Obscene Gestures: Sexual Transgression and Late Twentieth-Century American Political Culture

Patrick Scott Lawrence, PhD

University of Connecticut, 2016

Tracing a cultural history from the 1970s to the 1990s, Obscene Gestures places popular and legal notions of obscenity in conversation with anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist resistance movements, women of color feminism, and LGBTQ activism. Since the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Miller v. California, obscenity discourse has policed the shape of the nation by marking non-normative bodies as objectionable. The dissertation’s study of the cultural artifacts this discourse concerns opens by situating the history of literary obscenity alongside the key theories of sexuality, power, race, and knowledge. The first body chapter links the Miller ruling with 1970s-era neoconservative policies by considering some of the decade’s major novels, including Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), revealing a home- front cultural politics that stymied dissent by classing as out of bounds many forms of political speech, including Huynh Cong Ut’s 1972 photo The Terror of War. Chapter Two builds upon the polarization this moment caused via an analysis of the feminist battles over pornography in the early 1980s. I juxtapose figures on both sides of this debate with works by women of color, such as Alice Walker’s The Color

Purple (1983), that address the histories of embodiment that this debate tended to obscure. The occlusion of race in organizing around pornography parallels the role of possessive individualism in justifying racial wealth disparities during the Reagan administration, which the third chapter highlights. Working in the shadow of the 1986 Meese Commission report, this chapter interprets neoliberal economic policies as an enactment of racial indifference through the metaphors of sex and violence in The Bonfire of the Vanities

(1987) and American Psycho (1990). Finally, Chapter Four addresses the transformation of these politics during the AIDS crisis, when a family-values rhetoric asserting middle-class social norms as the basis for civic participation was both appropriated and resisted by LGBTQ activists. This final chapter teases the

tension arising between mainstreaming and resistive visibility demonstrated in such works as the NAMES

Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993).

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Obscene Gestures: Sexual Transgression and Late Twentieth-Century American Political Culture

Patrick Scott Lawrence

B.A., University of Southern California, 2004

M.A., New York University, 2008

A Dissertation

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

at the

University of Connecticut

2016

ii

Copyright by

Patrick Scott Lawrence

2016

iii

APPROVAL PAGE

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation

Obscene Gestures: Sexual Transgression and Late Twentieth-Century American Political Culture

Presented by Patrick Scott Lawrence, B.A., M.A.

Major Advisor ______Cathy J. Schlund-Vials

Associate Advisor ______Martha J. Cutter

Associate Advisor ______Kate Capshaw

Associate Advisor ______Chris Vials

Associate Advisor ______Josh Lambert

University of Connecticut 2016

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Acknowledgements

While composing this dissertation, I typed away for hours on an old Dell laptop in my office in the Philip E. Austin Building, Homer Babbidge Library, the house at 89 Spring Street, a handful of coffee shops, in the passenger seat of a Subaru Outback, on lawns, in parks, and on planes. Hammering away on the keys, I was mostly by myself. But the writing was a conversation and a dialogue with and among the handful of people in my life who were generous enough to invest in me their wisdom, intellect, care, and time—and in that sense, I was never alone.

The scholarly conversation of the dissertation was most significantly impacted by Cathy

Schlund-Vials, a matchless mentor, colleague, and friend. Her work in the fields of Asian

American Studies and Critical Race Theory has given me a lens to see my archive in ways that were illuminating and revelatory and that will frame all of my scholarly work for the rest of my career. I hope that I can, in that way, extend her influence and allow her insight to reach more spaces and impact more conversations and so carry on her work. As an advisor she has been exceptionally—even intimidatingly—diligent, committed, and dedicated. I was pushed, drug, cajoled, and lured into completing this dissertation by her, and I appreciate it deeply.

I have also benefitted from the generous efforts of my dissertation committee, who not only read my work, but acted as formal and informal mentors and guides. Martha J. Cutter has been an advocate of mine for over 6 years and has molded my development as a scholar of ethnic literatures while providing me with innumerable professional opportunities within the MELUS community and beyond. Kate Capshaw’s insightful questions and pitch-perfect recommendations have helped me to grow as a scholar in significant ways with the subtlest of touches. Chris Vials has been an encyclopedia of important ideas and contexts I cannot ignore, as well as an enduring

v compatriot in ways I hope will continue long beyond graduate school. And finally, Josh

Lambert’s work frames my own on obscenity, giving me a sense of what is possible in this field, even if it is hard to see how I could ever achieve as much. Other colleagues have helped me along the way, too, notably Jorge Santos, Steve Mollmann, and Jarred Wiehe. Each has been buffeted by the high crests and deep valleys of graduate school alongside me, and steered me along sometimes gently and sometimes forcefully, and without ever grumbling about the imposition, at least not in my presence.

Driving and underwriting the deliberation of what to learn and how to express it was a conversation about why to do any of this at all. My confidence often flagged, but Stephanie

Golaski, my wife and friend and partner in everything, never doubted my project or my abilities and was never more upset with me than when I doubted myself. She has brought bold humor and keen wisdom to this project and—more than anything else—purpose. It would have been impossible to complete this work without her, and I would not have had any reason to.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: “Making Sense of the Obscene” 1

Chapter 1: “Anti-War and Anti-Warren Court: 1973 and Obscene Critiques of the Global Militarism” 50

Chapter 2: “The Porn Wars: Feminist Resistance to Patriarchy and Pornotroping” 114

Chapter 3: “Obscene Wealth: Rapacious Capitalism in Excessive Novels of the 1980s” 171

Chapter 4: “Performing Family Values: Obscenity and AIDS Discourse” 232

Works Cited 290

Obscene Gestures, Introduction

Introduction: Making Sense of the Obscene

“Gentle reader, I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath its will like the Ancient Mariner. Oh

Christ what a scene is this! Can tongue or pen accommodate these scandals?”

William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch 34)

With these words, the narrator of William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) pauses briefly mid-paragraph to wonder aloud at his own narration, the content of which comprises absurdly graphic scenes and descriptions of excreta, violated bodies of myriad varieties, and sexual couplings involving all of these. Burroughs’s novel alternates between these carnivalesque passages describing seas of debauchery, sex, and violence (pages 32-35, for example) and passages that critique the institutionalization of power (112-13, for example). The political critique of the latter, though, fails to fully contain the excess and shock of the former.

That is to say the novel is not general remembered for its political stands—though its political fortunes are sometimes discussed—but for the sex and violence and drugs that made it outrageous. There are many reasons for this, but the tale of Naked Lunch is hardly unique. Other books pushing the envelope from this period are often remembered most for their excessiveness and only secondarily for any social critique. Thus, exploring precedent from this era can help us understand the idea that the book represents a threat that a narrator might want to spare a reader, and a threat that might go beyond offended sensibilities or mere modesty.

What seems to underpin the speaker’s concern that the scandals—the novel’s violation of taboos—are excessive and that the reader ought to be spared such scenes, is the presumption that they do something to him, they produce the risk of harm to the reader. The reader is affected

Lawrence 1 Obscene Gestures, Introduction negatively in a way that the speaker/author recognizes is unfair or improper. Thus, the final sentence of the epigraph, which wonders if it is possible to represent the scene in question might just as easily be read as wondering if is responsible to represent the scene in question. His inquiry reflects the reader’s own confusion, repugnance, and ambivalence when faced with such content.1 We ask ourselves, perhaps less rhetorically than the narrator, what we make of a text that so profoundly violates taboos and that seems to make us accomplice to its transgression.

This project, Obscene Gestures, seeks to understand, in a provisional and partial way, why we presume ourselves to be accomplices to such transgression and why—even when we do not— that the danger of contamination and of adverse effects is great enough, and accepted enough in society at large, both nationally and internationally, that laws exist to limit the circulation, dissemination, and consumption of such works. Perhaps more importantly, this nexus of danger, harm, and shock coalesces in a legal discourse that frequently silences resistive discourses and challenges to status quo structures of power. Thus we must follow our suspicion that something about the discourse of harm is allied with a discourse of power—and that there is more at stake than modesty.

Some less radical texts mitigate the threat of their representations of sex and violation by offsetting them with didactic condemnations or by redirecting the images toward mainstream political ends—something like the (perhaps specious) moralizing of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill

(1748).2 Texts like Naked Lunch refuse to offer this safe haven. Naked Lunch does periodically ruminate on the moral depravity of what is being represented—they are called scandals, after all, and the narrator, while compelled to recount them wishes that he were not driven to do so.

However, stacking up such moments next to those that seem to revel in violence and violation

Lawrence 2 Obscene Gestures, Introduction would yield a telling picture; by sheer volume the obscenity wins the day, outweighing any explicit moral or political reflection by a massive margin.3

On the other hand, perhaps more importantly, we might find that the breaking of rules, the transgressive impulse in the novel is precisely its political goal (or one of them). The presentation of graphic, often horrific, sex in the interest of contesting boundaries of good taste and decorum is an important element of what Naked Lunch seeks to accomplish, for better or worse. We need not seek recourse to Burroughs for proof of this, because we see the signs of it in small moments in the text itself. For example, one of the main characters, Dr. Benway, describes a man whose anus developed a personality and took over the man’s body, eventually killing him. The hideous blob of flesh that the man transforms into as parts of him atrophy and others grow out of control is repulsive. And yet, Benway declares: “That’s the sex that passes the censor, squeezes through between bureaus, because there’s always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness, spurting out like breaking boils” (Burroughs 112). Benway is critiquing censorship directly here, telling us that it is often misdirected, restricting access to some natural content while allowing through something on the order of a parasitic anus engulfing its host. Sex and the state, culture and representation, their entwinement is profound and grotesque, and it is the subject of the novel here, not a side- effect of its style. In this sense, then, the gory or shocking elements are not beside the point, they are the point.

In fiction of this sort—along with Naked Lunch, I would list Thomas Pynchon’s

Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), which I discuss in later chapters, and several less well-known works—revealing the profound interconnection between institutional power and sexualized violence is felt to require the depiction of taboo

Lawrence 3 Obscene Gestures, Introduction behaviors. This is not to say that there are not alternate ways of presenting such ideas that do not rely on explicit descriptions or representation. Description in medicalized terms, police reports that refer to acts of sexual violence using jargon ostensibly stripped of the erotic, and court testimony, for example, all have ways of talking about sexual violation and extreme acts in ways that deflect, euphemize, or mute their tendency to shock. These forums attempt to address the social effects of sexuality and violence without recapitulating the danger that explicit depictions might present. But this methodology takes for granted the very ideological position under analysis, presuming that sexual representations are dangerous before embarking on a deliberation about that very question of danger.

What follows the passage above from Naked Lunch is a monologue in which Benway describes government as a parasite—a cancer or a virus—that destroys its host. The text violates taboos, but does so as preamble to a metaphor for state power as disease that reveals its exercise through popular culture and censorship. Burroughs’s novel, through its radical violations of taste and propriety, condemns a more fainting cultural conventionality that would prop up the state by compelling us to look away. After all, we must keep in mind that this is a state whose dominance takes the form of a hegemony that must operate invisibly. In this context, then, the very marker obscene becomes a tool of the state and of a status quo that is often predominantly heterosexual, white, and middle class. In this view, the affective discomfort of the reader is a coming into knowledge of the repressive nature of the state and its deployment of power through culture, and violation of the taboo is a necessary part of the project.

However, readers naturally suspect that not all works that cross the bounds of good taste

(or legality) have a laudatory political goal; something tells us that the liberatory solution is a bit too easy. Burroughs’s absurd, even campy, taboo breaking or something like Robert Coover’s

Lawrence 4 Obscene Gestures, Introduction unabashed raunch in The Public Burning (1977) may not seem dangerous because of their excessiveness, the patent absurdity of the sexual content. Yet we are unready to accept all obscene material as radically progressive or intrinsically harmless. Passing attempts at narrative in Playboy or Penthouse, after all, do not render pornographic pictorials serious artworks. Sex is a representational medium in which we can see shifting cultural values, and the state’s participation in the disciplining of social values can be explored by brushing up against sexual taboos. However, to suggest the importance of acknowledging this interconnection is not to say that social values should be discarded or that what should supersede the current formation of power is unchecked id.

Novels like Naked Lunch critique the social imperative toward obfuscation and euphemism; more than that, they practice what they preach. Propriety serves the state, they say, and the list of available discourses for politely discussing sexual taboos—such as those affiliated with the clinic, the police, and the courts, each of which is inextricable from institutional power—confirms such a contention. The act of stripping transgression out of the way we talk about sex is a way of exerting power over sex and, by extension, life; critiquing this link may indeed require transgression.4 It is in this vein that Josh Lambert remarks on the apparent paradox that “In this sense, government efforts to suppress obscene speech mean that all obscenity, however abstract or apolitical it may seem, constitutes a putatively political act” (16).

There is a corollary we suspect some authors and cultural producers embrace as well: that political acts might sometimes require obscenity. Because of the relationship between state power and restrictions on sexual representations, any work operating in defiance of censorship resists the implementation of state power and the ideologies that drive that restriction of speech.

Thus embracing sexuality without purpose, without monogamy or reproduction, anonymously

Lawrence 5 Obscene Gestures, Introduction etc.—all the ways one might resist the imperatives to have sex the right way—become a resistive and politically significant, and so do representations of the same.

This is an important idea that drives my sense that obscenity operates ambivalently. State censorship enshrines the obscene as resistive because it makes sexual representations (of a certain kinds) off limits. Breaking taboos means rebelling against the state, and this can be construed as a form of self-liberation. This is true even when the underlying political arguments are actually reactionary or repugnant. Under a regime of informal censorship, American Psycho

(1991), for example, becomes an avatar of rebellion for certain groups because of its taboo- violating excesses, and the book is often mentioned in excited whispers by those who use it as a code-word for enlightened freedom from prudery. However, close analysis of its politics reveals it to be misogynistic and to prop up the notion of possessive individualism that it seems on the surface to criticize. Other examples abound, and they remind us that directing scrutiny toward taboos and toward boundaries can reveal them to be arbitrary or ideological, but that this does not obviate the need to be rigorous, critical, and, above all, ethical in passing judgment on them.

Breaking with norms, with laws, and with taboos takes on the veneer of resistance to the state— and states might inadvertently reinforce such gestures as resistive—but to uncritically embrace all such resistance would be to forget that the aim of an ethical scholar and citizen is not to smash the state, but to identify where it operates to produce injustice, taking accurate stock of where it does the opposite and preserving those structures that ensure equity.

Looking at culture through the lens of obscenity is a way of understanding and discriminating between cultural politics that exist at the intersection of sex and representation.

They are not all equal, but we must acknowledge them before we can discern their differences.

Acceding to state discourses of obscenity and their directive that we look away from sex means

Lawrence 6 Obscene Gestures, Introduction allowing the status quo to persist. Once we open our eyes to this occluded manifestation of power, we are left with the task of reforming the social order in a way that accords with our ideologies. In this process we do, yes, seek a culture that is more open, but also one that is more responsible and more equal. This is because the taboos being violated (fictively) continue to serve a purpose and the complete revolution in society and culture necessary to undo them offers remote and uncertain benefits as well as concrete violence. What, ultimately, is the cost of rejecting taboo, of breaking the rules of representation, and of transgressing the boundaries of taste? At the root of this is naturally the question of what literature, film, photography, music, and other media can do and what they ought to do.5

Individualist Obscenity in American Cultural Production

The work that individual obscene texts do is varied, and the late 19th and the 20th century saw texts engaging sexual morality in ways as diverse as on other topics of major literary interest, including war, race, nationality, and metaphysical concerns. In some cases, obscenity is used to dramatize the position of individuals of genius or special capacity as exempted from social norms. Such is Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s sexually explicit fictionalized memoir of the life of an artist in Paris during the early twentieth century, when the area was populated with

American ex-patriots. The book was published in France in 1934, banned in the U.S., and distributed in illegal editions for decades until the Warren Court’s 1964 ruling in Grove Press,

Inc. v. Gerstein declared it legally not obscene. Artistically, the book is of a piece with

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866); both works explore the consequences of rejecting society’s limits, as well as the power of the individual who does—for better or worse. They both, then, express a notion of individual freedom that supersedes social constraints. The primary

Lawrence 7 Obscene Gestures, Introduction difference between the two is that Dostoevsky works with crime and murder to discover the value of life, while Miller works with illicit sex and prostitution to explore the relational construction of individual identity. The focus on the individual in both owes much to a

Nietzschean sense of the empowerment and historical necessity of the individual who will explore the furthest reaches of experience to enable a testing of values and potential.

While I will here not deal extensively with the aspects of extreme individualism these texts explore, we can move through such concerns to see how the prerogatives abrogated by such obscene texts exist in relation to existing structures of power. These earlier examples give us insight into how the later texts I examine treat the role of the individual vis-à-vis the state, and thus by examining them we can tentatively begin to sketch out categories of obscene artwork and their effects. For example, I will engage a similar character in my third chapter when dealing with American Psycho (1991), which begins with an epigraph from Crime and Punishment, and which amplifies the sociopathy of the protagonist while stripping out the psychological nuance, all of which is part of a critique of rapacious capitalism. In this sense, the aspect of indifference of the übermensch reflects the narcissism of neoliberal economic excess, which provides obscene profits to some while requiring the mostly disavowed destruction of many. That the same principle of individuality underlies all three works (by Dostoevsky, Miller, and Ellis) suggests the lasting quality of such a structure through highly varied economic, national, and social conditions.

Among other expressions of the übermensch’s capacity, one of his key characteristics is that he exceeds the bonds of the state. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says, “There, where the state ceaseth—pray look thither, my brethren! Do ye not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the

Superman?” (Chapter 11). This sentiment, in which the artist is obliged by his unique vision to

Lawrence 8 Obscene Gestures, Introduction smash the state, to dismember culture, and to sear the eyes of the masses with unvarnished truth, is made explicit in Tropic of Cancer. Miller’s narrator/surrogate states:

Who that has a desperate, hungry eye can have the slightest regard for these existent

governments, laws, codes, principles, ideals, ideas, totems, and taboos? If anyone knew

what it meant to read the riddle of that thing which today is called a ‘crack’ or a ‘hole,’ if

anyone had the least feeling of mystery about the phenomena which are labeled

‘obscene,’ this world would crack asunder. It is the obscene horror, the dry, fucked-out

aspect of things which makes this crazy civilization look like a crater. It is this great

yawning gulf of nothingness which the creative spirits and mothers of the race carry

between their legs. When a hungry, desperate spirit appears and makes the guinea pigs

squeal it is because he knows where to put the live wire of sex, because he knows that

beneath the hard carapace of indifference there is concealed the ugly gash, the wound that

never heals. And he puts the live wire right between the legs; he hits below the belt,

scorches the very gizzards. It is no use putting on rubber gloves; all that can be coolly and

intellectually handled belongs to the carapace and a man who is intent on creation always

dives beneath, to the open wound, to the festering obscene horror. He hitches his dynamo

to the tenderest parts; if only blood and pus gush forth, it is something. The dry, fucked-

out crater is obscene. More obscene than anything is inertia. More blasphemous than the

bloodiest oath is paralysis. (225)

Miller’s polemic against “inertia” and “paralysis” resonates as a critique of convention and conformity while demanding a politics grounded in filth and transgression. It is this model that

Naked Lunch appears to follow, as will Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School (1984), which I analyze in Chapter Two. The politics expressed by Miller’s narrator are similar to those

Lawrence 9 Obscene Gestures, Introduction that emerge from fictional voices among Burroughs’s obscene circus. The mandates of good taste—the requirement that we refrain from mentioning genitalia, excreta, as well as erotic desire—serve only to keep us from looking at society and humanity for what they are. It is incumbent on the superman or the artist—the figure of genius in either case—to shock us out of complacency. Underpinning this notion is also the sense that the mandates of taste and propriety are in league with the status quo of economic and state power. Once discovers real knowledge and real power when one throws off the rubber gloves and goes looking where we’re told not to.

In looking at this particular vein of obscenity, I want in some sense to mark a trend that I will respond to. Texts such as these proclaim their independence from social norms in the interest of a larger anti-social project. These works were anti-social only, however, in the sense that they celebrate the unique and resistive individual who exceeds society’s mandates; thus they are excessively individualistic. Works that were challenged on grounds of obscenity in the early twentieth century often adopted such tactics. This work, especially the role of Grove Press in promoting and defending many of these books, has been catalogued by Loren Glass in

Counterculture Colophon (2013). The new terrain I hope to move into is in examining texts that offer alternative visions, using extreme depictions of sex and violence to offer inclusive, rather than exclusive visions. They, too, resist the imperative to remain silent on the subject of sex and pleasure; they, too, break with laws and conventions about the depiction of sexual acts and of sexualized violence. However, they do so to promote egalitarian visions of society that are utopic in their trajectory. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) and Tony Kushner’s Angels in

America (1993) are particularly good examples of this kind of work, and both were banned or protested on grounds of obscenity. These works dramatize the abjection of groups who are disempowered because of their sexuality or who face discrimination and oppression that is

Lawrence 10 Obscene Gestures, Introduction sexual in nature. When offering alternative fictional worlds that might help readers imagine ways out of such structures of oppression, they give voice to sexualities that older laws deemed off limits. Their transgression, then, is less about individuals, and more communal in nature. My dissertation juxtaposes these types of works—those that offer individualist critiques and those that imagine communal utopias—but they exist in relation to the same laws and norms of sex, and faced the same social sanction for their representations. In fact, the versatility of this mode of critique indicates the fundamentally fluid nature of the discourses in play. They are neither conservative nor progressive, and aligned with no metaphysical trajectory or religious faith. They seem, rather, to be deployed more or less strategically in all of these fields.

A Twentieth-Century Legal History of Obscenity

“[S]uch utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social

value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by

the social interest in order and morality” Justice William Francis Murphy (Chaplinsky v. New

Hampshire).

As with many complex social constructs, one often imagines obscenity to be clearly definable until it becomes time to apply pressure to the definition. The prevalence of this approach is demonstrated by Justice Potter Stewart’s famous declaration about pornography, suitable as well in discussions of obscenity more broadly, in the case of Jacobellis v. Ohio, that

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But

I know it when I see it.” The “I know it when I see it” doctrine seems insufficient on its face, and it is this tendency to assume the availability of the term to existing epistemological models that

Lawrence 11 Obscene Gestures, Introduction short-circuits attempts to understand the epistemic power of the obscene. Nonetheless, definitions of the term in both laws and case law tend to refer to some version of this tautology.

The bald assumption that the obscene might be available to knowledge without being available to language seems to point to the location of the obscene outside—and therefore as a challenge to— governing social and discursive structures.

It is, in part, this dangerous status that has provoked legislation and judicial intervention.

The history of this intervention demonstrates the extent to which this aberrant mode of expression challenges existing discursive foundations. One must ban the obscene, but it is impossible to define why or what it is. There are many reasons for this, one of which is simply that engaging the obscene, for any reason, whether to comprehend, condemn, or celebrate, carries the threat of contamination.

In her 1987 book Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society, Tipper Gore, who had been challenging the distribution of what she considered offensive rock lyrics, finds it necessary to apologize for presenting the material even in the context of condemning it. She writes in her introduction “Let me apologize in advance for the profane language and disturbing images that appear throughout this book. These examples are used to expose the material for what it is. I believe that the current excesses could not and would not have developed if more people had been aware of them” (13). It seems as if the material in question is potentially dangerous in any context, even when presented specifically for condemnation and so that increased awareness can lead to more effective (and more comprehensive) control.6 In a discursive field like this, dialogue is foreclosed and discourse is stunted, which limits the potential for action in any direction, and privileges the status quo, the very stasis and paralysis Miller’s narrator decries. Therefore,

Lawrence 12 Obscene Gestures, Introduction understanding the public discourse approaching this contradictory issue is useful for moving forward.

Importantly, obscenity also marks off a particular class of speech as apolitical: sexual speech. Obscenity is a political discourse by which the terms of political discourse are set. The

First Amendment protects political speech, but the prurient is specifically excluded by the case law. On such grounds we interpret sexuality to not be political—thus, on the grounds that sexuality is apolitical, its political arguments are disavowed. This paradox is something I explore throughout Obscene Gestures, where I tease out the notion that is a particular remnant of Puritan ideologies that are suspicious of pleasure for purposes other than reproduction.

I have up to this point discussed obscenity in broad terms, and before moving forward, it remains to define it more precisely. A thoughtful engagement of this cultural history must take as a precondition a thoughtful and specific understanding of the term and its history, which has shifted and been a site of contestation in the U.S. for over a century. At its basic level, obscenity is a legal term applied to films, books, photographs, and other cultural texts that classifies them as illegal on the basis of sexual content found to be offensive. There is a long history of jurisprudence on the issue. Some aspects of this history concern relationships between free speech and censorship and thus are a site for examination of Constitutional issues including the relationship between the individual and the state, the extent of government power, and the application of the Bill of Rights to the States. It is also a place for debates over what kinds of sexuality are privileged (or even allowed) and which are foreclosed. Because certain sexual acts are construed as out of bounds while others are considered inoffensive, obscenity cases often elaborate underlying notions of sexual conformity and morality.7 Legal cases, but also legislative deliberations and public debates—also often concern the issue of the potential harm

Lawrence 13 Obscene Gestures, Introduction representations of sexuality pose. These debates, then, are a place for working out somewhat fundamental issues about which there is nonetheless little consensus concerning what kinds of effects artistic production can have. The active front in this conversation was for a time novels, but it has now shifted largely to music, music videos, video games, and, since the late 1990s, the

Internet.

Determining what kinds of depictions should be considered harmful has been a primary concern for jurists and is somewhat difficult because specific definitions tend to be elusive, relying on vague or relative language and making reference to standards of propriety that vary geographically and historically. Defining obscenity is so difficult that it became a key issue in rulings made by the Supreme Courts under Chief Justices Warren and Burger. While many issues of law up until the mid-twentieth century were contested, the middle decades of the century were particular important because they involved numerous cases that reflected the political divisions of this time of foment, and because they produced what has been the ruling precedent on obscenity for the last four decades.

Through the first part of the century the question of literary obscenity worked its way through the courts concerning texts like Naked Lunch and Tropic of Cancer, as well as James

Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Obscenity became a major concern for the Warren Court in the late

1950s and through the ’60s, a fact that is important when considered alongside the other issues the Warren Court is known for adjudicating, such as those concerning school integration and the end of de jure segregation, the rights of criminal defendants, and the application of the Bill of

Rights to the States. Ultimately, conservative push-back against Warren Court rulings would result not only in the walking back of the rights of the accused under presidents Nixon and

Lawrence 14 Obscene Gestures, Introduction

Reagan, for example, but also a subtle but important step back in obscenity law by the Burger

Court that succeeded the Warren Court.

The long history of how the Burger Court came to refine the Warren Court ruling is ultimately indicative of the larger role played by the courts in defining American culture during this period. This is the period where I want to focus my attention to reveal the political forces that came together to produce the case law that now governs the boundaries between protected and unprotected sexual speech. The legacy found therein demonstrates the continuation of those forces in our cultural landscape today, and belies the notion that we have broken with the 1970s and ’80s in any fundamental way, despite radical shifts in technology and the international and domestic political landscape.

Because the law is an arm of state power while also a deliberative body that responds to and reflects public opinion, its approach to what Justice John Marshall Harlan II called “the intractable obscenity problem” (Interstate) is relevant to an understanding of what the role of sexuality is in culture generally and during this time specifically. What does obscenity represent that it should be weighed in the highest court and be subject to strict government control of the kind we are accustomed to with deadly weapons, psychotropic drugs, and toxic chemicals? Why is it a “problem,” and what makes it “intractable”? I contend that the obscene provokes state power for two reasons. First, because it represents the eruption into public consciousness of forces of sexuality and violence that underpin aspects of convention and norming that must be disavowed in order to protect existing structures of power. To wit, obscenity reveals the workings of the state in a way that are a threat to its uninterrupted continuation. Second, obscenity as a discourse of the law and the courts serves to police the boundaries of the national community by sanctioning certain kinds of sexuality and excluding others, and by controlling

Lawrence 15 Obscene Gestures, Introduction what sorts of political action is possible by members of sexualized minorities.8 This is a realm that certain public debates—such as the feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s—highlight effectively, but that we can see in operation underpinning other cultural and social contestations where the role of race, class, and ethnicity are not as obvious.

The notion of obscenity as a category of speech or cultural artifact has existed for centuries. Some of the earliest significant efforts to regulate sexual representations in the U.S. came in 1873 with a sweeping act known as the Comstock Law, named after its chief proponent,

Anthony Comstock.9 Comstock had led efforts to limit the availability of pornography and contraceptive devices and information through his organization, the New York Society for the

Suppression of Vice. The law enacted in his name made it a crime to distribute obscene representations, as well as contraception information, through the mail.10 The Postal Service would, as a result, become a chief censor for the following decades, and its interception of obscene materials spurred many obscenity cases11. Nonetheless, it was not for another eighty- four years that a firm definition of obscenity would be established to clarify the law’s application.

Significant efforts to pin down this legal definition for the nation as a whole took place in earnest in the twentieth century. This is particularly true in the mid to late 1960s, as part of the expansion of federal oversight established by the Warren Court and because of increasingly contentious public disputes about sex and culture.12 Publishers of books like D. H. Lawrence’s

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Joyce’s Ulysses, and Burroughs’s Naked Lunch sought to break through what they saw as antiquated prudery that restricted meaningful explorations of human experience. Obscenity trials over these and other works, including pornographic mailers, art

Lawrence 16 Obscene Gestures, Introduction films, and even theatrical releases of pornographic films, worked their way through the courts, eventually reaching the United States Supreme Court on several occasions.

In the Warren Court era, the first important decision was Roth v. United States. Roth is, according to the Court, the first time the question of obscenity had come directly before them.

Nonetheless, the content of the earlier Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942) is important context for Roth, because the justices will cite Chaplinsky as the justification for excluding obscenity from Constitutional protection. There, the Court affirmed and summarized, almost in passing, the existing judicial notion that the First Amendment does not protect all speech.13 The case concerned Walter Chaplinsky, who was preaching against organized religion on a sidewalk in

Rochester, New Hampshire. An angry crowd gathered and, according to the defendant and other accounts, accosted Chaplinsky, and when law enforcement officers attempted to remove

Chaplinsky (rather than arrest his assailants), he said to a local Marshal “You are a God damned racketeer and a damned Fascist and the whole government of Rochester are Fascists or agents of

Fascists” (Chaplinsky). At Chaplinsky’s original trial, these phrases were determined to violate a local ordinance prohibiting insulting speech, and the logic put forth by the court affirming the prudence of the law was that the local statue was intended to protect public peace by banning words likely to incite the hearer to violence.

When it upheld the state ruling upon review, the Supreme Court created what has become known as the “fighting words” doctrine, an exception to the First Amendment that allows government to limit speech—even political speech—in order to prevent imminent harm that might be caused by the speech. Justice William Francis Murphy’s majority opinion declared that this was not a new dictum, but a codification of older assumptions. He noted, in effect, certain kinds of speech had always been excluded from First Amendment protection:

Lawrence 17 Obscene Gestures, Introduction

There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and

punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem. These

include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting”

words—those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate

breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of

any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any

benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in

order and morality. (Chaplinsky)

In the decision, he reiterates what he takes to be uncontroversial, which is that speech can harm and that as long as local governments do so judiciously, it is appropriate for them to restrict and limit speech. Murphy’s repeated use of phrases implying the commonsense notion of exceptions to the First Amendment belies the novelty of the Court’s decision. The notion that protected speech must be an “essential part” of an “exposition of ideas” may have been latent in the case law and early documents, but its codification in his decision represents a significant change.

Moreover, he introduces the notion of a balancing test between harm and good, which the Court will wrestle with for another thirty years.

In Roth v. United States, the Warren Court picks up where Chaplinsky leaves off and begins to elaborate which other kinds of speech might be banned and how they are to be defined.

In the Roth decision, the Court established that obscenity did not rise to the level of protected speech, and their rationale is worth considering for the light it sheds on what the value and dangers of sexual expression are perceived to be. In a somewhat quixotic turn of phrase, the

Warren Court declared in Roth that “it is apparent that the unconditional phrasing of the First

Amendment was not intended to protect every utterance”—that is to say that the unconditional

Lawrence 18 Obscene Gestures, Introduction phrasing of the First Amendment was intended to be conditional. Despite the seeming contradiction, Justice William J. Brennan’s decision does what Murphy’s did not: it traces the original opinions of the framers and contemporary judgments to conclude, as Murphy does, that obscenity is an understood exception to the First Amendment. He notes that Brennan notes that

“Although this is the first time the question has been squarely presented to this Court, either under the First Amendment or under the Fourteenth Amendment, expressions found in numerous opinions indicate that this Court has always assumed that obscenity is not protected by the freedoms of speech and press.” Though earlier cases had already established the notion of exceptions to the First Amendment for obscenity, I wanted here to note the cases that would be referenced in the more seminal decisions in Memoir v. Massachusetts (1966) and Miller v.

California (1973), which I consider extensively in the first chapter.

But it is significant that Brennan also echoes Murphy with an important qualification, arguing that the social value of the speech is an important consideration. Brennan asserted that

“implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance.” What emerges from Chaplinsky and Roth, then, will run through the successive decisions in Memoirs v. Massachusetts and Miller v. California: social value affects determinations of obscenity. The precise effect that value has, however, was at first unclear and precipitated several successive challenges.

One of these was Memoirs v. Massachusetts, concerning Fanny Hill, which was also known by its sub-title Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. The book had to be judged against a 3- prong test of obscenity established in Roth that required for a finding of obscenity that: “(a) the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex; (b) the material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to

Lawrence 19 Obscene Gestures, Introduction the description or representation of sexual matters; and (c) the material is utterly without redeeming social value” (Memoirs). The book was found by the state court to conform to all three standards. However, the Supreme Court did not address the first two findings because to them the case required reversal because of the final prong. The State Court had found that minimal literary value was not sufficient to protect a book that was found to be prurient and offensive. Not so, said the Supreme Court, “A book cannot be proscribed unless it is found to be utterly without redeeming social value” (Memoirs, emphasis in the original). This produced a much looser test under which any amount—even a tiny bit—of social value would safeguard the text from censorship, reversing Murphy’s notion of a balancing act between harm and good. The resulting standard was understandably loose and allowed for publication of a wide range of material that had been easier to prosecute before.

The resulting proliferation of pornography and its eventual entry into mainstream cinemas with 1972’s Deep Throat spurred a conservative backlash. The Burger Court, stocked with four Nixon appointees, would walk back this standard and establish what remains as the dominant precedent in Miller v. California. In their ruling, they established a similar three-prong test resting on community standards, offensive content, and a lack of “serious” social value. The requirement that artworks have serious social value means that the potential harm of obscene content must, again, be judged against its beneficial contributions to society. This is an important, if subtle, change to the Roth requirement that a work be without any non-prurient value.

Implicit in the entire discourse of seriousness and of social value is an assumption that prurience is not a social value, which is to say that arousal serves no purpose or that sexual gratification is anti-social in some capacity. This assumption itself needs examination, and the

Lawrence 20 Obscene Gestures, Introduction fact that it has been accepted by both liberal and conservative courts alike suggests a greater ideological allegiance than their divisions over policy might suggest. To begin with, there is significant evidence against the conclusion there is no value in sex and sexual pleasure. The 1970 report of the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography suggested that pornography might help married couples achieve more satisfying sexual relationships—and that more satisfying sex lives might support more stable marriages.14 In an alternate vein, sex was viewed as a life-affirming and identity-affirming practice for gay and lesbian communities in the 1970s and 1980s, and this notion was part of the broader sexual revolution in this period as well. Thus, sex and arousal can be and have been understood in various periods as having positive social value. The presumption that they do not, that a work can be prurient and therefore without social value reflects an understanding of sex that precludes pleasure from value—and this reflects an ideological position that the history of jurisprudence takes for granted and that situates ideologically in opposition to such countercurrents. This is true despite the fact that phrasing it

(and framing it) in this way echoes the Puritanical social mores that the United States is often regarded as embodying. This is one of the values of an analysis of the legal history of obscenity alongside its cultural history. Through the juxtaposition and the use of obscenity as an optic, we can see the social construction of the puritanical ideology that divorces pleasure from use and that is suspicious of enjoyment, the body, and of sex as an expression of these things.

The Miller test remains to this day the standard by which local government regulations are judged, and it guides FCC oversight of public broadcasts. In this sense, we do well to understand its nuancing and the development of the balancing test between harm and good, which has to some extent left open the space for ongoing contestations about what harms and goods are, how they are quantified, and what entrenched interests such negotiations privilege.

Lawrence 21 Obscene Gestures, Introduction

Nonetheless, though debates about the legal definition of obscenity in general have lain dormant for forty years, obscenity prosecutions continue to come up. This is both because artists continue to find it useful to challenge the existing framework and because conservative social groups

(including individual prosecutors) find it desirable or advantageous to construe the laws as broadly as possible.15 Though the legal question had been settled by 1973, the post-Miller period of obscenity discourse is a vibrant field that merits examination, precisely because the debates about obscenity shifted out of the juridical sphere and into the public arena. In this forum, including street protests, art installations, record albums, and Senate speeches, as well as novels, plays, and other literature, the contours and implications of sexual speech continue to be worked out for high stakes, which I examine in the following chapters.

Theorizing a Politics of the Obscene

“Sex is a vector of oppression” Gayle Rubin (“Thinking Sex” 164)

The legal history of obscenity sets the stage for some of the historical moments I will examine in this project. Several of the works I consider were challenged on grounds of obscenity, and thus having at hand an understanding of the legal doctrine is important. As I will show in Chapter One, the legal history also chronicles neoconservative formations of knowledge and morality and their relationships to state and other forms of institutional power. This nexus of ideology and state power represents the historical and epistemological context for the discussion

I will pursue. However, the legal is only one sphere in which the politics of sexuality is pursued.

Sex is not only a deeply policed formation, but a deeply theoretical one. We must, therefore, also understand the major theoretical vectors that inform our understanding of how and why people

Lawrence 22 Obscene Gestures, Introduction participate in sex and representations of it, what social and political functions it can have, and the more abstract stakes of its negotiation in the juridical and cultural arenas.

The quote I introduced at the start of this section comes from Gayle Rubin’s influential

“Thinking Sex,” a tract that lays out the many ways that sexual variation is construed as deviance and how this deviance becomes the justification for policing, surveillance, incarceration, employment discrimination, and violence. In all these ways, as Rubin notes, “Sex is a vector of oppression” (164). It is not coincident with other vectors of oppression, such as race and class, and it is not parallel to them. But it does constitute a means by which existing or status quo loci of power are maintained. It names a category of behavior around which a common sense accrues that serves to class certain behaviors as acceptable, even laudatory, while others become the grounds for exclusion and discrimination that takes on the veneer of being acceptable, even logical. This vector is the angle from which I chart the trajectory of my analysis. But it is my primary concern along this path to understand the ways that the policing of sexual variance— through the policing of its representations—becomes a proxy for the policing of other vectors of oppression. Again, the exclusion of individuals from full citizenship on the basis of their sexual practices or identity is not parallel or precisely equivalent to the exclusion of individuals on the basis of race, gender, or class. However, these exclusions do intersect, and when public reaction to representations of sexuality reaches a fever pitch (in obscenity prosecutions, for example), in many important ways, there are also discourses of race, of class, and of gender in operation at the same time. Considering the sexual discourses separate from the others in these cases re-enacts the damaging segmentation of modes of activism that have served in the past to perpetuate certain kinds of exclusions. Moreover, we must understand these discourses as intersectional, rather than merely additive, in order to see the historical specificity of the oppressions in

Lawrence 23 Obscene Gestures, Introduction questions. Therefore, in order to carry forth an analysis of this particular exclusionary discourse that is dedicated to a rigorous emancipatory praxis—anti-discriminatory on the basis of race, gender, class, as well as sexuality—we must undertake a profoundly intersectional approach.

I want to begin by returning to the notion of liberation through sexual transgression that I discussed in Tropic of Cancer and Naked Lunch. In those novels, obscene depictions are used to suggest the artificial limitations imposed by the state or by normative (mostly prudish) culture.

The goal of awakening a revolutionary spirit in the reader seems laudable, and it is enticing at times to view the dramatic breaking of taboos as a refreshing liberation from ossified cultural norms. But such ideas do not circulate in a vacuum. There is a large body of work considering the extent to which both sexual liberation and its repression form underlying elements of culture and society. One of the most important twentieth-century examples of this thinking is Herbert

Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), which explores the connections between the growth of a rationalistic industrial society and the twin repressions of the life and death drives. As I discuss in the first chapter, Marcuse’s work sheds light on the writing of Thomas Pynchon, especially, and reveals an underlying sexual component to the growth of multinational corporations, technological advance, and global warfare. But his influence reaches far beyond Pynchon, who studied his works explicitly, and impacts widely disseminated critical notions of the interaction of society and sexuality, especially because it elaborates the Freudian understanding that remains persistent in one form or another in many modes of analysis, even if only to be resisted or rejected.

Marcuse’s theory is based in psychoanalysis and relies on the notion of twin instinctual drives that Freud works out most completely in 1920’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. These

Lawrence 24 Obscene Gestures, Introduction drives, one toward life and the other toward death, propel the subject on the one hand toward a sexual gratification that serves the propagation and increasing complexity of life and on the other hand toward quiescence and the cessation of all pain in death. Expanding these individual concepts into a theory of civilization, Marcuse contends that “civilization begins with the methodical inhibition of the primary instincts,” and that this inhibition of the life and death drives is accomplished in two ways: “(a) the inhibition of sexuality, ensuing in durable and expanding group relations, and (b) the inhibition of the destructive instincts, leading to the mastery of man and nature, to individual and social morality” (107). The first repression restricts otherwise chaotic reproduction to produce orderly group relations that enable technical specialization, monumental structures, and the kinds of infrastructures that can only be imagined and constructed as communal efforts. The second kind of repression channels anarchic destruction toward “mastery” of a hostile world in the form of enduring structures, agriculture, and expanding urbanization.

Marcuse’s wording highlights some of the major political concerns of this dissertation and of obscene cultural artifacts in the late twentieth century. Works engaging this discourse antagonize social structures that are encapsulated in the notion that civilization is based on repression that includes as ones of its major axes the disciplining of sexuality in ways that reproduce certain kinds of exclusive social arrangements. The specific terms of this disciplining, or strategic inhibition, are seen in the political resistance of LGBTQ groups, as well as in the resistance offered to sexual Othering enacted against ethnic and racial minorities, and the profound role sex plays in the maintenance of gender inequality. Whitney Strub, for example, demonstrates that the courts have routinely classified material depicting homosexual couplings and desire as inherently obscene, offering legal sanction to reproductive sexuality while

Lawrence 25 Obscene Gestures, Introduction criminalizing same-sex desire.16 In Unclean Lips, Josh Lambert also notes that anti-Semitic notions of Jews as sexually deviant colored obscenity prosecutions in the early twentieth century.

Explicit depictions of sexuality have been ways of responding to this kind of abjection and of resisting the specific ways that certain sexualities are inhibited in order to reproduce a cultural status quo.17 These works seek to effect the eruption of the repressed in order to critique their repression and to explore the possibilities of a society founded on alternative principles. In this way, they participate in, but differ from, more generally transgressive works by dominant voice authors seeking to elevate the individual.

From this standpoint, obscenity holds a revolutionary valence that carries the promise of liberation for groups disenfranchised in white, heterosexual, patriarchal, middle-class hegemony.

Nonetheless, there is also the effect that such works have in culture more broadly as a result of the images they display and the situations they represent. By instantiating spectacle and destruction, sexualized violence and violent sexuality, these texts create a body of representations that are uncomfortable, repulsive, rightly shocking. This reminds us that rather than valorize their rebellion, we ought to resist the facile assumption that efforts to press back against taboo are liberatory without qualification. As I stated before, we can recognize the possibility of emancipation in the transgression of obscenity standards, but we must then establish conditions and parameters for effective, egalitarian, and lasting gestures in that direction.

We might also simply be skeptical that this mode of resistance can ultimately produce liberation without re-inscribing the conditions of repression and eruption they seek to overturn.

As Michel Foucault contends, often desublimation, or the eruption of taboo sexuality, takes on a valorized political valence only in specious terms. While “the sexual cause—the demand for

Lawrence 26 Obscene Gestures, Introduction sexual freedom, but also for the knowledge to be gained from sex and the right to speak about it—becomes legitimately associated with the honor of a political cause,” Foucault reminds us that “a suspicious mind might wonder if taking so many precautions in order to give the history of sex such an impressive filiation does not bear traces of the same old prudishness: as if those valorizing correlations were necessary before such a discourse could be formulated or accepted”

(Volume 1 6). Foucault is drawing our attention here to the similarities between regimes that seek to use sex as a privileged mode of social interaction either to restrict or liberate it. Both seek to produce knowledge on and through bodies and to make sexual pleasure a facet of discourse— to render it accessible to power, rather than to free it from power’s operation. Foucault’s larger insights into how the putting into discourse of certain modes of behavior can be repressive even when they appear at first to be liberatory grows in fact out of this very scene of supposed sexual repression. The clinic and the state in this sense both become arms of the same apparatus that impels people to speak of their sexuality in order to condition it.

While Marcuse makes a convincing argument that society is founded on twin repressions of sex and destruction, Foucault cautions that the willingness to talk about sex often takes on the veneer of progressive revolution of which we are rightly skeptical: “What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation and manifold pleasures” (Volume 1 7). Thus, the discourse of liberation through obscenity, of a libertine utopia, also deserves scrutiny, because the motives for such a transformation may be enmeshed in the system that produced them. Foucault’s admonishment, then, is simply not to look too eagerly to sex for answers to broader structures of oppression, because the bringing into discourse of sex and the proliferation of it does not, of itself, represent progress.

Lawrence 27 Obscene Gestures, Introduction

Moreover, we cannot say with certainty that the taboos in question are themselves firm or that their primary operation is through total exclusion. Rather, it is possible that the larger operation of power is organized around both repression and eruption. That is to say that if we attend only to the interdictions against representing sex of certain kinds (BDSM, excretory, non- genital) and construe them as the sole expression of power in this arena, we miss the big picture.

That big picture would include an understanding an entire discursive system in which both repression and eruption are entailed, where speaking about sex or of participating in an economy of titillation can reinforce, rather than contest a larger system. The ways that sexual representations can buttress a larger system of oppression are evident in the publication and reception of American Psycho, as I noted above, but we see mundane examples of this in, for example, advertising and cinema, where sex is baldly used to spur consumption and to create a veneer of rebelliousness or novelty for otherwise contrived plotlines in mass media.

However, we must ultimately also admit that “To say that sex is not repressed or that the relationship between sex and power is not characterized by repression is to risk falling into a sterile paradox. It not only runs counter to a well-accepted argument, it goes against the whole economy and all the discursive ‘interests’ that underlie this argument” (Foucault, Volume 1 8).

Sex is, indeed, subject to repression as well as incitement. Under this conception, cultural works that tease the border between acceptable and unacceptable that obscene demarcates would, ironically, be neither liberatory nor strictly a threat to the established order. Rather, they would be part and parcel of the discursive system in which we “show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide” and “say it is something we silence” (9). The discursive formations around obscenity, then, prove themselves to be more complex than simply offering resistance to a stifling regime of repression. Rather, they exist as one pole of a discursive field in which a

Lawrence 28 Obscene Gestures, Introduction rhetoric of repression circulates, counterbalanced by a pole at which the virtues of unfettered expression are articulated. This axis represents a means of entering sexual representations into negotiations of power and of mediating its expression and implementation. But these do not exhaust the possibilities of resistance, and to conceive of them as doing so misses the more emancipatory ways that the system of power might be rendered less oppressive through an understanding of its historical contingency.

For this reason and others, we should attempt to understand the specific consequences of the challenges launched by this kind of work, remembering that breaking social norms is not intrinsically emancipatory and is not always directed at greater freedom, more equal distribution of power, or less repressive cultural formations. Nonetheless, it can serve as a challenge to specific and local expressions of a more overarching hegemony, and tracing its historical fortunes can draw our attention to the manifold operations of power in this arena. The deployment of power through the system requires its local application, which means that sex is disciplined in discreet instances in ways that show a pattern. These patterns can be critiqued and altered by the counter-discourse of obscene revelation.

By stepping back from the assumption that repressive imperatives call out to be ignored and that transgressive impulses represent uncomplicated liberation, we also move outside the more insidious polarization of these debates and the anti-other, anti-difference orthodoxies they reveal so that we can see how such debates often shift the terrain of discourse and present false binaries. Understanding debates about obscenity as concerning only simple binaries of free speech/censorship, conservatism/liberalism, prejudice/tolerance, and narrowness/openness forgets that often American practices of liberalism and tolerance have been ways of substituting symbolic acceptance of difference for substantive reform to the systems of oppression. That is to

Lawrence 29 Obscene Gestures, Introduction say, the false choice offered by such binaries forces a choice between the neoliberal multiculturalist state and the neoliberal homogenous state, while the complicity of the system of neoliberalism, of capital, of globalization, and of institutional inequalities remains in place. For these reasons, we must look beyond simple advocacy for openness or tolerance and look to the way that discourse of and debates about obscenity operate as screens or surrogates for larger questions of belonging, national identity, and social activism.

In the end, then, obscenity offers an important vantage on culture because it both is and is not about the sex that separates it from other forms of prohibited speech. The fact that sex merits its own category of prohibition on par with the dangers of inciting riots or fomenting violence

(“fighting words”) suggests the deep investment of society in sex (and keeping sex silent) and indicates that sex proxies for other deeply cathected social investments. As I will show in later chapters, debates over sex and its representations serve to mediate as they obscure other negotiations about the status of marginalized groups. The history of the use of sex to maintain gender hierarchies is well known,18 and there is substantial work done on the sexualization of race, while analogous work can be done on class.

That the disciplining of sexual explicitness serves as a proxy for mediating other issues— war, race, class, gender, economics—is ultimately not a surprise; sex has ever been a proxy issue. As Foucault reminds us in The History of Sexuality, particularly volume 2, The Uses of

Pleasure, sex and the various representations of it are often merely ways of evoking or discussing concern for the other structures of social organization, particularly status (class) and patriarchy. Sex is one biological function among others; what is interesting about it is the way it has been problematized in our era in ways that other biological functions have not. Obscenity becomes a token for this problematization in the twentieth century, when debates about the value

Lawrence 30 Obscene Gestures, Introduction of sex—its uses—entered popular consciousness, a result of Freud, Marcuse, and Kinsey as much as Burroughs, Walker, or Kushner.

Lastly, the prevalence of obscenity as a discourse and the eruption of obscenity debates are not important only as a metric of specific social movements or as determinant of the relative freedom or closure of American society (though they might be metrics for these). Obscenity also allows us to trace the constant rejection of the terms of debate. Political movements from anti- globalization to feminism to LGBT movements have consistently said they will not accept the notion that sex is outside the realm of the political and that efforts to construe the terms of the debate as excluding sexuality will not be accepted. And of course, the reason is clear. Policing, restricting, and channeling sexuality has always been a major element of dominant systems of subjectivity. From the inheritance of property and slave status to prohibitions against miscegenation to the lack of divorce procedures, anti-sodomy laws to anti-prostitution legislation to government oversight of contraception, sex (and procreation and the associated affective relationships) has always been the province state intervention. Not surprisingly, the groups materially affected by such state institutions and actions have rejected the clearly baseless notion that sex is not political. On the contrary, they have said, sex is always political—as is the effort to construe it otherwise.

Obscenity is a useful optic in part because close analysis of its history reveals these multifaceted trajectories. A Foucauldian analysis can, at its best, reveal the ways that the terms of a particular debate have misconstrued or obfuscated the real targets of an emancipatory project.

In this way, discourse analysis and a properly-contextualized cultural history can pave the way

Lawrence 31 Obscene Gestures, Introduction for real change, concrete amelioration of social conditions in ways that are sustainable, lasting, and significant.

The Miller decision serves as a useful pivot point in scholarship on the subject because it settled the question of obscenity’s definition (or ended consideration of it). Before Miller, U.S. debates about obscenity addressed Constitutional concerns—whether speech could be prohibited, what kinds of speech could be, whether vague definitions of prohibited speech violated the

Fourteenth Amendment—and also what obscenity might be and why it constituted a special kind of speech not afforded the same protections as others. Those, like Grove Press, who were interested in advancing the borders of free speech, who sought to win terrain for art and literature, pushed the issue in the courts, seeking at opportune moments to define the concept according to their terms. The discourse surrounding obscenity during the pre-Miller period, then, is often dominated by legal concerns.

To great extent, however, Miller put an end to obscenity prosecutions for literary texts.

Where in the pre-Miller environment novels such as Tropic of Cancer and Ulysses might face prosecution, after the decision such processes would be doomed because of the protecting aegis of their literary value. Pornography’s status was more suspect, and, relatedly, the status of photographs and music remains largely unsettled as well. But as the Meese Commission would assert in 1987, there was something about print texts that suggested seriousness and mitigated the danger of corrupting sexuality.19 As a result, while some literary texts were still denounced as obscene, including Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Walker’s The Color Purple

(which I study in Chapters One and Two, respectively), they were not prosecuted for it. This shift in the terrain of debates over literary texts can allow us to see beyond the legal, especially in the way that they now stand in stark juxtaposition to other media.

Lawrence 32 Obscene Gestures, Introduction

By contrast, the painted image included with Dead Kennedy’s album Frankenchrist

(1986) led to a prosecution in Los Angeles (as I discuss in Chapter Three), and the Cincinnati

Contemporary Arts Center was prosecuted for obscenity when it displayed photographs by

Robert Mapplethorpe in 1990 (something I mention in Chapter Four). In fact, the continuing relevance of obscenity today, despite Miller, is attested to by this CAC prosecution. Despite a century of jurisprudence on the issue, it was the first time, in the final decade of the twentieth century, that a museum had been prosecuted for the work on its walls. In the growing emphasis on non-written texts in this period, we can see the changing understanding of representational modes that greater availability of television, film, and the internet bring. We can also, perhaps, begin to understand what might differentiate the imaginative processes involved in consuming these different media.

Thus, obscenity shifted into different practical spheres after 1973, but ones that are often novel, interesting, and illuminating. As Lambert notes, “the 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of a new discourse of modesty in American culture” and what resulted was a shift “from obscenity regulated by law to modesty regulated by participants in the literary system” (21).20 Nonetheless, there are more significant shifts that take place as well. Prosecutions became increasingly symbolic, since they were unlikely to prevail. Similarly, accusations of obscenity lodged against literary works no longer carried the weight of the law, but were, rather, attempts to silence or condemn works on more clearly ideological grounds. Obscenity, then, became a way of characterizing a work as out of bounds in a terrain in which such offense is not unlawful. For this reason, obscenity serves to police extra-legal concerns, particularly resistance to the political or social ideologies of the texts themselves, and might reflect a weakening of the notion of a cohesive national identity. Where obscenity concerns are raised, often the underlying issue is a

Lawrence 33 Obscene Gestures, Introduction question of belonging. Post-Miller obscenity, then, makes explicit some of the concerns that were latent before 1973. With obscuring issues of free speech and literary value taking a back seat, it becomes easier to see the ways the obscenity is used to police political speech and national community.

Throughout, I attempt to emphasize as one aspect of the theoretical work here the presumption that images do things, not only that they are things. Thus, authors and distributors become liable for the effects of their images, and the law is a space for working out the extent of their liability. This is discussed by Judith Butler in “The Force of Fantasy” and in Anne

Higonnet’s Pictures of Innocence. Butler talks about the difference between fantasy and reality and the fallacy of assuming they have a one-to-one relationship. Higonnet discusses the way this is a result of trends in interpretation from author-centered (reflective) to social significance

(active). It is in this moment, when similar forces from opposite directions (intellectual desire to shift focus to art as artifact in the world and anti-intellectual desire to return art to the realm of responsibility for its effects) come together, that representations take on a particularly fraught capacity, and it makes sense that these debates would be hotly negotiated. The status of art and its social value were being radically renegotiated. Across the spectrum, however, contending forces in obscenity debates agree on the importance of art, on its social impact, on the more-or- less direct influence of representations on behavior. The fact that disagreements over specific content arise are far from unimportant, but they are also common knowledge, and the contours of the debates in terms of winners and losers are well known. They are overshadowed, however, by the insight we gain from examining them in the context of obscenity, because it is through this optic that we begin to see the underlying, shared social ideology underpinning both sides. We can learn more by looking at the texts that confound, rather than stage, the terms of this debate—

Lawrence 34 Obscene Gestures, Introduction the texts that engage these issues while being difficult to understand or that faced complex or mixed resistance—that seem simultaneously progressive and retrograde. Such is Gravity’s

Rainbow, The Public Burning, Blood and Guts in High School, The Color Purple, Naked Lunch,

Angels in America, Frankenchrist, and the other works I analyze. It is this simultaneity of seemingly antithetical valences that reveal the falseness of the binary. Obscenity, then, is a valuable optic because it reveals the way that certain (shared) ideological narratives about the relationship of art and reality are occluded by superficial disagreements about content.

While Miller offers a convenient turning point in judicial oversight of obscenity as well as suggesting a transition from juridical discourses to other cultural modes, there are historical specificities that deserve attention as well. In fact, the move from Memoirs to Miller crystallizes the historical processes that animate cultural production in this era. The Burger Court was more conservative than the Warren Court as a result of political actions, not random chance. Richard

Nixon ran on a neoconservative platform in 1968 and was able to appoint four justices to the court—a plurality that helped swing the court as I demonstrate in Chapter One. The movement of the court and the movement of obscenity, then, come about as a result of the same forces that brought Nixon to power: deteriorating conditions in Vietnam and push-back against counterculture revolutions of the 1960s. Looking at obscenity helps us to see the broader shift in culture that the Court’s movement represents. In the successive decades, we would see broad conservative efforts to roll back or undo the social upheaval of the ’60s by counteracting Civil

Rights and gender equality, by pursuing hawkish international policies, and, a particular concern for this dissertation, to re-weave the fabric of monogamous domesticity and the nuclear family that had been unraveled by the sexual revolution and to demonstrate the ongoing work of redressing racial inequality in a post-Civil Rights era.

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Chapter Summaries

In my attempt to understand this period, I have moved through a number of historical moments that coalesce around contentious artworks that tease the boundary between legal and illegal sexual representations. My chapters move roughly chronologically, but each looks at a specific front in ongoing cultural contestations from the late twentieth century. In so doing, they engage with the major historical phenomena of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, including

Vietnamization and the late stages of the Cold War; the Porn Wars, Third-Wave Feminism, and patriarchal push-back; racialized economic inequality in urban areas that resulted from

Reaganomics; and the AIDS crisis.

Because obscenity prosecutions for major artworks were rare, if tellingly symbolic, during this period, this dissertation will not exclusively consider literary works that were officially challenged, censored, or restricted for obscenity. Some of the literary texts I engage were, indeed, challenged for obscenity, however. For example, Tony Kushner’s Angels in

America was protested in Charlotte, North Carolina for its nudity and for its depictions of homosexual desire, and these protests led to the defunding of the local arts council. And Kathy

Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School was banned in Germany as a threat to minors because of its representations of sex and incest. Walker’s The Color Purple was removed from official school reading lists in California for similar reasons. But the broader corpus of texts I consider has not been defined by legal challenges and, pointedly in a post-Miller world, none of them is legally obscene (those texts that were prosecuted were acquitted). This is largely because my concern in the dissertation is not to discern what obscenity is, but rather, how it is used.

