The unruly queer figure’s phallic seductions and the re/production of sexual (in)difference

Desire and the ‘beyond gender’ motif

Sexuality is, as Freud and Lacan sought to show, an unconscious drive, an inherently perverse, non-normative force. In the Lacanian scheme, which extends Freud’s insights on sexuality through the universal structure of language, sexuality is cast as irreducible to sexual anatomy and thus (hetero)reproduction itself. In short, sexuality is wholly indifferent to sexual difference, beyond gender, and thus offers a ‘uniquely valuable source of antinormative potential’, as sexuality resists normalisation itself (Dean, 2000: 217). That this strain of queer is, according to Tim Dean, uniquely radical because it is ‘beyond gender’ is also, I argue, a severing of queer from feminism, a supersession of queer over and against feminism. The feminist–queer couple is here on ever more tenuous ground, for only a psychoanalytically inflected queer theory (rather than, say, a feminist-inflected one) can adequately challenge normative society, along with the teleological logic subtending it. Lee Edelman’s No Future offers just such a challenge to dominant logic, that of ‘reproductive futurity’ (2004: 2) and the pervasive, overwhelming affective investments (like romance, love, family) that bind us to this (hetero)normative ideal. Characterised as ‘one of the most controversial and powerful contributions to antisocial queer theory’ (Halberstam, 2008: 141), No Future is thought by many as having had a pivotal pull on not only the future of anti-social queer theory itself, but the direction of queer thought in general, thus conveying anti-social theory’s own rhetorical power in shaping the critical discourse of queer studies at the turn of the twenty-first century. Following Edelman, queer is the undoing of identity, that which stands to disrupt heteronormativity, since the heteronormative order, a progress narrative bound by the logic of temporality and teleological coherence, founds its meaning through the spirit of futurity by way of hetero-reproduction, kinship, and the plotlines of genetic, social and cultural inheritance. Thus, rather than participate in the ‘properly political sphere’ – which is merely the reproduction of heteronormative futurity – queer retains its capacity to ‘figure the undoing of the Symbolic’ by way of refusal (Edelman, 2004: 27). In sum, queer fucks the future as it resists familial, normalising codes constitutive of heteronormative logic/fantasy.

Edelman’s characterisation of queer, informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis, where desire is that of radical, uncontainable excess, typifies the queer figure operating within anti-social theory:

In a political field whose limit and horizon is reproductive futurism, queerness embodies this death drive, this intransigent jouissance, by figuring sexuality’s implication in the senseless pulsions of that drive. De-idealizing the metaphorics of meaning on which heteroproduction takes its stand, queerness exposes sexuality’s inevitable coloration by the drive: its insistence on repetition, its stubborn denial of teleology, its resistance to determinations of meaning […] [queerness] also names the jouissance forbidden by, but permeating, the Symbolic order itself. (2004: 27)

To understand gender within the Lacanian scheme is to engage Lacan’s ‘limit’, that zone of impossibility which is a place outside the unconscious. This is the real, Lacan’s third register (the other two being the imaginary and symbolic registers), which is also the law of castration, that negativity (lack) that comes with being subjectivated into language and the irreparable void/split instantiated in the child’s separation from the mother. We are always seeking to return to that state of full plenitude (jouissance), which is our desire to be desired by the Other (that of the mother and later, other human beings). But this desire always fails before the real as we can never satisfy the other, and thus we can never satisfy ourselves. We turn to others in the hope they can provide us our ‘truth’: as Slavoj Žižek explains, ‘[i]t is this truth that I am looking for in others [and] what propels me to “communicate” with them is the hope that I will receive from them the truth about myself, about my own desire’ (1993: 31). It is because of this very failure that we continue to desire. Our desire can never be satisfied for a gap must always remain; full satisfaction would be a ‘psychical death’ (Dean, 2000: 92), a discharge of the very tension fuelling our libidinal drives. Thus, it is within the real rather than through the symbolic register where sexual difference should be understood: ‘[w]hereas the unconscious endlessly proliferates meaning, the dimension of the real points to an impossibility of meaning, a fundamental resistance to sense. It is within this aporia that Lacanian psychoanalysis situates sexual difference’ (Dean, 2000: 87). While gender is a product of the unconscious and is in this way indeterminate, there is also ‘an aspect of gender – the real dimension – that cannot be transcended’ (Dean, 2000: 87). For while gender (sexual difference) as part of the real ‘does not exist’, it would be a mistake to see the real as a no-holds-barred scene of relativity/freedom, as the real, however paradoxically, sets limits on subjectivity. In short, while the subject will always fail to signify – to live up to those idealisations (male/female) set in social discourse, and is thus in this way ‘free of absolute social constraint, he or she is nevertheless not unconditionally free to be a subject any which way: within any discourse the subject can only assume either a male or female position’ (Copjec, 1994: 23; emphasis in original). Elsewhere, Dean describes the real as an ‘intractable limit’ (2000: 70), and it is this real that comes to distinguish a Lacanian-inflected queer theory from other paradigms that refuse to capitulate to it.

