partisan of hate

21. disturbing attachments: genet, modern pederasty, and queer history – kadji amin (22 de novembro)

[…] queer is not slick but rather the stickiest of terms. It has been made sticky not only by its career, its course within mostly U.S.-­centered academic conversations, but also by its historical emergence in precisely the U.S. scene of the 1990s that contemporary Queer Studies often seems so eager to forget and to move beyond. Forgetting this history is useful to the field, precisely because it permits us to refuse to define or to historicize queer, to say we are holding it open to indefinite becomings, all the while making implicit and explicit arguments that draw both their conviction and their appeal from queer’s affective charge, that is, from its disavowed historicity.

My argument, to be clear, is not that Queer Studies needs to confine itself either to the historical time and place of queer or to the “object” of same-­sex sexuality. To the contrary, I am arguing that any redeployment of queer outside its narrow context of emergence that keeps queer’s affective histories intact—seeking, for instance, to preserve the convergence of same-­sex sexuality, political urgency, and radical transgression—is unwittingly reinscribing its 1990s U.S. origin story.

For one reason why queer scholarship on Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as on earlier historical periods, tends to be marginalized within the field as a whole is because it examines sites in which queer operates in markedly different ways from what has been canonized within Queer Studies. In their introduction to a 2016 special issue of GLQ on Queer Studies and area studies, Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel incisively critique the tendency of queer scholarship to mine the global South for examples rather than epistemologies, failing to attend to how such key “concepts as loss, margin, normative, and nonnormative” emerge from a U.S. political context. Recent U.S. politics and histories inform not only the conceptual apparatus of Queer Studies, but also the very affective method by which new subjects, politics, practices, and concepts are claimed as queer in the first place. Finding a “match” between a historical or area studies example and one of queer’s affective connotations—such as shame, camp irony, or radical opposition—can offer a gateway from Sexuality Studies to Queer Studies scholarship, a wider audience, and a certain theoretical cachet, but at the cost of reinscribing queer’s U.S. affective histories at the center of work on new contexts.

ehh gatinhas.

há uma certa conivência eu acho. sempre vou me perguntar até que ponto o trabalho teórico e crítico eh de fato indicativo das alianças afetivas (e sociopolíticas) de um acadêmico (sua “vida pessoal”). parece às vezes ser irrelevante.

“How and to what extent is desire articulated in terms of race as opposed to body type or other attributes? To what extent is sexual attraction exclusive and/or changeable, and can it be consciously programmed? These questions are all politically loaded, as they parallel and impact the debates between essentialists and social constructionists on the nature of homosexuality itself. They are also emotionally charged, in that sexual choice involving race has been a basis for moral judgement.” Fung was asking some of the same questions about sex and race that I’d been pondering as a white male. However, the negative stigma of the RQ label had cowed me into silence. (As Fung’s partner, Tim McCaskell, once said: “Smart rice queens learn to keep their mouths shut.”)

dos diários de um auto-identificado ‘joão hashi’ (não vou divulgá-lo). a citação eh do próprio richard fung.

semana.

#scrr

Unknowing by Marie Davidson on Apple Music Song · 2025 · Duration 4:42

they say pain is transitory in this life of small scale glory so I keep to myself the magic and the torments for you to enjoy the same old stories.

Just as appreciating a vista as a landscape requires a prior aesthetic sensitization, sensing a landscape of revolt requires a habituated “affective mapping,” for instance, of how an emotion like anger distinguishes objects, subjects, and avenues for action within a subjective scene. What one identifies as the object of anger, as of love, is determined by the learned ability to sense one’s anger (or love) as putting into relation elements within a particular landscape. A shift in the scale of the landscape of one’s revolt therefore modifies both how this revolt feels and to what (violent, activist, coalitional, denunciatory) actions it can be imagined to lead. The transnational expansion of Genet’s landscape of queer revolt therefore modified his feelings about prison, transporting them from ambivalent love to indignant anger, while disaggregating imprisonment as the stable ground of his own position of queer revolt.