Lawrence 36 Obscene Gestures, Introduction

The archive I engage is defined less by specific classifications, and more as a constellation of texts sharing a concern with the political possibilities (and liabilities) of explicit sexuality. Obscenity, then, becomes less a category, and more a way of thinking about the dangers and potentials of texts in their relation to politics. It is a discursive formation that we can tease and reformulate to better understand how sexuality and race are contested in the U.S. cultural terrain. The texts I analyze exist within matrices of political rhetoric and social activism that take as one of their primary axes the politics of depictions of explicit sexual acts. Each chapter includes at least one text where discussions of obscenity affected publication or reception,21 but these texts serve to demonstrate an underlying sexual politics (and politics of sexuality) that the other texts I study also engage from different angles or to different ends.

Thus, when I discuss Acker’s novel, it is to inaugurate a discussion of the feminist politics of pornography that was a major element of transformations in feminist activism taking place in the 1980s. Obscenity claims and legal statutes governing sexual representations play a major role in this discussion. Similarly, though Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993) is decidedly not obscene, the fact that the filmmakers went to great lengths to avoid even implied sexual content demonstrates that the film exists as part of a larger discussion of what kind of representations of sexuality are appropriate and productive in projects of LGBTQ visibility. This is the same conversation that Kushner’s play engages in a radically different, more explicit vein—and thus discussing them together helps illuminate contrasting politics of assimilation and radical visibility. Other chapters do similar work, examining a selection of texts from different media that all engage with the politics of explicit sexuality to demonstrate the varied political effects such conversations mediate. The dissertation takes shape around obscenity rhetorics, then, which are contested and deployed in specific ways that I examine.

Lawrence 37 Obscene Gestures, Introduction

Looking at these moments through the lens of obscenity, each of my four chapters seeks to demonstrate how the legal and moral discourses of obscenity have been marshaled to control the boundaries of national belonging and how that process has been resisted by cultural producers. I examine cultural texts—photographs, films, music, plays, and novels—side-by-side with the political speech, including judicial opinions and legislation as well as Congressional hearings and addresses given by prominent politicians, that represents the state expression of the forces such artworks resisted. Though obscenity has been used by cultural producers for more conservative political purposes and I address those in places,22 my driving interest in this dissertation has been to examine this dynamic in the context of some of the major social movements of the late twentieth century, comprising efforts to influence war policy in Southeast

Asia, major developments in Feminism, inner-city urban poverty remediation, and AIDS activism. The cultural producers aligned with these movements understood sexuality to be one aspect, more or less evident, of the politics surrounding the larger issue they engaged with. While mainstream or dominant forces sought to limit the discussion of such topics through the taboo- enforcing discourse of obscenity, these authors, dramatists, photographers, and musicians, fought back by publishing and staging graphically sexual artworks in defiance of social norms.

In Chapter One, I am concerned with understanding the historical phenomena at work mid-century and leading up to 1973, a major year in obscenity as it was a pivotal year for

American history—though both often go unremarked. That year featured high drama in the

Watergate Scandal (Nixon would resign the following year), the signing of the peace accord in

Vietnam, and the issuance by the Supreme Court of what remains today the dominant precedent on obscenity in Miller v. California. I argue, in part, that the Burger Court ruling in Miller is demonstrably influenced by Nixon’s political strategies and electoral coalition building and that

Lawrence 38 Obscene Gestures, Introduction this neoconservative sentiment therefore continues to influence our understanding of the role of sexual representations in public discourse. These concerns come together in Nick Ut’s Pulitzer-

Prize winning photograph from that year, Napalm Girl, which testifies to the extreme violation of the racialized body during the Vietnam War, while also forcing us to consider the role of spectacle and cultural artifacts in influencing policy decisions.

Photographs like Ut’s often touched off public and private debates about the ideological institutions and narratives that had promoted the war, minimized the humanity of its racialized victims, and obscured the true reasons for ongoing military intervention around the world. As

Silvia Shin Huey Chong points out, during the War, it was assumed both by the press and by the military that graphic images of violence and casualties were inherently anti-war. By “elicit[ing] shock, disgust, or even sympathy from American citizens toward ending the war,” graphic images of violence carry a special potential (Chong 76).23 According to this line of thought, the danger that they cannot be assimilated into a known, sanitized visual lexicon makes these images inherently political in a way that combats efforts to diminish the cost of war in human and economic terms. Such insights, however, must be bracketed when moving from the field of photography to written texts, especially fiction. Depictions of sex and violence in such texts must be read in relation to authorial intent, presumed or actual; either the author intends to disrupt taboo or to titillate. The presumption of the latter often taints the former, and this has been used to deflect political projects enacted in this manner.

Such was the case with Thomas Pynchon’s magnum opus, Gravity’s Rainbow, which was also published in 1973. I discuss this text at length in connection to the ideologies circulating in this tense political time. Pynchon’s novel engages neoconservative ideologies by rewriting them into World War II, the beginning of the Cold War. Pynchon’s characters experience the social

Lawrence 39 Obscene Gestures, Introduction chaos at the end of the war, and this creates the conditions under which the metaphysical philosophies underwriting the discourses of progress, science, and capital can proceed unchecked. As a result of the pursuit of supremacy in war and through technology, humanity is reduced to data and material, and in the novel this allows for massive-scale barbarism and individual-scale depravity. Pynchon’s critique, then, imagines the end game for technoculture and for economic globalism. I read this critique specifically as a reflection of U.S., and more broadly Western, neocolonialism.

I connect these themes to Robert Coover’s slightly later novel The Public Burning, which was published in 1977, but had been composed in the years before Nixon’s second inaugural and revised in up until publication. Because it indicts McCarthyism directly while harshly critiquing the ways that American national mythologies can justify hypocrisy, power lust, and violence, the novel serves as a more raucous counterpoint to Pynchon’s expansive meditation. It also offers a picture of the domestic politics that operate in conjunction with and enable the international adventurism Pynchon addresses. However, the novel also directly explores the character of

Nixon, who is one of its main characters. Seeking to understand the development of his political career and his character, the novel dramatizes the 1953 execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but in this case, a sensationalized version of this execution that takes place televised live from

Times Square. Both novels include scenes of highly taboo sexuality that cannot be divorced from their political projects; Pynchon critiques the alliance of sex and violence in rationalist society, and Coover takes to task the base urges that underwrite political ambition.

Chapter Two focuses on the sexual politics of Feminism at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. In part because of the SCOTUS rulings leading up to Miller, this was a period of mainstreaming of pornography, represented, for example, by the nationwide theatrical

Lawrence 40 Obscene Gestures, Introduction success and celebrity endorsement of the pornographic film Deep Throat (1972).24 The growing popularity of pornography was resisted by some feminists, prominently Andrea Dworkin and

Katharine MacKinnon. They argued that the production of pornography was necessarily exploitative for women, and that the viewing or consumption of pornography led to the normalization of demeaning stereotypes about women, their desire, and their serviceability as sexual objects. This led them to advocate for stricter censorship of pornography and a variety of ordinances designed to limit or prohibit sexual representations. Rather than demanding stricter enforcement of obscenity standards, they argued that pornography violated women’s civil rights.

Other feminists, including Kathy Acker and Judith Butler and many porn performers, pushed back, asserting that women should have the right to express sexual desire and that sexuality was not constitutively harmful. While conceding the possibility for pornography to be demeaning and its production to be exploitative, they also sought to complicate simplistic notions of direct causation between representations of exploitation and acts of exploitation and contested what they saw as infantilizing ideas about the inability of women to make informed decisions about their own bodies, sexualities, and labor conditions.

During this period, Acker wrote a number of experimental novels that were influenced by and, in turn, influenced the nascent punk movement. These novels foreground abusive, violent, and explicit sexuality in almost crude ways. Her purpose was at once to explore the extreme limitations on subjectivity imposed on women by patriarchy and to locate within a problematic system the possibility of embracing desire as a source of empowerment. In her novel Blood and

Guts in High School, which was banned in West Germany and South Africa for its graphic sexuality, Acker works these concerns out in chaotic scenarios that serve as a framework to dramatize theories of gender, sexuality, and capital. Acker’s writing draws heavily from post-

Lawrence 41 Obscene Gestures, Introduction structuralist theory, and I nuance this sometimes abstract work by juxtaposing it with the important writings of women of color that provided the foundation for third-wave feminism. I include among these Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s germinal collection of essays This

Bridge Called My Back (1981), in which they and other women called to the attention of mainstream Feminists the perspectives of Third World Women and Women of Color. I also introduce the notion of “pornotroping,” which Hortense J. Spillers introduced in her essay

“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” also from this period. Pornotroping marks the specific experience of extreme and violent objectification that altered the embodied experiences and continues to drive representations of African American women. Resisting a too-narrow conception of how sexuality fit into a feminist praxis, Moraga, Spillers, and Audre Lorde negotiated sexual and gender norms according to specific cultural expectations that vary from group to group and across historical periods. I bring this discussion into focus through consideration of Walker’s The Color Purple. Walker’s novel, like Acker’s, begins by dramatizing the demeaning experience of women and concludes by imagining a world in which the power relations that produced these experiences are overturned. Stylistically, both are innovative, but their engagement with issues of race draws an important distinction. By comparing works with similar projects—and which were both banned or challenged—I am able to clarify the influence of theoretical distinctions that took shape at this time around the treatment of race.

Despite the sexual revolution and significant liberalization of segments of culture during the 1960s and 1970s, the 1980s were still a time of contestation for sexual representations, in part because of push-back against just these advances. At this time, too, global recession called for economic action, and the response of the Reagan administration was a sweeping reduction of

Lawrence 42 Obscene Gestures, Introduction taxation on capital wealth and loosening of regulation on financial markets. This doubling-down on neoliberal wealth generation and reinvestment in existing elite structures of capital produced results for large-scale economic indicators, but also meant a reduction in funding for anti-poverty programs and austerity for those already excluded from the American Dream. In 1986, Dead

Kennedy’s took to task the entrenchment of capital in politics with their album Frankenchrist, and were subsequently prosecuted for obscenity because of a poster insert of an H. R. Geiger painting showing several penises penetrating several anuses. The underlying politics of the artwork and the music were the same. As the band’s front man Jello Biafra put it, “The painting portrayed to me a vortex of exploitation, that vicious circle of greed where one of us will exploit another for gain and wind up looking over our shoulder lest someone do the same thing to us in return” (qtd. in Clark). The poster merely makes explicit the narcissistic desire and exploitation that underpin excessive wealth. The prosecution of the band over the album sparks my discussion of the forces at work, which were negotiated in several arenas. In particular, I consider the official national vision of acceptable sexuality that was sketched out in the 1986

Meese Commission report, which President Reagan commissioned.

To again consider how these political forces impacted cultural production during this time, I examine two popular novels, each of which were made into feature films and had significant public impact. Thomas Wolfe explores the way the poor were dehumanized in the eyes of the wealthy in this era in his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), which dramatizes the life of a Wall Street bond trader who accidentally kills a black youth while driving in Harlem with his mistress. Implicit in much of the work is the way that the necessary objectification of the poor in such strata of wealth is tied to fantasies of sexual potency and license. Borrowing from

James Kyung-Jin Lee’s Urban Triage and other works of scholarship, I show the racial

Lawrence 43 Obscene Gestures, Introduction components of this objectification. This license is carried to the extreme in Bret Easton Ellis’s

American Psycho. Ellis’s protagonist, financier Patrick Bateman, who works at the same firm as the protagonist of Wolfe’s novel, turns the gratuitous reduction of people to resources into mass murder. He kills panhandlers and deliverymen, but also prostitutes and women he dates. His voracious need to kill is matched only by his endless desire to wear the right clothes and be seen at the right restaurant. From amid the gore emerges a critique of a pleasure-obsessed narcissistic elite culture as rapacious in its consumption of those it others and objectifies. Ellis’s book, and the film version that followed it were criticized as depicting violence and gore without human substance, but its argument is the same about the society it satirizes. However, both novels also reflect dominant voices, and their critique must nuanced by their looking at how they were received. In particular, Ellis’s novel seemed to fare better financially because of uproar over its controversial content. This demonstrates how obscenity and taboo-violation can serve the ideologies of possessive individualism and consumerism. The novel as an artifact, then, is more interesting than its veneer of shock would seem, and it becomes important for demonstrating the complex ambivalence of obscenity discourses.

The fourth chapter brings notions of obscenity to bear on the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and early 1990s. During the crisis efforts to bring to national awareness to those living with and dying from the disease paralleled and grew out of a similar politics of visibility going on in the context of LGBTQ rights. This activism—over a sexually-transmitted illness and non-dominant sexual identity—made sex a major element of politics in both spheres in a way that was inextricable from a politics of representation. Cultural production around AIDS often featured sexuality and tropes of bodily contamination as ways of confronting audiences with the difficult realities of the disease. However, activists also had to contend with existing stereotypes against

Lawrence 44 Obscene Gestures, Introduction

LGBTQ individuals that worked in concert with medical bureaucracies and legislative efforts to limit and control access to care while dehumanizing seropositive individuals and blaming them for their illness.

One of the major fronts in this fight was the contested space of the family. I begin my analysis of the issue with a discussion of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. The Quilt, which is comprised of patches sewn in memory of those who have died from AIDS, unexpectedly makes use of domestic tropes and affective structures of the family and friendship to advocate for greater acceptance of those it memorializes. In this same moment, Tony

Kushner’s Tony-Award-Winning play Angels in America makes the lives of both gay men and those living with AIDS strikingly visible by including nude scenes and blood and feces on stage, and in so doing takes a starkly different approach. But it also explores the possibility of reforming our notions of the family, so that we might discard the idea of the nuclear family and adopt ad hoc affective loyalties formed to help us live up to our responsibilities to care for one another.

In turning to another medium, I look at Jonathan Demme’s film Philadelphia, which was the first Hollywood film to dramatize the life of someone with AIDS and was considered a milestone in promoting positive images of gay men in popular culture. Nonetheless, it deals with tropes of the family in more conservative ways, deploying images and clichés of domesticity to defuse the threat of homosexuality and same-sex desire for a mainstream, presumably homophobic, viewing audience. The least obscene of any of the works I address, it belongs in this project because producers studiously avoided any kind of sexual representation, even cutting a scene where the main character appears in bed with his lover. The film, then, incorporates an awareness of the dangers that sexual representations can pose for resistive political projects

Lawrence 45 Obscene Gestures, Introduction aimed at mainstream impacts. The cultural production of the AIDS epidemic is diverse and widely studied. I hope in this project to bring into conversation these three works because they help demonstrate the interconnection of tropes of sexuality and figures of the family, which was a major feature of political rhetoric in this era. This confluence of forces helps to show the variability and durability of obscenity as a discourse designed to control the shape of the nation and the boundaries of belonging, and for this reason it closes the dissertation.

Conclusions

In closing this introduction, then, I would like to return to my opening epigraph to reflect for a moment on the purpose of this dissertation and ask “can my tongue or pen accommodate these scandals?” American society’s particular politics of sex has been multifarious, and it is neither practical nor desirable to reduce this broad interplay of power and activism to a few images. Rather, I will attempt to give an image of several of the ways that policing representations of sexuality has been used to also police specific aspects of belonging and arrange the national community according to specific models. These images veer toward white, masculine, middle-to-upper-class, and heterosexual. Together, such tropes and figures offer a way of reproducing the status quo of hegemony, and obscenity can serve—though it also has other purposes—to shore up the boundaries of this community by putting off limits both non- mainstream sexualities and sex itself.

Pushing against the surface of these texts and putting into conversation the contrapuntal voices of these moments allows me to understand political culture, but also to understand the possible political function of literature and culture more broadly. Working interdisciplinarily, I hope to shed light on how texts become cultural objects and how, as culture, they participate in

Lawrence 46 Obscene Gestures, Introduction social activism and political rhetoric. Doing so can improve our understanding of what it means to debate the politics of representation and moves a consideration of literature outside the abstract and into the concrete. In this way, the project is driven by an activist impulse and a progressive ideology, dedicated to making literature work in the present. This project, however, entails deep consideration of the possibilities and complex realities of cultural activism. As Strub has noted “The notion that obscenity law serves as an enforcing agent of normative sexual regimes carries a certain tautological truth, but its self-evidence has perhaps acted to obstruct investigative efforts at historicizing its operations under specific settings” (“Lavender” 84). Strub is right that we have to concede the seemingly self-evident notion that restrictions on sexual representations can and often do contribute to norming and abjection. But he also reminds us that this cannot stand in the way of deeper investigation of the specific circumstances in which it does this. This dissertation attempts to take on the obstruction he mentions. By looking at specific contexts and attempting to understand the local, concrete ways that obscenity laws and rhetorics have been used to exclude individuals and groups based on real or perceived sexualities, I hope to give a better sense for American political culture, social activism, and the relationship between culture and society.

Engaging with obscenity also allows us methodological insights we might not have otherwise gained. Progressive theoretical and aesthetic impulses toward revealing the social significance of artworks are often directed at revealing how dominant discourses are conveyed furthered, or buttressed. This has been the iconoclastic method I often use in my own scholarship, and it underwrites my analysis of mainstream or dominant-voice texts in other forums. However, in this case, we can see that it is the same impulse to hold texts (and authors and distributors) responsible for their effects that informs censorship efforts as varied as limiting

Lawrence 47 Obscene Gestures, Introduction access to violent video games, placing warnings on music that contains profanity, and pearl clutching over gangster rap. In both cases, we see the “discursive alliance” (which we are now hesitant to call “sorry”) that Butler identified between Andrea Dworkin and Jess Helms (108).

Though we might ultimately retain our dedication to uncovering the material impacts of cultural artifacts because it seems to secure our best path to social justice, we must be wary of unconsciously enacting the same simplistic criticisms we critique when they come from those who seek to limit access to artworks. We must retain our belief in the value of deliberation, of the salutary nature of study and continued open debate, and we can still resist the impulse toward state or group authoritarianism underwriting censorship, even if we concede that artworks can have undesirable real world effects.

1 Evoking the ambivalence such works inspire Janet Kardon calls Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos, which were the subject of a 1990 obscenity prosecution in Cincinnati, “potent entrapments” where “The action cannot be perceived unless the eye constantly darts in opposite directions” (11). 2 Cleland’s novel, which I discuss below, became the subject of protracted legal battles over its purported obscenity. One of the main questions the court was tasked with settling was whether its slight social value might outweigh its more significant sexual elements. 3 As I will discuss later, the propriety of doing such quantitative comparisons of obscene versus moralistic content has been one way of unraveling the complex implications of sexually explicit text. This is reflected in the jurisprudence, which I analyze somewhat later. 4 Lenny Bruce’s iconic aphorism “Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government,’” encapsulates this notion. 5 Etymological definitions of the obscenity tend to emphasize, in fact, that it is a kind of text that does things, that creates a particular effect and therefore does more than depict or describe. Obscenity is “designed to incite to lust or depravity” (“Obscene,” Merriam-Webster) or “tend[s] to deprave and corrupt those who are likely to read, see, or hear the contents” (“Obscene,” OED). Because the obscene is a category of utterance that creates effects in the reader, it becomes dangerous rather than merely objectionable.

6 The reverse is also probably true. Whitney Strub argues that efforts to control the availability of sexual material were often ways of sublimating the same kinds of illicit desire and arousal they claim to suppress (Perversion 80- 115). 7 In this way, the history of obscenity directly supports Gayle Rubin’s suggestion that Western culture is unable to conceive of benign variation in sexual practice and desire (see “Thinking Sex”); in fact, the case history on the matter would be the chronicle of the legal enforcement of sexual conformity in representations. 8 In using the phrase “sexualized minorities,” I mean to evoke not only those who belong to groups defined by sexual desire or practice, but more conventionally understood minority groups for whom cultural tropes of sexuality contribute to Othering, such as, in Chapter One Southeast Asian and, in Chapter 2, women of color. 9 For more on anti-vice campaigns from this era, including the Comstock Law, See Nicola Beisel, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, and Molly McGarry. 10 By today’s standards the punishments, which were spelled out in the law, were draconian. Conviction meant an automatic 6 months to 5 years at hard labor.

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11 The holdover from this era and the persistence of the unusual role of the Postal Service as de facto censor in the U.S. can be seen in Rick Santorum’s call during his 2012 presidential campaign to use the Service to more aggressively enforce obscenity laws. 12 It is interesting to note that the period when the Comstock laws were enacted, following the Civil War, was similarly a period of increasing Federal oversight of matters previously under State control. 13 Much of the language of Chaplinsky speaks not of the First Amendment, but of the Fourteenth, which is primarily due to the fact that it is the Fourteenth Amendment that makes the First Amendment applicable not only to the Federal Government, but to the states as well. Despite the 14th Amendment focus, the central question they address in the decision relates to what kinds of speech are protected or not. 14 See United States, Report. 15 Santorum’s attempt to make political hay over pornography indicates that the issue appeals to some, though his inability to gain political traction with the issue also indicates that he and his campaign misjudged the galvanizing force of the issue. 16 See Strub, “Lavender.” 17 See also Lee Edelman on how sexuality is directed toward reproductive channels in order to maintain structures of political futurity. 18 See, for example, Hélène Cixous. 19 See United States, Final. 20 I agree with Lambert’s argument that a varied terrain of modesty governed choices about publication during this period, but texts such as Angels in America, American Psycho, and certain works produced in the context of AIDS activism, I think, demonstrate that modesty was a mainstream practice and that the strategic use of obscene—or explicit—material continued. 21 Nick Ut’s Napalm Girl in Chapter One, Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School and Walker’s The Color Purple in Chapter Two, Dead Kennedy’s album Frankenchrist in Chapter Three, and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in Chapter Four. 22 One notable example is the television show South Park (1997-present), which was considered offensive by some due to explicit content (mostly profanity, but also some sexual content). The show’s creators express libertarian viewpoints and often lampoon or outright attack liberal and progressive causes and figures. 23 However, this line of reasoning is contested by Guy Westwell in his reading of Ut’s photograph. Westwell recommends scholars adopt “skeptical and critical reading strategies to ensure that the tendency to overstate war photography’s traumatic and shocking effect is resisted” (408). 24 It is provocative, though perhaps not ultimately compelling, that the cultural prominence of pornography and sexuality was coterminous with the political scandals of Watergate, and that the result was that Howard Simon chose the name “Deep Throat” for his confidential informant, W. Mark Felt.

Lawrence 49 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1

Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1:

Anti-War and Anti-Warren Court: 1973 and Obscene Critiques of the Global Militarism

“I am particularly alarmed when I compare the differences in society 20 years ago and today regarding a fundamental breakdown in values. I first noticed these differences when I returned to

American society after more than 7 ½ years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.

Things that were considered totally unacceptable for public presentation when I left, were common sights when I came home”

Jeremiah Denton (United States, Subcommittee 1)

Though he made the statement above in 1985, Senator Jeremiah Denton’s comments draw together historical threads that actually find themselves entangled in the year of his release from a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp: 1973. By that year, he says, “things that were considered totally unacceptable for public presentation” when he was captured in 1965 had become “common sights.” The dramatic cultural shift that Denton missed as a POW was the sexual revolution and political upheaval of the 1960s and early seventies. The sentiment he expresses here highlights the extent to which the Vietnam War represents a profound shift in

American society and culture. That Denton is making this comment at hearings over pornography legislation reminds us that it is particularly the sexual aspects of this cultural upheaval he is concerned about—just as his making them another dozen years after his release indicates the lasting impact of these changes and of this moment in American history.

In this chapter, I demonstrate how moralist discourses like Denton’s, designed to capitalize on a sense of a lost American innocence, inflect and stand in for negotiations over war,

Lawrence 50 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 international policy, and militarized racial policy. The seemingly disparate pursuits of religious moralism, sexual repression, and neoconservative politics are routinely brought together in this debate about artworks containing graphic sexuality, revealing a shared ideological center that we might not see if we did not attend to obscenity as a specific category of discourse. Senator

Denton’s vague language is instructive: “things” that were not seen in public in 1965 were common in 1973—but these “things” reflect not only changes in sexual mores, but also racial tolerance and political dissent, as well as broader shifts in demographics.25 Many things had changed, but for Denton, they all justify to restrictions on sexual expression—just as restricting sexual expression might also be used to resist cultural progress on racial equality.

“The Worst I’ve Ever Seen”: Obscenity, Newsworthiness, and The Terror of War

Senator Denton’s yoking together of the war in Vietnam and concern over the distribution of pornography takes part in a longstanding relation between violence and sexual representations— including objections to sexuality that serve to censor images of war. Such was nearly the case of a famous photo from the year before Denton’s release. Responding to an incident of accidental napalm bombing of civilians in Trangbang by South Vietnamese jets in 1972, Nguyen Van Hai, a sergeant with the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) told on-scene reporters, “This is terrible, the worst I’ve ever seen!” (qtd. in Butterfields 9). The lasting legacy of that event is the photo that Associated Press photographer Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut took of the June 8 incident, a photo that won Ut a Pulitzer Prize. Published nationwide the next day, including on the cover of the New York Times, the image, titled The Terror of War (but commonly referred to as Napalm

Girl), shows a group of children running from the site of the bombing, smoke and fire visible in the background. In the center of the photo is a girl, 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, running

Lawrence 51 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 naked and screaming in pain and terror; she has torn off her burning clothes. Because of this nudity, The Terror of War faced hurdles to publication because of the presumption that the nude body would potentially run afoul of standards of propriety. For this reason, the image crystallizes the aesthetic politics of the moment.

Ut’s photo stands out as a record of the cruel anarchy of the war in Vietnam. The photo was prized because it demonstrated the human cost of the war in stark terms that were hard to dismiss. In part this is because the subjects are children, and the image therefore takes advantage of their standing in as the ur-sign of innocence (perhaps also problematically participating in the infantilization of the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and others during the war). It also made visible the monumental price paid by those who are the victims of the inability to make war a precise or ideologically perfect pursuit, despite efforts to construe it to the contrary. The rise of technological warfare and more and more remote use of ordinance—reflected today in the use of military drones—fostered an illusion that war could be scientific and sanitized. While many critiques of the war, such as the Academy Award-winning documentary Hearts and Minds

(1974), attempted to highlight the inextricably human element of the de-humanization of the war—its transformation into a technical rather than human endeavor and how this made possible devastation on an immense scale—this photo put a lasting human face on the destructive technology of the war in Vietnam in a way that has cemented for it an ongoing place in

American memory of the conflict.

The image itself suggests an overwhelming amount of auditory information. The open mouths of the children cause us to imagine their terrified screams; the clouds of smoke in the background suggest the roar of the burning napalm and the crack and crash of falling trees and crumbling buildings; we know, too, that the drone of the planes might be heard as they peel away

Lawrence 52 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 from the bombing site.26 Much about this image metaphorically cries out, but as a photographic, it only suggests the sounds that we imagine. The image also forces us to grapple with a larger absence, an epistemological absence: the inability to create a coherent meaning out of the image, to find the proper response or the proper placement of the represented phenomenon in a narrative that will justify it or use it for future action. As Sylvia Shin Huey Chong describes, news outlets often paired the photo with others in attempt to use montage and juxtaposition to suggest a narrative of meaning for the image that otherwise might gnaw at viewers with its unmitigated sense of inhumanity (113–26). Despite these juxtapositions, the image continues to be unsettling because of this epistemological difficulty and for other reasons, including the disturbing presence of a nude body.

At first, photographers and editors were unsure whether to transmit the photo over the wire because the presence of Phuc’s nude body in the image might have run afoul of propriety and obscenity standards. The reporters were concerned that mere nudity might be objectionable to editors on its face, regardless of intent or context. Joe McNally and Janet Mason reported in

Life in 1995 that the photo almost was not published because “An Associated Press staffer thought newspaper editors would find the girl’s nakedness offensive.” In addition, on its initial inspection by an AP deputy editor, the photo was rejected because of the nudity, though this decision was later overturned by a more senior editor, Horst Faas (Westwell 409). Though downplaying editorial disagreement about the nudity, Hal Buell, head of the Associated Press at the time, conceded that there was concern about public reaction. He notes that “there was a discussion before it went out, because of the frontal nudity,” though he dismisses the concerns by saying “we would discuss any photo that might be controversial” (qtd. in Winslow 20).

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Despite Buell’s contention that the image was screened only in the routine way any other image would be, other news agencies responded quite differently, which indicates that the image was, indeed, much closer to trespassing established guidelines and taboos. For example, NBC, who had cameramen present at the bombing, destroyed its footage of the incident because of

Phuc’s nakedness (Westwell 409), though they ran a cropped version of Ut’s photograph that did show Phuc (411). And although Buell suggests the image was treated routinely, John G. Morris recalls that the decision to place the image below the fold on the front page of The New York

Times was due to concern over the nudity (qtd. in Winslow 20). Thus, while it was decided by the AP that the photo was sufficiently newsworthy that it should be published, concerns over its potential to offend because of the presentation of nudity impacted the way it was published.

In this case, the full frontal nudity in the photograph seems both incidental and significantly problematic. On the one hand, the discussion of potential objections by those involved invokes the specter of sexualization of the body in the image, a sexualization all the more troubling precisely because the image is of a child.27 Anne Higonnet argues that photographs of children constitute a particularly important field for considering the presumption of indexicality (and I would argue, therefore, for considerations of obscenity which often troubles the notion of indexicality), because it parallels the presumption of innocence. She demonstrates the provocative link between “the ideal of absolute childhood innocence” and “a similarly absolute belief in photography’s objective neutrality” (10). Her work is useful for demonstrating how the anxiety we feel over this image’s openness to sexualized readings grows not only out of a need to protect children from harm, but out of a deeper historical use of children to represent innocence: “An attribution of sexuality to pictures of children cannot simply be tucked away on the bookshelf along with other exegeses. Real children seem to be endangered

Lawrence 54 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 when photographs imply, however ambiguously, that children are not completely sexually innocent, or when photographs allow predatory adult sexual projections onto children” (Higonnet

133). This powerful threat is often used, as with Terror of War, to demonize certain practices and discourses by representing them as potential threats to that innocence—this has been done routinely by representing the LGBTQ community as a threat to children, as well as Communists and others. But in this case the same trope is used to condemn the war in Vietnam. It is useful to note that the danger of harm to children is strong enough to create marked anxiety even with images where an interpretation or viewer projection of sexuality is possible, though not intended, and where the image is not a record of sexual abuse.

Anxiety over the dangers of child pornography are pronounced enough to impact any representation of child nudity. In the late twentieth century, such images are often controversial upon publication.28 An example from this same era can be found in Maurice Sendak’s 1970 In the Night Kitchen, a picture book in which the main character, a young child, is depicted nude in several scenes.29 The book has faced challenges since its publication over its possible sexual content, absent intent or explicit sexual content, a fact of reception that demonstrates the ambiguity of interpretation, but also how texts are often made to answer for all their possible interpretations and uses.30 The controversy, preceding Ut’s photo by a few years—which highlighted the fact that nudity was often presumed taboo—would have influenced any decision to publish during this era. And it is notable, therefore, that such images are often controversial even before the fact, as Ut’s was, since the possibility of negative public reaction is anticipated and influences decisions about publishing, creating a controversy in advance of release.

Ut’s photo brings provoke for viewers the anxieties of sexualization, but uses figures of threatened innocence for political purposes. Thus, questions of obscenity seems largely to miss

Lawrence 55 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 the point. The nakedness of the body is part and parcel of the power of the image not for sexual purposes, but because it speaks to the experience of those involved and induces empathy for the victim and horror at the violence. Phuc’s nakedness is an index of her profound suffering. She is in such pain and terror that standards of modesty have been superseded by more immediate material concerns: tearing off her napalm-covered clothes that are literally burning her alive.

This image, then, demonstrates the limits of a concern for sexual representation and the conditions that shift its boundaries. It reveals the privileged underpinnings of a cultural context in which modesty is a signal virtue, because it can only be so in situations where violence is a remote concern. Furthermore, the discourse surrounding the photo demonstrates that even in cases where nudity is integral to the significance of the image and presented in a non-sexual manner, even still the question of obscenity must be grappled with.

It is significant that debates about modesty and propriety are raised in response to this image. These questions of sexual representation accompany, but can occlude, important questions about the propriety of the violence the image depicts. As Chong points out, citing

Robert Hariman and Louis Lucaites, the image is obscene because it shows full frontal nudity, but also because it represents element of the war that national propaganda interests mandated must not be viewed. Both are ways that the image shows what must not be shown.31 Chong usefully points out that a concern for the sexual obscenity of the image misdirects attention from the violence and allows the reader to mistake its full import: “outrage over the image’s sexual obscenity alone becomes a way of masking the discomfort aroused by its transgressive violence, and the issue of sexual obscenity comes to the fore as the outrage over the violence in the image fades into historical cliché” (116). This is in keeping with Michel Foucault’s contention that concern with representations of sexuality can mask the operation of power, and this is why this

Lawrence 56 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 image is an important touchstone for a discussion about sexual representations and how they come to stand in for other concerns.

In this case, the nudity of the central subject is hardly beside the point—it is precisely the point because it is by virtue of the nudity that discussion and attention are directed away from the more important consideration of the napalm attack, of the civilian cost of the war, of the impossibility of maintaining ideological or philosophical principles in a condition of war. The more profound challenge this photo offers to existing structures of power by critiquing the discourses that allow war to continue is put in jeopardy by another discursive dodge. Because of the wide-ranging dissemination of a discourse of obscenity regulating the creation and distribution of images of the body—especially nude and wounded—the power of this image might have been suppressed and can still be mistaken. Here, the image itself was not restricted. It is instructive, however, that questions about public objection were raised at every stage of the publication process because a general concern over the possible impact of nudity were so broadly felt. In this way, journalists and editors can be seen reflecting a deep and pervasive self-policing that resulted from prominent obscenity cases in the same period.

However, I do not mean only to suggest that obscenity represents one field in a broadly felt structure of self-regulation in media and other forms of representation. Rather, it demonstrates that taboos on sexual representation are constantly negotiated against other concerns; they exist only in a tense balance with other values, in this case newsworthiness. This balance can create complex dynamics by which the deployment of obscenity discourse distracts from or mediates other ideological pursuits. We might imagine a simple binary: in some eras the loosening of prohibitions on nudity or sexual content reflects interest in promoting more varied and potentially transgressive challenges to social structures; in others, conservative trends push

Lawrence 57 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 back, hoping not only to control representations of sexuality, but to contain challenges to social norms through greater restraint on the freedom of authors, artists, and publishers. These latter figures are then often implicitly or explicitly linked to criminals, social resistance movements, and other groups deemed a threat to established order. More likely, however, as it is with Ut’s photo and the 1970s, both appear to be the case, as social upheaval both spurred widespread protest against restrictive social norms and led to law-and-order driven pushback. Latent and shifting antinomies become amplified and renegotiated in more stark terms.

Ultimately, what appears to be at stake is what social acts are privileged over other social acts and who belongs in the national community. Representations of sexuality are an indication of the state of these negotiations and can usefully contribute to our understanding of cultural formations in this era and others. The photo therefore stands out as an instance in which discourses about the possibility of showing material that might be deemed sexual clashed with competing social values, and the lasting impact of the photo, including multiple retrospectives in

2012 on the occasion of its 40th anniversary, indicate the continuing relevance of the war and of such issues of representation.32

We might usefully expand an analysis of photographs into the realm of fictive and verbal texts. Chong rightly points out that a handful of images are credited with changing the course of the war, galvanizing home-front resistance, and ultimately driving the withdrawal of troops.

However, the field of shocking, sympathy-and-outrage generating texts from this period (and those around which questions of obscenity were raised) should not be limited to the visual.

Extending such an analysis into literature reminds us of the profound challenges to political action, societal structures, and legal discourses that can come from arguably more ambiguous

Lawrence 58 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 media. Additionally, as I will show later on in Chapter 3, literary texts are often afforded a particular status in obscenity discourse, where the presumption that they are less dangerous actually allows them to make more effective critiques.

I turn now to consider how literary texts that used extreme sexual content alongside critiques of globalized warfare and militarism circulated in a legal environment where the fate of representations of sexuality was deeply linked to neoconservative military policies. That is to say, the novels I consider—Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Robert Coover’s

The Public Burning (1977)—used explicit sex to critique the economic and ideological machinery of war. At the same time, Supreme Court jurisprudence limiting the distribution of sexual material was shaped by the same political institutions and coalitions responsible for pursuing the war. The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Warren Burger featured four justices appointed by Richard Nixon that took upon itself to revise obscenity rulings of the more liberal

Warren Court that preceded it in the 1950s and 1960s. The political shift on the court had a number of causes and far-reaching effects, but the story of its movement on the question of obscenity in some ways crystallizes important concerns about how clashes over new ideas of social justice, empowerment, and politics could or should be pursued.

The early 1970s were tumultuous for the U.S. both at home and abroad, and the legal climate reflected this. During this period the organization of social norms, national identity, and political power were being contested profoundly as a continuation of the upheaval of the late

1950s and 1960s. As the Watergate scandal was coming to its apex following the 1972 break in at the DNC headquarters, the Burger Court was issuing its ruling in Roe v. Wade and federal agents engaged in an armed standoff with members of the American Indian Movement at

Wounded Knee. This was a year with profound significance for American involvement in

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Vietnam, too33: 1973 saw the signing of the peace accord and of the withdrawal of American troops. And as U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam was coming to a close, Pynchon’s encyclopedic meditation on war, Gravity’s Rainbow was published, and the Burger Court set the reigning precedent for obscenity in Miller v. California.

This was a time when the distribution of images from the war in Vietnam and news footage of violent clashes in the Civil Rights struggle flooded American culture with difficult representations, both reflecting and amplifying how those struggles played out. Artistic productions seeking to understand these processes similarly began to reflect more violent images. The implications of this, however, are significant, and do not allow us to assume that images of war simply led to a reflection of life by culture. As Chong argues, increases in violent images and violent material conditions both access an epistemological shift “[t]hese images did not only capture an index of physical violence taking place throughout the U.S. and the world.

They also symbolized an epistemic violence taking place within the American body politic, as its citizens engaged in various social and political movements that would alter the symbolic identity of the nation” (23). Chong’s relation of epistemic violence and physical violence is useful, because it points us toward an understanding of how images—violent or sexual—should be read in the context of real-world acts of violence and transgression.

Chong ultimately concludes that the underlying power of this confluence of violent events and violent images is a powerful combination of epistemic and material transformation oriented toward greater racial equality: “[T]he demands of formerly marginalized or silent subjects did violence to the normative conception of the American citizen as a white, heterosexual, middle-class male, even if these subjects were not themselves agents of violence”

(Chong 23). It is on this level, where normative models of identity and national myths have the

Lawrence 60 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 potential to drive action, that epistemic violence—transformations in modes of representation, in tropological possibilities, and in the boundaries of taste and propriety—can have important effects. As Lisa Lowe notes, “[T]he question of aesthetic representation is always also a debate about political representation” (4). Because national narratives of identity and destiny shape political action, from foreign military action to laws defining citizenship, this sphere, where explanatory models and metanarratives are shaped, is one in which the stakes of representation become clear. Questions of obscenity, where certain kinds of desire and certain modes of critique are enacted, then, become significant.

Before concluding with some theoretical considerations on the function of obscenity in other contexts, I will consider Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Coover’s The Public Burning.

Each novel includes over-the-top or troubling sexual content, including BDSM, group sex, and non-consensual or assaultive sex. In some senses, sex provides these novels with a set of simple metaphors for political relationships rooted in exploitation (a device common in other works I will consider in later chapters). At various points in the novel, passive partners provide service to dominant powers; group sex represents an eruption of repressed animalism; etc.

However, each novel uses extreme sexuality to more complex ends. Gravity’s Rainbow allegorizes Vietnam-era concerns and broader issues of social organization by drawing connections between sexuality and industrialized warfare—in addition to indicting global corporate structures in the perpetuation of violence across the world. Coover’s novel deliberately uses vulgar satire to link Nixonian politics to the metanarratives of American Exceptionalism that underpin it, a process that involves revisiting the 1953 execution of Ethel and Julius

Rosenberg. Both novels use sexual and violent imagery to advance arguments about the cruelty or voraciousness of the will to power during this period as well as its deep imbrication with sex

Lawrence 61 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 and taboo. Their particular concern is, respectively, the epistemological conditions of international warfare and the development of nationalist metanarratives that promote state power.

Because their projects use sex to critique the state and do so through extreme representations, they exceed the apolitical kinds of prurience that would lead to prosecution for obscenity.

Nonetheless, each was challenged in various ways for the extremity of its sexual content, sparking debates about their social value and the appropriateness of such a technique. For this reason, they represent important examples of both obscene political work and the cultural environment in which they circulate.

Political Representations: Richard Nixon’s Re-Shaping of the Supreme Court

This period of upheaval in the early 1970s, when Americans’ sense of themselves was being contested at home and abroad, was a significant time for Supreme Court jurisprudence on obscenity. The more conservative Supreme Court under Warren Burger sought to refine rulings on obscenity made by the Warren Court, which was famous for progressive decisions in cases such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Miranda v. Arizona (1966), and Loving v. Virginia

(1967). The Warren Court had played a highly visible role in the transformation of national identity, specifically the dismantling of Jim Crow, that contributed to the epistemic violence

Chong describes—a violence that produced important progress on civil and individual rights but that provoked strong reactions from conservative members of government and the public.34 It is in the context of—and as part of a larger, multifarious reaction to—this historical testing of

American national ideals that the Burger Court created the standard for defining obscenity that still governs precedent today.

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Our understanding of the positions of the two courts can be improved by looking at the political dynamics that contributed to the ideological constitutions of the different bodies.

Ultimately, the history here allows us to see how obscenity, imbricated as it is with both First

Amendment rights and the power of the Executive and Legislative Branches, becomes a lens through which we can better understand shifts in the value of cultural production relative to other concerns such as the power of prosecutors to pursue suspects, concerns that then fall under the auspices of the Judiciary.

Nixon saw a political opportunity in the considerable conservative frustration with the actions of the Warren Court. As Bruce H. Kalk notes:

Nixon cast his lot with a strain of thinking on the right that sought to roll back the

achievements of the Warren Court, especially its expanded interpretation of the Bill of

Rights and its crippling of Jim Crow. Not only did Brown v. Board of Education uproot

the racial mores of the South, but the court expanded its interpretation of the First

Amendment rights of accused Communists in a series of cases during the mid-1950s and

of accused pornographers in 1959. Having provided comfort for the purveyors of

Bolshevism and x-rated pictures, or so it appeared to conservatives, the Supreme Court

then announced its landmark 1962 and 1963 decisions banning prayer and Bible-reading

in the public schools. In the South in particular, the High Court’s seeming two-pronged

assault on long-held racial customs and official religious observances rankled

traditionalists. . . . In response to the court’s expansion of civil liberties during the

Warren Era, conservatives inveighed against the Supreme Court, not only on Capitol Hill

where they attempted to limit the power of the judiciary through legislation, but

throughout the country. (262–63)

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As Kalk notes, those who objected to the expansion of rights and freedoms under the Warren

Court rhetorically conflated a wide variety of disparate groups (Communists, Civil Rights workers, criminals, publishers) who had been given greater license or protections. This glossing of important differences parallels the uniting of disparate political constituencies that produced a galvanized coalition on the right, which formed to oppose these perceived excesses. The Warren

Court became a focus of conservative—especially white Southern—dissatisfaction, and this environment presented an opening for Nixon to strengthen his political support. Warren Court rulings against segregation and school prayer had further angered Southern conservatives who were already abandoning the Democratic Party over its support for Civil Rights.

Importantly, it is also at this time that Nixon, seeking to expand the power of the

Executive Branch and forge a Southern coalition for the Republican Party was given four nominations to the Supreme Court. It was evident at the time that Nixon intended to curtail the extraordinary expansion of rights overseen by the Warren Court, and he received an extraordinary opportunity to influence the judiciary. Time reported on his progress after only two appointments in June of 1971:

With the appointment of only two Justices, he has already helped to blunt the judicial

revolution that began in 1954, when Earl Warren wrote the court’s unanimous decision

outlawing school segregation. That historic ruling was followed by scores of others

involving race relations, voting, and capital punishment—many of them containing

unprecedented guarantees of individual rights in America. Now, as the new Burger Court

nears the end of its second term, it seems obvious that the Warren years of legal daring

are over. (“The Supreme Court”)

The shift after the appointment of Burger and Harry Blackmun is here described as one toward

Lawrence 64 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 restraint rather than “daring”—a question of method rather than ideology. However, we cannot neglect that the daring of the Warren Court was a daring to do things such as end segregation, expand federal power to overturn state laws deemed discriminatory, and increase the voting power of urban voters who had previously had their voice in government diluted by a lack of proportional representation. Thus, the Warren Court’s daring moved toward greater rights for urban, minority, and poor communities. A shift toward restraint, then, indicates a turn to the right.35

Thus, Nixon capitalized on retirements on the bench to walk back the advances of the

Warren Court, build the strength of the Executive branch by stocking the judicial branch with pro-Executive justices, and build a national Republican electoral majority.36 This turn to the right took the form of a desire to build a judiciary more amenable to the concerns of police and prosecutors as a way to signal a commitment to law-and-order values. Before sending his nomination of Lewis F. Powell, Jr. and William H. Rehnquist to the Senate, Nixon explained his judicial philosophy in part by quoting Walter Lippmann, who decried the fact that “[t]he balance of power within our society has turned dangerously against the peace forces, against governors and mayors and legislatures, against the police and courts” (qtd. in Nixon 62).37 Nixon affirms,

“I share this view” (62), then goes on to state “I believe some Court decisions have gone too far in the past in weakening the peace forces as against the criminal forces in society,” and that “I believe the peace forces must not be denied the legal tools they need to protect the innocent from criminal elements” (63). Not only does Nixon euphemize “governors and mayors and legislatures, … [and] the police and courts” as “peace forces” at a time when police violence against Civil Rights workers was well known and COINTELPRO overreach was becoming common knowledge, but he uses the phrase “criminal element” to categorize all those who had

Lawrence 65 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 disagreed with government policy during that time. His statement attempts to claim the moral high ground in establishing a pro-government Supreme Court that could be counted on to revise decisions of the Warren Court and promote the drastic expansion of Executive power he envisioned.

When it came to obscenity, Nixon realized his vision for a conservative court more likely to side with prosecutors than with those who produce and distribute sexual material. Rejecting a more lax set of guidelines set by the Warren Court, Chief Justice Burger led a narrow majority of just five justices—which included the four Nixon appointees—that walked back the rulings that had governed the publication and distribution of potentially offensive material.38 The new guidelines they set affirmed the importance of community standards in determinations of what is offensive. Though this might seem to represent the privileging of state and local authority in contrast to Federal oversight, in reality this enabled national prosecutorial forum shopping, where material produced in liberal locales, such as Los Angeles, was charged in more conservative communities, such as in Kansas and Ohio where such material might be bought.39

Perhaps most importantly, in the Miller ruling, they indicated that offensive material could be banned if it did not have a “serious” artistic value. In so doing, juries were required to respect the value of artistic and political discourse—they could not ban just any sexually explicit material—but political and artistic work in such cases was required to be “serious.” Thus the

First-Amendment standard that still governs today tasks us with discovering what constitutes a

“serious” artistic or social purpose and to understand in what contexts such purpose can be said to outweigh or override a text’s offensive, prurient, or repulsive content. That this is left to juries rather than delineated in law has led to numerous challenges based on Fourteenth-Amendment grounds that it does not allow individuals to know in advance what behavior is illegal and what

Lawrence 66 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 is legal. It also means that the standards of obscenity shift historically and in them can be seen an index of social values.

Because the Warren and Burger Courts played such a pivotal role in the development of discourse around obscenity as well as in the material conditions of its distribution, the relationship between obscenity and Supreme Court jurisprudence as it developed from the 1960s to the 1970s is highly important as a means of discovering political trends from that time. During this period, the Supreme Court and the governments of a number of jurisdictions attempted to negotiate the challenges of competing discourses that seek to balance the merits of free and open exchange of ideas—protected by the Constitution—and state interests in controlling objectionable material that might have detrimental effects on those who view or consume it.

Because of the influence of this ruling, U.S. culture still lives in the shadow of this era of social change, and obscenity law and the cultural artifacts it covers signal vestiges of the unfinished work of Civil Rights, the war in Vietnam, and the political legacy of Watergate.

Two Steps Forward and One Step Back: Obscenity Case Law from the Warren Court to the Burger Court

The rightward shift in the makeup of the Supreme Court in the early years of the 1970s can be seen as a reaction to the significant progressive activism of the Warren Court. In the

Burger Court’s more conservative obscenity rulings, this was expressed as a concern for state and local legislatures and prosecutors, groups that had lost ground to Federal and Judicial oversight. Anti-obscenity rulings and arguments, then, become a way of pursuing and emphasizing aspects of a broader culture of restraint, authoritarianism, and order that was being extended to sexual practice and representations.

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It is against the backdrop of its major civil rights and civil liberties rulings in Brown v.

Board, Miranda, Loving v. Virginia, and others that we see the Warren Court constructing a precedent on obscenity that would later be revised by the Burger Court to produce the governing legal framework that exists today. Just a few years after Brown, the Warren Court began its foray into obscenity. Their first major ruling in this area came with the 1957 case Roth v. United

States.40 It is evident in the length of the ruling that the Court sought with its first effort to settle a range of issues related to state oversight of obscenity; thus the decision offers a comprehensive snapshot the state of judicial logic and political culture on the matter at the time.

The most significant (and foundational) issue addressed by the Court was whether it was permissible under the Constitution, in any circumstance, for the government (primarily state and local governments) to enact laws banning obscenity. Justice Brennan, writing the majority opinion, concedes that “The fundamental freedoms of speech and press have contributed greatly to the development and well-being of our free society and are indispensable to its continued growth,” and that “Ceaseless vigilance is the watchword to prevent their erosion by Congress or by the States,” which seems to emphasize the danger of banning particular forms of speech.

While he further allows that “The door barring federal and state intrusion into this area cannot be left ajar,” he nonetheless contends that this door may be “opened only the slightest crack necessary to prevent encroachment upon more important interests.” Since the language used here and elsewhere in the decision is so explicit and extensive in its defense of freedom of the press and speech, it is somewhat surprising that the justices conclude that a “more important interest[]” is the control of what they call “material which deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest,” i.e., obscenity.

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Further attesting to the Court’s reluctance in this ruling is Chief Justice Warren’s affirmation of the majority opinion in which he states that “because we are operating in a field of expression and because broad language used here may eventually be applied to the arts and sciences and freedom of communication generally” (rather than the pornography that was at the root of the case), he suggests that the Court “limit [its] decision to the facts before [it] and to the validity of the statutes in question as applied.” In the end, the Warren Court decided that

“implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance,” and thus it did not, for the court, enjoy limitless Constitutional protection.41

Having established that the Constitution does permit the censoring of obscene speech, the more interesting question then became, “what is obscenity?” The semantic argument here is more significant than a question of definition might suggest. Because obscenity is specifically that kind of speech defined by being out of bounds, what the trespassed boundaries are, or, more specifically, how they are determined from one era to the next, is of critical importance. The practice of marking the boundaries of permissible discourse in a deliberative society reveals much about what dangers are perceived as so profound they require the suspension of conflicting principles.

The legal guideline emerging from Roth was that a text or publication was obscene if “the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest” (Roth). This seemed to draw a line between materials (movies, novels, and the like) that do not have arousal as their primary purpose (though they might include sexual content or incidentally arouse audiences) and those (e.g., pornography) that are intended for arousal alone. The debate hinged on the “social importance” of the material. Ultimately, the Court affirmed that it is not consistent

Lawrence 69 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 with the Constitution to weigh the social value of a work against its prurient appeal. Instead, a work must have no social value whatsoever, and appeal only to prurient interest, to be declared obscene. If the term obscenity marked off those texts that were “utterly without redeeming social importance,” it seemed that the presence of some level of social importance, even nominal, would mean that a text could not be obscene—and in fact this is how the Court’s ruling was subsequently interpreted.42

The application of this standard became a matter of concern for the court, and this was addressed in the 1964 case Jacobellis v. Ohio, in which an Ohio theater owner was convicted of possessing and exhibiting obscene material as a consequence of showing the French film Les

Amants (1958).43 In their ruling, the Court reiterated that “material dealing with sex in a manner that advocates ideas, … or that has literary or scientific or artistic value or any other form of social importance, may not be branded as obscenity and denied … constitutional protection.”

Thus, we are reminded that the representation of sexual material cannot, of itself, be grounds for finding a work criminally obscene. Instead, the work must meet the test the Court established in

Roth, a test that sorts texts into obscene and non-obscene based on the presence of “social importance,” a concept issuing from a consideration of “ideas.”44

Obscenity trials lingered as states and publishers attempted to force the Court to refine its rulings, pushing in two directions: toward greater state control of what could be published and toward greater artistic freedom. This fight played out in the halls of the Supreme Court again in

1966, with the case of Memoirs v. Massachusetts. The case concerned John Cleland’s Fanny

Hill, Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748). Fanny Hill (referred to as Memoirs in the legal documents) is a chronicle of a prostitute’s education into her profession and is almost entirely comprised of descriptions of a variety of sexual encounters. The book had been found to

Lawrence 70 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 violate obscenity statutes in Massachusetts. The lower courts affirmed the trial court’s finding and determined that the book was indeed offensive and prurient, and that while it might have

“some minimal literary value,” that “does not mean it is of any social importance” (qtd. in

Memoirs). The disagreement is essentially whether a book might be found obscene if its social value is slight enough to be outweighed by its offensiveness. However, the Warren Court disagreed and took the occasion to state their opinion unequivocally: “A book cannot be proscribed unless it is found to be utterly without redeeming social value. This is so even though the book is found to possess the requisite prurient appeal and to be patently offensive” (Memoirs, emphasis in the original). The standard reaffirmed by the Warren Court is that any social value is sufficient, because a text must be “utterly without redeeming social value” to be obscene. This affirmation, this clarification, is ultimately what the Burger Court will seek to overturn, largely because the finding all but entirely de-fangs obscenity statutes of any kind.

The Warren Court rulings in Roth and Memoirs were ultimately revised by the Burger

Court in 1973 with Miller v. California. The Miller ruling is important not because of the material in question, but because the ruling is the dominant precedent in obscenity law in the

United States and because the case demonstrates the nature and extent of the political shift on the

Court with its Nixon appointees. The appellant, Marvin Miller, was convicted of mailing circulars advertising pornographic materials that Justice Burger described thusly: “While the brochures contain some descriptive printed material, primarily they consist of pictures and drawings very explicitly depicting men and women in groups of two or more engaging in a variety of sexual activities, with genitals often prominently displayed.”45 The circulars had been

“thrust by aggressive sales action upon unwilling recipients who had in no way indicated any

Lawrence 71 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 desire to receive such materials,” a statement that implies that their receipt by unwilling parties was central—distributed to consenting individuals, they might be legal.

The importance of the unwilling recipient exposed to explicit material becomes clear in the following sentence: “This Court has recognized that the States have a legitimate interest in prohibiting dissemination or exhibition of obscene material when the mode of dissemination carries with it a significant danger of offending the sensibilities of unwilling recipients or of exposure to juveniles” (Miller). The danger of exposing the unwilling or juveniles to explicit materials is the justification for state intervention and obviates First Amendment issues, placing a clearer emphasis on the potential dangers of the material than found in Roth while presuming that exposure to sexual material constitutes harm. Whereas the more liberal Warren Court took time to affirm the importance of the First Amendment, Burger is careful here to note the state interest in suppressing certain kinds of speech. This indicates a shift in priorities emblematized by the recognition of state interest. Prior to this ruling, the emphasis had been on individual harm experienced by those exposed; in this case, we see a determination that restricting speech might be of interest to the state itself, a reflection of a deeper investment in promoting law and order and particular social behaviors, as opposed merely to preventing or punishing clear wrongs.

Taking as its basis the state interest in restricting speech and assuming the legitimacy of laws designed to limit “offending the sensibilities of unwilling recipients,” the court declared that, since it is Constitutional to ban some obscene materials in some circumstances, it is incumbent on the court to draw a line between what is obscene and what is not and to resolve the issues arising from what Burger calls “the somewhat tortured history of the Court’s obscenity decisions.” Though the Warren Court had done so explicitly, the Burger court still finds that “[i]t is in this context that we are called on to define the standards which must be used to identify

Lawrence 72 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 obscene material that a State may regulate without infringing on the First Amendment as applicable to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment” (Miller). This effort to define obscenity (again, but more expansively this time) then paves the way for the Court’s definitive ruling and the creation of the “Miller Test” to define obscene material.

Part of the reason they saw fit to revisit the issue ostensibly settled by the Warren Court, was that the Burger court wanted to create a workable test that would not preclude all proscription on obscenity. The Warren Court’s rulings in Roth and Memoirs and the test established in those cases required the prosecutor in any obscenity trial to prove that the material in question was completely devoid of social value, a difficult thing to establish definitively because of the subjective valuation of art. In order to establish this in courts that use a standard of reasonable doubt, Burger notes, prosecutors faced nearly insurmountable obstacles: “the

Memoirs plurality produced a drastically altered test that called on the prosecution to prove a negative, i.e., that the material was ‘utterly without redeeming social value’—a burden virtually impossible to discharge under our criminal standards of proof” (Miller).46 Concerned that following the test developed in Memoirs, an augmentation of that developed in Roth, was no longer workable in their view—because it would be difficult for prosecutors to prevail in court and thus essentially nothing could be legally declared obscene—the Burger Court took it upon themselves to refine the definition of obscenity.

The Burger Court’s concern here for prosecutors is telling, as it indicates their alignment with the Executive Branch, instead of operating as a check on it as the Warren Court had in cases such as Miranda.47 Their concern also seems to align with the judicial philosophy Nixon espouses, where he privileges the “peace forces,” which is to say “governors and mayors and

Lawrence 73 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 legislatures, … the police and courts” and declares that such forces “must not be denied the legal tools they need to protect the innocent from criminal elements.”

Echoing, then, the Warren Court test, the Burger Court established the following three- prong test to determine whether a law banning obscene materials is Constitutional:

The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether ‘the average person,

applying contemporary community standards’ would find that the work, taken as a whole,

appeals to the prurient interest; (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently

offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c)

whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific

value. (Miller)

Much of the language here echoes Memoirs, but deviates from it in significant, if subtle, ways.

The final prong of the test is most important for the understanding the value of art in relation to the danger of offensive sexual representations. This prong requires that the artwork, “taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” (emphasis added). The requirement that the value be serious as opposed to frivolous, passing, or contingent is key. The court was dissatisfied with rulings on texts—specifically Fanny Hill—which it deemed to be predominantly prurient while only superficially artistic or moralistic. As Burger affirms,

“prurient, patently offensive depiction or description of sexual conduct must have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value to merit First Amendment protection.” In question, clearly, is what constitutes seriousness and what constitutes value. In using more specific language, for example marking out the spheres of literature, art, politics, and science, the Burger

Court has attempted to clarify an issue that they see as plaguing the courts. Their purpose, however, is belied by the subjectivity of notions of value and seriousness.

