Getting Medieval

Sexualities and Communities,

Fre and Postmodern

Carolyn Dinshaw

Duke University Press Durkam and London

1999 reserved © z© Duke University Press All rights acidjree paper A Printed in the United States ofAmerica on for Marget Designed by C. IL Westmoreiand Systems, Inc. vpeset in MonoUpe Fournier by Tseng Information

Libraiy ofCongress CataloginginPublicati0n Data appear on the lt printedpage ofthis hooP politlcs of essentialized identities—hut rather, as Heather Findlay puts it, because we recognize in these others who we are not; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe maintain that in any “ overdetermined” Coda social field “the presence of some in the others hinders the suturing of the identity of any of them,” and, as Findlay continues, “this hin- drance is the condition, not the failure, of politics.” 96 Queer history, Getting Medieval: queer medieval studies, queer-friendly scholarship. the fight for pres- ervation of funding for the humanities, the defense of open inquiry in Fiction, Foucault, and education at all levels—each will be altered once such an articulation Pulp has taken place. Even as activism for the humanities and for higher education gains an energized contingent in queers and the queer- the Use of the Past friendly, so queers can demonstrate the value of destabilization, dis- junction, queerness in the projects that most deserve preservation and funding. And (in the spirit of Margery Kempel aD of us—not just the elect—can preach: each of us can embrace the project of building coalitions (those postmodern communities. and we can each partici- pate in building coalitions in which such abjected figures as queers and scholars of early periods are armed and empowered in the fray of I’m proud of my country’s past, but I don’t want to live in it. the culture wars, not merely tolerated as a liberal free—speech cause Tony Blair, in comments on a recent effort or resolutely sunk in some distant, dank past. And in defense of our united to update Britain’s image (but not necessarily unified) interests as queers, as medieval- ists, as proponents of queer scholarship, as humanities researchers, as advocates of higher education, and as supporters of academic free- Quentin Tarantino’s Middle Ages dom, we say to those who would eliminate us: Don’t touch me. My title derives from some lines in a dark scene deep within Pulp Fiction, They are spoken by Ving Rhames acting the part of Mar- sellus Wallace. the big black boss presiding over the underworld of

the movie — that world’s heretofore unmoved mover. To this point virtually all we have seen of him is the back of the neck. Due to cir- cumstances definitely beyond his control, Marsellus has been raped by a sadistic white southerner in an s/M dungeon; and after he has been rescued by the very man he has been chasing, Butch Coolidge (Bruce \Villis, he snarls back to “Mr. Rapist,” now shot in the crotch and writhing on the floor: L’m gonna call a coupla pipe-hittin’ niggers, who’ll go to work on homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch. (to Zed)

182 Getting Medieval Hear me talkin’ hillbilly both! I ain’t through with you tha damn sight. snot i u o tie md’e al t a o Fo’icui .

tm gone a cit Medieval on your ass) ic pr ‘eupanon .rv “-‘r im ar ct v h )SL politteal in en r “sc11cai Get Medieval, The phrase caught on like wildfire: street-smart teen e du I re ot ol / F age boys (the “young male viewers” whom Variety pegged as an pla n t, fi 1w ow a obvious primary audience for this movie) could be heard in San Fran ditiona oun cisco slinging the phrase around the neighborhood; Courtney Love, r in the re tor e rrat )un speaking of her dead husband, Kurt Cohain (reluctant idol of such tie ca s in thi v iolenc en rout cause teenage bovsy picked it up to describe how she wanted to treat his si prob1ems (“nv5 ou got a corpse in a car, minus a head, in remains;2 magazine headlines used it: Saturday iViglzt Live created a rage Take me to it.” says Harrey Keitel as Mr. Wolf, who fixes skit around it; Film Threat magazine in early ic voted Ving Rhames ft sse [t28] One hit man’s qualms (in the film’s last scene) cannot “Bastard of the Year” for pronouncing the phrase. and noted approv her the whu” moral economy: killing, maiming, and terrorizing are ingly, “Ving gets bonus points for combining the words mu and mcdi h t app nd the tinue to happen in the in- olded narra eva/in the same sentence,” Even after this first flush of publicity, the vents h eget’ 1 occur after th fi s las phrase stuck: Altoids in the spring of 1997 launched an ad campaign the dark which I bega t ement featuring mint-green billboards reading menacingly, “Get Medieval Pawnshop,” with dom hi m and its on Your Breath.” The phrase has entered American public culture. e n etors, there is what Time azine, pi kin up on the Why has it proved so popular? What exactly makes it so useful? To n’ priort es. called “a fate worse than death”: not only rape. but, get a clue. I want to look first at what it means in this film: why this ilcially. sodomitical rape.’ Butch, having freed himself from the it hesitates; word here? Does perform any function other than to inflict a slight I t ‘ bonds and fleeing the perverts’ pawnshop. suddenly sting on the medievalist, buried in the past hut finally getting out to lu decides cannot leave Marsellus, his mortal enemy, “in a situa see a movie? n like er. 105), a elects the largest weapon the pawnshop The phrase is not repeated in the fast-talking film; the Middle Ages o er to nem from being sodomized: not the are not mentioned again. But medievalists, especially queer mcdi not 1 0 1 il slugger, but a “mag evalists, instead of sinking even lower beneath the pop_culture sur en m r sw ( B h stealthily returns to face, might instead conceive of ourselves as specially equipped to b e nd “THR it nto of the brothers (scr. 107), view this rnovie.With a whole armature of narratives, discourses, and \l ,rsellus i treed from th other startled brother, shoots him in the images that look in fact much like Pulp Fiction — sodomitical insults itch, and makes his medieval plans: as was the provision of a secu

(such as we saw in chapter i). Arthurian romances and the discourse lar law in France in 1270 (discussed above, in chapter i), the punish of normative heterosexuality (in chapter z), Christian expressions of ‘nt tot sodomy was castration for the first offense, death by fire for a desire for transcendence (in chapter 3) —we can suggest ways in epeat offenders—rather like pliers and a blow torch.i which what was seen to be Hollywood’s latest, from the hot-hot- I he sodomitical violence in this scene is different from any other hot Quentin Tarantino, turned out indeed to be an old, old story— ence in the film, and it calls for a different remedy: it is ritual even as the temperature around Tarantino subsequently cooled.6 We d exual torture, it is dark and perverse, and it must be met by a can train our long, queer gazes on Pulp Fiction’s use of the medieval rson I eance that is itself ritualized, torturous, dark, and per to understand the film’s concomitant construction of the postmod_ erse.I hi is the realm of the medieval in Pit/p Fiction.’ it isn’t exactly em present. and to open up other options for thinking not only the 3nothcr tow in thF movie in which time is peculiarly flattened out past but the future. In this final chapter 1 play the movie’s idea of the ith 1w the manipulations of narrative and by the drenching of

184 Getting Medieval Coda 8 everything in postwar cinematic and pop culture references; Marsel Ins’s line about “a pair of pliers and a blow torch” is in fact a• direct quotation from the 1973 cult gangster movie /iarZev h, “: •‘i 1 n::l Varrick,9 The 1ff iii, - medieval, rather, is the space of the rejects—realiy the abjects—of this world, Despite the New York Jmes’s liberal claim that the film is “completely and amicably integrated,” we can see what must be eliminated: sodomy, rç sadomasochism southerners)° Even the status of -.:cionv: ‘p ob.:o’-. !‘h’ C,L - of black men is degraded by this scene, L, not Lo’e: p despite the fact that it is a • .-: lUflk 1’ ;4!-o!1tc:rjpk.- ]r’:ur black man who speaks these lines and who clearly participates in the process of abjecting those -, country pemlerts. At the end of this se jOL, J..i- iiT ‘‘ quence we’re left with the vision of the triumphant Butch, roaring —n iol’ic’ lai;tliabi di’a..tu’iinL. S ‘d’.:’v i away on the Harley owned by the homo whose medieval torture is both ‘-,i’e,cr-.rt’d aid ,it —ane tinr cit-tle -:‘c! j::t

being planned — white hypermasculine Butch, drawing on the sexu ‘0 .!‘. ally powerful look of a 1 , macho - - gay man but whose ass, we know for • i’t ,,- sure now, is straight. male, modern. in nh,l(- D’ n JIlL. u, mote preeJ’v. in nw n i:tcnne We might well have wondered about Butch’s butthole. The film -nd’:: tIn ‘ucran-i sorac ird heq;aath. ol rIa oat’ be

plants the doubt itself. in a 5-. - scene at least ‘— one critic found gratuitous, ni_ -- ,‘:i- the dream that chronologically begins his story, Butch recalls that as lIe ‘“c -Ic i’. L ‘.‘::qL. - a young boy he was visited by a Vietnam War buddy of his father’s.’ i--ar i:uc ‘,b-e’,siu aie-:l in hn:jr’c,’ fim (intl diu the Captain Koons, played by Christopher Walken, tells the young Butch SdI’e’iplW- Re (all J-’u. : nd hi—. hr p’ in /cr the story of the gold watch that he is now delivering from Butch’s —‘ dead father, who didn’t make it out - of “that Hanoi pit of hell” (67). 0 t: ii’ 0 ‘rC ddt)LI ‘i IT1 - “)r .I iii I am always interested in what seems gratuitous in a narrative, since i”.err-,’r J)og. the ‘i bole Rutcl’ cpisode umle-ri k0 10 these are the things that, for some reason, the author simply cannot u’ of rh am’4 We a’i.tht c:h this pioe” Dr reet leave out. What we get here is not just a “gross-out . anecdote” (Janet Maslin or a lousy “joke” (Anthony Lane); the anatomy, 0 1. Oj: T_], -J•nj - ‘ as it - • u idila .ale:Ls el a d.-.’ were, of male bonding—the relationship of homosocial and homo n’:a,ihilit, ii’ male bonding i then \:])h-itlV rprcented i’ h sexual male relations in this movie about - - gangsters— is opened to • —uahop hsemeii. as nnflc PSCflSU-li and ‘ rlcu’ rji?C so that view. 1’- u ‘_._I’’,.F I, ri.,1 Y In a deadpan monologue, Captain Koons tells the little (a- I Butch that hr: tale -‘- g1izv, SUtiOfl1\ PUN In p’:.5-ve and feminine. the watch he is being given was his “great ‘a granddaddy’s war watch” I’ equal to tIlt blacK, position heir. Sc:clunl\ N conihntcl ith from the First World War, handed down to his “granddad for good • oh in ;Nuchism. v hich f:ures sexual ‘orinre ‘ an Immisi ikable: per luck” in World War Two, in turn handed down oct to his infant father, I Mi •;rteI a IN rIo - -.e:d; >i at- hit !n: 1’ who grew up to be “shot down over Hanoi” with the watch on his ,ri rum nv pci ersc ‘Ie,irc.5- Butt ‘.w dc •: ni that chuper wrist: “Now he knew if the gooks ever saw the watch it’d be confis iii his- French girlfriend who insists tha I ic gi e her “oral plea— cated. The way your Daddy looked at it, that watch was your birth un-’ hotur: ‘he tines him [ 1) - he can cxcii “lmm!pl a hot l1O. a right. And he’d be damned if any slopeheads were gonna put their ipt p- ItlOmfi p5-bHku irIs In ‘‘rm : - .-.h0 greasy yella hands on his boy’s birthright. So he hid it in the one c cai, ox ike a Castor iag. ad be-ause 1 the—u reprc-.enta: - anal

i86 Getting Medieval Coda 1g7 Iready

strategies the audience can st//I rest assured that his straitht mascu unity is unthreatened.’7 Earlier in the movie, the marriage of queer “love birds”—the Three Stooges—is broadcast on a v that Lance the drug dealer is watching (“Hold hands, you love hirdv” we hear); but that queer parody is comfortingly replaced by the real thing now:

as the final stage directions for , _, this episode read. “the two lovebirds I - [Butch and Fabian PEEL [sic] AWAY” ‘: @cr. iii) on the chopper. rd ‘:“ . ‘} ‘i ir’ ‘-: h This anal surveillance - tit: - —‘ project makes sense, too, of the fact that --‘ i

