Fintan Walsh - Male Trouble - Masculinity and The Performance of Crisis-Palgrave Macmillan (2010)

Male Trouble
Also by Fintan Walsh
CROSSROADS: Performance Studies and Irish Culture

(co-edited with Sara Brady)
Male Trouble
Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis
Fintan Walsh
Post-doctoral Research Fellow, School of Drama, Film and Music,
Trinity College Dublin
© Fintan Walsh 2010
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First published 2010 by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Walsh, Fintan, Dr.
Male trouble: masculinity and the performance of crisis / Fintan
Walsh.
p. cm.
ISBN 978–0–230–57969–9 (alk. paper)
1. Masculinity. 2. Masculinity in popular culture. 3. Men—Identity.
I. Title.
HQ1090.W34 2010
305.3109182'1—dc22
2010012003
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
1 Introduction: Performing Male Trouble 1

2 Sacrificial Masculinity in The Passion of the Christ 36
3 Impotent Masculinities in Made in China and InterMission 58
4 Homosexuality and Subjection in Shopping and Fucking and
Faust is Dead 84
5 Wounded Attachments in the Live Art of
Ron Athey and Franko B 109
6 David Blaine, Fathers 4 Justice, and the Spectacle of
Heroic Masculinity 146
7 The Jackassification of Male Trouble: Incorporating the
Abject as Norm 160
8 An Ethic of Fragilization 182
Notes 191
Bibliography 218
Index 229
v
List of Figures
2.1 Queer Satan in The Passion of the Christ (2004). Courtesy

Newmarket Films/Photofest. 46
2.2 Jesus in The Passion of the Christ (2004). Courtesy
Newmarket Films/Photofest. 53
3.1 Detective Lynch (Colm Meaney) and Lehiff (Colin Farrell)
in InterMission (2003). Courtesy IFC Films/Photofest. 77
5.1 Ron Athey, Judas Cradle (2004–5). Courtesy Manuel Vason. 129
5.2 Franko B, I’m Not Your Babe, ICA London (1996). Courtesy
Nicholas Sinclair. 137
5.3 Franko B, I’m Not Your Babe, ICA London (1996). Courtesy
Nicholas Sinclair. 138
6.1 David Blaine, Vertigo (2002). Photographer unknown. 151
7.1 Johnny Knoxville wearing a ‘beekini’ in Jackass (2000–2).
Courtesy MTC/Photofest. 166
8.1 Taylor Mac, The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac (2007). Courtesy
Taylor Mac and Lucien Samaha. 189
vi
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to all those who have directly or indirectly assisted me

in the writing of this book. Some of this project was developed as part
of a PhD dissertation at the Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College
Dublin, and I would like to thank my supervisor Matthew Causey for
his intellectual insight and guidance during this time. Also, thanks to
Adrian Kear and Brian Singleton who offered helpful comments for
development. Other formative mentors include Anna McMullan and
Steve Wilmer.
I acknowledge the receipt of funding in the form of a travel bursary
from the Samuel Beckett Centre, a postgraduate scholarship from
Trinity College Dublin, and latterly a post-doctoral research award from
the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences which
assisted me in the final stages of bringing this study to print.
Portions of this book have appeared elsewhere, and I am thankful
for the permission to use developed versions of the work here. Parts of
Chapter 2 initially appeared in Trinity College Dublin Journal of Postgraduate
Research, 2005–6. Sections of Chapter 3 have been published in Deirdre
Quinn and Sharon Tighe-Mooney (eds), Essays in Irish Literary Criticism:
Themes of Gender, Sexuality, and Corporeality (Mellen Press, 2009). A good
deal of Chapter 4 has been published in Gender Forum, 18 (2007). I am
also grateful to those who have given me permission to reproduce
images, especially Nicholas Sinclair, Manuel Vason, and Taylor Mac.
I would like to express sincere thanks to Noreen Giffney, Michael
O’Rourke, and Anne Mulhall for convening ‘The(e)ories: Advanced
Seminars for Queer Research in Ireland’ since 2002. The(e)ories has
been an incredibly important forum for the dissemination and develop-
ment of queer theory in an interdisciplinary context in Ireland since its
inception, and it has had a significant impact on queer scholarship
internationally. I have been fortunate enough to participate in rich,
intensive seminars with Lee Edelman, Sara Ahmed, Bracha L. Ettinger,
and Leo Bersani (among others), thanks to the organizers of The(e)ories.
I am especially grateful to Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke who
gave me invaluable advice on how best to shape this research, and I am
particularly indebted to Michael who generously shared his expertise
at later stages of the book’s gestation. Laurence Scott also offered very
valuable feedback on earlier drafts of certain chapters.
vii
viii Acknowledgements
Sincere thanks to Christabel Scaife for commissioning the book, and

for guiding it through to completion. Manuscript reviewers gave helpful
recommendations, as did the eagle-eyed copy editors at Palgrave
Macmillan.
I would like to thank friends for encouraging me with the book, or
more importantly still, for distracting me from it. A special word goes
out to Aileen, Áine, Brian, David, Laurence, and Phillip. And finally,
thanks to my parents, for their trouble.
Fintan Walsh
Trinity College Dublin, 2010
1
Introduction: Performing
Male Trouble
At the beginning of the twenty-first century it is

difficult to avoid the conclusion that men are in seri-
ous trouble.1
Anthony Clare, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis
[T]rouble sometimes euphemized some fundamentally

mysterious problem usually related to the alleged mys-
tery of all things feminine.2
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and
the Subversion of Identity
[T]o leave masculinity unstudied, to proceed as if mas-

culinity were somehow not a contingent form of gen-
der/sexuation, would be to leave it naturalized, and
thus to make it necessary, to reproduce contingency as
necessity, to protect masculinity from change.3
Calvin Thomas, Masculinity, Psychoanalysis,
Straight Queer Theory
To think of ‘crisis’ as a performance is to imagine that the disruption it

signifies is actively or even carefully produced; or, to extend the theatri-
cal analogy, even affected. Understood from this perspective, we might
infer that there are active agents of crisis, and agents in whose interest
crisis acts. We might even deduce that crisis somehow distributes agency,
or that agency involves the distribution of always already critical terms
and positions. To think of masculinity as an embodied, social, and
political domain in which crisis might be performed is to conceive of
gender and sexuality as a performative arena of sorts, where ostensible
1
2 Male Trouble
disorder does not simply signal the radical dissolution of form but
rather its reorganization.
This book is concerned with the performance of so-called masculi-
nities in crisis, where the term ‘performance’ denotes both a doing
of gender and its representation in drama, theatre, live art, guerrilla
performance, public spectacle, and film. Since the 1990s, men have
increasingly appeared across a range of social and aesthetic practices as
troubled subjects, with Western masculinity repeatedly reported to be in
a critical state. Situated at the intersection of performance and cultural
studies, this book is committed to exploring the emergence of the dis-
course of critical masculinity, while looking to a pertinent selection of
performative practices mainly drawn from American, British, and Irish
contexts, in order to examine the articulation and negotiation of that
trouble. Discrete analyses are bound by the understanding that the dis-
course of masculinity in crisis is itself highly performative, in a manner
that both shapes and illuminates a wide spectrum of cultural activity.
The title of this book alludes to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Fem-
inism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), which marked a watershed in
contemporary thought on gender and sexuality upon its publication,
and was widely received as one of the most important interventions
in preceding discourse. Unlike previous critiques, Butler’s scholarship
sought to reconsider the heterosexual assumptions of feminism that
limited the category of gender it seemingly sought to expand. An initial
provocation for Butler’s research was the idealization of certain catego-
ries that merely reproduced gender hierarchies, often with homophobic
consequences. With this in mind, Butler’s writing worked to undermine
the presumed primacy and consequent privileging of heteronormativity,
in order to expose the field of gender to radical rethinking without
prescription.
While Butler’s reconceptualization chiefly took the form of philo-
sophical interrogation, her writing was spurred on by social realities. In
the preface to the republication of Gender Trouble in 1999, for example,
Butler asserts of the original text: ‘[I]t was produced not merely from
the academy, but from convergent social movements.’4 Throughout
the 1980s and 1990s, these influences included the growth of the gay
and lesbian movement, dominated by concerns for equal rights and
responses to AIDS; ongoing feminist debate, including the stirrings
of Third Wave Feminism; and masculinist backlash, and the growth
of masculinity studies as an academic discipline. It was in response
to these social, cultural, and theoretical conditions that Butler laun-
ched her critique of all claims to gender naturalness by exposing the
Performing Male Trouble 3
tenuousness of gender categories that nonetheless exert violence on

individuals. Analysing identity as performative, rather than innate,
Butler’s criticism performed a radical queering of the grounded pre-
sumptions of heteronormativity.
The initial publication of Butler’s text gave shape to the gender trou-
ble felt during preceding years. Its republication in 1999, along with
the release of Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993),
underscored that questions surrounding acceptable gender and sexual-
ity were increasingly pertinent. While many gay, lesbian, and feminist
scholars readily embraced Butler’s writing for mobilizing a new wave
of intellectual focus, its reception in the field of masculinity studies
was more considered. Torn between resistance to gay, lesbian, and
feminist accusation, the fear of emasculation, and also a real desire to
reconceptualize notions of masculinity outside limiting homosexual-
heterosexual distinctions, the deconstruction of masculinity within its
own academic field was a more tentative process. While I am not claim-
ing that Butler’s work had a direct impact on these developments, it
certainly exerted significant influence, and there is a synchronicity
between its release, urgent critiques of heteronormativity, and reports
on the critical condition of masculinity that qualify it as a key refer-
ence text in any study of gender and sexuality surrounding this period.
While a range of minoritarian voices had been declaring their own trou-
bled positions most vehemently since the 1960s through developments
in identity politics, these reverberations instituted a similar troubling
of masculinity ‘from within’, most notably, from the 1980s onwards.
As the title Male Trouble suggests, gender could no longer be seen as the
problematic domain exclusive to female subjectivity: masculinity was
equally in need of attention.
Popular resonances
Contemporary discourses of dysfunctional masculinity cite a number of

reasons for the condition of the typically heterosexual, white, Western
male. In the social sciences, researchers have described this figure as the
‘redundant male’,5 a product of years of economic, social, and biological
marginalization. More specifically, he has been understood as the victim
of decades of gay, lesbian, and feminist insurgence, and concomitant
changes in the gender and labour orders.
Writing in The Irish Times in 1999, for example, John Waters earnestly
hoped that in the coming years men would ‘finally start to stand up for
themselves […] to confront the sources of the propaganda which makes
4 Male Trouble
possible their marginalisation from home, family and society, to chal-

lenge the bully-boys and bully-girls, the misandrists and the feminazis’.6
Similar concerns were frequently expressed in the decade’s phenome-
non of men’s lifestyle magazines, with Men’s Health Magazine, launched
in the United Kingdom in 1995, for instance, regularly encouraging its
young, international readership to ‘Give yourself an MOT’.7 Talk shows,
which grew exponentially during this time period, often debated
changes in the role of men, with variations of topics such as ‘Too Many
Bad Dads Around’,8 often stimulating discussion. John Beynon identi-
fies the year 2000 as a high point of the debate in the West, claiming
that it ushered ‘the masculinity in crisis summer’: ‘While bookshops
across the United States were full of boy-crisis books, the press in the
United Kingdom carried endless articles on the subject following the
publication of Anthony Clare’s book.’9 In the work in question, On Men:
Masculinity in Crisis (2000), Clare provocatively asks: ‘It is true that patri-
archy has not been overthrown, but its justification is in disarray […]
In a world of equal opportunity for the sexes, can men renegotiate the
relationship with themselves and with women?’10
Figuring troubled masculinity
Of course, representing masculinity extends well beyond the turn of

the twenty-first century. René Girard suggests that one of the central
messages of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, for example, is that ‘all masculine
relationships are based on reciprocal acts of violence’.11 What differen-
tiates the representation and study of masculinity in the 1990s from
preceding eras, I argue, is the systematic focus on the gender order as
an issue in itself: masculinity’s contingency, its violent conditions of
construction, its precarious modes of operation, and the effects of its
expectations on male individuals. Further, the complex and often frac-
tious relationship between a range of masculinities and femininities
is forced into sharper relief. We might say that the defining feature of
masculinity became its dysfunction.
This book is dedicated to examining a selection of emblematic per-
formances and representations. While the study primarily considers
masculinity in a cross-disciplinary, Western context, it is perhaps useful
to map further the foregrounding of ostensibly disaffected masculini-
ties within discrete traditions. In drama and theatre, for instance, the
works of Sam Shepard (True West, 1980) and David Mamet (Glengarry
Glen Ross, 1983) in the US have been widely noted for spearheading
representations of troubled masculinity at the latter end of the twenti-

eth century. So too have the early works of British playwrights Harold
Pinter (The Homecoming, 1965) and Edward Bond (Saved, 1965), and
Irish playwrights Tom Murphy (A Whistle in the Dark, 1961) and Brian
Friel (Philadelphia Here I Come, 1964). Dramatists in the 1990s contin-
ued this tradition by exploring problems around divergent masculinity,
while simultaneously experimenting with aesthetic and form. In the
United States, the works of Edward Albee (Three Tall Women, 1991),
Terence McNally (Corpus Christi, 1998), and Tony Kushner (Angels in
America, 1991–2) addressed matters of male gender and sexuality, in par-
ticular, homosexuality. With reference to the latter, Christopher Bigsby
notes, ‘Gay playwrights, once forced to express their concerns and com-
mitments obliquely, if at all, increasingly staked out their territory in
the American theatre.’12 In Britain, so-called In-Yer-Face theatre also
foregrounded these matters, led by writers such as Anthony Neilson
(Penetrator, 1993), Sarah Kane (Blasted, 1995), and Mark Ravenhill
(Shopping and Fucking, 1996; Faust is Dead; 1997). Reflecting on this
period’s unique preoccupation with fraught masculinity, Aleks Sierz
writes,
[W]hen drama dealt with masculinity, it showed rape; if it got to

grips with sex, it showed fellatio or anal intercourse; when nudity
was involved, so was humiliation; if violence was wanted, torture
was staged […]theatre broke taboos, chipping away at the binary
oppositions that structure our sense of reality.13
During the same time period, the work of Irish playwrights Conor
McPherson (This Lime Tree Bower, 1995), Gary Mitchell (In A Little World
of Our Own, 1997), and Mark O’Rowe (Made in China, 2001) consistently
explored marginalized masculinities.14
Although perhaps less popular than drama and film (for reasons of
practical and even aesthetic accessibility), live art is arguably the most
immediate of all forms of performance, its close affiliation with identity
politics ensuring that it never veers far from such concerns as they arise.
This is especially true of developments in 1990s performance, with Lois
Keidan of the Live Art Development Agency in the United Kingdom
noting:
During the late 90s live art has proved that it is uniquely positioned
to articulate and represent seemingly problematic issues through
6 Male Trouble
alternative strategies and that it is one of the most flexible and

responsive artistic tools there is to pursue new ways of representing
and responding to these shifting and uncertain times.15
Although much of the form’s earliest stirrings as performance art were

mainly associated with feminist politics, as in the work of the French art-
ist Gina Pane (The Conditioning, 1973), the American performer Carolee
Schneemann (Up To And Including Her Limits, 1973), and the Yugoslavia-
born Marina Abramović (Thomas Lips, 1975), the 1990s witnessed an
increase in performances which explored the relationship between male
identity and masculinity.
Building on a tradition of visceral experimentation led by artists such
as the Austrian-based Viennese Aktionists since the 1960s, the work
of the Italian-American artist Vito Acconci (Trademarks, 1969) and the
American-born Chris Burden (Shoot, 1971) explored the relationship
between masculinity, sexuality, and violence. In Bob Flanagan’s Visiting
Hours (1994), for example, the American performer who suffered from
cystic fibrosis staged his own hospitalization, prompting questions
about the relationship between masculinity, sexuality, and illness. Flan-
agan continued with similar projects until his death in 1996. In later
works by the American-born Ron Athey and the Italian-born Franko B,
this experimentation was continued in more explicit ways.16 Although
arguably working within much more hybrid forms, I suggest that the
endurance practices of the American performer David Blaine, and even
the performative protests of the UK-based Fathers 4 Justice, might also
be situated alongside, if not within, this tradition.
While film has an equally long history of privileging male characters
and their perspectives, as most stringently critiqued by Laura Mulvey in
‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975),17 the time frame under
analysis is notable for its deconstruction of long-circulating myths of
masculinity. Manohla Dargis writes that Hollywood film, long fasci-
nated with spectacular masculinity, is notable for its softened represen-
tations of male gender during the 1990s, a trend she attributes to the
impact of Second Wave Feminism:
The second wave of feminism helped wash away these damaged

men, and in their place emerged new paradigms embodied by
Mr. Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Douglas and
Harrison Ford. Age and evolving audience taste would in time make
relics of Mr. Stallone and Mr. Schwarzenegger’s cartoon macho,
while Mr. Douglas and Mr. Ford mellowed, their edge blunted. The
stars who have stayed the course – Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Keanu
Reeves, Will Smith and that apotheosis of eternal boy-man, Tom
Hanks – remain freshly young in look and attitude, their masculinity
carefully sublimated.18
Also during this time, the films of Quentin Tarantino often parodied,
or interrogated, representations of the macho-male aggressor, as in Pulp
Fiction (1994), and revealed – not without irony – that even the most
violent men have feelings. At the height of the decade’s deconstruc-
tion, David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999, based on the novel by Chuck
Palahniuk) explored the centrality of masochism to the stability of
heterosexual male identity.19 In the United Kingdom, films like The
Full Monty (1997) saw men openly admit their social marginality but
also exploit their masculinity as a commodity for financial gain. More
recently, Billy Elliot (2000) imagined a new generation of less narrowly
defined, however sentimentalized, men and masculinities. In addition
to these popular works, the art house films of Derek Jarman, who died
of AIDS in 1994, explored the social position of homosexuals often by
comparing them to Christian martyrs who were also sacrificed for their
beliefs. Jarman’s The Garden (1990) juxtaposed homosexual men next
to Christian iconography, much like his earlier films Sebastiane (1976)
and Caravaggio (1986). In Irish cinema, films like When Brendan Met
Trudy (2001), InterMission (2003) and Adam and Paul (2004) screened the
socially marginalized Irish male.20
Heteronormativity, masculinity, and

the Western imaginary
Acting in counterpoint to these intimations of crisis, certain voices

have highlighted the discrepancy in discursive and institutional reali-
ties. If the condition of men and masculinity is so critical, such indi-
viduals ask, why is the world we live in still so patriarchal? The gender
theorist Lynn Segal sees the link between heterosexuality, men, and
power firmly in place and argues that it needs to be made clear that
not all men are failing, unemployed, or unhappy.21 Pamela Robertson
suggests that men are busy creating a litany of wrongs in order to claim
rights. The notion of crisis, she suggests, is nothing more that a discur-
sive strategy circulated by men in order to reoccupy centre stage and
reclaim patriarchal privilege.22 While Robertson is correct to point out
the discursive-institutional disparity, her perspective is too pervasively
suspicious. Robertson’s reservation does not acknowledge that there
8 Male Trouble
are many masculinities within the gender order, not all of which are
necessarily privileged by patriarchy. As leading thinkers in masculinity
studies such as Robert William Connell have pointed out, in a given
moment in history, any male subject who does not conform to the
hegemonic norm of masculinity is relatively peripheralized.
Of interest to the Euro-American breadth of this project, Connell
figures twenty-first century hegemonic masculinity as essentially globa-
lized and transnational,23 and not easily reducible to nation-based terms
of understanding. His perspective on Western masculinity finds resonance
in the work of Charles Taylor who in Modern Social Imaginaries (2004)
conceives of modernity not as homogeneous or coherent, but ‘that histor-
ically unprecedented amalgam of new practices and institutional forms
(science, technology, industrial production, urbanization), of new ways
of living (individualism, secularization, instrumental rationality), and of
new forms of malaise (alienation, meaninglessness, a sense of impend-
ing social dissolution)’.24 While societies may differ in the exact way
they modernize, Taylor argues that they do share certain characteristics.
These features constitute a ‘modern moral order’, which sees society as
comprising individuals who exist for their mutual benefit, rather than
for the sake of the state itself. In this, the desires of ‘man’ – that is, the
modern subject – can be seen to supersede all other potential social and
political goals. For most Western cultures, the question of identity and
individual desires is of central social and political importance.
Que(e)rying crisis
While remaining mindful of the reservations espoused by Segal and

Robertson, my primary concern here is to illuminate blind spots in the
production and circulation of these discourses. Or, to put it another
way, I suggest we might see the discourse of masculinity in crisis as a
cultural performative in its own right, rather than an epistemology, as
such. Further, I look to a specific selection of case studies to discern how
these dynamics are played out. It is interesting to note, however, that
discourses of crisis rarely concede to the condition’s reconstitutive
dimension. In place of this presumption of stasis, or failure, I suggest
that crisis is not an end in itself but a period of disorder that precedes
and precipitates a longer period of productivity, restructuring, and
redevelopment, which may even lead to the reestablishment of the
temporarily agitated norm. In fact, crisis is to be seen as a constitutive
element of all social, political, and economic systems, a fact that seems
pertinent during the current global recession. Further to this, indeed
following on from it, we should appreciate that certain kinds of crises are
also constitutive of subjectivity. Writing specifically on masculinity in
theatre, Michael Mangan draws attention to this condition by claiming:
Crisis is […] a condition of masculinity itself. Masculine gender

identity is never stable; its terms are continually being redefined and
re-negotiated, the gender performance continually being re-staged.
Certain themes and tropes inevitably reappear with regularity, but
each era experiences itself in different ways.25
Corroborating this recuperative thesis, recent studies have revealed

how throughout the twentieth century, national crises and trauma
(translated as emasculating) have been quickly followed by periods of
remasculinization. George Mosse, for example, identifies the rise of
Fascism in 1920s Germany as the assertion of a fanatical, militaristic mas-
culinity in response to national humiliation in the Treaty of Versailles
following the First World War.26 Leon Hunt understands the ‘uncertain
maleness’ of 1970s Britain as an effect of working through the disintegra-
tion of the Fordist heavy industries, deteriorating labour relations, the
impact of First Wave Feminism, and the rise of the gay movement.27
Susan Jeffords identifies a rise in macho-masculinity in the United States
throughout the 1980s, as exemplified in the figure of Rocky. Jeffords
equates this development with a form of masculinization in response to
1960s hippy culture, and the allegedly weak leadership of President Jimmy
Carter.28 Writing this introduction in 2010, in the wake of an economic
crash, I am painfully reminded of the relationship between vulnerability
and violence via numerous news reports that attest to the rise of national-
ism and racism, undoubtedly followed by other forms of insidious exclu-
sion. What seems important to note here is that there is nothing new about
troubled masculinity. However, at the turn of the twenty-first century,
this trouble has been foregrounded and congealed in a proliferation of
performative practices that might be seen to signal if not an ontological
crisis, then something of a creative impasse.
In Masculinities and Culture (2002), John Beynon identifies the emer-
gence of four main themes in the representation and study of masculinity
in the past decade: (1) the New Man and the Old Man; (2) men running
wild; (3) emasculated men; and (4) men as victims and aggressors.29 While
examples of each of these types are readily identifiable across culture,
this book is chiefly concerned with the relationship between so-called
emasculated, victimized, and aggressive men. Moreover, I am interested
in examining how overlapping positions of abjection, emasculation,
10 Male Trouble
masochism, sacrifice, victimization, and corporeal im/penetrability work

to articulate and negotiate trouble. However, the study maintains that
when masculinity is repeatedly articulated through troubled positions,
the endurance of subjection, or gender trouble, works to secure identity.
The book understands the selected performances and representations of
masculinity to operate within a normative-queer continuum, the former
term denoting the standard cultural proscription for male behaviour and
the latter denoting its deviant Other, which includes homosexual as well
as all non-normative masculinities. The analysis examines how heter-
onormative, heterosexual white masculinity is disturbed by its inherited
claims of authenticity and naturalness, repeatedly compelled to recuper-
ate and reassert its terms. The examination also considers how gay mascu-
linity relates to this heteronormative expedient. Compared to normative
male subjectivity that affirms itself through endurance, the study reveals
how gay subjectivity is represented as ‘naturally’ abject, self-destructive,
and willing to self-sacrifice, and also seemingly compelled to mimic
the terms of heteronormativity and not necessarily to subversive effect.
Moreover, the book understands the frequent and often frenetic reitera-
tion of gender norms, or what Butler refers to in ‘Imitation and Gender
Insubordination’ (1991) as the panicked performativity of heterosexual-
ity,30 as self-subjugating performatives towards mastery, insofar as the
rigorous disciplining of desire, and the display of aggressive male prow-
ess, ensure the subject’s certain stability. If identity crisis is revealed in
these terms, the book asks is this the inescapable deadlock of subjectivity,
or are there alternative/futural possibilities for performing the subject?
Mapping trouble
In Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics (2008), Samuel

Allen Chambers and Terrell Carver expand the concept of ‘trouble’ as it
resonates with/in Butler’s writing:
Our goal in this book is to explore the types of trouble that Butler has
got herself and her readers into, to investigate the manner in which
she has made trouble and to track the effects that her troubling has
had on politics and the political. In so doing we seek to bring Butler
into clearer view as a political thinker – to bring to light her political
theory as a politics of troubling and troubling of politics.31
Chambers and Carver are keen to situate trouble within a wider politi-
cal field, emphasizing the connection between troubling gender(s) and
troubling politics. Similarly, I assert the importance of considering how

certain performances and representations dialogue with discourses of
masculinity in crisis, mindful that troubled and troubling masculinities
retain the capacity to upset, or conspire with, political spheres beyond
the immediate spaces of performance and representation. The chapters
that follow create psychoanalytically inflected queer conversations with
examples from drama, theatre, live art, guerrilla performance, public
spectacle, and film in order to consider how male trouble is performed
and typically managed. The performative practices examined not only
exemplify male trouble, but in taking place within public spheres (or,
as with dramatic texts, intended to take place within such spaces), are
shaped by the desire to have masculinity widely register as traumatized
and traumatic.32 Crucially, however, I think of male trouble as a perfor-
mative practice, or a set of performative practices, perpetuated through
discourse, performance, and representation. I choose varied case studies
not to deny local resonance, but to reveal something of the ubiquity
of this phenomenon. The work discussed here has broadly emerged
between 1991 and 2007, and although this time frame is neither fixed
nor finite, it shares temporal co-ordinates with Butler’s Gender Trouble,
subsequent urgent critiques of heteronormativity, and widespread
claims to masculinity in crisis.
I maintain that male trouble should be considered as a conglomera-
tion of performative practices with no easily measured relationship to
the reality of male experience or masculine ontology. Even so, given the
particular foregrounding of troubled masculinity in the time period in
question, we might consider the work to emerge during significant local
sociocultural junctures: Reaganite backlash in America, and the mobi-
lization of a religiously inflected War on Terror under two Republican
administrations; the legacy of Thatcherite Conservatism in the United
Kingdom and the modernization of the Labour Party; the economic
acceleration of Celtic Tiger Ireland in the 1990s following the recession
of the 1980s. While unique histories shape the geographical loci that
I conflate into a Euro-American context here, I also think that global
capitalism is a central defining force in the regulation of identity poli-
tics. This is not a sociological book, but it nonetheless proposes that
bearing such a context in mind is useful for beginning to conceptualize
the West’s cultivation of a specific range of masculinities that matter
during this period.
In addition to these parallels, further resonance might be found in
thinking about the male body as a social synecdoche, the limits of
which mark the limits of hegemonic norms. It is worth noting that the
12 Male Trouble
turning of the twenty-first century has coincided with great anxiety

in the West, marked by increased concerns over the penetrability and
violability of masculine Euro-American borders. While this anxiety may
be said to have culminated in the September 11th terrorist attacks on
New York’s World Trade Center, the fear of the feminine Other (mainly
in the form of the Middle East) pre-existed and has persisted since
2001. Although none of the work analysed in the book directly refers to
such a macrocosmic politic threat – perhaps with the exception of the
performances of Taylor Mac which I look to in brief in the last chapter –
as masculinity serves and is privileged by patriarchy, I suggest that the
fear may be seen as an implicit context of the Western imaginary that
binds the work together, manifest in the will to shape, discipline, and
empower the male body. In defining the boundaries of the body politic,
and in confirming the resilience and resistance of that body through
endurance, the work considered here may also be seen to explore the
necessity of such subjection in the service of the political body. On
many levels then, this is a book about the questioning and testing of
borders: the borders of the body, the borders of masculinity, and the
borders of heteronormativity.
In Chapter 2, I consider how the performance of sacrifice works to
inscribe the law of heteronormativity through a reading of The Passion
of the Christ (2004). The study situates the film within the normativizing
family discourse that has inflected debates surrounding homosexuality
and gay marriage in the second half of this decade, while revealing
how anxieties surrounding normative stability are central to the film’s
narrative and visual modes. The chapter argues that these phobias find
embodiment in the androgynous figure of Satan and the evil children
that s/he engenders, all of whom must be destroyed through Christ’s
crucifixion. The role of sacrifice in the reproduction of heteronormativ-
ity is explored by considering the contributions of René Girard, Georges
Bataille, and Slavoj Žižek.
The management of castration anxiety, or as Calvin Thomas would
have it, scatontological anxiety, is explored in Chapter 3.33 This sec-
tion examines how masculinity is structured around fantasies of
hypermasculine idealization that demand extraordinary displays of
power, authority, and violence. Focusing on the play Made in China
and the film InterMission, both written by Irish writer Mark O’ Rowe,
the chapter traces the operation of matrices of desire and identifica-
tion that shape this system of expectation, and argues that even when
male characters fail to materialize fantasy phallic figures, they celebrate
impotence, abjection, and victimization. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s
writing on abjection, the chapter argues that the texts illustrate the
pliability of the laws of heteronormativity, by mapping how male
authority is recuperated through the reification of processes of endur-
ance rather than active achievement.
Chapter 4 analyses the relationship between homosexuality, sub-
jection, and fears of social degeneration in British playwright Mark
Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking and Faust is Dead. In reference to
Shopping and Fucking, the chapter examines how self-destructive behav-
iours, which culminate in fantasies of penetration, posit subjection
to ‘the father’ as a performative strategy for redirecting feminine and
homosexual identifications, and by extension, alleviating social dis-
array. In the case of Faust is Dead the chapter investigates how self-
destructive desires (as exemplified in the self-mutilating gay character
Donny, who kills himself) are related to the absence of stable father fig-
ures, with self-harm signifying a desire for the interdiction of paternal
Law to effect the masculinization of unruly homosexual subjectivity. In
these analyses, Jacques Lacan’s paternal paradigm and Fredric Jameson’s
theorization of late capitalist culture and schizoid subjectivity are
engaged.
Continuing with the question of gay subjectivity, Chapter 5 explores
the performativity of self-harm in the live art of Ron Athey and Franko B.
The live performance, visual, and photographic work of these artists
stands out for its grotesque violence, chiefly manifest in self-mutilat-
ing and bloodletting practices. While puncturing the gay male body is
historically a provocative response to homophobic reactions to AIDS, it
is also fraught with limitations. Complementing previously introduced
theories of sacrifice with the contributions of José Esteban Muñoz and
Amelia Jones to performance studies, the chapter suggests that while
the work under consideration is expressly motivated by identity trouble,
the centrality of biography, selfhood, and bodily integrity ultimately
reify male authorial prowess and bolster the impenetrability of the male
body.
Chapter 6 analyses spectacles of heroic masculinity as they relate to
the high-risk endurance performances of David Blaine and the public
protests of Fathers 4 Justice. The chapter explores how these perform-
ances begin at a point of male trouble and, drawing on the work of
Jean Baudrillard and Lacan, considers how the public, heavily media-
tized nature of the work functions to elevate and resignify that crisis in
reconstitutive ways.
Chapter 7 situates Jackass within discourses of recuperative laddism.
Focusing on the film Jackass: The Movie (2002), with reference to the
14 Male Trouble
MTV television series, the chapter explores how the discursive strate-
gies of laddism might be seen to involve a calculated transposition of
masculine norms, designed to licence a whole range of misogynistic and
homophobic behaviours. The examination considers how masculinity
is constructed through masochistic acts, presented as rites of initiation,
that involve the abjection, figurative castration, and penetration of the
male body. It also explores how, through various acts of playful mim-
icry, males performatively control their abject other(s) in the service of
affirming a stable masculine core.
In the last chapter, I primarily think through the contributions of
Leo Bersani and Bracha L. Ettinger, alongside the work of the New York-
based performer Taylor Mac. I do so to advance an ethic of fragilization
that would involve borderlinking with trouble, so as not to foreclose
other relational possibilities in being and becoming.
Critical interventions
Male Trouble finds impetus in a range of scholarly interventions into the

area of masculinity and queer studies. In addition to Butler’s philosophi-
cally textured research, for instance, the book owes much to the socio-
logical writing of Lynne Segal, Susan Faludi, Robert William Connell, and
Michael Kimmel. Segal’s Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing
Men (1990) is an important early exercise in troubling masculinity, by
addressing its pace of change and the manner in which masculinities are
produced at complex historical and social junctures. Similarly, Faludi’s
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991) explores
the reactionary politics of the feminist movement, while Stiffed: The
Betrayal of the American Man (1999) seeks to account for the troubled
and troubling response of men to their social disenfranchisement.
Equally formative has been the work of Connell whose Masculinities
(1995) and The Men and the Boys (2000) continue to inform our under-
standing of the construction of masculinity at the intersection of power
and labour relations. Kimmel’s Manhood in America: A Cultural History
(1996) remains a significant addition to the development of an anti-
masculinist approach to the study of masculinity that considers how
the gender order is a constantly changing social construct, while his
edited collection with Michael Messner, Men’s Lives (1989), explores
how working-class men, men of colour, gay men, older and younger
men construct different versions of masculinity.
Within the context of American literary and cultural studies,
David Savran’s Taking it Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism and
Contemporary America Culture (1998) traces the genealogy of the fantasy

of the white male as victim in American culture, beginning with the 1950s’
hipster and ending with more recent figures like Iron John, Rambo, and
Timothy McVeigh. Pressing Freudian theory to cultural materialism,
Savran considers poetry, drama, biography, legal documents, media and
popular discourse to argue that victimization became a means by which
white masculinity qualified its legitimacy and regulated its hegemony in
this period of American culture.
Additionally, Kaja Silverman’s Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992)
analyses representations of ‘“deviant” masculinities – masculinities whose
defining desires and identifications are “perverse”’.34 Using psychoana-
lytic theory to read literature and film, Silverman explores ways in which
male identity has been represented as fractured and marginal through
various strategies, including masochism and victimization. However,
in pitting these strategies chiefly as examples of ‘phallic divestiture’,35
the trajectory of Silverman’s work differs from mine.
Further, Calvin Thomas’ theoretically sophisticated readings of mas-
culinity in the fields of literature, mass culture, and film in Male Matters:
Masculinity, Anxiety and the Male Body on the Line (1996) and Masculinity,
Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass
Culture, and Film (2008) have, through focusing on the relationship
between abjection and writing, signposted alternative critical possibili-
ties for thinking about masculinity, representation, and the reproduction
of heteronormativity. Further, Thomas’ work foregrounds how produc-
tive such a project might be for feminist and queer scholarship, as well as
for critical masculinity studies.
Although not strictly concerned with gender and sexuality, Peter
Stallybrass and Allon White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
(1986) offers sharp insight into the operation of transgression, a key
dimension to the question of trouble. Analysing a wide variety of texts
from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, using literary theory,
history, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, the authors explore the
hierarchical dynamics between high and low culture in four symbolic
domains: psychic forms, the human body, geographical space, and the
social order. One of the central assertions of Stallybrass and White’s
study is that the relationship between the high and the low is ambiva-
lent and contradictory, with the lower order of things ‘both reviled and
desired’. The writers expand on this peculiar dependence, noting:
Repugnance and fascination are the twin poles of the process in

which a political imperative to reject and eliminate the debasing
16 Male Trouble
‘low’ conflicts powerfully and unpredictably with a desire for the

Other […] A recurrent pattern emerges: the ‘top’ attempts to reject
and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to
discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon
that low-Other (in the classic way that Hegel describes in the master-
slave section of the Phenomenology), but also that the top includes
that low symbolically as a primary eroticised constituent of its own
fantasy life.36
Of crucial significance is the authors’ insistence on the contradictory

interplay between the high and the low, the socially elevated and the
socially marginal, insofar as it parallels the relationship between the
normative dominant and the queer ‘subordinate’. If we are to fol-
low Stallybrass and White’s psychocultural thesis, all subjectivity ‘is a
mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear and desire […] a psychological
dependence upon precisely those Others which are being rigorously
opposed and excluded at the social level’.37 For this reason, the writers
continue to suggest that ‘what is socially peripheral is so frequently
symbolically central’.38 This critique is useful for this project insofar
as it suggests that the Symbolic and the abject enjoy a dynamic, often
self-serving relationship, and that this is discernible in the ‘highest’ and
the ‘lowest’ of cultural forms. Their elucidation of the complex relation-
ship between the sociocultural centre and the margin provides a way of
thinking about the normative and the queer as it relates to male identity,
in addition to underscoring the value of looking to examples of so-called
high and low cultural practices as I arguably do here. Given the pic-
ture they paint, we might query how, if at all, transgression or social
transformation is possible? Or, to put it another way, we might ask if
there are queer relational modes that are not defined by the jouissance
of transgression which ultimately sustains and reproduces the system of
relationality ostensibly being challenged? I cannot claim to answer all
of these questions in this book, but they are timely for queer studies.
Psychoanalytic inflections
While the preceding paragraphs sketched a sociocultural context and

provided an overview of this book, the project’s main methodology
is woven from psychoanalytically inflected queer theories, or rather,
queerly inflected psychoanalytic theories. Precisely because these dis-
courses are complex, it is useful to explicate them at length at this stage.
Accordingly, the following pages are dedicated to rehearsing some of the
central frameworks which will be engaged further in individual chap-

ters, in particular those theories that elaborate upon the relationship
between subjection and the production of male subjectivity. Again, it
is worth reiterating that discourses of crisis can be understood as potent
performatives inseparable from other modes of cultural activity, and
because of this, equally in need of interrogation.
Psychoanalytic theory centralizes the role of identification in the devel-
opment of subjectivity. In foundational Freudian and Lacanian accounts,
identification lays the very foundations of subjectivity, with works
by Butler emphasizing the additional role of enactments. In his intro-
duction to the edited collection Psychoanalysis and Performance (2001),
Patrick Campbell’s elucidation of the interplay between psychoanalytic
interpretation and the performing arts has implications for the study of
the practices considered in the book:
[I]f performing is a process in which individuals, physically present

on stage, think, speak and interact in front of other individuals,
then that very activity must throw into relief crucial questions about
human behaviour. In making the hidden visible, the latent manifest,
in laying bare the interior landscape of the mind and its fears and
desires through a range of signifying practices, psychoanalytic proc-
esses are endemic to the performing arts.39
While Campbell’s critique is primarily of live performance, I suggest

that his claim is also true of any representation that is performative, or
illuminates something of the performativity of identity, in that these
can also be seen to have interiority, latency, and signifying value.40
The lost object
Sigmund Freud’s paper ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) seeks to

account for the self-punishment displayed by those who lose loved ones.
Freud believed that such self-attacks might lead to hysteria, obsession,
or depression, and sought in his analysis of these experiences to under-
stand the structure of the psyche and the role of identification to these
phenomena. In this paper, Freud differentiates between experiences of
mourning and melancholia. While the lost object of mourning can be
readily named and accounted for, this is not true of melancholia:
The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking

in mourning – an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an
18 Male Trouble
impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale. The patient represents

his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally
despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be
cast out and punished. He abases himself before everyone and com-
miserates with his own relatives for being connected with anyone so
unworthy.41
Freud goes on to suggest that when the subject loses a loved one, the
ego internalizes that other into its structure, taking on attributes of that
other and sustaining it through imitation. The process of an object-
decathexis is overcome through an act of identification, designed to
incorporate the other in the self. While mourning is typically overcome
with the psychic ‘release’ of the lost love, ongoing melancholia can be
seen as a way by which the other, psychically internalized, is reproached
for its loss.
In The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud makes the claim that the harbour-
ing of lost loves is not just significant to adult life, but also formative in
the initial construction of the ego and its object-choice:
[W]e have come to understand that this kind of substitution has a

great share in determining the form taken by the ego and that it
makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called its
‘character’ […] When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual
object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can
only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego[…]42
Further, he suggests that while an adult may possess the capacity to

resist the influences of abandoned object-cathexes, childhood identi-
fications are usually fixed, and are related to the formation of the ego
ideal as it is governed by identification with the father and the mother
in the Oedipus complex. In a ‘positive’ complex, as the story goes, the
male child rejects the object-cathexis established with his mother in
favour of identification with his father. Freud maintains that the success
of the Oedipus complex and the assumption of masculine and feminine
positions are also dependent upon the resolution of ‘the constitutional
bisexuality of each individual’.43
Fractured reflections
Jacques Lacan’s systematic reading of Freud is heavily influenced by

post-structural linguistics, an intersection which sees him conceive of
the subject as having no fixed relationship to the external world, as

with the sign to its referent. Deconstructing popular theories of the
subject as essential and knowable, Lacan conceives of the subject as a
discursive construct, fragmented and unstable. Subjectivity is not an
innate disposition in Lacanian theory, but a position occupied within
language, precipitated by the social interpellation of individuals.
Social interpellation takes place across three main stages of develop-
ment which also roughly correspond to orders of consciousness, known
as the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic orders. Central to the
Imaginary is what Lacan refers to as the ‘mirror stage’, a moment/phase
when the infant joyously apprehends its reflected image and misrecog-
nizes itself as separate from its mother, a total and integrated identity.
In ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in
Psychoanalytic Experience’ (1949), Lacan describes the mirror stage as
a critical phase of identification(s) in the development of subjectivity:
‘We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the
full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation
that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image [...]’44 This
instance anticipates the child’s assumption that there is an objective
‘I’ to others and that this image is what ‘I’ am like. The incongruity
of the child’s sense of self with its idealized stable representation, or
méconnaissance, predisposes the ego to fiction and illusion, and pre-
cipitates the assumption of the signifying position of ‘I’ within the
Symbolic order.45
The shift from the Imaginary to the Symbolic stage comes about as
a result of the wielding of paternal Law. While the child has, up until
this point, not differentiated between itself and its mother’s body, it
now becomes aware that its father has some degree of precedence over
the right to enjoy the mother. Known as the Oedipus complex, this
stage sees the linguistic interdiction of ‘No’ by the Name-of-the-Father
disrupt imaginary identifications in favour of symbolic ones, forcing the
child to suppress its desire for its mother, and take up a position within
the Symbolic register.
In the Lacanian model, it is the Symbolic order of language that offers
the subject identity, in particular gender and sexual identity, by afford-
ing it access to its various signifying systems, orders, and laws. Insofar as
entry is dependent upon paternal interdiction, however, the Symbolic is
also the realm of male authority, a fact that perpetuates the privileging of
male symbolization over female. This is primarily due to the child’s rela-
tionship to the phallus during the Oedipus complex. In ‘The Significa-
tion of the Phallus’ (1958), Lacan figures the phallus as ‘the signifier
20 Male Trouble
intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signified;’46 the

master signifier at the centre of the Symbolic sphere which gives it stabil-
ity, by anchoring the play of signifiers, and by facilitating the generation
of meaning. As such, the phallus also plays a central role in the forma-
tion of sexed subjectivity. According to Lacan, this involves the
installation in the subject of an unconscious position without which

he would be unable to identify himself with the ideal type of his sex,
or to respond without grave risk to the needs of his partner in the
sexual relation, or even to accept in a satisfactory way why the needs
of the child who may be produced by this relation.47
Although Lacan claims that both males and females are constituted by
lack, from the moment in the mirror stage when they identify them-
selves as separate from the mother’s body, he claims that boys and girls
perceive this lack differently. While eager to point out that the phal-
lus is not the same as the penis – ‘the phallus is not a phantasy […] It
is even less the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes’48 – the psycho-
analyst maintains that the signifier is modelled upon such cultural
associations:
It can be said that this signifier is chosen because it is the most

tangible element in the real of sexual copulation, and also the most
symbolic in the literal (typographical) sense of the term, since it is
equivalent there to the (logical) copula. It might also be said that, by
virtue of its turgidity, it is the image of the vital flow as it is transmit-
ted in generation.49
Lacan refrains from naturalizing male dominance by suggesting that

boys only think they can possess the phallus because they have penises,
and so do not acknowledge this lack to the same extent as girls. In
‘On a Question Preliminary to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’
(1955–6) he remarks that females, in lacking penises, serve ‘as objects
for the exchanges required by the elementary structures of kinship’.50
Following on, we might say that something of profound misperception
rather than biological determinism is responsible for the construction
of heteronormative masculinity as the most dominant and powerful
gender order. This is most clearly evidenced in the supremacy of patri-
archy, which seduces the male subject with the promise of plenitude.
Lacan’s explication of the relationship between the phallus and male
identity has also informed subsequent gender theorists to coin the

term ‘phallic masculinity’ to describe its most aggressive manifestations.
While the mirror stage is the realm of imaginary identifications and the
construction of the ideal ego, the Oedipus complex is the realm of sym-
bolic identification with the father and the formation of the ego ideal.
In this account, subjectivity is constituted through a process of recogni-
tion and misrecognition, identification and disidentification.
However, the perpetuation of male dominance through the construc-
tion of masculinity and patriarchy demands certain sacrifices from its
would-be subjects. That is to say, the success of the male subject within
the Symbolic is dependent upon his compliance to certain normative
codes of behaviour initially encountered in the Imaginary stage. First, in
order for the male subject to be fully assimilated by the Symbolic order
and later privileged by its ruling system of patriarchy, he must submit to
the Law of the Father and be symbolically castrated. He must extricate
himself from the mother’s body, and all associated experiences, and do
as the father demands. From this moment on, male subjection – the
(willing) submission to paternal Law – is established as a central feature
of normative male identity, organized around a sacrificial economy of
exchange: the reward for subjection is the assumption of a privileging
‘masculine’ position within the Symbolic. The subject’s contract with
the Law is regulated in the denial of the lack inaugurated by maternal
separation in the Imaginary, and in the excessive production and sub-
limation of desire in efforts to master law, language, and culture, those
defining features of the Symbolic. This involves the male subject who
conforms to normative masculinity continually misperceiving, or over-
estimating his entitlement to patriarchal privilege.
While female subjectivity also necessitates the repression of desire in
the Oedipus complex, the girl does not misperceive her relationship to
the phallus to the same extent, and resigns herself to trying to be the
phallus for the male (by having children, for example). Lacan accounts
for this sex differentiation in terms which revolve around ‘a being and a
having’ of the phallus.51 Further, the female subject is not compelled to
completely repress her pre-Oedipal experiences, for in childbearing, she
maintains affinities to the Real and Imaginary orders. Regarding these
distinctions, Coppélia Kahn observes of girls:
Her femininity is reinforced by her original symbiotic union with her

mother and by the identification with her that must precede iden-
tity, while his [a boy’s] masculinity is threatened by the same union
22 Male Trouble
and the same identification. While the boy’s sense of self begins in
union with the feminine, his sense of masculinity arises against it.52
Not only is male identity figured as sacrificial in the Oedipus com-

plex but in the Symbolic too where if he wishes to be privileged by
patriarchy, the male subject must control deviant desires by adhering to
specific, normative codes of masculinity. In this polarizing arrangement,
masculinity is defined as a rigorous sacrificial regime, characterized by
the necessary self-disciplining of desire. As Elisabeth Badinter writes,
‘To be a man signifies not to be feminine; not to be homosexual; not
to be effeminate in one’s physical appearance or manners; not to have
sexual or overtly intimate relations with other men; not to be impotent
with women.’53 Or, as Butler suggests in The Psychic Life of Power (1997),
‘Becoming a “man” […] requires repudiating femininity as a precondi-
tion for the heterosexualization of sexual desire and its fundamental
ambivalence.’54
Abject potentiality
A number of feminist thinkers such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and

Jacqueline Rose have pointed out that the Symbolic order is premised
upon the repression of experiences of the female body. For Rose, abject
violence is made most vividly manifest at the rational pinnacle of
Symbolic Law.55 Kristeva, in particular, highlights how this repression is
revealed at the level of the social in her writing on the semiotic and the
abject. In a bid to interrogate the perceived phallocentrism of prevailing
psychoanalytic models, Kristeva reimagines the order of the Real and
its relationship to the Symbolic. In Revolution in Poetic Language (1984),
she conceives of the Real as the semiotic, a pre-Oedipal stage and order
defined by the sensual experiences of the female body: ‘the drives,
which are “energy” charges, as well as “psychical” marks’.56 For Kristeva,
however, the complete repression of semiotic drives is impossible, for
in being discursive effects, subjects are always subjects-in-process, the
interplay of ‘both semiotic and symbolic’ laws.57 In this formulation,
even a ‘positive’ Oedipus complex is never fully secure, for identifica-
tion with the father is continuously disturbed by identification with the
mother. Kristeva claims that the semiotic has the power to disrupt
the Symbolic, by drawing attention to it as an incomplete signifying
process. In Patrick Campbell’s elucidation, this is owing to the semiot-
ic’s capability of ‘disrupting the “status quo” [of the Symbolic], allow-
ing the feminine to re-enter discourse through its very exorbitance, its
transgressing of the phallocentric signifying process’.58 To illustrate this

point, Kristeva draws on the disruptive function of art: ‘In “artistic”
practices the semiotic – the precondition of the symbolic – is revealed
as that which also destroys the symbolic, and this revelation allows us
to presume something about its functioning.’59
The semiotic’s troubling potential is most vividly and violently dem-
onstrated in encounters with the abject. In the seminal work Powers of
Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), Kristeva figures the abject as that
which ‘disturbs identity, system order. What does not respect borders,
positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’.60 In
being ‘opposed to I’ the abject draws the subject ‘toward the place
where meaning collapses’,61 to the point of the subject’s annihilation.
Kristeva relates responses of abjection to the repression of pre-Oedipal or
semiotic experiences of the female body. The feelings of disgust incurred
by encounters with blood, excrement, and the skin on milk, she sug-
gests, are expressions of the Symbolic order’s insistence on system,
order, and boundary-making; and of the prohibition on transgressing
the Law. In resisting symbolization, the abject defies the Name-of-
the-Father; it exists as a père-version.62 This père-version also takes the
form of the père-vert, the abject human whose life resists (or is refused)
assimilation to the Symbolic realm. Such a figure continually challenges
the subject’s coherence by arousing the feeling of ‘the impossible within
[…] that it is [the subject] none other than abject’.63 In disturbing the
chain of socially acceptable Oedipal identifications, this figure con-
stantly questions the Symbolic domain’s convention, as ‘a deviser of
territories, languages, works’.64
Performative displacement
Butler further investigates the dynamic of Kristeva’s abject within

