Reading from Behind: A Cultural Analysis of the Anus

by Brian M Pollins

Overview

In a playful, yet scholarly romp through "low" and "high" culture, Jonathan Allan asks why—since we all have one and use it every day—do we squirm at the mere mention of the anus? How is it that Kim Kardashian's derriere can break the internet, Pippa Middleton's behind can create a "butt lift" craze, and yet we cannot handle a discussion of anality? And why, given that we all have one, has the anus been caught up in the very "ground zero of gayness"?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780889773844
Publisher:	University of Regina Press
Publication date:	03/04/2016
Series:	Exquisite Corpse Series , #1
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Jonathan A. Allan is Canada Research Chair in Queer Theory and Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Brandon University. He is at work on his second book, Uncut: The Foreskin Archive.

Read an Excerpt

Reading from Behind

A Cultural Analysis of the Anus

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By Jonathan A. Allan

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2016 Zed Books Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78360-757-0

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CHAPTER 1

Anal Theory, or Reading from Behind

MASCULINITY HAS LONG BEEN DEFINED IN TERMS OF the penis/phallus. Annie Potts, for instance, observes that the "penis stands in and up for the man." Indeed, at this point, it seems to be nearly impossible to deny the permanence of the penis to masculinity and our definitions of manhood. In A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, David M. Friedman declares, without hesitation, that "from the beginnings of Western civilization the penis was more than a body part," and he contends that it was "an idea, a conceptual but fleshand-blood gauge of man's place in the world." Likewise, Mels van Driel notes in Manhood: The Rise and Fall of the Penis that it was "worshipped in ancient religions, then demonized by the Church fathers, secularized by the learned anatomists and physiologists, ... and then for a while subject to psychoanalysis" and that, "after being praised to the skies by psychologists, abused by feminists and shamelessly exploited in pop culture, in the twenty-first century ... [the penis is] in danger of becoming totally medicalized." Micha Ramakers observes that the penis is "the simplest, oldest and most common way to symbolize male sexuality." Ilan Stavans proposes that one could write a "history of Latin sexuality through the figure of the phallus." The penis and its symbolic form of the phallus have had a lengthy history marred by controversy, but never has the penis been entirely neutered or rendered impotent, despite many attempts to destabilize its power — indeed, it seems that the opposite holds true today in our culture of Viagra, which has once more given rise to the penis. Even discussions of castration, the most literal form of reducing the prominence of the penis, necessarily reinforce the power of the phallus; after all, what could be more tragic, more fear-inducing, more humiliating than the loss of one's manhood, the proof of one's potency?

One of the aims of Reading from Behind is to consider how we might go about displacing — though not replacing or destroying — the primacy of the phallus in literary and cultural criticism. Although van Driel notes that the penis has been "abused by feminists," a claim that many men's rights activists would surely agree with, I believe that it is necessary to return to feminist theory, at least briefly, because it has provided some of the most exciting and innovative — though also problematic — critiques of the phallus. I am not writing this as a feminist study but attempting to show how feminism enables some of the questions behind this book. That is, there is both an implicit and an explicit debt to feminism even though the book is more comfortably aligned with queer theory and masculinity studies.

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar open their agenda-setting The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination with a question: "[I]s the pen a metaphorical penis?" They contend throughout their volume, and in subsequent works, that "male sexuality ... is not just analogically but actually the essence of literary power" and that the "poet's pen is in some sense (even more than figuratively) a penis." On the one hand, though there is undoubtedly a critique of phallic power about to unfold in their work, on the other there is an undercutting effect insofar as they need to reify the penis in order to deconstruct it. In a later book, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Gilbert and Gubar ask a similar question:

"[I]s a pen a metaphorical pistol?" Their readers will note, of course, the resemblance between their opening questions. And Gilbert and Gubar are not alone, for instance, in thinking of the pen as a penis: Elaine Showalter writes that "the text's author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is the instrument of his generative power like his penis."

The penis-as-pen has been a productive analogy for feminist critics; however, I am not content that this site of criticism itself is advantageous to a greater project that aims to deconstruct the phallocentric discourse called into question by feminist critics. Indeed, I contend that, by highlighting the symbolic reference, feminist theorists arguably maintain a necessary status quo (even if the ultimate goal is to deconstruct it) insofar as they need something on which to reflect and establish an argument. The object to which feminist critics disagree must be established and affirmed so as to allow for disagreement, deconstruction, and so on. Moreover, it creates the false and highly problematic assumption that all pens are necessarily, essentially, and equally penises, all of them involved in creation. Surely we cannot agree that all penises are the same, have the same function, and are used in the same way. Judith Butler, though not making a critique of the penis proper, makes an important observation about patriarchy and feminist theory in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity:

The political assumption that there must be a universal basis for feminism, one which must be found in an identity assumed to exist cross-culturally, often accompanies the notion that the oppression of women has some singular form discernible in the universal or hegemonic structure of patriarchy or masculine domination. The notion of a universal patriarchy has been widely criticized in recent years for its failure to account for the workings of gender oppression in the concrete cultural contexts in which it exists.

