Homos

ArtForum, Summer, 1995 by Bruce Hainley

Exploring the supposed radical qualities of such acts in a prologue and four essays as taut and revealing as the skin housing the masculinity performing the aforementioned rad doings, Bersani discovers much to consider and just as much, if not more, to find absurd. Bersani gives a needed slap on the wrist and kick in the pants to gay and lesbian studies and queer theory by saying, roughly, Think sex more complexly, explicitly: "gay critiques of homosexual identity have generally been desexualizing discourses. You would never know, from most of the works I discuss, that gay men, for all their diversity, share a strong sexual interest in other human beings anatomically identifiable as male. Even recent attempts in queer theory to make sexuality 'a primary category for social analysis' have merely added another category to the analysis of social institutions (making explicit the prescriptive assumptions about sexuality embedded within institutions) rather than trying to trace the political productivity of sex." Bersani claims that "gays have been de-gaying themselves in the very process of making themselves visible."

Bersani sees no connection whatsoever, though, between notions of "de-gaying" (certainly a kind of disappearance), which he loathes, and the "nonsuicidal disappearances of the subject" (the ego-shattering fuck), which his book celebrates. (Perhaps, like Esmeralda on Bewitched, homosexuality is most radical when fading away only to reappear when and where it is least expected, even wanted.) And by gaying things up, Bersani loses track of the lesbian - though his point is an emphasis on the sameness within homoness, his book might have better been entitled Fags. He begins by carefully rereading the work of Judith Butler and Monique Wittig, amongst others, but by his book's close it is sex between men, not women - specifically butt-fucking doggie style in public - that is the radical act, as his rigorous exegesis of a scene from Jean Genet's Funeral Rites makes clear. When he tries to pair this public scene of men's coming "to the world" with another scene of shifting interiorities from Genet's The Maids, he forgets (?) to mention that even if performed, as it often is, by men in drag, The Maids is a work structured by the dynamics of lesbian erotics and aggressions.

Though Bersani's book is bracing for its interest in and consideration of "irresponsibility"; "infecundity, waste, and sameness to requirements for the production of pleasure"; and "self-shattering . . . [as] intrinsic to the homoness in homosexuality," when he wants to claim that there are "glorious precedents for thinking of homosexuality as truly disruptive - as a force not limited to the modest goals of tolerance for diverse lifestyles, but in fact mandating the politically unacceptable and politically indispensable choice of an outlaw existence," I just want to laugh. Look around you, darling. Humans have been doing it with every available orifice since there were humans to have orifices to do it with, perhaps even before that - and this has achieved what utopian revolutionary existence? Why would anyone want fucking to mandate a cause? (Imagine the dating problems that might occur.)

Although he tries to preempt much criticism through his choice of writers and sexual acts, Bersani has almost nothing to say to lesbians or other women. Just as disappointing is his positioning of himself as outlaw, a critic indebted to and celebrating a "radical modernity anxious to save art from the preemptive operations of institutionalized culture" in the form of the "cult of failure and the cult of waste." I'm all for waste and failure, really, I love trash and moldy wonders, but how radical and outlaw is it to find a "scatological aesthetic," and an esthetic of failure, in the work of Genet and Samuel Beckett, Bersani's exemplars, two of the most internationally famous and awarded figures in the arts of the 20th century? Of course there are still many things about extremes of living and thinking to be gathered from their works, but for Bersani to position himself as a criminal risk-taker from the position of his Class-of-1950-endowed professorship is ludicrous. More to the point, by his writing's formal conservatism and his choice of writers, Bersani threatens no academic or other status quo. How different it would have been had he staked his claims on the work of Jane Bowles or Mary Butts or Nella Larsen, Modernist writers with a very different relationship to failure and unpublishability, or on some lost movie star, Anna Mae Wong or Mylene Demongeot; staked his claims from a stance that might threaten his own position, make him seem ridiculous, crazy, shattering, embarrassing, abject, and that might make those encountering him question their own interests rather than confirming the smug, hip correctness of being a so-called sex-radical theorist, an already all-too-sanctioned role, and one my gay daddy wouldn't give the benediction of his spit.

Bruce Hainley contributes regularly to Artforum.