Lacan’s Symbolic register, in the context of gender and sexuality.
Crucially, Butler attempts to think outside the heteronormative frame-
work of Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva by conceiving of gender and sex not
in terms of biology but citational performativity. In Bodies that Matter
Butler describes a performative as ‘that discursive practice which enacts
or produces that which it names’.65 Like Lacan’s theory of interpella-
tion, but with an added emphasis on acts as well as identifications,
Butler claims that the production of gendered identity occurs through
the citation and reiteration of social norms, conventions, or laws. Their
assumption is not a single act or event, but the effect of an iterable prac-
tice, and identity is only secured as stable through seamless repetition.
24 Male Trouble
To illustrate this point, Butler describes how the act of naming sex –
for example, ‘It’s a girl’ – sets in motion a process of ‘girling’:
This is a ‘girl’, however who is compelled to ‘cite’ the norm in order

to qualify and remain a viable subject. Femininity is thus not the
product of choice, but the forcible citation of a norm, one whose
complex historicity is indissociable from relations of discipline,
regulation, and punishment. Indeed there is no ‘one’ which takes on
a gender norm. On the contrary, this citation of the gender norm is
necessary in order to qualify as a ‘one’, to become viable as a ‘one’,
where subject-formation is dependent on the prior operation of
legitimating gender norms.66
Invoking Kristeva, Butler argues that this process of constructing viable

subjects is premised upon the existence of ‘abject beings, those who
are not yet “subjects”, but who form the constitutive outside to the
domain of the subject’.67 And given that the ‘normative phantasm of
“sex”’68 is a creation of a heterosexual discursive matrix, Butler identi-
fies homosexual non-subjects as the abject correlatives of heterosexual
subjectivity. Such figures represent what is unliveable, unthinkable,
and unintelligible to Symbolic Law. And yet, as Kristeva suggests of
encounters with the abject, Butler claims that these abject non-subjects
have disruptive potential. In defining the limit of the subject’s domain,
they continually threaten to expose the fragility of normative subjec-
tivity, ‘the self-grounding presumptions of the sexed subject […]’.69
The abject non-subject constantly threatens to puncture the borders
of the subject and the heteronormative regime it depends upon for
signification.
Moreover, Butler questions the identification readings offered by
Freud in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ and The Ego and the Id, Lacan’s
writing on the mirror stage and Oedipus complex, and Kristeva’s theory
of primary semiotic drives. Notably, she challenges the fixity presumed
by these readings. In her examination of Freud in Gender Trouble, Butler
questions the psychoanalyst’s claims of object-cathexis and paternal
identification. In The Ego and the Id, Freud understands the femininity
of boys to relate to bisexuality, claiming that this primary condition
‘makes it so difficult to obtain a clear view of the facts in connection
with the earliest object choices and identifications, and still more
difficult to describe them intelligibly’.70 Butler suggests that Freud
is compelled to introduce the Oedipus complex in order to explain
why the boy must reject the mother and identify with the father, but
not only that, choose masculine or feminine positions. Butler argues
that the imperative to reject the mother might not solely function to
resist castration, but possibly a homosexual cathexis:
That the boy usually chooses the heterosexual would, then, be the
result, not of the fear of castration by the father, but of the fear of
castration – that is, of the fear of ‘feminization’ associated within
heterosexual cultures with male homosexuality. In effect, it is not
primarily the heterosexual lust for the mother that must be punished
and sublimated, but the homosexual cathexis that must be subordi-
nated to a culturally sanctioned heterosexuality.71
In Identification Papers (1995), Diana Fuss takes similar issue with Freud’s
topography, which aims to draw a line between identification – ‘the
wish to be the other’ – and desire for the sexual object – ‘the wish
to have the other’. Desire and identification are problematically and
improbably presented, according to Fuss, in a way that renders Butler’s
offering conceivable:
For Freud, desire for one sex is always secured through identification
with the other sex; to desire and to identify with the same person at
the same time is, in this mode, a theoretical impossibility […] The
two psychical mechanisms, which together form the cornerstone
of Freud’s theory of sexual identity formation, work in tandem to
produce a sexually marked subject [… however ] psychoanalysis’s
distinction between wanting to be the other and wanting to have the
other is a precarious one at best, its epistemological validity seriously
open to question.72
In Gender Trouble Butler also queries the distinctions and psychic typo-
logies presented by Freud in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. She points
out that when the lost loved-object (the mother for boys in a positive
complex) is internalized, it is not given up, just preserved within the ego.
There it resides alongside paternal identification, which is the realm of
the ego ideal. Acting as a policing agent in the consolidation of mas-
culinity (and femininity), through guarding normative sanctions and
taboos, the ego ideal turns against the ego (of which it is a component),
to ensure success. Unravelling this psychic presupposition, Butler sug-
gests that gender identification itself is best understood as a kind of
26 Male Trouble
melancholia, with the sex of the lost object becoming psychically inter-
nalized as prohibition:
Because identifications substitute for object relations, and identif-

ications are the consequence of loss, gender identification is a kind of
melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized
as a prohibition. This prohibition sanctions and regulates discrete
gendered identity and the law of heterosexual desire. The resolu-
tion of the Oedipal complex affects gender identification through
not only the incest taboo, but, prior to that, the taboo against
homosexuality.73
If the relationship to the lost object is actually homosexual rather than

heterosexual, as Butler suggests it may be (lost because of the taboo on
homosexuality, which precedes the incest taboo); and if gender is a kind
of melancholia which results in the internalization of that lost object,
then the prohibition against having a same-sex love object might be
seen to precipitate a desire to become that lost object. The original pro-
hibition ultimately effects a desire to reproduce the gender of that sex.
Through this model, Butler suggests:
[I]dentity is constructed and maintained by the consistent applica-

tion of this taboo, not only in the stylization of the body in com-
pliance with discrete categories of sex, but in the production and
‘disposition’ of sexual desire […] dispositions are not the primary
sexual facts of the psyche, but produced effects of a law imposed by
culture and by the complicitous and transvaluating acts of the ego
ideal.74
If, in the works of Freud and Lacan, gender identification is based on

prohibition, Butler strongly questions the possibility of its successful
consolidation. (She also questions the maternalist discourse of Kristeva
for its heterosexual assumptions.) The excluded term in both accounts,
she asserts, is ‘an excluded sexuality that contests the self-grounding
pretensions of the subject as well as its claims to know the source and
object of its desire’.75 If heteronormative, heterosexual subjectivity
depends on the implementation of the taboo on homosexuality, then
Butler argues that certain identities that fail to internalize this taboo
inevitably fall outside of heteronormative intelligibility. Fuss echoes
this problem, noting the difficulty of singular, stable, complete identi-
fication to settle in her reading of Freud: ‘The astonishing capacity of
identifications to reverse and disguise themselves, to multiply and con-

travene one another, to disappear and reappear years later renders iden-
tity profoundly unstable and perpetually open to radical change.’76
Butler gestures towards looking to troubled identification, manifest in
the failure to imitate, repeat, and reproduce coherent gender, in order to
dissemble the presumptive heterosexual matrix:
If ‘identifications’, following Jacqueline Rose, can be exposed as

phantasmatic, then it must be possible to enact an identification that
displays its phantasmatic structure. If there is not radical repudiation
of a culturally constituted sexuality, what is left is the question of
how to acknowledge and ‘do’ the construction one is invariably in.
Are there forms of repetition that do not constitute a simple imita-
tion, reproduction, and, hence, consolidation of the law […] What
possibilities of gender configurations exist among the emergent and
occasionally convergent matrices of cultural intelligibility that govern
gendered life?77
In Bodies that Matter, imagining the political ramifications of disiden-

tification brings Butler to consider the affirmation of that slippage,
owing to the fact that ‘the failure of identification is itself the point of
departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference’.78
In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999),
José Esteban Muñoz embraces both Fuss’s and Butler’s work (in addition
to that of Michel Pêcheux79) for paving the way towards ‘an understand-
ing of a “disidentificatory subject” who tacitly and simultaneously
works on, with, and against a cultural form’.80
In Gender Trouble Butler invokes the work of Nicolas Abraham and
Maria Torok to further extend this question of where to locate and how
to analyse the subversive possibilities of identification. In the collected
essays of Abraham and Torok, titled The Shell and the Kernel (1994), the
psychoanalysts claim that Freud’s theory of identification pertains to the
realm of incorporation with ‘the prohibited object settled in the ego in
order to compensate for the lost pleasure and failed introjection’.81 While
introjection belongs to the work of mourning, incorporation belongs to
the work of melancholia. Crucially, however, incorporation is not a proc-
ess but a fantasy that imagines an object into an interior space. Where,
Butler asks, is the incorporated space that sustains identifications through
melancholy? ‘If it is not literally within the body’, she suggests, ‘perhaps
it is on the body as its surface signification such that the body must
itself be understood as an incorporated space?’82 Butler’s interrogation
28 Male Trouble
of this locale is understandable, given that Abraham and Torok maintain

that incorporation is ‘magic’ and ‘must remain’ concealed. After all,
‘it is born of prohibition’ and ‘the ultimate aim of incorporation is to
recover, in secret and through magic, an object that, for one reason or
another, evaded its own function’.83 As a naturalized site, Butler’s look to
the body is not surprising. Certainly Abraham and Torok maintain the
operation of incorporation in the field of representations, affects, and
bodily states.84 But similarly, fantasies of incorporation become another
way through which the lost love object is acknowledged and symboli-
cally recuperated. Unless there is ‘an openly manic crisis’85 which would
amount to a blatant, hysterical acknowledgement of the lost object,
incorporation is a subtle, secret act that signposts the graveyard in the
ego. This dynamic might be seen to resonate with the external and
internal body explorations of Ron Athey and Franko B discussed in
Chapter 5. Butler unites her theory of the psychical structure of gender
identification with Abraham and Torok’s elaboration of incorporation.
In doing so, she suggests that gender identification is accomplished with
the denial of loss and the encryption of loss in the body:
As an antimetaphorical activity, incorporation literalizes the loss

on or in the body and so appears as the facticity of the body, the
means by which the body comes to bear ‘sex’ as its literal truth. The
localization and/or prohibition of pleasures and desires in given
‘erotogenetic’ zones is precisely the kind of gender-differentiating
melancholy that suffuses the body’s surface.86
In this account, incorporation is an act that reveals and literalizes loss in

or on the body. Incorporation is act/moment/sign of gender trouble.
The subject of subjectivity
What emerges in these writings is a picture of subjectivity as inher-

ently melancholic, effected through repression, prohibition, and self-
punishment; marked in, on, and through the body. And this body,
despite the best efforts of the ego-police, can never completely conceal
this loss. Within these narratives, subjectivity is constantly haunted by
loss, although it must be denied in order to lay claim to stable identity.
Even apparently secured or normative identity is not safe. The more
stable the gender affinity, Butler warns, the less resolved the original
loss, with rigid gender boundaries merely serving to conceal that loss.87
At this point it is important to note that these readings of subjectiv-

ity are neither exhaustive nor exclusive. It is equally worth asserting
that while many of these hostile frameworks do not sit easily with this
author, it seems necessary to press them to further analysis, not least of
all because they go some way to explain the sacrificial bond that secures
subjectivity in our cultural imaginary, and which is traced throughout
this book. While this is the picture of identity that emerges through
classical psychoanalytical writings, it is embellished by other works that
address more specifically the relationship between sacrifice, subjection,
and male identity.
Freud goes some way to describing the relationship between subjec-
tion and subjectivity. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) is his
first explicit attempt to account for masochistic dispositions. Described
as ‘the most common and the most significant of all the perversions’,88
sadism and masochism are deemed to upset the Oedipus complex, not
least of all because of their pervasiveness. At the same time, Freud blurs
the common distinction by suggesting that sadistic and masochistic
leanings psychically co-habit: ‘The most remarkable feature of this per-
version is that its active and passive forms are habitually found to occur
in the same individual.’89 Freud continues his investigation of sado-
masochistic dispositions in ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ (1919). Chiefly
based on case studies (four females and two males), this paper accounts
for female-beating fantasies in a three-part structure: (1) ‘My father is
beating the child whom I hate’;90 (2) ‘I am being beaten by my father’;91
(3) ‘I am probably looking on’, typically at other boys being beaten.92
Freud notes that the first and third of these stages are similar and con-
scious, the second stage is ‘never remembered’,93 most likely because
it has been repressed owing to the ‘unambiguous sexual excitement
attached to it’.94 Typical of his Oedipal configurations, Freud impresses
that ‘none of these incestuous loves’ – the desire to be beaten/fucked/
loved by the father – ‘can avoid the fate of repression’95 and the female
subject’s desire in the second sequence is even too difficult to represent.
Desire is consequently displaced into the final fantasy, in which the
female appears as a sadistic spectator. Although phases one and two
of these fantasies appear to be sadistic, this is only true in their formal
construction as the self-identified spectator is vicariously masochisti-
cally satisfied, by virtue of the fact that the boys in the final scenario
are ‘nothing more than substitutes for the child itself’.96 Guilty desire
for the father, then, is transformed into a theatricalized fantasy of being
punished by the father, this disavowal resulting in ‘punishment for the
30 Male Trouble
forbidden genital relation, but also the regressive substitute for that relation’,97
the final phase converging a sense of guilt with sexual love.
The female subjects under Freud’s analysis reveal a fracturing of
sexual normativity. As David Savran points out, Freud’s analysis reveals
‘a subject who is radically divided, both spectator and victim, producer
of desire and recipient of punishment, sexually aroused and desperately
guilty’.98 As this study is concerned with masculinity, I want to read
the Freudian topography specifically in light of male subjects. What
is particularly interesting with female fantasies, when set in dialogue
with their male counterparts, is the centrality of the dominated male –
invariably a father figure – in spite of the sex of the confessing subject.
For Freud, this fantasy construction precipitates a masculinity complex,
which sees girls ‘only want[ing] to be boys’.99 In other words, it is
through her subjugation that the female desires to be a boy, and spur
masculinization. Savran draws attention to the homosexual investment
in Freud’s beating scenario owing to the fact that the males are seemingly
punished for loving the father:
The female is thus reconfigured as a male homosexual. According

to Freud’s analysis, normative constructions of both gender and
sexuality are thus severely disrupted by the masochistic scenario.
The female subject is rendered both homosexual and heterosexual,
masculinized and feminized, her passivity at once affirmed and con-
tradicted by its projection on to a male homosexual subject.100
While Freud initially brushes aside males with ‘beating-phantasies in

men are connected with another subject, which I shall leave on side
on this paper’,101 his commentary on the shifting positions of female
fantasies seemingly leads him to do just that. In his account, norma-
tive positions are similarly challenged in male-beating fantasies. Freud
suggests that the male subject imagines three phases to his subjection:
(1) ‘I am being beaten by my father’;102 (2) ‘I am loved by my father’;103
(3) ‘I am being beaten by my mother’.104 As in the female scenario, the beat-
ing corresponds to sexual love: ‘being beaten also stands for being loved
(in a genital sense), though this has been debased to a lower level owing
to regression’.105 The unconscious fantasy of stage two is thus repressed
in favour of the conscious third stage. Even so, the male beating fantasy
figures the male as inherently passive: not only in stage two with its
blatant homosexual investment but in stage three, where the mother
figure is endowed with ‘masculine attributes and characteristics’.106 In
both female and male masochistic fantasies (termed feminine, reflecting
the assumed naturalness of female passivity), normative constructions

of gender and sexual identity are radically disrupted:
The boy evades his homosexuality by repressing and remodelling

his unconscious phantasy: and the remarkable thing about his later
conscious phantasy is that it has for its content a feminine attitude
without a homosexual object-choice. By the same process, on the
other hand, the girl escapes from the demands of the erotic side of
her life altogether. She turns herself into a man, without herself
becoming active in a masculine way, and is no longer anything but a
spectator of the event which takes the place of a sexual act.107
In his analysis of both male and female subjects, Freud identifies a

repressed desire to be beaten by the father, which ‘lives on in the uncon-
scious after repression has taken place’.108
While Freud’s observations in Three Essays and ‘A Child is Being Beaten’
serve to build a theory of masochistic subjectivity, his argument strives
for an ontogenetic explanation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).
Here, the death drive is positioned in contrast to the pleasure principle, or
Eros. Freud suggests that libido functions to neutralize the death instinct,
by redirecting it outside the individual.109 However, if this primary
sadism is bound up libidinally, the individual becomes the subject of
its own aggression. Freud continues his investigation towards a pri-
mary masochism in ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ (1924).
Here, not only does he claim a primary, or ‘erotogenic’ masochism –
‘a condition imposed on sexual excitation’ – but two derivative forms:
feminine masochism, ‘as an expression of the feminine nature’ in male
subjects, and moral masochism, ‘a norm of behaviour’.110 Although all
forms are related, owing to the claimed masochistic primacy, this is
particularly true of erotogenic and feminine strains. Feminine maso-
chism, labelled as ‘the most accessible to our observation and least
problematical’111 is an exclusive perversion of male subjectivity, the
female understood to be naturally masochistic. Freud describes maso-
chism as something of ‘performance’, or ‘the carrying out of the phan-
tasies in play’,112 which typically relate to desires of ‘being gagged,
bound, painfully beaten, whipped, in some way maltreated, forced
into unconditional obedience, dirtied and debased’.113 Considered at
various stages of the book, these desires are given expression in The
Passion of the Christ, the performances of Ron Athey and Franko B and
Jackass, for example. Similarly, Freud notes the occurrence of mutila-
tion and torture, while claiming them to be less frequent. He impresses
32 Male Trouble
that in male masochistic desire, the male assumes the traditionally

female role of ‘being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a
baby’.114
Moral masochism is less explicitly concerned with sexuality and fan-
tasy than with a behavioural norm, or the mental suffering considered
in this project, most explicitly in InterMission. Freud typifies this strain
as a turning of the other cheek, irrespective of one’s relationship to the
masochist (erotogenic and feminine relate to being beaten/loved by the
father). Moral masochism is due to the demands of the ego for punish-
ment by the introjected parental voice of the super-ego, or the actual
parental powers themselves. Inevitably, Freud injects it with libidinal
significance, however, owing to the fact that guilt takes an unconscious
position in the sealing of the Oedipus complex. Its conscious emergence
marks the resexualization of the identity matrix once more: ‘Conscience
and morality have arisen through the overcoming, the desexualization of
the Oedipus complex; but through moral masochism morality becomes
sexualized once more, the Oedipus complex is revived and the way is
opened for a regression from morality to the Oedipus complex.’115 The
moral masochist, then, creates scenarios for which he must be punished
by his sadistic conscience or ‘the great parental power of Destiny’.116 He
is compelled ‘to do what is inexpedient, must act against his own inter-
ests, must ruin the prospects which open out to him in the real world
and must, perhaps, destroy his own real existence’.117
Central to Lacan’s paradigm of subjectivity is a masochistic relation,
with castration (submitting to the Law of the Father) ultimately affo-
rding the male a masculine position within the Symbolic. While this
pact is first forged on a subconscious level, it is also practised in the mis-
perceptions, over-estimations, and over-determined identifications of
normative masculinity and patriarchy. It is also revealed in what Butler
refers to as performative slippages,118 or those acts that reveal a subject’s
failure to fully internalize its social contract. Butler associates this mani-
festation of incoherence with the disconnect between the call of the Law
and its articulation – similar to Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance,
‘the structured and differing origin of differences’119 – in which pre-
sumptions of gender naturalness are undermined. Lacan also observes
evidence of this incomplete identity formation in analysis. In The
Ego in Freud’s Theory and in The Technique of Psychoanalysis (1954–55) for
instance, he equates the death drive with the Symbolic’s tendency to
produce repetition: ‘the death instinct is only the mask of the symbolic
order […] The symbolic order is simultaneously non-being and insist-
ing to be.’120 In The Psychoses (1955–6) he understands compulsive,
repetitious behaviour as an insistence on the signifier, or ‘the insistence

of speech’121 that binds the subject to the Law. Later still, in The Other
Side of Psychoanalysis (1969–70), Lacan relates this repetition to the
death drive, and the desire to go beyond the limit of knowledge, that
is, the return of jouissance,122 or the will to exceed the pleasure princi-
ple and seek death. At various points in The Family Complexes (1984),
he identifies the death drive in the re-enactment of the complexes –
the weaning from mother; the intrusion of other children into the
child’s life; the Oedipus complex – which works to secure socialization
and symbolization.123 Against Freud, who gives the death drive biologi-
cal roots, Lacan positions the drive as intrinsic to the Symbolic order,
not only as a disruptive force, but as a constitutive feature. Although
his view slightly changes over time, all nuances are useful towards
understanding the role of self-subjugation and the destructive drive as
part of the Symbolic’s imperative to signify presence. Less indicative
of joyful resistance, as Kristeva maintains of the semiotic surge, Lacan
associates the drive with being bound to the Law. This is the dead-
lock that he is led to when discussing the interdependency between
death drive and jouissance in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–60)
when he asserts: ‘We are, in fact, led to the point where we accept
the formula that without a transgression there is no access to jouis-
sance, and, to return to Saint Paul, that that is precisely the function of
the Law.’124
Slavoj Žižek highlights the sacrificial component to Lacan’s ordering,
which is a central structuring motif within the case studies considered
in this book, suggesting that ‘a sacrifice enacts the disavowal of the
impotence of the big Other’.125 The subject does not sacrifice to gain
himself, but rather to fill in the lack in the Other, ‘to sustain the appear-
ance of the Other’s omnipotence or, at least, consistency […] one sacri-
fices oneself (one’s honor and future in respectful society) to maintain
the appearance of the Other’s honor, to save the beloved Other from
shame’.126 However, he suggests that there is also a more ‘uncanny’
dimension to Lacanian sacrifice, in which the Other is duped to think
one is missing something it once had:
[O]ne sacrifices not in order to get something from the Other, but in
order to dupe the Other, in order to convince him/it that one is still
missing something, i.e. jouissance. This is why obsessionals experi-
ence the compulsion repeatedly to accomplish their compulsive
rituals of sacrifice – in order to disavow their jouissance in the eyes
of the Other.127
34 Male Trouble
Dennis King Keenan reads Žižek to succinctly suggest that the primor-
dial sacrifice of the Thing (das Ding) does not simply involve the loss of
the Real, rather that the Real (as drive) is the ‘driving force’ of desire:
It ‘is’, rather, nothing but loss, nothing but radical negativity, nothing
but radical sacrifice, nothing but the sacrifice of sacrifice (nothing but
a surplus that is the condition of the possibility and the condition
of the possibility of the symbolic order.) As such, the primordial
sacrifice (which is the emergence into the symbolic order) is not an
act of exchange that ultimately pays. The subject gets ‘nothing’ in
exchange […]128
While the subject might get ‘nothing’ in exchange for castration, the
symbolic fiction maintains that the ability to play with the Real is a
heroic act that might afford the subject centrality within the Symbolic.
This is especially true for males who are doubly removed from the Real –
‘totally-outside and too-early that it is forever-too-late to access’129 in
Bracha L. Ettinger’s words – and because of this have more to gain, and
simultaneously more to lose. This heroic playing with the Real, I suggest,
is observable in the performances of Fathers 4 Justice, but especially
David Blaine. While Freud suggests that masochism disrupts coherent
identity, later Lacan reimagines Freud’s Oedipal desexualization as a
trauma in subject formation. However, as suggested in the previous
paragraph, he reads the repetition of seemingly destructive, compulsive
behaviours to signify a will to resolve the trauma by being successfully
bound to the Law: in the ostensible absence of Law, the subject liter-
ally issues it upon himself. This is what the desperately decentered gay
characters in Mark Ravenhill’s plays illustrate so effectively. Given this,
wilful abjection, emasculation, masochism, sacrifice, the resistance to
destabilizing bodily penetration, and victimization – terms and posi-
tions which inevitably fold into each other – do not simply announce
moments of gender trouble, but the performative construction and
delimitation of identity.
Although I have taken something of a theoretical detour, it seems
necessary in order to unravel the complex discursive relationship
between masculinity and subjection. At this point, however, I would
like to weave a gentler, contrapuntal voice into the conversation. In
Derek Jarman’s monochromatic film Blue (1993), a speaker imagines ‘An
infinite possibility/Becoming tangible.’130 While the work specifically
deals with serious illness due to AIDS, it fundamentally draws attention
to the relationship between aesthetic invention and human becoming.
The words find resonance in John Caputo’s exposure of the limitations

of the language of identity:
For when we speak of the ‘I’ or the ‘we’ or the ‘self’, we are employ-
ing a certain shorthand that glosses over the complexities, that
hastily summarizes the current state of an inner archaic conflict in
which there are numerous competing forces, constantly shifting, and
unsteady alliances and unexpected turns yet to be taken.131
The landscape Caputo depicts is turbulent but mobile, and not inflex-
ible to change. While this book seeks to examine performances and
representations of troubled and troubling masculinities interlinked with
performative discourses of crisis, it does so not to present this condition
as fixed. Rather, the book ultimately seeks to expose, if not destabilize,
the phallic, sacrificial model of subjectivity to which masculinity seems
so heavily indebted, and in which it remains often violently immured.
If trouble has been a central mode of male signification in recent years,
then perhaps now it is time to take seriously the infinite possibilities of
our becoming: possibilities which are always almost tangible, but never
fully realized to the point of being firmly fixed.
2
Sacrificial Masculinity in
The Passion of the Christ
When the father is no longer an overbearing patriarch

the son looks everywhere for the law.1
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred
Christ’s Redemption is not the ‘negation’ of the Fall

but its accomplishment, in exactly the same sense that,
according to Saint Paul, Christ accomplishes the Law.2
Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf:
The Perverse Core of Christianity
Long before its cinema release on Ash Wednesday, 25 February 2004,

The Passion of the Christ attracted media attention.3 Much of this owed
to the fact that Director Mel Gibson is an outspoken Roman Catholic
and was keen to air his strong personal opinions on the subject of the
film. More specifically, Gibson belongs to a conservative Catholic group
known as Traditionalists, who have rejected the Church’s efforts in rela-
tive modernization ever since the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II)
in the 1960s. Further, the same group is understood still to hold the
Jews accountable for Jesus’s death, an anti-Semitic sentiment deemed
as incendiary and rejected by Vatican II. The anticipatory interest was
also cultivated by Gibson’s public assurance that his Passion would be
like no other version screened before. His contemporary interpreta-
tion would eschew the saccharine quality of early Hollywood religious
cinema, notable in films such as King of Kings (1961), The Greatest Story
Ever Told (1965), and Jesus of Nazareth (1977),4 while avoiding the post-
modern stylizations of more recent offerings such as The Last Temptation
of Christ (1988) and Jesus of Montreal (1990). Drawing inspiration from
all the synoptic Gospels, as well as from extra-biblical material in the
36
Sacrificial Masculinity 37
form of Sister Anne Emmerich’s devotional book The Dolorous Passion

of Christ,5 Gibson avowed that his film would provide the most explicit
and ‘realistic’ representation of the last twelve hours in Jesus’s life that
the world had ever seen.
Gibson’s resolute beliefs, coupled with the film’s grotesque violence,
became the main contexts for critical debate upon the film’s release. In
particular, The Passion was quickly accused of being grossly anti-Semitic
in its depiction of Jewish involvement in Christ’s arrest, torture, and
crucifixion. Commentators claimed that the Jewish leader Caiaphas
and the High Priests of the Sanhedrin are depicted as brutal and blood-
thirsty in their relentless pursuit of Jesus, and demonized next to the
mild-mannered Roman governor Pilate and the laughable King Herod,
who are both presented as relatively indifferent to Jesus’s activities.
Writing in The New Yorker, David Denby sensed a deliberate manipula-
tion of fact in the film, ‘making the Jewish leaders more, and the Roman
leaders less, responsible for the death of Jesus’,6 and consequently saw
the film at risk of heightening the ethnic unrest that characterized the
post-9/11 climate. Responding to one critic, Gibson suggested that he
was mindful of such sensitivities while making the film, deliberately not
subtitling Caiaphas’s blood libel that is spoken after Jesus’s death – ‘Let
blood be on our heads’ – for fear that ‘they’ ( Jews) would come to his
house and shoot him.7 In defence of these imputations, other respond-
ents were quick to point out how both the Jewish Veronica and Simon
of Cyrene assisted Jesus at the height of his torture, and how it was
ultimately the Roman soldiers’ ferocity which stood out in the film.
This ethno-religious interest appeared to culminate when the animated
American comedy series South Park released its own version of the film
later the same year, titled The Passion of the Jew (2004), in which Gibson
is represented as a zealous sadomasochist, and his film is compared to a
piece of Nazi propaganda.
In this chapter I do not wish to solely focus on the (anti) Semitic
inflections of The Passion. Rather, I seek to foreground the film’s represe-
ntation of gender and sexuality by resituating it principally within reso-
nant cultural debates surrounding homosexuality that have dominated
Western religious and political agendas before, during, and indeed since
the film’s release, not least of which include concerns over gay partner-
ship and queer familial configurations. The analysis offered here illumi-
nates how anxieties surrounding heteronormative stability are central
to the film’s narrative and visual modes, and argues that these phobias
find embodied exemplification in the androgynous figure of Satan,
pitted in opposition to the eroticized, normative masculinity of Jesus.
38 Male Trouble
The study suggests that queerly rendered Satan represents the alignment
of sexual difference with an evil, death-driven force that threatens the fam-
ily and terrorizes the film’s socio-Symbolic order. Reading Jacques Lacan
and Saint Paul, Slavoj Žižek maintains that the Christian story enacts
‘the ultimate assertion of the Law’.8 Following on from Žižek’s argu-
ment, this chapter examines the relationship between masculinity, sac-
rifice, and the performative regulation of heteronormativity as panicked
responses to the queer (as) threat.
Homosexuality and the Christian right
In Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance
(2003), Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini explore the relationship
between religion, politics, and sexuality within the rhetorical and social
procedures underpinning hegemonic American culture: ‘As we argue […]
assumptions about religion, values, and public life are crucially connected
to sexuality and its regulation. The secular state’s interest in regulating
sexuality is an interest in maintaining religious – specifically Christian –
authority.’9 Although the argument specifically refers to the decade
preceding the book’s publication, it retains a current urgency. In the
aftermath of one of the most contested presidencies, led by a Republican,
Born-Again Christian (George W. Bush) it is not altogether surpris-
ing that the relationship between religion and politics has remained
especially intimate in the United States. In the aftermath of 9/11,
political rhetoric in the United States has been especially invested in
framing the protection of the nation as coterminous with the preserva-
tion of Christian values. Only a couple of days after the attacks on the
World Trace Center, for example, Jerry Falwell of the CBN’s 700 Club
(a right wing Christian television programme) spoke the thoughts of
a moral majority by naming the domestic factors he saw as contribut-
ing to the event: ‘I really believe that the Pagans, and the abortionists,
and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians […] the ACLU, People For
the American Way – all of them who have tried to secularise America –
I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen”.’10
Writing in The New York Times in 2004, Frank Rich identified a growth
of conservatism in American society. Also paying heed to the marriage of
politics, religion, and cultural production, he observed,
It’s not just Mr. Bush’s self-deification that separates him from the
likes of Lincoln, however; it’s his chosen fashion of Christianity. The
president didn’t revive the word ‘crusade’ idly in the fall of 2001.
His view of faith as a Manichaean scheme of blacks and whites to

be acted out in a perpetual war against evil is synergistic with the
violent poetics of the best-selling ‘Left Behind’ novels by Tim LaHaye
and Jerry Jenkins and Mel Gibson’s cinematic bloodfest.11
Implicit in Rich’s discernment of a militaristic, apocalyptic American

culture (of which he sees The Passion to be a part) is a critique of its
perceived masculinism, cultivated in order to defend the nation against
destabilizing forces from outside and indeed inside its geographical and
imaginary margins. Quoting a Newsweek poll that reported 17 per cent
of Americans expect the world to end in their lifetime, Rich also sug-
gested that such a worldview was becoming increasingly popular among
base population demographics, chiefly comprising those who share an
antipathy to stem-cell research, abortion, condoms for HIV prevention,
and gay civil rights.12
While such perspectives may seem radical to a liberal reader, they
are by no means isolated. Increasingly a discursive swell has worked to
consolidate the causal connection between religious, gender, and sexual
diversity, and national vulnerability. Most recently, these ideas have
found focus in Euro-American debates surrounding the constitutional
qualification of the family and gay partnership rights. Most objections
to the legal recognition of gay unions have predicted a grave threat to
the heterosexual family unit, and by extension, to the future of the
social order itself. In this fight to preserve traditional family structures
and values, a number of organizations have relentlessly fought to pre-
vent the recognition of same-sex and alternative family partnerships.
In this regard, a letter published by the Campaign for Working Families
urges its readers: ‘If you still think homosexual “marriage” won’t affect
you, think again. Your job may be at stake! Once the state approves
of homosexual “marriages”, the full weight of the law will be brought
down against men and women of faith who believe in Judeo-Christian
values.’13 In a similar vein, the American Family Association protests:
For the sake of our children and society, we must OPPOSE the spread
of homosexual activity! Just as we must oppose murder, stealing, and
adultery! Since homosexuals cannot reproduce, the only way for them
to ‘breed’ is to RECRUIT! And who are their targets for recruitment?
Children!14
This association between national stability and gender and sexual nor-
mativity is explicitly foregrounded in the following statement from the
40 Male Trouble
American Society for the Preservation of the Family: ‘The family unit is
under attack by dark and conspiring forces who desire to redefine the
bond of marriage to include same-sex partners. This design is an abomi-
nation of nature and, if adopted by society as normative, will ultimately
lead to society’s downfall and destruction.’15
For the purposes of contextualizing The Passion further within this
climate, it is worth noting Mel Gibson’s own contributions to these
homophobic circulations. When asked about gay men as part of an
interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais, Gibson responded, ‘They take
it up the ass.’ Bending over to point to his behind, he concluded, ‘This is
only for taking a shit.’16 This homophobic outburst might be seen to
find resonance in other disparaging representations of homosexuality
across Gibson’s directing oeuvre, most notably in The Man without a Face
(1993) and Braveheart (1995). Although largely overlooked in immediate
responses to the film, I suggest that The Passion of the Christ exemplifies
this homophobic tendency in so far as queer subjectivity figures as and
through Satan, the Father’s fallen angel. Like the ‘dark and conspiring
force’ of homosexuality referred to by the American Society for the
Preservation of the Family, Gibson presents Satan as an uncanny, con-
taminating presence of doubling and inversion that threatens to destroy
the film’s socio-Symbolic order. It is this menace that compels Jesus to
submit to his father in order to institute the homogenizing, normalizing
discipline of paternal Law, and to eradicate queer alterity.
Separating the men from the Jews
Although this chapter eschews an ethno-religious critique as such, the

film’s representation of various male groupings – Jews, Romans, and
Jesus and his disciples – is specifically gender-codified and in need of
pre-emptory attention. While it is arguable that the Jews are especially
demonized in the film, it is more certain that they are feminized next
to other male groups. Reading Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism
(1939), Daniel Boyarin explores the historical feminization of the Jew
by refiguring the psychoanalyst’s statement that circumcision ‘makes a
disagreeable, uncanny impression, which is to be explained no doubt
by its recalling the dreaded castration’.17 Boyarin reverses Freud’s terms,
such that ‘castration recalls a dreaded circumcision – dreaded because
the act cripples a male by turning him into a Jew’.18 Whereas the Jewish
tradition of brit milah (the covenant of circumcision) confers perfection
on men within the Jewish tradition, in the film this practice is given the
opposite meaning of symbolic castration and effeminizing otherness.
As Jonathan Freedman has observed of anti-Semitic idioms elsewhere,

‘the sign of Jewish masculinity, circumcision, signifies castration, and
the male Jew is identified as castrated or feminized or both – in other
words, as a man-identified-as-woman’.19 The film’s Jewish community
first appear when their militia arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Despite the capacity for physical force that they demonstrate in this early
scene, those who accost Jesus are effeminately dressed with feathers.
Aside from the militia group, the Pharisees are represented as sly, spindly,
slightly epicene old men, who wear elaborately gilded gowns, in contrast
to the simple dress of the Romans, Jesus, and his disciples. In addition
to the emasculating semiotics of costuming, both the Pharisees and the
Jewish militia are usually presented in sepia hues, which deprive their
actions of the immediacy and potency of full colour representation.
Further, the Jews are repeatedly shot from a downward angle relative to
the Romans, a dwarfing strategy that frames them as nagging pests rather
than as intelligent voices or active political operators. Indeed, even when
Jewish authority is recognized, it is enacted indirectly, as though the
Jews do not wish to be associated with the unappealing aspects of power.
Any punishment that Jesus might receive must first be sanctioned by
the Roman authorities, a historical fact that the film renders as a form
of scapegoating. When Pilate asks Caiaphas, ‘Why don’t you judge him
according to your own laws’, Caiaphas answers, ‘Consul, you know it’s
unlawful for us to condemn any man to death’. A grimace accompanies
this reply, suggesting that Caiaphas is shirking his responsibility. Such
a portrayal of Jewish ineffectualness is compounded by the fact that,
aside from the earlier scenes of Caiaphas speaking to the Sanhedrin, the
Jewish Pharisees and crowds are usually screened as a unanimous group,
as distinct from the more heterogeneous Romans. Collectively, these
representational strategies erode Jewish capacity to exert control.
Jay Geller argues that ‘in the Central European cultural imagination,
male Jews are identified as men without penises, that is as women’.20
His observation implies that Central Europeans presumed their privi-
leged on the grounds of phallic authority. A similar ideology inflects the
film, where the Romans are portrayed as normatively masculine next to
the effeminate Jews. With simple dress, tightly shaved hair, and muscu-
lar physiques, the Romans seem to be a practical, ‘manly’ group, whose
appearance suggests a physically active lifestyle. In public at least, the
Roman governor Pilate is presented as a more rational and measured
leader than the quick-tempered, ostentatious Caiaphas to the extent that
the film dilutes Pilate’s historical reputation for brutality and bloodlust.
It is only under extreme pressure from the Jewish community that
42 Male Trouble
Pilate sanctions Jesus’s beating, and he is extremely reluctant to hand

him over for crucifixion. Pilate’s face shows none of the conniving
gestures that characterize Jewish expression; rather he initially appears
to be genuinely concerned for the fate of Jesus. He seeks help from his
wife Claudia on the matter and she initially nurses and counsels him
like a child. It is to her that he confesses his fears of an uprising: ‘If
I don’t condemn this man then Caiaphas will start a rebellion’, and this
becomes the main motivation for eventually permitting Jesus’s killing.
So, while Pilate’s masculinity is more tempered and uncertain in private,
in public he performs it coolly without question. The masculinity of the
Romans is further emphasized by the fact that the camera usually screens
them from underneath, or shoots downward from where they stand.
And, unlike the Jews who huddle together in small groups in restricted
spaces, the power of Roman authority is highlighted in the simplicity
and expansiveness of their mise-en-scène.
In contrast to Pilate, the Roman soldiers are presented as brutal
hypermasculine men, with insatiable appetites for violence. They beat
Jesus with a pleasure that verges on sexual arousal, characterized by the
studied choice of phallic flogging instruments, marked physical excita-
tion, and the ejaculatory splatter of bodily fluids. In this frenzy, coupled
with the apparent eroticism of Jesus’s reactions, their actions mirror
the all-male beating fantasies described by Freud in ‘A Child is Being
Beaten’, understood as fantasmatic dramatizations of the transmis-
sion of paternal Law.21 Significantly, it is this pleasure, rather than the
brutality of the action, which is foregrounded in the film, through the
use of close-up camera shots and slow motion. Crucially, however, this
homoerotic violence operates within a patriarchal economy of desire,
where the pleasure in disciplining only reveals all that has already been
disciplined, consciously and subconsciously, for normative masculinity
to take shape. The instance in question also affords a cartoonish quality
to Roman punishment, thus ensuring that beyond this garish sadism,
the locus of evil remains with the figure of Satan. On this, Robert Smart
draws attention to this downplaying of Roman violence by describing
the soldiers as ‘burly underlings’ and ‘goons’, created in the tradition
of Medieval representation: ‘With their hulking bodies and cruel faces,
[they] look as if they stepped out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. In
Bosch’s “Ecce Homo” and “Christ Carrying the Cross” the features of
Jesus’s brutal captors and mockers are so distorted they almost become
caricatures of Evil.’22
Not every Roman is represented as a model of hypermasculinity.
When Pilate sends Jesus to King Herod for consideration, for example, the
latter is constructed as a drug-taking, sexually promiscuous homosexual.

He wears make-up and highly ornate costume, and a wig tilts imper-
fectly on his head, suggesting a certain gender and sexual decentredness.
Less a macho king than a drag queen, Herod’s quarters are populated
by semi-clad individuals, most of whom also appear to be deliber-
ately queered. Incapable of controlling their physical urges, and unlike
Jesus who readily submits his body to the Law, these deviant figures
engage in orgies, devour food, guzzle drink, and laugh hysterically at
their indulgences. When one man falls to the ground from exhaustion
or intoxication during Jesus’s questioning, Herod and his immediate
circle appear grossly inept. Owing to the fact that Herod’s defining
feature is his queerness, his inefficacy can only be seen to stem directly
from his implied homosexuality. This association is not supported by
historical reference, however, which contrarily suggests that Herod
was a shrewd and callous ruler. Rather, Gibson’s depiction is a directo-
rial invention that understands Herod’s return of Jesus to Pilate as an
unmanly indecision.
On the fringes: Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene
Despite variations in the representation of masculinity in The Passion,

male characters are all afforded centrality in the film’s narrative and visual
modes in a manner that allows us to consider the film to be, at some
level, primarily about masculinity. In contrast, the few female characters
screened are confined in word and deed to the margins, a phallogocen-
tric representational strategy that bears witness to Lacan’s statement in
‘God and the Jouissance of the Woman’ (1972–3) that ‘There is no such
thing as The woman since of her essence […] she is not all […] There is
woman only as excluded by the nature of things which is the nature of
words’.23 This is especially true of Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene.
The exclusion of female subjectivity is signified in the film by an act of
indiscriminate figuration: both characters in question are simply referred
to as ‘Mary’ and they both look physically alike in costume (black gowns)
and facial appearance (pale skin, dark eyes, defined bone structure).
When first screened, they have been sleeping in the same room, only
to be awoken by a premonition of Jesus’s arrest. And although John
informs them as to what has happened, they remain marginal during
Jesus’s trial, beating, and crucifixion, relegated to the borders of the
male world. Denied of any real agency, they run through the streets
or push through the crowd, unsuccessfully attempting to connect
with Jesus. In their circulation, they appear like those lifeless objects
44 Male Trouble
of exchange referred to by Lacan in ‘On a Question Preliminary to

any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’, and as critiqued by Luce Irigaray
in The Sex Which is Not One (1981): not subjects, as such, but objects
existing only in relation to the masculine.24 While Jesus proceeds into,
and even inaugurates, the symbolic register, both the Mary characters
are ‘left behind in the imaginary, as [a] negative value expressed only
by lack’.25
Aside from their indiscriminate depiction, the issue of female-male
separation is of crucial importance to the film, as it is in psychoanalytic
readings of male subjectivity. In effect, the film plays out Žižek’s concise
elucidation of Lacan’s symbolic ordering: the submission of ‘the desire
of the Mother (which is the order of the Thing) to the law of the Father
(which comprises the totality of the signifying system, the structure
of the symbolic order)’.26 Mother Mary’s separation from Jesus as an
adult is highlighted by numerous flashbacks of his childhood. In such
instances, the film reveals the close physical relationship that Christ
had with his Mother, a connection that he had to relinquish in order
to enter the adult male world. While carrying his cross to Calvary, one
of Jesus’s falls is intercut with a flashback of his tripping as a child.
However, while his mother could protect him in his youth, she is
unable to do so now. This necessary separation is most poignantly repre-
sented in a scene where Mary is drawn to the place above where her
son is chained underground, their bodies apart but searching. Despite
the unspeaking and untouching nature of their latter interaction, they
retain an affective intimacy that draws them towards each other, even
though they may never physically connect in order to facilitate the
issuing of the Law that is at stake in Jesus’s successful crucifixion. Jesus
reminds Mary of the redemptive dimension to his suffering on his
way to Calvary with ‘See Mother, I make all things new’. As a result,
Mary does not try to stop his torture, but in the interest of reproducing
normativity, she is compelled to support him through it.
While the male characters are chiefly concerned with disciplining
the body, or having the body disciplined (as in the case of Jesus), the
female characters are chiefly concerned with its protection and healing.
Pilate’s wife Claudia advises her husband not to have Jesus killed –
‘Don’t condemn this Galilean. He’s holy’ – and she secretly delivers
cloth to Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene. They use the fabric to clean
up Jesus’s blood after his scourging once the courtyard has emptied.
Although John is in their company throughout most of the film, he
does not assist them in this cleaning. Later, Veronica also wipes the
blood off Jesus’s face on his way to Calvary, before being pushed out of
the way by the Roman soldiers. These depictions symbolically reinforce

the connection between female subjectivity and abjection, male sub-
jectivity and discipline, as critiqued most notably by Kristeva in Powers
of Horror. Indeed Kristeva emphasizes the exclusion of women in the
Judaeo-Christian world to such an extent that she refutes Freud’s theory,
outlined in Totem and Taboo (1913), that religion represses a primal par-
ricide, with the suggestion that it is premised upon an abhorrence of the
mother – ‘an unnamebale otherness’.27 This connection is most boldly
made in the film in the case of Mary Magdalene. In a flashback of her
stoning for adultery, she crawls on the ground like a snake before Jesus
intercepts to humanize, or subjectivize her. And during his crucifixion,
she maintains a similar pose, always in grounded obeisance, awaiting
His signification of her.
Despite the fact that female characters are kept on the sidelines of the
action, they are constantly desired for by the male characters. However,
female presence never destabilizes the male project. It might be even
said that female characters willingly embrace their own repression in
order to facilitate Jesus’s identification with, and post-mortal incar-
nation of, his father. This is signified by the manner in which Pilate
is nursed by Claudia while deciding Jesus’s fate, even though her advice
is ultimately ignored; and also in the long, lingering looks that Jesus
casts to Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene during his torture and
crucifixion. In both instances, if the Law is to be instituted and consoli-
dated, feminine identifications must be rejected in favour of subjectiv-
izing masculine ones.
A threat to the centre: Queerly-rendered Satan
It is not only female characters who are relegated to the edges of the
action, but also, and perhaps most significantly, the figure of Satan. As
with the females, it is Satan’s gender and sexuality that confines him/
her to the peripheries, in particular Satan’s gender and sexual ambigu-
ity or queerness. Satan’s undefined gendering disrupts the prescribed
politic of normative masculinity in the film, opening up the possibility
of a radical disarticualtion of the Law of heteronormativity. It is for this
reason that s/he figures as an evil threat, and it is for this reason that
s/he is destroyed through Jesus’s sacrifice. (See Figure 2.1)
Although possessing a deep masculine voice, Satan is dressed like a
woman and has androgynous facial features, even though played by
a female actor. While the female characters exert a relatively positive
influence on Jesus’s suffering by striving to comfort (if not save) him,
46 Male Trouble
Figure 2.1 Queer Satan in The Passion of the Christ (2004).
queer Satan exerts a constant threat to the state and also to the success
of Jesus’s sacrificial project. S/he first appears from the shadows in the
Garden of Gethsemane while Jesus is praying, crucially, for strength.
From this position, Satan taunts Jesus by casting doubt on his ability to
follow though with his sacrifice. S/he discourages: ‘Do you really believe
that one man can bear the full burden of sin? No one man can carry
this burden I tell you. Saving their souls is too costly. No one. Ever.’
During this provocation, Jesus is clearly distressed, as indicated by his
heavy breathing and profuse sweating. As soon as Satan finishes speak-
ing, maggots curl from his/her nostrils and a snake creeps out from
between his/her legs, in a move that implicitly correlates gender and
sexual indeterminacy with a primal evil, and posits this queerness as the
greatest threat to the social order. The scene also references the Genesis
story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In this double coding of
the primal scene, Satan’s tempting of Jesus is laced with a homosexual
subtext. When Christ grinds the snake to death with his foot, he signals
that he will endure his Passion in order to eradicate the threat of gender
and sexual ambiguity.
Satan’s physical appearance is strikingly similar to both Mary
characters. All three wear black headdresses and have similar facial char-
acteristics. Oftentimes, Satan travels the same route through the crowd
as do both the Mary figures, and (aside from Jesus) Mother Mary is the
only other character actually to see Satan. Despite the parallel, Satan’s
role is antithetical to that of Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene, and
indeed to other female characters that remain on the fringes. Whereas
women try to support Jesus, Satan attempts to spoil his sacrificial
plan, either through promoting Roman vitriol or by tempting Jesus to
give up. Whereas the women move through the crowd to assist Jesus,
Satan travels rapidly like a corrupting virus, appearing and disappear-
ing, asymptomatic and full-blown. According to Judith Butler, because
homosexuality is understand as ‘boundary-trespass’,28 queer subjects
are automatically understood as polluting persons, an association com-
pounded by media reactions – and, not least of all, rightist Christian
responses – to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Such is the association that
informs much of the ‘pro-family’ statements documented at the outset
of this chapter.
There are also moments in the film when the physical similarities
between Satan and Mother Mary are pointedly exploited to emphasize
their opposing functions. During Jesus’s flogging, Satan directly mirrors
Mother Mary in the crowd. In another instance, Satan walks through
the mob holding a deformed, demonic baby who smiles menacingly
at the suffering Christ: a diametric representation of the Holy Family. In
this alignment, the film once again presents Jesus’s self-sacrifice as the
action necessary to alleviate the queer threat figured in Satan – a force
that seeks to invade the heterosexual (Christian) family structure and
wreak deformity on mankind.
While Satan is screened holding his/her child anti-Christ, queer
blood also infects other familial lines. Shortly after Judas betrays Jesus
with a kiss – a gesture more heavily inflected as homosexual rather than
homosocial here – he is approached by a small group of children who
morph into demons and attack him. Subsequently a larger group of
young boys gather together and, led by Satan, chase Judas into the hills
where they provoke him to commit suicide. These are male subjects
undisciplined by the Father’s Law: the grotesque, unruly, destructive off-
spring of queer Satan. Within the climate of the film’s production and
release, these creatures might also be seen as fantasmatic projections of
the horror which queer families would inflict, given they were afforded
social recognition and encouraged to engage in their own reproductive
practices.
In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Lee Edelman
maintains that the image of the child, bound to the concept of hetero-
sexual futurity, is near-worshipped in Western culture, and pitched in
opposition to the figure of the queer. Edelman argues that the child
48 Male Trouble
marks the horizon of every acknowledged politics, ‘the fantasmatic

beneficiary of every political intervention’.29 He identifies anti-abortion
rhetoric to epitomize this fetishization of the foetus as unborn child,
where reproductive rights are invariably framed as ‘a fight for the
children – for our daughters and our sons’ and thus as a ‘fight for the
future’.30 Given the centrality of the child in political rhetoric, Edelman
wonders what it would signify not to stand by or for the figure of the
child? What, or whom, stands in opposition to the child and the stable
reproductive futurity that the child has been forced to signal in heter-
onormative rhetoric? For Edelman, ‘queerness names the side of those
“not fighting for the children”, the side outside the consensus by which
all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism’.31
Edelman’s disquisition finds ample resonance in The Passion in so
far as Satan’s queerness, which like a virus, rapidly reproduces itself in
the figure of a child anti-Christ and in the queer corruption of the
extant community of children, wherein the ‘facism of the [normative]
baby’s face’32 to which Edelman refers is placed under attack by a queer
death drive. Via flashbacks, this queer genealogy is pitted in unheimlich
opposition to the idealized images of Jesus. When the thief who mocks
Christ has his eyes pecked out by a crow towards the end of the film,
we might also associate the animality of the bird with the monstrosity
of the children, as Edelman does in his reading of Hitchcock’s The Birds
(1963), linking them both to the queer as death-drive:
As dozens of birds swoop down with hoarse cries, inducing a sort of

echoing screech in the children, who panic and run, the film implies
that the ravaging birds are too like the children to like them and too
much, or to like them as more than the objects of a murderous, and
murderously derealizing, drive.33
While most representations of the Passion story demonize Judas, in this

film Satan takes on a distinct form to wreak revenge on the betraying
disciple for mobilizing Jesus’s Passion, a Passion that will eradicate queer
alterity. And, in the grotesque children, the film charts a dehumaniza-
tion process at the hands of queerness such that Christ’s sacrifice prima-
rily functions to control the force of this disruptive subjectivity.
Sacred cuts
Throughout this chapter I have been suggesting that conflicting for-

ces in The Passion are characterized by variance in gender and sexual
normativity, with Satan, demarking the space of the queer as evil,

representing the greatest social menace of all. Faced with this danger,
Jesus demonstrates the expectations of the idealized male subject, who
ritualistically enacts the terms of participation within the Symbolic by
submitting to the Law of the Father. Before any action is screened in the
film, a quote from Isaiah directs the viewer to focus on the redemptive
power of Jesus’s suffering while viewing the action: ‘He was wounded
for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; by His wounds we are
healed.’34 While the reference is specifically biblical, as Freud and his
many successors have pointed out, this expectation has long formed the
basis of most non-Christian, as well as Christian, patriarchies. Following
this premise, the film opens with Jesus praying in Gethsemane, his
immediate surroundings lit with blue light. Although Jesus is clearly
distressed by what lies ahead, and by Satan’s appearance, the camera
refuses to record his vulnerability for long, as if doing so would risk
overshadowing his capacity for endurance. Thus, when he is arrested
moments later, the film proceeds to focus almost exclusively on Jesus’s
ability to withstand the torture he experiences, rather than his frailty
in its wake.
Of this suffering, detail is really of little importance. Rather, in an
almost Artaudian way,35 it is the silent, eroticized spectacle of Jesus’s
prolonged torture in the name of his father which is of significance,
an importance underscored by an aesthetic resistance to psychologize
Jesus (through linguistic complexity, for instance) but to present him as
body willing to be disciplined. Christ does not rebuke his attackers nor
question their motives but endures the torture to which he is subjected.
And although it is the Roman soldiers who conduct the prolonged
beatings, the brooding clouds towards which Jesus frequently stares,
and which are interspersed with flashes of sunlight, suggest that Jesus’s
endurance of this attack is related to his identification with the Father.
In this aspect, the film emotively plays on Georges Bataille’s reading
of sacrifice as a disruption of the restrictive forces of law (nomos) that
engenders a kind of anthropological intimacy through the entry of
the sacred via the excesses of eroticism and death.36 Jesus’s suffering is
recognized as a sacred act (sacrifice) by the Father in his full surrender
to extreme suffering. Further, the degree of torture withstood is not
necessarily an indication of the film’s anti-Semitic underpinning, but a
measure of Jesus’s commitment to alleviate the terror posed by Satan as
life-negating Other.
In addition to those mimetic indicators of the father’s role in Jesus’s
suffering, flashbacks offer some diegetic explanations. As Jesus carries
50 Male Trouble
his cross towards Calvary, he recalls a period in his preaching when he

spoke, ‘I am the good shepherd. I lay down my life for my sheep. No
one takes life from me but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power
to lay it down and power to take it up again. This command is from
my father.’ This missionary statement, which explains the relationship
between the son’s self-sacrifice to the father’s will and the continuation
of the patriarchal line, is presumably uttered in order to spur him on in
last the last stages of his Passion. Other flashbacks during this period of
the film reveal the relationship between Jesus’s suffering and the trans-
mission of the Law to his disciples. When he arrives at Calvary, Jesus
remembers his last Passover with his male followers. This scene, which
juxtaposes the beating of Jesus’s body in present-time with the symbolic
division of his body (as bread) a few days previously, underscores the
sadomasochistic impulse which structures Christian law, but also the
homosexually inflected cannibalism inherent in consuming the body
of Christ; that is, the literal incorporation of the father.
The wound and the process of wounding are central to Bataille’s con-
ceptualization of ritual sacrifice, eroticism, and mysticism. Wounding
involves the opening of the body at the level of matter, and the mind
or psyche at the level of desire and identification. For Bataille, ‘Excess,
laceration, and loss of substance’ amount to a ‘will to loss’, whereby
‘two beings are lost in a convulsion that binds them together. But they
only communicate when losing a part of themselves. Communication
ties them together with wounds, where their unity and integrity dis-
sipate in fever’.37In this formulation, the one who sacrifices is present
in masochistic identification with his victim. As a result, he too experi-
ences a little death – une petite mort – and, on a symbolic level, is ‘cut
open’ from sealed individuality to sociality.
Here, it is also worth remembering the distinction Giorgio Agamben
makes between bare life (zoë ) and political life (bios politikos) in his writ-
ing on sovereignty and exception. Under ancient Roman law, a man
who committed a certain crime had his rights revoked to become homo
sacer (sacred man). As a result of being placed outside law, he could be
no longer fully protected by law, and as a consequence was exempt from
sacrifice in ritual ceremony: homo sacer corresponded to an obscure
figure of ‘bare life […] who may be killed and yet not sacrificed’.38 This
figure stands in contrast to the sovereign figure (king, emperor etc.) that
exists both within the law (so he can be condemned) and outside of the
law (since he has the power to suspend law for an indefinite time). In
The Passion, however, Jesus’s power resides in his double articulation,
which engenders an ability to manipulate his positioning both as bare

life, under Roman law, and sovereignty, under divine law. Ultimately,
however, divine law reigns to resignify his ‘bareness’ through the per-
formance of suffering and endurance.
In On Belief (2001), Slavoj Žižek offers a consideration of the relation-
ship between Christianity and the law in a manner that resonates with
the film’s depiction of sacrifice and masculinity, turning our attention
away from the sweepingly liberational politics of Bataille. With regard
to the former, Žižek contends that sacrifice is structured around an
economy of exchange, whereby something precious is ‘offered up’ to
the Other in the hope of acquiring something that is even more vital.
While sacrificial practice may consciously desire an actual return from
the Other, according to Žižek the more basic purpose is to ascertain
that there is, after all, some Other that is able to reply to the sacrificial
entreaty:
Even if the Other does not grant my wish, I can at least be assured
that there is an Other who, maybe, next time will respond differently:
the world out there, inclusive of all catastrophes that may befall me,
is not a meaningless blind machinery, but a partner in a possible dia-
logue, so that a catastrophic outcome is to be read as a meaningful
response, not as a kingdom of blind chance.39
The willing subject in this instance obviously does not aim to profit from
his own sacrifice, but to fill in the lack in the Other in order to sustain
the appearance of the Other’s omnipotence or, at least, existence.40
Reading The Passion along this line of argument we might understand
Jesus’s sacrifice as an act intended to plug the gap in the other (his mor-
tal community) by effecting the Other’s (God’s) omnipotence, through
playing it as his own. Crucially, his sacrifice aims to convince the other
that it is ‘still missing something’ and that he possesses ‘the precious
ingredient’.41 Staying close to Lacan, Žižek emphasizes that the subject
possesses no special amalgam in the first instance and consequently is
unable to successfully fill the other’s lack through sacrifice, despite his
best performance.
On this ‘something’ which is ‘missing’ in man, Žižek discusses Christ’s
particular divine-human hybridity. More specifically, he argues that
because there is no God-Other, Christ cannot be thought of as man plus
God, but as man plus divine supplement – jouissance – which is every-
man. In this respect, Christ’s sacrifice does not make way for the God
52 Male Trouble
of Beyond, but an aura (Holy Spirit) which sustains the community of

believers once the body is gone:
[T]o put it in Freudian terms, once it can no longer rely on the

Anlehnung (the notion of leaning on Christ’s body), in the same sense
as, for Freud, the drive which aims at unconditional satisfaction, always
has to ‘lean on’ a particular, contingent material object which acts
as the source of its satisfaction.42
What makes Christ’s particular sacrifice unique, however, is that he

effectively chooses to act on this supplement/remainder that appears
‘too much’ to man. Christ intervenes to resignify man’s excess. Within
the context of The Passion, however, the excess to which Christ res-
ponds is figured as queer in the satanic morphs. Given that this queer-
ness dehumanizes and thus, de-divinizes man, Christ sacrifices himself
in order to take responsibility for the ‘“too much” of life which cannot
be contained in any life-form, which violates the shape (morphe) of
anthropomorphism’.43
Not only does Christ’s self-sacrifice function to ‘resolve’ this queer
excess, but the gesture is structured as a performative process of mas-
culinization. Even though Jesus’s suffering is portrayed as extreme and
violent, it is also lovingly and erotically charged. During the height
of his torture, Christ’s glowing brown eyes often look fondly to the
heavens, presumably the place of his father. In addition, his falling
on Calvary is frequently presented in slow motion, which frames the
action as much as a complicit, sexualized tumble as a ferocious assault.
Again, it is Bataille who draws the sexual and the sacred into close rela-
tion, claiming that ‘all eroticism has a sacramental character’,44 in so
far as it ‘jerks us out of a tenacious obsession with the lastingness of
our […] separate individuality’.45 But for Bataille, the sacred, like the
erotic, is always ‘beyond’ the law rather than intrinsic to its functioning.
(See Figure 2.2.)
The same erotic attachment to subjection is notable in scenes that
document the slow nailing of Jesus’s hands and feet to the cross. And
when his blood posthumously converts a solider, as well as when a drop
of water falls from the heavens to baptize the arid soil, the redemptive
quality of the suffering is accentuated. This regenerative dimension is
dramatically underscored when, shortly after this baptism, Satan dema-
terializes on the point of the drop’s contact with the earth, with a mani-
acal, defeated wail. So, as Hugh Urban has noted, while Bataille aligns
the entry of the sacred with a transgression that ‘violate[s] the utilitarian
Figure 2.2 Jesus in The Passion of the Christ (2004).
values of society through non-productive excess, violence or pleasure’,46

in the film the apparent sacred is central to the rule of reproduction.
The glorification of this structure more accurately reflects Žižek’s claim
that Jesus’s suffering is a triumphant implementation of the Father’s
Law: ‘Christ’s Redemption is not the “negation” of the Fall [of Adam]
but its accomplishment, in exactly the same sense that, according to
Saint Paul, Christ accomplishes the Law.’47 Certainly, it is hard to argue
that Gibson’s Passion does anything but fetishize torture and elevate
suffering and pain as the only way to a full assertion of life.
Jesus: A man with muscles
Theological discourse has received something of a queer modulation

in John Caputo’s dialogues with the philosophy of Jacques Derrida.48
Caputo’s engagement with Derrida invites a rethinking of notions of
weakness, passivity, suffering, and emptiness in a manner of signifi-
cance not only to the disciplines of theology and ontology, but also to
identity politics. Inverting atheistic presumptions of deconstruction,
Caputo claims that Derrida ‘speaks of God all the time’ but that his
work features religion without religion’s God, messianism without the
Messiah: ‘Day and night Derrida has been dreaming, expecting, not the
54 Male Trouble
possible, not the eternal, but the impossible.’49 Further it is Caputo’s

approach to Derrida that prompted him to frame the paradigm of ‘weak
theology’ and the weakness of God, in contrast to dominant notions of
God’s manly authority. In his work, God is displaced of power to figure
as an undeconstructable, non-intervening claim without force. In The
Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (2006) Caputo considers how
the crucifixion might be seen to institute, and exemplify, this rather
queer understanding of God:
God, the event harbored by the name of God, is present at the cruci-
fixion, as the power of the powerlessness of Jesus, in and as the pro-
test against the injustice that rises up from the cross, in and as the
words of forgiveness, not a deferred power that will be visited upon
one’s enemies at a later time. God is in attendance as the weak force
of the call that cries out from Calvary and calls across the epochs,
that cries out from every corpse created by every cruel and unjust
power.50
Caputo’s theology calls us to contemplate the weakness of Christ at the

site of the crucifixion, where ‘the logos of the cross is a call to renounce
violence, not to conceal and defer it’.51 In Gibson’s film, there is an
intense focus on this very weakness. However, it never functions as an
opening to queer alterity, but as a reaction to it that ultimately demands
a powerful, masculinizing resistance to invasion. Whereas Caputo’s
weak theology does not take the enemy by surprise, ‘to lay them low
with real power’,52 this is precisely the ruse of the The Passion, whereby
the endurance of weakness is fetishistically celebrated until the enemy
is indeed ‘taken by surprise’ via Christ’s incarnation.
While Christ’s posthumous moments described in preceding para-
graphs indicate the regenerative power of Jesus’s self-sacrifice, the most
arresting indication of Christ’s ‘return to power’ comes at the end of the
film. Traditionally, as in the gospels, Mary Magdalene makes the discov-
ery of Jesus’s empty tomb. In Gibson’s version of events, however, these
characters are omitted in favour of focusing exclusively on the reincar-
nated Jesus. From inside the tomb, the camera reveals his resurrected
body, initially focusing on his glowing, determined face before panning
downwards to show a gaping hole in his right hand and his muscular
legs. As he moves in the direction of the outside light, Jesus’s naked, ath-
letic body is exposed, revealing the empowering effects of his submission.
Mel Gibson’s Jesus is thus the embodiment of the figure described by
Jerry Falwell in the 1980s: ‘Christ was a man with muscles.’53
Commenting on this masculinized depiction, the theologian Stephen