Lawrence 74 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1

The court’s main interest here was to decide definitively what the Constitution allowed and what it prohibited states from doing. In pursuit of this goal, however, they were interested in moving away from the more liberal position of the Warren Court and scaling back the roadblocks placed in the path of prosecutors and legislatures. Instead, they wanted to view the prohibition of obscenity by states as something that could be managed under the First

Amendment, and it is clear that they viewed those who raised First Amendment issues with some disdain. For example, Burger is dismissive in attacking the dissenting justices on his own court:

“The dissenting Justices sound the alarm of repression. But, in our view, to equate the free and robust exchange of ideas and political debate with commercial exploitation of obscene material demeans the grand conception of the First Amendment and its high purposes in the historic struggle for freedom” (Miller). Again, while the decision is a subtle refinement of the Roth test, essentially replacing the modifier utterly with serious, the language of the decision creates a striking contrast. Compare, for example, Burger’s statement with Warren’s sixteen years earlier that “All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance—unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion—have the full protection of the [First Amendment] guaranties” (Roth). For Burger, the First Amendment is demeaned by its use in defense of objectionable material; for Warren, it is primarily designed to protect that which appears objectionable but that might have value.

The Miller decision establishes an important place for art in American culture but also demonstrates the politicization of the Supreme Court by revealing a neoconservative bent. Our laws identify danger in the sexual content and assert that there might be a governmental need to restrict certain kinds of sexual speech as there is a need to legislate speech that incites or puts others at danger. On the other hand, we see this danger as outweighed by the merits of artistic

Lawrence 75 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 pursuit and the open exchange of ideas. Nonetheless, what remains is a sense of vagueness, evinced by Justice Douglas in his dissent from the Miller majority, in which parameters exist for judging definitions of obscenity, but those definitions of obscenity remain varied by locality and interpretation and change as a result of historical circumstances that are not always predictable.48

At stake is the future of art that pushes boundaries and the political and aesthetic projects of such artifacts, and this is wrapped up in the political contests between the branches of government and the aspirations of a political party and its president. Though he will argue for more conservative interpretations of the First Amendment, Justice Burger does acknowledge the seriousness of the issue:

Apart from the initial formulation in the Roth case, no majority of the Court has at any

given time been able to agree on a standard to determine what constitutes obscene,

pornographic material subject to regulation under the States’ police power. … We have

seen ‘a variety of views among the members of the Court unmatched in any other course

of constitutional adjudication.’ … This is not remarkable, for in the area of freedom of

speech and press the courts must always remain sensitive to any infringement on

genuinely serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific expression. This is an area in

which there are few eternal verities. (Miller)

It is Burger’s statement that “there are few eternal verities” that highlights the epistemological uncertainty of the obscene—an epistemological uncertainty bordering on an ontological crisis.

The obscene is a locus of challenge and confusion, of danger without our being able to agree exactly why—in fact, the relative danger and the parties put in danger are matters of controversy.

This makes the obscene a site of aporia in cultural structures and indicates the importance of developing a clearer view of the effects of it.

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“Carried on under a Sentence of Death”: Gravity’s Rainbow’s Sexual Transgressions as

Critique of Global Warfare

As the Burger Court sought to expand the power of the state to oversee cultural production, important authors and counterculture figures were resisting this increase in state authority. Critiquing what they perceived as authoritarian and conformist stances being disseminated not only through government channels but also through mass media, authors, musicians, and artists pushed back with transgressive art of all kinds.

Two prominent texts from the 1970s that I want to consider for their use of extreme sexual content project their material into earlier eras: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, one of the most significant novels of the early 1970s and which is set during World War II, and

Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, a less well-known but more outrageous novel that has as a backdrop the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953. Rather than undermining their importance for their contemporary moment, the displacement of the content of their plots into the earlier crisis points instead links past violence with the moment of publication and suggests historical parallels. Both novels bring together the themes of violent chaos (war) and sexual depravity that often characterize obscene works, and since they were written before, but circulated after the Miller ruling, they are indicative of what kinds of texts the Warren Court’s liberalization of obscenity standards permitted, even as they push back against the Burger

Court’s reaction to that same liberalization.

Gravity’s Rainbow saw a more direct route to publication than Coover’s The Public

Burning, but nonetheless faced objections after its release based on its difficult prose and objectionable content, notably instances of coprophilia, multiple sexual encounters described explicitly—some involving adolescents—and a scene in which one of the main characters has

Lawrence 77 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 intercourse with a highly sexualized child. For these reasons, Gravity’s Rainbow experienced a mixed reception. Hailed by some as a masterpiece, and to this day considered Pynchon’s magnum opus, the book was also criticized for being opaque and offensive. Pynchon’s humorous, shorter novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and his previous expansive, encyclopedic novel, V. (1963), were somewhat less controversial.49

Pynchon’s eclectic style pairs technical minutiae with poetic description and absurd situations; Louis Menand calls him “a writer of postmodernist high-tech, a literary encoder of scientific arcana,” and declares that “on one level his stories slosh merrily along from one farcical-tragical episode to the next, while on another level an enormous web of symbolic implication is continually being woven and unwoven. It is as though the story of Popeye the

Sailorman had fallen into the hands of Richard Wagner.” In Gravity’s Rainbow, this seems to have led the author down a path that not everyone appreciated. The mixed reception is demonstrated by the novel’s tribulations in its unsuccessful journey toward the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1974. The novel was unanimously recommended for the Prize by the fiction jury, but the Pulitzer Board chose instead to issue no prize for fiction that year, rather than give it to

Gravity’s Rainbow. During their debate about the dense 750-page novel filled with obscure trivia and explicit sex, the novel was described as “unreadable” and “obscene” (Kihss).50 This disconnect between enthusiastic responses both positive and negative characterized the novel’s reception at the time.51

Some scholars do attest to the importance of considering the novel in terms of the politics of its moment, rather than those of the 1940s. Molly Hite, for example, notes that the novel

“seems passionately committed to both an ethics and a politics” that remain “radically unclear” for readers and that requires deep contextualization in the moment of its composition (39). Hite

Lawrence 78 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 advocates understanding the novel’s politics through the counterculture politics of the 1960s, a gesture that politicizes its satirical tone by invoking the fun-as-subversion element of Yippie culture, and she also links such projects to the cultural analysis of Herbert Marcuse (39-40).

Toon Staes also turns to Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization to explain the multifaceted critique in

Pynchon’s novel, a critique that rests in its sexualized representation of war and capitalism.52

They both stress the novel’s critique of scientific ideologies that have taken on their own life and eclipsed the human reality they once served, a process embodied in the arc of the rocket, gravity’s rainbow. In the world that results, humans serve discourse and society in a mechanized, bureaucratic way; that is to say, society remains dedicated to domination without rational basis.

As Staes puts it, “Gravity’s Rainbow hints at an ongoing historical process typified by the transformation of nature into a web of domination” (100). This understanding of the novel is also shared by Joseph W. Slade, who, again, echoing Marcuse, highlights the complicity of sectarian dogmas in the reduction of mystery, nature, and possibility to economic potential and, ultimately, violence (153).53

There are snatches of other suggestions that Vietnam forms at least part of the background for the novel. Slade notes that the experience of the South African Hereros in the

Zone in Gravity’s Rainbow may be resonant for the author with the imposition of Western rationality in Vietnam during the years Pynchon was composing the novel. And Slade remarks on “the hints that the narrator of Gravity’s Rainbow is a Vietnam veteran strung out on mysticism and dope” (160).54 Still, a more compelling metaphorical overlap emerges, as well;

Chong notes that “The Vietnam War instigated the development of televisual and filmic representations of explicit violence in a quantity and with an immediacy lacking in previous newsreel coverage of the Second World War and the Korean War” (19), suggesting the

Lawrence 79 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 importance of Pynchon’s project, which imagines World War II through the aesthetic mode of the Vietnam era.55

The novel itself takes place in Britain and continental Europe during the closing days of

World War II. A huge cast of characters spend the period engaged in unusual, clandestine, occult operations for the various combatant governments and extra-governmental agencies, both for the

Axis and the Allies, not always sure which and possibly both. As Germany’s defeat began to be seen as imminent, the Allied powers sought to secure the innovative technologies of the Reich, including especially Germany’s V2 rocket. The subsequent impact of these efforts on the ensuing

Cold War—the V2 would become the basis for both space exploration and the development of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile fueling the nuclear arms race—is not, however, the only aspects of Pynchon’s critique.

Much of the novel traces the historical connections between Western industrial and chemical corporations and the Nazi war machine. In the novel, these corporations are beginning to eclipse the national states at war, and thus the novel represents Pynchon’s efforts to historically situate, and thus defamiliarize, globalization, as well as reminding us that the process of globalization is intrinsically related to colonialism and warfare. Pynchon’s exhaustive demonstration of such connections is useful historically for an understanding of the causes and consequences of World War II industrial build-up, but is made much more poignant by the involvement of, for example, Dow Chemicals in the development of Napalm B and Agent

Orange, both of which were being used in military operations in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia at the time the novel was published. War profiteering—and the unchecked pursuit of economic opportunity in times of and at the cost of great human suffering—is a theme that expands our understanding of both World War II and Cold War military intervention in Southeast Asia and

Lawrence 80 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 allows us to see the continuity between these forces and economic globalization that is often linked with neoliberalism.

The primary character and imperfect hero, an American Army lieutenant named Tyrone

Slothrop, largely wanders through the novel collecting information about his unorthodox youth in an effort to understand his bizarre proclivities. His sexuality is not entirely his own and he is aroused by curious things—in truth, what causes Slothrop to become aroused is one of the great mysteries of the novel, both for the reader and the characters. Something about Slothrop’s past causes him to sleep with British women who live at sites in London where German rockets will land a few days later. Slothrop, a romantic, meticulously maps his conquests at the bidding of

ACHTUNG, the cooperative Allied unit concerned with obscure operations. Tracing the correlation between his sex and the rocket strikes is part of a larger effort to decode the strikes and hopefully prevent them. Paranoid theories abound, including Slothrop’s own suspicion that the rockets are tracking him personally.

Many assume that somehow Slothrop is both sexually aroused by the rockets and privy to remote extra-sensory information about their approach. He marvels “There is in his history, and likely, God help him, in his dossier, a peculiar sensitivity to what is revealed in the sky. (But a hardon?)” (Pynchon 26). A behavioral scientist in the novel named Edward W. Pointsman remarks on the esoteric assumptions of some of the researchers while asserting his own firm foundation in science, claiming he hopes only to find “A physiological basis for what seems very odd behavior. … [O]ddly enough none of you’s even suggested telepathy: perhaps he’s tuned in to someone over there, someone who knows the German firing schedule ahead of time. Eh? And

I don’t care if it’s some terrible Freudian revenge against his mother for trying to castrate him or someone” (89). Freudian science and the role of the unconscious are significant, but satirized by

Lawrence 81 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 the fact that in reality, his sexuality reacts to a Pavlovian conditioning performed on him as a child by a scientist engaged, it will is later revealed, with research on Imipolex G, a plastic used in the novel to construct a top-secret type of German rockets. Ultimately, this part of the novel’s intricately woven plot explores the possibility of free will in a hyper-determined world, representing also an allegory of the larger tendency to sexualize violence and technology; as

Slade puts it “Slothrop can apparently convert disorder—in the instance of rocket explosions— into order—in the instance of sexual potency” (173). Anxious rewriting of the chaos of war into linear narratives of battles and victories parallels this process, while sublimating its sexual component.

The question of agency bears directly on interpretations of the later scene of child sexual exploitation in which Slothrop is involved. Though repugnant, a lack of control on Slothrop’s part mitigates his responsibility. The scene then is not one in which a sympathetic character engages in a heinous act (blurring the ethics of the novel), but one in which the horrible consequences of social and empirical determinism are demonstrated (thus highlighting the ethics of the novel). In fact, as he reaches climax, Slothrop is described as “helpless here in this exploding emprise” (Pynchon 170); his ejaculation is then linked to the German missile technology he is investigating: “their own flood taking him up then out of his expectancy, out the eye at tower’s summit and into her with a singular detonation of touch. Announcing the void, what could it be but the kingly voice of the Aggregat itself?” (170). This moment of supreme violation of the figure of innocence coincides with Slothrop’s loss of control over his own actions. His link—still obscure—to the V2/Aggregat-4 missile drives whatever is happening at this moment, rendering it confusing, but indicting the structures of sexuality conditioned by technology, whether in the form of missiles or mass media. The implication is that even the most

Lawrence 82 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 congenial among us might be made complicit despite ourselves because of our interpellation into a system of knowledge and commerce.

Nonetheless, even if the character Slothrop’s behavior is reduced to an automatic stimulus-response that removes agency and diminishes his culpability, the novel as an artifact cannot be so exonerated. Thus it remains to untangle the meaning, purpose, and effect of such a representation—one that stands apart from those in The Public Burning because of this issue of agency. In Coover’s novel, the players are, if caricatures, still subjects imbued with agency— they are adults at least. They are complex, responsible for their own actions, and even sometimes sympathetic. The child Bianca, by contrast, presumably has no agency in the acts she is subject to. The scene, then, is one of clear victimization—proof of one of the novel’s main themes, which Slade describes: “children are saved from menace only in fairy tales” (165).56 Thus, while the novel faced less opposition to its publication than Coover’s, its challenge to our sense of morality is more profound. This is seconded by the more subtle rhetoric and less extreme mode of social critique that Gravity’s Rainbow undertakes.57 Because the book is less directly outrageous and trades in an aesthetic less concerned with shock and insult, the book’s offensive content becomes harder to ignore, though also harder to ban.58

In addition to the sexualization of a child in the scene mentioned above, the novel includes depictions of the primary inviolable taboo: incest. A German rocket engineer named

Franz Pökler has lost his wife and child to concentration camps. As he works on the rocket program, Pökler carries on a periodic liaison with a young girl (also a camp prisoner) that is the same age as—and in fact may be—his daughter. She is sent to Pökler each summer for a brief period as part of an inscrutable psychological game played by Pökler’s overseer, an SS officer named Weissmann (also known as Captain Blicero in other parts of the novel), in which the

Lawrence 83 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 young woman is a surrogate for Pökler’s missing daughter: comfort, compensation, and incentive for his work on the rocket. The presence of incestuous feelings in Pökler in these scenes serves a purpose. Through them, the novel dramatizes the way that the victims of the camps were pawns in a game of symbolic exchange between German men that incorporated war, sexuality, and patriarchy.

The act (or possible act) of incest is pathologized, but the novel is keen to remind us that in times of war, even pathological behavior finds expression and morality is displaced. The voice of a German administrator reassures Pökler’s handler, “Yes, yes, we know it’s disgusting, one never can tell what they have locked up in there with those equations, but we must all put off our judgments for now, there’ll be time after the war to get back to the Pöklers and their dirty little secrets” (Pynchon 420). Here, taboo and transgressive behavior—and the victimization of innocents parallel to or growing out of the Holocaust—must be tolerated because the perverse minds that produce them also contain scientific value that takes precedence; Pökler’s fantasies are “locked up in there with those equations,” and the fantasies must be indulged to profit from the technological knowledge. That Weissmann would object to Pökler’s sexual transgression is confusing, because as Blicero, when he is in charge of a rocket battery, Weissmann will engage in depravity of the highest order, engaging in sadomasochistic sex with captive adolescents, one of whom he kills. Moreover, this passing condemnation exists side-by-side with descriptions of sex acts and thus the novel runs the risk of eroticizing as it condemns.

However, the novel’s pathologizes Pökler’s acts while ascribing them to delusion and manipulation at the hands of the Nazis; like Slothrop, he is less than fully responsible.59 We read even, that “It was not, in fact, even clear to him that he had made a choice” (Pynchon 421) in the matter. Further, like most of the characters living in the lawless post-war period of the novel’s

Lawrence 84 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 later sections, Pökler is never punished for his transgressions. This ambivalent treatment is part of the unsettling nature of the text that complicates its role in the canon. As an image of the war, it makes the taboo acts it depicts part of a larger war-mania that crosses national borders and erodes conventions of morality, but it neglects to condemn that mania explicitly or particularly.

In the context of censorship, this is even more important. Often arguments for allowing objectionable content to be published rest on the notion that in fuller context (taking the work as a whole), the content serves a didactic purpose. It is not easy, to say the least, to find the didactic purpose here.

In fact, the descriptions of aberrant sexual behavior—including bondage, sadism and masochism, and coprophilia (in one of the novel’s most notorious scenes)—are carried out in much the same language as the more conventional sexual encounters between Lieutenant

Slothrop and his many adult lovers around Britain and Europe—encounters that would probably not meet the standard of “patently offensive” in the Miller Test. These other scenes are portrayed as a part of war and of human behavior, part of the ongoing drama of human life and a ubiquitous part of adult interactions—though all sexuality in the novel is enmeshed in a practice of pushing against taboos, a form of social transgression, if not always resistance.60 In fact, Slade contends that:

Sadomasochistic acts are common in Gravity’s Rainbow as attempts by characters to

break through the boundaries of the individual self and to reestablish the sense of

community that an impoverished spirituality has forestalled. … [T]he intent is to

transcend [the] self by breaking free of its borders, perhaps by annihilating the self

altogether in order to escape into void. In a rationalized culture, only sex and death

remain mysterious. Aberrant behavior links the two under the banner of rebellion. (189)

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In this sense, “sexual aberrations, though frequently distasteful, are more human than alien”

(Slade 192). They represent an effort to de-sublimate the repressed potential and will-to-life that has been channeled into the paradoxically destructive organization of society. This alignment of transgression with the potential for utopic revolution makes clear the novel’s ethics and the purpose of its representations. It violates standards of taboo in order to critique the system of repression that they underwrite.

Nonetheless, presenting child sexual abuse and incest without the critical or moralizing language that might negate the contaminating effect of such a representation creates a distinct kind of text that carries the stain of the obscene but forces one to grapple with the obscenity as part of a larger project, rather than dismissing it. In this way, it crystallizes the questions addressed in, if not resolved by, the Warren and Burger Courts’ obscenity decisions. The novel undoubtedly concerns ideas of significant social import (free will, the proliferation of international corporate conglomerates not answerable to national governments,61 the suspension of humanity and morality that attends war) but it is accompanied by—perhaps furthered by—its offensive material. Gravity’s Rainbow, then, performs some of the same work and encountered some of the same problems as Ut’s photo, Terror of War. The two works condemn war on the grounds that it erodes morality and destroys human lives and psyches, and in both cases, potentially obscene material is central, rather than incidental to that political project. Children figure as some of the primary victims in both texts, standing in for innocence violated, and a shocked public is induced to reconsider its complicity in barbaric (if technological) violence.

Ultimately, the scene of pedophilia, the invocation of incest, and Slothrop’s Pavlovian sexuality all veer toward the same theme. In Gravity’s Rainbow, war is an all-consuming social upheaval, one that displaces the logic that ostensibly spawned it. In the novel, World War II is

Lawrence 86 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 not fought for nationalist or political reasons. Those directly involved, both the planners and the combatants, think only of prolonging the war for their own purposes. Some of those purposes are economic, some are scientific, some are sexual; some are ideological while others are paranoid.

Nonetheless, the purpose of the war is these other impulses, not any proximate historical event or teleology of society or mankind. War becomes nothing more than—and as much as—the most productive theater for the pursuit of economic and political advantage without the conventional restraints of morality or society, and those who recognize this are most able not only to adapt but to profit.

Because conventions of order, of fair play, of logic, and of law are largely impotent in this milieu, anyone is free to pursue any goal by any means. Importantly, the goals being pursued are those that produce civilization, not those that tend toward its destruction. While there is looting and random violence, more common in Gravity’s Rainbow is the maniacal pursuit of a goal associated with progress: science, commerce, reproduction, exploration. The German rocket commander Blicero’s attempts to perfect his rocket through the exploitation of novel polymers and increasingly precise engineering are one example. Pointsman’s efforts to confirm the binary operation of the brain (“Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, he imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tin on/off elements” [Pynchon 55]) are another. The novel seems, in this manner, to underscore Marcuse’s argument that society’s fundamental organization—the repression of instinctual drives in order to promote activities that tend toward greater complexity in structures—is based on violence, but that this structure also fails to contain that violence. In this frame, the novel’s argument seems to be that the breakdown of order simply allows the animating forces of order (science, hierarchy, sociality) to progress unabated by less rationalistic concerns, such as standards of humane behavior.62

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Furthermore, the novel seems profoundly skeptical of the possibility of escaping the repressive structures that Marcuse identifies. In the Europe of World War II, society has effectively been smashed. The destruction of convention and the overturning of social order have been achieved, and the opportunity to found a utopia not predicated on the repression of sexual and destructive impulses—a repression that is necessarily incomplete and that, as Marcuse notes, produces excess violence (107-08)—that opportunity has arrived.63 There is virtually no check on any sexual or violent impulse. And yet, what obtains is not an idyllic cooperative society, but a chaos of self-interest and an orgy of destruction.

Moreover, as does The Public Burning, Gravity’s Rainbow reveals the misdirection performed by metanarratives of politics and nationalism. For the novel but also, it suggests, for our world, violent conflict on a massive scale simply fills a need. The narratives of national unity and of political allegiances that make the War possible and inevitable are merely a way of mobilizing the massive destructive forces necessary to radically transform the rules of the game, to allow for the transgression of laws and the abuse of humans, animals, and natural resources for scientific investigation (for its own ends), personal gratification, or economic accumulation.

Thus, the narratives that explain and produce national unity and that provoke national action become manipulations propagated by those in economic and state power in an effort to pursue that power more aggressively.64

Making any comprehensive argument about Gravity’s Rainbow is difficult, since the novel is so expansive. But it is logical to contend that the novel is arguing that the relative chaos of the war is a stage for social and anti-social impulses to progress to their (il)logical extremes and demonstrates a profound ambivalence about the sustainability or desirability of such a project. At these extremes we see the underlying manias that drive the structures of society. Still,

Lawrence 88 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 one must grapple with the nature of an aesthetic project that transgresses the boundaries of representation in order to make this point. Because the novel’s aesthetic is contaminated by its content, we have an obligation and an opportunity to uncover how these two trends can coexist and what the effect of it is. The Warren Court decisions of the preceding era paved the way for such a representation, since they deemed unconstitutional any law that did not consider the overall artistic merit of a work in making a determination of obscenity. Thus, a novel such as this that contains objectionable content but also pursues a larger artistic goal could not be banned.

The implied logic is that artistic and political merit and discourse are sufficiently valuable to permit a wide variety and manner of expression and that, to a certain extent, it is possible that the right purpose or a serious enough purpose can permit such representations or redeem them.

The novel attempts to guide us as we unpack this possibility. In a brief metafictional moment where the text muses on the nature of representation, the narrative pauses in its discussion of what is described as a “really offensive and tasteless film” that is, in addition to being offensive, mostly nonsense.65 At this point, the narration gives way to exposition on the fundamental flaw in efforts to judge the morality of any text and of the world itself. The novel discusses the presentation of material that is admittedly offensive, but claims that

the alternative is to start keeping some out and not others, and nobody’s ready for that. …

Decisions like that are for some angel stationed very high, watching us at our many

perversities, crawling across the black satin, gagging on whip-handles, licking the blood

from a lover’s vein-hit, all of it, every lost giggle or sigh, being carried on under a

sentence of death whose deep beauty the angel has never been close to. (Pynchon 746)

In the world of the novel and in the voice of the narration, what may be deemed offensive is nonetheless a part of existence, and the function of artistic representation is to uncover it, not to

Lawrence 89 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 judge it. Certainly, the text allows, there could be selection, there could be exclusion of certain material; there could be censorship. But the faculties necessary to make decisions about what is suitable and what is not are available not to humans but only to angels—the quintessential figure of the virtue humans do not possess. Moreover, the fallibility of humans—their degradation—is part of their mortality and their humanity. It is wrapped up in their “sentence of death,” an element of life that cannot be understood by those who would exempt themselves from its horrors and an echo of Marcuse’s hypothesis about the role of the death drive in civilization.

The January, 1973 signing of the peace accord in Vietnam and the withdrawal of

American troops in March signaled the end to a contentious war, if not the contentiousness of

American politics. Gravity’s Rainbow, published between these events, just as it was published between arguments and decision in Miller,66 crystallizes American anxieties and fascinations about power and the obscene through its sexualization of war and its encyclopedic treatment of the involvement of capitalist enterprises and human devastation. Though its plot describes World

War II, the context of its publication requires us to consider its impact on and reflection of conditions during the Vietnam War. Similarly, direct indictments of the corporate entities that played roles in and profited from the industrial mobilization that enabled both conflicts force us to attend to its contemporary implications.

Uncle Sam at an Orgy: The Public Burning and Obscene Spectacle

Coover’s The Public Burning is raunchier and less serious than Gravity’s Rainbow, but it was still effectively protected from prosecution because its historical critique of nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s secures its status as art concerning ideas. However, because of its treatment of Nixon—who is raped in the final pages—the book faced several hurdles to publication.

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Originally conceived as an irreverent inauguration present following Nixon’s 1972 election, the book’s composition took longer than expected, and completion was delayed beyond January

1973 (Frick 84). However, the biggest roadblocks came in the form of resistance by multiple publishers in the middle of the decade who feared prosecution for libel because of the depiction of the by-then-ex-president. Because of this difficulty, Coover’s satire missed its moment, but had been conceived as part of the striking confluence of historical events in late 1972 and early

1973 that I describe here.67

The Public Burning was Robert Coover’s sixth book. Previously known for short fiction, including the collection Pricksongs and Descants (1969), as well as two novels, The Origin of the Brunists (1966) and The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968),

Coover was an established author by the time of the publication of this novel, even if still outside the mainstream. Associated more with experimentalism, he remained a fringe figure in American letters. Like Pynchon’s novel, critics were divided over the book. Thomas LeClair notes that on the one hand, the book was one of the notable literary accomplishments of the 1970s (5-6). On the other hand, he continues, despite its serious aesthetic and political project, “like some of the other novels of the decade” (LeClair lists among them Gravity’s Rainbow), “The Public Burning is excluded from critical censuses or is dismissed as ‘excessive’” (5). Despite this tendency to neglect the book because of objections—like those faced by Pynchon’s work—to its supposed

“self-indulgence or diffuseness or obscurantism” (5) or its being “single or simple-minded” (8), important scholarly work on The Public Burning has been done.

This includes two special issues of the journal Critique, one in 1982, several years after the book’s initial publication, and the other in 2000, following the 1998 reissue of the book after it spent several years out of print. Scholars in these issues and elsewhere have traced the role of

Lawrence 91 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 popular culture in Coover’s novel, where it reinforces the personal and public narratives justifying the execution of the Rosenbergs, indicting especially Time magazine and Walt

Disney.68 There are also efforts to read the novel’s complex historiography through the figure of

Richard Nixon.69 Other authors address the novel’s sense of play and its metafictional and other experimental techniques.70

A running theme among the criticism is the role and importance of performance in the novel, which ruminates extensively—perhaps excessively—on the influence of filmic and theatrical tropes on self-perception and self-presentation.71 In fact, as Daniel E. Frick illuminates,

Coover’s work participates in the common practice among authors from this period of asserting the profound impact of specific fictions and of a general fictionality on life: “All of life, as

Coover sees it, is interpreted through fictions: that is, by mythic narrative structures that provide human beings, individually and collectively, with ways of ordering and thereby making sense of the world” (83). This notion, along with the novel’s critique of popular media in the 1950s (and the 1930s), shows both the method and the stakes of Coover’s critique. Specific narratives have influenced politicians and political culture, and this demonstrates the importance of cultural criticism in political activism. In the novel as in life, the American citizen is caught up in a propagandistic world where camp fiction and deadly political theater are indistinguishable facets of life.72

Coover’s reputation for this kind of playful yet serious fiction placed him squarely in the tradition of high postmodernism from the period. Still, it is the notion of excess that connects this work most to discourses of obscenity, which tend to construe sexual acts outside the mainstream

(such as group sex or extramarital affairs—both included in the novel) as decadence, a charge also directed at much postmodernist work.73 LeClair defends the work against the charge of

Lawrence 92 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 excess by championing its length, density, and over-the-top comedy, writing “Excess, as a criticism, is transcended by its function: transforming the text, transforming the reader’s understanding of important historical experience.” In this respect, his defense of the novel suggests one way we might interpret the gesture of obscenity: as deliberately invoking the taboo in order to interrogate the construction of such boundaries in a way that forces engagement rather than dismissal or indifference. Le Clair describes an “ambivalence of response” (13) to the novel, but this is not a lack of feelings that might result in indifference, but rather a mixture of revulsion and delight. This shuttling or simultaneous experience of both attraction and repulsion is often used to describe works deemed obscene.74 If they were only one or the other, there might be no problem. A purely repulsive work would be buried or banned, while a purely attractive one would receive no criticism (except perhaps as invitation to excess). But the danger of texts on the border of the obscene is that they attract toward what should repel.

One of the novel’s most strident critics was the neoconservative editor of Commentary,

Norman Podhoretz, who reviewed the book for The Saturday Review the year it came out. At odds from the start with Coover’s politics and seeing the book as exemplifying liberal depravity,

Podhoretz is unwilling to concede anything positive about The Public Burning, even the sympathetic nature of its portrayal of Nixon, something most critics note. Though perhaps ignoring much of the novel’s complexity, Podhoretz does succinctly sum up one its main points

(if sarcastically): “that the Rosenbergs were innocent of the charge of treason and that they were framed and then executed in order to further both the transformation of America into a fascist state at home and the expansion of its imperialistic power abroad” (27). Podhoretz probably considers this a denunciation, but I suspect Coover would consider it accurate. Seeming to laud the book at first, Podhoretz indicates his disdain by claiming the book is both better and worse

Lawrence 93 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 than its contemporaries, or perhaps merely that it exceeds them, that it is excessive: “What does distinguish The Public Burning from run-of-the-mill revisionist history is the raciness and richness of its style; a style that brings the high literary and the low vernacular together as effectively as has been done in any American work since Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie

March and that pushes the scatological sick joke to heights—or depths—it has rarely reached before” (27). Amid his back-handed compliments, Podhoretz’s main thesis is that the author takes liberties with the truth when he sees fit and transgresses what Podhoretz construes as important boundaries between fiction and history. Thus, Podhoretz takes issue with the facts of the account, with its historical picture, with its characterization of real figures in ways he disagrees with.

Since the history Coover presents resists neoconservative interpretations of the same events, the disagreement is natural. That indictment of the “raciness” and “scatological” humor of the book gets embroiled in their historiographic disagreement is hardly surprising and more than incidental. In effect he is critiquing the method rather than the message, a misdirection that charges of obscenity often performs. But it is further interesting in our context that Podhoretz’s objections lead him into legalistic language (he calls the book’s political arguments, for example,

“a brief that the evidence on its own refuses to support” [28]). Ultimately, he expresses his wish that the novel could somehow be prosecuted or banned, lamenting that the progressive

Constitution (or its interpretation by the courts) has permitted such fools and scoundrels to deceive the public. After complimenting or denouncing Coover’s skill at interweaving the historical record with his own views, Podhoretz determines that “because it hides behind the immunities of artistic freedom to protect itself from being held to the normal standards of truthful discourse, it should not only be called a lie, it should also be called a cowardly lie” (34).

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Here, Podhoretz expresses a characteristic neoconservative disdain for those who invoke the

First Amendment for purposes other than religious ones, where the expression of dissident views is characterized as hazardous at worst or sophomoric at best. And moreover, his turn to the courts demonstrates a dangerous strain of desire among some to criminalize dissent during this period.

Podhoretz’s objections to the novel lie at least in part because what he calls its

“revisionist history” attack the conservative movement he was a part of. The novel itself details an alternate history of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted in 1953 of espionage. In this version of events, the Rosenbergs are executed in Times Square and (Vice

President) Richard Nixon finds himself smitten with and secretly courting Ethel Rosenberg.75 He jeopardizes his career in attempts to speak and meet with her. In addition to this, throughout the novel, a fantastic embodiment of Uncle Sam appears, encouraging American politicians to wield their power with gusto and opposing the Phantom, a shadowy bogeyman representing

Communism abroad and Leftist sentiment at home. As he often does, Podhoretz criticizes the novel in terms that nonetheless crystallize its concerns lucidly; describing the apparent construction of the ephemeral Phantom in the novel, he writes that “the Phantom is an American delusion invented for the sole purpose of justifying a monstrous and criminal effort to

Americanize the entire world” (34). Calling to task the politicians and institutions that furthered and allowed a fear-based Cold-War politics, the novel revels in an orgy of critique, polemic, and violence, delighting in the rape of Nixon by Uncle Sam—a scene that as much dramatizes the costs of power as it perhaps serves to vent the author’s resentment of the president. The book seems to relish creating a textual effigy of Nixon to be abused in graphic detail.

The Public Burning ends in lurid fashion. Uncle Sam’s selection of Richard Nixon to play a prominent role in the destiny of the U.S. is consummated when the former rapes the latter

Lawrence 95 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 while delivering a lecture on civics in a thick drawl laced with malapropisms. Nixon’s pain is narrated following, and is therefore juxtaposed with, the events of the novel’s climax: the on- stage, live-broadcast execution of the Rosenbergs in Times Square. The scene serves in part to defuse or erase the sympathy that had been generated for Nixon in the novel, even as it casts him as a victim.

During the rape, Uncle Sam reveals a narrative of power and progress in terms that underscore the violence and violation of the scene. Unable to believe that Uncle Sam has arranged for the Rosenbergs to be executed despite its being no more than political theater,

Nixon accuses Uncle Sam: “You didn’t have to kill them! You just did it for fun! You’re a … a butcher! a beast!” Uncle Sam responds, saying “Aw fidgety fudge, them two raskils was lucky.”

Nixon is incredulous, and Sam finally explains, illuminating as he does, the nature of the power

Nixon craves and that will be bestowed on him: “It ain’t easy holdin’ a community together, order ain’t what comes natural, you know that, boy, and a lotta people gotta get killt tryin’ to pretend it is, that’s how the game is played—but not many of ’em gets a chance to have it done to ’em onstage in Times Square!” (Coover, Public 531). The idea that society is founded on and maintained through violence, especially spectacles of violence—even gratuitous ones—is not a new insight. This is one element of Marcuse’s theory of civilization, but has been articulated as far back as Hobbes. What is interesting here is that in this vision of power, it is necessary that we pretend society is natural, that “holdin’ a community together” is the normal order of life. And this lie about the rightness of national community is so valuable that “a lotta people gotta get killt” to protect it.

Sam’s notion of power is not so far-fetched. He describes a world in which communities vie against other communities for a power that is largely arbitrary, but hardly abstract. Moreover,

Lawrence 96 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 in a gesture we can interpret as Foucauldian, Sam indicates that power must direct attention away from its operation in order to gloss what is clearly oppressive. More particularly, this seems to be an indictment of the Watergate scandal, including unscrupulous acts undertaken in secrecy and clouded in cover-ups. The government in the novel, and in the U.S. of the 1970s Coover implies, is run by an unscrupulous power-mad elite who manipulate the public by creating fantastic enemies and disseminating propaganda. While a broader Cold War politics is being critiqued here, Nixon’s personal philosophies of law and order, related to his attempts to reverse trends put into motion by the Warren Court, are also under the microscope.

There are even larger purposes that these illusions serve. For Uncle Sam, the quest to defeat Communism is not about guiding principles of freedom or economics or prosperity.

Rather, the pursuit of raw power for its own sake necessitates the construction of the false narratives of freedom, prosperity, and divine providence. These narratives permit the state to pursue the accumulation of power by redirecting the impulses of the people toward industry, exploration, and warfare. Sam’s bald statement about the casualties of nation building is followed by his dismissal of the rhetoric of democracy as a holdover of a different era, little more than a revolutionary expedient. Again, Nixon accuses, “All they wanted was what you promised them, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration—” and Sam interrupts: “Bah! The wild oats of youth!

Listen, bein’ young and rearin’ up agin the old folks makes you fotch up a lottta hootin’ and hollerin’ you live to regret—puritanism! whoo, worse’n acne! It’s great for stirrin’ up the jism when you’re nation-breedin’, but it ain’t no way to live a life!” (Coover, Public 531). Coover’s

Uncle Sam is a straight-talker, but he also realizes the utility of false narratives for national unity, especially during times of crisis. Here, he pulls aside the curtain for Nixon—and for the reader vicariously. Once he does, we see enlightened republicanism and liberal government, as well as

Lawrence 97 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 the cultural heritage of the U.S., as nothing more than tools to be adopted when useful for, say, throwing off the English colonial government and to be dismissed when they are an impediment to further accumulation of power.

On the other hand, the public gets their share of vitriol in the novel, too, and the

American people are cast as hapless and semi-conscious, hungry for bloody spectacle and barely restrained by the rituals of society from indulging every imaginable vice. They are as bad as

Uncle Sam suspects, and he is able to show them just where their own desires will lead them if he is not around to channel them. The scene of the execution in Times Square is representative.

As the crowd has gathered to watch the execution, Nixon suddenly appears on stage with his pants down after a thwarted attempt to consummate his flirtation with Ethel Rosenberg, possibly a fake played by J. Edgar Hoover. Embarrassed, Nixon attempts to salvage his public image with a cunning speech that encourages the crowd to drop their pants in solidarity with him as

Americans (“We have nothing to hide! And we have a lot to be proud of!” [Coover, Public 482; emphasis in the original]). The crowd does, and when an infuriated Uncle Sam attempts to chastise Nixon, Nixon doubles down and convinces the crowd that Sam is the outsider, because he is the only one with his pants up. With a stern rebuke about the cost of getting what you wish,

Sam drops his drawers, and with the resulting revelation of the national myth, “There was a blinding flash of light, a simultaneous crack of ear-splitting thunder, and then—BLACKOUT!!”

(485). The revelers and spectators are now caught in a darkness of their own making; Sam has disappeared and the light of his presence has disappeared. His absence then serves to show them just what he provides, in order to make them appreciate their lot.

Trapped and directionless, the crowd, pants around their ankles, revert to unrestrained id.

First in fear, they strike out at each other and scream, “locked in this blind desperate battle with

Lawrence 98 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 their own worst fears and with each other, limbs entangled and hair on end, mouths stretched for screaming and perhaps in fact screaming, no longer distinguishable from one another” (Coover,

Public 491). The people act out and make explicit the implied arguments of a neoconservative law-and-order ideology espoused by Uncle Sam. In the absence of the state and its myths, such views suggest, people would return to barbarity and be cast in darkness. But Coover is critical of such apologies for state violence. In a gesture toward the similarities of the urges to death and reproduction that recalls Eros and Civilization as well as Gravity’s Rainbow, then, the chaos of destruction gives way to an orgy: “inevitably, in all this hysterical jangling around, flesh is finding flesh, mouths mouths, heat heat, and the juices, as Satchel Paige would say, is flowin’”

(492). As the book continues to describe a scene of indiscriminate group sex that is clearly excessive in both language and content (featuring never-ending lists of sex acts, body parts, and fluids), we get the sense that Coover is being hyperbolic and making ridiculous the assertion that people are no better (and perhaps worse) than animals without the structures of the state.76

The return of Uncle Sam further lampoons the narratives justifying governmental excesses and connects them more clearly to Cold War practices. Sam appears again after a few moments of the crowd’s debauchery. He has come from the nuclear testing site at Yucca Flat,

Nevada “bearing in his lean gnarled hands a new birth of freedom, a white-hot kernel of manifest destiny: a spark from the sacred flame!” (Coover, Public 493). Taking into account the novel’s satirical tone, I read in this passage a critique of the notion that nuclear ambition will bring peace and freedom. Instead, the hyperbolic rhetoric reveals that the nuclear arms race in fact simply provides a scope for exercising ambition, imperialism, and Exceptionalism. Coover lays bare the narrative of power animating neoconservatism through a satire grounded necessarily in

Lawrence 99 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 representations of sexuality—because such taboo sexuality is always cast as the dark consequence of disobedience, as is fear and destruction.

Coover’s bawdy, over-the-top approach to social satire is extreme. In The Public

Burning, caricatures of Uncle Sam as a callous rapist, a huckster, power-mad, and drunk on his own vigor, are threaded throughout. On the other extreme, mere mortals stumble through the events of their lives largely slaves to their animal instincts. It is Uncle Sam—guardian and salesman of the national identity—that sees the truth of power and safeguards the mindless masses. While the national narrative must be sanitized, Sam himself, in his interactions with his chosen few, such as Nixon, is truly vile. Through his hyperbolic caricature, Coover critiques jingoism, hubris under the guise of American Exceptionalism, and the unrestrained pursuit of global power. Further, the novel is an indictment of a certain vision of government in which the

(s)elect rise above the laws of society, seeing more clearly than the mass of humanity the nature of power and history, and are content to manipulate the common people for their own good.

Nixon’s interest in the effective exercise of power—through enforced restraint on expression and dissent, through empowering the police and courts, resonates in the novel much as it did in real life. Where Nixon affirmed Lippmann’s statement in announcing the Powell and

Rehnquist nominations that America was in a time where “[t]he balance of power within our society has turned dangerously against the peace forces,” in Coover’s novel, Nixon finds himself on stage in Times Square, cloaked in the American flag with his pants around his ankles saying

“We live in an age of anarchy!” and warning that “We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last five hundred years” (Coover,

Public 477). While the novel is set during the 1950s, the political rhetoric is ultimately resonant with the 1970s. This parallel reminds us that Vietnam and Watergate are an important context. In

Lawrence 100 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 fact, amid his criticism of the novel in 1977, Podhoretz astutely points out that “Coover uses

[Nixon] to suggest that all the political issues raised by this book are still alive and still at the center of history today” (28). The point of working with Nixon and the Rosenberg trial is not to muse on the past, but to demonstrate the persistence of the ideologies of the red scare and the ongoing influence of false narratives of national identity in the mid-1970s.

This is a scathing indictment of the American national narrative. Power requires sacrifices and it requires that we do not acknowledge those sacrifices. Moreover, the ideological narratives that drive our allegiances are fabrications. This need to see and pretend we do not see is indicative of a syndrome of repression that texts of this kind seek to combat. By forcing affective response, novels using excessive and violent sexuality in this way attempt to reveal the obscene underpinnings of culture and civilization. As in Naked Lunch, so it is in The Public

Burning, scenes of brutality and explicit sexuality—such as the orgy in Times Square and the rape of Nixon—attempt to make grotesque the national narratives and propaganda that the author sees at the root of American culture.

An important element in this matrix of representation, sexuality, and violence is historical projection. Both The Public Burning and Gravity’s Rainbow reflect (more or less directly) on

Vietnam and Nixonian politics as they relate to national or Western metanarratives. But both carry out this project by dramatizing other historical periods and events: World War II and the

Rosenberg trial. In this projection, both novels emphasize displacement and alienation as aesthetic devices—the elsewhere-ness of the present and its political concerns. This can be seen as a critique of political metanarratives that also direct attention away from or euphemize their violence by recalling images of a past construed as more whole, more present, or more fulfilling

Lawrence 101 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 than the alienated present. The novels attempt to displace these imagined origin stories in favor of a notion of a more contingent national unity. On the other hand, the projection of the novels’ critique of contemporary politics into past eras highlights the recurrent eruption of the repressed elements of the metanarratives they critique. The eras in which the novels’ action takes place are significant for the development of global Cold War politics and alliances; thus, they speak directly to the contemporary events of the novels’ publication as well as to events in our own era.

Not only during Vietnam, but in these other periods, the novels say, do we find the blind spectacle that became the Vietnam War, unchecked accumulation of power, and domestic strife—we see them in more or less open manifestations as constitutive parts of the state narrative. In so doing Gravity’s Rainbow and The Public Burning are able to tell a story inflected with the concerns of and addressing their present while meditating on the past. This is more than a deflection, however, more than an effort to avoid the controversy of critiquing contemporary situations or preserve the status of literature as above politics—both novels flaunt such proprieties. What the novels do instead is work out their concerns in another era in order to demonstrate the recurrence of such concerns in the present.

Sex and Excess in the 1970s and Beyond

If they are to be useful, readings of these texts and of the political history of obscenity rulings must produce knowledge of how obscenity discourse as a legal formation contributes to the structures of power and culture in the U.S. at this time and since. What we can see coming about at this time is a belief that obscenity refers only to that material that is both offensive and without an engagement with ideas that are valuable to society. Media that offends cannot be banned unless it is also without value—that is to say, specific scenes cannot be censored, texts

Lawrence 102 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 cannot be bowdlerized, we must tolerate the bad in order to benefit from good. This position is largely the legacy of the Warren Court, and though it proved unpopular with some as part of a larger package of reforms instituted by that court, it nonetheless stands today in much the form it was devised, having been revised in favor of state authority, but not abandoned altogether. The status of obscenity can also be seen to be wrapped up in political and ideological movements, furthering them as well as subject to them. At this time, the subtle shift in the Court’s stance reflects a concern for the power of the state.

Why are representations of sexuality such a threat to society and perhaps to state power?

Obscene cultural formations that address war and violence ask us to reconsider the relationship between sexuality and violence and to question as well why such representations are taboo. This particular episteme, in which the combination of sex and violence produces some discursive excess not contained entirely within either sex or violence, arises for particular reasons that we might further uncover. One hypothesis that must be contended with is that such works demonstrate a disavowed or unacknowledged truth, the revelation of which would destabilize society. If such were the case, this close relationship of sex and violence would prove to be interwoven with the fibers of society. I argue that this is the case in the novels discussed above, where each author takes pains to detail the deep connections between a state apparatus that claims a monopoly on violence and a system of repressed sexuality that channels popular energy toward social reproduction.

Protesting to the contrary, much of the legal discourse surrounding obscenity suggests that linking sex and violence is an abnormal formation.77 And yet, the obscene represents more than perversion. Because it is so often associated with violence and domination, we must understand it as an expression of society’s underlying addiction to destruction; it is an excessive,

Lawrence 103 Obscene Gestures, Chapter 1 rather than abnormal, expression of social forces. In this way, it seems reasonable that books designed to reveal this imbrication of forces would themselves be excessive: too long, too profane, too unserious, too erotic, too violent. They appear aberrant because they are hyperbolic, extreme versions of processes that operate more subtly. Thus, we cannot reject the violence of society as somehow abnormal just as we cannot believe obscenity is an aberration in an otherwise healthy system. Rather, as Marcuse argues:

Concentration camps, mass exterminations, world wars, and atom bombs are no “relapse

into barbarism,” but the unrepressed implementation of the achievements of modern

science, technology, and domination. And the most effective subjugation and destruction

of man by man takes place at the height of civilization, when the material and intellectual

attainments of mankind seem to allow the creation of a truly free world. (4)

Marcuse argues that civilization comes about only through the constant repression of instinctual tendencies—especially those toward sex and violence—but that these tendencies nonetheless ultimately find expression. We might expect the most powerful forces of society to be marshaled to stifle that which represents a return of the id and a free expression of those forces of desire that threaten to overthrow civilization. In fact, Marcuse notes that “Concentration and labor camps, the trials and tribulations of non-conformists release a hatred and fury which indicate the total mobilization against the return of the repressed” (71). The fury aimed at non-conformists demonstrates the powerful need of existing power structures to maintain their position through the continued repression of fundamental truths about themselves.

Sexual repression and eruption play a part in this as well. Representations of violent sexuality are one form of sexuality that is frequently classed as “patently offensive,” and thus becomes obscene unless recuperated by a “serious artistic project.” As I discuss in the

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Introduction, Marcuse explicitly argues that sexual impulses are central to the formation of culture and the organization of society while simultaneously entwined with the impulse to destruction. On the one hand the instinctual desire to produce and reproduce by combining into ever more complex structures is necessary for social engagement, but it must be selectively inhibited so that it leads to specific forms of reproduction and not others.78 Thus, sexuality is directed into specific channels that allow for the acts and events we associate with progress, such as industry, but also with normative models of the family and heterosexuality. On the other hand, the “destructive instincts” desire to return to stasis and thus want to inflict violence on the self, ending the suffering and deferral that characterizes life in an inhospitable environment. For society to emerge and grow, these desires must be redirected toward mastery of the environment.

This twin repression in service of social organization indicates why we might see sexual violence so often erupt in critiques of the state and of society and culture. Simply representing them is a rebellion against the repressive apparatus and a critique against a model of civilization that requires the self (in its sexual and destructive forms) to be mastered, dominated, and controlled.

Though Marcuse’s analysis may not apply to all societies or to all moments, it is a useful analytic for understanding novels like Gravity’s Rainbow, because its project seems so closely aligned with Eros and Civilization. The fact that Pynchon was aware of Marcuse adds to the suspicion that the novel’s overall critique is located in the revelation that society at its most seemingly pristine and orderly is firmly grounded in intrinsic processes of destruction and violation. Similarly, Coover’s novel is engaging a particular twentieth century moment in which the exhaustion of principles of rational thought was being felt, and their mandates were being resisted by, among other things, open sexuality.

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Critiquing society through the representation of sex and violence that must be disavowed, which is understandably prohibited by the state, then, is significant for an exploration of how obscenity bears on war and warmongering because the repression of the sex and death drives is never fully successful. Society is plagued by an excess of sexual and violent urges which have been fostered by incompletely redirected impulses. Marcuse continues, saying:

As the combination of these two forces sustains ever more effectively the life of ever

larger groups, Eros gains over his adversary: social utilization presses the death instinct

into the service of the life instincts. But the very progress of civilization increases the

scope of sublimation and of controlled aggression; on both accounts, Eros is weakened

and destructiveness is released. This would suggest that progress remains committed to a

regressive trend in the instinctual structure (in the last analysis, to the death instinct), that

the growth of civilization is counteracted by the persistent (though repressed) impulse to

come to rest in final gratification. Domination and the enhancement of power and

productivity proceed through destruction beyond rational necessity. The quest for

liberation is darkened by the quest for Nirvana. (107-08)

It is evident to Marcuse that current models of (Western) society are predicated on an uneasy structure of repression that can never be adequate. The repression of the id, of innate desires, progresses in a fashion that necessarily produces “destruction beyond rational necessity.” After the equation of culture is computed, we are left with a remainder of destruction—and this violent remainder indicates the instability of the social structure. Moreover, because that destruction exists not in the abstract but as expression, that destruction has a victim; thus the system is not only aporetic, it is unjust.

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In this context, the obscene might function as the eruption of the repressed—the bringing together of violence and sexuality, of destruction and production, to reveal that the two are inextricable under current conditions. If this is the case it indicates that a more profound restructuring of society is needed to escape this unfortunate fact. Such a diagnosis of culture suggests that the remedy must be radical. Reform will not suffice if the very structures of society produce—then occlude—this kind of sexualized violence. In this way, obscene texts, when they have political valences, often aim at (or are construed as threatening) a total overturning of society on a grand scale. In fact, as Foucault notes, the discourse that produces an understanding of society as founded on repression suggests only a powerful cataclysm can shake the established organization of power:

We are informed that if repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power,

knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be

able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: nothing less than a

transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of

pleasure within reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be

required. (5)

Foucault’s discussion (and rejection) of what he will call the “repressive hypothesis” is discussed at greater length in the introduction, but he does usefully convey the stakes of challenging a model of society at its roots. The tools of power, including laws, prohibitions, censorship, and the foreclosure of the pursuit of pleasure, are all at work in the discourse of sexuality, and any attempt to alter their deployment must be an attempt to change the fundamental nature of such a society.79

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If the obscene does this work of unveiling society’s dependence on violence and power, the fact of its taboo is significant and it becomes clear why the highest levels of state power are marshaled to control it. We might rightly ask under what conditions such a paradoxical structure—where civilization both rests on and disavows sex and violence—arises. As Marcuse states the conundrum, “Does the interrelation between freedom and repression, productivity and destruction, domination and progress, really constitute the principle of civilization? Or does this interrelation result only from a specific historical organization of human existence” (4-5). The underlying question, as Marcuse states it, is whether we might imagine a society in which the benefits of progress do not require the repression of the id—where pain is not unequally shared, authority is not monopolized, and where destruction and suffering beyond necessity are not the inevitable product of civilization. The process of imagining this alternate utopia is also akin to our project here: our first task is to uncover under what conditions this epistemological structure has arisen.

The episteme construing obscenity in this way and provoking the kinds of challenges to state aesthetic, legal, and military power as Gravity’s Rainbow and The Public Burning has a long history, but sees a major stage of its development in the years leading up to and including

1973. The legal status of obscene artworks becomes one of many fields of contention between competing cultural coalitions in this time. Ultimately, the shift from the progressive activism of the Warren Court to the conservative restraint of the Burger Court—made possible by and operating in service to the political goals of Richard Nixon—creates the field in which we now interpret obscenity discourses as they are deployed and contested by those who see their deep imbrication in the structures of continuing injustices.

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25 Significant changes in civil rights were also achieved during Senator Denton’s imprisonment, notably the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed a month after he was captured. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968, also changed the political landscape, as did the 1967 summer of love. 26 Many of these sounds were familiar because of the prevalence of video journalism at the time, as well as popular films about the war. 27 Westwell points out that technical manipulation was undertaken to reduce the possible interpretation of the photo as representing an adolescent or adult, a measure designed not only to avoid sexual suggestions that might stand in the way of publication, but to alter the photograph’s meaning by emphasizing the innocence of the war’s victims (410). Helena Grice interprets this act as of a piece with efforts to control the image of the war according to masculine perspectives (953-54). 28 Though Higonnet marks this transition slightly later than 1973, I think we can see the influence of this growing discourse at work in how decisions about publishing the image were debated. 29 The controversy over In the Night Kitchen is also discussed by Josh Lambert (92) and Perry Nodelman. 30 Higonnet notes provocatively that the transition to understanding images as having to account for possible interpretations, rather than authorial intent, seems to be a result of this particular moment in the history of interpretation, when, under the influence of postmodernism, understandings of artworks shifted from emphasis on authorship to emphasis on social significance. This means that, as Higonnet puts it, “[by] their own interpretive tendencies, art critics and historians have introduced previously immune pictures into danger zones” (133). This fact demonstrates the shared presumption among art critics and censors that representations have important effects in the real world, beyond abstract reflection. I explore this more in the second chapter, where such shared assumptions underwrite the unexpected coalition between radical feminists and conservative Christians in anti-pornography activism. 31 Robert Hariman and Louis Lucaites call the image “a picture that shouldn’t be shown of an event that shouldn’t have happened” (qtd. in Chong 116). Westwell disagrees with Hariman and Lucaites, noting that the absence of prohibited content other than nudity, such as Phuc’s burns, which actually made the image more likely to be published when compared to alternatives that showed wounds, maiming, or corpses (410). 32 For examples of such retrospective articles, see Tiffany Hagler-Geard and Donald R. Winslow. 33 Chong explores the lasting significance of the “Vietnam Syndrome” in the American national imaginary through the 1980s and 1990s (1-31). 34 See Bruce H. Kalk (261-68). 35 The Burger Court was not willing to overturn or amend all significant Warren Court rulings. They strongly supported school desegregation, even approving desegregation busing, a major source of tension at the time (see “The Supreme Court”). However, they also refused to hear state challenges to the constitutionality of the Vietnam War; see Anthony D’Amato and Rodric B. Schoen. 36 See Rhodes Cook. As would be the case when Nixon eventually clashed with the Burger Court over the release of the secretly recorded White House Tapes, Nixon often asserted the strength of the Executive Branch and its independence from oversight by the Judiciary. While the Burger Court proved amenable to the interests of prosecutors and other Executive-branch officials, it was hardly a rubber stamp for the President. 37 Though Nixon neglects this, Lippmann is careful to point out that the job of establishing law and order is made significantly more difficult by “The deep lawlessness of the Alabama authorities in Selma,” noting that “A society in which the legally constituted authorities use violence to deprive citizens of their lawful rights of assembly and petition is not likely to make much headway against private crime.” Though Nixon, writing in 1971, indicates that Lippmann wrote “twenty-one months ago,” the article he seems to be referencing was published in 1965 and has as its explicit backdrop the very Civil Rights abuses the Warren Court was attempting to curb. 38 Of the original six justices of the Warren Court who sided with the majority in the more lax Memoirs v. Massachusetts, three (Warren, Black, and Fortas) retired before Miller to be replaced by more conservative justices appointed by Nixon and three (Douglas, Brennan, and Stewart) sided with the minority in Miller. Thus, no member of the original majority was swayed to vote in favor of the more conservative standard. Attrition on the court entirely accounted for the ideological shift. The stark turn was evident in the alignment of the majority in the Miller ruling. All four Nixon appointees (Burger, Blackmun, Powell, and Rehnquist) voted in the majority in Miller; the fifth vote in the majority was Justice Byron White, who had dissented from the Memoirs ruling being revised. The ninth justice at the time was Justice Thurgood Marshall, who was not on the court at the time of the Memoirs ruling, but was appointed by Lyndon Johnson; Marshall dissented from the Miller ruling. 39 It was common for films and other media produced abroad or in Los Angeles to result in prosecutions against theater owners and booksellers in Midwestern cities. Cincinnati was a particularly common locale, because of its

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large Catholic population and the active anti-pornography movement. I thank Josh Lambert for pointing this out to me. 40 The Court also ruled at the same time in Alberts v. California; the rulings are concurrent, with the decision in Alberts being referred to the decision in Roth, thus, Roth is the ruling precedent. 41 The Court is essentially arguing at this time that the specific epistemological formations that denied the political functions of sexuality—that established an impermeable barrier between sex and politics—existed as far back as the late 18th Century, a questionable conclusion at best. The more conventional understanding of this history would trace the segmenting off of sexuality from the political sphere nearly a hundred years later in the Victorian era. It is notable that the justices stipulate that their interpretation relies on the “implicit” rejection of obscenity, and that they did not find an explicit case for it. 42 This interpretation is credited to Charles Rembar, the lawyer who, in 1959, defended Grove Press in its New York State obscenity trial concerning the publication of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover (1928). Brennan’s language in the Roth ruling was read by Rembar as allowing the ban only on material that is both prurient and without redeeming social value, though this may not have been anticipated in the original ruling. Thus, while Roth remains the important Supreme Court precedent, the legal logic involved developed in the New York State Courts in 1959 and 1960. See Fred Kaplan, Grove Press v. Christenberry (1959) and Grove Press v. Christenberry (1960). 43 The Jacobellis case is also well known as the source of Justice Potter Stewart’s claim about the designation hard- core pornography that “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.” 44 Jacobellis was ruled concurrently with another important case, Grove Press v. Gerstein. Grove concerned the 1961 publication of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, a novel that had been published in 1934 in France, but which it was illegal to import into the United States on grounds that it was obscene. The novel clearly addresses ideas, but prior to the Roth ruling, the social relevance of a text was not sufficient to overcome objections to specific portions deemed objectionable. Thus, the novel could not be published, imported, or distributed in the U.S. Still, even after Roth, the 1961 publication of Tropic of Cancer by Grove led to a number of lawsuits against booksellers. Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled that the book was not obscene, following the Roth test, and issued its ruling concurrent with and citing Jacobellis. 45 Though it is not interrogated by the justices here, the presumed distinction between indexical and verbal media is invoked again to imply that the pictures are more clearly offensive or prurient than written text might have been. The Meese Commission will offer the clearest statement of this underlying presumption in 1986. I discuss this in Chapter 3. 46 The “drastically altered test” that Burger refers to is one I have suggested is a clarification of the Roth test, not a significant break from it. 47 As was reported in Time in 1971, the Burger Court had already begun to walk back advances by the Warren Court on this front: “By dismissing strong language in some Warren Court rulings as mere dicta, … the new court has snipped away at due-process precedents” (“The Supreme Court”). 48 The fact that terms like “social importance” and “prurience” take the place of delineating what specific ideas are protected and what representations are forbidden, means, as Douglas suggests, that shifts in social formations can produce very different obscenity findings. For example, George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” routine notwithstanding, the FCC does not specifically detail what words, acts, or representations are prohibited on public airwaves (though Carlin’s routine has been banned and the SCOTUS did uphold the ban; see Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation). Instead, what constitutes a violation of the FCC’s policy—which cites the Miller ruling to define obscenity and defines profanity as “including language so grossly offensive to members of the public who actually hear it as to amount to a nuisance” (FCC)—is ruled on a case-by- case basis, a fact that produces a large number of Fourteenth Amendment challenges, including the more recently decided SCOTUS cases concerning “fleeting expletives”; see FCC v. Fox Television Stations (2009) and FCC v. Fox Television Stations (2012). Broadcasters have repeatedly requested specific terms and acts that cannot be broadcast and repeatedly been rebuffed by the FCC. Pacifica, further, proscribes the FCC’s authority to limit only that material that comes over broadcast media, and the status of cable, telephone, and computer pornography and indecency was grappled with in the mid-1980s; see, for example, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Law hearings from 1985 (United States, Subcommittee) and Senator Jesse Helms’s unsuccessful efforts to pass the Cable-Porn and Dial-a-Porn Control Act from the same year. Josh Lambert has also pointed out to me that the FCC’s reluctance to stipulate what content is prohibited may be strategic, in that specific constraints would allow for artists breaking the rules to claim doing so is a form of protected civil disobedience.