[…] the expanded transnational landscape within which Genet learned to affectively apprehend both prison and the figure of the European queer outlaw was not more true than the narrower one that had nurtured his prior feelings of love for prison, hatred for France, and queer revolt. It need not be a matter of grading landscapes of revolt, but of understanding what they enable as well as what enables them to change. Genet’s discovery of the complicity of the European queer outlaw as colonial stooge impelled him to affectively apprehend his revolt on a vaster scale, correspondingly shifting both the target of his anger and hatred and the site of his alliances.

amando muito o livro pra falar a vdd e a maneira como elu articula affect theory na análise me ajuda a situar e resituar os meus próprios antagonismos e juízos em relação a Certas Questões Contemporâneas.

Reading the long, overburdened, and didactic manuscript of “The Language of the Wall,” one has the impression that Genet wanted to put everything that he discovered in his research—every moralizing discourse, every debate on penology and profitability, every one of the colony’s financial contributors, every negotiation with a head of state, every colonial war, and every historical event that occurred during Mettray’s existence—into his film. The result is a script that seems intent on proving the same points over and over again, “day after day,” as its subtitle indicates, and in excruciating detail. As a result, “Language” has little of the affective or narrative power of Genet’s other works. If it does not succeed in moving its readers, however, it does give the impression of being, in itself, the record of a passion. Every scene is infused with a newfound zeal for meticulous research, maniacal documentation, and indignant denunciation. Through this strange document, itself sheltered in an archive, one glimpses Genet, possessed by the archive, producing an unwieldy and uncinematic dramatization of that archive.

The denunciatory passion of “Language” certainly was not the product of any tardy discovery that the penal colonies were inhumanitarian, a discourse against which Genet pitted his early novels. Rather, it was born of Genet’s discovery of how Mettray fit into a vast governmental-­colonial-­military-­economic network of administration and exploitation. In his research at the Mettray archives, Genet discovered, not the abuse of Mettray’s inmates, which he had trained himself to love, but their use, which he could not pardon. The denunciative and expository passion encoded in “Language” seems driven by a newfound animus—absent from Genet’s early works—against prison, the penal colonies, and the broader system of imperial, economic, and governmental interests in which they play a role. It registers a profound shift—from intimacy and love to outrage and denunciation—in Genet’s feelings regarding prison, carceral cultures, and, especially, his beloved penal colony of Mettray. If Genet had long regarded himself as a creature of prison—someone whose sexuality was formed in incarceration, whose most profound sympathies were with the imprisoned, and whose cherished sense of being an abject outlaw required prisons and police to set him apart as such—then the animus of “Language” is, significantly, directed against all that had so far constituted him as a queer outlaw. Obsessively tracing the complicities of former Mettray prisoners with the project of French colonial exploitation and rule results in a demystification of the position of the outlaw—Genet’s own position—whose perversity and amorality his early novels so often celebrate. What drives “Language” is thus the energy of a certain self-­denunciation resulting from Genet’s discovery of Mettray’s—and therefore his own—complicity in a series of nationalist, imperialist, and capitalist projects.

This was more than an intellectual exercise in leaping from the micro to the macro level in order to understand the interrelations and contradictions between large-­scale economic, governmental, and geopolitical forces. It required Genet to embark on his own project of attachment genealogy in order to relentlessly scrutinize his own foundling myth. “Language” is the document of this project of genealogy: an inquiry that unsettles contemporary categories, such as that of the queer outlaw, that are naturalized as the very foundation of identity and action. This is a form of historical inquiry with affective repercussions—the loss of the position of exemplary social abjection and uniquely resistant criminality, an affective shift from love of prison to rage against it, and, most importantly, the ability to not only understand but also sense oneself within an empirically vast transnational landscape of revolt.

sobre como mesmo o artista pervertido-mor acaba sendo deserotizado pelo entendimento, pelo estudo.

Apartheid à brasileira: como a falácia da democracia racial escondeu o racismo das leis | Intercept Brasil No Brasil, a gente caiu no conto da democracia racial, um mito popularizado pós-período escravagista. Enquanto isso, aprovamos leis racistas cujos reflexos são sentidos diariamente.