Prothero suggests that in the closing images of the film Jesus is no longer
a passive-submissive, but akin to a macho Arnold Schwarzenegger. The
author of American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon
(2003) goes on to suggest that the representation reflects the prolif-
eration of evangelical Christian groups over the past 30 years and the
decline of liberal Protestant denominations.54 Commenting on the same
topic, Richard Kirkpatrick claims that the portrayal is also rooted in
the eschatological spirit of our times, which produces the desire for
a saviour who has all the answers to ‘the apocalypse around the turn
of the millennium, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the two wars
with Iraq’. He also notes that a hypermasculine son of God ‘fits with
President George W. Bush’s discussions of a godly purpose behind
American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq’.55
Such anxiety can also be discerned in Gibson’s glorification of a pow-
erful Christ, who not only endures attacks from the Other by enduring
the masculinizing discipline of his father, but who can protect as well:
For Gibson, a man without muscles is no man at all, and God cannot
be less than a ‘real’ man. From this point of view, you’re either one
or the other, and God cannot be that kind of other. I see this link
between fundamentalism and a fear of queerness as revealing the
psycho-dynamics of most religious conservatives. That psychology
is based on a need to think in terms of either/or, to divide the world
into mutually exclusive dichotomies.56
This reification of binary dichotomies is evidenced in the film’s eradica-

tion of queer ambiguity, achieved through Jesus’s act of sacrifice. It is this
submission which ultimately results in his final masculinization. Drawing
on Greek tragedy as an example, in particular on the loss of sexual dif-
ferentiation that characterizes The Bacchae, René Girard suggests that it
is not community difference that gives rise to violence, but the lack of
clear distinctions: ‘it is not the differences but the loss of them that gives
rise to violence and chaos […] This loss forces men into perpetual con-
frontation, one that strips them of all their distinctive characteristics –
in short, of their “identities”.’57 In The Passion of the Christ, the loss of
difference that threatens the community relates to gender and sexuality,
and it is exemplified in the figure of queer Satan – or, Satan as the very
condensed figuration of queerness – that must be destroyed, or straight-
ened into normative perfection. To abate the crisis engendered by this
loss of difference, Girard suggests that the sacrificial victim – in this case
56 Male Trouble
Christ – must function like a conductor by ‘attracting the violent

impulses to itself’.58 This reading enlightens how and why Satan is
drawn towards Jesus in the film’s visual trajectory, until, through
Christ’s sacrifice, s/he is destroyed. In this process, Satan’s queer menace
is resignifed: ‘the victim draws to itself all the violence infecting the
original victim and through its own death transforms this baneful
violence into beneficial violence, into harmony and abundance.’59
Outside of the film text, Girard’s writing on sacrifice also allows us to
assess the cultural significance of the explicit example of male trouble
played out in The Passion. Resonating with the link I wove between
conservative Christian rhetoric and Euro-American politics at the begin-
ning of this chapter, Girard suggests that ‘when the religious framework
of a society starts to totter, it is not exclusively or immediately the
physical security of the society that is threatened; rather, the whole cul-
tural foundation of the society is put in jeopardy’.60 As homosexual, and
other queer modes of relationality, have been increasingly framed as a
threat to the family and the dominant social order, it is no surprise that
queerness and evilness – that is, queerness as social death – are inextri-
cably linked in The Passion. If the film politicizes Christ’s life and death,
we might add that queer life read in and through Satan resembles bare
life incapable of signifying social value or symbolic meaning:
What defines the status of homo sacer is therefore not the originary
ambivalence of the sacredness that is assumed to belong to him,
but rather both the particular character of the double exclusion into
which he is taken and the violence to which he finds himself exposed.
This violence – the unsanctionable killing that, in his case, anyone
can commit – is classifiable as neither sacrifice nor homicide, neither
as the execution of a condemnation to death nor as sacrilege.61
Neither fully outside nor inside the law, queerness and the possibility of
queer or homosexual identification is posited as a perilous danger, and
so the film enacts one of the most violent articulations of normativizing
Law ever seen on screen.
In addition to its narrative organization, we might address the film’s
emotive politics: the haunting music, the raspy Aramaic, the ‘divine’
James Caviezel who plays Jesus. These affective dimensions are crucial
to securing compassionate engagement with the material and render
spectatorial resistance near impossible. Lauren Berlant has observed
how the twenty-first century US Republican party brands itself with the
phrase ‘compassionate Conservatism’ in a bid to foster a moral imperative
among citizens to engage in specific kinds of labour, and to develop

particular cultural attachments:
[C]ompassion measures one’s value (or one’s government’s value) in

terms of the demonstrated capacity not to turn one’s head away but
to embrace a sense of obligation to remember what one has seen and,
in response to that haunting, to become involved in a story of rescue
or amelioration: to take a sad song and make it better.62
Berlant’s analysis of compassion’s political agenda leads us to consider

The Passion’s emotive rhetoric as, how can you turn your back on your
children, your family, your nation, and your God by so weakly embrac-
ing the queer?
This compulsion to feel for the painful straight and narrow is
grounded in a fear of religious and sexual liberalism. As Girard observes,
‘When the father is no longer an overbearing patriarch the son looks
everywhere for the law.’63 The Passion might well be seen to respond to
the crisis in masculinity described in the introduction to this book, but
more specifically to fundamentalist Christian beliefs and conservative
politics which have rallied against gay rights by perceiving queer sub-
jects as threatening, destabilizing forces who revel in the borderlessness
that the post-9/11 West fears so much. Glorifying the figure of Jesus
as the ideal male subject, The Passion of the Christ can be understood
as a hypermasculine endorsement of the submission to the Law in
the service of bolstering the borders of heteronormativity against such
destabilizing forces. The film explicitly celebrates the unquestioning
submission to this normativizing Law during a cultural moment when
traditional norms seem gravely under threat.
3
Impotent Masculinities in
Made in China and InterMission
[It] is always to be noticed that the attempt to establish

a male, phallic power is vigorously threatened by
the no less virulent power of the other sex, which is
oppressed […] That other sex, the feminine, becomes
synonymous with a radical evil that is to be suppressed.1
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror:
An Essay on Abjection
The boundary between the inner and outer is con-

founded by those excremental passages in which the
inner effectively becomes outer, and this excreting
function becomes, as it were, the model by which other
forms of identity-differentiation are accomplished. In
effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit.2
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity
When normative masculinity is threatened, the disruptive element

must be rejected or incorporated for (the) order to be restored. Owing
something to sacrifice’s economy of exchange, the performative resig-
nification of encounters with the abject – and in particular, experiences
of the male as abject – are important responses to repairing abjection’s
emasculating and dehumanizing impact. Julia Kristeva draws attention
to the manner in which that which is expelled ‘does not cease chal-
lenging its master’,3 by fuelling a drama of repulsion and attraction:
‘a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor
who sells you up, a friend who stabs you.’4 Even as this dynamic shapes
the conditions on which identity is constituted and relationality is
58
Performing Impotence 59
mobilized, the symbolic crisis that the abject heralds must be contained
in an effort ‘to establish a male, phallic power’.5 As Judith Butler
implies, in order for normative masculinity ‘to figure on its surface
the very invisibility of its hidden depth’,6 that which is physically and
psychically excrementalized must always be excluded or performed
with added value, while Others are routinely turned into shit.7
The work of Mark O’Rowe offers interesting insight into the relation-
ship between impotence, abjection, and masculinity. Most of his scripts
for stage and screen focus exclusively on this dynamic by exploring
what is excluded from microcosms of normative masculinity, what dis-
rupts these groupings, and how men secure ‘stable’ identifications and
social positions.8 While much of his work explores Dublin working-class
experience, often with dark humour, the performative construction
of masculinity remains one of the writer’s most persistent concerns.
In this regard, O’Rowe reflects the interests of a generation of Irish
writers who almost exclusively explored similar issues throughout the
1990s (for example, Conor McPherson and Gary Mitchell), leading one
critic to bemoan that theatre-going during this period was like watch-
ing ‘the same old show’ over and over again.9 This chapter will focus
on O’Rowe’s play Made in China and the film for which for which he
wrote the screenplay, InterMission. My primary aim here is not to read
Irish culture through the works as such, but to illuminate how mas-
culinity is performed around positions of impotency, abjection, and
victimization.
‘Up-yer-hole theatre’: Scatological masculinity

in Made in China10
When first produced on the Peacock stage of Ireland’s National Theatre

in April 2001, Made in China notably transgressed the institution’s
tradition of staging literary dramas of ‘ancient idealism’.11 Not sur-
prisingly, the play was initially greeted by mixed reviews, with most
commentators praising the actors’ performances, while criticizing the
degree of violence depicted. Such was the spirit of the review proffered
by Stephen Di Benedetto in Irish Theatre Magazine. In his critique,
Di Benedetto drew attention to the representation of aggressive mascu-
linity in the play world, while also noting the popularity of this kind
of representation outside of an Irish context. That which he observed
seemed to be like any number of urban wastelands, stripped of geo-
graphical specificity. Di Benedetto also emphasized the centrality of
misogyny and homophobia to the play’s male order, suggesting that
60 Male Trouble
O’Rowe ‘reflect[s] the misogyny, homophobia, violence and lack of

morality that is brewing underneath American and Irish societies,
which glorify the action of murderers, thugs and the mentally ill’.12
This violent underworld to which Di Benedetto refers is occupied by
the characters Hughie, Paddy, and Kilby. It is a realm controlled by the
sinister Puppacat, head of the so-called Echelon gang to which Hughie
and Kilby belong. Puppacat’s threatened arrival to audition Paddy for
gang membership forms the dramatic backdrop to the play, and struc-
tures the plot around male performance anxiety. However, the core
action principally centres around Kilby’s efforts to persuade Hughie to
carry out a brutal attack on a character named Bernie Denk, who sup-
posedly attacked Nancy (Peg-leg), Puppacat’s disabled astrologer. Hughie
refuses to carry out Kilby’s request, as he has become disillusioned with
Echelon life. In response, Kilby primes the younger Paddy for joining
the Echelon group, seducing him with violent anecdotes. As the plot
unfolds, it emerges that Kilby has recently been sexually assaulted
by Puppacat, with assistance from Hughie, in order to control him
and to delineate his position within the male hierarchy. Retributively
impelled, Kilby marshals the plot to a violent climax, assaulting Hughie
and Paddy. Fortunes take an unexpected twist, however, when Kilby is
himself demobilized through the joint efforts of his colleagues.
This chapter looks to Made in China to consider how the hypermas-
culinity that characterizes the play world signifies masculinity’s perfor-
mative ambition and conceptual instability rather than its ontological
authority. Exposing masculinity as a performative aspiration, this read-
ing highlights how its would-be subjects must submit themselves to the
gender’s specific violent laws if they are to be accommodated within
the male order. Moreover, this critique illuminates how those subjects
who fail to realize gender cohesion must willingly subject themselves
to violence at their own or others’ hands in order to be assimilated by
the group.
Hypermasculine performativity
An analysis of the performative ambitions of masculinity first requires
a description of the normative benchmark against which it is regulated.
In Made in China the gender that male characters perform (or at least
aspire to perform) can be described as hypermasculine or compulsively
masculine in nature, typified by the demonstration of aggressive behav-
iour and hyperbolic physicality. According to Lucy Candib and Richard
Schmitt in ‘About Losing It: The Fear of Impotence’ (1996), hypermas-
culinity also involves excessive emphasis on physical strength, a belief
in the legitimacy of male violence in certain interpersonal interactions,

misogyny, and homophobia.13 In O’Rowe’s play, this behaviour is estab-
lished as a norm among the Echelon associates by Puppacat, the leader
of the gang with whom characters must identify and emulate. Not only
does Puppacat commit the most heinous act of violence referred to in
the play by raping Kilby, but as the central authority figure, he instructs
the Echelons on how to conduct themselves. Correspondingly, all the
characters desire his validation, in one way or another. In demarcating
the parameters of acceptable male behaviour, all male desire circulates
around Puppacat. Despite being the centre of power, however, Puppacat
never materializes on stage. In this sense, he is less a dramatic character
than a symbolic device or master signifier in the generation and stabil-
ity of meaning in the play world. In its will to mastery, the masculin-
ity associated with Puppacat’s influence is distinctly phallic in nature,
insofar as it enacts a possession or a will to possession of the phallus.
Of course, as Jacques Lacan is keen to remind us, because the phallus
only signifies itself, it can never actually be possessed.14 In exaggerat-
edly affecting possession of the phallus, hypermasculinity or phallic
masculinity always runs the risk of exposing the incompleteness of
gender’s masquerade.
Judith Butler has extensively analysed the saturation of the body
with expectation, which results in the internalization of naturalized
constructions of gender. In ‘Imitation and Gender Subordination’ she
argues that gender ‘is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion
of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself’.15
She explicates:
As a social construct, gender is a performance that produces the

illusion of an inner sex or essence or psychic gender core; it produces
on the skin, through the gesture, the move, the gait (the array of
corporeal theatrics understood as gender presentation, the illusion
of an inner depth).16
Although Butler’s ideas are not grounded within dramatic or theatrical

contexts as such, her thinking has been instrumental in forging a link
between performances and representations of gender and everyday
social conditions. Taking cross-dressing as an example, Butler illustrates
how drag reveals the imitative nature of gender by exposing it as a
falsely naturalized entity. The mapping of gender theatrically across the
body, Butler suggests, highlights its contrivance as the sum of a ‘stylized
repetition of acts’.17 In drawing attention to moments of deregulated play
62 Male Trouble
or slippage, Butler imagines gender as the consolidated effect of the

recurrent citation of a set of gender conventions. While this analysis
is not concerned with cross-dressing, Butler’s ideas create a theoretical
space for the investigation of the performativity of masculinity in the
play. In Made in China, masculinity’s tacit expedient to substantiate its
authority is first exposed when the male body fails to repeat those styl-
ized acts or normative codes about which Butler writes. Secondly, it is
revealed when these ‘failed’ men are subjected to violence, or willingly
subject themselves to aggression, in order be assimilated by the social
order. In all of these instances, the resignification of relative impotence
is posited as integral to the reproduction of stable male identity and
heteronormative masculinity.
From the moment Made in China begins with Paddy removing his wet
clothes, the play establishes itself as a drama of undressing. The subtlety
of this encoding is concretized as the play gains momentum, with atten-
tion being focused in text and in the performance mentioned towards
physical appearance and clothing, signifiers of male masquerade that
are interrogated and often viciously undone. This association is main-
tained throughout, with instances of dress paralleling reconfigurations
of status: when Kilby’s jacket, which bears a Chinese inscription said to
translate as ‘Brotherhood of the Guard’, is sold to Copper Dolan, this
exchange pre-empts Kilby’s downgrading, and the corrupt policeman’s
social ascension. Moreover, Paddy longs for a jacket that might afford
him the authority of Kilby, and the masculinity of Dolan is profoundly
corroded by the deciphering of the jacket’s signature to actually mean
‘Made in China’ and not ‘Brotherhood of the Guard’.
Indeed most of the pre-emptory consternation between the male
characters, building up to the final gruesome attack, arises from debates
about suitable clothing. Paddy’s trademark accessory is a snorkel jacket
which conceals his face when zipped up. It is no coincidence that he is
the least experienced of all the Echelon members, a position reflected
in Act One when he enters cosseted in swaddling attire. Paddy is gen-
erously helped with his catching zip by Hughie, a more established,
though recently reluctant, Echelon comrade. The eventual shedding of
his stubborn wet clothing may be read as a symbolic baptismal gesture
marking his initiation into the tribe, but it is by no means the end of his
process of becoming. Forced to stand in his underwear until his clothes
are dry, Paddy’s state of undress is consistently correlated with a tem-
pered and attenuated masculinity by both Hughie and Kilby, and this
motif becomes the touchstone for a process of excoriation. When Kilby
(an apparently committed Echelon) eventually enters the apartment, he
establishes this connection with his suspicion of homosexual activity

between Paddy and Hughie, an accusation he substantiates with the
accidental protrusion of Paddy’s penis, who is in his underwear. His
relentless attention to the impromptu emergence is initially met with
unease, although this perceived weakness is quickly exploited for the
potential to reconstruct Paddy into a valuable Echelon member. As
Hughie recoils from gang activity, Paddy is primed to become Kilby’s
next subject of masculinization.
After Hughie leaves the apartment in Act One, Paddy’s induction
begins as Kilby regales him with the history of the prized Chinese
jacket. Paddy recalls the garment with envy, admitting, ‘See you walk-
ing down the street, think, Jaysus! I wish I had a fuckin’ chink writin’
jacket’,18 revealing how he had thought it ‘said somethin’ Karate’.19
Kilby claims that Copper Dolan stole the jacket from him in the hope
that its branded references would confer him with a similar authority.
Following the loss of the garment, Kilby invested in a new, impressively
crafted leather jacket, also bearing Chinese inscription. During Kilby’s
frequent trips to the toilet, Paddy admires and eventually tries on
Kilby’s coat, a gesture reflecting his mounting desire to emulate Kilby’s
masculinity.
Paddy is not the only character whose masculinity is paralleled by
changes in physical appearance. Hughie conveys his new-found con-
servatism with a penchant for John Rocha designer clothing. When
Paddy offers him his snorkel coat to protect him from the rain, Hughie
rejects the gesture with ‘snorkel! I’d rather get up on Obboe the fuckin’
Abbo’.20 This rebuke not only criticizes Paddy’s appearance, but corre-
lates his dress sense with emasculation and an attendant sexual trans-
gression. In turn, Hughie is accused by Kilby of knowing nothing about
clothing, in a remark that similarly connotes his dress sense with his
feminization: ‘Got the values of a woman, he has. Woman’d walk six
miles nippy through a blizzard, you know?’21
Kilby, the leader of the group as we know it on stage, is not excluded
from this dress-gender-power matrix of signification, so much so that
the play’s title foregrounds its importance. As indicated earlier, the glo-
rification of his original leather jacket is the primary means by which
Kilby seduces Paddy. Envied by many and eventually stolen by a figure
of the law (or so Kilby claims), the jacket represents physical strength
and social status. Throughout the play, as the masculinity of both
Hughie and Paddy is agitated and recast by Kilby, O’Rowe engages the
reader/audience in an ancillary seduction plot. Little by little, suspi-
cions are aroused as to what exactly happened to the famous coat until
64 Male Trouble
Hughie eventually ‘outs’ Kilby. Contrary to his claim, Kilby actually sold
his prized coat to Copper Dolan, who thought that ‘it looked alpha’22
having copied the label off his current coat. Unfortunately for Kilby,
Copper Dolan discovered the writing’s correct translation.
Following on, the problem of dress and appearance become part of
the larger problem of identification, and the problem of shaky identifi-
cations becomes part of the problem of securing normative masculinity.
To become a member of the Echelons is to identify with and embody its
codes of masculinity, but the problematization of these codes institutes
a radical disruption of male authority and sociality. In Identification
Papers Diana Fuss maintains that manifold identifications implicitly
trouble subjectivity, observing: ‘The astonishing capacity of identifica-
tions to reverse and disguise themselves, to multiply and contravene
one another, to disappear and reappear years later renders identity
profoundly unstable and profoundly open to radical change.’23 Equally,
in the play world, once identifications with ‘Brotherhood of the Guard’
are brought into question, male identity is dutifully destabilized. As
already illustrated, most of the play is dedicated to aligning physi-
cal appearance and cohesive gender enactment with male positioning.
Identification with these codes is necessary for gang participation.
Allied to this performative aspiration is the rehearsal of martial arts,
a pedagogical bonus gleaned from the men’s enthusiasm for action films.
In this sense, China itself also becomes embroiled in this gender nego-
tiation, with the male characters coveting the hypermasculinity repre-
sented by martial art films in particular, which lies in direct contrast to
the country’s historical effeminization by the West. The emergence of
the truth about Kilby’s jacket, however, precipitates a systematic prob-
lematization of all essentialized positions in the play world. As the coat
does not read ‘Brotherhood of the Guard’, the sovereignty of Kilby and
Copper Dolan’s masculinity is simultaneously brought into question
through an inferred masquerade. Hughie explicitly draws attention to
this unravelling of normative identity by saying that the disclosure
of the insignia’s meaning had the effect of ‘queerin’ things up.’24
While Fuss understands identification as a psychic process that
involves the ‘internalization of the other’, the physicality of the charac-
ters in the play also exposes a degree of gender dysfunction. Writing
on masculinities in literature, Peter Middleton examines the popular
representation of male characters in comics:
The action-comic image of the male body is one reduced to its

basic motor functions. These bodies kick, punch, stretch, with the
maximum use of the limbs and maximum occupancy of space […]

The exaggerated emphasis on motor functions seems to lead naturally
to super-human attributes in many of the action-comic narratives.25
Such representations of masculinity are similarly reflected in the Holly-

wood action hero, such as the kind worshipped in Made in China.
Middleton’s observations could equally be used to describe the Peacock
production, notable for the formidable physicality and at times vir-
tuosic performances of the male actors who dominated the entire
stage, at times almost encroaching upon the audience. The most strik-
ing acknowledgement of the performative aspect to masculinity is
staged in Act Two, with Kilby coaching Paddy for his meeting with
Puppacat, arranged to assess his suitability for Echelon membership:
‘This’ll be your chance, see. Your audition piece. Audition for Puppacat,
demo first hand in person, man, your focused viciousness, willin’ness to
inflict.’26 If Paddy stands any chance of being accepted into the Echelon
group, he must adhere to certain gender conventions, which not only
involve executing violence on others, but a willingness to endure it
himself.
As Middleton’s observation infers, the male body is the principal tool
that strives to achieve hypermasculine idealization. In Made in China this
is most obviously revealed in the case of Paddy and Kilby. Their hyper-
bolic movements and striving energy reveal a will to realize an identity
in excess of their ostensible reach, through straining identification with
the omnipotent Puppacat. In this, they resemble Fuss’s description
of identification as ‘a desire to be as or like the other […] identifica-
tion is fundamentally a question of resemblance and replacement’27
Unlike the comic book heroes of which Middleton writes, however,
O’Rowe’s characters are not parodic constructions, despite their initial
hyperbolism. Once a range of failed men has been identified, the endur-
ance of suffering is refigured as a strategy of symbolization.
Addressing the abject

In revealing normative masculinity as a kind of triumph over impotence,
Made in China also identifies a number of characters that fail to secure
this identification from the play’s outset. These abject beings are
marked out in the relentless pursuit of normative appropriation. In
O’Rowe’s play, the abject emerges in a number of forms: as scatological
reference and representation, misogyny, and homophobia. One of the
most startling characters described in the play world is Nancy, otherwise
referred to as Peg-leg. A one-legged astrologer who gives consultations
66 Male Trouble
to Puppacat, Nancy is Lacan’s ‘not whole’ woman par excellence: not

only is she missing a leg, but she never appears on stage.28 Her ‘want-
ing’ physicality is frequently recounted in order to create a vertical
line of desirability, with Puppacat at the top and she at its reviled base.
Recently, however, criminal Bernie Denk is reputed to have fractured
her functioning limb, rendering her completely immobile. Kilby later
reveals to Paddy that Nancy and Bernie are actually lovers:
Paddy: So did Bernie Denk not cripple the peg-leg?

Kilby: Everything but, man, ’Costed her, broke in, wrecked her gaff …
Paddy: Why?
Kilby: They’re lovers. What d’you expect. They were lovers an’ they
had a tiff, she dumped him an’ that’s not the issue.29
Kilby garnishes this revelation by reporting that Bernie called Nancy

‘Ma’ during sex. In Act Two he persists in aggrandizing Nancy’s mon-
strosity by chronicling a reported raucous sexual encounter between
her and Bernie during the funeral ceremony of Hughie’s mother, which
ended with Nancy toppling to the ground. Once suspected of getting
‘up on his oul’ one’30 (his mother), Bernie can now vicariously fulfil his
incestuous fantasy with a willing Nancy, who allows him to address her
as ‘Ma’ during sexual intercourse.
Nancy’s character, which represents a fusion of mother, whore, and
monster, constructs woman as illegible deformity. In turn, Nancy is
portrayed as one of the greatest threats to male characters and to the
cohesion of the heterosexual male order. By allowing Bernie to refer to
her as his mother, Nancy also permits the kind of Oedipal transgression
of which the Echelon order is fearful and intent on preventing: she
actively encourages her partner to actualize a (repressed) desire for the
mother. In ‘Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’ (1910),
Sigmund Freud links homosexuality to a complex matrix of maternal
desire and identification that resonates with the threat posed by the
couple’s sexual habits:
In all our male homosexual cases the subjects had had a very intense
erotic attachment to a female person, as a rule their mother […] the
child’s love for his mother cannot continue to develop consciously
and further; it succumbs to repression. The boy represses his love for
his mother: he puts himself in her place, identifies himself with her,
and takes his own person as a model in whose likeness he chooses
the new objects of his love.31
In the play world, the resexualization of maternal attachment is a defin-

ing moment of male trouble.
Discussing Freud’s Moses and Monothesism and Totem and Taboo,
Kristeva addresses what she refers to as ‘the socially productive value of
the son-mother incest prohibition’, while also holding up the taboo as
a fear of the feminine as abject, undifferentiated, and without order.32
The symbolic menace of the sexual arrangement becomes materially
evident towards the end of Act Two when Kilby reveals that he stole
Nancy’s prosthesis in order to teach her a lesson. He proceeds to use
the dislodged appendage in violent combat with Paddy and Kilby, in
the gruesome foregrounding of female abjection. At the same time it is
worth noting the leg’s metonymic function. While it figures Nancy as
abject, its centrality in violent processes of male identification qualifies
it as a phallic signifier. As it lords over male characters in combat, its
phallic connotations are conspicuous, denoting an ambition for mas-
tery by male characters while simultaneously illustrating the difficulty
of such an embodiment.
If we follow Hughie’s explanation, Copper Dolan’s prostitute is
responsible for mobilizing the play’s action. When he does not adhere
to her codes of sexual conduct (against her will, he ejaculates in her
mouth), she publicly announces the meaning of his Chinese inscription.
This revelation then becomes the greatest hazard to male identity
throughout the play world. The only female character drawn with posi-
tive connotations is Hughie’s mother, and her illness (and concomitant
desexualization) due to a car crash, motivates Hughie to abandon his
unlawful ways. Her death marks the removal of a role model, and when
Hughie rejects Paddy’s final plea for assistance on the grounds of his
mother’s memory, he implicitly consolidates this process of othering
and tribal foreclosure.
While this chapter has so far revealed how certain identifications,
desires, and practices upset normative constructions of masculinity,
homosexuality and the suspicion of homosexual desire are the most
threatening of all. Kilby is constantly suspicious of sexual relations
between Hughie and Paddy. His accusation that Paddy keeps ‘gayin’
Hughie up’33 is the principal tool he uses to exert control over the pair
and it ensures that the ‘machosocial’ arrangement never collapses into
the annihilative realm of the homosexual, as in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s
description of the organization of homosocial relations.34 However, if
such an injunction is threatened, Kilby himself facilitates it. His inces-
sant allusion to homosexuality raises suspicions about his own sexuality.
Writing about masculinity in Irish theatre, Karen Fricker, suggests that
68 Male Trouble
Kilby is a classic closet case.35 Certainly, we might say that he signifies the
point where identification with his male peers blurs as desire for them.
Writing on the Freudian subject, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen argues that iden-
tification always anticipates desire: ‘Desire (the desiring subject) does not
come first, to be followed by identification that would allow the desire to
be fulfilled […] Identification brings the desiring subject into being and
not the other way around.’36 Kilby’s obsession with anality, marked by
his repetition of phrases such as ‘touch-hole’ and ‘dirtburger’,37 in addi-
tion to his constant uttering of gay innuendo, figure him less as a know-
ing homosexual and more as a man desperately trying to forge a stable
identity. In the attempt to resolve this tension, he repeatedly defines
himself against the abject.
Eventually, the motivation behind Kilby’s scatological fixation is dis-
closed. As described earlier, the climax of the play occurs with Hughie’s
revelation that the Chinese symbols on Kilby’s jacket read ‘Made in
China’ rather than the presumed ‘Brotherhood of the Guard’. It was also
emphasized that this discovery marks the end of a symbolic undressing
and redirects focus towards the male body. Enraged by the deception,
Copper Dolan and Puppacat, assisted by Hughie, have Kilby anally
raped with a snooker cue. After he has been severely injured, Puppacat
and Copper Dolan shake hands in Kilby’s blood and excrement as a sign
of solidarity.
In The Psychoses (1955–6) Jacques Lacan maintains that the organiza-
tion of body materiality actually structures identity: ‘The bodily, pre-
genital, exchanges are quite adequate for structuring a world of objects,
a world of complete human reality, that is, one in which there are sub-
jectivities.’38 In Powers of Horror, Kristeva ciphers abjection as a state of
insecurity, even antipathy, towards that which both is and is not part of
the self, incurred by the recognition that that which has been perceived
as the other becomes too intrusive upon the subject. Since Kristeva
conceives of humans as subjects-in-process, the abject is that which
threatens identity by drawing the subject to the ‘edge of non-existence
and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates
me’.39 While she understands the object as a constitutional term of the
ego, the abject is concerned with the realm of the punitive superego
where it exists as a ‘père-version’ and is rationalized as the desire of the
other: ‘I deposit it to the father’s account (verse au père – père-version):
I endure it, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other.’40 As a
père-version, the abject is implicitly related to the stability of the Law,
as an organizing principle of identity and culture. The sadistic assault
on Kilby in Made in China reveals something of the expectations of the
Law on male subjects. In shaking hands in Kilby’s excrement, Puppacat

and Copper Dolan also reveal the centrality of adding value to abjection
in the service of securing masculinity. Such is the dynamic between the
‘high’ and the ‘low’, described by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in
The Politics and Poetics of Transgression:
[T]he ‘top’ attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons
of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in some
way frequently dependent upon that low-Other, but also that the top
includes the low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of
its own fantasy life.41
In accepting his assault, Kilby’s position within the Echelons is ulti-

mately reaffirmed: his submission allows him to be assimilated back
into the group.
Sadomasochistic desire
The sadistic mastery of Kilby, carried out by the hegemonic males and
sealed in his waste, problematizes intimations of his homosexuality,
if only through the disavowal of reciprocity. The act is an unequivo-
cal rape that allows Puppacat and Copper Dolan to consummate their
relationship and to reconcile the endangered male order. While the
violation may be read as a brutal effort to humiliate Kilby, it also draws
attention to the sadistic dynamic that propels the play. Not only is this
impulse revealed in the actual attack, but also in Hughie’s pleasure at
regaling Paddy with the tale in the present:
Hughie: Welters of gore, there was, fuckin’ geysers of blood spurtin’

sprayin’ out of both ends of him, hole an’ mouth. That right Kilby?
Gurglin’ like a blocked drain.42
As Hughie delivers his animated account of the evening, Kilby confesses

to arousal and yearns to satisfy his excitement through sexually assault-
ing Hughie. As he brandishes a baseball bat over Hughie’s disabled body,
simultaneously undoing his trousers, Kilby exclaims, ‘Incapacitate your
opponent single pawed, leaves the other free for whatever you want.
It’s popular with faggot rapists an’ berserk sodomites.’43 Although Kilby
also endeavours to rape Paddy in order to satisfy his ‘rage horn’,44 he is
prevented from doing so by the intervention of Nancy’s prosthetic limb.
In ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ (1915), Freud’s notion of sado-
masochistic reflexivity dissolves the sadist-masochist distinction, while
70 Male Trouble
also situating these mobile desires within a highly performative scene of

exhibitionism and voyeurism. Reflexive sadomasochism is structured
around the premise that the sadist is also a masochist, and vice versa.
In this paper Freud understands masochism as a reversal of sadism: ‘The
active aim (to torture, to look at) is replaced by the passive aim (to be tor-
tured, to be looked at).’45 For Freud, however, satisfaction is not actually
derived from being tortured. The masochist identifies with his torturer,
deriving his pleasure through this identification. Although the masochist
may submit to a father figure, he does so in relation to male desire ful-
filment, reproducing and consolidating the Law, despite its temporary
eroticization. Viewed in this light, sadomasochistic relationships might be
seen to reinforce the Law (and thus gender norms), not only by submitting
to it oneself (masochism), but by subjecting others to it as well (sadism).
Kilby is the most obviously sadomasochistic character in Made in
China. Not long after his entrance, he draws attention to this by miming
an attack on Paddy while exclaiming, ‘step outside the law prevents the
dispensin’ of swift justice. Just below the ribcage. Fuckin’ rupture you.
Would you like that? Don’t think you would.’46 He continues to air a
multiplicity of sadistic pleasures with an unnerving degree of glee. He
advises Hughie to avenge his mother’s death on the driver involved in
the accident saying, ‘Mangle the cunt like he mangled Dolly’,47 and
later figuratively dominates Nancy through stealing her prosthesis.
Kilby’s behaviour soon foregrounds a collapse in the sadist-masochist
distinction as he enthusiastically imagines how he would like to give
Copper Dolan a ‘good buggerin’48 in order to teach him a lesson.
His fantasy is quickly disrupted by Paddy’s alarm, which is abated by
Kilby’s qualification: ‘An’ not in a sexual way, now. Not in a way he’d
like it, pansy an’ all as he is, but in a violent way. Disable him with a
wing-chun flurry.’49 Paddy is attracted by Kilby’s imagined scenario,
and joins in the frenetic role play to administer sexual punishment to
the ‘subservient’ Kilby. In a moment where fantasy and reality become
indistinguishable, Kilby calls to the thrusting Paddy:
Kilby: You feel the potential, there, man?

Paddy: Potential for anguish.
Kilby: You feel it? (Mimes arse slap.) Huh? Gonna stop you destroyin’.
Treaty or not, man. Treaty or none, gonna make you create’
Paddy: ‘Or suffer’
Kilby: Yep.
Paddy: ‘Create or suffer, man. Create or endure. Your choice’…
Buggerin’ or needlecraft.50
In this exchange, it is interesting to note how creation is implicitly

associated with ‘buggerin’, while real endurance and suffering is to be
found in ‘needlecraft’, or other similarly banal domestic (female) pur-
suits. However, the philosophy expounded by the Echelons has never
been to create or to suffer, as Paddy suggests in an interrogative tone. As
elucidated so far, it is more accurately defined as suffer in order to cre-
ate, to prove male worth through the submission to violence. Or, to put
it another way, to bugger in order to create. It is this which consolidates
the group’s authority. Kilby confirms this doctrine when he proclaims,
I am the alpha male of youse fucks ’cos I can take it an’ have took it to
the fuckin’ hilt, man. Yous’re only twopenny strong, twopenny true.
Your convictions’re two penny … I took cue stick stoic an’ acceptin’
an’ me will was forged tenfold stronger in, yep, shit an’ guts! 51
In this manifesto of sorts, ‘shit an’ guts’ are elevated as currencies of

exchange. This expression of what Calvin Thomas refers to as ‘scatonto-
logical’ anxiety, or the feeling that ‘I’ am nothing but excrement – is
abated by being given value within the tribe.52 Jacques Lacan suggests
something similar when in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
Analysis (1963–4) he argues that faeces might stand in for the phallus:
The anal level is the locus of metaphor – one object for another, give
the faeces instead of the phallus. This shows you why the anal drive
is the domain of oblativity, of the gift. Where one is caught short,
where one cannot, as a result of the lack, give what is to be given,
one can always give something else.53
Not only does waste have currency, then, but Lacan points out that the
game of mastery and subjection is constitutive of selfhood: ‘It is in so
far as the subject makes himself the object of another will that the sado-
masochistic drive not only closes up, but constitutes itself.’54
Some characters, however, are unable to align themselves with this
excremental (i)deal. Hughie, who relinquishes his Echelon membership,
expresses an inability to sustain any more beatings. In warning Paddy
of the requirements of Echelon participation, he says, ‘Don’t wanna
get battered. That’s right, right. Tell I’ll get head smacked, so I’m …
or fuckin’ worse, man, so I’m not gonna. Suffice to say but. Shit you
can’t hack. Know what you can hack an’ you can’t hack this.’55 In light
of this admission, and in the context of his eventual departure from
the apartment, Hughie’s rejection of the Echelons is concomitantly
72 Male Trouble
a repudiation of its subjectifying imperative. Hughie’s departure is not

glorious, however, for the play intimates that he will eventually be
traced by Puppacat, and duly punished for his transgression. When
he arises after being beaten, his final resurrection is the most vivid
testament to the perpetuation of a politics of suffering in male identity
formation. Viewed in this light, Hughie’s eventual departure does not
mark a triumphant escape but a failure of becoming. The final image of
the play – Paddy menacing a threatening baseball bat over the stirring
Kilby along with the promise of Puppacat’s arrival – suggests that the
endurance of violence is not necessarily destructive. Rather, as a perfor-
mative refusal of the self as abject, a refusal effected through a kind of
wrestling with the abject, the process also works to inscribe the male
subject within the Law, to perpetuate that same Law, and to ensure male
dominance.
‘I fought the law and the law won’: The performativity

of male authority in InterMission
As with Made in China, InterMission (2003) explores a pocket of urban

working-class masculinity.56 Set in Dublin, the main plot pivots on the
male characters’ hypermasculine ambitions and behaviours, cultivated
and pursued in order to compensate for relationship and employment
failings. The guiding motif of the film is the transformation of the
ineffectual white, working-class heterosexual male into an aggressive
assailant, in a bid to ignite his self-esteem and to avenge his perceived
injustice. In this, the film presents an excellent example of how cul-
tures of victimhood, as Wendy Brown maps out in States of Injury: Power
and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995) become so invested in their own
subjection that identity itself is constituted as and through a form of
immobile, uncreative ressentiment.57 Bearing in mind the tendency of
postmodern representational modalities to fetishize genuinely marginal
social groups, the analysis offered here also considers how a victimized
male logic can triumph over criminal law through reifying a kind of
bodily endurance that supports phallic Law.58
Farrell/Lehiff and the macho standard

It would be difficult to consider masculinity on an organizational level
without devoting some preliminary attention to the protagonist in this
film, played by Colin Farrell. Lehiff, the first character screened, is the
masculine ideal with whom other males first identify, and later desire.
In a role analogous to that of Tyler Durden in David Fincher’s film
Fight Club, Lehiff unites assorted storylines with the promise of remas-
culinizing the disaffected males. From the opening scene of the film,
he establishes a hypermasculine standard for other male characters to
follow, and he continues to be the principal perpetrator of violence
throughout. As is often the case with celebrity actors, Farrell inflects
the character with his own well-established media persona. Toby Miller
elucidates something of how the persona and the role overlap in his
suggestion that film stars operate and are sustained by the follow-
ing divisions: character is ‘a notational entity’, personality a ‘private
biographical reality’, and persona ‘the public image of the actor as a
concrete person that is inferred from his or her screen presence and
associated publicity’.59 For Michael Quinn, celebrities bring to new
roles ‘an overdetermined quality that exceeds the needs of the fiction
and keeps them from disappearing entirely into the acting figure of
drama’.60 While I am not claiming Farrell to be a misogynist, a homo-
phobe, or a thief as is his character in InterMission, his Hollywood film
roles and media persona converge at a particular male stereotype that
inflect and resonate in the character of Lehiff.
A brief outline of Farrell’s career reveals some connections between his
onscreen roles and offscreen persona. The actor readily made his mark
on the movie industry with his first major film, Ordinary Decent Criminal
(2000), soon after which he appeared in Premiere’s list of the ‘100 Most
Powerful People in Hollywood’ (April 2003). Celebrated for his ability
to work and play hard, Farrell has held macho roles in films such as
Tigerland (2000), S.W.A.T. (2003), Daredevil (2003), as well as Alexander
the Great (2004). In addition to being a leading man on screen, Farrell’s
off-stage virility has been frequently confirmed by media reports that
draw attention to his multiple lovers and sustained partying. The follow-
ing profile by John Hiscock in the Mirror newspaper is typical of Farrell’s
popular media representation: ‘He is a wild Irishman with a huge appe-
tite for life. His lusty late-night exploits with booze and women are
legendary in clubs and bars from Dublin to Hollywood.’61 Farrell has
also actively attempted to cultivate this wild Irishman image, primarily
by denying his middle-class upbringing in a middle-class Dublin suburb
in favour of marketing himself as a working-class man with a strong
regional accent, who is from a less affluent area.62 In 2003, the year of
InterMission’s release, Farrell became the centre of a media frenzy for
dating the pop star Britney Spears, and since then, his reputation as one
of Hollywood’s most notorious lotharios has been repeatedly reinforced.
Thus, I suggest that Farrell’s persona as a sexy, successful, working-class
idol done good, constantly supplements the character of Lehiff.
74 Male Trouble
With cropped hair and an unshaven face, Lehiff opens the film flirting
with a waitress. He confesses diffidently to having been ‘around the
block; sowed me oats; acted the rapscallion; ran wild, ran free’, but claims
to have overcome this phase, with ‘Time comes, you have to leave behind
the old hell raiser, man. Take some responsibility for your life. Prepare the
ground work’. To this end, he advocates ‘nest building’. For a moment
his words are plausible; the object of his flirtation is certainly endeared.
Unexpectedly, however, Lehiff lurches across the counter, thumps the
girl in the face and plunders the cash register, therein establishing him-
self as an aggressive thug and instituting a hypermasculine standard for
other male characters in the film to follow. Simultaneously, this moment
heralds Lehiff’s conflict with institutional law represented by Detective
Jerry Lynch. The incident also polarizes the ‘legal system’ of the film
into the outlaw Lehiff on one side and the ‘in-law’ Detective Lynch on
the other. However, the terms of institutional law and Symbolic Law are
constantly at odds, and the plot is chiefly concerned with their mutual
interrogation. This is chiefly explored in the context of male identity and
masculinity.
Disaffected masculinity
In order for this conflict between institutional law and Symbolic Law to
be resolved, a number of ancillary characters and subplots are introduced.
Of these, the male figures are burdened with work and relationships, with
each man identifying himself as a hapless victim of external forces. In
reality, however, victimization emerges as more of an elected subject posi-
tion. This is chiefly revealed in male expressions of mental and physical
subjection. The character John has a job in the local supermarket, which
he frequently claims to detest. Like Freud’s moral masochist, John is com-
pelled ‘to do what is inexpedient, must act against his own interests, must
ruin the prospects which open out to him in the real world and must,
perhaps, destroy his own real existence’.63 Recently separated from his
girlfriend, he discovers in the course of the film that she is now dating a
married bank manager, Sam. At the beginning of the film, John mourns
his loss with co-worker Oscar, who similarly complains of feelings of
sexual inadequacy. From the moment they are screened, both characters
do well to endear the viewer through their apparent vulnerability, iden-
tifying as victims rather than as villains. However, it is not long before
the veracity of their attested subjection is brought into question with
Deirdre’s revelation that, contrary to John’s claim, it was he who actually
terminated the relationship.
In addition to his self-portrayal as something of a romantic victim,

John is also represented as professionally subjugated. His time in the
supermarket is spent either complaining about his failed relationship
or arguing with his boss, Mr. Henderson, whom he views as another
oppressive force in his life. Having rejected his girlfriend, he proceeds to
abandon his job by hurling a tin can at his manager’s head during work.
Surprisingly, the customers who witness this violent interaction are not
shocked by Henderson’s disablement. Rather, in presuming the guilt of
the manager – the representative of legitimated business authority – they
applaud the assault. Pleased with his popularity, John takes an athletic
leap onto a nearby counter, as if a podium, to revel in the popularity
which his stunt has afforded him. Although neither the customer nor
viewer has any reason to credit John’s attack, his own identification as a
victim is clearly championed in this scene. It is not long before he unites
with Lehiff in the hope of avenging himself on those he believes to have
maltreated him in the past, namely, his ex-girlfriend Deirdre and her
new boyfriend Sam, through the robbing of the latter’s bank.
When thirty-something Mick is initially introduced, he too is por-
trayed as a moral masochist, agonizing about family responsibilities.
Anxious of his wife’s expectations and displeased with his job as a bus
driver (he complains to a colleague that they are both dogs), Mick is
primed for rejuvenation by Lehiff. This opportunity comes, somewhat
convolutedly, following a rock being thrown at his bus which results in
its crashing. Although he insists on his innocence, Mick is sacked on
accusations of negligence. While he is not directly responsible for the
incident, there is a reasonable suspicion of recklessness owing to his pro-
pensity to gossip with passengers. Nevertheless, he becomes the film’s
second victimized male who retires to a pub to defer his wife’s wrath. It
is not long before Mick, like John, is co-opted by Lehiff to help in the
bank robbery, through an introductory mark of sympathy followed by
the promise of financial gain, retribution, and masculinization.
Although John’s co-worker Oscar resists this regenerative route in
turning down Lehiff’s offer to participate in the heist, the path he takes
reveals a similar preference for self-affirmation through pain. At the
beginning of the film, Oscar’s victimization, like that of John and Mick,
is attributed to feelings of social and sexual inadequacy. Ultimately,
however, his fractured masculinity reveals itself in masochistic sexual
practices, like those fantasies Freud describes as characterized by the
desire to be ‘painfully beaten, whipped, in some way mal-treated,
forced into unconditional obedience’.64 This power position is made
76 Male Trouble
particularly clear in Oscar’s relationship with Noeleen (the rejected wife

of Sam) whom he meets at the nightclub he attends in the hope of
remedying his impotence. The morning after they sleep together, Oscar
sports the back lacerations he incurred at Noeleen’s hands. He identi-
fies his wounds as badges of virility with: ‘Rough man […] a bit of pain
slash pleasure, you know. Cock’s killin’ me. Me bones, me muscles but
I’m energised.’ While he is initially pleased with his encounter, identify-
ing in its pain a source of pleasure and fortification, Oscar is eventually
unable to withstand the intensity of Noeleen’s physical attacks, which
culminate in her beating him up. Although he flirts with victimhood
briefly, and masculinization through the endurance of pain, Oscar’s
inability to entertain the masochistic scenario heralds a rejection of this
popular identity. And yet even the finality of this repudiation is ques-
tionable given the relationship he develops later with Sally.
While Lehiff, John, Mick, and Oscar are most clearly at odds with legit-
imated authority, even Detective Lynch, its supposed enforcer, delights
in his own victimization, as if aware that the hard Law of the Father
(as it is manifest in the film’s dominant male subjects, Lehiff, John,
and Mick) is more powerful than institutional law. From the moment
he accosts Lehiff by the throat at the beginning of the film, and uri-
nates on him in order to mark his territory and figuratively signal a
prospective power dynamic, one is suspicious of his claims to hardship
(see Figure 3.1). It soon becomes obvious that Lynch does not strive
specifically to eradicate local crime but to represent himself as a victim
of the outlaw; as a martyr whose authority is affirmed not by his achieve-
ments, per se, but by his endurances. The detective’s determination to
ensure this strategic representation is most vividly underscored in the
documentary made by and of Lynch in conjunction with the reporter Ben.
The filming of Lynch at work is as parodic of his ability and author-
ity (and the judicial system that he represents) as is the film’s robbery
scene of hypermasculine ideals. Not only does the device reveal that
the detective does very little on the streets, but also that he is almost
incapable of functioning without being recorded and acknowledged
for his community service. Here, Laura Mulvey’s ‘determining male
gaze’65 does not project its fantasy onto a female figure; rather, in the
action of Lynch in this male-dominated world, it projects circuitously
back onto itself. What was intended to be a shadow documentary of
the detective becomes a highly manipulated construction whereby
Lynch orchestrates scenarios for the benefit of his own representation
and reputation. In a scene where he breaks into an apartment to chal-
lenge its occupant with accusations of drug dealing, Lynch insists that
Figure 3.1 Detective Lynch (Colm Meaney) and Lehiff (Colin Farrell) in
InterMission (2003).
Ben record him beat the man unconscious, ending his frenetic assault
with ‘See what I mean? Scum’. Similarly, during his final showdown
with Lehiff, he ensures that Ben is recording the whole event before
he approaches his nemesis. Lynch’s need to affirm his macho prowess
through a documentary of himself serves to highlight the detective’s
incompetence but also his desire to be more powerful than he actually
is. Lacan’s writing on the scopic drive which inspired Mulvey delineates
how this nexus of desire operates:
[A]t the scopic level, we are no longer at the level of demand, but of
desire, the desire of the Other […] the relation between the gaze and
what one wishes to see involves a lure. The subject is presented as
other than he is, and what one shows him is not what he wishes to see.
It is in this way that the eye may function as objet a, that is to say, at
the level of the lack.66
Via the documentary construction, the ‘Other’ of Lynch’s desire is

deemed to be his imaginary self, and this narcissistic looping of desire
78 Male Trouble
works to undermine his stability as a subject and as his command as a

figure of authority. In this uncompromising exposure Detective Lynch
joins the ranks populated by the other failed men in the film.
Rather than interpreting this male victimization as a mark of termi-
nably critical masculinity, it seems more accurate to understand it as a
performative route towards securing symbolic centrality, which play-
fully transposes the codes of normative masculinity. This trajectory is
mapped early on in the film when the male characters actively choose
their seditious identities in order to justify a hypermasculine reinvention:
they are homosocially reinforced by virtue of their marginality. This is
equally the case for Detective Lynch who assumes that he will accrue
public support by displaying his suffering. This analysis is bolstered
by the fact that the masochistic scenario is orchestrated exclusively in
relation to male desire fulfilment. Viewed in this light, victimized iden-
tifications in InterMission surreptitiously reinforce and validate aggres-
sive masculinity, that very social hierarchy those positions endeavour
to conceal.
Rejecting females and faggots

Central to the justification of male discontent is the demonization of
other characters in the film. Women and homosexuals are constructed
as Other and abject in a manner that draws attention to the vulnerabil-
ity and permeability of the borders of hegemonic masculinity. In their
treatment and referencing of those abject bodies, normative males are
constantly threatened with the disturbance of their own identities, in
dramatic realization of Kristeva’s premise: ‘[I]t [the abject] does not radi-
cally cut off the subject from what threatens it – on the contrary, abjec-
tion acknowledges it [the subject/male character] to be in perpetual
danger.’67 The opening scene of the film not only establishes a hyper-
masculine standard in the film but it simultaneously positions woman
as an obstacle to this realization that needs to be violently removed.
Only after the female cashier has been assaulted and jettisoned to the
margins of the homocentric narrative can Lehiff mobilize his ambitions
and the plot proceed. This configuration tacitly correlates male desire
fulfilment with female subjection and exclusion.
As the plot unfolds further, we learn that Deirdre’s sister Sally has
suffered grotesquely at the hands of male violence. Her low self-esteem
and indifference to her appearance are legacies of a brutal relationship
that ended with her boyfriend tying her to a chair, telling her she was
a ‘shit lay’, and defecating on her chest. Left in this condition for three
days, Sally was eventually discovered by her mother. While this event
is not screened, the foregrounding of Sally’s ‘ronnie’ (moustache) is a

pervasive reminder of female abjection in this world. This positioning is
all the more insidiously construed by figuring her ‘badge of mourning’
(as her mother refers to it) as a central focus of humour in the film.
In a similar vein, Deirdre is held hostage in her home while Lehiff,
Mick, and her ex-boyfriend John attempt to rob her current partner’s
bank. She is also beaten by Lehiff when she tries to retaliate. Despite
the fact that John is involved in her attack, Deirdre reunites with him
at the end of the film, without significant hesitation. In this, the film
ultimately naturalizes male violence and places the onus upon females
to wait-out male abuse. Implicitly, this resolution plays out the dan-
gerous domestic abuse maxim that it was, in fact, the woman’s fault
all along. While Sally and Deirdre are both abjected in this way, their
mother is omitted from the main action and confined to the family
home, where she repeatedly promotes her daughters’ obligation to the
domestic sphere.
In addition to the abjection of female characters, homosexual slurs
and intimations abound in the film, used to question male authority
and the stability of masculine identifications. Detective Lynch makes
this position clear when he defines his mission as to ‘separate the men
from the faggots’. At different moments in the film, similar insinuations
are used to undermine male characters who deviate from an aggressive
normativity. Similarly, when the editor of ‘Little Big City’ (the local
news station) initially prohibits Ben from making the documentary of
Detective Lynch, his sexuality is brought into question. In a telephone
exchange, Lynch correlates this refusal with an inability to appreciate
his work and aligns the perceived defection with homosexuality.
Jerry: Has no one any balls these days?

