Meditations on Bersani's last paragraph. And some other stuff.

To begin with, I'd like to just go into a little bit more on some of my thoughts on that last paragraph we analyzed from the Bersani essay. I'd like to do this mostly to sort out what exactly it is I think of the concept (and also what the hell it means). I've heard before that writing is thinking, and I prefer to do both at the same time, so I am not really sure how this ends.

Bersani has a few key concepts, so let's get those out:
1. The inviolability of selfhood
2. Selfhood allows for violence as self preservation
3. Sex is dysfunctional in that it is a violent action that leaves the at least one party disenfranchised.
4. Sex as a union is a myth
5. The violence of sex is against the self (solipsistic-jouissance)

So that's established, individually none of these is controversial. Connecting the dots gets weird. As mentioned, the self and the belief by "a self" in the greater concept of "selfhood" (vis-à-vis selfishness) is how violence against another self is justified ethically. Someone else violates my selfhood, I kill them. Done. Now, to counteract that, the myth of sex arises. The myth is that this self v. self violence is put to an end by the pastoral view of sex in relation with matrimony and union and procreation and what have you. Bersani says this is a lie.

Basically Bersani is proposing then (in my interpretation) that because of the myth, people go into sex (and let's take another example than his of homosexual males, because if this is a principle it should apply all over, with a heterosexual pairing) with the maxim of unity. That is, they intend to form a union, and under this pretense the self destruction lies. Broadly consider the "insertee," Bersani's article would have that the submission and passivity of this participant is a disenfranchisement of power. Thus, the insertee submits in order to allow for the union, but in reality only allows the violence against the self, categorically destroying the self (the jouissance  is then the act, compiled with the mental violence of technical self abasement).

For the "inserter," the violence comes in the literal concept of insertion as well the deprivation of power upon said action. The inserter has the maxim, or intention, of union, but with only a dictum of submission to show for the violence exhibited, the maxim is contradicted. Therefore, the self in contradicting itself commints self-violence, thus destruction (the jouissance is again the action on one hand and the psychic violence of self contradiction).

Simply adding a hyphen clarifies Bersani's "solipsistic jouissance." Solipsism alone would not support this self shattering, in fact it is the opposite. But solipsistic-jouissance is then the intense feeling of the destruction of the self, the solipsistic self to be precise. Thus, the self is destroyed as a concept, there is no indication that Bersani is proposing sex destroys one's identity and would then have to be reconstituted afterward.


Also, as an unrelated note, and maybe this will help with posting replies because it is a question (that is kind of out there), it seems that there is something very strong being said underneath Lars and the Real Girl to some extent, to a large extent in Misfortune and also in Foucault and more so in Butler regarding masculinity and femininity. So Butler calls gender repeated actions. Meaning that "normal" is just the average, and is baseless as far as gestalt views of total behavior.  Rose seems the perfect example of this with her behaviors as a father and as a "feminine man" (scare quotes used to show impending clincher). What all these seem to be saying, is that these categories are an illusion to a very specific point. For lack of a better (and more satisfying) term, masculinity and femininity are complete and utter bullshit.

Lars and the Fake Girl & Misfortune and the Not-Girl

In looking at the film Lars and the Real Girl alongside the novel Misfortune, it is impossible not to notice some similarities. There is the issue of restriction of body for one, for example, in the film, Lars (Ryan Gosling) feels physical pain at the touch of others. Rose from the novel constantly mutilates herself, chewing her fingers, because of the years of bodily abuse she has received. Another example is the need for isolation in both Lars and Rose, and to go along with this isolation, both have a srong familial love that brings them out of their isolation.

While these themes and motifs, as well as many more, are present and important to each story, I believe that there is one central theme that is similar to both, though enacted in a different way. In each story, the plot revolves around the issue of an artificial or constructed femininity. In both, this is simultaneously a simple a complex relation. However, I think the outcomes are very similar.

In Lars and the Real Girl, a lonely man with deep feelings of guilt and desire for isolation (largely over his mother dying during childbirth and a depressive father) is driven towards developing the delusion that an "anatomical love doll" that he has purchased over the internet is in fact a living person, whom he met on the internet and is now in a relationship with. This causes alarm in Lars' family as they seek psychological help for him. Eventually, the town comes to embrace Lars' delusion. Because of all the attention that Lars and "Bianca" get it becomes necessary for Lars to invent an entire back story for Bianca. This story is often vastly similar to Lars' own experience, signalling his trouble to deal with his experiences in isolation and the need to form another identity with which to empathize. Lars begins to use this artificial ideal female version of himself as a proxy for deflecting his problems around. This artificial feminine shield becomes Lars' disguise as he learns to conquer his own personal issues.

