My perverse master signifiers are each an irruptive and resistant Real response to the ploys of the master. My perverse rants and raves are the disavowed kernel of my nascent perverse discourses and inchoate schizoid yelps. These master signifiers are provoked by: my traumatic reaction to injustice; my categorical discomfort with the traditional Cartesian Cogito; my obsessive commitment to critical theory; and my noticeable passion for the reader’s penis, and so on. The reader pricks his ear and flicks his dick — reading and writing and studying — in an analytic silence that retroactively (Nachträglichkeit, après-coup) recalls my reinvention. The future happens in the past. Notes and sketches, the reader responds with the perverse master signifiers in the generation(s) of the vibration(s). This is a flirtatious rejoinder that need not conform to the master and his bureaucracy of academic philosophy. My cum is for the reader to enjoy at his will. The threat of my perverse disavowal is the murder of man for the sake of the future of the arrival of the tout autre. This simultaneously promises and disavows the birth of the next generation of chirpy boys and baritone girls. The deconstructionists, Marxists, and psychoanalysts of the gay kiddiewink and queer juvenile generations will intuit the system and follow the rules — reading and writing and studying — the applications(s) of the flirtation(s) of the generation(s) of the Becoming-Master of the Pedagogy of the Pervert. This rigorously redrawn replay and rewind of retro records remixed for a reengineered and recreated roster of ravers and runaways is — swallow slowly and let it dribble — returned for review. Take notes and draw sketchesand then burn the book. We now approach a blowjob from Ms. Perverse Philosophy herself whose contents of protein are shooting over both of us.
G/LBTIAQ and You Too
Not yet! I want to conclude this preface manifesto with the accessible and wise work of Marilyn Frye. Frye is a second-wave lesbian feminist separatist who was a professor of philosophy at Michigan State University and also for a time Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at the same University. In an essay entitled, “Lesbian Feminism and the Gay Rights Movement: Another View of Male Supremacy, Another Separatism” (a talk given in 1981 that was published in her collection of essays in 1983), she describes the tension between gay men and lesbians from a rigorously theoretical perspective (Frye 1983: 128-151). In this essay, Frye articulates a hard-and-fast division — binary opposition — within the category of GBLTIAQ. Such a fissure was torn across GLBTIAQ before such an acronym was unfortunately translatable into the simple plea for so-win marriage equality for gays and lesbians alike. The division in question is between gay men and lesbians. She refers to the gay (male) rights movement as the “fundamentalism of the global religion which is Patriarchy” (Ibid: 133). Frye also affectionately refers to gay men as “more like ardent priests than infidels” of male-supremacy and male-sexism (Ibid). Frye’s signifiers are wonderfully connotative. She discerns queer but patriarchal faith in the sour and righteous religion of so-called identity politics. Nietzsche would refer to identity politics as the ressentiment of the Je t’accuse. Frye reproduces such dynamics in her whip-slap against homosexual men. Frye performs this smart but crude broad swath of critique in relationship to patriarchy, sexism, racism, and phallocentrism.
Oppression
Frye invents her own master signifier in the neologism of “phallism.” She does so with admirable precision in vocabulary and critique. But there are several mistakes in Frye’s quick criticism of the homosexuality of patriarchy. Frye’s deployment of the word “global” to describe patriarchy is questionable. Third-wave feminism corrects the white and middle-class universalization of the feminist struggle. Third- wave feminism is also keen in its inclusion of international differences in the interpretation of the condition of women. Third-wave feminists analyze the rhetoric of the ways in which these so-called global contexts of third-world women and beyond are conceptualized and objectified by Western political judgment and activist intervention. The rupture of a theorized “global” patriarchy unsettles the definition of patriarchy itself because it situates it in local contexts and contingent practices. Patriarchy can be summarized as a society which is structured by men in the interests of men. But is the specification of these men and the isolation of their interests possible in a globe of intersectionality and difference? The patriarchy of male homosexuality cannot be the archetypal male-centrism because the categories of men and men’s interests are multiple and contradictory. Homosexual patriarchy may be one variant of male-centrism. But it is not representative of patriarchy tout court or indicative of the global interests of men. The challenge is to specify the particularities of gay male patriarchy and to outline the sexist and misogynist attitudes and behaviors of gay men.