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49 Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason and Dixon directly engages notions of American identity through fictionalized depictions of prominent figures in American history, including the eponymous surveyors. However, the book was not controversial when it came out. 50 Menand similarly describes the “arty and impenetrable magniloquence that swamps the last section of Gravity’s Rainbow.” 51 For example, the novel was denied the Pulitzer but shared the National Book Award that year with Isaac Bashevis Singer’s A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1973). 52 Scholarly consensus is that Pynchon was already familiar with Marcuse and Eros and Civilization when he wrote Gravity’s Rainbow. 53 In addition to Eros and Civilization, Joseph W. Slade mentions Marcuse’s “The Affirmative Character of Culture” (1937) and charts connections to Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen extensively. Thomas LeClair also finds Weber useful in describing the role of Julius and Ethel Rosenbergs in Coover’s The Public Burning; see page 26. This by no means exhausts the possible lenses through which to read Pynchon’s expansive corpus, which includes several lengthy novels. Slade traces Pynchon’s critique of Protestantism and Calvinism through his anti-empiricist projects. Michael Harris and Louis Menand both read Pynchon as a writer concerned with the effects of colonialism, though Harris acknowledges that Pynchon worked with “the psychosexuality underlying colonial rule” (100), a notion that connects neatly with the concepts Marcuse discusses. Pynchon’s conception in Gravity’s Rainbow of World War II as a moment of transition for, rather than terminus of European colonialism is also highlighted by Harris, who notes that “Pynchon insists that we understand colonialism not only as a political-historical-economic phenomenon but also as a way of seeing the world and experiencing life” (104). I would read this alongside Jodi Y. Kim’s assertion in The Ends of Empire that the Cold War represents not so much (or not only) a series of international political events, but a hermeneutic that explains and represents the world. Pynchon’s novel, then, speaks to both the fallout of World War II, and the continuity of colonialist mentalities with a Cold War hermeneutic. 54 Slade’s suggestion is a provocative invitation to read the novel as a direct allegory of Vietnam, though perhaps the connections are more thematic than point-for-point. 55 There is further evidence that Pynchon was thinking about the long narratives of American national identity at the time he wrote Gravity’s Rainbow. Menand notes that also in 1973 the author reportedly signed a contract to write Mason and Dixon, which was not released until 1997, but is explicitly about colonial politics and British imperialism—and, naturally, science. The underlying message of Mason and Dixon, as Menand describes it, echoes a concern running through Pynchon’s oeuvre: “The settling of America is an allegory for the way getting people to think alike depletes the world.” 56 As Josh Lambert has reminded me, there is a parallel trend in obscenity legislation from this period addressed to the belief that children are more susceptible to the harms of and need more protection from sexual material. This concern extends through later efforts to restrict music lyrics and video games, and much of the jurisprudence on obscenity, as well as laws controlling pornography, marks out special cases of restrictions on access by minors. 57 It is, of course, somewhat unorthodox to refer to Pynchon’s novel as subtle, but in contrast with The Public Burning, it is the less-over-the-top critique. Coover’s raucous satire is clearly outside the real, and its obscene representations remain safely in the realm of the absurd, where their ramifications are more easily allegorized and contained. 58 Obscenity jurisprudence before the Miller verdict (which was issued after the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow by a matter of months) would foreclose censorship of the novel because the standards in place required that a book lack artistic merit in order to be obscene. Pynchon’s novel, while containing repugnant acts, clearly engages important issues and contains passages of insight, humor, and beauty. 59 Hite states that the novel’s “erotic descriptions titillate as well as represent titillation in many scenes of conventionally problematic sex” (39). 60 The liberatory possibilities of sadomasochism as something that teaches individuals to resist artificial social taboos and reveals the erotics of submission and dominance at work in social organization is something Kathy Acker explores and that I examine in chapter 2. The potent challenge of S&M to the state is in some senses supported by the fact that it is often explicitly listed among offensive sexual content in legal documents, both legislative and judicial. S&M has also played an important, if contested, role in the history of the LGBT movement. Samois, an early lesbian feminist BDSM group from San Francisco formed in 1978 openly resisted attempts to limit women’s sexuality and were forerunners of sex-positive feminism. 61 In his reading of Gravity’s Rainbow, Slade contends that multi-national corporations are an extension of the logic of the nation state and that national status was merely a name given to a fundamentally economic entity that is continuous with the corporation (158).

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62 C.f. Hite, “Reading,” where the author contends that the post-war Zone that briefly obtains after the fall of Germany is a chance to explore the backward, utopic movement of society that Marcuse advocates (41-42). This notion seems plausible and interesting, but ultimately not compelling, given the broad, chaotic, and violent—that is, not utopian—character of the zone. It is anarchy, not the return of a more just society, which is what Marcuse envisions. Slade would also disagree about the utopian potential of the Zone, as he states that “the uncertainty of the Zone offers hope that is soon defeated: an old world may or may not be dying, but a new one clearly is powerless to be born” (178). Staes notes, similarly, that near the end of the novel the Zone is defined as a space of death and not utopia (Staes 100; Pynchon 747). 63 This notion is something I discuss extensively in the introduction. 64 In talking about metaphors of warfare in relation to illness, Susan Sontag highlights the irony of the discourse that makes this possible. Describing ours as “a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principles, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one’s actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability,” she notes that “War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view ‘realistically’; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent—war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive” (11). 65 The film’s director describes the film in terms that make clear that it is total nonsense: “the climate blondes its way, for they are no strength under the coarse of war. No not for roguery until the monitors are there in blashing sheets of earth to mate and say modeoshnicka bleelar medoometnozz in bergamot and playful fantasy under the throne and nose of the least merciful king” (Pynchon 746). 66 To wit, Miller was argued in January and November of 1972 and decided on 21 June 1973; Gravity’s Rainbow was published in February of 1973. Also in February of 1973, Senator Jeremiah Denton, quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, arrived in the U.S. after having been released from a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp as a part of Operation Homecoming. 67 For more on the publishing history of The Public Burning, see Coover’s “One Hot Book” and William H. Gass’s introduction to the 1998 Grove Press edition. Gass noted that multiple publishers feared the real-life ex-president would object to his caricature and file suit, calling Nixon “a lawyer with a skin thinner than a condom, and … believed to possess a vindictive streak so wide it would turn a skunk white” (xvi). 68 See, for example, Eric Solomon. 69 See, for example, Solomon and Daniel E. Frick. 70 See, for example, Raymond A. Mazurek and Lance Olsen. 71 LeClair’s work is exemplary in this respect. 72 As Louis Gallo phrases it while describing a moviegoer who emerges dazed into the streets of New York in the novel, “A lonely man in the Lonely Crowd, a temporary refugee from the proto-Silent Majority, the moviegoer typifies any average American of the early 1950’s; a product of his times, he succumbs by virtue of those times to mass hysteria and paranoia” (44). LeClair also comments on this scene in passing and notes that the disoriented man stands in for the reader (15-16). Both authors are indicting the role of popular media in the spread of McCarthyism. 73 This claim is particularly interesting in light of the appropriation of the tropes of political work in The Public Burning, which Solomon points out: “Coover pays homage to and parodies the modernist experiments of John Dos Passos in the realm of political fiction” (18). Solomon goes on to detail similarities between Dos Passos’s and Coover’s treatment of the 1930s. 74 See David Joselit. 75 Richard Nixon is a central character in the novel. At this time, he was Vice President to Dwight Eisenhower, who Solomon says “functions in the novel as a ’30s Western hero” (19). This connection highlights the importance of American national myths in the novel while also pointing out that they were constructed in the early 20th century through mass media, rather than on the frontier in the 1800s. 76 This recalls Marcuse’s notion of a society that attempts at all times to direct and sublimate a powerful sexual energy but fails to do so. LeClair describes the scene in terms that similarly highlight the flux of repression and eruption that characterize the novel’s excessive aesthetic: “Satire of 1950s political excess is deepened by Coover’s recognition of primal necessities that lie beneath civilized arrangements: the cultural need for festivals where excess, both destructive and constructive, is required” (7). Notably, LeClair also finds sadomasochism a useful metaphor for describing the dualistic impulses animating American consumption of performances and spectacle as organized in this scene, writing, “the final implosive orgy which merges performers and audience is sado-masochistic, the public’s enacting of the primary performers’ paradoxical motives” (24). 77 The obscene, in fact, specifically marks only that sexual material which crosses beyond the realm of acceptable behavior; it is the boundary. As lay citizens, the “average person” as they are referred to in Roth and Miller,

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individuals are instructed to define the obscene as that which appeals only to people unlike themselves—outside the mainstream. 78 The incest taboo, for example, mandates exogamy while the Oedipus and Electra complexes force the subject to redirect its attempts to satisfy its desires away from the parents. 79 Foucault is skeptical that this is the case, or perhaps only that it is the whole story. Instead, he argues that the proliferation of discourses aimed at regulating sexuality and its expression have produced something quite different than repression: “since the end of the sixteenth century, the ‘putting into discourse of sex,’ far from undergoing a process of restriction, on the contrary has been subjected to a mechanism of increasing incitement; … the techniques of power exercised over sex have not obeyed a principle of rigorous selection, but rather one of dissemination and implantation of polymorphous sexualities” (12).

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Chapter 2:

The Porn Wars: Feminist Resistance to Patriarchy and Pornotroping

Introduction Section: Domestic Policy and Body Politics

The books and other primary cultural works I have considered up to this point address matters of international policy and national myth-making—and these are places where challenges to taboo take place. Using sex in ways that evoke the theorization of Foucault and

Marcuse can be a challenge to the deep imbrication of state power with conventions of sexual morality. But naturally, the politics of sex take place through individual bodies and in domestic policy as well. The word domestic in this sense, in fact, suggests both the home front, that is the

U.S. and the social policies applicable within its border, and the space of the home. These fields of cultural and political intervention intersect in meaningful ways, and the history of feminist thinking, writing, and activism from this period provides a rich archive for understanding them.

In fact, during the subsequent years, in the beginning of the 1980s, a debate erupted among feminists of differing views over the role pornography could or should play in public life and its status as a contributor to liberation or to oppression. Thus, this was a moment of particular foment for considerations of explicit depictions of sex and their political status. As such, I will address works by feminist writers offering very different modes of understanding obscenity, the politics of sex, and the role of transgressive sexuality in emancipatory praxis.

I begin with an image of one figure in this debate: Kathy Acker. Topless, Acker, the author of over a dozen novels from the 1970s to the 1990s, sits on a motorcycle looking over her left shoulder. The photo, taken in 1991 outside the San Francisco art museum by Kathy Brew, has become an iconic image of Acker, appearing in a review of her work in The Village Voice

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 that year and in promotional material for the documentary Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker (2007).

It is, essentially, about Acker’s body—not the staid form of a clothed author at a work, but the bare body of a woman in the world. While we might conventionally resist sexualizing a female author out of a desire to treat her as an intellectual subject rather than an embodied one, in this case, Acker puts her own body into play and suggests we reconsider the presumption that an embodied subject is not also an intellectual one.80

Figure 1. Photograph of Kathy Acker, 1991. By Kathy Brew.

While the viewer might be drawn to Acker’s defiant gaze, the photo is dominated by the elaborate tattoo of a koi and flowered vines on her naked back. Beneath the design ripple the strong contours of her muscles and shoulder blades.81 Because she is shirtless, a portion of a breast that will be removed six years later during a double mastectomy is visible.82 Her nudity foregrounds her sexuality and the shock value of the naked female form, while her short hair, muscular body, and aggressive pose highlight her transgression of feminine norms. Acker’s pose reveals her willingness to champion the body as a site of power and contestation of gender and sexual norms, while the brazenness of this public spectacle demonstrates the high value the

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 author places on this ideological site, even as society demands the body be hidden from view.

Though often a fraught signifier and site of oppression, the body emerges in this image and in

Acker’s work as an important locus of resistance. This photograph, then, inaugurates a discussion of how the body, particularly in its non-normative manifestations and through its visibility, can reveal the contours of a complex politics of sex and culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

This political discussion later became known as the “Sex Wars” and was characterized by debates within feminist circles and culture more broadly about the role of sex, desire, and particularly pornography in gender power imbalances. Activism against pornography based on the assumption that it is constitutively demeaning to women was especially prominent, while contrary forces—drawing extensively from post-structuralist thought—pushed back on the grounds that sexual expression, previously denied to many women, might be a means of securing greater recognition of women’s autonomy. Similarly, women advocated for greater freedom in sexual and marital economies and over reproduction. The fractures in the feminist movement that take shape around this naked politics of the body are indicative of a larger social process that encompasses not only sexual representations, but a broader challenging of normative subjectivity in a variety of manifestations.

At the same time, however, a more mainstream feminist movement was coming under fire from lesbians and women of color for heterosexist and racist practices and assumptions. At the same time that the porn wars erupted, women of color were responding to specific histories of embodiment that included tropes of hypersexualization and of the exotic. Thus, sex, which had been a site of oppression and objectification, was not available as a simple avenue of

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 emancipation. This aspect of the struggle over the place of women’s bodies is powerfully evoked by many of the writers in Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back

(1981).83 The collection of essays presents an impassioned call for a voice for women of color and others excluded from second wave feminism and marks a major turning point in the development of third-wave feminism. The authors who collaborated on the project call for an end to the invisibility—the cloaking, hiding, and ignoring—of the presence of women of color in public feminist discourse and within nationalist movements.84

Moraga, especially, is interested in the development of a “theory in the flesh,” a notion of drawing the praxis of feminism out of the lived experiences of women that in its rhetoric reminds us of the need to avoid diminishing the intellectual and theoretical significance of the body.

Moraga writers that “A theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of our lives— our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity” (“Entering” 23). Such a theory, rather than avoiding the bodily elements that challenge taboo, instead embraces the gritty, the dirty, and the sexual. Moraga elaborates on the idea, arguing that such a theory is necessary to begin to reverse the harm done by an abstracting culture. Tying a reference to the historical Wounded Knee Massacre to the notion of a physical body, Moraga elaborates on this embodied aspect of her theory, writing,

“We are interested in pursuing a society that uses flesh and blood experiences to concretize a vision that can begin to heal our ‘wounded knee’” (“Entering” 23). Both Acker and Moraga evince a need to locate a true feminist praxis not in the sanitized abstract realm of ideas—a location privileged by the phallogocentric order—but rather in the sometimes-messy realm of the body.

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By returning to the body as the site of meaning, these two authors return to a site of subjectivity and power they hope will be beyond the interpellative powers of patriarchy and thus envision an alternate feminism that sometimes found itself at odds with dominant or entrenched elements of the coalition. Interestingly, though Acker is thoroughly grounded in the abstract theoretical ideas that Moraga, Anzaldúa and others were resisting as too divorced from material concerns, she nonetheless arrives at the same conceptual place, where the body is the most important site of knowledge and power—both repressive and resistive. Nonetheless, important distinctions remained, as each woman was responding to a different set of cultural tropes that made it difficult for the work of one author to speak to the experience of the other.

The fractures in feminist coalition building along lines of race and over approaches to pornography are intertwined. As Nicola Pitchford has noted, feminist reaction against pornography served as a convenient way of reconciling factions within the movement that had splintered over issues of race and sexuality. Pitchford notes that pornography represented an area of activism that could be shared among women who otherwise experienced social disempowerment differently: “Pornography provides the ideal focus because sexuality is the primary site at which women enter representation … and because the object of pornography is primarily women, a position shared in this case (albeit differently) by working women, leisured women, white women, women of color, lesbians exhibited for male voyeuristic pleasure, and so on” (162). In this way we see the strategic value of a politics of sexuality and that attempts to control sexual representations can consolidate liberal coalitions as well as conservative.85

In order to illuminate certain cross-currents in this conflict of ideologies, I will turn to two novels representing very different perspectives. On the one hand, I will consider Acker’s

Blood and Guts in High School (1984, copyrighted 1978), an important though now largely

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 neglected novel that dramatizes the perverse effects on sexual subjectivity that patriarchy creates for women, especially white women. I juxtapose this novel with Alice Walker’s roughly contemporaneous novel The Color Purple (1982), which is much more widely read and studied, and which also provides an important alternative perspective that avoids the abstracting postmodernism of Acker’s novel while counterbalancing it with a consideration of how racialized tropes can influence sexual politics. A comparative reading of these books is suggested by some of their superficial characteristics. For example, both novels begin with their protagonists being raped by their fathers and experiencing profound psychological disruptions to understanding their own subjectivity and forming attachments to others as a result.86 An extension of this surface feature, both novels engage primarily with the possibilities (and limitations) of women’s identity in a world governed by a social order that not only privileges men, but silences women’s voices through sexual violence and predicates social participation on adherence to family norms that elevate the father’s prerogatives over all other laws. Apropos of my particular project, both novels also sparked controversy for their sexual content. The novels have their distinct differences, too, such as their form, their engagement with race, and their critical reception. It is this combination of stark differences with extensive similarities that makes them a productive juxtaposition, because they reveal how a shared ideological project can manifest in dramatically different ways.

“Speaking Desire Out Loud”: Resistive Sexualities in the Politics of Second-Wave

Feminism

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“War, if not the begetter of all things, certainly the hope of all begetting and pleasures.

For the rich and especially for the poor. War, you mirror of our sexuality.” Kathy Acker (Empire

of the Senseless 26).

In the quote above, one of the central figures in Acker’s 1988 novel Empire of the

Senseless ruminates on the birth of piracy as a flowing into the workforce of the de-mobbed soldiers of nationalist wars in the sixteenth century. The erotic allure of violence as power is coupled with the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure as a metaphor of sex in patriarchy. I turn to this quote because it spurs a discussion of the connections between violence, pleasure, and capital that foregrounds an exploration of Acker’s unorthodox but important intervention in second- wave feminism. Understanding sex as an economy and patriarchy as a labor hierarchy allows

Acker to create fictional worlds that take to grotesque extremes what she sees as the underlying principles of status quo power structures in the late twentieth century. Because it is conveyed through explicit depictions of abusive, often criminal sexual acts, the feminist critique running through Acker’s body of work frequently teases the border of obscenity, and in Blood and Guts in High School was banned in Germany and Australia as a possible threat to minors. These novels and essays appear in the context of the Samois movement and of public disagreements within the feminist movement about the status of bondage, sadomasochism, pornography, and other sex acts and representations. Acker was unabashedly partisan in these disagreements; she understood the dangers of exploitative sexual economies and cultural systems, but she also saw in the body and in pleasure opportunities for women’s liberation. She imagined these possibilities in her novels, and in her essays she responded to those, such as Andrea Dworkin and

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Catharine MacKinnon, whom she saw as infantilizing women or foreclosing avenues of sexual empowerment.

However, using sex and sexuality in this way also enacts a critical blindness to the very contrary experiences of women of color. Acker’s work, though periodically engaging race in her characteristically convoluted way, nonetheless enacts a sexual politics that takes it bearings from a particular cultural and historical perspective that was not available to all women. Because cultural metanarratives depicted white women as having no autonomous sexuality, expressing one’s own sexual desire took on political tones and worked toward liberation by resisting these patriarchal tropes. Quite to the contrary, women of color were responding to a cultural history that often construed them as having no subjectivity except via sexuality. Thus, in this context, embracing sex and sexuality reaffirmed, rather than contested patriarchal (especially white patriarchal) representations of women of color, especially for African American women in the long shadow of rape and concubinage under slavery.

I turn to Acker, then, in order to foreground only the first step in understanding a complex moment in sexual representations in which the charge and concept of obscenity reveals the multiform operations of sexual politics. While explicit sexuality serves emancipatory purposes in some cultural contexts, it serves oppressive purposes in others. By considering this moment, we can see not only that obscenity itself is fluid in this regard, but that the underlying sexual oppression under patriarchy is also flexible to the point of sustaining profound contradictions. These contradictions converge in the effort to resolve a question of praxis of which Acker represents (but does not exhaust) an important vector.

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Acker’s interest in explicit and overtly dominance-themed sexuality is rooted in a concern over power dynamics and objectification, just as was the work of both her political allies and the anti-pornography activists with whom she found herself at odds. Nonetheless, while her thinking is informed by the same writers and theorists that other feminists extended or responded to, her tactics were often extreme and even those who agreed with her underlying ideals often objected to their execution. Thus, Acker’s relationship to feminism is somewhat fraught; Cynthia

Carr calls her “a feminist by instinct, at war with feminist orthodoxy.” While the reference to instinct belies the deeply theoretical background informing her writings, the point about the somewhat chaotic (seemingly haphazard) and often provocative nature of Acker’s work is well put. This disconnect between shared ideological ground and very different practice can illuminate the roots of the issues at work during this period.

As is often the case with authors who practice a postmodern aesthetic, critics have wondered if Acker’s work has, or can have, a political valence. For her part, Acker has always been cognizant of the contradictory nature of her stylistic and political projects and attempted to grapple with, if not resolve, them. Emphasizing the centrality of the body in her work, she wrote,

“I am looking for the body, my body, which exists outside its patriarchal definitions. Of course, that is not possible. But who is any longer interested in the possible?” (“Seeing Gender” 166).

Acker’s pursuit of the impossible has led her outside the conventions of literary fiction, and

Pitchford argues that the resulting postmodern play with language is actually fundamentally, rather than accidentally, political. She explains that “The question that runs throughout Kathy

Acker’s work is how people outside the mainstream of power—primarily women, but also men of color, gay men, and the poor—can claim agency when in fact … their identities [are] defined within existing systems of language and power” (Pitchford 59). Stemming from the

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 poststructural linguistic thinking that Pitchford alludes to, Acker’s novels examine the interpellation of women (and others) in language and the negotiation of subjectivity that is at the root of sexual interactions, and they do so through the sometimes-problematic techniques of postmodernism.

This practice flows out of the work of prominent feminist thinkers of the 1970s and

1980s—particularly those engaged with the afore-mentioned post-structuralism and post-

Freudian psychoanalysis. The writing of Hélène Cixous is especially helpful to an understanding

Acker’s work. Cixous sought to revise Lacanian psychoanalysis, wherein she saw the reification of the position of men as supreme within language.87 In response, Cixous and others worked to disconnect the architecture of culture from its foundations in masculine privilege. Acker echoes and advances this project; in fact, Ellen G. Friedman contends that “Acker, perhaps more directly than many other women writers, creates the feminine texts hypothesized by” Cixous (“Now Eat”

39).

No single document demonstrates the resonances between the two women’s politics as clearly as Cixous’s “Castration or Decapitation,” which appeared in French in 1976 and in

English in 1981—a few short years before Blood and Guts in High School. The essay lays out the fundamental difficulties of establishing a feminist praxis in a thoroughly phallogocentric culture. For Cixous, the threat of force (especially of death) undergirds patriarchal power, which must train women to participate in their own subjection:

it’s always a question of education. An education that consists of trying to make a soldier

of the feminine by force, … the “capital” force that is effectively decapitation. Women

have no choice other than to be decapitated, and in any case the moral is that if they don’t

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actually lose their heads by the sword, they only keep them on condition that they lose

them—lose them, that is, to complete silence, turned into automatons. (42–43)

Women are forced to participate in the masculine cultural economy on threat of decapitation, and this threat is directed in part at their “laughing and chattering” (Cixous 42), that is, at their voice.

It is worth noting, as well, that “laughing and chattering” evokes the characterization of women’s speech as unserious, a characterization that Acker’s aesthetic crudeness carries to excess.88 In the phallogocentric order, women must either be killed or keep their objections to themselves.

Cixous finds the root of women’s subjection in the impossibility of female subjectivity in language. Cixous ventriloquizes “Old Lacan takes up the slogan ‘What does she want?’ when he says, ‘A woman cannot speak of her pleasure,’” before continuing, “It’s all there, a woman cannot, is unable, hasn’t the power. Not to mention ‘speaking’: it’s exactly this that she’s forever deprived of. Unable to speak of pleasure = no pleasure, no desire: power, desire, speaking, pleasure, none of these is for woman” (45). In this passage, Cixous identifies the psychoanalytic construction wherein a lack of access to language and to desire constitutes a lack of subjectivity and power for women. Dramatizing the effects of this foreclosure, Acker’s female protagonists are tormented by their lack of access to sexual and subjective agency. They compulsively seek to speak, to overcome the barriers Cixous identifies, and they will very specifically seek to speak their pleasure, to name it and call it into being. Through the travails of her protagonists facing the same conditions, Acker attempts in her fiction what Cixous outlines in her essay.

Against the notion that sexual desire falls below the threshold of significance necessary for rigorous analysis, Cixous reassures us that there is a lot at stake. She writes that the underlying principle in the logic of the couple is difference, and the logic of difference structures the most rampant and insidious inequalities. She contends that women

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have it in them to affirm the difference, their difference, such that nothing can destroy

that difference, rather that it might be affirmed, affirmed to the point of strangeness. So

much so that … when the preservation or dissolution of sexual difference, is touched on,

the whole problem of destroying the strange, destroying all the forms of racism, all the

exclusions, all those instances of outlaw [rapports de mise hors-la-loi] and genocide that

recur through History, is also touched on. (Cixous 50)

Here she speaks to the stakes of an analysis of sexual politics in conjunction with other fields of oppression and to the value of an artistic project such as Acker’s. Through Acker’s efforts to undermine the binary privileging male desire while making women only objects of that desire, we are able to explore alternatives to the profound structures of Othering that create the most significant inequalities of the twentieth century.

The idea that differences expressed in the realm of affective and sexual relationships echo and reinforce the primary structures of oppression in other spheres—particularly patriarchy and racism—is echoed by other feminists. Cheryl Clarke, for example, writes that “Sexual politics, therefore, mirror the exploitative, class-bound relationship between the white slave master and the African slave—and the impact of both relationships … has been residual beyond emancipation and suffrage” (131). Moreover, Anzaldúa reminds us that sex is indeed a key area of political action and that the requirement that political engagement address particular topics— governance, trade, warfare, etc.—is a means of maintaining hegemony by controlling the terms of debate. She writes that “No topic is too trivial. The danger is in being too universal and humanitarian and invoking the eternal to the sacrifice of the particular and the feminine and the specific historical moment” (Anzaldúa 170, emphasis in the original). Each of these writers is speaking to the mantra that the personal is political, and reminds us of it in varying ways.

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Cixous and Acker, then, connect closely with the efforts of other feminists to redirect the project of feminism toward a greater inclusion of non-mainstream sexualities and the greater acknowledgement of sexuality as a site of (patriarchy-derogated) power. In order to resist these inequalities, we ought to attend to the specificity and encourage the expression of “sexual difference,” something Cixous here uses only to describe gender difference, but that we might usefully extend to differences in sexual practice, desire, and identification. In this way, we might turn an examination of pornography and the transgressive—that is non-normative—exhibition of the body and desire, we can train our sights on the subversion of hierarchies and subjection in culture at large.

Anti-Porn Feminism and Sex-Positive Push-Back

However, those pursuing these goals met with resistance from those who sought to limit sexual expression because of concern of the harmful effects of pornography, both sociological and cultural. The project envisioned by Cixous and enacted by Acker comes in conflict with those who opposed such work for its brazen sexuality and explicit content and its potential consequences. In 1984, for example, Roy Hoffman condemned Acker’s Blood and Guts in High

School as “abusive to women.” Though he acknowledged the parodic elements of Acker’s depiction of a girl made a slave by patriarchy, he deemed it a failed parody, a book that recapitulates, rather than challenges, that structure.89 Hoffman’s review is representative of criticism that acknowledges that Acker espouses feminist politics, while remaining skeptical that her novels accord with a feminist praxis. Friedman reminds us that Acker’s work circulated in precisely this context: “some mainstream feminists … take her work seriously enough to condemn it as pornography. Since her language is crude … and she graphically depicts

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 sadomasochistic sexual acts, they view her work as misogynistic; the pornographic sequences typical in it, they argue (quite correctly) would never be tolerated in the work of men” (“Now

Eat” 40). The disagreement here gets at one of the core points of censorship, which is whether context is important with respect to objectionable content or whether its mere presence is dangerous no matter its narrative situation. Ultimately, the legal precedent has determined that the context is relevant (though the moralist project must be “serious” as we saw in Chapter One).

Perhaps mooting this distinction here, such critiques ring hollow in the face of Acker’s depictions of sex, which tend toward the grotesque or comic rather than erotic, with exposition in stilted psychoanalytic or philosophical language. Scenes, then, that might belong in a pornographic movie are accompanied by their own absurd theoretical commentary that diffuses erotic potential and redirects the reader to political concerns.

The critiques of Acker’s work represent a strain of thought and activism rejecting any depiction of sexuality that contains elements of dominance. Feminists including Dworkin and

MacKinnon argued that porn, no matter the narrative or coupling or specific content, was inherently demeaning to women because it engaged in male power fantasies and dramatized sexuality’s (primarily heterosexuality’s) subjugation of women. Using this logic, Dworkin and

MacKinnon convinced local governments to pass anti-pornography statutes in Minneapolis,

Indianapolis, and other municipalities on the grounds that the creation, distribution, and viewing of pornography violated women’s civil rights.90

In her 1981 book Pornography: Men Possessing Women Dworkin takes issue with pornography’s dramatization of male power, and she sees this as its predominant characteristic:

“The major theme of pornography as a genre is male power, its nature, its magnitude, its use, its meaning.” Moreover, this theme is evident not only in the actual films, images, and other media

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 in question, but in the process of creating and distributing porn: “These strains of male power are intrinsic to both the substance and production of pornography; and the ways and means of pornography are the ways and means of male power” (Dworkin 24). Using this rubric, where pornography constitutively reifies male privilege, normalizes patriarchy, and demeans women,

Dworkin agitated for the strict controls on its production mentioned above.91 This approach became known both as the Civil-Rights approach to anti-pornography activism and, more pejoratively, as sex-negative feminism.

Dworkin’s laudable goals, however, were imperiled by her methods. More “sex-positive” feminists, such as Acker, found themselves at odds with Dworkin as she indicted both pornography and sexuality as such (a potential site of empowerment for Acker) as complicit in the oppression of women by men.92 The issues in some sense reside with Dworkin’s foundational terms. Echoing obsolete nineteenth-century usages, Dworkin defines pornography as “the graphic depiction of whores,” and, pre-empting defenses of porn invoking the First Amendment, calls it “trade in a class of persons who have been systematically denied the rights protected by the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights” (9).93 However, Dworkin’s rhetorical move tends to neglect varieties of porn and the varied experiences of performers.

Moreover, Dworkin’s understanding of pornography is contradictory, in that under her set of conditions, even her own analysis would be impossible. Judith Butler elaborates:

Even from within the epistemological discourse that Dworkin uses, one which links

masculinity with agency and aggression, and femininity with passivity and injury, her

argument defeats itself: no interpretive possibilities could be opened up by the

pornographic text, for no interpretive distance could be taken from its ostensibly injurious

effects; and the muted, passive, and injured stance of the woman viewer would

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effectively preclude a critical analysis of its structure and place within the field of social

power. (113)

Butler’s contention is that if we were to reduce pornography to a simple and direct instantiation of male privilege at every level, then it would be impossible for it to give rise to an awareness of this very fact; it would simply enact its violence in every instance and never be the ground of reflection. And yet, Dworkin’s own analysis proves that pornography can, in fact, give rise to thoughtful reflection including but not limited to her own.

A more contemporary understanding of porn as defined by its erotic appeal creates ambiguity about intent and reception that must be unraveled—issues of power and objectification that feminism can address—but Dworkin’s definition obviates such nuance by painting all erotic material with the same brush. While it is important to acknowledge the real power imbalances that result from and are endemic to the pornography industry, to condemn the body of pornographic material as well as the genre itself neglects the affirmative potential of, for example, queer and feminist porn.94

In addition, this attack on the porn industry presumes sex workers to lack any form of agency, a move which actually mirrors the misogynist structure she attacks. In a 1987 polemic against those, including Dworkin, she considers “sex-negative” feminists, porn actress Nina

Hartley takes specific issue with definitions based on specious etymologies: “I resent mightily that sex-negative feminists (or ‘sex-negs,’ mouthing Dworkinite orthodoxy —the Dworkinite deformation of feminism) have caused the previously neutral term ‘pornography’ to become, in many people’s minds, synonymous with violence, degradation, death, subjugation, and harm to women.” Hartley’s personal umbrage and strident indictment of Dworkin comes from her sense that anti-pornography feminists are depriving adult women of their subjectivity by presuming

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 consensual sex acts and informed sex-work to be the result of deluded interpellation into the patriarchal system.

Dworkin had presumed that all women in this line of work lack agency, something

Hartley finds infantilizing. She contends to the contrary that “What really matters is time, place, degree, mutuality and consent. I believe that a woman is capable of consent. If we aren’t granted that one prerogative then we are not being granted full adult status. Either women are capable of managing their sexual lives or they are not” (emphasis in the original). Thus, for Hartley, a woman’s freedom to engage in sex work and to control her body, her pleasure, and her desire is a necessary part of full subjecthood.95 Pornography can be an expression of that subjectivity, and to dismiss all pornography as forms of oppression forecloses realms of potential empowerment.

For Hartley, this is anti-feminist. Pitchford echoes the sentiment, contending that she “finds in the rhetoric of antipornography critiques” of Acker’s work (and that of Angela Carter) “that the tendency to treat all representations as necessarily reproducing oppressive consciousness results in a static, oppositional model of difference that leaves women without agency and threatens to erase the differences among them” (155). Thus Pitchford and Hartley sound consonant notes, arguing that restrictions placed on women’s sexual practices recapitulate, rather than resist, patriarchy because they infantilize women, even in situations where objectification is a very real danger.96

With Dworkin and Hartley, we can see the contours of a broader schism among feminists about what constitutes a responsible politics of sex and the body that drew in many more figures.

Dworkin sees sex work and pornography as inherently demeaning, while Hartley sees sexuality and explicit depictions of sex as only one part of a broad spectrum of representations and actions in which “time, place, degree, mutuality and consent” are more important than genre. While

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 much of pornography does take as its theme male empowerment and represents fantasies that reify rather than challenge patriarchy, this is a contingent (if dominant), rather than essential aspect of pornography. Moreover, we run significant risks when we condemn all pornography on the basis of what most of it does, which is surprisingly often the end-goal for activists such as

Dworkin and MacKinnon.97

One sticking point was that Dworkin’s efforts were directed not so much at pornography but at patriarchy, which Dworkin saw expressing itself through sexuality as a whole.98 Pitchford describes the position of Dworkin, MacKinnon, and others this way: “Antipornography feminism seeks to reject the existing regime of sexual representation entirely, seeing it as inherently masculine and therefore inimical to women’s interests” (153). Alex Houen echoes this sentiment in discussing Acker’s work, writing that “Dworkin presents a hard-line feminism, suggesting that pornography and male sexual penetration of women essentially serve to render women objects rather than subjects” (177). Though sharing Dworkin’s desire to combat patriarchy, other feminists saw her indictment of sexuality as going too far.

I have catalogued extensively the work of Dworkin and the rhetoric of the porn wars because Acker herself powerfully felt the dangers of Dworkin’s activism and took issue with her politics in both fiction and non-fiction—directly naming Dworkin in interviews and even passingly casting her as a villain in the novel Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (1986).99 In

1991, Acker characterized Dworkin’s position as extreme, referring to it as “Andrea Dworkin’s view that men are basically totally evil and responsible for all the shit that’s ever existed in the world” (“Interview” 91). While they originate in the same critique of patriarchy, the trajectories of Dworkin’s and Acker’s work significantly diverge. For Dworkin, women can only be liberated through a total rejection of maleness on both biological and symbolic levels. Acker

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 critiques what she calls Dworkin’s “dualistic argument that men are responsible for all the evil in the world” and says that “Her views go beyond sexism. She blames the act of penetration in sexual intercourse. I find that view not only mad but dangerous. With all the problems in the world, such a view doesn’t do feminism any good” (qtd. in Friedman, "Conversation" 13). The reason Acker might find this view dangerous is elaborate on by Pitchford, who notes that “Not only does the concept of sexual pleasure become severely limited if one eliminates all sexual practices found in male representation; more importantly, the concept of ‘women’ grows equally exclusive if defined solely through its opposition to a monolithic notion of hegemonic (i.e., white, straight) masculinity” (153–54). A too-restrictive conception of sexuality, then, limits the forms of subjectivity feminism can speak for; as such, Dworkin’s efforts can alienate segments of the feminist coalition and limit its effectiveness on both practical and theoretical levels. And this is the case, despite the fact that anti-pornography activism was seen in many circles as a way of uniting, not dividing, coalitions.

The tensions within feminism over the status of the representations of sexuality and the body—especially pornography—reveals the complexity of political organizing and the necessity of attending to historical nuances. Rather than focus on simplistic narratives of progressive and conservative, we have to begin to appreciate the dense web of intersecting and sometimes conflicting campaigns that can grow out of shared ideologies, as well as the strange bedfellows that sometimes result when groups with contrary beliefs (such as Dworkin and Christian conservatives) share near-term goals while disagreeing about fundamental principles.100

Somewhat counter-intuitively, then, the use of obscenity as an optic actually helps us avoid construing the roots of the problem as merely a contestation over the status of sexual representations. There are also racial histories at stake here, too, that demonstrates a certain

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 privilege on the part of those who would condemn pornography and sex work so readily. On the fact that seeing all heterosexual sexuality as equivalent in patriarchy—thus condemning both prostitution and marriage—stems from a limited and privileged worldview, Audre Lorde writes that: “Poor and third world women know there is a difference between the daily manifestations and dehumanizations of marital slavery and prostitution, because it is our daughters who line

42nd Street” (“The Master’s Tools” 99). Moraga echoes this sentiment, saying:

unlike battered women’s, anti-rape, and reproductive rights workers, the anti-porn

‘activist’ never has to deal with any live women outside of her own race and class. The

tactics of the anti-pornography movement are largely symbolic and theoretical in nature.

…

It is not that pornography is not a concern to many women of color. But the anti-

materialist approach of this movement makes little sense in the lives of poor and Third

World women. Plainly put, it is our sisters working in the sex industry.” (“Long Line”

128)

Thus the abstracting position that conflates sex work, marriage, and other sexual interactions and relations erases the lived experiences of women, disproportionately privileging the viewpoint of women of higher economic classes and white women, while also removing the ground for material change in these other locations. By looking at Acker’s and Walker’s novels together, we can trace their different and shared trajectories. Both were stridently feminist, both challenged for their sexual content, both concerned with the body’s power. And yet, they reflect and illuminate very different histories of embodiment and dramatize these histories in distinct ways.

Kathy Acker’s Political Aesthetic/Aesthetic Politics

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“The Law is not patriarchal because it denies the existence, even the power, of women. … The

Law is patriarchal because it denies the bodies, the sexualities of women.” Kathy Acker

(“Reading the Lack” 78–79).

I begin by looking more closely at Acker as a political figure whose efforts to expand how we see the human subject and its interaction with power often foregrounded bodies. Michael Hardin notes that “Acker recognizes in the body a unique potential for meaning” (“Kathy” xii) and

Acker herself called the body “the only place where any basis for real values exists anymore”

(qtd. in Hardin, “Kathy” xii). Acker’s approach to embodiment grows out of a complex theoretical politics that resonates with her unconventional biography.101 Acker studied at

Brandeis and the CUNY Graduate Center, received a BA from UC San Diego, and was conversant in various schools of literary theory that were ascendant in the late twentieth century, something her writing reflects in its esoteric allusions and complex engagement with problems of language and subjectivity.102 Importantly for my consideration of her political work, Acker was a student of Herbert Marcuse, an influence that can be seen in her attempts to dismantle political structures through a reconsideration of the subjective experience of sexuality. In a seeming contrast to this intellectual pedigree, Acker worked as a performer in a Times Square sex show early in her writing career.103 These widely divergent experiences combine in work that is both challengingly cerebral and shockingly visceral.

Such combinations are part of why Acker’s work is difficult and often confusing.

Friedman notes that Acker’s texts are, paradoxically, “filled with sets of disrupted movements over which not even discontinuity rules” (“Now Eat” 37). The discontinuity Friedman describes offers coherence not so much in discrete narrative closure as in the circulation of central

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 concerns among vignettes within novels and across her various texts. Carr identifies recurrent situations, forming the basis for an understanding of the Acker corpus and its aesthetic project:

Her female characters always struggle with dependence on two things they can’t trust:

language and love. Acker is part of a century-long tradition of writers, from Dadaists to

deconstructionists, who rail at the limitations of the word. Her heroines seem

interchangeable from book to book, different names tagged to the sound of one voice

raging—obscene, cynical, bewildered, and demanding to fuck. They find their only truth

in the body, in sexuality.

Carr’s characterization is useful because it points to the revelations Acker’s novels enable of the limitations of language, the resistive potential of the body, and the position of women in a masculine sexual economy. Though Acker’s work has been described as “almost anti-literary” and “deliberately assaultive and overt” (Friedman, “Now Eat” 39), Carr’s characterization reiterates the sophisticated (if not always serious) intellectual project of her novels by invoking

Dada and Deconstruction, dissuading us from rejecting Acker’s work as simply opaque or obscurantist—or perhaps simple or crude.

In fact, this aspect of Acker’s style may speak to intersections with other feminist practices. In her evocation of the style of revolt particular to the Third World woman, Anzaldúa asserts:

We revoke, we erase your white male imprint. When you come knocking on our doors

with your rubber stamps to brand our faces with DUMB, HYSTERICAL, PASSIVE

PUTA, PERVERT, when you come with your branding irons to burn MY PROPERTY on

our buttocks, we will vomit the guilt, self-denial and race-hatred you have force-fed into

us right back into your mouth. (Anzaldúa 167, emphasis in the original)

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The labels “DUMB,” “HYSTERICAL,” and “PERVERT” easily attach to Acker’s work with its basic, vulgar language, its manic cadences and obsession with dreams, and its rampant explicit sexuality. Read in the context of Anzaldúa’s embracing the labels of transgression, Acker’s work allows us to see some similarities among outsider work of this period, where what resists the patriarchal and capitalist order, and the racist order as well, takes on a number of negative appellations as the system attempts to denigrate it, thus rendering it impotent. Through negative connotation, patriarchal systems of language attempt to refute the power of these outsider positions and taboo representations, discourage their circulation, and stamp their creators with the mark of abjection.

The role of the obscene in this is explicit. Because the bounds of acceptable speech and speech modes are functions of power, resisting them must sometimes transgress norms of modesty. Anzaldúa writes that her sense of revolt and of political responsibility compels her “to write about the unmentionables, never mind the outraged gasp of the censor and the audience”

(169). Anzaldúa’s commitment to the bodily in pursuit of a revolutionary feminist world is further evoked when she implores Third World Women, “Don’t let the censor snuff out the spark, nor the gags muffle your voice. Put your shit on the paper” (173). The ground of political action must be this ground of “shit”—metaphorical but also literal; Anzaldúa expands: “To touch more people, the personal realities and the social must be evoked—not through rhetoric but through blood and pus and sweat” (173). Moraga’s theory in the flesh and Anzaldúa’s call to touch “personal realities”—written in a way calibrated to demonstrate that we have been conditioned to interpret the body as repulsive—illuminates the political vector of Acker’s vulgarity. We see her work, then, as an indictment of the system that would put such representations out of bounds.

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Blood and Guts in High School: “A Colorful, Exciting and yet Banal and Trivial Gutter

Language”

In a negotiation of the value of representations of sexuality, Acker’s work is important because it has been labeled pornographic (Pitchford 152), but according to Pitchford, “this label is misleading, for it conflates the discrete stylistic conventions and contexts of reception of the popular genre … properly termed pornography with those of Acker’s … difficult and not exactly best-selling novels, which enjoy the legitimacy of major publishers” (152–53).104 Blood and

Guts, like Acker’s other early novels, including Don Quixote, deals extensively with the interpellation of women in the sexual economy at a time when these concerns were playing out in the public and political spheres.105

Blood and Guts in High School is considered Acker’s breakout work and introduces themes related to the exposition of the body and of explicit sexuality that will take on a more profound political significance in her later works. Blood and Guts narrates the experiences of

Janey, a young girl involved in an incestuous and coercive relationship with her father who ends the relationship and sends her to New York for school. There she gets involved in a gang before being captured by a slave trader who trains her for prostitution and teaches her to write perverse poetry in Persian. Finally, she travels across northern Africa with the author Jean Genet. Because of these transgressive themes, the novel was placed on a list of books harmful to minors by the

German government. It was, moreover, censored for its offensive depictions of sex (including the incest), the inclusion of hand-drawn explicit images of genitals and nude bodies (there are 9 such images), and, pointedly, its lack of artistic value.

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According to the official 1986 finding of the German Federal Inspection Office for

Publications Harmful to Minors, the book is “confusing in terms of sexual ethics and is therefore equal to ‘immoral texts’” (Acker, Hannibal 145). The FIOPHM finds the “confusi[on]” of

“sexual ethics” to be grounds for finding the text immoral (which is defined in the law to which the decision refers). From our own perspective, this confusion cannot be equated with immorality. The complexity of the novel’s representations are not sufficiently damning to condemn it, as we might recognize that the complexity is in service of the resolution of a complex social issue; this is the kind of engagement with ideas that circulates in the Miller ruling and which protects cultural products of this kind. Nonetheless, the German government claims that the book “renders a positive picture of deviant pathological sexual acts” and that “[s]exual excitement is increased by sado-masochistic acts,” and that “this kind of description gives reason to worry that the still unformed juvenile readers will be hampered from becoming fully responsible personalities and sexual partners” (Acker, Hannibal 146). The danger of complex representations of sexuality to children will become an issue as we will see in attempts to limit minors’ access to explicit music lyrics, and rhetoric of protecting children from artworks that contain sex, even if that sex is used to positive ends, surfaces frequently. But the condemnation is useful for evoking some of the novel’s themes and depictions as well, and it crystalizes opinions stateside that circulated about the novel but could not have the force of law in the U.S.

In the U.S. context, the presence of sexuality—even offensive representations of sexuality—is not sufficient grounds for banning a book for its obscenity. As we saw in the previous chapter, the text must also lack artistic merit. It turns out the German government did find the book to lack such merit. The decision declares flatly that the book “is neither art not does it serve any artistic purpose” (Acker, Hannibal147). The judgment is subjective of course,

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 and reflects ingrained attitudes about art, as demonstrated by a disdain for the pastiche style and coarse language of the novel: “The chosen elements of style do not enhance the novel to the level of art. A colorful, exciting and yet banal and trivial gutter language in itself cannot relay any artistic qualities within a novel” (148). The findings of the committee seem important to grapple with, but it should be clear that alternate findings could be reasonable. The book might, in fact, with the benefit of retrospect, be found to have been innovative in its style and a disdain for raunch and explicitness might be muted with time as the cultural innovations of the punk movement gained wider recognition.

Though the German declaration focuses on (and lists) discrete instances of explicit acts, the book, like most of Acker’s, more often (though not exclusively) only gestures toward sex and sexuality, eliding specific descriptions in favor of exploring the psychology of the characters through stream-of-consciousness exposition, cut-up techniques borrowing from William S.

Burroughs, and narration of mundane events. The focus of the novel, then, is not titillation or eroticization of violent acts, but the mental states of those driven to these behaviors and the ontological conundrums they face.106

Acker’s novel begins in the realm of taboo, with Janey’s incestuous relationship with her father. She is psychologically damaged, we intuit, because the novel describes the scene of incest as a break-up between an adult couple. Janey is dependent and jealous, and she and her father talk openly of sex in explicit and vulgar terms. The relationship between the two is so abnormal that we can only read Janey’s sexual desire, jealousy toward older women’s claims on her father, and failure to critique or question the terms of the relationship as the pathological result of her degraded state and corrupted childhood.107 This sets the stage for an allegory of sexual victimization that dramatizes the internalization of patriarchal values about the role of the female

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 body, and this will lead to the complete breakdown of Janey’s psyche that will be reflected in the nearly incoherent nature of the text. In this way, the novel meditates—in grotesque terms—on the effect of a patriarchal sexual economy that affects women even when they are children.

Janey spends the rest of the novel on a convoluted journey to find fulfillment or simply make her way in the world. She often supplies an emotional lack and palliates a sense of alienation with sex, violence, and delusions, alternating between a horrific reality and an idyllic, if chaotic, fantasy. The allure of this kind of illusory fulfillment for disenfranchised women in a society that values them primarily for their bodies is one of the novel’s main themes and prefigures the kind of utopic vision we might ascribe to the project of Acker’s larger corpus, especially Empire of the Senseless. While sexuality is sometimes empowering, it is also potentially empty, a sign of the commodification of female bodies that devalues the social and cultural contributions of women—that, in fact, deforms those contributions until they resemble

Blood and Guts in High School. The imagination and the dreamscape become sites of working through a general trauma of disempowered subjecthood, and these are inscribed on the page in both experimental prose and elaborate line drawings. In this context, the book’s graphic description of sex and the inclusion of drawings of genitalia simply make explicit the bare facts of life: it’s all about sex, anyway.

The link between this nihilistic attitude and larger social transgression is developed early on in the novel. After her father abandons her and sends her to New York to make her way,

Janey briefly holds down a job, but then joins a gang, unable to resist the allure of crime and sex—both portrayed as substitutes for affection. After briefly giving up on the gang and finding a job, Janey is lured back. Describing her motivations, she says: “Love turned me back to crime.

Tommy and I … [d]id everything we could to dull our judgment and acted outrightly as violent

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 as possibly. … I could hardly stand being so happy. The sex made me crazier than the crime”

(Acker, Blood and Guts 41-42). In scenes like this, criminality (as a form of social transgression) and sex are the fruits of perverse affective relationships. By linking the destruction of the possibility of healthy affective relationships to violence and sex, Acker’s novel dramatizes the psychological effects of a masculist sexual economy on the women who must participate in it under the threat of, as Cixous argues, decapitation.

For Blood and Guts in High School, the purpose of this kind of transgression, where explicit, violent, and meaningless sex is depicted routinely, is to reveal the consequences of the commodification of female bodies. The grotesque text is a revelation of the deformed subjectivity of patriarchy’s victims, which functions as an indictment of the structures of power that produced them. Though the prose is erratic, it is worth noting the frenetic and chaotic pronouncements made by the narrator:

Once upon a time there was a materialistic society one of the results of this materialism

was a ‘sexual revolution.’ Since the materialistic society had succeeded in separating sex

from every possible feeling, all you girls can now go spread your legs as much as you

want ’cause it’s sooo easy to fuck it’s sooo easy to be a robot it’s sooo easy not to feel.

Sex in America is S & M. This is the glorification of S & M and slavery and prison.

(Acker, Blood and Guts 99)

Because Janey’s childhood was corrupted, we read her pathological behavior—accepting sexual slavery (and prison and S&M) and seeking out empty sexual encounters and violent crime—as a result of it, but it is also a consequence of a greater structure of culture wherein the body and the mind become only nodes in a network of need and exchange, particularly for women. Moreover,

Janey’s ironic pronouncement makes a clear statement about the implication of materialism and

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 consumer culture with an oppressive sexual economy that unites the eroticization of suffering (in sadomasochism) with a history of economic exploitation through violence (slavery). Supporting all of this is cultural landscape in which sex is just one more commodity. Here, we see the eruption of a political project that re-signifies what might have seemed like meaningless reveling in explicit depictions. I would argue that in this moment, Acker reveals that the nihilistic aesthetic of a consumer-driven economy of sexual representations is damaging and empty.

The message that sexuality and economic exploitation are inter-implicated is expanded in successive passages where Janey describes her situation as twin kinds of slavery. On the one hand is “Body slavery: I have to eat and get shelter so need money. Also my body likes sex and rich food and I’ll do anything for these.” On the other hand is “Mind slavery: I want more than just money. I live in a partially human world and I want people to think and feel certain ways about me. So I try to set up certain networks … These networks become history and culture ….

They tell me what to do” (Acker, Blood and Guts 111). Janey is describing her awareness of societal interpellation, the extent of control that structures of power have on her, even to the point of determining her desires. While this system creates abject positions for Janey and women generally, it allows men to persist in the status of victimizer and users—subjects with power and self-determination, in Dworkin’s terms—those who benefit from the system of abjection. In the novel, Jean Genet explains the hierarchy of civilization to Janey in stark, brutal terms: “Rich men

/ Poor men / Mothers / Beautiful women / Whores / Poor female and neo-female slut-scum /

Janey” (130-31).108 This hierarchy, reified in the novel and functioning as an allegory of reality, not only denigrates Janey specifically, but lays bare the logic of patriarchy where men are more powerful than women, but women who serve patriarchal functions (reproduction or sexual gratification) are also more valued than those who refuse the system. Janey, then, exists in a state

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 of total abjection which it is Acker’s project to reveal as a hyperbolic form of the general abjection of women in the sexual economy. By pointing this out, Acker takes the first step in a process of identifying the structures that need overturning, then yearning for (if not fully realizing) an alternative.

In its brutality, the novel enacts a project of pushing social conditions to the point of grotesqueness. But this grotesqueness of expression is meant to reveal the grotesqueness of the discursive condition. Janey’s abjection is an indictment of the system that produced her condition. Moreover, her position completely outside the societal order is the place in which she can take the power to critique the system and demonstrate its illogic, its victims, its incoherence.

Acker’s novel reflects a reality in which the sexual economy that determines women’s role in the world is no longer glossed, but laid bare. When we investigate the causes of Janey’s actions, it is the system itself that is critiqued, specifically a sexual economy that begins with and finds as its final reference in the father and the authority of the patriarch.109

The difficulty of locating a viable subjectivity for Janey in this system—and the difficulty she faces in extricating herself from deeply ingrained self-loathing, are indicative of the complex foreclosure of female desire that Acker is attempting to dramatize. This may be because of the conventional assumption that the feminine desire to be affirmed does not exist; as Pitchford describes the argument:

women’s socially defined identity does not include the active expression of desire. While

women’s historic association with irrationality also identifies them with unrestrained

desire, their desire is conventionally figured as unfocused and turned in upon itself,

rendered articulate (meaningful) only when given shape by male desire. Without the

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directive forces of male reason and language (this argument goes), desire fails to signify.

(84–85)

This argument underpins an understanding of pornography and Acker’s fiction as inherently and irredeemably masculist, in that even representations of female desire can only represent a feminine sexuality conditioned to reflect male desire. I argue, to the contrary, however, that it is

Acker’s goal to dramatize the emptiness of this position, while representing in Janey’s moments of utopic longing the desire to transcend such a system.

The novel seems to recognize this masculist conditioning and acknowledge the attendant difficulty of creating sexual representations that legitimately celebrate feminine sexuality.

However, what does obtain here is a momentary vision of Acker’s utopic dream: a world where a more equal expression of love is possible between fully-realized subjects and where desire is open and public.110 At the root of this hope is a rejection of Dworkin’s philosophy because such belief relies on the liberatory power of desire, particularly of tangible expressions of it. While such representations run the risk of recapitulating masculine desire, the utopic vision, the belief in the power of desire, is not abandoned.

This affirmation of desire finds its roots in the body and in the complementary de- institutionalization of the mind. Acker’s mode of accessing this de-institutionalized condition veers through Deconstruction and Post-Structuralism. Acker elaborates on this idea in an important passage from Empire of the Senseless that is worth quoting at length:

That part of our being (mentality, feeling, physicality) which is free of all control let’s

call our ‘unconscious.’ Since it’s free of control, it’s our only defence [sic] against

institutionalized meaning, institutionalized language, control, fixation, judgement [sic],

prison.

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Ten years ago it seemed possible to destroy language through language: to destroy

language which normalizes and controls by cutting that language. Nonsense would attack

the empire-making (empirical) empire of language, the prisons of meaning.

But this nonsense, since it depended on sense, simply pointed back to the

normalizing institutions.

What is the language of the ‘unconscious’? … Its primary language must be

taboo, all that is forbidden. Thus, an attack on the institutions of prison via language

would demand the use of a language or languages which aren’t acceptable, which are

forbidden. Language, on one level, constitutes a set of codes and social and historical

agreements. Nonsense doesn’t per se break down the codes; speaking precisely that

which the codes forbid breaks the codes. (134)111

In this passage, Acker’s narrative voice (in some ways continuous with that in Blood and Guts) invokes Post-Structural experimentation as a limited way of resisting the hegemony of imperial language by flouting the imperative to make sense. Acker contends that this produces a recursive binary where non-sense relies on sense and therefore “simply point[s] back to the normalizing institutions.” This again recalls the notion that feminine desire might fall short of its resistive potential if it can be shown that its revolutionary otherness is foreclosed by the thoroughgoing penetration of masculine desire in epistemological modes—including desire and fantasy.

However, Acker also confirms the necessity of essaying such a project. She claims that

“speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks the codes,” suggesting that it is explicit, transgressive representations that present the strongest threat to conventional structures of power.

Turning the abject into a symbol of power by embracing taboo behaviors represents the major tactic of Acker’s explicit feminist politics. As Houen notes, “Acker’s pirate myth,” nascent

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 here and realized more fully in later works, especially Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996), “opens new linguistic potentials while using a language of abjection to ensure that those potentials become affective corporeal powers” (190). If we connect the imperative here to compose in taboo forms, we see a political project that valorizes transgressive sexual expression as a means of realizing alternate spaces of being. This project makes plain the potential of pornography and explicit representations—of a body politics based in revelation of desire—that challenges those who would ban pornography as constitutively degrading.

I have examined Acker’s early work here primarily to draw together the threads of her complex weave of post-structuralist theory, feminist politics, and a concern for sexuality and its representations. Acker was an important figure and her work, though complex and difficult—and often shocking or offensive—demonstrates some of the key modes of resistance to patriarchy within second-wave feminism. Her work is exemplary in that respect. Nonetheless, this is only one vector of resistance, so I position it here in relation to the work of Alice Walker and the very different histories of racialization her work engages.

