Tim Dean: “Stumped: The Pornography of Disability”
Guest Writer: Claire Barber

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

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[On November 12, 2012 the Unit for Criticism hosted Tim Dean (Buffalo). His lecture "Stumped: The Pornography of Disability," is written about by guest writer and unit affiliate Claire Barber (English). This is the second of two posts on the Tim Dean lecture]

Disabled Sexualities: Those Who Shouldn’t Have Sex and Why

Claire Barber (English)

The flyer for “Stumped: The Pornography of Disability” warned that presenter Tim Dean would show a clip of pornography; yet, some audience members were obviously unprepared for this footage as they walked out before he completed the talk. Based on the title, they must have known that Dean would speak about pornography, but some element of this particular pornography was too much for them. In the presentation, Dean provided several explanations for similarly averse responses to representations of sex among disabled individuals. In this post, I reflect on these propositions and draw out their implications.

First, I applaud Dean for treating a topic that is too infrequently discussed: the sexuality of disabled individuals. As a scholar of disability studies, I have been disturbed by the ways in which what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls “normates” treat sex among disabled individuals. Whether we’re talking about the amputee and his partner in the video that Dean showed; a sexual relationship between two mentally challenged individuals, as in The Other Sister (1999); or a boy with an autism spectrum disorder discretely masturbating in a semi-public location, as described by Tito Mukhopadhyay, many able-bodied individuals read these as events that shouldn’t happen. And if they do, they must remain hidden from able-bodied individuals or risk public censure.

From film The Other Sister

As in Dean’s study of the bareback subculture, this presentation drew attention to one possible motivation for disabled individuals who create pornography: “to make certain forms of intimacy visible.” By recording and publicizing non-normative sexual acts—what Dean called “stumping”—the individuals in the video he screened push normates to grapple with the uncomfortable reactions that they have to such scenes. These reactions include disgust, the feeling to which Dean paid the most attention. Many able-bodied individuals confronted with “abnormal” bodies and acts judge them as being in bad taste, so to speak; therefore, they attempt to regulate such expressions of sexuality rather than investigating the cause for their reactions.

This feeling—and the attendant desire to disable sexuality—is closely tied to an interest in maintaining the innocence of individuals with disabilities. This term frequently appears in discussions of disability and cultural attitudes toward disabled individuals. Etymologically, innocence has explicit connections to sexuality (via the guilt associated with sin); thus, any use of this term (an autist’s supposed inability to lie, for instance) has sexual undertones. There is a fine line between helping individuals with disabilities to develop their individual capacities and restricting their potential so that they more closely adhere to normative behaviors and expectations. When we infantilize disabled individuals, we affirm the perception that they do not have sexual desires (which children are also supposed to lack). As Dean suggested, an able-bodied commitment to the preservation of innocence relegates disabled individuals to a perpetual childhood closely intertwined with asexuality.

Many able-bodied individuals read disabled bodies as asexual based on an assumption that when (hetero)normative sexual acts are no longer possible, sex itself is out of the question. Matthew Crawley from Downton Abbey presents one popular instantiation of this fact. When he is paralyzed (a reference to Lady Chatterley’s Lover), he and other characters acknowledge that a sexual life will no longer be possible for him, which provides sufficient reason to release Lavinia from their engagement. It does not matter that he still can move his upper body, which makes many other sexual acts possible. Reproduction will not happen, so their sex life will not be fulfilling and, thus, shouldn’t exist. Obviously, queer and feminist theories have done much to refute such restrictive statements, but the specter of reproduction still haunts explorations of sexuality among disabled individuals. Surprisingly, reproduction among disabled individuals continues to raise extreme concern in our society, which means that many normates still consider sterilization to be a legitimate option, particularly for individuals with intellectual and cognitive disabilities.
Character Matthew Crawley from Downton Abbey

The issue of sexual expression becomes even more precarious when we turn to social attitudes toward individuals with cognitive and intellectual disabilities. Individuals with these disabilities are often read as “weak-minded,” unable to make decisions for themselves, even if they are able to live independently. By contrast, individuals with physical disabilities are recognized to be “able-minded,” in control of their thoughts and desires, even if they are not able-bodied. It is necessary to recognize this distinction between cognitive/intellectual disabilities and physical disabilities in any discussion of sex among disabled individuals, a theoretical area that I would have liked to see Dean develop further.

