Sexy Bodies

The Strange Carnalities of Feminism

Elizabeth Grosz, Elspeth Probyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134859702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Are bodies sexy? How? In what sorts of ways? Sexy Bodies investigates the production of sexual bodies and sexual practices, of sexualities which are dyke, bi, transracial, and even hetero. It celebrates lesbian and queer sexualities but also explores what runs underneath and within all sexualities, discovering what is fundamentally weird and strange about all bodies, all carnalities. Looking at a pleasurable variety of cultural forms and texts, the contributors consider the particular charms of girls and horses, from National Velvet to Marnie; discuss figures of the lesbian body from vampires to tribades to tomboys; uncover 'virtual' lesbians in the fiction of Jeanette Winterson; track desire in the music of legendary Blues singers; and investigate the ever-scrutinised and celebrated body of Elizabeth Taylor. The collection includes two important pieces of fiction by Mary Fallon and Nicole Brossard. Sexy Bodies makes new connections between and amongst bodies, cruising the borders of the obscene, the pleasurable, the desirable and the hitherto unspoken rethinking sexuality anew as deeply and strangely sexy.

1

QUEER BELONGINGS

The politics of departure

Elspeth Probyn

When we are sitting on the bank of a river, the flowing of water, the gliding of a boat or the flight of a bird, the uninterrupted murmur of our deep life, are for us three different things or a single one, at will.

(Henri Bergson; cited in Deleuze 1991: 80)

UP ON THE ROOF

It is the winter of 1994 when all of the east of North America froze and here I am in San Diego with strains of T.S. Eliot going through my brain: ‘A cold coming we had of it.… The very dead of winter’ (1963: 109).¹ The very dead of winter and I’m up on the roof with the harbour in front of me and the airport to the side. Still not totally sure where I am, I sit on the roof and watch the planes slope by. They angle by the two weird trees on the close horizon, then from mere specks they emerge in all their awesome materiality over me; bellies swaggering, lights flashing, they descend and are gone. This happens over and over and over again; the frisson of slight excitement each time smoothed away. From where I am, all is descending, arriving, returning. The only hints of leaving are the invisible roars from the space-off.

This seems like a very apt place in which to think about belonging. This most southern of Californian cities is a strange place of movements. Across the flight path lies the port, dotted with yachts, criss-crossed with ocean cruisers, the site of cargo ships coming and going. I navigate San Diego on bike, my trips constantly interrupted by canyons, by signs declaring ‘Danger’, ‘Peligro’, ‘Naval Property’. I ride along paths enjoying the feeling of self-locomotion, ignoring the refrains of friends who said ‘you’re crazy, you can’t exist in southern California without a driver’s licence’. Frequently I am stopped, caught in a net of highways, halted before concrete channels of movement, fascinated and appalled by a place that constructs highways as lethal barriers to aliens crossing borders. In short, this is an appropriately strange place in which to consider belonging, a space that cackles with movement as people continually arrive, depart, are thrown out; some try to belong, some take their belonging for granted.

In turn, this reminds me that in common usages, the term belonging moves from ‘being the property of someone, something’ to the sense of ‘fitting in socially’, ‘being a member’, and that ‘belongings’ designates ‘possessions’ and ‘baggage’. Belonging for me conjures up a deep insecurity about the possibility of really belonging, truly fitting in. But then, the term ‘belongings’ also forefronts the ways in which these yearnings to fit in will always be diverse: at times joyous, at times painful, at times destined to fail. Perhaps more immediately, belonging brings forth images of leaving, carting one’s possessions and baggage from place to place. Thus, while belonging may make one think of arriving, it also always carries the scent of departure – it marks the interstices of being and going.

On another level, but bound up in belongings, as a term it causes me to consider points of departure, of where we say we’re leaving from, and why. Depending on your tastes, it is either a lyrical or a maudlin way of saying that as theorists, we all have epistemological allegiances and baggages that we cart through our writing and thinking. And while much theory seems to be hell-bent on arriving somewhere, belonging to one clique or another, fitting in, being in, travelling under the sign of the latest buzz-words, there is some merit in a mode of theorizing that is careful of where it is leaving from.

Departing, getting going, going on, getting (it) on, getting by – these are necessary terms. They are also terms that I need to make rhyme with desire, a desire to keep on going, a desire to keep desire moving. I sit and watch the planes float in. I shut my eyes and feel the brightness burn holes in my memories. I wonder if I can ever fit in here. I sit and feel nebulously touched by belonging; a vague shifting of desire for a woman, a woman past and a woman present. These images of desire are not merely whimsical; rather, as concrete memories they queer me again and again as they embed themselves in the possibility of desire now. Images and fragments: meeting in a doorway, a handshake, a kiss, seeing my features rearranged as I smile back at her. Desire for me is not a metaphor, it is a method of doing things, of getting places. I want to think desire as singular, I want to make the singularities of desire the modus operandi of my queer theorizing.

