4th Global Conference
Monday 19th November - Thursday
22nd November 2007
Salzburg, Austria
Session 7: Narrative Constructions
Chair: Allison Reeves
Big Sex: The Story of the Nail
Becky McLaughlin
Department of English,
University of South Alabama, USA
This rather hybrid essay is situated at the intersection where autobiographical narrative and theoretical discourse meet. It does not simply document my personal experience or history as a sexed and/or sexual being but reflects upon it in relation to the discourses or symptomatics of academic institutions such as grade school, high school, and graduate school, each of which has played a role in shaping my sexual identity and practices. In fact, “Big Sex: The Story of the Nail,” is precisely an exploration of how academic institutions function as the big Others that dictate the mechanisms or technologies (repression? exhibitionism? voyeurism? hysteria? masquerade?) one employs as a sexed subject in and for the classroom, in and for the academy at large, in and for one’s scholarship.
For me, the first disavowal concerns narrative. To say that I don’t engage in it, grand or otherwise, would be wrong because the narrative—in the form of personal storytelling—is something I’ve always done. Like anyone else who has a name, when I first learned to write mine, I was beginning a narrative that can only end with the death of desire. And what is one, finally, but the stories one tells of oneself, a series of constructions built on congealed words and gestures, some so tiny as to be almost imperceptible and others so grandiose as to be laughable?
Put the blindfold on me, then, my dear, and I’ll tell you a story that we can revise in the morning over coffee, oranges, and the screech of a green cockatoo. Come Sunday, this is good for what (n)ails you, which is simply another way of saying that poetry, or the poetic enterprise, is the supreme fiction, for any religion worth its cultural weight is founded on storytelling, fictions masquerading as truth and then, like Joan Riviere’s masquerading Woman, finally becoming truth in a brilliant reversal of terms. It doesn’t take an understanding of psychoanalysis to see that the truth rest on, relies upon, deception. But it helps, and so let us begin with the dream and move backwards in time to events that can be known, if at all, only through the unintentional distortion of memory and the defensive mechanism of screen memory.
Renouncing Sexual Ambiguity: Conservative Politics in the Intersexual Movement
Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
Research & Project Development Director, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
No abstract is presently available