Anxious Embodiment,Disability, and Sexuality: A Response to Margrit Shildrick

This piece responds to Margrit Shildrick's “Dangerous Discourses,” which offers a theorization of embodiment useful to several fields of scholarship, including disability studies, gender theory, and queer theory. I argue that these fields must take sexuality seriously as a site for both bodily construction and bodily disruption and that the complexities of corporeal contact offer a way to map how discourses of (dis)ability, gender, and race delimit what we perceive as a human body. More expansively, I contend that perception is just as constructed as gender, with norms of embodiment shaping what we perceive as the boundary between disabled and nondisabled bodies. Shildrick's article then becomes a starting point to ask how we might perceive not just difference but differently, opening up new ways to think and live embodiment.     

Trans Men: Embodiments,Identities, and Sexualities

This article examines the experiences of 25 persons who were assigned female status at birth but do not wish to live as women and take on a masculine or queer gender identity. We employ the concept of “gendered embodiment” and introduce the concept of “sexualized embodiment” to highlight what is involved in this process. We ask how experiencing a masculine gender identity is reflexively tied to a trans man's sexuality and the ways in which these two embodiments are tightly, moderately, or loosely coupled. For example, a tight coupling appeared when trans men began to use testosterone and obtained surgery such as breast removal; a moderate coupling was found where gender validation was sought from a sexual partner (with this being related to sexual preference identities as well as the interpretation of vaginal penetration); the loosest coupling of the gender‐sexuality embodiments was linked to the liberality of the locale and whether “queer” identities could be easily adopted. In sum, our research demonstrates the link between gender and sexuality as a result of the body work trans men do and the historical and geographical situations in which they find themselves.     

The Eroticism of the Maternal: So What If Everything Is About the Mother?

The “erotic” bond between the mother and the infant is often idealized as the epitome of the preoedipal, prerepressive utopia in the blissful image of the naked and sacred mother-infant dyad. This article problematizes such a utopian image by identifying the core fantasy underlying that which is maternal. My discussion looks at the mother both as the object of erotic fantasy and the subject who is doing the fantasizing. This study brings together two seemingly disparate theoretical notions, Lacanian feminist psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray's argument about our culture's relationship with the mother and Japanese psychoanalyst Takeo Doi's study of amae. I argue that what Irigaray calls “desire of/for the mother” and what Doi attempted to explain using the everyday Japanese word, amae, a wish to “depend and presume upon another's love or bask in another's indulgence,” are both what is understood in the clinical psychoanalytic language as maternal erotic transference.     

Blocked Creativity and Inhibited Erotic Transference

In this paper, I pursue the relationship between erotic transference and creativity. Erotic transference is not solely a resistance to treatment; treatment can involve a resistance to erotic transference, the dynamics of which can have parallels in the inhibition of creativity. Although it is certainly true that erotic transferences may be defensive against other layers of material, there has been a virtual neglect of the deleterious impact of resistance to erotic desire and romantic love for the analyst. The feeling seems to be that erotic transference is a problem to be analyzed when it exists in overt form. The absence of erotic transference in many treatments is often taken for granted, not thought of as constituting a problem or as indicating anything in particular about the patient's psyche that might benefit from analysis. As clinicians, we favor creative expression and promote the psychoanalytic process as facilitating this potential, but we are often ambivalent about a similar approach to erotic transference. A clinical example illustrates the connection that I have in mind between erotic transference and creativity. I have chosen a same-sex case in which the transference was homoerotic, but the larger point I am making has general application to any of the gendered treatment dyads. After focusing on the dynamics of the case, I discuss more generally certain shared features of erotic transference and creativity, as well as inhibitions on the part of clinicians.     

Desire and Procreation in the Ukrainian Tales of Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko

Recently, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnov’ianenko has come under criticism from feminists for originating female characters whose repression of sexuality contributed to the perpetuation of a “patriarchal discourse” constitutive of Ukrainan populism. The problem with this take is that it ignores the fact that it is anxiety about sexuality as such, including its essential “patriarchal” correlate procreation, that informs Kvitka’s Ukrainian stories. The consequences of this anxiety—namely, an entire series of childless heroes and heroines, whose erotic desires are effectively foreclosed—is to undermine the conservative patriarchal order that is at the heart of Kvitka’s overt ideology. As in Gogol, what remains is a vision of an occluded, doomed society.     