Frye debunks the heterosexual myth of a homogenized gay/lesbian alliance of mutual politics and shared sexuality. In a provocative essay, “Lesbian ‘Sex’” (1987), Frye argues that the phallocentric version of “sex” excludes lesbians from sex itself. Frye writes:
It has been said before by feminists that the concept of ‘having sex’ is a phallic concept; that it pertains to heterosexual intercourse, in fact, primarily to heterosexual intercourse, that is, male-dominant-female-subordinate-copulation-whose-completion-and-purpose- is-the-male's-ejaculation. [ ] We [lesbians] quit having sex years ago, and for excellent and compelling reasons (Frye, in Allen 1990: 309).
A model of sex that phallocentrically identifies a discrete sexual encounter as teleologically structured by the male orgasm and ejaculation banishes lesbians from sex. Lesbian sex is neither visible nor countable. Lesbians do not have sex. Gay men are the epicenter of sex because homosexual intercourse involves not one but two (or more) male orgasms and ejaculations. Gay men have so much sex because their sex counts as sex.
Oddly, Frye fails to define the features of a non-phallocentric version of sex, but she claims that the debarred male orgasm and ejaculation frees lesbian sexuality from both spatial and temporal constraints. She even speculates that lesbians have sex for days at a time because the requirement of climax and ejaculation is lifted from their sexual lives. Frye also generally contests the assumption of common aesthetics and affective investments between faggots and dykes. This claim is (con)textualized in the most colorful of artistry in her theorization of a necessary divide between fairies and lesbos. This is especially instructive within the frame of her own work. She is committed to the word and the concept with rigorous definition. She eschews vague and whiny pronouncements about discomfort with personal status and individual value.
Frye also rehabilitates the supposedly shameful and antiquated signifier of “oppression” for a contemporary audience who rereads her work. Frye defines the word principally with reference to patriarchy, but she also applies it to subordination by race, sexuality, and even species. To Frye’s inventive mind, her master signifier “phallism” denotes male human superiority over all others in culture and nature. Frye’s definition of oppression can be summarizzed by the image of the birdcage. This is a hackneyed but still useful pedagogical metaphor for the system. The system of oppression involves wires which oppressively “mold,” “immobilize,” and “reduce” women in a systematic will to block their movements of desire, escape, freedom, equality, and so on (Frye 1983: 2). The key condition of oppression is membership in a class which is recognized as legitimately oppressed. In other words, a straight white rich guy can’t receive a totally lame quickie teethy blowjob from another straight white rich guy and proclaim that his semen was oppressed. But I do know of such a case. Membership in a recognized class of otherness and subordination is a necessary condition for inclusion in the qualification of oppression. These memberships include status within such categories as gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and even others which have yet to be properly identified by the culture such as fatness. There are populations of the oppressed which are not recognized in Frye’s categorization of subordination. These invisible oppressions include discriminations against the idiot, the pedophile, the prisoner, the victims of $-ism, or any mark of unrecongized subjugation which molds, immobilizes, and reduces. These potential classifications of oppressed people may impress as silly or offensive. But the challenge is not to identify the categories of oppression today. This reflection on today is simple and intuitive because of the easy propaganda of the dominant culture. The system has already included the minor qua oppressed in a modality of unexpected perverse disavowal. Rather, the arduous dare is to risk the identification of the oppressed groups of the future whose current oppression is invisible at this instant but whose subordination will become manifest in the future. Later, these deferred oppressions will retroactively indict the current moment as the blind persecution of the Other. Are the 660,000+ homeless Americans not a diaspora of Jews without clothing, food, or shelter in the concentration camps which are dispersed across cities in the wealthiest nation ever known to mankind? Why do we not see the Jew in the homeless for what he is? Frye puts the point: “Thus, to recognize a person as oppressed, one has to see that individual as belonging to a group of a certain sort” (Ibid: 8).