This is expressed by Dean as a warning: ‘I would suggest that any queer or feminist political theory that refuses to acknowledge intractability will remain less effective than it otherwise might be, because it will ceaselessly encounter the real as unfathomable blockage of its political aims’ (2000: 92). While Dean is referring to the antagonisms intrinsic to and constitutive of society, it is also a response to those (feminist) projects that specifically work at disrupting gender and the normative gender regime. Dean looks to Butler as a paradigmatic example of theorists refusing to heed that intractability in psychic life, meaning also, the intractability of gender/sexual difference. As Joan Copjec (1994) notes over and against Butler, it is not gender’s instability of meaning, but rather gender’s ‘impossibility of complete meaning’ that marks the radicality of Lacanian thinking. For sex is, as Copjec continues in reference to Lacan, ‘the stumbling-block of sense’ (1994: 18) language attempts to fill (up) with meaning. And this is where Butler errs, for she ‘reduces’ sex to the discursive and cultural domains such that sex is now cast as a product of signification and thus, gender’s mutability and potential reconfiguration. But re-signification, that which seeks to disrupt compulsory heterosexuality, depends for its subversion on the very tool that splits us: that of language. If language is constitutive of loss, it will inevitably fail for no amount of re-signification can, according to the Lacanian view, destabilise gender, since the impasse that is the real cannot be overcome. While Lacan observes an unsymbolisable dimension to human existence, Butler remains ‘stuck’ in the imaginary and symbolic registers as her critical project, that of re-signification, assumes we can know, and thus can change, gender/sex. Since the non-ego aspects of psychic life dominate gender, deconstructionists (Butler) will never be able to deliver on this promise of gender subversion and its proliferations. So, how is it exactly that attempts to understand gender are deemed naïve and pointless, while sexuality/desire, product of our unconscious, can be more fully understood through language?

I want to continue with this ‘beyond gender’ motif operating within anti-social queer theory as it suggests another impasse: a feminist–queer uncoupling, as this is not so much an indifference to/of gender as its erasure. To think desire independently of gender is, as previously stated, to challenge normative (hetero)sexuality, for there is no normal or natural sexuality as sexuality is constitutively perverse. Dean asks in the form of a question whether Lacanian psychoanalysis might have been a foreshadowing of queer critique, foreshadowing ‘by a couple of decades the radical move in queer theory to think sexuality outside the terms of gender’ (2000: 216). That queer theory made the ‘radical move’ to think sexuality outside the purview of gender circuitously, yet unambivalently, hierarchises (anti-social) queer theory over and against feminism. This move, as Annamarie Jagose contends, works to ‘typecast feminist theory itself as old-fashioned and passé, temporally quarantined from new-school queer theory’ (2009: 160). While discrediting feminism as anachronistic has played out in other venues by way of various other machinations, what is odd is the dearth of critique among queer theorists when it comes to this rather unambivalent erasure of gender/feminism. In the footnote attached to Dean’s rhetorical question noted above (and again on p. 193), Dean notes those ‘pioneering’ feminists – Gayle Rubin, Butler, and Eve Sedgwick – whose work has been that of theorising sexuality outside the terms of gender. Dean wants to show that these feminists who have greatly influenced the field of sexuality studies, and the very field he wishes to advance (queer theory), agree that when it comes to the task of deciphering sexuality, the tools of feminism do not suffice. Presumably these pioneering feminists acknowledge feminism’s limitations vis-à-vis sexuality, the need for analytic separation between gender and sexuality, and agree that we must develop new theoretical tools (not feminist ones) that can take on sexuality.