As individuals with intellectual and cognitive disabilities enter adolescence, a primary argument mobilized by normates against their sexual activity concentrates on consent—they don’t know what they’re doing. One complication with obtaining or confirming the consent of individuals with these disabilities is that they may express themselves or participate socially in ways that differ from normates; therefore, their consent may be more difficult for normates to recognize and, thus, easier to overlook. Consequently, able-bodied individuals often rely on social conventions and legal statutes to disable the sexuality of these individuals.

It is true that there are legitimate concerns about the sexual (and physical) abuse of individuals with cognitive and intellectual disabilities, as the work of Donna Williams and Dawn Prince-Hughes shows. However, the infrequently discussed and yet ongoing problem remains: how to allow disabled individuals to have fulfilling sexual lives without letting them become victims of abuse. While I have no solution for this problem, I want to draw attention to the predicament and state that neither forbidding disabled individuals from participating in sexual activities nor sweeping the issue under a figurative rug resolves the situation.

Therefore, Dean’s presentation pushed us toward an important discussion, one that many people prefer not to have. In the process, he located disability porn as a means of resistance that aligns it with disability rights and advocacy, a provocative claim. With the distribution of “Stump Grinder,” the video’s creator advocates for the existence of sexual desire among disabled individuals and what may seem to many the paradoxical desire of disability by normates. The disabled individual represented here is presented to the viewer as a desired being—available for desire by the viewer, but already desired by his partner.

By making this form of intimacy visible, the maker of “Stump Grinder” has the power to both disable and enable the viewer with the potentially shocking nature of this sexual encounter. Like many of those who left the presentation, we may be disabled by an encounter with that which we would rather not see because to see it means that we must recognize the existence of sexual desires and acts among disabled individuals. The person who created the edited version of "Stump Grinder," "2 guys, 1 stump" (which Erin McKenna describes in more detail) likely found him/herself in such a position. But, this recognition can enable able-bodied individuals to think and engage differently with others. In Unlimited Intimacy, Dean writes that “sexual action generates sexual community,” and “Stump Grinder” has this power to create a community organized around and supportive of expressions of sexuality among disabled individuals.

As Dean suggested in relation to another film, “Stump,” the climax may be not just an individual’s orgasm but also the individual’s “awakening to the sexual possibilities” of his disability. I can only hope that the viewer experienced a similar mental climax during Dean’s presentation as his or her eyes were opened to the sexual possibilities of disability.



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Author's Roundtable I: Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection
Guest Writer: Dan Tracy

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

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The extent to which the abject might be recuperated for some kind of political potential has been an occasional focus of queer studies; Darieck Scott’s forthcoming book specifies that question, and raises its stakes considerably, by asking it of “black abjection,” or the history of debasement under slavery and Jim Crow. Scott argues that two responses have dominated black literary and critical focus on this topic. The first, typified by the work of Frantz Fanon and the writers of the Black Arts movement, demands a recuperation and celebration of abjected blackness before an ultimate turn away from it. For Fanon, especially, “blackness is constituted by a history of abjection, and is itself a form of abjection” (Scott 6). The second response comes from late 20th-century neo-slave narratives, texts that try more deeply to historicize slavery in order to question the idea of an abject history. In these narratives, slaves engage in forms of resistance that complicate our sense of the power relations evoked in narratives of abjection.