QUEER MEMORIES

A woman in a bar asks me what sign I am. Not a very original line, but a project of astral origins; I think that I give the wrong answer. (A past lover, a very rational type takes up astrology in her 50s, places me as an Aquarian and thus solves her problem of why I am what I am.) I should have been born under the sign of a plane: Delta, Southwestern, Air America. Wherever I am, people ask me where I come from and the answer is as evasive as my accent. I have a few stock answers: I’m an army brat; I grew up in Wales; I am from no one where. In fact, my family myth places us under the sign of the train, recounting, recanting the story of my Canadian mother meeting a slightly hung-over British army officer on the Canadian Pacific. The story goes that she was leaving the west to get a job in External Affairs; he was brought over to teach Canadian soldiers home from the war how to skydive out of silos – a Cold War sort of thing. As the great train rolled on and on and on through the prairies, and remember this was the days of great trains, my mother’s companion told her to offer that young man a drop of whisky. Wham, bam, thank you mam, her dreams rolled off the edge of that endless scape, and three months later she was an army wife.

So you see, I was born departing, watching from the sidelines the ways in which children seem to know as if by intuition who belongs and who doesn’t. The product of a childhood of moving, boxing up belongings, carting them along with my mother’s injunction never to get married. Crossing seas, continents, innumerable borders which stop our movement with the fear of lost passports, of being turned back, of watching others who belong even less being stopped short at the frontiers of economic hope.

As I sit on the roof watching the planes descend, watching the lines of flight, I wonder if I’ve lost the knack of feigning belonging. Have I lost the desire to belong? Is that already a condition of the desire for belongings? I wonder where desire goes. This isn’t a new thing, I often ponder this, normally at the end but recently at the beginning (a disastrous move as we all know). I try to remember a moment when I felt ‘belonged’, when I first felt desire, when I was first moved by it. The desire to remember familiar desiring bodies and bodies that desire. An image of horses and a girlfriend come to mind, inextricably wound up in each other, bound up with the motive of motion and emotions.

Horses, planes and trains… strange points of departure. As objects, they seem so impossibly phallic. I remember what Raymond Bellour said of the horse in Marnie: that ‘Marnie’s fetishistic love for Forio… typically takes the place of a man and children’ (1977: 84). In turn, Bellour doubly takes away Marnie’s pleasure with her horse (‘“Oh Forio, if you want to bite someone, bite me”’) when he posits that, on the one hand, it is merely the ‘pleasure of the signified… the horse, animality, the phallic substitute’. And on the other, this image is ‘the condition necessary to the constitution of [Hitchcock’s] phantasy’ (ibid.: 85–6). In this scenario, the image of the horse impales desire as the desire for the phallus, for the family. It cannot be Marnie’s desire; it always-already displaces hers as the condition of another’s desire.

Not a very promising point of departure, I think you will agree. However, as stilted and dated as Bellour’s reading may seem, it is hard to escape psychoanalytic interpretations of desire. Indeed, one could speculate that modern conceptions of desire were spawned with the birth of psychoanalysis. So it is not surprising that, with notable exceptions, psychoanalytic assumptions inform the basis from which to consider questions of queer desire. On this front and as a theoretical point of departure, psychoanalysis is implicitly and outrageously caught up in belonging. It may well be one of the theoretical ‘homes’ that demands the most investment, that has the steepest dues to be paid before you belong. As a ‘possession’ it is hard won through the years that it takes to master its complex machinery. Although, for many reasons, I have not taken the time necessary to fit in with feminist psychoanalytic theory, I am impressed by those who have. To be truthful (in that my own point of departure is Foucault), I am more impressed by those who have possessed this machine, who made it belong to them and for them, only to depart from it. They also tend to be rare. However, a few years ago, after years of brilliant slogging through Lacan, Elizabeth Grosz departed from her point of departure and ‘left’ psychoanalysis. The reason seems to be simple, even if the logistics of leaving probably were not:

I don’t want to talk about lesbian psychologies, about the psychical genesis of lesbian desire.… I am much less interested in where lesbian desire comes from, how it emerges, and the ways in which it develops than where it is going to, its possibilities, its open-ended future.

(1994: 68–9)²

In that essay, Grosz rigorously and elegantly moves on from psychoanalysis. But to stop for a moment, and to be crude, one can say that, in one form or another, desire still lurks as lack within much of contemporary cultural theory. Even in Judith Butler’s reworking of Lacan, the movement of desire is ‘impelled, thwarted by the impossible fantasy of recovering a full pleasure before the advent of the law’ (Butler 1993: 99). Butler does, of course, reposition Lacanian and Freudian origins. Thus, like the judge who enacts the law by citing it but does not originate it, she argues that ‘the law [of sex] is no longer given in a fixed form prior to its citation’ (ibid.: 15). However, if Butler does an admirable job of dislodging sex as origin, she does not quite manage to shift desire from its Lacanian position as that which circles endlessly and compulsively around its constituted object. Here, desire ‘misses’ its object, as in the French, son objet lui manque; it misses and lacks its originary object.