It is suggested that some feminists shifted their allegiances to(ward) the queer camp and that, on some level, these feminists, having found feminism’s theoretical and analytical reach exhausted, are themselves ‘beyond’ feminist thought and thus in search of something else, namely queer theory. Dean applauds Butler, alongside Sedgwick, for ‘struggling to think sexuality outside the terms of gender’ (2000: 193; emphasis mine), and Dean also suggests the logic – that of Lacanian psychoanalysis – that will alleviate this struggle, as Lacan’s tools enable the necessary cut (sexuality from gender) they seek. I now turn to Sara Ahmed’s critical reflections on the creation of new fields of inquiry, which must clear ‘the ground of what has come before’ (2008: 36) through routinisation and prohibition. This routinisation applies here: that is, psychoanalytic queer theory can characterise itself an ‘advanced’ field of theoretical inquiry only by way of historical erasure. Ahmed is specifically addressing so-called feminist ‘new-materialism’, the very founding of which relies on the ‘routinization of the gesture’ which is in this case the ‘routine’ (anti-feminist) claim that feminism is ‘routinely anti-biological’ (2008: 24). The belief that feminism is anti-biology – that it does not deal with matter – is current orthodoxy, as this notion, now routinised, has become foundational. But this claim, to be effective, must operate through repudiation and the disavowal of the feminist archive of work on the biological. This anti-biological view caricatures feminist thought, only to (re)emerge actualised through male writers, who, Ahmed notes, are treated with a degree of closeness and love not found elsewhere. And while she is not saying feminists must rely solely on the feminist archive, Ahmed is suggesting that this ‘return’ (to feminism), which comes whenever one seeks to carve out a new theoretical position, must be an ethical one – one that seeks to remember through engaged, attentive analysis.

In propping up certain feminist theorists as those who understand the necessity of ‘letting go’ of gender in order to interrogate sexuality more fully, Dean caricatures not only the feminist work these theorists have produced, but feminist thought itself. Dean’s depiction, while not untrue (certainly, these thinkers have produced prodigious works of insight when it comes to thinking/understanding sexuality), is misleading in that he condenses extensive oeuvres down to a certain object – that of sexuality/desire – such that other objects (i.e. gender) fall outside of feminist analysis. It is this kind of ‘return’ to the feminist archive that Ahmed attacks, for it obfuscates feminism’s conceptual richness vis-à-vis sexuality and its impact on queer theorising more generally. In fact, one wonders how Butler could be cast as a theorist bent on theorising sexuality outside the terms of gender, for it is Butler who argues against just such a cleavage:

when questions of gender are separated off from questions of sexuality, that is, when sexuality is ‘liberated’ from gender, such that there is a ‘refusal to mark that difference’ between masculine and feminine, what we have […] is a theory founded on male domination (assumed symmetry) such that ‘the masculine has achieved the status of the “sex” which is one’. (1994: 20)

The (anal) erotics of self-loss

What figure retains this rupturing potential, and what kinds of representations will we find in the anti-social archive, that which performs this nefarious negation? While anti-social queer theory works within the figural dimension, that which is ‘beyond rhetoricalism’, as desire itself, while in language, ‘is not itself linguistic’ (Dean, 2000: 178), it nonetheless grounds itself by way of representation, giving us images, if not substantiations, of this queer subject. I want to consider the figurations informing this archive. The anti-social strain in queer comes from the work of Leo Bersani, whose ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ (1987) maps out his self-shattering thesis. This thesis emerges through his critique of what he perceives to be the dominant gay ethos operating at the time (the era of Reagan and HIV/AIDS), an ethos complicit, he contends, with the normative order. That is, Bersani attacks gay liberationists as he sees in their ‘pro-sex’ views an assimilationist logic, an underlying pastoralism that, in order to work, demands the ‘desexualization’ of queer sexuality. This desexualisation is an attempt to, Bersani believes, redeem sex, more specifically, to redeem gay male sexuality by way of denying its (inherently) noxious qualities. In short, gay liberationists (alongside radical feminists) seek to purify sex, such that sex comes to signify ‘good’ things like egalitarianism, self-transformation, and relationality/community. This he coined the ‘redemptive reinvention of sex’, that in seeking to ‘prettify sex’ rids homosexuality of its very ‘homo-ness’ – a gay specificity, an ‘inaptitude – perhaps inherent in gay desire – for sociality as it is known’ (Bersani, 1995: 76). Informed by Freud, sexuality is, for Bersani, a ‘tautology for masochism’ (1987: 217), as sex is, at its core, humiliating and self-annihilating. And it is gay male sexuality that typifies this psychic annihilation, that which exposes the nefariousness of sex. More specifically, it is receptive anal sex, one man fucking another man’s ass, that most closely captures that ego-shattering jouissance we (all) seek, whereby the self, in being ‘“pressed” beyond a certain threshold of endurance’ (Bersani, 1987: 217), momentarily achieves a sense of psychic wholeness (a suturing of our lack). Anal sex emblematising the wholly non-redemptive, ‘ineradicable’ qualities constitutive of queer sex – anal eroticism is, in short, this homo-ness.

