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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations
The Graduate School
2012
Enter the Man
Aaron C. Thomas
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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF VISUAL ARTS, THEATRE & DANCE
ENTER THE MAN
By
AARON C. THOMAS
A Dissertation submitted to the
School of Theatre
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Awarded:
Fall Semester, 2012
Aaron C. Thomas defended this dissertation on October 19, 2012.
The members of the supervisory committee were:
Mary Karen Dahl
Professor Directing Dissertation
Patricia Warren Hightower
University Representative
Elizabeth A. Osborne
Committee Member
Leigh H. Edwards
Committee Member
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members,
and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university
requirements.
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want, first of all, to thank my advisor, Mary Karen Dahl, for believing in this
project from the first and
as her graduate students always say among ourselves
for
always making my questions smarter. Many years ago as I was speaking to Dr. Dahl
about this project when it was only an idea, she said to me: and isn’t it interesting that
Aristotle placed the moment of the greatest release at the same moment as the greatest violence.
If I hadn t been convinced that she would be the perfect advisor before that moment,
then that sentence certainly confirmed her as the ideal director of this project. I would
also like to thank my dissertation committee, Leigh Edwards, Patricia Warren
Hightower, Lynn Hogan, and Elizabeth Osborne. Much of the early groundwork for
this project was completed in courses I took in their fields of expertise, and I have
learned a great deal from all of them. I am so fortunate to have had such a supportive,
diverse, and rich group of scholars contributing to this work.
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Focus Group at the
Association for Theatre in Higher Education has been an intellectual and community
home for me for many years, and I d like to thank the wonderful group of scholars who
have befriended me and mentored me during the time I was working on this project.
Cassidy C. Browning, Frank Episale, Jason Fitzgerald, Glenn Kessler, Christopher J.
Krejci, Patrick McKelvey, Derek Mudd, Brent Stansell, and Kalle Westerling have been
extraordinarily supportive colleagues. Bud Coleman, Jon Fraser, Brian Eugenio Herrera,
Frank Miller, Nicholas Salvato, Robert Schanke, and Jordan Schildcrout have been the
most encouraging, warm, kind, and avuncular group of people I could have ever
imagined. These men have been models of mentorship in academia, and while I have
certainly appreciated their contributions to the field as scholars, I have also been
grateful, even more, for their advice, availability, and generosity to me personally.
iii
I wish to thank, too, the people in my life who constantly sent me news items,
plays, and other cultural references to male/male sexual violence over the years that I
was working on this document, including Justin Abarca, Linda Bisesti, Carlos Cisco,
Caleb Custer, Elizabeth Harbaugh, Meghan Hawkins, Mallory Hewell, Irma Mayorga,
George McConnell, Ashley Opstad, Joshua Mikel, Bryan Schmidt, Anne Towns, and
Joel Waage. I was always pleased to know that they were thinking about me when they
came across something they thought I would find interesting.
My parents Kim and Chris have not always understood my work, but they have
always been very interested in it, always taken the time to read it, and always
approached it with pride and encouragement. Their personal support during the
writing of this document has been complete and generous, and I am very grateful to
them. (They are also just great folks in general.)
Finally, I want to thank the four people who have truly kept me sane during the
writing of this dissertation. Each time I would finish a chapter, I would instantly send a
copy of it to Catie Humphreys, David Kimple, Mark Lunsford, and Michael Stablein, Jr.
This ritual became one that marked the milestones of completion, and each of these four
gave me in-depth, sensitive feedback on the chapters, asking very difficult questions,
and pushing me forward in productive, helpful ways.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures ............................................................................................................................. vii
Abstract....................................................................................................................................... viii
1.
ENTER THE MAN ...............................................................................................................1
Rape and Its Rhetoric ...........................................................................................................3
At the Center: Why Male/Male Rape? ...............................................................................8
Violent Subjects, Violated Objects ....................................................................................10
On the Queerness and Normativity of Rape ..................................................................17
Our Fathers: Men, Maleness, Masculinity ......................................................................25
Better to Give .......................................................................................................................29
Bodies in Space ....................................................................................................................33
Criminality, Deviance, Delinquency ................................................................................37
Stigmatization and Performatives of Shame ..................................................................41
Laying Out Enter the Man .............................................................................................46
2.
THE QUEEN S CELL .........................................................................................................49
Fortune and Men’s Eyes: the New Prison Drama .............................................................53
Strange Bedfellows: Social Justice with a Camp Sensibility .........................................59
The Boys in the Band Get Busted .....................................................................................62
Perverting the Prison-Reform Play ..................................................................................69
Fortune’s Legacy as Rape-Drama ......................................................................................72
Homosexual Desire Causes Rape ...........................................................................73
Rape Is Separate from Society .................................................................................77
Rape Authenticates Representations of Prison .....................................................79
3.
TROUBLE DEAF HEAVEN ..............................................................................................82
Jokes about Banjos ..............................................................................................................85
It s got me, I said. / What s got you? / It. .............................................................90
Nature and Civilization .....................................................................................................93
Masculinity and the River .................................................................................................98
Ritual Violence and the Making of a Man ....................................................................103
Queer Pleasure in Deliverance .........................................................................................107
4.
PIG LATIN.........................................................................................................................113
Joe ”uck s Nightmare: Midnight Cowboy .......................................................................118
Deliverance in the Language of the Movies ...................................................................125
v
Pork Products: Apocrypha ..............................................................................................132
The Last Word ...................................................................................................................138
5.
AFTER ROMANS .............................................................................................................142
Spoil, Ravage, Sack, Pillage, Ruin: Caesar Invades Britannia ....................................144
Gross Indecency ................................................................................................................150
That Which Is Unseemly: Male/Male Rape and Eroticism .........................................154
Viewing Positions: Identity and Victimage ..................................................................156
Keeping Our Distance ......................................................................................................160
6.
THE WAY THINGS ARE ................................................................................................165
Generic Taxonomies: the 1990s on British Stages ........................................................168
On the Playground: Anthony Neilson s Penetrator ......................................................175
It s Nothing Sarah Kane s Blasted ..................................................................................184
Traumatic Fantasies: Mark Ravenhill s Shopping and Fucking....................................193
7.
CONCLUSION..................................................................................................................204
Appendix: Permissions for Use of Figures ............................................................................207
References ..................................................................................................................................208
Biographical Sketch ..................................................................................................................223
vi
LIST OF FIGURES
1
Advertisement for Fortune and Men’s Eyes emphasizing the gritty realism of
the production from page 28 of the New York Times 3 Mar 1967 .............................63
2
Frontispiece from ”ernard Weiner s TDR
s article describing the Romans
in Britain controversy....................................................................................................161
vii
ABSTRACT
Enter the Man is a study of representations of sexual violence that focuses on
the trope of male/male rape as it has gained prominence as a linguistic and cultural
metaphor in USAmerican, British, and Canadian society. This dissertation attempts to
disaggregate the assumptions that adhere to representations of male/male rape, and to
discuss the various uses to which representations of male/male rape have been asked to
work by artists working in theatre, film, literature, and television. Enter the Man uses
gender theory, queer theory, theories of violence, and trauma theory, to explore why
male/male rape has become a popular literary, theatrical, and cinematic trope within
Anglo-American media.
Enter the Man is also a history text, detailing and analyzing the development
of this trope. The dissertation follows a chronology of these representations beginning
with the productions of Canadian dramatist John Herbert s play Fortune and Men’s Eyes.
This document also considers James Dickey s Deliverance both as a book and in its film
version. Other texts analyzed include Miguel Piñero s Short Eyes, Rick Cluchey s The
Cage, John Schlesinger s Midnight Cowboy, and Howard ”renton s The Romans in Britain.
Enter the Man ends with the new movement of British playwriting in the 1990s with
an examination of “nthony Neilson s Penetrator, Sarah Kane s Blasted, and Mark
Ravenhill s Shopping and Fucking.
viii
CHAPTER 1
ENTER THE MAN
O,
The lust of death commits a rape upon me,
“s I would ha’ done on Castabella.
D “mville, The “theist’s Tragedy1
Oh justice will be served and the battle will rage
This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage
You'll be sorry that you messed with the U.S. of A.
’Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass it’s the “merican way.
Toby Keith, Unleashed2
Watch it, fellas. I’m pretty sure this guy wants to rape us.
Butters, South Park3
Well, obviously we have a rapist in Lincoln Park. He’s climbin’ in your windows
he’s snatchin’ your people up, tryin’ to rape ’em. So y’all need to hide your kids,
hide your wife, and hide your husband, ’cause they rapin’ everybody out here.
Antoine Dodson4
The subject of Enter the Man is a topic about which most people will claim to
have no interest in speaking. In discussions with friends and acquaintances, most of the
people I meet converse as though they spend no time thinking about male/male rape,
that it is neither a frequent object of their consideration nor one they wish to make so.
Many cannot remember ever having seen a representation
1
either a still image or a film
Cyril Tourneur, The “theist’s Tragedy, 5.2.266-8.
Toby Keith, Courtesy of the Red, White, & ”lue The “ngry “merican , Unleashed, Dreamworks
Records, 2002.
2
Imaginationland, South Park, season 11, episode 10, original air date 17 Oct 2007, written and directed
by Trey Parker.
3
4
Antoine Dodson, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzNhaLUT520 (accessed 5 Aug 2010).
1
sequence or a theatrical presentation
to speak about it
of male/male sexual violence. And as they begin
most have a fascination with the topic despite the ostensible
infrequency with which they think about it
they place an amount of distance between
themselves and male/male rape, as though it is something that they know must occur
but that happens far away: in other countries, most likely; in military barracks,
probably; in prisons, definitely; in ancient Greece and Rome; on pirate ships in the
eighteenth century; in the more forbidding fraternity houses across the United States;
during the European colonization of Africa and South America; among homosexual
men in bathhouses or leather dungeons; during times of war or genocide. Additions to
the list are always discrete societal groups that have been excluded from societies
deemed normal and usually exist in fixed locations or
thing
in what amounts to the same
in the past.
This document takes the point of view that questions and analytical problems
surrounding male/male sexual violence have much to teach us, not least about
masculinity and power. Further, because masculinity and power are so embedded in
the structural mechanisms of phallocentric society, an examination of representations of
male/male sexual violence can illuminate society itself in unique ways. Far from being a
topic we should banish from discussion or speak about only obliquely, the topic of
male/male rape can be a rich subject for exploration, and representations of sexual
violence of this sort have much to say about how we think about sex, gender, sexuality,
violence, equality, and difference, as well as subjectivity itself and Anglo-American
society as a whole.
The situation I describe above, where an interlocutor speaks about rape in order
to place a literal distance between actual male/male rape and herself as she speaks about it
illustrates an important difference between talk about rape and an actual act of rape.
Eve Sedgwick makes this distinction precisely clear in Between Men when she turns to a
brief analysis of Gone with the Wind. Sedgwick describes how Mitchell s novel manages
2
to describe a non-sexual attack by a black man on a white woman as rape at the same
time as it can describe violent, indeed, nonconsensual sex between white men and
women as though it is not rape at all.5 Sedgwick s argument is that for the white
heterosexuals in the novel (and for its white intended audience), rape itself fails to
denote rape, but an interracial assault that is not sexual reads as though it is rape,
because the man stealing something is black and the woman from whom he is stealing
is ostensibly white. Sedgwick argues that We have here in this protofeminist novel,
[…] a symbolic economy in which both the meaning of rape and rape itself are
insistently circulated. Because of the racial fracture of the society, however, rape and its
meaning circulate in precisely opposite directions.
