourselves: What the Growing Popularity of Pain and Humiliation as Entertainment says about all of us’, Philadelphia City Paper. Read at http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2002-08-08/cover.shtml. Last accessed on 1 March 2010. Wills, David. Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Wilson, Cintra. ‘Men Who Hurt Themselves for a Living’. Read at http:// www.salon.com/people/feature/2002/05/21/blaine/ Last accessed on 1 March 2010. Wollaston, Sam. ‘With “Xtremely” Healthy Circulation’, Media Guardian, February 24, 1997. Woodward, Kathleen, ed. Myths of Information: Technology and Post-Industrial Culture. Madison: Coda Press, 1980. Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Žižek, Slavoj. ‘Response to Jean-Luc Marion’s “Towards a Phenomenological Sketch of Sacrifice”’. Read at http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/ webforum/112008/Response%20to%20Marion%20Zizek.pdf. Last accessed on 1 March 2010. ——— The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Theology. London and New York. Verso, 1999. ——— On Belief. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. ——— Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London and New York: Verso, 2002. ——— The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. London and Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003. ——— Organs Without Bodies. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. ——— ‘Neighbors and Other Monsters’, in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (eds). Eric L. Santner, Kenneth Reinhard, and Slavoj Žižek. London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, 134–90. ——— Violence. London: Profile Books, 2009.

Films Blue, Dir. Derek Jarman, Basilisk, 1993. Hallelujah! Ron Athey: A Story of Deliverance. Dir. Catherine Gund, Aubin Pictures, 1999. Frozen in Time. Dir. Roger Goodman, Patrice Productions, 2000.

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Vertigo, Dirs. Michael Dimich and Jacob Septimus, Dakota North Entertainment, 2002. Jackass: The Movie. Dir. Jeff Tremaine, MTV and Dickhouse Productions, 2002. InterMission. Dir. John Crowley, Brown Sauce Film Productions, 2003. Above the Below, Dirs. Harmony Korine and Steve Smith, Channel Four Television, 2003. The Passion of the Christ. Dir. Mel Gibson, Icon Productions, 2004. Jackass: The Box Set. Dir. Jeff Tremaine, MTV and Paramount, 2005. Walk, Dir. Michael Snead, 2007.

Index A Whistle in the Dark 5 Abject, the 14, 16, 22–24, 58–59, 65, 67–68, 72, 78–80, 84, 88–90, 98, 104, 113, 115–116, 123, 144–145, 160, 162, 164–165, 176, 181, 186 Abjection 9, 12, 13–15, 23, 34, 45, 58–59, 66–69, 78–80, 83, 88–90, 114, 118, 125–126, 131, 136–136, 141, 144–145, 152, 157–158, 162–165, 174, 178, 183, 187, 202n68, 212n40, 216n4 Above the Below 149–155 Abraham, Nicolas 27–28, 122–123, 170 Abramovi´c, Marina 6 Abu Ghraib 128–129 Acconci, Vito 6 Acting out 127–128, 193n40 Acuña, Jason 172–173 Adam and Paul 7 Agamben, Giorgio 50, 142 Albee, Edward 5 Alexander the Great 73 Allain, Paul 148 Angels in America 5 Animal House 180 Anti-Semitism 36–3, 41, 49 Artaud, Antonin 49, 84, 118, 131, 143, 198n35 Athey, Ron 6, 13, 28, 31, 146. See chapter 5. For performance details see 206n10 Attachment 52, 57, 66–67, 86 Authority 12–13, 19, 38, 41–42, 54, 60–64, 72, 75–76, 78–80, 83, 90–91, 97–98, 106, 113, 118, 120, 126, 133–134, 140–141, 143–144, 148, 158, 160, 168, 171, 174–178 Badinter, Elisabeth 22 Badiou, Alain 182, 185–187, 215n65 Bakhtin, Mikhail 174, 180 Bataille, George 49–52

