Homophobia: Mixing Desire With Disgust

In their classic study, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Stallybrass and White argue that the bourgeois subject defines himself through an act of exclusion. In other words, his identity is not merely founded upon self-affirmation: I am X, but also negation of otherness: I am not Y. 

For example, I am male / I am not female; I am straight / I am not gay. In this manner he constructs an entire system of binary oppositions that are as tedious as they are restrictive. While one term is highly valued as the good and noble, the other is seen as a form of worthless evil; that which is base, dirty, repulsive, and corrupting.

But here's the thing: the latter, whilst excluded, is nonetheless internalized under the sign of negation and so disgust always retains the imprint of desire - just as, conversely, desire forever keeps an element of disgust. So it is, that whenever one reads the obscene rantings of the homophobe one is struck not only by the level of hate, but also the obsessive and perverse fascination for those practices and those people which are so despised. 

To be clear: I'm not simply saying there's always a secret longing on behalf of the homophobe for an experience of gay sex - although doubtless this is often the case - but that there is, to quote Jonathan Dollimore, "an additional structural interdependence of desire and disgust". 

And so: "even when homophobia is not obviously a projection of repressed desire, being more a hostile response to the intolerably different, even then, the homosexual, through condensed association, may be one on whom is projected the repressed disgust inherent in desire."

  

Notes

Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, (Oxford University Press, 1991). Lines quoted are on p. 247.

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, (Cornell University Press, 1986). 

     

What Big Extraterrestrial Eyes You Have

Matilda the Cat is something of an internet sensation, with thousands of followers on social media. But, despite her appearance, she's actually a perfectly normal moggie. The poor thing does suffer, however, from a rare condition in which the lenses of her eyes have spontaneously detached, causing blindness, and giving her the look of an alien being. 

Those who are interested in reading more about her case should visit: aliencatmatilda.com - her official website. Because, fascinating as her story is, what I really wish to discuss here is the origin of the idea that aliens - particularly those known as Greys - have large, black, glassy-looking eyes. 

Obviously it doesn't come from the actual world, because there are no entities from out of space visiting planet Earth on a regular basis and abducting large numbers of human beings in order to probe them and fuck with their minds. Many people - mostly Americans - might believe contrary to this and insist that there's a global conspiracy covering up the facts, but, alas, it is of course complete nonsense; a mad fantasy on behalf of the needy, the lonely, and the fearful. A bit like the belief in a loving - but vengeful - God. 

For God, like ET, is a convenient fiction. Not surprisingly therefore, we find that our idea of what an alien looks like first comes from literature: H. G. Wells to be precise, who, as long ago as 1893 was already imagining futuristic grey-skinned beings with big heads and large eyes. Then, in 1901, he depicted the natives of the moon (Selenites) in very similar terms. 

He was followed in this belief that alien races would conform closely to a certain body type, by the Swedish writer Gustav Sandgren who, in 1933, under the pen name of Gabriel Linde, published a sci-fi novel translated into English as The Unknown Danger. Here, once again, a race of aliens were described as chinless wonders possessing big bald heads, large gleaming eyes, and small mouths. 

Thirty years later and press reports of the Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction case described those doing the abducting in this identikit manner. All stereotypes are grey; but by now all Greys were stereotypical.

Spielberg unimaginatively gave us more of the same in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). And then, in the 1990s, Mulder and Scully chased very familiar looking aliens for nine seasons, The X-Files firmly establishing the link in the paranoid imagination between Greys and the military-industrial complex of the New World Order.

As Oscar Wilde once said, Life imitates art far more than art imitates life. The disappointing thing is how few people realise this (and how tragic the consequences can be).

On the Idea of Manning Up

Image from the You Don't Say campaign

Click here for details

 

Despite what some students at Duke University might argue, the phrase man up is ambiguous enough in meaning for us to let it pass.

Not that I'd personally feel comfortable using it and I certainly understand how it might be interpreted as demanding conformity with a sexist, homophobic, and ultimately untenable model of hyper-masculinity. 

And I've no doubt that many of those who tell others to man up also tell them to grow a pair and stop being a pussy. But whereas these expressions are clearly and crudely rooted in biology, to man up just might be seen as an ethical imperative that can be addressed to any individual regardless of their sex or gender and which basically means act with a degree of self-control and a little courage; recognise your responsibilities and don't blame others when things go wrong. 