To sanitise sex – that is, remove its ‘antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving’ aspects or revel in its more communal qualities – as gay liberationists purportedly do, is, as Bersani asserts, ‘dangerously tame’ (1987: 219). This taming of sex is, for Bersani, and anti-social queer theorists more generally, the most worrisome aspect of redemptive politics. For this also directly contravenes queer’s most radical dimension, that of refusal, its anti-social pulse. But I argue that in this taming of sex, this fear for ‘our’ (queer) domestication, lurks a much deeper concern. This is the real source of Bersani’s anxiety, an anxiety both exposed and concealed in his anti-redemptive critiques and his need to centralise, as truly disruptive, gay male sex and the self-shattering such practices elicit. What Bersani fears most is, in short, the ordinariness of homosexuality, the de-virilisation of gay male sex. Michel Foucault is one such figure, who in viewing sex as a site of connectivity, relationality and queer community, thus stressing the generative, relational aspects of sex, is complicit in this sanitising as it de-emphasises the threatening, disintegrative effects (gay male) sex instantiates. Moreover, queer sex is for Foucault a ‘form of counterdiscipline’ (Halperin, 1995: 97), a potentially self-transformative exercise that can enable new ways of being and novel ways of relating: ‘I think that what most bothers those who are not gay about gayness is the gay lifestyle, not sex acts themselves’ (Foucault, 1994b: 153). Foucault is specifically referring to the forging of relationships and forms of community fashioned through queer sex – where queer sex and queer ways of relating are neither determined by (hetero)normative gender nor bound by genital specificity. But Bersani has a right to be concerned, for there is more to this Foucauldian project. Foucault exemplifies this redemptive, ‘domesticating’ agenda Bersani so fears precisely because his project is one of de-virilising gay male sex. Take the case of queer S/M. While S/M’s radical appeal lies, in part, in its potentially disintegrative effects, such fragmentation is, according to Foucault, radical precisely because it encompasses the entire body. That is, in S/M the entire body is caught up in the circuits of desire, such that S/M practice ‘detaches sexual pleasure from genital specificity, from localization in and dependence on the genitals’ (Halperin, 1995: 88). In short, S/M de-centres the penis as it de-localises and diffuses bodily pleasure, and ‘alters one’s relation to one’s own body’ (Halperin, 1995: 89). It is through this de-virilisation of masculine sexuality, the de-throning of the penis, and the bodily (re)invention (through sex) that this de-centring enables – those proliferations of desire instantiated through gender’s destabilisations – that makes queer sex ‘queer’.

Bersani goes on to attack Foucault’s assertion that gay relationships might possibly be more threatening than particular sex acts, more specifically, the ones in which gay men engage: can ‘a nonrepresentable form of relationship really be more threatening than the representation of a particular sexual act – especially when the sexual act is associated with women but performed by men and […] has the terrifying appeal of a loss of the ego, of a self-debasement’ (1995: 220)? For Foucault then, it is not so much sex but relationality itself and the de-valorisation of ‘the male as male’ (Halperin, 1995: 89; emphasis in original) that signifies queer transgression, which is, for Bersani the ultimate crime/betrayal. The male bottom exemplifies Bersani’s shattering figure, those male masochists, who by bottoming in the erotic exchange (taking up the feminine position in sex) come to exemplify this shattering discord – the sexual ‘threat’ anal penetration delivers. While Bersani’s claim is that sexuality is a tautology for masochism, indicating that men are as corporeally and psychically vulnerable as women, thus potentially undermining idealisations of male invulnerability, his masochism is in actuality an avowal of, rather than a disruption to, masculinity itself. This anti-relational stance (as seen through his critique of Foucault), coupled with Bersani’s need to masculinise that which is, prima facie, emasculating, is a fetishising of gay male sex, a fetish that works to conceal both his own anxieties and the misogyny subtending this logic. As Lynda Hart so eloquently puts it, Bersani’s male masochism can only be, can only perform, because ‘women’s sexuality, and especially the “impossible” lesbian’ is ‘the ground upon which such a “masculine” liberation can take place’ (1998: 102). Put differently, women cannot perform masochism – they are masochists, since masochism is constitutive of femininity (Hart, 1998: 102) – and this is why Bersani compares male bottoms to (all) women. In short, this ostensibly emancipatory project uses ‘woman’ (and ‘lesbian’, in particular) as the ground on which to erect this shattering ideal. In fact, unlike female masochism, male masochism is, as Hart asserts, active passivity, since the gay male remains psychically and corporeally masculine – that ‘fullness’ male-centric self-loss seeks to conceal. Bersani’s masochism is, I argue, redoubled in its masculinity, where, however paradoxically, the ego is not so much shattered as shored up. In sum, to ‘sanitise’ sex (specifically, anal sex) is to de-privilege the penis, whereby gay male sex is neither the threatening moment nor that which wholly defines the erotic exchange.