John Travolra, as Vincent Vega. spends so much . time on the toilet in -.. N

this movie. He misses out on crucial - .on tIlt action twice when he goes to I ‘ i hr radie,r’al. edprr “take a shit” (and once when he “take[s] a piss”). This is part of the film’s anal project: it . is trying to reassure the (putatively straight) S . tgi ‘k”- i.- iu - I it, I, - . audience by this reminder that anuses are fit,. used for shitting. But that cdi.’- al i eu jOk” mut : v hs ii’ une ‘1’s fact might not turn out to be ‘ 1 so reassuring, after all,’8 Vince’s 1 -- time ‘ P in the toilet has been not only — useful -. but - c’’:0l pleasurable -. he daIlies in -- JI till. dii J, t’d a leisurely read of an action novel at Butch’s apartment — and thus 1),iit. stia’lu’es. clIcrii-”-’ m.elrriiiit. it tl;

its distinction -,‘ from another - -. :- pleasurable use of the anus has become 1;;.• ,‘‘ blurred. Shitting is problematic in this i -. movie, as Sharon Willis . i. lft - ‘ (. has 0 .. --an ma shown; just as little Butch’s father is said I to have died of it, Vince -g time— -ire plicit car It ihc t:!m, tilt1. It is .10 !nl himself must - - be eliminated. He is blown tj tirinof iniil -‘ii’ apart by Butch, the film’s h :1’’ -i:a- ‘i - representation of the triumph of homo/hetero • - - distinction, • -- 13 . hr ‘I .tRc’ • J pnotR Ho- it )fl. 00 ige Homosexual sex is a constant possibility between of a5 puts I”, men, Tarantino’s ‘, jt -‘i rh ‘laluls- --:m Jlailcc winE he

movies affirm. In major and minor ‘ HY moments throughout Pulp Fic It’ -, ‘k’i7: 10! tion the possibility of homosex mind is raised in - is (r ‘s an attempt to manage a”[. b ii h- Xc itt:, PCt it—to distance and foreclose it. The attempt to . in \ lnmC construct straight o ‘5’ i. hHelfi’i.m o ci which he -tncl white maleness and armor -. its body is thorough: men’s bodies, black :i- fl’ ‘i 1 0: 1 kno u: h, he ii 1 and white, must remain on guard against iCi11b ‘.i’ the possibilities of plea --‘i. . . nIlt u. jet. ‘.‘ h blu’- ,i surable opening)9 But by the end of the . film, one black man s v.t mdcc ha” been playing in has . ii that h - : ole it exacrlv,

- - been “fuck[ed] . . . like a bitch” ‘ ‘ boo’ (as Jules puts it, referring to another ‘ i,’ :; --L Hii l ecnid worry situation [24]); the “armour” of Vince’s and Jules’s black suits, as 1 nonl wtcrc ianeahili’s jolt in lem elvc means that Tarantino said in an interview, has been completely stripped off and he through ith this aefing arid this e hole world. \s

turned into “the exact antithesis—volleyball ni wear”;2° and Vince is a - -in ,tLntldlI\ ha h-.’n 1uared in the lost cause in the project of constructing masculinity. tic ii o. ai mdci the th ‘‘ Ln’ 1 it turns out. he preft . is lie “a rc at end. e,o neither Vince nor Jules can finally survive in this world in which any ml pits mc lIen lit wants mc ro C’ (14. enmhasis added). 1ulu

play with open and shut, ciearcut, and stable and Iliu’o mmic distinctions proceeds to up’ . ‘c a. this p 11’. the fl’ according to an all_too_predictable straight white male agenda. rk in : c b.c arid st’h pLguec’ b hs hitman pal) su’gest’. The medieval signals all the abjected Others of this world of Pu/p in break ln1es trie” t. make isn’t going to he clean. urther Fiction, But as with - all such - ‘ abjection, the ‘ - - ‘;ifl1 -+ ‘ile. oHi. 1’l medieval inheres in the -- c a.

188 Getting Medieval (tick, i5 notes. the “resident black male preacher/philosopher death_dealing ht e re c rc resenta’ofl t r mammified intellectuaL” thus enlightened, doesn’t have anywhere to go: Vince makes seque it clear that Jules will he a bum if he quits.2 p b t’. a ill te’ I a narra it Jules’s is not the only response to the impossibility of true identity, 1 1 / of course, to simulation and roles, in this movie whose deepest (and x t bacu n rmai’ Ba d d5 ill -till be made most expensive) visual delight is the simulation of a simulated fifties diner in nineties L.A. The film revels in role_playing so deeply that n tie bl k man will SI 11 be a just barely visible its own actors refer to their earlier roles: John Travoita’s dancing the ‘t a.d i a a twist and Christopher homosexual, Walken’s POW monologue are the most obvi [ j nd a hi b’ke court s. of a dead ous examples. But it is crucial to remember that shaping all this rev- tr n jue nomoun go ‘ic ad. cling is the film’s desire to limit what, exactly. can be performed and n r a d th s wil’ n’n t represent authen by whom—which roles or positions can be taken up as empower to a ped-u dom nant ultur —the ru tu e n and of t i fi ing and which ones cannot be. This is an agenda that has used Jules o de o ‘t a t i 1 e r h revels in b it to articulate its own desire for authenticity, for the solid ground of sr all gett ng mcdi xa I being. Dennis Cooper has remarked on Tarantino’s “fascination with the amoral,” a fascination that is itself “moralistic.” 22 But couldn’t Pulp Fiction, then, for all the obviousness of its ass- h alt dl hole narrative, for all its joy in cross-race male homosociality, be pointing out and critiquing homophohia? Couldn’t it be critiquing 1 a d 1’ the way homophohia dissolves even racial boundaries in its corrosive or tr n endent. ssentlal id ntitv. th dense cluster of patriarchal politics? Butch cannot leave the black man “in a situation n ani 1 q .i r a i like that”; sodomy is the worst thing, bar no explosive violence, in the at n Tarant no s s tu,ated-coioi, no grain handling of it. world of this movie. Isn’t Tarantino showing how absurd an attitude cc pains rdep,it n t this is? Maybe. at times; there is certainly a send-up of Deliverance f u let a teli a in more anahtical and political in this scene.23 But - ‘ t with bell hooks, who has posed these questions - uc a in t cau Ia ar s rv u 1 as well, I contend that it doesn’t finally matter if you read it that way i id n i ox’e an b ok I ontend 1 not hap- or not, if you catch the parody - I di sr or if you don’t: “Yeah, like it’s really - I arttuetat,otonk h smi ie b funny when Butch the hypermasculine phallic white boy—who has dc nes e i h m In h retofthiscodaISh no name that - t means anything. who has no culture to be proud of, 1 e x t x )lume 1 of Fouca alt Hstorj’ and support h look

who ‘. comes straight out of childhood clinging to the anal-retentive t a o Ii f o it’ wor ne ii ation timepiece of patriarchal imperialism—is exposed. Yet exposure does t Fou ault practce of the 1iisto of sexuahty in volume i hae nothing to intervene on this evil, it merely graphically highlights dvo i ri lm bt touo it.”’4 Jules. she points Out further, is not shown “grieving or seek me i er b ca se it has had the most Impact on lesbian and gay ing revenge” for cr0 Vince when he is killed: so much for enduring male CIa Fu slm uthmd i bonding. And if it is a twist on the usual scenario that this black man rs of ,eh rmulating his Hbtor o[Sexualzty; and yet as I shal is not eliminated, no place it th t n r to which he tries to exit will have changed: . h p r si e po ti I n hi al di po on as Sharon Willis remarks more mildly, “we need to entertain the pos clams in volume percis hrough his late thought. I-tic use

190 Getting Medieval Cncl 101 ot — the medieval contradictory, nostalgic, and above all tactical— finds, possibilities for creativit where PuZc lkction has found shin I am walking something of a tightrope through the course of my analysjs here, as I both celebrate Foucanlt’s usefulness and critique aspects of his work. Foucault is not unassailable, a highcuiture club with which i I shall beat pop-culture fictions to a pulp; recalling to us nt -. the racial agenda sodomite ‘i linked to sexuality in Pulp Fiction, for example, Fou n --u the cault i’ I in i - volume uses various, mostly eastern civilizations— “China, d -r liowing Japan, India, o t 2’. ropean Rome, the Arabo-Moslem societies” (c7 [76])— as uni - ii Jv’ .. form. idealized, ci. -, ii -1: n and unproblematically eroticized societies of the ars Lu’dt erotica in order h1t 1,1 ict uric ,Ufl./.Ud a to develop and analyze the concept of the Western II also i,,:t,t,. scientia - sexualis ——a use so troublingly imperialist that yici i’ chco U he disavowed 91 it later.2° What “ienliue’-. cOflflRflt U at. I do want to suggest. though. is that Putp Fiction takes • •; ‘ -, -‘ an easy way out of the labyrinth of cultural problems it maps; it is threatens ahi— - ,4fl’ -.-,.i’c’ c’ :inihuip hat easy at least in part because of its long history—a history -l that in uoc p1 nulL he aim of married cludes such ii I fl . tb-u ut essentializing and abjecting strategies as we have seen in i -lomy in 1v- iii. . ,,fore acts that men this book but which is not inevitable, as Foucault helps us recognize. ‘man (a possibility rarely envi - ii u oth rn’--. . ;nufl it My aim is to understand how the all-too-familiar dynamics of a work ; ..,,nci anyonewith a goat. a pig, I ‘ ‘n worneo ad eacho like Pulp Fiction can and .- be exploded and how—instead of the abjection pertorrnanceeflrge - ese actS - I ai’i ‘1 hr of the past and the inessential, and the longing for pure truth — a o’9’t iii trc to have done them also can postidentitarian - .9 neli ti c -,aid and postmedieval ethos and history can he forged. cit ,ii least, disturbers of the 1, dii it ii - ii iii. the very I shall begin my discussion of Foucault’s use of the medieval with •ngementsmaintaed.33 one of his ‘n n- - mirchcu ni famous claims in volume i of The History ofSexuality, the notorious historical ueanlcL arsmentati0fl, men - of distinction between the sodomite and the homo - cling to this strand sexual. “As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes,” he writes, •,-!t in sexual relations vi:h niw ,,ni’ther and not only did ‘sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was identify themselves as homosexuals, but the acts them nothing more than male_dominated structure of the juridical subject of them.” But in the late nine ii-’ of and continuous with the teenth century. Foucault unless performed in “par maintains, there occurred “an incorporation -. ‘vtre not even visible as sodomy ofperversions and a new specfcation of ina’ivia’uals” (42—43 [58—59], .l.rl igmatiziflg contexts.”34 My argument in this book has emphasis original); and of Lollardy and therefore follows the distinction that Fou— il rart d the pe’asive relation of the discourses cault, as David homosexual, M. Halperin has recently explained, posited in the thUs confirming Goldberg’s viewpoint.35 The service of his sub- larger claims about modernity: “The sodomite had 1 151. i a sexual identity deployed in the process of the been a temporary aberration subjects, and their [on relaps]; the homosexual was now a \ U( in of mi idern individuals (the maHng of species” operations []). Thus the paradoxical but thoroughly Foucauldian IiIItJi i” a crucial argument about the nature and proclamation in Halperin’s “repressive hy earlier, influential essay, “One Hundred ‘ii’ ck rn pi’w.’r, Foucault opposes what he calls the Years of Homosexuality”: not merely to “[A]lthough there have been, in many dif to tns contention that modern power works ferent times and places . . multiply and im . persons who sought sexual contact with ci ,s ---to niock or negate—but to produce sex, to other persons of the same the truth— sex as themselves, it is only within the last if forms of it. Modern power constitutes “sex” as