What I take from Butler's critique of "universal patriarchy" is a recognition that not all gendered performances/experiences are universally available, nor do they mean the same thing universally. Thus, as much as we might want to critique the phallic signifier, and especially the penile focus, we would do well to remember that not all penises mean or do the same thing. Indeed, there is a worrying potential in these analogies for the penis to become heteronormative and hegemonic, a false mythology aiming to show that all penises are the same, used in the same way, and mean the same thing. That is, the penis and its penetration, though appearing to be identical across a range of acts, might have significantly different meanings (for everyone involved). Even the theorization of penetration, we must acknowledge, will have radically different implications and meanings for a range of theorists and their readers. It is in this regard that I begin to move away from the pen-as-penis analogy that has been so influential.

But we should take a closer look at Gilbert and Gubar. They argue that male sexuality, which surely includes but is not limited to the phallus, is what motivates and confirms "literary power" and indeed, I would argue, simply put, "power." To read Gilbert and Gubar carefully is to admit that, though they are fundamentally interested in the penis, we must recognize that it is but a part of male sexuality and that the male body is rich in erotic and sexual potential, much like the female body. To be sure, there is nothing wrong with the existing readings of Gilbert and Gubar, but we have not fully recognized the complexity of male sexuality. Gilbert and Gubar are not alone in this perspective. Hélène Cixous, for instance, argues that, "Though masculine sexuality gravitates around the penis, engendering the centralized body (in political anatomy) under the dictatorship of parts, woman does not bring about the same regionalization which serves the couple head/genitals and which is inscribed only within boundaries. Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide." Likewise, Luce Irigaray suggests that "Woman has sex organs just about everywhere. She experiences pleasure almost everywhere. ... [T]he geography of her pleasure is much more diversified, more multiple in differences, more complex, more subtle than is imagined — in an imaginary [system] centred on one and the same." Each perspective does a disservice to the male body and male sexuality and reduces that body to nothing more than an appendage that totally informs and defines male sexual experience. Although the penis is a synecdoche of the male, a part that can represent the whole, we must be careful to resist the temptation that the penis is the man. We must treat cautiously "microcosm-macrocosm relationships" that inform a theory of masculine sexuality through the penis and it alone. We must move beyond the reductive logic that informs this simple version of male sexuality, largely because it excludes any number of erotic potentials that often inform this study, which proposes a new mode of reading, not just of literary texts, but also of culture. We must begin to read from behind, focused on the complexity of male sexuality.

Since we all have an anus, it seems to me that this "private part" contains a utopian potential for a theory of sexuality, gender, sex, desire, and pleasure that is inherently inclusive. The anus is not exclusive, like the penis or the vagina, to one sex, to one type of body. Indeed, even aberrations of the penis and vagina, for instance in cases of intersexuality, are not inherently problematic to the logic of this study, which argues that we must read from behind. The anus is a key part of the human body, a remarkably complex organ that has significant symbolic potential, not least because of the numerous ways in which we have desperately tried to keep it repressed. It is also the organ that most makes many of us rather uncomfortable because of its alignment with abjection, dirtiness, shame, and, in our homophobic culture, male homosexuality. This is largely the interest of this study — deflating not just the phallus but also, more particularly, the primacy of homophobia.

Thus, though I am fundamentally interested in critiquing the assumption that the anus is the "essence of homosexuality, the very ground zero of gayness," it must nevertheless be admitted that this is a perception, an assumption, rooted in seemingly significant historical truth and value. This observation that the anus is gay — rightly or wrongly — does not quite make sense. After all, it seems to be fair enough to suggest the obvious: we all have one. Admittedly, with these statements, I run the risk of "degaying" the very subject that I set out to explore. Leo Bersani cautions that "de-gaying gayness can only fortify homophobic oppression; it accomplishes in its own way the principal aim of homophobia: the elimination of gays." My intention here is neither to erase homosexuality or gayness nor to suggest that anality, anal eroticism, and anal sexuality are somehow unique to gayness. Anal sexuality is not unique to gay men, as even the most cursory review of the history of sexuality demonstrates. Anal sexuality might well mean very different things in very different scenarios; this is precisely Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's point in the opening axiomatic claim of Epistemology of the Closet: "[E]ven identical genital acts mean very different things to very different people."

What does the ass, the rectum, the anus mean for masculinity, for the male body? How do men, perhaps especially straight men, conceptualize this site of eroticism, especially when it is imagined as somehow being gay? While engaging this question, one might be accused of degaying gayness, but why does gayness become the barometer through which to understand anality? Repeatedly in my research, I found questions on the Internet about whether or not finding the ass to be pleasurable makes a man gay. If this is the measure of gayness, and if calling it into question runs the risk of degaying gayness, then how do we move forward or to a theory of the ass that recognizes that it is neither orienting nor oriented? I am arguing here that, by understanding the complexity of the ass and its various forms, we are making something polyvalent rather than limiting its relevance to a particular group of people. I am not arguing, however, that we must somehow degay the asshole; at times, it might well be gay (though not in David Halperin's surprisingly sexless How to Be Gay); at other times, it might not be oriented sexually at all.

