parallax,2002,vol. 8, no. 4, 1– 3 Introduction: talking/having sex KurtHirtler,Ola Stahl&Ika Willis In issue 17of the Vertigo comic Transmetropolitan ,SpiderJerusalem wakes upin bed with his assistant, Yelena: ‘What happened?’he asks himself. ‘Well, obviously,I know what happened’. Butwhen she wakes up,Y elena insists –repeatedly– that ‘nothing happened’. ‘I’msticky’, Spiderargues; ‘ Something must have happenedto make me sticky’. ‘Nothinghappened. Nothing at all. Nothing. Nothing!’Yelena reiterates, though,in increasingly largeand messy lettering. 1 If sex is nothad, then, nothing happens,it would seem. This commonplace enough formulationnonetheless perhapsdemonstrates the potentialenormity ofthe task which this issue of parallax has set itself in takingon the title having sex – a word which shouldbe read here bothin the Butleriansense of‘ biological’sex as a dimorphismproduced as the e Vect ofcompulsory heterosexuality andenforced by beingcast as prediscursive in relationto gender, and in the sense of‘ sexual intercourse’as anactivity similarly circumscribed byheteronormativepresumptions aboutwhat itis to‘ have sex’. (These preliminaryand tentative denitions will, of course,be fucked with inthe course of having sex.) Nothing happened ,as asynonym for sex was not had ,beginsto make visiblethe intricate conjunctions ofdesire,signi cation, reproduction,evolution, technology, familialstructures, ‘nature’..., which can always besummonedwhen the term ‘sex’is deployed;it hints ataparticularunderstanding of‘sex’as that which makes itpossiblefor something, anything, everything tohappen. Here we movefrom Transmetropolitan’s Yelena to TheBallad of Halo Jones’s Glyph, a character who has changed sex somany times that ze (it?)no longer registers as human: Downloaded By: [Lund University Libraries] At: 15:32 18 November 2009 Iremember Istartedo V asagirl.That much I’mcertain of.Or maybe Istartedout as aboy.Never mind– itdoesn’ t really matter.The thing is,I wasn’t happyas agirl...uh... or maybe I wasn’t happyas aboy...So I hada totalbody remould that turnedme intoa boy... orpossiblya girl[...] 6 months afterthe treatment Istartedregretting my decision.So I hadanother remould to turn me back towhatever Istartedout as. Over the next ve years, Ichanged my mindabout whether Iwanted tobeaboyor agirlforty-seven times [...]Eventually, Iwasn’t aboyor a girl.I wasn’t anything. Icouldn’t even remember what I’dbeen originally.The doctorswere equallyconfused. Also, my personalityhad been completely erased[...] I wasn’t aboy,I wasn’t parallax ISSN1353-4645 print /ISSN1460-700X online ©2002Taylor & FrancisLtd http://www.tandf.co.uk /journals parallax DOI:10.1080 /1353464022000027902 1 agirl...I was justa cypher, asortof glyph [...]I walked throughthe crowdedstreets andnobody even lookedat me... They juststared straight throughme. It was as ifI’ dsomehow slippedbeneath the threshold ofhuman awareness. 2 A. Gargett’s essay marks outsome lines of ightfrom this use of‘ sex’as dening andcircumscribing the human,in its explorationof the posthumanerotics of Natacha Merritt. Any understandingof sex asthe conditionof possibilityof humanness –with an eye tothe Freudian-Lacanian traditionwithin which beinghuman must be beingsexed – risks operating,as DrucillaCornell puts it in this volume,according to ‘ the need to protectthe law ofsexual di Verence as amatter ofmaking civilization safe for heterosexuality’. According toone all-too-familiar consequence ofsuch a conguration, a strict regulationof sex –technological ifnecessary, butonly insofar assuch technological intervention bringssex intocloser alignment with ‘nature’– is necessary tosecure the futureof humanity:to ensure that ‘nothing’will nothappen. The outcry overthe recent ‘designerbaby’ case in which twodeaf women chose a deafsperm donorto increase the oddsthat their second child togetherwould also bedeaf need only bementioned, I think, in orderto suggest that such deployments of‘sex’are by no means yet defunct. Myra Hird’s careful attentionto biological models begins to solicit –in the Derridean sense ofat once evokingand shaking in its foundations– oneof the couplingswhich underpinsthis progressivist-evolutionaryassumption that ‘nature’will, throughsex, regulatethe reproductionof the species in the directionof ever betterand better organisms:the couple sex and reproduction .Somecrucial groundworkfor a psychic and legal decouplingof these terms has, ofcourse, been laidby Drucilla Cornell, who continues tothink the relationbetween psychoanalysis andlegal andpolitical discourse,and to develop strategies forunderstanding and respecting the sexuate beingof individualswithin ademocraticpolitical-legal system, in aninterview inthis volume.Mary Conway,too, turns ourattention to the di Yculties with which