In other words, to man up, is to behave in a virtuous and noble manner; to never explain, never complain. It is not to behave like a macho brute or emotional retard, flexing muscles and prejudices. It is, as a Jewish friend says, simply to be a mensch (not a schmuck or a superman).

Strangely, it sounds so much more acceptable in Yiddish ...

         

A Cinderella Moment

Sophia Mechetner in a dress by Raf Simons for Dior

Photo: Yannis Vlamos / Indigitalimages.com

According to Natasha Bird, Senior Editor of Yahoo Lifestyle and a woman who prides herself not only on her knowledge of fashion and beauty, but her ability to be sarcastic about those involved in an industry off of which she makes her living, calling the catwalk debut of 14-year-old Israeli model Sophia Mechetner a "Cinderella moment" is a bit creepy.

This time, according to Ms. Bird, those monsters at Dior have gone too far! 

For whilst accepting and delighting in the fact that the fashion industry has always pushed what she calls the moral boundaries (without telling us what these limits are and how designers might be thought to challenge such, although it seems to involve nipple baring, skeletal frames, and overtly sexual posturing), Ms. Bird insists that the appearance of  Miss Mechetner on the runway oversteps the threshold between what is interesting and discomforting. 

In other words, whilst she likes to be intellectually titillated and perhaps just a little scandalized, she doesn't actually want to engage in the dangerous - and yes, often troubling - business of thinking cultural values and social norms, particularly those which revolve around the body of the young girl. 

It's so much easier just to tell us that there was something a little untoward about Miss Mechetner closing (and stealing) the Dior show in what she ludicrously describes as essentially a nightdress - whilst at the same time happily reproducing images of the model in her beautiful sheer white gown that she finds so distasteful. Ms. Bird continues, in a passage full of false outrage and faux concern:

"Even more distasteful, one might argue, is the way some media outlets chose to ignore 14-year-old Mechetner's bare breasts, calling her debut "a Cinderella moment". We can probably all agree, this isn't a Cinderella moment, it's a Lolita moment and it's one that should probably be addressed going forwards"

Ms. Bird seems incapable of imagining that others might have genuinely found Miss Mechetner's debut enchanting. And that others might actually be interested in the clothes and not share her seeming obsession with young flesh and exposed nipples. 

To find something obscene or perverse in Miss Mechetner's debut is in itself a little obscene and perverse. And when the real horrors of child sexual abuse (be it within a pornographic or indeed a religious context) still remain largely unaddressed, one finds it depressing that an undoubtedly intelligent and well-educated woman such as Ms. Bird wastes her time writing such prudish and piss-poor articles.       

Note: For those who might be interested, Natasha Bird's online piece can be read in full by clicking here. 

Artificial Intelligence and the Question of Racism (The Case of Jacky Alcine)

Jacky Alcine and Friend - laughing and posing for selfies 

in a manner that is all too human 

One of the more disconcerting stories doing the digital rounds at the moment concerns Google's amazing new picture service which lets you store (and edit) unlimited images online. So far, so good. 

But Google Photos also automatically stores the images under a wide but predetermined variety of category headings using the latest advances in Artificial Intelligence to identify objects. And this is where the problems begin; including the problem of racism as an inbuilt feature of technology.  

Thus, embarrassingly for Google, the case of Jacky Alcine, an African American, and his female friend, also black, who were both labelled as gorillas! 

Now, whilst there's nothing essentially wrong or shameful with looking like an ape - we are apes! - of course this issue needs to be understood within the cultural context and long history of racism. This is what makes this case of mistaken identification in the words of a Google executive, "100% not okay". 

To their credit, Google acted swiftly to rectify the situation, apologised to Mr. Alcine and his friend, and issued a statement expressing their genuine sorrow at the upset caused. But still the question tweeted by Mr. Alcine, himself a computer programmer, not of how this happened, but why, remains discreetly passed over in silence. 

For whilst we can all understand glitches in the technology involved and accept that more work needs to be done, the key question concerns the kind of image data that was collected and used by Google in the first place. It's here that an unconscious cross-race effect enters in. For when engineers attempt to teach a machine what a human being looks like by showing it the happy white faces that belong to the majority of their fellow employees in Silicon Valley, then unintended (but nonetheless real and just as offensive) racist consequences follow.

Somewhat depressingly, though unsurprisingly perhaps, it seems that just as the White Man is modelled in the image of God, so is Sonny made in the image of his pale-faced creator and comes with bias built in as standard ...                 

