This makes sense to me.  Thanks.  That point of surrender is where
poetry begins...

Best

A

>Alison, haven't read the book you mention. Sounds interesting.
>Many thanks for your interesting comments on Freud and Lacan and
>I am inclined very much toward agreeing. Another problem posed by
>psychoanalysis is lesbian sexuality is put in a position of riding on
>the back of gay male sexuality, into the castration complex et al, and
>as a result lesbian sexuality becomes again defined in terms of
>masculine heterosexual desire. Not an analysis I am happy with, to put
>it mildly and just in terms of gay male sexuality being defined in terms
>of white male heterosexuality, let alone to also carry what most
>lesbians would find to be not only sexism but a complicating homophobia.
>
>I studied Freud and Lacan in philosophy of culture (what would be now
>known as Australian Cultural Studies) with a reading list so large it
>made the straight male students cry. My out lesbian friend and me made
>trouble, of course, and had to do our assessments on hysteria, while the
>rest of the seminar got to choose any topic they liked. Another lesbian
>friend from the seminar said reading Freud made her horny. Freud is a
>very rich and complex materialist thinker who analysed the empirical
>conditions he observed in upper middle class European life. It is not a
>theory that can be applied to individuals, simply as such, but an
>analysis of the social forces of sexuality and if you like, modern
>patriarchy. This is why it is able to be such a rich source of material
>for feminists and gay theorists, since all that hard work has already
>been done. Juliet Mitchell, _Psychoanalysis and feminism_ would now be
>one of the classic readings of Lacan. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
>(_Epistemology of the Closet_) in the gay studies area has done a
>brilliant mapping of homophobia, linking it to paranoia which is
>transformed into a generalised background fear which in terms of the
>politics of everyday life is a staple of political domination. The way
>terrorists threats are deployed by governments, for example, and the
>fear generated with HIV/AIDS or SARS. The link between terrorism and
>homophobia is there, functioning as a mechanism of domination with a
>terrible anti-Arab war politically justified on the bodies of dead gay
>men.
>
>Sedgwick also links this to homosociality and friendships between men
>which must always guard against crossing the boundaries of continuing
>erotic practices or homosexuality. A sort of Oedipal homosexuality
>between men which is often expressed by straight men as bisexuality in
>order to guard their identity as men. Guilty experiments tainted with
>shame, even the thought that sex between male friends may be possible
>produces the affect of shame. The experience of the male self by the
>male self which produces shame. An onanistic homosexuality which
>harbours itself at the static ontological genesis of masculine thought.
>This led Sedgwick and her student, Adam Frank, onto the affect
>psychology of Silvan Tompkins, another very rich thinker who breaks with
>Freud over his confusion of drive and affect systems and which Sedgwick
>notes for his lack of homophobia. Sedgwick's prior mapping allows
>another theory of homosociality to emerge which both recognises and
>affirms the erotics of male to male friendship and allows this to be
>spoken. Gives fear a face which can be transversed and the shame refused
>or negotiated around. Still is the look of paranoid guilt and contagious
>fear on the face of a straight boy as he leaves the site of a night
>where he gave his body as an object of pure sensation and surrendered
>his masculine subjectivity and he goes home, spreading contagious fear,
>to his girlfriend, to find again a place for his masculine subjectivity.
>Again, the fear is faced, again, the eroticism of homosociality is
>affirmed. This masculine fear spills into the lives of women and
>friendships between women, marking them with a suspicion which again
>brings the masculine paranoid erotics of male homosociality into his
>face, again spreading a contagious fear. Some times this breaks into the
>violence of rape in an effort to again reclaim masculine subjectivity.
>Again, fear is spread from the contagious masculine face into the lives
>of women. The violence of rape links with gay bashing, spreading fear
>into the lives of gay men. It becomes a low level background radiation
>of fear. An everywhere homophobia. To break the circle is to face the
>greatest fear of all. To simply surrender his bodily subjectivity as an
>object of pure sensation. It is here, at this point, that I begin
>cultural studies, using Silvan Tomkins, Volume Four of Affect, Imagery,
>Consciousness. The deterritorialised body, to map a way out of fear and
>guilt. A way out of shame written all over his face. The end of
>homophobia.
>
>best wishes
>
>Chris Jones.
>
>On Sun, 2003-04-27 at 18:47, Alison Croggon wrote:
>
>>
>>  Interesting.  Freud's analysis of female sexuality is predicated on
>>  ideas of lack and my suspicion of Lacan extends to this presumption.
>>  I have only read a little of Lacan because I can't handle the
>>  misogyny in his writing, although I know Lacan is important to people
>>  like Cixous and Kristeva, who took his ideas and extended them for
>>  their own purposes.  Freud took a socially determined male perception
>>  that women are castrated men, elevated it to a universal principle,
>>  and then from that derived all his ideas of relationships between
>>  women and men, women and themselves and women and women (especially
>>  girls and their mothers).  The only axis of fulfilment of self is a
>>  male norm; there is no such thing as a fulfilled female self, which
>>  can only evolve itself through male agency.  It makes his work on
>>  female sexuality often very puzzling and puzzled reading. I think it
>>  useful only as an analysis of misogyny itself, the projected male
>>  fear of castration phsyicalised in a woman.
>>
>>  I wonder if you've read a book on gender and sex by Thomas Laqueur?
>>  It traces the formation (and performativity) of both gender and sex
>>  in texts from Aristotle on, and is fascinating and depressing, if
>>  ultimately liberating, reading.  Unfortunately I lent it to someone
>>  years ago and never got it back.
>>
>>  Best
>>
>>  Alison
>>
>>  --
>>
>>
>>  Alison Croggon
>>  Editor
>>  Masthead Online
>>  http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
>>
>>  Home page
>>  http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
>>

--


Alison Croggon
Editor
Masthead Online
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/

Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/