Both of these solutions attempt to overcome abjection, or, in the case of the neo-slave narratives, to refute its sufficiency as historical description. Scott, by contrast, in introducing his book on Monday evening, provoked us by asking whether retaining abjection might be the more politically effective move. Although he finds neo-slave narratives compelling, he notes that the black abject continues to hold a powerful grip on the contemporary imagination despite its historical deficits. Reading (often against the grain) Fanon, James Weldon Johnson, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, and Samuel Delany, Scott suggests that a strain of latent power (and, in Delany, explicit erotic pleasure) undergirds the figuring of black abjection. If one is racialized through abjection, he suggested, then this racialization “offers capabilities, not just debilities.”

In Fanon’s corpus, Scott emphasizes, the metaphor of “tensed muscles” repeats to figure the moment of abjection, signaling this latent power for political response. Moments of male-on-male rape from Baraka and Morrison signal the pitfalls of the Black Arts and neo-slave narrative responses to black abjection but also suggest abjection’s potential. The danger Scott locates is the shared imperative of both projects to celebrate a black male subject who embodies normative masculinity: a subject both homophobic and misogynistic. Yet these moments of rape also figure a loss of sexual subjectivity that could allow for the development of a different kind of male subject. Here, Scott acknowledges his debts to Hortense J. Spillers’s feminist argument that the devastation caused to gender roles among black slaves by the middle passage was an opportunity, carrying the potential for longer-lasting changes to gender norms. Likewise, he argues that the moment of black abjection opens up a range of potential responses that need not be limited to a revivified patriarchal masculinity. The final chapter of his book, on Samuel Delany’s literary pornographic novel The Mad Man, argues that its turn to a fantasy of black abjection creates another possibility: pleasure, through the resignification of racist violence in erotic contexts that the black protagonist (who searches out white sexual partners who will humiliate him) finds surprisingly liberating.

Much of the discussion in response to Scott’s work centered on the potential political and methodological problems it raises. Richard T. Rodriguez suggested the importance of Scott’s work in rethinking the usual disempowered take that figures the sexual bottom as both emasculated and feminized. Particularly in the context of the chapter on Delany, Marc D. Perry, in his response, asked if this recuperation of the abject risked fetishizing violence. He also wondered if a writer like Fanon, often critiqued as masculinist, could be incorporated into this project without reproducing his problematic relationship to gender. Emily Skidmore, in turn, wondered if calling the male-on-male rape in Morrison’s Beloved “homosexual” might flatten out the history of sexuality. She also called attention to the diversity of Scott’s archive, asking whether the abjection he discusses is specific to African-American experience or indicative of African diaspora more broadly.

Two of Scott’s responses struck me as especially suggestive of his project’s emphasis and aims. First, he clarified that he was not offering the recovery of abjection as the only—or even the best—resource for a political response to racial inequality. Instead, he draws attention to it precisely because most anti-racist work misses it entirely. Second, Scott at one moment rather boldly defended the possible distortions of the history of abjection in any contemporary political or literary recovery (especially, in this case, Delany’s novel), arguing that while it is a position of privilege that allows us to transform that history rather than live it, we are also inheritors of that history and how it is imagined. Thus, he suggests, we are entitled to use that history of abjection in any way that will help to mitigate its legacy of psychological and social hurt.
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Author's Roundtable 1: Response from Richard T. Rodriguez

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Above photo: Emily Skidmore and Ricky Rodriguez.

I want to begin by thanking Professor Darieck Scott for sharing his work with us this evening. However, it is important that my gratitude be supplemented with a sense of indebtedness. And while I don’t want to make this response all about me, I do want to acknowledge that the selections I’ve read from his forthcoming book provide invaluable insights as I think through the transition from my first book to my current project on Latino masculinity, sexuality, and fantasy. Allow me to explain.

