...every literary text is in some way about desire (Bennet & Royle, 2004:179)
Scholarly work on how subjects – and their bodies – relate to one another abound. Within the field of relationality, all aspects of lived – corporeal – existence are shown to be constituted within dimensions of relation to other human and nonhuman subjects. Of these aspects, sexuality and sex receive disproportionate attention, while desire, and affective correlates such as intimacy and love, are often overlooked or glossed over in critical analyses.Likewise, where desire is discussed, especially within immersive models of (filmic) spectator theory, the focus most often falls on the desirability of bodies on the screen, and how this might have changed throughout cinema’s development. After Laura Mulvey’s (1975) watershed proposition of the (male) gaze, desire was inextricably linked with (male) power, within the central dyad of male viewers and female characters/bodies on screen. The last few decades have, however, seen progressive focus on the male body on screen, and recognition of both male and female (and, ever so slowly, non-binary, a-gender) spectatorship; or, in an interesting correlate, seen in Tim Dean's movement form barebacking communitas to genre porousity.
Theoretical work on male-male desire and gay (and queer) spectatorship is more brash and vocal, especially with the advent of queer theories’ pseudo-acceptance in academia. Gibson (2004:177), for example, is concerned with the re-embodiment of spectator theory, and
analyses “shifts in the idea of what constitutes a ‘desirable’ male body”. His work forms part of a
larger movement that focuses on corporeal/lived bodies within social structures, an approach that Connel describes as a
…politics of social justice [that] needs to change body-reflexive practice, not by losing agency but by extending it, working through the agency of the body […]. Rather than disembodiment involved in role reform, this requires re-embodiment for men, a search for different ways of using, feeling and showing male bodies. (Connel, 1995:233)
This move toward understanding the (cinematic, corporeal) body in terms of its social lived- ness/relationality (and specifically the male body as constructed, relational and mediated concept) is seen as an inherently political and engaged act, echoing queer theories’
destabilisation of identity categories. In their reading of Connel’s clarion call, Powrie, Babington and Davies (2004:14) write:
The patient chronicling of images of men on screen for what they can tell us about social and historical shifts – whether based in class, ethnicity or gender, or a mixture of all of these – can only help destabilize patriarchal hegemony by showing us that masculinities are various, shifting and comprised of ‘flows’, in the Deleuzian sense.
I quote this here, not only to illuminate the politically subversive, destabilising potentiality such work contains, but also to point towards one of the anti-essentialist, foundational tenets of this approach, encapsulated in the plural noun, masculinities. No longer seen as monolithic, feminist and queer theories over the last three decades have shown ‘the masculine’ to be a
shattered/fragmented, and above all, performative category composed of men’s (and male- presenting folk's) navigation of flows of desire.
In essence, as the theorists cited above show, if we need to look anew/askew at gender and sexuality as performance, then we also need to look anew/askew at desire and pleasure. 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 early writings of Giddens (1992), Tucker (1991) and Singer (1993). 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/aske to/through the nation – comes full circle.
However, 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 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. Queer theories provide a framework for looking anew/askew at film (and fiction; and the experiential) 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).
In this article, 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.
From the two queer zombie films look at the construction of discourses on the erotic as regulatory of our way of engaging with a text, as a precursor to an analysis of Wolf, Wolf that focuses on rereading/reapproaching it as both am erotic text and a text abouterotic texts. I posit a reading like wolves, a readerly lupification, so to surface how the flows of male intimacy so obviously fragrant and in your face in LaBruce are in actual fact also as obviously (close to the textual surface) in Venter's novel, but that our engagement with it is arrested because of the opaque layer of nation-ethno-father and raciality over the erotic flow and flux of the novel.
Rai’s ‘ecology of sensation’ can also be read as positioning us within (not only toward) a grander mesh of ecological belonging. Furthermore, it might allow the subject, ironically, to tap into a greater and less mundane whole, a feeling of relationality with the totality of the cosmos:
Queer director D. Jarman wrote poetically about the sense of connectedness he felt during that most banal activity known to gay men, cruising in Hampstead Heath: “The deep silence, the cool night air, the pools of moonlight and stars, the great oaks and beeches [...] as always, once you are over the invisible border your heart beats faster and the world seems a better place”
(Jarman, 1992:83).
4.2 Text and body and author as a series of sexual reflexive personas, opened up to