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Semen Representations in Middle Ages & AIDS Era. |
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Ricco J (1994). Queering boundaries: semen and visual representations from the Middle Ages and in the era of the AIDS crisis. Journal of Homosexuality, 27(1-2), 57-80.
In
a libidinal economy bodies are produced by, and are producers of, language,
as the [sycho-physiological and the linguistic are understood to be inextricable
linked. Semen is the key term in libinal economies, precisely because it
has the potential to defy the limits of strict definition ( proper spaces),
to subvert meanings, and put into question the logic of identity and signification,
as it crosses borders between the psychological, physiological, self and
others, etc. Effects of seeing double twinning, and a certain two-facedness,
are signs (if this term is still operable) of the workings of a libinal
economy (p. 60).
As
rhetorical structures which confuse distinctions between front and back,
anagrams closely approximate the analogies made between female vagina-uterus
and the site of male-male sexual intercourse, the rectum. As Leo Brusani
has noted in his essay "Is the Rectum a Grave?" this analogy has traversed
historical moments, two of which - the late nineteenth century and the
present era of AIDS - he highlights as particularly acute in their linking
female vagina and male rectum. By arguing (anagrammatically) that male-male
sexuality turns "hes into shes," Alan of Lille shifted his criticism from
mastubatory to anal sex, from sex up front to sex from behind
(p. 66).
The
"threat" of male-male anal penetration was (is) often cast, vis-à-vis
heterosexist positions, as a loss of self through either the blurring of
boundaries between two male bodies (penetration), or parallel fear (carried
over from masturbatory paranoia) of a loss of semen as a loss of self (ejaculation).
This latter equation certainly fits within medieval definitions of semen
as presented by such writers as Isidore of Seville who, one remembers,
defined semen as man's most self-signifying substance. Such heterosexist,
phallocentric fears mis-take the ways in which male-male anal intercourse
unhdermines the former's binary distinctions between top/bottom, active
passive, penetrant/penetrated, sole/mutual orgasms. The knotted web of
male-male sexualty and sexual practices allows for the inclusive transgression
which at once connect, overlap, ande disrupt body boundaries and sexual
identities between self and other (p. 68).
Haraway's
essay is part of a growing corpus of literature which attempts to come
to terms with the biological, technological, political, and medical discourses
which together construct discourses such as those which have constituted
AIDS. If one accept's Turner's definition of disease as a language (albeit
one which causes radical miscommunication), and in turn recalls William
S. Burroughs' famous dictum that "language is a virus," one might begin
to conceive of some of the ways in which bodies are already infected with
language or discourse (p. 76)... Language, once understood as viral,
assumes a status both negatively and positively potent. For Burroughs,
language is always inbedded within systems of control, and thus inherently
destructive (p. 77).
William S. Burroughs?
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