Apartheid à brasileira: como a falácia da democracia racial escondeu o racismo das leis No Brasil, a gente caiu no conto da democracia racial, um mito popularizado pós-período escravagista. Enquanto isso, aprovamos leis racistas cujos reflexos são sentidos diariamente.

fazendo algo que eu já deveria ter feito há muito tempo. uma lista de objetos (termo genérico) que me afetam positivamente pra que eu me lembre do que recorrer qnd estiver morrendo de ansiedade e quase sucumbindo ao abismo.

Whatever the reason, it is not the imago of the Negro that makes the colon into a fetishist, but her obedience to a phantasm; it is not the phantasm or imago that is traumatic, but the interpellation it later calls forth and that is unconsciously displaced as such. Whether that passion or obedience is moved by love, or compelled by fear, or moved (as is more common) by hatred and fear commingled, Fanon insists that the myth of the Negro necessarily extends to all aspects of life in the colony and that people submit to it whether they choose to or not. Accordingly, we should not immediately infer that Mlle B. is a racial fetishist out of sexual perversity rather than out of cultural obedience.

If it is true that the phobic object forms itself out of the stereotype (with the ambiguity that that implies—the stereotype as the material from which desire is built, and the stereotype as the disfiguring of desire by culture), only to find the stereotype returning to haunt this fantasy of the black object at its root—then it is reasonable to suppose that the stereotype, the one that returns to the ego its own murderous-shameful attachment, is in fact standing for a fear of disintegration that is the originary trace of the other within us. And if the contingency and violence of the stereotype is already occupied by the returning violence of the ego, Fanon makes it clear that the ego’s neurosis just is where the stereotype returns—and the stereotype just is the real occupying the ego. The enemy attacking the ego from within and against which it seeks to indemnify itself using phobia is, then, the ego, for whom the contingency and violence of the other is intolerable precisely because it originates in its own fetishistic attachments. We must therefore distinguish the determination of the fetish-as-stereotype from the fantasies that sustain it, which derive pleasure from the mortification so consecrated, but which leave us undisturbed in our everyday relationships, allowing us to explore our relations to feelings of insecurity, but only in the absence of any crisis of self-relation or dissolution. The fetish is our way of enjoying—or consuming—our own acts of sublation. And this concealed unconcealment is both enjoyed and, in the end, necessarily repeated. We are fetishists not in our relation to forms of appearance, but in relation to what is always missing from appearance, which we metaphorically assume to be masked. We act as if this absence is inscribed on the surface of appearance but its meaning lies elsewhere.

Racial fetishism, in other words, points to an illusion at work in social reality itself: people are racial fetishists in how they act, and not necessarily in how they think. If the fetish is a defense against uncertainty, a defense crucial to the belief that it is possible to draw a veil over the (misrecognized) implications of castration, this is because psychically it represents a cultural disciplining of (egoic) enjoyment through (racial) splitting and displacement. Politically, fetishism leaves us unfree within our representations, but frees us from the presuppositions and outcomes (the compensations and the punishments) of mutual exposure to ourselves and others.

Indeed, even with sameness thus grounded in a virtual being that lover and boy both are and not yet, it is hard to imagine how it can be apart from the exclusionary logic of difference that Bersani works to avoid. The problem becomes apparent when Bersani reverts to the more familiar language of psychoanalysis. In Freudian terms, he writes, “we might say that the boy sees and loves his ideal ego in his lover—except that this ego is not exactly something that he has lost and that he projects onto someone else, the over-valued object of love. On the contrary: it is what the lover loves in him. In a sense, the lover recognizes his ideal ego in the boy; desiring the boy is a way of infusing the boy with an ideal self that is both the boy’s and the lover’s.” If the problem with the ideal ego is that it is imposed from without, as Bersani makes clear in “Erotic Assumptions,” he attempts to recover it here by, in effect, creating a closed loop between the boy and the lover, in which neither has lost or imposed the ideal ego because it was always there as virtual being. To see the lovers in this manner, however, requires either that they be severed from sociality, insulated from that which would make the ideal ego they share into something other than what they already are, or, dangerously, it would mean expanding the loop they are in and positing an ideal ego, a virtual being, that members of a group “already share” but that is “not reflected in everyone else.”