Like the texts Scott critically appraises for the ways in which the black bottom has historically been rendered as a figure often signaling an abdication of power, in my book Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics I treat a handful of Chicano authored texts that raise the subject of homosexuality only to object to its assumed complicity with a failed masculinity and, as a result, sexual passivity. Indeed, the appearance of gay men in various Chicano movement (and movement inspired) literary texts are conveniently rendered “bottoms”; that is, they are cast as failed men who, for a struggle hinging on reproductive futurity, presumably wish they were women. In short, these bottoms are incapable of generating la familia in the heteronormative terms set forth in Chicano empowerment narratives. After reading Scott, I realized that I failed to say anything about the queer political potential of bottom status. For after pointing out the ways in which anal penetration is deemed an act of subjugation, I simply argue against this typecasting (reading it in a way that, after learning from Scott, now seems quite obvious) and mark it as the exertion of heteropatriarchal domination over gay men. Yet Scott’s work, while indeed registering the force of domination at work in representations of the bottom, further insists that the “willed enactment of powerlessness” also “encodes a power of its own—a kind of skill set that includes pleasure in introjecting and assimilating the alien (perhaps, alienation itself), a sense of intimacy acquired even in situations of coerced pain, a transformation, through harm, of the foreign into one’s own.”

Professor Scott’s reading of Samuel Delany’s The Mad Man is provocative as it is essential for thinking about the crucial significance of the bottom, especially the black bottom. Unlike the smooth equation of unwilling consent with anal penetration in texts by Amiri Baraka and Toni Morrison, for example, Delany’s novel offers a counternarrative in which protagonist John Marr, Scott argues, “navigates the position of sexual/racial ‘bottom’ as a complex, empowered political persona, and potentially demonstrates how a history of sexual domination endows the figure of blackness with nimble abilities, with a form of power.” Moreover, “John uses his activities and fantasies and their historical resonance of racial subjugation, and the intense pleasure these acts give him largely because of that resonance, to open the way to a sense that he operates within a greater sphere of freedom and power than he did before engaging in his sexual practices.” The coordinates of this “greater sphere” match up with Delany’s aptly-named “pornotopia,” the cartographic context of The Mad Man. And just as reconfiguring the bottom does not simply lead to his mobilization as a figure for radical empowerment in performing a reversal of social hierarchies, pornotopia, Scott cautions, does not line up with discernable “utopias, those golden Edens imagined by emancipatory narratives: Here the erotic and sexual are not liberating as some hoped they might prove to be in the Sexual Revolution, though they are of course political in their work in and with human relationships.” But unlike those who cast the bottom as the end of reproduction, Scott crucially emphasizes the generative function of both the bottom and pornotopia: “We do not find emancipation here; but we find movement toward it, however ponderous, along a particular asymptotic curve.” Within pornotopia—and I would insist outside of it, thanks to Scott’s deft and searing theoretical formulations—the bottom stands as both an embodied subjectivity and a meeting ground of its own on which contests for power repeatedly play out.

I also do not want to lose sight of the fact that Scott’s black bottom is a subject of desire. Sex—or rather, what I take as more to the point, sexual fantasy—is the setting where submission and pleasure are intertwined. In The Mad Man, Scott insists, racialized discourse produces meaning that does not sidestep historical matter or lapse into careless decontextualization but rather grapples with fantasy scenarios shot through with social and political phenomena. The goal, Scott maintains, is “to address the historical (or little-r ‘real’) in the mode of the fantastic, and to invest the fantastic with a consciousness of the painful, horrific historical reality that makes the fantasy appealing (precisely in its also being appalling). And for the black bottom, this means deriving sexual/erotic pleasure specifically from the history—as well as the present enactment—of an abjection that gives rise to the racialized subject-that-is-also-an-object.” The far reaching potential of Scott’s book, I believe, rests on an illuminating proposal of reconfiguration through fantasy. And if we continue hold on to Laplanche and Pontalis’s classic assertion that fantasy “is not the object of desire, but its setting” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1986, 26), then pornotopia is indeed one such setting where we might begin to imagine other possibilities.
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Author Roundtable III: Tim Dean's Unlimited Intimacy

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

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Written by Ryan M. Jones (History)

Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy provided a provocative experience on Monday, December 8, one that I was honored to participate in. I read the section of this book with a certain bias—two people I know recently found themselves facing life-changing news due to their sexual experiences, and as such, reading about a subculture that actively cultivates the HIV virus as a form of kinship struck me as particularly pathological. However, I also understood that part of the exercise Dean’s work intended to complete was to challenge an initial response such as mine, one cultivated by two decades of safe-sex education, but also one that is enmeshed in competing ideologies of health and illness, risk and pleasure. I believe that Dean succeeds, although ethical concerns seem to be unresolved with the current form of his book...

The event was headlined by Dean reading from his work, followed by an insightful look the process by which books are reviewed and revised on their trajectory towards publication. This was offered by Prof. Matti Bunzl, who had been one of the reviewers of the text. Bunzl’s primary claim was that a tension existed in Dean’s work between the self-reflexive revelation of his HIV status and at times dismay at activities in the bareback culture (such as the intention infection of others) and his desire to remove discussion of the subculture to a neutral ground where new insights into sexuality and society could be better evaluated, free from kneejerk reactions that were biased against bareback culture. Bunzl asserted Dean could have his cake and eat it too—at once create a neutral space as well as offer his own judgment on the subculture, something that I too found desirable from Dean as author, yet didn’t find in the text. Following Bunzl, Cris Mayo offered a reading of Dean vis-a-vis her work on queer youth, citing similarities in the way that subcultures rewrite more mainstream cultures (such as through appeals to risk and nonnormative behaviors), as well as her concerns on the implications of bareback culture for queer youth already surrounded by a confusing array of sexual information, especially as these youth are entering complex adult cultures partially unaware of the significance of the activities taking place. As for me, I had a number of questions as the final respondent, which I have elaborated on below. I do wish to thank the Unit for inviting me to participate and for helping make my presence in person possible.

Masculinity

On my own second reading of he text, a number of questions remained unresolved for me. First, I found it difficult to believe that bottoms (men who are penetrated) were as actively praised as “heroes” for the subculture and as hypermasculine men as Dean described. This is due in part to the manner in which the bottoms are treated, from parties in which negative bottoms are proffered to tops of indeterminate HIV status in a sort of roulette game.

It seems to me that far from a bonding event, a hierarchy remains that privileges tops over bottoms, whether in terms of power (such as who is dominating who towards a certain desire), in terms of tops being “gift givers” who can bestow HIV on someone else, or in the lack of evidence that after sex, bottoms were affirmed as hypermasculine and that the degredation during sex was just part of the fantasy, rather than an expression of reality.

Versatility

Do people actually inhabit versatile roles, or are they more demarcated. Dean offers that one can be both a gift giver and someone who receives a gift, a top in one moment and a hypermasculine bottom in another. But, like with the unclarity towards the status of bottoms in bareback subculture, I’m left wondering if people in bareback subcultures are truly versatile, or if versatility, a stated goal of many gay rights organizations and a feature of North American gay cultures that at least partially eschewed heteronormative gender identities, is part of the homonormativity which bareback subculture also attempts to undermine.