(Im)perishable Pleasure, (In)destructible Desire: Sexual Themes in U.S. and English News Coverage of Male Circumcision and Female Genital Cutting

Under what conditions do sexual pleasure and desire get addressed in news coverage of sexual health issues like female genital cutting (FGC) and male circumcision (MC)? In this study we employed an embodied ethnosexuality approach to analyze sexual themes in 1,902 items published from 1985 to 2009 in 13 U.S. and 8 English newspapers and news magazines. Journalists' discussions of sexual pleasure, desire, control, problems, and practices differed in quantity and quality depending on the practice and nation to which they pertained. News coverage in both nations presented FGC as impeding female sexual pleasure, desire, and activity in ways that reinforce (hetero)sexist understandings of sexuality. The English press depicted MC as diminishing male sexuality, whereas U.S. papers showed it as enhancing male sexuality. These patterns are influenced by, and serve to reinforce, cultural norms of embodiment and ethnosexual boundaries based on gender, race, and nationality. They may, in turn, shape public understandings of FGC and MC as social problems.     

Offending Gender Being and Wanting in Male Same-Sex Desire

The hegemony of gender in theorizing sexuality has made sexual orientation the principal organizer of erotic experience. This has resulted in a heterosexual-homosexual binary in which male hetero-sexuality is presumed to hinge on the eroticization of difference while male homosexuality has been Understood as a desire for likeness. In this essay, I argue that this view of male same-sex desire is forced by the dominant heterosexist discourse that splits being and wanting into mutually exclusive categories for its understanding of normative heterosexual desire. Examining the psychic consequences of this forced splitting in both straight and gay men, I argue that subjective experiences of difference are no less central to same-sex desire and that, in gay and straight contexts alike, defensive forms of complementarity often wreak havoc with the capacity to love.     

The Danger of Desire: Anal Sex and the Homo/Masculine Subject

Anal eroticism between men has been a recurrent focus in psychoanalytic theory for over a century. Many theorists conflate anal eroticism with danger, particularly danger to masculinity and male gender identity. Defensive resistance to aggressive penetration and fear of receptivity are repeatedly invoked to understand anal erotic excitement and actions. The author reviews numerous papers on this topic from a broad spectrum of psychoanalytic theories, including drive theory, queer theory, and relational psychoanalysis and seeks to expand the discourse on anal eroticism between men.

Although danger and dangerousness may be an aspect of individual anal erotic experience, it is not an essential or obligatory aspect of it; its construction as dangerous restricts the meanings that anal sexuality can carry. This imposes a defensive function on anal erotic desire or marginalized identity upon the practitioner when this is unwarranted.     

INTIMACY,QUEERNESS, RACE

‘What do we see when we look at ourselves?’ asked South African visual activist/artist Zanele Muholi in her 2006 photographic collection Only Half the Picture. The question, a deeply challenging introspection, required black women in particular to reflect on the ways in which history has made us not look at ourselves, but be looked at. The images Muholi presented were viewed as both troubling and liberating. This article, using a queer framework, is concerned with recoding the ways in which black women's bodies and female sexuality have been represented in post-colonial contexts. Using Zanele Muholi's photography, the article opens possibilities for claiming an erotic position for the black female's ‘queer’ body. This is further complicated by racial dynamics. The article argues that such representations work against painful colonial histories of black female torture while also desexualizing the black female.     

FIGURES OF HOPE AND THE FILMIC IMAGINARY OF JIANGHU IN CONTEMPORARY HONG KONG CINEMA

Through an extensive allegorical reading of films, this paper attempts to capture a certain cultural form of imagination in Hong Kong during the transitional period leading up to the historical handover of power in 1997. Dwelling on the world of signification conjured up through what I call the jianghu filmic imaginary,the analysis focuses on the ideological and utopian impulses registered in relation to a whole emotional complex of anxiety, bewilderment and despair in the works of some highly creative local filmmakers of the genre: Ching Siu-Tong, Ann Hui, Tsui Hark and Wong KarWai. The study draws theoretically from Castoriadis's notion of the social imaginary and Bloch's aesthetics of hope, to focus on the textual and contextual re-constructions of a number of very unconventional martial arts swordplay (wuxia) films made in Hong Kong in the last two decades: namely, Tsui's Butterfly Murders (1979), Hui's Romance of Book and Sword (1987), Ching/Tsui's Swordsman II (1992), and Wong's Ashes of Time (1994). By identifying the ideological and affective moments in the filmic imaginary,I want to trace what has been left in a ruined culture for utopian longings, and point to the presence/absence of ‘hope’ as the cultural imagination for an unknown and unknowable future (beyond 1997). It is my contention that an understanding of that peculiar form of popular imaginary at the unusual juncture of Hong Kong's history can begin with a critical attempt to cope with this subtle practice of hope, so as to recognize (or reject) it as mediation in the process of our collective cultural crisis, anticipation and identification.     