192 Gettine Medevl Coda 101 which we tell ourselves is taboo—of each individual, Thus sexual, to and in particular homosexual, identity (though Foucault does not use rt ‘sin1 ai S t j ib rk this word here). otht if riot to tlemseive ‘pod with otLer ot We can see the applicability of Foucauit’s analysis of modern homo ‘n’J ci ‘ieh ‘c by xua1 i In thi- s soc chapter r e

sexual identity as we consider Pulp Fiction once again. Though the n c od’ by film shows a world of male bonding (in this respect picking up from a m 1 0 Reservozr Dogs. in which there are no major female characters, as well “not a least in the P e’:’’ oniusto’s) d ntified sblx as from True Romance and IVdtural Born Killers, in which the female ‘1 e as a group or b\ a specifiL d re n other o ds sic

characters are not terribly nuanced),36 sexual relations between men ri o ‘the omi th ork.’ me oe cannot be acknowledged as an inevitable part of the structure of that society. Thus Mr. Wolf. having detailed and begun to implement a n 1hat gender dissa merr invi i to ucau ana y plan to clean up a particularly bloody mess, warns everybody not moment. For now we must allow that it may bc indeed to congratulate each other too soon: “[L]et’s not start suckin’ each ton of the kind of claims Fo icault makes in ti h totroduc other’s dicks quite yet” (134), he sneers, the scorn in his statement e 0 0 ‘ol n ‘i’ on

making it clear that only homos would stop to enjoy this point, taking bet n u 1 a and al de it e ft pleasure when it should not be taken. Homosexual relations are on the his pa age to he juridical subject of ancient ci ii or canon’ horizon of male bonding. but must be kept there. A divide must be he thus mp]ving th’ir °ne particular disurcise formation is erected and anxiously maintained; on the one side are homosexuals, h ilk n ab at th mo a lpe i as p0 ed 0 those whose same-sex desires are at the center of their identities; on t a itt1 n tu t the other are straight men, whose absence of homosexual desire and t ‘ ialifi .g’ male-male ‘x, ag inst which h p1ass he mo aggressive gender style define their identities. The fact that Marselius carslv stale” of doing so ( ia tic construcdon of a modem has participated in even forced homosexual sex acts must be hidden al ‘d itita) oucault doos nor stat her’ hat premoder forever: “[Djon’t tell nobody about this” (io8), he orders Butch, lest dn avmd on in’ p disc he be thought a fairy. n e p r cul eho e I st I or s I j ti Foucault’s contrast between the sodomite and the homosexual has ,‘(,S sil0 pertornsed them ‘ Halpenin cxpIa1n’ H mor simply. had a big impact on scholarly work on sexuality. it has been taken aflv mggests here that premodern ways of ‘regulating nd as a dictum, and scholars of early and late periods have taken up and in al I iff om de as sal run with it, analyzing what, exactly, sexual identity is, how it is con 98 ml w n Imagun in hich mos uahty I stituted anti manifested, whether or nor one can indeed talk about ed and jerences to ti c Middle Ae are parsued. oucault sexuality as a constructed core of identity in premodern times, When ,i ‘tarkl drawn opposition between sexual acts and sexual the assertion about the sodomite • wit has been taken to imply something ‘ C tainlv v that time Halperin contend. and about the entire premodern Western sexual landscape, the dictum tiullyin h it volumsofth Hi oryof e ulity has been used to authorize reductive and ignorant views of sex in t’ u had ted waa I om contr sting odom and homos u the Middle Ages. In fact, as we have seen in this book, any stark his exual practices and categories of individuals, and toward what torical opposition between the categories of premodern subjects of I 13 iO has summaftzed a “defining diffment historical forms of sodomitical acts, on the one hand, and modern people who are iden en e—d ren ways of being, duff nt 1 1 tified on the basis of sexual preference, on the other, is wrong: that othe nd t on se diff t ar ulation of le r a d is, it is clear from a number of different kinds of premodern sources •n’ o, different forms of consciousness

iq, Gettintt Medieval Coda tos But a sharp contrast between acts and identities is drawn, and that ieint in “history” difficult to ascertain. But, as he put it in an opposition, however heuristic, is deployed for certain ef’ects in the iw about volume i: “I am well aware that I have never writ particular paragraph in volume i, in the whole volume, and in the hing but fictions. . . . One ‘fictions’ history on the basis of a later work.4° However Foucault might have changed his mind about f reality that makes it true, one ‘fictions’ a politics not yet in the history of sexuality, a contrast between acts and identities pro Lc: on the basis of a historical truth,” 42 vides something of a structuring principle for Foucault’s thinking istory ofSexuality, volume i, offers a vision of a future poli about history—and about the future, Foucault in volume i evinces on a politically “fictioned” “true” past. And as opposed to a particular desire for a premodern realm of (as he sees it) clearly i desire in Pulp Fiction, at the base of Foucault’s “fictioned” apprehensible sexual acts as opposed to the hypocritical and surrep s is the inessential identity of its author. Foucault suggests in titious world of modern sexual identities, I want to look more closely or introduction—this one to The Archaeology ofKnowledge— at volume i to see, first, what kind of history this is. We can then dim s writing is a kind of performance, whose gaps and lapses seek cern carefully what the medieval is for Foucault, and understand the ssolution of his own identity. This introduction clarifies Fou kind of liberatory potential that is offered by a realm of acts without s relation to historical markers: he uses them strategically to essential identities — in contrast to the fear of such a realm and the space (“this blank space from which I speak”) for his own desire for true being in Pulp Fiction, t.43 How, exactly, he uses the conventionally delineated Middle In looking at Foucault’s deployment of the Middle Ages, we must his project of disaggregating identity is the issue to which I

— keep in mind if it has been forgotten over the course of this book — %trn. that he refuses to write “history” as it has been traditionally formu olume i Foucault posits (by using conventional markers) two lated. In briefdiscussions of Foucault’s treatment of the Middle Ages, historical “ruptures,” shifts in the history of sexuality mapped, what Pierre Payer has not acknowledged, and what Anne Clark Bart puts it, as the history of “mechanisms of repression”: one in lett has, is Foucault’s crucial and thorough assertions of his projects’ eventeenth century, one in the twentieth: “The first . . . was difference from “history.” From Madness and Civilifation (1961) acterized by the advent of the great prohibitions, the exclusive through The Order of Things (1966), The Archaeology ofKnowledge ‘rn of adult marital sexuality, the imperatives of decency, the (1969), and “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), to The History of atory concealment of the body, the reduction to silence and Sexuality (1976—84), he resists the search for determinative origins tory reticences [pudeurs itnpérativesj of language. The sec and “the discourse of the continuous,”4’ Yet what makes this antihis was really less a rupture than an infiexion of the curve: this torical perspective difficult to keep in mind is the fact that Foucault be moment when the mechanisms of repression were seen as has also chosen to retain some markers placed by very conventional aing to loosen their grip [se desserrer]” (iii [152]). “The chro history, such as “medieval,” “modern,” and “the rise of the bour y of the techniques [of repression] themselves,” he notes with geoisie” (not to mention eras defined by centuries); he retains as well rteristically broad stroke,” “goes back a long way [remonte some concepts that derive from totalizing historical analyses (“capi more precise, he goes on: “Their point of .“ Making this dating tal,” for one), and some dates that are often taken by conventional sation must be sought in the penitential practices of medieval historians as watersheds or as moments of origin (1215, for example, ristianity, or rather in the dual series” of changes imposed by the the date of the Fourth Lateran Council). That he employs these con rth Lateran Council of 1215 and then by devotional practices of ventionally accepted historical concepts in his discussion of the re ‘rteenth century (ii—i6 [i53]).We might ask, for starters, what pressive hypothesis — that is, that he critiques, via conventional his o Foucault makes in adhering to a paradigm of ruptures and pen torical markers, a conventional historical story that we moderns tell , particularly since the points of rupture seem so constantly ourselves, a story that he says is not the whole truth (H)—makes his red, so labyrinthine (note the “or rather” in this passage, and such