6
“s so many of Sedgwick s provocations
in Between Men have proved in the twenty-five years since its initial publication, her
brief analysis about rape here opens a fruitful area of research.7 Sedgwick s analysis of
Mitchell s novel encourages an examination of the ways in which rape and its meaning
circulate in other texts, as well. In Gone with the Wind, the meaning of rape and rape
itself circulate in opposite directions because of the way that racism redefines rape and
its meaning. It is the argument of Enter the Man that, more often than not
of racism, certainly, but also for reasons other than racism
because
rape and its meaning
circulate within a symbolic economy where they are made to signify in ways that are
vastly different from one another.
Rape and Its Rhetoric
Taking Sedgwick s work as her cue, “mericanist Sabine Sielke further underlines the
difference between rape and its meaning by reminding us that talk about rape does not
5
See Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 787-95.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, (New York:
Columbia University Press,
, . Sedgwick s emphasis.
6
See, for example, Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities, (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1992), particularly the way in which he concludes chapter four, p. 142.
7
3
necessarily denote rape, just as talk about love hardly ever hits its target. Instead,
transposed into discourse, rape turns into a rhetorical device, an insistent figure for
other social, political, and economic concerns and conflicts.
8
According to Sielke, the
difference between what she calls the rhetoric of rape and rape itself needs to be
emphasized
rape narratives relate to real rape incidents in highly mediated ways only.
They are first and foremost interpretations, readings of rape that, as they seem to make
sense of socially deviant behavior, oftentimes limit our understanding of sexual
violence.
9
Rape narratives and rape metaphors, in other words, often occlude real-
world acts of rape, making rape itself more difficult to see.
Because of this important distinction between rape and its representation, this
book will be as specific as possible when it uses the term rape. In Enter the Man, the
word rape refers at all times to forced penetrative sexual violation, either oral, anal, or
vaginal, regardless of gender. As we shall see, the term rape need not necessarily refer
to genital contact on the part of the perpetrator of the violence. The specificity used in
the definition of rape in this study is intended as a corrective to the insistent
metaphorization of the term rape in common USAmerican and British parlance, a
metaphorization repeated equally insistently by television political commentators,
print-media journalists, activists, and academics alike.
It is the word rape as a metaphor that has allowed, for example, USAmerican
radio commentator Michael Savage to refer to the so-called gay agenda as a giant
propaganda machine committing acts of mental rape. He said in
, for example,
that the children s minds are being raped by the homosexual mafia, that s my position.
Sabine Sielke, Reading Rape: the Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Culture, 1790-1990,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) 2.
8
9
Sielke 2-3.
4
They re raping our children s minds.
10
And Savage is not alone in his metaphorization
of the term. The flexibility of the word rape as a signifier in USAmerican and British
culture has proved nearly inexhaustible. In an interview in the UK that created a
firestorm of outraged responses, anti-obesity activist MeMe Roth used a rape metaphor
to characterize overeating, saying to the Observer in 2009 that
The defence has been made in the case of sex criminals that there is
pleasure on the part of the victim. The same is true with what we re doing
with food. We may abuse our bodies with food, but it s incredibly
pleasurable. From a food marketer s point of view, when your quote
unquote victim is so willing and enjoying of the process, who s fighting
back?11
Much more famously, James Dickey s screenplay for the film Deliverance includes a
prefatory sequence where a character complains about the construction of a man-made
lake
You push a little more power into “tlanta, a little more air conditioners for your
smug little suburb, and you know what s going to happen? We re gonna rape this
whole goddamn landscape. We re gonna rape it.
12
In these metaphorizations
propaganda as rape, overeating as rape, the building of a dam as rape
the idea of rape
is made to do ideological work. Each of these descriptions uses the image of rape to recharacterize the activity it purports to describe, managing, because of the incendiary
imagery associated with rape, to confuse both sex and violence with very different
(non-sexual, non-violent) activities. When confronted with metaphorizations of this sort
it might be productive to ask the following questions: How is propaganda either violent
Michael Savage quoted in Zachary “ranow, Savage The Children s Minds “re ”eing Raped by the
Homosexual Mafia , Media Matters for America, http://mediamatters.org/research/200806180005 (accessed
15 Sep 2011).
10
11
MeMe Roth quoted in Gaby Wood, The Woman Who Hates Food, Observer 24 May 2009, 26.
James Dickey quoted in Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 128.
12
5
or sexual? In what way is overeating either violent or sexual? Is it accurate to describe
the flooding of an area of land
even if the term violence is an apt one
as though it is
sexually violent? The coupling of sex and violence to ideas that the speaker means to
characterize as bad
commercialization
antihomophobic propaganda, overeating, flooding and
metaphorizes and metamorphoses these ideas into sexually violent
ones so that audiences respond to them as though they are sexually violent.
In these instances, the use of rape as a metaphor ideologically covers over these
fissures in logic, behaving as though these questions have already been answered and
that links to sex and violence are natural and obvious. I wish to argue that the use of the
rhetoric of rape is a specifically ideological project, at work even when the person
utilizing this rhetoric is unaware of its attendant political implications. Ideology, as
Sedgwick defines it, even when it is declarative “ man s home is his castle , is
always at least implicitly narrative, and in order for the reweaving of ideology to be
truly invisible, the narrative is necessarily chiasmic in structure that is, […] the subject
of the beginning of the narrative is different from the subject at the end, and […] the
two subjects cross each other in a rhetorical figure that conceals their discontinuity.
Rape, through the use of these metaphors
rhetorical figures
13
is itself covered over;
rape and its meaning circulate in precisely opposite directions. If the metaphors
function as intended, we are not supposed to think about rape in its reality, but are
instead asked to respond to something that manifestly is not rape as we would to a real
act of sexual violation.
When Sielke asks us to look again at rape as a literary, cinematic, or theatrical
trope, she explicitly turns to a critique of the idea of rape culture. She argues that rape
has become the metaphor par excellence for the violation and subjugation of women in a
misogynist and homophobic society based on normative heterosexuality. For Sielke,
13
Sedgwick, Between Men, 14-15.
6
Feminism of the Dworkin/MacKinnon kind has not only identified all
heterosexuality as rape and turned rape into the master metaphor, for
defining the violation of woman by patriarchy.
14
So-called radical
feminism also labels the United States a rape culture and thus
misleadingly suggests that rape occurs more frequently in a culture that
talks about rape excessively than in one that denies its existence. To my
mind, though, the term rape culture says more about the prominent
status of rape as a central trope within the American cultural imaginary
than about the state of real rape.15
Talk about rape, then, is important as an object of study in its own right. According to
Sielke s argument, rape is a fundamentally important figure in American (and, I will
argue, Anglo-American) cultural symbology. Enter the Man s focus on male/male
rape in specific, as opposed to acts of rape more generally, is an attempt to reflect and to
interrogate what I see as a cultural shift toward an increase in iterations of the
male/male rape trope in theatre and film.
It is the goal of this book, then, to historicize this trope
fundament of Western society
one that I will argue is a
to note its evolution and to theorize the productive
effects it has in our culture. Rather than asking what a proliferation of images of
male/male rape might reflect in society, I am interested instead in how an increase in
iterations of this trope might function. If rape in general and male/male rape more
specifically hold prominent status as central tropes in our societies, how are these tropes
working culturally? What are the ideological effects they achieve? What does all of this
increased talk about male/male rape produce?
Sielke cites William ”eatty Warner, Reading Rape Marxist Feminist Figurations of the Literal,
Diacritics 13.4 (1983): 13.
14
15
Sielke 3-4.
7
At the Center: Why Male/Male Rape?
The topic of male/male sexual violence exists at the center of discussions of male/male
violence and male/male sexuality. For both sexuality and violence, male/male rape is a
limit, constituting the very edge on any continuum of relations between men. If,
according to the Dworkin/MacKinnon model, the rape of a woman by a man is a logical
extension of, or more accurately the paradigm for, all social relations between men and
women in heteronormative society, rape between men, because it does not easily reflect
any normative relationship in our predominantly heterosexual society, asks to be
interrogated in ways that differ from this model. This approach will be, necessarily, an
interdisciplinary one, utilizing theories of violence, theories of sexuality, gender theory,
theatre, literary, and film theories, critical race theory, and especially queer theory. I
wish to argue that the trope of male/male rape exists as a nexus for myriad
relationalities in Anglo-American society, opening various and numerous spaces for
analyses of:
1. considerations of violence between men at the most quotidian level, including
bullying, fraternal violence, and violent language, as well as violence on more
national and global scales such as torture, war, and genocide,
2. considerations of sexuality such as the too-easily manufactured and too-often
repeated binary of heterosexuality/ homosexuality, but also more nuanced
taxonomies of desire, attraction, arousal, and pleasure,
3. considerations of gender identity such as masculinity and femininity and the
related concepts of man and woman, as well as slippages between and away
from these simple binaries,
4. considerations of sexualized power such as relationalities between sexual
dyads such as top/bottom and aggressor/receptor, but also ostensibly
nonsexual social relationships such as winner/loser and topdog/underdog,
8
5. the spatial dimensions (inside/outside, over/under, behind/before) of the
body itself as it is penetrated or rendered permeable; these spatialities take on
even further resonance and significance because of the persistent link (both
real and rhetorical) between rape and incarceration, notions of being behind
bars, under surveillance, and even
as the carceral is colloquially termed
inside,
6. considerations of criminality, deviance, and vilification, as sexual violence is
frequently rendered as the ultimate crime, and victimization by rape as the
ultimate in abasement,
7. discussions of shame and traumatic experience, as well as the silences,
obfuscations, and desires for revenge that frequently accompany and indeed
constitute both shame and the experience of trauma,
8. considerations of the intersections and interconnectedness of pleasure and
pain, ecstasy and abjection that often accompany both sex and violence, but
that are also linked to questions of wholeness and dissolution, identity and
shattering, and the ideas of the subject and the object,
9. the capacity of the theatre, film, and other media to represent or perform
pain, sex, aggression, and/or violation,
10. the identificatory practices of audiences as we witness representations or read
descriptions of sexual violence and are asked by cultural producers to
identify with or disidentify with either the rapist or his victim, and, finally,
11. the ethics of such representations.
As Sedgwick demonstrates in Tendencies with the purported functions and ostensible
meanings of the word family, disarticulating the factors which constitute and confer
power onto our ideas about rape is no easy task.16 I find it impossible, for example, to
My list of 11 nodes of discussion attendant to male/male rape rhetoric is indebted to a similar list in
Tendencies that disarticulates the idea of the family into a surname / a sexual dyad / a legal unit based on
16
9
discuss the gendering of rape victims apart from a consideration of penetrative
violence, and many theorists have discussed shame as attendant to receptivity/loss and
even as constitutive of subjectivity itself. It will be my constant rejoinder, however, that
the use of rape as a metaphor is designed precisely to cover over these constituent
elements of rape, naturalizing their links to one another and ideologically connecting,
for example, shame to femininity, receptive sexuality to incarceration, wholeness to
maleness, criminality to anality, etc. To pry apart and to address the natural
connections that rape has to these considerations is, hopefully, to analyze the power
that rape
both real and metaphorized
holds in our society and to begin to
understand why talk about the raped male body is so ubiquitous. Enter the Man is
intended as an initial foray into this locus of questions. I will begin this study by
partially laying the theoretical groundwork for a discussion of male/male rape. This
first chapter, then, serves as an initial attempt at describing and theorizing the
epistemologies that surround acts of male/male rape and their representations in AngloAmerican culture. This trope, I will argue, is one that is fundamental to Western society,
and one that has become, and will continue to be, increasingly important in AngloAmerican cultural production.
