Shame
and trauma are integral themes in queer theory, as well as
sociological studies of sexual minorities, and with good reason.
Knowing that shame plays a role is, however, very different from
understanding how it functions.
Shame works both as a despised position and as a desired emotion.
It leads to teenage self-cutting alone in bedrooms and to six-packs
abs floating down canals in Amsterdam.
In
the subculture identified and discussed in Tim Dean’s piece,
“Breeding Culture: Barebacking, Bugchasing and Giftgiving,” the
desire to experience shame and trauma is a pervasive, defining and
motivating force. This group
of people and this activity partially accomplish and complicate both
Leo Bersani’s and Michel Foucault’s calls to action in “Is the
Rectum a Grave?” and in The History of
Sexuality Vol.
1, respectively.
Despite Bersani’s claims that his writing serves as a critique of
Foucault’s redemptive theories of sexuality, their positions on sex
have overlapping assumptions and similar goals in some cases.
I will use Dean’s piece to illuminate their differences and
agreements, as well as to add to the discussion of the relation
between penetration, shame and politics articulated in the
aforementioned works as well as by Michael Warner in “The Trouble
with Normal,” and Ann Cvetkovich in “Trauma and Touch:
Butch-Femme Sexualities.”
Bugchasing,
giftgiving and barebacking, the activities at the center of Dean’s
piece, are the defining activities of a specific “breeding”
subculture. Barebacking is
the practice of having sex without a condom out of a desire for
enhanced pleasure, to reassure one’s constantly-threatened
masculinity, or out of forgetfulness.
While this interaction looks the same as bugchasing and giftgiving,
as all are forms of unprotected sex, they differ in their motivation:
giftgiving and bugchasing involve the deliberate transmission of HIV
among gay men, which is the central activity in a subculture that has
its own terms, practices and values.
Dean
notes in his piece the values that are created through this breeding
subculture. Arguing that
breeding culture has formed in opposition to values and norms of both
the heterosexual and homosexual communities, he argues the culture
reimagines “kinship” through serostatus, which creates
“ostensibly permanent forms of bodily and communal affiliation.”1
He connects this rebellion against gay norms with the increasing
acceptance of gay life, as evidenced by gay marriage and adoption,
even asking the reader to “conceive of exchanging bodily fluids as
a viable alternative to exchanging wedding rings.”2
These behaviors and this subculture constitute newly created sexual
identities, and, in this regard, are creative and shamed.
Creative
rebellions against dominant sexual discourse are exactly what Bersani
requests in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” In this piece, he identifies
the horror of AIDS crisis as an opportunity to shame homosexuals into
“welcoming the return to monogamy”3--something
he advises gay men to avoid.
In calling for gay men (and presumably others) to rebel against
sexual regimes, he is also calling for an embrace of the pleasures
and value of shame and trauma he sees as inherent to penetrative
sex.4
Bersani sees his piece as a critique of the “general enterprise”
of the “redemptive reinvention of sex.”5
Because he sees sex as inherently traumatic, self- shattering and
antisocial, our best option, accordingly, is simply to embrace the
these seemingly negative aspects of sex as the pleasures that our
bodies constantly desire.
While
Bersani positions himself in opposition to Foucault’s call to
continually discover the pleasures of the body, they actually share
many assumptions and prescriptions.
They both end their pieces with calls to action, requesting an
embrace of pleasures; even those that may at first not seem like
pleasures. As an integral
part of this appeal, they both advocate for a destruction of the
self: Bersani by connecting the “strong appeal of powerlessness”
with the “radical disintegration and humiliation of the self”
inherent in penetration,6
and Foucault in his call for to leave behind our sexualities and
instead inhabit only our bodies.
Believing that sex has inherent value,7
they both argue for the removal of moralism in order to allow for the
full pleasures of the body.
While it is true that Foucault, unlike Bersani, imagines a time
before sex became a stigmatizing act, Bersani’s call for embracing
shame can at times be a route to realizing Foucault’s utopian
vision.