Response to Juliet Mitchell's Reflections

Mitchell credits me with two important contributions, the first, that in theorizing the development of sex and gender I propose that it is “cognitive gender [that] controls/organizes libidinal sexuality” rather than “Freudian libido theory or some genealogical object relations theory.” This is correct insofar as cognition in this context is understood to mean a cognitive/affective constellation. Mitchell also credits Lionel Ovesey and me with suggesting that disidentification is another name for separation-individuation and with pointing out that both sexes need to separate and individuate from mother. Although the etiology of transsexualism is unknown, one significant factor in its genesis is separation anxiety, which gets bound in cross-gender fantasies. In transsexuals, safety takes priority over sexuality; this is the key finding that dictates a reevaluation of the absolute priority so often afforded sexuality in psychoanalytic theory. The way medical culture shaped the diagnosis of transsexualism and provided a surgical resolution is a premier example of what I call a shared cultural fantasy (Person, 1995). The medical endorsement of transsexualism as a biological disorder tilted the treatment toward a surgical resolution.     

The periodic table model of the gender transpositions: Part II. Limerent and lusty sexual attractions and the nature of bisexuality

I propose a theory that puts the notion of two sexual attractions into a precise, testable form, and then I mesh it with the periodic table model of the gender transpositions described previously (Pillard & Weinrich, 1987). I define a limerent sexual attraction, active in eroticizing the physical and personality characteristics of a particular Limerent Object, and a lusty sexual attraction, active in producing erotic arousal when encountering a new Lusty Object. Three hypotheses then account for much of what we know about sexual orientation: (a) Limerence and lustiness are experienced by both men and women—but there is an average difference in the ease with which each can be elicited in a particular sex. Limerence is experienced by most women in our culture as an autonomously arising desire, whereas lustiness, when it occurs, is experienced mostly as a reaction to particular stimuli. Lustiness is experienced by most men in our culture as an autonomously arising desire, whereas limerence, when it occurs, is experienced mostly in reaction to particular stimuli. (b) In some people the limerent attraction can be indifferent (or nearly so) to the sex or gender of the Limerent Object. (c) The lusty attraction is rarely indifferent to the sex or gender of the Lusty Object. Individuals may vary in their readiness to respond to the two kinds of attraction. Some of this variability can be understood in the light of the periodic table model described previously, and some of it can be understood in the light of cultural conditioning and socialization. The result is a theory that deduces many of the major facts about sexual orientation from only a small number of hypotheses.     

Crossing divides: Ethnicity and rurality

This paper draws on research with people from African, Caribbean and Asian backgrounds regarding perceptions and use of the English countryside. I explore the complex ways in which the category ‘rural’ was constructed as both essentialised and relational: how the countryside was understood most definitely as ‘not-city’ but also, at the same time, the English countryside was conceived as part of a range of networks: one site in a web of ‘nature places’ across the country, as well as one rural in an international chain of rurals – specifically via embodied and emotional connections with ‘nature’. I argue that alongside sensed/sensual embodiment (the non-representational intuitive work of the body), we need also to consider reflective embodiment as a desire to space/place in order to address the structural socio-spatial exclusions endemic in (rural) England and how they are challenged. I suggest that a more progressive conceptualisation of rurality – a ‘transrural’ open to issues of mobility and desire – can help us disrupt dominant notions of rural England as only an exclusionary white space, and reposition it as a site within multicultural, multiethnic, transnational and mobile social Imaginaries.     