The key preposition in this citation is the Frye-italicized “as” which indicates a central concern. This issue is compulsively rearticulated and smartly reconceptualized by contemporary politics of difference and community: how does the “as” emerge? — what are the social and psychical conditions for the emergence of (dis)identification with oneself, oneselves, and the Other? Frye’s violent division between gays and lesbians may be practically unproductive for the empirical gays and lesbians in toto, but it is certainly an enticing theoretical provocation. Frye’s move splits the class of gayness. But such a gap between male homosexuality and its various permutations of penis exclusivity, on the one hand, and lesbian. Separatism and its specific aesthetics and practices, on the other hand, make visible an undeniable difference. This difference is not necessarily an opposition. This gap gay/lesbian splits a political movement that otherwise consolidates its battle against its binary opposite term: so-invented heteronormativity. It does so in haste, without veritably any sense of deconstruction or psychoanalysis even by the arch(e)-theorists of critical theory and identity politics. I will return to a Logic of Sameness+ later in the body of the book. But I can say at this juncture that theory and practice in gay (lesbian) politics pits anti-marriage radical fairies and their monster cocks against Andrew-Sullivan-style-Republicans and their tiny wieners. But this academic politics does so in a modality of binary opposition. This split within gay (culture and theory) and with Frye in sub-woman/dom-man (culture and theory) is also radically traditional. This schism is even (counter)revolutionarily conservative.
Penis Worship
For Frye, the constitutive features of gay men and their cultures are: the presumption of male citizenship; the worship of the penis; man-loving (homoeroticism); woman-hating (misogyny, sexism); compulsory male heterosexuality; and the presumption of general phallic access (Ibid: 130). Of our worship of the penis, Frye writes: “In phallocratic culture, the penis is deified, fetishized, mystified and worshipped. Male literature proves with convincing redundancy that straight men identify with their penises and are simultaneously strangely alienated from them (Ibid: 132). Frye has it right in her analysis of gay male obsession with penis. It is instructive that she uses the word “fetish” in her text because Freud claims that for the pervert the fetish is a so-called penis-substitute (Freud 1997: 205). Frye also refers to the “magic of penis” as if the penis were mystical and paranormal for gay men (Frye 1983: 133). I think that the penis is “magical” but not so for reasons of phallic access or woman-hating. But Frye is certainly in pursuit of an accurate critique in her assessment of a generalized gay male misogyny. The insight that men “identify” with their penises is surely perceptive. It applies to gay men and straight men alike. Among other sexual activities, we enjoy masturbation. This male auto-affection is undeniably making love to a man — especially for straight men who have no other homoerotic sexual release. Men are simultaneously “alienated” from their penises, as Frye says, because they are alienated from both their own bodies and the bodies of the Other.
Frye argues that the deification of penises in (gay) male culture (for gay men, “cock worship”) is symptomatic of a male estrangement from the bodies of both men and women. She establishes a distinction between “enjoyment” and “worship.” Frye writes,
"I suspect that if penises were enjoyed a good deal more and worshipped a great deal less, everyone’s understanding of both male and female sexuality, of power and of love, would change beyond recognition and much for the better" (Ibid: 134). Frye suggests that the penis obscures and obstructs love and sexuality. Political negotiations and interpersonal relations would qualitatively shift if the “worship” of the penis were displaced from its dominance as the general equivalent of sexual and social relationships. The worship of the penis is a relationship to an object of idealization and its dominance over the devotee. The enjoyment of the penis is an affective response to flesh and the crucial mise-en-scène of the fashions which surround it. Frye indicates that the displacement of the idealization of the objet petit a with the fantasy around which this object is situated may transform sexual and political culture. Frye’s argument about “right to access” is instructive because it implies the concept of le propre: the proper, property, ownership, possession, and mineness. Men exert a right to access to patriarchal (and capitalist) private property in the culture, including women and their bodies. This universal access to the commodities writ large in the culture is indicated by genitals, “in virtue of their genital maleness" (Ibid: 141). Men have the right to access whatever they deem their object of desire to be, whether clothing, food, shelter, women, porn, beer, Miley Cyrus, and so on. Worship of the penis and universal access go cock-in-mouth. The genitalia enable access to all public goods in the culture that are dictated by the phallus as general equivalent.