Lawrence, Derrida, and the Snake: It's Time for Man to Make Amends

Snake is one of Lawrence's most widely known poems, subject to numerous critical readings. But perhaps the best of these - certainly the one that most interests at present - is Derrida's. For it's a reading in which the question of interspecies ethics is paramount, i.e., how should we behave when confronted by the non-human otherness of the animal. 

The fact that we need to develop a new type of ethics and form a new relationship with animals can, I suppose, be regarded as a given. For the old relationship, determined by an implicitly anthropocentric moral philosophy in which the human subject is granted dominion over all other creatures and can treat them or eat them as he will, is clearly not satisfactory or working very well; unless, that is, one actively desires to continue the industrial slaughter of domestic beasts and further the mass extinction of wild things.

I certainly don't want this and, contrary to what some readers mistakenly believe, torpedo the ark doesn't mean exterminate all life forms. Rather, it means destroy the human coordination and exploitation of animals - the making them march two-by-two into captivity and containment within a system described by Derrida as carnophallogocentric; a system in which they are turned into just another natural resource to be processed and negated in their uniqueness of being.  

In his poem, Lawrence as narrator attempts to approach and to know a real snake - not merely an idealized construction or symbol - with a mixture of respect and due reverence. He's not entirely successful, but he tries. Thus he accepts that he is ethically accountable for his behaviour, including his cruelty, towards the snake and this is what fascinates Derrida in his reading. This and the fact that Lawrence openly challenges Judeo-Christian fears regarding snakes that are biblically rooted within our culture. As Anna Barcz notes:

"Derrida does not treat the poem as a challenge to literary criticism; he reads it, paying attention to details, as a sort of guidebook, a summary of human and other species' history of complex relationships and emerging problems. This results in a philosophical interpretation ... [that] sheds light on the issue of human and animal rapprochement and distance, not directly but also not far from the vantage point  of many critical, anti-speciesist and anti- or post-humanist accounts." 

Derrida is convinced that Lawrence's short verse effectively anticipates and contains his own animal philosophy in poetic form, as it touches upon just about everything that he himself is concerned with in a lecture series entitled The Beast and the Sovereign. Like Lawrence, Derrida concludes that we as humans have something to profoundly regret in the history of our relationship to the animal; a pettiness to expiate. 

This healing process begins when we recognise both the victimhood and the sovereignty of the snake; that he has been unfairly persecuted and that he is, in fact, an uncrowned king - one of the true lords of life.

Notes:

Anna Barcz, 'On D. H. Lawrence's Snake That Slips Out of the Text: Derrida's Reading of the Poem', Brno Studies in English, Vol. 39, No. 1, (2013), pp. 167- 82. Lines quoted are on p. 170.  

Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Vol. I, Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (eds.), (Chicago University Press, 2009); see the 'Ninth Session' for Derrida's discussion of Lawrence's poem Snake.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'Snake', Birds, Beasts and Flowers, in The Poems (Volume. 1), ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 303-05. 

 

Save the Chimps of Monkey Island!

Yes! We have no bananas, we have no bananas today.

One of the more upsetting stories in recent days concerns the threat of starvation facing the chimps of Monkey Island. 

The colony of over sixty individuals, is composed of ex-lab animals who played a vital role for many years in biomedical research for the New York Blood Center. Amongst other things, they helped scientists discover a vaccine for hepatitis and gain an international reputation for their work in the field of viral infections.

The NYBC, which established the apes in their idyllic new retirement home a decade ago, deep in the jungle of southern Liberia, has shockingly reneged on a promise to provide lifelong care by suddenly withdrawing the funds needed for supplies of fresh food and water, thus effectively leaving them to die.

This action has - not surprisingly - been condemned by numerous groups and charities and prompted a letter of moral rebuke from Jane Goodall. But, for me, it's not merely a matter of animal welfare; it's also a class issue to do with workers' rights in retirement, ensuring they can live out their days in freedom and security. It should thus also solicit full union support. 

These chimps are not wild animals; most spent decades as test subjects and part of an involuntary labour force. Some were born and raised in captivity. All are therefore fully deserving of compensation in my view, or a decent pension - particularly when this is essentially just the provision of a few bananas and maybe the odd mango. 

The $30,000 monthly cost of care is peanuts for a prestigious (and profitable) institution such as the NYBC which has hundreds of millions in revenue each year. They should not only be reminded of the written commitment made in 2005 by then director Alfred Prince to provide a sanctuary and look after the chimps, but legally obliged to honour such.

