Rubin, "Thinking Sex," and Bersani, "The Gay Absence"

The two essays we're reading for Wednesday, by Rubin and Bersani, have a somewhat common set of opponents in thinkers who either see sex as inherently negative (dirty, vicious, etc) or who wish to avoid looking squarely at sex acts even as they write about sexuality. Their responses are quite different, however. Rubin's essay challenges the pervasively negative valuation of sex ("sex negativity") among feminists and in mainstream culture. Bersani, developing a line of argument that he began in "Is the Rectum a Grave?" (1987), wishes in "The Gay Absence" (a chapter of Homos [1995]), to embrace that negativity as a theoretical resource in itself. In what follows, I'll try to give some context for Rubin's essay; a second section tries to link her essay, from the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, to Thom Gunn's treatment of the themes of pleasure and danger in a section of his poem "In Time of Plague"; a final section below offers some brief thoughts on "The Gay Absence," particularly as it picks up on a wariness already present in Rubin's essay of normalizing tendencies -- what's the trouble with normal? -- in queer politics. 

Feminism and Pornography (the so-called "sex wars")

Gayle Rubin

Gayle Rubin is a cultural anthropologist whose dissertation, a study of 'leather' culture among gay men in San Francisco, was one of the first anthropological studies of a sexual subculture. She's best known for two essays, "The Traffic in Women," a piece of which we looked at very briefly in the context of Sedgwick's theory of homosocial relations among men, and "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality."

"Thinking Sex" was written at a time of heightened conflict within the feminist movement. A considerable number of feminists, most notably Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and Adrienne Rich, had begun investing their energies in anti-pornography arguments and legislation in the 1980s. Though their theoretical arguments against pornography were radical, questioning the very possibility of consensual sex in a culture of sexual violence, there was broad support in the U.S., much of it from conservatives,  for the restrictions on pornography that they saw as the first steps towards farther-reaching reform. Rubin will point out that feminists and social conservatives make strange bedfellows (2394), and this is one practical reason that she's wary of anti-porn arguments.

Her reasoning is ultimately philosophical and not simply tactical, though. We've seen Leo Bersani write appreciatively of MacKinnon and Dworkin's  analysis of sex as intrinsically violent while demurring from the anti-pornographic conclusions that they drew from it. "They have given us," he says with stunningly deadpan contrarianism, "the reasons why pornography must be multiplied and not abandoned" ("Rectum," 22). Rubin will challenge not just their conclusions but their analysis, for while Bersani would like to dissociate sex and love, Rubin is more interested in arguing that pain and differentiated roles can be parts of loving sex. 

Adrienne Rich, recall, makes a passing and somewhat pejorative reference to "whips and bondage" in "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1597 and note); Rich feels that porn and S&M alike threaten the model of love that she values, "loving and being loved by women in mutuality and integrity" (N 1597). For Rubin, a lesbian and also a sadomasochist, such a formulation seems exclusionary; if your experiences of love and sex involve role-playing and pain, "mutuality and integrity" may appear to have no necessary relation to love, at least if they're taken to mean sameness and tenderness. What's more, if the law fails to recognize that the sexual acts you prefer (anal sex, bondage) can be consensual--see Rubin's discussion of consent on 2397-9--MacKinnon and Dworkin's critique of consent can seem oppressive rather than liberating. 

The first version of "Thinking Sex" was first delivered as a paper for a 1982 conference on sexuality at Barnard College in New York City--the conference itself was a contentious event among feminists; for more context, see the Norton introduction to Rubin's essay. There's also some brief, useful background at a website on Lesbian History created by Rubin's University of Michigan colleague Esther Newton. The essay was first published in a volume derived from the conference, entitled Pleasure and Danger (1984).

It's important to note that Rubin doesn't simply counter the often quite sophisticated arguments about why porn is bad with a broad counterclaim that 'porn is good.' What she's after is a better, more nuanced way to define (and thus combat) precisely what's unjust or oppressive in it without also colluding with anti-feminist puritanism. So in her discussion of porn, she acknowledges that the industry as it exists is "hardly a feminist utopia" and "reflects the sexism that exists in the society as a whole" (2395). This seems wry and cool-headed--but is it sufficient as critique?

The same is true for Rubin's defenses, often abundantly referenced but sketchily articulated, of practices like prostitution (and "commercial sex" more generally) that we tend to associate, and not without good reason, with violence exploitation. Her essay seems an invaluable but also at times an unsettling theoretical resource; what aspects of her argument do you find most useful or illuminating? What aspects of it would you question or challenge--are the points at which you find yourself more closely aligned with a thinker like Rich than with Rubin's position?

Pleasure and Danger

Ewan McGregor, in Trainspotting (1996, dir. Danny Boyle)

Their mind is the mind of death.

They know it, and do not know it,

and they are like me in that

(I know it, and do not know it)

and like the flow of people through this bar.