Health and Risk

If bareback subculture rewrites the manner in which we can conceive of health and risk in that it refuses to link infection with illness, what they do we do with the bodies involved in such a subculture, especially as the subculture is identified as one that worships muscularity and masculinity. Many men who are HIV positive also take testosterone supplements, thereby promoting a stereotypical masculine physique at the gym which translates into a body desirable in ways similar to mainstream culture: big muscles, ripped physique, an appearance of overall health. In this way, bareback subculture seems to ratify mainstream health perspectives (e.g., those of gym culture), even as the appearance of health belies the possibility of infection. Additionally, what of the presence of bareback twinks? Gay porn sites are rife with younger, less muscular men having “raw” sex (think Chaosmen, HotStuds or Bareback Twinks). Two questions then: first, in relation to Cris Mayo’s points on the problems with young queers who grew up with little sex education being initiated into a complex subculture they may not fully grasp the consequences of, what role do twinks have in the bareback culture? Or in another way, what role do those who do not have muscular bodies have in this subculture? Are they more frequently found in the bug-chasing or bottom positions vis a vis more experienced members? Tim Dean did have an interesting response in the presence of emaciated, diseased bodies in bareback porn—this then points to the subculture’s possible glorification of other forms of eroticism, but more evidence would be needed. The second question is this: is the presence of barebacking now in mainstream gay porn—which has long been a bastion of promoting safer-sex practices after AIDS forced the abandonment of the pre-condom romps of the 1970s—an attempt at the normalization of bareback subculture by those in the mainstream who themselves like (whether as fantasy or reality) unprotected sex, but prefer it under a regulated guise, rather than the free-flowing, often anonymous practices of the subculture. That is, under circumstances which do not transmit the disease, such as is required by many of the websites through the constant screening of models for HIV. Is homonormativity striking back, bringing this unruly subculture under its regulatory purview by eroticizing “deviant” behavior inorder to control it and reaffirm the commitment of the mainstream gay community to stopping HIV.

Evidence

As a historian, I wanted more evidence to support Dean’s work. I wanted to see more oral histories or at least evidence why the anecdotes chosen were representative. I wanted, perhaps, more numbers on participants and roles played in the subculture, as well as evidence on how the visual aspects of bareback subculture—the pornographic aspect, for example—actually influence the decisions and desires of the participants. I imagine some of this evidence will be provided in the later chapters we didn’t get to read. Additionally, I was unsure about the significance of etymology to the subculture. Dean makes some provocative, insightful, and elegant readings of the etymology of “gift” and “virus” and how older meanings of these terms related to current realities in the bareback subculture. I wanted to know, however, if the individuals actually were thinking of etymology as they fucked.

Death culture

One of Dean’s most interesting and crucial assertions is that bareback subculture has reconfigured what “life” and “death” are, making death a part of life rather than the opposite of life itself. This occurs in the relexification of HIV as a gift rather than as a death sentence, HIV as a trial of masculinity rather than a stigma, and death as something to be eroticized rather than feared, among other ways. I saw parallels to this relexification in the Death culture of Mexico, a place where death is celebrated yearly on Dia de los Muertos and is seen as a passage in life, rather than life’s end. Anti-AIDS campaigns in Mexico have at times linked themselves to Mexico’s different perspective on death as a means to destigmatize the disease, even as mainstream culture can be significantly phobic about those with the disease. However, if death is seen as part of life rather than its end, then like in bareback culture, death is seen as a consequence of living and as a means of potentially challenging the medicalization of health and life. Moreover, an acceptance of death provides spaces for attaining desires at least partially free from the fear of HIV, as well as a lifestyle that is bittersweet: cognizant of the dangers and risks of sex, but desirous of both the risks and potential consequences as a result of having lived, with death as the freedom from sexual regulation and previous concerns in life.

Condom culture

In contrast, many Latin American nations such as Brazil have also had successful condom campaigns that took unsafe sex—which is the general norm in Latin America—and deroticized it in favor of condom culture. For one Brazilian campaign, it was a matter of honor for fathers and sons to use condoms and get tested, regardless of their sexual proclivities. Using fun commercials and phrases like “strapping on a condom,” safe sex was eroticized in a culture that had seen it as the male right to inseminate any orifice he chose. It is interesting, therefore, that in North America, bareback subculture was the solution to the restrictions of the AIDS epidemic, while condom culture sprouted in Latin America for the same reasons, seeing condoms not as restrictive (as bareback culture did) but liberating from previous notions of sexuality and a conservative backlash against sex during the epidemic.

Conclusion

Overall, a fascinating and provocative study which generated much discussion among professors and students at the Unit’s event. I look forward to further conversations about this work. If you attended…any thoughts?. Read more

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