And it shouldn't require the evolution of a Caesar figure to ensure this ...

Note: those interested in the chimps of Monkey Island might like to view a short documentary from the makers of 20th Century Fox's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes available on YouTube: click here.

Those interested in the campaign to end the use of chimpanzees in biomedical research should click here.

  

Ours is the Day of Realization

Cover (detail) of the 1961 Penguin edition

The latest news from the Lawrence world is of a new adaptation of Lady C. made by the BBC and to be broadcast this autumn. Do we really need such? I don't know: it's debatable. What was once a vital and necessary book no longer seems so today. Nevertheless, the news has made me want to rethink the novel and, here, look again at Lawrence's surprising defence of it in the opening pages of his posthumously published essay A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'. 

After briefly detailing the various pirated editions, Lawrence claims that he wrote and published his most notorious novel in good faith as an honest, healthy book containing an obscene litany of four-letter words that shock at first, but "don't shock at all after a while". Is this because we as readers are rapidly depraved by familiarity? No, says Lawrence, it's because such words only ever troubled the eye and ear and never really disturbed the mind which has evolved far beyond the body and its overly-sensitive organs prone to "violent and indiscriminate physical reactions" that threaten culture and society.

This, it has to be said, is a rather astonishing argument coming from Lawrence of all people. For it implies our sensory organs work independently of consciousness and that their perceptions are superficial, dim-witted, and dangerous. Lawrence thereby not only reinforces a damaging mind/body division, but unexpectedly opts to come down squarely on the side of the former. Indeed, he says quite openly in this astonishing essay that individuals without minds don't interest him and don't matter.

Modern men and women, he continues, are superior to the people of the past precisely because they are capable of a more sophisticated and relaxed relationship with language; they can assign to words "only those mental and imaginative reactions which belong to the mind" and thus not respond like crude savages to every provocation and stimulus without thinking. 

Thus, whilst Lawrence wants us to act, "the great necessity is that we should act according to our thoughts" and not allow ourselves to be so feeble-minded  that we are incapable of contemplating our own bodies (and the words that relate to bodily functions) without "getting all messed up" and carried away. In particular, Lawrence wants us to be able to think sex. 

This, he writes, is the real point of Lady Chatterley's Lover. It's neither a manifesto for sexual liberation nor an apology for adultery. Rather, it's a bold - and puritanical - attempt to realise sex in the head; "fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly". Lawrence knowingly aims at an explicit literary representation of desire; that is to say, he wants to transform the intensity of physical experience and erotic sensation into a pure piece of knowledge. 

Indeed, it's his conviction that a large number of people are happiest "when they abstain and stay sexually apart, quite clean: and at the same time, when they understand and realize sex more fully". He continues, in a startling passage that anticipates Baudrillard's thinking on the world that exists after the orgy:

"Ours is the day of realization rather than action. There has been so much action in the past, especially sexual action, a weary repetition over and over, without a corresponding thought, a corresponding realization. Now our business is to realize sex. Today the full conscious realization of sex is even more important than the act itself. After centuries of obfuscation, the mind demands to know and know fully. The body is a good deal in abeyance, really. When people act in sex, nowadays, they are half the time acting up. They do it because they think it is expected of them. Whereas as a matter of fact it is the mind which is interested, and the body has to be provoked. The reason being that our ancestors have so assiduously acted sex without ever thinking it or realizing it, that now the act tends to be mechanical, dull, and disappointing, and only fresh mental realization will freshen up the experience."

Lawrence, we might conclude, ultimately encourages us to spend less time in the bedroom and more time in the library. Lady C. is a book for thinking, nothing else: a call for a new form of chastity, it belongs to those thought-adventurers for whom the pleasure of the text is the greatest pleasure of all. 

I'll be extremely impressed if Jed Mercurio's new BBC adaptation manages to get this point across and isn't merely another lame and ludicrous work of pretentious soft-porn. We'll see ...


Notes

A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' can be found in the Cambridge Edition of  Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (CUP, 1993), pp. 303-35. The lines quoted from this essay here can be found on pp. 307-08. 

Readers might be interested and amused to know that later in the same essay, Lawrence flagrantly contradicts what he says here by arguing the complete opposite and indulging in a far more familiar anti-mind, pro-body rant; calling for greater harmony between the two, whilst still keeping them separate within a system of metaphysical dualism. As with Nietzsche, you can find textual support in Lawrence for almost any position; the challenge is not to determine the author's genuine view, but to critically examine all perspectives and realise that truth can never be fixed or given absolute moral-logical consistency. 