Batman 155, 157–158, 212n32 and n40 Baudrillard, Jean 13, 97–98, 100, 102–103, 106, 174 Be(a)st of Taylor Mac, The 188–190 Beating fantasy 29–32, 42, 207n25 Beating 42–43, 49–50, 71–72, 75–77, 79, 111 Berlant, Lauren 56–57 Bersani, Leo 14, 160, 169–170, 183–184, 187 Beynon, John 4, 9 Bigsby, Christopher 5 Billy Elliot 7 Bio-virtual 107 Birds, The 48 Biressi, Anita 152, 154 Blaine, David 6, 13, 34, 161–162. See chapter 6 Blasted 5 Bloodletting 13, 111, 114–115, 130, 133, 136, 141 Blue 34 Bond, Edward 5 Borderlinking 14, 187 Boscagli, Maurizia 144 Boundary-trespass 47, 90 Boyarin, Daniel 40 Braveheart 40 Brown, Wendy 109, 111, 113 Buckingham Palace Protest 155 Burden, Chris 6, 140, 161–162, 168 Buried Alive 149 Burton, Tim 157, 72 Bush, George W. 38, 55 Butler, Judith 1–3, 10–11, 14, 17, 22–28, 32, 47, 58–59, 61–62, 90, 95–96, 114, 118–119, 126, 132, 170, 178, 188 Campbell, Patrick 17, 22 Candib, Lucy 60 Capitalism 87–89, 93, 98, 181 229

230

Index

Caputo, John 35, 53–54 Caravaggio 7 Carlton, Darryl 115 Carter, Jimmy (President) 9 Caruth, Cathy 135 Carver, Terrell 10–11 Castration 12, 14, 25, 32, 34, 40–41, 80, 93, 95, 104, 106, 111, 121–122, 124 Cathexis 18, 24–25, 96 Catholicism 36 Caviezel, James 56 Celtic Tiger 11 Chambers, Samuel Allen 10–11 Child, the 48 Christian 38–39, 45, 47, 49–50, 55–57, 112, 117, 121–122, 133, 141 Christianity 36, 38, 51. See chapter 2. Christ-like 116, 137. See chapter 5. Circus 153–154 Clare, Anthony 1, 4 Cohen-Cruz, Jan 148 Commodification 88, 111, 178–179, 181 Compassionate Conservatism 56 Conditioning, The 6 Connell, Robert William 8, 14, 91 Conservative 11, 36, 38, 55–57 Corp propre 145 Corpus Christi 5 Crawford Municipal Gallery 140 Cross-dressing 61–62, 112–115, 117–118, 124, 188 Crucifixion 37, 42–45, 54, 121, 138, Cut, The 104 Danckwardt, Joachim F. 127–128 Daredevil 73 Dargis, Manohla 6 David Blaine: Magic Man 148 David Blaine: Street Magic 148 Dean, Tim 107 Death-drive 38, 48, 90 Debord, Guy 148 Dehumanize 48, 52 Deleuze, Gilles 92, 117, 137, 173 Deliverance 111–112, 117, 120–123 Denby, David 37

Derrida, Jacques 32, 53–54, 116, 142–143, 173 Di Benedetto, Stephen 59–60, 132 Dionysus 112 Dirty Sanchez 161 Disidentification 21, 27, 109–110, 194n70 Dismemberment 149, 167, 178 Dive of Death 149 Dolan, Jill 119 Dunne, Ryan 168, 170–171 Dutoit, Ulysse 183 Ébranlement 183. See self-shattering Edelman, Lee 47–48, 90, 170 Effeminization 40, 64 Emasculation 3, 9, 34, 58, 63, 155, 167, 178 Encryption 28, 123 England, Dave 163–167 Eroticism 42, 29, 50, 52 Ethics 14, 113, 129–130, 173, 182–188 Ethnic 37, 101, 185 Ettinger, Bracha L. 14, 34, 182, 186–188 Excrement 23, 58–59, 68–69, 71 Exhibitionism 126, 139, 157 Faludi, Susan 14 Falwell, Jerry 38, 54 Fantasmatic 42, 47–48, 95, 170 Fantasy 12, 15–16, 27, 29–30, 32, 66, 69–70, 76, 81, 92, 94–96, 107, 117, 147, 153, 172–173, 186, 188 Farrell, Colin 72–73, 77, 83 Fascism 165 Fathers 4 Justice 6, 13, 34. See chapter 6. Faust is Dead 5, 13. See chapter 4. Feminism 2, 6, 9, 160–161, 175 Fetishism and fetishization 48, 53–54, 72, 110, 112, 114, 122, 125, 171, 181 Fight Club 7, 73 Fincher, David 7, 72 Flanagan, Bob 6