Is the impersonal narcissist even a failed subject then? In the opening passage, Bersani suggests that his failure is a function of his need to have his “identity cloned, or inaccurately replicated.” But isn’t this what all subjects need, apart perhaps from the self-shattering subject in its most mythologized form? The promise of a new relational mode can only be fulfilled by the impersonal narcissist if the sameness he seeks is based on something other than categories of human difference. Otherwise, his failure will remain a failure like any other. The homo-ness of impersonal narcissism thus might be seen to take two other paths: one headed toward a notion of universal being, another toward a model of correspondence that requires further abstraction into form. In both cases, however, categories of human difference still prove hard to elude. Kaja Silverman, responding to Bersani’s turn to form, lauds the possibilities of thinking about the ego in formal terms: “It’s deanthropomorphizing,” she writes. “It permits us to begin conceptualizing relationality outside the usual human categories, which have become very reduced in recent years through the insistence on race, class, gender, etc. It helps us to understand that what we are at the level of the ego may be a much more complex issue than we are accustomed to imagining, having to do not only with mothers, fathers, lovers, etc., but also with line, shape, composition, color”. The last word should already give us pause, for it points to the difficulty of trying to separate “human category” from formal property. In a sense, this is what is largely unconsidered in the work on impersonality. When Bersani describes the boy in Socratic love as “seeing himself in the lover as in a mirror,” for instance, he does not consider what it would mean if color interrupted the scene.

the promise of a new relational mode can only be fulfilled by the impersonal narcissist if the sameness he seeks is based on something other than categories of human difference. otherwise, his failure will remain a failure like any other.

por isso me pergunto se dps desse ensaio o projeto do livro dele continua o mesmo… zero bataille aqui. mas as implicações continuam macabras. he’s scary.

ele eh mt foda slk.

Sacrificial Lamb by Coroner on Apple Music Song · 2025 · Duration 6:02

these shall make war with the Lamb and the Lamb will overcome them.

faz seis anos o ensaio tb lol eh pré-pandêmico às vezes ele nem endossa mais td aquilo.

(…ignorando que mandei uma pergunta acadêmica pro e-mail dele de madrugada só com base na lembrança que eu tenho do argumento; eu *sinto* que tenho problemas com as Implicações (políticas, éticas) do ‘agents and objects of death’ mas acho que vai precisar me responder pra saber se discordo ou não).

dps desse capítulo fiquei com vontade de reler os ensaios do bobby benedicto sobre negatividade queer (ansioso pelo futuro livro inclusive…) pra lembrar qual eh exatamente a posição dele nesse debate.

Although sophisticated queer theory has publicly cast off “naive” 1970s accounts of the revolutionary effects of sexual liberation and the efficacy of sex as a method of political coalition across difference, its field habitus remains infused with the intoxicating sexual utopianism of the 1970s, which envisions queer erotics as unlocking revolutionary social, political, and temporal possibilities or, on the antisocial side, as dissolving otherwise intractable disciplinary social identities. In defining erotohistoriography as “a politics of unpredictable, deeply embodied pleasures that counters the logic of development,” Freeman exemplifies the ways in which a liberationist affective history animates queer theoretical practice. In noting this, my purpose is less to critique Freeman’s generative work than to acknowledge the ways in which, to a queer theorist, nothing could be more natural than to expect to find a gravitational pull between queer erotics, progressive politics, and counternormative temporality. This “naturalness,” I am arguing, is itself the product of an incompletely recognized liberationist inheritance. Encoded less in its theoretical apparatus than in the expectations and methods by which the affectively dense term queer bundles together the politically radical, the futural, and the nonnormative, this liberationist inheritance accounts for the fact that work on queer time has tended to be attuned to capricious mobility and alternative futures, in contrast to scholarship on racialized or postcolonial time, which has sought to tend to the still open, still damaging wounds of the historical past.