Rose's situation, while seemingly different, is quite similar. While Lars manifested this artificial identity by imbuing it onto an external object, Rose was raised with a dual identity, causing her(/him) to have two conflicting identities, both of which feel at odds to her. While Rose, categorically a male, is raised female, her masculinity is thrust upon her at the advent of her physical development and deviation from the female body.

While Rose has strong feelings of alienation towards her masculinity, especially her anatomy and the uncomfortable feelings she encounters while wearing men's clothes. We see that Rose, despite often partitioning it and ignoring it, has accepted, if not her masculinity as an embrace of identity, that she is masculine. Therefore, a good deal of the plot is devoted to Rose's acceptance of the artificially created femininity that was imposed on her from birth. As physical ideals of this, Rose takes Sarah and ,to an even greater degree, Prudence. Prudence's stolen red dress thus becomes a symbol of Rose's femininity. Always in tow and hidden.

However, at the resolution of both stories there is simultaneously a loss of these feminine ideals, as well as a profound acceptance of the wholeness of identity through a connection with the feminine sides of both Rose and Lars.

Rose's revelation comes when she is given the option to be a man who wears dresses first, and second at the sort of "fall from grace" that Prudence has had in Rose's mind. Stating that childbearing (a possible extension of femininity) has reduced Prudence to plainness and stripped her of her appeal to Rose. Rose loses her ideal of femininity at the confrontation with Prudence. However, she is able to retain a piece of it in her identity, evidenced by her request to be referred to as "she" while simultaneously fathering two children. That and the dress, of course.

Lars' acceptance of the feminine in his identity is perhaps even more dramatic. Lars, in his waning need for the external construct of Bianca, slowly allows the delusion to simply die. Lars literally kills his constructed delusion. However, when he should seem at his lowest for losing his shelter and proxy, Lars is finally able to connect with an actual person, namely Margo, the "real girl" who had been constantly after his affections. In the acceptance of another person into his life Lars actualized his stunted identity, accepting himself at the same time as Margo.

Meta Gothic and Gender Confusion

I think in order to suss out this novel, Misfortune, it is important for me to just simply state all of the various facets of the largely ambiguous and troubling scenes and themes. To start with, like I stated in class, there are seemingly a lot of similarities to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The first of which that I found is the elaborate experiment regarding the capacities of human life that Anonyma engages in with baby Rose. Now, this is obviously not reanimation or anything as extreme or scientifically improbable (improbable should really have scare quotes around it), however, Anonyma does in fact take on an experiment whereby she is taking certain boundaries that persist to human life and seeing at what points she can bend, shape and basically erase them. And, just like Victor Frankenstein, Anonyma is present for the duration of the process. She knows all along that Rose is a boy in girl's clothing. It should be as little a surprise that Rose would eventually discover "her" anatomy than it was to Victor that he was building a human form out of various large cadavers. How can Victor think these dead rotting tissues wouldn't be horrifying when they stood up and looked at him? Similarly, how did Anonyma think that, without informing Rose of the availability of the proposed gender choice that she had tried to afford her, Rose would grow to be anything but confused and self-destructive? To be fair, Anonyma's experiment was cut short by external machinations.

I also found odd, as I'm sure the author intended, the three sort of sex scenes discussed in class: first with creepy old Uncle Edwig (who reminds of the child molester uncle from Tommy), then the encounter with Sarah, and finally Esmond's (deserving) torment. To start, the scene with Uncle Edwig is nothing short of horrifying. There are multiple factors and cues that Stace gives us to interpret. One, there is a sensational quality to the disgust. The old man has spilled food strewn over him, he smells awful, and he has a dubious manner of speaking. Other things include the obviousness that he is an alcoholic in withdrawals and that he makes extremely unwanted advances at all manner of women in his own family. Finally, we have the omniscient view point's sense that Rose really has no idea of the disturbing quality of the situation she is in. There is (or was for me) a palpable sense in the reader of wanting Hood to simply stroll out and end the debauchery. Which of course doesn't happen. To Rose, it becomes an exploration of anatomy that becomes something of a comfort, in that "she" seems to think there is nothing wrong with "her" body. This juxtaposition is simultaneously brilliant and demented. Finally, Rose gets the stigma of Edwig's death, in association with what she believes is the "tuning" that she feels from Edwig.