iq6 Gettintt Medieval 107 revisonsthrouhout the heox:. This is the whole (ruptured style c ral ou vp nt tu his pes oc use of his xietzschean model of efThctive history, But it might also be icr, h cr fiddle -\.g r h read as its;elf having a specific rhetorical effect: perhaps it affords s neaT )Vt him what early in volume i he calls “the speaker’s benefit [le béné r Ii a flee de locuteurj” (6 [13]): the verbal act of speaking of a time before h 1 ‘a “the great prohibitions” puts the speaker prophetically outside of or hIt 00 fferei (n p n beyond them, and thus “anticipates the coming freedom [Ia liherté ific field exualit ( bi— 4]). nas a ffwre]” (6 [is]). Foucault’s analysis of the discourse of liberation (the P “ocs o a markedly unitam” discourse “un dir- ruse of the repressive hypothesis) can he applied to his own use of t a zitaire”) around ‘the theme of the flesh and the the Middle Ages in “a discourse that combines the fervor of knowl a uniforrntty that was “broken apart” (“dicorn edge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the tly [46]) t this point I hear something like a garden ot earthly delights [lejara’in espérides deuces]” ( [id]). I shall ing Fo ul ‘s historical song. pick up on such longed-for past delights in a moment. ‘en mo audible in the claim that “[ljittle by But notice first what role the medieval period plays in this pas of estions formulated by the confession sage about the two major historical ruptures: it is the time period in le Ag a good number of those still in use which techniques of modern subjectivation took form .Specifically, century as veiled” (i8 [27]). Foucault argues the medieval is the time in which, after 1215. the obliLTation of annual ‘r ‘tion of earl modern confessors was advised so confession began the process of putting of sex into discourse (a pro i I uld be articulated: no longer was there, as he puts cess completed by the seventeenth century [20 (29)]). The Middle ci scription of the respective positions of the partners. Ages here are the rime of rue seeds of modern “men’s subjection ned. gestures, places touched, caresses, the precise [I’assujettissement des hommes]: their constitution as subjects in both an entire painstaking review of the sexual act senses of the word” (6c [8i]); “Since the Middle Ages at least,” Fou (i [27]). In his style that mimes the rhythms cault contends (8 [78]), confession has been a mainstay of such sub s ion itself, Foucault seems here to assert that jection; the Christian pastoral made sex an “enigma,” creating “mod as able to record so precisely as itself to mime ern societies” who speak and exploit sex as “the secret” ( [48—49]). unfolding [dans son operation mbme]” (27). Further, Foucault claims that modern power’s suppression of its own pin don the historical value or even the place in actual multiplicity originated in the Middle Ages (86 [114—Ic]). Even ‘in nt of Fc,’icault’s idealizing assertion here.46 This de if these “beginnings” of modern sexual subjectivity were “surrepti ‘1ume i, which Foucault offers as an accurate account

tious,” they were “long ago ... already making” themselves “felt at r (the beginning of the proliferative modern pro the time of the Christian pastoral of the flesh” (i6 [206])— already nw discourse) sounds much like the mocking long in evidence before the sixteenth century. pres e hypothesis that opens the volume: “it Thus there is a powerful and continuous use of the Middle Ages in he writes in the opening, that the beginning of volume i as the site of the beginnings of modern sexual subject for tur as still “a time of direct gestures, shame mation. We have seen in relation to John/Eleanor Rykener in chap open transgressions, when anatomies were shown ter 2 at least one potential context in which this analysis of putting 1d at will, and knowing children hung about amid the sex into discourse is right on target. I am not going to evaluate fur ci Its: it was a period when bodies ‘made a display of ther Foucault’s particular claims about the institution of confession s this time of direct gestures, easy contact between here; my intent is only to present his general claims about periodiza ad aked dascr tions of nakedness a rhetorical effect or

i-,X Gpttino Mp,-li,’vil Coda ioo genealogical-historical fact? (More generally, and hearkening hack -‘ prem

-.,.,, . - •‘. - .1 41jr.- -, I - .\ ,. to my earlier observation about the repressive hypothesis: is this re - c- a pressive hypothesis a story Foucault must tell to produce a certain i ‘‘i;’ i 11.. lI-c ,( t’_ i_i! ‘ ‘-1 ;l- modernity, or one he believes we moderns really believe?) Following i “:‘. -‘:- .- “c- -- his comments on politics, fictioning, and history, I think both propo l’.rnin sitions are true: the Middle Ages plays a role in the history of sexu rn, ;_ ‘‘,‘ k’Ii-nr,.i( ea ;‘teiews, ality formulated around the mechanisms of repression — the period works bar his effective history, he deploys it for certain effects and a mab ‘ as on the cud’, a n’printable surface he believes, or at least desires, that it really was like that. am,rakenlv rcdiuceu to mere nostalgia—for a Now it may well be that these two perspectives on the Middle :.1;eauble acts md legible surfaces. In DiscsZine Ages— seen as a period that produces our modernity, and as a period modern offender’s acts were clearly motivated by quite separate and different from our own—are conceptually coher icault writes, while the delinquent’s in

ent, part of a whole genealogical approach to the modern subject.The is. -, vLncies. character” muddy the surface.9’ demonstration of modern contingency traces the forces that produce \ H’\ uked in the 1980 Introduction to Hercuime us and at the same time suggests that we can be different in the future mtlc body is clearly legible. not clouded over because we were not always like this. But I do not want to harmonize inturpretation.’ At the beginning of The His- these two strains completely and thus elide not only the obviously the scene opens on “this bright day [ceplein tactical use of the Middle Ages in volume i but also—crucially—the displayed and accessible, on the surface and desire that emerges from this contradictory history, Central to dis 1.11101 Md at the end of volume i, Foucault calls for a cerning the value of this double position is in fact that nostalgic tone; Ci modern “sexuality” and its “fictitious unity” various critics have noted an idealization and have assigned vary itinter the nps of power with the claims of bodies. ing importance to it. Medievalists have always taken exception to a ,\nu- -t dges ‘ 1208])—calls, as Leo Bersani puts Middle Ages that functions “as a lost and golden age,” as Bartlett puts lt utd i’, a surface of multiple sources of it, yet I don t want to discard utopianism altogether48 The utopian on he cable and apparent, on the the elegiac, what 1 have been calling the nostalgic. functions as part mmedic\ : it e\ . ‘ s mnds “prediscursive.” as of a serious ethical and aesthetic vision of the present and the future: a a int nE. ckspit oucault’s “officiai” line that (as she view of political reality informs Foucault’s historical pronouncement no -cx’ in itself” --- and certainly no bod —“which about the sodomite and the homosexual, and, in turn, the historical d b’ ;mplU\ interactions of discourse and power.” pronouncement allows Foucault to fiction a future politics. YE I adiscursh e reinvention project has as its basis “de Foucault has insisted that he does not study historically distant I ucault put it in an interview at about the time periods in order to find an alternative to the present: “I am not look publicatun: a reinvention “with the body. with its dc ing for an alternative; you can’t find the solution of a problem in -iitces. its culLimes, its depths, [of] a nondisciplinary the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other ia’ of body in a volatile and diffuse state given to people.” Indeed, he maintains, “T]here is no exemplary value in a ‘ne’rs and incalculable pleasures” not centered on geni—

I -Ic i a Gai savoir,” that period which is not our period. . . it is not anything to get back to”;49 [ ,uai 1978 interview, “Le and yet genealogical analysis, he suggests, can be useful in showing c-ieuunters there is “an exceptional possibility us that, and perhaps how, such a “fictitious unity” as modern sexuality zati n. of clesubjection. perhaps not the most radical note of. vol. I, 154 [204]) can be broken apart and reconfigured. Foucault uses i-.c ‘.u hientlv intense to be worth taking

-‘nfl (pttn Mp,-lava1 Coda 20i It’s not the affirmation of identity that’s important, it’s the afflrma i.lcer already in his heart” (King James Version); the act, that is, don of nonddentity”: the act, the surface, and the loss of identity are •i.i:eady taken place even before the act has occurred. This is a de linked6 The body is turned inside out; its depths become surfaces; iction of the act pursued with moral vigor by patristic writers this body is “diffuse,” “exploding,” and without the old hierarchical ias Saint Augustine and Saint Jerome6° What we see in the act, conceptualizations of internal drives and impulseu57 •.i “concrete realization” (2: 63 []), on the surface, does not nec In the later volumes of Tile Histoiy of Sexuality as well as in late fi.iy indicate—and certainly does not exhaust—its meaning or discussions in the gay press, Foucault’s emphasis on becoming rather tion in social context. We only have to recall the intense anti than on being, performance rather than ontology, is marked; in study ird polemics on the Eucharist to appreciate that in the Middle ing the “arts of existence” in volume 2, for example, Foucault clarifies o (as in any other time) what you see is not necessarily what you that he means “those intentional and voluntary actions by which men remember Roger Dymmok’s argument that inner change is not not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform iays accompanied by outer change. And Foucault, ever suspicious themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make he ways modern power can infuse and saturate the body from the their life into an oeuvre” (2: 10—Il [i6]). And in a 1981 interview, he ior, would not presume that a visible surface at any time is a re insists, “[W]e have to work at becoming homosexuals and not be ob Le indicator of meaning or function; indeed, who would stinate in recognizing that we are”58 Finally, recalling to us the very c be historiographical tools, then, and not mere heuristic devices, different treatments we have seen in the other visions of the medd o “category of forbidden acts” and the concomitant “juridical sub eval, Foucault happily links such an actmcentered disposition against t of them” must be supplemented in order to accommodate (among depth to sadomasochism in a 1982 interview: “I think that s/M. [is] :her things) differences in social context and empowerment among the real creation ofnew possibilities of pleasure. The idea that s/M ch subjects. The mechanisms of the premodern codes’ prohibi is related to a deep violence, that s/M practice is a way of liberating cc functioning—exactly how these civil and canon laws worked to this violence, this aggression, is stupiff” And in the same interview, ;ulate specific communities—need further analysis; such mecha

he links s/M to the “strategic game” of medieval” ‘courtly love’ “ matter because (for one reason) these codes clearly had dif But the valorization of surfaces and thus clearly apprehensible acts xent relations to male and to female perpetrators of sodomy. In needs to be considered carefully. “Acts” of course cannot be imag ie case of the 1270 legislation of Orleans that I cited above, for cx med to be immediately selfapparent. Foucault, genealogist, certainly nple, female sodomites were mentioned but not really envisioned is not suggesting that they are, Earlier, in Discpline and Punish, he it all (their punishment makes little practical sense, as I pointed out suggests that the modern penal state itself problematizes the notion chapter I), whereas males definitely were; the law therefore has of a proven and punishable act (19 [27]). At specific moments in i different evidentiary status in relation to male sodomites from the volume i, too (elaborated in volume 2 [eg, 92 (106—7)]), Foucault cc it has to female sodomites. More generally, any historical ob makes perfectly clear the complexities of judging acts, especially in servation that depends on an understanding of legal codes or even the Christian tradition. In his discussion of the expansion of the scope nore broadly, some category of “acts,” must register the fact that of confession in volume i, for example, he notes that an “evolution historically women’s acts are not recorded and not codified as fully as tended to make the flesh into the root of all evil, shifting the most im men’s because women don’t act in public spheres as do men, and thus portant moment of transgression from the act itself to the stirrings— women tend to be regulated differently. The Twelve donclusions oft/Ic so difficult to perceive and formulate—of desire” (19—20 [28]). I as Lollards makes this point, as we have seen. I argued in chapter I that sume that the biblical precedent for this shift is Matthew p28, Christ’s the Eleventh Conclusion makes a very different kind of accusation warning in his Sermon on the Mount: “But I say unto you, That who about women than the Third Conclusion makes about men; a con soever looketh on a woman to lust after her bath committed adultery cept of gender, the secondariness and perversion of femininity itself,

