Coquetry on Board

from Jean Genet, Querelle, trans Anselm Hollo (1974), p. 82, 84:

And then, without understanding why, Querelle noticed a slight relaxation of the officer’s rigid attitude. Spontaneously, with the amazing sense for putting their attractions to work for them that young men have, even those to whom any degree of methodical coquetry is quite foreign, he gave his voice a somewhat sly inflection, and his body, relaxing too, became animated from neck to calves — by the almost imperceptible shifting of one foot in front of the other — by a series of short-lived ripples that were truly graceful and reminded Querelle himself of the existence of his buttocks and shoulders. Suddenly he appeared as if drawn in quick, broken lines, and, to the officer, drawn by the very hand of the master.

…

Within his body, his anxiety was giving rise to a most exquisite sensation. Querelle called his star: his smile. And the star appeared. Querelle kept on moving forward, planting his wide feet firmly on the deck. He gave a slight roll to his hips, narrow as they were! — to provide a little action there in the midriff region, where an inch of his white underpants showed above the wide, plaited leather belt, buckled at the back. He had of course registered, and not without spite, that the Lieutenant’s gaze often dwelled on that region of his physique, and he had a natural awareness of his own seductive points. He thought of them in a serious manner, sometimes with a smile, that habitual, sad smile of his. He also swung his shoulders a little, but the motion, like that of his hips and his arms, was more discreet than usual, closer to himself, more internalized, one might say. He was hugging himself: or one might say, he was playing at being huggable.

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The Gaze in Fassbinder

from Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992), pp. 126-128:

Identity, as psychoanalysis has taught us, necessitates the internalization of a series of things which are in the first instance external. Freud insists upon this principle with respect both to the ego and the super-ego, defining the former as the psychic mapping of what is initially a body-image, and the latter as the introjection of parental authority, in the guise, for instance, of the father’s voice. Lacan’s account of the mirror stage further elaborates this notion of an exteriority which is taken within the subject, first in the guise of its mirror image, subsequently in the form of parental imagoes, and later yet in the shape of a whole range of cultural representations, the moi becoming over time more and more explicitly dependent upon that which might be said to be “alien” or “other.” What Lacan designates the “gaze” also manifests itself initially within a space external to the subject, first through the mother’s look as it facilitates the “join” of infant and mirror image, and later through all of the many other actual looks with which it is confused. It is only at a second remove that the subject might be said to assume responsibility for “operating” the gaze by “seeing” itself being seen even when no pair of eyes are trained upon it — by taking not so much the gaze as its effects within the self. However, consciousness as it is redefined by Lacan hinges not only upon the internalization but upon the elision of the gaze; this “seeing” of oneself being seen is experienced by the subject-of-consciousness — by the subject, that is, who arrogates to itself a certain self-presence or substantiality — as a seeing of itself seeing itself.

What happens within Fassbinder’s cinema is that both the gaze and the images which promote identity remain irreducibly exterior, stubbornly removed from the subject who depends upon them for its experience of “self.” [Thomas] Elsaesser has touched upon the first of these exteriorizations in “Primary Identification and the Historical Subject: Fassbinder and Germany,” although his emphasis falls more fully upon the exhibitionism of Fassbinder’s characters than upon the gaze on which they depend:

Their endless waiting wants to attract someone to play the spectator, who would confirm them as subjects, by displaying the sort of behavior that would conform to the reactions they expect to elicit. The audience is inscribed as voyeurs, but only because the characters are so manifestly exhibitionist. Substantiality is denied to both characters and audience, they derealize each other, as all relations polarize themselves in terms of seeing and being seen… to be, in Fassbinder, is to be perceived, esse est percipi.

The film through which Elsaesser pursues his thesis… is Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1973), but there are many other texts in that filmmaker’s oeuvre where characters display themselves in this way to whomever will look, and in which subjectivity is consequently shown to depend upon a visual agency which remains insistently outside. “We are watched on all sides,” the singer, Tripelli (Barbara Valentin) warns in Effi Briest (1974), a curse which turns into a lost source of sustenance when the socius finally looks away from Effi. Continue reading…

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Masochism and Subjectivity

from Amber Musser, “Masochism: A Queer Subjectivity?”, rhizomes 11/12 (fall 2005/spring 2006):

While [Judith] Butler highlights the social context required to endow a subject’s performance with significance, [Gilles] Deleuze’s masochist is created in the intersubjective space between the dominant and the submissive as opposed to within a larger social context. Masochism can be thought as reciprocity dependent on local, contingent differences where the intersubjective relation takes precedence to the individual. The crucial exchanges between the dominant and submissive, which anchor masochistic notions of agency are based on the differences assigned in their contract and articulated in their performance, which in turn produces their identities. The performative aspect of masochism depends on the locality of perception between performers. Beyond the broader notion of context, whereby certain acts take on meaning because of their location, perception, which operates on a more intimate level between performers, is significant because it creates the identities of the performers, even as they create the performance. In the ambiguous terrain between reality and fantasy, the self is figured as a potential, not an identity because identity relies on interaction from others (the audience and the other performers) in the performative exchange. Both the dominant and submissive anticipate the reaction and action of the other, altering their performances and identities accordingly. This suggests that identities are contingent and fluid, relying on difference and requiring intersubjectivity for their creation and manipulation. Through this, we gain an understanding of becoming as a continuous social process that is equally dependent on relations with others and regulatory norms.

Yet this process of becoming is also embodied, which points to another key difference between Deleuze’s masochist and Butler’s subject. Continue reading…

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Bodybuilding as Drag

from Micha Ramakers, Dirty Pictures (2000) pp. 119-120:

Much attention has been given in recent years to the role, effects, and possible political implications of drag. Rather less critical interest has been manifested in the effects of what could be called hypermasculinity. Yet … two are intimately linked. This would seem to be borne out if one considers recent theoretical arguments about drag. John Champagne has argued that drag should be read as “nonproductive expenditure,” i.e., wasteful energy, aimed at creating a high degree of affect: “In its excessive deployment of both costuming and affect, drag displaces the disciplined, restrained, and efficient body of the modern gendered subject with an image of the body as melodrama. The modestly gendered body of the disciplinary subject is countered by one ostentatiously dressed and excessively sexualized, a body whose gestures are both extravagantly stylized and wastefully deployed.” The gay male bodybuilder is deeply involved in precisely this activity. He is creating a body, at great cost, “wastefully” deploying a maximum of energy (he is not going to use his muscles for physical labor), for no other reason than bringing about an “excessively sexualized” effect… His body distinguishes itself from that of its “disciplined” fellow men by pushing masculinity to its farthest limit: like drag, gay male bodybuilding plays with the limits of masculinity and femininity and often ends up as a parody of its gender characteristics.

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