On Fri, 2003-04-04 at 10:25, Alison Croggon wrote:
> I found Dom's poem less uncomfortable on that front: I read it not so
> much as homophobic as expressing the suppressed homoeroticism of
> violent conflict. There was a similar passage in one of Genet's
> novels - Funeral Rites?
All of Genet's novels are concerned with this in some way, I guess. I
wasn't totally convinced by Dom's poem, although that comment isn't
exactly fair, as I know what is being argued and wouldn't disagree.
Perhaps the refusal wasn't sharp enough in my reading and I may have
missed it, if it is to be placed in terms of Genet's writing? Foucault
has written on this, as well, and I wondered if this was the direction I
was being led. Perhaps also unfair as I am working with a different line
which connects images of sperm with military violence and also sperm as
Monads where each sperm-Monad is a point of view on the world (masculine
realist narrative structures) and paternal pathogenesis through the
mating of sperm cells as a queer parodic structure. (And still working
on it so can't really get into a discussion on this.)
> Well, it's fair to say it doesn't work for me, and irony doesn't make
> it work either.
Shitting as giving birth is a well known masculine anal erotic fantasy
and the placing of it in ironic terms reinforces the fantasy by placing
the writer above the fantasy as some sort of transcendental masculine
god who need only swoop down to the ground to kidnap a boy to rape.
The figure of anal eroticism posed as male bisexuality resulting in a
splitting headache from which leaps masculine thought, fully formed. All
that is missing is maternal pathogenesis and the apotheosis of fascism
falls fatally upon us (in Daniel Guerin's analysis of the term). In a
final analysis this is homophobia and pink triangles in a concentration
camp being herded into gas chambers.
Anyways, some of my thoughts on this mythology that connects male
homosexual rape and anal eroticism which is bisexuality or a male
homosexual phase with warfare and the historical fascist trajectory the
current war operates with. (There was a quote from a disaffected wounded
US soldier I posted earlier who said he had grains of sand in his ass...
those who know Freud's libidinal economy could probably use this comment
as a starting point? Deconstructing the racism in the metaphor may be
another angle?)
best
Chris Jones.
|