Focusing on the ways in which queer time keeps hurtling back to a shameful past it can neither supersede nor shake off puts work on queer temporality into conversation with scholarship on the dilemma of postcolonial and racialized time: that of the stuck past, of historical change that fails to be completely revolutionary, and of identities and communities built out of the emotional detritus of history. This approach is also the only way to contend with those painful, politically ambivalent, and disturbing aspects of our affective histories that continue to have effects, even when ignored or disavowed, and that therefore signal unfinished intellectual and activist labor for the present. Such a project is contingent on Queer Studies confronting its liberationist inheritance in order to, at long last, deidealize the queer erotic.

pior que elu matou muito aqui.

In his posthumously published 1986 memoir of his political activism, Prisoner of Love (Un captif amoureux), it is often the case that when Genet calls the Panthers to memory, a sexualized imagery comes to mind. At one point, he pauses in the midst of a sexual analogy in order to explain why it is that the Panthers necessarily evoke phallic images of male sexuality: “At the beginning of 1970 the Party still had both the suppleness and the rigidity of a male sex organ: and it preferred erections to elections. If sexual images keep cropping up it’s because they’re unavoidable, and because the sexual or erectile significance of the Party is self-­evident. Not so much because it was made up of young men, great screwers who would just as soon shoot their load with their women in the daytime as at night, but rather because their ideas, even if they seemed rather basic, were so many sprightly rapes committed against a very old and dim but tenacious Victorian morality.”

nossa mas ele era mt nojento qq isso bicha.

M.’s account is of crucial interest in its underlining of the temporal aspect of self-­shattering. His narrative delineates a mode of sexual ecstasy ignited by the explosive incompatibility of the temporalities inhabited by the white man and racialized other. The complimentary play of echoes between the “Arab beast” and the “beast” released within the white man indicate that jouissance is fantasized simultaneously as the release of the (racialized) inhuman within the (white) human and as a devolution to an archaic stage in species evolution. In other words, M. is fantasizing a shattering-­into-­archaic-­beastliness impelled by the encounter of civilized white time with the prehistoric time of the racialized other. Here, the specificities of the history of Arab racialization are lost in the fantasy of the prehistoric—itself a historical product of colonial racial “science”—which might well be evoked, with equivalent efficacy, by an interchangeable series of nonwhite ethnicities.

The use of the trope of prehistoric beastliness to render distinct nonwhite ethnicities ahistorically equivalent is apparent also in the illustrations that accompany “The Arabs and Us.” These illustrations reprise the popular French comic starring the white French boy, Bibi Fricotin, and, beginning in 1947, his African friend, Razibus, and depict them having oral and anal sex. Razibus was drawn, at the time, using extremely simianized racial iconography, such that he appears more monkey than boy. When contextualized in relation to the text, the result is that the African as monkey signifies the Arab, and that this conjoined figure of simianized racialization is the object of Arabophilic desire. Simianization is key here, since it is a figural rendition of the European scientific racist fantasy that nonwhite peoples were further down the evolutionary scale, and closer to man’s evolutionary past as ape, than white men. The white sexual fantasy of being shattered, by passive anal sex with nonwhite men, into prehistoric time, relies on a slippage from the specific histories of black and/or Arab racialization to the fantasy of race as a figure for the prehistoric inhuman itself.

the white sexual fantasy of being shattered, by passive anal sex with nonwhite men, into prehistoric time, relies on a slippage from the specific histories of black and/or arab racialization to the fantasy of race as a figure for the prehistoric inhuman itself.