Index Foucault, Michel 87–100, 104, 142 Four Scenes in a Harsh Life 111–121, 134, 136 Fragilization 14. See chapter 8 Franko B 6, 13, 28, 31, 146. See chapter 5. For performances details see 206n10 Freedman, Jonathan 41 Freud, Sigmund 15–18, 23–27, 29–34, 40, 42, 45, 49, 52, 66–70, 74–75, 79, 87, 93, 95–96, 104–105, 112, 115, 117, 121–123, 126–128, 132, 163, 165, 169 Fricker, Karen 67 Friel, Brian 5 Frozen in Time 149–155 Full Monty, The 7 Fuss, Diana 25–27, 64–65, 95–96, 104–105 Futurity 47–48 Galperin, William 181 Geller, Jay 41 Genet, Jean 128 Gibson, Mel, See chapter 2 Girard, René 4, 12, 36, 55–57, 141–142 Glengarry Glen Ross 4 Greatest Story Ever Told, The 36 Green, André 127 Gross, Martin 87–88, 97 Guantánamo 128–129 Guattari, Félix 92, 137, 173 Guerrilla performance 2, 11, 146, 148, 155, 158 Gutenberg, Andrea 140 Gynophobia 122 Hamlet 91 Harvie, Jen 148 Heddon, Dee 110 Hegel, Georg W.F. 16, 81–82 Hegemony 8, 11, 15, 38, 69, 78, 90, 91, 93, 188 Heterosexism 119, 124 Heterosexuality 7, 10, 25, 89, 97, 119, 126, 160, 169, 170, 174–176, 179

231

HIV/AIDS 2, 7, 13, 34, 39, 47, 90, 109, 111–112, 115, 120–122, 125– 126, 133 Hocquenghem, Guy 121 Homecoming, The 5 Homo sacer 50, 56, 142 Homographesis 90 Homophobia 2, 13–14, 40, 59–61, 65, 73, 89–90 Homosexual panic 176 Homosexuality 3, 5, 7, 10, 12–13, 22, 24–26, 30–31, 37–40, 43, 46–47, 50, 56, 63, 66–69, 78–79, 83, 111, 117, 119–121, 128, 140–142, 169–170, 175–176, 178– 179. See chapter 4 Homosocial 67, 78, 161, 166, 175–176, 200n34 Houdini, Harry 146 House of Commons Protest 155 Hunger Artist, The 154–155 Hypermasculinity 42, 55, 57, 60–61, 64–65, 72–74, 76, 78, 80–81, 83, 115, 170 Hysteria 17, 28, 160, 177–178, 187 I’m Not Your Babe 136–138 Iceman Cometh, The 149 Identification 12, 13, 15, 17–19, 21–28, 32, 45, 49–50, 56, 59, 64–68, 70, 75, 78–79, 81, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95–97, 100, 104–105, 112, 121, 128, 130, 133, 141, 170, 178, Impotency 59–60, 62, 65, 76, 80–81, 83 In A Little World of Our Own 5 Incorporation 18, 27–28, 50, 123, 170, 181 Incorruptible Flesh 111, 112, 123–128 Indestructibility 142–145, 165, 172 Infantilization 115, 130–132, 160, 171, 177 InterMission 7, 12, 32. See chapter 3 Interpellation 19, 23, 91 Introjection 27, 32, 170 Irigaray, Luce 22, 44

232

Index

Jackass 13–14, 31, 157. See chapter 7 Jakobsen, Janet R. 38 James, Henry 176 Jameson, Fredric 13, 87–89, 104 Jarman, Derek 7, 34 Jeffords, Susan 9 Jenks, Chris 179 Jesus of Nazareth 36 Johnston, Adrian 185 Jones, Amelia 13, 121, 129–130, 142 Jouissance 16, 33, 43, 51, 80, 107, 141, 146–147, 155, 177, 184, 187, 196n122 Joyce 112 Judas Cradle 128–130 Judeo-Christian 39 Kafka, Franz 154 Kahn, Coppélia 21 Kane, Sarah 5 Kaplan, Ann 174 Keidan, Lois 5–6 Kimmel, Michael 14 King of Kings 36 Knoxville, Johnny 161–163, 165–168, 171–174 Kojève, Alexandre 81–82 Kristeva, Julia 12–13, 22–24, 26, 33, 45, 58, 67–68, 78, 80, 88–89, 124, 126, 133, 144, 164–165, 180. See abject and abjection Kubiak, Anthony 109 Kushner, Tony 5 Labour Party 11 Lacan, Jacques 13, 17–21, 23–26, 32–34, 38, 43–44, 51, 61, 66, 68, 71, 77, 81–82, 84, 87–88, 91, 95–96, 105–107, 119, 126, 146–147, 158, 163, 167, 169, 178, 182, 186–187 Laddism 13–14, 160–162, 171–172, 175–176 Laing, Stewart Last Temptation of Christ, The 36 Lenau, Nikolaus 97 Lion King, The 91