Violent Subjects, Violated Objects
Rape is unquestionably an act of violence. That cultural products so often treat rape as
equivalent to pleasurable sex acts (as Margaret Mitchell does in Gone with the Wind) is
central to the questions this document interrogates and is, I will argue, central to the
ideological and rhetorical power of rape itself. But I want, as an ethical strategy, to
address rape s violent dimensions
its power to physically wound, its ability to
damage the human body, and its world-destroying capabilities
before discussing the
state-regulated marriage / a circuit of blood relationships / a system of companionship and succor / a
building / a proscenium between private and public / an economic unit of earning and taxation, etc.
See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 6.
10
sexual components of an act of rape. I do this in order to place rape firmly on a
continuum with other acts of violence such as beatings, torture, murder, and war. An
act of rape is no less violent for its sexual components than the physical breaking of a
body during an act of torture or the stabbing of a body with a knife, and it is part of the
ideological power adherent to an act of rape that rape has so often been considered
somehow separate or different from these acts of violence committed on the human
body.
Freud, in his 1930 treatise on violence Civilization and Its Discontents, considers
violence to be a natural aspect of humanity that is also inseparable from sexuality,
describing man s drive toward aggression as coterminous with a drive toward sexual
satisfaction. He posits, for example, that men are not gentle creatures who want to be
loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the
contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful
share of aggressiveness.
17
Aggressiveness is, for Freud, both sexual and violent, or more
accurately, aggression is an instinct that can manifest itself both sexually and violently.
Somewhat surprisingly for 1930, in the section which follows this same passage,
Freud refers specifically to male/male rape, offering that, as a result of men s
instinctual endowment of aggressiveness,
Their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but
also someone who tempts them to satisfy their sexual aggressiveness on
him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him
sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to
cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus.18 Who in the
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, the Standard Edition, translated by James Strachey,
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 68.
17
Perhaps not coincidentally, the image of the wolf will later be used in prison argot to refer to men who
overpower other men sexually.
18
11
face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to
dispute this assertion?19
In Freud s formulation, man is naturally inclined toward both violence and sex, but
sexuality and violence are for Freud so inextricably intertwined with one another that
he figures sexually violent activity as simply one more aspect of man s aggressive
nature. Indeed, he states flatly in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality that the
sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness
subjugate.
a desire to
20
Although Freud has argued that violence is endemic to human beings as such,
there has been no shortage of other explanations for the violence present throughout the
history of humanity. The Freudian psychotherapist Rollo May argues, with Freud, that
aggression is an element that is essential to [a human being s] full humanity,
considering aggressive behavior as fundamentally rooted in an impulse of selfpreservation.21 Unlike Freud, May contends that violence has its breeding ground in
impotence and apathy. For May, deeds of violence in our society are performed
largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to
demonstrate that they, too, are significant. […] Violence arises not out of superfluity of
power but out of powerlessness.
22
Here May places himself in line with Hannah
Arendt, who argues that subjects often resort to violence when they feel that their
power has diminished (she uses the familiar example of Billy Budd striking Claggart,
19
Freud, Civilization, 68-9. Emphasis mine.
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the Standard Edition, translated by James
Strachey, (New York: Basic Books, 2000), . Freud s emphasis.
20
21
Rollo May, Power and Innocence: a Search for the Sources of Violence, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972), 97.
22
May 23.
12
the master-at-arms who accuses him of conspiracy).23 It has often been said, “rendt
notes, that impotence breeds violence, and psychologically this is quite true, at least of
persons possessing natural strength, moral or physical.
rage and the violence that sometimes
24
For Arendt,
not always goes with it belong
among the natural human emotions, and to cure man of them would
mean nothing less than to dehumanize or emasculate him. That such acts,
in which men take the law into their own hands for justice s sake, are in
conflict with the constitutions of civilized communities is undeniable; but
their antipolitical character […] does not mean that they are inhuman or
merely emotional.25
Arendt and May (after her) insist upon violence as natural to humanity, and in this they
follow Freud and his notion that aggression is fundamentally human. For all three there
is a drive toward aggression that can be channeled in various ways but which always
contains the possibility of violent action.
For Arendt and May, violent action is the result of a feeling of a loss of power
and a compulsion or desire to return oneself to a position of power. In The Freudian
Body, however, Leo Bersani has wisely noted that Freud himself makes, in fact, precisely
the same point in Civilization and Its Discontents: by submitting to civilization, we limit
our own aggressive potential, that is, attempt to renounce a fundamentally human
impulse toward destructiveness:
In a very important sense, civilization in Freud, at least that aspect of it
which he thinks of as a socialized superego, is merely a cultural metaphor
Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor: (An Inside Narrative), in Pierre; Israel Potter; The Piazza Tales; The
Confidence-Man; Uncollected Prose; Billy Budd, Sailor, edited by Harrison Hayford, (New York: Library of
America, 1984), 1404.
23
24
Hannah “rendt, On Violence, in Crises of the Republic, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969), 153.
25
Arendt 161.
13
for the psychic fulfillment in each of us of a narcissistically thrill[ing] wish
to destroy the world. From this perspective, civilization is not the tireless
if generally defeated opponent of individual aggressiveness; rather, it is
the cause of the very antagonism which Civilization and Its Discontents sets
out to examine.26
Civilization in Freud, because it attempts to limit aggressiveness in humans, is itself the
cause of aggressiveness after all.
Other theories that place the responsibility for violence with society include the
social philosopher Erich Fromm s assertion that human aggression is often caused by
crowding:
modern mass man is isolated and lonely, even though he is part of a
crowd; he has no convictions which he could share with others, only
slogans and ideologies he gets from the communications media. […] Emile
Durkheim called this phenomenon anomie and found that it was the
main cause of suicide which had been increasing with the growth of
industrialization.27
Fromm places responsibility for anomie with the social, psychological, cultural, and
economic conditions under which [crowding] occurs, stating that it is obvious that
overpopulation, i.e., population density under conditions of poverty, causes stress and
aggression.
28
Fromm argues that violence is often caused by an unbearable sense of
boredom and impotence and the need to experience that there is someone who will
react […]. Killing is one way of experiencing that one is and that one can produce an
26
Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 23.
Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972),
107.
27
28
Fromm 108.
14
effect on another being.
29
This is precisely the argument that James Dickey would
make about Deliverance in 1973 when he described his novel as a story of how decent
men kill. […] “merican life is so structured that a lot of areas of one s existence
one s potentiality, maybe,
or
for either good or evil never get a chance to surface. And
sometimes these are repressed feelings of violence.
30
What each of these theorists articulates is that an act of violence works to
produce the subject who commits the violence. Through the act of violence that he
commits, the violator reminds himself that he is alive, or rather, comes to life through the
act of violence; in Arendt he redresses his loss of power; in Freud he exercises his human
potential; in May he insists upon his significance; in Fromm, he triumphantly
experiences his own existence.
This act of violence is committed on a body, then, that the subject transforms into
an object so that the subject can exist. “s Simone Weil once hypothesized of violence, it
is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it
turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody
was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all.
31
Violence creates a subject
through the simultaneous creation of an object. For Weil, the master-slave relationship
of ancient Greece works in a similar way. Describing the violence of slavery, Weil
makes clear that the ancients saw their slaves as things, objects, a relationship that
worked reciprocally to create the Greeks as subjects, the masters of those things.
In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Fromm notes that because of the taboo
against killing humans with which one feels an identificatory bond or a capacity for
29
Fromm 251.
James Dickey quoted in Geoffrey Norman, Playboy Interview James Dickey, in The Voiced Connections
of James Dickey: Interviews and Conversations, edited by Ronald Baughman, (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press: 1989), 127. First published in 1973.
30
Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force, translated by Mary McCarthy, in Simone Weil: an
Anthology, edited by Siân Miles, (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 163.
31
15
empathy, other persons are often treated as objects as a way of enabling violent actions.
Fromm says that the stranger, the person who does not belong to the same group, is
often not felt as a fellowman, but as something with which one does not identify,
remarking as well that even in a highly civilized culture like the Greek, the slaves were
experienced as not being entirely human.
32
Christopher Browning notes a similar
attitude toward other human beings in Poland during the sweeps of the Parczew forest
by Reserve Police Battalion 101 in 1942 and 1943: during what they called the judenfrei,
the Jew hunt, these Nazis carried on a tenacious, remorseless, ongoing campaign in
which the hunters tracked down and killed their prey in direct and personal
confrontation.
33
Those being killed are considered by their killers to be objects, less than
human.
In this formulation it is important to note that violence is at work,
simultaneously creating objects and subjects at the same time as it also performatively
asserts itself as possessing this productive power. In other words, violence, as it is
committed, cites itself as powerful. Weil warns, for example, that force is as pitiless to
the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes,
the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.
34
Victim and perpetrator
are, in the end, both slaves to violence itself. And more recently, Judith Butler has
noted, after Michel Foucault, that there is no power, construed as a subject, that acts,
but only […] a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability. This is
less an act, singular and deliberate, than a nexus of power and discourse that repeats
or mimes the discursive gestures of power.
32
35
To modify Butler slightly, if the rapist
Fromm 121.
Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, 2nd
edition, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), 132.
33
34
Weil 171.
35
Judith Butler, ”odies That Matter on the Discursive Limits of Sex , (New York: Routledge, 1993), 225.
16
uses the binding power of his act of rape to create a power differential between himself
and his victim, ”utler suggests that this works through the citation of the law that the
act of rape performs.36 The rapist cites the power of rape as he commits rape, tapping
into the already-existent trope of rape as world-destroying. He confirms the power of
that act at the same time as he utilizes it as a way of attaining power.
But if power moves through bodies, controlling them and articulating its own
existence without consideration for either violator or victim, in real-world incidences of
male/male rape there do still exist a rapist and a victim, a man who is committing
violence and another man on whom that violence is committed. It may not be
inaccurate to describe power as being exchanged and organized between them and to
note that the rapist creates himself as a subject through the transformation of the victim
into an object, but we should also be careful to note the pain and trauma that victims of
rape suffer. Violence is at work between the bodies of the men, but significantly, it works
in a profoundly different way on the body of one of the men, creating extraordinary
pain and causing unseen trauma that can last for a lifetime. It is the project of Enter the
Man to press on the discourses which circulate around rape and describe rape, to
attempt always to link them back to real-world violence, and to explore the ways that
representational practices influence and bolster the power of rape itself.
On the Queerness and Normativity of Rape
Scholars agree that the causes of rape are varied, complex, and dependent on numerous
cultural factors. Any universalized explanation for the causes of rape is, by necessity,
doomed to fail. The term rape can and ought to be applied to various acts of sexual
violence committed in numerous contexts, and any explanation for rape requires a
definition of rape that necessarily excludes some acts that ought to be deemed rape. In
the Encyclopedia of Rape, for instance, Martha McCaughey provides the example of white
36
Butler, Bodies,
. ”utler s emphasis.
17
men raping black women under slavery in the United States. In such cases, she
argues, rape is best explained as enabled and motivated by a legalized sexual
entitlement to specific women by specific men.
37
The rape of enslaved women by white
men who believed these women to be sexually accessible
was in fact ensured and enforced by the law
a sexual accessibility that
cannot be explained in the same way as
date-rape or prison-rape or rape as a weapon of genocide. It is unhelpful and totalizing
to seek a single cause for sexual violations which differ in circumstances and take place
under differing structures of power. Any account of the causes for rape must therefore
remain contextualized and specific, avoiding universalization as best as possible.
Explanations that seek, for example, to describe the cause of rape as an expression of
sexual frustration or, conversely, domination or even socialized masculinity, can hope
only to provide an account of why some men rape some women. These explanations
cannot describe causes for why a man might rape another man.