Third-Wave Feminism and Perspectives from Women of Color

Acker’s novel gives us a clear picture of what a deliberately political transgressive sexual representation looks like when it grows out of the post-structuralist and postmodern traditions. It is deliberately chaotic and assaultive to the reader because of its narrative incoherence and shocking descriptions. Often critiqued for simple vulgarity—and banned as a threat to children— this work, however, has its political ambitions and a deliberate method. Nonetheless, like sex- negative anti-pornography activism, it has its limitations, in part because it is bound up in precisely this binary that limits debate on the status of sexual representations to sex-negative and

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 sex-positive, and because its deep investment in theories of language privilege a Eurocentric episteme.

As noted above, the writings of Moraga and Anzaldúa offer a useful companion to

Acker’s fiction, because they similarly explore the potential of non-mainstream and non- patriarchal desire to be avenues of liberation for women. However, they begin to open up alternative valences because they introduce the perspective of non-white women and remind us of the different concerns that arise when we consider racialization alongside sexual subjectivity.

Moraga wrote in 1982, for example, that “I have come to realize that the boundaries white feminists confine themselves to in describing sexuality are based in white-rooted interpretations of dominance, submission, power-exchange, etc.” Moraga puts an even finer point on it by insisting that feminists who see gender oppression as the sole vector of oppression are neglecting the importance of intersectionality and producing a counterproductive sexual politics: “In failing to approach feminism from any kind of materialist base, failing to take race, ethnicity, class into account in determining where women are at sexually, many feminists have created an analysis of sexual oppression (often confused with sexuality itself) which is a political dead end” (“Long

Line” 126). Moraga, like Lorde, has emphasized the need to engage directly with race and ethnicity and avoid the abstraction that both grows out of and produces economic and political privilege for white women, even feminists. Acker’s novels, though politically engaged, largely elide race or treat it in oblique, confusing ways. Not racist, but not anti-racist in an organized fashion either, to some extent they represent just the kind of high-theoretical approach that

Moraga and Lorde decry.

Lorde elaborated on some these concepts in her contributions to This Bridge Called My

Back, including the germinal essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s

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House.” In it, Lorde emphasizes the historical occlusion of the voices of women of color in feminist debates, noting that “It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory in this time and in this place without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, third-world women, and lesbians” (98). She is in part attacking the use of post-structuralist theory at the time to guide feminist praxis. Not only she contends, does this recapitulate a masculine intellectual history, but it limits the change that can come from activism. The means of academic analysis, particularly when rooted in European high theory, she contends, brings with it the suppositions of male supremacy, asking “what does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable”

(98). This is the context in which she coins her often repeated aphorism that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” adding that “They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (99, italics in original).

Lorde’s essay is rightly remembered as a powerful call for the development of new modes of knowledge that grow organically out of the experiences of women. But it is worth also remembering this practical concern for the viability of real change. She is interested in the reality that the use of methods borrowed from a patriarchal system will only produce superficial change.

Applying this insight to the sex-positive/sex-negative divide, we might conclude that the entire debate is a debate over different uses of the master’s tools. On the one side you have those like

Dworkin and MacKinnon pushing for legislative change on the local and national level in ways that reify the structures of possessive individualism, and on the other you have those like Acker

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 disassembling norms of language while relying on structures of knowledge imported from the high philosophical tradition.

Perhaps offering a way out of this, Hortense J. Spillers engages with the psychoanalytic tradition that Cixous and Acker extend, but is primarily engaged with carefully attending to the historical experience of African American women in slavery. Like Lorde and Moraga, Spillers addresses in passing the failures of academic theory and academic second-wave feminism to attend to the different histories and tropes of embodiment applied to and imposed on African

American women. In this way, Spillers is important not so much for extending or recapitulating the indictment of second-wave feminism, but in providing for a deeper understanding of what we could attend to in order to produce a more productive alternative. In a difficult passage early in her influential essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” she introduces the notion of

“pornotroping,” which I want to use a node of connection between the notion of anti- pornography activism and an understanding of the different histories of embodiment that characterize the representations of non-white women in a U.S. cultural and historical context.

The word pornotroping shares a root with pornography, which I have discussing at some length, but the similar etymologies belie importantly distinct semantic vectors. Pornotroping is not the enactment of metaphors and symbols related to erotic or sexual material; rather, it represents the complex of historical fields, representations, and actions that reduced African

American women to flesh.112 In order to elaborate on the concept and disassociate it from simpler and more historically laden terms such as objectification, Spillers returns to the Middle

Passage to reconnect her discussion to the history of slavery that produced the distinct manner of dehumanization she wants to voice. Writing in reference to “socio-political order of the New

World,” she highlights how “That order, with its human sequence written in blood, represents for

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 its African and indigenous peoples a scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile. First of all, their New-World, diasporic plight marked a theft of the body-a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire.” Continuing, she argues that cultural norms related to the body that the captive individuals brought with them are broken down, but that “this body, at least from the point of view of the captive community, focuses a private and particular space, at which point of convergence biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and psychological fortunes join.” The recreation of these spaces of intimacy and new cultural and social processes and relationships would be a means of establishing defenses against the violence of enslavement.

However, Spillers describes, four social and representational procedures intervene to further disrupt this defense:

This profound intimacy of interlocking detail is disrupted, however, by externally

imposed meanings and uses: 1) the captive body becomes the source of an irresistible,

destructive sensuality; 2) at the same time-in stunning contradiction-the captive body

reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor; 3) in this absence from a subject

position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of

"otherness"; 4) as a category of “otherness,” the captive body translates into a potential

for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more

general “powerlessness,” resonating through various centers of human and social

meaning. (Spillers 67).

In the narrative Spillers constructs, first, the violence of slavery simply obliterates existing configurations of gender for captive and enslaved people because it totally removes the social conditions under which those configurations of gender arose and were maintained or

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 perpetuated. The enslaved people do, however, retain their experiences and create new ad hoc structures of gender and affiliation, but these, too, are wiped away by rhetorical structures and modes of knowing the gender of the oppressed. The dominant and oppressive power simply fills in new gender roles and imposes them. Spillers describes these roles as including some contradictory binaries of total sexual threat versus total disempowerment. Otherness also becomes inscribed in this sexuality.

Where Spillers articulates the concept of pornotroping is in the relationship between the body and “sheer physical powerlessness.” Importantly, this notion is a form of meaning making; it is a system of troping. It is also a system of sexual tropes. But in the knowledge system these tropes deploy and evoke, the structures of power are even more imbalanced than the concepts of dominance and submission that Acker engages in her writing about BDSM. The concept of submission, notably, is not appropriate to a context of total coercion, in which even the possibility of willful submission is violated. The notion of pornotroping in a sense renders

BDSM a parody and caricature. In this structure, moreover, there is no escaping racialization, and any discussion of sexual politics absent an explicit indictment and refusal of white supremacy is meaningless.113

Having thus at hand a notion that articulates a sense of objectification, but attends to race- specific histories and the problematics of offering sexual desire as a means of escape from a system of white patriarchy, we can begin to understand the limitations of a false binary in feminism between sex-negative and sex positive. “Objectification” is a word that embodies a critique of discourses that reduce the body from a site or ground of subjectivity to something less rich and less agentive. But in its orientation it is a rejection of the body’s reduction to a site of pleasure (for men). Beginning with a similar premise, “pornotroping” encapsulates the

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 evacuation of subjectivity to the body, but emphasizes less its function as a site of pleasure, and more its function as a site of pain, rupture, and violation.

As a counterpoint to the feminisms of Cixous and Acker, and of Dworkin and

MacKinnon, then, we must add the insights of Third-Wave feminism to more fully understand

(and combat) the structures of oppression that are revealed to be more than patriarchal, but also white supremacist. Similarly, Walker’s The Color Purple offers an important counterpoint to

Acker’s novel. Each book explores and dramatizes feminist theory, providing a more complex picture of how dominant voice policing of sexual representations works.

Like Acker’s, Walker’s novel begins with the rape of its main character by a man she understands to be her father. Like Janey, the development of Celie’s subjectivity is damaged and overwhelmed by this act of violation. Unlike Janey, however, Celie’s story is one of overcoming.

The novel traces the dark times she experiences after her supposed father trades her to another, to whom she is no more than a servant and sexual object. The one person who loves Celie and whom she loves is her sister Nettie, who also faces the threatening sexual advances of their father and of her husband, Albert/Mr. ______. Nettie first escapes their father by coming to live with Celie and Albert, only to leave after he responds violently to her rejecting his advances, too.

She then flees to Africa as a servant of a black missionary and his wife.

While Nettie learns about the Olinka tribe and European colonialism in Africa, Celie continues to struggle against a brutal male supremacy in her own community. Her husband is in love with a blues and jazz singer named Shug Avery, with whom Celie eventually falls in love, too. Through an introduction to sexual pleasure, Shug helps Celie see that she might live for herself and that doing so might be a way of accessing a divine spirit analogous to the God to whom she addresses her early letters in this epistolary novel. In this way, Celie journeys from a

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 state of total degradation under a baldly exploitative and dehumanizing patriarchy to one of independence in a more woman-identified community. Through this dramatization, Walker seems to be operating under a parallel artistic strategy to Acker. Both authors paint a picture of the evils of patriarchy stripped of its euphemisms and obfuscations, and then imagine a more equal world influenced by the author’s feminist theories.

The novel was widely praised, and received numerous awards. Published in 1982, it won both the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Award in 1983. It was made into a film by the same name in 1985, directed by Steven Spielberg and with an all-star cast that included

Danny Glover, Oprah Winfrey, and Whoopi Goldberg. It was similarly adapted into a Broadway musical in 2005. Both the film and musical were subsequently nominated for numerous

Academy Awards and Tony Awards, respectively. The novel was also widely hailed by critics and the public. In his 1982 review in The New York Times Book Review, for example, Mel

Watkins calls the book Walker’s “most impressive” book, one that “easily satisfies [the claim]” that Walker is “a lavishly gifted writer.”

The reception of the novel was not overwhelmingly positive, however, and some of the strongest critiques come from those who were concerned about its engagement with negative images and tropes that recall the cultural history Spillers details. Trudier Harris wrote a scathing critique of the novel in which she describes her long process of agonizing over its representations of African American life. She suggests the position of some that the novel is not just over-rated, but wrongly valorized, a book that threatens to instantiate more than challenge the structures it depicts, even though it ostensibly does so in order to overthrow them. In this way, the novel might be said to be even more similar to Acker’s since it, too, faced the criticism that its political project was ineffective against the danger that it reinforced existing stereotypes. Harris argues

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 that in addition to foreclosing attention that might be directed at other deserving texts and authors,

Response to its unequaled popularity, first of all, has created a cadre of spectator readers.

These readers, who do not identify with the characters and who do not feel the intensity

of their pain, stand back and view the events of the novel as a circus of black human

interactions that rivals anything Daniel Patrick Moynihan concocted. The spectator

readers show what damage the novel can have; for them, the book reinforces racist

stereotypes they may have been heir to and others of which they may have only dreamed.

(155)

In this passage, Harris links the film to the infamous 1965 Moynihan report that blamed a “tangle of pathologies” in the African American community for the economic and social ills faced by

African Americans. Though intended to justify social programs, the report was criticized on the right for not emphasizing individual responsibility, but it has also come under a more lasting and withering critique on the left for lending a veneer of social science legitimacy to stereotypes about the weakness of African American families. Harris is concerned that The Color Purple does something of the same work by giving viewers—especially white viewers—an image of black culture that seems to reinforce these very presumptions, especially the cruelty of African

American fathers.

Exacerbating this possibility for Harris is the fact that, as she put it, “a large number of readers, usually vocal and white, have decided that The Color Purple is the quintessential statement on Afro-American women and a certain kind of black lifestyle in these United States”

(155). Harris here emphasizes the effect the novel might have on the circulation of certain negative stereotypes of African American life, especially in this moment. In this sense, it is not

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 only that the negative attitudes or stereotypes of “spectator readers” are confirmed, but that they might supplant other available images or representations, and thus limit the possibility of a more varied and nuanced understanding of African American culture. While Harris has articulated other criticisms of the novel, this is the one that affects my reading most profoundly, so I hope to elaborate on it some here.

In particular, Harris objects to Celie’s passiveness in early passages, which she finds a caricature of stereotypes, infamously calling the protagonist “a bale of cotton with a vagina”

(155). Celie seems, at the outset of the novel, almost impossibly ignorant of her body and her identity. Part of the issue is likely that Walker’s novel, though interpreted and read in the realist genre, often takes on the exaggerated or allegorical style that we see with Acker’s novel. Though decidedly human and evoking sympathy in a realist mode, the book also seems self-consciously to be a representation or metaphorization of the workings of patriarchy. Harris is aware of this element of the book, but contends that the novel presents itself not as an allegory or fantasy, but as a realist novel and that it can and should be critiqued on those grounds. Harris writes “If

Walker had wanted to write a fairy tale, why would she have dressed it up as a novel? Since it professed to be a novel, I would treat it as such. And since it professed to be realistic fiction, I would respond to that as much as I could” (159). For Harris, because of the likelihood that other readers will interpret it as depicting actual conditions, she must respond to the effects of such an interpretation. This is due in part because the representations will seem real because they accord with stereotypes and misrepresentations with a long history; thus, for Harris, The Color Purple runs the risk of cementing and strengthening the negative images it intends to overturn.

If the novel instantiates the figures it means to overthrow because of its massive popularity among an unknowing or uncritical public, then it might spread and shore up those

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 very figures of pornotroping. Harris expresses her concern in part as the worry that Celie’s story might be “used to create a new archetype or to resurrect old myths about black women” (156).

We know these stereotypes circulate from Spillers and understand their impact somewhat, but

Harris is usefully explicit, and her delineation of them reminds us of them in specific terms:

The book simply added a freshness to many of the ideas circulating in the popular culture

and captured in racist literature that suggested that black people have no morality when it

comes to sexuality, that black family structure is weak if existent at all, that black men

abuse black women, and that black women who may appear to be churchgoers are really

lewd and lascivious. (157)

Sounding notes in echo of Spillers, Jacqueline Bobo defends the film and novel not so much on aesthetic or political merits, but on the work it can do in regards to pornotroping (though she does not use this term). She writes that “During enslavement black women were worked as hard as men, used as breeders, then constructed in mythology as wanton and sexually lascivious. After slavery black women were usefully constructed as mean and evil castrating wenches, emasculating their male partners and further impeding the progress of the race. Contemporary works by black women writers, of which The Color Purple is part, are a corrective to prior notions of black women” (335). I should stress here that I do not mean to affirm Harris’s reading of the novel, nor that it would even be my place to do so. But her critique reminds us of the real dangers of system of pornotroping that the novel engages, and brings to the fore the political stakes of any representation of abusive sexuality, which must intersect with existing systems of knowledge.

I present Harris’s critique not to agree or disagree with it; rather, her critique is a way of invoking the impact of pornotroping and the possibility that, once overcome, it might be re-

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 inscribed. What I mean is that if we hope that some of the symbolic reduction to flesh that attended slavery and its aftermath had been overcome by the time of the novel’s production, then

Harris’s critique suggests it might be reawakened. Thus, whether right or wrong, Harris calls our attention to the dangers and the operation of pornotroping in cultural production. Her review reminds that this can happen even in work that is self-consciously emancipatory and conceived to counter negative representational discourses.

Harris was not the only vocal critic of the novel. In fact, in popular reception of the novel, obscenity challenges were the more common objection. The book’s sexual content and celebration of lesbian desire were rejected by some social activists, and this led to a complicated history. Walker faced simultaneous celebration and censorship. Patricia Holt noted that Walker was “one of the most censored writers in American literature” (1) and recalls her mixed celebrity in 1994 when the State of California sought to honor her as a “State Treasure” at the same time that the California Board of Education removed two of her short stories from the high school reading list (1-2). The Color Purple itself has a somewhat tangled history of censorship, as well.

It appears as number five on the American Library Association’s list of frequently challenged works of classic literature (“Banned & Challenged Classics”). The ALA records over a dozen instances of the book’s place on school readings lists being challenged because of its explicit sexual content, depictions of violence, and use of profanity (“Banned and/or Challenged”).

These challenges occurred despite the book’s critical acclaim, and reflect negotiations about appropriate content for children and parents’ rights to oversee what their children are exposed to.

In many ways, then, they prefigure later work by the Parents’ Music Resource Center. Still, the specific history of the book is worth noting, as it demonstrates that the book was simultaneously perceived as a valuable work of art and a potential threat.

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Walker’s novel occasioned not only popular reviews, but a wealth of critical interpretations as well, something that is part and parcel of the novel’s all but certain canonization and frequently being taught in secondary schools and universities. Because the novel is so rich and multifarious, criticism has been understandably varied. Authors such as

Wendy Wall and M. Teresa Tavormina have taken on the role of quilt making and cloth work in the novel, which can be seen as contributing to a long tradition of African American quilting as a counter-hegemonic practice. The novel’s use of language has also come under close scrutiny.

Keith Byerman and King-Kok Cheung have examined this aspect of the novel. Because the epistolary novel is narrated in Celie’s voice as it evolves with her consciousness, it provides several models of speech meant to evoke different mental states. Similarly, the use of African

American vernacular and blues-influenced rhythms are prominent elements in these analyses.

Other elements of the novel, including its function within the African American literary tradition, the genre of the epistolary novel, and as a form of feminist theorizing are analyzed by a collection of scholars including Henry Louis Gates Jr., Lauren Berlant, Molly Hite, Martha J.

Cutter, Linda Abbandonato, and others.

Martha J. Cutter has also written about the novel in her article “Philomela Speaks.” In this article, Cutter puts The Color Purple into a long tradition of rape narratives and uses the

Greek mythological figure Philomela to explain how Celie’s coming into voice in the later part of the novel is an overturning of existing tropes of rape that end with the victim’s silence. Cutter writes that:

Like the novels of Morrison and Naylor, Alice Walker's The Color Purple invokes this

archetypal rape narrative [of Philomela], but Walker is most interested in re-envisioning

this myth through an alternative methodology of language. … Unlike the original mythic

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text, as well as the novels of Morrison and Naylor, Walker's text gives Philomela a voice

that successfully resists the violent patriarchal inscription of male will onto a silent

female body. (163)

Works like Cutter’s help us understand the long tropological and mythological tradition within which Walker’s work makes its meaning. It does so by invoking some tropes in order to overturn them, a model for the novel’s treatment of patriarchy that encourages us to see any one part of the novel as constituting only a partial evocation of Walker’s vision. Moreover, it gives us a means for making meaning of its scenes of violation.

Cutter also joins other critics that I will address later who elaborate on Walker’s creation of a feminist utopia that mirrors her concept of the woman-identified community. For Cutter,

Celie’s linguistic development contributes to this: “The novel therefore indicates that alternative methodologies of language (whether spoken by men or women) need not perpetuate the mythic cycle of feminine destruction encapsulated within patriarchal discourse and patriarchal narrative”

(175). In her growth into a more expressive language, Celie demonstrates one important element of how an alternative world that avoids the injustices of patriarchy might be approached.

Abbandonato’s discussion of the novel brings into focus some of the feminist aspects of the novel. As others will also do, she elaborates on how The Color Purple enacts part of its important resistive project by simply dramatizing non-conforming sexualities and women refusing the roles assigned to them in patriarchy. She writes that, patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality “can only operate smoothly so long as sexual nonconformity is kept invisible. An important project of feminism, then, is to make the invisible visible: to topple the dominant ideology by placing the unorthodox and the marginalized at the center of the discursive and cultural stage” (1109-10). This is pivotal in directing my reading of The Color Purple through

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 the lens of obscenity, because I am interested in what representations are meant to be made off- limits and how the obscene functions to keep “sexual nonconformity” invisible. Whitney Strub has argued convincingly that legal obscenity discourses function particularly to limit visibility of non-mainstream sexualities and desires, which is often described as a fear of normalizing such behaviors.

In some senses, this is precisely what those who would seek to represent such desire also hope. Abbandonato, for example, writes that “Celie’s lesbianism is politically significant, subverting masculine cultural narratives of femininity and desire and rewriting them from a feminist point of view” (1109). However, the specific move from abuse to healing is important, because it reveals the function of the narrative structure. Celie’s shattered and abused identity is healed through lesbian desire, a move that not only brings same-sex desire into view, but celebrates its ameliorative potential: “It is her love for Shug that enables Celie to bury her sad double narrative of paternal origins and construct a new identity within a feminine domain”

(Abbandonato 1111). The construction of a new identity that Abbandonato is describing saves

Celie from the hell of her narrative origins: “Implicit here is an escape from patriarchal law. In breaking the taboo against homosexuality, Celie symbolically exits the master narrative of female sexuality and abandons the position ascribed to her within the symbolic order” (1111-12).

This new possibility, however, is open to others, too, including men. Albert learns over the course of the novel to mend his ways, and at the end of the novel, the world that exists in Celie’s orbit gives a glimpse of an imagined world that suffers less from unequal gender binaries.

Berlant also offers an important critique of the novel. Berlant is particularly concerned that while race is a factor in the novel, its indictment of racism is misdirected. All the violence and suffering for black women in the novel seems to come from black men, and instances of

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 white supremacist violence—though present in, for example, the lynching of Celie and Nettie’s true father—are told in a fairy-tale format and through rhetorical elisions that diminish their racist elements while emphasizing class-based discrimination and violence. Berlant argues that the racial violence in the novel is thus displaced into the economic sphere—Berlant says it functions “to racialize the scene of class struggle” (843)—and so sees the novel leaving the structure of racism largely in place, even as it suggests that race is often a subterfuge for economic inequalities and violence rooted in them.

Perhaps more important to Berlant is the fact that the structure of the narrative, which, like other scholars, she identifies as moving toward an imagined feminist utopia,114 creates its vision for a more equal future by affirming, rather than contesting, capitalism and American nationalist mythologies. Berlant critiques the novel for its “progressive saturation with capitalism and its fruits, along with its insistence on the significance of the product in the consumer’s self- knowledge and self-expression,” which, she contends, “marks the relative cleansing of violence from its class and capital relations” (857). Because it reifies long-standing and deep-rooted economic structures that form the material conditions of injustice while minimizing the racist components of those structures, Walker’s novel inverts the efforts at diversity under multiculturalism.

In her reading of the novel, Berlant points out a facet of the text I have been returning to that is important in a reading focused around pornotroping. While discussing the narrative structure that elevates Celie by the novel’s end, Berlant writes that “The Color Purple’s strategy of inversion, represented in its elevation of female experience over great patriarchal events, had indeed aimed to critique the unjust practices of racism and sexism that violate the subject's complexity, reducing her to a generic biological sign” (857). The passage here neatly transitions

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 from the discussion of the plot structure to the important facet of pornotroping: the reduction “to a biological sign.” Though it is through embracing capitalism and the consumer fetish, Celie does throw off the symbolic structure, the real violence, and the representational modes that had reduced her to a biological sign, to a sexual object or source of domestic labor. Taking the novel as a whole, the ambivalent re-inscription of the capitalist mode exists alongside a symbolic exchange in which The Color Purple expunges or exorcises negative cultural images through a direct engagement with them.

I hope here to augment this reading of the novel’s critical life by looking closely at a few key scenes in the hopes of clarifying the novel’s specific contributions to the notion of pornotroping. However, because my emphasis is in large part on the social history of the novel and the conflicts it caused, and because existing criticism of the novel is so exhaustive, I will not venture to add significant new readings. A few scenes I want to highlight because of their similarity to Blood and Guts. They demonstrate that certain tropes and figures—especially the sexual domination of the father in patriarchy—are shared concerns for the both authors and for feminism more broadly.

In The Color Purple, Celie’s story, like Janey’s, begins with her rape by her father. In

Walker’s novel, it will later be revealed that Alfonso is not her true father, but her stepfather, which erases some of the stain of incest in that moment, allowing for partial recovery from the trauma she experiences in this first scene of the book. Nonetheless at this time, when she is fourteen, she thinks he is her father, and we as readers, do, too. The violation she experiences is the product of Alfonso’s desire, rather than of power or domination, which seems to justify complaints that the novel portrays African American men poorly. Celie’s mother has fallen ill, and rebuffs Alfonso’s advances, upon which he tells Celie “You gonna do what your mammy

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 wouldn’t” (Walker 1). The scene represents Alfonso’s desire as free-floating, attaching to any female object. This casts him as monstrous, of course, but it also clarifies that for him the women in the novel are interchangeable objects of gratification, and this supersedes social norms and taboos.

I would argue that to some extent Alfonso is represented not as an aberration in the novel, but as the clearest example of a patriarchal system that the other men in the novel also participate in. His monstrosity, then, is not a matter of kind but of degree, and I read him as an eruption or unveiling of the system of patriarchy, not an aberration of it. In this way, the incestuous violation of the novel is an excessive representation that makes explicit the underlying logic of the bourgeois family. This contention is supported by the mobility of Albert’s desire as well. He is relatively easily convinced to shift his initial interest in Nettie onto Celie when Alfonso refuses to allow Nettie to marry. The two women are not entirely indistinguishable to him; he sees Nettie as prettier and more desirable, but he is swayed from pursuing her by Alfonso’s arguments about

Celie’s ability to work. We can see from this that the women are expected to participate in an economy not only of sexual pleasure, but of work and care, in a broadly oppressive system of exploitative and coercive domestic service.115

It is also important in the context of my discussion of obscenity to explore the scenes in which Celie discovers her independence from this system through lesbian sexual exploration with Shug Avery. It is Shug who first introduces Celie to her clitoris and describes the sensation of orgasm, which Celie has never felt or conceived of. Prior to Shug’s instruction, Celie had never felt sexual pleasure. In fact, her experience of sex is characterized by the lack of feeling that she has cultivated in order to survive her multiple traumas. When describing intercourse with Albert, she tells Shug that “Most times I pretend I ain’t there. He never know the difference.

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Never ast me how I feel, nothing. Just do his business, get off, go to sleep.” Shug is incredulous and says “Why, Miss Celie. You make it sound like he going to the toilet on you,” to which Celie responds, “That what it feel like” (Walker 77). Through this exchange we can see the way that

Celie has blunted herself to all feeling and the effects of Albert’s treatment. It is this that Shug remedies over time by introducing Celie to her own body and its pleasures. This discovery is so important to Celie, because of how she has been forcibly entered into an embodied economy of care in which she has no autonomy and in which seeking her own pleasure is violently disciplined. This economy is the system of exploitation of which pornotroping is the logic.

One additional scene can give us a sense of the specific character of sexual liberation that

Walker envisions, and it indicates one reason for the negative reactions of potential censors because of its violation of taboos not only regarding sexuality but also the treatment of religion.

Shug continues Celie’s education in the scene from which is drawn the novel’s title. Shug tells

Celie about her amorphous notions of spirituality, which are grounded in the world, in pleasure, and in nature, rather than in a patriarchal god or in organized religion. Shug describes her liberation from religion as beginning with an appreciation of nature, saying “My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds.” From there, it progresses to a sense of unity with the world, “it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all.” The ideas expressed by Shug challenge organized religion and white Christianity in particular, and thus seem taboo not only for Celie but for the book’s audiences as well. For my reading, however, it is key that this feeling of beatitude is understood as very nearly sexual. Shug says

“when it happen, you can’t miss it. It sort of like you know what, she say, grinning and rubbing high up on my thigh” (Walker 191). Here, the suggestion is that religious enlightenment and sexual pleasure are not antithetical (Celie asks “Go don’t think it dirty,” to which Shug replies

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“Naw … God love everything you love” [191]). Moreover, feeling pleasure is a way of serving

God and of engaging in religious celebration. This is a major deviation from Puritanical notions of the sinfulness of pleasure, just as it is a radical revision of Celie’s understanding of her role in the world.

In many ways, this refiguring of the relationship between sex and spirituality is the most significant ideological offering of the novel. The book is explicitly sexual in parts, but more frequently it depicts frank conversations like those between Shug and Celie, and thus offers not erotic material, but metaphysical contemplations of the erotic. The difference is important, because it suggests that at least one reason for concern over the novel was not only its prurient material, patently offensive or not, but its ideas. I invoke the language of the Miller test here to recall that these are precisely the concerns that tease the border between obscene and non- obscene material. The Puritan ethic underlying obscenity case law presumes pleasure to be purposeless and anathema to God and religion. Walker’s vision is very specifically counter to this, but it does so in large part through its contemplation of ideas—which are expressly protected in the Miller ruling. Walker’s book, then, faced some controversy, but manages to carve out a space for considering the possible purpose of pleasure outside the purview of the courts. It does this not only by exploring sex alongside its consideration of social value, but directly through it.

“Not Just Disgust”: Utopias of Desire

Exploring the possibilities of feminine desire along heterosexual and lesbian lines within a patriarchal sexual economy has taken these two artists into spaces that are not always pretty— and that seems to be part of the point. For instance, in Blood and Guts, the female protagonist

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 must experience intense degradation at the hands of men and because of her own masculine- conditioned desires. She is made a sex slave and the victim of incest. Though Janey struggles to see a way out of her traumas and their psychological afterlives, Acker’s protagonist in the later novel Empire of the Senseless does begin to imagine it. While she cannot yet inhabit a world free of the oppression she has seen, she can begin to envision it; her final words sound a note of optimism: “I stood there in the sunlight, and thought that I didn’t as yet know what I wanted. I now fully knew what I didn’t want and what and whom I hated. That was something. And then I thought that, one day, maybe, there’ld be a human society in a world which is beautiful, a society which wasn’t just disgust” (Acker, Empire 227). This note of hopefulness about a world free of disgust is predicated on negative knowledge (what not to want and whom to hate), but suggests the possibility of positive knowledge in the future.

What is at stake in bringing about this utopia is a significant re-imagining of the structure of culture. Because sexual difference is foundational to language, which is in turn foundational to society, knowledge, philosophy—the phallogocentric order—the loss of this inequality in the sexual sphere means a total revolution in culture and subjectivity. This suggests the incredible power that resistive sexualities hold and belie the strength of the resistance they face. The apocalyptic vision of Acker’s work, therefore, echoes Cixous’s argument that asserting feminine equality in the sexual economy strikes at the heart of the entire order of being. Similarly, Butler notes that this effort to envision a potential world is a central element of feminist activism:

“Fantasy has been crucial to the feminist task of (re)thinking futurity: to that end feminist theory relies on the capacity to postulate through fantasy a future that is not yet” (105). This notion of might even allow us to return to the Harris’s criticism of Walker’s novel using the language of the fairy tale and to turn the critique to a new purpose. Walker’s utopia, in which a woman-

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 identified community comes about through intense struggle to create new affective relationships represents a use of fantasy to begin the work of bringing such a world into being outside the novel. Using fantasy and the phantasmatic in this way, Acker’s and Walker’s novels encourage us to retain the body and sexual desire as sites of empowerment while recognizing the complex systems of tropes that make such empowerment difficult and ambivalent. The terms of excess and the grotesque—and the obscene representations—that often accompany this effort are markers of abjection—not simply a de-valorization of effluvia or a preference for the sanitary, but a refusal to grapple with the knowledge produced by, on, and through the body.

Returning to the schism between anti-pornography feminists and sex-positive feminists, we can more clearly outline the stakes of a politics of representations of the body because of

Acker’s and Walker’s pained and painful meditations. We can see that sexuality is a highly charged field of action in which the choice of partners, choice of acts, and the imbrication of sexuality with histories of racialization provoke strong reactions and require careful responses.

Sex, then, and its representations are an important area of investigation for any understanding of gender activism. Pornography and other representations of desire must belong to any politics of sexual liberation and can play an important role in overturning the structures of patriarchy. By contrast, those, like Dworkin, who seek to limit the possibilities of representation foreclose possible avenues of resistance by wrongly assuming all explicit representations to recapitulate the subjection of women. Instead, Acker and Walker, like Moraga and Anzaldúa, propose sexuality and desire as modes of self-exploration and self-knowledge, though ones that often produce negative or disconcerting epiphanies.

Nonetheless, undeterred, their protagonists see on a receding horizon the possibility of “a world which is beautiful, a society which [i]sn’t just disgust.” Ironically, however, it is the

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 2 presumption of a negative impact—the fact that Dworkin and other cultural gatekeepers take seriously the fantasies and phantasmatic representations of sex and sexuality—that gives these works their opportunity to alter the way we conceive of the world. Butler finds that it is when the phantasmatic pushes up against the real and is taken seriously as something with real-world implications—as anti-pornography activists presume—that it is most productive: “it is precisely the moment in which the phantasmatic assumes the status of the real, that is, when the two become compellingly conflated, that the phantasmatic exercises its power most effectively”

(107). This clarifies the anxiety with which representations of female desire of various kinds are resisted by patriarchy: their imagining a world in which the structures of masculist power break down posits such a world as a not-yet-real, rather than unreal, and thus challenges the foreclosure of equality that attends patriarchy, turning the impossible into the imminent.

80 Hélène Cixous suggests that requiring women authors to be sexless is a result of patriarchal derogation of the specific contributions of women authors: “Women who write have for the most part until now considered themselves to be writing not as women but as writers. Such women may declare that sexual difference means nothing, that there’s no attributable difference between masculine and feminine writing” (52). 81 Kathy Acker’s exploration of the language and politics of the body through her interest in bodybuilding is well- documented and something she wrote about herself. See her essay, “Against Ordinary Language.” 82 Acker was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996 and had a double mastectomy that year. Del LaGrace Volcano took two portraits of Acker in 1997 that speak to Acker’s determination to make visible her post-surgery body, provoking discussions about gender and the non-normative body; see Volcano (email). In Sublime Mutations, Volcano calls Acker “one of the most radical sex writers of the century” (107). 83 It would be difficult to overstate the impact of this book. Among many others, its work is referenced by writers I engage elsewhere, including James Kyung-Jin Lee’s (xvi-xix) and Jack Halberstam (Queer Art of Failure). 84 See especially Mitsuye Yamada and Audre Lorde, “Open Letter.” 85 Whitney Strub describes the way that anti-pornography crusaders have sought to capitalize on the titillating and enervating power of sexuality to inspire membership and action. See, for example, Perversion for Profit (80-115). 86 Such a similarity suggests connections as well to novels like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sapphire’s Push (1996). See Martha J. Cutter for a discussion of tropes of rape, including father rape, in African American fiction; see also Missy Dehn Kubitschek. 87 Acker also engages Lacan directly; see Christopher Kocela. 88 This gesture, in which an author might revel in crudeness, is part of a larger aesthetic that is associated with the punk movement, in which Acker played an important role. Thus, her aesthetic takes part in overlapping modes that include the deliberate crudeness of punk, the dark laughter of postmodern cynicism, and a feminist embrace of discursive modes marked as unserious. 89 Nicola Pitchford describes Roy Hoffman’s critique and others in her exploration of Acker’s changing fortunes in the literary world (66). 90 For more on their efforts, see Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon.

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91 As the 1986 Meese Commission Report notes, the Indianapolis Statute and others like it cannot sustain constitutional challenges because the definition of pornography is too broad to withstand the test established in Miller v. California (1973). See United States, Final (391-96). 92 Clarke, for example, worked against strains of heterosexism within the feminist movement and found ideological common ground with Dworkin, writing that “the institution of heterosexuality is a die-hard custom through which male-supremacist institutions insure their own perpetuity and control over us. Women are kept, maintained, and contained through terror, violence, and spray of semen” (130). 93 The ordinances banning pornography that Dworkin and MacKinnon worked to pass use similar language. For example, the Minneapolis ordinance calls pornography “a form of discrimination on the basis of sex” and defines it as “the sexually explicit subordination of women, graphically depicted, whether in pictures or in words” that also includes any of a list of specific forms of representations that demean women (Dworkin and MacKinnon 101). 94 For more on the potential for affirmation and empowerment through non-mainstream pornography, see Tina Vasquez. 95 Though perhaps recognizing the complexity of decisions about sexual freedom, Acker was ambivalent about her own experiences as a sex worker, saying that “working in a sex-show really didn’t make you feel very nice about sex” (“Devoured by Myths” 5). 96 There are more theoretical objections to Dworkin’s work, as well. Judith Butler, for example, notes that “In those anti-pornography positions that favor censorship” there is a “set of untheorized presumptions” (105) that creates a theoretical impossibility in which “the real is positioned both before and after its representation; and representation becomes a moment of the reproduction and consolidation of the real.” Butler clarifies this notion when she describes anti-porn feminsts as “propos[ing] to establish a logical or causal continuum among fantasy, representation, and action” (109). Because of its reliance on the real, anti-pornography feminism, then, actually runs counter to the feminist need to use fantasy to imagine a world of greater equality: “Whereas anti-pornography feminists presume a mimetic relation between the real, fantasy, and representation that presumes the priority of the real, we can understand the ‘real’ as a variable construction which is always and only determined in relation to its constitutive outside: fantasy, the unthinkable, the unreal” (106). 97 That this continues to be an active front in feminist discussions and public policy debates is attested to by the recent consideration by the European Union of a measure that would ban all forms of pornography as part of an effort to reduce gender bias. See, for example, Amanda Hess, Zack Whittaker, and European Parliament. 98 Dworkin does take express issue with sexuality when she contends that within patriarchy, “‘The sex act’ means penile intromission followed by penile thrusting, or fucking. The woman is acted on; the man acts and through action expresses sexual power, the power of masculinity. Fucking requires that the male act on one who has less power. … In the male system, sex is the penis, the penis is sexual power, its use in fucking is manhood” (23). 99 From the novel: “Evil enchanters such as Ronald Regan and certain feminists, like Andrea Dworkin, who control the nexuses of government and culture,’re [sic] persecuting and will continue to persecute us until they have buried and downed, drowned us in our own human forgetfulness” (Acker, Don Quixote 102). As Alex Houen notes, this attack on Dworkin is ambiguous, steeped in an irony that complicates the simplistic discourse that Dworkin’s logic seems to produce. Houen writes, “To figure Dworkin as a biopolitical partner to Reagan is a satirical exaggeration— and an irony” (177). 100 Butler notes, for example, the ironic similarities between conceptions of art shared by Dworkin and Jessie Helms, reminding us that the latter’s bill restricting state funding for certain sexual representations in media “virtually cites the MacKinnon/Dworkin bill.” She calls this overlap a “sorry discursive alliance” based on “a common theory of fantasy and the phantasmatic that informs both views” (108). Similarly, Gayle Rubin notes that “Feminist rhetoric has a distressing tendency to reappear in reactionary contexts” (169). Rubin is noting how anti-porn conservatives and those who wish to see a more limited experience of sexual variation use the language of objectification to argue that sex is fundamentally debasing. Neither she nor Butler is arguing that these conservative moves are feminist. Rather, Butler is condemning Dworkin’s tactics, and Rubin decrying the ease with which dominant voices co-opt the language of resistance. 101 Acker’s works are not, however, strictly autobiographical. For more on the relationship between Acker and her characters, as well as her use of diary material in her writing (her own as well as others’), see Friedman ("Conversation" 12) and Acker’s “Devoured by Myths” (6-7); Houen characterizes Acker’s work as allobiography, that is, “the writing of one’s life as other” (152). 102 See Cynthia Carr, Terry Engebretsen, Houen, Kocela, and Barrett Watten; see also Acker’s “Reading the Lack” (73); “Against Ordinary Language”; “A Few Notes” (118-119, 120); “Seeing Gender” (160-61); and “Colette” (154) for examples of such engagement. Lawrence 169

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103 This experience influenced Acker immensely. She says of her time as a sex worker, “it changed my politics. … The 42nd Street experience made me learn about street politics. You see people from the bottom up, and sexual behavior, especially sex minus relationship—which is what happens in 42nd Street—is definitely bottom” (“Devoured by Myths” 4-5). 104 Acker is certainly no stranger to writing pornography, however. She describes the first novel she ever wrote, Rip- Off Red—Girl Detective (later published by Grove Press in 2002), as a “pornographic mystery story” that “was supposed to earn [her] a lot of money” (“Devoured by Myths” 2). 105 For more on the explicit depictions in Blood and Guts, see Ann Bomberger. 106 The German declaration finds, for example, that the novel “mostly deals with male power and potency,” though it then confoundingly concludes that this means the novel is not feminist (Acker, Hannibal 147). 107 It is at this point in the novel that line-drawings of genitalia make their way into the text. The novel’s first sentence, which concludes with “Janey depended on her father for everything and regarded her father as boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father” (Acker, Blood and Guts 7), is followed on the next page by a drawing of two views of a man’s body, penis uncovered but with his head out of the frame. The caption for this image is “boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father” (8). 108 In the text, this is represented as a vertical list, emphasizing that Janey is symbolically beneath these other subjects (or non-subjects). 109 This critique becomes somewhat explicit when President Carter gets a particularly filthy treatment (Acker, Blood and Guts 119-21). Carter had been inaugurated the year before the book’s completion. 110 Ellen G. Friedman contends that Acker does not fundamentally believe that such a utopia can come to pass: “Acker’s questers’ searches for identity and a new healing myth lead to silence, death, nothingness, or reentry into the sadomasochism of patriarchal culture. … The attempts to subvert male texts and thus male culture result in revelation rather than revolution; the path to an alternate site of enunciation blocked by the very forces this path is meant to escape” (“Now Eat” 44). 111 The recurrence of the word prison evokes Friedman’s description of Acker’s notion of the interpellation of women into a misogynistic culture, which she calls “patriarchal cultural incarceration” (“Now Eat” 41). Jon Stratton links this passage to Fredric Jameson’s 1972 The Prison-House of Language (93), indicating a close connection between Structuralist conceptions of language and the cultural models (including capitalism) that Acker is resisting. Further metaphors of imprisonment in relation to the heterosexual order are found in Acker's “Reading the Lack of the Body” (69) and “Colette” (154). That all of this is related directly to Acker’s interventions in contemporary material conditions is demonstrated by Houen, who notes that “Empire’s passages on incarceration were topical considering the increase in the prison population under Reagan” (185). 112 For other elaborations of the concept of pornotroping, see Jennifer C. Nash and Alexander G. Weheliye. 113 In this vein, we might interpret Lauren Berlant’s comment in regards to The Color Purple that “For Celie and Nettie's biological father, race functions much as gender functions for the sisters: not as a site of positive identification for the victim, but as an excuse for the oppressor's intricate style of cultural persecution. Lynching, in his narrative, has a structural equivalence to Celie's rape, in its violent reduction of the victim to a “biological” sign, an exemplum of subhumanity” (840). 114 Berlant writes: “The Color Purple problematizes tradition-bound origin myths and political discourse in the hope of creating and addressing an Afro-American nation constituted by a rich, complex, and ambiguous culture. But rather than using patriarchal languages and logics of power to describe the emergence of a postpatriarchal Afro- American national consciousness, Celie’s narrative radically resituates the subject's national identity within a mode of aesthetic, not political, representation. … While political language is laden with the historical values and associations of patriarchal power, aesthetic discourse here carries with it a utopian force that comes to be associated with the spirit of everyday life relations among women” (833). 115 I should also mention that part of what seems to sway Albert is Celie’s infertility, a result of complications during her second pregnancy. Alfonso tells Albert that he can have sex with her any way he pleases and not have to worry about supporting a child as a result, thus offering Celie as an object of care-free gratification: “God done fixed her. You can do everything just like you want to and she ain’t gonna make you feed it or clothe it” (Walker 10). The concept of Celie’s consent or pleasure does not occur to either man.

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Chapter 3:

Obscene Wealth: Rapacious Capitalism in Excessive Novels of the 1980s

Framing Reagan-Era Sexual Politics

As the Feminist movement reconsidered its methodologies and became more responsive to women of color, a discussion impacted profoundly by the pornography wars, the administration of Ronald Reagan was also entering the fray, making policy to police and oversee sexual desire and behavior. The sexual politics of the 1980s, then, should be considered not only from that standpoint of social justice activists, but also from the state. Pressure for reform or progress on these issues came as much from loci of power as from the margins, including the government at all levels, but also mainstream cultural production. The moment’s importance for an understanding of the contours of obscenity discourse, then, requires a look at dominant-voice authors, whose engagement with extreme or excessive forms of sexual representations offer a more ambivalent, sometimes sinister picture, as well as helping understand the market forces through which transgression is co-opted into status quo power relations.

I will discuss in this chapter how Thomas Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and

Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) link objectification of sexual objects to the class politics of the era, something that became clear as the Reagan administration attempted to pull the nation out of recession by enacting policies favoring capital investment and reducing funding for anti-poverty programs. Each novel imagines Wall Street’s rapaciousness consumption and indifference to inequality through a figure of elite, white, masculinity. The monstrous inhumanity of these men produces a surface-level critique of the excesses—sexual, violent, and economic—of the time. The books, however, not only critique a culture of greed; they also

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 capitalize on the commercial appeal of scandal and shock. Wolfe’s Bonfire reads like a celebrity gossip sheet, and Ellis’s American Psycho was a commercial success in large part because of the attention its extreme depictions garnered.

In such a media climate, it is not coincidental that Reagan was pushing an anti- pornography agenda, and the bringing together of economic concerns and efforts to police sexual representations brings joins important considerations for the politics of obscenity in this moment.

Before beginning an analysis of these themes, I want to frame the sexual politics of the moment by exploring the 1986 Final Report of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography

(often referred to as the Meese Commission Report, after then-Attorney General Edwin Meese) and the obscenity trial of the punk band Dead Kennedys, which illuminate the connections between a pro-business right that was uneasy about sex and an anti-capitalist left that broke taboos as part of its activism.

As he spoke before announcing the formation of a commission to investigate the social ills of pornography in 1984 (later called the Meese Commission), Ronald Reagan assured the assembled press that his “remarks here [would] be brief, because the issue this bill deals with is so clear that it requires little elaboration” (“Remarks”). Reagan’s assertion that the issue of pornography and its effects are so straightforward that they don’t merit extended analysis is belied by the fact that the report generated by the Meese Commission would runs over 2000 pages. Moreover, the fact that the Reagan administration needed to re-open an issue presumably settled by the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (established by Lyndon

Johnson), which issued its report on the same subject less than fifteen years prior, is significant.116 This is particularly true because it came at a time when renewed Cold War tension and massive realignments of economic opportunities domestically presented unique challenges to

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 national ideals and unity that might easily have had priority over such matters. The desire to take a “second look” at pornography and, upon the Meese Commission’s release of its report, mobilize prosecutors to challenge sexual artworks points to the abiding relationship between

Cold War military policies abroad and moralist social policies domestically.

The 1970 report, the 1973 Miller ruling, and the sexual revolution had, indeed, signaled and contributed to shifts in popular attitudes toward pornography, which experienced what is now known as its Golden Age. It was a time when pornographic films were subject to fewer restrictions and even enjoyed commercial success with films such as Deep Throat (1972).117 In addition, the advent of home video technology allowed for wider distribution of sexual material, and these factors contributed to the relative mainstreaming of pornography. In contending that this trend merited intervention—though previously regarded by the government and social scientists as innocuous and pronounced by the Supreme Court as mostly beyond state censorship—Reagan asserted that “the evidence that has come out since that time, plus the tendency of pornography to become increasingly more extreme, shows that it is time to take a new look at this conclusion, and it’s time to stop pretending that extreme pornography is a victimless crime” (“Remarks”). The description of a movement to extremity and excess and the emphasis on victims suggests the Reagan administration saw the mainstreaming of sexual representations as fundamentally misguided and harmful, and this drove the formation and direction of the Commission.

However, this sentiment drove not only the formation of the committee, but guided its research as well. That is, the commission’s finding that pornography had significant harmful effects was a foregone conclusion. This is signaled by the Commission’s mandate, which Meese later recounted as being to “determine the nature, extent, and impact on society of pornography

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 in the United States, and to make specific recommendations to the Attorney General concerning more effective ways in which the spread of pornography could be contained consistent with constitutional guarantees” (Meese, emphasis added). Because the Commission was tasked with restricting pornography at the same time it was tasked to discover if pornography needed restriction, there could be no pretense to scientific objectivity. The Commission, then, was a body designed to, where possible, amass what social science research and expert opinion

(including from religious figures) was available that would buttress desired state restriction on sexual content in media.

And find pornography harmful it did—or at least mostly so. Despite the seemingly presumptive language of their mandate from the political arm of the Executive Branch, the

Commission often evinces an open approach that should be commended. They note, for example that “We certainly do not take everything that is to be inevitable, and we deem it important to treat even that which has been assumed for generations as open for serious and foundational reconsideration” (United States, Final 356). Ultimately, the Commission declared that they were confident (based on a circuitous description of their only-partial reliance on social science research and declaring the importance of “common sense” in coming to their conclusions)118 that

“exposure to sexually violent materials … bears a causal relationship to antisocial acts of sexual violence and, for some subgroups, possibly to unlawful acts of sexual violence” (326). Thus, the first category of pornography they surveyed—that which depicts scenarios or acts involving violence and coercion—is in their view without question harmful. Significantly, the Commission did not only find that individuals exposed to violent pornography were more likely to commit rapes and assaults, they also found that such individuals were less likely to view victims of rape sympathetically, more likely to minimize the harm suffered from such crimes, and more likely to

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 mitigate the responsibility the aggressors in such circumstances (327).119 The committee’s thus concluded that pornography showing violent and coercive situations had dangerous social impacts by creating “significant attitudinal changes” (327) in viewers that might make them more likely to commit acts of aggression and to be less sympathetic towards those who are victims of it. While their methodology may be problematic, their findings are far from controversial.

The Commission’s claims as they move into less violent and degrading forms of pornography become more tentative, and they “make them with somewhat less confidence and

[their] making them requires more in the way of assumption than was the case with respect to violent material” (United States, Final 332).120 Nonetheless, the Commission is confident in making the following pronouncement: “Over a large enough sample a population that believes that many women like to be raped, that believes that sexual violence or sexual coercion is often desired or appropriate, and that believes that sex offenders are less responsible for their acts, will commit more acts of sexual violence or sexual coercion than would a population holding these beliefs to a lesser extent” (333). As the committee states, there is an underlying logic here, and a reasonable case that necessary social and cultural changes ought to take place to minimize what we might today call “rape culture.”121 However, the language is profoundly tentative, suggesting only the probability that some people might commit acts of sexual aggression based on being exposed to material that valorizes it, and that it is only in the aggregate that an overall tendency might be seen.

The committee gradually had to limit its claims as it moved from more “extreme” forms of pornography where the relationships dramatized are not obviously exploitative. The approach is remarkably subtle and nuanced compared, for example, to the rhetoric of Andrea Dworkin,

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 who called pornography in any form inherently a violation of women’s rights (see Chapter 2).

Still, they take a step toward the same social reform as Dworkin advocated when they state that

“the problems of sexual violence, sexual aggression short of actual violence, and sex discrimination are serious societal problems that have traditionally received a disproportionately small allocation of societal resources” (United States, Final 359) and advocate “remedying that imbalance by a possibly disproportionate allocation in the opposite direction” (359-60).122

Though “quite small in terms of currently available material” (United States, Final 335), for our purposes, the most theoretically interesting category of material analyzed by the Meese

Commission is “materials in which the participants appear to be fully willing participants occupying substantially equal roles in a setting devoid of actual or apparent violence or pain”

(335). This type of pornography, while less common, allows us to distill out the question of violence and power imbalance and the promotion of degrading ideas about women and focus only on the potential harms of viewing sexual material qua sexual material. The findings from this class of material, then, might more usefully be applied to categories of queer porn and non- degrading porn that were shown by the 1970 report to have beneficial social effects. This section of the 1986 report, then, begins to address what it is about pornography, per se, that might be dangerous or controversial. For a consideration of obscenity, then, this is invaluable. By dissociating violence and exploitation and focusing solely on sexuality, the Commission actually begins the process of revealing the reasoning behind the deep investment of Western society in the policing of sexuality—rather than sexuality as a means to policing violence or inequality— and this might reveal why arousal would be a threat in itself and why it is presumed to have no social value.

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In the end, however, the Commission could not reach a conclusion because “there are widely divergent views in this society” about the depiction of “‘pure’ sex” (United States, Final

336).123 It is thus, in this very moment where the potential to understand the social impact of sex for its own sake—sex as pleasure, and also sex as expression, sex as politics—that the impossibility of finding common ground arises. The potent moment they found themselves in, and the possibility of potentially offering significant—even revolutionary—insights about the role of sexuality in society proved too much.

There is still much that is revealing about why they were unable to proceed, though. As they note, the Commission’s inability to reach a consensus is “representative of the population as a whole” (United States, Final 336). Conflicting religious and moral attitudes toward sex, as well as regional and urban/rural divides, compounded by attitudes toward media in general and political affiliations all impinge on the ability to actually understand “pure sex” once the common ground of opposition to violence and degradation of women is removed. The

Commission, and the society they attempt to reflect, seems content to condemn violence, but divided over the question of pleasure. This persistent disagreement, coupled with its technically legal status, is what allows sexually explicit cultural artifacts to continue to circulate while still having the power to shock and incite. Gaining an audience by appearing taboo, texts that cross this line can also exploit this gray area, while the maintenance of sexuality as a fraught zone, a zone of contention produces the field of political opportunity that both artists and politicians find useful.

Though the Commission was unable to arrive at a consensus on the subject of the potential harm of purely sexual content, the report is not entirely silent on it. The Commission concedes, with some equivocation (not unlike their tone throughout), that “there is no persuasive

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 evidence to date supporting the connection between non-violent and non-degrading materials and acts of sexual violence, and that there is some, but very limited evidence, indicating that the connection does not exist” (United States, Final 337). Thus, they must admit that non-violent porn is unlikely to lead to sexual violence. However, this “does not answer the question of whether such materials might not themselves simply for some other reason constitute a harm in themselves, or bear a causal link to consequences other than sexual violence but still taken to be harmful. And it is here that we and society at large have the greatest difference of opinion”

(338). Therefore, there is some interest among Commission members in censoring this kind of material. At issue is the representation of specific kinds of sex acts and the possibility that pornography might normalize acts not considered desirable by some—a conclusion bearing directly on the tendency of obscenity prosecutions to target non-mainstream sexualities and marginalized groups defined by such sex acts.124 Moreover, this kind of language suggests a desire on the part of some Commission members to begin to regulate social formations including family structures, affective relationships, and, most obviously, sexual practice.

Perhaps the most provocative notion addressed by the Commission concerns the nature of sex as a public or private phenomenon. What desire there was to regulate individual sexual behavior seems to be directed at keeping it private, evincing one half of the Foucauldian notion

(explored in my introduction) concerning the simultaneous bringing into discourse of the silencing of sex. The Commission’s explanation of this concern merits quoting at length. They write:

Even insofar as sexually explicit material of the variety being discussed here is not

perceived as harmful for the messages it carries or the symbols it represents, the very

publicness of what is commonly taken to be private is cause for concern. Even if we

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hypothesize a sexually explicit notion picture [sic] of a loving married couple engaged in

mutually pleasurable and procreative vaginal intercourse, the depiction of that act on a

screen or in a magazine may constitute a harm in its own right … solely by virtue of

being shown. Here the concern is with the preservation of sex as an essentially private

act, in conformity with the basic privateness of sex long recognized by this and all other

societies. The alleged harm here, therefore, is that as soon as sex is put on a screen or put

in a magazine it changes its character, regardless of what variety of sex is portrayed.

(United States, Final 340)125

Contrary to their demonstrably untrue statements on the practices of “all other societies,” the

Commission’s expressed goals are to preserve a particular kind of sexual culture, in which mystery and private-ness are elements in the amplification of pleasure—something we recognize from Foucault as contingent and historically specific. Nonetheless, on this ground—and on the danger of possible exposure to children—that the Commission concludes that all forms of pornography are at least possibly harmful, in their status as pornography, and this relates even to sexual content in those works that are not pornography, but are “largely education or undeniably artistic” (346).

Noting that “images are significant determinants of attitudes, and attitudes are significant determinants of human behavior,” and that therefore, “dealing with the messages all around us seems an important way of dealing with the behavior” (United States, Final 360), the

Commission does recommend taking action to reduce the availability of pornography. In many ways, the language of “harm” throughout presages this conclusion, since it attempts to generate the grounds on which civil action might be initiated. Though rejecting arguments about the unconstitutionality of regulating pornography and similar arguments founded on the presumption

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 that pornography is harmless, the Commission does grapple with the Reagan-esque question of

“the appropriateness of governmental action in general,” noting that in the context of their research into pornography, “serious arguments have been made that go to the fundamental questions of what governmental action is designed to achieve” (356). They therefore suggest neither new laws nor the repeal of existing laws and jurisprudence, but a re-allocation of resources toward the prosecution of obscenity based on the notions of harm they have identified.

Doing so in cases where the material in question is beyond constitutional protection, they hope, will allow prosecutors, using the law’s “important symbolic function” (362), to address the broader tendency toward open sexuality in culture.

It is in this way, by making high-profile campaigns against extreme representations, that the Commission advocates dealing with the (somewhat revealing) conundrum they identify concerning the fact that “much of what people are concerned with in terms of truly pornographic materials might also be a concern with respect to an immense range and quantity of materials that are unquestionably protected by the First Amendment” (United States, Final 361). Rather than enforce laws uniformly, local officials should capitalize on the “general assumption of legitimacy with respect to the law in general that generates to many people a presumption that the law’s judgments are morally, politically, and scientifically correct in addition to being merely authoritative” (363).126 Though generally balanced in their understanding of the law and government’s role vis-à-vis Constitutional guarantees, the Commission here baldly advocates symbolic prosecutions as a way of working to discourage behavior that is explicitly protected by the Constitution. Thus, their approach is a strategic one, allowing non-deliberative Executive-

Branch bodies the latitude to press for social change—against popular morality and cultural views—through selective prosecution. Concomitantly, they recommend concerted public action

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 against material citizens find objectionable, when such material is beyond the reach of the law, through boycotts and protests (419-29). Under the Meese Commission guidelines, then, the state is at the head of social change (even contravening the Constitution, effectively working outside the law), while attempting to garner public support after the fact by encouraging grass-roots activism to support political projects already underway.

Though the more basic findings of the Meese commission are significant and in many cases laudable, it is important to examine why the Reagan administration prioritized pornography at this time—particularly because Reagan famously opposed government activism.127 Reagan’s presidency roughly coincided with and defined the major cultural movements of the 1980s. While in office, Reagan initiated significant shifts in American politics that continue to influence the global and domestic political climate. Ending détente with the

Soviet Union in the early 80s meant a resumption of Cold War anxieties and antagonisms as

Reagan advanced an aggressive anti-communist policy that included funding and arming militant and insurgent groups. I contend that this international policy was intimately linked with efforts to police sexuality domestically.