202 Getting Medieval Coda zo informs the indictments of female sexual behaviors in the Eleventh kn.’t what it used to be. Foucault, tactical, forward-looking Conclusion. Acts are not separable from gender categories; acts have .fhat, is fictioning history on the basis of a political reality values and effects that differ as they are practiced by different people it true, in order that he can fiction a politics not yet in and in different contexts. As feminist scholars have continually in Sexual identity now is constructed as truth, so that only in sisted we ask, “Who can act, when, and under what circumstances?” to modern sexual subjectivation is there any possibility of But as a mere heuristic device, the Foucauldian distinction between or “explosion” of the body into surface. identity and act proved immensely fruitful in queer political organiz ht.rast to the medieval in Pulp Fiction, then, that space of ab otherness—the space where sodomy, sadomasochism, ing in the United States. The importance of volume i for queer activist nd nness, and blackness get dumped in the creation of a unified practice in the late 19805 and early 19905 was immense: Halperin ob

masculinity — the Middle Ages Foucault most deeply serves in Saint Foucault, on the basis of an “unsystematic” 1990 sur ..ywhite vey of people active in ACT UP/New York in the late eighties, that *is a time whose lack of unified sexuality is preferable to the “the single most important intellectual source of political inspiration tnith its “fictitious unity” of normative heterosexuality, a is not to be feared but can for the for contemporary AIDS activists—at least for the more theoretically- .ose sexual disaggregation potential. “There is a creation minded or better-outfitted among them” was volume i of the His o offer a creative, even liberatory, toty ofSexuality6’ Just as an analytical model of sex acts challenges rchy within the body,” Foucault comments in a 1975 interview models of identity, so does a model of political acts: current queer re .sting such disaggregation, “where its hierarchies, its localiza sistance to identity politics is informed by an acts-centered model of and designations, its organicity, if you will, are in the process coalition politics (such as I outlined in chapter ) that picks up on Fou .ntegrating. This is something ‘unnameable,’ ‘useless,’ out- cault’s preference for acts. Such an acts-centered model is politically of all the programs of desire. It is the body made totally plastic efficacious in particular circumstances, countering the persecution of easure: something that opens itself, that tightens, that throbs, beats, that gapes” 63 Here is that prediscursive body gaping wide already marginalized identity-based groups — efficacious when, for ti. example, the concept of “high-risk acts” in AIDS activist discourse counters the phobic, racist, and misogynist concept of “high-risk So when Hayden White analyzes, and goes on to condemn, Fou groups” But queer politics can constantly benefit from feminist tute ..t’s historiography as “all surface,” I can agree with the terms lage, as the connotations of the term “queer” themselves suggest (still the analysis but value them entirely differently64 “Of course,” young, white, and male): who gets to act—and who gets to act up?62 ates Ed Cohen on this late material, “Foucault does not characterize The very concept of self-identical and thus self-apparent acts ap iese new possibilities of pleasure as inherently ‘political’ or ‘resis of the radicalityofanony prehensible via the surface, then, needs to be nuanced in scholarly and ,nt’ “; thus his qualification, for example, nous sexual encounters (quoted above63 But he does place them at in activist practice. Identities maybe constituted by acts — the theory of nonessentialized, performative identity so fully enunciated in Gen o center of any future deliberations of a “homosexual movement” der Trouble has conceptual roots in Foucault’s genealogy of modern bout the organization of a given society The ethos of this disaggregative project underwrites a coalition sexual identity in volume I, and volume i in turn continues to per form the dissolution of essential identity that we saw in the preface politics such as I delineated in relation to queer medieval studies, funding for the humanities, and academic freedom in chapter This to The Archaeology ofKnowledge — but acts are not themselves fully 3. self-identical or self-apparent. From a conventional historicist point view of the fragmented self enables contingent relations with the of view, Foucault’s locating self_apparent acts in the Middle Ages in past, such as we have seen Foucault making in the archive in chap volume I of The History of Sexuality seems both essentializing and ter 2—and, in my introduction, as we have seen Michael Camille and nostalgic. Essentializing it is not, as I have suggested. Furthermore, Roland Barthes make, too—and those relations, I have been argu

ma Getting Medieval Coda 205 ing throughout this book, can be the material not only of selves but of communities, And we can insist that such a project of disaggre gation be specihcaliy infhrmed and iided by feminist analyses and No t e s goals of transforming the “social relations within which sexuality is organized and articulated,” Getting medieval.’ not undertaking brutal private vengeance in a triumphal and unregulated bloodbath, as Marsellus Wallace threat ens in Pulp Fictions and not turning from an impure identity to some solidity iaranteed by God, as Jules is made hopefully to do; but using ideas of the past, creating relations with the past, touching in this way the past in our efforts to build selves and communities now Introduction Touching on the Past and into the future. What could be better, after all, as the Altoids ad orat nd do u te vertising executives obviously knew, than getting medieval on—or el p vi ;io 1 d ptio to b ci d with—your ver breath? ii f this hook: “I ollards mit all’, a term of disapprobation disapprosed them - to base been picked up and used by the iv to follow r of John W0 clii 130 84), philo oph and x o ycl t v conc ned th mong othe thin s

Na as the i1legttirnac ot the established church hierarchs and pris ilege nciuding the church’s material holdings, clerical claims iii mira in th ac ament of the uch t, and dcvi tion horn i was p e ed in he Bible e t o Wychf doc

e odemned as her tical 10 138 . From the i38os through the oi!ards ‘acre found in a relatisely wide range of English society, II’s lo opp itio consoldated again t Loll rd’, during Richa d 9) th fi o Ia d wa b n d fl ro The o i I ye1 of in he fifteenth entur became more decidedly non risto atic. ‘o that the term refers to dissenter whose ideas, though “born” i (a Ann Hod on put it) were not nec sarily entir ly uni orm o t. a ul d scriptm e lie Conce Ofrd iv of h Ii liii (/,u Ii, ed E. iso g ton (Osfo d: 0 ford Press. I9-); for the standard scboiarh work, see Anne Hudson / ma re Rejrinaton: It’,ydzffi ‘ Texti and Loliard H/iron.’ (Oxford: 1 Ti 1988) to who n h chola hip am d ply ndebt d n nglish t an 1 tion are my own unles the se indicated /hn ‘Wirks InstrucnonrjorParich Priest0, ed. Gillis Kristensson (Lund: ‘p 1974). This edition updates the i868 EFT5 edition by Edward Pea Paul 1 by J F nivall in I9 (C o i[Lo don g n i’Ll ncr, 9o2j) My modei ngl h tra lation ar i form d by risson’s glosses. On the genre or religious instruction manuals in the nth through fifteenth centuries, see H. G. Ptander, “Some Mediesal o ligio s In t crion in Ian d Oh i’s non n h er s

1 Jouroalof’Engli Ii an rm Ii lology ( 9 )‘ ,

206 Getting Medieval versv dv s.cveret. of me historians resoonsiote for developing the .standards fiscal ippS y,oss dc-/bated in a a-—nn vote. For fis-cal qqo, both tl.te i-louse (Gary 13. Nash. Charlotte Grahtne, aod Roaa F. Duno, History on ToLL’ and the Senate turned aside efforts to del/md thn LEA. *4; Ce/tare Wtrs and the Teaching ofthe Post [New York: Knopf, t997]), makes Tim Miller and David Romhn, “ ‘Pre-aching to the Converted,’” The 9. r the poiot that “[e]ollege and university historiaos perhaps have the most tt atre Joerno/ 47 (1995): thp—88. Note that the LEA Four ultimately lost in learo from ‘History on Trial.’ Uoless they work closely with schoolteachere::.;i NEd sa Karen Pin/ry. See above, note -72. aod edocatioo officials, history teachiog is likely to suffer enormously. At 5. Letter to the editor, “The MOA and Conservatives,” by Elizabeth best, schoolteachers sviIl proceetl oblivious of current historical research Powers, siLo Newsietisr, 29.2 (Summer t 997): iS. and at wor’ t, in the words of one California educator, ‘history will soon be 96. Heather Findlav, “Queer Dora: Hysteria, Sexual Politics, and Pecan’s as tlead Lati:a in th.e scbc;-ois’ Ne,.c }‘hrh TzMes Pooh Pe:vinv. o Novem ‘intervention on Ransference,’ “ CL of A Joeroo/o[Lesbian and Gas Studies bet town 2V $1. at Note that new rca.n chairman William R. Ferrts’s I ;191J00 $2$—a. esp. 3$, adapts: Laden and Mouffe in, her invigorating dis a lttt%c1 — _cr cession- of’ one-ct c,aalition politics. See Frnestu Laclau and Chantal Moufib, more safet concentrating an ennun on individu.a; families and their rein- tic7t r and a in dt a cff 1’ ads Poe’ ci Ten , Wit rivets to’ arger histurical currents in the United States. trans-.’sVinstnn, Monte and Paul C’amnsack (london: Verse, 198.5). csp. 104--

88. John K. Wilson. “The Acadcnw Nae:alos. Back:’ rev, of Pc Cr,; Po/i s. On r’verdoternsination of a social field, see qS: “The svnsh’alic — i.e.. tc r t,A te F, ‘o F, 9_o sn. ,sverdetermined -—- character of’ social neiatiohs therefore implies that they Tire; Poh$rLs, Pconomics, and the (his/I of/he Hentonidea, cr1. Michael B/rube ack an ultimate literality which would reduce them to necessary moments and Gary Nelson; and 41/er To/itdoi (hrrectness: The Humanities and Society of an immanent law.” ‘Articulation” is “any- practice establishing a relation in the iygpns, ed. Christopher Newfield and Ronald Strickland, Democratic among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articu Ge/tore 4.1 (Spring 1995): 29; Jeffrey Williams, TG Wets: To/ides and Theory latory practice” (to). See also Joshua Gamson, “Mnst Identity Movements in the Acodenss ed. J. Williams, as’ quoted by Wilson, “The Academy,” 29. Self-Destr’act? A Queer Dilemma,” Socioi Problems 42 (1995)-: 390—407, Sp. Rep. Louise Slaughter (L -NeveYork) pointed this out in discussion of for a discussion of the innovations in understanding social mrivements that Rep. Chabot’s 195 amendment and, a. year later, of Rep. Shadegg’s amend t1necr activism and theory can suggest.