McCaughey is also careful to point out that many men who commit acts of rape
do not understand their own actions as acts of rape:
It is the victims [of rape] who describe rape as not sexual and as rendering
them powerless or subordinate to the perpetrator. Conflating the
perspective of perpetrator and victim has led some to assert that rape is
caused by a desire to find unwilling people to force into sex. This view
presumes that rapists realize they are raping, which they often do not.38
Describing other explanations for the causes of rape, McCaughey goes on to say that the
fact that male/male rape is committed by perpetrators who do not identify themselves
as homosexual confirms, for some, that rape is about violating another rather than
gaining sexual pleasure, and for others, suggests that the cause of rape is the
Martha McCaughey, Rape, Causes Of, in Encyclopedia of Rape, edited by Merril D. Smith, (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 167.
37
38
McCaughey 167.
18
socialization to a masculinity that stresses aggression and goal-oriented sexuality over
intimacy.
39
It is important, then, that we avoid conflating the vastly differing
experiences of victims and perpetrators of rape. For most victims, acts of rape are not
about sex conversely, many men who rape women do not comprehend themselves
as having committed rape at all and may see what they have done as only a sex act.
But if rape is an act of sex for many of its perpetrators, then it would seem that it
is the only sex act, or rather group of violent sexual acts, that is not indicative of
does not tie itself inextricably to
that
the sexuality of the persons involved in its
commission. I mean, by this, to note that an act of sexual violence does not confer a
sexual identity onto the person committing the act. The rape of a woman by a man
might seem to confirm a male heterosexuality but it, as we shall see, cannot; the rape of
a man by a man, conversely, certainly does not confirm the rapist s homosexuality. The
Encyclopedia of Rape declares that
Although most male rape is perpetrated by men, it should not be
considered homosexual rape. While males who rape other males
usually identify themselves as heterosexual, neither the biological sex nor
the sexual identification of the rapist or the rape victim makes the act a
sexual one. Sexual intercourse without mutual consent is always rape. […
However,] male survivors may interpret their rape as an act of sex and
therefore believe they [have] had a homosexual encounter.40
Male/male rape, then, confers homosexuality neither on the rapist nor the victim. The
overwhelming majority of men who rape men are manifestly opposed to interpellating
McCaughey 167. I object to McCaughey s creation of a binary that places intimacy opposite goaloriented sexuality. The two are hardly dichotomous. Her essay does not contain an argument promoting
intimacy (a term which remains undefined in her essay and in society as a whole), and other models
exist for sexualities that are not goal-oriented. A model of sexuality which differs from the hydraulic
model need not necessarily place a greater focus on so-called intimacy than the hydraulic model does.
39
Heather Schmidt, Male Rape, in Encyclopedia of Rape, edited by Merril D. Smith, (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2004), 121.
40
19
themselves within homosexuality. Far from confirming either homosexuality or
heterosexuality, male/male rape instead works to confound distinctions between
homosexuality and heterosexuality. We might, therefore, pose the following questions:
What is the sexuality of the man who commits rape on another man? Is he a
heterosexual who understands himself to be committing a homosexual sex act despite
his heterosexual identity? Do homosexuality and heterosexuality as terms lose all
credibility in analyses of male/male rape? Is male/male rape more accurately described
in the language of kink, as though it is a sexual practice inflecting heterosexual sexuality
but maintaining heterosexuality s coherence? Ought we instead to consider rape its own
sexuality, perhaps one specifically linked to criminality, like pedophilia? What other
taxonomies might be useful here?
The taxonomic problem in cases of male/male rape partially exposes the flaws in
the oft-repeated binary that describes human sexualities as contained only within the
terms heterosexuality and homosexuality. Over thirty years ago, in one of queer
theory s founding texts, Michel Foucault famously argued that the notion of
homosexuality qua sexuality was a phenomenon culturally specific to our own time:
Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from
the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul.
The sodomite had been a temporary aberration the homosexual was now a species.
41
”ut Foucault s radical historicization of the term homosexual in The History of Sexuality
appears to have had very little effect on popular conceptions of sexual identity and little
to no influence on popular insistence that there are only two sexualities: a (privileged)
heterosexual one and a (more or less condemned) homosexual one.
As recently as 2009, the editor of the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide even felt
comfortable publishing
without irony
an article by playwright and novelist Larry
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: an Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley, (New
York: Vintage Books, 1990), 43. My emphasis.
41
20
Kramer that makes the explicitly anti-Foucauldian claim that homosexuality has been
pretty much the same since the beginning of human history, whether it was called
homosexuality, sodomy, buggery, or had no name at all.
42
The obvious and offensive
androcentrism of Kramer s argument is plain in his blatant neglect of terms like sapphist
and tribade. That these terms are absent in his argument makes it clear that he refers
only to a stable, transhistorical male homosexual identity, though his theory ought
consequently to presume that an equivalently concrete and unchanging lesbian identity
has existed since the beginning of human history as well. Kramer s argument further
necessitates though he does not specifically note it
that there must also have existed
throughout history a stable and predominantly unchanging heterosexuality.43
Still more recently, a 2011 story in the New York Times bore the headline No
Surprise for ”isexual Men Report Indicates They Exist. The Times seemed shocked to
report that researchers at Northwestern University have found evidence that at least
some men who identify themselves as bisexual are, in fact, sexually aroused by both
women and men.
44
The phrases at least some and in fact in the Times report betray the
author s apparent skepticism at the existence of bisexual desire, even though the data he
cites report precisely the opposite. That the existence or nonexistence of bisexuality in
some men even merited scientific study indicates how powerful the homo/hetero binary
has become in USAmerican culture; our society demands that one is either heterosexual
or homosexual, and any mode of desire that varies from this binary becomes
immediately illegible to many readers and viewers.
42
Larry Kramer, Queer Theory s Heist of Our History, Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 16.5 (2009): 11.
The idea of such a heterosexuality is unsupportable (even in males), and has been refuted by two
decades of meticulous research into the history of sexuality. See, for example, Steven Angelides, A History
of Bisexuality, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
43
David Tuller, No Surprise for ”isexual Men Report Indicates They Exist, New York Times 23 Aug
2011, D1.
44
21
Popular insistence on the existence of only two sexualities
pace Larry Kramer
is, however confounded by acts of male/male rape, and I want to argue, as J.
Halberstam does in Female Masculinity, that we ought to develop new taxonomies for
positions of desire and sexuality that expand away from the Kinsey continuum and in
new directions.45 “s Halberstam notes, the main problem with taxonomizing was first
that it was left to sexologists, and second that we have not continued to produce ever
more accurate or colorful or elaborate or imaginative or flamboyant taxonomies.
46
We
might also direct our thinking away from taxonomies that are beholden to identity
positions, focusing instead on specific sexual practices and creating taxonomies around
activities and desires
nonce taxonomies, Sedgwick once bemusedly called them47)
instead of categories that purport to be stable and attempt to describe transhistorical
positions of identity.
One path around taxonomies of sexuality that concern themselves with identity
positions is to consider what we imagine to be the causes of sexuality tout court, as
Elizabeth Grosz does in Space, Time, and Perversion. Grosz describes our typical model
for sexuality as a hydraulic one, meaning that when we think about sex, we are thinking
primarily about ideas like release or ejaculation. For Grosz,
the fantasy that binds sex to death so intimately is the fantasy of a
hydraulic sexuality, a biologically regulated need or instinct, a
compulsion, urge, or mode of physical release (the sneeze provides an
analogue). The apparently urgent and compulsive nature of sexual drives
is implicit in the claim made by many men who rape, those who frequent
prostitutes, and those prostitutes who describe themselves as health
45
The Kinsey continuum is, of course, itself a move away from binaristic thinking about sexuality.
46
Judith Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 47.
47
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 23.
22
workers, insofar as they justify their roles in terms of maintaining the
health of their clients.48
Grosz s analysis allows us to see that many explanations for rape imagine sexuality as a
whole to be hydraulic and therefore consider rape as due to a frustration of the drives
and compulsions that fuel normative sexual desires. She finds the entire paradigm of
hydraulic sexuality to be problematic and misdirected, arguing that when eroticism is
considered a program, a means to an end foreplay , a mode of conquest, a proof of
virility or femininity, an inner drive that periodically erupts, or an impelling attraction
to an object that exerts a magnetic force i.e., as actively compelling, or as passively
seduced , it is reduced to versions of this hydraulic model.
49
Grosz imagines a different
paradigm for sexuality that is based on an idea of surface effects or what Deleuze and
Guattari called machinic connections.
50
I wish to remain with Grosz s theory for a just
a short while longer as a way to think outside the hydraulic model. She proposes the
following:
To relate, through someone, to something else; or to relate, through
something, to someone; not to relate to some one and only that person,
Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, (New York: Routledge, 1995),
204.
48
49
Grosz 204.
Grosz 182. See also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987). Quoting Deleuze and Guattari is a difficult undertaking, and I do not wish to
decontextualize their work, but a brief illustration of what it might mean to relate through instead of
relating to can be found in this sequence from early on in Anti-Oedipus:
50
If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in
the real world and can produce only reality. Desire is the set of passive syntheses that
engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production. The
real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as autoproduction of
the unconscious. Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the
subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed
subject unless there is repression. Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the
machine, as a machine of a machine. Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is
another machine connected to it. (26)
23
without mediation. To use the machinic connections a body-part forms
with another, whether it be organic or inorganic, to form an intensity, an
investment of libido is to see desire, sexuality as productive. Productive,
though in no way reproductive, for this pleasure can serve no other
purpose, have no other function, than its own augmentation and
proliferation. A production, then, that makes, but that reproduces
nothing.51
Grosz successfully bypasses the hydraulic model, proposing a way for us to think our
own libidinal productivity as machinic connection or surface effect, always mediated by
eroticized body-parts (or, as she says, inorganic objects) and desiring machines.
I have quoted this section from Space, Time, and Perversion at length in order to
demonstrate just how far a model of pleasure such as Grosz s is removed from the
violence, pain, confusion, and shame immanent to any act of rape regardless of gender,
circumstances, or the specific nature of the violation committed. Acts of rape, in other
words, are fundamentally rooted in a hydraulic model of sexuality, privileging
compulsion and release over pleasure, and if it is possible to conceive of a sexuality that
is immanent to rape, we must locate it outside of the model of a binary homosexuality
and heterosexuality. We must attend to rape, instead, as taking part in a larger culture
of hydraulic sexuality, a model which moves quickly past pleasure and toward release,
which emphasizes the penetrative, the ejaculative, the orgasmic, devaluing any other
erotic experience.
If the theoretical model above and Enter the Man as a whole seem heavily
dependent on the field of queer theory and on theories of sex and sexuality, it is because
those fields of study have felt comfortable and capable addressing questions that other
fields have deemed unworthy of interest and shameful. This is, of course, not a book
51
Grosz 183. My emphasis.
24
about queerness per se, but rape, no matter the genders of the persons involved, is a
non-normative sexual experience by any measure. Male/male rape is queer in particular
because it replicates and perverts the pleasurable and erotic experiences of gay men and
because both rapists and victims frequently understand themselves to be heterosexual.
We might further understand male/male rape as queer because rape is an act invariably
and ineradicably linked to criminality, shame, and secrecy
attributes still considered
immanent to queerness itself in many parts of the world. I wish, however, not to argue
for a taxonomy that states that rape is either normative (as Andrea Dworkin has done52)
or queer. Rather, using male/male rape as a point of departure, this document asks how
we might think of rape as an act that produces a specter of queerness, one that is
frequently used to define queerness in culture, and, following this, how rape s
queerness and normativity might be used to speak about Anglo-American culture as a
whole.