   

Nietzschean Notes on the Question of Power

The question of power is, for Nietzsche and those who write within his shadow, one of primary importance and the attempt to formulate and advance a critical conception of power beyond the reactive representations of moral idealism remains a real concern. That is to say, a conception free from what Lawrence describes as the superficial contempt for power which most of us experience due to the fact that we moderns only know dead power. Live or active power is worthy of esteem. It is not brute force, which is base and tied to bullying authority or what Deleuze identifies as emaciated forms of prohibition.

This is the key: to rethink power outside of currently accepted values and as more than that which restricts, prohibits, and denies. For power, as Foucault pointed out, has somewhat ironically been made subject to a repressive hypothesis and conceived as poor in resources, sparing in its methods, and incapable of invention. Only when we liberate our thinking on power will we see that what makes power so intoxicating is the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no; rather, "it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasures, forms of knowledge, produces discourse". 

In other words, power keeps us alive and in touch with one another acting as it does as the great productive network running throughout the social and political body. This is why Lawrence insists that power is not only prior to love, but that the latter is ultimately called into being by the former; "the first and greatest of all mysteries". 

Jesus failed because he didn't understand this; didn't experience the joy of an erection on a sunny day. Indeed, rather than thinking of power as a form of eternal delight, he taught that goodness is a form of impotence and passivity and evil is the active springing from energy which violates all human attempts to stabilize the free movement of life. 

Nietzsche was having none of this. Like Blake (and like any other poet worth his salt), he recognised that man needs what is most evil in him if he is to develop what is also best and most beautiful in him. Be happy, he says, and you will be good (once more reversing Christian teaching). But one is only happy when one feels oneself powerful and a little bit demonic via an expenditure (not an accumulation) of energy - shining like a tiny star with brilliant intensity, but to no end. 

Power is thus not something one can consciously seek out or seize and possess; power, rather, is that which can only be accepted as a gift flowing into us from behind and below - and flowing just as vitally away from us forever beyond our control. And humanism is everything that would limit this and accustom us to see the figure of Man behind every event and phenomenon.

Nietzsche's anti-humanist philosophy doesn't consider goodness or pleasure as its primary aim. Nevertheless, as indicated, his notion of joy connected to his concept of power allows for a new ethic to emerge. Or perhaps not so new: ethos anthropoi daimon, as Heraclitus would say ...

Note: this post is an extract taken from my study of Nietzsche's project of revaluation entitled Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010) and those who are interested in reading more on the subject of power and the politics of evil - as well as tracking down references - might like to consult part II, chapter 5 of this text. 

In Defence of the Cleft of Venus

 
Camel toe is an ugly name for a beautiful thing; what is known and revered within more enlightened cultures as the cleft of Venus or, if you prefer the pudendal fissure; i.e., the groove at the base of the mons pubis where it divides to form the lips of the labia majora. 

Personally, I would like all women to be proud of their genitalia - or even cheerfully indifferent. 

But, unfortunately, there is a constant and concerted effort to make them ashamed of their bodies and remind them that they are forever being scrutinized, ridiculed, and judged (both by men and by other women who have learned how to view themselves and members of their own sex in a perversely puritanical manner).   

The jeeringly misogynistic term camel toe plays a significant role in this, letting women know that all eyes are fixed on their most intimate areas and that their cunts - even in outline - ought to be a source of acute embarrassment; an obscene fashion faux pas far worse than visible panty line.

But the same people who invent this false concern for women to worry about, also provide a solution: a pair of knickers designed by Maggie Han and sold under the name of Camel No. 

Ms Han, after suffering from the problem herself and fearing that it might make people think she had a huge vagina, has created a new form of polyester and spandex underwear fitted with a modesty enhancement panel composed of odourless medical-grade silicone to prevent all unsightly creases or the impression of faulty anatomy. Now all women can be as smooth as a Barbie doll between the legs! 

One surely doesn't have to be a radical feminist or a courageous vulva activist to find this strangely depressing and offensive ...?

For whilst I don't mind if some individuals aspire towards plastic perfection and opt for designer vaginas neatly tucked away, I do object when this ideal is extended into a categorical imperative within a pornified and photoshopped culture obliging women and ever-younger girls to find their flesh dirty and inferior and confuse anatomical self-loathing with empowerment (i.e., when sexism and misogyny become internalized and normalized across gender).