Homophobia For Women
Frye’s argument also illuminates male homosexuality as a sexual practice. She argues that the homophobic prohibition on homosexual sex is the only cultural law which restrains all of the traits that she otherwise and rightly associates with male homosexuality: the presumption of male citizenship; the worship of the penis; man-loving (homoeroticism); woman-hating (misogyny, sexism); compulsory male heterosexuality; and the presumption of general phallic access. Frye says that “the one general and nearly inviolable limitation on phallic access is that males are not supposed to fuck other males” (Ibid: 142). The only restriction on patriarchy and phallocentrism — or Frye’s unique and pedagogical master signifier of phallism — is faggot sex and genital contact between men. The otherwise universal phallic access of the penis is constrained and inhibited.
Homosexuality is repressed because it is a threat to an asymptotically equal society. Frye says of a potential rampant homosexuality, “there really would not be room in the universe for more than one masculine being” (Ibid: 143). She continues, “there must be a balancing factor, something to protect the masculine beings from each other” (Ibid). The homoerotic flirtation of the bromance is acceptable in the secondary system of the ego-conscious. But manifest male-to-male fucking and blowing is prohibited as the necessary brake on the firestorm of patriarchy and phallocentrism. A refusal to restrain the masculine subject would encourage the unbridled prey on men by other men. Such is visible in this preface and in gay culture. Frye refers to this as an “incest taboo” in which masculine subjects must restrain from the consumption of other masculine bodies. This consumption is de rigeur in gay male culture under capitalism. Of this reconfigured “incest taboo,” Frye says that it ensures that “a properly masculine being does not prey upon or consume other masculine beings in his kinship group” (Ibid). Frye’s statement outlines the argument about the exchange of woman in the work of such various authors as Claude Levi-Strauss (1969: 478-497), Gayle Rubin (2012: 33-65), and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2008: 185). The exchange of woman generates homosocial bonds and attachments between kin groups such that the social system is organized by a homosociality without a homosexuality. This kin group model of the homosexual/social relationship means that there is neither otherization nor objectification as technique for the relief of desire. Frye’s finest words about this phallic dynamic indict the fiery conflagration of male (on male) sexuality: "the proscription against male-male fucking is the lid on masculinity, the limiting principle which keeps masculinity from being simply an endless firestorm of undifferentiated self" (Frye 1983: 143). My take is that this interpretation of the “incest taboo” is stain-on. Frye’s turn to the image of the “endless firestorm of undifferentiated self” recalls a homosexual spatial and temporal, and material and abstract, destruction of the world. The image is of a threat of an unchecked masculinity which intends to destroy the globe. Frye can make the outrageous claim that homophobia is an anti-phallic reaction to rampant and reckless masculinity gone violently awry in homosexual culture. Frye claims that “the straight male’s phobic reaction to male homosexuality can then be seen as a fear of an unrestricted, unlimited, ungoverned masculinity” (Ibid). Homophobia is the ideological prophylactic protection against the nuclear fallout of unbound patriarchal homosexual violence.
Lesbian feminism is counter to these homosexual phallist commitments. Frye says that the lesbian’s “style, activities, desire, and values are obviously and profoundly incongruent with the principles of male-supremacist culture” (Ibid: 144). The division is hard-and-fast between gay men and lesbians. Homosexual males are figured as the über-mensch of masculinity. A lazy critique of Frye’s analysis of homo-narcissism may critique her for an essentialism. But her appraisal is perspicuous, bold, and exact. The thesis is homophobic and couragous. Frye’s analysis of the homophobic containment of the firestorm of homosexual masculinity presents a scary query: is the next Holocaust the imprisonment of women in concentration camps and gas chambers ruled by a German homosexual Reisigbündel Schutzstaffel?
