Fisting and other gifts for the graduate students

It seems we have been changing the lives of graduate students here at ITM ( http://karma-navit.livejournal.com/581125.html) and one crazy person even wants me to say something about fisting (in) Chaucer. So here goes (just a little tease):

Queer Theory is a theory that is not based on traditional theoretical rationalism, but on a theoretical eroticism. It thus becomes not merely a theory concentrated on sexuality, but a theory whose very underpinnings are based on the confluence of identity and desire. David Halperin talks in Saint Foucault about ‘queering theory’ and this suggests to me that queer theory has always been about, in a way, gaining erotic pleasure from theory (and that if it is to have a future it needs to be fisted); indeed, Ed Cohen, with double entendre intended offers the motto for queer theorists: “we fuck with categories”. Theory is, for D & G a toolbox: pick up a tool and see if it works for you. Queer theory picks up: a thousand pick ups, a thousand assfucks, a thousand tiny fistfucks. Deleuze (with and without Felix) seems to be totally fascinated with, if not obsessed with, the ‘behind’. In Dialogues, “Le mouvement se fait toujours dans le dos du pensour”(movement always happens behind the thinkers back); “avec Fanny, Je n’ai jamais cesse de travailler de cetter manier. Toujours ses idees m’ont pris a revers”(I always worked this way with Fanny. Her ideas seized me from behind). Sartre, “C’etait vraiment le courant d’air d’arriere cour”(was the breath of fresh air from the backyard). Spinoza “q’ui m’a fait le plus d’effect d’un courant d’air qui vous pousse dans le dos chaques fois que vous le lisez, d’un balai de sorciere qu’il vous fait enfourcher”(more than any other gave me the feeling of a gust of air from behind each time you read him, of a witch’s broom which makes you mount). Most famously, Deleuze imagines the history of philosophy as a kind of assfuck: “Je m’imaginais arriver dans le dos d’un auteur, et lui faire un enfant, qui serait le sien et qui serait pourtant monstreux” which is sometimes translated as ‘I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child which would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous”. The history of philosophy is a daisy chain in which GD gets to fuck and be fucked by Marx, Freud, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Guattari, and Foucault. But Deleuze's assfuck is still gendered; his penis fucks the ass of the philsopher he approaches from behind giving him a child, a monstrous arrivant to be sure, but yet this scene of copulation is reterritorialized by the overcoding Oedipal-machine of heteronormativity. But, what if ass fucking is deterritorialized by the permeability of fisting (a practice so favored by Foucault and Zizek)? What if the penis is replaced by a body part which has no gender? As Guy Hocquenghem says in Le Desir Homosexuel, the ass does not discriminate. And neither does the fist. Both belong to man and woman and yet neither (fist nor anus) is male or female.

Enter Chaucer (from behind) or more precisely Chaucer’s Summoner, whose tale contains a scene of eroticized male-male groping, of a male hand entering a male anus:

“Now wel,” quod he, “and somwhat shall I yive
Unto youre hooly covent while I lyve;
And in thyn hand thou shalt have it anon,
On this condicion, and oother noon,
That thou departe it so, my deere brother,
That every frere have also muche as oother.
This shaltou swere on thy professioun,
Withouten fraude or cavillacioun. “

“I swere it”, quod this frere, “by my feith”
And therewithal his hand in his he leith,
”lo, heer my feith; in me shal be no lak.”

“Now thane, put in thyn hand doun by my bak”,
Seyde this man, “and grope wel bihynde.
Bynethe my buttok there shaltow fynde
A thyng that I have hyd in pryvetee”.

“A!” thoghte this frere, “That shal go with me!”
And doun his hand he launcheth to the clifte
In hope for to fynde there a yifte.
And whan this sike man felt this frere
Aboute his tuwel grope there and here,
Amydde his hand he leet the frere a fart”

(The Summoner’s Tale, 2129-2149)

Catherine Cox in a discussion of the textual erotics of the Summoner’s Tale persuasively argues that when the Friar unadvisedly gropes Thomas’s behind, places his hand in Thomas’s “clifte”, and receives the gift of a fart “amydde his hand”, we are reminded of an earlier scene when the Friar explains how the law was written with God’s finger. If one conflates the Friar’s glossing with his groping, then one can argue that, as Cox suggests, “Thomas receives Friar John’s finger”. However, I would go even further, and Chaucer’s text permits my reading, and say that Thomas’s anus is penetrated by the entire hand or fist of the Friar. The Friar penetrates, gropes Thomas enthusiastically; the sexual encounter is, however, invited, not coerced and cannot be recuperated for a reading of eroticized violence and/or rape as other Chaucerian penetrations can. Rather, it charts the possibility for an erotic or social encounter beyond the phallus. The Friar, like Deleuze assumes an aggressive, assertive role and eagerly gropes the “tuwel” of his “compeer” (the Summoner gets to grope the Pardoner perhaps?) in search of the unnamed “thyng” located in his “pryvetee”, that is to say, inhabiting the zone of secret, private, but also genital territories as David Lorenzo Boyd has shown in a discussion of the Miller’s Tale. If, for Deleuze, the assfuck produces a monstrous text, for the friar his assfuck produces his own text, that is, if Cox is right to conflate fart /flatus and speech, groping and glossing, penetrating and hermeneutics. The fruit of Deleuze’s assfuck remains heteronormative however; his becoming-homosexual is reproductive. But, the Friar’s grope cannot be recuperated to a scheme of normative heterosexuality. The coupling described by Chaucer is unnatural, nonprocreative, sodomitical. The fruit of the “tuwel” is a fart; the fruits of homoerotic coupling produce precisely nothing; rather than the fertile fruit of the womb, of heterosexual conception, no conception is possible. As an unclean usage of male bodies that feminizes one of them, Thomas, homoerotic activity, to quote Boyd and Karras, “scorns the sweet heteronormativity sanctioned by Nature and God, and disregards the proper, gendered use of male bodies”. The fart is, in effect, shown to be the bastard fruit of unnatural coupling, a nuptial against nature. David Halperin sees fisting as an activity which challenges the goal oriented, end driven practice of sexual intercourse in that it may take hours, may or may not involve orgasm and its key values are “intensity and duration of feeling”. I agree with Halperin that “as a sexual practice and a subcultural phenomenon” fisting “has the potential to contribute to redefining both the meaning and practice of sex” (and theory) but Foucault is, I think, wrong to suggest that fisting is a twentieth century invention. I would like to think that in Chaucer we witness the first narrativization of male-male fisting as an eroticized, deliciously lubricious act. As Brian Massumi puts it: “So let us introduce ourselves by making the philosophical gesture of friendship: reach into your anus, and take my hand”. Or as Thomas might put it: “Reach into my anus and take your gift”.