Ben: That’s what I said to his face. I agree with you one hundred
percent, Jerry.
Jerry: The faggot. Is he a faggot? Bet ya he is. One of those fucks who
tries too hard to be one of the ladies, ya know.
The detective’s recourse is for Ben to produce his own show called ‘Hard
as Nails Cunts’, starring himself.
Although many male characters are intent on defining the correct
boundaries of male subjectivity and masculinity through a doctrine
of self-victimization and the construction of the Other and the abject,
these same figures ultimately reinforce the manifesto of endurance by
celebrating their own abjection. It is at this point that Freud’s notion
80 Male Trouble
of feminine masochism, defined by the male desire to be ‘dirtied and

debased’ may be more usefully reimagined, in Kristevan terms, as a
correlative of semiotic abjection. Kristeva’s theorization of pre-Oedipal
antics suggests that entry into the Symbolic domain of language and
culture necessitates a repression of maternal authority. In contrast,
the journey taken by male characters in InterMission reveals a steady
rejection of all dominant cultural (paternal) authority in favour of
performed castration and an Oedipal carnival. For ultimately, having
flaunted masochistic tendencies and parodied hypermasculine ambi-
tions in dressing up to rob a bank, these characters not only eventually
embrace the abject body (as in the case of Oscar and Sally’s union), but
teeter on the threshold of abjection themselves. This is most notably
highlighted when Oscar congratulates the hospitalized John for being
shot during the failed robbery and when Detective Lynch sports the
colostomy bag he had fitted following his shooting by Lehiff, as if a
military insignia. It is also foregrounded when Mick celebrates being
mutilated, paralysed, and wheelchair-bound, owing to the fact that his
debilitation allows him to escape police punishment, a sign that the
Symbolic Law informing masculinity supersedes institutional law in
the film. Although the performed jouissance may imply a weakening of
the Law of the Father, and its particular demands on masculinity and
male supremacy, I contend the implausibility of such an outcome by
virtue of its strategic choreography. In contrast, this self-abjection is
merely a mechanism that flirts with ‘monstrous feminine’68 by mimick-
ing lack and subordination, those marginalizing representations that
many of the same male characters have been so intent on perpetuating.
The representation of Mick in the film’s penultimate scene explicitly
reinforces the glorification of male impotence and subjection. In a bar,
the temporarily wheelchair-bound Mick is challenged to a race by a
wheelchair-using regular in order to settle the hierarchical equivocacy
with ‘Think you’re the King on wheels? I’m the King round here’.
Although the anonymous client is almost completely immobilized, he
celebrates his condition with ‘The body compensates. Instead of mobil-
ity I have increased perception. Sight and Sound. Smell of Course. It’s
a fair trade. I wouldn’t go back.’ Eventually Mick agrees to the chal-
lenge and emerges victorious, exclaiming, ‘I’m King of the World!’ to
the applause of other customers, in a moment reminiscent of John’s
supermarket glory. Even while deriding abjected females, abjection as
endurance becomes a useful strategy to counteract male impotence.
For the masculine to survive, its (repressed) constitutive abjection
must be strategically collapsed into the glamour of the wounded hero.
When these men fail to accede to Lehiff’s hypermasculine signification,

or indeed to the economic leaders as represented in Mr. Henderson and
Sam, they valorize their own failure.
The destruction of Lehiff

Once Lehiff’s would-be accomplices have retreated from the aborted
crime scene to embrace the fruits of their failure, Detective Lynch
chases Lehiff from the city into the countryside. The setting signals
a primordial engagement with the two most dominant males vying
for supremacy. Lynch confirms the primal significance of the location
by suggesting that they resolve their differences with a fist fight ‘man
to man’. If Lehiff wins, Lynch claims that he will release him with-
out charge. In place of a fist fight, however, the men draw guns and
Lehiff is killed. Of course, this is the only possible outcome for a film
which has steadily been intent on valorizing male impotence and suf-
fering. Lehiff’s power invokes a phallic sublimity that threatens other
male characters unable to emulate him. Having consistently revealed
this ineptitude, Lehiff must be destroyed.
Most interesting about Lehiff’s death is that it is the direct result of
desire in overdrive, rather than recognizable vitriol. While male char-
acters initially seem to identify with Lehiff in the film, identification
gives way to desire. In the reading of Made in China, I referred to Borch-
Jacobsen’s notion that identification precedes desire. He elaborates upon
this dynamic through a discussion of rivalrous mimicry, stating, ‘[W]hat
comes first is a tendency towards identification […] which then gives
rise to desire; and this desire is, from the outset, a (mimetic, rivalrous)
desire to oust the incommodious Other from the place the pseudo-
subject already occupies in fantasy.’69 This destructive aspect of desire is
certainly evident in InterMission, and it finds further illumination in the
work of Lacan who construes desire in ‘The Signification of the Phallus’
as a desire of the Other’s desire, wherein the desired object/person,
termed the objet a, represents the absence that structures signification:
‘The fact that the phallus is a signifier means that it is in the place of
the Other that the subject has access to it. But since this signifier is only
veiled; as ratio of the Other’s desire, it is this desire of the Other as such
that the subject must recognise.’70 This concept is borrowed from Georg
W. F. Hegel, via Alexandre Kojève, who states,
Desire is human only if the one desires, not the body, but the Desire
of the other […] that is to say, if he wants to be ‘desired’ or ‘loved’,
or, rather, ‘recognised’ in his human value […] In other words, all
82 Male Trouble
human, anthropogenetic Desire […] is, finally, a function of the

desire for recognition.71
The desire of the objet a, then, is a tautological relation caught up in the

endless pursuit of presence, made impossible by the Symbolic’s meto-
nymic ontology. Kojève proceeds to argue that in order to achieve desired
recognition, the desiring subject must risk his life in a struggle for pres-
tige, a battle arising from the fact that the other also desires recognition.
This combat must be a fight to the death for it is only by risking one’s life
for recognition that one can prove one’s humanness. The struggle ends
at the brink of death when the vanquished recognizes the victor as his
master and becomes his slave.
This scenario is evidenced in InterMission in the resolution of Lehiff’s
position. As the one around whom desire conflates – by the men who
seek his masculinizing influence, by the detective who seeks to con-
trol him and at the same time be recognized as a viable male threat –
Lehiff corresponds to the master in Lacan’s adaptation of the Hegelian
paradigm. Correspondingly, John and Mick, his desiring accomplices,
may be conceived of as his slavish counterparts, who initially desire him
and the masculine prowess that he signifies, although in recognition of
the impossibility of this ascension, seek to destroy him. This destructive
component to desire is expressed by Lacan as ‘I love you, but, inexplicably
because I love something in you more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate
you.’72 After ‘mutilation’, the male characters in InterMission seemingly
succumb to victimization and defeatism. They instate a new paradigm
of male identity, built from the fragments of their own destruction,
in apparent deference to phallic signification. This rejection is further
consolidated by the eradication of all hierarchical threats: not only is
Lehiff killed, but the bank manager Sam is forced into subservience
when he eventually reunites with his wife, and Mr. Henderson ends the
film by crashing his car. Collectively, these resolutions serve to privilege
absence over presence, failure over success, victim over victor, and a
communal glorification of male subjection. However, at the same time
this male endurance-testing, which reveals and conceals the bonding
strategies of patriarchy, serves as a mechanism of cultural reproduction
which does not abnegate male power but renegotiates its terms.
Generic shadows
In its marketing blurb, InterMission is referred to as a ‘comedy drama’
and an ‘urban love story’.73 While the film has many comic scenes and
is concerned with the dynamics of intersecting relationships, these
elements are superseded by the film’s focus on masculinity. Comedy

features sporadically in the film, and it is usually deployed by males
to make palatable their abjection of female and homosexual identities,
and also to celebrate their own ‘marginality’. Comedy only appears as
parody when the men dress up in masks to rob a bank, and in Detective
Lynch’s documentary, but this double-coding of hypermasculinity is
also part of the celebration of male endurance and impotence. Even
though the trope of celebrating the male underdog may be well estab-
lished in Irish cinema, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson caution
how, in genre films, ‘the familiar characterizations and plots of genres
may also serve to distract the audience from genuine social problems’.74
While representations of aggressive masculinity on film has oftentimes
been understood as a postcolonial strategy of Irish empowerment, as
suggested by Lance Pettitt in Screening Ireland,75 in its narrow focus on
gender, sexuality, and extreme violence, InterMission exceeds this tradi-
tion, and in so doing warrants a critique that considers the film’s symp-
tomatic meaning in a wider context.
At the outset of this analysis I proposed to interrogate the character-
istic amalgams that the film presents, particularly those of victor and
victim, law and outlaw. While I have exposed these contradictions in
the plot by revealing how authority is undermined, the film’s closing
song ‘I fought the law and the law won’, sung by Lehiff/Farrell initially
seems to deny such ambiguities. Through the exposition of Lynch’s cor-
ruption, it is clear that institutional law is not victorious. As a maverick,
the detective highlights a legal shortcoming, embellished by the revela-
tion that Ben (who was recording the showdown) killed Lehiff, and not
himself, as professed. That law has clearly failed.
This invites an alternative interpretation of the posthumous decla-
ration. While the disavowal of desire, consolidated in the annihilation
of Lehiff, would suggest an abnegation of phallic Law and its particular
demands on heteronormative masculinity, I suggest that this is a mislead-
ing configuration. Rather, I argue that the winning law is in fact phallic
(paternal Law) rather than statutory (law), effected through the reimagin-
ing of normative masculinity. For ultimately, the wallowing in impotence
and the endurance of self-abjection are figured as productive positions
and performative routes towards masculinization. For despite the male
characters failings, they ultimately remain the central narrative foci and
occupy the main power positions within the film world. InterMission’s clos-
ing images, scenically fused by the wheelchair race and a cheering crowd,
clearly revels in this mode of signification for its capacity to accommodate,
celebrate, and elevate a multiplicity of victimized male subjectivities.
4
Homosexuality and Subjection
in Shopping and Fucking and
Faust is Dead
I am there,
there means pain.1
Antonin Artaud, Œuvres Complètes
Man is in fact possessed by the discourse of the law

and he punishes himself with it in the name of this
symbolic debt which in his neurosis he keeps paying
for more and more.2
Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses
By all normative accounts, gay men are failed men. Although the word
‘failed’ might imply gender trouble past the point of rescue, even
homosexuality is not without its own performative agency. This chapter
explores this recuperative dynamic by considering how homosexuality is
rehabilitated through acts of violent subjection within a heteronorma-
tive imaginary. Focusing on a selection of plays by British playwright
Mark Ravenhill, the chapter investigates how homosexuality negotiates
late capitalist culture’s economy of exchange. More specifically, the study
analyses how homosexuality is aligned with an array of postmodern ills
in Ravenhill’s work, and examines how the abject homosexual perfor-
matively manages his socio-Symbolic debt.3 Thinking through the plays
Shopping and Fucking and Faust is Dead, the chapter pays attention to the
manner in which the homosexual functions as ‘code-breaker’ within a
heterosexual economy of gender relations. In addition, it considers how
this figure must punish himself for his ‘transgression’ in order to be resig-
nified within the Symbolic order; how, as the character Donny puts it in
Faust is Dead, he must ‘take the pain’ in order to ‘get the gain’.4
84
Homosexuality and Subjection 85
Shopping and Fucking
Principally set in a worn-down London flat, Shopping and Fucking

documents the interactions of a group of four despondent characters –
Robbie, Mark, Gary, and Lulu. The male characters are named after the
members of Take That, one of Britain’s most successful pop bands in
the 1990s, who collaborated with the 1960s singing icon Lulu around
the time the play was written. As the title provocatively suggests, this
play is about consumerism and sex, and their connection in capital-
ist culture. In the world depicted, insatiable desire and a principle of
transaction govern both shopping and fucking, resulting in individual-
ism, alienation, and social disorder. Although the play’s characters are
seemingly aware of this dynamic, they are locked in cycles of isolation
and self-destruction: Mark is expelled from a drug clinic for having sex
with another client; Robbie is sacked from his job in a burger restaurant
for inciting a customer to attack him with a plastic fork; Lulu strips for
middle-aged Brian, and Gary hungers to receive ‘a good hurt’ with a
knife. Characteristic of Ravenhill’s work, gay characters (Robbie, Mark
and Gary) dominate the drama’s bleak territory.
The play opens with Lulu and Robbie attempting to feed their friend
Mark fast food. The character entreats the pair to stop with ‘I’m so tired.
Look at me. I can’t control anything. My … guts. My mind’.5 Mark’s
resistance establishes him in conflict with his friends and the consum-
erist culture that they represent. Although they persist in encouraging
him to eat by regaling him with tales of their rampant partying, Mark
refuses. Upon persuasion, he agrees to repeat the story of the group’s
first meeting, a tale that frames the relationship of all three characters
in consumerist terms. Mark reminds Robbie and Lulu of how he first
saw them both in a supermarket, shortly after which he purchased them
from a ‘fat man [with] … hair and lycra’. He recalls the man approach
him, offering to sell the couple:
See the pair by the yoghurt? Well, says fat guy, they’re both mine.
I own them. I own them but I don’t want them – because you know
something? – they’re trash. Trash and I hate them. Wanna buy them?
How much? Piece of trash like them. Let’s say … twenty. Yeah, yours
for twenty. So I do the deal. I hand it over. And I fetch you. I don’t
have to say anything because you know. You’ve seen the transaction.
And I take you both away and I take you to my house […] And we
live out our days fat and content and happy.6
86 Male Trouble
Although somewhat ironically imparted, the anecdote distills some

of the worst indictments of consumerist culture into a few sentences.
Simultaneously, the characters’ eagerness to hear the tale repeated
accentuates their compulsive attraction to such excessive consumerist
modalities. So too does it warn of things to come, by framing their
relationships to each other entirely in terms of economics. By the end
of the play, when the three characters feed each other in the same apart-
ment after subjecting each other to great cruelty, the prophetic nature
of the story and the inescapability of the social malaise it evokes are
emphasized.
Having disclosed the tale, Mark reveals that he is to attend a treatment
centre for drug addiction, insisting that he deliberately isolate himself
from his friends, including his lover Robbie. Mark’s desire to overcome
his addiction mobilizes a similar impulse among his friends and they
also try to regain control of their lives. Lulu secures an interview for
a television sales position and Robbie resumes work at a fast food
restaurant. It soon becomes clear that their efforts for self-improvement
will come to nothing. Robbie is sacked for urging a customer to be
more decisive in his life and Lulu resorts to shoplifting food and deal-
ing drugs. Although these characters articulate a wish to take control of
their lives, they are unable to do so. This is largely due to the fact that
they are represented not simply as victims of circumstances, but rather
symptomatic perpetuators of the conditions presented. Moreover, the
queer men are loci of uncontrollable desire.
Manifestations of social alienation become more frequent and severe
in Ravenhill’s play. Mark’s return from a brief rehabilitation period
signals a definite acceleration in their occurrence. He refuses to kiss his
boyfriend or, more generally, to ‘form an attachment’,7 favouring trans-
action over interaction, sex in place of emotional reciprocity. Although
Mark enunciates this doctrine, he confesses to having had sex at the
clinic. He justifies this by denying it had any emotional investment:
‘I told them: You can’t call this a personal relationship … More of a …
transaction. I paid him. I gave him money. And when you’re paying,
you can’t call that a personal relationship, can you?’8 Mark’s credo is the
first explicit link made between capitalist individualism, consumerist
isolationism, and homosexuality in the play. This connection is subse-
quently fortified by the fact that the two gay characters are unemployed
and extort Lulu, who works. Although she earns her money illegally,
Lulu is set apart from her gay counterparts who parasitically live off her
income. The homosexual indictment is additionally embellished with
the introduction of Gary.
In ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ (1983), Fredric Jameson

suggests that the dynamics of late capitalism, or postmodernism, like
those that characterise the themes and textually prescribed production
aesthetics of Shopping and Fucking, are schizophrenic in nature. Drawing
on the example of MTV aesthetics, typified by the rapid succession of
disconnected signifiers, the erosion of a sense of temporal continuity,
and the destruction of material stability, Jameson describes the late capi-
talist world as a montage, comprising ‘isolated, disconnected, discontin-
uous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence’.9
Following Jacques Lacan, Jameson suggests that the subject’s experience
of such a world can have disorienting effects, and may contribute to the
egolessness characteristic of schizophrenia.
Drawing on Lacan’s correlation of Law and language with the Sym-
bolic order, Jameson defines the schizophrenic as one who fails ‘to
accede fully into the realm of speech and language’.10 In other words, the
schizophrenic lies outside signification. He writes, ‘The schizophrenic
thus does not know personal identity in our sense, since our feeling of
identity depends on our sense of the persistence of the “I” and the “me”
over time.’11
In Out of Joint theatre company’s original production of Shopping and
Fucking at the Royal Court Upstairs in 1996, for example, this schizo-
phrenic condition was evidenced in a range of production aesthetics,
including flashing neon lights to emblazon scene titles, juxtaposed
against a drably decorated living room, and booming dance music in
between scenes, dissonant to the characters’ efforts to communicate. In
the drama this schizophrenia is also conveyed in the lives of the char-
acters that desperately search for meaning. Like Jameson’s schizophrenic,
they exist in the absence of a regulatory Law. However, the postmodern
schizophrenic in Ravenhill’s world is exemplified in the figure of the
homosexual.
Within the Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis, the male homosexual
is broadly defined as one who fails to internalize the paternal function,
in favour of feminine identification. In The Psychological Society (1978),
Martin Gross draws attention to this conventional account of homo-
sexuality:
Freud and many of his modern successors saw homosexuality as the

penalty for the boy child’s failure to win the Oedipal battle against
a seductive, overbearing, over-affectionate mother – the classic
Mrs. Portnoy. Instead of finally identifying with the hated father at
the resolution of the Oedipal rivalry, the child identifies with the
88 Male Trouble
mother. Thereafter, the now homosexual male seeks other men as

his love object.12
In Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Jameson

reads Lacanian psychoanalysis alongside Saussurean structuralism to
elaborate upon schizophrenia ‘as a breakdown in the signifying chain,
that is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers which constitutes
an utterance or meaning’.13 In Shopping and Fucking, I maintain that the
homosexual embodies this ‘breakdown’ in signification characteristic
of the schizophrenic condition, and he is called upon to bear the bur-
den of late capitalist dysfunction. Ravenhill’s characters are strikingly
similar to Jameson’s ‘decentered’, ‘free-floating’, and ‘impersonal’ signs,
and the male homosexual is the site on which late capitalist symptoms
of ‘isolation’, ‘discontinuity’, and ‘disorder’ conflate and intensify.14 If,
however, the fundamental feature of postmodern culture is ‘the con-
sumption of sheer commodification as a process’15 as Jameson suggests,
then the homosexual can also be seen to embody a crisis in cultural
reproduction itself.
The abject homosexual

In their abject figuration, gay characters in Shopping and Fucking are
also agents of social pollution. The work of Julia Kristeva once again
proves to be a useful reference point in analysing this construction of
homosexuality. In both Powers of Horror and Strangers to Ourselves (1994)
Kristeva considers abjection to suggest how unconscious dynamics
generate and manage fears and aversions. Her conjecture is helpful
in assessing the explicit staging of the homosexual body in respect of
social otherness. Viscerally defined as a feeling of loathing and disgust
precipitated by an encounter with certain matter, images, and fantasies –
the horrible Other – Kristeva develops abjection as
[a]n extremely strong feeling which is at once somatic and symbolic,

and which is above all a revolt of the person against an external men-
ace from which one wants to keep oneself at a distance, but of which
one has the impression that it is not only an external menace but
that it may menace us from the inside. So it is a desire for separation,
for becoming autonomous and also the feeling of an impossibility
of doing.16
In this explanation of somatic and symbolic revolt, the feeling of abjec-

tion is associated with the unconscious fears of being lost in the body of
the ‘ambiguous other’, and therefore vulnerable to abandonment, loss

of power, and individual identity.
In Shopping and Fucking, male homosexuality is represented as abject,
and not just a figural, but a literal threat to social order. This is prima-
rily achieved through the explicit staging of the homosexual body. The
overt attention directed to corporeal borders, fluids, and permeability
in the play positions the gay body as excessive and uncontrollable, like
Jameson’s reading of late capitalism itself, and posits that same body
as lacking stability and meaning, and in danger of disrupting other
(straight) bodies. This association is foregrounded when Mark rims Gary,
and even more so when he suddenly bleeds; actions that take place
centre stage in Out of Joint’s performance, for instance. It is similarly
highlighted when Robbie and Mark smear their hands and penises with
saliva before penetrating Gary. Further, it is fantastically accounted for in
Gary’s wish to be anally violated with a screwdriver or corkscrew.
In Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), Iris Marion Young
expands Kristeva’s theory of abjection towards a more concrete under-
standing of its social implications. Young suggests that although many
societies are committed to respect and equal rights, routines of practical
consciousness, forms of identification, and interactive behaviour, rules
of deference clearly differentiate groups, privileging some over others.
Hence there exists a dissonance between group-blind egalitarian truisms
of discursive consciousness and group-focused routines of practical
application. This discord, Young claims, creates ‘the sort of border crisis
ripe for the appearance of the abject’.17 She elaborates,
Today the Other is not so different from me as to be an object; so

discursive consciousness asserts that blacks, women and homo-
sexuals are like me. But at the level of practical consciousness these
groups are affectively marked as different. In this situation, those in
the despised groups threaten to cross over the border of the subject’s
identity because discursive consciousness will not name them as
completely different.18
Young draws on homophobia to embellish her hypothesis, owing to

the fact that since a greater number of homosexuals have affirmed their
sexuality in public, it has become obvious that homosexuality has no
specific characteristics: no physical, mental, or moral character that
marks it apart from heterosexuality. It thus becomes increasingly dif-
ficult to assert any difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals
except by their choice of partners. She continues, ‘Homophobia is one
90 Male Trouble
of the deepest fears of difference precisely because the border between

gay and straight is constructed as the most permeable; anyone at all can
become gay, especially me, so the only way to defend my identity is to
turn away with irrational disgust.’19
Young’s explication of the relationship between homophobia and abj-
ection further enables an understanding of the representation of queer
characters in Ravenhill’s play. The drama not only foregrounds rim-
ming and anal sex as abject rather than pleasurable sexual experiences,
but it correlates capitalist excess and inutility – as evidenced in the
abundance of fast food, empty food cartons, and the giving away of
three hundred ecstasy tablets – with the unruly homosexual. In con-
structing this alignment, we might even say that Shopping and Fucking
contributes to the spectacle of the ‘boundary-trespass that is homo-
sexuality’,20 a perception stabilized, according to Judith Butler, by the
media’s homophobic response to AIDS as a gay disease, its victim a
polluting person. Building on the work of Mary Douglas, Butler also
draws attention to the homosexual body as social synecdoche, sug-
gesting that ‘[s]ince anal and oral sex among men clearly establishes
certain kinds of bodily permeabilities unsanctioned by the hegemonic
order, male homosexuality would, within such a hegemonic point of
view, constitute such a site of danger and pollution’.21 In the title of
Ravenhill’s play, as well as in the plot and performance, a direct line is
drawn between consumerist culture and the violent, polluting impro-
priety of the homosexual. Perhaps more seriously, the nihilism of the
gay characters literally inverts them towards death, compounding the
discursive relationship between ‘the male homosexual […] whose desire is
somehow structured by death, either as the desire to die or as one whose
desire is inherently punishable by death’.22 However, unlike in the writ-
ing of Lee Edelman, where the queer as death-drive exerts something
of a recalcitrant, critical force on the dominant Symbolic, in the play,
gay characters willingly submit to violence in order to symbolically
reinstate a lost paternal authority, and precipitate social regeneration.23
To put it another way, if for Edelman homographesis is a reading and
writing practice that both codifies identity, and is ‘intent on de-scribing
the identities that [a conservative social order] has so oppressively
inscribed’, then the male trouble figured here contains this latter poten-
tiality through a violent compression or congealment of subjectivity.24
Violence and the male sublime

Brian is the only representation of heterosexual masculinity in the play
and it is he who employs Lulu to sell drugs. As the most commercially
profitable hegemonic male, drawn in the likeness of Robert William

Connell’s corporate hegemonic,25 Brian reflects most extensively on
capitalist functioning. He speaks compulsively about the Disney anima-
tion The Lion King, drawing particular attention to the ghostly reflection
of the dead King’s face to Simba. His excitement at the appearance of the
King’s face might also be understood to signify a desire for the renewal
of stabilizing Law. The Lion King has been critically noted for paralleling
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which Lacan considers in ‘Desire and the Inter-
pretation of Desire in Hamlet’ (1959). In this paper Lacan reads the play
as a ‘tragedy of [the Prince’s] desire’.26 He goes on to suggest that ‘the
principal subject of the play is beyond all doubt Prince Hamlet. The play
is the drama of an individual subjectivity, and the hero is always present
on stage, more than in any other play’.27 Lacan argues that the tragedy
is foremost a dramatization of the desire of the subject in ego-formation,
a process dependent upon Hamlet encountering and internalizing an
external image. In Lacanian thought, selfhood arises out of the misrecog-
nition of self in idealized otherness, as evidenced in Hamlet’s encounter
with his ghostly father and Simba’s with his. It is only with this misi-
dentification that the self may distinguish itself from others and from
objects and enter the Symbolic order: ‘The privilege of the subject seems
to be established here from that bipolar reflexive relation by which, as
soon as I perceive, my representations belong to me.’28
Central to this interpretation of subjectivity is the role of the father,
as the ideal point of identification, who interpellates the individual as
subject. Read in this light, Simba’s (mis)recognition of his self in his
father is also the moment of subject formation which ensures that the
circle of paternal authority remains unbroken: it is this very relationship
which propels the ‘Circle of Life’. Consequently, Brian’s enthusiasm for
this scene in the Disney animation may be understood to mirror his
desire for the reinstatement of paternal authority in society. Later in
the play, he attempts to articulate this desire more clearly. Watching
a video of a schoolboy cellist, he is moved to say, ‘You feel it like – like
something you knew. Something so beautiful that you’ve lost but you’d
forgotten that you’ve lost it. Then you hear this.’29 Despite his wish
to rectify the disarray of contemporary life, Brian’s actions are more
ambiguous. Ultimately for Brian, commerce is Law.
As the dominant male of the play, Brian is the normative benchmark
against which gay male characters gauge their masculinity complexes.
These efforts take place in a web of violent negotiation that culminates
with the introduction of Gary. Before analysing his function in detail,
I wish to attend to other leading incidents of violence. Scene Seven,
92 Male Trouble
set in an Accident and Emergency room, sees the injured Robbie being
tended to by Lulu. As she tentatively applies ointment to his wounds,
Lulu assures Robbie that his injuries are badges of honour and virility,
saying, ‘Yes, suits you. Makes you look – well … tough. I could go for
you. Some people a bruise, a wound, doesn’t suit them. But you – it fits.
It belongs.’30 Her comment is striking for a number of reasons, not least
of all because Robbie’s character has been hitherto so lightly drawn. It
is even more startling by the end of the play, when little else has been
revealed about his character, and it appears that he is foremost a queer
cipher. Lulu’s comments serve to bolster the recurring association of gay
masculinity with a need for subjection to violence. Robbie’s wounds are
attractive insofar as they masculinize or heterosexualize him. This corre-
lation is compounded when Lulu urges him to divulge a violent account
of his attack, while simultaneously masturbating him:
Lulu: Tell me about them.

Robbie: Who?
Lulu: The men. Attackers.
Robbie: Them.
Lulu: The attackers. Muggers.
Robbie: Well.
Lulu: Sort of describe what they did. Like a story …
Robbie: There was only one.
Lulu: Didn’t you say gang?
Robbie: No. Just this one bloke.
Lulu: A knife?
Robbie: No.
Lulu: Oh. So. He pinned you down?31
Robbie eventually claims that he incurred his injuries while selling the
three hundred ecstasy tablets that Lulu acquired from Brian. Instead of
selling them, however, he confesses to having given them away free to
attractive gay punters. It emerges that he was beaten for exhausting his
supplies, unable to give his assailant the free drugs he demanded. We
might say that Robbie queers capitalist relations by donating the drugs,
instead of selling them. Unlike the figure of the schizoid in the work of
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who is celebrated for his achievement
in ‘the decoding and the deterritorialization of flows in capitalist pro-
duction’,32 Robbie is condemned for his excesses and harshly territorial-
ized by the Law for his attempted transgression. When he fails to deliver
the violent, erotic fantasy that Lulu craves, she stops masturbating him.
The specifics of the assault, his failure to identify with macho masculinity,
and his inability to abide by capitalist tenets collectively provoke Lulu to
abandon her affection and proceed with an attack on Robbie’s sexuality:
Fucking fucker arsehole. Fuck. Pillowbiter. (Hit) Shitstabber. (Hit)

Boys grow up you know and stop playing with each other’s willies.
Men and women make the future. There are people out there who
need me. Normal people who have kind tidy sex and when they
want it. And boys? Boys just fuck each other. The suffering is going
to be handed out. And I shouldn’t be part of it. But it’ll be both
of us. And that’s not justice.33
Lulu’s retort directly correlates Robbie’s behaviour with an immaturity

rooted in his homosexuality. She constructs this alignment with an
intimation of Oedipal dissolution, urging him to mature and resolve
the defection incurred by his failed complex. Her accompanying physi-
cal attack simultaneously invests violence with rectifying potential;
her final blinding with ointment suggesting that castration may have
already taken place.
In Sublime Surrender: Male Masochism at the Fin-De Siècle (1998), Suz-
anne R. Stewart examines the discourse generated by and about certain
men between 1870 and 1940 in the German-speaking world. Drawing
particular attention to the work of Leopold Sacher-Masoch, Richard
Wagner, and Sigmund Freud, Stewart argues that masochism became
a ruse by which men constituted their own marginality in order to
refigure and reinstate their hegemonic status. Owing to its subcultural
practice, Stewart claims that masochism has subversive power vis-à-vis
mass culture and consumer capitalism. She writes,
Paradoxically, however, such a critique is achieved precisely through

a staging of those same commercial relationships, on the one hand,
and the mass consumption of masochistic scenarios on the other.
The masochistic contract between slave and dominatrix is the most
capitalist of all relations because the masochist insists on the right
to sell himself.34
Although capitalist/consumer relationships and master/slave models

exist in the play world (Brian/Robbie, Mark/Gary, Robbie/Gary), they
are not played out to the subversive effect that Stewart describes. In
presenting violent subjection as a route towards masculinization and
social regeneration, the play centralizes the importance of masochistic
94 Male Trouble
dynamics to positive socio-Symbolic functioning. There is no sense of

what we might think of as queer possibility.
This dynamic is most clearly revealed in the fantasies and sexual
practices of Gary. In Out of Joint’s performance, he sits beneath Mark
as soon as he enters Scene Four, this physical arrangement denoting
the passive-aggressive power balance Gary favours. This orchestration
is further elaborated as the play progresses. Mark meets Gary via a sex
phone line in order to fulfil his need for sexual transaction devoid of
emotional intimacy. From the outset, Gary is adamant of his sexual
passivity, insisting, ‘You’re in charge.’35 He corroborates this predilec-
tion by recounting previous sexual experiences and desires. When Mark
offers him thirty pounds for sex, Gary indignantly retorts that he knows
a rich older man, desperately offering to look after him. It turns out
that this man is someone he encountered solely online, but the revela-
tion does not detract from Gary’s chimerical investment. His imagined
description of this figure is especially indicative of Gary’s desire to be
dominated into recognition: ‘He’s a big bloke. Cruel like but really really
he’s kind. Phones me on the lines and says: “I really like the sound of
you. I want to look after you.”’36 The man may be fierce, but for Gary
this quality is construed as a route towards happiness. It is not long
before Gary’s interest in actual, as opposed to fantastical masochistic
scenarios, is exposed.
Later in the play, Gary candidly describes the sexual violence he has
endured in the past, most notably at the hands of his stepfather who
repeatedly raped him. Gary reiterates earlier sentiments by declaring
that he hungers to discover the cruel man of his earlier imagining.
When he discloses that he is only fourteen years old, the brutality of
his past and the contentiousness of the representation are heightened.
Although Mark now claims to love Gary, the sentiment is not recipro-
cated, with the latter convinced of his preferences: ‘I’m not after love.
I want to be owned. I want someone to look after me. And I want him
to fuck me. Really fuck me. Not like that, not like him. And, yeah, it’ll
hurt. But a good hurt.’37 Gary’s fantasy to be dominated is realized at
the end of the play through role enactment initiated by Robbie. Not
surprisingly, his desire is to be a slave, and Robbie willingly facilitates
the realization of this fantasy by assuming the role of master/father.
In this capacity, he helps Gary tessellate his narrative and embody the
specular man of his desires. This process begins with Robbie removing
Gary’s trousers and penetrating him. He then admits Mark to take over,
who violently intercedes. As he does so Gary calls out, ‘Are you my
dad?’38 and begs for the encounter to climax, as it recurrently does in
his mind, with his ‘father’ penetrating him with a knife or a corkscrew.
When he calls out, ‘Got to be fucking something. That’s how it ends’,39
it is obvious that Gary’s fantasmatic identification is bound up with a
desire to gain control over his queer, haphazard life.
Jacques Lacan describes the father in symbolic, imaginary, and real
terms. While, as Dylan Evans has pointed out, he is particularly obscure
on what he means exactly by ‘real’ father,40 in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
(1959–60) Lacan emphasizes that the real father is the agent of castration;
the figure and effect of language (in Freud’s 1909 account of Little Hans,
for example, the father is not physically present), whose intervention
prevents the child from developing phobic substitutions. Lacan describes
the interplay between the real and imaginary father thus:
[T]he real father is elevated to the rank of Great Fucker […] Yet
doesn’t this real and mythical father fade at the moment of the
decline of the Oedipus complex into the one whom the child may
easily have discovered at the relatively advanced age of five years old,
namely, the imaginary father, the father who fucked the kid up.41
This father that Lacan discusses might well be seen as the very figure
Gary fantasizes about in Shopping and Fucking. Essentially, he desperately
desires the father to fulfil his role of Great Fucker, to castrate him by
fucking him up properly, as it were. While Gary’s activities might be seen
to mirror a capitalist bind, I am reluctant to agree that the behaviour is
socially subversive, as Stewart suggests of masochism in another context.
His longing to incarnate the violent man is more like a fantasy to return
to the Oedipal scene. This scenario promises identification with a fiercely
masculine figure, the straightening out of feminine identifications, and
the restoration of order. Essentially, he wants to be rescued by a ‘real’
man. This dramatic construction finds resonance in some of the theories
of subjectivity mapped out in the introduction to the book, in particular
Freud’s identification readings and subsequent interrogations by Judith
Butler and Diana Fuss. In The Ego and the Id (1923), for example, Freud
asserts that a positive Oedipus complex is dependent upon the rejection
of identification with the mother, in favour of the father. This relinquish-
ing process, he claims, results in the internalization of that abandoned
identification in the ego: ‘When it happens that a person has to give up a
sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can
only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego.’42
Butler questions Freud’s description of the child’s fear of feminine
identifications, suggesting that what might well be prohibited in the
96 Male Trouble
Oedipus complex is a primary, homosexual cathexis. She also claims

that the ‘lost’ loved-object is never really given up, just preserved within
the ego, alongside paternal identification, which is the realm of the ego
ideal. With the ego ideal patrolling the consolidation of masculinity
(and femininity), through guarding normative sanctions and taboos, it
turns against the ego (of which it is a constituent), to ensure success-
ful ‘gendering’.43 But, as Lacan points out, the lost father ‘which is the
basis of the providential image of God’ is condemned to be mourned
through the subject’s self-punishment, and this mourning is essentially
‘for someone who would really be someone’, for a father who would
really be ‘a Great Fucker’.44
In certain ways, Gary’s fantasy in Shopping and Fucking mirrors Butler’s
interpretation of Freudian subjectivity, wherein male homosexuality
is troubled by desire for and identification with the father. This tension is
precisely what Fuss takes issue with in Identification Papers which com-
pels her to collapse the Freudian distinction between desire and iden-
tification, which she describes in terms of ‘wishing to have the other’
and ‘wishing to be the other’.45 Gary desires a father figure, but only so
that he might become a father figure (a heteronormative male) himself.
In this construction, Gary differs from the heterosexual characters con-
sidered in Made in China, for example, whose identifications only teeter
on the brink of desire. Gary longs to the brink of self-destruction, but
in the hope of stabilizing his identity.
Gary is not the only character who reveals self-destructive patterns
of behaviour. Mark’s drug usage similarly denotes a powerful urge to
gain control over his life, or perhaps more accurately, a will to alter his
perception of it. He reveals this most vividly in the closing moments
of the play in the telling of yet another anecdote. Set in the year three
thousand, Mark imagines that the Earth has died and is inhabited by
mutants who have been deformed by radiation. He discovers one such
creature, owned by ‘this fat sort of ape-thing’ who defies the aesthetic
norm by being ‘tanned and blond and there’s pecks and his dick […]
I mean, his dick is three-foot long’.46 The character he describes is
reminiscent of Cosmo in Philip Ridley’s bleak Pitchfork Disney (1991):
‘eighteen, pale, with pale hair, and a menacing angelic beauty’.47 The
monstrous owner in Mark’s story confesses to hating the boy and so
sells him to Mark, who offers liberation. However, the beautiful boy has
never been independent before and begs, ‘Please. I’ll die. I don’t know
how to … I can’t feed myself. I’ve been a slave all my life. I’ve never had
a thought of my own. I’ll be dead in a week.’48 His plea falls on deaf ears,
and Mark intends on taking the risk.
Essentially, this closing tale is an adaptation of the play’s earlier story

of how the three friends met. As with Gary, the attractive blond man
from Mark’s story feels unable to operate outside of mastery. Although
Mark asserts that he is willing to risk the boy’s death by freeing him,
the closing vignette suggests the impossibility of the characters realizing
this ambition in their own lives. In the absence of order and Law, Mark,
Robbie, and Lulu huddle together on stage, feeding each other with
fast food, as in the opening scene. Prophetically, the play has come full
circle, and the characters are slaves to their own appetites, unable to
mobilize desire outside of shopping and fucking.
As most clearly illustrated in the analysis of the hospital scene, homo-
sexuality is related to a failed heterosexuality in Ravenhill’s play. This is
substantiated on a number of levels, not least of all in Gary’s pursuit of
a cruel paternal figure to look after and normalize him. As Aleks Sierz
reflects of 1990s’ British theatre, Ravenhill’s work shares an interest in the
impact of a collapse of authority: ‘Young people have been abandoned.
However funky and uninhibited, they are dazed, confused and boiling
over. With all adults corrupt, there is little to relieve pain and the tedium
except shopping and fucking.’49 As with Sierz’s reading of the play, there
is certainly a lack of authority in Shopping and Fucking. But this absence
of Law, as suggested by Gross’s earlier remark on homosexuality, is
pathologized in and perpetuated by the representation of homosexual
masculinity. In the play, self-destructive behaviour is bound up with
homosexuality and the struggle for masculine identifications: the desire
for the interdiction of paternal Law in order to rectify the disruptive
homosexual subject, stem pollution, and restore social order.
Reality bytes: Faust is Dead
While Shopping and Fucking dramatizes some negative conditions of

consumerism, Faust is Dead is a startling theatricalization of the most
hyperbolic nightmares of Jean Baudrillard. A postmodern rendition of
the Faust legend, Ravenhill’s play was originally commissioned by Nick
Philippou of the Actors’ Touring Company, and developed with the
company during workshops in October 1996. Drawing inspiration most
specifically from Nikolaus Lenau, a German Romantic poet who penned
his version of Faust in 1836, Ravenhill’s play is also informed by Nick Phi-
llipou’s and Stewart Laing’s project Brainy, which examined the activities
of Michel Foucault in California, reputedly marked by sex and drugs in
Death Valley. Although Brainy was performed as an independent show in
Glasgow in 1995, there are strong parallels between it and Faust is Dead.
98 Male Trouble
While Shopping and Fucking depicts the most base conditions of late
capitalism, Faust is Dead is less contracted in its scope. Ravenhill works
within the context of a more powerful and privileged social sector, and
he also appears to be more unambiguously critical of that group. The
play features Alain, a French philosopher who bears an obvious resem-
blance to Michel Foucault, who is touring American television chat
shows in order to advertise his new books on the death of man and the
end of history. When he loses his university lectureship, Alain spends
his time with Pete, the son of a computer tycoon, strongly intimated as
Bill Gates. The pair travel the Californian desert, indulging in sex and
drugs, in a manner which reimagines the flower-power hipster as a post-
modern nihilist. The couple makes contact with Donny, a teenager using
an Internet chat room, and arrange to meet him in person. This moment
marks the fracturing of the play’s casual buoyancy, with Donny’s subse-
quent death precipitating a sharp critique of postmodern conditions.
The centrality of Alain’s book, The Death of Man – which owes its
origins to Foucault’s declaration in The Order of Things (1966) – posits
the postmodern collapse of authority and troubling of centered subjec-
tivity as fundamental to Ravenhill’s play. As is typical of his work, gay
masculinities are central to Faust is Dead. My reading addresses the rela-
tionship between homosexuality and what appears as the play’s broader
sociocultural critique. While suggesting that gay characters are not as
explicitly abject here as they are in Shopping and Fucking, I argue that the
play also constructs a relationship between homosexuality and a range
of postmodern ills. This route invokes the writings of Baudrillard, as well
as Foucauldian notions of subjectivity, power, and resistance. Finally,
this critique considers how violence as self-harm affords homosexual
characters corrective potential.
The death of man and hyper-reality

Scene Two of Faust is Dead opens in the United States where Alain is
being interviewed on the David Letterman television show about his
recently published books. His co-interviewee Madonna admits to hav-
ing read ‘The book about sexuality’.50 The scene unites two of the most
influential, if radically different, postmodern icons in preparation for
a deconstruction of contemporary culture. Although Madonna herself
is not on stage for a long time (Rude Guerrilla’s 2003 production rep-
resents Madonna as a cardboard cut-out), she nonetheless furnishes
the play with cultural import. The performer’s early music videos, for
instance, uniquely included a proliferation of marginalized identities
and a plethora of subcultural practices.51
As indicated earlier, the title and inferred thesis of her co-interviewee

Alain’s book refers to Foucault’s archaeology of the human sciences
in The Order Of Things, particularly to his explication on the finitude
of man. In this study, Foucault figures man as a complex conceptual
figure, a discursive space opened by philosophy, biology, economics,
and philology. His meticulous polemic suggests that Man, as ‘he’ has
been thought about since the eighteenth century, did not exist in the
Classical period, where representation and analysis were one:
The profound vocation of Classical language has always been to

create a table – a ‘picture’: whether it be in the form of natural
discourse, the accumulation of truth, descriptions of things, a body of
exact knowledge, or an encyclopaedic dictionary. It exists, therefore,
only in order to be transparent […] the essential consequence is
that Classical language, as the common discourse of representation
and things, as the place within which nature and human nature
intersect, absolutely excludes anything that could be a ‘science of
man’.52
The modern period drew close to this condition, precipitated by the

advent of the human sciences, and the figuration of the human body
as an object of knowledge. Foucault charts the historical emergence of
man along the following lines:
When natural history becomes biology, when the analysis of wealth

becomes economics, when, above all, reflection upon language be-
comes philology, and Classical discourse, in which being and rep-
resentation found their common locus, is eclipsed, then, in the
profound upheaval of such an archaeological mutation, man appears
in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as a subject
that knows.53
In this disquisition, man is conceived of as a space of knowledge,

a set of relations between ‘knowledges’. As such, he occupies an ambig-
uous position that establishes him as both object and condition of his
own knowledge. It is in this bound construction that Foucault locates
man’s finitude: a figure who faces two directions ‘towards, domains of
life, labour and language whose determinations are represented in his
being and towards philosophy where the status of the knowledge of
those determinations is itself determined and fixed’.54 Man’s finitude or
death as it is expressed in Faust is Dead, relates to his limited external
100 Male Trouble
determinations and to the problem of characterizing the knowledge of

that finitude in the postmodern world.
It must be said that Alain is not exclusively a Foucauldian mouthpiece,
for he also expresses ideas of the latter’s sometime critic, Baudrillard. In
Forget Foucault (1977) Baudrillard dissociates himself from certain trends
in French intellectual thought by castigating Foucault’s genealogies as
attempts to produce the effects of truth while simultaneously denying
the possibility of truth.55 Baudrillard does not offer clearly identifi-
able alternatives to Foucault’s concepts of power and society. Rather,
he allows values such as mobility, dispersal, irony, and scepticism to
emerge, notions that Alain espouses in the play. While the demise of the
centred subject resonates with Foucauldian philosophy, the notion of
the end of history and the impossibility of a stable, referential universe is
more directly rooted in the theories of Baudrillard. His essay ‘Simulacra
and Simulations’ (1981) is a startling evocation of the accession of the
real to the hyper-real in contemporary culture:
Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror
or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin
or reality: a hyper-real […] It is the real, and not the map, whose ves-
tiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those
of the empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.56
Baudrillard draws attention to culture’s obsession with imitation, dupli-

cation, and parody, practices seemingly accelerated by simulation and
hyper-reality, as exemplified by Disneyland. His concern for the mainte-
nance of fictions of the real in American culture are played out in Faust
is Dead on a number of levels, most explicitly through the representation
of homosexuality as it figures in the character Donny.
Before examining this representation in detail, it is worth identifying
some of the tensions that exist between the real and the hyper-real in
the play world. Alain emphasizes ambivalence towards these distinc-
tions through a number of anecdotes that call to question the relevance
of theory over practice, and the postmodern obsession with deconstruc-
tion over tangible materiality. One of the characters’ favourite stories
relates to a Dutch woman who, while having lunch with a Japanese
businessman and reading him poetry, is shot and subsequently eaten by
the man. Telling his lover Pete this story, Alain asks who is at fault in
this scenario, ultimately conferring blame on the Dutch woman because,
unlike her colleague, she understood metaphor. Alain confesses to hav-
ing been cautioned by a university representative for regaling a Japanese
sponsor with this story over lunch, due to it being offensive to women,
religious, and ethnic groups. In response, he told his superior to ‘go fuck
herself’ and abandoned his post to ‘live a little’.57 Living a little meant
travelling to America to escape the trappings of bourgeois Europe.
Alain broadens his politically incorrect brainteaser with a further
analogy. He poses the scenario of a woman who asks a man which part
of her body he finds the most attractive, to which he responds her eyes.
The following day he receives a parcel containing the gouged organs.
Alain then combines his disparate stories into one central question:
‘Who was the seducer and who was the seduced?’58 In light of the play’s
titular reference, this question may also be seen to apply to Faust and
Mephistopheles: who of Faustus and Mephistopheles is the tempter
and the tempted? It seems to me that the philosopher’s question here
is foremost concerned with issues surrounding subject autonomy and
complicity. His overall comments point to a subject that is at once the
seducer and the seduced; the subject and object of his own knowledge;
the villain and victim of malaise.
This double bind is evidenced in the degree of reliance that characters
in the play have on those very conditions that they also repudiate. Pete
protests against the loss of the real while pursuing avenues of protec-
tion from its implications, a strategy most notable in his relationship
to media technology. He insists on recording Alain talk, and even Alain
himself perpetuates this alienating strategy when Donny arrives in their
apartment. Also, at the beginning of the play, Pete agrees to have sex
with Alain if he arranges a record contract for his friend Stevie. He sings
a sample song to impress the potential producer:
Got a killer in my VCR

Killer in my ROM
Killer on the cable news
Killer in the floss I use
Killer in the floss
Killer in the floss
Killer in the floss.59
Pete’s lyrics express concerns over the loss of stable identity and knowl-
edge, and the pervasiveness of death in the contemporary world. He
qualifies his reflection by confessing that his father Bill is planning to
release chaos on the world via a computer programme. In order to delay
these plans, Pete confesses to having recently corrupted the programme
with a virus while keeping an original copy himself. At the end of the
102 Male Trouble
play he rescinds his pursuit of the real and defies Alain’s claims to the
death of man by making a Faustian pact with his father. He purports
that Alain’s theorizing did not prevent Donny’s death, and that the
boy’s insistence on reclaiming the real over the virtual resulted in his
demise. In the closing scene of the play, imbued with scriptural over-
tones, not only does Pete raise the subject from death in a virtual other
world, but a new paternal Law is instated: the virtual law of Bill Gates:
‘My dad built this house. Well, hundreds of guys built this house out of
my dad’s … vision. And in my father’s house, his vision of the future, of
perfection is realised […] I hate my dad. But you offer despair, you know
that? And it may be true, but it doesn’t get us anywhere.’60 Although
Pete ultimately surrenders to the inevitability of his life and succumbs
to the virtual paradise of his father, his decision is not made without
divergence. In fact, most of the play is concerned with his and Donny’s
difficulty with living in the contemporary world, leading them to explore
the possibilities of the flesh, and press the materiality of their bodies to
the limit.
Invoking the real

Scene Fourteen sees Pete and Alain log onto an Internet chat room
to which the former has subscribed. As soon as they do so, an image
of Donny appears on screen: a naive teenage boy who evokes one of
Baudrillard’s most troublesome postmodern grotesqueries, the body as
an ‘object of salvation’.61 Donny confesses to his virtual counterparts
that he used to hate his body, but is growing to love it through self-
mutilation. When he removes his t-shirt, his philosophy, ‘you take the
pain, you get the gain’62 is literally etched across his torso in scars. Donny
proudly introduces them: ‘Look at these beauties. Look at that. Did it all
myself. So come on, guys, you got anything better to show? I love these
beauties, love these little babies and I’m feeling so good.’63 Alain is quick
to diagnose Donny’s mutilation as a desire for ‘control over the self’,64
an act of authentication designed to challenge, if not remedy, post-
modern claims to the dissolution of the subject and the loss of the real.
Pete is especially suspicious of simulation – or what Slavoj Žižek calls
the effect of the real, ‘the cobweb of semblances which constitutes our
reality’65 – and in calling Donny a ‘fucking actress’66 challenges him to
transcend his electronic mediation and visit in person. Pete voices his
own fears of contemporary depthlessness and substantiates his desire to
reclaim and affirm the reality of embodied experience by revealing his
own self-inflicted scars: ‘Everything’s a fucking lie, you know? The food,
the TV, the music … it’s all pretend. And this is the one thing that’s for
real. I feel it, it means something. Like suffering, like cruelty. I did it like
you said. I did it for you. You don’t need Donny.’67 Implied in this attack
is a suspicion of the discursively produced subject, with an assault
launched at the body designed to verify the materiality of identity.
In The Body in Pain, The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985),
Elaine Scarry considers the sociopolitical importance of torture and
mutilation in times of cultural crisis, claiming that ‘to have pain is to
have certainty’.68 She elaborates her argument by suggesting,
At particular moments when there is within society a crisis of belief –

that is, when some central idea or ideology or cultural construct has
ceased to elicit a population’s belief either because it is manifestly
fictitious or because it has for some reason been divested of ordinary
forms of substantiation – the sheer material factualness of the human
body will be borrowed to lend that cultural construct the aura of
‘realness’ and ‘certainty.69
Scarry’s analysis directs us to think of the play’s violence as a chal-

lenge to postmodern uncertainty, but also, anxiety surrounding male
identity. In the play, this protest accelerates when Donny arrives at
the apartment. Pete and Donny decide to have a cutting competition
to establish who is the strongest and the most ‘authentic’ individual
among them, while Alain records proceedings on a video camera, in a
gesture that suggests that even ‘authenticity’ needs to be mediated to
Alain, and perhaps even the audience. Slicing his chest, Pete claims to
feel ‘Pure. Clear. True’.70 Desperate to prove himself, Donny responds
by cutting his jugular vein and dies. Observing this in live performance,
the collapsed body and scarlet gush of blood are arresting testaments of
actuality, a state acknowledged by Pete who attempts to stem the flow.
Alain, by contrast, defers action and responsibility in favour of philo-
sophical musing: ‘At some point, at a moment at the end of the twen-
tieth century, reality ended. Reality ended and simulation began […]
And we have to live this dream, this lie, this simulated existence.’71 His
suspicion towards the recorded death is reminiscent of Baudrillard’s
predication in Libération in 1991 that the Gulf War did not take place
owing to the permutations of possibility rehearsed by the communica-
tions industry.72 Pete’s abrupt retaliation ‘Reality just arrived’73 is an
attack on Alain’s (and by extension postmodernism’s) perceived episte-
mological and ideological indulgence, a perspective he substantiates at
the end of the play by rejecting intellectual analysis for the inevitability
of the subsuming of reality by the virtual.
104 Male Trouble
Foucault’s deconstruction of the enlightenment subject is related

to Jameson’s notion of the problem of ‘micropolitics’,74 marked by a
postmodern recognition of a plurality of subjectivities. This concern is
principally foregrounded in Faust is Dead through the staging of mascu-
linity and male homosexualities. Pete offers to kiss Alain in order that
his friend might get a record contract, although he does not claim to be
homosexual: ‘It’s not like I have a prejudice or, or a problem, you know …
with the whole gay thing. It’s just like it’s not totally me, okay.’75 In
performance, his dress and physicality, heavily encoded with stere-
otypical gay signifiers (effeminate gestures, tight clothing, etc.) attest to
the contrary. This is further emphasized when Alain fellates Pete in the
desert, although the latter can only perform when he records the event:
‘I don’t have a prejudice here. You filthy little weenie-feeling heap of
shit. I believe in Affirmative Action. I believe in a multiplicity of sexu-
alities within our society.’76 Pete is reluctant to claim a definitive sexual
identity, and can only cope with intimacy by framing the event, or as he
reveals later, by conducting his relationships with males online. Pete’s
corporeal signifiers and willingness to engage in sexual activity with
Alain suggest that he may be homosexual, his insistence on recording
pointing to a fear of ‘real’ sensations. This is made explicit when he has
to ask Alain if he (Pete) has ejaculated or not.
Alain unabashedly pursues Pete. In fact, there seems to be a direct
correlation between the philosopher’s dark promulgations and Pete’s
sexual willingness, as if a growing (pessimistic) understanding of the
world seduces Pete to homosexual activity. It should be noted, however,
that although the representation of homosexuality in this play may
not be as viscerally abject as it is in Shopping and Fucking, a similar link
is forged between homosexuality and a range of postmodern ills. Pete
and Donny are both victims and agents of this pathology. They do not
merely cut themselves in order to verify the materiality of existence
under the experience of pain. Rather, in the presence of father-lover
Alain, cutting also functions as a castrating mark on the body that
works to resignify homosexuality. Indeed, while not explicitly dealing
with homosexuality, the mark of castration is precisely what Ravenhill
explores in his later play, The Cut (2006). Fuss’s criticism of Freud’s polar-
ization of desire and identification also resonates with this representa-
tion of male subjectivity, where Donny and Pete (as with Gary) appear
torn between desire for the father (associated with homosexuality), and
an identification with the father (associated with heteronormativity).
Fuss queries why the sexed subject of Freudian psychoanalysis must
choose between the two terms (desire and identification), contending,
‘[W]hy assume, in other words, that any subject’s sexuality is structured

in terms of pairs? […] For Freud, the mistake is a convenient one. It
allows him to theorise homosexual desire as inherently contradictory,
since desire can only be for the other and never for the same.’77
It is this very confusion that is played out between the homosexual
characters in Faust is Dead. Rather than interrogate or undermine this
construction, however, Ravenhill’s play holds subjectivity in this same
deadlock, where violent subjection functions to symbolize homosexu-
ality within a heteronormative economy. Fuss’s critique applies to Faust
in that the play represents homosexuality as an instance of identifica-
tion gone awry – ‘identification in overdrive […] this overdrive is also
implicitly a death drive’.78 Accordingly, homosexual identifications
and desires must be painfully fashioned into utility. When Donny dies,
we are initially led to believe that his self-harm has been unproduc-
tive, although his final resurrection points to the regenerative potential
afforded by his actions. Pete, on the other hand, redirects his desire by
forging a Faustian pact with his father, therein hurling himself into a
postmodern hell.
One of the most interesting dramaturgical devices in the play is the
use of a chorus. While the original production included college stu-
dents, the production at the Samuel Beckett Centre at Trinity College,
Dublin (2003) represented the chorus in one actor who, like Pete,
adorned his body with stereotypical gay signifiers (effeminate gestures,
tight clothing, and jewelry). As in Greek drama, the chorus reveals an
omniscience that transcends the understanding of other characters. It
exists before and after the events chronicled, constantly commenting
on what it sees. For Lacan, the chorus in tragic drama also functions
to takes a certain pressure off the spectator: ‘Your emotions are taken
charge of by the healthy order displayed on stage. The Chorus takes care
of them.’79 In the introductory speech, the chorus confesses to having
cried as a child for the state of the world, eventually learning to conceal
its hopeless dejection from its mother: ‘I pretended to sleep and my
mom went off to bed. And after that I taught myself to cry in a special
way that meant she wouldn’t hear me ever again.’80 Towards the end
of the play, the chorus admits to having once longed for Armageddon,
though now, as ‘an adult’, it is desensitized to the world’s pain. Like
Pete, the chorus surrenders to the inevitability of the world’s condition.
The chorus also reveals that Donny’s death was documented on all the
major chat shows, including Oprah and Ricki Lake. Further, it claims that
Donny’s friend Stevie released a song which was played three times an
hour on MTV: ‘Which seems to say to me that maybe Donny wasn’t so
106 Male Trouble
pathetic after all and he knew what was happening in his life and fig-
ured out a way to make something good come from it.’81 Like Pete, who
ultimately shoots Alain, the chorus rejects the despair of theoretical
rhetoric in resigned acknowledgement that the world’s Faustian pact
has already been forged. Virtuality seems to prevail at the expense of
‘real’ experience. As Baudrillard captures so powerfully in The Illusion of
the End (1992), ‘Our Apocalypse is not real, it is virtual. And it is not in
the future, it is here and now […] It circles around us, and will continue
to do so tirelessly. We are circled by our own end and incapable of get-
ting it to land, of bringing it back to earth.’82
In the final moments of the play, Pete delivers a box containing
Donny’s eyes to the hospitalized Alain, ironically positioning him as a
subject in his own favoured philosophical tease. As he opens the con-
tainer and peers inside, the eyeless Donny is resurrected on stage. He
confesses to having been sent back to earth by his mother to redeem
Alain from hell. The closing tableau sees Donny nurse the older man on
stage. Donny’s resurrection, however, cannot be seen in isolation from
his submission to an extreme act of violence. His rebirth is encoded in
Oedipal signification, his gouged eyes an indication of castration.
Donny’s efforts to affirm his identity prove useless in the new virtual
order, where the Law is issued within virtual matrices. He also reveals
that Pete is planning to subscribe to this new world order: ‘He’s gone
now. Gone to his daddy and they’re gonna take over the world.’83
While Ravenhill’s play problematizes the conditions of postmo-
dernity, most notably in respect of the collapse of authority, subject
autonomy, and complicity, he conducts his critique within the context
of gay masculinities. Ravenhill’s representation of homosexuality is
not as sexually explicit in Faust is Dead as it is in Shopping and Fucking,
although oral sex and self-mutilation do take place on stage. The
relationship between homosexuality, the loss of stable identity, and
postmodern dysfunction similarly remains a constant theme. Alain
is a nihilistic philosopher who escapes to the desert to have sex with
the young Pete. In the wake of Baudrillard we might even suggest that
he escapes to the real of the desert, in his own search for purpose.
Ultimately, however, his musings infuriate the boy who shoots him
for his dystopian vision of the dissolved subject and the end of reality.
While Pete attempts to subjectify himself through self-mutilation, he
finally adheres to a somewhat transposed paternal Law by working
with Bill (Gates), the representative of virtual Law. On the other hand,
Donny surrenders completely to subjection, to the point of killing
himself. While he emerges as a spectre at the end of the play, to nurse a
wounded Alain, this is by no means a consoling representation. On the

one hand, it implies that a great act of sacrifice may be the only way
of dealing with a world troubled by ceaseless plurality and virtuality,
and on the other hand it suggests that even the dead are recuperated
by the virtual, that the virtual recycles death. It is worth noting that in
Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment (1990) Lacan
claims that ‘suicide is the only completely successful act’, insofar as it
marks the conscious assumption of the unconscious death drive.84 The
action of the play also suggests that even though philosophy might
announce the death of man, man will continue to haunt the virtual
realm, perhaps as a bio-virtual, traumatic trace.
This chapter has primarily explored how homosexuality as failed
masculinity is performatively symbolized within the selected plays of
Mark Ravenhill. In Shopping and Fucking and Faust is Dead, the male
homosexual figures as both a symptom and perpetuator of a range of
postmodern ills. Moreover, following Lacan, we might say that the
male homosexual figures as the subject of the drive – which is always
a death drive – whose oral (eating), anal (excretion and fucking), and
scopic (pornography) fixations amount to ‘a violence that the subject
commits, with a view to mastery, upon himself’.85 This ‘looping’ of the
drive is both directed at ‘catching the jouissance of the other’ but also at
constituting the object of the drive (the homosexual) as subject.86
But another cultural fantasy is also at play here, which does not
just describe the structure of the drives, but which imagines the male
homosexual in an over-determined relationship to jouissance. In an
essay titled ‘Homosexuality and the Problem of Otherness’ (2001), Tim
Dean draws attention to a heterosexual fantasy that imagines gay men
as having greater access to forms of pleasure than other social groups:
Gay men are often pictured as having access to forms of jouissance –

more sex, more disposable income, freedom from the ties of family and
tradition, et cetera – that responsible law-abiding citizens are denied.
From this perspective it is not the failure to imagine others, but,
on the contrary, the avid willingness to do so that leads to violence
against them.87
Emphasizing the general danger of imagining others, Dean draws

specific attention to a heteronormative envy-complex that sees the over-
determined pleasure-seeker on a road destined for violent retribution.
In Ravenhill’s play, these heteronormative fantasies inflect the repre-
sentation of homosexuality as a problem of appetite, satisfaction, and
108 Male Trouble
consumption, whereby an inability to incorporate and internalize the

authoritative paternal function precipitates an insatiable pursuit of
fulfillment through substitute objects, and the literalization of the Law
as eroticized male-male violence on the body. In Ravenhill’s construc-
tion, the homosexual who disavows the Law is condemned to seek it
out cannibalistically, even to the point of his own annihilation.
5
Wounded Attachments in the Live
Art of Ron Athey and Franko B
In its emergence as a protest against marginalization

or subordination, politicized identity thus becomes
attached to its own exclusion […] In locating a site
of blame for its powerlessness over its past – a past of
injury, a past as a hurt will – and locating a ‘reason’
for the ‘unendurable pain’ of social powerlessness in
the present, it converts this reasoning into an ethiciz-
ing politics, a politics of recrimination that seeks to
avenge the hurt even while it reaffirms it, discursively
codifies it.1
Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and
Freedom in Late Modernity
Thus even when the body artists have tried to expose

the relations between theatre, violence, and law, they
have sometimes ended up accomplishing the opposite
of what they set out to do.2
Anthony Kubiak, Stages of Terror
In his book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of