Queer sex functions as a form of refusal, a perversion that makes manifest our fiction as coherent subjects. But more deeply still is the insight that desire, as product of the unconscious, remains fundamentally irreducible to the body. As Dean puts it, ‘desire is predicated on the incommensurability of body and subject’ (2000: 200; emphasis in original). And to ontologise desire (make it a thing) is to participate in this domesticating agenda, for ‘[a]s soon as perversion or queerness becomes ontologized as an identity […] perversion loses its disruptive potential’ (Dean, 2000: 246). Rather, it is the subject’s constitutive disembodiment, the split subject ‘that produces the subject and its causes of desire’ (Dean, 2000: 201). But it is just this purported disembodied position that is disingenuous, for this repudiation depends on and is sustained by the very body it wishes to refuse. In Dean’s recent text, Unlimited Intimacy (2009), he explores the bareback subculture which emerged in San Francisco in the mid-1990s as a response to HIV/AIDS, and the conservative and homophobic discourses surrounding it. Bareback sex is unprotected anal sex that, in an era of HIV/AIDS, carries not only great physical risk, but considerable symbolic significance. The bareback subculture views unprotected anal sex as the site/source for the shattering of limits, in terms both physical and psychic, and is thus in this way ‘an activity deeply invested with meaning’ (Dean, 2009: 45). Barebacking literally removes barriers (condoms) to physical contact, enabling the physical transgression necessary for self-loss. Dean argues that bareback sex was specifically invented to counteract the gay and lesbian movement’s assimilationist agenda, which sought to showcase, in the midst of virulent homophobia, a normalisation: ‘to help keep their [gay male] sex outside the pale of bourgeois respectability’ so as to ensure that ‘some gay men will retain the status of outlaws – a status that carries considerable erotic appeal’ (2009: 85). For all the rhetoric on sexual perversion, there is in anti-social queer theory a curious dependence on (gender) normalisation writ large. One reading could situate bareback sex, the simultaneous lethality of unprotected anal sex coupled with the undoing of self that masochistic sex engenders, as the repudiation of masculinity and the (hyper)self-control manhood valorises. Yet male masochism avows no such thing – this is not a feminising force, one that works to pry loose normative gendered entanglements with regard to the body and desire. Instead, masochism is the mark of manhood, an avowal of (hyper)masculinity wherein bodily repudiation is the search for self-mastery and bodily possession:‘[t]hrough its commitment to no-excuses submission and no-limits endurance, however, bareback subculture conversely embraces masochism as proof positive of masculinity […] by remasculinizing masochism, barebackers have made self-loss into a confirmation rather than an effacement of manhood’ (Dean, 2009: 56). Bareback sex, as a matter of life and death, exemplifies, to an extreme, this (self)negation so valued by anti-social queer theory. This is not a critique of bareback subculture, but merely a way to demonstrate once more this masochism, and how male masochism is, through its attachment to negation, fundamentally dependent on (privileged) gender, while simultaneously duplicitously unaware of it.