I include Frye in this preface because she explains the alienation of the body that my own playful illustration of gay culture foregrounds. The latent truth of virulent homophobia and even its apparent obverse in homosexual sex can only be on display in textual and representational form in this preface. The male body and its relationship to the bodies of both women and men in a mediated culture of images and representations is rife with alienations and estrangements. Frye is at her diagnostic best in her commentary on the peculiar isolation and specific alienation of the male body in such a sexed-up culture. Her critique is worth a citation, in full:
In particular, both gay men and lesbians may have access to knowledge of bodily, sensory, sensuous pleasure that is almost totally blocked out in heterosexual male-supremacist cultures, especially in the streams most dominated by white, Christian, commercial and militaristic styles and values. To the extent that gay male culture cultivates and explores and expands its tendencies to fetishism, fantasy and alienation, it seems that it could nurture very radical, hitherto unthinkable new conceptions of what it can be to live as a male body. The phallocratic orthodoxy about the male body’s pleasure seems to be that strenuous muscular exertion and the orgasm associated with fucking are its highest and greatest forms. This doctrine suits the purposes of a society which requires both intensive fucking and a population of males who imagine themselves as warriors. But what bodily pleasures there are in the acts which express male supremacy and physical dominance are surely not the paradigms, nor the span nor the height nor depth, of the pleasure available to one living as a male body. There is some intuition of this in gay male culture, and the guardians of male-supremacism do not want it known. A direct and enthusiastic pursuit of the pleasures of the male body will not, I suspect, lead men to masculinity, will not direct men to a life of preying on others and conquering nature, any more than pursuit of bodily pleasure leads women to monogamous heterosexuality and femininity. I can only recommend that men set themselves to discovering and inventing what it would lead to (Ibid: 148).
Frye pivots to a soft and sensitive discussion of the male body, its pleasures and troubles, and of specifically gay male alienation from the body, nature, and each other. The text may read as quaint. It may read as prudish within the framework of this obscene preface. This preface itself may be read as precisely symptomatic of the object of Frye’s critique. The boredom of sex yields to the frenzy of text. Is there the possibility of an écriture masculin(e) which could textualize around the body? Frye’s responsive criticisms of phallism and homosexuality are to be valued because they should hit the reader like a squirt of semen as punctilious and veracious. Frye’s careful exegesis is intended to aid and abet the culture of a different male homosexuality from a lesbian-separatist perspective. Despite this preface’s playful sexuality, I would hold that we can grasp much about ourselves and each other by paying heed to Frye’s incisive correction to the alienation of male bodies from each other. Faggots may unexpectedly find that such cues and clues from an otherwise dis’-filled text on gay men by a lesbian- separatist could rebuild a culture which at moments has strayed from the habitable and hospitable for all of us. Frye intimates that patriarchy may be resolved by a transformation in the relationship of men to their own bodies and to the bodies of other men. Patriarchy is an effect of the ruckus between men and the male body. The male body — rather than masculine ideology — is the site of the patriarchal problematic. A transformation in the male body is the site of a potential revolution against patriarchy. The body must not be forgotten in the revolution of Perverse Philosophy. Rather, the future (of the body) must be circumnavigated. There is a dead man in this book. This book about perverts and schizoids will write around this Woman.
The author of a manifesto for Perverse Philosophy must herald his own murder by his brothers, sisters, and the rest of us. But this squad who fires and chair which electrocutes is conditioned by Chris and Ross — the criss-reference and cross-citation at the crossroads — reading and writing and studying with notes and sketches — of the classic tradition. The gay pervo philosopher may be the revolutionary slave with his intellectual libido. But it is the lesbian’s sly transformation in Praxis of the suspension of the present master’s signifier toward the horizon of the Other Signifier which animates the essence of Perverse Philosophy. The lesbian is the tout autre who assembles the future foundations of a nascent selfhood and sociality of the galaxies. The buggerist and the blowster rival the master and lecture the analyst. But the dyke is the thinking, being, and living of the Spirit of the System. The future inherits the pervert and the schizoid. But the Spirit of the System summons the Woman. The space around this horizon is the crossroads of the undergrounds of this book.
Andy Pink
Los Angeles, California
February 2016
Works Cited
Marilyn Frye. The Politics of Reality. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983.
Clifford Geertz. The Intepretations of Culture. NY, NY: Basic Books, 1977.
Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror. Transl. Leon S. Roudiez. NY, NY: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Claude Levi-Strauss. Structural Anthropology. NY, NY: Basic Books, 1974.
Jacques Lacan. Seminar 17. Transl. Bruce Fink. NY, NY: W.W. Norton and Co., 1977.
Gayle S. Rubin. Deviations: A Gayle S. Rubin Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Epistemology of the Closet. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.