Politics, José Esteban Muñoz emphasizes the role of the solo performer
in radical queer performance. For Muñoz, this figure is in a unique posi-
tion to articulate ‘the reality of being queer at this particular moment’.3
Following the initial outbreak of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, which dev-
astated gay communities, Muñoz sees in the solo performer an ability
to press queer concerns into razor-sharp relief with great immediacy:
‘More than two decades into a devastating pandemic, with hate crimes
and legislation aimed at queers and people of color institutionalized as
109
110 Male Trouble
protocols, the act of performing and theatricalizing queerness in public

takes on ever multiplying significance.’4
Muñoz convincingly describes some of the ways in which solo per-
formers might disidentify with heteronormative culture, but ten years
following its initial publication, his position warrants at least some
redress. Indeed, I think Cruising Utopia: The Then And There of Queer
Futurity (2009) is a fitting follow-up, not least of all in its insistence
that ‘Queerness … is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the
future.5 Nonetheless, the statement I previously quoted touches upon
two presumptions that have prevailed within certain strands of queer
and performance studies for some time that are in need of further inves-
tigation: (1) the idea that solo performance is more socially and politi-
cally efficacious than other practices or representational media, a notion
which owes much to the fetishization of the ‘live’ and the ‘personal’
within certain strands of performance studies, and (2) that the solo
performer is incapable of ‘failing’ in his/her dialogue with normative
culture, inadvertently reifying the system s/he presumes to challenge.
In Autobiography and Performance (2008), Dee Heddon celebrates the
same aspects of solo performance that Muñoz enjoys, emphasizing that
‘[a]utobiographical performances can capitalize on theatre’s unique
temporality, its here and nowness, and on its ability to respond to and
engage with the present, while always keeping an eye on the future’.6
But Heddon is keen to impress that such performances are also subject to
certain limitations, and while they may always carry unique ‘potential’,
they are not always guaranteed to ‘do’ anything in particular: ‘Focusing
on the “potential” of autobiographical performance, I recognize its
potential also to do harm or to fail in its transformational objectives.
This is precisely the liminal quality heralded by the word “potential”;
it can always go both ways.’7 Heddon goes on to suggest that solo per-
formance might be seen to ‘fail’ for a variety of reasons, with the result
that the audience, and possibly the performer him/herself, is reinscribed
within the oppressive power dynamics ostensibly claimed to be under
interrogation:
Some performances might well ‘fail’ to communicate, or ‘fail’ to

move us, teach us, inspire us, challenge us. Some might prescribe to
essentialist notions of self and identity, thereby further repressing
or constraining us. Some might speak ‘for’, rather than ‘as’, while
others might be appropriated in unexpected ways or might appropri-
ate other’s stories in inappropriate ways. Some performances might
use the politics in a less sincere way, recognising that ‘the personal’
Wounded Attachments 111
functions as a useful marketing tool in today’s culture where the

personal is a popular and cheaply manufactured commodity.8
This chapter furthers the book’s analysis of masculinity by consider-

ing the work of two primarily solo performers, namely, Ron Athey and
Franko B.9 Building upon the last chapter, this study is interested in
exploring the relationship between homosexuality and trauma in the
performers’ biographical oeuvres. The analysis considers how victimized
dramaturgies of this kind approximate what Wendy Brown has referred
to as ‘wounded attachments’, that see politicized identities become
entrenched in their own exclusion. More often than not, though not
exclusively so, I write on singular performances, not assuming their
inherent stability and reproducibility, but their representative value for
the purposes of examination here.10
Ron Athey and the body in crisis
Ron Athey’s performance practice stands out for its explicit violence,
chiefly manifest in self-mutilating and bloodletting procedures. Since
the late 1980s, Athey and his collaborators have staged sadomasochistic
enactments, with pieces like Four Scenes in a Harsh Life (1993), Deliverance
(1994), and Incorruptible Flesh (1997)11 all featuring cutting, bloodletting,
piercing, beating, figurative castration, and hanging. While some critics
have responded to Athey’s work with the language of psychopathology,
body-objectification, and in the context of HIV performance (Athey is
openly HIV positive); many have assumed the queer radicality of his
performances without interrogating what precisely constitutes a per-
formance as either queer or radical, or how this might or should change
over time. Certainly, as I mentioned in the introduction to the book,
puncturing the HIV positive gay male body in public is significant in the
history of performance art, but it is also troubled by limitations which
perhaps seem more apparent over time. Mary Richards suggests that
Athey’s work ‘underscores and parodies binary notions of masculinity
and femininity’ and ‘offers a number of provocative means of resisting
traditional representations of masculinity’.12 Reflecting the assumption
that self-mutilation uncomplicatedly operates as a statement of socio-
political resistance, Richards suggests that Athey’s performance work,
in ‘using masochism as a key element, achieve[s] a poignant critique of
the structuring mechanisms of patriarchal power and patriarchy’s influ-
ence on notions of fixed subjectivity, particularly desirable masculine
subjectivity’.13
112 Male Trouble
In interviews, critical writings, and performances, Athey repeatedly

states that damaging childhood experiences inspire his work, which
were the result of growing up within a female collective and a fana-
tical church.14 Born to and raised by a Pentecostal family in Groton,
Connecticut, who were deeply involved in the charismatic movement,
Athey is very clear on the objective of his work, intended as in Sigmund
Freud’s description of the analytic process, to ‘work through’ these
early traumatic experiences: ‘[the] Grapes of Wrath darkness that was
fatherless, an institutionalized schizophrenic mother, a decade of drug
addiction followed by 15 years of HIV infection’.15 In performance,
these anxieties are chiefly played out through self-wounding practices
that are ostensibly intended to reflect and resignify the wounds inflicted
by others. However, I am reluctant to concur with Richard’s assertion
that Athey’s self-harm amounts to uncomplicated ‘gender parody’ and
‘patriarchal assault’. Rather, in this chapter I explore the idea that the
underpinning anxiety of Athey’s work pertains to feminine identifica-
tions that connect his maternal abuse with his sexual identity and
the performance of trauma in the ‘present’. Understood in this light,
we might discern a strong misogynistic current within his oeuvre. In
Joyce (2002) and Four Scenes in a Harsh Life, for example, Athey only
self-harms when he has invoked some of the damaging matriarchs from
his past through fetishistic drag performance. In such instances the
misogyny is evidenced by negatively imagining women as threatening
spectres without the presence of the women in question. To a similar
effect, in Deliverance Athey primarily executes violence on the bodies
of the female performers. Further, in Incorruptible Flesh the effects of
Athey’s childhood matriarchs are aligned with the contaminating effect
of his HIV infection, with the performer’s climactic self-harm marking
the simulation of a rebirthing process.
In other instances Athey’s self-harm unmistakably connects with
issues of religion. While Christian iconography is often referenced in
many of his live art pieces (Martyrs and Saints, 1992; Deliverance), so too
is Dionysian ritual (Four Scenes in a Harsh Life, which might also be seen
to refer to Gertrude Stein’s and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts,
1934). When not representing the female figures from his past as mon-
strous via cross-dressing, Athey positions himself as a sacrificial Christ
or Dionysus who endures mutilation in the hope of a second birth. In
this, wounding may be seen to amount to the performative symboliza-
tion of traumatic (feminine) others, rather than a radical articulation of
queerness, as such. And in this bind, the phallic mother, or her onstage
proxy, is also understood to exert a significant, maligning influence on
Athey’s identity. As in Melanie Klein’s writing, this mother figure is both

an object of love and hate, ‘both desired and hated with all the intensity
and strength that is characteristic of the early urges of the baby’.16 In my
mind, this root context problematizes the queerness of Athey’s work, –
or at least its particular ethical bent. Immured in the biographical,
and entrenched in a system of selfhood, many of Athey’s self-harming
practices can be seen to reify the notion of an essentialized identity,
whose traumatic origin can be traced and worked-through in perform-
ance. For Friedrich Nietzsche, whose notion of ressentiment Brown
elaborates upon, this is the measure of troubled identity over-invested
in its own victimization to the point of foreclosing revolt: ‘The slave
revolt in morals begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and
ordains values’, whereas ‘slave morality from the outset says no to an
“outside”, to an “other,”, to a “non-self”: and this no is its creative act.’17
Similarly, I think that the sacrificial aesthetic with which Athey works
forecloses other valuable, politicized interventions.
Painful past: Four Scenes in a Harsh Life

Four Scenes in a Harsh Life is the title of the second part of Athey’s Martyrs
and Saints trilogy, which primarily explores the relationship between
the performer’s traumatic childhood and his adult identity. The piece
begins with Athey referencing his Pentecostal upbringing, guided by
his family’s belief that he had a religious vocation. The title of the
piece, along with Athey’s opening remark – ‘I was born with a calling
on my life’ – demands that the audience acknowledge the biographical
nature of the work, while at the same time establishing him as the pro-
tagonist in the ensuing drama. Interviewed on The South Bank Show in
1998, Athey admitted, ‘Of all the work I’ve done it’s probably the most
autobiographical.’18 This context in place, Athey sets out to interrogate
authority figures from his past, by conjuring up an array of disturbing
characters, violent scenes, and bloody rituals. While authority positions
are questioned in this performance, they are not the obvious uphold-
ers of the Law. Rather, central to Four Scenes is the representation of
female figures from Athey’s past and the performer’s subsequent effort
to assimilate/exclude – where both terms signify a form of disavowal –
these abject and abjecting others through the endurance of self-harming
enactments.
The piece begins with the illumination of Athey, who stands centre
stage in drag, wearing a white see-through dress, and a wig. A scant-
ily clothed female performer flanks him on stage left, whose raised
right arm and back are pierced with quills. In a rumbling voice, Athey
114 Male Trouble
sermonizes on two visits he took to see a holy woman as a child, reputed

to have had ‘the miraculous gift of stigmata’. In conclusion to this anec-
dote, he anoints the woman to his side and beckons audience members
forward. Those who step to the altar-stage and are anointed by Athey
collapse backwards into their ushers’ arms. Once three participants have
been ‘blessed’, Athey removes the quills from his fellow performer and
pierces them into his belt. He releases her from her bind and carries her
body into darkness off-stage.
Initially, one might presume that this opening scene is concerned
with questioning patriarchal institutions such as the church. It soon
becomes apparent, however, that Athey’s cross-dressing is less concer-
ned with destabilizing patriarchy or heteronormative power structures
than with ridiculing the attributes and practices of his childhood
matriarchs. While critics like Judith Butler have espoused the subversive
potential of drag performance, Peggy Phelan, speaking within the tradi-
tion of outspoken critics Marilyn Frye and Janice Raymond, has noted
how drag can also be a highly misogynistic enactment, by fetishiz-
ing ‘woman’. In Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), Phelan
contends: ‘Gay male cross-dressers resist the body of woman even while
they make its constructedness visible. This is in part why the misogyny
which underlies gay male cross-dressing is so painful to women.’19 The
traces of this misogyny run deeper, as revealed in Athey’s account of
travelling to see the religious woman who is recalled not to have bled
on either of Athey’s two visits, compelling the young boy to castigate
her as a fraud. His embittered childhood reaction was to take his sister
into their back garden, slice the tips of her fingers with a razor blade,
and do the same to his own, ‘to show her [his sister] how insignificant
the wounds were and to make her stop crying.’ These opening recol-
lections of female figures in Athey’s life are bound by the centrality of
bloodletting processes. Athey more positively recalls an encounter with
his sister, compared to the holy woman, by virtue of the former’s ability
to produce, or have coercively produced, the blood he desired to see.
This introductory correlation between woman and blood, culturally
indissociable from menstrual blood, is a recurring motif throughout
Athey’s work, and it refuses to allow female subjectivity to escape from
derisory notions of abjection. Using self-harm, Athey exploits this asso-
ciation in order to incriminate his female minders.
The next scene in Four Scenes is longer and more complex than the
first, beginning with the illumination of a butch woman, with short
hair and tattoos, on stage right. Her surly demeanour and khaki clothes
suggest that she might be a solider or a prison officer. The performer sits,
legs spread apart, smoking a cigar and slugging alcohol from a bottle.
The dark setting, complemented by discordant jazz music, suggests she
might be in a seedy bar. After moments elapse, a figure enters from
stage left, entombed in multicoloured balloons, with only a pair of
dark high-heeled shoes protruding from underneath. After some brief
wandering about the stage, the female figure on stage right stands up
abruptly and proceeds to burst the balloons with her cigar, one by one.
The outburst ends with the eventual exposure of a large black man in
drag – Athey’s collaborator, Darryl Carlton, who typically performs as
Divinity Fudge. Suddenly, he is grabbed from behind by the aggressive
female who grinds into his back before wrestling him to the ground.
Lying there motionless, he is roused by another man who removes his
clothes, puts him on all fours, and dresses him in a diaper. A monitor
reveals the man’s back being sliced by the recent arrival, with each cut
being covered with pieces of tissue, which are subsequently raised on a
wire over the audience’s heads. It was this scene that provoked media
attention in 1994 after it was reported that the spectators were sprayed
with HIV positive blood during a performance in the Walker Arts
Center, Minneapolis.20
Multiple layers of identity are signified in this scene. The woman
is phallicized through the exposure of her muscular physique and
aggressive movement. The black man is feminized through his drag
performance, then degraded and infantilized. Common to this identity
play, however, is a palpable hypermasculine constancy, reflected in the
female performer and in the formidable body of the black male. But
this is not a parodic enactment. Rather it seems to function to deni-
grate traditionally ascribed feminine qualities. As in the first scene, the
drag performance here may also be read as an effort to conjure and
master abject and abjecting female subjectivity. The bloodletting that
follows would seem to confirm this correlation, for once the feminine
is evoked, the cross-dressed performer’s back is cut numerous times by
another male figure, and the tissues held up for viewing.
Contemptible femininity continues to be performed in following
sequences, with the action fading to commotion on stage left, where
Athey writhes on a bed. His earlier recollection about cutting his
sister’s fingers is hauntingly replayed in the present with a disembod-
ied voice, while rumbling synthesized music effects a pre-Oedipal or
semiotic gurgle, which imagines the foetal performer in a womb-like
receptacle. Like trauma’s ‘incubation period’ described by Freud in
Moses and Monotheism to explain the successive movement from an
event to its repression to its return,21 this scene pitches past, present,
116 Male Trouble
and unconscious experiences together in a bid for resolution. And

while this recovery depends upon a figurative return to the womb,
it is by no means a welcoming space. Phrases which echo and repeat
with nightmarish unease, such as ‘I hated myself as a child’ and ‘I was
stuck in my own private hell’ reinforce the connection between womb
and tomb and the performer’s mothering as damaging, even though
Athey subjects himself to a comparable process again in order to work
through the trauma incurred. As if in a trance, Athey stirs to wipe his
body with a damp cloth. He reaches to the side of his bed, takes numer-
ous syringes and injects them all along his left arm, before removing
them again, an enactment that addresses both his drug addiction and
medicinal dependency. Athey’s own recorded voice drones, ‘I wanted
to slash my face’, and so he does, by plunging numerous steel pins into
his forehead. With blood rivulets streaming down his forehead and arm,
Athey appears Christ-like. He lies back to twist some more on the soiled
cotton, before covering his face in a sheet.
This scene sees Athey respond to the articulated childhood trauma
by figuratively returning to the deemed problem source. The recorded
voice of the older, present-time Athey, which interjects upon the in
vitro state like a disembodied paternal function, infers an Oedipal
trauma while reminding the spectator that the staged mutilation is a
kind of rebirthing process necessary to resignify his sense of victimiza-
tion. As with the crucified Christ which the pose references, the aim of
Athey’s self-harm is to engender a form of resurrection. In listening to
his own voice, the piece evokes Jacques Derrida’s claim that the desire
for absolute presence ‘can be expressed as a will-to-hear-oneself-speak’,22
to suspend ‘the natural attitude and the existential thesis of the world’,23
with ‘attitude’ and ‘thesis’ referring to poststructuralism’s claim of pri-
mordial non-presence. In this effort to extricate himself from his mons-
trous birth bond, woman is identified as a spasmic, unsymbolizable
abject, ‘the unspeakable condition’24 of Athey’s enactments. Herein the
problematic bind of Athey’s work is again manifest: the performer does
not wound himself strictly in order to attack patriarchal systems or
decry the Law, as such; but to express a personal trauma which can only
be overcome via repeated processes of self-wounding. For this reason,
the self-hatred of youth changes tone as Athey identifies in mutilation
the opportunity for self-redefinition, as expressed in the concluding
words: ‘In that dream I stood strong. In that dream I was to turn my life
around.’ As he finally grasps hold of an umbilical-like rope, to the echo-
ing phrase ‘Elation washed over me’, it is as if Athey is reaching for his
own voice, having performed a masterful control of his abject others.
In this bid for resolution, Athey’s performance focuses on controlling

this and associated disturbances. He rises, quicker than Christ, to bow
to the crowd.
These sacrificial associations are continued into the next scene, which
begins with two men in long red robes walking on stage. They place a
red sheet on a bed, on top of which they lay a young tattooed man who
has spikes ground into his head. The two figures knit the spikes together
to more obviously effect a crown. The young man falls back onto the
bed and convulses, much like Athey does in the preceding scene. The
performer from Scene Two re-enters, now dressed as a bride/nurse figure,
complete with a white dress and veil. He lifts the young man from the
bed to a bath. Making the bleeding man stand, he removes his veil to
wrap it around his torso. This complete, he eases the man back down
into the bath and pours water all over his bloodied head. The cross-
dressed figure then removes the spikes from the younger man and, strik-
ing a Pietà pose, begins to sensually massage the dripping blood onto
his face.
One might consider the scene’s gender and racial play, achieved
through the Virgin Mary being played by a cross-dressing black man,
to contest patriarchal religious narratives and depictions of who Christ
and his mother were and what they represented. However, given the
autobiographical context of the performance, the blurred identity of the
Virgin character may well be seen as a dramatization of the masochist’s
strong and commanding fantasy female, who in Freudian terms, is a
mere cover for homosexually inflected desire.25 Athey himself under-
stands the seductiveness of female figures who tend to suffering men in
religious art to relate to their masculine qualities:
For instance, in a new piece I do, Deliverance, we are often asked, why
are the women always tending towards the men; why are the men
sick and the women strong. I think of the images of religious paint-
ings and it’s always this hard woman tending some broken down
man. In depiction of women saints they’re never tended. They’re just
left with their cut off breast or their poked out eyes, in a sort of more
dignified state. Men are collapsed all over the place being held up by
three or four women.26
While the dominant female may typically hold appeal for the male
masochist, as notably described in Gilles Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty
(1989), this allure is two-fold in the scene’s exploitation of Christian
iconography, for Christian faith is fundamentally guided by a doctrine
118 Male Trouble
of regeneration and rebirth through suffering. The men who initially

bring the younger man on stage, dressed in red robes, at once evoke
Roman soldiers and queens. This identity confusion continues as they
twist the spikes and the audience may wonder if this is also a conflation
of woman as torturer/dominatrix . If doubts exist here, they are clarified
somewhat in the ensuing action. The man who established himself ear-
lier as a female substitute now reappears in bridal or nurse’s costume to
aid the young man. When he removes his veil to expose his muscula-
ture, however, he is clearly male. Continuing by smearing blood all over
the young man’s head and face, it is obvious that this is not a familiar
version of the mother of Christ, but the hijacked image, reappropriated
as nurturer-torturer. Via cross-dressing, the male performer grounds his
own articulated trouble in female abjection, and exploits this status in
order to symbolically ‘nurture’ the suffering man. Like Christ, his end-
urance of suffering will ultimately lead to his own glorification.
The concluding scene of this piece is the longest of all, and it is seem-
ingly concerned with Athey’s attempt to resolve previous interrogations
of authority. The episode begins when Athey stands behind a podium
like a preacher, wearing a shirt and tie, to all intents and purposes
the judge of his domain, like the author-creator derided by Antonin
Artaud.27 Once again, Athey recounts his childhood anguish before
continuing to conduct a ‘commitment ceremony’ on the three ‘bull
daggers’ (lesbian performers) to his right.
When illuminated, the daggers are veiled in cocoon-like receptacles.
Athey removes his preaching clothes, walks to the daggers and peels
off their wrapping. The women’s bodies are adorned with multiple
piercings and small bells. Athey anoints the figures with black ash
before energetically banging a drum, which initiates the most frenetic
aspect of the piece. The women instantly assume a trance-like state
and begin groaning and shuffling about the stage. The naked Athey
accompanies them dancing, and he is joined by four other naked male
musicians. Two of these men carry hand-held drums and the other
two, tambourines. They play their instruments to encourage the female
performers to dance, and when the daggers’ energy wanes, their bodies
noticeably inflamed from the friction of the piercings, the musicians
encroach upon them, insisting that they continue dancing. And so they
do – howling, jumping, and gyrating, like Maenads worshipping the
Dionysian Athey.
The most striking aspect of this section is the relationship construed
between the phallicized lesbians and the male performers. Butler’s
questioning of the possibility of symbolization through body parts
other than the penis is useful in understanding the implications of this

portrayal. Such a move, Butler suggests, in defiance of heterosexist dis-
course, would facilitate greater Symbolic access: ‘[T]he displacement of
the phallus, its capacity to symbolize in relation to other body parts or
other body-like things, opens the way for the lesbian phallus.’28 Butler
is primarily referencing Jacques Lacan here, who in ‘The Signification of
the Phallus’ claimed that the phallus ‘can play its role only when
veiled’.29 Indeed, this observation takes on a literal quality here given
that the lesbian performers are actually veiled phallic symbols – daggers.
Butler proffers that disturbing the signifying relation between phallus
and penis, in favour of aligning the phallus with the lesbian body ‘sug-
gests that the signifier can come to signify in excess of its structurally
mandated position; indeed the signifier can be repeated in contexts and
relations that come to displace the privileged status of the signifier’.30
She expands,
When the phallus is lesbian, then it is and is not a masculinist figure

of power; the signifier is significantly split, for it both recalls and
displaces the masculinism by which it is impelled. And so far as it
operates at the site of anatomy, the phallus (re)produces the spectre
of the penis only to enact its vanishing, to reiterate and exploit its
perpetual vanishing as the very occasion of the phallus. This opens
up anatomy – and sexual difference itself – as a site of proliferative
resignifications.31
While Butler’s explication somewhat optimistically points to the possi-

bility of phallic displacement, the lesbian performers here do not resignify
its meaning. Rather, they are afforded a lower status next to the power-
ful, penis-flaunting men. Considering that the male performers control
this ritual, and that it is undertaken in the service of ‘worshipping’
Athey, there is an overall sense that all women – heterosexual and
homosexual – are denigrated by their muscled, penis-bearing counter-
parts. This reading of gender and sex relations in performance finds
resonance in Jill Dolan’s seminal The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1991)
in which the author claims, ‘A male nude onstage makes women’s lack –
particularly when the nude female shares the representational space –
more pronounced.’32
Although Mary Richards suggests that Athey’s work ‘questions
whether the penis, with its attendant economy of sexuality/pleasure, is
necessary for a “complete” experience of the body’, and hypothesizes
that penis-play ‘makes parodic reference to the machinations and
120 Male Trouble
assumptions of phallic power’,33 the link forged in this piece between

possession of the penis, phallic power, and Symbolic dominance is
rarely questioned. Like other instances in Athey’s work, this enactment
is propelled by an apparent will to enact and performatively secure this
association. Moreover, these acts take place in a context already troubled
by the centrality of Athey’s biography and by the collaborative nature
of the work. Not only must the lesbian daggers wait to be unveiled by
Athey, but they are goaded in their dance ritual by the male musicians,
and seemingly prevented from slowing down, even as their piercings
obviously irritate. Despite Athey’s homosexuality and HIV status, a
phallic authority is asserted in his treatment of females and his central-
ity to all of the performances.
Bloody redemption in Deliverance

Deliverance extends many of the issues explored in Four Scenes, but as
the title suggests, the performance is more bound to a regenerative
tract. Set in a Philippine psychic surgery hut,34 constructed with a split
horizontal stage, Deliverance begins with performers wandering about
on the lower level, carrying wooden crutches on their backs, overlooked
by a large man on the upper stage. Three performers surround a gyrating
naked figure on the lower stage, before the movement is interrupted by
a butch woman strutting centre stage from the left. Looking directly at
the audience, she authoritatively recites,
You exist in a dream-world where there are no absolutes. You talk of

healing, psychic surgery and new help, but still you come to me not
believing; still with guilt and shame. I cannot offer help if all you
seek is atonement. Should I be the flagellator in this deliverance that
you seek? You will pay something. Haven’t you ever heard that noth-
ing in this life comes free?
As the third piece in the Martyrs and Saints trilogy, it is no surprise that
the opening statement of Deliverance is imbued with the language of
forgiveness and redemption. Athey’s redemption is not to be achieved
through prayer, however, but through subjecting himself to a variety of
injurious enactments. His exultant response ‘Could I ever have imag-
ined such a beautiful place?’ indicates that he is overjoyed at the pros-
pect of his own regeneration through wounded investment.
This process of deliverance is set in motion with two men being
washed on either side of the stage – Athey lying between them. After
the energetic opening, the atmosphere becomes serene and reflective
in preparation for the transformative events. In light of the title of the

piece and Athey’s religious background, the washing is evocative of bib-
lical rites of induction and initiation, and the spectator is prompted to
think of the Last Supper and the ensuing events of Christ’s Passion. This
association is carried through in the prayerful murmurs of an unseen
speaker, whose demands are no less severe than those of the first orator:
‘There will be no deliverance unless you surrender all that it demands […]
You must come open, trusting, not knowing like a child. Be painful and
ugly, nothing less will do.’ These lines pre-empt Athey’s own Passion,
which begins when he is laid on a bed, wiped down, and maneuvered
onto his hands and knees. A masked figure moves towards him, and
extracts a string from his anus before inserting an enema. In literally
purifying Athey’s faecal ‘contaminants’, the gesture also signifies the
purification of other ‘contaminants’, in particular those relating to his
HIV positive status . The scene also elevates the typically privatized anus
into a public arena. It is worth noting that in Homosexual Desire (1993),
radical queer theorist Guy Hocquenghem sees the public repositioning
and reimagining of the anus as a fruitful gesture towards destabilizing
the phallic principle,35 and indeed Amelia Jones has gone so far as to
claim that Athey’s anus has its own place in the history of art.36
Following this cleansing, monitors are switched on above Athey’s head
to reveal the mediatized action to the audience. In fact, multimedia of this
kind is often used in Athey’s work to assist visibility. In this context, Philip
Auslander’s problematization of the domain of liveness seems especially
apt, as not even those present have direct access to the experience.37 It
now becomes clear that Athey has hooks and ropes attached to his arms
and legs, in response to which he screams and tosses around. Athey’s
torture continues by having his scrotum stapled over his penis to effect
castration. This is performed by a woman in military costume, similar
to the opening speaker and reminiscent of the female performer in Four
Scenes. With this climactic moment, the stage lights briefly extinguish,
after which Athey reappears wearing a tinsel wig and an orange robe.
The accompanying opera music suggests that Athey has realized the
castrato performer that he refers to at the beginning of the movement.
This scene is something of a reimagining of Christ’s crucifixion. In
this adaptation, Athey once again correlates his own suffering with
the sacrifice of Jesus. For this suffering, he is rewarded with rebirth as a
burlesque performer. While this might appear as an amusing parody of
the Christian story, it also remains close to picture of homosexuality
mapped out in Freud’s writing. In this performance, Athey is literally
castrated for his over-identification with his defiling maternal figures.
122 Male Trouble
Standing before a microphone, Athey seems not only to mock Christian

teaching, but those women deemed as responsible for his victimization.
This is evidenced in his representation of woman as castrated man –
wo/man – and fetishized sex object. When Athey calls out ‘Was it nec-
essary that I be castrated in order to receive this healing?’, his voice is
charged with anger. Simultaneously, the statement suggests that self-
mutilation has offered relief. Athey has mastered his traumatic others
through withstanding a physical castration designed to have symbolic
import.
The performance continues with Athey suggesting that deliverance
might be achieved through sexual pleasure. He begins by kneeling on
a mat facing another man. Against a large monitor backdrop of rapidly
alternating pornographic images, the men kiss, rim, and penetrate each
other with dildos. As the sex show continues, Athey speaks into a micro-
phone about a friend who directs pornography, another who died of AIDS
the previous week, and the dangers of reinfection through unprotected
sex. In spite of these warnings, Athey is provocatively defiant. Although
he reiterates sexual prohibitions, Athey rejects this ruling and satisfies
his urges instead, seeming to revel in the dissolution of bodily unity that
he enacts, or as Slavoj Žižek suggests of the spectator of pornography in
Organs Without Bodies (2004), Athey’s delight is in beholding the male
body ‘as a kind of vaguely coordinated agglomerate of partial objects’,38
rather than as a fixed, impenetrable (w)hole. The piece is drawn to a close
when the man who has been lording over events from above, walks on
stage. He cuts the double-ended dildo that both men have been using in
two, and puts a part in each of their mouths.
Although Deliverance seems to take a detour from its Passion anal-
ogy, in referencing the removal and entombment of the bodies of Jesus
and the thieves the final scene is more recognizable to its Christian
inspiration. When the scene begins, three male bodies are suspended
upside-down on stage from a bar. Once their bodies are wiped down,
their arms are pierced and they are wrapped in white sheets. In turn,
the figures are placed in black bags that are interred in shallow mounds
of clay. On to each of these three mounds straddles a naked female per-
former. They each sit, facing the audience, moaning and writhing over
the corpses. They also sensually rub the mounds, finger the clay and
release it through their fingers from a height. The positioning of the
women in this scene is inflected with the gynophobic suggestion that
they are giving birth to the corpses.
The psychoanalytic thought of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok
redirects the work of Freud, through emphasizing concepts of the
phantom, the secret, incorporation, and encryption. While Freud’s

notion of latency paints a psychic landscape where the unconscious
erupts into signification when repressive defences are relaxed, Abraham
and Torok use the term encryption or cryptonomy to describe the way
traumatic family secrets are submerged, or ‘preservatively’ repressed,
and sealed off from one’s own life, in order to conceal the traumatic
event. In ‘The Lost Object – Me: Notes on Endocryptic Identification’
published in The Shell and the Kernel (1994), the authors describe the
process of encryption thus:
Between the idyllic moment and its subsequent forgetting (we have
called the latter ‘preservative repression’), there was the metapsycho-
logical traumatism of a loss or, more precisely, the ‘loss’ that resulted
from traumatism. This segment of an ever so painfully lived Reality –
untellable and therefore inaccessible to the gradual, assimilative
work of mourning – causes a genuinely covert shift in the entire
psyche. The shift itself is covert, since both the fact that the idyll was
real and that it was later lost must be disguised and denied. This leads
to the establishment of a sealed-off psychic place, a crypt in the ego.
Created by a self-governing mechanism we call inclusion, the crypt is
comparable to the formation of the cocoon around the chrysalis.39
This concept of encryption resonates with the entombment scene in

Deliverance. While Abraham and Torok describe the encrypted as a
‘wound [which is] unspeakable, because to state it openly would prove
fatal to the entire topography’,40 I maintain that Athey’s piece suggests
that this unspeakable wound is woman, or the feminine.
From waste to worth: Incorruptible Flesh

As with Deliverance, the resignification of trauma marks the performa-
tive thrust of Incorruptible Flesh. In particular, the piece is concerned
with refiguring Athey’s relationship to issues of illness, morality, and
mortality. Not surprisingly, Incorruptible Flesh blatantly sources this
abject status in childhood experiences, with blame falling on the shoul-
ders of the women who raised him for religious vocation. This piece is
also very clear on the purposes of Athey’s self-mutilation.
The performance begins with the artist Lawrence Steger, Athey’s
collaborator, delivering a manifesto of intent:
What we are to do in a very small amount of time is to build another

paradise, a mirror image of the real and the historical worlds. The
124 Male Trouble
task is to build an image in which the human condition is recast

and the quality of life is brought to a plateau of complete and total
reflection. This is an upside-down world where illness is banished,
hunger is forgotten, the corruptibility of the flesh abashed.
Steger’s prologue pre-empts a challenge to those laws that legislate

Athey’s socio-Symbolic exclusion. This protest will take the form of a
materialization of a pre-Symbolic state, akin to Kristeva’s semiotic order,
which will privilege the sensual experiences of the body – ‘the drives,
which are “energy” charges, as well as “psychical” marks’.41 Removed
from the word-bound Law, Steger promises that the multisensory body
of this world ‘will enjoy as it never has before all that it craves after. It
is a body which will enjoy all the fruits of all the ages […] the maturity
of strength and the decorum of old age. It is a body which is unlike a
body. It is a paradox’.42
The plan is mobilized with Athey appearing on stage wearing a black
rubber corset, a blonde wig, fake eyelashes, and make-up. His mouth is
pierced with pins, the flesh peeled back to create a cavernous mouth and
pouting lips. When jazz music is played, the cross-dressed Athey dances
like a showgirl, before removing his underwear to reveal a stapled scro-
tum. In this unveiling, the paradoxes of Steger’s manifesto become more
obvious. With a pinned mouth, it appears that the promised sublime
body defies the Symbolic register’s logocentric imperative; the gender
confusion effected by cross-dressing and figurative castration indicative
of a refusal to comply with heterosexist proscriptions. Richards suggests
that this form of body mutilation by male performance artists questions
the totality and stability of the male body, which is not typically associ-
ated with seepage and leakage, unlike its female counterpart. As such,
she hazards that the cut, pierced, or tattooed body
enters a temporary or even a ‘permanent’ (genital piercing) liminal

zone which may arguably be aligned with the feminine and its asso-
ciation with the flowing of various body fluids. In this way, these
practices represent a rupture in the accepted understanding of the
male’s bodily integrity.43
However, owing to the biographical information furnished by Athey,

and to the recurring trope of mimicking female figures from his child-
hood, the performance is not easily subversive. Like other occasions of
cross-dressing in Athey’s work, the representation may also be seen as
a derisive depiction of woman as castrated and indeed castrating, with
Athey’s ‘usurpation’ of the female form signifying an attempt to domi-

nate and assimilate/exclude those smothering figures from his past.
Athey hints at this motivation himself when he confesses on stage:
I’m coming to an awareness that in a round about way I mimic the

very foundations I rebelled against. For years I’ve tried so hard to
reinvent my ideology, my history, my whole way of being, yet in
many ways I’ve ended up just like them, the matriarchy of the poor
white trash dustbowl refugee family much more than my conserva-
tive brothers and sisters.
In the attempt to reconcile his past, then, I suggest that Athey actually
enacts something closer to fetishistic misogyny.
Sitting on a swing, now wearing a black Victoriana dress, the perform-
ance continues with Athey vocalizing the centrality of his matriarchal
upbringing to the piece, by recounting the relationship in terms which
associate the obsessive cleanliness of his female minders, in respect of
morality and hygiene, with the purifying function of his self-harm now.
He recalls having to help his grandmother with her suppositories and
douching, and remembers how his sister had to endure similar clean-
ing, and relates these practices in terms of ‘three generations of female
incest’. Athey’s cleaning is not sanitized, however. Rather, abjection
precedes regeneration, a trajectory highlighted in the assertion ‘I get
obsessed with rinsing out all the filth. I enjoy watching it run down
the drain hoping that at next rinse, the water will run out clear’. While
such a concatenation undoubtedly relates to the performer’s HIV status,
it also connects self-mutilation with the exorcism of childhood trauma,
the purification of bad blood in every sense of the term.
In Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Con-
temporary French Thought (1997), Timothy Murray offers a way of think-
ing about masochism as mimesis in the field of familial relationships.
For Murray, all familial arrangements are produced through the intro-
duction of the blood of the Other into the blood of the native, and
mimetic process. Murray writes, ‘The mimesis of familial anteriority […]
circulates blood that is always already as Other as it is natural.’44 For
Athey, purification is a matter of familio-viral concern. His surmise
that ‘In more ways that one, I have carried out the family tradition of
cleanliness’ is another spoken reminder that his performative objective
is self-creation by way of the wound.
Once Athey materializes those troubling female characters in his cross-
dressing, his performance aims to master them further by transcending
126 Male Trouble
the corruptibility of his own flesh. This process begins with the per-
former lying naked on a table, his body illuminated by an overhead
light, as if about to be operated upon. Steger’s voice intones that Athey
resists his own abjection, with, ‘He energetically refuses to play the role
that the questioners are trying to impose upon him.’ Suddenly Athey’s
disembodied, seemingly recorded voice resounds, guiding him down
ten steps to a state of ‘incorruptibility’. These stages also evoke Kristeva’s
semiotic, a realm of sensuality which resists complete symbolization.
The stairway metaphor that Athey adopts to describe this psychic jour-
ney suggests a vertical descent from the high rungs of Law and order
to the lower rungs of the senses. The deeper down the steps he travels,
Athey describes entering a pre-Symbolic world, with his voice echoing,
‘Your flesh shall be fresher that that of a child’s. You shall return to the
days of your youth.’ Entering this terrain, Athey’s blood becomes ‘more
than blood. It radiates an abundant transcendent love’,45divorced as it
is from the Symbolic’s obligations, the reality of his HIV status, and also
his bloodline. By the final stage, the voice of Athey describes how ‘Light
has become the only thing present in my inner vision’. Through the
invocation of a pre-Symbolic state, the performer engenders a rebirth
of sorts. And this transfiguration precedes Athey’s assimilation by the
Symbolic order, as his guiding voice – like the interjecting voice of the
Lacanian Father – from present-time testifies. Here Athey can be seen to
exhibitionistically perform a transition from abjection to intelligibility;
a movement which seems to enact more than it parodies the panicked
performative towards heterosexuality, identified by Butler.46 After
moments elapse, Athey rises, smiling, to face the crowd.
Judith Butler’s assertion that heteronormativity is a system governed
by rules of intelligibility certainly offers one way of understanding
Athey’s relationship to abjection in this piece. So too does the Freudian
concept of ‘working through’. In the paper titled ‘Remembering,
Repeating and Working Through’ (1914), Freud addresses the problem
of patient resistance in psychoanalytic treatment. What cannot be
immediately remembered in treatment, he argues, is expressed in
repeated actions:
[W]e may say that the patient does not remember anything of what
he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it
not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course,
knowing that he is repeating it. For instance, the patient does not say
that he used to be defiant and critical towards his parent’s authority;
instead, he behaves in that way to the doctor.47
Freud saw it as the analyst’s role to lead the patient through acted resist-
ance to conscious remembering, and he described this treatment process
as ‘working through’:
One must allow the patient to become more conversant with this
resistance with which he has now become acquainted, to work
through it, to overcome it, by continuing, in defiance of it, the ana-
lytic work according to the fundamental rule of analysis […] This
working through of the resistances may in practice turn out to be an
arduous task for the subject of the analysis and a trial of patience
for the analyst. Nevertheless it is apart of the work which effects the
greatest changes in the patient.48
In Incorruptible Flesh, Athey might be seen to perform his own working

through. However, unlike Freud’s proposition, acting out does not give
way to unearthing repressed memories here, but his recollections are
presented as synchronic, mutually productive, and, of course, repeated
every time the performance is restaged or documented through photog-
raphy or film. Nonetheless, the piece ends on a note of resolution, as
if Athey has overcome his expressed trauma. But Freud also recognized
the reconstitutive dynamics at play in forms of acting out. In ‘Psycho-
Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia’
(1911) he gives further attention to this process, noting ‘[that] which we
take to be the pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a
process of reconstruction’.49 In his paper on ‘The Dead Mother’ (1986) –
a subject of certain relevance to Athey’s work – André Green also
emphasizes the role of reparative performance in response to the loss of
the living, but psychically dead mother:
Performance and auto-reparation go hand in hand to coincide with

the same goal: the preservation of a capacity to surmount the dis-
may over the loss of the breast, by the creation of a patched breast,
a piece of cognitive fabric which is destined to mask the hole left by
the decathexis, while secondary hatred and erotic excitation teem on
the edge of an abyss of emptiness.50
More recently, psychoanalysts Joachim F. Danckwardt and Peter Wegner

impress that for Freud, symptoms did not just index trauma but also
restitution of the self:
Freud’s view that symptoms represent not only signs of illness, but
simultaneously the self healing restoration of health, seems to have
128 Male Trouble
been forgotten. Freud borrowed the concept implicitly from physical

medicine: following an injury, the skin shows the consequent symp-
toms of inflammation, pain, redness, loss of function, not merely as
a sign of injury, bit also as a sign of the healing process. As a rough
analogy, Freud recognised, for example, that the tormenting certainty
of being persecuted can not only represent an instant projection of
one’s own aggressive-destructive responsiveness, but that the symp-
tom must also count as an attempt at restitution.51
Given the biographical context, all of Athey’s work might be seen to

owe something to the phenomenon of working through. But it should
not be seen as working through in the clinical sense, but a theatrical-
ized construction of the process invested in a performative mastery of
the self. Athey’s repeated acting out does not mobilize the articulation
of repressed memories, rather he asserts full knowledge of his claimed
traumatic past from the outset. Perhaps more accurately, then, what
Athey’s oeuvre amounts to is the repeated representation of a working
through scenario – the acting of ‘acting out’ – where resolution is not
achieved through the ‘working through of the resistances’, but via the
spectacular representation of his suffering self.
Betraying the other: The Judas Cradle

Most of Athey’s live art is concerned with resignifying feminine and
associated homosexual identifications through masochistic enactment
(feminine and homosexual deemed as linked, through the autobio-
graphical context provided). However, one of his most recent perform-
ance pieces, The Judas Cradle (2005), marks a different turn in his
work. This piece is a self-described exploration of historical torture and
suffering, supposedly marking a new, outward-looking trajectory. The
multimedia collaboration with singer Julia Snapper incorporates music,
voice, movement, and self-harm. A Judas Cradle is medieval torture
device, shaped like a sharply pointed pyramid, onto which victims were
forced to sit and endure compressed penetration. A real Judas Cradle is
the central prop in this performance, which Athey willingly mounts
(see Figure 5.1). Juxtaposed against this self-torture are extracts from
Inquisition hearings, various opera librettos, and Jean Genet’s Prisoner
of Love (1986). In addition to these more subtle contexts, the perform-
ance’s pivotal reference point is American military torture devices, such
as those reportedly used in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib.
The hour-long piece culminates when Athey straddles the Judas Cradle
while scenes of military torture are projected onto a back wall. In one
scenario, a man wearing an orange prisoner uniform, like that worn by

Guantánamo detainees, wanders through a desert. In another scenario,
a female prison officer abuses a male prisoner, in an orchestration remi-
niscent of the images taken of prisoners in Abu Ghraib. This connection
is bolstered by the sight of Athey sitting on top of the large pyramid,
in a manner that evokes the images of human pyramids also to emerge
from Abu Ghraib. Although not initially clear, it is eventually revealed
that the man featured in the projected footage is Athey.
In a largely persuasive article, Amelia Jones celebrates The Judas Cradle,
and suggests that unlike some of Athey’s other work, it is profoundly
queer. She suggests that the piece offers an example of ‘erotic ethics’,
and demonstrates an ‘ethics of embodiment’ that seduces the spectator
to ‘its multisensual texture to reclaim us as bodies with holes: permeable
to the potential violence and pleasures that surround and inhabit us’.52
Of Athey’s anal exposure in particular, she contends that ‘[e]xposing
the hole(s) in the body is exposing the hole(s) in the self is pointing to
Figure 5.1 Ron Athey, Judas Cradle (2004–5).

130 Male Trouble
the ultimate source of human aggression on both personal and political

(global) levels’.53 Jones continues to suggest that Athey’s ‘manly’ body is
‘brought to feminine excess’,54 in a manner that ‘dehabituates’ the body
and recalls ‘a general sense of socially bonded suffering.’.55
While Jones is correct to point out that this piece is more outward
looking than Athey’s earlier performances, certainly in the way it
presses the body towards a radical openness that is not premised solely
upon violent self-harm, it seems to me that its queer ethics do not
extend beyond this dimension. Despite the fact that Athey references
suffering beyond himself in this piece, productive engagement with
any suffering subject and its violating other (other than himself) is
foreclosed by his over-identification as victim. Instead, real victims of
torture appear to be exploited in the service of representing Athey as a
kind of transhistorical subject of oppression: he is at once the medieval
torture victim, the abused soldier, and the onstage victim. Further,
Athey’s potentiality as a representative oppressed everyman is limited
by the heavy biographical context that he has furnished throughout his
career, which I argue cannot be ‘read out’ of any of his performances.
But perhaps more fundamentally, we might question the value of Jones’
affirmation of ‘socially bonded suffering’, if only for the presumption it
makes on the transformative potential of empathic identification. There
must be other ways of articulating injustice and instituting change that
do not rely upon an elaborate sacrificial aesthetic.
Franko B: Trauma, infantilization, and self-harm
As with Ron Athey, Franko B’s live art has been chiefly concerned with
bloodletting and the violation of the artist’s own body. In form, however,
Franko’s work differs to Athey’s. This may well be due to the fact that
Franko trained as a fine artist, a background reflected in his preference
for tableaux in place of energetic movement; image instead of the spoken
word; and mainly the use of his own body rather than other performers.
Franko describes his work with the assurance of a fine artist: ‘In a way my
body is the canvas for me to make beautiful icons, and blood is just like
a drip of paint […] the body is the canvas and the blood and everything
else that is projected onto the canvas, that is the language that is paint.’56
Further, he explicitly compares his work to painting: ‘I work in a kind of
tableau; I like that idea a lot. Every time I perform I am making a series of
paintings. You’re looking at an image, the light goes off, and I appear as
something else. My work is not theatre! You’re not expected to stop and
say ‘when does it finish’?’57 In framing his work in this manner, Franko
seemingly attempts to objectify his body, despite the performativity of

his practice.
Before examining discrete performance pieces, I would like to elabo-
rate further a context for analysis. This can be done by framing recur-
ring images, motifs, and points of reference in Franko’s work within the
biographical context that he furnishes. The experience of abandonment
and institutionalization which Franko claims to have experienced as a
child resonates in occasions of maternal address, religious iconography,
and medical practice in his work.58 These reference points are generally
presented in a concatenated relationship to issues of bio-invasion, vul-
nerability, gender, and sexuality. Consequently, the narrative context
for understanding Franko’s oeuvre relates to a traumatic youth and the
impact of these forces upon his identity and performance of self. This
crucial premise is expressed by Franko as ‘My main concern is the use
of objects, my body with its own history and life.’59
In addition to the information verbally proffered by Franko, the
centrality of his childhood to his work is highlighted by his self-
infantilization. With a bald head, pale skin, and soft form, he is baby-
like, seemingly caught in a war between childhood and adulthood,
innocence and corruption. The blue hot-water bottle that he often
grasps is the most vivid testament to his infantilization, as is an old rag
that he frequently clutches. Combined, these features work to repre-
sent Franko as a young orphan, and underscore the importance of this
traumatic legacy on his performances. Franko’s doleful eyes and out-
stretched arms in response to being cut, beaten, and caged all suggest
that he is still something of an abandoned figure waiting to be rescued.
As with Athey, Franko’s self-abjection might also be seen to theatrical-
ize a working through process in the service of resolving these traumas.
Franko claims that his work is not about sacrifice per se, but rather that
it is concerned with making ‘the unbearable bearable.’60
Body, voice, conflict
Frequently covered in white wax make-up, Franko’s body is the startling

incarnation of the figure alluded to in Artaud’s ‘Saint Francis of Assisi’,
who attempts to ‘dissolve terror’ through the invocation of a ‘strange
Father’ in performance:
I have only a face of wax and I am an orphan

And yet wherever I go angels come
To show me the path of that strange Father
Whose heart is softer than a human father’s heart […]
132 Male Trouble
I am he who can dissolve the terror

Of being a man and going among the dead.
For is not my body the miraculous ash
Whose earth is the voice of the speaking dead?61
Franko’s anaemic appearance foregrounds his blood loss and frames his
body as one to be rescued.
This sense of infantilization is also foregrounded in Franko’s avoid-
ance of spoken language, a dramaturgical strategy described by Patrick
Campbell and Helen Spackman thus: ‘Franko B […] closes his mouth
as he opens his body.’62 Related to this, Stephen Di Benedetto suggests
that Franko’s work is chiefly organized around a ‘fluid dramaturgy’.63
In the place of words (and in addition to his open body), Franko builds
an auditory syntax out of techno-industrial music, the rattle of medical
apparatus, and the drip of his own blood. The sharp synthesized sounds
of his frequent collaborator, Gavin Mitchell, are privileged over the spo-
ken word. Sometimes this music is no more than a discrete vibration.
Other times it evokes a range of menacing scenarios from the clatter of
medicine bottles to the spark of electrical machinery to the thunder of
fighter jets overhead. Like the flautist satyr Marsyas, who in some ver-
sions of the myth was nailed to a tree for contesting the lyrist god
Apollo, Franko presents himself as suffering for his act of protest.
Franko claims that his refusal to speak is sparked by a society that
insists on verbal articulacy, and that words can never adequately express
the complete emotional spectrum of contemporary experiences:
Society, people are obsessed with being articulate, always being able
to express yourself; I don’t think that I am being very articulate now;
no, it has nothing to do with being articulate, but with expressing
yourself. Being articulate is not the same as expressing yourself, it is a
way of justifying yourself, it is a way of showing that you are intelli-
gent, that you know how to do something. I think that being articu-
late, in practical terms, is a way of getting out of things, a dishonest
way of dealing with things. Why should you have to be articulate?
How is it possible to articulate the sense of having lost something,
whether it is love, people, your parents, or your innocence?64
Significantly, in the above statement Franko associates his silence with

loss. This recurring connection between the loss of a parental love
object, melancholia, and gender trouble resonates with the dialogue
Butler sets up with Freud, whereby the former suggests that ‘gender
identification is a kind of melancholia’.65 In light of this, we might

also think of Franko’s work as being broadly concerned with exploring
this sense of loss. Additionally, if Symbolic assimilation is precipitated
by entry into language, and the concomitant rejection of the fluidity,
motility, and sensuality associated with the female body, Franko’s verbal
silence in favour of sensory affect may also be interpreted as a strategy
of resistance. The musical scores that accompany his performances cer-
tainly contrive the disorganized, inarticulate rumble of Kristeva’s imag-
ining. However, in many pieces these sounds are often threatening, and
the maternal connection that they implicitly evoke (through context,
title, or content) is figured as inhospitable.
Symbols and images

The invasiveness of systems of authority on the body is represented in
a number of ways in Franko’s work. Most obviously, bloodletting draws
attention to the Symbolic’s insistence on a closed, clean body, especially
for male subjects. In a mise-en-scène dominated by catheters, operat-
ing tables, stretchers, wheelchairs, braces, chemical suits, and scrubs,
medical institutions, and the control they exert over the body, are
specifically referenced. These distinct institutional forms are united in
the recurring image of a red cross, which not only dominates Franko’s
performance, film, and fine art work, but is also tattooed on his body. In
addition to referencing the Red Cross organization, the sign also evokes
the bloodstained Christian cross, and a HIV positive sign, which draws
attention to issues of sexuality in his work.66 Titles are also extremely
significant, serving to fill in that which cannot be represented fully on
stage or in language: his Mother, or an imaginary proxy. Many of the
works are either addressed to a Mother, or position Franko as an infant.
In this semantic fusion, Franko directs his self-harm either in response
to a specific or imaginary injurious parental figure, or in a bid for some
kind of parental intervention. As in the Christian doctrine of suffering,
Franko’s wounding may be seen as a route towards a second birth.
Reproaching the feminine in Mama I Can’t Sing

Mama I Can’t Sing explores the idea of childhood trauma. Part Two of
the performance, which I explore here, is constructed around a series
of flashing vignettes, rather than organically connected scenes. A blue
light that slowly fades into darkness illuminates each of the approxi-
mately ten minute long expositions. As the violence of each scene
becomes more explicit, the light flickers, as if asking the viewer to ques-
tion whether or not s/he really wants to bear witness to the enactment.
134 Male Trouble
Adding to this intensity is a shrill musical arrangement, broken by

pregnant silence, which seems to forewarn a certain menace.
With the release of a piercing note, Franko hazily materializes on
stage. He sits on a platform in the centre of a deep tunnel, washed in
blue light. After momentary darkness, he reappears, this time huddled
in the corner of the structure. Darkness continues to punctuate subse-
quent expositions, which include Franko standing in the centre of the
tunnel, prostrating himself on a stretcher, wearing a blanket over his
head and torso, and posing sideways. This structure, from which Franko
seems reluctant to move, is evocative of the womb scene in Athey’s Four
Scenes. The action moves centre stage where Franko stands, wrapped in
bandages and leg-braces, grasping a blue hot-water bottle, again like a
child victim of abusive institutional care.
After a period of darkness, a bandaged body is presented on stage
right, flanked in the shade by two naked male performers on stage left –
one lying on a stretcher and another standing at his head. The band-
aged body is lifted and placed on a stretcher by two masked male
nurses. When they leave, another two figures come on stage, remove the
bandages, and reveal Franko’s ghostly white body. One of the figures cut
Franko’s chest with a scissors (it is not clear whether this really happens)
and begins to poke at the ‘wound’. Not only does this section demonstrate
the literal power that institutions exercise on the body, the coming-and-
going of different people who rarely complete a task seems to decry an
irresponsibility and complicity in the form of the institutional violence
presented.
Franko is the principal casualty of this assault, although it is techni-
cally administered with his own consent. Once again he stands centre
stage, grasping the blue hot-water bottle, his face now visible and in
apparent distress. As the stage lights flicker on and off, the bottle is
sequentially exchanged for a drinking bottle and some red wire, perhaps
symbols of progressive dependency, from childhood comforts to chemi-
cal and technical body control. When the segment ends with Franko
spitting clots of blood from his mouth (again, we are not sure if it is
real), the relationship between institutional policing and his performed
affliction is vividly manifest. While simultaneously crossing his arms
over his chest, Franko reasserts his status as a victim.
The piece builds to a climax with Franko trapped in a cage. Most
obviously, the image signifies how institutional authority imprisons,
curtails, and animalizes its subjects. Of course, the cage also suggests a
child’s cot, and given the biographical context in question, familial and
institutional harm. In fact, the title of the piece quite blatantly directs
the viewer to read Franko’s mother into the piece, as a primary link in
the maltreatment represented. Under the uneven pulse of light, Franko
faces the audience with a chain around his neck, and then with a white
cloth bag on his head, his chest still bleeding over his white body from
the earlier incision. Incarcerated, tortured, and blind, Franko stands
alone until the nurse-figures return to raise his body into a wheelchair,
and position it centre stage. These people offer no help, however, but
slap his face before laying him on a stretcher and bandaging his mouth
with red cloth. The piece comes to a close with the administering of an
injection and the apparent sewing of Franko’s wound. Before leaving,
the nurses spray his entire body with red paint, reinforcing his identity
as a scarlet, abjected form.
Part Three of this performance is also composed of a series of vig-
nettes, broken by periods of darkness, and carried on the uneasy waves
of synthesized music. The performance begins with the gradual unveil-
ing of four separate images on stage: a naked man seated on stage right,
two naked men on stage left (one lying on a stretcher with the other
standing at his head), and a bandaged man in a cage, upstage. The
uneasy mood is punctuated by flickering light.
When the stage is lit once more, the piece takes up where Part Two
left off. Franko stands in a cage, his head covered with red cloth. Under
darkness, he changes positions so that his neck is chained to the right,
front and left of the cage. Attendants move him upstage in a wheelchair
and slap his face before positioning him downstage on a stretcher,
under the gaze of spots. This appears to be another hospital scene,
and beams of light scrutinize Franko’s body. Like Part Two, his bandaged
head is covered with red cloth, his body is sprayed with red paint, and
braces are fitted to his legs. Moving the body downstage, the medical
staff remove the head bandage to reveal Franko’s face.
Trauma theory maintains that the impact of a traumatic event is not
felt at its moment of occurrence, but later, repeatedly, and somewhat
obliquely. According to Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma,
Narrative, and History (1996), for example, trauma might be seen as ‘the
response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events
that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated
flashbacks, nightmares, or other repetitive phenomena’.67 Such a depic-
tion captures well the visual and dramaturgical strategies adopted by
Franko B here. In keeping with this repetitive pattern, the second part
of Mama I Can’t Sing repeats the hot-water bottle sequence from Part
Two, this time with Franko in a cage. He stands centre stage, flanked
by a young man in a wheelchair on stage right and a naked couple
136 Male Trouble
on stage left, comprising a woman standing over a man lying on a

stretcher. Once this sequence ends with Franko spitting clots of blood,
the opening sequence is repeated, with Franko chained to a cage, put on
a trolley, bandaged and slapped. This time he rejects his subjection by
ripping out his catheter, dropping the hot-water bottle to the ground,
and walking off stage. As the music stops, there is a concluding sense
that through processes of self-abjection, Franko has arrived at some
kind of reconciliation with his aggressors.68
Resisting the maternal in I’m Not Your Babe

While Mama I Can’t Sing is certainly violent and menacing, it features
none of the explicit bloodletting of Franko’s other performances, of
which I’m Not Your Babe is an example. While the aesthetic may be diff-
erent, however, similar conflicts underpin the work.
Part One begins with the sounding of a signature discordant note,
signifying the working through of a tension in the representational
imaginary. An overhead light, which shines against a cloudy backdrop
of liquid nitrogen, instantly establishes an atmosphere that is ghostly,
clinical, and threatening. When the light extinguishes, Franko is dis-
cernible on stage, his head a vague outline next to his illuminated body.
Presenting himself as a sacrificial offering, he holds out his arms which
are bleeding at the elbow joints. He stands motionless while blood spills
from his veins like Christ (see Figure 5.2). After a few minutes, his waxy
head and body are illuminated more evenly and more vividly. His body
twitches and his breathing becomes shallower. After a short time, he
falls to his knees, and later curls into at a foetal position with his eyes
closed, as if unconscious. All the while, Franko’s struggle is mirrored by
the irregular consonance and dissonance of the musical cadences. As
his blood circles around his body, it is reminiscent of Athey’s in vitro
mutilation in Four Scenes.
In the performance series in question, Part Two took place one
day later. Encrusted blood served as a reminder of the previous day’s
occurrence. It also signified that the process was unfinished. Part Two
commences with Franko kneeling down while clutching a hot-water
bottle. With his bleeding right arm outstretched for the attention of
the audience, Franko repositions himself as a sacrificial offering for the
spectators. His gagged mouth suggests that he has been deprived of the
right to speak.
Following the relatively still opening, a series of repeated movements
ensue, which see Franko attempt to performatively recover from the
traumatic presentation. This process is set in motion when he drops
Figure 5.2 Franko B, I’m Not Your Babe (1996).
to the ground and prostrates himself, while nursing a hot-water bottle

close to his chest. Although he tries to get up, he falls three times,
therein sustaining the Christ-like parallel (see Figure 5.3). Moving
downstage he lies on his front and reaches his hands over the stage
edge in obvious address. When no one helps, he crawls away from the
blood, seemingly in search of further assistance, but to no avail. As in
Part One, this movement might also be seen to signify Franko’s wish to
disassociate himself from abjection by being rescued.
Although no one immediately assists Franko, individuals wearing
medical or chemical suits intervene. One of the attendants binds his
feet, Oedipus-like, while another attaches a meat hook to facilitate
the suspension of his bleeding body above the stage. This mode of
bodily presentation resonates with much of what Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari critiqued as the ‘dreary parade’ of subjectivization in A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972): ‘strung up to
stop the organs from working; flayed, as if the organs clung to the skin;
sodomized, smother, to make sure everything is sealed tight’.69 Hung
like a slab of meat, Franko’s body also references work by the Viennese
138 Male Trouble
Figure 5.3 Franko B, I’m Not Your Babe (1996).
Aktionists (such as Hermann Nitsch’s 80th Action (1984), which involved

the slaughtering and disemboweling of animals over three days), and
some of the crucifixion images of Francis Bacon (such as Painting (1946),
which includes images from a butcher’s shop). But these resonances do
not serve to figure Franko as an anti-subject, but as performatively self-
constitutive. The piece culminates when Franko’s body is taken down
from the hook, and the performer is greeted to applause.
Mourning and melancholia in I Miss You