Cosmopolitan knowledge and the production and consumption of sexualized space: Manchester's gay village

According to ?i?ek (1997 ) the logic of late capitalism offers opportunities for the incorporation of previously marginalised groups, whilst simultaneously dividing them at the same time. These possibilities for incorporation create divisions on the basis of gender, race, sexuality and class. Here, we examine how the capitalist desire for opening new markets for leisure consumption with new forms of branding, alongside the desire for the territorialisation of space by campaigning gay and lesbian groups, has led to the formation of a ‘gay space’ marketed as a cosmopolitan spectacle, in which the central issue becomes a matter of access and knowledge: who can use, consume and be consumed in gay space? We also ask what is the radical political impetus of sexual politics when commodified as cosmopolitan and incorporated spatially? The paper grounds the examination of the politics of cosmopolitanism within a specific locality drawing upon research undertaken on the contested use of space within Manchester's gay village. The paper is organised into four sections. The first examines competing definitions of cosmopolitanism, exploring how sexuality and class are framed as conceptual limits. The second describes how Manchester's gay village is imagined and branded as cosmopolitan. The third considers the navigation and negotiation of difference within this space. The final section evaluates the exclusions from cosmopolitan space and pursues the significance of this for arguments about incorporation in late capitalism.     

Seeing Agnes: Notes on a Transgender Biocultural Ethnomethodology

In this article, I revisit Harold Garfinkel's classic ethnomethodological account of Agnes, a transgender woman he met in the 1950s. I situate this case in its larger historical context, within the arc of a contemporary transgender studies, and incorporate recent material from bio‐neuro‐cultural studies of gender and sexuality. Within this framework I ask: what can ethnomethodology learn from transgender studies and what can it contribute.     

The sexuality‐assemblage: desire,affect, anti‐humanism

Two theoretical moves are required to resist the ‘humanist enticements’ associated with sexuality. Post‐structuralism supplies the first, showing how the social produces culturally specific sexual knowledgeabilities. A second anti‐humanist move is then needed to overturn anthropocentric privileging of the human body and subject as the locus of sexuality. In this paper we establish a language and landscape for a Deleuze‐inspired anti‐humanist sociology of sexuality that shifts the location of sexuality away from bodies and individuals. Sexuality in this view is an impersonal affective flow within assemblages of bodies, things, ideas and social institutions, which produces sexual (and other) capacities in bodies. Assemblages territorialize bodies' desire, setting limits on what it can do: this process determines the shape of sexuality, which is consequently both infinitely variable and typically highly restricted. We illustrate how this anti‐humanist ontology may be applied to empirical data to explore sexuality‐assemblages, and conclude by exploring the theoretical and methodological advantages and disadvantages of an anti‐humanist assemblage approach to sexuality.     

Just one of the guys until shower time: How symbolic embodiment threatens women's inclusion in the US military

The military constitutes a complex occupational field for women — one in which embodied masculinity is legitimized and rewarded, and women's bodies are often perceived as problems to the extent that they deviate from this masculine standard. Drawing from 33 in‐depth interviews with men and women who served on active duty in the US military between 2005 and 2015, we ask: How does female embodiment raise barriers to the full incorporation of women as equal workers in a total institution? Our analysis focuses on three primary aspects of what we call symbolic embodiment (female bodies as physically weak, as leaky/unclean and as sexually distracting), as they are rooted in the cultural imagination more than in any biological or experiential reality. We show how the symbolic embodiment of female workers effectively undermines individual claims of honorary masculinity by reasserting the pre‐eminence of naturalized capacities over individual performance and experience, and constructs women as second‐class workers within the masculine culture of the military. Our results extend the literature on the embodied self at work and reveal potential limits to Bourdieu's theory of the gendered habitus.     

Sexism,Erotophobia, and the Illusory “No”

SUMMARY

I examined erotophobic, sex-negative attitudes toward female sexuality as they relate to acquaintance rape. Evidence suggests that sexist assumptions about female eroticism are intrinsically related to sexual violence against women. The argument is made that society's willingness to acknowledge women as sexual victims while simultaneously failing to validate women as sexual agents creates an ideal breeding ground for acquaintance rape. Accordingly, an analysis will be offered: in a culture that denies women freedom to say “yes” to sex without negative stigma, “no” does not always mean “no.” In this article, I will assert mat those who care about stopping sexual aggression in dating relationships have an obligation to work to eradicate sexist assumptions that neuter women's erotic selves.