submittingsex tothe law and/orhaving sex as alegalsubject arefraught in her reading of Eight Bullets ,asurvivor’s account ofhomophobic violence. Downloaded By: [Lund University Libraries] At: 15:32 18 November 2009 Which bringsus tothe questionof whether andhow sex, once had– or if had, a questionof conjunctionleft openin the punctuationof Alex Garc ´’aDu¨ttman’s essay, precisely where Spidersought to close itdown (‘ something must have happened’= sex was had=‘obviouslyI know what happened’) –can bespoken. It is clear in Transmetropolitan 17that we are,of course,to understandthat the oppositeof Elena’s words(that is,the oppositeof ‘ nothing’; that is,‘ sex’) did occur inthe space between issues, andit takes only acursory glance at ThePsychopathology ofEverydayLife to warn usnotto believe what aspeaker tells usabouthis, her orhir sex –nor,on the other hand,to believe that aspeaker is not telling usaboutsex, even ifhe, she orze appears tobe speaking about something else entirely. As in TheBallad of Halo Jones , it is having sex that makes communicationpossible; but as in Transmetropolitan it is sex, also,that can make communicationimpossible, by inverting andundermining the meanings ofwords. Introduction 2 Ifwe arenot to repeatthe gesture ofconsigning sex toaprediscursive domain,then, we may have towonder whether andhow languagehas sex: whether andhow sex has language:whether, in short,sex andlanguage can cohabit,and how sex plays througha speaker,or through writing – how sex is reproducedphono/ graphically. 3 Steven Shavirogives us apeepat a phonographicerotic in his Deleuzean reading of Bjo¨rk’s andChris Cunningham’ s videocollaboration, Allis Full ofLove . Stephen Muecke’s oraltopography of sex in‘The Fall’, DimitriosEfstratiou’ s readingof the Baudelaireanlesbian as asite ofsomatic-semiotic resistance to‘ sex’as anormal- deviantbinary, Adrian Rif kin’s ‘porno-theory’and Calvin Thomas’ s explorationof metaphoricity,all couplesex with writingin di Verent, butequally stimulating, ways. Lynn Turner, onthe otherhand, while noless sexually graphic/graphically sexual, examines the functioningof already-establishedrelations,asking whether the couple must submitto the logicof marriage in her examinationof the translationcontract between Derridaand Benjamin. The reference Ihave madeto Transmetropolitan and TheBallad of Halo Jones leads me toconclude byremarking onthe appearanceof apanelfrom HotheadPaisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist onour front cover. In amedium– comics –oftenassociated with the productionand reproduction of heterocentric hypermasculinity, HotheadPaisan’ s creative andrepeated interventions around,precisely, the notionof ‘ having sex’in all its meanings make her the ideal(anti-)cover girlfor this issue of parallax. We aregrateful to Diane DiMassa for permission to reproduce her here. Notes 1 WarrenEllis, DarickRobertson & Rodney ofHalo Jones (London:Titan, 2001 [1986]) (no Ramos,‘ Yearof the Bastard5’ , Transmetropolitan pagenumbers). 17(New Y ork:DC Comics/Vertigo,November 3 This formulationindicates our debt to the work 1998),pp.1– 2. ofBarbaraEngh. 2 AlanMoore & Ian Gibson,‘ I’ll NeverForget Whatsizname’, Book2, prog3, The Complete Ballad Downloaded By: [Lund University Libraries] At: 15:32 18 November 2009 parallax 3 parallax,2002,vol. 8, no. 4, 4– 7 ARomanHoliday 1 AdrianRifkin Davidand his companionhad strolled upthe hill tothe Church ofSan Pietro al Montorio,it was abrightbut chilly morning,Rome in the early springtime, the usual,ambient smell ofwisteria notyet released bythe warmingsun. They were curiousto note an elderly couple,very bourgeois,elegantly dressed,camel hairand tweed,stooping at the roadsidewith scissors anda plastic bag.On closer inspection they saw that this distinguished,carefully beglovedpair were cutting nettles and otherfresh springweeds, nodoubt to make some exquisitesoup quite alien toa northern palate.The ideaof abourgeoisscavenger was alreadysomething ofashock, preparingthem alittle forthe other,expected butalways rather shocking contrasts ofthe church itself. They wouldonce againsee the high seriousdecorations of the Renaissance chiming with the brash,blue velvet drapedover the seating andcovering the central aisle,left permanently in place forthe stream ofupper class marriages which the church ofSanPietro al Montoriomakes its speciality. There isnodoubt, Davidthinks pompouslyto himself, that marriagesmake iteven moredi Ycult to lookat art than dotourists. And the arthistorian, of course, is nowhere atourist, everywhere aworker. AsDavidand his friendenter the Church they see that onewedding had just nished andthat there will bea fullhalf hourof grace beforethe next onewould begin. Davidmakes straight forthe Sebastiano,his friendto gaze upinto the little chapel