Brad and John thirst heroically together
for euphoria – for a state of ardent life

in which we could all stretch ourselves

and lose our differences. I seek
to enter their minds: am I a fool,

and they direct and right, properly

testing themselves against risk,

as a human must, and does,

or are they fools, their alert faces

mere death’s heads lighted glamorously?
     —Thom Gunn, from "In Time of Plague"



What does heroin have to do with heroism?

Gunn's "In Time of Plague" draws its power, its fierce attractiveness, from its willingness to take the risk of placing somewhat crazily self-destructive behavior on a continuum, even a level, with classical virtue. Brad and John, in 1980s San Francisco, have asked the poem's speaker to share a needle with them--the particular sort of euphoria they have in mind is heroin. Yet Gunn in this poem is attuned to how close the edge of death is to the quick of life--to how beautiful these two strangers are in their eagerness to risk death (or at least HIV), and to the passing, pulsing moment in which he feels tempted to take that risk with them.

Thematically, what these lines recognize is that both euphoria and death are states in which we lose ourselves, states of de-individuation. Aesthetically, their achievement lies in a patient discovery, in quite ordinary words, of a refined vocabulary for our many different ways of losing ourselves in each other (knowing, being like, liking, euphoria, stretching, losing, being fooled, ardency, glamor); in the lineation that brings "I" and "they" into nearly parallel formation (knowing it and not), then disperses them to different sides (right and left) of the poem; in the speaker's refusal either to claim moral superiority in his hygienic separateness, or to indulge in a fantasy of complete identification with others. 

For Brad and John, the identification is complete, and they share lines in the poem as they share drugs:

      Brad and John thirst heroically together... 

The speaker, on the other hand, is less heroic and less successful in his desire for merger with others. The verb that names his desire is abstract rather than embodied ("seek," not "thirst"), and it's left hanging at the end of a line in separation from its object:
                                                    I seek
     To enter their minds....

Thirsting together doesn't add up to knowing one another, here, any more than being aware of death (one way of knowing it) is equivalent to undergoing it (a second sense of knowing). Nor does Gunn's consciousness of his desire for these two men lead him to actually share a needle with them. But his refusal isn't a refusal of kinship, and in the poem's most surprising shift from the plural to the singular (from "they" to "a human"), Gunn brings these two potentially marginalized men straight back to the center of our common ethical experience: in some way, 

          they['re] direct and right, properly 
     testing themselves against risk 
     as a human must, and does.

From Gunn to Rubin
This poem seems to me like a good point of entry into Gayle Rubin's "Thinking Sex" because it asks us, first, to see the relationship between pleasure and danger, desire and risk, sex and mortality--these associations are ancient--but also, and more urgently, to see afresh how these linked experiences of sex and death have been lethally literalized for some in the present moment, while they remain sources of heightened consciousness and enriched experience for others. Brad and John may be dying already; Gunn is writing a poem. Whatever the difference between Gunn on the one hand and Brad and John on the other, it's surely not as wide as that between life and death. And it surely is.

Rubin's diagram of the sexual behaviors coded 'good'
(inner circle) and 'bad' (outer circle)

More clearly: we all enjoy certain thrills, certain risks. And we should. But for most of us, these are managed risks, expressions of strength, and the fact that we can take pride in those risks has much to do with why we're able to manage them so successfully. Imagine if downhill skiing, for example, were understood to be the most perverse of all pleasures--one that could be undertaken only at night and far away from settled areas, and under constant threat of exposure and prosecution. We'd have fewer skiers; skiers would be likely to internalize the low moral evaluation of their source of pleasure; a greater proportion of skiers would be injured or killed. Mainstream Americans might be afraid to let skiers near their kids--they might learn to ski!--and might look the other way in the event of skier-bashings.

These are, of course, pretty much the conditions under which a lot of sexual pleasure on the outer circle of Rubin's diagram (above at left, and see 2391) has had to be sought out, and Rubin tries to devise conceptual tools that will allow us to map these activities differently and less harmfully. I'd add they can help us to understand not only how certain sex laws have been unthoughtfully structured, but also those like Brad and John, who seem to be both gay and intravenous drug users, might let the healthy search for love and pleasure turn into something truly self-destructive. It's harder for pleasure to be a way of caring for the self, or others, when that pleasure is shot through with shame.

There's a resonance here with Bersani's argument that if the rectum isn't literally going to be a grave for gay men, whether through unsafe sex or homophobic violence, then we need to receognize or even celebrate it as a site of the self's (and not the body's) temporary and psychological (and not literal) undoing in sex. More generally, we all recognize numerous ways of enjoying controlled risk, pleasurable danger, that range from healthy to heroic. 

Yet because we also think about such activities as ranged on a conceptual map where the sexual and the non-sexual occupy different continents, rather than one in which genital pleasures involve and overlap with other pleasures, we tend to judge them according to radically different criteria. Boxing is a sport, but masochism is a perversion; dinner followed by sex is a date, while food in bed or sex in the kitchen is kinky; whipping a consenting adult is assault (see 2398), while tackling one in the right costume in the right place is football; an image of a bound man might be erotic, or religious (see the images by Reni and Mapplethorpe at the bottom of the post).

