OPSOMMING
Chapter 23: Concerning the disease of lycanthropy, in which men believe themselves to be turned into wolves
2.1 Introduction
Further back, perhaps, clues are offered to what is needed: Laura Mulvey’s gentle-fierce reminder to find “a new language of desire” (1975:8) through which to address structural
inequalities, specifically in popular narrative cinema. Forty-five years after Mulvey’s essay, filmic scholarship on the body repeatedly looks anew (and, in this era of peak queer, askew) at the (social, cultural, onto-) matrices of power inherent to the act of engaging with visual texts. While popular culture has stratified as much as it has diversified – after all, “not everyone occupies the same Now” (Bloch, 1991:97, quoted in Dean, 2008:75) – some have been finding new ways of looking at, and new languages through which to articulate, emerging forms of desire, intimacy and pleasure. For example, Suzanne Ashworth’s re-reading of Edgar Allan Poe as in search of the “cadaverous intimacies” (2016:565) denied to him in the social sphere he occupied, the movement to re-conceptualise the sexploitation films of the 1970s as body-affirmative (Jackson, 2017) or, even, patriotic (Olson, 2017), or Tim Dean’s multi-text project (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011) to find meaning in and through barebacking (also filmic) communities. This approach of finding new ways of articulating the discourse(s) of the abjectly erotic to show how they
modulate frames of belonging to various groupings, including citizenship, is, however, coming into its own.
Desire and the erotic, as distinct from, though related to, pleasure, sex and sexuality, have occupied a space in public discourse – and in public – from the time of Aristotle to current discussions on Pokémon Go32. Certain subsets of contemporary cinema, specifically New Queer Cinema, and its subsequent queer-themed non-studio, pseudo-amateur-aligned filmmaking offshoots – as well as, to a lesser degree, both bespoke television series and bespoke sites such as thisvid.com – are progressively taking the lead on driving public
discourse on desire by prodding at the Overton window of sexual economy and public discourse on desire-pleasure.
The contemporary popvisual landscape is subsequently filling up with what is seemingly progressive takes on desire articulation that are particularly tied to the renegotiation of (af)filiation, intimacy and belonging. Interestingly, such cultural-visual representations of new categories of belonging usually go hand-in-hand with the foregrounding of an abject version of the body as central to the narrative.
Net-based platforms such as MeWe, Swrl, and such, as the porno-equivalent of (atomistic) viewing platforms such as Netflix, Showmax, Hulu – as well as the rising popularity of porn studio subscriptions (such as Cockyboys, the studio Canadian filmmaker and director Bruce LaBruce is currently working with to offer a funded platform to expand his queerzombie
universe) – act as echo-chambers of taste and identity and so narrows the already significantly subjective spectatorial viewing position. Instead of experiencing the filmic text as a member of
32 See, for example, the discussions on PokéDates and on the (humorous) similarities between Grindr and Pokémon Go in Henry (2016), or the smattering of titles modeled around Pokemon porn.
an audience, the viewer now more often than not constitutes an audience-of-one, with greater selective control over the text (he paid for) and consequently a lessened exposure to texts that (might possibly) offend or go against his highly subjectivised schema of belonging-desire. The popularity of these atomistic viewing platforms allows for niched zones of private erotic
exploration that has taken the place of traditional porn, compounded by the banning of (vaguely defined) 'pornographic content' on two of the globe's largest and most democratic platforms – first Tumblr and now onlyfans.com (in 2021). In effect, creating a larger and more diffused – but paradoxically more precarious – assemblage of erotic citizenship33.
I see LaBruce’s queerzombie films, though their idiosyncratic foregrounding of not-porn as prefiguring the advent of atomistic viewing, as early harbingers of such viewing praxis. As one of the last generation of filmmakers to work on celluloid, LaBruce stands for a steadily passing time when film was/is still tactile, material, impermanent, and there's elements of a poetic elegiac to be mined in how the turn to digital (away from celluloid) came to signify a move from abstracted desire to concrete, messy pleasure. Instead of having to satisfy a common,
homogenised audience, atomistic viewing platforms are able to fund, market and sustain idiosyncratic niche expressions of erotic praxis (FraternityX, Treasure Island Media, Planta Rosa Features, justcapturedguys.com, and the tweaker-porn34 of Slamrush Studios.). A very large number of these ‘mini-genres’ are constructed around a (usually singular) abject act:
college rape scenarios, non-consensual group breeding, highly scripted (so to appear realistic) pozzing/stealthing eroticisation, etc. – many, if not most, finding erotic gold in the coalpits of social dehumanisation and tribal-urban conflict playing out on in violently-sexual ways on one
33 An alternative view would be that erotic exploration (through curated visual media) has always been to an extent niche and curated, and even as availability, volume, and consumption has increased manifold, the contours of curation has not.