I Miss You begins with the thundering evocation of fighter jets overhead.
Combined with a runway stage, with lights embedded along its sides,
one might suspect that this piece is concerned with some kind of mili-
tary control or policing. However, the stage also resembles a catwalk of
sorts, down which Franko eventually parades. The addition of strobe
lighting does not clear up the ambivalence, but it heralds the entry of
Franko onto the stage.
When he steps onto the platform, bleeding hands slightly out-
stretched, Franko’s body is slowly illuminated. The lights that edge the
runway light up one by one, as Franko walks to the end of the platform.
When he reaches its end, he is greeted by flashing cameras, an action
that holds both the contexts of military warfare and the fashion ind-
ustry in balance. Franko himself suggests that the flash of cameras in
I Miss You are suggestive of ‘those machines which you see in certain
institutions generally, maybe in the kitchen, or in outdoor restaurants,
where insects are attracted to the light and then instantly electrocuted.
It was like dying for me, the model walking down to the flickering light;
except I stop’.70
Considering the background that Franko furnishes, it is not surprising
that this explanation draws on the terminology of medical surveillance.
The title also suggests that the piece is about loss and mourning, the
recovery from which might be achieved through public displays of self-
harm. As he walks up and down the catwalk, his blood dripping onto
the white flooring, Franko presents himself as a victim of a range of
socio-political systems, while also seeking public engagement with, or
affirmation for, his abuse and marginality.
Theodor Reik’s theory of the masochist as deeply exhibitionistic and
narcissistic resonates with this performance.71 Walking up and the cat-
walk, Franko demands that his suffering be watched, photographed, and
recorded. One might argue, however, that there is a double standard at
play in Franko attacking the fashion industry when, with every drop
of blood shed, his own artistic profile is raised. The blinding camera
flashes and the media attention are testament to this. Perhaps, then, it
is only this kind of narcissism – the gaze of others – which can fill the
lack inferred in the titular ‘I miss’.
Presence and absence in Oh Lover Boy

Like I Miss You, this performance begins with music that suggests fighter
planes overhead, with Franko lying on a stretcher, or sometimes a plat-
form so that his feet face the audience. His fingers noticeably quiver
before the twitches become fists. Through a clenching and release
motion, Franko begins to expel blood from his already punctured arms.
It flows in a scarlet rivulet in the direction of the audience, and gathers
at the bottom of the table. As the ‘planes’ sound overhead, Franko lies
for approximately twelve minutes, glistening in white and red, like a
wounded soldier waiting for assistance.
Like I Miss You, the most striking element of this work is Franko’s
exhibitionism. Although he lies still throughout, his stark body insists
that the audience focus on his suffering, and his alone. The simplicity
of the set and the spot focus refuse to allow the spectators’ line of
140 Male Trouble
vision to become distracted. Further, the blood that streams down

the set and stains surrounding surfaces ensures Franko’s visibility, and
marks him as irrefutably present. Following a performance of this piece
at the Crawford Municipal Gallery, Cork, in 2005 – staged without a
soundscape – it was not the bleeding itself which seemed to attract audi-
ence attention (a number of spectators giggled), but the pool of blood
that coagulated in a trough beneath Franko’s feet. Once the performer
left the stage, a number of spectators took the liberty to approach the
performance space in order to inspect the gathered blood and stained
canvas. It ultimately appeared than the trace of the man on the canvas,
like a latter day Shroud of Turin, generated most interest on the night.
Of course the trace marks the fact of being, or of having been, in a way
that live performance does not. In a religious context, it is evidence of
martyrdom. Seen as part of an oeuvre repeatedly troubled by concerns
over identity, the ending to this performance might well be read as an
effort by Franko B to crystallize the anxieties of loss and abandonment
into a still image, that figures the artist as a martyr. As I see it, this is
constructed without irony or subversive effect.
While Franko B’s work is clearly troubled by familial relations, posi-
tions of authority, structures of perceived oppression, and the implica-
tions of these forces on his subjectivity, he has insisted that the work
itself is in no way queer or about homosexuality.72 Such a disagreement
might seem initially difficult to understand, given the disorganized,
decentred world that he presents, and considering that most of his work
is related to his body and his identity. In addition to the biographical
underpinning of the work, Franko’s oeuvre contains many gay references,
imagery, and signifying systems, with the film You Make My Heart Go
Boom (2001), for example, building on the imagery of gay pornography.
As in the reading offered here, perhaps the work conflicts with queer-
ness is so far as Franko’s violations do not easily figure him as dislocated,
fragmented, or becoming, but as an enduring, centred artist-subject.
Wounded attachments: Sacrifice and the solo performer

Andrea Gutenberg argues that the desire to confirm the realness of the
body through its use as artistic material, which characterized perform-
ance art in the 1960s and 1970s, has more recently been refigured as
a will to politicize and legitimize the endurance of pain. As examples,
she identifies Chris Burden’s Trans-Fixed (1974) (which involved the
performer being nailed to the bonnet of a Volkswagen Beetle) and Bob
Flanagan’s film Sick (1991) (in which the performer is shown nailing
his penis to a block of wood). Common to both of these examples is an
invocation of the image of the suffering Christ in the service of express-

ing the performers’ own particular sense of trouble. 1990’s live art has
witnessed a bold revival in this representational strategy, although often
more visceral and theatrical than before. Most notably, Ron Athey and
Franko B have consistently associated their performance works with sac-
rifice. Although these acts may be seemingly irreverent and anti-religious,
Elisabeth Bronfen warns that sacrificial imagery is always highly political,
particularly in respect of gender and sexuality. She writes, ‘Literally cruci-
fied, Christ gives figural expression to the way all human subjects must
subject themselves to the Law of the Father and the reality principal he
stands for.’73 This is echoed in the writings of Žižek on the Christian doc-
trine of suffering, when he comments, ‘Christ’s death cannot but appear
as the ultimate assertion of the Law, as the elevation of the Law into an
unconditional superego agency which burdens us, its subjects, with guilt
and with a debt we will never be able to repay.’74 In the wake of Bronfen’s
caution and Žižek’s elucidation, I suggest that although the performances
examined here claim to critique institutional authority and exercise a
degree of gender play, they also enact the terms of Symbolic participa-
tion by performatively controlling male abjection. For Athey, I suggest
that this is primarily grounded in a fear of feminine identification, and
for Franko B, in the pain of loss and abandonment. The performers suffer
through the agency of paternal Law in order to performatively resignify
themselves against closely conflated feminine/maternal/homosexual
identifications. In this process, the work examined here does not simply
disrupt the normative through the agency of queer jouissance, rather male
trouble is performatively appeased through the affirmation of the author-
ity and durability of the male body.
In Violence and the Sacred (1972), René Girard writes about the nature
and role of sacrifice in society. For Girard, ‘the purpose of the sacrifice
is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric.’75
In other words, the sacrificial gesture may be interpreted as a process
whereby the Law is reinstated. Girard deploys the term ‘sacrificial crisis’
to describe the failure of the sacrificial structure. This can occur, he
writes, for a number of reasons:
1. When the sacrificial victim loses its mimetic relation with the com-
munity by being too different to the group.76
2. When the sacrifice becomes impure (uncontrolled violence and
bloodletting).77
3. When the rite is not believed in by the community, intended as it is
towards protecting it from its own violence.78
142 Male Trouble
Based on Girard’s account, Ron Athey’s and Franko B’s performances

are always in danger of failing as ‘good conductors’ of queer trouble, or
indeed for mobilizing queer politics.79 This is especially true of Athey’s
work, with the most noted ‘sacrificial failure’ taking place at the 1994
production in the Walker Arts Center as mentioned earlier. While Girard
reminds us that blood generates a multiplicity of meanings, he cautions
that not all blood can purify: ‘Only blood itself, blood whose purity has
been guaranteed by the performance of appropriate rites – the blood, in
short, of sacrificial victims – can accomplish this feat.’80 The failure of
Athey’s sacrificial gesture was most likely related to a perception that the
‘polluted’ blood made ‘the artist an unacceptable surrogate sacrificial
victim for a healthy community’.81
Of course, the rejection of the sacrificial gesture by the ‘healthy’
community cannot be disassociated from the foregrounding of the
homosexual body. Such a status disqualifies Athey and indeed Franko B
from functioning as sacrificial offerings. Rather, they are more akin
to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the homo sacer: an individual who is
excluded from civil rights, but who cannot be sacrificed, as sacrifice is
a socially important event. In classical thought, ‘Homo sacer belongs to
God in the form of unsacrificeability, and is included in the community
in the form of being able to be killed.’82 Curiously, then, we might think
that it is precisely this social position that the performers are trying to
resignify. However, despite serious physical mutilation, these figures
ultimately appear unkillable.
The inviolable male

If the performers fail as sacrificial offerings, even as they exploit this
aesthetic, what might we take this wounded attachment to signify? For
Muñoz, queer failure is generative, the site of ‘a kernel of potentiality’.83
However, this utopian possibility is not something I see in the work
of these performers. Jones, writing on male performance art within a
modernist tradition, enlightens this problematic best. She suggests that
‘the artist in modern Western culture is a quintessentially phallic figure,
one who exaggerates the characteristics of the fictional unified subject
of modernism (that subject Michel Foucault has theorized as modern
man)’.84 In contrast, Jones suggests that the performativity inherent in
performance may destabilize that centred artist, described by Derrida as
‘the figure of the artistic genius who is given surplus value by God’.85
While the live art of Ron Athey and Franko B is performative, the artists
ultimately retain many of the phallic attributes of that centred, inde-
structible male artist.
This ‘genius’ and ‘indestructibility’ are evidenced in the creation of

a distinctly theological and subjectivizing stage. The self-aggrandizing
dramaturgy is manifest not only in the way the performers, as divine
authorities, direct all attention upon themselves and their partic-
ular plights, but in the collaborative nature of the work, which sees
other performers assist the protagonists in the working through of their
ostensibly personal or personalized struggles. In representing them-
selves through representatives, ‘interpretative slaves who faithfully
execute the providential designs of the “master,”’86 the artists are always
in danger of perpetuating the phallocentric representational strategies
attacked by both Artaud and Derrida.
Athey’s live art includes many performers in addition to himself.
However, these figures – including those who self-mutilate under
the sign of Athey’s cause – rarely speak. Neither do they control the
action of a piece, as it is Athey’s personal narrative that is being pub-
licly presented. Similarly, they are infrequently granted the spotlight.
In the work examined in particular the performers subject themselves
to violence and/or inflict it upon others, ostensibly for the benefit of
the master-of-ceremony’s own sake, a feature noted by Richards in her
observation that ‘Athey is using performance to achieve a different kind
of ‘divine’ prestige but one that proclaims a parallel message and that
still retains him as essential and prominent protagonist’.87 Richards
also suggests that by ‘extending the ritualisation of his experiences,
ordeals and visions in a way that gave him a masochistic sense of
empowerment’, Athey’s performances strive ‘to achieve the confirma-
tion of his own existence and the significance of that existence beyond
the designations of identity as either sick or queer’.88
In enduring and executing violence in the name of their ‘acting father’,
collaborators take roles in Athey’s personal drama. In this arrangement,
the claimed and frequently presumed challenge to authority is reflex-
ively empowering for Athey. Richards’ describes this relationship as ‘[t]he
perpetrators of violence are subordinated to their victims, and are even
described as being in obeisance to them, in positions of rabid worship
the victims of violence are glorified by the violence they suffer, and are
presented as well above their captors’.89 In this alignment, Athey resem-
bles the male artist who serves the Law by enacting its disciplining expe-
dient; therein ensuring that man remains the beginning and end, alpha
and omega, ‘the origin of the production of meanings’.90 Understood
in this light, Athey’s anti-religion is no less a ‘religion’ in its own
right; his apparent subversion of gender binaries is questionable, given
that he retains many misogynistic and phallic attributes of traditional
144 Male Trouble
masculinity in his appearance and behaviour; his anti-authority stance

is no less authoritarian, with him in control of each performance. In
fact, it would seem that Athey’s work is primarily directed towards the
constitution of the performer’s own identity as centred male artist.
The centrality of Franko B to his own work is ensured by not admit-
ting many other performers on stage. When other people are included
in Franko’s pieces, their faces and bodies are covered to guarantee that
he remains the central focus of attention. They become mere sadistic
representatives of a larger community, which perhaps unwittingly also
includes the audience. In Extreme Bodies: The Use and Abuse of the Body in
Art (2003), Francesca Alfano Miglietti asserts that ‘chaos is transformed
into a rigorous performative presence’ in Franko’s work.91 This perspec-
tive marries well with the interpretation I offer here, by inferring that
while Franko stages a disordered world with his abject-self at its centre,
self-harm also works to assuage trouble.
While Ron Athey’s and Franko B’s probing, piercing, and playing with
their bodies seems to reveal a performative approach to male identity,
this reaches closure at a point of the performing subjects’ indestruct-
ibility in the face of self-abjection. In her book Eye on the Flesh: Fashions
of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century (1996), Maurizia Boscagli’s
describes Nietzsche’s überman (as figured in Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
(1887)) as ‘unsutured and castrated […] articulated through a dou-
ble moment of excess and specularity’.92 Her depiction of popular
representations of potent masculinity resonates appositely with the
self-styling of Athey and Franko B. The performers’ repeated survival
of self-abjection – like the subject’s mastery of the object in the fort/da
game documented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle – is also a moment
of rebirth or self-definition through talking control.93 The men who
emerge at the end of each performance, despite wounds, bleeding, and
suppurations, are unlike the earlier victims; rather they are more akin
to Kristeva’s figuration of the dynamized artist, who ‘in exporting semi-
otic motility across the border on which the symbolic is established […]
sketches out a kind of second birth.’94 Although Rebecca Schneider
suggests that the explicit body collapses the conceptual space between
the sign and the signified, imploding across the performer’s body,95 it
would seem that in the case of the work of Athey and Franko B, the sign
refuses to be erased. Rather, repeated self-harm, and the endurance of
that self-harm become the mark of an undeniable presence; the sign of a
form which resists the threat of disappearance common to the perform-
ing body.96 And this presence is distinctly phallicized and masculinized
in contrast to the earlier claims and representations. This is evidenced in
the final exposition of the performers’ naked bodies, no longer abject

but indestructible corps propres.97 By the end of each performance, male
trouble seems, however provisionally, to have been managed, if not
resolved. In establishing a narcissistic relationship to conventional
artistic masculinity that exploits the phallic attributes of male authorial
prowess, both Ron Athey and Franko B ultimately build up an image of
the male body as an inviolable vessel with male subjectivity as capable
of controlling the psychic intrusions of its traumatic and abject others
as much as the body is capable of controlling its physical intrusions.
In this, the performance of wounded attachment is less the queer suc-
cumbing to abjection, or indeed the generous opening out to otherness,
but more akin to its stabilizing endurance.
6
David Blaine, Fathers 4 Justice,
and the Spectacle of Heroic
Masculinity
[H]e [Houdini] turned the perennial philosophical

problem of scepticism into a performance art (indeed,
street theatre, when he would hang chained, from
a bank in Manhattan). And by making exaggerated
claims on people’s credulity, by encouraging them
to believe the unbelievable, he did something very
strange. He showed them that the only cure for scepti-
cism was high-risk.1
Adam Phillips, Houdini’s Box:
On the Arts of Escape
One can do a semblance of surplus jouissance – it draws

quite a crowd.2
Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis
This chapter examines spectacles of heroic masculinity. Focusing on the

endurance performances of David Blaine and the guerrilla protests of
Fathers 4 Justice, the study explores how male subjectivity is publicly
performed as endangered, and suggests how the spectularized, public,
mediatized nature of the work contributes to the resignification and
management of that trouble. Unlike with the explicit live art practices of
Roy Athey and Franko B, this analysis considers how Blaine and Fathers 4
Justice operate within a seemingly innocuous register of popular perform-
ance that enables their work to appeal to many. It pays specific attention
to the manner in which the body is staged in high-risk scenarios not
strictly to endanger it, but in order to engage the public in questions
surrounding mastery, bodily integrity, and masculine authenticity.
146
The Spectacle of Heroic Masculinity 147
While different in many respects, the performances of Blaine and

Fathers 4 Justice resonate within a distinctly phallic fantasy of man-
as-superman, wherein the desire for social recognition is played out
through performances of impossible constraint and unnatural freedom.
However, even though the performers work within this paradigm,
neither Blaine nor members of Fathers 4 Justice expose themselves to
such radical vulnerability. Rather, the men’s shared capacity to respond
to social and physical contingency is reified, frequently in a manner
that replicates the very conditions that the performers are expressly
interested in challenging.
The spectacle of the self
How does the self become spectacularized? How does the spectac-
ularized self resist spectralization in postmodern culture? For Jean
Baudrillard, the hyper-real and its characteristic procession of simulacra
are not referential: they belong to a model of the semblance of the ‘real
without origin or reality’.3 Similarly, a range of contemporary performa-
tive practices can be seen to ask questions surrounding authenticity,
originality, and reality. These rank among the questions which enact-
ments by Blaine and Fathers 4 Justice seem to invite us to dwell upon,
seducing the spectator into a game of reality and illusion, in a manner
that curiously reaffirms bodily materiality and psychic strength.
While it is the nature of the spectacle to exceed meaning through the
production of a proliferation of signs, given the centrality of solo per-
formers to this interplay as it is considered here, we might reframe this
excess within a subjective/psychic economy. Jouissance, the subject’s
excess in signification, points to the radical particularity of subjectiv-
ity that resists normativizing regimes. Jacques Lacan not only develops
this ineluctable dimension to subjectivity, but points to its powerful
magnetism. In an interesting extract from On the Other Side of Psychoa-
nalysis (1969–70), Lacan describes this allure, cautioning that it can be
performed, or affected, to draw ‘quite a crowd’.4
In the performances in question, a certain public performance of
jouissance as spectacularized indeterminacy seems to be at stake, and
this is articulated though playing the self as torn between the status
of victim and hero, whose final position is ostensibly for the public to
decide. However, to draw on a phrase used by Jacques Rancière, there
is little room for the ‘emancipated spectator’ to emerge in the work of
the performers in question, constructed as they are with such reduced
opportunities for blurring the line between viewing and acting.5 Despite
148 Male Trouble
the public and sometimes spontaneous nature of these enactments, the

male protagonists carefully stage-manage their performances in order to
control their terms of signification.
Writing on protests, demonstrations, and parades, Paul Allain and Jen
Harvie suggest that the forms often stage a challenge to authority:
These are forms of mass group performance that generally take place
in public spaces in order to influence public opinion by occupying
and exploiting the power of those sites […] protests and demonstra-
tions occupy public space in ways intended to challenge authority,
claim freedom of movement and expression, consolidate a sense of
counter-cultural group identity, and reclaim a sense of democratic
agency for the people rather than the State.6
Similarly, in Radical Street Performance (1998), Jan Cohen-Cruz main-

tains that such activity ‘draws people who comprise a contested reality
into what its creators hope will be a changing script’.7 Further, Cohen-
Cruz claims that performances of this kind tend to take place in periods
of social flux, ‘during or just after a shift in the status quo’.8 She con-
tinues, ‘When one needs most to disturb the peace, street performance
creates visions of what society might be, and arguments against what
it is. Street performance is porous, inviting participation of all who pass’.9
While many examples of street theatre or protest retain this potential
for grating against the normative, the guerrilla performances and public
spectacles in question here can be seen to corroborate with the status
quo by staging the near disappearance of the subject, only to bring him
back to life, in a spectacular coup de thêatre. In this, David Blaine and
Fathers 4 Justice resonate more powerfully with Guy Debord’s notion of
the spectacle as that which resists dialogue among those who encounter
it, and whose message might be understood as ‘What appears is good;
what is good appears’.10
David Blaine: ‘An everyday hero for an everyday age’
David Blaine’s performance career began with street magic, showcasing

card tricks, levitations, and seemingly bringing dead creatures back to
life. Following appearances on the Conan O’Brien show, Blaine began
to record his act live in front of the everyday public giving rise to the
popular television shows David Blaine: Street Magic (1997) and David
Blaine: Magic Man (1998). The New York-born performer was accredited
with revolutionizing magic by maintaining a strong focus on his own
steely persona, and spectators’ reactions to his showmanship. But it was
for his high-risk endurance tests that he earned international attention.

While Blaine plays upon fears of disempowerment, dismemberment,
and castration in virtually all of his performances to date – Buried Alive
(1999), Frozen in Time (2000), Vertigo (2002), Above and Below (2003),
Drowned Alive (2006), Revolution (2006) and Dive of Death (2008) – this
chapter will focus on select examples that exemplify these recurring
motifs. Reading Blaine’s persona against his performance practice as it
has taken place and been mediatized, the chapter explores his status, as
one reporter described it, as ‘an everyday hero of an everyday age’.11
Of particular interest is how Blaine’s body is positioned as both fragile
and impenetrable in his performance work. In Frozen in Time, Vertigo,
and Above the Below, for instance, Blaine’s body resists the incorporation
of food and often liquids, while also practising a form of social detach-
ment, or performative asceticism, even as he is publicly exhibited. In
all cases, his body is quite literally fixed through framing – with a slab
of ice, a pillar, and a small glass case – and even though the spectator
is engaged in concerns over his vulnerability in these scenarios, Blaine
remains remarkably composed and intact.
Frozen in Time, Vertigo, and Above the Below

On 27 November 2000, Blaine performed a stunt called Frozen in Time
in Times Square. Broadcast as a television special, as well as across world
news stations, the performance involved Blaine being encased in a large
block of ice. The ice was raised on a platform so that Blaine would be
easily visible to spectators, camera crews, and photographers. After
nearly 64 hours, the performer was removed from the ice, shaky but
alert, to greet the audience and media crews.
While the event ran rather smoothly – until towards the end when
the audience began to chant ‘Get him out’ – in the documentary of the
performance Blaine is keen to emphasize the arduous nature of the task.
Recalling how even doctors warned him not to follow through with it,
Blaine reveals how it became ‘a self-imposed torture, like a living hell […]
nobody had prepared me for the mental difficulties I was to face’.12
Further, not only were celebrities present during the performance to
afford it a glamorous edge, but on the documentary Kevin Spacey is
interviewed to affirm Blaine’s project, by comparing it to his more
challenging theatrical roles: ‘What people don’t really believe is that
he’s actually going to be in the ice for the full three days […] I did The
Iceman Cometh, but I only did that for four and a half hours per night’.13
Moreover, what stands out here is Blaine’s insistence that he is highly
visible during the performances, and that the public engages with his
150 Male Trouble
situation. Such was the reasoning for getting the ice specially delivered
from Alaska: ‘The reason we got the ice from Alaska was because when
it freezes at cold temperature […] everybody can see right through it.
I didn’t want anybody to doubt that I was there’.14
On 22 May 2002, Blaine was raised onto a pillar measuring 27 m in
height, and 55.88 cm in width, in Bryant Park, New York City. He was
to remain standing on the pillar for the next 35 hours. Vertigo, the title
of this performance piece, referred to the intense feelings of dizziness
and anxiety that Blaine was likely to experience at such a height, and
it also captured the sensation that the viewing public were invited to
feel as they looked up at, or thought about, Blaine’s actions.
In the documentary which followed Vertigo, Blaine suggests that his
primary inspiration for the performance was a group of fifth-century
ascetics called Stylites. Saint Simeon was the founder of this group, and
he is noted for spending 37 years on a small platform on top of a pillar
near Aleppo in Syria in order to separate himself from ordinary people
and to grow closer to God. As Blaine summarizes, ‘The Stylites stood on
pillars as an act of protest against the decadence of their time. St Simeon
believed this brought you closer to God’.15 In Vertigo, Blaine aspires to
repeat this form of social detachment, which is also a form of elevation,
in order to assert his control of his body, mind, and the world around
him. In one scene in the documentary, he reflects, ‘I want to be alone in
the world, just me and no other living thing. Myself, alone. No culture,
no politics, no time, no breath. And I won’t have nothing to be afraid
of’.16 (See Figure 6.1.)
One year later, on 5 September 2003, Blaine began one of his most
discussed performances to date. Above the Below involved Blaine being
sealed inside a transparent Plexiglas case, suspended 9 m in the air on
the South Bank of the River Thames in London. The small case, meas-
uring approximately 0.9 m x 0.9 m x 2.1 m had a camera installed on
the inside, to allow those present, and those watching on television,
the opportunity of getting the best possible close-up view of Blaine.
Blaine was to stay in the case for the next 44 days, without eating any
food, and only drinking 4.5 litres of water per day. He emerged on
19 October 2003, addressing the crowd with ‘I love you all’, before
being hospitalized.
All of these performances took place over a number of years and in a
variety of locations. During each event, public interest spread beyond
the immediate environs through media attention. While the specific
dynamics of the execution and reception of the events may have
differed, Blaine and his team staged the performances in a remarkably
Figure 6.1 David Blaine, Vertigo (2002).
similar fashion. Most notably, each piece was presented as a time-based

endurance practice that involved the public elevation and display of the
suffering artist in a manner that expertly managed that presentation of
selfhood. Perhaps best summed up by Blaine himself in the documen-
tary of Frozen in Time: ‘Some people think I have a death wish. For me,
when I confront death is when I’m most alive’.
152 Male Trouble
Critical composure
Commenting on Blaine’s remarkable composure in performance, par-
ticularly in Above the Below, Anita Biressi suggests that he resembles
the classical, antiquarian statue that is raised up and set apart from
ordinary people.17 For unlike those who behold the spectacle, who are
incapable of managing their vulnerability with such efficiency, Blaine’s
body is raised up as a source of wonder and awe. Indeed, in a televised
interview preceding Above the Below, Blaine suggests that one of his
desired outcomes was that his spectators would suffer too, given that
this is something he has had to go through in the past: ‘I love mak-
ing people suffer because ‘cause I had to watch it all my life […] I saw
everybody that I know, my mother, my real dad, drop dead in front of
my face’.18
In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Peter Stallybrass and Allon
White explore the distinction between the classical body, and the open,
grotesque forms of the carnival sphere. They argue,
[T]he classical statue was always on a plinth which meant that it was
elevated, static and monumental. In one simple part of the plinth
or pedestal the classical body signaled a whole different somatic
conception from that of the grotesque body which was usually mul-
tiple (Bosch, Bruegel), teeming, always already part of a throng. By
contrast, the classical statue is the radiant centre of a transcenden-
tal individualism, ‘put on a pedestal’, raised above the viewer and
the commonality and anticipating passive admiration from below.
We gaze up at the figure and wonder.19
In a sense, this is also the invitation posed by Blaine’s body to the spec-
tators in these enactments. Owing to the fact that he does not openly
display any obvious signs of abjection, and medical professionals care-
fully monitor his physical health, the spectator is primarily invited
to ‘gaze up’ at his superhuman achievement. Stallybrass and White
describe the classical statue’s invitation thus:
We are placed by it as spectators to an instant – frozen yet apparently

universal – of epic or tragic time. The presence of the status is a prob-
lematic presence in that it immediately retroflects us to the heroic
past, it is a memento classici for which we are the eternal latecomers
and for whom meditative imitation is the appropriate contrition.20
Similarly, Blaine’s heroism is reinforced in his public performances, and

like the classical body which ‘keeps its distance’,21 he always manages to
escape close scrutiny, even in the presence of crowds and technological
mediation. Moreover, Blaine even manages to sexualize and eroticize
his own body, frequently exposing his muscled physique during the
enactments and documentary footage.
Writing on the nineteenth-century circus performance in Australia,
Peta Tait suggests that the transitory nature of the form and the event
evoked a social fantasy of liberation from regulatory systems of order.
For female performers in particular, Tait maintains that the circus
provided an area for public displays of the body that defied social
conventions and allowed women performers to explore a freedom of
movement that was prohibited elsewhere […] Aerial acts in particular
reversed the social practice of restricting the behaviours of female
bodies from explicit demonstrations of physicality.22
In Tait’s reading, female aerial performers in particular transgressed ‘the

fixed order of gender behaviour imposed on social bodies’,23 not least of
all because mastery was understood to belong to a male order. Further
to this, aerial performers can be seen to provide the audience with a
glimpse ‘of freedom beyond performative states of identity’.24 In this
respect, the aerialist is a performer of excess who ‘momentarily acts out
the desire of physical bodies to defy the gravity of social categories, before
returning to familiar territory when he or she halts the free fall and rein-
states gender identity and the material order of bodies’.25 Following on,
inversely, we might say that Blaine’s spectacular aerial displays do little
to draw attention to his vulnerability, but bolster the association between
masculinity and the mastery of self and the laws of nature.
Making the public suffer

As already mentioned, Blaine has suggested that one of the objectives
of his work is to make the public suffer.26 On the issue, Blaine’s Above
the Below is especially interesting. Of all the pieces he has performed,
the extended temporality of his elevated isolation and starvation in this
piece – which was designed to outdo Jesus’s isolation for 40 days and
40 nights in the desert – allowed for the impact of the performer’s
endurance to visibly register on his body over the course of the period.
As the days went by, many people began to gather under Blaine’s
transparent container. The scene became a buzzing site for picnics and
154 Male Trouble
photo opportunities, television broadcasts, and public interviews. The

atmosphere was not always convivial, as some people threw eggs at the
suspended Blaine in an expression of disapproval, or less considered
revelry. On another occasion, a burger was lifted to his cage as a taunt.
As the energy built up on the ground, however, Blaine managed to
calmly conduct himself above the people, discreetly performing his
toileting and medical necessities. We might say that as Blaine expertly
managed himself, the people below became much more disorderly.
Biressi questions Blaine’s status as a victim in this performance, by
stressing that his starvation was preventable. Emphasizing the integrity
of his body throughout, she observes that Blaine had ‘no wounds to
show to his audience, no grotesque body as a signifier of damage’.27 She
goes on to stress that if this is pain, then it is ‘pain without the mark-
ers of indignity of pain, bodily trauma with its offensiveness heavily
masked, suffering of an elevated kind’.28
Even though Blaine’s suffering may have appeared ‘elevated’ in more
ways than one, his weight loss certainly marked him as someone who
had experienced starvation. While his previous endurances in Frozen in
Time and Vertigo revealed some momentary effects – visible disorienta-
tion as well as reported shock and concussion usually monitored and
treated onsite by medics – the impact of starvation on Blaine’s body
was given even more detailed, scientific consideration on this occasion.
A paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine documented
the impact of Blaine’s weight loss on his health, revealing that he lost
25 per cent of his original body weight, while claiming that his greatest
danger was re-feeding.29 Unlike some of the body practices discussed in
the previous chapter then, Blaine’s suffering seemed to be scientifically
authenticated.
While science may have intervened to monitor and interpret Blaine’s
performance, the event seems indebted to Franz Kafka’s short story
The Hunger Artist (1922) for its inspiration. In this piece, the male
protagonist – a circus performer – starves himself in order that he might
be glorified. He places himself in a visible location so that people might
see him, although even then he could not be watched constantly: ‘No
one could possibly watch the hunger artist continuously, day and night,
and so no one could produce first-hard evidence that the fast had really
been vigorous and continuous; only the artist himself could know that,
he was therefore bound to be the sole completely satisfied spectator of
his own fast’.30 In Above the Below, Blaine seems to challenge this prob-
lem of visibility by installing a camera in his cage, although even then
his more intimate procedures are unavailable to us. And yet, there is
still something of ‘the sole completely satisfied spectator’ to Blaine. For

even though the viewing public is drawn to his performances, curiosity
is always tempered with high doses of cynicism. The protagonist in The
Hunger Artist experiences something of this too, and even though he
continues to starve himself, and recuperate, he senses that no one really
takes his trouble seriously; that is, his struggle for self-creation through
endurance: ‘So he lived for many years, with small regular intervals of
recuperation, in visible glory, honored by the world, yet in spite of that
troubled in spirit, and all the more troubled because no one would take
his trouble seriously’.31
Even though Blaine stages public acts of endurance, he does so in
a manner that allows him to retain an essentially masculine identity.
Although the public is engaged in questions of vulnerability and illu-
sion, Blaine’s performance of jouissance is contained by an almost
classical mode of self-presentation which serves to reify his bodily and
psychic integrity.
Fathers 4 Justice: Superhero dads
While David Blaine is a self-identified performer, Fathers 4 Justice

is a UK-based fathers’ rights pressure group. Formally founded by
Matt O’Connor in 2003, the group has since developed bases in the
Netherlands and Canada in 2004, and in the United States and Italy
in 2005. While the organization was temporarily disbanded in 2006
following suggestions that some members plotted to kidnap Tony
Blair’s son, and has since been relatively inert, during its most active
period the group frequently gained media attention for campaigning for
father’s rights in a variety of well-known locations throughout London.
Unlike similarly invested groups, Fathers 4 Justice operates within a
style of guerrilla performance to highlight their perceived discrimina-
tion within social and legal systems.
Of particular interest to this chapter is not so much the legitimacy
of the Fathers 4 Justice cause; indeed, in many ways, the group has
been accredited with highlighting real shortcomings in the provision
of father’s rights in Britain. Rather, what interests me here is the man-
ner in which the group plays out fantasies of empowerment through
appearing as comic book heroes such as Spiderman, Superman, and
Batman and Robin during their protests.32 With reference to the so-
called Tower Bridge Protest (2003), House of Commons Protest (2004), and
Buckingham Palace Protest (2004), the chapter examines how the fathers
resignify their attested marginalization and emasculation by filtering
156 Male Trouble
fantasies of phallic masculinity through the figure of the animated

superhero.
While on one level we might think that a man dressing up as a
superhero somehow exposes his inability to approximate such an
embodiment, in the protests by Fathers 4 Justice this very ambiguity is
harnessed in the service of appealing to the public. Much of the rhetoric
that supports this performance aesthetic is outlined in Matt O’Connor’s
Fathers 4 Justice: The Inside Story (2007). In this book, founder O’Connor
charts the activities of the group, in a manner that outlines the organi-
zations aims, achievements, and the public response, but more interest-
ingly still the group’s conception of their performance of self.
First, O’Connor is keen to point out the importance of theatricality
to the group’s activities. On this he maintains, ‘Campaigning can be
serious fun. It can also be theatrical and showbizzy’.33 Advising on how
to conduct a protest, he writes,
Make it eye-poppingly theatrical: Real life can be duller than

watching a party political protest. Why else would the nation want
to live vicariously through reality TV shows? Everyone likes a little
dramatic licence and it’s true that a picture speaks a thousand words.
Create something that you know newspapers will want to print. The
brighter your plumage, the better your coverage.34
While bright plumage is the ideal mode of self-presentation, equally

important is the kind of man – ‘the fully certifiable activist’ who is
‘totally fearless to the point of insanity and beyond’.35
While O’Connor’s book reads like a handbook of macho male stere-
otypes, often with misogynistic overtones, what stands out is less the
activities and the achievements of the group, but rather the way modes
of presentation, and particularly dress, are understood to express a
particular kind of masculinity. This idea receives pointed development
in one section of the book in particular, when O’Connor describes the
process of dressing up as a superhero:
We discovered that it’s all very well coming up with themed

campaigns – men in tights, Lycra lads and caped crusaders – but
the harsh reality is that being a fully unpaid superhero requires one
secret ingredient: balls. Big brass balls in the summer. Pingpong balls
in the autumn. And marbles in the winter. And at the risk of sound-
ing sexist, embarking on a superhero safari is man’s work and once
you’ve read this, you’ll be thankful for that.36
Interestingly, despite the somewhat parodic look of the men dressed as

superheroes, what becomes the real mark of the men’s masculinity for
O’Connor is their ability to deal with the appearance of their penises in
the tight costumes. Further to this, he stresses the value of being able
to handle the physicality of the protests and centralizes the importance
of being able to deal with the humiliation that may come with such
self-exposure:
As you throw your cape over your shoulder and unleash your inner
hero, you’ll be struggling against the enemies of equality while facing
extreme discomfort and fear in a pseudo-Jackass act of exhibitionism,
whether it be scaling a tall building, clinging to a crane, or simply
bringing the traffic to a standstill. But worse, far worse than that is
the humiliation that comes with the costumes you have to wear.37
O’Connor continues to describe in detail the process of donning a

‘supersuit’, in a manner that once again underscores the importance
of appearing as macho as possible. In particular, he describes how
members might enhance the appearance of their penises:
1 Use talc.
2 Put a sock on it: It’s generally fucking cold up there. By the time
the wind chill hits freezing, your bits will have shrunk to the size of
raisins and your knob will have curled up for some self-loving and
warmth. It’s long been suspected that superheroes ‘pad out’ their
lunchboxes to compensate, and I can confirm that cosmetic sock-
enhancements were not unknown in F4J demos.38
Given the centrality of superheroes to the Fathers 4 Justice performance,

in particular Batman and Robin, we might consider the construction
of these characters in a wider context. Writing the masculinity in Tim
Burton’s Batman (1989), for instance, Calvin Thomas suggests that
‘Because it deals with a male “superhero” Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman
inevitably thematizes certain issues concerning masculinity. Specifically,
Burton’s film foregrounds an anxious relation among “armored” mas-
culine subjectivity’.39 Thomas relates this ‘masculinist’ anxiety to the
mechanisms of photographic and cinematic representation, position-
ing it as ‘a constitutive unease about mass cultural “technology of
abjection” that both threatens and works to enforce the boundaries of
normative heterosexual masculinity’.40 In a sense, we might say that the
men involved in the Fathers 4 Justice campaigns are also motivated to
158 Male Trouble
act by the ‘technology of abjection’ which not only gives them unequal
access rights to their children under the law, but which perpetuates the
image of men as unequally competent parents; or, to rephrase Thomas,
which figures them as ‘ontological shits’.41 The superhero costumes
work to allude to this technology of abjection, but moreover they func-
tion to enforce the boundaries of heterosexual masculinity, pitting it as
infinitely malleable, extensible, beyond human.
Baz Kershaw has argued that protest events in the late twentieth
century have become integral to the production of the society of the
spectacle, the simulacra and the hyper-real. He writes,
[T]he synecdochic spectacle of protest challenges a system of

authority in its own terms, because in such societies the display of
power – its symbolic representation in multifarious forms of public
custom, ceremony, and ritual and then their production throughout
the media – has become in some senses more important to the main-
tenance of law and order than authority’s actual powers of coercion
and control.42
But if the maintenance of law and order is understood to operate within

a patriarchal order that predominantly privileges men, then any spec-
tacular display of masculinity may not easily ‘present a reflexive critique
of the foundations of authority’.43 Rather, as in the case of Fathers 4
Justice, such displays also work to recuperate and celebrate a distinctly
masculinist kind of authority.
Self-made Men
While Calvin Thomas suggests that Batman is haunted by the ‘phan-
tasmatic image of having been a passively and cloacally (m)other-made
child’,44 he also illuminates the way in which the superhero figure works
to produce ‘unimpaired masculinity’, to overcome abjection through
active self-creation.45 This will to self-creation in the public sphere binds
David Blaine and Fathers 4 Justice together most powerfully. What is
being played out here is not the vanishing of the subject, from spectacu-
lar centrality to lonely dissolution, as Lacan imagines the function of
the analytic process.46 In both cases, the men seemingly put their abjec-
tion to test: Blaine through endurance-based performances and Fathers
4 Justice through superhero-inspired guerrilla performance practices.
While Blaine has suggested that he performs to make people suffer, and
Fathers 4 Justice perform in order to challenge their social and legal
marginality, in both cases the performers effectively cast themselves
as contemporary superheroes, rather than magicians or activists, in a

manner that relies upon the secure performance of inordinate physical
and mental strength. Quite literally elevated in public, the male body
seeks recognition not through having its vulnerability recognized, as
such, but through showcasing its achievement in being fashioned into
a spectacle of centred, heroic masculinity.
7
The Jackassification of
Male Trouble: Incorporating
the Abject as Norm
Loving to be shattered becomes a self-preservative

strategy.
Leo Bersani, Intimacies1
Beneath the hysteric’s rebellion and challenge to

paternal authority there is thus a hidden call for a
renewed paternal authority, for a father who would
really be a ‘true father’ and adequately embody his
symbolic mandate.2
Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent
Centre of Political Ontology
One of the recuperative strains of masculinity politics to emerge in the

1990s became known as laddism or new laddism. A behaviour typically
associated with young, heterosexual males, central to laddism’s various
discursive inflections was the strategic infantilization of male subjects
to the reductive stereotype that ‘boys will be boys’. This infantilization
might best be understood as a highly manipulative practice, designed
to cultivate the association that laddish behaviour is innate but innocu-
ous, and something that males will overcome with time. The term ‘new
laddism’ reframed this behaviour more definitively as a reactionary
response to feminism; the prefixing ‘new’ implying that this behaviour
pre-existed and was even spurred on the feminist movement. Critics
attuned to masculinist backlash in the 1980s and 1990s noted in the
discursive strategies of new laddism a calculated transposition of mas-
culine norms, designed to license a whole range of negative behaviours.
Commenting on this, Garry Whannel suggests that while new laddism
defends and promotes itself as ‘a form of post-modern irony’, it actually
160
The Jackassification of Male Trouble 161
represents a reconstruction of pre-feminist masculinity, replete with

‘masculine fears of the female Other, masquerading as desire’.3 In an
equally doubting, tongue-in-cheek tone, Pat Stack observes,
The new lad is apparently harmless. Unlike the traditional ‘work-

ing class lad’, the new lad is not violent, nor is he racist. He is an
educated, middle class, witty character who is only reclaiming parts
of harmless masculinity from the horrors of feminism and the ter-
rible wimpishness of the ‘new man’ era. The new lad is, according
to his defenders, only reaffirming the fact that men like a pint, like
their sport, and find women sexually attractive. The new lad is still
‘alternative’ when it comes to comedy, but is free of the sexual prud-
ishness of the original alternative comedy scene.4
In its variously loud, aggressive, and sometimes comic manifestations,

laddism was quick to become a highly marketable cultural phenomenon.
In more recent years it has found its greatest support in a range of televi-
sion shows produced by MTV. At the forefront of this global mediation
has been the hugely successful Jackass series (2001–) which has inspired
a number of offshoot productions such as Viva La Bam (USA, 2003),
Dirty Sanchez (UK, 2003–), and Wildboyz (USA, 2004–), not to mention
real-life replications, recorded on phones and camcorders, and uploaded
to the Internet. All of these shows involve a large group of young men
(many of whom have become celebrities through appearing in a number
of the shows listed) carrying out a range of so-called laddish acts, in
public and private spheres. Typically of a self-harming nature, these acts
structure the homosocial world depicted and function to performatively
secure the ‘normative’ masculinity of associated subjects.
This chapter is not interested in discussing whether or not the inci-
dents screened in Jackass are ‘for real’. This issue seems less relevant
than what categorizations of masculinity are screened and possibly pro-
duced by the phenomenon. Instead, I want to focus on the more press-
ing impact of the Jackass aesthetic. Cintra Wilson draws a comparison
between Jackass and live art in this regard, by placing the show’s leading
man Johnny Knoxville, as well as David Blaine, in the tradition of the
1970s’ performers Paul McCarthy and Chris Burden. Writing on what she
sees as ‘fashionably macho’ acts of ‘simulated crisis’, Wilson comments,
If this were the ‘70s, both Knoxville and Blaine would be impor-
tant conceptual artists (that is, if Blaine didn’t end up a cult
leader instead). Many Jackass installations closely resemble the ‘70s
162 Male Trouble
offerings of artist Paul McCarthy, who would sit in a bathtub wear-

ing a wig, drinking ketchup, and stuffing raw sausages in his mouth
and up his ass (the latter with the assistance of handfuls of Pond’s
cold cream) to the point of illness. Both Knoxville and Blaine are
the intellectual godchildren of masochistic artist Chris Burden who
for his MFA thesis in 1971 locked himself in a 2-by-3-foot locker for
five days at the University of California at Irvine – the first of many
such endurance pieces in his career. Later in ‘71, Burden had a friend
shoot him in the arm with a .22, and in 1974 he crucified himself on
top of a Volkswagen.5
This chapter seeks to examine Jackass primarily within the context of

laddism. I strategically focus on the first film, Jackass: The Movie (2002)6
insofar as it exhibits all the dominant tropes of the television series, off-
shoot shows, and the sequel, Jackass: Number Two (2006).7 Although the
film is of little interest in terms of plot, and my aim is to focus on a range
of categorizations of masculinity, certain scenes are necessarily discussed
at some length as representative of a particular performative iteration
or motif. The study analyses how masculinity is produced through rites
of initiation that involve the abjection, figurative castration, and pene-
tration of the male body. It also examines how males performatively
control their ‘abject others’ in the service of affirming a stable masculine
core. The chapter assesses the role played by comedy in the film, and
questions whether Jackass merely signifies the triumph of low culture or
if it exemplifies a deeper problem with Western masculinity that demands
further attention be given to male trouble, and troubling masculinities.
The boundaries of acceptable masculinity
While the performance of an outward-oriented aggression is very much

part of Jackass’s figuration of masculinity, so too is the rigorous, ritual-
istic testing of the boundaries of male bodies through acts that involve
scatological and fluidic abjection, figurative castration, and the viola-
tion of the male body. While these are seemingly anti-phallic gestures,
in male subjects’ playful relationship to the processes, and in their
endurance and survival of them, the relationship between corporeal
resistance (which does not necessarily rely on exertive muscularity) and
an essential, inviolable male core is reinforced.
The sociologist Tony Jefferson draws attention to the centrality of
endurance to masculinity when he suggests that normative masculin-
ity involves ‘a certain indifference to the body’ as well as ‘hardness’,
manifest in a willingness for endurance. He also proffers that this hard-

ness is mental as well as physical.8 Inverting Freudian and Lacanian
positions, he expands,
Muscular strength has long been associated with masculinity, as a

symbol of perfection, a matter of beauty combined with strength in
different ways. The muscular body offers both power and pleasure.
How does this fit with hardness? The Freudian line suggests that mus-
cular bodies are simply symbolic extensions of the penis and phallic
mystique. But this is reductionist, barely saved by the Lacanian
notion of the phallus as a symbol rather than an actual organ.9
In his revision of these dominant psychoanalytic positions, Jefferson

suggests that ‘hardness’ involves not just strength but a willingness ‘to
risk the body in performance’.10 And it is through taking such risks that
the so-called jackasses prove their masculine worth.
One of the recurring Jackass motifs involves scatological self-abjection.
In one particularly long scene from the film, Dave England prepares
for a task which involves defecating in a display toilet in a hardware
store. Prior to entering the outlet, he and his crew convene in a van
where England confesses his desperate need to use the toilet. With
that, the men push him around the vehicle and press on his intestines,
forcing him to defecate. In response, the group roll about laughing,
until some of the men tumble out of the van and others vomit. Later,
England returns to the shop and undertakes the task as planned. When
reproached by staff, he pleads ignorance, and leaves the building. This
occasion of public defection mirrors a scenario from Season Two of the
television series that involves Chris Raab defecating on the side of the
road, provoking attention from the public passing by, and laughter from
his Jackass companions. These instances also resonate with scenes from
Season Three, such as one involving Knoxville’s nephew being recorded
flatulating and defecating in the living room of his family home, while
being watched by Knoxville and his grandfather, as if some kind of male
rite of (back) passage.
This revelling in scatology is evidenced in numerous other scenes in
the film. Steve-O, a figure who stars in a range of similar productions,
leads a ‘Tropical Pole-Vaulting’ task in which he vaults around palm
trees, volley ball nets, and public spaces. His exercise culminates in an
effort to leap across a sewerage-filled river. As expected, he fails to cross
successfully and plunges into the contaminated water, from where he
laughs aloud to the camera, only to later develop a severe infection.
164 Male Trouble
The performer’s distinctive penchant for ingesting the abject is further

evidenced in his snorting of wasabi in a sushi restaurant, which results
in further emesis to his own delight and to that of his fellow jackasses.
For Steve-O, this pattern is well established: in Series One, he snorts a
live earthworm and coughs it through his mouth.
The ‘Yellow Snow Cone’ scene continues this pattern of border testing.
Set at night, mainstay Ehren McGhehey eats a urine-saturated snow cone.
When he vomits to cheers from his comrades, he is kicked in the testicles
by England, only to fall down, and vomit again. England’s enthusiasm
is rooted in the fact that he is particularly accomplished at consuming his
own bodily waste. In the second season of the television series he eats the
raw ingredients for an omelette – onion, peppers, butter, cheese, tomato,
milk, and eggs – before regurgitating them and cooking the excretion
into an omelette, which he subsequently eats. And in Season Three of the
series, England consumes the faeces from dirty diapers. Here, the abject
does not devour England, as Julia Kristeva suggests it inevitably does;
rather in a bid to master his corporeal impulses, he repeatedly devours
and expels it.
The jackasses’ relationship to abject substances may be further enlight-
ened by Kristeva’s writing. For her, faeces, urine, and mortification all
amount to examples of the abject, as they seem to ‘come from an outside
or an exorbitant inside’,11 and they are unassimilable. Although the self
(‘I’) typically rejects the abject in a bid for the sense of a definable self,
Kristeva suggests that ‘a pole of attraction’12 and repulsion characterizes
the self-abject relationship, as it does in Jackass, which finds the self con-
templating its relation to the abject in terms of ‘Not me. Not that. But
not nothing either. A “something” that I do not recognise as a thing’.13
Despite the feeling of attraction and repulsion which the abject incites,
the self faces annihilation when it acknowledges that the abject is actu-
ally part of the self. This recognition provokes the experience of abjec-
tion, when the subject ‘finds the impossible within; when it finds the
impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject’.14
In Jackass the men repeatedly seek out the abject within the self.
However, they do not recognize the abject to ‘the point where mean-
ing collapses’;15 rather, they ingest and excrete the abject in a mood of
irreverence and nonchalance, as if in a deliberate attempt to deny its
disturbance of identity. As an example of abjection, Kristeva describes the
body’s rejection of spoilt milk: ‘“I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it’.16 And
in this process of expulsion, the body rejects itself as it rejects the milk,
a dynamic which frames abjection as the simultaneous repulsion of what
the self is not and as well as what the self is – ‘I expel myself, I spit myself
out’.17 On the contrary, the Jackass team actively seek out the correlates
of spoilt milk, not to confirm the fragility of identity, but through the
defiance of a self-abject or self-other relationship, to assert the indestruct-
ibility of the male subject.
Johnny Knoxville, the show’s leading man, shows a particular affinity
for fluidic, above scatological, abjection. In one scene of the film,
Knoxville stands on a lawn while a tidal wave is repeatedly released
from a chute overhead, forcing him to stand his ground in its consum-
ing wake. Arising from his saturation, the first thing Knoxville asks the
cameraman is ‘How did it look?’ in a moment which foregrounds the
narcissism of his identity performance. This scene is reminiscent of one
in Series Two when he stood in front of an emergency services water
hose, emitting water at a rate of 325 gallons per minute. Assuming a
range of positions, Knoxville attempted to withstand the elemental
force. This will to survive the ‘oceanic’ is understood by Kristeva and
Klaus Theweleit as symptomatic of a desire to withstand the threat
posed by feminine sexuality. In his study of the relationship between
misogyny and fascism entitled Male Fantasies: Women, Floods, Bodies,
History (1987), Theweleit sees in recurring phobias of water and fluidic
destruction a fear of dissolving the boundaries of male identity, related
to a reactive need to affirm the body’s hardness and invulnerability.18
Castration is one of the most recurrent motifs of both the Jackass
series and the film. In fact, the first episodes of both Series Two and
Three begin with scenes that explicitly play with this notion. In Season
Two a group of children are invited to kick Johnny Knoxville’s cupped
testicles as hard as they can, encouraged from the sidelines by their
mothers and Knoxville himself. Following this exercise, other members
of the crew hit Knoxville’s genitals with tennis balls, pool balls, and a
sledgehammer. While these scenes play upon the threat of castration,
they ultimately work to foreground that (biological) castration has not
taken place, as it has with female sexuality in the writing of Freud. It is
for this reason that Freud describes the castration complex in Analysis
Terminable and Interminable (1937) as a ‘rejection of femininity’.19 In
this orchestration, the male’s indestructibility as a phallic agent is rei-
nforced, a premise established by Knoxville at the beginning of the
Jackass phenomenon when, in the first episode of Season One, he is shot
from a cannon and runs around with a large dildo in his pants. (As an
example of castration games, see Figure 7.1.)
One of the film’s most elaborate and dangerous performances of cas-
tration takes place as part of a scene entitled ‘The Muscle Stimulator’.
Here, Chris Pontius, Knoxville, McGhehey, and England place muscle
166 Male Trouble
Figure 7.1 Johnny Knoxville wearing a ‘beekini’ in Jackass (2000–2).
stimulators at high voltage around various parts of their bodies. Sitting

semi-naked around a table, they all take turns, with one placing the pads
on his face, another on his thumbs and another on his chest. Once the
pads are in position, they are activated by the other men, who laugh
uproariously at each other’s pain. When one of the men reacts with par-
ticular discomfort, Knoxville urges him on with ‘You ok. It’s cool. Come
on. Daddy’s got ya. Daddy’s got ya’. And so, reminded by the ‘father’ of
the subjection integral to their homosocial bond, he willingly endures the
pain. With that, Knoxville calls for someone brave enough to step forward
and have his testicles electrocuted. Both England and Pontius oblige, their
pain rewarded with affirming applause and laughter from their male col-
leagues.
Violating and penetrating the male body
While these scenes of castration may play with the idea of male trou-
ble, they ultimately work to signify that castration has not taken place,
and that the threat of castration is repeatedly survived. In Jackass,
injuring the genitals is a mark of masculine prowess that reinforces
the connection between the biological penis and the right to socio-
Symbolic phallic power. In Jacques Lacan’s writing, the fear of castration
is linked to a series of other anxieties surrounding body dismember-
ment and fragmentation, understood to originate in the mirror stage.
During this phase of development, anxiety is provoked by the indi-
vidual’s perception of difference between its image of synthesis and its
feeling of fragmentation, which spurs the development of the ego and
the pursuit of specular unity. For Lacan, the subject is forever threatened
by memories of the original sense of fragmentation. In ‘Aggressivity in
Psychoanalysis’ (1948), for example, he suggests that these fears mani-
fest themselves in ‘images of castration, emasculation, mutilation, dis-
memberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the
body’.20 To appease this threat, which seems to be the main objective
of the Jackass rituals, the men attempt to confirm the unity of the body
through its ability to either resist or recover form violation.
Although the male body is typically considered to be closed, secure,
and integral, in some respects it is more vulnerable than the female
form. According to Alan Peterson, certain techniques, expectations,
and social practices render men more vulnerable to physical disability,
premature death, and to inflicting violence on others and themselves.
While the muscular, controlled, and impenetrable ‘matter’ is a powerful
vehicle in the performative articulation of normative masculinity, so
too is the ability to react to potential disempowerment through regu-
larly testing the body and mind:
Involvement in ‘risky’ leisure and competitive or combative activi-

ties provides an occasion for demonstrating one’s ‘manliness’. Sport
and warfare are key sites for the disciplining of male bodies, the
regulation of the mind, an the undertaking of risk […] Pushing one’s
body to the limits in competitive sports and in other contexts of
168 Male Trouble
risk-taking, and displaying the emotional and physical control, are

means of enacting masculinity.21
In addition to revelling in scatology and castration, the physical viola-

tion of the male body is also a central feature of Jackass’s construction
of masculinity, where the endurance of and recovery from corporeal
infraction works to reaffirm male authority.
One of the film’s most noted tasks in this regard involves Johnny
Knoxville being shot with a beanbag projectile. The act, which refer-
ences Chris Burden’s performance piece Shoot (1971) involves Knoxville
being shot in the torso by a projectile travelling at 250 feet per second.
In preparing for the task, an instructor says that contact with Knoxville’s
chest will be avoided as it runs a higher risk of mortality. Once shot,
Knoxville immediately drops to the ground in apparent agony, and is
quickly brought to a hospital. Two days later, he reveals the extensive
tissue damage incurred. It is worth noting that this is not the first time
that Knoxville has been shot. In the MTV series he shoots himself with
a handgun. He has also posed being shot by a paint gun for the cover
of Rolling Stone magazine, a mark of the iconicity of his suffering. As
the leading jackass, it is no surprise that Knoxville undertakes the most
dangerous tasks in the film and in the series; it is his very willingness
to repeatedly risk his safety and endure pain that secures his position
as the dominant male, and has earned him the title ‘the hardest-falling
man in show business’.22
‘Ass Kicked by a Girl’ involves Ryan Dunne fighting the World
Women’s lightweight boxing champion Kumagai Naoka, and it is one
of the few representations of women in the film. Although Dunne
seems to mock his own and possibly even his opponent’s participation
by wearing female underwear in the ring, he confides to the camera
his fear of being ‘about to get the shit kicked out of me by a girl’. His
Jackass friends do not show a similar concern, but excitedly surround
the boxing ring in various states of undress. From the wings, in a
homoerotic mosh, they chant and cheer as Dunne is repeatedly beaten
by Naoka in the ring, even as his jaw bleeds and he is nearly knocked
unconscious. Jefferson writes about boxing’s unique power structure,
claiming that the sport provides the ultimate arena for the display of
hardness because boxers require the ability to ‘soak up punishment as
well as dish it out’.23 In the context of the Jackass scene in question,
Jefferson’s insight implies that a man’s ability to ‘soak up’ punishment
from the female Other, which runs the risk of fracturing the male ego,
would not only validate his physical strength but also mental prowess.
This reading finds support in Theodor Reik’s writing, which claims that
‘[t]he masochist is a revolutionist of self-surrender. The lambskin he
wears hides a wolf. His yielding includes defiance, his submissiveness
opposition. Beneath his softness there is hardness; beneath his obsequi-
ousness rebellion is concealed’.24
While minor, external violations of the male body pose a threat to the
stability of normative masculinity, penetrating the male body runs the
risk of interminably undermining the law of differentiation. This is largely
due to the fact that penetration is a more complete gesture that reveals
the actual vulnerability of the body. Moreover, this is due to the fact that
certain kinds of penetration of the male body are associated exclusively
with male homosexuality. For this reason, scenes involving the participa-
tion in and reaction to the puncturing of the male body are most revealing
of the boundaries of acceptable heterosexual masculinity.
Writing on Freud’s Wolfman study, Lacan states, ‘As soon as the fear
of castration comes up for the subject, symptoms appear, located on a
plane we commonly call the anal, since they are intestinal’.25 Two scenes
focus explicitly on this form of castration anxiety. The first involves
Steve-O being challenged to insert a glass bottle in his rectum. Although
he does not turn down any other task on screen, he refuses to undertake
this one, fearing that his father would disown him. One of the crew,
surprised by his response, asks, ‘You said that you didn’t want to do
it cause your dad would disown you? […] You drank wine off a dude’s
ass crack’. Steve’s only defence of his stance is ‘My dad never saw that;
never told him that’. It is worth noting that Steve does not have any
problem with inserting fireworks in his anus, as he does in the film and
in the series. However, for a dominant male like Steve, prolonged anal
penetration, which runs the risk of appearing pleasurable, is a step too
far. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that he has his buttocks bolted
together in Season Three of the television series.
This particular instance of penetration draws attention to the intense
anality of the group’s practices, filtered through references to shit and
flatuence, or anal exposure and penetration. As I have already sug-
gested, however, a marked anxiety is generated when the line between
pain and pleasure becomes unclear, rendering the anus as ‘the privi-
leged site for the persecution of desires’.26 In ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’
(1988) Leo Bersani explores what is at stake in the oscillation of power
in sexuality and sexual practice:
The self which the sexual shatters provides the basis on which sexu-
ality is associated with power. It is possible to think of the sexual as,
170 Male Trouble
precisely, moving between a hyperbolic sense of self and a loss of