Dean’s investment in depathologizing fetishism leads him to be wary of queer critiques of racial fetishism which, he warns, “tacitly repathologize fetishism” in ways that he finds troubling. Taking on Dwight McBride’s protest, in “The Gay Marketplace of Desire,” against the dehumanization of a racial fetishism that would reduce him to the stereotypical bearer of a big black cock, Dean, striking the note of a nonjudgmental libertarianism of desire that is also sounded in French gay liberation texts, warns against the “Orwellian” connotations of any effort to submit fantasy to political dictates, even antiracist ones. Dean takes issue with both McBride’s humanism and his alleged moralism. He argues that all desire “impersonalizes” its objects by fragmenting them into infraindividual partial objects: “Under the sway of the unconscious, erotic desire fragments and partializes those totalized forms that consciously we recognize as persons. It is not whole persons whom we find sexually arousing but partial objects; we find an individual to be arousing by discerning in him or her the lineaments of a partial object.”

Far from distressing queers, this should be cause for celebration, since desire’s depersonalization and partialization of its object dissolves precisely those static, hierarchical identities that Dean, in harmony with much queer psychoanalytic criticism, takes to be the disciplinary basis of social oppression. Desire, for Dean, is necessarily fetishistic, and fetishism fragments the static identities of heteronormativity and racism alike. What McBride should be protesting, Dean implies, is not racial fetishism, but racial stereotyping: “Stereotypes concern identity, not desire; by contrast, fetishism is a form of desire largely independent of identity.” Dean’s implication is that, as a form of desire that functions independently of identity, fetishism cannot be racist, since racism works by reifying identity in the stereotype. He offers a handy method of distinguishing the two operations: “Stereotyping works synecdochically by taking the part for the whole (African American male sexuality is reduced to the big black dick), whereas fetishism works with parts that, strictly speaking, do not form part of a larger whole.” Fetishism is saved, as it involves partial objects whose referent is not ever a “whole,” and stereotyping alone must be to fault for racist modes of desire. But “racist modes of desire” are precisely what cannot be accounted for here. By insisting that desire and identity are mutually exclusive and that “stereotypes concern identity, not desire,” Dean leads us to counterfactually conclude that neither identities nor stereotypes, including racial stereotypes, are capable of inciting desire. Hence, according to his own logic, there can be no racist desire—no desire that is animated by racist stereotypes rather than innocently and, one must suppose, arbitrarily racialized part-­objects.

aliás… eu não fazia ideia de que a crítica do tim dean ao dwight mcbride era tão redutiva e *fraca* assim pqp eu teria vergonha.

Presenting himself as the most articulate theorist of the group, M. analyzes sex with Arabs as the ideal means of attaining the dissolution of his ego that he understands to be the apex of sexual enjoyment. The devil is in the details here, and M. makes it clear that in order to achieve the desired annihilation of his personhood, he pursues exclusively passive sex with an interchangeable series of Arab men who do not, or who are not permitted to, pursue any relation beyond the anonymous fuck. What he seeks, in other words, is precisely the highly eroticized figure of the aggressively phallocratic Arab-­Islamic bugger that French gay men at the time were teaching one another to anticipate and to desire as well as to criticize and to fear. For M., the pleasure of such an encounter is that “you feel negated, killed, by this Arab who butt-­fucks you [qui t’encule]. And it’s awesome.” At this point, G. and P. have already articulated various components, which they sometimes problematize, of their desire for passive anal sex with Arabs, such as an indiscriminate search for “erect cocks,” “the desire to feel like a hole,” a means of “consuming virility,” and a mode of desire in which “you think of sticking them in your ass, and that’s all. And it stops there.”