MacCormack, Patricia 188 Made in China 5, 12, 96. See chapter 3 Mama I Can’t Sing 133–136 Mamet, David 4 Man Without a Face, The 40 Mangan, Michael 9 Margera, Bam 171–172 Martyrs and Saints 112–123 Masochism 7, 10, 14–15, 29 31–32, 34, 70, 80, 93, 95, 111, 125, 175, 178 Maternity 21, 26, 66–67, 80, 112, 121, 131, 133, 136, 141 McGhehey, Ehren 164–165 McNally, Terence 5 McPherson, Conor 59 Melancholia 17–18, 24–28 Messner, Michael 14 Micropolitics 104 Middleton, Peter 64–65 Miglietti, Francesca Alfano 144 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen 68, 81 Miller, David 175 Miller, Toby 73 Misogyny 14, 59–61, 65, 73, 112, 114, 125, 143, 156 Mitchell, Gary 5 Mosse, George 9 Mourning 17–18, 24–25, 27, 79, 96, 123, 138–139 MTV 14, 87, 105, 161, 168, 174, 181 Mulvey, Laura 6, 76–77 Muñoz, José Esteban 13, 17, 109–110, 142 Murphy, Tom 5 Murray, Timothy 125 Narcissism 139, 145, 184 National Theatre of Ireland (Abbey) 59 Neilson, Anthony 5 Nietzsche, Friedrich 113, 144 O’Rowe, Mark 5, 12. See chapter 3 Objet a 77, 81–82 Oedipus complex 18–24, 29, 32–33, 87, 95–96, 170, 176

Index Oedipus Rex 4 Oh Lover Boy 138–140, 156 Optimism (queer) 183 Ordinary Decent Criminal 73 Out of Joint (theatre company) 87, 89, 94 Pane, Gina 6 Passion of the Christ, The 12, 31. See chapter 2 Pêcheux, Michel 27 Pellegrini, Ann 38 Penetrator 5 Peterson, Alan 167 Pettitt, Lance 83 Phallic masculinity 21, 35, 61, 144–145, 182 Phallocentrism 22–23, 143, 184, 186 Phallogocentrism 43 Phantasy 20, 31, 187 Phantom 123 Phelan, Peggy 114 Philadelphia Here I Come 5 Phillipou, Nick 97 Phillips, Adam 146, 184 Pinter, Harold 5 Pitchfork Disney 96 Prisoner of Love 128 Prohibition 128 Prothero, Stephen 55 Psychosis 186–187 Quinn, Michael 73 Raab, Chris 163 Rancière, Jacques 147, 188 Rank, Otto 186 Ravenhill, Mark 5, 13, 34. See chapter 4 Reik, Theodor 139, 169 Republican administrations 11, 38, 56 Ressentiment 72, 113 Rich, Frank 38–39 Richards, Mary 119–120,124, 143 Ridley, Philip 96 Robertson, Pamela 7–8 Rose, Jacqueline 22, 27