Robert Mapplethorpe, Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter (1979).
Mapplethorpe's photos of gay and leather subcultures were
at the center of a controversy over NEA funding at the end
of the '80s. Sen. Jesse Helms proposed banning grants
for any work treating "homoerotic" or "sadomasochistic"
themes. When Helms showed the photos to his colleagues,
he asked "all the pages and all the ladies to leave the floor."

My point isn't to suggest that there aren't important differences between these activities, or that  there aren't for each individual some clear distinctions between sexual and non-sexual pleasures.  It's not even to suggest that football is sadomasochistic (which would be cheaply provocative and conceptually sloppy). Rather, it seems worth pointing out that 1) we allow people considerable freedom to take pleasure in danger in many areas of life; 2) psychologically and sometimes physically speaking (and I have in mind here activities like consensual S&M and emphatically not unprotected intercourse), sex provides such pleasure in danger; 3) the level of risk or violence involved in these different activities has nothing to do with why some are marginalized and others celebrated. 4) social and legal marginalization can contribute to (but not determine) how, and for whom, healthy thrills turn into bad risks.

Spielberg, Man with leather vest and whip.

Bersani, "The Gay Absence"
...what's certain is that [the sexual instinct] refuses to be integrated into the social, because there is in eroticism a revolt of the instant against time, of the individual against the universal; by wishing to channel and exploit it, one risks killing it, because one can't make use of living spontaneity in the way one makes use of inert matter; furthermore, one can't compel it as one compels a liberty... 
     —Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 67,  
          trans. modified)

In "The Gay Absence," Bersani elaborates the argument about "the inestimable value of sex as...anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving" that he had begun in "Is the Rectum a Grave?" (22). 

His title for this chapter from Homos (1995) refers to the normalizing arguments that were becoming increasingly influential among in queer politics at around this time, most prominently in Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal (1996). Bersani worries that the representation of gay men and lesbians and other queers as 'just like everyone else' is at best a way to defer the acknowledgment of sexual difference required for any lasting change in the status of sexual minorities. (These defenses of homosexuality, he writes, "mount a resistance to homophobia in which the agent of resistance has been erased"--56). Beyond this, however, he wants to draw on gay "sexual specificity" (see 41), the particular psychological underpinnings of homosexual desire, as a theoretical resource for rethinking sociality itself.

At the end of "Is the Rectum a Grave?," Bersani had suggested that 

it may...be in the gay man's rectum that he demolishes his own perhaps otherwise uncontrollable identification with a murderous judgment against him. That judgment...is grounded in the sacrosanct value of selfhood, a value that accounts for human beings' extraordinary willingness to kill in order to protect the seriousness of their statements. The self is a practical convenience; promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence. (29-30, my emphasis)

He continues this line of argument in "The Gay Absence" as he engages with Wittig's discussion of the 'straight mind':

So the tonal sign of the straight mind is its seriousness: differences are validated by the thinker's demonstration of how seriously he takes his own statements--and this may be the only validation we can give to the philosophic myth of truth. (40-41, my emphasis)

It's perhaps surprising to see a theorist so wary of the value of 'seriousness.' Isn't theory supposed to be serious? But Bersani seems to mean by seriousness not so much sincerity or intellectual rigor as that attitude to one's words that makes one eager to pass beyond language and into violence to defend them. (If I've understood him rightly in this, then my wish here would be for terms that allow us to distinguish between the curious and open-minded conviction [I don't see this as an oxymoron] that we ought to have in moral argument and, on the other hand, the sort of phobically rigid argument that seeks assent rather than response).

If 'seriousness,' understood in Bersani's specific and non-obvious sense, is an intrinsically violent mode of relationality, then what alternatives are available? Drawing on Freud's understanding of all sexual desire as involving both identification and difference, Bersani suggests that "homo-ness itself necessitates a massive redefining of relationality" (76, author's italics). This is because "its privileging of sameness has, as its condition of possibility, an indeterminate identity. Homosexual desire is desire for the same from the the perspective of a self already identified as different from itself" (59). And so it is an "an outlaw existence," at once "unacceptable" and "indispensable" (76).

"Indeterminate identity" requires a rethinking of liberal notions of sociality insofar as we imagine sociality as grounded in relations among integral and voluntaristic subjects. (Those of you who read Zizek's "Courtly Love" may recognize some aspects of his critique of the liberal social contract in Bersani's argument). "Outlaw" sociality would be non-contractual, non-normalizing. (What would it be, though?)

I'm not sure how much time we'll have to discuss "The Gay Absence" this week, but here's a reason to work through it nonetheless: in the space of this fairly short chapter, Bersani engages with Freud, Foucault, Wittig, Rich, Butler, Sedgwick, and Warner--and his engagements with these other theorists are at once concise, respectful and contentious; his essay is at once a great way to start reviewing for the final exam and an excellent model for the sort of work you might aspire to in your final papers.

Mapplethorpe, Untitled (1973)

Guido Reni, Saint Sebastian (c. 1616)