M. goes on to analyze the workings of racial fantasy that sustain such fetishistic desires in a locution that shifts from “me,” detailing his own fantasy, to “he,” contrasting it with the Arab’s lack of any fantasy life, to “we,” joining his subjectivity to that of the other white French men in the group: “Me, I get off [jouis] intellectually on the idea of abandoning myself to him. He fucks, but he doesn’t have that intellectual distance. We remain intellectuals playing at abandoning ourselves to savagery, to the beast.” Crucial to the pleasure of white self-­annihilation is a highly scripted fantasy scenario, in which the white man, who fancies himself as an intellectual with a highly developed ego and psychic life, abandons himself to “the Arab beast,” himself brutely unthinking and devoid of any fantasy life, who proceeds to execute the white man and annihilate his highly developed subjectivity with his giant cock, while releasing “the beast that sleeps within” — the “beast” of subjectivity-­destroying jouissance inside of the “civilized” white man. What M. desires is neither the part for itself — Arab cock —nor the part for a whole—Arab cock for the tyrannical Arab bugger—but rather a scripted fantasy scenario whose positions are enabled by the mutual interanimation of a series of racist historical fragments—the bestial and uncivilized native, colonialist hierarchies of intelligence and psychic complexity, despotic Orientalist Arab hypervirility, anticolonial Arab masculine potency, the sexual threat of a postcolonial “Arab invasion,” gay liberationist Arab phallocracy, and so on…

The erotic/phobic narrative fragments thus assembled are historically and logically incoherent—the uncivilized native beast occupies an entirely different position within European-­authored evolutionary, civilizational, and historical hierarchies of being than the Oriental despot. This assemblage is called up, not because it makes sense, obeys historical progression, or corresponds to intellectual and political beliefs, but because it is efficacious—it impels the ecstatic self-­annihilation that, for M. and psychoanalytic queer theory, constitutes the apex of sexual intensity. Within this scenario, the erotic/phobic assemblage—what Dean would assimilate to the stereotype—at once incites desire and achieves the depersonalizing shattering of self, ego, and identity more efficaciously, one is led to believe, than would sex with mere (white) human beings. Fetish versus stereotype, stereotype versus desire, racist dehumanization versus universal depersonalization … the boundaries simply will not hold.

what m. desires is neither the part for itself nor the part for
a whole but rather a scripted fantasy scenario whose positions are enabled by the mutual interanimation of a series of racist historical fragments.

In a transcribed discussion between self-­identified Arabophiles from Three Billion Perverts published under the telling title “The Arabs and Us” (“Les Arabes et nous”), certain discussants describe, as a central aspect of the erotics of passive anal sex with Arab men, an experience of self-­dissolution much like that which a certain psychoanalytically influenced tradition of queer theory has enshrined as exemplifying the shattering of social identities in sex.

M. at one point declares, “I want there to be no more persons, no more egos. What I want: is a functioning that produces pleasure, which is incompatible with the encounter of two persons who stand face to face [s’affrontent]. I don’t want to be a person.” M.’s highly articulate understanding of sexual pleasure as having nothing to do and, in fact, being incompatible with selves, egos, and identities uncannily predicts Bersani’s and Dean’s accounts of the erotic.

“a functioning that produces pleasure.”

The FHAR appears, at first glance, to be a textbook example of the radical, coalitional politics ascribed to the gay liberation movement. Inspired by intellectual Freudo-­Marxism, the U.S. gay liberation movement, Third World decolonization movements, and even the African American civil rights and Black Power movements, the FHAR promoted a notion of revolutionary homosexuality in solidarity with radical struggle everywhere. More uncomfortable, for the queer present, is the FHAR’s tendency to position sex as the basis of solidarity and coalition alike. A centerpiece of the Tout! special issue is the following quote, attributed to “Jean Gênet [sic]”: “Perhaps if I had never gone to bed with Algerians, I could never have approved of the FLN [Front de Libération Nationale]. I probably would have been on their side anyway, but it’s homosexuality that made me realize that Algerians are no different than other men.” This quote serves as exergue for the following manifesto: “WE ARE MORE THAN 343 SLUTS. We’ve been butt-­fucked [nous nous sommes faites enculer] by Arabs. WE’RE PROUD OF IT AND WILL DO IT AGAIN. SIGN AND circulate THIS PETITION WILL THE NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR PUBLISH IT??? AND DISCUSS WITH ARAB PALS.”