Breeding
culture, as a group which embraces the pleasures of trauma and shame
as described by Bersani, represents a fulfillment, and complication
of many of the aspects of Foucault’s and Bersani’s prescriptions
for sex. Bersani points out
that while penetration has always functioned as the “grave” for
the “masculine ideal of proud subjectivity … AIDS literalizes
that potential,” as well as contributing to the rectum’s symbolic
status as such.8
In contrast, in Dean’s piece, being seropositive comes to be one
“humiliation” that proves your “masculine status” within the
bareback community, as evidence of having endured “physical
ordeals.”9
While breeders fulfill his call to embrace shame (of being
seropositive) they do so in a way that reinscribes masculinity,
rather than shatters it.
The
practice of conversion parties, in which one person would be
penetrated by many HIV-positive men,10
speaks to Bersani’s belief of sex as anti-social and to the
comparisons of paranoia surrounding 19th
century prostitutes. To
Bersani, sex is antisocial, riddled with power dymanics and
“anticommunal.”11
For breeders, being converted by multiple partners is a communal act
that is at once an antisocial auto-displacement away from mainstream
values and society, as well as initiation into a “community of
outlaws”12
that spans generations. In
choosing to practice seroconversion in groups, breeders are seemingly
in agreement with Bersani’s prescription to resist the monogamy
that the AIDS crisis and its representations encourage.13
This practice also reflects onto representations of 19th
century prostitutes, where multiple orgasms, “an unquenchable
appetite,” and “the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman,”14
all factor into societal perceptions of them.
The communal nature of their sexual activities adds to the shame and
trauma breeders strive to endure.
Ann
Cvetkovich, in “Trauma and Touch: Butch-Femme Sexualities,” adds
to our understanding of trauma, how one can embrace it and the
multiple meanings of penetrations. Cvetkovich
asks the reader to imagine that any single sex act (i.e.
phallic penetration) may have more than one social meaning.15
One of the meanings that can inspire trauma is the breach of
boundaries, both of the mental and physical shells.16
Two additional routes to inspiring trauma are the penetrated’s
feeling of being used solely for the pleasure of the penetrator and
the unknowability that creative and newly forming sexual identities
inhabit.
Effectively
and persuasively, Michael Warner asks us to understand shame as a
social process, involving politics and in-group purification, as well
as a way of unifying a subculture.
Warner helps articulate the trauma associated with social exclusion
to citizenship, as caused by17
unknowability, but he also believes this shame “intensifies the
oscillation of aversion and fascination,”
18
signaling that shaming another is a product of curiosity. By focusing
on identity, rather than the politics of shame, the LGBT movement ,
he writes, have used shame to engage in “in-group purification,”
allowing shame to be an adhesive force for queer subcommunties,
functioning similarly as it does for LGBTQ generally.19
Although
Dean does not examine shame or trauma in any serious way, both
Cvetkovich and Warner can help us understand how integrally shame
functions in breeding culture.
Breeding subculture, like all sexual identities, is historically
contingent; in this case, most obviously upon the AIDS crisis.
Bugchasing is a new phenomenon that seems completely at ends with
many of society’s seemingly core values.
For this reason, bugchasing is on the edge of knowability.
For many, to imagine anything but revulsion to multiple HIV-positive
semen samples swimming around inside one’s body, or even to anal
sex, seems impossible.
Trauma
as a breach of boundaries has multiple iterations in breeding
culture. One is the desire
for penetration expressed by the bugchasers.
Another is the breech of the healthy subject; HIV runs through the
blood, deteriorating the entire body: it is fully penetrative of the
body and the mind. The lack
of condom also serves as a way to secure the trauma by dissolving
barriers, or as one bugchaser, quoted in Dean’s piece, put it:
Over and over, I asked myself why it was so appealing
for me to get fucked without a condom.