34 In which homeless methamphetamine-zombified young men are lured into getting fucked and bred by everyone in the neighbourhood, then thrown back on the street.
male body. As such, situating these forms of abject actualisation(s) of pleasure – like LaBruce’s lustful zombies – within existing frameworks of desire necessitates a nuanced re-reading of major models of desire.
The zombie has, moreover, been read as a barometer of capitalist anxiety (Dendel, 2007) and the concomitant dehumanising scenes may in fact be read as an acting out of socio-economic arrangements. (ibid.). In the following piece, I consider how queerzombies (as a cypher for larger trends towards focusing on abject themes in porn and society at large) speak to or challenge existing models of desire and pleasure, specifically with regard to three aspects:
identity formation, corporeality, and the socius, which does not refer to society but, rather, to “a particular social instance” in which society “presents itself as a socius or full body upon which all kinds of flows flow and are interrupted, and the social investment of desire is this basic
operation of the break-flow” (Deleuze 1971). Primarily, I show how our engagement with these zombies mirror a change in society itself which often goes together with a change in theory, from notions of desire based in a modality of lack (Aristotle, Freud, Lacan, Paglia) to concrete35, socially situated understanding(s) of pleasure (Grosz, Beckman, and others following Deleuze), and then consider how we might begin to speak of the desire/pleasure of the self-marginalised abject-subject. To do so, I take into consideration that the models of desire dealing with
immersive experiences (here: cinema, porn) are frequently (and as frequently not, for specific audiences) situated within an abjectifying mode, and, perhaps more importantly, within frameworks of immersion that rests on the push-pull of attraction-repulsion.
35 In this specific phrasing I do not wish to imply that the writings of Aristotle, Freud, Lacan, Paglia, and others I quote in this section, as a category can be reduced to 'desire as abstract', but do wish to emphasise that, coalescing around Lacan, desire is made to be based in lack, which then in Freud is reduced to an all-consuming Oedipality.
As stated, LaBruce’s idiosyncratic use of the bodyhorror/porn body genre(s) necessitates a conscious recoding of the abject alongside frameworks of desire/pleasure (in order to do: for more affirmative understandings of the abject; for underscoring the immanence of the abject to desire) and to that end, I explore here one such recoding, abject desire. By surfacing the inherent similarities between the desire and repulsion (as induced by the abject) of pleasurable bodies-in-marginalisation, I explore how desire/pleasure and the abject can be made to
correlate within the three aspects highlighted above, thus showing the abject as immanent to desire. This, though true within the world of LaBruce’s queerzombie universe (and perhaps true for the abject porn of FraternityX, Treasure Island Media, and the like) will also, crucially, be shown in subsequent components of this study to have applicability potential for re-seeing erotic citizenship in a wider selection of texts and experiences that echo LaBruce’s surfacing of
questions of abject sexual inclusion/exclusion(s) and feral-erotic citizenship, and which specifically speak to prevaling discourse on belonging within national frameworks.
In the second facet of this study, I move away from the diegetic hermeneutics of LaBruce’s filmic world, to investigate such an abject desire model’s impact on categories of belonging in my own life, via an exploration of a South African (written) text (Wolf, Wolf), by an Australian author (Eben Venter), that I have personal resonance with and that correlates with the way new languages of intimacy is articulated in LaBruce’s films. This, in turn, allows for possibilities of re- reading Venter’s text more broadly in terms of olfactory intimacy and feral citizenship, and thereby specifically tracking the changes implied by the movement out of loss of white symbolic power to temporary intimacy. The interludes and addenda make up the third facet of this study, where I apply a queer scavenged alloying method to place texts that relate to the theory
(through which I, in roundabout way, apply abject desire as a lens through which to better understand my own experiential reading of LaBruce and Wolf, Wolf).
The different facets of this study, though on the surface disparate, gradually (component by component) move the abject-desire model out of an exclusive body genre (filmic) application to a model for personally engaging with aspects of inclusion/exclusion in the molecular multiplicity of me-Venter-novel-oeuvre. By recoding the ways in which we understand ways of belonging, activated by the participatory identification with the marginalised body’s experience of
relationality through (abject) pleasure, all texts in the three facets speak to a shift from the filial to alliance.
2.2 Bodies and pleasure: From desire as lack to messy, bodily pleasure to queer