The authors contrast the political effects of white French men being fucked by decolonizing Arabs to those of old-­style colonialist pederasty: “First of all, everyone is obsessed with the cliché of the old European pederast who fucks young Arabs. Aside from the fact that it’s never that simple, we want to emphasize that in France, it’s our Arab friends who fuck us and never the other way around. Impossible not to understand this as a revenge, to which we consent, against the colonizing Occident. Do you imagine that it’s possible for us to have the same relation to Arabs as everyone else or as the typical French man when we commit with them what bourgeois morality makes out to be the most shameful of acts? Yes we feel a very strong solidarity of the oppressed with Arabs.”

três imagens diferentes de mulheres brancas em protestos do movimento black lives matter segurando cartazes escritos: “BBC MATTERS”, “I ONLY SUCK BLACK” e “I LOVE BLACK DICK SO YOU WILL HEAR ME SPEAK”.

:(

Throughout Miracle, seduced by memory and perpetually vulnerable to the invasion of desires past, Jean, as a temple hospitably open to Villeroy’s living memory, cedes to the pull of Mettray. Jean’s chronic state of openness to possession and haunting by the past is figured as a series of tiny openings—fissures and cracks—in the hardness of his masculinity. These fissures suggest a state of being wounded and even broken by the past, and therefore also perpetually receptive to it.

When Bulkaen asks Jean to write a poem about two “friends” in the Guiana penal colony, Jean concludes, “Mettray had dealt him a telling blow. He was mortally wounded, despite his laughter and health.” By requesting a homoerotic poem about a male couple in a penal colony, Bulkaen displays his wound to Jean. The gash Bulkaen bears is at once the sign that he might be inclined to pederasty and the scar of his injury at Mettray’s harshness. Although Bulkaen’s gash is described as an indication of secret flaws, Jean loves him all the more after discovering it, for it suggests that, wounded just as Jean is, Bulkaen might be open to carceral loves. Similarly, of Mettray’s former prisoners, Jean speculates, “They will have women, but I dare not think that these kids [ces gosses] who for so long were courtesans, or males who adored them, could possibly not keep, in their hearts, in their souls, and in their muscles, the bruise of Mettray.” The “bruise of Mettray,” like Bulkaen’s wound or the cracks on the surface of the prison big shots, marks the swollen and wounded hardness of pederastic toughs in perpetual mourning for the past pleasures of adolescent imprisonment, youthful femininity, and sexual receptivity.

This is far from the conventional understanding of prison wolves as merely virile and sexually aggressive men. Genet theorizes carceral pederasty as having subject-­forming effects, but the subject pederasty forms is not the homosexual, a being defined by his sexuality. Instead, the adult pederast is someone queered, whether or not he pursues women, by his wounded—and eroticized—attachment to a carceral youth. The pederastic prison wolf, in Miracle, is less a sexual identity than an apparent gendered “toughness” paradoxically defined by its fissured openness to the haunting of past pleasures and desires. He is, in other words, less the bearer of a sexual or gender identity than a state of having been wounded by the past. As such, the subjectivity of the prison pederast requires the partial failure of its own ideals of virile development, precisely that failure dramatized in the narrative of Miracle. By contrast, the masculinity of the “commonplace pimps” requires both that, during adolescence, they lovingly imitate adult pimps, and that later, they stop, forgetting in the process the queer yearnings of their youth. For if they did not forget, they would, like Miracle’s haunted pederasts, be perpetually vulnerable to the past and, therefore, inclined to adult pederasty. Denying their history of homosocial loves rather than invoking memories, the pimps attain a perfect hardness through the disavowal of their adolescent passions.

isso eh tão ethel cain - punish.

fandom culture is what protects and runs cover for JKR, gaiman, and countless other monsters even as they enact brutal social and/or interpersonal violence on the oppressed. fandom must be destroyed. learn to love art without being IP-brained.

the personal is political, the political is personal, all art is political, all art is the product of collective labor and history and culture and context, all art is a speech act, and as a speech act all art has illocutionary and perlocutionary force, art says something about both artist & audience

no more building identity around which IPs you like. no more virulent hostility to social (esp. feminist, anti-racist, and youth-rights) critique of the thing you like. no more small nationalisms. no more "let people enjoy things," the only way to truly appreciate things is to think about them