Our Fathers: Men, Maleness, Masculinity
Acts of rape manage to distance themselves from sexuality through violent acts of
gendering. Put another way, acts of rape are intended to solidify gender positionalities,
to emphasize gender difference through a reaffirmation of what it means to be
woman and what it means to be man. Rape, if it is not an act of sexuality, is
explicitly an act of gender. A man has the capability of asserting his position as male
through an act of rape that, through its commission, explicitly genders him as male by
gendering the body of his victim as female. German historian Klaus Theweleit explains
this gendering of men in the first volume of Male Fantasies, his seminal study on
Fascism and misogyny:
if male-female relations of production under patriarchy are relations of
oppression, it is appropriate to understand the sexuality created by, and
52
Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1987).
25
active within, those relations as a sexuality of the oppressor and the
oppressed. If the social nature of such gender-distinctions isn t
expressly emphasized, it seems grievously wrong to distinguish these
sexualities according to the categories male and female. The sexuality
of the patriarch is less male than it is deadly, just as that of the subjected
women is not so much female as suppressed, devivified.53
For Theweleit, the Fascist male (re)asserts his maleness through acts of violence, and
re asserts the woman s femaleness by actively suppressing her power and often killing
her. Put more succinctly: for the Fascist, a man is a man only because of his acts of
violence and a woman is a woman only because she is the victim of that violence.
Judith ”utler has argued that gender as substance, the viability of man and
woman as nouns, is called into question by the dissonant play of attributes that fail to
conform to sequential or causal modes of intelligibility.
54
Butler argues that gender is
performative, though she has been widely misinterpreted partially due to the
indiscriminate use of the word performative55 in academic discourse
be performative
gender proves to
that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense,
gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist
the deed.
56
Gender, in other words, is always an activity; this means, not that gender is
Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, translated by Stephen Conway,
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 222.
53
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd edition, (New York: Routledge,
1999), 32.
54
J.L. Austin theorized the term performative in a series of lectures at Harvard University called the
William James Lectures published as How to Do Things with Words, (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1962). For Austin, a performative is a linguistic phrase that actually performs itself as it is uttered.
Examples might be I now pronounce you husband and wife or I sentence you to ten years in prison.
The frequent misuse of the term (to mean something akin to the word theatrical) throughout academia,
particularly and regrettably by theatre scholars, has not only diluted the value of the term as Austin
theorized it but has contributed to confusion when the term is used in its Austinian sense, as Butler does
in Gender Trouble.
55
56
Butler, Gender, 33.
26
a performance per se, but rather that it is performative, constituting itself through its own
declaration. Turning our attention to men and to rape
gender
which I am arguing is an act of
we must remind ourselves that there is no subject that preexists the deed.
An act of rape is a means of becoming a man, of asserting one s maleness even more
accurately, an act of rape ought to be seen as a technique that places one within a
history of violent maleness, confirming one s membership in a category that exists prior
to the subject himself. ”utler concludes that There is no gender identity behind
expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very
expressions that are said to be its results.
57
A man does not, in other words, commit
rape because of his maleness. On the contrary: an act of rape offers the opportunity for a
man to achieve an always-contested maleness, a maleness that does not actually exist
prior to the rape itself.
Critiquing the naturalized link between maleness and masculinity, J. Halberstam
has argued that we need to disarticulate masculinity from the male body so that we can
more easily see masculinity as such. Halberstam argues that
Masculinity in this society inevitably conjures up notions of power and
legitimacy and privilege; it often symbolically refers to the power of the
state and to uneven distributions of wealth. […] If what we call dominant
masculinity appears to be a naturalized relation between maleness and
power, then it makes little sense to examine men for the contours of that
masculinity s social construction. Masculinity […] becomes legible as
masculinity where and when it leaves the white male middle-class body.58
Throughout Female Masculinity, Halberstam clearly demonstrates that men have not
created masculinity in a monosexual vacuum without the help of women, or even as a
57
Butler, Gender, 33.
58
Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 2.
27
series of homosocial relations simply using women as objects of exchange. Rather,
women (and others) have expanded masculinity as a categorical descriptor and have
contributed to what is specifically meant by the term masculinity. Further, masculinity
has ceased to be
if indeed it ever was
the sole property of the heterosexual male, as
gay men, transmen, lesbians, heterosexual women, and transwomen all manage to
possess and express various masculinities. Halberstam sums up her argument by
saying that
it is crucial to recognize that masculinity does not belong to men, has not
been produced only by men, and does not properly express male heterosexuality.
59
I include Halberstam s argument here because her examination of masculinity
apart from the male bodies to which it is ideologically linked demonstrates just how
tenuous the link between masculinity and biological maleness is. This link s fragility is
indicated further by the herculean efforts put forward to repair the link by people like
Robert Bly (Iron John [
] and the men s movement more generally. The men s
movement as a whole was an effort to restore a specific version of masculinity to a
specific type of (white, middle-class) man.60 ”ut if, as the men s movement has argued,
masculinity needs to be restored to men, it ought certainly to be obvious that
masculinity has become indeed it has always been
separate from maleness, joined to
it through ideological work and not through a kind of natural, biological, or spiritual
essence immanent to the Y chromosome.
59
Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 241.
For a much fuller discussion of Iron John and the men s movement, see David Savran, Taking It like a
Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1998), pp. 169-76.
60
28
Better to Give61
Just as, according to Klaus Theweleit s argument, the rape of a woman has the power to
produce maleness for the rapist, the rape of a man by another man has a comparable
ability to gender a rapist as male. We will see examples of this power to produce gender
exercised repeatedly in the examples of male/male rape in Enter the Man, but for now
we will take time only to note the taboos that have existed throughout history for males
who have taken (consensually or not) the receptive position in penetrative anal sex
between men. In Is the Rectum a Grave? Leo ”ersani has described a historical
structuring of sexual behavior in terms of activity and passivity, with a correlative
rejection of the so-called passive role in sex.
62
”ersani goes on to cite Foucault s study
of ancient sexuality in the second volume of The History of Sexuality:
What the Athenians find hard to accept, Foucault writes, is the authority
of a leader who as an adolescent was an object of pleasure for other
men; there is a legal and moral incompatibility between sexual passivity
and civic authority. The only honorable sexual behavior consists in
being active, in dominating, in penetrating, and in thereby exercising
one s authority.
63
In other words, the moral taboo on passive anal sex
in ancient Athens is primarily formulated as a kind of hygienics of social
power. To be penetrated is to abdicate power.64
I mean my pun to refer to the King James Version of the Bible, Acts
I have shewed you all things,
how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how
he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.
61
62
Leo ”ersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? October 43 (1987): 212.
Bersani cites Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure
Robert Hurley, (New York: Vintage, 1990), 78-93.
63
64
”ersani, Rectum,
Volume 2 of the History of Sexuality, translated by
.
29
In other words, to be penetrated is to become a woman or, at the very least, less than a
man65; to penetrate either a man or a woman is to assert oneself as male, to achieve
maleness through the gendering of the person penetrated as female.
Moving away from acts of gendering that become explicit through the violence
inherent in acts of rape, we ought also to remember that ostensibly nonviolent sex, even
between nonheterosexual couples and groupings, is also inextricable from real-world
power relations. A sexual relation66 does not exist in a utopian space that subverts or
recodifies power relations between its participants. As Robert Reid-Pharr has noted
about power relations in gay male black-white relationships, the tendency to insist
upon the innocence of our sex, the transparency of desire at the moment of penetration,
is itself part of the complex ideological process by which whiteness is rendered
invisible, unremarkable except in the presence of a spectacularized ”lackness.
67
Reid-
Pharr notes that sex between a black man and a white man in this scenario (however
queer, and therefore transgressive, that sex may be) exists within the complex relations
of race and racism in the United States and not in a queer nation of its own that is
innocent of racist ideologies.
Further, sexual activity works to produce differences between subjects, not simply
reflect them or repeat them. For Reid-Pharr, what we think when we fuck is not so
much dictated by race, gender, and class, but instead acts itself as an articulation of the
structures of dominance
and resistance
that create race, gender and class.
68
This is
not to say, as Freud would presumably have it, that sex is inherently violent in some
Bersani continues this discussion in Homos, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), see especially
pp. 105-6.
65
I cannot write that phrase without noting that Lacan once said that there is no sexual relation. The phrase
has been much debated and I do not propose to go into it here, but I am partial to Leo Bersani and Adam
Phillips discussion on the topic in Intimacies, (Chicago: University of Chicago, Press, 2008).
66
67
Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Dinge, Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory 8.2 (1996): 78.
68
Reid-Pharr 80.
30
way; Reid-Pharr s argument is instead that sex is always already about power and that
sexual relations cannot escape power relations simply by virtue of their queerness We
do not escape race and racism when we fuck. On the contrary, this fantasy of escape is
precisely that which marks the sexual act as deeply implicated in the ideological
processes by which difference is constructed and maintained.
69
A sexual act, then, is
always imbricated in real-world structures of power. Penetrative acts of sexual violence
not only display authority and perform power, they tap into a history of relations in
societies across the planet that render a person who is penetrated as powerless, subject,
dominated, weak.
It is this historical link between power and penetration that grants the words
screw and fuck the meanings with which they are so often fraught,70 so that Jesse
Sheidlower can describe the second definition of the verb fuck as to harm irreparably
finish victimize.
71
Sheidlower cites Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Henry
Miller as all using the word with precisely this meaning
humiliated
of being victimized or
prior to 1940.72 Certainly to be penetrated is to abdicate power in this
use of the word, but even more importantly, the word serves as a persistent
sexualization of power relationships tout court. When Philip J. Kaplan describes ruined
businesses as fucked, as he does in his 2002 book F’d Companies Spectacular Dot-com
Flameouts and its accompanying website fuckedcompany.com, 73 or when, for example,
69
Reid-Pharr 84.
Words such as faggot, punk, cocksucker, whore, slut, cunt, slag, etc. (the list would appear to be
nauseatingly endless) that describe the receptive partner in any penetrative sexual relation have retained
their power because of an always implicit rendering of the penetrated person as dirty, valueless, or
having lost something.
70
71
Jesse Sheidlower, ed., The F Word, 2nd edition, (New York: Random House, 1999), 124.
72
Sheidlower 124-5.
73
Philip J. Kaplan, F’d Companies Spectacular Dot-com Flameouts, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).
31
Newt Gingrich says to a group of tobacco lobbyists that You guys have screwed us,
74
these men sexualize what are ostensibly nonsexual power relations. Their uses of the
words fucked and screwed both discursively reimagine nonsexual relations as sexual at
the same time as they articulate and shore up a bias against any person who allows
him- or herself to be penetrated in a sexual situation. These uses refashion the loser, the
defeated, the dominated as the penetrated. And the equation re-exerts its power on the
original term; the sexually penetrated subject is re-inscribed (for the nth time) as the
loser, the defeated, the dominated.75
If being the receptive partner in a penetrative sexual relationship is described
and re-described as a universal negative in almost all cultures across history, it might be
helpful, briefly, to note the ubiquity of the sexual even in power relationships where
penetration does not figure. In situations where the loser is not explicitly equated with
the screwed, the erotic, as Michael Moon demonstrates, is already aligned with power.
Moon describes these relations as something we might call sadomasochism, noting that
the taboo against gay-male sadomasochism
sexual perversion
works to efface the
very real presence of sadomasochistic pleasures in ostensibly nonsexual power
relations:
[Sadomasochistic] object-choices flourish in many institutional settings;
relations of inflicting and receiving psychological and physical pain, with
the sexual element of this interchange suppressed or not, are considered
Newt Gingrich quoted in Ceci Connolly and John Mintz, For Cigarette Industry, a Future without
GOP Support, Washington Post 29 March 1998, A1.
74
My examples so far have been ancient Greece, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, and the
United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but we might also note in passing the
continuing power of the mythos of Malintzín / la Malinche / la chingada (literally: she-who-has-been-fucked) in
post-Columbian American culture, as well as the enduring stigma of the penetrated man in Islam. See
Gloria “nzaldúa, Movimientos de Rebeldía y las Culturas Que Traicionan, in Borderlands/La Frontera:
the New Mestiza, 3rd edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007), 37-45, and Brian Whitaker,
Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006),
see chapter four in particular.