Homophobia as a critical concept requires that we recognize not just what it is but also how it works so that we can begin to dissipate its effects and affects. For Eric Anderson, one of the central concepts in understanding homophobia and its changing nature is "homohysteria," which might best be understood as "the need to distance oneself from the spectre of 'the fag.'" Thus, the male subject, in an attempt to avoid being perceived as a fag, will comport himself in such a way that doubt is removed, what Raewyn Connell calls "hegemonic masculinity," which finds affinities with Michael Kimmel's thesis about masculinity as homophobia. Homophobia became part of, if not entirely necessary to, masculinity and being masculine. The male, to be masculine, must not be homosexual or perceived to be homosexual and thus becomes homophobic, so the logic went. Anderson, in his recent work, argues that this idea has shifted radically since Connell's and Kimmel's theses, particularly in adolescent culture. Homohysteria nonetheless proves to be a useful concept to think about in the framework of Reading from Behind, which largely attends to texts that cannot account for the shifts that Anderson explores in his work.

Anderson explains that his career has been "characterized by expanding upon earlier gender theorizing of Connell and her use of hegemony in explicating how homophobia has been central to the polarization of hegemonic, complicit, subordinated, and marginalized masculinity." Anderson sees a radical shift away from homohysteria and toward "inclusive masculinity," which necessarily affords a vision of masculinity that does not align with Connell's thesis. Anderson argues that "homohysteria peaked in the mid-1980s" and that the "reduction of homophobia has meant that today's youth all know that gay men exist, and they likely believe that they exist in higher percentages than they actually do. But significantly, they increasingly do not care." Although it is tempting to embrace Anderson's inclusive masculinity, in which there is decreasing homophobia, I am not convinced by what is arguably an incredibly optimistic vision of masculinity. If it is true that young people "increasingly do not care," then why do we need to continue having discussions about how "it gets better," as Dan Savage would have us tell queer youth?

Anderson contends that a "homohysteric culture necessitates three factors: 1) widespread awareness that homosexuality exists as a static sexual orientation within a given culture; 2) cultural disapproval towards homosexuality (i.e. homonegativity); and 3) disapproval of men's femininity due to association with homosexuality"; he further contends that "all three conditions must be maintained for homohysteria to persist." If the anus becomes a barometer for this discussion, then we must admit that we still live in a homohysteric culture; however, a queer theorist must question Anderson's argument and its requirement of "static sexual orientation" as a governing principle. No sexuality is as static as we'd like to believe. If we accept that "disapproval of men's femininity" is also a principle of homohysteric culture, then we must surely work through what approval of men's femininity would look like and what it means for misogyny. Male femininity is as much about homophobia as it is about misogyny. A homohysteric culture, following Anderson, would require, I correctively add here, the maintenance of misogyny.

Homohysteria, as a guiding principle, assumes the certainty of the gay man, whereas my study is not as convinced of this hysteria and instead opts to think through homoparanoia, which imagines that every body is always already possibly homosexual and that the homoparanoid person looks for any clue that the subject being gazed at might well be a homosexual. Paranoia and hysteria are surely similar, but the difference, I argue, resides in the subject himself: the hysteric subject asks if he himself might be gay — as the Lacanian hysteric asks, "Am I a man or a woman?" — whereas the paranoid subject worries about homosexuals who might be around him: the homosexual as threat. Mark McCormack explains that "homohysteria is defined as the cultural fear of being homosexualized," but again this is about the subject himself, the I in the scenario being homosexualized, whereas in homoparanoia it is about the you or he being homosexualized. I want to situate a difference here, not because I am against homohysteria, but because I wish that Anderson and McCormack had dwelt further on hysteria.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Reading from Behind by Jonathan A. Allan. Copyright © 2016 Zed Books Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction: No Wrong Doors: An Entryway 1

Chapter 1 Anal Theory, or Reading from Behind 23

Chapter 2 Orienting Virginity 49

Chapter 3 Topping from the Bottom: Anne Tenino's Frat Boy and Toppy 63

Chapter 4 Orienting Brokeback Mountain 81

Chapter 5 Spanking Colonialism 111

Chapter 6 Unlocking Delmira Agustini's "El Intruso" 129

Chapter 7 Shameful Matrophilia in Doña Herlinda y su hijo 147

Chapter 8 Vengeful Vidal 169

Notes 189

References 223

Index 241

Editorial Reviews

"A remarkably fresh and original contribution. With Reading from Behind, Allan emerges as a widely respected critical voice of his generation." David William Foster, author of Sexual Textualities

From the Publisher