Phallic de-centring through the materialisation of sex

Butler seeks to explain this materialisation, this subjectification into being via cultural norms. Central to this process is the psychic and somatic sedimentation of gender norms on/in the body, in order to render a body intelligible to dominant heteronormative logic. Butler wants in essence to make matter matter, and it is this normative sexing and gendering of the body via compulsory heterosexuality that she aims to disrupt, for, as she states ‘the boundaries of the body are the lived experience of differentiation, where that differentiation is never neutral to the question of gender difference’ (1995: 65). For Butler, gender differentiation is produced through exclusionary mechanisms, those psychic and corporeal foreclosures, such that desire itself is a product of (en)closure and repudiation. It is this she seeks to exploit. While Butler sees psychoanalysis as a crucial theoretical tool in understanding the subject and subject formation, much of her own work is a critical feminist reworking of key psychoanalytic concepts. My focus in this section concerns Butler’s critique of Lacan, specifically his notion of the phallus, and what a reworking of the phallus might mean in the way of gender re-signification. Butler’s intervention vis-à-vis the phallus is a response to what she sees happening within psychoanalysis, which is what I see operating here – a desire (albeit repudiated and concealed) to ‘restore phallic property to the penis’ (1995: 62). Butler wishes also to challenge an element of inevitability operating within psychoanalysis, as masculinity, while exposed as fiction, retains its central, universalising posture, for this phallus is our symbolic order, our very language. This is why Butler’s intervention is so critical, not because the lesbian phallus is necessarily right, but because it forces us to ask the bigger, more pressing questions such that we are compelled to fuck up/with the phallus in ways male-centric thought simply does not engage. I end the section with the lesbian phallus and consider lesbian/queer S/M, which confirms the very plasticity Butler wishes to exploit. That is, ‘the phallus’ as found in lesbian sadomasochism is transferable, mutable and at times, quite peripheral to sexual pleasure. It might resemble the ‘real’ thing or it might not – either way, the shattering lesbian/queer S/M elicits is irreducible to the phallus if by phallus we mean ‘the penis’.

The Lacanian scheme revolves around the phallic function, which refers to castration/lack. Subjects are constituted in language, a splitting whereby a self/subject emerges. The Name-of-the-Father designates the law, the ‘symbolic father’ – that which positions through prohibition the two poles of sexuation. While the subject’s position depends upon its possession, or lack thereof, of the phallus, one should not, according to Lacan, interpret the phallus as one of anatomical difference; rather, the phallus serves merely a symbolic function as ‘the sole representative of what that [anatomical] difference is allowed to be’ (Mitchell and Rose, 1982: 42). While the phallus delimits the signifiable, thus regulating our subjectification within the symbolic and holding meaning in place, these representations – the terms on which sexual difference, and thus the symbolic order itself rests – are empty signifiers that will always fail to live up to their ideal. Thus, following Lacan, the masculine and feminine positions are placeholders that while having a stabilising effect, simultaneously expose through the unconscious and thus, sexuality/desire, ‘the duplicity that underpins its fundamental [sexual] divide’ (Mitchell and Rose, 1982: 44). In sum, both men and women lack the phallus as we are all castrated by language. The phallus operates merely as a veiling (Butler, 1995). Within Lacan’s logic then, masculinity is as much artifice as femininity. The problem, according to Butler, is that Lacan’s phallus remains the origin of signification, the privileged signifier, that ‘law’ constituting (through the Oedipal struggle) our sexuality while serving as the ‘grid of all epistemic relations’ (1995: 78). In being ‘the law’, the phallus ‘wards off its own genealogy’, that which is outside the realm of interrogation, as seemingly unquestioning truth. And while the phallus is meant only to convey symbolic difference, that which is irreducible to the penis, thus confirming the arbitrariness of signifier and signified, its signifiability and rhetorical power depends on this very relation.

Thus, what is supposedly only an imaginary morphology comes to signify a naturalised, biological morphology bound to heteronormative logic. In short, the anatomical penis gives the phallus its symbolic force, for this is the foundation upon which the phallus rests. Butler highlights the curious effect of repudiation, and how such denials work to recuperate and solidify that which it is meant to refuse:

If the phallus must negate the penis in order to symbolize and signify in its privileged way, then the phallus is bound to the penis, not through simple identity, but through determinate negation. If the phallus only signifies to the extent that it is not the penis, and the penis is qualified as that body part that it must not be, then the phallus is fundamentally dependent upon the penis in order to symbolize at all. Indeed, the phallus would be nothing without the penis. (1995: 84; emphasis in original)