75
32
not shocking aberrations but ordinary and even necessary practice in the
military, in prisons, in many corporate organizations, athletic teams, and
schools of all levels. It is the domestication of many of these procedures
into discipline, the daily practice of institutional law and order, with
only those interchanges that are most flagrantly sexually enacted isolated
and stigmatized as sexual perversion, that conduces most of us to
disavow our insiders knowledge of sadomasochistic pleasures most of
the time.76
Moon s argument here ought to suggest to us that male/male rape exists on a
continuum of ordinary and even necessary practices in many homosocial settings,
and that rape may not necessarily form the ultimate limit of this continuum.
Moon offers a way for us to consider sexual violation as simply an extension of
the everyday
indeed almost banal
practices of sadomasochistic pleasure that
undergird male homosocial relations in the most quotidian of situations: the classroom,
the football field, the boardroom. Moon s analysis asks us to re-sexualize these
situations, to begin to note the erotic content of, say, a hostile takeover, a basketball
victory, or a playground-fight. We might, in other words, begin to think of an act of
rape committed by a man against another man as one more way of screwing an
opponent, a complex but concrete extension of the erotics already embedded in
structures of male power.
Bodies in Space
An act of rape is, fundamentally, a relationship between bodies. An act of simulated
rape for presentation on stage or in a film also, of course, necessitates a relationship
between bodies: specific bodily positions for actors are necessary to indicate sexual
Michael Moon, “ Small ”oy and Others Sexual Disorientation in Henry James, Kenneth “nger, and
David Lynch in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, edited by
Hortense J. Spillers, (New York: Routledge, 1991), 142.
76
33
violation. When speaking about rape, as I noted before, we easily slip into thinking of
rape metaphorically. The words rapist and victim, for example, primarily denote a
juridical relationship, one in which a rape has already occurred, in which the spatial
relationship that existed between the rapist and his victim no longer exists. I want to
argue, however, that we ought to pay special attention to the spatial relationships that
form around acts of rape. We are, in fact, already in the habit of conceiving power
relations in terms of the spatial; we frequently use binary formations such as
over/under, above/below, behind/before, outside/inside to denote positions of power
and subjection. Binaries such as these are unavoidable in any description of actual
bodies in an act of rape, whether fictional or real. Even a male/male rape text like
Lorenzo Carcaterra s Sleepers (1995) that prefers to deal in metaphor and to depict
psychological effects rather than physical ones
down to my knees,
cannot avoid phrases like forced
Styler put an arm around my stomach,
“ddison hovered over
Tommy, or Nokes leaned over and pushed me facedown on my cot.
77
These phrases
each describe a spatial relationship in which a relationship of power is already
embedded: the rapist stands above, behind, over.
I have already highlighted the cultural equation of weakness with a willingness
to be penetrated, but I want further to note the specific spaces that are penetrated as a
man is raped. The anus and mouth can be used for penetrative activities during
consensual sexual contact between men and women regardless of so-called sexual
orientation. The anus would, however, appear to possess a unique power to describe
the subjectivity of its owner. This power has been discussed, for example, by Guy
Hocquenghem, when he says that whereas the phallus is essentially social, the anus is
essentially private. If phallic transcendence and the organisation of society around the
great signifier are to be possible, the anus must be privatised in individualised and
77
Lorenzo Carcaterra, Sleepers, (New York: Ballantine, 1995), 191, 239, 265, 266.
34
Oedipalised persons, and even more definitively
except sublimation.
78
The anus has no social position
Sedgwick and Moon elaborate on Hocquenghem s analysis in a
jointly written essay:
Anyone interested in making anality a central concern of analysis must
counter a pervasive epistemological bias in much psychoanalytic theory
(as well of course as in the wider culture) in favor of the phallus and the
phallic. On the conventional road map of the body that our culture
handily provides us, the anus gets represented as always behind and
below, well out of sight under most circumstances, its unquestioned
stigmatization a fundamental guarantor of one s individual privacy and
one s privately privatized individuality79
What Sedgwick and Moon note is that the anus s spatial relationship to the rest of the
body
behind and below
contributes to the power the anus possesses as a symbol or
figure for the body s secrets, its privacy, its shame, and
discussion
most importantly for this
the fantasy of the body s impenetrability. “n act of rape has the particular
ability to destroy this fantasy, conferring shame onto the body through exposure of the
anus and penetration into a body that has been fantasized as impenetrable.
As Klaus Theweleit describes the violent practices of the Fascist soldier-male in
Male Fantasies he pays particular attention to the soldier-male s idea that a man is
unbreakable, that his body is impenetrable, and that he commits rape and performs
torture in an effort to break other bodies, reminding himself of his own body s
wholeness. The key quality of the blow as an act of physical violence, Theweleit
argues, is its capacity to break and crack open, to smash to pieces. It produces the man
Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, translated by Daniella Dangoor, (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1993), 96.
78
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon, Divinity a Dossier, a Performance Piece, a LittleUnderstood Emotion, in Sedgwick, Tendencies, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 246-7.
79
35
as I, not by switching him in to some different reality, but by an eruption of muscular
activity whose goal is to crush all existing distinction and to raise the man above the
undifferentiated miasma.
torture
80
An act of anal penetration, then
as well as any act of
produces a broken body; it is also a performative act in the Austinian sense,
one that produces the body of the torturer as whole, impenetrable, powerful. As
Theweleit puts it, what torture represents is an attempt by men to maintain their own
bodies.
81
I want, also, explicitly to link the wholeness of the body to sexuality as such and
to heterosexuality in particular. Robert McRuer has critiqued, using a disability-studies
perspective, the system of compulsory able-bodiedness [that] repeatedly demands that
people with disabilities embody for others an affirmative answer to the unspoken
question, Yes, but in the end, wouldn t you rather be more like me?
82
For McRuer,
compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality are interwoven, and
this analysis allows us to understand at least partially how the breaking of a body
through torture or rape has the attendant capacity to produce the body of the victim as
a less-than-heterosexual, even homosexualized body, which in turn produces the rapists
body as simultaneously able-bodied and heterosexual.83 If, as McRuer claims, the
subjective contraction and expansion of able-bodied heterosexuality […] are actually
contingent on compliant queer, disabled bodies, an act of rape actively produces a
disabled, compliantly queer body, conferring the power of space on the (always male)
able-bodied heterosexual subject.84
Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies Volume 2: Male Bodies Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, translated by
Erica Carter and Chris Turner, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 274.
80
81
Theweleit, Male Fantasies Volume 2, 305. My emphasis.
Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, (New York: New York University
Press, 2006), 9.
82
83
McRuer 9.
84
McRuer 19.
36
Sexuality is itself also frequently described in terms of the spatial, even when we
speak not of a relationship between sexual subjects but of a single subject s so-called
sexual identity. Nineteenth-century sexologists, of course, frequently described lesbians
and gay men as possessing one gender while being trapped inside the body of another.85
This paradigm, while largely discredited in twenty-first century models of sexuality,
finds its not-so-faint echo in the image of the closet, with its accompanying insistence on
the highly moralized binaries of inside/outside, trapped/free, and dark/light, and the
constant privileging of one term over the other so that one is compelled to be out,
free, and in the light. The spatial dimensions of this paradigm work to figure
closetedness as a kind of prison sentence and create a false binary between private
sexuality and public sexuality that spatially re-inscribes anality in general and rape in
particular as part of the domain of the private: behind and below.86
Criminality, Deviance, Delinquency
When I cited the first volume of The History of Sexuality earlier, I noted Foucault s
famous description of the epistemological mutation of the sodomite (who has
committed a crime) into the homosexual (who is a species). Foucault takes pains to
point out that homosexuality ceases to be the practice of sodomy and becomes
instead a reflection of an interior compulsion. Homosexuality becomes something
immanent to a specific type or species of person.87 When Foucault speaks of sodomy as a
practice, he is, of course, speaking about specific laws that have traditionally prohibited
sodomy in European societies. Sodomy, in other words, was a criminal act at the same
time as it was a sexual act. Sedgwick notes as much when she theorizes that for the
great balance of the non-public-school educated classes in the nineteenth century,
See Bersani, Homos, 106, and George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of
the Gay Male World 1890-1940, (New York: Basic Books, 1994), especially pp. 47-97.
85
86
See Sedgwick, Epistemology, particularly pp. 65-90.
87
Foucault, History of Sexuality
Volume 1, 43.
37
overt homosexual acts may have been recognized mainly as instances of
violence: English law before the Labouchère amendment of 1885 did not
codify or criminalize most of the spectrum of male bodily contacts, so that
homosexual acts would more often have become legally visible for the
violence that may have accompanied them than for their distinctively
sexual content.88
Sedgwick s position is corroborated by “lan ”ray when he makes it clear that
homosexuality was only a matter for sixteenth- or seventeenth-century courts of law
when violence was involved.89 As Bray describes male/male eroticism in Early Modern
England, homosexual sex acts became readable as homosexual sex acts only when they
were accompanied by violence. A homosexual sex act was, in other words, only a
homosexual sex act when it was an act of rape.
Noting this link between rape and male/male sexuality as such before the
invention of homosexuality, I wish to connect Foucault s description of the invention of
the homosexual with a similar proposal he made the year prior to his History of
Sexuality. In the latter half of Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that the
penitentiary apparatus and the whole technological programme that accompanies it
do not apply themselves to a convict and certainly not to an offence
the
penitentiary applies itself to, and thus is productive of, a rather different object, one
defined by variables which at the outset at least were not taken into account in the
sentence, for they were relevant only for a corrective technology. This other character,
whom the penitentiary apparatus substitutes for the convicted offender, is the
delinquent.
90
As Foucault describes him, the delinquent becomes indistinguishable from
88
Sedgwick, Between Men, 174.
89
Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, (London Gay Men s Press,
, especially p.
.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan, (New York:
Vintage, 1995), 251.
90
38
his crime so that (like the homosexual) his crime describes not an activity but an
essential and unchangeable part of his subjecthood
The introduction of the
biographical is important in the history of penality. ”ecause it establishes the criminal
as existing before the crime and even outside it. And, for this reason, a psychological
causality, duplicating the juridical attribution of responsibility, confuses its effects.
Foucault s notion of the biological
91
under which might fall case studies, family
histories, attributions of the term at risk, etc.
opposes itself directly to a notion of
responsibility: no longer is the criminal responsible for the punctual act of his crime;
instead the delinquent is identified with that which makes him delinquent. The
delinquent is his crime, and those who commit crimes are delinquents, that is, were
criminals, in their essence, prior to the crime itself.
In terms of male/male rape, the man who commits an act of rape upon another
man becomes through representational practices
a kind of person, a species in
Foucault s terminology. The man who commits rape becomes a rapist, a pervert, an
unnatural or anti-natural figure. Jasbir Puar has noted, for example, the U.S. President s
careful description of the perpetrators of the sexualized abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison
in Iraq in
Days after the photographs from “bu Ghraib had circulated in the
domestic and foreign press, President George W. Bush stated of the abused Iraqi
prisoners, Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the “merican people.
Bush links sexualized violence immediately with a kind of natural
92
Mr.
or rather unnatural
inclination toward the commission of such acts. Puar notes that Mr. ”ush s efforts to
refute the idea that the psychic and fantasy lives of Americans are depraved, sick, and
polluted by suggesting instead they remain naturally free from such perversions […]
91
Foucault, Discipline, 252.
Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, (Durham: Duke University Press,
, . Puar s emphasis. Puar cites Thom Shanker and Jacques Steinberg, ”ush Voices Disgust at
“buse of Iraqi Prisoners, New York Times May
, “ . See also Seymour M. Hersh, Torture at “bu
Ghraib, New Yorker 10 May 2004, 42ff.
92
39
reinstates a liberal regime of multicultural heteronormativity intrinsic to U.S.
patriotism.
93
The rhetoric here locates the unnatural treatment of these specific Iraqi
prisoners within the depraved and unnatural desires of a few bad apples in the
USAmerican military complex, dividing them from the rest of the military apparatus
and from the United States population as a whole. The Bush administration figured this
sexual abuse as aberrational and, even more importantly, as a reflection of a pathology
possessed only by those committing and documenting the abuse.
Put a different way, the Bush administration and the popular newsmedia
worked to pathologize the men and women committing sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib.
Puar s argument makes clear that this production of pathologies for those committing
sexual abuse was designed to function ideologically during the U.S.-Iraq war. The Bush
administration s pathologization of the abusers, making them into members of a species
instead of persons committing specific violent acts, worked to occlude non-sexual torture
activities committed in the name of U.S. national security. As Puar pointedly asks,
Why are these photos any more revolting than pictures of body parts blown apart by
shards of missiles and explosives, or the scene of Rachel Corrie s death by bulldozer?
94
It ought to be clear, however, that the scenes depicted in the Abu Ghraib photographs,
unlike pictures of body parts or decimated homes, involved (but were certainly not
limited to) male/male sexual violence, and it is this that made them particularly
offensive and disgusting to Mr. Bush and his administration.95 Violent activities such
as bombing buildings, waterboarding prisoners, and even the rending of civilian bodies
93
Puar 80-1.
94
Puar 80.
Media discussions of Lynndie England, who became the face of the perpetrators of sexual violence at
“bu Ghraib, consistently portrayed her as one of the boys. Carol Mason contrasts this masculinized
portrayal with representations of Jessica Lynch, a female soldier who was captured and then rescued
during the Iraq War. See Mason, The Hillbilly Defense Culturally Mediating U.S. Terror at Home and
“broad, NWSA Journal 17.3 (2005): 39- . See also Tara McKelvey s edited volume One of the Guys:
Women as Aggressors and Torturers, (Emeryville CA: Seal Press, 2007).
95
40
during war are discursively allowed to remain only activities. Acts of male/male sexual
violence, in this formulation, are only possible if one has a nature inclined toward such
perversions. The violence of the soldier responsible for the deaths of many people is a
result of the war itself; he is violent because he must be. In contrast, the violence of the
male/male rapist is an integral part of his subjecthood. Male/male sexual violence, here,
functions as a limit, even for horrific violence. On a continuum of violent activities that
might be considered acceptable even by people like John Yoo or Alan Dershowitz,
male/male rape cannot be located. The man who commits rape upon another man is, in
the Anglo-American imagination, a deviant criminal like no other. And this deviance is
allegedly a pathology all his own, ideologically kept discrete from both heterosexuality
and normative violence, unreflective of the culture at large.
Stigmatization and Performatives of Shame
Despite increased media attention to acts of rape and the presence of rape in AngloAmerican society, the Encyclopedia of Rape reports that the stigma surrounding rape
remains a pervasive and persistent phenomenon whose peculiarity becomes evident
when one realizes the difference between the attitude toward rape survivors and that
reserved for victims of nonsexual assaults.
96
The stigma attached to being victimized
by rape, much of which I have already described in relation to power differentials and
penetrability, is productive of a culture that condones and often enforces silence about
rape so that victims of rape frequently avoid being named in media coverage. Often
advised against speaking out, rape survivors let themselves be shamed into silence.
An even greater silence and invisibility surrounds acts of male/male rape. The
Encyclopedia notes that due to the stigma attached to being a male rape victim […],
many men do not report rape or tell anyone about their experience. […] Lack of
Konrad Szczesniak, Stigma, in Encyclopedia of Rape, edited by Merril D. Smith, (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2004), 243.
96
97
Szczesniak 243.
41
97
reporting and community awareness creates a lack of visibility of male rape and
reinforces the isolation and silence of all victims.
98
I want to avoid, here, the implied judgment made by the Encyclopedia that silence
about rape is an incorrect or closeted behavior and that speaking out about rape is
always the right thing to do. Silence, as has been noted by Elaine Scarry, is essential to
what pain is; the destruction of language and the enforcement of silence are an integral
part of what the creation of pain works to do. For Scarry, silence and shame are the
direct results of power that creates pain, and the difficulty of articulating physical pain
permits political and perceptual complications of the most serious kind. The failure to
express pain […] will always work to allow its appropriation and conflation with
debased forms of power.
99
If pain works actively to destroy language, it is important
that we avoid further stigmatizing those who have experienced trauma and then elect
not to speak about their traumatic experiences. We need to work, instead, to articulate
the ways in which silences are encouraged and enforced by culture and the traumatic
effects these silences have on specific bodies in pain. Cultural products that represent
male/male rape
such as James Dickey s novel Deliverance, Lorenzo Carcaterra s
memoir Sleepers, and Quentin Tarantino s film Pulp Fiction
ostensibly give voice to the
traumatic experiences associated with rape, while at the same time articulating silence
as the appropriate response to those experiences. Rape, in each of these representations,
and in many more, is inseparable from shame about having been raped. Describing the
way these representations create shame by producing, encouraging, and enforcing
silence about rape and rape trauma is part of the project of this document and will be
addressed in detail in the chapters that follow. For now, I wish briefly to note some of
the ways in which theorists have discussed shame and its links to subjecthood.
98
Schmidt 121.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World, (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1985), 14.
99
42
Few words, Sedgwick notes in Touching Feeling, could be more performative
in the “ustinian sense than shame
Shame on you, For shame, or just Shame! , the
locutions that give sense to the word, do not describe or refer to shame but themselves
confer it.
100
Sedgwick here articulates not only the simple power of the word shame,
but also the infectious quality of shame itself. As an emotional response to actions or
performatives, shame lingers. It is also as easily conferred as language itself, flood[ing]
into being as a moment, a disruptive moment, in a circuit of identity-constituting
identificatory communication.
101
Shame for Sedgwick is the place where the question
of identity arises most originarily and most relationally.
102
I take Sedgwick to mean by
identity that shame is always about relationality. Sedgwick, following the work of
Silvan Tomkins, sees humiliation-shame as a response to a rejected declaration of love:
the child looks to its mother (as a lover might look to the beloved) and when the
response is not one that is loving in return, one feels shame.103 This response manifests
itself in a covering of the face, a turning away; because shame is about hiding from
someone else, it is related to an incomplete or interrupted identificatory practice.
Shame also appears ineradicably and originarily related to sexuality. This
relationship between sex and shame is not only the simple one outlined by Michael
Warner in The Trouble with Normal when he provocatively argued that it might as well
be admitted that sex is a disgrace. We like to say nicer things about it: that it is an
expression of love, or a noble endowment of the Creator or liberatory pleasure. But the
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003), 32.
100
101
Sedgwick, Touching, 36.
102
Sedgwick, Touching, 37.
Silvan Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters: a Silvan Tomkins Reader, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and
Adam Frank, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), especially pp. 133-78.
103
43
possibility of abject shame is never out of the picture.
104
The idea adumbrated by
Warner is that sex is somehow always ghosted by shame, or that shame is always
inherent to an act of sex, and that, therefore, any sex practice
be it queer and kinky or
heterosexual and vanilla105 is equal to another in that it induces a shame-response
from its practitioners. For Warner, no sexuality is inherently better than any other sex
practice because all sex practices are shameful. The liberatory possibilities of
considering shame as somehow equalizing
subjectivity based on shame
or, indeed, of building a powerful
seem to me problematic, but those considerations lie
outside of the present discussion. The point I wish to make here is only that sexuality
and shame have been linked to one another by both queer theorists and, as we shall see,
classicists.
Bernard Williams has noted, in a more nuanced way than Warner, shame s links
to nudity and sex in ancient Greek literature. Shame, Williams points out,
is straightforwardly connected with nakedness, particularly in sexual
connotations. The word aidoia, a derivative of aidōs, shame, is a standard
Greek word for the genitals, and similar terms are found in other
languages. The reaction is to cover oneself or to hide, and people naturally
take steps to avoid the situations that call for it […]. When the gods went
to laugh at the spectacle of Aphrodite and Ares caught inextricably in
flagrante delicto by Hephaistus s nets, the goddesses stayed at home, aidōi,
from shame.
106
Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, (New York: The Free
Press, 1999), 2.
104
See also Gayle Rubin, Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality, in
Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, edited by Carole S. Vance, (London: Pandora Press, 1989),
267-319.
105
106
Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 78.
44
Shame can be, then, a direct response to the exposure of an area of the body considered
private; for the Greeks, this area is the genitals. As we have discussed earlier, the anus
often functions, for both men and women, as a site of shame, a physical symbol of
bodily integrity, and as a guarantor of privacy. “n act of violence committed on this
area of the body considered extremely private cannot help but induce a shamehumiliation response in the victim. Shame would, therefore, seem to be impossible to
separate from any incidence of male/male rape.
As anti-rape activist Michael Scarce makes clear, for many male victims of rape
the involvement of body parts that our culture deems to be sexual or private […]
hamper[s] survivors ability to speak openly about their experience.
107
Silences
surrounding rape are often the direct result of the shame the act of sexual violence itself
induces. The ability to produce a humiliation-shame response in the victim of a rape
through an act of rape makes that act of violence akin to the locutionary performatives
Sedgwick describes in Touching Feeling. In other words, an act of rape confers and is
intended to confer shame on a body through a method uncannily similar to the linguistic
performative Shame on you.
Enter the Man is, of course, not about acts of male/male rape; it is a document
about representations of male/male rape and male/male rape s rhetoric. It is the project
of this dissertation to begin to think ethically about representations of rape in theatre,
film, literature, or other media, and part of that project is to document the ability that
representations of rape have to confer shame onto bodies in ways similar to real-world
acts of rape. As we continue, it is important for us to consider images of shame as both
constative and performative. It is essential that we question portrayals of rape,
interrogating their ability to encourage and enforce the very silences they appear to
break.
Michael Scarce, Male on Male Rape: the Hidden Toll of Stigma and Shame, (New York: Insight Books, 1997),
19.
107
45
Laying Out Enter the Man
The remainder of this dissertation will move in two directions. There currently exists no
text that charts the history of representations of male/male rape in theatre, fiction, film,
or on television. Enter the Man begins to detail that history, describing exemplary
representations of male/male sexual violence over the span of the last forty years. At the
same time, I understand representations of male/male rape as serving both
dramaturgical and ideological functions, and I will argue that the trope of male/male
rape is put to use in different ways by different artists, critics, and audiences in different
historical moments. While Enter the Man is, then, a history text, it also examines the
various functions to which male/male rape is put to use by artists working in a range of
media as well as the ways in which consumers of those media have put such images to
use. We will move through iterations of the male/male rape trope chronologically while,
at the same time, we move sideways along a continuum of meaning, where male/male
rape is asked (by critics, artists, audiences, by creative media) to make an assortment of
meanings, and often to mean something other than itself.
Chapter two describes the foundational text of male/male rape in drama,
Canadian playwright John Herbert s Fortune and Men’s Eyes. I examine this play for the
specific dramatic tropes it establishes. Herbert s play is a prison drama and cements the
tradition of prison in the theatre as a homosexualized space where power is exerted
through sexual violence. The chapter also outlines how Fortune spatializes male/male
rape by secluding it in the world of the carceral. I conclude with an examination of
Miguel Piñero s Short Eyes and Rick Cluchey s The Cage, clearly detailing how these
dramas and their representations of incarceration and sexual violence were deeply
influenced by Herbert s
drama.