‘ ,_‘P , P(I/ no— t_ 7 —, ‘t H— lns’cs( the poInt teas mane agatn :n qcy’ anti agaan 10 sisrlntt e, (in Ferris’s eom nat-nt’s to the F-louse Appro nat tons Snbcnmn,ttte-e- on Interior and Related Coda: Getting Medieval 2s,gyn ciest, cr, Robert ‘C Hanle- and SM Robe-rn. Cesnnor. quoted Isv Paulette STriker jtrPjafrc ,‘ lOt n°a’’ U enn. (apip’tr)cs l-Iuma:nh$es kn,de,u-rnent’s Fund-Raising Lf$orr Starts Snaail,” Ta—an w ‘Up’ n dv 0 p—ns , is C nm — P’ ,‘ rtterences to Pu/p ibenon a-re to th;s screcnpav ;“ set.” before a pad-c ref

91. See abtave, note 72. erence in my text indicates nondialogtie material); it should be n,oted that 92. Campbell, “I-lnnaanities Endowment’s Fund-Raising Rffort Starts there ,are some differences between this published screenplay a-nd the wide- Small,” A43. release movie. 9. The Chahot amendment to defund in 1996 was defeated 145—277, The late Frskine Peters, in a personal communication, suggested that the with p not voting. The Shadegg amendment to increase the NEH 1997 line really sounds like “get me evil on your ass;’ an expression from African budget reduction (to achieve the allegedly agreed-on three-year phase American vernacular, a-nd that Tarantino, “in casting the vernacular from out of the Endowment) was defLated (Gongressiono/Peconi. ao June 1996, the streets onto the page misheard the original and subsequently misrep Pee4—, Pep S,dn V5 es D ‘luto aig too r n ualntvlncet tb resented it.” The screenplay does say “Medieval”; Peters’s suggestion is an it “cVW ii sc s “grv ,st,ltn ‘eauuh i a Is o’bea n interesting one, though, in. that points net tia idrantina’s appropriation rhe tx ‘a patties rearctn “precisely how we is-outni hase out” the Nan o’f black.’ s—crna.cnlar but his- misapprepria’tio-n of it. a p’aint that snpponts H6642)’. The Ghabot amen,dment to defund in fiscal eqS yeas defeated a fuller critique of the film’s racism 1,5cc, fiat an example of snch critique.

s ‘ ear-i — 6—2S UtI ea n tsp Smil ‘ a0’—_n ‘l’ ft’s Hem ,arnn\Xi ‘The F t sos F_i r Pm Rem” a car R-çortt Carolina] and John Ashcroft [R—Missouti]) to do/nod the N LA in F —

292 Notes to Pages typ—t8o Notes to Pages t81--i84 293 a. Todd McCarthy, ‘Put Fiction,” U/tieU/ 23 May tD4, 9; Cour.fi.U If that last is pure coincidence with S r Gay a n and the Green Kntgne, as I Love, interview with Kevin Sessums, “Love Child,” Tandy Fair, June..•.:i•:.i• am certa n it is the othe- thematic similarities I have just enumerated are far io6—i5, 169—71; quotation on to8 (emphasis original): •••*•.from happenstance: they are part and parcel of romance plotting, the con E::..yentions of which are familiar to anyone steeped in American or European Across the living room is the Buddhist altar on which most of Coift *pop culture, The romance narrative genre, as I mentioned in chapter a, has ashes are kept in an open urn....” I wonted his heart. I wanted his heáii :a big ostensible taskS’, to promote some version of heterosexuality against put an oak in it. I was going fucking medieval,” •ali odds. For an elaboration of this analysis of Gawain in relation to Fulp “An oak?” I ask, Fiction, see my “Getting Medieval: Fulp Fiction, Gawain, Fnucault,” in The “Yeah, I wanted to plant an oak in it and have it grow. It’s an old S Rook and the Rody, ed. .Dolores W. Frese and Katherine O’Bi’en O’Keeffe tradition,” (Noire Dame: Univ. of Norre Dame Press, 1997), 116—63. Tarantino’s earlier work in Reservoir Dogs “spoke to Kurt Cobainl:.Q:* 7. Richard Corliss, “Saturday Night Fever,” Time, 6 June ‘994, 73. cording to another Taniry Fair article quoted by J. Hoberman in “•P.E * S. LiLivres dejosdce erdepler, 18.24.22, specifies this law from the legal and Glory,” Village Vice, n October 1994, 6t, 75 [at 6i]). Cobain thaU/ school of Orleans, c. ian: see reference above, chapter i, n. 117, and n. 4I Tarantino in the liner notes to Nirvana’s In Ueero, for discussion of secular punishments for sodomy in late medieval En 3. “Idol Threats: Bastards!’”Film Threat 20 (February 1995): 20, * gland. For discussion of sodomy and other sexual legislation throughout 4. My own place of employment at the time was imphcated, as the Western medieval period, see Louis Crompton, “The Myth of Les magaxine reported, “Berkeley, long thought of as a peacenik kind of pdy bian Impunity’. Capital Laws from 1270 tO 1791,” Hfrtorfral Ferpecrives on got medieval last week as the BIG GAME, the yearly clash with Stanfob. Homosexuality, spec. issue of Jaurnal of Homosexuality 6.i—a (1980— 8i): got ugly” (Time, 8 December 1997, us). n—a5, esp. i; John Boswell, U/rfrtianfry, Social Tolerance, and Homosexu

ality James c. One reason — obvious enough that I take it for granted in this disf( (Chicago: Unix of Chicago Press, 1980); Brundage, Law, Sex, and hrfreian Society A Medieval sion — is that its use in the film fits into an existing range of connotat.i& Furtpe (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, in the United States and in Europe of “medieval:’ See Fred C, Robin 1987). Death by sword had been recommended by Justinian in his ca intentionally humorous yet nonetheless troubled presidential address.:) * Instfrutions, and death in his two later constitutions on the subject, while the F edieval Academy in 1984, “Medieval, the Middle Ages:’ Speculum:.* * literary sources of the period state that castration was the punishment; (1984): 745—56, for a delineation of the term’s pejorative meanings, amOi * burning was recommended by Valentinian, Arcadius, and Theodosius (390 them “outmoded,” “hopelessly antiquated,” “tyrannical,” and simply “evil cv) and the Theodosian Code of 438, which was picked up in the West by especially when torture and warfare are concerned, For excellent discus??? Alaric II in n6; see Eva Cantarella, Rfrexualiev in the Ancient World (New of the development of “the ideological function of ‘middle ages,’” expih Haven: FOe Univ. Press, 1992), 173—86. These laws suggest punishments itly taking up and fllhng in Robinson’s account, see Pat Rogers, Tkoi??::; that endured through at least the high Middle Ages in the West. Thanks to Warton and the Waxing of the Middle Ages:’ in Medieval Literature t David Greenberg on the asanuxv Internet list for these references, Antiquities: Studies in Honour ofhosil cotrle, ed Myra Stokes and T, L. Ru 9. Dir. Don Siegel, Universal Pictures, 1973. I thank Alfred Arteaga for ton (Cambridge: D, S. Brewer, 1987), 175—86. ibis bit of cinematic lore. 6, The Arthufian chivalric romance is a genre that has a lot in comsii in, Janet Maslin, “Quenrin Taranrino’s Wild Ride on Life’s Dangerous with the gangster crime genre for which Tarantino has become famct( Road’ New York Time, 23 September 1994, Ci, C34, at C34. After all, what is more Arthurian than Fulp Fiction’s gangsters, dressed*.: ii. Anthony Lane, “Degrees of Cool,” Mw Yorker, in October I994, their black suits of “armor:’ performing tasks for a central lord, hondbi* 95—97, at 96. Note that Roger Avary contributed the story of “The Gold brothers, going off alone on adventures, splattering blood and gore, fad? Watch” sequence, though Tarantino adapted the Avary ?cript and wrote death? What is more Arthurian than a watch-amulet, symbol of fiercefili the monologues; see Jeff Dawson, Quendn Tarandno,’ The Cinema of Cool loyalty? Than a mi. tress from a far-off land? Than riding off on a sui (New York: Applause, i995), 143—46. .4: is. looked-after animal, a “hog”? Than names that are full of descriptive Note, too, that another intertextual reference — to Air Force, a I943

nificance? What is more Arrhurian than being seduced by the lord’s w Howard Hawks film — underlines the anal theme in this monologue. (A while he is away? Than a solitary debate of issues of loyalty to one’s 1ôn Howard Hawks film festival was playing in Amsterdam while Tarantino Than having a character central to the narrative with a nick on his neck? was there writing the FuIp Fiction screenplay.) Captain Koons recalls here

294 Notes to Page 184 Notes to Pages 18c—i87 aqc that the watch was given by Bntch’s granddad nn Wake Island to “a g:d.. cool with the subject: ‘I really think so, actually.’ “Steve Warren, “Gay ‘Top ncr on an Air Force transport named Winocki” —John Garfield, that k.: Gun’? .A Thik with Tarantino,” San Francisco Sentinel, ta October 1994, the t943 movie, who rigs a machine gnn in the tail of the Bw7 they call.:ii In Lisa Kennedy’s “Natural Burn Filmmaker: Quentin TOrantino Versus McryJane. Thanks to Frank Grady, who pointed this reference out to ix. the Film Geeks” (Village bAre, a October 1994, 29—32), her pal “the Girl as he put it, “Boy, are the Japanese Zeros surprised” Pup” puts another hypothesis more baldly: “‘What he wants is a big black See Willis, “The Fathers Watch the Boys’ Room,” for an analysis of •ti man to fuck him up the ass!’ Well, she’s frank if nothing else, and for her a thematics of skit in three of Tarantino’s screenplays (Reservoir Dogs, m...: guy wanting it up the ass by a brother is not necessarily a bad thing” (32). Romance, and Pulp Fiction), particularly its relation to anal sex, race, •afi 14. See bell hooks, “Cool Tool,” and Robin MUod, “Slick Shtick7 in the history. Willis seems, however, to be somewhat taken in by the filmll *k March t995 Artforum discussion of the film, “Pulp the Hype: On the Q.T.” similation of sodomy to shit: concerned to analyze what she sees as (fla— 67, tuS— to), for observations on Pu%o Fiction’s relation to Reservoir infantile fantasies of Pulp Fiction, she does not call homophobia homopbd Dogs. Tarantino himself, always ready to court a market, when asked about bia, On the rape scene, furthermore, she assumes that “we” laugh as BrtJti the Australian Metro article on homusuciality and homosexuality in Resew Willis “unaccountabl[y]” changes his mind and “goes to seek a weapi:.j voir Dogs, laughs: “but what was really funny was Jerry Martinez and I with which to rescue Marcellus” [sic; she thus seems already to have at were saying, you know what? If he’s really going to go down this road, he sumed what she is ostensibly arguing: that the audience itself particip.ate left out a lot of things” qtd. in Bernard, Quentin Tarantino, iSo). according to Tarantino’s intention, in “anal aggressivity” (so—si). i. John J.Winkler, The Constraints ofDesire: Fhe Anthropology ofSex and Michael Rogin, too, suggests that the audience participates in the rapes.k. Gender in Ancient Greece (New York: Routledge, 199u), 54—64. 1 was alerted Marsellus: “We, the audience, as well as the Bruce ‘Willis character, are no) to this phrase by’ Will Ruscue, “Strange Graft, Strange History, Strange supposed to be on the side of the sodomizers; but in fact the sudomizers... Folks: Cultural Amnesia and the Case for Lesbian and Gay Studies;’ Amerft are doing our work fur us” (quoted in Cecil Brown, “Doing that 01’ OscaJ can Anthmpologftt 97 (1995): 445-53. SoftShoe,” San Francisco F/rammer Magc1ine, afi March 1995, 24—27, 16, Sec Marc Steyn in The Spectator, aa October 1994, flu—fit, at fin 4t, at 40). It is notable that both Willis and Rogin, ultimately occupied with:::.. 17. This questionably masculine sexual behavior (Willis’s giving his girk racism in Pulp Firtion, downplay the power of the komuphobic address•c friend “oral pleasure”) has a raciaI component in flue Romance, In a scene tue film and assume an audience that accedes to a komupkobtc identiflcm early in the movie, a bunch of men have been debating cunnihngus, and a on See bell honks Cool Tool, in the March 1995 Artforum discussion professed difference between two black men seems to be fomented by the of the film, “Pulp the Hype: On the Qt” (62—67, iu8—nn), for an analysikt::5 white man in the group. “Any uigger say he don’t be eating pussy is lyin’ that takes into consideration both racism and homophobia. his ass off;’ says one, while another insists, “If I ever did eat some pussy— t3. Sleep with Me, dir, Rory Kelly, August Bntertainment, 1994; Reservoifl.• I would never eat any pussy, right—but fi did eat some pussy, I sure as Dogs, dir. Quentin Tarantino, Miramax, i99a. Note that Tarantino’s Toft:.*.. hell wouldn’t tell no goddamn body about it. I’d be ashamed as a mutheix Gun rift (in S/rep with Mi) was, according to some, Roger Avary’s ideaH: fucker, man,” To which the other replies that if he smoked enough dope, which the two had rehearsed for years (Jami Bernard, Quentin Taranrino: “yuuki be in there suckin’ niggers’ dicks,” The :VIan and His Movies [New YOrk: HarperPerennial, 1995], 173; see alsu.:* iS, See Willis, “The Fathers Watch the Boys’ Room”; Lee Fdelman, in the section “The Gay Thing”). Discussing his friend and former employee, “Tearooms and Sympathy or, The Fpistemulugy of the Water Closet;’ The Lance Lawson recalls Tbrantinu while he worked at Video Archives iS Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ad, Henry Abeluve, Michble Ama Barale, southern California’s B anhattan Beach and wrote True Romance and Natm and David M, Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 553—74, discusses the ralRorn Killers: “You know back then, Quentin was a bit of a homopknbixt prublematics of elimination in the context of I9fius national security in the He was really a kid who’d never been out of LA couuty. Being able to travel United States, the world was such a broadening experience and so good for him[;] . . . its: 19. The film represents one other major character’s violation in an epC really made htm a better person Lawson ts remembering cons ersattuns soda that further demonstrates this preoccupation: Uma Thurman’s ODftng the had — about sleeping with FR is for example — that eventually ended Mia is hysterically, hyperdramatically punctured by Ymca with a gigantic up in True Romance (Dawson, Quentin Tarontino, Tarantinu himself, in needle full of adrenaline, (Recall, too, the penetrated state of Lance’s wife an interview with the gay press, “agrees with the suggestion that he’s able Judy [Rusauna Arquatte]: ‘All of my piercing, sixteen places on my body, to throw gay and gayllsk references into his work because his generation is every one of ‘am dune with a needle, Five in each ear, One through the