One way in which to pry loose this relation of equivalence (phallus = penis) is to re-territorialise, so as to destabilise, masculine and feminine morphologies. Such destabilising would render the phallus transferable via re-signification. As Butler argues, the phallus as ‘the incipient moment or origin of a signifying chain’ (1995: 81) gains that privilege through repetition, and it is in this force of repetition where recirculation and thus the ‘de-privileging’ of the universal signifier occurs. This de-privileging comes for Butler in the form of the lesbian phallus (a strategy not unproblematic in its consequences, as Butler herself emphasises), which works to signify the phallus differently, dislodging its linkage to masculine morphology. The lesbian phallus challenges the valorisation of male desire and cleaves the penis–phallus relation in two key ways: through the (re)corporealising of masculine morphology, grounding the male body (specifically, the penis) as mere flesh; and exposing, through psychoanalysis, gender’s own troubling (unpredictable) economy, whereby the body itself is constitutive of desire. While the lesbian phallus might be read as affirmation of our lack (as lesbians), our wish for the ‘real’ thing, or a miming of heterosexual exchange, thus evacuating possibilities for lesbian specificity, it is also for Butler just as possibly a disruption to the hegemonic imaginary: ‘When the phallus is lesbian, then it is and is not a masculinist figure of power; the signifier is significantly split, for it both recalls and displaces the masculinism by which it is impelled […]. This opens up the site of anatomy – and sexual difference itself – as a site of proliferative resignifications’ (1995: 89). In weakening the phallus–penis relation, Butler renders masculine morphology mute. That is, like Foucault, she de-virilises it, exposing phallic virilisation itself as fiction, wherein no gender ‘has’ it but any gender could. For what would it mean for (anti-social) queer theory, if all sexualities/genders were potentially transgressive – that site/sign of refusal/rupture? A theory that captures queer transgression solely through (disembodied) phallic sex offers no real challenge to dominant society; it merely fortifies asymmetrical gender relations, (re)installing the masculine as centre, that site of rupturing significance.

The self-loss sex instantiates has tremendous theoretical appeal, for it exposes our psychic failings and the instability that is the subject. It forces us to reflect on our own fragility, where the subject as fiction rubs up against the very ideals structuring dominant society (i.e. individualism, democracy, freedom). But while shattering can play out in any number of ways, only (gay) men elicit masochism’s subversive qualities. And because this is so, self-loss is understood on male-centric terms. This is a virilised relation that aims to illuminate, out of its own anxieties, the overwhelming, tumescent and intoxicating powers of penile penetration. This is where I see the re-signifying potential of the lesbian phallus, for this plasticity exposes and disrupts, and in this way de-virilises, that which anti-social discourse seeks to shore up – the very anxiety fuelling Bersani’s shattering thesis. The point here is not so much that the phallus ‘might symbolize body parts other than the penis’ (Butler, 1995: 84) but rather that other body parts – and many kinds of objects – have the potential to elicit states of psychic and ontological discord. In this view, the penis is merely one object among many, and is certainly not the privileged site of sexual pleasure. On that note, might this discord offer up another modality, one no less threatening in its resistance, where shattering, in all its fragility, does not refuse so much as bind, generating alternative ways of relating as Foucault himself envisioned? Exploring lesbian/queer S/M, this is how I have come to understand self-loss, as a relational, co-constitutive device. Such self-loss moves beyond mere negation. That is, self-loss engenders rather profound morphological shifts in the way of bodily remapping, literally re-sculpting the flesh in ways generative of alternative embodied orientations to the world. This is a modality generative of futurity and attachment. Lesbian/queer S/M instantiates a sense of ‘aliveness’ and self-expansion (Kleinplatz and Moser, 2006: 17), a physical intensity that in its rupturing attaches not to death, but life. As Hale (1997) so eloquently shows, S/M is fundamentally about the body, one’s gender, wherein alternative bodily modalities and alignments (a kind of bodily re-coding) are productive of desire, a desire both libidinal and ontological (the desire to be, to expand, to resist). And where Bersani (and others) would see in this a redemptive, de-sexualising view of sex (so be it), precisely because it de-privileges masculine morphology and corporealises desire, I argue that this sex embodies queerness precisely because it does give a fuck about the future.