consciousness of self. But sex as self-hyperbole is perhaps a repres-
sion of self as self-abolition. It inaccurately replicates self-shattering
as self-swelling, as psychic tumescence.27
Not only is the danger of moving between hyperbole and loss height-
ened by the hypermasculine context of Jackass, but also the potential
for the eroticization of the anus separates normative heterosexuality
from unacceptable homosexuality. The ‘asshole’, Bersani writes, is the
ultimate organ/signifer of gay male sexuality for heterosexuality, and
anal sex is associated with a ‘self-annihilation originally and primarily
identified with the fantasmatic mystery of an insatiable, unstoppable
female sexuality’.28 For Lee Edelman too, the orifice represents a whole
that defines the part, and it is the sight of this figure which leads to
the disavowal of definition, or figuration, itself.29
In Steve-O’s refusal, the task is taken up by Ryan Dunne, one of the
more junior members of the group, a gesture that once again frames
the action as a preparatory rite. In a bedroom, in the presence of a
medic and other Jackass members, Dunne inserts a blue toy car into his
rectum. Although he was in fact assisted in this task, some careful edit-
ing makes it look like his does it himself, in order for the film to avoid
sodomy legislation active in some states in the United States. When,
during this process, another man walks into the room, Dunne calls out,
‘Tell me I’m a man!’ He does not get an immediate reply, as the answer
is dependent on how he endures the process.
In The Shell and the Kernel, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok discuss
the nature of psychic incorporation by suggesting that identification
belongs to the realm of incorporations, which sees the prohibited love
object of the Oedipus complex settle in the ego ‘in order to compensate
for the lost pleasure and failed introjection’.30 Addressing a similar issue,
Judith Butler wonders where such an incorporated bodily space might
be: ‘If it is not literally within the body’, she suggests, then ‘the body
must itself be understood as an incorporated space’.31 In the Jackass scene
under discussion, the ‘incorporated space’ is literally ‘within the body’.
While the toy car is typically an object of masculine identification,
its actual bodily incorporation sees identification move dangerously
into the realm of desire. However, in presenting the task as an act of
endurance, Dunne manages to rescue his heterosexuality in the eyes of
his male peers.
Once the car is inserted in Dunne’s anus, he attends a doctor for an
x-ray. He tells him that he was at fraternity party, fell asleep, and woke
up with pains. When the doctor discovers that there is a toy car in his
rectum he calls a colleague and is overheard telling him that Dunne
was at a party and that ‘they were having sex with each other, and
stuff like that’. Referred to someone else, Dunne leaves the clinic with
a caution from the doctor: ‘You just go to the doctor. You don’t talk to
anybody […] to your girlfriend, to your boyfriend, to whomever […]
You don’t tell nobody, all right. He already knows [pointing to the one
of the crew] – that’s too many people’.
The others of stable masculinity: Childhood, old age,

animalism
In addition to those laddish acts that test and ultimately affirm the
masculinity of the enacting male subjects, Jackass includes many less
painful, less dangerous, scenarios of a prankster variety. Thematically,
these centre on childhood, old age, obesity, and male physicality.
Despite their comic rendering, these iterations are constitutive of a
larger performative pattern wherein males strive to control states of
vulnerability which have, could, or will inevitably undermine their
masculine authority.
At the outset of this chapter I eluded to the relationship between
laddism and male infantilization. In this conflation, it is inevitable
that many of the scenarios in Jackass involve an element of apparent
juvenility. While this is often used to license bad behaviour, it also
amounts to a kind of fetishizing of boyhood and a wish to protect and
preserve ‘the child inside the man’, so to speak. This is most clearly
evidenced in the frequency of activities that involve children’s toys or
games. Many of the Jackass crew are actively involved in skateboarding –
in fact the show evolved out of skate culture – and this is reflected in
the number of tasks that involve skateboarding and bike riding. In one
scene in the film, Knoxville attaches bottle rockets to the back of a pair
of skates and rolls down hills. In another, entitled ‘Roller Disco Trunk’,
Bam Margera, Steve-O, Pontius, Knoxville, and Dunne dress up in 70’s
clothes and roller-skate in the back of a truck. Driven haphazardly, the
men are knocked about inside, and fall to the ground, laughing. In
another scene, Knoxville tries to skate down the handrail of steep out-
door steps. He falls, but laughs regardless. Similar ludic acts recur in the
television series, and include the cast ice-skating over barrels, skating on
ice-blocks, snowboarding naked, and rolling down golf courses (all from
Season Three). This air of juvenility also permits the acceptable cultiva-
tion of hard, sporting masculinity, which, despite its presentation here,
172 Male Trouble
is based upon ‘muscularity, a lack of sentiment, acceptance of pain’ and

a will to ‘reassert a traditional masculinity [… confronting …] dishon-
ourable feminized men’.32
Perhaps more revealing of male anxiety are those scenes that involve
the performers dressing up as old men. Wearing customized silicon
masks, they carry out a range of unlikely events in public, including
rapping in the streets, riding geriatric mopeds down flights of steps,
and freewheeling down hills. Another recurring portrayal is that of an
‘old man’ shoplifting, deliberately provoking retail staff and security to
confrontation. The punch line seems to be that an old man, assumed by
the social majority to be impotent, is extremely physically and mentally
competent in defending himself. This pattern of preserving strength
in old age is most vividly manifest in a scene which involves Johnny
Knoxville, dressed as old man, weightlifting in a gym. Cautious for his
safety, the gym instructor asks if he needs assistance. Soon after Knoxville
has turned down the offer, he falls on the ground with a weight pressed
against his neck, prompting the instructor to frantically rush to his help.
Knoxville rises, coughing, amused by his diversionary tactic. I suggest
that these performances resonate within a male fantasy of continuous,
inviolable presence and strength. As self-harming laddism reflexively
empowers the enacting subject, these performances of vulnerability are
exploited to assert the indestructibility of the Jackass males.
In contrast to these depictions, the film has a particularly negative
take on obesity. There are numerous scenes that centre on the comic
spectacle of obesity, pitted in direct contrast to the discipline of the
jackass’s body. In one scene a morbidly obese man, who is eating on a
bench, breaks it. When he falls to the ground, exposing his behind,
a passer by goes to help him, but he runs away. In another incident,
a BMX cyclist tries to tow away a couch on which an obese man sits.
Similarly, in ‘Sweaty Fat Fucks’ Margera and his two friends, Matt
Hoffman and Tony Hawk, are padded to appear grossly overweight
and skate around a park. Unable to move as agilely as normal, they fall
around the ring, injuring themselves and snapping their skate boards.
This depiction resonates with one from Season Three, which involves
Margera, dressed to appear overweight, repeatedly fall off a treadmill.
Against this spectacle of impotent masculinity, the masculinity of
Jason Acuña, known as ‘wee man’ on account of his dwarfism, is
celebrated. While masculine prowess is typically associated with physical
size, as Jefferson notes above, this prowess is also determined by a
capacity for ‘hardness’. Acuña validates his masculinity on his ability to
endure rather than on his ability to inflict, or rather than on the basis of
his physical size. Further, Acuña’s size is celebrated for it permits him to
endure unique circumstances, unavailable to the other men. For exam-
ple, Acuña dodges crowds while being chased and eventually attacked
by a sumo wrestler, hides under a traffic cone in order to obstruct
crowded streets, and kicks himself in the head for the amusement of the
group. In the recording of a video for the singer Shaq, shown in Season
Three, Acuña allows Shaq to repeatedly simulate sex with him.
Many of the film’s macho rituals involve animals. On one occa-
sion, Knoxville’s powers of endurance are tested when a baby alligator
is deliberately placed in front of his chest until it bites down on his
nipple. However, his feat in the film does not upstage his performance
in Season Two when he plays matador to a number of raging bulls, or
when he covers his face with leeches to contrive Abraham Lincoln’s
beard. In another instance, Pontius (dressed in a bikini) tries to ward
off alligators in a pond while Steve-O attempts to walk a tight rope
overhead. In advance of the action, Pontius speaks directly to the cam-
era, saying, ‘Any of these alligators try to ruin our swimming; I’m going
to wrestle them down and probably have my way with them.’ When
Steve falls into the water, Pontius helps him get back up safely, but this
time he attaches a piece of meat to his underwear, and dangles it over
the alligator’s heads. One bites, as the Jackass team looks on cheering,
but Steve-O remains untouched. On another occasion, Steve-O and
Pontius scuba dive with whale sharks, first filling their underwear with
shrimp in order to entice the sharks closer, and foreground the threat
of castration. When the sharks only eat the shrimp, the men’s survival
is presented as a phallic triumph, despite Pontius’ emerging awareness
of the deficit between his physical phallus and its symbolic referent:
‘My penis looks really small right now. I can’t really look cool right
now.’ During the same diving expedition, Steve-O and Pontius are told
by their diving instructor that sea anemones release white fluid when
scared. When underwater, they both grab hold of anemones and rub
them in a masturbatory fashion, until they emit the seminal fluid.
Clearly, the use of animals reflects the fantasy of a sort of primal
engagement. Less than dissembling the ‘different organizational struc-
tures of the living being’,33 as Jacques Derrida deems as ethically
important, or an anti-Oedipal unravelling coterminous with ‘becoming
animal’, as in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s formulation,34 sce-
narios with animals serve to emphasize male superiority. This attraction
to bestial pain might also be undertood as a variation of the attraction
to the inanimate object, for both relationships are marked by an indif-
ference towards the structural parameters that create system, order, and
174 Male Trouble
identity. However, humanity and animalism do not mix here as they

do in Mikhail Bakhtin’s grotesque animal-human hybrids, which are
capable of negotiating a multiplicity of identities.35 Despite Johnny
Knoxville’s threat to inseminate a cow himself in Season Two, males
unquestionably supersede animals – ‘the animal is not a subject of law
(or therefore of power)’36 – and masculinity is bolstered by distinguish-
ing its phallic prowess from the undisciplined variety of animals.
Points of enunciation and deconstruction
Throughout this chapter I have maintained that Jackass: The Movie,

like the series, is primarily concerned with the recuperation of male
authority within the context of what I term as laddish practices. Jackass
plays male trouble as pain, subjection, and abjection but resignifies that
same trouble through the reification of endurance. Although almost
frivolously presented as a series of fragmented, comic scenarios, Jackass
cannot be sweepingly applauded for being parodic of its subject matter
or dismissed as merely popular postmodern entertainment, comprised
of an excess of signs that avoid precise signification. For although Allan
Bloom and Jean Baudrillard have, in the past, accused mass culture of
devaluating meaning,37 in the early days of MTV production, before
Jackass was ever conceived, figures like Ann Kaplan warned of the dan-
gers of depoliticizing its output:
Narrative/non-narrative is no longer a useful category within which

to discuss videos. What is important is, first, whether or not any
position manifests itself across the hectic, often incoherent flow
of signifiers which are not necessarily organized in to a chain that
produces a signified, and, second, what are the implications of the
twenty-four hour flow of short (four-minute or less) texts that all
more or less function as adds […] In line with Baudrillard’s theory,
MTV partly exploits the imaginary desires allowed free play through
the various sixties liberation movements, divesting them, for com-
mercial reasons, of their originally revolutionary implications.38
Although blatant in its performance of laddish masculinity, Jackass is

rarely critical of its constitutive terms. There are very few incidents
that reveal the performers’ inability to endure painful rituals, for exam-
ple, and when this does occur, it is usually affirmative of the codes of
heterosexual masculinity, as when Steve-O refuses to insert a bottle in
his anus. Rather, Jackass endorses the recuperation of a masculinity
based on endurance rather than obvious productivity; premised on the

ability to withstand the Other, instead of opening to it. If any form
of masculinity is critiqued in the film, it is the mainly absent kind
which rejects the connection between the enduring male body and the
accruement of power and authority. In the context of laddism, which
critic David Miller has applauded as a genuine ‘attempt by straight
men to come to terms with their new position in the world, with the
second wave of feminism and the undermining of traditional forms
of masculine gender identity, such as jobs in basic industry and full
employment’,39 Jackass may well be seen to reflect a ‘real’ moment of
trouble in Western masculinity. As is well documented in psychoana-
lytic theory and practice, masochism is often exploited as a recupera-
tive, masculinizing strategy:
Pain, cutting and self-harm, including suicidal gestures, are all

attempts at repairing the cohesiveness of the self in the face of over-
whelming anxiety associated with intense fears of annihilation and
the dissolution of the self, Some people in severe distress put their
bodies at high risk, subjecting them to controlled mutilation, because,
in so doing, they feel in charge. The pain which they experience helps
them to conquer their ongoing annihalatory and nihilistic fears.40
Owing to the fact that the politics of masculinity are so closely related
to the politics of governance, Jackass – in a not dissimilar fashion to
The Passion of the Christ – might also be seen to dialogue not only with
American but contemporary Western culture more generally. Shortly
after its US release, which quickly followed the 9/11 attacks on New
York, the film became a box-office number one, prompting one critic to
write, ‘Last week Jackass was the number-one film in the nation, proof
that we have not let the terrorists win. America, as we know it, lives’.41
The type of self-harming masculinity performed in Jackass also allows
male subjects to form apparently close heterosexual relationships
with other men. In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (1985) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick examines the boundaries separat-
ing sexual and nonsexual male relationships. For Sedgwick, homoso-
cial and homosexual relationships are not diametrically oppositional:
‘“Homosocial desire”, to begin with, is a kind of oxymoron. “Homosocial”
is a word [… that …] describes social bonds between persons of the same
sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed with analogy with “homosexual”,
and just as obviously meant to distinguish from “homosexual”.’42
For Sedgwick, homosocial and homosexual relationships may be seen to
176 Male Trouble
exist on a continuum, which she sees evidenced in the ‘erotic triangle’

of Victorian literature, comprising two males in active pursuit of a
‘passive’ female.43 However, no female is pursued in Jackass. Rather, the
laddism at play functions like the apex of Sedgwick’s erotic triangle –
or the ‘total relationship of exchange’ noted by Claude Lèvis-Strauss44 –
that affords male subjects access to homosocial relationships that
are intimate and sometimes erotic, but ultimately aggressive enough
to avoid entering the abject domain of the homosexual. Writing on
the novels of Henry James, Sedgwick diagnoses the tension among male
social groups as a kind of ‘homosexual panic’, characterized by ‘a male
panic in the face of heterosexuality’,45 which goes some way to shed
light on the functional urgency of laddish performativity in Jackass. In
the omission of female subjectivity, and in the careful guarding against
homosexual desire through the use of aggressive buffering strategies,
Jackass creatively loosens and licenses the norms of heteronormative
masculinity. However, it only does so in order to creatively accommo-
date its heterosexual male subjects.
While I maintain that laddism functions as a masculinizing strategy
that simultaneously affords males access to homosocial intimacy, the
film concludes with a scene called ‘Son of Jackass’ which, in a genuinely
parodic fashion, imagines the behaviour of the cast in 2063. In a rework-
ing of the film’s opening scene, the men, made up to appear old, emerge
from the smoky distance to Carl Orff’s O Fortuna. Now, however, they are
not aggressively riding in a shopping trolley as they do in the opening
scene, but are attached to intravenous drips, riding on geriatric bikes,
and holding walking sticks. Like the opening shot, there is an explosion
here too, but now the men are not immune to harm. Instead, they are
killed by exploding cars, engulfed by flames, and decapitated by shrap-
nel. This concluding scenario would seem to acknowledge the ultimate
destructibility of the male performers; the fact that there will come a
time when their endurance testing will not confirm anything about
their masculinity, but rather their mortality. And yet, in Steve-O’s final
exclamation, lurched at the camera – ‘Yeah Dude!’ – the jackasses seem
to relish in this nihilism that gives urgency to their injurious exploits.
Big others and little others
In The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (1999),

Slavoj Žižek provides a detailed discussion on symbolic authority by
considering the Oedipus complex in light of contemporary claims to
the decline of paternal power. Of significance to this study, Žižek links
the decline of symbolic authority to the splintering of the Big Other

into small big Others. The father is no longer perceived as the ego ideal
that provides an (impossible) template for self-creation, Žižek argues,
but as a more localized, ideal ego:
[A] father is no longer perceived as one’s Ego Ideal, the (more or less
failed, inadequate) bearer of symbolic authority, but as one’s ideal
ego, imaginary competitor – with the result that subjects never really
‘grow up’, that we are dealing today with individuals in their thirties
and forties that remain, in terms of their psychic economy, ‘imma-
ture’ adolescents competing with their fathers.46
In this interpretation, the decline of symbolic paternal authority has

resulted in a certain infantilization. The subject is condemned to seek
definition by competing against imaginary fathers.
For Žižek, this questioning of imaginary and symbolic fathers is char-
acteristic of hysterical subjectivity. It is the hysteric that questions his
relationship to the big Other, wondering what it wants of the subject,
and what the subject is for it:
Hysteria is not simply the battleground between secret desires and

symbolic prohibitions; it also, and above all, articulates the gnawing
doubt whether secret desires contain what they promise – whether
an inability to enjoy hinges only on symbolic prohibitions. In other
words, the pervert precludes the Unconscious because he knows the
answer (what brings jouissance to the Other); he has no doubts about
it; his position is unshakeable; what the hysteric doubts – that is,
her position is that of an eternal and constitutive (self) questioning:
What does the Other want from me? What am I for the Other?47
Žižek also sees the questioning of what it means to be a subject as a

consequence of the decline in symbolic authority, revealed in recent
calls for men to be ‘real men’, and fathers to be ‘real fathers’; fathers of
‘the uncompromising No!’48
As is well known, there lies the problem of the hysteric: the central
figure of his universe is the ‘humiliated father’, that is, he is obsessed
with the signs of the real father’s weakness and failure, and criticizes
him incessantly for not living up to his symbolic mandate – beneath
the hysteric’s rebellion and challenge to paternal authority there is
thus a hidden call for a renewed paternal authority, for a father who
178 Male Trouble
would really be a ‘true father’ and adequately embody his symbolic

mandate.49
Žižek’s writing on this aspect of subjectivity resonates strongly with

many of the issues explored in this book. All of the chapters collected in
this study emerged during a cultural moment framed by gender trouble,
and marked by a decline in symbolic paternal authority. The case stud-
ies of heteronormative and homosexual masculinity assembled here are
precisely concerned, to various degrees, with the questioning of what
it means to be a male subject. Complex and contradictory networks of
identification, desire, and relationality are evident in all the perform-
ances and representations examined that prevent the easy assumption
of unified gendered identity.
In the examples analysed in this book, the male subject’s often vio-
lent endurance of abjection, emasculation, and vicitimization might
be understood as a protest against the symbolic father’s weakness, but
also a performative gesture of self-creation. To invoke Lacan’s writings
on the mirror stage, we might say that the male ‘I’ of these examples
is frequently haunted by the threat of his own dismemberment, castra-
tion, and emasculation; and it is this anxiety which spurs him towards
the testing of his fragmentability against an orthopaedic, ‘rigid ideal’.50
Supporting this reading, Žižek maintains that subjectivity remains in
something of a deadlock, despite the postmodern faith in genuine fluid-
ity. He refers to masochism as a prime example of this belief in reflexiv-
ity that nonetheless binds the subject to a regulatory regime:
[The] ‘masochistic’ reflexive turn, through which the repressive regu-

latory procedures themselves are libidinally invested and function
as a source of libidinal satisfaction, provides the key to how power
mechanisms function: regulatory power mechanisms remain opera-
tive only in so far as they are secretly sustained by the very element
they endeavor to ‘repress’.
Commodifying, commercializing, and containing

male trouble
While Butler’s writing on performativity and Žižek’s notion of hysteri-

cal questioning signals ways in which the mechanisms of heteronorma-
tivity might be exposed and agitated, the analyses of performances and
representaions considered in this study reveal that positions of abjec-
tion, emasculation, masochism, sacrifice, victimization, and corporeal
im/penetrability among ostensibly heterosexual and homosexual mas-

culinities ultimately work to control deviant desire and stabilize male
subjectivity, therein sustaining heteronormativity’s regulatory engine.
So while the work observed might begin at a point of gender trouble,
its performative arc typically ends at a point of resolution. Outside of
identity politics, this regulatory function of ‘transgression’ is widely
affirmed. In his book of the same title, Chris Jenks claims that while
the desire to exceed boundaries is a dominant feature of modernity and
so-called postmodernity, transgression is essentially a reflexive process:
‘To transgress is to go beyond the bounds or limits set buy a command-
ment or law […] But to transgress is more than this, it is to announce
and even laudate the commandment, the law or the convention’.51
In affirming the Law, the transformative potential of transgression is
limited:
Transgressive behaviour does not deny limits or boundaries, rather

it exceeds them and thus completes them. Every rule, limit, bound-
ary or edge carries with it its own fracture, penetration or impulse to
disobey. The transgression is a component of the rule. Seen in this
way, excess is not an aberration nor a luxury, it is rather a dynamic
force in cultural reproduction – it prevents stagnation by breaking
the rule and ensures its stability by reaffirming the rule.52
In addition to the trajectory of individual cases analysed in this book,

this study has a culminating point of its own; a point where queerness
is managed as a condition of the normative. Such a culmination, I sug-
gest, might be described as the jackassification of masculinity in con-
temporary culture, whereby male trouble is turned into a commercial
commodity, divested of real social and critical urgency.
Reflecting on recent trends in reality television programming, the
critic Kent Williams suggests that ‘the essence of contemporary enter-
tainment [is]: sadomasochism. In the old shows, suffering was the by-
product […] Today, it’s the product. Instead of grace under pressure,
audiences now crave disgrace under pressure’.53 Many people would
suggest that Jackass, and other programmes and films of its particular
genre, represents the ‘triumph of low culture and cheap thrills’54 in
late capitalist society. Reading Jackass in this light, we might see the
phenomenon as a developmental fusion of decades of action movies,
sporting obsession, and reality television, carefully constructed here as
a series of quick-fix fragments of ‘real-life’ riotous carnival. However,
owing to the fact that Jackass has spawned so many similar shows that
180 Male Trouble
dominate our screens and popular cultural references, and given that it
may be contextualized alongside the other examples considered in this
book, such interpretations seem reductive.
In order to challenge the suggestion that Jackass merely marks the
carnivalesque eruption of low culture into the public arena, I wish to
return to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque as developed in
his study of the works of Rabelais. As Bakhtin saw it, one of the most
important features of the Medieval carnival was the absorption of the
individual into the collective, the destruction of social hierarchy, and
the triumph of equality: ‘Here, in the town square, a special form of free
and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by
the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age.’55 Robert Stam echoes
this dimension to the carnival, emphasizing its role in disturbing the
status quo: ‘Carnival promotes a ludic and critical relation to all official
discourses, whether political, literary or ecclesiastical.’56 Jackass, on the
other hand, is not critical of dominant ideologies. Rather, the show is
extremely narrow in its points of focus, which almost exclusively relate
to issues of male gender and sexuality. Although presented as playful,
this relationship is not critically examined in either of the films or the
series. Further, while these male bodies are pushed to their limits, they
are not the elastic, malleable, unfinished forms of the carnival tradition.
Conversely, gender and sexuality are treated without the celebration
of alterity which Bakhtinian representation requires.57 It was this very
quality of Bakhtinian thought which inspired Kristeva to seek ways of
transcending the metaphysical category of difference in her concept of the
semiotic, and in her reworking of the concept of the carnivalesque, to
the point where ‘discourse attains its “potential infinity” […] where
prohibitions (representation, “monologism”) and their transgression
(drama, body, “dialogism”) coexist’.58
Reflecting on Bakhtin’s wider contribution to leftist cultural critique,
Stam warns of the dangers of co-opting Bakhtin’s theories for the dis-
cernment of ‘redeeming elements even in the most degraded cultural
productions and activities’.59 Drawing specifically on the example of
fraternity films such as Animal House (1978), Stam cautions how some
so-called carnivalesque behaviour actually supports the dominant power
structures it is presumed to critique: ‘It would be wrong, for example,
to see the beer-fuelled carousing of fraternity boys in Animal House as
a Bakhtinian celebration of people’s culture, since fraternity boys and
their macho rituals form an integral part of the power structure which
authentic carnival symbolically overturns.’60 Stam’s comment reads as a
timely reservation for those who claim that Jackass is merely an example
of low culture which is funny, foolish, and harmless. Even aside from
the gendered signficance, surely nothing produced by MTV can call itself
carnival in the Baktinian sense of the term. In Jackass’s near dominance
of the channel, reflected in the continual showing of the series and off-
shoot series, there remains little to suggest that this is ‘the oppositional
culture of the oppressed, the official world as seen from below’.61
In ‘Sliding Off the Stereotype: Gender Difference in the Future of
Television’ (1988), William Galperin suggests that televised action and
sporting events, of which I consider Jackass to be a contemporary exam-
ple, might be seen to give form to male fantasies, giving men access to
a power they otherwise lack. Galperin suggests that such representa-
tions cultivate ‘an absorption of men by men’.62 Inflecting a paternal
metaphor, Galperin makes a distinction between action sports and
soap operas: ‘If televised sports can be said, on occasion, to render the
divine incarnate – to mystify the human in the image of the father –
soap operas tend rather to retrace this movement back to the very
structure that requires God to be a father.’63 Although Galperin refers
specifically to sport, his comments are as relevant to other action-based
performances, not least of all which include Jackass. In its celebration of
the omnipotent male, it also ‘renders the divine incarnate’, and in this
it might be seen to exemplify the trend in cultural representation that
Galperin identified embryonically in the late 1980s.
Žižek suggests that social shifts should be observed in terms of sym-
bolic changes. Significant moments of change, he asserts, incorporate
the abject as norm: ‘This moment of change is the moment at which
the system restructures its rules in order to accommodate itself to new
conditions by incorporating the originally subversive moment.’64 In its
pervasion of popular culture, I suggest that this is precisely what the
Jackass phenomenon signifies: the assimilation of trouble by heteronor-
mative masculinity such that it is defined, at least in part, by its ability
to play with and manage queer desire. Of course, this is very much the
work of global capitalism that fetishizes lack and introduces it as com-
modity. Under such a regime, the possibiliy of an interruptive act or
a paradigm-shifting event seems virtually impossible.65 That does not
mean that gender and sexuality simply become unproblematic. Rather,
they require more nuanced forms of critical analysis and cultural
intervention.
8
An Ethic of Fragilization
Am I made man in the hour when I cease to be?

Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory
and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis.1
The question of the political process is always a question

that goes beyond identities. It’s the question of finding
something that is, paradoxically, a generic identity, the
identity of non-identity, the identity which is beyond
all identities […] It’s something like an identity which
is non-identity; it’s humanity as such.2
Alain Badiou, in interview
Femininity, I propose, transforms from within what it

means to be a subject, for it is the kernel of ethical being,
the ultimate measure of the ethical relationship.3
Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace
This book has analysed performances and representations of ostensible

‘masculinities in crisis’ which inevitably incorporate trouble as norm by
operating within a distinctly phallic, sacrificial model of identity. That
is to say, subjective violence both reveals and reproduces systemic vio-
lence. Male trouble emerges as a network of performative practices that
contain the queer disruption that crisis might otherwise signify. While
the reading offered here is queer, the plays, performances, and films are
less easy to situate insofar as they are so deeply immured in a victimized
logic. Rather than rethink restrictive terms of identity and relationality,
the works are committed to the reconstitution of a phallic masculin-
ity via a performative politics of suffering. Focusing on a spectrum of
182
An Ethic of Fragilization 183
ostensibly gay and straight masculinities, what remains most troubling

in these constructions is an underlying fear of women and what we might
think of as ‘the feminine’.4 Repeatedly, what we are confronted with is
the feminization of trauma and the traumatization of the feminine.
Even though this particular structuring of masculinity is pervasive, it is
not without being challenged. While this study has worked to reveal how
complex, subtle, and sometimes blatant these dynamics function, I would
like to follow up my discrete readings with a wishful epilogue that asserts
the necessity of moving beyond this crippling understanding and doing
of subjectivity and relationality. This oppressive framework may be con-
stitutive of and cultivated by a heteronormative imaginary that privileges
patriarchy, but it is also perpetuated – perhaps unwittingly – by many
queer rhetorical and cultural practices. In Queer Optimism: Lyric Optimism
and Other Felicitous Persuasions (2009), Michael D. Snediker brilliantly
draws attention to queer theory’s own debilitating negativity, calling for
a reclamation of critical optimism: ‘Queer Optimism asks that optimism,
embedded in its own immanent present, might be interesting.’5 Searching
beyond trenchant aggression and melancholia, Snediker celebrates a type
of lyric personhood configured within poetry.
Optimism is not where this project ends, although its end is not
without optimism. Rather, it seems most urgent that this book should
close with a call to address further the deep-seated phobia towards the
feminine on which patriarchal Western culture is built, and which
consequently inflects male relationality. While theories of abjection,
masochism, sacrifice, and victimization all tell us something of the
cultural value of the feminine qua its destabilizing force on masculinity,
they do not reveal how that encounter, when met differently, might be
less destructive and more productive. To avoid this incessant masculi-
nization and concomitant rejection of the feminine as Other, and the
Other as feminine, I would like to stress the need to explore an ethic
of fragilization between the subject and culture which has particular
significance and urgency for masculinity.
Leo Bersani’s scholarship has been especially influential in reclaim-
ing the value of instances of disruption in selfhood. Following Jean
Laplanche’s writing on ébranlement or self-shattering, Bersani’s recent
writing in particular explores not the sacrifice of desire as such, but the
sacrifice of the ego. His writing implies that certain forms of identity
crisis do not strictly amount to an undoing of gender or a redefinition
of identity, but rather they might signal the violent hyperbolization
of the ego.6 In Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity (2004),
Bersani and co-author Ulysse Dutoit suggest that within psychoanaly-
184 Male Trouble
sis ‘jouissance “rewards” the illusion of having abolished the distance,

and the difference, between the subject and the world’,7 in a manner
that renders the world intrinsically destructive. Focusing on Terrence
Malick’s film The Thin Red Line (1998), the authors suggest that an alter-
native to the dark enjoyment of self-shattering might be to engage in
willed moments of ‘ontological passivity’,8 which would involve being
‘extraordinarily receptive to the being of the world’, even in the midst
of war. This relation might amount to being ‘shattered by it […] shat-
tered in order to be recycled as allness’. 9 This shattering would open up
the isolated subject to the world, and allow him to apprehend it as an
infinite site of human and non-human correspondences.
Insofar as Bersani’s work focuses on male relationality, it is an espe-
cially interesting platform from which to think about how forms of
crisis might precipitate non-violent forms of self-divestiture that dilute
rather than aggrandize the ego. Further, Bersani’s writing, as Jonathan
Dollimore points out, has long maintained that ‘phallocentrism is not
primarily the denial of power to women but rather the value of the
powerlessness in both men and women’.10 Dollimore expands, ‘By
“powerlessness” he means not gentleness, non-aggressiveness, or even
passivity, but rather the positive potential for a “radical disintegration
and humiliation of the self”.’11
In Intimacies (2008), written as a dialogue with Adam Phillips, Bersani
asks, ‘Might there be forms of self-divestiture not grounded in a teleol-
ogy (or a theology) of the suppression of the ego and, ultimately, the
sacrifice of the self?’12 He looks to gay male barebacking to exemplify
an ethic of ‘impersonal narcissism’13 that would not seek to close
the distance between subjects, precisely by debasing selfhood. This
comes to pass when the subject ‘allows himself to be penetrated, even
replaced, by an unknowable otherness’.14 Despite the ethical value of
disrupting the violent games of selfhood, the debasement for which
Bersani calls can only be thought of as a reaction to an already fixed
symbolic ordering that pressurizes subjects towards moments of psychic
explosivity.
Yet I think Bersani is correct to pit the capacity to experience an
‘unknowable otherness’ as a fascinating ethical possibility or even
imperative. It counteracts the cultural paranoia that forces us to see the
world and those in it as constant sources of menace. In Violence (2009),
Slavoj Žižek suggests that liberal tolerance towards others actually
engenders violence: ‘the respect of otherness and openness towards it,
is counterpointed by an obsessive fear of harassment.’15 This obligation
to be tolerant of the Other, he asserts, means that ‘I’ cannot get too
close to the Other or intrude on her space: ‘What increasingly emerges

as the central human right in late capitalist society is the right not to be
harassed, which is a right to remain at a safe distance from others.’16
Today’s predominant mode of politics is post-political bio-politics – an

awesome example of theoretical jargon which, however, can easily
be unpacked: post-political is a politics which claims to leave behind
old ideological struggles and, instead, focus on expert management
and administration, while ‘bio-politics’ designates the regulation of
the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal […] That
is to say, with the depoliticized, socially objective, expert administra-
tion and coordination of interests as the zero level of politics, the
only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilize
people, is though fear, a basic constituent of today’s subjectivity. For
this reason, bio-politics is ultimately a politics of fear, it focuses on
defence from political victimisation or harassment.17
Žižek’s writing is appealing insofar as it reminds us that the politics of

difference can actually produce violent inequality. This is also a concern
of Alain Badiou’s universalism that seeks to reveal how ethical ideology
that promises to cultivate respect for difference, prevent harm, and
protect rights, can lead to ‘the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest, the
disappearance or extreme fragility of emancipatory politics, the multi-
plication of “ethnic” conflicts, and the universality of unbridled com-
petition’.18 Against identity, he argues, ‘Infinite alterity is quite simply
what there is.’19
While Žižek’s and Badiou’s politics propose the task of inventing new
forms of being that bypass conventional identitarian categories, I have
certain reservations regarding the disruptive imperative suggested by
their work. In Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence
of Change (2009) Adrian Johnston elucidates this problematic as one of
temporality and rhythm:
In its quick dismissal of ostensibly minor actions in favour of await-

ing the miraculous event of the major act, this ‘parallax view’ of poli-
tics is at risk of being blind to, among other things, the possibility of
various dialectical interactions between the multiple speed temporal
tracks structuring both the microcosm of subjectivity and the macro-
cosm of the polis, including immanent self-sundering moments out
of and into the planes of varying-velocity movement associated with
both actions and acts.20
186 Male Trouble
It seems to me that the work of psychoanalyst and artist Bracha L.

Ettinger is more attuned to the subtleties of transformation by consid-
ering the relationship between ‘the microcosm of subjectivity’ and the
‘the macrocosm of the polis’ through their meeting in artistic and cul-
tural practice. Ettinger imagines a radical fragilization of the subject and
phallocentric Law over time, grounded in a resignification of feminine
specificity.21 If, for Lacan, the ethics of psychoanalysis involves refor-
mulating the relationship to the Thing that avoids the vicious superego
cycle of the Law and the desire to transgress the Law, which accounts
for the morbid fascination with self-subjection (while at the same
time avoiding the claim to a direct relationship with the Real Thing),
for Ettinger this ethics can only be realized through encountering the
feminine.22 However, the fragile subject of Ettinger’s imagining is not
the passive figure of Žižek’s or Badiou’s criticism, or indeed the subject
considered in this study. Rather, Ettinger’s fragile subject is character-
ized by its unfolding multiplicity.
Underwriting rather that overwriting psychoanalytic theory, Ettinger
challenges the classic position emphasized by Jacques Lacan and Julia
Kristeva in particular, that maintains that the womb can only appear
in culture as unthinkable and psychotic, based on the assumption that
whatever is thinkable has to pass through the castration mechanism.
The result of this cultural cartography, she maintains, is that the womb
as abject must be rejected, with violent consequences:
It is precisely this mechanism that establishes the mother as an

abject or a lack, scarified to the creation of meaning and to the
meaning of creation, whose elimination is the basis for the creative
process and the Birth of the Hero. This hero perhaps naively ignores
the fact that he eliminates and fore-cludes the begetter-mother (and
also kills the father, only to resurrect him) and takes upon himself
his own birth.23
In this passage, which implicitly critiques Otto Rank’s Genius-Male-

Hero model, the ‘Hero’ of castration is elevated precisely for forgetting
his begetter: for performing the ruse of giving birth to himself. As a
result ‘the mother is either an attractive object of father-son rivalry or a
nursing object, either a copulating animal or a nourishing animal […]
but between copulating and nursing it seems that there is a void’.24
Ettinger suggests that ‘this void […] holds the Genius Hero complex
together’.25 This patriarchal fantasy is certainly damaging for women,
but the act of ‘fore-clusion’ also does damage to men. The solution
Ettinger offers is not to go beyond jouissance as Bersani advocates, nor is

it to be prepared to strike out at the Neighbour Thing, as Žižek proffers.26
Rather, Ettinger’s work seeks to energize the matrixial sphere in order
to acknowledge the ongoing cross-inscriptions of the feminine/prenatal
encounter which only become ‘psychosis-like when they have no sym-
bolic access whatsoever in a culture that takes them for non-sense’.27
‘Metramorphosis’ is the term Ettinger uses to denote the ‘originary
human potentiality for such reciprocal yet asymmetrical crossing of bor-
derlines between phantasy (the primary mode of tracing) and trauma,
and between I and non-I’.28 She suggests that encounters with art can cre-
ate transsubjective connections, in which ‘instances of co-emergence and
co-fading […] transmit[s] the unforgettable memory of oblivion’.29 Art,
Ettinger maintains, retains the ability to unleash and process a traumatic
memory in the present:
When in art a memory emerges, it captures what has just been born
into and from co-spasming, and it opens a lane of fragility. It creates
both the scar and its wound, the amnesia and its memory, and it
makes sense, as an impossibility, as the impossibility of not-sharing
the memory of oblivion as the veiled Event.30
While Ettinger focuses on visual art, she is more broadly interested

in the manner in which a range of cultural practices and encounters
might open up lanes of fragilization that resist foreclosure, by creating
‘a surplus-of-fragility again and again’.31 While Lacan, in his discussion
of Hieronymus Bosch, speaks of ‘lines of fragilization’32 as problemati-
cally hysterical, Ettinger’s fragilization is predicated on rethinking the
womb. She contends that the matrixial space is a real and conceptual site
in which the ‘impossibility of not-sharing with the other is profoundly
fragilizing; it demands its price, but also gives rise to its own beauty’.33
Because they are radically split from the womb – ‘this archaic site of vir-
tuality and potentiality’,34 – Ettinger suggests that men ‘enter in contact
with the matrixial time and site through transference relations and via
art, when they are affected, like women, by joining-in-difference with
others’.35 She continues, ‘An artistic filter, the matrixial apparatus serves
whoever can yield and tolerate this fragile, fragmented, and dispersed
mode of co-becoming.’36
If male trouble is to be truly transformative, then the feminine (and
its associated others) must be disassociated from abjection and psycho-
sis and, as Ettinger suggests, imagined as the basis for a borderlinking,
bordersharing ethical relation. While Badiou’s universalism is strikingly
188 Male Trouble
attractive, I find it difficult at this point in time to imagine the recog-

nition of multiplicity without at least first encountering the matrixial.
This would not simply amount to ‘the recognition of the primary
vulnerability in others, one that one cannot will away without ceasing
to be human’,37 as Judith Butler stresses in Precarious Life: the Powers of
Mourning and Violence (2004); but it would, as she suggests in Undoing
Gender (2004), supply the necessary conditions to imagining otherwise:
‘Fantasy is part of the articulation of the possible; it moves us beyond
what is merely actual and present into a realm of possibility, the not yet
actualized or the not actualizable’.38
***
Throughout this book, I have been mindful not to create a hierarchy of
performances or representations that might be better situated to reveal
or effect male trouble, not least of all in order to reflect that hegemony
indiscriminately operates through a wide range of cultural practices. As
I understand it, male trouble indexes a complex interconnected series of
performative discourses and cultural practices. As I think about the pro-
ductive force of fragilization in these closing paragraphs, however, I am
aware that no singular ‘object’ can supply immediate answers or signal
clear directions. Nonetheless, within the context of queer performance
culture, I think that the theatre and film work of the queer cabaret per-
former Taylor Mac suggests some interesting possibilities which I would
like to discuss in brief.
Taylor Mac is an especially seductive reference point here insofar as
his work to date has been interested in questioning the cultural pro-
duction of fear, anxiety, and paranoia which distort our relationship
to otherness on a daily basis. Much of his work dialogues with a post
9/11 ‘War on Terror’ climate during which mainly American and British
administrations urged citizens to be alert to terrorist activity at all times –
that foreign figure often reducible to the monstrous, feminine East.
Although Taylor Mac uses elements of cross-dressing in his work, he
is not simply a drag artist. Rather, he uses costuming and make-up as
part of an exuberant dramaturgy that seeks to affectively infiltrate those
paralysing lines of thought and feeling about which Ettinger writes.
Discussing the idea of the ‘evanescent moment’39 as it appears in Jacques
Rancière’s On The Shores of Politics (1995), Patricia MacCormack adv-
ances the value of a ‘jubilant ethics’40 to queer projects, which resonates
with Taylor Mac’s work. In the performance Walk (2007), for example,
filmed by Matthew Snead, Taylor Mac breezes through the streets of
London dressed in the most conspicuous stylization of colours and
clothes. As he dances throughout the city, including taking the tube

which was the epicenter of fear following the 7/7 bombings, while sing-
ing ‘I’m afraid of patriotism and nationalism and jingoism […] there’s
nothing to fear but fear itself’,41 Taylor Mac appears like the embodi-
ment of Snediker’s lyric personhood.
However, it is a different performance from his theatre piece The
Be(a)st of Taylor Mac (2007) that I would like to devote my atten-
tion to in these final lines. (See Figure 8.1.) Not the strangely beauti-
ful song that describes the meeting of Lynne Cheney and Saddam
Hussein at the latter’s execution, and the imaginary drama that
inflects the meeting of two novelists who have replaced feeling with
violence, but the performance of a song called ‘Practice’ in which
Taylor Mac recalls ex-boyfriends to the audience. The verse about John
stands out:
John’s father who was manic depressive decided to kill himself

instead by asphyxiating on the exhaust pipe from a lawnmower, but
not before he wrote in big spray paint letters all along the walls of
John’s childhood home: ‘John is a dirty faggot who deserves to die’.42
Not only does the ostensibly real story alert us to the dangers of
foreclosure on masculinity and male relationality in particular, but
Figure 8.1 Taylor Mac, The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac (2007).

190 Male Trouble
beautifully relayed through music, voice, gesture, and design, the per-
formance as encounter-event affectively insists that we are fragilized too
without being immobilized by negativity, aggression, or melancholia.
As the performer leads us through a list of failed love affairs, he punc-
tuates each one with ‘but I love him’, in a move that seems to affirm
‘trouble’ in the widest possible sense as an unresolved, excessive, unrav-
elling temporality of fragilization where all acts of foreclosure come, as
in his song, with too high a price.
Notes
1 Introduction: Performing Male Trouble

1. Anthony Clare, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis (London: Chatto and Windus,
2000), 3.
2. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (1990)
(London and New York: Routledge, 2008), xxix.
3. Calvin Thomas, Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on
Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture, and Film (Basingstoke and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 20.
4. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, xvii.
5. Fay Weldon quoted in Rosalind Coward, Sacred Cows: Is Feminism Relevant to
the New Millennium? (London: Harper Collins, 1999), 60.
6. John Waters, ‘Prejudice is Right on if Men are the Victims’, The Irish Times,
January 12, 1999.
7. Sam Wollaston, ‘With “Xtremely” Healthy Circulation’, Media Guardian,
24 February 1997.
8. The title is taken from the BBC chat show Kilroy which aired on 22 September
1999, BBC1.
9. John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open
University Press, 2002), 79.
10. Anthony Clare, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis, 3–4, 8.
11. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London:
The Athlone Press, 1995), 48.
12. Christopher W. E. Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945–2000 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 371.
13. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face-Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber and
Faber, 2000), 30.
14. The dates listed refer to production premieres and not necessarily published
scripts.
15. Lois Keidan, ‘Blood on the Tracks: The Performance Work of Franko B’, in
Lois Keidan, Stuart Morgan and Nicholas Sinclair, Franko B (London: Black
Dog Publishing, 1999), 1–6, 3.
16. The dates listed refer to premieres.
17. First published in Screen, vol. 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18.
18. Manohla Dargis, ‘Russell Crowe’s Special Brand of Masculinity’, The
New York Times, 4 March 2001. http://www.murphsplace.com/crowe/
dargis2001.html.
19. The film has already been studied by other critics and for this reason is not
considered here. See Lynn M. Ta, ‘Hurt So Good: Fight Club, Masculine
Violence, and the Crisis of Capitalism’. Journal of American Culture, vol. 29,
no. 3 (2006): 265–77.
20. The dates listed refer to premieres.
191
192 Notes
21. Lynn Segal, words delivered as part of the opening address to the confer-
ence ‘Posting the Male’, John Moores University, Liverpool, August 2000.
Quoted in John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture, 93.
22. Pamela Robertson quoted in John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture, 94.
23. Robert William Connell, taken from ‘Arms and the Man’, a paper prepared
for a UNESCO expert group meeting on ‘Male Roles and Masculinities in
the Perspective of a Culture of Peace’. See http://www.peacenews.info/
issues/2443/connell.html.
24. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (London and Durham: Duke
25. Taken from an unpublished paper by Michael Mangan, ‘Shakespeare’s
First Action Heroes: Critical Masculinities in Culture, both Popular and
Unpopular’, quoted in Beynon, Masculinities and Culture, 90.
26. This is the thesis forwarded by George Mosse throughout The Image of Man:
The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
27. Leon Hunt, British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (London and
New York: Routledge, 1998), 72.
28. Susan Jeffords explores the relationship between gender and political
dynamics throughout her book The Remasculinization of America: Gender
and the Vietnam War (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1989).
29. John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture. See chapter on ‘Millennium
Masculinity’, 122–43.
30. Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, (1991) in The Lesbian
and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David
M. Halperin (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 307–20; 314.
31. Samuel Allen Chambers and Terrell Carver, Judith Butler and Political Theory:
Troubling Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 2.
32. I do not mean to suggest that this desire belongs to individuals such as
writers and performers. Rather, I see this desire as culturally produced, in
part effected by another desire for men to show repentance or marginal-
ity, and reproduced by men to regain power via this public expression of
victimization.
33. Thomas underwrites castration anxiety to suggest that there might be, at
bottom, a scatontological anxiety that stems from the knowledge that the
‘I’ is nothing but excrement. In Masculinity, Psychoanalysis: Straight Queer
Theory he describes the distinction in the following terms: ‘If castration
anxiety permits desire to be normatively organized in terms of either being
or having, scatontological anxiety concerns the fear of being abjected, of
being something not worth having’ (p. 70).
34. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London and New York:
Routledge, 1992), 1.
35. Ibid., 9.
36. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
(New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), 4–5.
37. Ibid., 5.
38. Ibid.
39. Patrick Campbell (co-ed. with Adrian Kear), ‘Introduction’, in Psychoanalysis
and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 1–18; 1.
Notes 193
40. Interestingly, writing from an analytic perspective, Joachim Danckwardt and

Peter Wegner suggest that we might think of the term ‘performance’ within
the clinical space as an ‘attempt at restitution’, drawing on Freud’s notion of
‘acting out’, Winnicott’s ideas of play, and Laplanche and Pontalis’s theory
of ‘actualising’. See Joachim F. Danckwardt and Peter Wegner, ‘Performance
as Annihilation or Integration’. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
vol. 88, part 5 (October 2007): 1117–33, 1119–20.
41. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, (1917) in The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIV trans. and ed. James
Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and
Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 246.
42. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, (1923) in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIV, 28–9.
43. Ibid., 31.
44. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as
Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, (1949) in Écrits: A Selection (1977),
trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 2. From here
on in, I will cite Lacan’s seminars in the body of the text with the year in
which they were delivered, and in the endnotes for the year in which they
were published in English.
45. Ibid.
46. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, in Écrits, 316.
47. Ibid., 312.
48. Ibid., 316.
49. Ibid., 318–19.
50. Jacques Lacan, ‘On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of
Psychosis,’ (1959) in Écrits, 229.
51. This Lacanian construction, as outlined in ‘The Signification of the Phallus’
(p. 320), is contested by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose in Feminine
Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, trans. Jacqueline Rose, eds.
Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (London and New York: W. W. Norton,
1982), 74–85.
52. Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 10.
53. Elisabeth Badinter, XY: On Masculine Identity, trans. Lydia Davis (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995), 115.
54. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997), 137
55. Jacqueline Rose, Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Return to Melanie
Klein (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 55.
56. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, foreword
by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 25.
57. Ibid., 34.
58. Patrick Campbell, ‘Introduction’, in Psychoanalysis and Performance, 7.
59. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 50.
60. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.
61. Ibid., 2.
62. Ibid.
194 Notes
63. Ibid., 5.
64. Ibid., 8.
65. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London and
66. Ibid., 232
67. Ibid., 3.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid.
70. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, 33.
71. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 80.
72. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 11.
73. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 85–6.
74. Ibid., 86.
75. Ibid., 90.
76. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers, 2.
78. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, 219.
70. Michel Pêcheux is a French linguist who developed a theory of disidentifica-
tion in response to Louis Althusser’s theory of social interpellation as detailed
in ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1970). In Language, Semantics
and Ideology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982) Pêcheux considers the
constructed subject to be variously good, bad, and disidentifying.
80. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of
Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 12.
81. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, Vol. 1, trans. and
ed. Nicolas T. Rand (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 113.
83. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 114.
84. Ibid., 113.
85. Ibid., 114.
86. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 93. Italics in original.
87. Ibid., 86.
88. Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, (1905) in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, VII,
trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted
by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 157.
89. Ibid., 159
90. Sigmund Freud, ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, (1919) in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XVII, trans. and ed. James
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid., 186.
93. Ibid., 185.
94. Ibid., 186.
95. Ibid., 188.
96. Ibid., 191.
97. Ibid., 189.
Notes 195
98. David Savran, Taking it Like A Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and
Contemporary American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1998), 30.
99. Freud, ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, 191.
100. David Savran, Taking it Like A Man, 30–1.
101. Freud, ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, 184.
102. Ibid., 198.
103. Ibid.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid.
106. Ibid., 200.
107. Ibid., 199.
108. Ibid., 200.
109. Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, (1920) in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XVIII, trans.
and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by
Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001). Explicating his
biological example, with a sacrificial twist, Freud writes, ‘Accordingly, we
might attempt to apply the libido theory which has been arrived at in
psycho-analysis to the mutual relationship of cells. We might suppose that
the life instincts or sexual instincts which are active in each cell take the
other cells as their object, that they partly neutralize the death instincts
(that is, the processes set up by them) in those cells and thus preserve their
life; while the other cells do the same for them, and still others sacrifice
themselves in the performance of this libidinal function.’ (p. 50).
110. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’, (1924) in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIX,
trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and
assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 161.
111. Ibid.
112. Ibid., 162–3.
113. Ibid., 163.
114. Ibid., 162.
115. Ibid., 169.
116. Ibid.
117. Ibid., 169–70.
118. The notion of gender slippage recurs throughout Bodies that Matter.
Discussing Žižek and méconnaisance, Butler writes ‘it may be that the
affirmation of that slippage, the failure of identification is itself the point
of departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference’
(p. 219).
119. Jacques Derrida, ‘Difference’, in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on
Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern
120. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in
the Technique of Psychoanalysis, Book II, 1954–55, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli,
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller with notes by John Forrester (London and New
York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 326.
196 Notes
121. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses, Book III, 1955–56,
trans. Russell Grigg, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller with notes by Russell Grigg
(London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 242.
122. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis,
Book XVII, 1969–70, trans. Russell Grigg, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller with notes
by Russell Grigg (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 15–16.
‘Jouissance’ is a term coined by Lacan to elaborate upon Freud’s notion of
a death drive. Charles Shepherdson describes jouissance as ‘the name for a
dimension of (unnatural) suffering and punishment that inhabits human
pleasure, a dimension that is possible only because the body and its satis-
faction are constitutively denatured, always already bound to representa-
tion’. Moreover, Shepherdson understands jouissance not as a transgression
of paternal law but its eroticization that ensures its reproduction. He writes
that jouissance is intimately ‘tied to punishment, organized not in defiance
of the repressive conventions of civilization, not through the transgres-
sion of the moral law, but precisely in relation to the law’. See Charles
Shepherdson, ‘History and the Real: Foucault with Lacan’. Postmodern
Culture, vol. 5, no. 2 ( January, 1995). Read at http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/
text-only/issue.195/shepherd.195, paragraphs 40–6.
123. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Family Complexes’, (1984) trans. Carolyn Asp. Critical
Texts, vol. 5, no. 3 (1988): 12–29.
124. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60: The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan, Book VII, trans. with notes by David Porter, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller
(London and New York: Routledge 2008), 217.
125. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Response to Jean-Luc Marion’s “Towards a Phenomenological
Sketch of Sacrifice” ’. Viewed online at http://divinity.uchicago.edu/
martycenter/publications/webforum/112008/Response%20to%20Marion
%20Zizek.pdf.
126. Ibid.
127. Ibid.
128. Dennis King Keenan, The Question of Sacrifice (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 2005), 105.
129. Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2006), 142.
130. Blue, Dir Derek Jarman, Basilisk, 1993.
131. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 283.
2 Sacrificial Masculinity in The Passion of the Christ

1. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London: The
Athlone Press, 1995), 189.
2. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity
(London and Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003), 81.
3. The Passion of the Christ. Dir. Mel Gibson, Icon Productions, 2004.
4. René Girard described the film as ‘featuring Jesuses with hair so blond and
eyes so blue that they could never be subjected to the abuses of Roman
soldiers.’ See René Girard, ‘On Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.’
Notes 197
Anthropoetics, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 2004). Read at http://www.

anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1001/RGGibson.htm
5. Sr. Emmerich was an eighteenth-century mystic German Nun. In The
Dolorous Passion of Christ Emmerich records her visions of Jesus’s violent
Passion.
6. David Denby, ‘The Passion of the Christ’, The New Yorker, 8 March 2004.
Read at http://www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/film/the_passion_of_the_
christ_gibson
7. Richard Goldstein, ‘A Backlash Passion: A Messianic Meller for Your Time’,
The Village Voice, February 25–March 2, 2004. Read at http://www.village
voice.com/issues/0408/goldstein.php
8. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 103.
9. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the
Limits of Religious Tolerance (London and New York: New York University
Press, 2003), 4.
10. Jerry Falwell, words spoken on 700 Club, September 13, 2000. Read at http://
online.logcabin.org/talking_points/talking_points_radical_right_quotes.html.
11. Frank Rich, ‘Now on DVD: The Passion of the Bush’, The New York Times,
3 October 2004.
12. Ibid.
13. Gary Bauer of Campaign for Working Families in a letter to supporters. Read
at http://online.logcabin.org/talking_points/talking_points_radical_right_
quotes.html.
14. Don Wildmon speaking on behalf of the AFA. Read at http://online.logcabin.
org/talking_points/talking_points_radical_right_quotes.html
15. A statement from the American Society for the Preservation of the Family.
Read at http://online.logcabin.org/talking_points/talking_points_radical_
right_quotes.htmlon
16. Absolute Astronomy Reference Encyclopaedia. Read at http://www.absoluteas
tronomy.com/encyclopedia/M/Me/Mel_Gibson.htm
17. Sigmund Freud, ‘Moses and Monotheism’, (1939) in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XXIII, trans. and ed. James
18. Daniel Boyarin, ‘What Does a Jew Want? Or, The Political Meaning of the
Phallus’, in The Masculinity Studies Reader, eds. Rachel Adams and David
Savran (Oxford and Malden Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002), 273–91; 273.
19. Jonathan Freedman, ‘Coming out of the Jewish Closet with Marcel Proust’.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 7.4 (2001), 521–51: 522.
20. Jay Geller, ‘A Paleontological View of Freud’s Study of Religion: Unearthing
the Leifmotif Circumcision’. Modern Judaism 13 (1993), 49–70.
21. See ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, (1919) in The Standard Edition, XVII and my
discussion of this paper in Chapter 1.
22. Robert Smart, ‘The Passion of the Christ: Reflections on Mel’s Monstrous
Messiah Movie and the Culture Wars’. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary
Media, no. 47 (2004). Read at http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc47.2005/
melsPassion/index.html
23. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits
of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, 1972–1973, (Encore), trans. with notes by
198 Notes
Bruce Fink, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, (London and New York: W.W. Norton
and Company, 1998), 72–3.
24. Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (New York:
Cornell University Press, 1985), 84–5.
25. Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Michigan: The University of
Michigan Press, 1991), 13.
(Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1982), 59.
(London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 179.
29. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (London and
Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 3.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 151.
33. Ibid., 121.
34. Opening title statement to the film The Passion of the Christ.
35. In Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, for instance, the desubjectified ‘body
without organs’ is afforded subversive potential. See The Theatre and Its
Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958).
36. See, for example, Fred Botting and Scott Wilson’s (eds.) elucidation on the
relationship between sacrifice and intimacy in ‘Introduction: From Experi-
ence to Economy’, The Bataille Reader (Oxford and Malden, Massachusetts:
Blackwell, 1997), 1–34; 22.
37. George Bataille, Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1985), 250.
38. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998), 8.
39. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 69.
40. Ibid., 70.
41. Ibid., 72.
42. Ibid., 91.
43. Ibid., 132–3.
44. Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 1962), 15.
45. Ibid., 16.
46. Hugh Urban, ‘The Remnants of Desire: Sacrificial Violence and Sexual
Transgression in the Cult of the Kapalikas and in the Writings of Georges
Bataille’, Religion 25 (1995): 7–90; 75.
48. Michael O’Rourke has written on the queerness of this intersection in articles
such as ‘Queer Theory’s Loss and the Work of Mourning Jacques Derrida’.
Rhizomes 10 (Spring 2005) http://www.rhizomes.net/issue10/orourke.htm#_
ednref116
49. John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), xviii
50. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 44.
Notes 199
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Jerry Falwell quoted in Francis Fitzgerald, ‘Reporter At Large: A Disciplined,
Charging Army’, The New Yorker, May 18, 1981. Read at http://www.newyorker.
com/archive/1981/05/18/1981_05_18_053_TNY_CARDS_000336703
54. David D. Kirkpatrick, ‘Wrath and Mercy: The Return of the Warrior Jesus,’
The New York Times, 4 April 2004.
55. Ibid.
56. Robert Smart, ‘The Passion of the Christ: Reflections on Mel’s Monstrous
Messiah Movie and the Culture Wars’.
57. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 51.
58. Ibid., 39.
59. Ibid., 85.
60. Ibid., 48.
61. Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 82.
62. Lauren Berlant, ed., Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion
63. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 188–90.
3 Impotent Masculinities in Made in China

and InterMission
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 79.
3. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2.
4. Ibid., 4.
5. Ibid., 70.
7. Ibid., 182.
8. Such plays include Howie the Rookie, 1999; Made in China, 2001; Crestfall,
2003; Terminus, 2007. Film scripts include InterMission, 2003.
9. Karen Fricker, ‘Same Old Show: The Performance of Masculinity in Conor
Mc Pherson’s Port Authority and Mark O’Rowe’s Made in China’. The Irish
Review, 29 (2002): 84–94; 84.
10. While I think that O’Rowe’s plays fit into a trend in British theatre
somewhat reductively termed as ‘In-yer-face’ theatre, I also think that
in its scatological focus O’Rowe’s drama deserves its own nuance. For
instance, in Terminus (2007), his most successful play to date, the climax
of the play occurs when the only male character is anally penetrated by a
worm demon, at which point he sings Bette Midler’s ‘Wind Beneath My
Wings’.
11. Lady Augusta Gregory, ‘Our Irish Theatre’ (1913), in Modern Irish Drama:
A Norton Critical Edition, ed. John. P. Harrington (London and New York:
W.W. Norton, 1991), 377–86; 378.
12. Stephen Di Benedetto, review of Made in China in Irish Theatre Magazine,
vol. 2, no. 9 (2000): 67–70;70.
200 Notes
13. This explanation of hypermasculinity is informed by the term’s explica-

tion by Lucy Candib and Richard Schmitt in ‘About Losing It: The Fear
of Impotence’, in Rethinking Masculinity: Philosophical Explorations in Light
of Feminism, eds. Patrick D. Hopkins, Larry May, and Robert A. Strikwerda
(London and Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.,
1996), 211–36; 222.
14. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, (1958), in Écrits: A Selection
(1977) (London and New York, Routledge, 2001), 316.
15. Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination,’ (1991) in The Lesbian
and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M.
Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 307–20; 313.
16. Ibid., 317.
18. Mark O’Rowe, Made in China (London: Nick Hern Books, 2001), 26.
19. Ibid., 24.
20. Ibid., 23.
21. Ibid., 26.
22. Ibid., 70.
23. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (London and New York: Routledge,
1995), 2.
24. Mark O’ Rowe, Made in China, 72.
25. Peter Middleton, The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern
Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 32.
26. Mark O’Rowe, Made in China, 67.
27. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers, 51.
28. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits
of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, 1972–1973, (Encore), trans. with notes by
Bruce Fink, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (London and New York: W. W. Norton
and Company, 1998), 7.
30. Ibid., 12.
31. Sigmund Freud, ‘Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’
(1910), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, XI, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud
and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001),
99–100.
34. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1. Sedgwick coins the
term ‘homosocial’ to describe the basic structure of patriarchy, wherein
men attempt to establish intimacy with each other via a triangulated
construction with woman. The safeguarding of this arrangement, she claims,
is of crucial importance in preventing the merger of the homosocial with the
homosexual.
35. Karen Fricker, ‘Same Old Show’, in The Irish Review, 84.
36. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford:
Notes 201
38. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, The Psychoses, 1955–56,
(London: and New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 189.
39. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2.
40. Ibid.
(New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), 4–5
43. Ibid, 80.
44. Ibid., 84.
45. Sigmund Freud, ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ (1915), in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIV, trans. and
ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix
Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 127.
47. Ibid., 22.
48. Ibid., 33.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 33–4.
51. Ibid., 82.
52. See Calvin Thomas’s writing on the scatontological in Male Matters:
Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1998) and Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory:
Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture, and Film (Basingstoke and New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Also, see note 29 in Chapter 1 of this book.
53. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Book XI,
(1977) (London and New York: Karnac, 2004), 104.
54. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 185.
55. Ibid., 62.
56. InterMission. Dir. John Crowley, Brown Sauce Film Productions, 2003.
57. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 73–4. See also Fredrich Nietzsche’s idea of
ressentiment, which inspired Brown, in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887),
trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
58. I do not disagree that many people in urban areas experience real disadvan-
tage. But there is nothing Marxist about this film, and it certainly does not
attempt to document these conditions in any thorough way. If the men in
film fetishize impotence, we might also say the viewer is invited to fetishize
the toils of working-class masculinities and their communities.
59. Toby Miller, ‘Stars and Performance’, in Film and Theory, eds. Toby Miller and
Robert Stam (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2000), 595.
60. Michael Quinn, ‘Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting’. New Theatre
Quarterly, vol. VI, no. 22 (May 1990): 154–61; 155.
61. John Hiscock, ‘Colin Farrell on his Passion for Life’, Mirror, 6 August 2003, 5.
62. Farrell frequently affects a strong, working-class Dublin accent in film roles
and interview. While he claimed to be from Blanchardstown, a working-class
area of Dublin, he is actually from its affluent neighbour, Castleknock.
63. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ (1924), in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIX
202 Notes
by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 169–70.
64. Ibid., 161.
65. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Screen, vol. 16, no. 3
(Autumn 1975): 6–18.
66. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 104.
68. The ‘monstrous feminine’ is a term borrowed from Barbara Creed who, in
The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London and New
York: Routledge, 1993), construes a link between the female monster in
horror films and Kristeva’s notion of abjection.
69. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, 47.
70. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, in Écrits, 319–20.
71. Alexandre Kojève, ‘In Place of an Introduction’, in Introduction to the Reading
of Hegel: Lectures on the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’, trans. James H. Nichols, ed.
Allan Bloom, ass. Raymond Queneau (London: Basic Books, 1969), 6–7.
72. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 268. Italics
in original.
73. Film description featured on InterMission’s promotional material, including
posters, and the DVD cover sleeve.
74. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 2004), 117. Although InterMission is not strictly a genre film,
it is highly referential of genre films, including Heists and Westerns.
75. In Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000). Lance Pettitt suggests that the postcolonial Irish
subject is often screened in ‘a raft of negative characteristics, which include
being violent, alcohol-dependent stupid, irrational, dirty, disordered, femi-
nine and infantile’, as evidenced in Ron Howard’s Far and Away (1992). By
contrast, the assertion of male authority is associable with ‘postcolonial
resistance and opposition’ (pp. 11–12).
4 Homosexuality and Subjection in Shopping and

Fucking and Faust is Dead
1. Antonin Artaud, Œuvres Complètes (XXII) (Paris: Gallimard, 1961 and 1976),
153.
2. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III, The Psychoses, 1955–56,
(London and New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 242.
3. Ibid.
4. Donny speaking in Faust is Dead, in Plays: 1 (London: Methuen Drama,
2001), 123.
5. Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking, in Plays: 1 (London: Methuen Drama,
2001), 4.
6. Ibid., 5.
7. Ibid., 18.
8. Ibid.
Notes 203
9. Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in The Anti-

Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Washington: Bay Press,
1983), 111–25; 119.
10. Ibid., 118.
11. Ibid., 119.
12. Martin Gross, The Psychological Society A Critical Analysis of Psychiatry,
Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis, and the Psychological Revolution (New York:
Random House, 1978), 79–80.
13. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(London and Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 26.
14. Ibid., 15–16.
15. Ibid., x.
16. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 135–6.
17. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (1990)
21. Ibid., 180.
22. Judith Butler, ‘Sexual Inversions’, in Discourses of Sexuality, From Aristotle
to AIDS, ed. Domna C. Stanton (Michigan: The University of Michigan
Press, 1995), 344–61; 346. I should also say that my critique of Ravenhill’s
plays does not intend to moralize as to what would be an appropri-
ate mode of representation of gay people. In certain instances, the two
plays in question might work to expose commercialized gay culture to its
more insidious patterns. However, I do think that there is a lack of queer
agency in the plays – both in terms of opening within the play worlds
a space of possibility, but also in terms of destabilizing the greater social
order.
23. I am thinking here of Edelman’s writing on the queer as death-drive as devel-
oped in No Future and discussed in Chapter 2 of this book.
24. Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory
25. R.W. Connell, taken from ‘Arms and the Man’, a paper prepared for a
UNESCO expert group meeting on ‘Male Roles and Masculinities in the
Perspective of a Culture of Peace’. http://www.peacenews.info/issues/2443/
connell.html
26. Jacques Lacan, ‘Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet’, in
Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana
Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 11–52; 11.
27. Ibid., 12.
28. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis XI (1977),
(London and New York: Karnac, 2004), 81.
29. Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking, 45.
30. Ibid., 34.
31. Ibid., 35–6.
204 Notes
32. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(1972), trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 265.
34. Suzanne R. Stewart, Sublime Surrender, Male Masochism at the Fin-De-Siècle
(New York: Cornell University Press, 1998), 2.
36. Ibid., 26.
37. Ibid., 56.
38. Ibid., 83.
39. Ibid., 84.
40. Dylan Evans, Entry on ‘The Real Father’, in An Introductory Dictionary of
Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Bruner-Routledge, 1996), 63.
41. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60: The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan, Book VII, trans. with notes by David Porter, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller
with (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 378.
42. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923), in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIX trans. and ed. James
43. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 78–89.
44. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60, 378.
45. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York, Routledge, 1995), 11.
46. Ibid., 89.
47. Philip Ridley, Pitchfork Disney in Plays 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 35.
49. Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face-Theatre, British Drama Today (London: Faber and
Faber, 2000), 132.
50. Mark Ravenhill, Faust is Dead’, 98.
51. For instance, sadomasochistic imagery features prominently in Madonna’s
Justify My Love (1990) music video.
52. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(1966), (London and New York: Routledge, 1980), 311.
53. Ibid., 312.
54. Mark Cousins and Athar Hussain, Michel Foucault: Theoretical Traditions in the
Social Sciences (London: Macmillan, 1984), 50.
55. Forget Foucault is Baudrillard’s response to Foucault’s History of Sexuality.
Baudrillard claims that Foucault’s genealogies amount to ‘mythic discourse’,
arguing that desire and power and interchangeable, and so desire has no place
in Foucault’s thesis. Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (1977), (Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e), 2007).
56. Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, [extract from the 1981 text] in
Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1988), 169–87, 169. Italics in original.
57. Mark Ravenhill, Faust is Dead, 99.
58. Ibid., 105.
59. Ibid., 100.
60. Ibid., 139–40.
61. Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970), (London:
Sage, 1998), 129.
Notes 205

63. Ibid.
64. Ibid., 124.
65. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London and New York: Verso,
2002), 12.
67. Ibid., 126.
68. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, The Making and Unmaking of the World
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 13.
69. Ibid., 14.
71. Ibid., 132.
72. Between January and March 1991, Jean Baudrillard published three essays in
Libération claiming that the Gulf War was so heavily mediated, that it had
greater virtual, rather than material, currency. These essays were published
as the book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1995).
74. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 17.
76. Ibid., 113.
77. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers, 11–12.
78. Ibid., 77.
79. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60, 310
81. Ibid., 135.
82. Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 119.
84. Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment,
trans. Joan Copjec, eds. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette
Michelson (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 66–7.
85. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Book XI
(1977), (London and New York: Karnac, 2004), 183.
86. Ibid., 183–4.
87. Tim Dean, ‘Homosexuality and the Problem of Otherness’, in Homosexuality
and Psychoanalysis, eds. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2001), 120–43, 129.
5 Wounded Attachments in the Live Art of

Ron Athey and Franko B
1. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 73–4.
2. Anthony Kubiak, Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as
Theatre History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press,
1991), 145.
3. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of
Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 1.
206 Notes
4. Ibid.
5. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
(London and New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1.
6. Deirdre Heddon, Autobiography and Performance (Basingstoke and New York:
Palgrave Macmilllan, 2008), 2.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Please note that I focus on the performers’ earlier practice, and that more
recently, Athey and especially Franko B have worked less with cutting and
bloodletting.
10. Note that the following performances are used for discussion: Four Scenes
in a Harsh Life, performed at ICA Theatre, London, 15/07/1994; Deliverance,
performed at ICA Theatre, London, 09/12/1995; Incorruptible Flesh, per-
formed at Cankarjev Dom, Ljubljana 29/07/1997; The Judas Cradle, per-
formed at Gallery 291, London, 19/05/2005 (viewed live); Mama I Can’t
Sing Part Two, performed at ICA Theatre, London, 13/01/1995; Mama
I Can’t Sing Part Three, performed at ICA Theatre, London, 18/04/1996; I’m
Not Your Babe Part One, performed at ICA Theatre, London, 05/12/1996;
I’m Not Your Babe Part Two, performed at ICA Theatre, London, 06/12/1996;
I Miss You, performed at De Beweeging, Antwerp, 29/10/1999; Oh Lover
Boy, performed at Crawford Municipal Gallery Cork, 3/9/2005 (viewed
live). Unless otherwise stated, photographs and mediatized performances
at the Live Art Development Agency, London, UK were primarily used for
study.
11. The production dates listed in this paragraph refer to first runs, and are not
necessarily the performances analysed.
12. Mary Richards, ‘Ron Athey, A.I.D.S. and the Politics of Pain’, in Body, Space
and Technology, e-journal (Internet Publication: Brunel University, Dept. of
Performing Arts, 2003). Read at http://www.brunel.ac.uk/departments/pfa/
bstjournal/3no2/Papers/mary%20richards.htm
13. Ibid.
14. See, for example Athey quoted in Lois Keidan, ed., Exposures (London: Black
Dog Publishing, 2001), 6.
15. Ibid.
16. Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation, (1975), (London: Vintage, 2007), 306.
17. Fredrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (1887) trans. Douglas Smith
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22.
18. Ron Athey, words spoken in interview on The South Bank Show: Body Art,
12 April 1998.
19. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York:
20. In 1994 the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was publicly criticized
for funding the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, for hosting Ron Athey,
after a spectator claimed that the audience was sprayed with HIV positive
blood. Athey claimed this was not the case.
21. Sigmund Freud, ‘Moses and Monotheism’ (1939), in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XXIII, trans. and ed. James
Notes 207
22. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory
of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1973), 102.
23. Ibid., 78.
24. Elizabeth Grosz, commenting upon Kristeva’s semiotic, suggests that women,
and in particular mothers, risk being associatively tied to the pre-Symbolic
register, to which they are aligned via childbearing. See Elizabeth Grosz,
Jacques Lacan, A Feminist Introduction (London and New York: Routledge,
1990), 163.
25. In ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ Freud describes male beating fantasies as being
structured around three phases of subjection: (1) I am being beaten by my
father; (2) I am being loved by my father; and (3) I am being beaten by my
mother. This beating fantasy, Freud suggests, corresponds to sexual love for
the father: ‘[B]eing beaten also stands for being loved (in a genital sense),
though this has been debased to a lower level owing to regression.’ The
unconscious fantasy of stage two is thus repressed in favour of the more
socially acceptable conscious fantasy of stage three. As such, Freud maintains
that the masochist’s female fantasy is only a veil for a repressed desire for
being beaten by the father. For an elaboration of this discussion, see Chapter 1
26. Ron Athey, words spoken in interview on The South Bank Show: Body Art,
12 April 1998.
27. For an elaboration of Artaud’s position, see Jacques Derrida, ‘The Theatre of
Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, in Writing and Difference, trans.
Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 232–50.
28. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London and
29. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, in Écrits: A Selection (1977),
trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 319.
30. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, 90.
31. Ibid., 89.
32. Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Michigan: University of Michigan
Press, 1991), 54–5.
33. Mary Richards, ‘Ron Athey, A.I.D.S. and the Politics of Pain’.
34. The precise setting is not obvious in performance, although in writing,
Athey identifies it as a surgery hut. See Ron Athey, ‘Voices from the Front’, in
Acting on AIDS: Sex, Drugs and Politics, eds. Joshua Oppenheimer and Helena
Reckitt (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997), 430–44.
35. In Homosexual Desire Guy Hocquenghem argues for a radical queer politics
that would involve the social reclamation of the anus in a bid to destabi-
lize the dominant phallic principle. He writes that the ‘the anus does not
practise discrimination’, given that ‘seen from behind we are all women’.
See Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella Dangoor (London and Durham: Duke
University Press, 1993), 101. In a sense, I like to think that this anticipates
David Wills’ idea of ‘dorsal ethics’ espoused in Dorsality: Thinking Back
through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2008). Sexuality, according to Wills, ‘is not, at least not in the first instance,
determined as hetero- or homosexual, as vaginal or anal, as human (or
indeed animal) or prosthetic, not even as embracing or penetrating but
which implies before all else a coupling with otherness’. (p. 12)
208 Notes
36. Amelia Jones, ‘Holy Body: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper’s
Judas Cradle’, The Drama Review, vol. 50, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 159–69.
37. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London and
New York: Routledge, 1999).
38. Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies (London and New York: Routledge,
2004), 184.
39. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, ‘The Lost Object – Me: Notes on
Endocryptic Identification’ (1975), in The Shell and the Kernel, Vol. 1 (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 141.
40. Ibid., 142.
41. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, foreword
by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 25.
42. Lawrence Steger, words spoken in Incorruptible Flesh, performed at
Cankarjev Dom, Ljubljana on 29 July 1997.
44. Timothy Murray, Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality
in Contemporary French Thought (Ann Arbor: the University of Michigan
press, 1997), 15.
45. Steger speaking in performance.
46. Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ (1991), in The Lesbian
and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M.
Halperin (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 307–20; 314.
47. Sigmund Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’ (1914), in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIX,
by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 150.
48. Ibid., 155.
49. Sigmund Freud, ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account
of a Case of Paranoia (dementia paranoids)’ in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XII, trans. and ed. James
Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 1–82; 71.
50. André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’ in On Private Madness (London: Hogarth
Press and the Institution of Psycho-analysis, 1986), 142–73, 152
51. Joachim F. Danckwardt and Peter Wegner, ‘Performance as Annihilation
or Integration’. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 88, part 5,
October 2007, 1117–33; 1119.
52. Amelia Jones, ‘Holy Body: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper’s
Judas Cradle’, 160.
53. Ibid.,168.
54. Ibid., 161.
55. Ibid., 166.
56. Franko B in interview with Robert Ayers, ‘Listening to Franko B: Blood
Bravery and Beauty’, in Body Probe: Torture Garden 2: Mutant Flesh and Cyber
Primitive (London: Creation Press, 1999), 69.
57. Ibid., 74.
58. Although less forthcoming than Athey about his personal background,
Franko admits to certain details that are crucial to understanding the
Notes 209
relationship between certain figures and authority systems referenced in his

work. Franko spent much of his childhood in a climate of religious fervour
at a Catholic orphanage in Brescis in Northern Italy. While he returned
to live with his mother at the age of seven, he was soon sent away to the
Red Cross, close to Lake Mergozzo. See Sarah Wilson, ‘Franko B: Haute
Surveillance, Haute Couture’, in Franko B, Manuel Vason, Gray Watson
and Sarah Wilson, Franko B: Oh Lover Boy (London: Black Dog, 2001),
Unpaginated.
59. Words spoken in interview with Patrick Campbell and Helen Spackman in
‘With/out An-aesthetic: The Terrible Beauty of Franko B’, The Drama Review,
vol. 42, no. 4, (1998): 56–74; 64.
60. Franko B, Shelf Life (London: Two10 Gallery/The Wellcome Trust, 2000),
6–7.
61. Antonin Artaud, ‘Saint Francis of Assisi’, in Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 5. I acknowledge that Sarah
Wilson makes this comparison with Artaud in her essay in Oh Lover Boy,
unpaginated.
62. Patrick Campbell and Helen Spackman, ‘With/out An-aesthetic: The Terrible
Beauty of Franko B’, 64.
63. Stephen Di Benedetto, ‘The Body as Fluid Dramaturgy: Live Art, Corporeality
and Perception’, in Journal of Dramatic Criticism, vol. XIV, no. 2 (2002): 4–15; 4.
64. Francesca Alfano Miglietti in interview with Franko B in Extreme Bodies: The
Use and Abuse of the Body in Art (Milan: Skira, 2003), 234–9; 239.
65. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990),
66. While the cross draws attention to HIV, Franko does not claim to be HIV
positive like Athey.
67. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 91.
68. It is important to remember, however, that while institutional abuse is
staged, Franko directs the piece at his/a mother in the title, ultimately
implicating her as a root problem. Unlike Athey, however, Franko’s maternal
address is less fraught with explicit concerns surrounding feminine identifi-
cation than it is with abandonment.
69. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (1972), trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York:
Continuum, 2004), 167. For Deleuze and Guattari, the Body Without
Organs is an open, potentialized intensity, ‘full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance’
(p. 167).
70. Franko B interviewed by Gray Watson in Oh Lover Boy, unpaginated.
71. Theodor Reik, Masochism in Sex and Society, trans. M. H. Beigel and
G. M. Kurth (London: Grove Press, 1962), 44–91.
72. See Body Probe or Campbell and Spackman interview.
73. Elisabeth Bronfen, ‘The Body and its Discontents’, in Body Matters: Feminism,
Textuality, Corporeality, eds. Avril Horner and Angela Keana (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000), 109–23.
74. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity
(London and Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003), 103.
210 Notes
75. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: John’s
Hopkins University Press, 1995), 8. I also acknowledge here Dawn Perlmutter’s
elucidation of Girard’s theorization of sacrificial crisis in ‘The Sacrificial
Aesthetic: Blood Rituals from Art to Murder’, in Anthropoetics, vol. 5, no. 2
(Fall 1999–Winter 2000). Read at http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0502/
blood.htm
76. Ibid., 12, 39.
77. Ibid., 34, 39.
78. Ibid., 12.
79. Ibid., 38.
80. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 36.
81. Dawn Perlmutter, ‘The Sacrificial Aesthetic: Blood Rituals from Art to Murder’
82. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 82.
83. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer
Futurity, 173.
84. Jacques Derrida, ‘Economimesis’, in Diacritics, vol. 11, no. 2, trans. R. Klein
(1981): 3–25; 9.
85. Ibid.
86. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representa-
tion’, 43.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid.
90. Amelia Jones, ‘Dis/playing the Phallus: Male Artists Perform their
Masculinities’, in Art History, vol. 17, no. 4 (1994): 546–84; 557.
91. Francesca Alfano Miglietti, Extreme Bodies: The Use and Abuse of the Body in
Art, 34.
92. Maurizia Boscagli, Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early
Twentieth Century (Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), 5.
93. In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Freud suggests that the fort/da game he
played with his grandson, in which an object repeatedly disappeared and
returned, allowed the boy to manage his anxiety about the absences of his
mother. But this repetition of anxiety also has implications for managing
‘trouble’ and securing subjectivity in the long term: ‘each fresh repetition
seems to strengthen the mastery they are in search of’ (p. 35). See ‘Beyond
the Pleasure Principle’, (1920) in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XVIII, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in
collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson
(London: Vintage, 2001).
94. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 70.
95. Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London and New York:
96. See Johannes Birringer, Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 203.
97. Kristeva suggests that the process of separation is fundamental to the corps
propre or clean body. However, while the clean body is the opposite to the
abject body, the former is dependent upon the latter for its constitution,
which can only be secured via repeated processes of othering.
Notes 211
6 David Blaine, Fathers 4 Justice, and the Spectacle of

Heroic Masculinity
1. Adam Phillips, Houdini’s Box: On the Arts of Escape (London and New York:
Faber and Faber, 2002), 15.
2. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis,
Book XVII, 1969–70, trans. Russell Grigg, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller with notes
by Russell Grigg (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 81.
3. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Shelia Fariah Glaser (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1.
4. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 81.
5. In The Emancipated Spectator Jacques Rancière argues for the need to challenge
the opposition between seeing and acting which inflects many twentieth-
century ideas concerning what constitutes community/political theatre.
Rancière suggests that ‘viewing is also an action, that confirms or transforms
the distribution of positions’. See The Emancipated Spectator (London and
New York: Verso, 2009), 13.
6. Paul Allain and Jen Harvie, ‘Protests, Demonstrations and Parades’, in The
Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance (London and New York:
Routledge, 2006), 194–5.
7. Jan Cohen-Cruz, ed., ‘General Introduction’, in Radical Street Performance
(London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 1–6; 1.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), trans. Ken Knabb (Rebel Press:
London, 2004), 10–11.
11. Scot Lehigh, ‘And for David Blaine’s Next Feat’, The Boston Globe, 10 May
2006. Read at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/
articles/2006/05/11/AndforDavidBlainesnextfeat/
12. David Blaine, Frozen in Time (Documentary), Dir. Roger Goodman, Patrice
Productions, 2000.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. David Blaine, Vertigo (Documentary), Dirs. Michael Dimich and Jacob
Septimus, Dakota North Entertainment, 2002.
16. Ibid.
17. Anita Biressi, ‘“Above the Below”: Body Trauma as Spectacle in Social/Media
Space’. Journal for Cultural Research, vol. 8, no. 3 (2004): 335–52; 346–7.
18. Blaine interviewed in Above the Below, Dirs. Harmony Korine and Steve
Smith, Channel Four Television, 2003.
(New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), 21–2.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Peta Tait, ‘Feminine Free Fall: A Fantasy of Freedom’, in Performance: Critical
Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. II, ed. Philip Auslander (London
and New York: Routledge, 2003), 207–15; 207–8.
23. Ibid., 210.
24. Ibid., 211.
212 Notes
25. Ibid., 213.

26. Blaine interviewed in Above the Below (Documentary).
27. Anita Biressi, ‘Above the Below’, 344.
28. Ibid., 347.
29. Márta Korbonits, David Blaine, Marinos Elia, and Jeremy Powell-Tuck,
‘Refeeding David Blaine – Studies after a 44-Day Fast’. The New England
Journal of Medicine, vol. 353, no. 21 (November 24, 2005): 2306–7
30. Franz Kafka, ‘A Hunger Artist’, (1922) in The Complete Short Stories, ed. Nahum
N. Glatzer, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (London: Vintage, 2005), 268–77;
269–70.
31. Ibid., 272.
32. On 21 October 2003, campaigners Eddie Gorecki and Jonathan Stanesby
scaled the Royal Courts of Justice, dressed as Batman and Robin. Ten days
later, group member David Chick scaled a crane near Tower Bridge, London,
dressed as Spider Man. On the morning of 22 December 2003, campaigners
Eddie Gorecki, Jolly Stanesby, Michael Sadeh, and Steve Battleshild dressed
as Santa Claus and climbed on top of Tower Bridge. Outside the United
Kingdom, a protest by a member dressed as Robin the Boy Wonder was
held for 12 hours on the Pattullo Bridge in Vancouver, British Columbia,
Canada. On 6 May 2005 the group made headlines after a member
dressed as Superman climbed up scaffolding in Old City Hall in Toronto,
Ontario.
33. Matt O’Connor, Fathers 4 Justice: The Inside Story (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 2007), 54–5.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 78.
36. Ibid., 80.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 80–1.
39. Calvin Thomas, ‘Last Laughs: Batman, Masculinity, and the Technology of
Abjection’. Men and Masculinities, 2 ( July 1999): 26–46; 26.
40. Recounting his earlier book Male Matters in ‘Last Laughs: Batman, Masculinity,
and the Technology of Abjection’, Calvin Thomas writes, ‘I suggest that the
cloaca theory helps account for the abject or expelled status of that “lost
object” that Lacan says is the phantasmatic support of the subject, and
I argue that the “instinct for mastery” that motivates the fort/da game may
also be motivated by the boy’s desire to overcome his feelings of helpless
and abject passivity by symbolizing the mother’s body as a small, passive,
controllable object. In so doing, I suggest, the boy attempts to disavow not
only his own dependency on the mother as an active subjective agent, but
also an anxious feeling of a deep ontological shittiness at the core of the
subjective existence itself’. (pp. 26–7).
Abjection’, 29.
42. Baz Kershaw, ‘Fighting in the Streets: Dramaturgies of Popular Protest,
1968–1989’, in Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies,
vol. III, ed. Philip Auslander (London and New York: Routledge, 2003),
266–92; 269.
43. Ibid.
Notes 213
Abjection’, 29.
45. Ibid.
46. In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Lacan states, ‘Shouldn’t the true termination
of analysis […] in the end confront the one who undergoes it with the reality
of the human condition […] the state in which man is in that relationship
to himself which is his own death […] and can expect help from no one’
(p. 373.) See Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60: The Semi-
nar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, trans. with notes by David Porter, ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).
7 The Jackassification of Male Trouble:

Incorporating the Abject as Norm
1. Leo Bersani in Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (London and
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 121.
2. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology
(London and New York Verso, 1999), 334.
3. Garry Whannel, ‘Sports Stars, Narrativization and Masculinities’, Leisure
Studies, no. 18 (1999): 249–65; 257.
4. Pat Stack, ‘Stack on the Back’, Socialist Review, no. 203 (1996). Read at http://
pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr203/stack.htm
5. Cintra Wilson, ‘Men Who Hurt Themselves for a Living’. Read at http://
www.salon.com/people/feature/2002/05/21/blaine/
6. Jackass: The Movie. Dir. Jeff Tremaine, MTV and Dickhouse Productions,
2002.
7. It is worth mentioning that Jackass 3D is due for cinema release in 2010.
8. Tony Jefferson, ‘Muscle, Hard Men and Iron Mike Tyson: Reflections on
Desire, Anxiety and the Embodiment of Masculinity’, Body and Society,
vol. 4, no. 1 (1998): 77–98, 78.
9. Ibid., 80.
10. Ibid., 81.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982): 1.
12. Ibid., 32.
13. Ibid., 2.
14. Ibid., 5.
15. Ibid., 2.
16. Ibid., 3.
17. Ibid.
18. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Polity Press,1987), 244.
19. Sigmund Freud, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (1937), in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume
XXIII, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud and
assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 211.
20. Jacques Lacan, ‘Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis’ (1948), in Écrits: A Selection,
(1977) trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 13.
214 Notes
21. Alan Peterson, The Body in Question: A Socio-Cultural Approach (London and
22. Kent Williams, ‘Their Bodies, Ourselves: What the Growing Popularity of
Pain and Humiliation as Entertainment says about all of us’, in Philadelphia
City Paper. Read at http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2002-08-08/cover.shtml
23. Tony Jefferson, ‘Muscle, Hard Men and Iron Mike Tyson’, 83.
24. Theodor Reik, ‘Masochism in Modern Man’ an extract from the book
published in The Cassell Dictionary of Sex Quotations, ed. Alan Isaacs,
(London: Cassell, 1997), 228–9.
25. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique, Book 1,
1953–1954, ed. Jacques Allain Miller, trans. with notes by John Forrester
(London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 42.
26. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989),
319–20.
27. Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave’, in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural
Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (London and Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press, 1988), 197–222; 218.
28. Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave’, 222
29. Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory
30. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, vol. 1, trans. and
ed. Nicolas T. Rand (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 113.
32. Garry Whannel, ‘Sports Stars, Narrativization and Masculinities’, 256.
33. Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow … (Standford:
34. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, (1972) trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York:
Continuum, 2004). In this text Deleuze and Guattari outline a non-
hierarchized theory of becoming, available to men, women, animals,
vegetables, molecules, ad infinitum, that involves Becoming-Intense,
Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible.
35. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, (1941), trans. Hélène Iswolsky
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 25.
36. Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow …, 70.
37. See Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1987) and Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Implosion of Meaning in
the Media and the Information of the Social in the Masses’, in Myths of
Information: Technology and Post-Industrial Culture, ed. Kathleen Woodward
(Madison: Coda Press, 1980), 137–48.
38. E. Ann Kaplan, ‘Feminism/Oedipus/Postmodernism: The Case of MTV’, in
Postmodernism and its Discontents, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London and New York:
Verso, 1988), 30–44; 33–6.
39. David Miller’s Response to Pat Stack, Socialist Review, no. 204 ( January 1997).
Read at http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr204/letters.htm
40. Estella V. Welldon, Ideas in Psychoanalysis: Sadomasochism (Cambridge: Icon
books, 2002), 35.
Notes 215
41. Jerome Doolittle, ‘Desperately Seeking Empire’, in Bad Attitudes journal/

weblog. Read at http://badattitudes.com/MT/archives/2002/10/
42. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1.
43. Ibid., 21.
44. Claude Lèvi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1969), 115.
45. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of
Homosexual Panic’, in The Masculinity Studies Reader, eds. Rachel Adams
and David Savran (Oxford and Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002),
158–73; 164.
46. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 334.
47. Ibid., 248.
48. Ibid., 322. Žižek describes the big Other as the ‘real father’: the castrating
agent of the prohibitive ‘No!’ in contrast to the small others, or imaginary
father/prohibitions he sees as proliferating the contemporary world.
49. Ibid., 334.
50. Lacan suggests that the mirror stage confronts the subject with his/her
own fragmentation, while also spurring him/her to regain the (pre-mirror
stage) presumed ‘orthopaedic’ self. See Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as
Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Practice’
(1949), in Écrits, 4–5.
51. Chris Jenks, Transgression (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 2.
52. Ibid., 7.
53. Kent Williams, ‘Their Bodies, Ourselves’.
54. Steve Burgess, ‘The Jackass Effect: Why I Watch the Evil Spawn of
Candid Camera that Punk’d Our Culture’. Read at http://www.thetyee.ca/
Entertainment/2004/06/02/The_Jackass_Effect/
55. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 10.
56. Robert Stam, ‘Bakhtin and Left Cultural Critique’, in Postmodernism and
Its Discontents, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London and New York: Verso, 1988),
116–45; 134.
57. Ibid., 140.
58. E. Ann Kaplan, ‘Feminism/Oedipus/Postmodernism: The Case of MTV’, 33.
59. Robert Stam, ‘Bakhtin and Left Cultural Critique’, 135.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., 149.
63. Ibid., 155.
64. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 328.
65. I am thinking here about the trajectories of transformation suggested by
Slavoj Žižek’s notion of the ‘act’ and Alain Badiou’s theory of the ‘event’,
that might create productive ruptures in the (postmodern) norm. While
both philosophers make provocative arguments for breaking with the
established order, which would also include a redefinition of the subject,
I am also mindful that the subject that concerns me here is very much the
subject who comes, if you like, before the act/event. Also, I remain wary of
the kind of violence that such moments might unleash, and consequently
216 Notes
in my last chapter I appeal to the act/event of fragilization rather than

revolt, which always demands its own kind of sacrifice.
8 An Ethic of Fragilization
1. This is how Lacan frames Oedipus’s questions in the paper ‘Desire, Life and
Death’ (1955). See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, The Ego in
Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, Book II, 1954–1955,
trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller with notes by John
Forrester (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 230.
2. Alain Badiou in interview with Diana George at ‘Is a History of the
Cultural Revolution Possible?’ Conference at University of Washington,
February 2006. Read at http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/
002075.php
3. Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace (London and Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 189.
4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick draws attention to the difficult place of the feminine
not only in straight male culture, but also in gay culture. She writes, ‘Indeed,
the gay movement has never been quick to attend to issues concerning
effeminate boys. There is a discreditable reason for this in the marginal or
stigmatized position to which even adult men who are effeminate have
often been relegated in the movement. A more understandable reason than
effeminophobia, however, is the conceptual need of the gay movement to
interrupt a long tradition of viewing gender and sexuality as continuous
and collapsible categories […] To begin to theorize gender and sexuality as
distinct though intimately entangled axes of analysis has been, indeed, a
great advance of recent lesbian and gay thought. There is a danger, however,
that the advance may leave the effeminate boy once more in the position
of the haunting abject – this time the haunting abject of gay thought itself.’
See ‘How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay’, in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics
and Social Theory, ed Michael Warner (London and Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1994), 69–81; 72.
5. Michael D. Snediker, Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous
Persuasions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 2.
6. Leo Bersani in Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (London and
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 68.
7. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity
(London: British Film Institute, 2004), 175–6.
8. Ibid., 165.
9. Ibid., 176–7.
10. Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (London and
11. Ibid.
12. Leo Bersani in Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies, 55–6.
13. Ibid., 77.
14. Ibid., 85.
15. Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2009), 35.
16. Ibid.
Notes 217
17. Ibid., 34.

18. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter
Hallward (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 10.
19. Ibid., 25.
20. Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of
Change (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009), xxx.
21. The subject of queer temporality has become of great interest to a number
of scholars working in performance studies. In her introduction to Feminist
and Queer Performance: Critical Strategies (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), Sue-Ellen Case imagines ‘a slipstream of time, a wormhole
of time, a palimpsest of times in which the past, present, and future inter-
mingle’ (p. 13). Also, in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
(New York: New York University Press, 2009), José Esteban Muñoz explores
queer culture’s anticipatory function, suggesting that art and performance
can open windows to the future.
22. Dennis King Keenan, The Question of Sacrifice (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University press, 2005), 127.
23. Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace (London and Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 179–80.
24. Ibid., 172.
25. Ibid.
26. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Neighbors and Other Monsters’, in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries
in Political Theology, eds. Eric L. Santner, Kenneth Reinhard, and Slavoj Žižek
(London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 134–90.
27. Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, 141.
28. Ibid., 167.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 169.
32. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as
revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, (1949), in Écrits: A Selection (1977),
trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 5.
33. Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, 181.
34. Ibid., 181–2.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London
and New York: Verso, 2004), xiv
38. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 2004),
28–9.
39. Jacques Rancière, On The Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London and New
York: Verso, 1995), 19.
40. Patricia MacCormack, ‘Inhuman Evanescence’, in Borderlands: Jacques
Rancière on the Shores of Queer Theory, eds. Samuel A. Chambers and Michael
O’Rourke, vol. 8, no. 2 (2009): 1–17. Read at http://www.borderlands.net.
au/issues/vol8no2.html.
41. Taylor Mac singing in Walk, Dir. Michael Snead, 2007. Viewed on http://
www.youtube.com/wacth?v=cu_1WeDEGTA.
42. Based on a production at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 15/7/2007.
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Films
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228 Bibliography
Vertigo, Dirs. Michael Dimich and Jacob Septimus, Dakota North Entertainment,
2002.
Jackass: The Movie. Dir. Jeff Tremaine, MTV and Dickhouse Productions, 2002.
InterMission. Dir. John Crowley, Brown Sauce Film Productions, 2003.
Above the Below, Dirs. Harmony Korine and Steve Smith, Channel Four Television,
2003.
The Passion of the Christ. Dir. Mel Gibson, Icon Productions, 2004.
Jackass: The Box Set. Dir. Jeff Tremaine, MTV and Paramount, 2005.
Walk, Dir. Michael Snead, 2007.
Index
A Whistle in the Dark 5 Batman 155, 157–158, 212n32 and

Abject, the 14, 16, 22–24, 58–59, 65, n40
67–68, 72, 78–80, 84, 88–90, 98, Baudrillard, Jean 13, 97–98, 100,
104, 113, 115–116, 123, 144–145, 102–103, 106, 174
160, 162, 164–165, 176, 181, 186 Be(a)st of Taylor Mac, The 188–190
Abjection 9, 12, 13–15, 23, 34, 45, Beating fantasy 29–32, 42, 207n25
58–59, 66–69, 78–80, 83, 88–90, Beating 42–43, 49–50, 71–72, 75–77,
114, 118, 125–126, 131, 136–136, 79, 111
141, 144–145, 152, 157–158, Berlant, Lauren 56–57
162–165, 174, 178, 183, 187, Bersani, Leo 14, 160, 169–170,
202n68, 212n40, 216n4 183–184, 187
Above the Below 149–155 Beynon, John 4, 9
Abraham, Nicolas 27–28, 122–123, Bigsby, Christopher 5
170 Billy Elliot 7
Abramović, Marina 6 Bio-virtual 107
Abu Ghraib 128–129 Birds, The 48
Acconci, Vito 6 Biressi, Anita 152, 154
Acting out 127–128, 193n40 Blaine, David 6, 13, 34, 161–162.
Acuña, Jason 172–173 See chapter 6
Adam and Paul 7 Blasted 5
Agamben, Giorgio 50, 142 Bloodletting 13, 111, 114–115, 130,
Albee, Edward 5 133, 136, 141
Alexander the Great 73 Blue 34
Allain, Paul 148 Bond, Edward 5
Angels in America 5 Borderlinking 14, 187
Animal House 180 Boscagli, Maurizia 144
Anti-Semitism 36–3, 41, 49 Boundary-trespass 47, 90
Artaud, Antonin 49, 84, 118, 131, Boyarin, Daniel 40
143, 198n35 Braveheart 40
Athey, Ron 6, 13, 28, 31, 146. Brown, Wendy 109, 111, 113
See chapter 5. For performance Buckingham Palace Protest 155
details see 206n10 Burden, Chris 6, 140, 161–162, 168
Attachment 52, 57, 66–67, 86 Buried Alive 149
Authority 12–13, 19, 38, 41–42, 54, Burton, Tim 157, 72
60–64, 72, 75–76, 78–80, 83, 90–91, Bush, George W. 38, 55
97–98, 106, 113, 118, 120, 126, Butler, Judith 1–3, 10–11, 14, 17,
133–134, 140–141, 143–144, 148, 22–28, 32, 47, 58–59, 61–62, 90,
158, 160, 168, 171, 174–178 95–96, 114, 118–119, 126, 132, 170,
178, 188
Badinter, Elisabeth 22
Badiou, Alain 182, 185–187, 215n65 Campbell, Patrick 17, 22
Bakhtin, Mikhail 174, 180 Candib, Lucy 60
Bataille, George 49–52 Capitalism 87–89, 93, 98, 181
229
230 Index
Caputo, John 35, 53–54 Derrida, Jacques 32, 53–54, 116,

Caravaggio 7 142–143, 173
Carlton, Darryl 115 Di Benedetto, Stephen 59–60, 132
Carter, Jimmy (President) 9 Dionysus 112
Caruth, Cathy 135 Dirty Sanchez 161
Carver, Terrell 10–11 Disidentification 21, 27, 109–110,
Castration 12, 14, 25, 32, 34, 194n70
40–41, 80, 93, 95, 104, 106, Dismemberment 149, 167, 178
111, 121–122, 124 Dive of Death 149
Cathexis 18, 24–25, 96 Dolan, Jill 119
Catholicism 36 Dunne, Ryan 168, 170–171
Caviezel, James 56 Dutoit, Ulysse 183
Celtic Tiger 11
Chambers, Samuel Allen 10–11 Ébranlement 183. See self-shattering
Child, the 48 Edelman, Lee 47–48, 90, 170
Christian 38–39, 45, 47, 49–50, Effeminization 40, 64
55–57, 112, 117, 121–122, 133, 141 Emasculation 3, 9, 34, 58, 63, 155,
Christianity 36, 38, 51. See chapter 2. 167, 178
Christ-like 116, 137. See chapter 5. Encryption 28, 123
Circus 153–154 England, Dave 163–167
Clare, Anthony 1, 4 Eroticism 42, 29, 50, 52
Cohen-Cruz, Jan 148 Ethics 14, 113, 129–130, 173,
Commodification 88, 111, 178–179, 182–188
181 Ethnic 37, 101, 185
Compassionate Conservatism 56 Ettinger, Bracha L. 14, 34, 182,
Conditioning, The 6 186–188
Connell, Robert William 8, 14, 91 Excrement 23, 58–59, 68–69, 71
Conservative 11, 36, 38, 55–57 Exhibitionism 126, 139, 157
Corp propre 145
Corpus Christi 5 Faludi, Susan 14
Crawford Municipal Gallery 140 Falwell, Jerry 38, 54
Cross-dressing 61–62, 112–115, Fantasmatic 42, 47–48, 95, 170
117–118, 124, 188 Fantasy 12, 15–16, 27, 29–30, 32,
Crucifixion 37, 42–45, 54, 121, 138, 66, 69–70, 76, 81, 92, 94–96,
Cut, The 104 107, 117, 147, 153, 172–173,
186, 188
Danckwardt, Joachim F. 127–128 Farrell, Colin 72–73,
Daredevil 73 77, 83
Dargis, Manohla 6 Fascism 165
David Blaine: Magic Man 148 Fathers 4 Justice 6, 13, 34.
David Blaine: Street Magic 148 See chapter 6.
Dean, Tim 107 Faust is Dead 5, 13. See chapter 4.
Death-drive 38, 48, 90 Feminism 2, 6, 9, 160–161, 175
Debord, Guy 148 Fetishism and fetishization 48,
Dehumanize 48, 52 53–54, 72, 110, 112, 114, 122, 125,
Deleuze, Gilles 92, 117, 137, 173 171, 181
Deliverance 111–112, 117, Fight Club 7, 73
120–123 Fincher, David 7, 72
Denby, David 37 Flanagan, Bob 6
Index 231
Foucault, Michel 87–100, 104, 142 HIV/AIDS 2, 7, 13, 34, 39, 47, 90,
Four Scenes in a Harsh Life 111–121, 109, 111–112, 115, 120–122, 125–
134, 136 126, 133
Fragilization 14. See chapter 8 Hocquenghem, Guy 121
Franko B 6, 13, 28, 31, 146. Homecoming, The 5
See chapter 5. For performances Homo sacer 50, 56, 142
details see 206n10 Homographesis 90
Freedman, Jonathan 41 Homophobia 2, 13–14, 40, 59–61,
Freud, Sigmund 15–18, 23–27, 65, 73, 89–90
29–34, 40, 42, 45, 49, 52, 66–70, Homosexual panic 176
74–75, 79, 87, 93, 95–96, Homosexuality 3, 5, 7, 10, 12–13,
104–105, 112, 115, 117, 22, 24–26, 30–31, 37–40, 43,
121–123, 126–128, 132, 163, 46–47, 50, 56, 63, 66–69, 78–79, 83,
165, 169 111, 117, 119–121, 128,
Fricker, Karen 67 140–142, 169–170, 175–176, 178–
Friel, Brian 5 179. See chapter 4
Frozen in Time 149–155 Homosocial 67, 78, 161, 166,
Full Monty, The 7 175–176, 200n34
Fuss, Diana 25–27, 64–65, 95–96, Houdini, Harry 146
104–105 House of Commons Protest 155
Futurity 47–48 Hunger Artist, The 154–155
Hypermasculinity 42, 55, 57, 60–61,
Galperin, William 181 64–65, 72–74, 76, 78, 80–81, 83,
Geller, Jay 41 115, 170
Genet, Jean 128 Hysteria 17, 28, 160, 177–178,
Gibson, Mel, See chapter 2 187
Girard, René 4, 12, 36, 55–57,
141–142 I’m Not Your Babe 136–138
Glengarry Glen Ross 4 Iceman Cometh, The 149
Greatest Story Ever Told, The 36 Identification 12, 13, 15, 17–19,
Green, André 127 21–28, 32, 45, 49–50, 56, 59, 64–68,
Gross, Martin 87–88, 97 70, 75, 78–79, 81, 87, 89, 91, 93,
Guantánamo 128–129 95–97, 100, 104–105,
Guattari, Félix 92, 137, 173 112, 121, 128, 130, 133, 141,
Guerrilla performance 2, 11, 146, 170, 178,
148, 155, 158 Impotency 59–60, 62, 65, 76,
Gutenberg, Andrea 140 80–81, 83
Gynophobia 122 In A Little World of Our Own 5
Incorporation 18, 27–28, 50, 123,
Hamlet 91 170, 181
Harvie, Jen 148 Incorruptible Flesh 111, 112,
Heddon, Dee 110 123–128
Hegel, Georg W.F. 16, 81–82 Indestructibility 142–145, 165, 172
Hegemony 8, 11, 15, 38, 69, 78, 90, Infantilization 115, 130–132, 160,
91, 93, 188 171, 177
Heterosexism 119, 124 InterMission 7, 12, 32. See chapter 3
Heterosexuality 7, 10, 25, 89, Interpellation 19, 23, 91
97, 119, 126, 160, 169, 170, Introjection 27, 32, 170
174–176, 179 Irigaray, Luce 22, 44
232 Index
Jackass 13–14, 31, 157. MacCormack, Patricia 188

See chapter 7 Made in China 5, 12, 96.
Jakobsen, Janet R. 38 See chapter 3
James, Henry 176 Mama I Can’t Sing 133–136
Jameson, Fredric 13, 87–89, 104 Mamet, David 4
Jarman, Derek 7, 34 Man Without a Face, The 40
Jeffords, Susan 9 Mangan, Michael 9
Jenks, Chris 179 Margera, Bam 171–172
Jesus of Nazareth 36 Martyrs and Saints 112–123
Johnston, Adrian 185 Masochism 7, 10, 14–15, 29 31–32,
Jones, Amelia 13, 121, 129–130, 34, 70, 80, 93, 95, 111, 125, 175,
142 178
Jouissance 16, 33, 43, 51, 80, 107, Maternity 21, 26, 66–67, 80, 112,
141, 146–147, 155, 177, 184, 121, 131, 133, 136, 141
187, 196n122 McGhehey, Ehren 164–165
Joyce 112 McNally, Terence 5
Judas Cradle 128–130 McPherson, Conor 59
Judeo-Christian 39 Melancholia 17–18, 24–28
Messner, Michael 14
Kafka, Franz 154 Micropolitics 104
Kahn, Coppélia 21 Middleton, Peter 64–65
Kane, Sarah 5 Miglietti, Francesca Alfano 144
Kaplan, Ann 174 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen 68, 81
Keidan, Lois 5–6 Miller, David 175
Kimmel, Michael 14 Miller, Toby 73
King of Kings 36 Misogyny 14, 59–61, 65, 73, 112,
Knoxville, Johnny 161–163, 114, 125, 143, 156
165–168, 171–174 Mitchell, Gary 5
Kojève, Alexandre 81–82 Mosse, George 9
Kristeva, Julia 12–13, 22–24, 26, 33, Mourning 17–18, 24–25, 27, 79, 96,
45, 58, 67–68, 78, 80, 88–89, 124, 123, 138–139
126, 133, 144, 164–165, 180. MTV 14, 87, 105, 161, 168, 174,
See abject and abjection 181
Kubiak, Anthony 109 Mulvey, Laura 6, 76–77
Kushner, Tony 5 Muñoz, José Esteban 13, 17,
109–110, 142
Labour Party 11 Murphy, Tom 5
Lacan, Jacques 13, 17–21, 23–26, Murray, Timothy 125
32–34, 38, 43–44, 51, 61, 66, 68,
71, 77, 81–82, 84, 87–88, 91, 95–96, Narcissism 139, 145, 184
105–107, 119, 126, 146–147, 158, National Theatre of Ireland
163, 167, 169, 178, 182, (Abbey) 59
186–187 Neilson, Anthony 5
Laddism 13–14, 160–162, 171–172, Nietzsche, Friedrich 113, 144
175–176
Laing, Stewart O’Rowe, Mark 5, 12. See chapter 3
Last Temptation of Christ, The 36 Objet a 77, 81–82
Lenau, Nikolaus 97 Oedipus complex 18–24, 29, 32–33,
Lion King, The 91 87, 95–96, 170, 176
Index 233
Oedipus Rex 4 Royal Court (theatre) 87

Oh Lover Boy 138–140, 156 Rude Guerrilla (theatre company) 98
Optimism (queer) 183
Ordinary Decent Criminal 73 S.W.A.T. 73
Out of Joint (theatre company) 87, Sacrifice 7, 10, 12–13, 21–22, 29,
89, 94 33–35, 58, 107, 112–113, 117, 121,
130–131, 136, 140–142, 178, 182–
Pane, Gina 6 184. See chapter 2.
Passion of the Christ, The 12, 31. Sadism 42, 70
See chapter 2 Sadomasochism 69–71, 179
Pêcheux, Michel 27 Saint Paul 33, 38, 53
Pellegrini, Ann 38 Saved 5
Penetrator 5 Savran, David 14–15, 30
Peterson, Alan 167 Scarry, Elaine 103
Pettitt, Lance 83 Scatology 59, 65, 68, 162–168,
Phallic masculinity 21, 35, 61, 199n10,
144–145, 182 Scatontological 12, 71, 192n33,
Phallocentrism 22–23, 143, 184, 201n52
186 Schizophrenia and schizoid
Phallogocentrism 43 subjectivity 13, 87–88.
Phantasy 20, 31, 187 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Phantom 123 Guattari
Phelan, Peggy 114 Schmitt, Richard 60
Philadelphia Here I Come 5 Schneemann, Carolee 6
Phillipou, Nick 97 Schneider, Rebecca 144
Phillips, Adam 146, 184 Sebastiane 7
Pinter, Harold 5 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 67, 175–176,
Pitchfork Disney 96 200n34, 216n4
Prisoner of Love 128 Segal, Lynn 7–8, 14
Prohibition 128 Self-harm 13, 98, 105, 112–116, 125,
Prothero, Stephen 55 128, 130, 133, 144, 161, 172, 175
Psychosis 186–187 Self-shattering 169–170, 183–184
Shoot 6, 168
Quinn, Michael 73 Shopping and Fucking 5, 13.
See chapter 4
Raab, Chris 163 Sick 140
Rancière, Jacques 147, 188 Sierz, Aleks 5, 97
Rank, Otto 186 Silverman, Kaja 15
Ravenhill, Mark 5, 13, 34. Snapper, Julia 128
See chapter 4 Snead, Matthew 188–189
Reik, Theodor 139, 169 Snediker, Michael D. 183, 189
Republican administrations 11, South Park 37
38, 56 Spacey, Kevin 149
Ressentiment 72, 113 Stallybrass, Peter 15–16, 69, 152
Rich, Frank 38–39 Stam, Robert 180
Richards, Mary 119–120,124, 143 Steger, Lawrence 123–128
Ridley, Philip 96 Stein, Gertrude 112
Robertson, Pamela 7–8 Steve-O 163–164, 169–171, 173–174,
Rose, Jacqueline 22, 27 176
234 Index
Stewart, Suzanne R. 93 Vertigo 149–155

Stylites 150 Victimization 9, 10, 12, 15, 34,
Superhero 155–159 59, 72, 74–76, 78–79, 82–83,
111, 113, 116, 122, 178,
Tait, Peta 153 182–183
Tarantino, Quentin 7 Viennese Aktionists 6
Taylor Mac 12, 14, 188–190 Virtuality 102–103, 106–107,
Taylor, Charles 8 205n72
Temporality 185–190, 217n21 Visiting Hours 6
Theweleit, Klaus Viva La Bam 161
Thin Red Line, The 184
This Lime Tree Bower 5 Weakness 53–54, 63,
Thomas Lips 6 177–178
Thomas, Calvin 1, 12, 15, 71, Wegner, Peter 127–128
157–158 Whannel, Garry 160
Three Tall Women 5 When Brendan Met Trudy 7
Tigerland 73 White, Allon 15–16, 69, 152
Torok, Maria 27–28, 122–123, 170 Wildboyz 161
Tower Bridge Protest 155 Working through 126–128, 131,
Trademarks 6 136, 143
Trans-fixed 140 Wounded attachment 109, 111,
Trauma 9, 11, 34, 111–113, 115–116, 140, 142, 145
122–123, 125,127–128, 130–131,
133, 135–136, 145, 154, 183, 187 You Make My Heart Go Boom 140
Young, Iris Marion 89–90
Universalism 185, 187
Up To And Including Her Limits 6 Žižek, Slavoj 12, 33–34, 36, 38, 44,
Urban, Hugh 52–53 51, 53, 102, 122, 141, 160, 176–178,
Utopia 142, 217n21 181, 184–187, 215n65

Fintan Walsh - Male Trouble - Masculinity and The Performance of Crisis-Palgrave Macmillan (2010)

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Male Trouble

Also by Fintan Walsh

CROSSROADS: Performance Studies and Irish Culture

1 Introduction: Performing Male Trouble 1

2.1 Queer Satan in The Passion of the Christ (2004). Courtesy

I am grateful to all those who have directly or indirectly assisted me

Sincere thanks to Christabel Scaife for commissioning the book, and

At the beginning of the twenty-first century it is

[T]rouble sometimes euphemized some fundamentally

[T]o leave masculinity unstudied, to proceed as if mas-

To think of ‘crisis’ as a performance is to imagine that the disruption it

tenuousness of gender categories that nonetheless exert violence on

Contemporary discourses of dysfunctional masculinity cite a number of

possible their marginalisation from home, family and society, to chal-

Figuring troubled masculinity

Of course, representing masculinity extends well beyond the turn of

representations of troubled masculinity at the latter end of the twenti-

[W]hen drama dealt with masculinity, it showed rape; if it got to

alternative strategies and that it is one of the most flexible and

Although much of the form’s earliest stirrings as performance art were

The second wave of feminism helped wash away these damaged

Heteronormativity, masculinity, and

Acting in counterpoint to these intimations of crisis, certain voices

While remaining mindful of the reservations espoused by Segal and

Crisis is […] a condition of masculinity itself. Masculine gender

Corroborating this recuperative thesis, recent studies have revealed

masochism, sacrifice, victimization, and corporeal im/penetrability work

In Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics (2008), Samuel

troubling politics. Similarly, I assert the importance of considering how

turning of the twenty-first century has coincided with great anxiety

Male Trouble finds impetus in a range of scholarly interventions into the

Contemporary America Culture (1998) traces the genealogy of the fantasy

Repugnance and fascination are the twin poles of the process in

‘low’ conflicts powerfully and unpredictably with a desire for the

Of crucial significance is the authors’ insistence on the contradictory

While the preceding paragraphs sketched a sociocultural context and

central frameworks which will be engaged further in individual chap-

[I]f performing is a process in which individuals, physically present

While Campbell’s critique is primarily of live performance, I suggest

The lost object

Sigmund Freud’s paper ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) seeks to

The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking

impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale. The patient represents

[W]e have come to understand that this kind of substitution has a

Further, he suggests that while an adult may possess the capacity to

Jacques Lacan’s systematic reading of Freud is heavily influenced by

the subject as having no fixed relationship to the external world, as

intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signified;’46 the

installation in the subject of an unconscious position without which

It can be said that this signifier is chosen because it is the most

Lacan refrains from naturalizing male dominance by suggesting that

identity has also informed subsequent gender theorists to coin the

Her femininity is reinforced by her original symbiotic union with her

Not only is male identity figured as sacrificial in the Oedipus com-

A number of feminist thinkers such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and

transgressing of the phallocentric signifying process’.58 To illustrate this

Butler further investigates the dynamic of Kristeva’s abject within

This is a ‘girl’, however who is compelled to ‘cite’ the norm in order

Invoking Kristeva, Butler argues that this process of constructing viable