Reagan also veered sharply to the right on domestic policies as a way of reversing the effects of a global recession by advancing neoliberal economic policies. Reagan shifted government resources from services for the working class and the poor to subsidies and tax reductions for corporations and the wealthy. This model of economics included massive cuts to capital gains taxes, corporate taxes, and the marginal tax rates for high income earners, as well as aggressive anti-union policies. As James Kyung-Jin Lee notes, along with the ascendancy of the political right, “the 1980s saw the dismantling of what little was left of the Keynesian ‘welfare- warfare’ economic policy and installed a new economic regime that dramatically shifted state

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 and corporate resources away from vast sectors of the U.S. population” (xx). Thus, the rich were privileged over the poor and corporations were empowered against their workers.128 As a result, the disparity in income between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of the country increased to levels higher than at any other time in the twentieth century. Income inequality became cause for divisions among Americans, as class warfare became a fact of life and governmental policy on a massive scale.129

In this atmosphere of international and domestic upheaval, political interest in obscenity seems like a distraction, but is revealed on closer inspection to be an integral part of a larger attempt to shape national culture for political ends. This is evident in part because efforts to reform cultural production to reflect middle-class aesthetics of modesty and restraint became a national phenomenon. This period saw efforts to police not only pornography, but rock lyrics and album artwork, as well as cable television and telephone sex lines, all new fronts in such efforts.130

In May of 1985, Tipper Gore began forming the group of politically-connected activists that would, the following year, become the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC), which worked to pressure recording companies to institute warning labels on albums advising of explicit content. Taking up their call to action, that same year the Senate Committee on

Commerce, Science, and Transportation, chaired by John Danforth of Missouri (an Episcopal minister) and including Tipper Gore’s husband and future Vice President of the U.S. Al Gore, held hearings to investigate “the content of certain sound recordings and suggestions that recording packages be labeled to provide a warning to prospective purchasers of sexually explicit or other potentially offensive content” (United States, Commerce).131 Though the PMRC was scrupulously bipartisan, these hearings overlapped with the larger Reagan-administration interest

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 in pornography and obscenity, both aimed at discouraging the distribution of sex-themed and sexually-explicit material; the fact that both media were targeted by the same rhetoric and seen as interchangeable is indicated by the adoption by the PMRC of the term “porn rock” to describe much of the music to which they objected, including songs with more or less explicit references to sex and masturbation, such as Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” Judas Priest’s “Eat Me Alive,” and

Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop.” Thus, regardless of whether it was spoken, photographed, filmed, painted, or simply described, all depictions of sex were targeted.

Though probably not the conscious intent of the PMRC or all the Senators on the

Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, this kind of anti-pornography and anti- obscenity action often targeted critics of the Reagan administration and had a chilling effect on political dissent. This is not only because record labels and musicians tended to support

Democratic causes or held left-leaning views, but because obscene artwork was often a vehicle for strident social critique on issues such as poverty, labor, and war in this era as it was in previous ones (see my Introduction and chapters 1 and 2). The effects of such prosecutions, letter-writing, and editorializing on well-known artists like John Denver, Frank Zappa, and Dee

Snider of Twisted Sister, all of whom testified before—and largely antagonized—the committee was minimal. Protected by large record labels, these performers were in relatively little danger.

Less-well-known artists on less-well-capitalized labels, often those advancing revolutionary political goals or antagonistic toward corporate culture, were more vulnerable.

The Frankenchrist Obscenity Trial

A case in point is the punk band Dead Kennedys, whose album Frankenchrist, released in

1985, was targeted by the PMRC, and became the subject of an obscenity trial in 1987. The furor

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 arose not over explicit sexual content in the lyrics, but over a poster insert distributed with the album. The insert consisted of a reproduction of H. R. Giger’s 1973 painting Penis Landscape, that contained images of penetration and that the band asserted was meant metaphorically to critique late twentieth-century capitalism. The trial cost the lead singer, Jello Biafra, tens of thousands of dollars and nearly bankrupted their record label, Alternative Tentacles, proving that there was more at stake in these public debates that heated rhetoric. Real individuals engaged in real political protest using rock music as a medium and explicit sexuality as content could be made to suffer real harms through prosecutions that were anything but symbolic. This is all the more alarming because, as the Meese Commission attested, prosecutions over such material were unlikely to result in convictions that would withstand Constitutional scrutiny. At best, this suggests that political activism is collateral damage in a broad and sweeping campaign against explicit sexual material. However, because the rhetoric of anti-obscenity campaigning is so entangled with pro-nuclear-family, pro-capitalist language—and because social outsiders made such convenient targets—deeper links cannot be dismissed out of hand. The fate of the album and of the band, and the nature of the prosecution, reveal the intermingling of sexual moralism with pro-capitalist strains among conservatives during this time. The obscene, then, becomes an optic for clarifying the mutually-supporting rhetorics of repression being deployed.

Dead Kennedys were a hardcore punk band formed in San Francisco in the late 1970s and were contemporaries of other influential early American punk groups such as Black Flag (from

Los Angeles), Minor Threat (from Washington, D.C.), and the Ramones (from New York City).

The band’s music is heavily influenced by surf rock, and is distinctive for its political content and “frog-voiced loudmouth” lead singer, Jello Biafra (McDonnell). Remarking that “No wonder the PMRC is afraid of them,” one reviewer describes Frankenchrist as “exhibit[ing] unusual

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 musical sophistication, matching souped-up surf riffs to typical thrash dissonances” and including “tricky time-changes and complex arrangements while still managing to pack a punch”

(Considine). Though their music was highly sophisticated, early performances established the band as socially-conscious provocateurs, a reputation embodied not only in the band’s name, but in one of their early singles from 1980: “Holiday in Cambodia.”132

“Holiday in Cambodia” is largely an indictment of superficial sympathy with and appropriation of the culture of the disempowered by those whose wealth and status makes such sympathy ridiculous. The central conceit of the song is that a hypothetical privileged liberal is sent to Cambodia under the Pol Pot regime and made to experience firsthand the kind of struggles he romanticizes. The song begins by establishing the main character as someone who would “Play ethnicky jazz / To parade your snazz / On your five-grand stereo / Braggin’ that you know / How the niggers feel cold / And the slums got so much soul.”133 By juxtaposing the character’s expensive stereo with slums and exposure to the elements, Biafra reveals the limits of the character’s sympathy. His affinity for the underprivileged extends primarily to cultural appropriation, signified by “ethnicky jazz and soul.” The song then transports him to Cambodia to experience real suffering—a gesture that relates the condition of non-U.S. subjects and that of the nation’s poor and racialized others. With its focus on individual behaviors and failure of sympathy and political awareness, the song is less a critique of U.S. government or politics (even the U.S. proxy wars in Asia that form the context of the song) and more a critique of individuals on the left who would romanticize suffering and appropriate the styles and cultural production of the disempowered. The use of the Killing Fields for this kind of far-left social commentary is an inflammatory gesture consonant with the band’s ideology and methods.134 Almost no topic and no language was off limits.

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On Frankenchrist, the primary target of the band’s polemics is more often nationalist mythologies and a business-centered economic policy that disenfranchised workers. The album’s inaugural track “Soup Is Good Food” is one example, and can be read as a reference to Andy

Warhol’s famous painting of soup cans, as it invokes the Campbell’s Soup slogan from this era.

Echoing Warhol’s references to commodities and the anonymizing homogenization of culture in the postmodern period, the song uses an ironic tone to lament the reduction of workers to resources to be consumed. “Soup is good food,” the chorus begins before continuing “You made a good meal,” backed by the lines “We don’t need you anymore.” The workers being addressed by Biafra’s ventriloquized voice of society have been ground into grist for the system. The verses, still an address to a displaced worker from an indifferent society and its enforcers, details the various ways that the poor and working class have been disempowered. “Unemployment runs out after just six weeks,” the song reminds us before asking “How does it feel to be a budget cut?” Here and in other places, the song repeatedly refers to workers as concepts or policies rather than human individuals, and in this way, “Soup Is Good Food” seeks to make visible the way workers are objectified and dehumanized in a political and economic environment that privileges profit over all.

The other songs on the album also engage Reagan-era government policies and political culture, but the album’s most virulent critique comes in the song “Stars and Stripes of

Corruption,” which juxtaposes images of American nationalism with those who are left out of the myth of prosperity. One verse in particular makes it clear: “The symbols of our heritage / Lit up proudly in the night / Somehow fits to see the homeless people / Passed out on the lawn.”

These lines highlight that even where the image of American power is constituted and disseminated across the globe, the individuals—the real people—that are neglected by that

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 power remain. The song also indicts the establishment of puppet states in Latin America as well as the jingoism that supports it (“No wonder others hate us / And the Hitlers we handpick / To bleed their people dry / For our evil empire”) and, ironically, censorship and the need for vigilance in maintaining civil liberties (“I’m thankful I live in a place / Where I can say the things I do / Without being taken out and shot / So I’m on guard against the goons / Trying to take my rights away”). Using language like “Hitlers” and “goons” to describe those who propagate capitalism and American nationalism, the band provocatively pits itself against the

Reagan administration and participates in an aesthetic of provocation and excessiveness that is in its way obscene. Among these and the various other targets of the song’s lyrics—the drug war, high school sports boosterism, Cold War Paranoia—the song recalls Giger’s painting in a verse that goes, “So this is where it happens / The power games and bribes / All lobbying for a piece of ass.” Here, the song suggests that politics is a game of (sexual) gratification at the expense of the governed, which demonstrates the deep connection between their radical political project and their obscene content.

These lyrics position the Dead Kennedys as opponents of the state, of corporate culture, and of consumerism, offering a wide-ranging indictment of various elements of American culture.

The medium—surf-punk—is largely indicative of a small-scale, DIY aesthetic designed to refuse the stain of consumerism and corporatism the band decried. This voluntary outsider status proved problematic for the group. For all the radical politics and in-your-face posturing of

Frankenchrist’s lyrics, it was ultimately the poster insert that initiated the obscenity proceedings—but it was the band’s small label and lack of high-priced lawyers that made them a target for an obscenity prosecution: the prosecutor in the case, Michael Guarino once called the

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 trial a “cost effective way of sending a message out” (qtd. in Clark). Their deliberately marginal status, then, made them vulnerable as a potential scapegoat.

Giger’s airbrush painting Work 219: Landscape XX (often referred to as Penis

Landscape) came to prominence in the U.S. twelve years after its creation when it was featured as the poster insert with Frankenchrist. Before this time, the work was largely unknown in the

U.S., though it had been reproduced in Europe and elsewhere. Both in the U.S. and internationally, Giger is better known for his work on the visual concept for Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien and for a variety of films, sculptures, paintings, and material culture projects. It was only in the American political context—where sexuality is a highly politicized discourse stripped of the protections afforded to political discourse—that Penis Landscape could have the complicated impact that it did.135

The image itself includes nine penises entering nine anuses.136 Each member is unique, some symmetrical and some not, some longer or shorter, one sheathed in a condom. Similarly, each is in a different state of penetration, some angled, some straight, some deep and others shallow. The entire image consists only of this alternating series of penetrations; each set of buttocks is separated from the others by a dark, bubbling goo that obscures any other identifying characteristics about the people presumably attached to the body parts here represented. Because the rest of the bodies attached to these genitals and orifices are omitted, the individuality of the members is overwhelmed by the anonymity of the bodies. The individual penetrations paired with the general sense that the people involved could be anyone—or that they are reduced to their function as subjects or objects of penetration—suggest that the thematic content of Giger’s work is society in a broad, collective sense: culture’s anonymizing collectivity composed of nominally individual members.137

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Figure 2. H R. Giger, Penis Landscape (1973).

Moreover, the reduction of each implied person to an orifice or penetrating member is a metonym for the relationship of culture to the individual and, importantly, the process of sexual objectification that circulates in, for example, Dworkin’s indictment of pornography. Though they use radically different techniques, both Giger and Dworkin draw awareness to the reduction of the individual to genitalia and the distillation of social interactions to sexual gratification. This should not be read as a consonance between their projects; Dworkin means to agitate for change, while Giger’s work meditates in an ultimately ambiguous fashion on this underlying quality of culture. As many have pointed out, this is a picture that showcases the sinister mechanization of sexuality that is a hallmark of Giger’s work—in addition to evincing the sexual motifs evident in diverse expressions of culture.138 In this way, the painting participates in the same mode of obscenity as William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), in that it is explicitly sexual to demonstrate the sexuality implicit in other areas of culture—particularly state institutions and cultural norms, the “power games and bribes” and “lobbying for a piece of ass” of Biafra’s lyrics.

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Though not considered a central work in the Giger canon, per se, the painting gained prominence because of the furor that followed its mass distribution in the United States. Biafra’s intent in including the image with the album—originally wanting it as the album cover, but relenting to the wishes of his band-mates and others and allowing it to be included as only an insert—was to highlight what he saw as the aggressive self-interest of American society under the political culture of the time, embodied by Reagan’s economic policies. In 2010, Biafra described being “totally blown away the minute I saw it,” and thinking, “‘Wow! That is the

Reagan era on parade. Right there! That shows how Americans treat each other now’” (qtd. in

Thill). Like Naked Lunch or Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), Biafra saw Penis

Landscape as an encapsulation of the violent sexuality and self-interest underpinning structures of power, particularly under capitalism and the broader politics of Reaganism. Biafra elaborated elsewhere that “The painting portrayed to me a vortex of exploitation, that vicious circle of greed where one of us will exploit another for gain and wind up looking over our shoulder lest someone do the same thing to us in return” (qtd. in Clark). For Biafra as for Burroughs and

Dworkin, sexual penetration is a metaphor for every social interaction under the system of capitalism in its highly developed form in the 1980s.139

As we saw above, the political vector of the album is squarely directed at this notion of culture, economics, and politics. Frankenchrist is first and foremost an album dedicated to anti- capitalist principles and to fighting the dehumanization of individuals in an industrial economy.

Biafra saw the artwork as consonant with that work: “I realized that many of these same themes ran like a thread through the songs slated to be on the Frankenchrist album…. I felt that we should include this piece of artwork as a kind of crowning statement of what the record was trying to say, musically, lyrically and visually” (qtd. in Clark). The album’s lyrics worked to

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 advance this anti-state message, yet it was the sexual image that is only a metaphor for this critique that spurred state action.140 Though this would seem to suggest not only misplaced energies, it actually suggests the extent to which obscenity acts as a proxy or cover for such prosecutions. The sex—seemingly innocuous—becomes a source of harm which the state must intervene, while the anti-state critique which is silenced appears to be only collateral damage.

Frankenchrist also reveals another side of obscene art, and clarifies that explicit sexuality is not always or only used to resist oppressive taboos; that is to say, it is not always liberatory.

Though used to express visually a critique that was primarily verbal on the album, the use of

Penis Landscape in this way is also retrograde. Because Biafra reads anal penetration as primarily an expression of dominance and submission, he partakes in a homophobic and misogynistic rhetoric that presumes the passive sexual position to be dehumanized. This aspect of his interpretation of the image reminds us of the need to situate the critique being launched in a deeper theoretical field. Though inadvertent here, the latent homophobia of the reading relies on an underlying understanding of the power dynamics of non-reproductive sex that underpin the more reactionary work of American Psycho. Similarly, he has since conceded that his confidence that the record would not run into trouble proved misguided, but he seems content in retrospect to have played the role of firebrand on this issue. In fact, Biafra’s subsequent career as a speaker and public lecturer on civil liberties turned somewhat lucrative. In a sense, then, he made a career out of the trial. Though he likely would not have chosen this path, the ability to market resistance to the state as itself a viable mode of economic participation indicates the complexity and ambivalence of the transgressive act.

In an interview shortly after the conclusion of the trial in 1987, Biafra was asked if he expected the reaction the album and its insert provoked. He responded: “Klaus (Fluoride, the

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 band’s bassist) thought there might be some, but I kind of shouted him down as I was known to do ... ‘What do you mean, this is 1985, why would anybody be that dumb? Nobody prosecutes people over things like that anymore.’ Was I ever wrong” (Biafra). One is inclined to be skeptical that Biafra, whose lyrics were so socially and politically aware, was blindsided by the reaction. In fact, as we saw above, concern over censorship and the need to be vigilant against state encroachment of civil liberties is present in “Stars and Stripes of Corruption.” In reality, he had always intended the record to indict those in power—just maybe not to attract their intervention.

The system, however, took notice. In 1987, the Dead Kennedy’s album containing the image was the subject of an obscenity trial, and though the defendants—Alternative Tentacles and Biafra, as well as others—were never convicted, the label was bankrupted and the band broken up as a result of financial the pressures and disagreements resulting from the trial.

Moreover, sales of the album immediately dropped, as stores ceased carrying it to avoid prosecution.141 Thus, we can see that obscenity charges do not have to be upheld or have strong legal grounds in order to have devastating effects on cultural producers and a chilling effect on political dissent.

The charges officially concerned the distribution of harmful matter to a child, invoking a frequent bogeyman of obscenity prosecutions: the protection of children. This is similar to the event that inspired the creation of the PMRC and parallels the frequent invocation of children as the potential victims of viewing or seeing pornography. Discussing the trial on The Oprah

Winfrey Show in 1990, Biafra describes his experience in hyperbolic and loaded terms:

I can relate to NWA’s song about the police because after my record Frankenchrist was

blasted by Susan Baker and the PMRC in Variety, two weeks later nine police officers …

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broke a window by my front door, stormed into my house, tore the place apart like you’d

see KGB people doing in a TV movie or something, … while I sat there on a chair with a

bathrobe on with two cops … circling around me like sharks. It was a subtle form of rape

in a way. (Oprah Winfrey)

Biafra is known for extreme rhetoric,142 and it is clear he is attempting to make a point here by emphasizing the intrusive nature of the state’s actions. Still, he calls attention to the important point that acquittal (or in this case, a hung jury that favored acquittal and the judge’s subsequent decision to dismiss the charges) does not mean redress of damages including court costs and disrupted lives.

Whether Biafra’s description exaggerates or not, the trial—even though it did not result in a conviction—had significant effects on the accused. Biafra’s band broke up, as did his marriage, while legal fees, travel, and other expenses cost the singer over $55,000 (Ressner).

Michael Bonnano, a party to the lawsuit as the erstwhile manager of Alternative Tentacles risked losing his job as a bicycle messenger in San Francisco because of missing work to attend the trial in Los Angeles. Biafra was affected profoundly enough to accuse Tipper Gore of “trying to destroy my career and ruin my right to make a living” (Oprah Winfrey). The Frankenchrist trial, therefore, demonstrates that the kind of symbolic prosecutions advocated by the Meese

Commission can be a form of para-judicial punishment of dissent. In fact, as Strub has noted and the Meese Report demonstrated, obscenity prosecutions continued (and were encouraged by activist groups) even when it was known that such prosecutions had no chance of standing up to constitutional challenges, in the hopes that the accused would capitulate and others would be discouraged from following in their footsteps (Perversion for Profit).

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The incident is emblematic, then, of the political climate. Cultural producers like Dead

Kennedys sought to challenge what they saw as restrictive or exploitative institutions by shattering taboo, not only by pushing the conventions of rock music, but by flaunting the norms of sexual modesty. However, doing so proved hazardous for Dead Kennedys, and their fate demonstrates the high stakes of sexual politics in this moment, as well as its close relationship with economic policy. The ideology they resisted can be seen emerging from the prosecutorial perspective in the trial: social outsiders and radicals might usefully be made examples of as part of a general process of social engineering favoring business, reproductive heterosexuality, and an empowered state. The Meese Commission and PMRC also represent the broad scope of such efforts because they united voices from academia and the media, from religious institutions and philanthropic organizations, and from local and federal governments. Together, these voices sounded anxieties the depth of which are revealed in the passion of their efforts. In retrospect, it seems counterintuitive that resources on this scale would be marshaled to pursue relatively minor figures like Dead Kennedys or that issues like pornography that pale in scope to global war and massive economic inequality—both of which were ongoing at the time. That such prosecutions and activism seem knowingly to have been in conflict with settled Constitutional doctrine only makes the issue more confounding. But the seeming contradiction suggests that something more profound is at stake, that rather than in distracting from foreign or economic policies, such social projects were actually of a piece with them. In both cases, what is being contested is the shape of the nation, who belongs, what citizens aspire to and hold dear.

American Psycho, a Wealth of Obscenity

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The debate about who belongs, how the nation values and encourage progress, and what kinds of affective and family relations are privileged was never only bilateral. Often, cultural producers were able to capitalize on the fact of disagreement, the conditions under which some saw transgression as valuable and other saw it as dangerous. Such is the case with Bret Easton

Ellis’s novel American Psycho, which was published in 1991 (and was later made into a

Hollywood movie in 2000). Ellis had already published the novels Less Than Zero (1985) and

The Rules of Attraction (1987), and Less Than Zero had been adapted as a film in 1987; thus

Ellis was established as an author by the late 1980s, but American Psycho has proved his most enduring work, because the controversy surrounding its publication generating widespread interest and drove the book to become something of a cultural phenomenon.

The novel ostensibly lays bare the mindset of a particular member of the 1980s Wall

Street corporate culture: a self-absorbed, commodity-obsessed, sex-and-drug addict looking out only for himself—and he is also a serial killer. The appropriateness of examining a novel about a serial killer in the context of obscenity is actually suggested by the prosecutor in the

Frankenchrist trial, who compared Giger to Richard Ramirez, the serial killer and rapist known as the Night Stalker, whose murder spree occurred the same year as the album’s release

(Ressner).143 Rhetorically and metaphorically, advocates of censorship either perceive that or find it useful to argue that the depiction of sexual material is akin to the most violent crimes.

Such comparisons turn out to be not entirely off base, in that artists such as Burroughs, Giger, and Ellis consciously make the connections, as well.144

Ellis’s project for the novel seems to have been to offer a critique of the underlying immorality of consumerism by simply making an explicit analogy between consumption and violence. His consumer par excellence is also an unrepentant killer, carrying out the most

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 heinous acts of murder and torture. Interspersed among the narration are internal negotiations and mediations about clothing choices, reflections on the merits of fashionable restaurants, nightclubs, and bars, descriptions of meals, shopping trips, and video rentals. Along with these crushingly mundane details of all-consuming consumer-culture are often blasé descriptions of murders of prostitutes and call girls recounted in grisly detail, impulse killings of panhandlers and deliverymen, and decapitations of colleagues and competitors. Simply pairing these two opposite strands of extreme narration within a single consciousness, Ellis argues that they are not radically different, but simply alternate sides of the same narcissism.

Elaborating the ethical dilemmas interrogated by such a link, Michael Godden asks

“Given that the workings of the financial sector occur within a medium—speculative capital— which systematically seeks to avoid uncomfortable collisions with the more material practices of the economy, how might such an immaterial mask be rendered expressive of the social relations that give rise to it” (855). We must ask ourselves how a speculative neoliberal economy that works in abstractions can be responsive to the human consequences of its transactions. In our own moment, the urgency of this question is felt all the more strongly since the collapse of the housing market and subsequent Great Recession, which was precipitated by runaway capital speculation. Godden’s answer for the 1980s is that such a relation is dramatized in American

Psycho, and we can see the novel as a metaphor for the conscious ignorance of material concern in the accumulation of financial capital—a lack of interest in the actual people and objects involved in the generation of wealth. It is in this context that Godden explains not only the indifferent brutality of Bateman as he carries out his murders, but his encyclopedic accounting of the brand names worn by those around him, a fetish for commodity that takes up a startling amount of the narration. Ascribing this cultural model to Reagan’s anti-union and pro-corporate

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 policies, Godden claims that “Bateman (named in citation of Norman Bates), kills serially in accord with the ur-structure of his financial profession” (861). For these reasons, Godden confirms that Ellis’s novel is an allegory of the various patterns of Reagan-era consumption and is “a representative text for Reaganomics” (859).

This theme might serve as a kind of political project, and the book was the source of controversy and, like Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, upon publication, access to the novel was restricted in Germany and Australia as a possible danger to minors. Still, we should be cautious about relating Ellis’s “representative text for Reaganomics” and Dead

Kennedy’s indictment of the “Reagan era on parade.” These works do not produce similar critiques of capitalism. Looking at the phenomenon of the novel’s publication is illuminating.

Though the novel was originally slated for publication with Simon & Schuster, the company cancelled its contract with Ellis after leaked excerpts stoked controversy over the depiction of graphic violence against women. Once a new publisher was found (Knopf-Random House), the novel was ultimately published, and public outcry spread even wider. Despite opposition over its misogyny and gore, the controversy was actually a kind of windfall for Ellis. Naomi Mandel notes, for example, that because Ellis kept his advance from the original publisher upon their cancelation of the contract while also garnering a second advance from Knopf-Random House, the novel actually proved much more profitable for the author than if there had been no controversy (“Value” 9). Because objection to the content of the book worked in favor of the producer, rather than against them (as it has with other works), we are led to believe that the novel’s transgression reflects how taboo-breaking can be co-opted by consumerism—even within ostensible critiques of consumerism.

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Godden’s reading reflects the major interpretation of the novel, but as Mandel notes, there is also something problematic that emerges from its “tenuous claim to be a work of art”

(Part I 16). The novel’s apparent indictment of yuppie and Wall Street culture is often thought too loosely drawn and too implicit to fully account for what seems to be its evident delight in extreme violence, degrading sex, and misogyny. This is true not only because the author and the publishers seem to have profited hugely over the controversy, but because the narrative force of

American Psycho is developed as a kind of violence-porn to accompany the consumption-porn of its hero’s brand obsession. The events of the narrative do not progress toward an dramatic climax; rather, the narrative anticipation—the reader’s arousal—is developed through a gradual increase in the explicitness of the descriptions of the violent acts Bateman commits. Though we can be sure that Bateman’s murdering impulse has preceded the events of the narration (he mentions having abused a woman in college [Ellis 207-08] and raped a maid when he was 14

[342]), the novel only reveals the violence gradually. The increasing pace of revelation, as

Bateman’s murders are described in more graphic detail, then, emphasizes the importance of the representation of violence, not its presence in the plot. The story’s violence is at a relatively constant pace. It is only in its telling that we see the rise toward a climax that characterizes the narrative arc. Thus, the story is both violence porn and, through this, a commentary on reader’s expectations.

American Psycho opens with a quote from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground meant to guide our expectations about Bateman and the purpose for the character: “Both the author of these Notes and the Notes themselves are, of course, fictional. Nevertheless, such persons as the composer of these Notes not only exist in our society, but indeed must exist, considering the circumstances under which our society has generally been formed” (Ellis n. pag.) The passage

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 suggests the novel means to demonstrate the production of individuals like Bateman as a result of social and political cultures. Ellis clearly means the New York (and America generally) in the

1980s: the passage calls the author of the Notes (analogous to the narrator of American Psycho)

“one of the characters of our recent past.” We can see Bateman, then, as one of the assholes in

Giger’s paintings and his actions as a dramatization of “how Americans treat each other” during the Reagan era. Perhaps more particularly, though perhaps gesturing toward a broader American sentiment, the novel also dramatizes a specific aspect of New York’s stark class divisions at this time. Because the coexistence of the very rich and very poor in the same space emblematized divisions that were widespread but less visible elsewhere because of regional class segregation, the city is an analog of the novel: it makes visible a violence and disparity that is implicit, rendering extreme what has come to be seen as natural.

The novel’s depictions of murder, cannibalism, and necrophilia are extreme, but according to a more generous interpretation of the novel, they are meant to show the danger of the principles of self-interest and consumerism, of predation, that underlie a politics of increasing acquisitiveness. In a turn that anticipates Foucault’s interest in the conditions of possibility that produce epistemes we live through, Ellis’s selection from Notes includes the explanation that “this personage describes himself and his views and attempts, as it were, to clarify the reasons why he appeared and was bound to appear in our midst.” Here, we are directed to interpret Bateman as potentially psychotic, dangerous, and predatory145—but we are not to wallow in the lurid details of his exploits. Rather, it is the cultural conditions that inevitably lead to his coming about that is the target of Ellis’s novel. Moreover, the setting of

New York and Bateman’s employment in finance make evident the novel’s critique of a specifically Reagan-esque culture.146 Godden reminds us that under Reagan’s economic policies,

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“Pecuniary incentives, in the form of tax concessions to the rich, allied to a spectacular explosion in state indebtedness, drew the surplus capital of the world through New York” (854) emphasizing that it is specific economic policies that made possible the accumulation of wealth not specifically tied to material objects such as manufacturing.

The quote from Dostoevsky also gives us a clue to the reading mode most apt for the novel. Its critique lies in Bateman; he is the man of this age and its faults are embodied in him.

Through this allegory, we are to see Bateman’s viciousness as that of yuppie culture, his anxieties as those of the MTV generation, and his politics as that of neoliberalism. The novel, then, details Bateman’s thoughts and actions to allow us to better understand the narcissists produced by this social and cultural configuration and the rampant, perhaps sublimated, violence of their consumption.

Though we are intended to read the novel as a grim satire of the morbid tendency toward excessive and empty consumption, Bateman is less a critic of it than its epitome. His sartorial knowledge is often sought by his friends, his dicta on the proper tie pattern, cut of suit, or style of shoes seen as conclusive in their disagreements. Moreover, his brand awareness permeates the descriptions of other characters in the text, where colors, shapes, and clothing styles are noted, but always secondary to litanies of the names of designers. These litanies erupt directly into the text in a chapter called “Shopping,” where Bateman looks for Christmas presents. As he wanders from store to store in mid-town Manhattan, “worried that [he] might have taped thirtysomething over Pamela’s Tight Fuckhole,” the narration is interrupted every other paragraph by ellipses- flanked lists of designer gifts: “electric shoe polishers and heated towel stands and silver-plated insulated carafes and portable palm-sized color TVs with earphones” (Ellis 177). This switching of the mental frequency in this chapter, in which the narration of daily activities jump-cuts to

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 lists of commodities, is merely a heightening of the novel’s general mode, where the same monotone narration meanders over lists of commodities, meditations on the merits of pop music or television shows, detailed descriptions of sexual acts, and depictions of savage violence.147

This panorama view and the monotone with which the disparate events are described is not purposeless. Rather, it is meant to convey the bland inhumanity of Bateman and the cultural mode he represents. To him, such things are simply equivalent instances of self-indulgence, the main and perhaps only purpose in life. A longer scene evokes this clearly. After a conversation in which an acquaintance has ranted about the trade war with Japan and exclaimed “They’ve bought the Empire State Building and Nell’s. Nell’s, can you believe it Bateman?” (Ellis 180),

Bateman finds himself unexpectedly moved, probably less at the purchase of the Empire State

Building than of his favorite night club. Then, on his way to a Christmas party thrown by his fiancée, he murders what he thinks is a Japanese delivery man.148 Continuing the practice of interspersing the transgressive and the banal, the same sentence where Bateman disrespects the corpse and expresses his irritation at “accidentally killing the wrong type of Asian” concludes with him remembering the topic of the episode of a television talk show he watched that morning

(“Teenage Girls Who Trade Sex for Crack”) and noting how many abdominal crunches he can do (“two hundred … in less than three minutes”) (181). He then passes a homeless man to whom he gives the fortune cookies from the delivery man and approaches his fiancée’s apartment, where he notes that “the police lines are still up around the brownstone where her neighbor Victoria Bell was decapitated” (181). Bateman probably murdered Bell, but it has been months. The ongoing investigation of the wealthy woman’s murder is juxtaposed with the presumably anonymous, uninvestigated murder of the delivery man to emphasize the differential treatment of crimes against the wealthy and white versus the racialized poor.

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One of the novel’s most important chapters, though not its most graphic, is “Lunch with

Bethany.” In it, Bateman reconnects with an old flame from college, giving us a glimpse both of his present self and a brief window into his past. During lunch the normally composed Bateman experiences intense anxiety. The cause is at first obscure, though Bateman offers us two possibilities:

It’s either that I’m afraid of rejection (though I can’t understand why: she called me, she

wants to see me, she wants to have lunch with me, she wants to fuck me again) or, on the

other hand, it could have something to do with this new Italian Mousse I’m wearing,

which, though it makes my hair look fuller and smells good, feels very sticky and

uncomfortable, and it’s something I could easily blame my nervousness on. (230)

Bateman seems to protest too much on both counts, revealing that the mousse is likely a red herring and that he may, despite his protestations, have reason to fear Bethany’s rejection. She does, in fact, find him odd, though it seems as if it is his nervousness that is causing him to behave erratically and put her on edge.

The conversation is strained; Bateman makes Bethany read a vulgar racist poem he wrote for her; he argues with the waiter and continues to worry about his hair. In the end, however, he is able to convince her to come back to his apartment for sex, her reluctance signaling that maybe fear of rejection—or fear of missing this opportunity—was at the root of Bateman’s mood. For once, he cared about a woman. Of course, his concern is merely an indication of the force of his desire to murder her, which he must conceal.

Once they return to his apartment, and Bethany has pointed out that his expensive prestige artwork is hung upside-down, Bateman ambushes her, knocks her unconscious, and nails her hands to boards so that she is unable to escape. While torturing her with Mace and

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 gnawing the flesh off her fingers, Bateman harangues her about her involvement with another man, a rival. The scene involves some of the more—but not the most—graphic incidents in the novel, but is notable for the final moment, in which Bateman’s violence is driven by spite.

Generally, he is emotionless during his crimes, but here, his sang-froid gives way and he reveals one of the few things that causes him to feel: brand loyalty. Earlier, at lunch, Bethany has tried to put a visibly enervated Bateman at ease by complimenting his suit: “That’s a nice suit.

Henry Stuart?” Insulted, he tells her that, no, in fact, it is a Garrick Anderson suit. In the chapter’s closing passage, however, we learn that this, too was incorrect. Bateman, worked into a rage tells her the suit was neither Stuart nor Anderson:

“And another thing,” I yell, pacing. “It’s not Garrick Anderson either. The suit is by

Armani! Giorgio Armani.” I pause spitefully and, leaning into her, sneer, “And you

thought it was Henry Stuart. Jesus.” I slap her hard across the face and hiss the words

“Dumb bitch,” spraying her face with spit, but it’s covered with so much Mace that she

probably can’t even feel it, so I Mace her again. (Ellis 247)

Bateman’s brutality finds both its expression and its cause in this kind of image-awareness. The brand is everything and a mis-appraised suit can lead to terrible violence. Terrifying, graphic, and horrible, the scene is nonetheless grimly trivializing. Bateman, the epitome of financial excess and consumer culture, kills on account of clothes. Whereas Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the

Vanities engages race and class directly, with sex an undercurrent moving the major players, here, there is nothing even approaching social significance. Matters of life and death hinge solely on accoutrements of fashion and style, of excess and wealth—perhaps this is its commentary.

One other incident in this chapter is worth mentioning for the insight it gives into the novel’s critique of finance and yuppie culture. Through Bethany we discover that Bateman’s

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 trust fund would enable him to stop working, and thus, his motives for being in finance (or for working at all) are not grounded in need. Instead, they are purely about a desire to belong in the culture of Wall Street. When Bethany asks him, “why don’t you just quit? You don’t have to work.” He responds, cryptically, “‘Because,’ I say, staring directly at her, ‘I … want … to … fit

… in’” (Ellis 237). This moment reveals the essentially immaterial nature of Bateman’s involvement with commodities, stocks, and finance, in parallel to Sherman McCoy’s in Bonfire.

Both men find their identity, rather than any essential material need, in the accumulation of wealth and its accoutrements. This highlights the reason for deep investments in economic formations of this kind. They signal individual value and personal affiliations; that is, they indicate how we understand belonging in the nation as much as or more than they are tied to a desire for leisure and comfort.

The trust fund is also a symbol of the main anxiety of the novel. At its heart is the notion of inheritance and transmission, of reproduction of wealth and capital. Bateman, because of wealth transferred to him by his parents, does not have to work. Because he has no economic need, he is free to engage in just the same kind of high-finance transfers of wealth on the stock market. Underneath this, however, runs an aversion to productivity, to re-productivity, which reveals the underlying nature of Bateman’s sexual violence. In turn, Bateman’s sexual violence can be read as an allegory of the anti-productive use of capital that stock and bond trading represents.149

There is good evidence that while Bateman frequently engages in sex, he shuns, even fears, reproduction. When he sees a breast-feeding mother, for example, it “awakens something awful in” him (Ellis 297). He also balks at the prospect of marrying his fiancée Evelyn, and they spend a week in the Hamptons that is more a mockery of a heteronormative fantasy than its

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 instantiation—it ends with Bateman killing their dog. These fears and aversions find their most grim expression when Bateman accompanies his secretary, Jeanette, on her way to have a clandestine abortion of the fetus they have conceived together. In the car outside he recounts (to himself) that “This is the fifth child I’ve had aborted” (381). The novel at first seems simply to be including this callousness as one element of Bateman’s inhumanity—but a more powerful emotion is at work in the sinister way he plans to emotionally torture Jeanette when she returns to the car after he has left on an international flight. He purchases for her and leaves in the back seat “a doll, a rattle, a teething ring, [and] a white Gund polar bear” (382). Taking the time to emotionally torture Jean, rather than physically torture her indicates a level of sinister dedication for this act. Moreover, there is a common vector among Bateman’s general murderousness and his multiple aborted potential children.

Bateman’s preferred sex acts are also non-reproductive. In the many explicit scenes of sex and sexual violence in the novel, Bateman always avoids potentially reproductive acts (in fact, the scene where he presumably impregnates Jeanette is elided). Rather, he scrupulously wears condoms during vaginal intercourse; prefers manual, oral, and anal sex acts; forces/coerces his victims/partners into lesbian intercourse; has women use dildos on each other as surrogates for his penis; and engages in necrophilia. Bateman’s efforts to avoid insemination are various and extensive, and demonstrate a profound aversion to procreative acts—a trope of cultural and social reproduction.

In addition to a critique of Wall Street culture and Reaganomics as a fundamentally violent, then, American Psycho also indicts them as non-productive. Bateman, the representative man of the age, exults in the destruction of life and fears its creation. Pleasure without reproduction is an analogue of wealth without production, and thus the novel condemns a

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 financial system that is fundamentally groundless and allows for the accumulation of wealth without a corresponding addition to the system. Ironically, this metaphor critiques financial speculation and profiteering for not being firmly grounded in reproduction, though reproductivity is tightly bound to the continuance of the neoliberal state, which is one reason sexuality is so often yoked to nationalist rhetorics.

American Psycho exists at an unusual nexus point. It is a critique of consumer culture while its author and publisher profited obscenely from sensation, creating a commercial success and an artifact with mass appeal out of a transgressive text. This contradiction evokes the unusual political moment of the 1980s, when strong trends pushed both toward restraint and license, often paired unexpectedly: the right preferred sexual restraint and an unfettered market; the left preferred sexual license and a regulated economy. The multiple pairings suggest neither restraint nor license is the dominant value, and American Psycho’s extreme representations of sex bring this to light. Moreover, its financial success—and status as a form of transgressive act of independence for readers—signal a broader strain of cultural practice not entirely encapsulated by either loosening or tightening of controls, but more in line with the kinds of discrete transgressiveness that underpin individualist myths of the U.S. nation.

The Bonfire of the Vanities and the Obscenity of Wealth

Surface parallels between Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and American Psycho abound. The main characters of both novels are Wall Street traders; both are killers. Though

Bonfire was published before the conclusion of the 1980s, it was still late enough to explore the underpinnings and capture the consequences of Reaganomics as the President’s efforts to shift resources toward business interests, particularly finance, were being felt. At its core is the world

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 of Park Avenue privilege—expensive clothes, fancy dinner parties—in conflict with the mass of humanity that subsists outside in the urban wasteland. Though conflicted in its loyalties, the novel does attempt to draw attention to the structural mechanisms and personal illusions that perpetuate the class privilege that Dead Kennedys were critiquing. Moreover, the novel finds sexuality to be one of the most important factors influencing these mechanisms.

The novel is concerned primarily with the fate of—among a Dickensian cast representing a variety of social strata—Sherman McCoy, a self-proclaimed “Master of the Universe.”150 This phrase “bubbled up into [McCoy’s] brain” (Wolfe, Bonfire 12) seemingly of its own accord on the occasion of his making a hefty commission on a bond trade. Because of this association, the phrase encapsulates McCoy’s feelings of privilege and power. As a Master of the Universe, with a phone call he can make extravagant sums, shift more money than most people have ever seen from one place to another, and collect his own piece of the pie, all from the offices of Pierce and

Pierce, high above Wall Street.

This transactional power, where the wealth of the world flows through his hands, gives

McCoy a sensation of euphoria and often justifies base acts that he construes as merely the enjoyment of his rightful privilege. For example, he mentally rehearses a justification to his wife for his marital infidelity: “Look, Judy, I still love you and I love our daughter and I love our home and I love our life, and I don’t want to change any of it—it’s just that I, a Master of the

Universe, a young man still in the season of the rising sap, deserve more from time to time, when the spirit moves me” (Wolfe, Bonfire 12). McCoy’s excessive self-indulgence is here on display.

He wants not only the trappings of wealth and success (marriage, children, home, social life); he also wants what is here simply described as more. Enough is not enough for McCoy. Putting this in the context of the phrase “Master of the Universe” thus evokes both the delirium of power and

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 the total freedom money bought in the late 1980s—primarily and essentially the freedom to indulge any whim and to take more than the standard allotment—even an excess—of satisfaction.

But it also a self-evidently ridiculous phrase, and Wolfe reveals it to be an ironic characterization—not always to McCoy, but of McCoy for the reader. Though McCoy works to feel sincerely that he is a Master of the Universe, he admits that he borrows the phrase from toys his daughter plays with, which he describes as “lurid, rapacious plastic dolls that his otherwise perfect daughter liked to play with” and which “looked like Norse gods who lifted weights”

(Wolfe, Bonfire 12). Through this reference to the line of Mattel toys of the same name which also spawned the 1983-1985 television series He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Wolfe satirizes McCoy’s self-aggrandizement while also drawing our attention to the way the self- image is drawn from cultural representations.151

This notion of being a Master of the Universe demonstrates not only the dissemination and potency of this delusion of power in 1980s Wall Street culture that is central to The Bonfire of the Vanities, but it also signals an important connection between Bonfire and American

Psycho. Ellis’s protagonist, Patrick Bateman, also works at a firm called Pierce and Pierce and is familiar with someone named McCoy who seems not to work there anymore. In fact, these direct references indicate a deliberate intertextuality that demand a comparative reading. In many ways,

Ellis’s later novel builds directly on Wolfe’s more leisurely satire, making the violence and self- interest of the earlier novel overt and extreme. Whereas in Bonfire, the self-important Wall Street financier is at the center of a system of sublimated violence of which he is unaware, in American

Psycho, the parallel figure is deliberately, graphically, and openly violent. No longer needing to conceal the violence of his privilege beneath a veneer of aristocracy and innate ability as does

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Wolfe’s McCoy, Ellis’s Bateman simply murders for fun, arousal, and because he can. The same purposes and privileges animate both men and both novels, and the explicitness of American

Psycho helps us to see the same forces at work in more subtle ways in Bonfire.

Importantly for my purposes, American Psycho demonstrates one of the central techniques of obscene works that involves the use of graphic violence as an allegory to assert the covert violence of the allegorized social conditions. In this way, the novels, like Giger’s painting, contend that their graphic content is simply the stripping away of the veil that concealed the mechanisms of social control, economic privilege, and racialized power. For its part, Bonfire is not graphic or explicit in its treatment of sex or violence. But it belongs in an analysis of the obscene, because it exposes the obscenity of capital accumulation in terms that parallel those used by Ellis in American Psycho. Between Bonfire and Psycho, then, we see the same revelations couched in contrasting formal milieu. Where Wolfe takes over 600 pages to slowly allow McCoy to see the anxious violence that supports the illusion of placid power and wealth he enjoyed before his trip to the Bronx, Ellis reveals it within the first hundred pages—and Bateman never suffers a corresponding fall (we might infer from this difference that the novels contend that it is the illusions one nurtures that make one worthy of social castigation, not the exercise of power). Because Ellis’s social critique is often hamstrung by the reception of the novel’s gratuitous elements, Wolfe’s novel allows us to see more clearly and in more nuance the argument being sketched in American Psycho. Sharing a project while highlighting the impact of extreme representations, then, the two novels create a provocative juxtaposition for an analysis of the obscene.

The novel’s critical reception over the last thirty years is multifarious, as befitting an ambitious and complex novel. I see my own reading fitting into the strain of readings,

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 exemplified by Michael Lund, Joshua J. Masters, Liam Kennedy, and James Kyung-Jin Lee, who are interested in the social ramifications and political implications of Bonfire. This tradition begins with those who laud the novel’s social project and detail its similarities to earlier examples of progressive literature of the city. Lund, for one, describes the serialization of the novel as primarily a feature of reader reception and magazine marketing, but Wolfe’s attraction to this medium is significant, too. In particular, it highlights his affiliation with and advocacy for journalism as a vehicle for social commentary, as well as his affinity for an older style of social activism over the more assertive tone of the Civil Rights Era or the abstractions of his more immediate post-modern forebears and contemporaries.152 As Lund points out, Rolling Stone, the magazine that published the early serialized version of the novel, explicitly linked Bonfire to

Oliver Twist (1837-1839) and Nicholas Nickelby (1838-1839),153 signaling their desire (and presumably Wolfe’s) that these texts be read as the reference points for its aesthetics and politics, rather than any written in the intervening century and a half. Similarly, James F. Smith links the several connections between Wolfe’s first novel and Theodore Dreiser’s evocation of urban life from the early 1900s.

Building on this work are those who see Wolfe’s social realist project, but also see its limits in treatment of homelessness, politics and race. For example, according to Kennedy,

Bonfire is two things; first, it “is a novel which strikingly promotes the discourse of decline.”

That is, it engages a literary tradition more than a century and a half long that locates anxieties about society—such as race and racism, wealth inequality, crime, educational inadequacy, youth violence, etc.—in cities that are construed as failing in myriad ways, crystallizing the larger failures or decline of the nation and offering cities as sites for aggressive corrective action in increased police controls, augmented funding for anti-poverty programs, and other sometimes

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 contradictory programs. Second, the novel represents a “singular effort to reproduce the totalizing vision of the classic realist novel as the most adequate form of literary response to the complexities of urban change at the end of the twentieth century” (Kennedy 95). In making this claim about the genre and form of Wolfe’s novel, Kennedy echoes many other critics, including

Smith and Lund, who see the expansive tome and its multiplicity of characters and plots as recalling the early 19th-century social novel. Bonfire and those works most often cited as its precedents, seek to understand and communicate (in their entirety) the complexities of the city’s institutions, the causes of its failures, and the humanity of its inhabitants.

More recent work in this area, for example that by Lee, Masters, and Kennedy, links the novel’s project specifically to the racial politics of that moment and a continuing privileging of whiteness. 154 One important element of Bonfire is how it dramatizes the clash of the racialized poor with white privilege in the urban space of New York. Capitalism’s reliance on existing wealth and the resulting persistence of economic privilege in the hands of whites reveals the racial politics of Reaganomics; trickle down policies inevitably must trickle down from a

WASP-dominated Park Avenue. As Lee demonstrates, the shift in government stimulus from social welfare to financial and corporate power centers during the 1980s had this racial component, ironically coming at a time when the rhetoric of multiculturalism was prominent in media and culture, if not in policy (xiv). The division of the civic space along racial lines and the role this practice plays in the creation of broader racial dynamics are central to the project of

Wolfe’s novel. In fact, Lee argues, Bonfire “tracks and exposes the underpinnings of white privilege,” characterized by “a triangulation of power determined largely by the privatization of space, the continuation of white supremacy through property relations, and the attendant ethos of individualism” (xxiii).155 In a move that may seem unexpected, then, I hope to use Wolfe’s novel

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 about a white defendant to demonstrate the racial components of the wealth disparity of this moment. In addition, sexual license figures prominently as an expression of McCoy’s privilege, and thus, the novel actual serves as a nexus point for discussions of economic inequality, racial injustice, and sexuality.

We find this process starkly on display in a scene in which Assistant District Attorney

Lawrence Kramer, who will come to prosecute McCoy for the accidental killing of an African

American man in the Bronx, describes his place of work, the fortress-like Bronx County

Building. Here, the edifice of whiteness is made into a spatial metaphor. As the still white- dominated (primarily Irish and Jewish in the novel) system of courts, judges, district attorneys, and police stands erect like “a prodigious limestone parthenon” (Wolfe, Bonfire 38), it also demonstrates the increasing isolation of that embattled system in the primarily non-white Bronx.

As Kramer says, no one who worked in the building even left it for lunch. Instead, “They stayed inside the building, this island fortress of the Power, of the white people” (39). The injustice perpetuated by this arrangement is attested to by Lee, who writes that in the age of multiculturalism, “prisons and their affiliated economies have made some urban communities the frontline for what can only be called genocide, where industries of punishment rather than institutions of learning have become the primary definers for racialized and poor people” (xv).156

The frontline of this fictional version of the real practice is Franz Sigel park, which runs along the side of the building. Kramer looks down on the park from his window and remarks that

“Nobody from the District Attorney’s Office went out into the park on a sunny day in May to have lunch. … They stayed inside the building, this island fortress of the Power, of the white people, like himself, this Gibraltar in the poor sad Sargasso Sea of the Bronx” (Wolfe, Bonfire

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39). Their isolation is a result of fear, fear of crime that stems from poverty and that is perceived as primarily racial.

As the novel progresses, the spatial tropes transform, so that this lumbering isolated fortress becomes increasingly penetrated by the people of the community, often cast as an unruly and violent mob. In the final court scene, violence erupts within the very halls, first in the courtroom where McCoy’s indictment is dismissed and then throughout the building and on its steps. This invasion of the hallowed spaces of whiteness and power is also carried over in the way the transformation of McCoy’s mentality is described. Following his initial arrest and subsequent hours in the criminal justice system—the halls of the courts that are not wood paneled—McCoy describes the breaking down of his essential self and the loss of the seemingly inviolable “brass crucible of his mind” (Wolfe, Bonfire 492). Instead of that hidden, central self,

McCoy feels his self “has become an amusement park to which everybody, todo el mundo, tout le monde, comes scampering, skipping and screaming, nerves a-tingle, loins aflame, ready for anything, all you’ve got, laughs, tears, moans, giddy thrills, gasps, horrors, whatever, the gorier the merrier” (491-92). Nested in this passage is the sense that McCoy feels his white individuality is contrasted with an invasive multi-lingual hoi polloi living in a wretched, fetid, demonic collectivity. Ironically, the sexual undertones in the passage recall McCoy’s own bohemian fantasies about his affair. In those more innocent moments, for example, we read

McCoy’s interior monologue on his love nest, “How bohemian! How . . . real this place was!

How absolutely right for these moments when the Master of the Universe stripped away the long-faced proprieties of Park Avenue and Wall Street and let his rogue hormones out for a romp!” (18). Here, however, the animal sexuality is projected onto others and becomes a marker of McCoy’s racial paranoia. He is violated by his own fantasies.

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If sex exists as a testing of oneself and an experience of transgressing boundaries, then

McCoy is having the experience of being sexually penetrated. When the press makes a scandal of his life, it inaugurates this transformation of his psyche, but the entire world comes along for the ride: “His entire central nervous system was now wired into the vast, incalculable circuit of radio and television and newspapers, and his body surged and burned and hummed with the energy of the press and the prurience of those it reached, which was everyone, from the closest neighbor to the most bored and distant outlander titillated for the moment by his disgrace” (Wolfe, Bonfire

492). There can be no denying that McCoy’s newfound selfhood is an eroticized, penetrated media creation. The references to prurience and the pronounced sexual metaphors alone suggest a reading in terms of obscenity. Such a reading reveals the central aspect of McCoy’s imaginary crisis, where the restrained white privileged self is under threat from a barbaric entity that is simultaneously racialized, impoverished, and rapaciously sexual.

Through McCoy’s experience, the novel does demonstrate the fragility of white privilege and its unique relationship to property: real property, imagined property, symbolic property—a confluence of forces usefully grouped under the notion of capital. Wolfe shows that the selfhood and material wealth of whiteness can be undermined by concerted political action, by mass media, by impoverished individuals, by slight contact with the outside world — in the words that describe the contact between McCoy’s car and the man he kills, “just a little thok. And then he wasn’t standing there anymore” (Wolfe, Bonfire 92). In the novel, all these forces are marshaled to bring down Sherman McCoy, but the sense is there that any individual one might have done the trick.

However, Lee points out the symbolic death of McCoy as the standard bearer of white privilege serves, paradoxically, to extend that very privilege. Describing McCoy’s trial, he notes

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 how the district attorney pursues McCoy in order to “protect both himself and the institution for which he works from the charge that the state’s reproduction and legitimacy depend on the racial criminalization of communities of color.” He concludes, “White supremacy, simply put, must sacrifice one of its own” (Lee 173). This sacrifice, of McCoy as “The Great White Defendant”

(Wolfe, Bonfire 104 et passim), is a convenient way of placating the rest of society and maintaining the status quo a little bit longer. By offering McCoy as a token white victim, the criminal justice system can burnish its credentials as race-blind and equally applied. This persistence of the overall structure of privilege is made clear in the epilogue to the novel, where we find out that most of the white characters are actually rewarded for their role in the trial, rather than punished, as if the novel acknowledges that whiteness must periodically symbolically sacrifice itself as property (money, excess, wealth—McCoy) in order to persist as hegemony (in terms of state power, represented by District Attorney Abe Weiss whose “tenacious prosecution of the case was widely regarded as the key to his successful bid for re-election” [658]; and in terms of cultural capital, represented by journalist Peter Fallow, who wins a Pulitzer for his reporting and marries his boss’s daughter).

The novel, then, reaffirms the tenaciousness of ossified whiteness, even as it concedes that individual whites must be sacrificed to maintain the fictions of multiculturalism. It is worth noting as a coda that not all of the figures of white power in the novel are rewarded in the end.

Larry Kramer, the philandering Assistant District Attorney who prosecuted McCoy’s case, has been disgraced after he attempted to secure McCoy’s “Rent-Controlled Love Nest” (Wolfe,

Bonfire 658) for use with Shelly Thomas, a juror with whom he pursued an affair. Though Weiss is craven and opportunistic, Fallow is a drunk and opportunistic, and McCoy’s lawyer Thomas

Killian is unscrupulous and opportunistic, it is only Kramer—whose sin was sexual—who is

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 punished in the end. The novel, then subtly reveals that it is these “rogue hormones” that are unredeemable, and this indicates the stakes of reading Bonfire through the optic of obscenity, because in the novel’s world of exploitation, sexual transgressions seem to merit special treatment.

The absence of racial politics—or its sublimation, occlusion, (in)visibility—in Ellis’s novel actually points up the more central relationship between American Psycho and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Bonfire is thoroughly and visibly concerned with how white supremacy (and its adoption by individual whites) is predicated on a series of tenuous illusions sustained by acts of real violence, and yet, underneath this all is a baser urge: sex. McCoy’s fall is precipitated by his marital infidelity, something he construes as the privilege to indulge himself because of his financial power. Kramer’s taking up the mace of state power and his willingness to wield it with bombast is ultimately a result of his own desire to show off for the brown-lipstick-girls of the world in the hopes of having his own ego stroked. These men turn the world upside and victimize the community for the sake of their own illusions of potency. It is the exposure of the eroticization of power and the violence that constructs the male erotic subject that links the two novels most intimately.

The “more” that McCoy feels entitled to, the excess consumption he deserves simply by virtue of making a hell of a lot of money off fictional transactions—selling promises from one person to another—is, simply, sex.157 Drunk on his own sense of power, McCoy sees himself as able to forego the sublimation of his id that is otherwise required of individuals in a productive society, according to Marcuse. For McCoy, moreover, sexual indulgence is a characteristic of culture in its most refined aspects and, as such, is not cause for self-doubt. Or, at least, this is how he works through the guilt he feels over his transgressions. After a tense breakfast with the

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 family the morning after a slip-up that has implicated him to his wife, McCoy finds himself scanning the covers of pornographic magazines in a candy store. There, “The salmon flesh jumped out at him ... a happy grinning riot of pornography, a rout, an orgy, a hog wallow”

(Wolfe, Bonfire 54). The boldness of the images, the frankness of the erotic content, displayed directly and without coyness, like the open sexuality of a woman he had seen on the street, justifies to McCoy the acceptableness of his urges and the appropriateness of his indulging them—particularly because of his wealth and power. He thinks to himself as he walks to catch a cab,

It was in the air! It was a wave! Everywhere! Inescapable! … Sex! … There for the

taking! … It walked down the streets, as bold as you please! … It was splashed all over

the shops! If you were a young man and halfway alive, what chance did you have? …

Technically, he had been unfaithful to his wife. Well, sure … but who could remain

monogamous with this, this, this tidal wave of concupiscence rolling across the world?

Christ almighty! A Master of the Universe couldn’t be a saint, after all … It was

unavoidable. (54, ellipses in original)

That the world is swimming with sex convinces McCoy that he need not question his own sexual transgressions. He is alternately entitled to it or a victim of a hyper-sexualized world.

Either way, McCoy finds the justification he needs and is able to conclude of his affair and being caught, “It meant nothing. It had no moral dimension” (Wolfe, Bonfire 54).158 Wolfe’s intention in this scene is obscure. Because he generally lampoons McCoy throughout, I presume that this scene ironizes McCoy’s rationalizing, and instead suggests that a world awash in frank sexuality does not, in fact, justify sexual license, but rather should provoke disdain. McCoy’s wife Judy, of course, will find that it does have a moral dimension, and not a prudish one owing

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 to the sanctity of the sexual act. Rather, she finds the deceit shameful; what breaks her relationship with McCoy apart is that he has driven a wedge between them because of his weakness, his lack of honesty, and the emptiness of his promises to her. The sex becomes incidental to her. Thus, we cannot conclude that the omni-presence of sex is, in the novel’s view, justification for his acts, nor can we conclude that the novel’s voice is prudish in its insistence on sex as sacrosanct. Instead, sex is omni-present, but that does not justify the overvalued position

McCoy has given it as reward and privilege.

The most telling moment in this swirl of sexual indulgence is the infamous passage where

McCoy and Maria Ruskin hit the young man Henry Lamb with McCoy’s Mercedes in the Bronx.

This elliptical and vertiginous passage shows the anxiousness McCoy has with respect to his potency and how sex—as a prop to his ego—has the power to rewrite the narrative of his life.

The event that transpires there—as they attempt to flee what they think is a robbery, Ruskin, driving the car, side-swipes Lamb, knocking him over, a seemingly minor accident that will lead to his death from head trauma—at first worries McCoy. He has to be aggressively coaxed by

Ruskin into believing they ought not to go to the police over the incident. In the end, he is able to transmute his anxiousness over the possible danger and the criminal implications into exultation over their escape. Now, he and Ruskin can crow over their wit and courage in surviving what they characterize as “a fight” (Wolfe, Bonfire 95), “the battle,” and “the miracle” (96, emphasis in original). Finally, they can see it in a new light: “Together they had faced the worst nightmare of New York, and they had triumphed” (96). Naturally, this newfound glory leads to sex. After they “plunge[] into the thick adrenal details of the adventure,” they find themselves on the floor indulging their passion sexually. The arousal they are able to whip up through the glorification of a confusing, ambiguous encounter with potentially (and ultimately) catastrophic consequences

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 finds its outlet in intercourse. McCoy exults in terms that merge his delusional conceptions of his sexual and financial abilities, calling himself “Priapus, king and master! Master of the Universe!

King of the Jungle!” (97).

Kennedy responds to the novel’s pivotal scene where Sherman and Maria get lost in the

Bronx in ways that help to demonstrate the racial aspects of the incident that I hope to connect to this sexual fantasy. Kennedy says that their “journey through the South Bronx is narrated as a colonial adventure in a wild, frontier space, a space of urban depravity rather than deprivation. It is not black poverty, but white fear, which dominates the scene” (101). Kennedy’s description of the scene is astute and important, because it shows us how this novel’s attempt to totalize the diversity of New York in the 1980s is characterized by deep investment in a white perspective.

However, I think we can meaningfully extend this points by linking the racial politics with the sexual politics of the moment. Kennedy relates how Maria and Sherman congratulate themselves, remarking on how they survived a “fight” in the “jungle” of the Bronx, but he neglects to mention that they celebrate with sex. This moment of white survival, of encountering a phantasmatic black threat and fantasizing their victory over it is, I contend, a specifically erotic act. This moment of projective, racialized role play leads to the death of its non-white participants, and the sexual pleasure of its white players.