This stigma carries over to the sensation that Sarah has during the encounter between her and Rose. This scene is especially ambiguous because it casts into light so many different ways of observing the relationship. It seems apparent that Rose looks up to Sarah. Sarah is an exceptional model for what a girl should be (Prudence is as well, physically, but is lacking in character). Rose wants to be like Sarah. In discovering the disparities in their anatomies, Rose becomes sorry for Sarah at what she perceives as a loss. If the male uncle Edwig had this appendage, and the "female" Rose does as well, then everyone should right? After some fears, Rose finally pieces together the only logical solution: that "she" is a not a she.

Where this matters for the sake of the theme of gender identity/roles and how these play into sexuality lies in the analysis of the intentions in this scene. We know that Sarah and Rose have kissed multiple times, with varying degrees of romantic (or maybe proto-romantic) weight. So. The many, many possibilities in this situation play out like this. Sarah is embracing this as much as Rose is enacting it. Intentionality towards continuation from both. But. Sarah is literally a girl, who thinks that Rose is also a girl. Rose is not a girl. This can mean many things, not all of which could have changed due to whether Rose had been raised the way she was or not. Is Sarah accepting the pleasurable feeling from the simple attention of the friend she is extremely close with, or does she have an implicit attraction to other females in general. Does she have an attraction to Rose only because of her androgynous qualities? Also, does Rose, raised as a girl, still hold all alleged biological propensities towards heterosexuality despite not really even knowing what that means for "her." It is almost impossible to say whether this experiment had an effect on the situation. There are a lot of questions here, but I think to strengthen the theme, it is important to isolate perhaps a stronger teleology. Reading more of the story might clear this up (what a novel concept). Yet at the same time, in the spirit of deconstruction, perhaps it would make the utterly confusing quality of Rose's position even stronger if there was a disharmony between this scene and any further evidence we get from Rose and Sarah as they develop.

Finally, I have to mention the scene with Esmond just because I thought it was, for lack of a better term, super badass. I laughed openly throughout it. The powerlessness that Esmond encounters is such great vengeance for the slew of awful attitudes and behaviors that most of the Loveall's extended family exhibit. Also, there is one more thing that I thought was great about this scene. Anonyma had intended to create a being that was, at least as close as possible to, equally feminine and masculine. And it is in this embracing of a male body and a feminine mind that Rose is completely in control of her full faculties of embodiment, wit and personality.

Vampiric Identities

In this weeks readings, we are introduced to a range of ideas and theories that I found to be very interrelated. The readings for the Case essay were especially intriguing.  The way in which she uses the mythos of the vampire for an analogy to the lesbian experience. There were three main ways in which this metaphor functions. The first, which she opens the essay with, is that of referring to the hurling of the term queer as an insult. She equates this to a physical wound that is the mark of interaction with a vampire. Thereby, both the vampire and the "queer" are created by a wound. Most interesting to me, was that she also made the connection that this wound, on both sides of the analogy, was the locus of the desire associated with it. This seems to be the most insightful idea in this portion of the comparison.

The next association came in the practice of the discontinuation of life as well as the contamination of blood. To skim, typical vampire mythology has them dying and returning in a post-life state with specific ramifications, notably here the need to consume living blood. The basis of Case's argument was in what she described as the unnatural quality that sterile homosexual sex had long been demonized with. Because of this inability for the act to procreate, homosexual sex is devoid of the right to life, whereby heterosexual sex has the right to life in the creation of it. The main problems that I had with these arguments came from the fact that homosexual sex is an un-live practice. It does still involve living people. However, I suppose the distinction can be made that it does not directly pass life on. And then again, this can be countered by stating that this is an antiquated view and that there are methods of procreation available for most circumstances. There is also the distinct notion that a vast array of problems can limit the birth capacity of heterosexual couples as well.

The problem of the contamination of the blood by "queers" is a wholly social construct that has basis more in propaganda and xenophobia than fact, especially in case of the AIDS epidemic and how it was blamed at the start on the gay population.

