NICA recommends | Shame and Shit: The Underside of Queerness? – Two lectures by the Queer Analysis Research Group
NICA recommends | Shame and Shit: The Underside of Queerness? – Two lectures by the Queer Analysis Research Group
Date: 26 September 2024
Time: 17:00
Location: University of Amsterdam, OMHP (Room A 008)
Contact: d.semerene@uva.nl
Misha Kavka, ‘Queerness and Hontologie, or what can Baby Andy tell us about shame?’
In the ‘clinic’ of television, otherwise known as the 1990s/2000s classic Sex and the City, a curious exchange takes place at a baby shower that the urban, single girlfriends reluctantly attend (season 1, episode 10). A beaming mother says of her 11-month-old son, ‘Andy’s a god and I tell him so every day’, leading pragmatic Miranda to do the work of the analyst when she asks Carrie, ‘Thirty years from now, what do you think the chances are that some woman’s going to be able to make Andy happy? I’m gonna go with zero.’ This comic encounter, which imagines a (male) baby propelled by maternal love into a future unhappiness with women, provides the elements to be explored in this paper: babies, a queer trajectory, an overwhelming ego ideal and a vague sense of shame hovering around it all. Although it is not clear whose shame it is, something and someone in this encounter has been exposed. To die of shame in the Real is impossible, says Lacan in Seminar XVII, but this makes it all the more important to engage with hontologie.
In this paper I will refuse the easy way out, namely, to argue that Baby Andy will grow up to be queer because his mother loved him too hard. This argument, an unimaginative reading of Freud if there ever was one, leads to a certain fixation of ‘queer shame’ as internalised homophobia (presumably the mother’s, since she tried to set a good example for heterosexuality by loving Andy so much). Instead of tying queerness to same-sex relations and projecting this into Andy’s future, I will argue the opposite: that Baby Andy is already queer, precisely to the extent that all babies are a field of turbulent being (in Lacan’s sense). In this reading, the mother who props Andy up before the mirror, telling him ‘you’re a god!’, is delineating not just an ideal ego with which the baby must identify for self- coherence, but also a set of ego ideals which will bind him to the (heterosexual) social order of the Other. This is the same as saying that that which escapes signification in the living being of the baby – presumably so much more turbulent than the socialised child or adult – is the objet a reimagined as an unsignifiable but compelling queerness.
As I will argue, shame is both the hontological exposure of the subject’s lack-in-being to the Other and the site from which queerness could be made to speak in the clinic. Green and Vanheule (2024) cite Lacan to claim that the exposure of the ego’s fantasy of unity should be considered a breakthrough in the psychoanalytic treatment, making shame a productive affect. If what is exposed, however, is the queerness of babies that precedes the fantasmatic capture of the ego, then this is equivalent to (re)discovering the queer baby – that is, the baby-as-queer – at the limit point of the Symbolic.
Diego Semerene, ‘Cathexis of Shit: toward a Lacanian erotics of fecal matter’
In No Archive Will Restore You (2018), Julietta Singh’s baby daughter molds her own excrement into a penis to cover her vagina. In Lucas Rijeneveld’s Discomfort of Evening (2018), a young child refuses to poop after their brother’s tragic death. In Neige Sinno’s autobiographical account of incest, Triste Tigre (2023), it is as a turd that the abusive stepfather shows up at a costume party. In the opening of Camila Sosa Villada’s trans* novel The Queens of Sarmiento Park (2022), a travesti sex worker finds a newborn covered in feces in a swamp and promptly feeds him her industrial- silicone breasts. The shit-covered baby is soothed as he latches on to the milk-less breast. Here we have lactation of a very different kind, which Villada describes as rare, reparatory, and even magical. Travesti lactation is a hallucination. It shows us it isn’t just the materiality of milk that the baby is after, that matter arises through a framing, a gesture, a trace (of memory), which can eclipse the pleasures of its own material gifts. In this talk I argue defecation, its ancillary practices, and associated signifiers (excrement, stench, flatulence, coprophagy), to hold the potential for the hallucinatory qualities Villada sees in travesti lactation. This hallucination is a precondition for a meaningful encounter with another’s body, and one’s own, which blows sense into it, turning the body into (new) parts, and certain body parts, along with the substances they bring forth, into loci of attraction.
Digital networks such as X, Scatboi and Darkfans are rife with pornographic scatological content and role- playing “daddies” giving their lovers diaper checks. And yet, speaking about feces as substance for creativity, pleasure, and analysis, remains taboo. What is it about this under-theorized substance that insists on emerging – in literature, in sex— despite our most visceral attempts at disavowing it as disgusting, useless, or non-existent?
In Seminar 3, Lacan reminds us that babies don’t repress, they express. Repression doesn’t appear until the Oedipus complex disappears, at which point the division between identification and object choice must be staged. I look to the baby’s relationship to feces, and erotic praxes involving fecal matter later in life that harken back to this early moment when the subject was able to revel in shit as material for articulating what he/she couldn’t in any other way. I thus theorize the queer potentiality of fecal matter through the work of Lacan by tracing the creative usages and symbolic meaning of feces in literary and digital cruising worlds.
Suggested Reading: Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Seminar XVII (excerpt tba: d.semerene@uva.nl)