The characters themselves are able to rationalize the experience in other ways that reinforce their identities and privilege. After their tryst, when he has returned to “White

Manhattan, the sanctuary of the East Seventies” (Wolfe, Bonfire 98), McCoy’s mind continues the process of delusion by which the fraught class and racial politics of New York, and his own transgressions, buttress rather than challenge his self image. He tells himself that “with nothing but his hands and his nerve he had fought the elemental enemy, the hunter, the predator, and he

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 had prevailed. … He had saved a woman. … He was not merely a Master of the Universe; he was more; he was a man” (98-99). Here, the “Master of the Universe” is again invoked, as is the notion of excess: McCoy has become more than the Master of the Universe. Now, not just deserving more, he can do more, and this cements in him his status as an individual and a man.

This is an important notion, given the abstraction that characterizes his work for him and his family, something that causes him anxieties about his potency. Here, he proves that he can survive not just on Wall Street, but “on the nightmare terrain” (98). This “nightmare terrain” is a fundamentally racialized space that reflects the Othering and abjection resulting from the politics of Reaganomics.159

McCoy is not the only man with power in Bonfire who finds its most satisfying expression in sex. As I implied earlier, his adversary in court, Larry Kramer, is subject to the same weakness, and through examining him, the novel explores the relationship between sex and the power of the state. Kramer’s sexual interest in his wife has waned as she has aged (and his vanity will not allow him to see himself doing the same). Instead the Assistant District Attorney finds himself fixated on Shelly Thomas, “The Girl with Brown Lipstick” (Wolfe, Bonfire 100), a juror in a case he is trying as the novel opens. Echoing McCoy’s fascination, Kramer is taken by her expression, which he finds “so frank and forthright!” (127). Both men are fixated on women whose sexuality is obvious, who seem open to reciprocal advances, perhaps because they are frustrated with the sublimation and nuance required by polite society. For Kramer, desire is wrapped up in his work and the image of power he is able to convey in the courtroom. He notes that “First-time jurors in the criminal courts had a way of becoming intoxicated by the romance, the raw voltage, of the evil world they were now getting a box-seat look at, and the young women became the tipsiest of all” (126). The close contact with the forbidden and dangerous

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 world of criminals and the lawyers who confront them means a vertiginous experience that

Kramer casts as “romance.” The overtones of masculinity in the description cement the notion that behind the anxious use of power to further sexual conquest is an embattled male ego.

Not only does Kramer use his access to juror information to get Thomas’s address and phone number, not only does he use the case as a pretext for initiating out-of-court meetings hoping they will lead to sex, but he views the other male members of the court as his competitors for her attention (Wolfe, Bonfire 127). Thus, all the players in the “stark dramas of the billion- footed city” (126), including the court officers, court reporter, defense attorney, and judge, are possible romantic rivals and, as Kramer’s over-the-top performance in the court demonstrates, the court system is merely an arena for mating displays. Thus, for Kramer as well as McCoy, power, whether it comes from wealth or state institutions, is primarily a vehicle for the expression of sexual desire. Both men are satirized by the novel, but through them the novel reveals one of its primary themes. Power and sex are means to each other.

Underneath the prospect of using his position for sex, using the enervation of danger, of crime, of transgression—underneath this, Kramer reveals, is the arousal of power. Kramer sees this clearly during a moment of self-awareness when he goes to see Marie Ruskin in order to ascertain her involvement in the crash. Flanked by her lawyers, she is the picture of composure and, as always, sexuality. Upon seeing Maria for the first time, his feelings, and her power over him are clear:

The widow—how young and bouncy she looked! Foxy, Roland had said. Arthur Ruskin

had a lot on his hands, seventy-one years old, with his second pace-maker ticking away.

… Kramer tried to keep his eyes from running up the highlit curve of the top of her foot

and the glistening curve of her calves and the shimmering curve of her thighs under the

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black silk. He tried his best. She had the most wonderful ivory neck, and her lips were

parted slightly, and her dark eyes seemed to be drinking his right up. He was flustered.

(Wolfe, Bonfire 588).

Here, Maria has a clear power over Kramer stemming from her ability to instill in him a desire he is not always able to control—the same “rogue hormones” McCoy sacrifices his entire life to indulge with her. But Kramer finds himself in possession of a countervailing force: state power.

Kramer at first struggles to regain his composure and rambles extensively in describing the evidence implicating Maria, until he finally states outright that she is a suspect. In response, she swallows just perceptibly, and this movement of her “most wonderful ivory neck” gives

Kramer a glimpse of the fear he can instill. Suddenly, the world of wealth and privilege—and of sex—breaks open for Kramer:

In that instant, the instant of that little swallow, his scuffed attaché case meant nothing,

nor did his clodhopper shoes nor his cheap suit nor his measly salary nor his New York

accent nor his barbarisms and solecisms of speech. For in that moment he had something

that these Wasp counselors, these immaculate Wall Street partners … would never know

and never feel the inexpressible pleasure of possessing. … For it was nothing less than

the Power … . It was the power of the government over the freedom of its subjects.

(Wolfe, Bonfire 591)

Kramer’s power refutes the spatial divisions of wealth and privilege (“What are all the limestone facades of Fifth Avenue and all the marble halls and stuffed-leather libraries and all the riches of

Wall Street in the face of my control of your destiny and your helplessness in the face of the

Power” [591]). It is the answer to, but an analog of the power of sex, and it clearly manifests for

Kramer as his avenue to sexual gratification. In fact, he notes to himself about Maria, after

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 having “rogue stirrings” that “Sometimes you ended up working very closely with a cooperative witness” (589). In fact, Maria is cooperative, though her testimony is false, and in this instance, we are led to wonder if Kramer’s impulse to trust her is colored by his desire. If it is, it is not only a sexual desire, but a desire to exercise and enjoy the arousal of wielding the Power.

The novel is long and there are many scenes of tension late. I hesitate to call this one a climax for the novel, but it is nonetheless significant for my reading because it represents the coming together of diverse themes in the novel. Those with money or power (like McCoy or

Kramer) use them to get sex, while those who can offer sex are able to use it to gain money and power. The financial economy, then intersects quite deliberately the sexual economy, and a similar relationship organizes the exercise of power on an individual level. Because revealing this interweaving of sex and politics in the context of a multifarious critique of neoliberalism,

Bonfire is an illuminating companion to American Psycho. Moreover, through McCoy’s experience, the novel demonstrates that significant aspects of these power relations are racial; in unequivocal terms, they produce death for non-white people. Whiteness has mixed fortunes, but survives relatively unscathed. Though McCoy loses his wealth, his loss sustains the system of white privilege, and in American Psycho, Bateman and the white world of excess consumption he represents suffer essentially no consequences.

Excess, Violation, Accumulation

Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Ellis’s American Psycho both take as their subject the yuppie culture of Wall Street. They indict its wealth founded on fictional capital, its emptiness, its circularity. Moreover, both emphasize that the process of thus shoring up existing economic privilege can only proceed by victimizing others, especially racialized others who

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 become invisible in the sleek world of white wealth, mobility, and luxury. In Wolfe’s “social novel,” the victims are shown to be a numerous racialized population living in close proximity to but starkly walled off from the bastions of white privilege. In Ellis’s “splatterpunk” novel, the victims are more various: the homeless, women and men, children and adults, people of all races.

The allotment of privilege is more anarchic and its victims less differentiated. Nonetheless, both feature and alternately seem to celebrate and condemn, rich, white, male financiers whose run- ins with those less privileged seem always to lead to death.

Both novels rely on the underlying revelation of privilege as predicated on a number of factors. First, though most readers are skeptical of these claims, both ostensibly assert that the valorization of financial transactions as a source of wealth perpetuates a culture of privilege that is fundamentally non-productive, that is parasitic on, rather than symbiotic with, the production of material betterment for society at large. Second, both contend that in order to mask this parasitism, the loci of privilege must construct the appearance of entitlement or justification through the airs of aristocracy, primarily demonstrated through taste and connoisseurship as a marker of class.160 Third, then, and taking the first two into account, they contend that it is a complex system of cultural illusions, backed by economic and state power, that perpetuates a system of privilege that is unjust both racially and economically.

Interestingly, the third point indicates an anxiety about the transformation of culture in late Postmodernism that both novels share, a regressive nostalgia for an imagined society in which wealth and productivity are united with only negligible or temporary excesses of injustice, where an essential righteousness (individual ability) is affirmed by material success. Both of these are fantasies of industrialization and of U.S. national mythologies, and both are exacerbated by late twentieth-century economic policies and the growth of media. It is somewhat

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 surprising that the two novels find this common ground. Wolfe might claim that his “social novel” has a more liberal bent, demonstrating racial injustice, the tenuousness of whiteness, and foreshadowing the inevitable decline of the U.S. racial hierarchy, if demonstrating some anxiety over that fact. Conversely, Ellis’s novel revels in the emptiness and violence without always issuing a clear reprisal toward the culture it represents—glorifying if nominally satirizing it.

Thus the two novels seem to diverge in their politics, and yet underlying each is the same nostalgia for a pre-postmodern and pre-late-capitalist age.

This desire is in some senses not at all a surprise, and clarifies the role of these dominant- voice authors in a consideration of obscenity in social justice projects. Often their transgressiveness is not a marker of outsider status, but of the privilege to break taboos with relative impunity—even to accrue additional status and power by virtue of demonstrating independence from staid social conventions. This is a form of cultural capital that operates in concert with economic capital in a reciprocal circulation.161 Moreover, such critiques are leveled from a position of power that construes itself as inhabiting a universal subject position that transcends difference. As Grace Kyungwon Hong describes its early forms and role in an

American mythos, “although organized around whiteness and masculinity and based over and against racialized enslavement, the possessive individual was posited as ostensibly universally available” (xiii). When Wolfe and Ellis criticize consumerism or privilege, they do so in a way that suggests that they transcend the concerns of poverty and race, rather than redress them.

Their partial critique, then, draws us into a theoretical and practical dead-end in which the material wrongs they seek to solve are reinforced at deeper levels through a metaphysical and political discourse that fails to see its own historical limitations.

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Dead Kennedys are representative of a broader strain of critique leveled from a variety of vantage points at the 1980s culture of Wall Street excess and anti-poor/anti-worker politics.

Unexpectedly, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Thomas Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the

Vanities also participate in a critique of this culture—though they also capitalize on (and in some senses reinforce) the sensationalism surrounding a culture of conspicuous consumption. They draw attention, in the case of the former, to the violence resulting from and driving the culture of commodification, and, in the case of the latter, to the neglected issues of race and class that underlie the culture of privilege enabled by the every-man-for-himself, Master-of-the-Universe ethos of Wall Street. This notion is the same that underpins the American metanarrative of possessive individualism and so sympathy with the projects of these novels—or delight in their anti-conformist stances—can ironically reinforce the kinds of injustices the books might also tend to critique on other levels.

Like Frankenchrist, these novels, too, generated their own controversies. The furor they generated, however, never resulted in a prosecution as with the visual image in the Frankenchrist trial. This may be because, as discussed in Chapter 1, indexical media often sparks more outrage and is assumed to have more power to corrupt than the written word. This is pertinent in the era when MTV was in its nascence, bringing visual interpretations to rock music in a way that was often sexual, and also because the Meese Commission specifically noted this in its report.

Seeking to crystallize what they saw as important differences between indexical media like film and photography, the Commission addresses a hypothetical subset of “books consisting of nothing other than descriptions of sexual activity in the most explicit terms, plainly patently offensive to the vast majority of people, and plainly devoid of anything that could be considered literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”162 On the subject, they conclude:

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Although many such books exist, … they seem to be the least harmful materials within

the various categories. Because they involve no photographs, there need be no concerns

with those who are actually used in the process of production. And the absence of

photographs necessarily produces a message that seems to necessitate for its assimilation

more real thought and less almost reflexive reaction than does the more typical

pornographic item. There remains a difference between reading a book and looking at

pictures, even pictures printed on a page. (United States, Final 382-83)

The visual image, then, is afforded great power in the public imagination and becomes a special target for prosecution. Because it is quickly consumed, it might influence the viewer more directly without the viewer’s critical faculties intervening. And though contemporary anxieties over drawn or computer generated pornography belie the statement that the absence of performers mitigates the potential danger (which itself seems to borrow from the Civil Rights approach to anti-pornography activism), there does seem to be something about fictiveness that reduces the perceived threat of the written word. However, the politics at play in the

Frankenchrist trial overlap with the concerns of the novels by Ellis and Wolfe. Concomitantly, the written word, because of its potential to promote “more real thought” and “less almost reflexive action,” then, is actually the more potent vehicle of lasting social critique and, paradoxically, less often an object of censorship.

In addition to allowing us to see the ways that powerlust and anti-reproductivity are intertwined with late-century anxieties about the sustainability of a neoliberal economy, considering these texts through the lens of obscenity, then, also enables new insights about indexicality, which emerges as one of the primary concerns for obscenity. It is not insignificant that Potter Stewart’s famous dictum on pornography is “I know it when I see it,” emphasizing

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 3 sight and visuality. For reasons enumerated in the Meese Commission Report, there is a presumption that visual media are more dangerous. Still, in the realm of fiction, we can see the emergence of a more complex figure—the possessive individual—than can emerge in pornographic images. Importantly, obscenity masks the way this figure reproduces structures of privilege, because the subject position thus reified is left relatively unscathed, even when his actions are deplored as misogynistic or ultra-violent.

116 See the Report of the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (United States, Report). 117 The antagonism between those associated with this liberalization of sexual attitudes and political figures on the right becomes clear in the selection of the name of this film as the code name for Watergate informant Mark Felt. 118 The Commission stated that “What would be surprising would be to find otherwise” and noted what they felt was the “underlying logic” of the conclusion they came to (United States, Final 326). Like Reagan’s assertion that the harm is self-evident, this anxious affirmation reveals the extent of ideology that drove the work of the committee. 119 An interesting finding of the commission is that the amount or extent of sexual explicitness linked to the depiction of violence does not correlate with the “attitudinal changes” (United States, Final 327) that result in the viewer—the important element is only that sex and violence are linked in the representation. They use this to condemn, on that ground, horror films in which violence is linked with sexual suggestiveness but not to sexual depictions. 120 Concerning pornography that is not violent but is, “degrading,” the Commission then also adds that “there is less evidence causally linking the material with sexual aggression,” though they are still convinced that there is enough evidence to conclude that “substantial exposure to material of this type will increase acceptance of the proposition that women like to be forced into sexual practices” (United States, Final 332). 121 Judith Butler takes issue with the logic implicit in this notion, and, interestingly, links it directly to feminists, such as Andrea Dworkin, working to restrict access to pornography. Describing Dierdre English’s argument that “pornographic fantasy substituted for action and provided a catharsis in fantasy that made action superfluous,” Butler notes that “a very different position on fantasy has been operative within the anti-pornography movement and recent New Right calls for censorship. Both of these efforts to restrict or prohibit pornographic fantasy end up inadvertently but inevitably producing and authorizing in their own discursive actions precisely the scenes of sexual violence and aggression that they seek to censor” (111). Moreover, the Commission here is relying on the implicit presumption that fantasy leads to action, something that is far from certain: “Here, the view that fantasy motivates action rules out the possibility that fantasy is the very scene which suspends action and which, in its suspension, provides for a critical investigation of what it is that constitutes action” (113). 122 Dworkin testified before the Commission on 22 Jan. 1986, and the report discusses her approach to anti- pornography activism, including excerpts of legislation she co-authored (United States, Final 391-96). 123 David Joselit also notes that in his photography (also challenged on obscenity grounds) Robert Mapplethorpe is aware of and deploys the masks of imagined “‘pure’ sexual postures” (19). Mapplethorpe’s deployment of “pure sex,” however, is vastly different than the Commission’s. Rather than attempting to distill sex into a mechanical function that might serve a definable social purpose, Mapplethorpe seeks to distill the purely erotic aesthetic, those moves, poses, and angles that arouse without recourse to social conditioning. At the far end of the Commission’s efforts is use, at the far end of Mapplethorpe’s is pleasure. 124 For more on this, see Whitney Strub, “Lavender.” 125 Much in the way of the Commission’s underlying assumptions is revealed here. Of particular interest is the kind of sex portrayed as completely inoffensive when practiced in private: “a loving married couple engaged in mutually pleasurable and procreative vaginal intercourse” (United States, Final 340). This vanilla, heteronormative, reproductive model of sexuality has little cultural value as an unquestioned norm anymore—even among those who still advocate for it do not contend it is a universal—but is taken for granted in the Report. In fact, in a striking confession of just how far they might go toward close regulation of sexual practices, the members of the

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Commission apparently “disagree about the extent to which people should, as adults, be tolerated in engaging in sexual practices that differ from the norm” (344). For more on the Western culture’s “lack of a concept of benign sexual variation,” which this pronouncement makes clear, see Gayle Rubin (148). Rubin also notes the persistence of an extraordinarily narrow definition of acceptable sexual practice, referring to the cultural folk wisdom that preferred sexuality “should ideally be heterosexual, marital, monogamous, reproductive, and noncommercial. It should be coupled, relational, within the same generation, and occur at home. It should not involve pornography, fetish objects, sex toys of any sort, or roles other than male and female. Any sex that violates these rules is ‘bad,’ ‘abnormal,’ or ‘unnatural’” (151). 126 In regards to “local officials,” the Commission specifically recommends states take the lead and discourages a reliance on Federal assistance (372-75). 127 Reagan famously opined in his first inaugural address, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” 128 The notoriously privileged trust-fund child Patrick Bateman of American Psycho actually complains to his lawyer that he “needs more tax breaks” (Ellis 382). 129 Changes in the role of labor unions (as a result of aggressive anti-union actions) and the stagnation of the minimum wage contributed to the growth in income inequality during this period, but there was also a corresponding change in culture to one that not only tolerated, but celebrated, wealth and excess. See Thomas Picketty and Emmanuel Saez, who argue that “changes in institutions such as the minimum wage and unionization account for a large part of the increase in U. S. wage inequality from 1973 to 1992” (34), but that “Changing social norms regarding inequality and the acceptability of very high wages might partly explain the rise in U.S. top wage shares observed since the 1970s” (35). Also see Richard Godden, who points out that “While, in 1980, the top 1 per cent of US income earners claimed less than 8 per cent of the national income, by 2000 their return stood at 15 per cent” (855). 130 The 1987 obscenity trial of Dead Kennedys front man Jello Biafra and others would be the first such prosecution over a musical recording. The controversy continued with 2 Live Crew. See Kimberle Crenshaw. 131 Al Gore mentions the significance of his connection to the PMRC in his opening statement to the Committee on the hearings, crediting his wife with the very influence others would impugn: “Because my wife has been heavily involved in the evolution of this issue, I have gained quite a bit of familiarity with it, and I have really gained an education in what is involved” (United States, Commerce). 132 The name of the album in question, Frankenchrist, is also provocative, given the ascendancy of the Moral Majority and other evangelical groups at the time. 133 In later recordings and performances of the song, the word niggers is replaced by brothers. 134 Interestingly, the band also used a precursor of the very parental advisory stickers that would one day be a hallmark of efforts to suppress their music. Some record stores refused to carry an early single called “Too Drunk to Fuck” (1981). The band provided stickers that retailers could use to cover the offending word, with this text addressed to the purchaser: “Caution: You are the victim of yet another stodgy retailer afraid to warp your mind by revealing the title of this record so peel slowly and see....” The band’s smart-alecky prank anticipates what would one day be a reality: stickers on offending albums warning consumers that what they are about to purchase offends the sensibilities of a certain segment of society. Note that the band had done this with Frankenchrist already, and in the case in question, there already was a sticker on the album. This gives the lie to the PMRC’s efforts—an album with a warning label was still prosecuted, so there is little indication warning labels would satisfy their aims. 135 Biafra once said he had to inform an amused English reporter about the restrictive political climate affecting freedom of speech in the US compared to Europe. Describing his trial for obscenity, he says he “met an MTV news reporter … who was English and had never heard of such a thing, so I explained to him how things are done in this country and why there is far less freedom of the press here than there is in England or Australia or in most of Europe” (Biafra). For more on the denial of political aspects for sexual speech, see Strub, Perversion. 136 See Strub’s Perversion for Profit on how homosexual acts, such as anal sex, were often determined to be inherently obscene by courts, prosecutors, and juries. On the painting, the consensus among commentators seems to be that the penetrated orifices are anuses, but it is not entirely clear that each one of them is an anus and not a vagina. 137 Compare to Patrick Bateman’s disembodied vaginas in his gym locker in American Psycho (Ellis 370). 138 In a contemporary retrospective of Giger’s work, Scott Thill describes the main motifs of Giger’s work, “the cyborg sex and horror that … defines his most identifiable pieces,” and calls Penis Landscape “graphically but mechanically sexual.” In his retrospective of several iconic Giger pieces, Penis Landscape is discussed entirely in the context of the Dead Kennedys album and its obscenity trial. Lawrence 229

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139 It is interesting to note that Charles Keating, Jr., known as a staunch anti-pornography crusader and founder of Citizens for Decent Literature, served four years in prison over fraud charges related to the savings and loan scandal of the late 1980s that also led to ethics violations sanctions for five sitting U.S. Senators. There is a provocative, if convoluted network here of resistance to pornography and corporate greed culture, as well as political influence. 140 A neatly parallel public outcry resulted from the cover of Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind, which featured a nude infant swimming in a pool toward a dollar bill baited on a fishing hook. As Kim Wook states in a retrospective, “The label was okay with the anti-capitalism message, but had concerns about the prominent display of baby genitalia.” Kurt Cobain’s response to the label’s concern was almost identical to Dead Kennedy’s response to record store concern over the title of their single Too Drunk to Fuck. Both artists apparently offered cheeky stickers insulting censors and prudes that could be used to cover the offending material (Cobain only suggested this; Dead Kennedys produced and distributed them). 141 See Anne L. Clark. This kind of drop in sales is not always the result. Commercial success can actually be spurred by pushing the envelope of acceptable content, as many figures I discuss did, including George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, and others. 142 Biafra told an interviewer, for example, that “I was just an opinionated, loud-mouthed person about everything anyway, and had it in for authority from an early age” and that “Straight politics is for people with no sense of humor. …. I've always tried to use my life and my art as a prank as much as possible” (Biafra). 143 Perhaps another significant connection is indicated when Patrick Bateman murders his competitor, Paul Owen. In this scene, Bateman hacks Owens’s head with an axe in the middle of Owens describing his growing appreciation for Iggy Pop ever since Pop’s movement away from punk (Ellis 217). Bateman’s violence can be seen as intervening violently in the cooptation of punk music by corporate interests. 144 As I mention in the introduction and elsewhere, however, such linkages are often done specifically to indict a state culture that elides the interrelationship between sex and violence. 145 At one point, Bateman describes everyone around him as “prey” (Ellis 347). 146 This critique belongs to the novel, but not to Bateman. As Godden notes, “Fetishized and fetishistic, mired in brands and committed to ‘fictitious capital’, both a financier and rentier (he is possessed of a trust fund), Bateman experiences the affects and anxieties inherent in the fetish form, but not as access to critique” (859). 147 Similarly, the seemingly graphic over-taping of a hard-core pornographic film with a banal TV sitcom becomes itself banal in a parallel incident in which Bateman discovers that he has taped The Patty Winters Show over home- made tapes of his violent sex murders (Ellis 291). 148 Bateman discovers afterward that the man was presumably Chinese—the novel satirizes Bateman’s racism but not convincingly. Bateman calls “killing the wrong kind of Asian” an “irritating setback” (181). 149 That Bateman calls his department at the firm Pierce and Pierce “Murders and Executions” (Ellis 206) instead of “Mergers and Acquisitions” is a multi-layer pun. Not only does Bateman actually murder and execute as a serial killer, but his work in finance is a form of destruction, where productive firms are dismembered and sold off. 150 For more on the Dickensian nature of Bonfire, which several critics read as a sort of 19th Century social novel, see Jerry A. Varsava, James F. Smith, Michael Lund, James Kyung-Jin Lee, and Wolfe’s own “Stalking the Billion- Footed Beast.” 151 The likeness to Norse gods is not without meaning in the context of the novel’s racial politics. Sherman McCoy imagines himself as a kind of hyper-white figure, which sets off his coming encounter in a hyper-racialized outer borough, where he kills a young African American man. 152 Lund, for example, is anxious to distinguish the novel from earlier twentieth-century works, asserting that Wolfe’s use of cliff-hangers was nothing like “the cheap, melodramatic ending of a 1930s movie serial” (55), though he does mention a similarity of technique with Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence from 1920 (56) and concedes that “Because Tom Wolfe chose a Victorian manner of publication for Bonfire of the Vanities [sic], his fiction recreated an old-fashioned relationship between author and readers” (51). 153 Lund adds to the list, linking the novel with those of Honoré de Balzac, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Emile Zola (54). 154 For example, Joshua J. Masters writes that “the novel naturalizes these class tensions through its incessant, and at times gratuitous, deployment of racial stereotypes, stabilizing the fictive categories of ‘racial’ difference and ultimately fetishizing whiteness” (209). 155 Lee feels, however, that the novel’s use of satire undermines this critique of whiteness because “even as the novel attempts to dismantle one man’s dependence on white privilege through satire, Wolfe’s narrative must reassert whiteness in a more aggressive, masculine, and violent form” (xxiii). 156 This topic is also discussed in depth by Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow. Lawrence 230

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157 Lee notes of McCoy’s line of work that “Like the enormous loan that undergirds and structures his own life, Sherman engages in work that facilitates and extends an economy of debt and that masks the deep scarcity at the root of seeming monetary abundance” (156). 158 As will many elements of Bonfire, this moment finds a sinister parallel in American Pyscho, where Bateman philosophizes internally: “it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term ‘generosity of spirit’ applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue” (Ellis 375). 159 As Lee points out in discussing McCoy’s vision of the Bronx, “a vision of an urban wasteland made racial is fundamentally the anxious expression of the eviscerating forces of the 1980s U.S. political economy” (167). 160 This process is described in detail by Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel in The Love of Art. 161 See Bourdieu for more on how cultural capital complements economic capital. 162 Their language here is a deliberate echo to the Miller ruling, suggesting that such works would fail the referenced prongs of the Miller Test.

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Chapter 4:

Performing Family Values: Obscenity and AIDS Discourse

“AIDS words—the linguistic constructs used to talk about AIDS—are never simply ‘facts’ or

‘truths’ but take on particular meanings at particular times, and are understood differently by

different people.”

Cindy Patton (Inventing AIDS 45)

Reagan-era (neo-liberal) economic and (neo-conservative) international policies found traction in part because they were couched in terms of narratives of national identity and international mission. Complementary to the well-known public rhetoric of Exceptionalism that characterized the Reagan administration were efforts to police the domestic narratives of

American identity in a way that might support interventions in strategic regions around the globe while propping up electoral coalitions developed in the 1960s and 70s. As U.S. the economy gradually recovered from recession through the 1980s and the tensions of the Cold War subsided in the days before the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, a new rhetoric

(and a new enemy) was needed to galvanize voters in a world in which America might be the only superpower. Efforts to find targets within the American population that could support the

Manichean framework the Cold War bred can be seen in anti-Civil Rights push back at this time, evidenced by reactionary resistance to the gains of ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities, groups which has already been (often speciously) linked with communism and the threat of Soviet infiltration.

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The resulting polarization of American society in this period is emblematized by clashes over art and media during the 1980s and 1990s that became known as the Culture Wars, a battle fought along lines of race and class—as seen in American Psycho and The Bonfire of the

Vanities, which I discuss in chapter three—but also along lines of sexuality, with the gay urban population in New York and elsewhere often cast as outsiders by a moralist movement on the right. The cultural contestations arising among these groups stretched on through the beginning years of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s and continued through the growing efforts to publicize the disease and humanize those living with it that extended well into the 1990s. This meant that AIDS-related funding fights in Congress, major political organizing, and spectacular public memorials intersected in battles over national identity for more than a decade, affecting the political fortunes of three presidents.

Some of the forces at play can be seen by looking closely at the 1992 Republican presidential nominating convention. The Republican Party had made pursuing the fight over perceived cultural rifts a major plank in its 1992 platform and the defining feature of its electoral rhetoric. That year, George H. W. Bush was seeking election to a second term, hoping to extend the political culture of Reaganism to a full sixteen years. He was pitted against a charismatic

Southern governor named Bill Clinton. Emphasizing national differences to split the electorate and energize conservative voters—particularly in a New South that was potentially vulnerable to

Clinton’s appeal—the party adopted a Culture Wars rhetoric that characterized the nation as verging on moral decay, particularly as a result of liberal gains on issues like LGBTQ rights, affirmative action, and abortion. Though this rhetoric was unsuccessful in carrying George H. W.

Bush to a second term in office, it continued to drive conservative activism, and saw renewed currency with the 1994 takeover of the House of Representatives by Republicans led by Newt

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Gingrich and in House-led efforts to impeach Clinton in connection with his affair with Monica

Lewinsky.

As a result of this, though no longer wielding effective legislative power after 1992, moralist obscenity discourses that had been circulating continued to affect artistic production and exhibition and were part of a highly polarized public discourse. For example, Andres Serrano’s photograph Piss Christ and Robert Mapplethorpe’s traveling retrospective exhibition The Perfect

Moment were the subject of a controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts that centered on issues of obscenity and led to funding restrictions in 1989. Serrano’s work was provocative in part for using bodily fluids as a medium at a time when, as bell hooks reminds us

“the mass media had begun to warn us that our vital substances could be lethal,” while

Mapplethorpe’s photos frankly represented homoerotic themes and subjects. The discussion in the Congress about the appropriate use of Federal funds to support art that was not unanimously approved led to fairly significant revisions in how the relationship between the state and culture were understood. These artworks highlight the stakes of obscenity discussion at this time, where they had shifted away from the terrain of legal battles over individual artworks or Executive-

Branch enforcement of laws, and into the realm of funding restrictions and public protests.

The manner in which underlying social forces and anxieties were made manifest by the

AIDS epidemic comes to the fore in three texts I will analyze more closely in this chapter. First, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt (begun in 1987, continuing to the present) worked to memorialize those who died from the disease in ways that resisted the characterization of AIDS as a “gay disease.” Second, Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America (1993) dramatized the experience of living with AIDS, particularly its effects on family and romantic relationships, in the context of an apocalyptic challenge to national unity—and was subsequently challenged for

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 obscenity. Last, Jonathan Demme’s film Philadelphia (1993), the first major Hollywood treatment of AIDS, humanized both gay men and people living with AIDS, but only at the cost promoting family norms that undercut the potential for radical social change. These three cultural artifacts represent different ways of negotiating the complex of figures that circulated around

AIDS and LGBTQ activism in the 1980s and early 1990s, but they coalesce around notions of the family as a central—if contested and problematic—figure of national belonging.

Stitching Together a National Community

I begin with the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, a project with a history nearly as old as the epidemic itself. What would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS was first described among small groups of gay men in New York and California in 1981. The virus was first defined by the opportunistic infections that besiege the identified patients, such as

Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and Kaposi’s Sarcoma, diseases that seemed unusually aggressive in these cases and that were otherwise exceedingly rare—facts that indicated an underlying immunosuppression. By the following year, organizations and clinics, such as Gay

Men’s Health Crisis in New York, arose to help provide care and support, as well as services designed to prevent transmission, despite the fact that at the time, little was known about what the disease was or how it spread.163 At the same time, in 1982, Congress acted to fund research into the new epidemic, and the Center for Disease Control used the term AIDS for the first time

(“History”).

Despite this rapid progress of the disease, the epidemic remained largely outside public consciousness, and scientific knowledge was initially limited, in part because of the perception that the disease was specific to the gay men who were its first victims. Outside San Francisco

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 and New York, and among heterosexuals, awareness was at first very low. It was not until 1984 that the virus that causes AIDS was identified,164 and not until 1985 that the first test to screen for the presence of the virus in blood was developed, several years after the first cases. The death of actor Rock Hudson from AIDS in October of 1985 is generally considered the moment when the epidemic reached a mainstream public in the U.S. Hudson had been known as a leading man in Hollywood films and television since the 1950s. His death brought a high-profile face to the epidemic. In the subsequent years, growing awareness and increased funding and research would eventually lead to better treatments, but even after the development of new drugs, access to information, treatment, and medication was uneven because of racialized and classed barriers.

Even in the late 1980s and early 1990s, because of its association with stigmatized groups, support efforts were still hotly contested in Washington.

AIDS became one of many undercurrents in Culture Wars political attacks on marginalized groups. Condemnations of gay men, especially, often invoked the specter of AIDS as a way of activating unstated metaphors of contamination and disease that spoke to fears about a more diverse and inclusive society. This was a way of buttressing exclusionary national- identity narratives based in notions of the family as under threat from sexual practices other than heterosexual monogamy, the nation as besieged by foreign invaders, and the body politic as menaced by debilitating corruption.

Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, for example, made the connection clear when he introduced (and succeeded in passing) an amendment to a 1987 appropriations bill to restrict federal funding for AIDS education by excluding programs that had gay-positive and sex- positive themes. The same year, he introduced but failed to advance the draconian AIDS Control

Act, which would have criminalized the donation of blood or organs by gays and Haitians,

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 among others. It also ordered the armed services to release individuals found to be infected and the CDC to keep records of individuals infected with HIV. In sinister conjunction with the latter, it also would have required that broad swaths of the population be tested during routine contact with health officials, such as when they were admitted to the hospital for unrelated conditions.

The deep anxiety the disease created is reflected in the excessive surveillance Helms suggested to contain it.165

Similar to contemporary (and continuing) efforts to limit sex education based on restrictive, often religious notions of proper sexual conduct, limits on funding that prohibited gay-positive themes were devastating to existing institutions of AIDS education and activism, which had largely arisen in urban gay communities in the early years of the decade before mainstream awareness of the disease took hold. The language of the amendment—which states that “none of the funds made available under this Act to the Centers for Disease Control shall be used to provide AIDS education, information, or prevention materials and activities that promote or encourage, directly, homosexual sexual activities” (United States. S.AMDT.963)— significantly complicated efforts to encourage safer sex practices among gay men, because suggesting alternative sexual practices that were less likely to transmit the virus than anal intercourse might still be construed as “condoning” sexual contact between same-sex partners.166

Despite this emphasis on homosexuality in early efforts to politicize funding, it is clear that interest among some members of the government in regulating sexual practice extended beyond the margins to total oversight of the intimate lives of all citizens. The bill further requires that “Education, information, and prevention activities and materials paid for with funds appropriated under this Act shall emphasize” in addition to refraining from drug use, “abstinence from sexual activity outside a sexually monogamous marriage” (United States. AIDS). Of course,

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 this notion is consonant with other efforts to police the practice of marginalized groups; they are always also an effort to restrict all sexual practice in the population according to specific regimes of reproduction. Such efforts attempt to direct sexual desire into channels that promote organizations of society favoring white-middle class structures and ontologies of futurity.

Moreover, looking at such efforts in conjunction with the proposed AIDS Control Act, we can see the outlines of a broad politics that places sexual politics at the center of efforts to police the borders of national identity and citizenship, including participation in civil discourse, care for the sick, and military service.

One way that the LGBTQ community resisted these attacks was by deliberately manifesting and making public elements of the experience of living with AIDS. Such efforts at visibility were designed to humanize sufferers and create empathy. Perhaps the most monumental of these was the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, a patchwork of textiles that began with just a handful of panels made to commemorate individuals who had died of AIDS.

The Quilt now includes more than 48,000 panels and is so massive it has not been seen in its entirety for almost twenty years. Each of the panels is a three-foot by six-foot piece of fabric stitched—or glued, or appliqued, or tied, or painted, or inked—with objects and words and images that recall the memory of the individual who lost their life to the disease. The panels are made by loved ones and strangers and collected together by the NAMES Project along with testimonial letters by the quilters.

The Quilt has its origins in the San Francisco gay-rights movement of the mid 1980s.

Activist Cleve Jones was inspired to create the quilt by the sight of placards bearing the names of those who had died of AIDS-related causes taped to San Francisco City Hall at the 1985 march to honor city supervisor Harvey Milk and mayor George Moscone, who had been assassinated in

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1978. Cleve hoped to recreate the memorial patchwork on the building in order to recognize the many victims who had succumbed to the disease. Within two years, the NAMES Project organization was formed and received hundreds of panels contributed by people across the

U.S.167

The Quilt was displayed for the first time in October of 1987 on the National Mall in

Washington, DC, and included over 1,900 panels at that time. Since then, it has grown significantly. Its size is now most commonly measured in football fields, and it has appeared in the Capital five times, both on the National Mall and the ellipse in front of the White House grounds.168 The last time was in 1996, when the quilt covered the entire Mall. During this time the Quilt became an important national symbol of those who lived and died with AIDS.

The first block of eight three-by-six panels includes Jones’s own memorial to his friend

Marvin Feldman as well as others that include the names and mementos of seven other men.

They vary tremendously and are often colorful or irreverent, but they also frequently omit identifying information in a stark reminder of the stigmas associated with AIDS, which those making the panels still feel.

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Figure 3. Block 1 of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.

Simply naming those who died has its own significance, because it demands attention and awareness, and because the act of memorializing is often felt to be above baser political concerns. Panels like these serve to memorialize the lives lost to AIDS in a way that has particular resonance for the politics of AIDS activism. In particular, the AIDS Quilt resists two persistent cultural discourses on AIDS: the invisibility of those who suffered from and died of the disease and the characterization of LGBTQ individuals as outside the domestic, family, and affective mainstream, an abjection that devalued their deaths.

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The Quilt manages the first of these concerns—the invisibility of victims—by registering and displaying the impact of their lives through material objects. Through the use of words that might describe the subject, through color choices that reflect his or her personality, through the inclusion of actual used or representative objects, of religious or allusive iconography, the personalities of the individual become part of a national monument. The panel proportions are intended to suggest the size of a human body, and thus to create a virtual cemetery to remind visitors and viewers of the human loss of AIDS in sheer numbers or scope. Because of this, the

Quilt effects on a much more spectacular scale the kind of memorializing of other monuments that simply list the dead. Nonetheless, speaking more to character traits and ideas, to personality and conversations, to love and reciprocity than mute photos or names would do, these panels attest to the interpersonal relationships of the individuals who are memorialized by the Quilt, not merely their death.

Marita Sturken and Peter S. Hawkins both note overlaps and differences between the

Quilt and the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, which was conceived and constructed around the same time. With the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, the long list of individual names etched into the black granite façade creates a sense of mass and numbers while leaving aside the individual lives of those who died.169 By contrast, the Quilt is highly individual, and each person listed is given not just a name, but often a rich collection of material traces and images.170 While the flattening effect of scope is also a result of the Quilt’s growth over the years, visitors are encouraged to walk among the panels and look at them individually, reinforcing the individualizing aspect of it.

This individuation takes spectacular form, as the Quilt when fully displayed is over a million square feet, over 25 acres. In this way, it eclipses the other monuments on the Mall for

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 sheer size. Nonetheless, because it is arranged in twelve-foot by twelve-foot blocks, visitors can browse among panels, walk between blocks, and view sections up close. Despite its massive scale, the Quilt maintains a focus on the local and individual. This is true even when full-scale presentations of the quilt take place, but the emphasis on the individual being grieved over is even more apparent when the Quilt is displayed now. The most common way to see the Quilt today is to visit a small section, perhaps only a few blocks, when they are hosted by local organizations. Though linked to and serving as a metonym for the massiveness of the full Quilt, such small-scale displays encourage visitors to not only consider the whole population that has been lost, but to focus on the memorialization of those eight, sixteen, or twenty-four individuals represented on the one, two, or three blocks on display. In addition, seeing the Quilt outside the national public space of the Mall, and in one’s own hometown, civic center, or University brings the memorialized lives literally closer to home.

The Quilt manages the second concern—the abject status of LGBTQ individuals in mainstream affective and family structures—in two ways: through its celebration of intimate and family relationships and through its use of the medium of quilting. The creation of Quilt panels by lovers, friends, and family members is often an occasion to pay tribute not to a single individual, but to the lives touched by that individual. Victims are often listed with or by their family relationships. One panel reads only “Our Son, Our Brother” under several traditional quilt blocks. Another was created “For All the Mothers Who Thought They Wouldn’t Get AIDS.”

Such expressions emphasize that those who were lost were not only individuals cut off from family—or somehow anti-family—but that they were defined by those families. Remembering— and stitching back together—such relationships, which were often torn apart by ignorance and intolerance, is one important element of the Quilt’s sentimental politics.171

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The form of the Quilt complements this. As Hawkins points out, the history of quilting in the United States is one in which politics has always been present, but in which a certain apolitical domestic ideology is also foregrounded. Noting that “As our quintessential folk art, the patchwork quilt is linked to nineteenth-century sewing bees and a nostalgia for a past sense of community,” Hawkins links the Quilt to the American flag stitched by Betsey Ross, writing that

“Jones discovered the domestic equivalent for the sign of national unity. It offered a metaphor of e pluribus unum that was … cozy, humane, and warm” (757). The long American history of quilting and its domestic associations help move AIDS and its sufferers out of the margins and into the American national community by speaking in the language of heritage and the home.

Hawkins notes the strategic value of such a gesture, saying “The NAMES Project has been astute in claiming some measure of this American heritage; it has used the homey associations of the patchwork quilt to domesticate AIDS, to neutralize hostility toward ‘high risk’ populations by appealing to a national legacy” (765). Cast by conservative forces as a punishment for same-sex desire, AIDS in the 1980s often carried a profound stigma that made it difficult for those living with the disease to access care. The NAMES Project attempted, through the Quilt, to combat negative stereotypes and enter LGBTQ individuals into a less-threatening tradition of mourning that simultaneously linked them a national mythology.

Once the intimate lives and love of the many gay individuals memorialized in the Quilt are recognized, and placed alongside the many heterosexual individuals also included, the Quilt takes on an apolitical veneer that nonetheless effects an important political goal. As Sturken argues, “Cultural memory generated by this memorial to a controversial epidemic can be seen as inherently political; it defiantly marks the human toll of the epidemic and says: We must mourn these lives lost, challenge the homophobia that worsens the AIDS epidemic, and fight the

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 policies that make prevention and treatment so difficult” (66). While the Quilt’s affective imperative would in some ways become a mainstream mode of memorializing that would lose some of its status as “inherently political,” the Quilt retained elements of its political valence through the specific manner with which it effected this memorializing.

Elaine Showalter recounts how the feelings activated by the Quilt bind groups together:

“Love and grief are the common threads that bind mothers, fathers, wives, lovers; here hemophiliac children, gay men, straight women, the famous and the obscure, the addicted and the caretakers, are equally remembered and mourned” (172-74). Normalizing non-heterosexual affective relationships by placing them alongside heterosexual ones and by using rhetorics of domesticity and intimacy, the Quilt asserts the place of the LGBTQ lives it registers in the

American family. It places them alongside heterosexual victims and links their lives to the family and friends who mourn them, reaching outside the political and activist circles where AIDS work first began. This work is consonant with creating a pluralist national polity; as Showalter notes, amid concerns over the melting pot metaphor in post-War America, “the patchwork quilt came to replace the melting-pot as the central metaphor of American cultural identity” (169). The

NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, then, occupies a particular space in the larger world of

AIDS discourse by strategically mainstreaming those who died from AIDS in order to depoliticize efforts to provide for funding and research.

This effort was not without controversy, as the efficacy and appropriateness of such a move was questioned by some who found the emphasis on grief and mourning to distract energy and attention from activism. Writing in 1989, Douglas Crimp noted that “Public mourning rituals may of course have their own political force, but they nevertheless often seem, from an activist perspective, indulgent, sentimental, defeatist” (5). The emphasis on the dead that attends grief

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 and mourning necessarily recalls that those who died have succumbed and that the fight is not complete while losing sight of life-affirming projects.172 Similarly, it reinforces the narrative of inevitable death that attended AIDS in the early years and that directed funding toward finding a vaccine while neglecting treatments designed to ameliorate the conditions of those living with the disease. The Quilt has also been criticized for being overly commercialized or sentimental

(Showalter 172).

It may be that some element of conflict is inherent in the Quilt’s project and it historical moment. Sturken notes that “Its role as a therapeutic project is often in conflict with what many see as its political role in changing the terms of the epidemic” (66), and that this mirrors divisions within LGBTQ political activism between “speaking defiantly from the margins of society and demanding inclusion within the mainstream” (67). These divisions are mirrored by the classed and raced aspects of collective mourning173 and the many other elements of AIDS coalition-building that reflect tension or conflict—later on, they will also frame my analysis of

AIDS-focused cultural artifacts. In this way, the AIDS Quilt makes manifest the many diverse discourses that are mobilized with the epidemic,174 while crystallizing particularly those that stitch together narratives of family and nation.

The Rhetoric of the AIDS Epidemic

Because we can see the larger concerns of normativity and citizenship crystalize in AIDS discourse, looking at AIDS and representations of it attunes us to the host of other concerns for which it was a vehicle and which it made visible. Much of this also overlaps in telling ways with obscenity discourse, and so paves the way for my later discussion of the relationship between the two. As Cindy Patton avers, “Radically different metaphors of power, of community, of

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 resistance are deployed across different sites in the class war surrounding AIDS” (1). Existing prejudices both animated and were reciprocally inflected by negative attitudes toward AIDS.

Patton reminds us that in the early 1980s, because actual encounters with the disease and awareness efforts were rare or happened in isolated communities “The epidemic gained its social meaning in relation to deep prejudices about race, class, gender, sexuality, and ‘addiction’” (25).

Patton suggests that because the reality of AIDS was largely unknown for several years, it became a site of projection in cultural representations, thus it is useful for an understanding of cultural and political forces from this period not only because it marshals discourses designed to problematize sex, but because it makes visible those underlying discourses. This linkage between

AIDS and multivalent prejudices is important because in AIDS discourse, we see the metonymic relationships between the terms of homophobia, racism, misogyny, and other forms of hate.

It is easy to see the convenient narratives AIDS provides for dominant culture, particularly as a way to justify existing prejudices or amplify mistrust of Othered individuals and communities. Figures of the religious right commonly declared that AIDS was punishment both for homosexual acts and for a society that was increasingly tolerant of LGBTQ individuals, but such thinking was not restricted to fringe groups or figures. As Patton points out, discourse around AIDS construed non-heterosexual sex as a terminal practice for LGBTQ individuals and drugs as a terminal practice for people of color, primarily in the inner city. The simple neutral fact of sexual transmission or transmission via drug use allowed mainstream thought to construe the disease as deserved by those who contracted it. This is so because drug use and sexual activity were themselves construed as suspect. With respect to sex, this is a continuation of the notion I explored in my introduction that sex is without purpose unless it is reproductive, and that pleasure is to be mistrusted or demonized.

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AIDS also simultaneously provided opportunities for savior-style volunteerism (Patton

25-26) in what Patton calls the “white middle-class AIDS industry” (44). Even further, sex workers were inordinately blamed for transmitting HIV to the heterosexual community, a practice that reinforced stereotypes about the dangers of sex work and the inability of women to control their own sexuality (39). Reaching back to cultural tropes from before the Sex Wars, this version of sex negativity portrays sex work as a threat to the community, not to the prostitute.

This activates and reinforces deep-seated notions about race and sexuality in which white, hetero, male, middle-class society is pure and righteous (even generous beyond necessity), while outsiders and others reap the consequences of sinful indulgence while threatening to contaminate the community.175

AIDS, at first a murky and mysterious epidemic affecting primarily already-stigmatized communities, produced a discourse that allowed for the open circulation of prejudiced notions in the guise of self-evident truths. How to Have Sex in an Epidemic, written and distributed by members of the gay community in New York, laments how “The AIDS crisis has … produced a lot of recommendations which are really misplaced morality masquerading as medical advice”

(35). Moreover, the nature of AIDS as a sexually-transmitted disease means that philanthropic, medical, and criminological intervention in the AIDS crisis literally became an effort to alter sexual practices, pushing toward models of sexual desire and behavior that map onto the same notions of ideal sexuality espoused by the Meese Commission and the Helms Amendments: monogamy, reproductivity, and the heterosexuality.176 This moment therefore is significant for an understanding of a broader politics of obscenity, in which policing sexual practices and representations is a method of controlling social organizations, subject formation, and civil participation.

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The history of AIDS is not only the history of a disease; it is also the history of a discourse and a performance, a politics and a cultural practice. Following on her investigation of the cultural construction of disease in general, Illness as Metaphor (1978), Susan Sontag examined AIDS through its figures and tropes in AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988), which clarifies the stakes of cultural production about AIDS. Sontag points out that AIDS is a disease that creates and capitalizes on discourses of the national body politic and as a space in which to contest the borders of belonging. In this way, it makes possible for forecloses certain ways of understanding our responsibilities to others and the relative dangers posed by the disease.

Patton described the inherent divisions between the “general public” and those in “risk groups”—almost always already marginalized Others marked by sexuality, race, class, or disability—and Sontag relates this to the metaphors that typically attend Western ways of talking about epidemics:

Every feared epidemic disease, but especially those associated with sexual license,

generates a preoccupying distinction between the disease’s putative carriers (which

usually means just the poor and, in this part of the world, people with darker skins) and

those defined … as “the general population.” AIDS has revived similar phobias and fears

of contamination among this disease’s version of “the general population”: white

heterosexuals who do not inject themselves with drugs or have sexual relations with those

who do. (27)

Through her placement of AIDS in a longer history of Western epidemiology, Sontag is able to show that the projection of damaging metaphors onto marginalized groups is hardly unique to

AIDS. In doing so, she contests the notion that the conclusions we draw about AIDS are inherent or specific to it. Rather, AIDS discourse demonstrates one valence of a multivalent Othering that

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 has similar historical formations. The alignment of the medical and scientific communities with white middle-class practices then becomes less a function of the historical specificity of AIDS

(though it often appears as such) and more a function of the persistent marginalization of racialized and sexual Others through discourses of disease.

The creation of a discourse of AIDS that appears self-evident and obscures its participation in longstanding ideologies of exclusion happens particularly through moralist discourses that dovetail with metaphors of purity. Sontag identifies one of the most persistent and insidious characterizations of AIDS in America: “‘Plague,’” she says, “is the principle metaphor by which the AIDS epidemic is understood” (44). The trope of the plague activates a number of metaphors that speak to underlying ideologies of national identity in the U.S. and were thus deployed strategically, rather than inevitably. For example, Sontag notes that “One feature of the usual script for plague” is that “the disease invariable comes from somewhere else”

(47). In the case of AIDS, the “somewhere else” is Africa (and in early writings Haiti, and even

New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, as those are understood as outside the mainstream of America in some circles), and we can see how narratives of foreign otherness are interwoven with military metaphors of alien invasion that are also used to characterize illness.

But these metaphors also suggest a kind of metaphorical nativism, a mistrust of the outsider and a supposition that those who live with or contract HIV must be tainted or marked as not belonging, somehow touched and infected not only with sexual deviance but with foreignness—a notion that finds expression in limitations on immigration and service in the armed forces for seropositive individuals at this time.177 The military metaphors then resonate with the rhetoric of ethnic homogeneity, while metaphors of cleansing, also applied to illness, take on a more sinister tone.178

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The rhetoric of plague also works in concert with Culture Wars notions, both discursive formations propping up and lending credence to the other so that a firm foundation in fact is hardly necessary for either. Because plagues are interpreted as moral/divine judgments on societies that have lost their way, they inspire calls to return to traditional ways and scriptural orthodoxy, a practice paralleled by appeals to return to strict interpretations of the constitution, particularly for jurists. Such calls to reform moral standards and return to conservative values find dubious proof in the apparent judgment of plague. Thus, metaphors of cultural warfare are reinforced by the presence of the plague of AIDS, while the interpretation of AIDS as a plague is buttressed by the arguments of those who claim American society is off its moral bearings. And as Sontag points out, just as with older uses of the marker plague when “Responses to illnesses associated with sinners and the poor invariably recommended the adoption of middle-class values” (54-55), so moralizing around AIDS suggests that the habits of a white middle class— monogamy, heterosexuality, abstinence from drugs and pre-marital sex, etc., as well as submission to the scientific, bureaucratic regime of testing and surveillance—are the proper remedies for a society inflicted with the disease, even if hope for individual sufferers is not offered by a disease characterized as leading inexorably to death.

As Lee Edelman has attested, the association of gay men and lesbians with death is a historical practice that serves to cover over a larger social compulsion to reproductive futurity.

As a discourse that links any sexual practice other than penile-vaginal intercourse to waste, narcissism, and a host of other pathologies, heteronormativity aligns itself not with an arbitrary preference for a particular kind of sex, but with the reproduction of the social order. Civil society and capitalist production, then, rely on the pathologization of non-reproductive sex, a fact that clarifies the extent to which laws attempting to criminalize homosexuality (such as anti-sodomy

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 laws) also control the practice of heterosexuals. The pre-existence of this rhetoric, suffusing disciplines as different as medicine and economics, reveals as false the idea that AIDS proves the morbidity of same-sex desire. Rather, AIDS became a coalescing point for an epistemology already deeply embedded in social structures.

AIDS served this same function for various discourses of national identity circulating— and increasingly contested—since the late 1960s, not all of which were exclusively linked to sexuality, and some of which I addressed in previous chapters. In this way, it demonstrates continuity between civil rights and AIDS activism, as well as between the forces of exclusion and invisibility that both resist. Explicitly indicting cultural and social conservative push-back against perceived excesses of the 1960s—the kind of traditionalist resistance that brought Nixon to power and underwrote the Reagan Administration’s social politics—Sontag describes the often-obscured historical through lines in a manner that merits quoting at length:

Denunciations of “the gay plague” are part of a much larger complaint, common among

antiliberals in the West and many exiles from the Russian bloc, about contemporary

permissiveness of all kinds: a now-familiar diatribe against the “soft” West, with its

hedonism, its vulgar sexy music, its indulgence in drugs, its disabled family life, which

have sapped the will to stand up to communism. AIDS is a favorite concern of those who

translate their political agenda into questions of group psychology: of national self-

esteem and self-confidence. Although these specialists in ugly feelings insist that AIDS is

a punishment for deviant sex, what moves them is not just, or even principally,

homophobia. Even more important is the utility of AIDS in pursuing one of the main

activities of the so-called neo-conservatives, the Kulturekampf against all that is called,

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for short (and inaccurately), the 1960s. A whole politics of “the will”—of intolerance, of

paranoia, of fear of political weakness—has fastened onto this disease. (63)

Though Sontag’s efforts to highlight the ideological continuity among various facets of neoconservative ideology are echoed elsewhere, what is useful here is her demonstration that, just as discourses about sex are ultimately about belonging, so discourses about belonging ultimately also merely serve a larger disciplinary belief system, one based on will, one that opposes laxity and permissiveness, one that is predominantly authoritarian and accumulative, rather than based on a collection of policy preferences or even an electoral coalition’s vested interests. Thus the connection surfaces between the oversight of individual sexual practices and a broader movement of power and capital.

In many ways, then, AIDS marks an important transition point in major national discourses. A kind of coming into maturity of the high sixties, AIDS inaugurated a culture of seriousness and reserve that was in marked contrast to the ethics of fun that characterized the social movements of, for example, the Yippies and of Disco. Acknowledging the somber fact that “in the age of AIDS, all life involves some risk” (9), the authors of How to Have Sex in an

Epidemic soberly advised that “The party that was the ’70s is over” (39).179 With AIDS came a growing sense that the freedom, promise, and utopic spirit of the 60s and 70s had reached a point of transition. What kind of transition that would be begins to crystallize when we read the authors’ reassurances that “What’s over isn’t sex—just sex without responsibility” (40).

Similarly, Sturken notes that the AIDS Quilt in particular “symbolizes a shift in representation of the gay community from one of pleasure-seeking to one of responsibility and concern,” part of a conscious effort by some activists to “emphasize aspects of the gay community that were simply invisible to mainstream culture prior to the epidemic” (84). The impulse to responsibility sounds

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 like a call to grow up, to understand the experiments of the 60s as a sort of childhood, and get down to the business of serious adult life. But it is also a call to monogamy and bourgeois values, to assimilation and respectability; the subsuming of these under the heading of maturity is itself part of a long history of construing pleasure seeking, as well as same sex desire, as abortive or retrogressive practices. As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, many of the most prominent artistic productions to explore issues related to AIDS involve serious consideration of issues of family that dovetail both with this narrative of maturation and with the broad field of metaphors activated by such figures.

“Like a Sex Scene in an Ayn Rand Novel”: The Erotics of U.S. National Mythology in

Angels in America180

“AIDS activists know that silence equals death, but we also know that this cannot be

said, it must be performed” (Patton 131).

With these words, Cindy Patton highlights the necessity for those living with HIV and

AIDS to embody their critique of compulsory silence and enforced visibility not only through speaking out, but by acting out.181 Her words, though, also call to mind the cultural modes of the

AIDS epidemic, particularly the role that theater played as a vehicle of cultural expression that already foregrounds the role of the body in aesthetic meaning making. Tony Kushner’s landmark

Pulitzer-Prize winning play Angels in America intervenes in the historical moment I’ve been discussing by dramatizing narratives of loyalty, family, and nation in ways that speak to both the experience of the gay community coming to terms with the disease and to a larger American

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 community grappling with the possibility of a more inclusive future. Michael Cadden remarks on this duality of purpose, writing “For Kushner, AIDS, while retaining a gay-specific identity, is about the fate of the country” (84), and his comments are echoed by David Román, who contends that the play’s poignant questions about how AIDS affects the lives of gay men “hold insight and concern into the current U.S. political landscape” (42). The play, then, is often read as both an effort to humanize people living with HIV/AIDS and to explore the questions of belonging and identity that Helms and other Culture Warriors attempt to influence.

Though initially celebrated when it debuted in New York, Kushner’s play encountered resistance when it was staged in Helm’s home state of North Carolina in 1996. Local sentiment was divided over the frank discussion of homosexuality and the depiction of gay relationships.

And a brief nude scene was also the subject of some controversy. When the Charlotte Repertory

Theater planned to stage Angels, they faced opposition both within their organization—two members of the Board of Directors resigned—and from without—funding sources dried up

(Houchin 251). Objections came from religious figures as well, spearheaded by the reverend

Joseph R. Chambers—already a public figure because of similar campaigns against other works, notably Barney and Friends (1992-2009) and Disney’s The Lion King (1994). Chambers led a public campaign of protests, including pickets outside performances that were met with counter- protests by supporters of the play.