The final comparison was more in tune directly with the lesbian experience. This view was equated to the invisibility of the vampire as well as a lesbian's alleged need to appear normal. While the vampire hides in darkness, it is the lesbian's invisibility that is even more pernicious, inherent in the concept of passing. I found this the most disturbing as it entails the negation of the self. Yet, it is in this that perhaps the best vampire reference can be found. The vampire is the death of one's previous self and the negation of it through something new and destructive.

Extinction of Queer

In reading Foucault's final notions of the body in his terms of the cogency of the power held in controlling death, we can see his (possibly extreme) views on the role of construction of sexuality and the notion of how that might be negatively charged. What this really leads us to is the concept form the Sedgewick readings on queer theory. Foucault's views of allowing the body to be constituted of itself presuppose some of the ideas in Sedgewick. In demanding that the only source of sexuality should be the body (literally) and pleasure, Foucault resists the socio-historical context of sexualities established by an ideological hegemonic apparatus.

If we relate this to Sedgewick then (and I think it's a pretty direct relation),  then we can use her views of adopting the term queer. She spends a lot of time on this, with just cause. I really enjoyed the back-up that is described through the deconstructionist view of diction-based or linguistically charged idiosyncrasies and often contingencies within a text as a means of embracing a sense of dissonance. She makes it quite clear in her elaborations upon the precipitous trend in suicides amongst gay teens and adolescents that there is a feeling of going against the grain that comes in conjunction with an identification as homosexual. This same tension in going against the grain seems to be the very source  of identification that Sedgewick seems to find in queer theory's application of the deconstructionist method of isolating those minor details and intricacies of excess in terms of the over all plot arc and theme of a text.

Compiled with the reader response revival inherent in the first person application of the means by which queer theory explores the meanings available within a text, this embrace of tension at a very personal level can be read as an embracing of the recently repossessed monicker of "queer." However, inasmuch as queer is now an umbrella term for the gay/lesbian/transgender movement, then semantically it doesn't mean simply homosexual. It would follow then, that queer has made a semantic return to something akin to odd. Although, it is likely more accurate to define it as apart from a proposed norm as opposed to simply odd or strange, both of which can be devoid of relations to a norm.

This would mean, then, that any who feel as though they have some factor of their embodiment or personality which deviates even slightly from the norm could conceivably be self-labeled as queer. TO the militant gay movement, this might be a sullying of a chosen term. This would be an oversight, though, in my opinion. The point of oppositional philosophies is to eliminate that opposition. Therefore, for queer theory to "succeed" (in the utopian sense) there would need to be a recognition by each and every individual that regardless of what society they inhabit they are quite literally an individual and as such cannot possibly adhere to every single norm in existence. In this way, any one can feel queer, because, in fact, everyone is queer. And if everyone is queer, then no one is. Oppostion negated. Unity reached. This is of course utopian; apart from the militant gay sector there would be opposition to this concept from both the conservative core who would cling to majority status and then the inevitable ignorance that surrounds the issue. So, possibly farfetched, but then again most ideals are. I do like to think sardonically that the meta narrative might have a teleology, however asymptotal.

Foucault and the Evil Baby Machine. Week 2

Like I stated in class Wednesday, the parts of this week's reading I was most taken with were Foucault's takes on the causes of why Victorian Puritanism came to be. Moreover, I was piqued at the the lasting effects that Foucault insists derived from this and the means by which modernity claimed to have solved these issues while (for Foucault) not really fixing anything. Foucault, as it would appear through his text, doesn't really seem to think that anything at all is being repressed, but rather that sexuality is basically being sterilized and pigeonholed into teleological digressions.

First, there is the part where Foucault makes the implicit claim towards this reification of sexuality. Foucault says that "there emerged the analysis of the modes of sexual conduct" (26). OK, so basically he is up in arms about this. There "emerged"? That diction alone seems to show that a criticism of sexual conduct did not exist prior to this period. He continues to say that this analysis sought directly to locate the "boundary line of the biological and the economic domains" (ibid). Reading more through this section, it seems apparent to me that Foucault is really not happy about this. It seems to him that sexuality, as part of the body and the body's interaction with others, should not be something that can be empirically rendered.

As we know from the Butler reading, Foucault views the body as the source of everything for people, not a disembodied mind, or soul. Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, says that the "soul is the prison of the body." To the post-structuralist Foucault, I would take this to mean that Foucault believes the only prohibition to the choices that we make are those that represent the historicity and situation we inhabit. Foucault, in my opinion is then equating the concept of an exterior presence influencing the self (read body, here), the soul, with the social, historical and situational factors that render so much of the existence that the self endures.