Of course, desire as lack goes beyond the texts of Freud and Lacan, or, rather, Freud as cultural phenomenon has gone beyond himself. Thus, the OED first defines desire as ‘unsatisfied longing or wish; or an expression of this’, only to finally remind us of the Latin root, ‘desidero: to long for’. While it is, as I mentioned earlier, beyond my interest to engage in a rigorous critique of the role of desire within psychoanalysis, what I will do is suggest ways in which desire may be put to work as method within queer theory. To replay that, let me state that desire is my point of departure and my guide. This in turn involves reconceptualizing desire as well as the idea of departure in theory. In a nutshell, as a problematic, desire compels me to work along the lines set up between and among longing, leaving, being, bodies, images, movement; in short, it causes me to depart from any strict and stationary origin.

This problematic that I am calling queer belonging is essentially about the movement between bodies and points of departure in theory. It is fundamentally about milieux not origins (to take up Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction). As Deleuze describes it,

a milieu is made of qualities, substances, forces and events: for example, the street with its matter like paving-stones, its noises like the cry of the merchants, its animals like the horses yoked, its dramas (a horse slips, a horse falls, a horse is beaten…).

(1993: 81)

Indeed, Deleuze’s essay about Freud’s ‘Little Hans’ (‘Ce que disent les enfants’) is a marvel of movement and a refutation of origins. In fact, Deleuze takes up ‘Little Hans’ and rescues him from his location as evidence for Freud’s theory of Oedipal beginning. In other words, Deleuze frees ‘Little Hans’ from his position as belonging to Freud and to the history of psychoanalysis: this ‘rage of possessiveness and of the personal [in which psychoanalytic] interpretation consists in finding the person and his possessions’ (ibid.: 86). He looses ‘Little Hans’ from the grip of Freudian principles and lets him once again wander the streets, exploring his desire to get out of his family’s building, his desire to meet up with the rich little girl taking him by the horses’ stable. It is this meandering that Freud reduces ‘to the father-mother: bizarrely enough, the wish to explore the building strikes Freud as the desire to sleep with the mother’ (ibid.: 81).

Thus instead of origins (bizarre or normalized), Deleuze proposes that we follow a cartographic logic whereby ‘maps superimpose… it is not a question of looking for an origin, but rather of evaluating displacements’ (ibid.: 83–4, emphasis in original). This is movement that we can only catch and recreate through images; images, in turn, that with desire move through bodies. Each of these terms must take flight. Take, for instance, the body: the body as hallowed within feminist theory; the body as cairn. All those pages read and written about the body as location seem now to ring with a nostalgia of lost origins. Even Adrienne Rich’s (1986) birth scene, that most cited of citations about the body, grounds the body – alright, her body – in a place of origins: the hospital. And while I have been inspired by Rich’s use of her body, the strategy of naming the institutional markings (white, lesbian, Jewish) only takes us so far. It is a project of differentiating bodies on account of their locations; a project that speaks of where bodies belong but that can’t quite write out of the desire for other belongings. Important as it is, it tends to slow the body down.

So instead of the body as location, let’s take the body as loca-motion (to borrow from Anzaldua’s (1991) use of ‘loca porque’). Belonging set in motion which skewers as it remembers the marks of difference; motion that queers those necessary moments and memories of originary belonging. This body, these bodies, can only be understood as images. In Bergson’s terms (1990: 168–9), the body as image ‘is then the place of passage of the movements received and thrown back, a hyphen, a connecting link between things which act upon me and the things upon which I act’ (cited in Massumi 1992: 185; emphasis in original).

TO QUEER THE OBJECT

The problematic of belonging that I propose thus foregrounds the body as a place of passage, moved through by desire and being moved in return. Images of past and present belongings, of necessity, pass through and on. But, of course, images of ‘belonging’ conjoin with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Editors’ Acknowledgements
• 1. Queer Belongings: The politics of departure
• 2. The ‘Cunning Lingua’ of Desire: Bodies-language and perverse performativity
• 3. Sextec: Excerpt from Working Hot
• 4. Lesbian Bodies: Tribades, tomboys and tarts
• 5. Teledildonics: Virtual lesbians in the fiction of Jeanette Winterson
• 6. Green Night of Labyrinth Park: La nuit verte du parc Labyrinthe
• 7. Acts of Creation: The brainchildren of certain psychoanalytic fictions
• 8. ‘I Embrace the Difference’: Elizabeth Taylor and the closet
• 9. Pariah Bodies
• 10. Sexualizing Space
• 11. The Jewels in the Crotch: The imperial erotic in The Raj Quartet
• 12. Girls on a Wired Screen: Cavani’s cinema and lesbian s/m
• 13. I used to be your Sweet Mama: Ideology, sexuality and domesticity in the Blues of Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey and Bessie Smith*
• 14. Destruction: Boundary erotics and refigurations of the heterosexual male body
• 15. Animal Sex: Libido as desire and death
• Index