File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9803, message 958


Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 19:56:05 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Sex, Race and the Politics of Representation


Leo wrote:
>Sexual representation, a category in which pornography is the most infamous
>but not the only element, is a complex cultural and political terrain.
>Political interventions from the left usually do little justice to that
>complexity. They generally are either (1) prohibitionist and censorious, which
>almost invariably leads into tacit -- and at times, open -- alliance with the
>puritanical and anti-sex politics of the fundamentalist right (perhaps most
>manifest in the political trajectory of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine
>McKinnon), or (2) libertarian, based on tacit acquiescence to the demands of
>the sovereign consumers of an unfettered market in such representations,
>regardless of the specific forms those demands might take, a position which
>almost invariably leads into tacist -- and at times, open -- alliance with the
>likes of Bob Guccione and Larry Flynt (perhaps clearest in the stance of a Pat
>Califia). Neither approach is very helpful.

Up to here I agree, in that both positions are woefully inadequate from the
points of view of marxism, feminism, queer liberation, etc. But one thing
that occurs to me is that the libertarian side often (though not always)
has a virtue of _clarifying_ how the ideology of the sovereign consumer
works in issues such as sexuality and sexual representation. The
prohibitionist side often obscures this point and ends up making the
simple-minded libertarian side look better than it should. What do you
think?

>The difficulty with the prohibitionist view is as fundamental as its view of
>sexuality and its representation. It sees representation, especially
>pornography, as objectification, rejects all objectification as a denial of
>the subjectivity of women, and posits a direct line from sexual representation
>as objectification to violence against women. It thus ends up advocating a
>pure, object-less eros as a solution to sexual violence. (Susan Griffin's
>_Pornography and Silence_ is emblematic here.) The problem with this analysis
>is that there can be no eros without objectification in the form of
>embodiment: we are not attracted to humanity in general or to someone's
>'soul', but to specific individuals who exist within particular bodies. Eros
>must go through the 'defiles of the signifier', as Lacan would have put it:
>there is no eros without representation, no intersubjectivity without
>objectification. Thus, despite claims to the contrary, prohibitionism is, at
>its very conceptual roots, an anti-sexual posture. (In my view, there is a
>very interesting parallelism in utopian thought: the idea of a eros without
>representation is just as unrealizable as a democracy without representation.)

Leaving aside the question of democracy + representation, is it really
impossible to have eros without representation? How about dancing, playing
music, hearing someone's voice, being touched, smelling someone's sweaty
body, and so on? Are they not erotic without being representational? They
are embodied activities, to be sure, but I think that representation and
embodiment are not the same. By saying the above, I am not downplaying the
dominant role of representation, esp. visual representation, in implanting
sexuality into us; but I think that the distinction between representation
and embodiment is an important one.

>But part of the complexity of the politics of cultural representation lie in
>the openness, the indeterminateness, the range of possible meanings that a
>particular representation may have, and thus, the difficulty in determining
>how a particular cultural artifact impacts on the political. An excellent
>illustration of this problematic surrounds the controversy of what to make of
>Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of African-American men -- the most famous
>of which ("Man in Ployester Suit") portrays a black torso (the head is not
>part of the photograph), dressed in a three piece suit, with an uncircumcised
>phallus hanging out of the fly. Is this part of the classical racist reduction
>of African-American men to their phallus, as some critics maintain? Or is it,
>by its combination of the stereotypical with the atypical, subversive of that
>classical image, as others argue? Indeed, could it be unintentionally
>subversive of that image? The one thing I am certain of here is this: whatever
>the answer to these questions may be, it is not simple.

Given your points about the openness, indeterminateness, etc. of
signification + interpretation, how do you identify the possibilities of
political intervention in issues of representation, based upon--according
to your views I discern from your articles and posts here--'moral values'
of 'communities'?

Yoshie




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