Then I would say that this matters to our readings in the connection that, in a society (a situation) where everything one does is a relational choice, that restricting the literal body in terms of sexuality, or even labeling and sterilizing it, is a means of the "soul" constricting the "body." In a bizarre way.

As a final note, Hegel said in one of his biggest (and I mean important and also just way too long) books The Philosophy of Right, there is no such thing as a subject that doesn't have something else, object or another subject, in relation to it. Subjectivity, the self-in-itself (to get all annoying and Heideggerian), only exists as a relation that allows it to be subjective.

The Cartesian Dualism: Wait people still care about that? Week 1

My initial reaction to Butler's Gender Trouble was that of most dense philosophical tracts. I lay the book open on my desk, pinched the bridge of my nose and then shrugged my shoulders. However, upon a methodical reading it isn't hard to parse out exactly what she means in a analytical, and often merely semantic, way. In the very first sentence she relates the skepticism that she has for the grounding of feminist theory, without denying the veracity of feminism in and of itself. She uses the word "assumed" to indicate that the aforementioned "identity" that consists of the category of "woman" is an illusion (Butler 2). Butler seems to imply that there is a feminist theory-- and therefore femininity-- however, the basis (woman) is altogether a synthetic construct. It isn't often a thing that is called to attention, but every theory, especially mathematical, must have a basis. This is basically what the Theory of Relativity did to physics, it established a base principle. And to some miniscule degree even the cosmological constant required some assumption.


This basis is then the challenge that Butler goes into with the first few sections. I found the musing towards the necessity that Butler sees in some forms of feminism to establish a "universal patriarchy" as a way of legitimizing their own goals funny (Butler 5). She clearly has some disdain for this lack of regard for cultural relativism when she claims these feminists are blaming societies of "non-Western barbarism" (5). As if to say, how dare they not feel oppressed, the savages! After settling her idea that this 'workers (women?) of the world unite' is frivolous, Butler begins to coalesce the concepts of gender and society or politics as inseparable. She states that "gender intersects with race, class, ethnic and sexual" influences as well (4). This is to say gender roles, and thus the role of woman, are inherently connected and manufactured by the means of society. And as she noted before, that can mean many different things. What it means for her, in a Western, "masculine hegemony," is that there is in fact a suppression of genders NOT masculine, of which she insists there are multiple (46).

What I take this to mean, and what the statement closing chapter one blatantly insists, is that gender is created by the mechanisms of society and thus can be changed by the very same means. The gender roles of 1950s businessman and his obedient housewife were oppressive then and intolerable now. In beginning to identify this role of the combination of sex, biology and gender in individuals, Butler and the other reading by Grosz bring out the concept of the difference between the mind and the body. The concept that the mind and body are separate is not new.

This is where I started to see some tie ins with my philosophy background. Descartes basically came up with the idea that the mind is the source of all subjectivity and reason and exists within a 'spirit realm' while the body lives in the 'empirical world' as a mass of dumb matter. Kant comes along and uses this in his morality. He uses the physical body and the concept of emotions, impulses, urges and other 'unwholesome' things to stand in opposition to the idea that one must, in every moral decision, act in a way that one would want to be expressed as natural law from then on out. Basically, don't lie or else you allow the world to be full of liars. The phenomenologists came along, followed by the French Existentialists and made a different distinction. They relied in part on the concept of humanism and a little on this speech Nietzsche made where he basically said that nothing in some ridiculous spirit world could have any causal effect on a physical body. For some, this debunked the mind-body dualism. It was taken further by a dude named Merleau-Ponty (a friend of Simone de Beauvoir's) who said that is is in fact the situation (i.e. history, presence, existence, personality, choices) of a person that lies their 'soul'. He insists that the body and the mind are one in that we perceive things with both our reflective mind and active body all at once. Basically.

So what this means for gender, is that, crudely, take the example of a transvestite like Izzard. His body has male physiology. He is attracted to women (male lesbian), yet he enjoys wearing high heels and make-up. His mind is not some separate entity that wishes to wear make up while his male body is biologically programmed for heterosexuality it is one consistent entity with fallacious contradictions construed upon it.

Works Cited
Butler, Judith Butler. Gender Trouble, Feminism And The Subversion Of Identity. 
     Routledge Classics, 2006. Print