296 Notes to Page 187 Notes to Pages 187—188 297 nipple nf my left breast. One thrnngh my right nnstril. One thrnugh m 29. See “Cn the Ce’nealoforof Rthics: An Overview ofWork in Progress,” lqSai. t’rtebn eh”ugn lgO rl c [he Seneca), l?eoder. ed. Paul Rabmnovv (Nesv Sbtk: Pantheon. 3aa — ,rro t tongue” [3112’ Lance instructs Vincent, as he readies hirnseif to stab Mia: a —— a Ce 1a “e’a” a “‘a )u to tc ‘c1a ‘1e i”ogl was what I said about this ors erotica, I should have ‘apposed our sci that” (62). The penetration is hnrrifying: “Lance demonstrates a stabbing et.ce of sex to a contrasting practice in our own culture.” Ann Laura Stoler, mor on which looks like The shape ksllsr5 its victims in HALLOn EEL .2 Pace and the Fducarion of Desire: Toueaulrb History’ of Sexuality and the @cr. 6z). This ovewthmtop injection does some serions work in the whollp* 2 Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 5995), suggests project of constrncting straight mascnhnitv: it semes tn deflect the homo that Foucault’s race politics are complex; his work “offers way’s to rethink erotics, in an earlier scene’ in Lances hedroom, ofvince’s shooting Lance’s c a’ ‘“d— t91flLs las vatsalvrga —sd etnc0erm” “shir” (32) intn his vein, (While Once shoots up. he and Lance talk about ti-om—him” (13). Mv treatment here ofFoucault’s use of rise Middle Aes “fuckin with a gny’s autumnbile[.j You don’t f’ack another man’s vehicle” is provisional and will have robe reconsidered in light of Stoler’s auestiun: [34A1.) That huge horse needle full of adrenaline, Auth penetration, and it “What happens to Foueault’s chronologies when the technologies of sexu happens to umen— whereas S moe s IS lust little pnca ality are reflgured in an imperial field?” (6). an. See “Quentin Tarantino on Pulp Pier/on, as told to Manohla Dargisf::t 30. David H. Halperin, “Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Idenfiries, and the Szfhr and Sound, November 1994. 16—19, at 17. History of Sexuality.” R6preseo rations 63 (Summer 1998): 93—120. 2!, hooks. “Cool Rmol,” F’S. 3!. David M. I-ialperin. One Hundred P/arc of i-iomo.rexuanrv ana’ Oilier 22. Dennis Cooper. “Minor Magic.” in “Pulp the Hype: On the Q.T.,” Essays e’n Greek Poet (New Shrk: Rourledgv, 1990). 29. in/jr r \latuh 6( Trough e di mi Zr ne 1 1 n a C ir stan 32. Poucault, Ducirlf’me anal Pun frh: The Birth of rhe Prison. rrans. Alan Cod—its loss and at least strategic recapture—is a key element of From Sheridan (NewYork: Vintage, 1979), aim; Surveillererpunir: Msitsonce de Ia Dma to Dunn (Dimension Films, Miramax 1996), wntten by harantsno prison (Paris: Gallimard, 5975), 292. directed by Robert Rodriguez. 33. Jonathan Goldberg, Sodom.erries: Renaissance Texrg iviodern Sexuoli 23. Tarantino said to Rolling Stone: “Deliverance did it Miner/eon lie did ties (Stanford: Sranftard Univ. Press. 1Q92). 19. it, too. There’s like three hutt—fucking scenes in nmer,con /1/c. That’s defi’. 34. Goldberg, Sodbnmerries, 19. nmrel the one to beat in that particular eategorrz” Qtd. in Bernard. Qoennh 35. Ar the same rime. I would emphasize that such contexts do not neces Tsncorjoo. aoS, sarily ensure the emergence of sodomy into discourse: sometimes sodonsy’, 24. hooks, “Cool Tool,” 6li6. even as it might be specifically’ feared, cannot be spoken or is not recog 25. Willis, “The Fathers Watch,” 6a. nized as such even in those stigmatized contexts, and thus a sense of the 26. hooks, “Cool TonI,” 66. differential operations of sexual discourses within specific contexts must he ar. Willis, “The Fathers Watch,” observes the signihcance of the “flesh” maintained. color of Marsellus’s Band-Aid (4%’).The image of the black woman appears 36. Varural Born Killers, dir. Oliver Stone. story by’ Quenrin Tarantinn, for a moment in the movie hut not in the published screenpiavi See Willis. Warner Brothers. 1994. Or, female characters. see Dawson. Quenrin Thron 56-67. rno, 154—55 And note a scene cur from the original screenplay’ of Reservoir 28, The NCtory ofSexuoliry, vol. i: An introduction, trans. Robert Hurley Dogs: according to Bernard, Qoentin Taronrino, 141, it was to have occurred (Ne v kork Pantheon, 19—8) Lu Volonre de sos on (Pans Gallsmard 1976) “between Joe and Mr. Pink, in which Joe says his girlfriend w’ants him to The Use of Pleosure, trans. Robert Hurley (New’ York: Pantheon. t980; read Sylvia Plath’s 7’he BellJor and then discuss it with him. The subtexrnf L’DSoge des ploirirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984)’. The. Core of the Se/f trans. the scene is the relationship between Joe and Pink, and how they relate to Robert Hurley (New Thrk: Pantheon, 1986): Pr Soon’ de soi (Paris: CalM the women in their lives.” mard, 1984). s-’. Halperin. “Forgetting Foueault,” 97—moo. Karma Lochrie, “Desiring Foucault.”Journal ofMedieval ondL’orly Mod 38. “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act: An interview with Miehel Foucault,” ern Studies 27 (1997) 3—6 makes many similar points in her essay of ad trans. James O’Higgins, Salmogundi 58—59 [5982—83]: 10—24; rpt. in Fou monition to “beware the dangers of deploying Foucault” (13): among these eaultLive: interviews, 1964—84 (NewYork: Semiotext[e], 5996), 322—34. points are her discussions of inconsistencies in Foucault’s delineation of the 39. Halperin, “Forgetting Foucault,” note 8. Middle Ages and tlse fact that Foucault’s Middle Ages excludes all women. 40. Halperin, “Forgetting Fe’ueauit,” in note S. dra;vs attention to a tran

298 SAtes to Pages 188—195 N:otes to Pages 192—196 299 247-4--il 4—6. rpt. 1415 errzrs,7 :228—36., at 236, 0 J “‘ C” C ottCTairc anuar 15r7):

I 1 “7 0i a F na P 2 a 2 ,J a2c “aecw’- “' e , 1 0d ic pa s id 01 i ot t H noes at S s Ift In recp a to toe yuny ma trial activities,” see David M. Haiperin, “The Queer Politics of Michel FLu’ narrative that recalls to Foucault an earlier time before homosexual idhd cault,” in Saint IUucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford fication, Foucault remarks: “The category of the homosexual was inveki Univ. Press, t995), esp. 24—25. latelyc It didn’t use to exist; what existed was sodomy, that is to say a 3. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, t7; L’Archdologie do savoir, lain number of sexual practices which, in themselves, were condemned, f 27. John Mowitt’s unpublished manuscript, “Queer Resistance: Foucault th h i 1oeyua1 ir’i dual did x s ( La cH nc de t 1 mi and The Unnarnah/e.” comments usefully on Foucaul t’s performativir3’. See a Itf inventfe tardivement. Ca n’exisrait eas. cc uu existait, cétair Ia also the section. “Perfiirmin Foucault.” in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. “Gem sarlomie. c’estftdire un certain nomore de pratioucs sexuelics qui. elLa, der Cniticisnu” in Redrawing rue Boun.darzes.- The Transfbrmarion or Log/is/i

a i cc i ,, a rI “c acX 0 S 4 - and ,.4rnerzcan 1.zterarv Srudzex ed. Stephen Greenblau and Giles Curio

1 -a admia t1ic at si I e” 2 ra ii S C (NewYork: MLA, 1992). 271—302. at 2$59i. that Foucaulr is depending here on a basic hisrc.rical. analysis creatin “Nietzsche. Genealogx’. History,” in Language, C’oanter—il’iemary, the opposition between sodomy and homosexuality which he later ahQ Practice,’ Selected Ei-says and interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans, doned, as Halpenin observes, The change in Foucault’s thinking seemLf Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), have had something to do with Boswell’s hristia,zit% Social Tolerance, I39—64, esp. r54—7; originally published as “Nietzsche, Ia génhalogie,

