OPSOMMING
Chapter 23: Concerning the disease of lycanthropy, in which men believe themselves to be turned into wolves
2.9 Concluding note on a queer theoretical disposition
In this section I've brought into play several scavenged relevances, that can be latticed into the alloying of Sections 3 and 4. In essence, as the theorists, activists, and scholars entered into engagement with in this section show, if we need to look anew/askew at ourselves as
performatives, then we also need to look anew/askew at how desire and pleasure are limitations of that (especially within the national frames they are often enfolded in through regulatory
discourse – or, even, narrative-textual-genre).
This approach is accordingly reframing the queer paradigm from its halting creative early-90s nascency into a full-throated, re-embodied, academic-accepted spotlight on flows and flux – ways of looking at desire by reconsidering traditional (theoretical) views of the erotic – and a
range of social manifestations/regulations of desire, specifically male-male desire – as
embedded in larger frameworks of belonging (such as, for example, the national). By following
‘desire lines’ through theory, corporeal models, interactionism, and queer reconceptualisation of socialised desire, queer theories eventually arrive at the subversive power of an anti-
heteronormative socio-political understanding of desire, as already immanent to the early 1990s writings of Giddens (1992), Tucker (1991), Singer (1993), and others. Significant, all three called for an erotic manifesto of citizenship (i.e. a way of actualising positive and productive citizenship through positioning ourselves vis a viz sexual groupings and the nation – riffing on how our exclusion can actually be taken to be constitutive of the identity of the nation state, as it were), which means the work of Puar and other – in situation the erotic-non-norm in/aside
to/as/to/through the nation – comes full circle. For, as Jasbir Puar shows, often what we hold dear as non-normative, is appropriated into the overcoding machines (also into the literary overcoder intensities that is the local literary field – which is why my seeming critical tone and tenor in section 2.10 must instead be read as productive prodding from within). Queer is creeping slowly closer to being recruited – yes, that term with all its attendant baggage – into ethno-national, masculinist, military, nuclear family, disciplinary filiality ideals, as Puar makes clear. So, use the disruptive and stilted textuality (of, for example, white-queer). Agitate the expected structure of the PhD. While a scavenging or queer alloying still holds productive power, it should be utilised.
The temptation (in reseeing erotic re-embodiment in national terms) is to de-emphasise the racial: In The Right to Maim (2017), Jasbir Puar builds on Amit Rai’s (2010) recoding of
sexuality as one of an “ecologies of sensation” that allows us to see it not in identitarian frames, but instead as a product of affective belonging: “transcend[ing] the designations of straight and gay and can further help to disaggregate these binary positions from their racialized histories”
(2017:4). Not only are categories of gender and sexuality shown within a poststructuralist queer
paradigm to be naturalized as opposed to natural, normative as opposed to normal, but so, too, have our conceptualization of art (including film) changed to focus on its (textual) performativity and relational nature: Mieke Bal (2006:397) rightly states that “[a]s it happens, contemporary – postmodern – conceptions of art are also more invested in art’s relational potential, its
performativity, than in its iconography” – echoing the Deleuze-Guattarian insistence on re- orientating towards our affective positioning toward a text (i.e. what texts do, as opposed to what they mean). In Otto; or, Up with dead people, the viewer is confronted with representations of desire that do not fit with current, widely-held assumptions and models of desire, intimacy, or love. Looking at other lenses through queer theories' disposition provide a framework for looking anew/askew at performatives and at frames of belonging as affective-relational representations, and answers Connel’s call for a politically engaged and anti-essentialist approach that enables re-embodiment, a “search for different ways of using, feeling and showing male bodies”
(1995:233).
Because of this reading through and with/but beyond queer theoretical dispositions, in the next section I attempt an alloying of (not 'between') LaBruce and Venter, moving between them not in a comparative manner, but to mine for resonances that illuminate both readings. As such, I'm not much interested in an analysis of either body of work on its own as how they work together, what they do. And, ultimately, as my own research focus is on Venter, on whether a more productive reading of Venter (specifically, in Wolf, Wolf) can actualise to ultimately, curiously and creatively complement (not disregard, nor discredit) existing research on the oeuvre.
The (perhaps not entirely uncheeky) pairing of Puar and Bal's temporal, geographic, and perceived epistemologic differences points to what I see as a joyous, blissful allowance (or, even, imperative) in both my methodology (scavenged, queer alloying) and in my own assemblaging onto/into/with/alongside/askance to Afrikaans scholarly work on Venter: the
productive bringing into relation of seemingly disparate theoretical voices in a pleasurable- forced affinity, to see how they strums and riff and buzz and resonate.