2nd Global Conference
Wednesday 30th November - Saturday
3rd December 2005
Vienna, Austria
Session 6: SAS In Your Face
Chair: Tamas Benyei
Sexuality in Extremity: Trauma Literature,
Violence, and Counter-Erotics
Mel
Kohlke
University of Wales, Swansea, United Kingdom
Trauma literature’s depictions of extreme states of human suffering, occasioned by violent woundings of human psyches and bodies, jar disconcertingly with representations of sexuality, whether the sex-act is merely fantasised, enacted through choice, or figured as a further violation of selfhood and subjectivity. The proximity of sexuality and graphic violence risks the collapse of a text’s witnessing and/or testimonial function into pornographic voyeurism, as confrontation of/working through the past cedes to salacious spectacle and reader titillation. Yet since trauma literature deals with the disintegration/re-integration of both personal and communal identity – predicated at least in part on sexuality – many trauma texts breach such ethical reservations. Whether fictional, factional, or documentary, trauma literature repeatedly engenders disturbing intimacies in the contexts of the unimaginable, locating sexual desire in the very midst of public horrors, including Holocaust, massacre, slavery, and civil war, as well as the more “private” horrors of disease, domestic violence, and child abuse. Touching on a variety of canonical and less well-known trauma texts, from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, to Liana Badr’s The Eye of the Mirror, this paper aims to convey a sense of the range of contradictory functions and effects of sexuality in trauma literature. At times serving to foreshadow, underscore, and condemn perverse processes of dehumanisation, expressions of sexuality also re-assert that same threatened humanity. Used to represent acts of resistance and empowerment, temporary escapism, attempts at self-validation, and efforts to achieve “wholeness”, sexual acts also problematically figure in narratorial or authorial endeavours to console, atone, and intimate the sublime or divine. Inevitably ambiguous and literally risqué, sexuality in trauma literature nevertheless generates a powerful counter-erotics to the pornography of violence.
Homosexuality, Machismo, and Violence in B. Schroeder’s ‘La
Virgen de los Sicarios’
Juan
Ramos
University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Barbet Schroeder’s film, La Virgen de los
Sicarios,
inextricably links violence and social decadence with homosexuality,
machismo, teenage male prostitution, Catholicism, and the constant
fear of living in Medellín, Colombia, where drug lords, cartels,
sicarios, poverty, and ‘chaos’ are everyday scenarios. Fernando
Vallejo, the adult protagonist, returns to Medellín to die after
a 30-year absence, becoming sexually and emotionally involved with
two male adolescents, Alexis and Wilmar, whose absolute disregard for
life stands in stark contrast with Vallejo’s fear of living.
With few opportunities open to them, male teenagers are forced to work
as sicarios (assassins) and prostitutes; aware of their ‘disposable’ nature
in Medellín, they are only too eager to capitalize on the few
options available to them. The film’s narrative suggests the
degree to which violence becomes a habitual practice, ultimately desensitizing
both the protagonists and the audience.
In this paper, I analyze
Schroeder’s narrative strategies, arguing that visuality is constructed
as a modality for problematizing homosexuality and machismo; I suggest ways
in which these strategies at once intensify and interrogate the labyrinthine
nature of violence and social decadence in Colombian society. I explore Schroeder’s
reconceptualization of masculinity, which is redefined through the protagonists’ recognition
of and confrontation with their homosexuality in a society where homoerotic
identity remains taboo, while masculinity is reformulated and reaffirmed through
acts of violence, whether in self-defense or as a form of resistance to social
decadence. My analysis concludes by interrogating film’s dynamic of negotiation
between masculinity and power, counterposing discourses of survival in opposition
to the production of heteronormativity.
Sodomy for Real Men: T.S. Eliot's Homosocial Pornography
Andrej
Zavrl
Despite Eliot's claim to a pre-eminent position within
masculine modernist poetry, quite some of his canonical poetry discloses
underlying
homoeroticism (cf. The Waste Land, "Prufrock", etc.). Little,
however, can
prepare us for the pornographic homosexual fantasies in his Columbo
and Bolo
verses.
Even though he could not have them published, Eliot continued
to circulate
the verses among his friends well into his forties. It is interesting
that
he pressed Bolo and Columbo upon men one would not expect to enjoy
same-sex
pornography. And it has to be said that Bolo’s and Columbo's
escapades are
far from exclusively homosexual; the attention, nevertheless, seems
to be
rather firmly locked onto penises, testicles, anuses, and buggery.
Unlike
some critics who have suggested biographical explanations for them,
I interpret the poems as Eliot's treasured tokens of
bonding with some of
the leading modernist writers, as well as a dangerous game that Eliot
plays
at simultaneously hiding and revealing his insecurity and fragile sense
of
masculinity.
Male homosocial bonding can only thrive on the grounds of
(supposed)
equality between heterosexual men. Yet Eliot, it would appear, never
felt he
was quite up to it, as he apparently felt uneasy about Pound’s
anti-homosexual, masculinist and phallocentric conception of Modernism.
Pound, on the other hand, took pleasure in fantasies of begetting and
giving
birth to texts together, and he continually referred to Eliot as the
female
part of their relationship.
My paper will look at some of Eliot's and
his friends' accounts of the
poems, to point out that their explications do not follow so readily
from
the verses themselves, and that there is quite something that their
public
masks remain reluctant to reveal. Writing homosocial pornography,
I
suggest, Eliot undertook a hazardous task: to discourage unmanly views
of
himself, he self-indulgently exploited them.