Though conservative and religious figures considered challenging the play on the grounds of obscenity, the accolades heaped on Angels would put its artistic merits beyond doubt and make unlikely any finding that the work was without serious social value. Thus, their efforts to prevent the staging because of religious objections were diverted into other veins, and they sought to prohibit the performance based on the supposition that a nude scene where an AIDS

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 patient is examined would violate local indecent exposure laws.182 That objections had to be transferred from the realm of obscenity to statues literally governing the visible presence of sex

(the exposure of sex organs) recalls the broad notion found in the Meese Commission Report that sex of any kind or the suggestion of it might be distasteful and only suitable as a private and secretive pursuit.183

In the end the Charlotte Repertory Theater was able to secure an advance ruling protecting them from state interference in the production, there were nonetheless long-lasting negative effects on the arts community in Charlotte.184 This was a place that was experiencing cultural tensions resulting from a corporate and cultural renaissance that brought a large number of new residents from outside the American South. As The Economist noted when the county’s

Board of Commissioners voted to cut funding to the local arts council the following year, “where art is concerned, the natives and the newcomers sometimes [found] their tastes colliding” (“No

Gays”).185 Notions of “natives” and the alien notwithstanding—though they are highly resonant with both obscenity and AIDS discourses—the debate over funding was quite explicitly a reaction to the production of Angels the previous year, and the rationale given by the Board was that the measure was intended to “protect children from exposure to perverted forms of sexuality” (qtd. in “No Gays”). This makes clear that those who opposed integration of sexual minorities into the mainstream were willing to use their control of public finances and philanthropic resources to further their goal of exclusion. This financial response was, further, part of a larger piece of legislation that was specifically targeted at prohibiting county funds from being used in a manner that supported homosexuality—a gesture essentially identical to Helms’s on the national level.186

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The play that caused the furor is long and multi-faceted. Evoking its many tropes, genres, and projects, Jonathan Freedman describes it as: “a loose baggy monster of a play, housing in its capacious representational tent (inter alia) Brechtian alienation devices, American mythologies,

Broadway schtick, kabbalistic folktales, sitcom wisecracks, [and] vaudeville blackout sketches”

(42). The play is so monstrous, in fact, that its two parts are seldom performed together, since they run roughly seven hours beginning to end. Similarly, its production history reflects the complexity of writing, developing, and staging such an ambitious play. Though its first half,

Millennium Approaches, was work-shopped in 1990 and premiered in May of 1991 in San

Francisco, its second half, Perestroika, was still in development at that time. Perestroika was work-shopped in Los Angeles through 1992, where it ultimately premiered. The first performance of the work in its entirety was in November 1992—the very moment of the Bush-

Clinton election. Thus, the play makes its entry into the public arena at a moment of particular pique in the Culture Wars.187 It is also a somewhat late moment in the AIDS crisis, but the wounds of ongoing battles over funding and censorship were still fresh.

Kushner attempts to bridge the divides that surfaced during the Culture Wars while redressing and overcoming decades of oppression of gays and lesbians through a revision and rejuvenation of American metanarratives of redemption. In this way, Kushner tries, through the play, to help heal a fractured America through its own promise. Kushner imagines that a more inclusive nation would be a more American America—countering jingoism with a patriotism rooted in a pluralistic vision. Freedman identifies these themes and lauds the goal, but points out the necessary contradictions that arise from such an undertaking: “Kushner desires to create both a dramatic form and an understanding of transcendence that allow a space for queer citizenship in a culture, obsessed with the mythography of rebirth and the inevitability of miracle, that

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 privileges the ideal of family and reactivates the mythos of national coherence and destiny” (41).

The two strains seem contradictory, because the images of rebirth emphasize a reproductive futurity that casts queerness as its Other. These are the same contradictions that shape the debate between an assimilationist activism and a more radical one at this time (as in others). Freedman, therefore, highlights the way that Angels is a play as conflicted and contradictory as the national story it seeks to rewrite.

The plot centers on a man with AIDS named Prior Walter, who has been chosen as the emissary of a band of abandoned Angels. God has left mankind and the angels to fend for themselves and, lacking guidance and in fear of the terrible wreckage humanity is visiting on each other and the world, the Angels decide that they must force God to return by halting the progress of mankind. In an attempt to stop this progress, the angels endow Prior with prophetic vision and an epic mission. The language in which they declare this to him suggests that AIDS is the mark of stasis that he is supposed to bear to the world. They tell him “Oh Exemplum

Paralyticum: On you in you in your blood we have written: STASIS! The END” (180). The marks on him (Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesions) and in his blood (HIV viruses) are meant to indicate to the world that the movement—intercourse—of humanity must end. Prior ultimately decides that the Angels are misguided, rejecting their call and demanding “more life.” Prior himself rejects this apocalyptic narrative about AIDS, but it nonetheless serves as the narrative foil he engages throughout the play. The weight of this metanarrative of a compulsory end to sex and affirmation takes the place in a larger social allegory, and allows the play to introduce some of the moralist and reactionary discourses Kushner seeks to revise and reject.

As Prior grapples with the complexities of what AIDS portends for society, other characters deal with its more mundane details. Belize, a black drag queen and nurse, ministers

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 not only to the physical suffering of Prior and to Roy Cohn—a dramatic analog of the controversial real-life figure—but to the emotional suffering of Louis Ironson, who grapples with the burdens and responsibilities imposed on him as Prior’s partner. Neither Joe Pitt nor Harper

Pitt has HIV, but they are drawn into the dense web of social narratives around the disease because their heterosexual marriage is a sham that conceals Joe’s homosexual desire. Joe owes his career in politics to Cohn and finds himself caught up in a love affair with Louis. Through these characters and their shifting relationships, the play’s epic concerns with the historical implications of AIDS and LGBTQ identity are mediated through the persistent quotidian realities of life. These movements shift the relationships of the various characters until the conventional relationships break down and new ones, formed ad hoc, take their place, a gesture that affirms the importance of affective ties while questioning the value of received forms for them.188

The complicated and often contradictory nature of the effort to move into new affective territory, offers both ambivalence and promise. Freedman describes a particular aspect of the utopic vision that offers some hope, the appropriative nature of it:

[Kushner] offers the image of redeemed community in the guise of a utopian

Americanness where the nation is reconstituted as a postnuclear family made up of

quarreling outsiders. … That Kushner is echoing a problematic nationalist discourse is

ultimately less important than his appropriation of it for a frankly queer political

project—and of the family-as-nation metaphor for a nonprocreative notion of both family

and nation that includes all forms of family in a new national narrative. (57)

In other words, Kushner’s play does re-enact problematic metanarratives, but adapts them to more inclusive forms, thereby hoping to redeem both the nation and its outsiders, and possibly to move forward with new forms of community. Kushner’s use of gay and seropositive characters

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 represents the potency of LGBTQ politics and AIDS discourse for understanding and negotiating the contours of American identity, resisting their characterization as totally Other or different.

While the play should not be read as only incidentally about gay characters or HIV, it should be recognized as a play in which those characters, their lived experience, and their politics exist as important players in a reconfiguration of U.S. nationalist metanarratives, not as outsiders to it— neither as abject nor as radical.

Freedman’s use of the phrase “postnuclear” above is doubly significant, for we can understand it on the one hand as indicating the incipient end of détente with the Soviet Union and the Cold War moment directly invoked by the title of the second half of the play:

Perestroika. The Soviet period of “reorganization” roughly coincides with the action of the play, so the pervasive anxiety of a nuclear strategy based on “mutually assured destruction” also inflects the concept of a “postnuclear family,” offering a hope beyond nuclear annihilation.189

Additionally, talks to ratify the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) were underway at the time of the 1990 workshop production of Millennium Approaches, and the 1991 premiere of a complete Millennium Approaches with a staged reading of Perestroika preceded the dissolution of the Soviet Union by a matter of months.

On the other hand, we must also read the use of postnuclear in terms of the replacement of the nuclear family and its concomitant insistence on procreation, genealogies, heterosexuality, and the binary ideologies of the domestic and public. The new family that will take its place is one not built around the demands of reproduction that Edelman notes have been the core of existing political structures on both the right and left. Nor will they reinforce the domestic as the space off limits to political protection. Instead, ad hoc families formed in response to crisis and

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 adapted to material needs will be the new model. In this sense, the imagined family is “post-” two times, in that it succeeds the nuclear aggression of the Cold War and the nuclear family.

Angels is deeply invested in reconsidering models of the family and how they create and foreclose identities. Aware of how the hegemony of the family and of patriarchy have dominated possible identities for LGBTQ individuals, as well as shaping narratives of political action, the play both contests conventional notions of family relationships and offers new family models that are less exclusive.

One of the models of affective relationships that Kushner responds to in detail is the influence of patriarchy in politics, that is to say, the way that patriarchal relationships serve as the template for many of the circuits and exchanges of political power. Like many such models,

Angels erects it in order to demolish it. Making Ronald Reagan Joe’s father in a metaphorical slippage that captures Joe’s political genealogy, Louis asks Joe, “What’s it like to be the child of the Zeitgeist? To have the American Animus as your dad? …So what’s it like to be Reagan’s kid?” (77). This all important family, of which Joe is now a part (in the way one is the child of one’s time, of MTV, of the culture), is the role model for the nation, but, alas, headed by an actor and full of celebrities, it cannot be authentic. Louis has said “It’s not really a family, the Reagans,

I read People, there aren’t any connections there, no love, they don’t ever even speak to each other except through their agents” (77). If the shining example of the American nuclear family is the Reagans, then in Angels, we are doomed. All show and no substance, the Reagans are adept at playing a family, but fail where it counts: “connections.” Here, connections refers to affection and loyalty, and these same emotions make up the fatherly political relationships established by

Roy Cohn, relationships more inflected with the connotations that connections takes on in a business or political context.

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For Cohn, the people to whom one is connected are networks to be exploited, capitalized on. Nonetheless, the relationships this model fosters are also sometimes intimate. In one early scene, Roy explains the operation of political influence to Joe, who has been his protégé.

Through the terms of Roy’s excurses, Kushner provocatively inverts the family values rhetoric that was ascendant in the late 1980s and that Cohn contributed to. Roy tells Joe:

Everyone who makes it in this world makes it because somebody older and more

powerful takes an interest. The most precious asset in life, I think, is the ability to be a

good son. You have that, Joe. Somebody who can be a good son to a father who pushes

them farther than they would otherwise go. I’ve had many fathers, I owe my life to them,

powerful, powerful men. Walter Winchell, Edgar Hoover. Joe McCarthy most of all. He

valued me because I am a good lawyer, but he loved me because I was and am a good

son. He was a very difficult man, very guarded and cagey; I brought out something tender

in him. (62)

Shortly thereafter, he continues, “The father-son relationship is central to life. … The son offers the father his life as a vessel for carrying forth his father’s dream” (62). In these passages, Roy’s words describe the father-son relationship as centered on the transfer of power, highlighting the role of family metaphors in the structure of the state and interpellating those who would wield authority—demanding their allegiance to the patriarchal narrative in ways similar to Uncle

Sam’s demand for loyalty from Nixon in The Public Burning, which I address in Chapter One.

But Kushner’s choice of words also provocatively suggests a sexual component to the mentorship. The repetition of the word powerful, as well as the notion of the younger man as a receptive vessel, and a later description of “a father’s love” as “very, very hard” (62)—these speak equally to sex and penetration.

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Additionally, the emphasis on tenderness, love, and transgression of boundaries (“pushes one farther than they would otherwise go”) create romantic and sexual undertones. Perhaps more to the point, this scene is juxtaposed through a sudden jump cut with a scene of the character

Louis cruising for sex in Central Park’s Rambles. The juxtaposition causes the themes of both scenes to cross over into each other. Thus, Roy’s discussion of power becomes an elaborate expression of same-sex desire, while conversely, the openly sexual scene between Louis and the anonymous man in the Rambles becomes a dance of power.

Joe’s relationship with his wife Harper, an isolated, unstable woman with an addiction to

Valium, also causes us to reevaluate conventional family structures. Her marriage to Joe is cold and stilted. Joe’s lack of sexual desire for her has left her unsure of the meaning of their relationship and desperate for a more fulfilling life. She has, in a sense, been left adrift by the demands of a normative culture that has taught her to crave married life while emptying that life of its value. The sexless character of their relationship is demonstrated when, after Harper has been talking to herself, Joe arrives after his meeting with Roy. “Buddy,” Joe calls her, and saying

“Buddy kiss,” he kisses her (24). Joe’s use of buddy signifies that the relationship is friendly—or that he wishes it were so—rather than intimate or romantic. In fact, it seems that Joe is insisting on this, attempting to use words to create a relationship of platonic amiability, rather than sexuality or romance.

In this moment, they seem like awkward pals, the sexual absence that characterizes their relationship is an unavoidable silence. In a later scene, the strain of living with the platonic character of what should be a romantic relationship boils over. In fact, the illusion of their happy marriage is never complete in the play, and though Harper often cannot bring herself to mention

Joe’s homosexuality, it is clear that she has known of it. As they fight, she reproaches herself, “It

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 was wrong of me to marry you, I knew you … (She stops herself)” (43, ellipses and italics in original). Joe and Harper seem unable to mention Joe’s homosexuality directly in this early part of the play, and their reluctance expresses their stubborn hold on an illusion of normative life that they nonetheless suspect is untenable.

But in this scene, they come to confront the failure of that image, and Harper uses the figure of the child to bring together the many ways they have failed the reproductive norm. She tells Joe she is pregnant with “A baby born addicted to pills. A baby who does not dream but who hallucinates, who stares up at us with big mirror eyes and who does not know who we are”

(47). In this moment, Harper raises the specter not only of addiction, but of an uncomprehending future that reflects back to us our failings. Their child represents not only a single individual, but the offspring of the system that produced such false marriages as the condition for social belonging.

In the end, this twisted version of the hetero-monogamous-domestic myth is reduced to what it is: an arrangement of capital. In the scene of their final parting, Harper tells Joe, “I want your credit card. That’s all. You can keep track of me from where the charges come from. If you want to keep track. I don’t care” (272). Harper has laid out clearly the hard-won insights she gleaned from her struggle to make sense of their relationship. In exchange for support in its crudest form—money—Harper has been responsible for being an object of projection, a space where Joe can inscribe his illusory image in the normative mode, something that protects his own ability to earn money. When the illusions of their marriage fade, she wants to continue to act out what it ultimately was, an exchange of services, a support contract.

An analog to Joe and Harper is the romance between Louis and Prior. As Joe and

Harper’s relationship is constructed in the play as already on the verge of collapse, so is Louis

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 and Prior’s. Their relationship is deeply centered on Prior’s experiences living with AIDS and

Louis’s difficulty coping with the responsibilities this imparts to him. In fact, Louis leaves Prior in a scene in which the realities of Prior’s disease literally erupt. Prior wakes Louis up in the middle of the night; he is suffering an acute attack of an AIDS-related illness. The two argue over whether to call an ambulance, and Louis goes off stage to call when, in one of the most controversial scenes in the play, Prior loses control of his bowels and defecates on stage. The scene ends with Louis crying “I can’t I can’t I can’t” (54). When we encounter Louis and Prior again, Prior is unconscious in the hospital and Louis is having trouble dealing with the grim, bodily realities of AIDS. The presence of body fluids—feces and blood—has made unavoidable the danger and responsibility of living in close contact with someone whose body is being ravaged. Louis decides he is unable to handle it and leaves.

Soon, Joe and Louis become involved, and for Joe, this is a moment of authentic life. He embraces that part of him, his desire, that he has denied for so long, and the experience is electrifying. The two men spend a month in bed, exploring each other sexually and engaging in a honeymoon period that, ironically, the play largely elides in favor of the scenes of discord that signal its end. In a scene in which the two engage in foreplay on a beach (202-07), Joe expounds the mythological promise of America and expresses a deeply hopeful optimism and faith in

Reagan, all while professing his love for Louis. Louis on the other hand, is deeply cynical and mistrustful of politics because of the institutional prejudice he has witnessed, and he also refuses to accept that Joe loves him. In the end, the scene devolves with Louis wanting to return to Prior, and Joe melodramatically stripping off his Mormon temple garments in a metaphorical shedding of his old identity. Though the tryst with Louis has been invigorating and transformative for Joe, it has been a guilty self-absorbed dalliance for Louis.

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With the newfound affirmation of Joe’s desire, the play almost seems to offer this end to the closet as an answer to the corrupted family structures that characterized the beginning of the play, until we remember that Louis is not morally free to participate in the new life. He still has ties of affection and responsibility to Prior, and his freedom to engage in carefree love and sex— and to enter into this temporary domestic bliss—are purchased only at the cost of distancing and forgetting the rightful object of his love in a medical prison. Though Joe and Louis’s relationship has its affirming moments, it is founded on the mutual self-loathing of the two men. In the scene where they first connect and before they make love, Joe confesses “I don’t think I deserve being loved” and Louis responds “There? See? We already have a lot in common” (123). As a moment that significantly advances their relationship and establishes the connection on which they will build, this is a poor foundation.

The play cannot let this model stand. Where there should be happiness there is only the camaraderie of suffering. And where there should be domestic bliss, there is only its strife. When

Joe and Louis first consummate their new relationship, they do so in Louis’s new apartment—he has moved out of Prior’s place. The set description leaves no question that this is a place of despair, not utopia: “Louis’s new apartment in the arctic wastes of Alphabetland; barren of furniture, unpainted, messy, grim” (162, italics in original). The terms “wastes” and “barren” mark it as a fruitless place, and we wonder if it could perhaps be one that can revel in being closed out of futurity, forming an alternative space not bound by the imperative to reproduce,

However, the negative connotations of the words are quickly asserted when they are combined with messy and grim, and the space is coded as empty and ungenerative in ways we know are undesirable. Here, Louis and Joe can only recreate the false, “barren,” relationship Joe had with

Harper. Here there are only illusions of happiness, not authentic experiences. It is important to

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 note, however, that this is not because the relationship is not heterosexual, but because it is based on false affection and personal indulgence. This is a relationship formed in abdication or avoidance of the proper responsibilities of care and loyalty that human relationships demand and that AIDS highlights.

Though many of the ways that family models are reconstructed in Angels in America turn out badly, the play presents the dissolution and recreation of family models as a way of envisioning the transformation that AIDS requires of the nation—in large part the major narrative time of the play is spent on the dissolution that must precede the utopic future. After all, the false models of affective relationships—such as domestic heterosexuality—need to be actively made contingent in a process of working through so that more authentic relationships can form outside normative lines. But in this process of reformation, interpersonal responsibility for care and support must take priority. Freedman’s analysis leads us to a consideration of these themes in the Epilogue, a time in the play where most of the action has been resolved and we see the consequences of the drama and its vision for the future. Here, most of the characters gather together, but the exclusions are notable. Hannah and Louis, Prior and Belize are there, but Joe,

Harper, and Roy are absent.

The importance for Kushner’s play of Roy, in particular, can hardly be overstated, making his exclusion significant. Cadden calls him “the Satanic catalyst” of the play (84).

Kushner’s efforts to rewrite national family narratives require him as bugbear and evil foil.190

Roy is the element of the community that cannot survive or be assimilated, not because all subjectivities cannot be welcomed into the whole, but because Roy’s greed for power and his willingness to harm others—to kill Ethel Rosenberg, for example—have no place in the new polity. It is not his identity at issue, but his actions. His unmitigated self-interest represents a

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 more dangerous threat than Louis’s failure of responsibility; the greed and amorality he represents have led to the corruption of the institutions of society. Moreover, his self-hatred and his closeted persecution of other LGBTQ individuals cannot be reconciled with the affirmative, accepting space of the new nation. For these reasons, Roy must be sacrificed—and as Freedman points out, this happens in the play quite literally.

Roy is in possession of an illicit stash of the anti-retroviral medication AZT at the time of his death, and Belize, who has access to his hospital room as his nurse, steals the drug to give to

Prior. Thus, “Cohn dies, it seems, so that Prior might live to preside over the new queer postnuclear family” (Freedman 55). As Freedman articulates it, the play enacts a sort of quid- pro-quo, re-allocating life-saving measures from Roy to Prior. Roy represents the old world

Kushner sees dying off, provocatively, from AIDS. The world of self-hatred, of persecution, and of corruption is the world that will pass away as a result of the AIDS crisis, not the gay world of affirmation and acceptance.191 This gesture is a reversal of the cultural imperative that the person with AIDS dies in order to preserve the discourses of homogeneity that underpin society—and is a denial of the idea that the morbidity of AIDS is a divine retribution for the corruption of homosexuality. This latter is the dominant-discourse insistence that Patton paraphrases as,

“people with AIDS must in the end always be silenced, their words given over to an expiating hermeneutic” (131). The irony here is that it is the right-wing person with AIDS who dies, and the words that are silenced are those of self-hate, of the closet, and of oppressive state identity policies. Conversely, Prior, the out gay man with AIDS, survives the play, and his death, in order to take part in a more affirmative America.

This final scene moves between very material concerns and more epic ones. As has the play overall, it demonstrates the necessary interconnectedness of abstract visions and quotidian

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 reality, a paradox Joe’s mother Hannah summarizes in this scene by saying “You can’t live in the world without an idea of the world, but it’s living that makes the ideas. You can’t wait for a theory, but you have to have a theory” (278). The necessary contradiction of living authentically with incomplete theories and the oscillation between big-picture vision and local-order concerns plays out in the shifting staging of the scene. Though we begin in the real world—the Bethesda fountain in Central Park—Prior soon steps out of the action to address the audience while muting the conversation between Belize, Louis, and Hannah over the recent fall of the Berlin Wall and transformations in the Soviet Union. Prior turns down the global political debate in order to muse on the beauty of the Park, a consideration of an abstraction. But he quickly returns to the fountain and enlists his compatriots to tell different aspects of the story of the fountain, pulling each out of their conversation with each other and into his intimate conversation with the audience. Louis is borrowed to relate how Bethesda landed in Jerusalem, Belize to describe the powers of the fountain she created there, and Hannah to foretell its future function in the end times. By this point, the entire group has transitioned out of the material world into the dramatic dialogue about apocalypse and myth that began with a musing on beauty.

The quotidian world intervenes again, of course, as Louis and Belize devolve into debates over Israel and Palestine, but Prior returns again to the big picture. And what is more important is that each of them plays a role together in the coming transformation of America and the world.

They form a new community and a new myth from the wreckage of the old. This aspect highlights the play’s millennialism and its engagement with apocalyptic sentiments. It suggests that America’s pluralist vision can emerge from the homogeneity and corruption of the late

1980s and that the crisis and death of the AIDS pandemic serve a transformational purpose.

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Still, as Freedman also points out, Kushner’s narrative is not so much transformative as it is quintessentially American—in that transformation is a hallmark of the American narrative. As

Sontag puts it, relating the predictable metaphorization of AIDS as apocalypse, “There is … the need for an apocalyptic scenario that is specific to ‘Western’ society, and perhaps even more so to the United States. (America, as someone has said, is a nation with the soul of a church—an evangelical church prone to announcing radical endings and brand-new beginnings)” (87). In this sense, the apocalyptic feeling that AIDS becomes a sign for and that its material realities succumb to, is the recirculation of a persistent millennialism that marks American national identity and that Kushner registers in the title of the first half of the play, Millennium Approaches

(as well as perhaps the second half, Perestroika). Nonetheless, the play’s argument that gay identity and a more queer nation are extensions of, rather than anomalies within, the larger

American mythos is significant and certainly enough to threaten those who would ply the opposite rhetoric. This is, in many ways, the underlying challenge to exclusive discourses of nationhood that likely animate many protests of the play that take the form of obscenity challenges.

The polemic against tolerance that Louis voices in the play can help us extend this discussion into the multiculturalist politics of this decade, as well. Louis describes the limits of tolerance as it aligns with a capitalist system and neoliberalism—and, for that matter, liberalism.

In the end, he confirms, tolerance merely papers over inequality, and AIDS, by showing us the body breaking down, has given us a chance to see the emptiness of the discourse of tolerance:

“what I think is that what AIDS shows us is the limits of tolerance, that it’s not enough to be tolerated because when the shit hits the fan, you find out how much tolerance is worth. Nothing.

And underneath all the tolerance is intense, passionate hatred” (Kushner 96). Certainly

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 underpinning Louis’s speech is his own guilt at not being able to tolerate Prior’s illness. He has translated his personal failing into an abstraction that explains other people’s failing; it is a deflection. But there is a certain insight here, as well, and Louis describes clearly the fact that tolerance speaks about equality while persisting in difference. The tolerated entity, subject, identity, is always an outsider, and though the dominant group might refrain from the violence of expulsion, the promise expulsion remains.192 To tolerate something is not to incorporate it, but merely to allow it temporarily or rhetorically diminish the material deprivation that attends it.

“Who Does What to Whom, and How They Do It”: Philadelphia, the Law, and the

Aesthetics of the Middle-Class Family

Turning now to a more mainstream cultural artifact—one for which the appellation

“mainstream” is a kind of victory—I want to look at Jonathan Demme’s film about AIDS,

Philadelphia. An important element of the film is that it stages the public debates about accepting those with HIV/AIDS in the context of a courtroom drama, which brings into our consideration the function of the law in such contestations. The wrangling of figures like Jesse

Helms and others to enshrine anti-gay or other discriminatory ideologies in legislation suggests that the law has to some extent always operated as a space that is responsive to specific historical conditions, even though it is also mythically characterized as deliberative, universal, objective.

Figures such as Cohn similarly demonstrate that individual lawyers might be unscrupulous, but still the law itself often benefits from the supposition that it rises above or exceeds such petty concerns, appearing perhaps subject to manipulation, but tending more towards justice than abuse.193 That the law has this (imperfect) tendency toward justice makes it a metonym for the

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American nationalist mythology; in both cases a blind and egalitarian force tests the facts and the mettle of the players, weighs the possible outcomes, and distributes power according to merit, rather than favor, birth, or whim. Such an ideal animates the rule of law, the free market, and the

American Revolution and underwrote the use of the courts in the pursuit of civil rights.

This ideology finds cultural expression not only in obviously nationalist artifacts, but also in those that offer narratives that challenge certain aspects of society—those that are reformist rather than radical. Such was the case with the 1993 film Philadelphia, starring Tom Hanks and

Denzel Washington and directed by Jonathan Demme. In the film, while (some) lawyers are prejudiced or self-interested, the law itself is cast as a beacon of hope, a source of salvation, and the instrument of a balancing justice.194 This is because according to the film’s liberal sensibilities, a person’s humanity is a universal entity of which sexuality—or race or class or gender, for that matter—is an incidental characteristic. The law, in this formulation, regards all people as equal and ignores the specificity of their histories. Moreover, in the film, America’s best aspects—such as the rule of law, the equality of all persons before the law, and the principles of equality and representative democracy—are seen as redeeming the nation when it fails and righting it when it goes astray. In this way, the film (perhaps strategically) shares much with mainstream nationalist notions and reifies, rather than critiques, the ontologies of American society, even as it points out that a lack of equality for gay individuals needs redress.

In the film, the narrative is the primary, though not exclusive, mechanism through which this message is conveyed (staging and cinematography also play significant parts). In the film,

Hanks plays the talented young lawyer Andrew Beckett, a gay man living with AIDS and a rising star at an influential Philadelphia law firm. Initially, his employers are unaware of his sexuality or HIV status, though they become aware of both in the course of the film. Beckett is

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 fired following a suspicious incident involving a misplaced file and then hires Joseph Miller, a personal injury attorney played by Washington to pursue a wrongful termination lawsuit. The rest of the film centers on Beckett and Miller’s efforts to prove in court that the incident and firing were engineered by the law firm because of Beckett’s disease, as well as on Miller’s evolving views on homosexuality and AIDS.

Though the drama of the film revolves around Beckett’s struggle for justice, the primary character, the one who undergoes the most profound change, is Miller. As the Jet review of

Philadelphia noted, “it is Washington’s Joe Miller who experiences the greatest emotional transformation in the film, as he must come to terms with his longheld prejudices and review his longheld feelings about fairness and human decency” (“Denzel”). In many respects, then, the film is not centrally about LGBTQ politics or the experience of those living with AIDS, but uses them as a backdrop against which to dramatize the struggles of mainstream society to find terms on which it can incorporate such individuals while maintaining its underlying ideologies. It is about the testing of which elements of American society are fundamental, and arriving at the conclusion that it is a set of shared beliefs (the law), not ethnic, sexual, or racial homogeneity, that defines the nation.195

Ultimately, Miller prevails in his efforts to prove Beckett’s humanity and the jury—and through them the court, and through it the law—confirms that the firm fired him because he had

AIDS, and that when they did so, they broke the law (to paraphrase Miller’s opening statement).

The message affirmed through this story is that all individuals, regardless of their sexuality or able-bodiedness deserve equal treatment, but it is also that AIDS was not a central part of

Beckett’s identity, that it was not relevant to his performance as a lawyer, to his role in the firm, and, by extension, to other aspects of his participation in civic life. That this notion was a

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 dominant feature of the characterization and plot is implicit in the way Washington describes the growth of his character in the movie: “Joe was nervous about being in the same room with Andy; but by the end, he’s actually touching him. He understands this is another human being who’s hurting, and what he’s labeled as shouldn’t have anything to do with their relationship” (qtd. in

“Denzel”). Through the course of the narrative, Miller evolves from a position of prejudice against difference to one in which difference is erased. In this way, the film reinforces the notion that citizenship is a status that exists outside the influence of sexuality, gender, and race, and it seems to encourage a public discourse in which such things play no role. The erasure of difference as a significant factor of civil identity, rather than the acceptance of difference as a source of invigoration and change, indicates the particular ideology of the film as one of “color- blindness.” Thus, it shares the sense of multicultural tolerance that Louis speaks of in Angels, only here it is offered quite sincerely as the redeeming element of American identity.

The movie was a profound success in many respects, a fact that suggests the popularity of this notion. It grossed over $77 million domestically and an additional $129 million internationally, earning roughly eight times its production cost in box office receipts. Moreover, the film was critically acclaimed, and numerous Academy Award nominations—including Best

Screenplay—bore fruit in Hanks winning the 1994 Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role (and the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Dramatic Film) and Bruce Springsteen winning for Best

Original Song. But the film is also credited for advancing national opinions on AIDS by putting a charismatic face with the disease and harnessing the power of narrative to generate sympathy for those living with HIV/AIDS. As one writer reflected on the 20th anniversary of the film, “it’s difficult to think of a movie that had a more humanizing and positive effect in changing perceptions about people with HIV/AIDS” (Webber). Moreover, the filmmakers deliberately

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 employed some fifty people from the Philadelphia area living with AIDS as extras in the film, quite literally documenting their presence for the viewing audience (Gordon). Additionally, they filmed an early scene in which Beckett visits his doctor at ActionAIDS, a local Philadelphia

AIDS services organization (Webber). For these efforts to humanize and support those living with AIDS as well as to combat the negative attitudes they faced, the film is often remembered positively.

But reviews were not universally celebratory. When he reviewed the film for Newsweek,

David Ansen called it a film about “not a disease, but a climate of intolerance that turns a disease into a stigma” (Ansen). Acknowledging that it “has the power to open more than a few blinkered hearts,” he nonetheless critiqued it for its heavy-handed sentimental style, noting of the pairing of Beckett and Miller that “This is the kind of morally symmetrical, social-issue setup we’ve come to associate with TV movies, and ‘Philadelphia’ doesn’t entirely transcend the didactic limitations of the formula.” As Ansen did, most critics acknowledge the important role the film played as the first major-studio film about AIDS. Nonetheless, the demands of Hollywood cinema required ahistorical and unrealistic contortions. As Kirsten Ostherr describes it, the

Beckett character is constructed in such a way that similarities with mainstream culture are overwhelming and that, as a result, “the clean-cut, all-American protagonist, with his unequivocally supportive extended family and friends, his social privilege as a highly educated professional, his access to health care, and his sanitized sex life, is yet another stereotypical

Hollywood fantasy of AIDS, not a realistic portrayal” (233). Similarly, Paul Sendziuk notes that by aligning Beckett with the prejudiced Miller as his lawyer-of-last-resort, the film obscures the extensive networks of support that emerged from within the gay community in the early years of the epidemic. In fact, the first lawsuit filed for AIDS discrimination was filed by Gay Men’s

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Health Crisis and Lambda Legal in 1983, but the film suggests that no community legal support was available to Beckett.

The film is often seen as necessarily imperfect because of Demme’s goal of reaching a mainstream audience that still harbored deep biases against LGBTQ individuals and deep fears about AIDS. The film’s sanitized presentation of sex, affection, and desire between Beckett and his lover Miguel (played by Antonio Banderas), along with elements designed to make Beckett more mainstream through, for example, providing him with a loving and supportive family, are all part of reaching an audience that was not immediately receptive to its message. For some, this means it falls short of the kind of radical politics it might have advanced, while for others, it did what it could and made important progress. Sendziuk sums it up thus:

Philadelphia was not the movie for which everyone hoped, and certainly lacked the

invention, political commitment, and, dare I say, rage that propelled many of the

independent and activist filmmakers discussed in the preceding texts. But in terms of

raising awareness and tolerance outside queer circles, it arguably became the most

important film produced in the time of AIDS. (447)

Thus, the film, by attempting to address a mainstream, heterosexual audience, fails to accurately represent the experience or politics of the gay community at the heart of its project. Nonetheless, as the first major motion picture to take on the topic, and by making important strides in raising the visibility of people living with HIV/AIDS, it has had some positive social effects as well.

Like Angels in America, family structures play an important role in the film’s message, partly because aligning Beckett with mainstream family structures both suited the sentimental style of the film and reinforced a non-threatening domesticity very much like that effected by the

AIDS Quilt. Monica B. Pearl asserts that “Philadelphia is a film of wedding rings and babies, as

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 though the weight of homosexuality is so strong that it needs dramatic overcompensation to give the film a sense of balance” (107). This tendency to overemphasize the reproductive bona fides of the film compels us to read the film through Lee Edelman’s No Future, which conceives of the child as a figure of a hegemonic insistence on futurity. In considering a movie in which AIDS and/as death is intrinsically linked to the place of the gay protagonist in society, such a consideration is unavoidable.

The film operates as a foil to Edelman’s argument in No Future. Drawing on Lacanian thought, Edelman encourages an oppositional queerness that refuses the future-directed movement of political activity both right and left. In a particularly lucid expression of this idea,

Edelman writes “the true oppositional politics implicit in the practice of queer sexualities lies not in the liberal discourse and patient negotiation of tolerances and rights, … but in the capacity of queer sexualities to figure the radical dissolution of the contract, in every sense social and

Symbolic” (16). Here, Edelman’s polemic militates against aligning with either conservative or progressive forces because both insist on allegiance to an underlying animating structure of futurity that queerness, as outside the reproductive matrix, might rightly resist. In fact, queerness has, historically, been abjected because it represents this refusal of reproduction, and Edelman encourages queer theory to embrace this role for its oppositional potential. But this is not the vision of Philadelphia, which steers in a very different direction for reasons stated above.

Edelman addresses the film in passing in No Future. He examines the final scenes, in which Beckett as a dying man, an adult in a body marked by disease, fades out to be replaced at his wake by home videos of him as a child. The sentiment evoked through this juxtaposition evokes a sense of moral imperative, a part of the film’s desire to inspire change. But for

Edelman, this change is marked by the limitations of heteronormativity and reproductive futurity

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 that are inherent in any politics. He writes that “Thus, the occasion of a gay man’s death gives the film the excuse to unleash once more the disciplinary image of the ‘innocent’ Child performing its mandatory cultural labor of social reproduction” (19). The film, in promoting any politics at all trespasses Edelman’s call to embrace the negativity that has been assigned queerness and take on the role of provocative anti-futurity. But the film does so in many ways that are resonant with Edelman’s polemic. Namely, it reifies social institutions and yokes social progress and continuity to the figure of the child.

While Edelman’s ideas have been criticized stridently by Jack Halberstam and others for his anti-political stance as well as his failure to acknowledge non-white and non-male perspectives on queerness, Edelman’s critique of the pervasive image of the child and the underlying logics of reproduction shine a useful light on the discourses at work in

Philadelphia.196 The film offers support for, rather than a critique of, neoliberal state and family formations, even as it condemns homophobia. While the law is a salient element of the film’s thematics, it is paralleled by the role of the family in figuring proper social relations and subjectivities. That recent LGBTQ politics have pursued legal recognition for family status

(through adoption and marriage rights) indicates the ongoing interconnectedness of these fields.

In a move similar to the implicit argument of sameness running through the film’s appeal to the law, the film’s argument for the acceptance of LGBTQ persons into the American polity is foregrounded on the notion that such persons already fit expected norms of behavior and relationships. It does this rather than advocate a reform in the rules of belonging to incorporate alternative ways of being and loving. By casting Beckett and Miguel as fundamentally like a middle-class (or affluent) family, Philadelphia contends that LGBTQ people already fit the mold of model Americans.

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There is a history of using domestic settings and assumptions to rebut the projection of sexuality onto images and representations that creators wish to remain non-sexual. Anne

Higonnet discusses the fact that interpretations can be limited (and safeguarded) by certain contexts, after all, “[s]ome visual comparisons, verbal explanations, and contexts still do signal safety. The more traditionally private, the safer the signal. Awareness of any exposure to a public, rather than familial, gaze has become warning sign” (140). Higonnet’s emphasis is the inverse here, but the important point for my reading is that the home and domestic settings—and family, importantly—can signal non-sexual love as a way to rebut in advance the imputation of sexual content and meaning for artworks. Perhaps more to the point, she writes, “No context better retains its ability to soothe than the family album” (141). I think it makes sense to understand elements of Philadelphia as grouping images of families—Beckett’s, Miller’s—and that then the film can be seen as just such a family album, using the domestic space and the family structure to promote affective relationships while downplaying sexual content.

Though at various levels this message runs throughout the film, two scenes in particular confirm this reading. In the first, Miguel rushes to his partner’s side at the hospital after Andrew has had an acute attack of an AIDS-related illness very similar to the one Prior suffers in Angels in America. Beckett’s doctor has recommended a colonoscopy, and Miguel responds confrontationally because he believes the doctor has not adequately considered Beckett’s comfort in suggesting such an invasive and perhaps unnecessary procedure. In doing this, Miguel plays the part of the concerned partner in a moment of crisis. He yells at the doctor and reacts emotionally in a way that allows Beckett to respond rationally and diplomatically. The two take up complementary roles that allows their relationship to play out according to fairly conventional binary models (Ansen describes their relationship thus, “their brief scenes convey both the

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 tenderness and the irritations of a longtime intimacy”). The fact that this scene occurs at the hospital and that the doctor momentarily challenges Miguel’s right to be present on the grounds that he is not technically family serve as justification for inclusion in the film’s more prominent project of highlighting the institutional barriers to LGBTQ equality.197 But it is the sentimental interaction that gives this project weight—Ansen remarks that the film’s “emotionalism is unfiltered by cool”—and the use of conventional tropes of affective relationships serves to create a feeling of familiarity and recognition.

The underlying suggestion that gay relationships are more similar to than different from heterosexual ones is construed more overtly in a later scene at Beckett’s parents’ house. After the festivities of his parents’ 40th wedding anniversary, Beckett and his siblings have gathered among themselves. The staging presents the multiple couples that make up the larger extended family. The parents sit together, while arrayed to their left and right are each of their children and their spouses. Among them sits Andrew, holding his infant niece, giving her a bottle; Miguel sits to his right.198

As Andrew explains the difficulties the family should anticipate with the impending trial, the camera turns from Andrew and Miguel, framed as a nuclear family with child, to his brother and his wife, back to Andrew and Miguel, then to another brother with his wife, then again to

Andrew and Miguel, then to Andrew’s sister and her husband, then to Andrew’s mother and father. Each time the camera moves from a shot framing one couple to the next, an equivalence is made between the heterosexual couplings of his siblings and that between Andrew and

Miguel, with the latter even being marked as procreative through a visual slippage involving the niece. This equivalence supports the notion that LGBTQ individuals should be accepted into the neoliberal polity on the basis not that their difference is productive or that social institutions

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 might benefit from diversity—but rather on the grounds LGBTQ individuals actually already represent the status quo.199

But it is not only the cinematography that merits attention here. The scene concludes by invoking civil rights and the notions of equality marked by the pursuit of justice in the courts.

Each sibling, backed by silent but encouraging spouses, has assured Beckett that he will have their support. The most emphatic expression of this comes from Beckett’s mother, who says “I didn’t raise my kids to sit in the back of the bus.” Her equation of Beckett’s wrongful termination suit with the civil rights struggle makes overt a comparison that was merely latent up until this point. The scene immediately transitions to an aerial shot of the statue of William Penn atop Philadelphia city hall, cementing the association with the long tradition of American justice and linking through juxtaposition the already interrelated discourses of family and law.

Court scenes in the film also present opportunities for the film to double down on its pro- family message. Social stigmatization is voiced by defense counsel, played by Mary

Steenburgen. In cross-examining Beckett and in her statements to the jury, Steenburgen’s character ventriloquizes and plays on the prejudices of society at the time, suggesting that he deserved to contract AIDS because of his sexuality. She says of him in her opening statement that “Andrew Beckett is angry because his lifestyle, his reckless behavior, has cut short his life, and in his anger, his rage, he is lashing out.” In this brief speech, Steenburgen’s character brings into the film the deeply suggestive label lifestyle, which was often used to characterize LGBTQ identity as a choice and outside the mainstream—and therefore to insinuate that those who acted on same-sex desire were responsible for contracting the disease. She also speaks to the idea that those who pursue monetary settlements in the courts are compromised by greed or self-interest.

These lines of thinking boil over when she asks Beckett to describe how he was exposed to HIV,

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 and he is forced to reveal that it was the result of an incident of infidelity to Miguel. Beckett contracted the disease from anonymous sex in a gay porn theater. His revelation is a tense moment in the film because Beckett’s image as a stanchion of monogamy and non-threatening domesticity is understood by Miller to be crucial to winning the sympathy of the jury (and of the wider viewing public they stand in for).

The eruption of sex in this form at this moment poses one of the biggest crises in the film, a moment when Beckett’s sympathy with the jury is eroded and his credibility as a protagonist is jeopardized. Ultimately, they recover; we know that Miguel forgives him and that Beckett acknowledges the wrongness of his actions. The film, thus, can excuse Beckett—no one is perfect—but he has learned from his mistake and been punished enough.

That Beckett, as a model LGBTQ individual, buys into the system of American ideology is signified by his pursuit of justice through the courts. As representative institutions of the state, turning to the courts is an appeal to American ideals, representing a belief that it is his employers—as prejudiced and privileged—that are aberrations in civil society, rather than himself. There can be no more compelling evidence that Beckett believes in the promise of

America than his coming to its institutions in his time of crisis. Similarly, there is no greater extolling of the validity of such a move than Beckett’s success at trial. Beckett’s victory confirms that American institutions—specifically the law—can right the wrongs of individual injustice.

This notion of justice is consonant with, among other things, Jodi Melamed’s description of the operation of multiculturalism.200 The equality Beckett garners for himself as a gay man and someone living with AIDS comes only at the cost of relinquishing the revolutionary potential of the margins and is predicated on the embrace of both family norms and American institutions. Though not precisely individualist, because he has made provisions in his will that

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 some of the monetary award will go to charities, Beckett’s victory does seem to require an investment in the possessive individualism and capitalist system of the American state. In fact, though the narrative begins with a critique of the way American society is currently organized by reminding us that discrimination persists, it ends with a celebration of the potential for overarching American ideals to redeem the nation from such errors.

By insisting that America can, and thus will, right its wrongs, by overtly celebrating the system while only nominally critiquing its effects, Philadelphia serves to reinforce notions of hope and futurity that Edelman rejects. In fact, though the film concludes with Beckett’s death, and thus positions death as its more than literal endpoint, it also serves as a timely motivation to translate hope into action lest we lose the opportunity—and as Edelman notes, the eruption of images of a young Beckett at this moment suggest rebirth and hope for the next generation. The question is not whether we should work for change, but whether we will rise to the occasion now, rather than putting it off.

The change, however, that the film suggests is a renewed investment in American metanarratives, in the normalization and incorporation of civil society’s outsiders through the extension of rights accompanied by the demand to adhere to middle-class norms. Edelman notes that at the horizon or telos of this structure is the recreation and the reinforcement of the structure that creates abjection and a rejection of the oppositional potential of queerness:

If the queer’s abjectified difference … secures normativity’s identity, the queer’s

disavowal of that difference affirms normativity’s singular truth. … Such refusals

perform, despite themselves, subservience to the law that effectively imposes politics as

the only game in town, exacting as the price of admission the subject’s

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(hetero)normalization, which is accomplished, regardless of sexual practice or sexual

‘orientation,’ through compulsory abjuration of the future-negating queer. (26)

It is important to recognize the extent to which this negotiation of belonging only happens at great cost. However, Edelman would leave us in a space without an effective politics, rejecting politics on all grounds as fundamentally complicit in Othering. Moreover, it would not adequately acknowledge the material and symbolic progress won by films like Philadelphia which, while reifying institutional structures that perpetuate marginalization, nonetheless also effected both in their production and their symbolic logic positive change in the status of those living with AIDS and LGBTQ individuals.

Philadelphia, then, performs the negation of negation and embraces American metanarratives of equality before the law and middle-class family norms while simultaneously buttressing the institutions of American civil society. The film is premised on a critique of homophobia, and made important gains in bringing LGBTQ individuals into public consciousness. Similarly, the film constituted a strong rebuke of those who would deny equality to or maintain prejudice against those living with HIV and AIDS. And yet, the ground on which such gains are won might foreclose future gains in the form of more significant challenges to the underlying systems of exclusion that created and maintained them.

A Cure for What Is Wrong with America: Sexual Politics and the Liberal Compromise

Where Angels in America is Freedman’s “loose, baggy monster,” in which the promise of a queer revolution in society is undermined by a reliance on American master narratives of

Providence, Philadelphia is a controlled, mastered narrative that contests homophobia and

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 discrimination against those living with HIV/AIDS while advocating queer assimilation through an embrace of middle-class family norms. Both works advocate social progress and work for the amelioration of material conditions in ways that were and are important. Nonetheless, their means of doing so foreclose some avenues of reform as it pursues others.

This incorporation of difference was also characteristic of the AIDS Quilt and its efforts for equality and to normalize those who died from AIDS. Through its use of the medium of quilting and the deliberate invocation of domesticity and American heritage, the Quilt blunts its own critique and erases the challenging otherness it might represent. Sturken argues that “one of the fundamental paradoxes of the quilt: the claim of inclusion in the nation for those who have died of AIDS also has the effect of negating their difference” (80). As with Angels and

Philadelphia, then, tradeoffs and tensions between radical activism and negotiated tolerance persisted throughout the AIDS epidemic and its cultural artifacts.

In November of 1992, Bill Clinton was elected and in January of 1993, he became the first president to openly acknowledge the NAMES Project by inviting them to march in the inaugural parade. The shared counter-revolutionary rhetoric of the modes of resistance discussed above is made clearest, perhaps, in Clinton’s inaugural address. “There is nothing wrong with

America,” Clinton opined, “that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” The message of hope, of change, and of optimism for an end to inequality and discrimination is the immediate tone here, made possible by a chiasmus that emphasizes a dialogic reversal of current wrongs as part of the natural progress of American history. But there is another message, too. To those who are dissatisfied and angry Clinton admonishes, do not seek to overturn society, seek to reform it.

America is not fundamentally broken, it has merely stumbled in its path toward greatness. The wrongs in society are an aberration to be fixed, not the sign of a fundamental flaw in the design

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 of possessive individualism and free-market capitalism. Moreover, America has provided the tools with which it can be fixed.

The statement speaks both to those who see the need for change and to those who fear that change will fundamentally alter the structure of society. Both can be reassured by the prospect of measured improvements based in a commitment to shared values. Though laudable in these goals, and demonstrating a commitment to civil society, Clinton’s formulation also advocates assimilation and order, while failing to question the possibility that systemic problems indicate the need for systemic change. Leave in place the courts, the police, capital, the state; pursue your wrongs through the abstracting rhetoric of the law; be patient. That is to say, it offered the end to de jure inequality on the condition that de facto inequality persist perhaps indefinitely.

This is, too, a rhetoric at work in both Angels and Philadelphia. They offer an end to discrimination; they offer the hope of sympathy between groups and empathy between individuals; they condemn those who abuse the political and judicial system while championing the law as a source of salvation. But they also rely on and further overarching myths of American

Exceptionalism and the universal subject. Philadelphia militates against stereotyping gays and lesbians as deviants engaged in risky behavior by emphasizing their adherence to typical sentimental norms of affective relationships. This rhetoric of respectability reflects the embrace of bourgeois family practices—childrearing, sentimental attachment, monogamy, generational ties—at the expense of the queer potential to demonstrate deep-seated problems with the epistemologies and structures of subjectivity in American culture. Angels in America is a more capacious and less unified work. Its notions of American identity might be more fluid, and its

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Obscene Gestures, Chapter 4 conclusions less closural. Nonetheless, it, too, offers the promise of American pluralism as the answer to a society lost in political corruption, disease, and hate.

However, these works have yet another valence, an important project made manifest not in their singular messages but in their participation in a larger project of visibility. AIDS was not only a crisis and a disease; it was also a rallying cry for the cause of visibility in a time when silence and invisibility meant death. Cultural production that made present, sympathetic, and complex the figure of the LGBTQ individual meant an important step in humanizing people who had been violently objectified. The message and effect of neither work can be entirely encapsulated by these missions, and both had far-ranging positive effects in bringing the struggles of LGBTQ people and those living with AIDS into the public consciousness.

Pursuing a nationalism that relied on and required heteronormative and patriarchal models of subjectivity and submission, figures like Helms were able to mobilize a rhetorical slippage linking the AIDS epidemic to homosexuality, invoking notions of homosexuality as itself a kind of moral plague of which AIDS was only a symptom. Manifesting through mourning, drama, and narrative the lives of LGBTQ individuals and those living with

HIV/AIDS, these cultural works make such flattening characterizations more difficult. In so doing, they resisted the objectification that made use of AIDS as a convenient rhetoric in pursuit of policies that relied on conventional notions of the family and sexuality and invoked tropes of

Otherness to confirm and further racial and sexual prejudices.

163 One early example is the safe-sex manual How to Have Sex in an Epidemic, from 1983, which rejected the idea that a single foreign agent—like a virus—caused AIDS, and concluded instead that AIDS was multi-factorial, meaning it resulted from the build-up of multiple substances resulting from, among other things, repeated exposure to cytomegalovirus. While technically incorrect, the means of interrupting transmission suggested in the manual would have been effective against the HIV virus as well. 164 At the time, two separate labs had isolated what they believed to be the same virus, using different names: Lymphadenopathy Associated Virus (LAV) and HTLV-III. It was not until 1986 that the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses decided that the virus would officially be called Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV (“History”).

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165 See AIDS Control Act of 1987 (United States. AIDS). 166 One example of the kind of activism that would be ineligible for funding but was central to early efforts to prevent the spread of the disease was the previously mentioned How to Have Sex in an Epidemic, which described how to interrupt transmission while performing various sex acts. In addition to the use of condoms, various non- penetrative acts and the promotion of alternative affective arrangements—such as closed circles of sexual partners not limited to monogamous pairs—are encouraged as ways to continue to pursue sexual pleasure and affirm the validity of same-sex desire. 167 See “The AIDS Memorial Quilt” for official details of this history from the NAMES Project. 168 Not only is it expansive, the quilt is heavy, suggesting significance through its weight. Elaine Showalter notes that even the comparatively small number of panels present at the first showing of the Quilt (1,920) weighed 6,890 pounds, and that after a boom that resulted from publicity around that event, the ballooning number of panels increased its weight to thirteen tons by 1989 (170). 169 Though Peter S. Hawkins describes how “The [Vietnam Veterans’] memorial turned numbers into names” (755) and how through it “[t]he dead would be honored and the living accorded some dignity” (756), he also notes that mourners who visit the memorial often leave items of personal importance to augment the list of names, a way to “give those names the keepsakes of identity, as if to restore to the dead the intimate worlds they had lost” (755). This is similar to the stitching together of mementos in the AIDS Quilt. 170 In fact, as Hawkins reminds us, several individuals are not even given full names, with last names left off or initials used in place of more identifiable markers. These may be ways for those who create the panels to respect the privacy of the remembered loved one, but also emphasizes ephemera, objects, and materials over written words or names that might be associated with alienated families. 171 The development of the Internet has provided an interesting opportunity to search the Quilt by its text and by name, making finding and collating such information much simpler. See “Search the Quilt.” 172 Douglas Crimp also describes the many ways that social disapproval and stigmatization suffered by LGBTQ people often characterized the rituals of mourning, such as funerals and obituaries, that were occasioned by AIDS deaths, making the mourning process itself conflicted at best. 173 See Sturken 86-89. 174 For Sturken, “The AIDS Quilt is asked, in a certain sense, to represent AIDS, and thereby becomes a site for struggle around who is visible and invisible in the AIDS crisis” (94). 175 Gayle Rubin encapsulates this process thusly: “All these hierarchies of sexual value—religious, psychiatric, and popular—function in much the same ways as do ideological systems of racism, ethnocentrism, and religious chauvinism. They rationalize the well-being of the sexually privileged and the adversity of the sexual rabble” (150- 51). Rubin’s later determination that “This kind of sexual morality has more in common with ideologies of racism than with true ethics” because it “grants virtue to the dominant groups, and relegates vice to the underprivileged” (154) warrants the parallel analysis undertaken here that seeks to understand racism and the policing of sexual behavior as doing similar ideological work. It would be naïve and counterproductive to call them identical and each has its historical specificities (therefore suggesting and requiring different modes of untangling). The fact, however, that each serves as an explanatory regime that cements and justifies the persistence of privilege merits this kind of parallel consideration. 176 This was true in mainstream national campaigns and after AIDS became a national issue. However, the kinds of sex-positive or gay-positive campaigns that characterized early efforts at control were quite different. How to Have Sex in an Epidemic is a good example of material that did encourage the alteration of sexual practices, but did not artificially construe domestic monogamy and other middle-class virtues as the obvious or only safe-sex alternatives. As the authors of the book note, “Gay men have always been criticized for having ‘too much sex’ with ‘too many’ different partners. Because the development of AIDS in gay men is obviously somehow connected with the amount and kind of sex we have, a lot of advice has focused on ‘reducing’ the ‘number of different partners.’ Wherever we turn we are reminded of the joys of romance and dating by those who claim they are only concerned with our health” (35). 177 Sontag notes the serviceability of disease metaphors for nativist sentiment: “Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens—and real diseases are useful material. Epidemic diseases usually elicit a call to ban the entry of foreigners, immigrants. And xenophobic propaganda has always depicted immigrants as bearers of disease” (61-62). 178 War metaphors were also used by AIDS activists to evoke the scale of loss associated with the epidemic and to suggest the nature of a unifying national tragedy or struggle; see Sturken (69-70).

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179 And, even more dramatically, “Today in most large urban centers, what began as sexual freedom has become a tyranny of sexually transmitted diseases” (How to 3). 180 Quotation from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (244). 181 The New York-based group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (or ACT UP), takes this notion literally by encouraging direct action but also through its association with the slogan “Silence=Death,” which became widely known during the pandemic. 182 See John Houchin 250-52. This situation presents certain unusual considerations for scholars of censorship that do not bear directly on the cultural history I am performing here, but that intersect with it in important ways. By applying laws intended to apply to, for example, strip clubs, the protestors were not only presuming that nudity under any circumstances is erotic, but they were also erasing any boundary between artistic production and other aspects of life, which stage performance actually complicates. 183 The Blumenthal Performing Arts Center where the play was to be put on was criticized by free speech advocates for requiring that the theater company staging Angles obtain legal pre-clearance for the play and for requesting the nude scenes be stripped. The criticism was similar to that Dennis Barrie voiced when the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center was prosecuted for hosting the Mapplethorpe retrospective The Perfect Moment and that was directed at the Corcoran Gallery in the same context for insufficient fortitude in the face of government restriction of the arts; see Dennis Barrie (32), and V. Cullum Rogers. 184 The CAC in Cincinnati has sought a similar protection before hosting The Perfect Moment, but were denied. There are a number of other notable similarities between events in Charlotte and the obscenity prosecution against the CAC. Just as Barrie would note that his museum was largely a target of convenience in a larger cultural battle, so director of the Charlotte Repertory Keith Martin noted that his organization was merely convenient tinder in a long- smoldering conflagration over cultural difference. Martin is responsible for the fire metaphor here, stating “The conditions were ripe for a fire. … Where lightning struck to kindle that conflagration was anybody’s guess.” Also, just as Barrie considered the CAC a mainstream organization, so Martin notes that “Prior to Angels, we were known as a mainstream company” (qtd. in Nunns 23). 185 See also Stephen Nunns 23. 186 The author of the measure, Hoyle Martin, in fact, also suggested that the imputed moral failing of homosexuality is the reason for AIDS (Nunns 26). 187 For more on the exact timeline of this staging and its importance for the AIDS epidemic, see Román (51-52). Both parts of the play were staged together for private audiences and reviewers beginning November 1, 1992—two days prior to the election—while public performances began on November 8—five days after it. Román, however, is careful to note that the entry of productions and performances into history is a complex process that merits careful attention (42-53). 188 Take for example, Perestroika Act IV, scene 6, where Hannah Pitt, Joe’s mother, goes to the hospital as moral support for Prior Walter. Prior introduces her to his nurse, saying “This is my ex-lover’s lover’s Mormon mother” (234). Though Hannah’s relationship with Joe has broken down, she is able to appreciate Prior’s humanity, fulfilling some of the roles Louis ought to be fulfilling as Prior’s partner. Non-nuclear family relationships and affiliations are also offered as a possible new social model in Alice Walker’s the Color Purple (1982), which I discuss in Chapter Two. 189 Sontag notes, however, that AIDS more commonly reflects an extension of notions of apocalypse, not their abatement. 190 Speaking of obituaries of the real-life Cohn, Cadden notes how this resonates with the cultural conflict over the narratives of American identity that, again, both make use of metaphors of the body: “They rejoice in the fact that, as a diseased member of the American body politic, Roy Cohn has been lopped off” (82). 191 See also Román (53). 192 Crimp quotes Pier Paolo Pasolini in a way that echoes this sentiment, saying that tolerance is “always and purely nominal,” merely “a more refined form of condemnation” (qtd, in Crimp 12). 193 Though Philadelphia shows a deep investment in the law, Angels is much more ambivalent. Joe Pitt says “It’s law not justice, it’s power, not the merits of its exercise, it’s not an expression of the ideal, it’s…” before being cut off (242). This passage demonstrates a practical understanding of the law as a human institution not entirely separate from, but not coincident with ethics and justice. 194 Moreover, as happens with Denzel Washington’s character, as well as others, belief in the law leads to some degree of overcoming personal prejudice, which construes the law as a higher order of belief that can act as an antidote to base materials and personal interest.

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195 This view is shared by Louis Ironson in Angels in America, who struggles to express it over a long dialogue with Belize, saying “it’s the racial destiny of the Brits that matters to them, not their political destiny, whereas in America…” and “look, race, yes, but ultimately race here is a political question, right? Racists just try to use race here as a tool in a political struggle. It’s not really about race” (97). What Louis is trying to get at is the common notion that the American nation is constructed according to political ideals rather than racial or ethnic identity. The dissemination of this notion in American literature is examined by Werner Sollors in Beyond Ethnicity, among other texts. 196 For Jack Halberstam’s critique of Edelman, see The Queer Art of Failure. 197 For more on Philadelphia and the politics of same-sex partner medical rights, see Kirsten Ostherr. Ostherr notes that “The hospital sequence highlights the institutionalized homophobia that occurs when the social and legal status of domestic partners is questioned in the medical setting” (232). 198 Monica B. Pearl notes in passing that this scene and others contribute to a feminizing of the Beckett character that reinforces stereotypes of gay men, rather than contesting them (106). 199 Sturken notes a similar tendency in the testimonies of those contributing panels to the AIDS Quilt: “These stories belie the stereotype of gay men as antifamily people irrevocably estranged from their kin” (85). 200 See Jodi Melamed, “Counterinsurgent Canon Wars.”

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