233

Royal Court (theatre) 87 Rude Guerrilla (theatre company) 98 S.W.A.T. 73 Sacrifice 7, 10, 12–13, 21–22, 29, 33–35, 58, 107, 112–113, 117, 121, 130–131, 136, 140–142, 178, 182– 184. See chapter 2. Sadism 42, 70 Sadomasochism 69–71, 179 Saint Paul 33, 38, 53 Saved 5 Savran, David 14–15, 30 Scarry, Elaine 103 Scatology 59, 65, 68, 162–168, 199n10, Scatontological 12, 71, 192n33, 201n52 Schizophrenia and schizoid subjectivity 13, 87–88. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Schmitt, Richard 60 Schneemann, Carolee 6 Schneider, Rebecca 144 Sebastiane 7 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 67, 175–176, 200n34, 216n4 Segal, Lynn 7–8, 14 Self-harm 13, 98, 105, 112–116, 125, 128, 130, 133, 144, 161, 172, 175 Self-shattering 169–170, 183–184 Shoot 6, 168 Shopping and Fucking 5, 13. See chapter 4 Sick 140 Sierz, Aleks 5, 97 Silverman, Kaja 15 Snapper, Julia 128 Snead, Matthew 188–189 Snediker, Michael D. 183, 189 South Park 37 Spacey, Kevin 149 Stallybrass, Peter 15–16, 69, 152 Stam, Robert 180 Steger, Lawrence 123–128 Stein, Gertrude 112 Steve-O 163–164, 169–171, 173–174, 176

234

Index

Stewart, Suzanne R. 93 Stylites 150 Superhero 155–159 Tait, Peta 153 Tarantino, Quentin 7 Taylor Mac 12, 14, 188–190 Taylor, Charles 8 Temporality 185–190, 217n21 Theweleit, Klaus Thin Red Line, The 184 This Lime Tree Bower 5 Thomas Lips 6 Thomas, Calvin 1, 12, 15, 71, 157–158 Three Tall Women 5 Tigerland 73 Torok, Maria 27–28, 122–123, 170 Tower Bridge Protest 155 Trademarks 6 Trans-fixed 140 Trauma 9, 11, 34, 111–113, 115–116, 122–123, 125,127–128, 130–131, 133, 135–136, 145, 154, 183, 187 Universalism 185, 187 Up To And Including Her Limits 6 Urban, Hugh 52–53 Utopia 142, 217n21

Vertigo 149–155 Victimization 9, 10, 12, 15, 34, 59, 72, 74–76, 78–79, 82–83, 111, 113, 116, 122, 178, 182–183 Viennese Aktionists 6 Virtuality 102–103, 106–107, 205n72 Visiting Hours 6 Viva La Bam 161 Weakness 53–54, 63, 177–178 Wegner, Peter 127–128 Whannel, Garry 160 When Brendan Met Trudy 7 White, Allon 15–16, 69, 152 Wildboyz 161 Working through 126–128, 131, 136, 143 Wounded attachment 109, 111, 140, 142, 145 You Make My Heart Go Boom 140 Young, Iris Marion 89–90 Žižek, Slavoj 12, 33–34, 36, 38, 44, 51, 53, 102, 122, 141, 160, 176–178, 181, 184–187, 215n65

Male Trouble: Masculinity and The Performance of Crisis

Masculinity and Film Performance: Male Angst in Contemporary American Cinema

Masculinity and Film Performance: Male Angst in Contemporary American Cinema

Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (Male Orders)

Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World

The End of Masculinity

The Anthropology of Masculinity

Male of the Species

Male of the Species

Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction, 1950-2000: Keeping It Up

Male of the Species

Conrad and Masculinity

Evaluation and Treatment of the Infertile Male

Masculinity, Law and Family

Masculinity and Popular Television

Evaluation and Treatment of the Infertile Male

The male genitalia of Hymenoptera

Cultures of Masculinity

The Genetics of Male Infertility

The Genetics of Male Fertility

Secrets of the Alpha Male

Black Masculinity

Hornblower and the Crisis

Masculinity beyond the Metropolis

Trouble

Trouble

The crisis of philosophy

Male Trouble: Masculinity and The Performance of Crisis

Masculinity and Film Performance: Male Angst in Contemporary American Cinema

Masculinity and Film Performance: Male Angst in Contemporary American Cinema

Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (Male Orders)

Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World

The End of Masculinity

The Anthropology of Masculinity

Male of the Species

Male of the Species

Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction, 1950-2000: Keeping It Up

Male of the Species

Conrad and Masculinity

Evaluation and Treatment of the Infertile Male

Masculinity, Law and Family

Masculinity and Popular Television

Evaluation and Treatment of the Infertile Male

The male genitalia of Hymenoptera

Cultures of Masculinity

The Genetics of Male Infertility

The Genetics of Male Fertility

Secrets of the Alpha Male

Black Masculinity

Hornblower and the Crisis

Masculinity beyond the Metropolis

Trouble

Trouble

The crisis of philosophy

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