This is a shattering that while annihilative, tends toward sociality and connection. The S/M exchange dwells in the depths of vulnerability and violation, but this is a co-constitutive, embodied, shared intensity that transpires in the witnessing and recognition of an-other. Within the lesbian/queer S/M scene, there is no ‘real’ penis if by ‘real’ we mean an anatomical one. There are, however, phallic representations that come in a variety of forms – as objects (whips, dildos, needles), and body parts (in S/M all body parts are fair game as sites of erogeneity) all of which, among skilled practitioners at least, can rend the self from its consciousness/flesh. And while the dildo is, for some feminists, complicit in misogyny, as confirming our lack, that is, our need to mime the real thing (Case, 1989), still for others, the lesbian dick confirms no such thing. It instigates rather a ‘representational crisis’ as this penis moves beyond plasticity to show that the phallus ‘has no reference to the “real” of the penis […]. It neither returns to the male body, originates from it, nor refers to it’, because these lesbians ‘refuse to acknowledge an origin outside their own self-reflexivity’ (Hart, 1998: 123). The lesbian dick is, for Hart, ‘the ultimate simulacra’ (1998: 123). While the lesbian phallus raises as many problems as possibilities, what does seem clear is that interventions must take place. In this case, phallic/penile tumescence is taken down from its magical heights to the ground, made mere flesh – this is the actual lived vulnerability that embodiment brings to theoretical inquiry. Contra Bersani, self-loss is not a means toward an end, a shoring up of one’s self and thus one’s (phallic) invulnerability. Thus, it is not that we need to ‘drain sex of its value’ (Dean, 2000: 216); rather, we need to drain phallic sex of its mystifying value, which this dominant strain of queer seems overly reluctant to do.

Conclusion

Queerness refuses to participate in the politics of signification, as it refuses to engage in redemptive politics. Queerness is the death drive, that jouissance which ‘tears at the fabric of Symbolic reality’ (Edelman, 2004: 25). This article is not a critique of the politics of refusal, for I see in this a useful modality, a perspective that, in the midst of dwindling ‘democracy’, must be taken seriously. But this ‘anti’-social queer theory, for all its refusals, contains and depends on its own privileged foundations. Put differently, this logic rests on and works through, as has been repeatedly stated, a certain kind of queer sex and thus a certain kind of (dis/embodied) figure. This is of course the phallic sexual economies of (gay) men, whereby anal eroticism figures this negation precisely because certain other sexualities cannot (e.g. lesbianism, racialised sexualities). Given the implications that inhere in this strain of queer and its disinclination to engage gender, the feminist–queer couple stands on ever more tenuous ground. Anti-social queer theory’s claim that we must move beyond gender in order to ‘understand sexuality/desire more fully’ (Dean, 2000: 216) is a ruse familiar to feminism, as it works merely to re-install so as to re-centre a kind of masculinism that does not disrupt, but rather insists on, the very signifying chain – in this case, the phallus/penis relation of equivalence – it denies. More problematic still is the fact that much of this work operates through the feminine position, symbolised by way of male masochism. Thus, it appears at first blush an attractive argument, not only because the phallus will (finally) be exposed as the fragile flesh that it is, but because it might sympathise with the ‘plight’ that is femininity. This is unfortunately not this case. Rather, and to echo Hart (1998) once more, this is an appropriation of femininity that uses the position of woman only in order to embellish men’s masculinity and, in the process, further denigrate women’s sexuality. Male submission is here active pleasure, an active sexuality that women as ‘Woman’ are barred from participating in, as woman is always already symbolically castrated. Women cannot give up that which has never belonged to them. And, to state the obvious, within the cultural imaginary, the only ones who have it are (privileged) men – precisely what Butler’s lesbian phallus attempts to challenge.

We must thus refuse this order of things, which means engaging the body (that is, gender) and those particularised embodiments that accrue and inform our sexualities/desires, as these are always at play, especially at our most vulnerable. For, as Butler notes, the lesbian phallus offers an alternative imaginary to a hegemonic heteronormative one, and thus offers ‘the critical release of alternative imaginary schemas for constituting sites of erotogenic pleasure’ (1995: 91). In this case, it would be a release from a queer theory that fetishises gay male sex, and the hyper-masculinity it performs. To that end, I want to conclude with a simple reformulation. De Lauretis states that we must reclaim queer ‘in its contestatory sexual meaning’, for like those theorists discussed here, she views as necessary a ‘conception of sexuality that goes beyond the nebulous equivocations of gender’ (2011: 249). In her view, gender is insignificant to the question of sexuality/desire, for gender colludes with the political discourse, which is one of recognition and rights. And gender is on another level a kind of container and organiser, the articulation in the reproduction of social norms, that which contests (albeit unconsciously) desire’s unruly, shameful qualities. Thus it is that she states that the ‘trouble with gender is the kink in sex’ (de Lauretis, 2011: 253). But, gender is, as I have shown here, what makes certain kinds of sex kinky, both in the anti-social mode of transgression that works through (hyper)masculinity, but also in the deconstructionist mode whereby gender’s own destabilisations – its release from phallic idealisations – fucks up/with desire. If this is so, then maybe the trouble with sex is the kink in gender.