Ho osevua’ltl wha i he olscusea ipproringly in Inurytews severa time I’histoire,” Homma,t-e b Jean I—iyppolite (Paris: P resses Universita.ires de including “Dc l’amitié. comme mode de vie: Un entretien avec un iectefil France, 1971), 145—72: rpt. in Pits ci dents, 2: I36—S6. (10 c” 5 3 ii c. Son contrasi ing analyses of Foucault’s claims concernin6 confession, and Gregory W Gross, “Secret — a” ft D c” 1 4 see Pierre Paver, ‘i-ouca;ult on Penance,”

ij0 ‘ I a and Truth in Sir Gawain arid the Green Knight.” I — a U ‘ a Li i Rules: Sex. Confession, iftzraru/rLi;-e, 3-25—12;: “Histoire et ;iomosexua,Ite: Entretien as cc M. Fou ,.4rthuriana 4 (ii9Q: 146—74. i t 11” 46. See Bartlett. “Foucault’s ‘Medievalism,’ “ is, for other moments of 1 ,, aérr_1j a P —, / for b ii hnjohnstoo a H story aD i9 mwexualn iucaultL linguistic nostalgta in Foucault’s works. And see chapter z, note no, a See my discussion above, in the introduction, discussion of Foucault’s shifting attitude toward language in literature, t. Pierre Payer, “Foucault on Penance and the Shaping of Sexuality 7. History ofSexuality i:; La Volonti de savoir, p: “Des gestes directs, Studies in Religion, 14 (1985): 313—20; Anne Clark Bartlett, “Foucaulof des discours sans home, des transgressions visibles, des anatomies moo’ rhdant sans gene ni scandale ‘Medievalism,’ “ Klvctks Quarter’ a o (1994): 10—18; Foucault, “introdtift. trhe.s et facilemenr mhlhes, des enfants dhlurés ‘ ( T6 ftr Ka ii T%e 4 ch c C FKar / parmi les rites des adultes: les corps ‘faisaient la roue.’ the bticorse on La’;’uage, trans. A. U. Sheridan Smith and Rupert Savwer 48. Bartlett castigates what she sees as “Foucault’s view of the Middle

ci il realm, which oliUrs a cultural space free of the \uV or& ift”t “'_ a nm0 Ages as a sort of utopian 1969), 22, on- “le dscours do continu.” For a useful discussion at the rHo-. routine and disabling surveillance that, for Foucault, characterizes modern don ship of Foucault’s work re conventional historiographv Cud a discus’ society” (“Foucault’s ‘Medievalism: “ , Eve Kosofskv Sedgwick duds sion of his utopianism), see Allan Mcgill, Prophets of Extremity: Viet1sche, “utopian or elegiac eLements,” but sees them as “fugitive” (“Gender Cniti’ Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), cisns,” 280). 190 ..‘-98. See also Halperin’s distinction between Fbucauit’s “discursivh. 9. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 3;, anaiysls n PAstors ofSexualits vol i, and a hiatorical assertion ( For’- o. Judith Butler, for example, makes this focus on the body as imprint’- getting Foucault,” iii), able surface clear: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion oj’Identity The His in of Sexual ts ‘Iterriew asiC Lucette Fin-i Hans [New York: Routledge. 99o], 134—39. Leo Marshall. in Power/Know/cake: eetected L’ireri’zeir-s and Or/icr Witings, DiScipline and Pun/s/i, V3: Surveil/er etpunir. 29;. rq—o. ed. Cohn Gordon (New ‘tUrk: Pantheon. io8o), 183—9;. at 193; 2. Herculine Barb/n: Being the Recently Discovered Jiemoirs of’ a Nine’ “Les Rapports de pouvoir passent S l’intérieur des corps.” La Ouin’aing teenrh’-Genturv French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall (New

300 Notes to Pages 196—197 Notes to Pages 197—201 301 hUrk: Pantheon, 1980), vii—xvii, cap. vii—vhi; “Le Vrai sexe,” Dits at icrits, hia excellent “Poucauldian Necrologies: ‘Gay’ ‘Politica’? Politically Gay?” 4: 1:16 (for foil bibliographic details, see above, chapter 2, 0. 107).. See Textual Pracdce 2,1 (Spring 1988): 87—101. .Arnoid Davidson, “Sex aod the Emergence of Sexuality,” critical Inquiry 59. “a/al is the use of a strategic relationship aa a source of pleasure 14 (1978): 16—48, cap. I 9, 00 Foucaoit’a aimplificatiooa of medieval aod (physical pleaauref it is not the first time that people have uaed strategic early modero legal, religious, aod medical treatmeot of hermaphrodites, relationa as a source of pleasure. Eor instance, in the Middle Ages there aod Lorraioe Daatoo aod .Katharioe Park, “Hermaphrodites io Reoaissaoce was the institution of ‘courtly love; the troubadour, the institutions of the Praoce,” &itical Matrix: Prioceton W’6rking Papers in Womeok Studies i love relationships between the lady and the lover, and so on, That as well (1985): 1—19, ea.. 3, 6—7. was a strategic game. What is intereating is that in this heterosexual 53. Eeraani, “Ia the Rectum a Grave?” in AIDS: GulturalAnaiysd, Gultural life those strategic relationa come before sex, It’s a strategic relation in Activism, ed, Douglas Grimp (Gambridge, Mass,: MIT Press, 1988), 197— order to obtain sex, And in a/M those strategic relations are inside sex, 222, at 219. Note that Beraani (in “Ia the Rectum a Grave?”) takes issue as a convention of pleasure within a particular situation,” Gallagher and with what he sees as Eoucault’a turn away from sex acts and with Poucault’a Wilson, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity;’ 388; see also 384. Ac description of a/as (such a reinvention or deliberate play) as “not a repras cording to Miller (Passion ofAlichelPoucault, 262—63) this interview took duction of the structure of power” (in Bersani, llamas [Gambridge, place in 1982. In the 1982 Saimagundi interview., “Sexual Ghoice, Sexual Mass,: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995], 88). My argument doesn’t take up the Act,” Poucault linked courtly love with a/SI, making the same contrast: specific question of the workings of power in, or the subversiveness o “You find emerging in places like San Pranciaco and New York what might a/al; my focus is on the potential for sex acta to shatter the liberal notion be called laboratories of sexual experimentation. You might look upon this of the individual subject, a potential Beraani readily grants. as the counterpart of the medieval courts where strict rules of proprietary 54. Butler, Gender Trouble, 97. courtship were defined” (Poucaule Live, 330), Pot a critique of Eoucault’a p. “Sade, aergent du aexe,” Ginbrnatogtaphe i6 (December 1975—January “theoretical sleight-of-hand” in separating power structures from pleasure 1976), 3—5 rpt in Dits et Icrits, 2: 821—22: “II faut inventer avec Ic corps, in his discussions of a/M, ace Bersani, Mamas, 77—lu, cap. 88—89. avec aea blbmenta, sea surfaces, sea volumes, sea hpaiaaeura, un hrotiame fib, See Saint Jerome, Letter 22, to Eustochium, which develops this idea non diaciplinaire: celui du corps a l’itat volatd et diffua, avec aea rem in meticulous detail (sec. and pasaim, in Epistulae, ed, laidotus Hilberg, contrea de haaard et sea plaiaira sans calcul”; English translation modified 3 vola,, caaL 54—56 [Vienna: E,Tempak, 1910—18], i: 143—211, cap. 149—so), from James Miller, The Passion ofMichel Macaalt (New York: Simon and Judith Butler, uncharacteristically on the aide of the exegetea here, analyses Schuster, 1993), 278, (See .Haiperin, Saint Poucault, 143—52, for sharp crL such a deconatruction in her Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits tique of Miller’a projectS) Gompare Leo Beraani and Ulyase Dutoit in The of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 2440 7. P6tans of Violence: Nattative in Assvrian An andModern Galtate (New York: 6i, Halperin, Saint Poucault, i—i6. Schocken, 1985), 72: “The shock of’caatration’ can thus have the beneficent 62, Sarah Schulman, My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During reault of detaching desire from the phallus, and of promoting the discovery the Beagan/Bush Years (New York: Routledge, 1994), diacuasea the diaaym of new surfaces” ftd. in Teresa de Lauretia, The Practice ofLove: Lesbian metrics cf and rifts between men’s and women’s political commitments in Sexuality and Perverse Desite [Bloomington: Indiana Univ, Press, 1994]: 79). xm up and in other activist contexts (e.g,, pp. 216—17, 238), Gathy Gohen, 6. Quoted in Haiperin, Saint Poacaolt, 94. “Punks, Buildaggera, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer 57. “U]n brotiame, du corps a l’btat diffua”; “cc grand plaiair du Pohtica?” GLQ: A journal ofLesbian and Gay Studies 3 (1997): 437—65, corps en explosion”: “Sade, aergent du aexe’ 821—22; fragments quoted in points to the failure of current queer politics to deatabilise systems of domi translation by Miller, Passion ofMichelPoucaair, 278, 274. nation, 8. “Noua avona donc 6 noua acharner a devenir homosexuals et non pas 6. “Sade, aetgent du aexe” in Dits et Icries, : 819: “II y a là anarchi 6 noua obariner 6 reconnaitre que nous le sommea” (“Dc l’amitih comme aation du corps on lea hihratchiea, lea localiaationa et lea denominations, mode de vie,” 163; “Priendahip as a Way of Life;’ 308). See also “History and l’organicitC, Ii voua voules, aont en train de se dhfaite, , , , G’eat une chose Homosexuality;’ 369—70; “Hiatoire et homoaexualitf’ 24. Por Poucault’a ‘innommable ‘inutiliaable hots de toua lea programmes du dCair; c’eat le emphasis on becoming, see also “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity;’ corps tendu entiCtement plaatique par Ic plaiair: quelque chose qui a’ouvre, an interview with Bob Gallagher and Alexander Wilson, The Advocate, qui ae tend, qui palpite, qui bat, qui bCe,” English translation modified from 7 August 1984, 26—30, 58, rpt. in Toucaulr Live, 382—90; and Ed Gohen, in Miller, Passion ofMichel Poucault, 274.

302 Notes to Pages 201—202 Notes to Pages 202—205 303 .

6. Hayden White, She Lonteszr oft/ic &rm: Nsrrari:e Disooorse carl Eli rericaiBegresentorfoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins LnTe Press. i9S). 104—41. at io; noted in Haiperin, Saint .Toaecoit, 7. 6. Cohen, “Foucauldian Necrologies.” p6. Bibliography 66. Biddy Martin; “Feminism, Criticism, and Fnncanlt,” New Cerh..li Critique 25- (1982): 3—30, at ii,

Freedom: A Tne [Teachers for a Democratic Culture] Special Report.” Democratic Cu/tore 4.2 (Fail 1995): 6—35. ers David. “Fiporing Forth the Body of Christ: Devotion and Politics.” f C ‘ TCBa 1,, 0 ,r rJL “a ed. Allen 3. Frao.tsen and’ Daviri A. Robertson, i14. Spec. issue ofEisaos inAieaS.evai Studies ii, Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association

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304 Notes to Pages 205—206