I have been reading this thread with great interest and I only wish I had
the time to go back and cut and paste all the different things people have
said that made me want to respond--I am, unfortunately, in the middle of a
long evening of email business and I have allowed myself this brief response
as a break from the boring and mundane--but I still want to add my two
cents, for what they're worth, and I hope I do not do an injustice to
anything anybody has said in the process.

1. I read Sophie Mayer's essay, which reads to me a little more like a
review than a full-fledged exploration of the issues she raises. This is not
a criticism but an acknowledgment that the piece seems more intended to make
certain works visible, and to advocate for a political/erotic stance that
she sees in this work, than to take on in a critical way the enormously
complex issue of politicized sexualities/sexualized politics. I found
myself, like Dominic, growing impatient with the piece, though perhaps for
different reasons. Mayer's advocacy--and I should say that I think the work
she talks needs and deserves that kind of advocacy--does lead her to create
an implicit hierarchy between indigenous languages and English that borders
on an essentialist argument for the superiority, in sexual/erotic terms, of
the indigenous. It may be true that Cree has one word, nîcimos, that
combines the emotional intimacy and sexual desire, in a way that Mayer
asserts the English words sweetheart and lover do not and cannot, but the
tone and tenor of her writing suggests that this makes Cree in some
eroticized political way better or more advanced or more spiritual or
whatever than English, that there is something essentially better in being
able to use one word to express something that in another language takes two
or three. It is the inverse of some of the racist arguments that used to be
made for the superiority of the English language--because for example,
English is more "analytical" in its grammatical structure, i.e., the
sentence is broken down into its constituent parts that must be placed in a
relatively fixed order, while other languages tend to bunch things together
and have variable word orders and so on.

2. Having said that, I also want to acknowledge that the work Mayer talks
about does seem to politicize sexuality and sexualize politics, but not
simply because the sexuality and the pleasure the writers take in it is
explicitly named in the poems and connected via language in an overt way to
some form of political statement. Sexuality and pleasure are not inherently
of any given political stripe, right, left or otherwise. I can, for example,
without too much difficulty, imagine a repressive culture in which enforced
multiple sexual partners is a way of excluding pair-bonding as a legitimate
sexual choice. What makes the work Mayer quotes subversive, to me at least,
and I have to say that I am here relying on her word rather than on a close
reading of any of the writers she is talking about, or even of the brief
snippets she quotes, is that it is intended as a critique of a culture that
has politicized sex to serve capitalist, consumerist, corporate needs.

3. To pick up on something that Alison said: A critical insistence on
pleasure as something that should be at the center of how we give meaning to
life and how we resist oppression/colonization/whatever is quite different,
I think, from the sexual counter-culture to which Dominic referred. The
problem is that it's hard to maintain the distance to be critical when you
get lost in the panting and the moaning and the gyrating, and then in
remember the panting and the moaning and the gyrating and so on and so on.

And now back to the mundane--

Richard
who would give anything right now to be panting and moaning and gyrating
instead of doing what he has to do