I'm a bottom, and I honestly can't tell whether someone is fucking me
with or without a condom. It
feels the same to me. Yet I
still didn't want the barrier, and it really disturbed me that I
didn't know why.20
The
surface sensations have nothing to do with why this particular
barebacker chooses to disregard the condom.
The multiple barriers being broken inspire multiple sources of
pleasure via shame and trauma.
Another
route to trauma, which the bugchasers seemingly invert, is when “the
bottom is constructed as humiliated by or used for the pleasure of
the person doing the fucking or penetrating.”21
Butch-femme discourse on this matter emphasizes the potential give
and take of penetration and the power that being the penetrated can
entail.22
Breeding culture signifies the power of penetration slightly
differently. The terms
“bugchasing” for the penetrated and “giftgiving” for the
penetrator construct the “bottom” as the desiring subject and the
“top” as fucking to satisfy the desires of his partner.
The penetrated, Dean writes, “gets to enjoy the men, sexually
possessing them all…”23
In breeding culture, being penetrated is the crème de la crème,
partially because it is more likely to result in seroconversion, and
thus elevated status in the community.
The
HIV virus has created stigmatized identities.
Bersani points out that the AIDS crisis has given new cultural
legitimacy to the persecution of homosexuals, many of whom had
entered mainstream normalcy.24
This association of homosexuals and AIDS led to panicked in-group
purification25—changing
sexual practices, identity distancing, etc.
Homosexuals with AIDS have come to be seen as a separate class from
HIV-negative homosexuals.
This construction allows for HIV-positive semen to carry significance
along with the virus. The
trauma associated with ostracization from what was one’s community,
is exactly what breeders are striving for as they rebel against
ethical norms associated with mainstream U.S.
culture and mainstream gay culture.
An
analysis of how embracing trauma and shame functions in breeding
culture has many things to teach us with regard to the creative
fulfillment of sexual pleasures.
One is a greater appreciation of the multiple meanings of
penetration. Here, the
penetrated is masculine, has access to others’ bodies, and is the
receiver of, not only the phallus, but also pleasure and the “gift.”
Because this particular expression of sexuality has little to do with
bodily pleasures (as evidenced by the quote above: I
honestly can't tell whether someone is fucking me with or without a
condom. It feels the same to
me.”) it remains firmly in
the field of sexuality, and thus not in line with Foucault’s dream
of a world without sexuality, that would focus on pleasures.
The practice does, however, square with Bersani’s calls for
creative ways to embrace the inherent shame of sexuality.
Although breeders in ways reject his argument that being penetrated
necessarily means humiliation, they do seek to enjoy that humiliation
in other manners. Whether or
not these theorists would approve of these specific desires, or if
they would see them as in line with their aspirations for sexuality
is indeterminable from these essays, given the relative youth and
just-barely-thinkability of these manifestations.
1
Tim Dean, “Breeding Culture: Barebacking, Bugchasing and
Giftgiving,” (University of Massachusetts Review: 2009) pg 82.
2
Ibid.
3
Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Homos (Harvard
University Press: 1996) pg. 218
4
Bersani, 216.
5
Ibid, 215
6
Ibid, 217
7
Bersani, 217, 222
8
Bersani, 222
9
Dean, 85
10
Dean, 85
11
Bersani, 215
12
Dean, 82
13
Bersani, 218
14
Bersani, 211-2
15
Ann Cvetkovich, “Trauma and Touch: Butch-Femme sexualities,” in
An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public
Cultures (Duke University Press:2003)
16
Ibid, 56
17
Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the
Ethics of Queer Life. New York (The Free
Press: 1999), Pg 7. I am using “citizenship”
broadly to refer to access to goods, resources and cultural
legitimacy.
18
Ibid, 23
19
Ibid, 31-2, 34-6
20
Dean, 83
21
Cvetkovich, 59
22
Ibid, 59-60
23
Dean, 88
24
Bersani 203-4
25
Warner, 32
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