Chapter three, Trouble Deaf Heaven, takes as its object of study what is
perhaps the most notorious male/male rape text of all, James Dickey s novel Deliverance.
I consider Deliverance as a supertext, tracking the way Dickey figures male/male rape in
46
his book and the methods he uses to connect rape to masculinity, to nature, and to the
South. I argue that critical reception of the novel has conflated Dickey s work with the
film adaptation of Deliverance, and my analysis disaggregates the two, looking
specifically at Dickey s text and the enormous body of scholarship written about this
famous book. Contrary to almost all scholarly analyses of Deliverance, I argue that
Dickey s book is neither misogynist nor homophobic, but figures rape as a kind of ritual
process, a violent, painful, experience that enables one, if not all, of the novelist s
characters to move closer toward a version of masculinity that differs profoundly from
its dominant iteration in Anglo-American culture.
After examining Dickey s novel, I move to an adaptation of Deliverance, the most
famous of which is the 1972 John Boorman film of the same name starring Burt
Reynolds and Jon Voight. As an exploration of male/male rape on film, this fourth
chapter also describes the way male/male rape is figured in another important film from
this period, John Schlesinger s Midnight Cowboy, and addresses the differing ways in
which Deliverance and Midnight Cowboy put male/male rape to use cinematically.
Perhaps even more importantly, chapter four takes as its focus the way Deliverance has
been disseminated in culture so that now forty years after its initial publication it has
become a powerful cultural referent for the trope of male/male rape even for a
generation of people who have never read the novel or seen the film. I close this chapter
by offering some possibilities for why squeal like a pig has remained a running joke
in Canadian, British, and American popular culture.
“fter Romans, chapter five, examines one of the most notorious plays in
”ritish theatre history, Howard ”renton s
historical epic The Romans in Britain,
discussing first the public scandal the play caused and paying strict attention to the
ways in which eroticism and violence were confused by the play s viewers, in
discussions of the play by newsmedia and government officials, and indeed by the
playwright himself. This chapter pays particular attention to Mary Whitehouse s
47
famous lawsuit against the play s director chapter five examines Mrs. Whitehouse as an
audience member, pressing on her understanding of the act of male/male rape in
Romans as though it were a homosexual sex act. I look, especially, at the interpretation
of sexual violence between men as though it were erotic and the effects of such a
formulation on the male/male rape trope.
Chapter six continues a discussion of British theatre, building on the scandal of
The Romans and examining later theatrical representations of male/male rape in Britain.
This chapter looks specifically at the early plays of the so-called in-yer-face
movement in British playwriting of the 1990s, and closely reads one play from each of
the most important writers of the time. Anthony Neilson s Penetrator, Sarah Kane s
Blasted, and Mark Ravenhill s Shopping and Fucking, are all considered exemplars of the
genre. This final chapter of Enter the Man finds that male/male rape as an imagistic
system of metaphors comes of age in the 1990s. Images of male/male rape become
widespread in Anglo-American culture in the 1990s, and this chapter looks at the ways
in which these three writers utilize the male/male trope. Further, this chapter proposes
that these writers, though at first accused of an interest only in shock, truly grapple
with these images of pain and trauma. My contention is that the three writers in this
chapter propose new ways of looking at male/male rape that, in various ways, avoid
sentimentality and metaphorization, and that they turn their attention to male/male
rape itself: its causes, its victims, and its lasting effects both on bodies and on our own
cultural conceptions of sex, violence, and power.
48
CHAPTER 2
THE QUEEN’S CELL
“ con ain’t a human being. “ con’s a con. He’s stuck in here and the world’s
forgot him. “s far as the world is concerned he don’t exist anymore. What
happens to him in here them people outside don’t know, they don’t care.
Butch, Not about Nightingales108
I recall what it felt like to stand on the verge of puberty and wait for sexuality,
fierce and unexplained, to rescue me. Of course sexuality performs no rescue; it
complicates rather than simplifies.
Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat109
Can’t you see that here we make up stories that can live only within four walls?
“nd that I’ll never again see the light of day? You take me for a fool? Don’t you
know who I am? Don’t you realize that the grave is open at my feet?
Green Eyes, Haute Surveillance110
The December 1970 issue of the Canadian newsmagazine Maclean’s features an article
by movie critic John Hofsess designed to promote the new film Fortune and Men’s Eyes
and to alert readers to that drama s importance to Canada as a nation. The piece is
subtitled “ Report from the Set in a Quebec City Prison and announces John
Herbert s play Fortune and Men’s Eyes as the most famous Canadian drama of the last
decade it s been translated into eight languages and performed in
countries.
Hofsess s paragraph, however, does not contain Fortune s list of accolades; instead, the
author begins his piece with the following extraordinary narrative:
Tennessee Williams, Not about Nightingales, in Plays 1937-1955, edited by Mel Gussow and Kenneth
Holditch, (New York: Library of America, 2000), 129.
108
Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, (Cambridge
MA: DaCapo Press, 2001), 89.
109
Jean Genet, Deathwatch, translated by Bernard Frechtmann, in The Maids and Deathwatch, (New York:
Grove Press, 1954), 124.
110
49
Two years ago the CBS television program Sixty Minutes reported a
routine incident in a Philadelphia jail. “ white youth, arrested for
possession of marijuana and jailed overnight, was gang-raped the next
morning by six black convicts in the back of a paddy wagon en route to a
courthouse. Police found the boy bleeding and in shock. Such incidents
[are] commonly and mistakenly referred to as the problem of
homosexuality in our prisons, […] yet, statistics indicate that more than
80% of sexual assaults in American prisons are committed by blacks
against whites and are motivated by a different lust, a hateful rage that
knows no containment.111
This sensational paragraph, shockingly graphic for the opening of an article in a
magazine s film-review section
particularly in a piece designed as promotional
betrays an enormous amount of anxiety. Hofsess makes a plea for public understanding
of the truth of prison-rape it is the responsibility of blacks, not homosexuals
motivated by uncontainable hatred and rage, not lust
it is
white youths are its victims,
gangs of black convicts its perpetrators. Hofsess returns neither to the issue of gangrape in the Philadelphia prison system nor to his vehement racialization of this violence;
the remainder of this piece in Maclean’s features descriptions of the film s actors, a
laudatory interview with screenwriter/playwright John Herbert, and displays an
unabashed affection for all involved.
But if John Hofsess was anxious about Fortune and Men’s Eyes in 1970 he was
certainly not alone. From the play s opening in New York s West Village in
London production a year later after ”ritain s Theatres “ct
, to a
abolished theatre
censorship there), to its Los Angeles premiere in 1969 followed by a second New York
production in the same year, to the film version released in 1971, Fortune and Men’s Eyes
John Hofsess, Fortune and Men s Eyes
1970, 81.
111
a Report from the Set in a Quebec City Prison, Maclean’s Dec
50
seemed to engender anxiety everywhere, and discussions of Fortune in print tended,
paradoxically, to be both emotional and incredibly careful.112 Perhaps even more
interestingly, though Fortune and Men’s Eyes was the first play explicitly to represent
male/male rape on stage, critics discussing the play in the 1960s and 1970s seem to have
had no notion that Fortune broke ground in any way.
Although Fortune was the first play to deal explicitly with male/male rape, it was
certainly not the first document to discuss rape within American prison systems.113
Historian Regina Kunzel notes that the tautological link between prison and male
sexual violence is an association [that] was forged remarkably recently. Despite
sporadic references to rape in prison earlier in the century, the subject did not receive
significant attention until the late
s and
s.
114
Fortune, first appearing as a
workshop in Toronto in 1965 and premiering off-Broadway in 1967, was an enormous
part of this new public discourse about rape in prisons and helped to cement the
popular association between rape and incarceration. In Criminal Intimacy, Kunzel
explains that Alan J. Davis s 1968 report in the journal Trans-Action announcing an
epidemic of sexual violence in men s prisons launched, in turn, an epidemic of
investigations, sensationalistic journalistic exposés, prisoner autobiographies, and film
and fictional representations of American prisons and jails, the primary focus of which
was the alarming frequency and horror of rape among male inmates.
attention paid to prison-rape
115
This rise in
which Kunzel dates as beginning in 1968 with Davis s
The film version of Fortune and Men’s Eyes from 1971, directed by Harvey Hart, is available only on
VHS, (Culver City, CA: MGM/UA Home Video, 1992).
112
I will be using the word American with care in this document, noting that it describes Canada and the
United States as well as Central and South America. When I adjectivally refer only to the United States I
have adopted the use of the descriptor USAmerican.
113
Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press,
,
. See also “lan J. Davis, Sexual “ssaults in the Philadelphia Prison
System and Sheriff s Vans, Trans-Action 6.2 (Dec 1968): 9.
114
115
Kunzel 150-1.
51
Trans-Action piece coincides with the decriminalization of consensual homosexual sex
in England and Wales in 1967, the relaxation of theatre censorship in Britain in 1968, the
decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada in May of 1969, the explosive Stonewall
Riots in New York City that June, and the famous prison riot in Attica, New York in
September 1971. 116 Fortune and Men’s Eyes, then, became part of several larger
transnational conversations during the years 1967-1971, and emerged during a time of
extreme upheaval, as interpretive paradigms for homosexual sex, prison violence,
conditions of incarceration, and theatrical propriety all were shifting in the United
Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.
Functioning as a public, indeed spectacular, representation of this confluence of
topics, John Herbert s play became a contested site for critics, activists, and audiences
alike. The play and its meaning, with its representations of underrepresented
populations (homosexuals, prisoners, rape victims) have, from the first, been unstable
quantities, floating signifiers hotly debated by both critics and audiences. This chapter
will discuss Fortune and Men’s Eyes as a representation of male/male rape in an
American prison, and it will explore the ways this violence was described by critics and
understood by audiences. I am interested in how both groups anxiously negotiated the
nexus of issues addressed by the drama. As the first play to portray male/male rape,
Fortune would also set a precedent for how male/male rape would be read in
subsequent representations, and would, indeed, fundamentally shift representations of
prison in popular culture. Herbert s play would establish the terms of discourse for a set
The Sexual Offences Act 1967 decriminalized homosexual sex between men (homosexual sex between
women was not illegal) in only England and Wales. Scotland would decriminalize homosexual sex in
1980 and Northern Ireland would follow suit in 1982. Homosexuality was decriminalized in Canada as a
part of sweeping changes to the criminal code passed with the Criminal Law Amendment Act on 14 May
1969. Homosexuality in the United States was not decriminalized by the legislature but by a finding of the
Supreme Court in the case Lawrence v. Texas in June 2003. Though there were no changes to USAmerican
law due to the Stonewall Riots, as an event signaling upheaval in the United States vis-à-vis its gay
population, they are difficult to overestimate.
116
52
of topics of which theatre audiences did not soon tire of watching long after his play
closed. Chapter one describes that precedent and attempts to identify the interpretive
frames that Fortune and Men’s Eyes created.
Fortune and Men’s Eyes: the New Prison Drama
Herbert s play concerns a group of four young men in what he calls a Canadian
reformatory.
is barred
118
117
The play is set in the boy s dormitory/cell, but the whole upstage wall
so that Herbert has designed the most dominating feature of the set to be a
signifier for the boys incarceration. Fortune follows a young man named Smitty, a firsttime offender who is taught the difficulties, horrors, and politics of prison life by his
three cellmates, Queenie, Mona, and Rocky. Queenie, the most flamboyant of the play s
characters, is a hardened and clever prison queen, adept at prison politics and expert in
her manipulation of sexual power.119 Herbert describes Mona, on the other hand, as
hang[ing] suspended between the sexes, neither boy nor woman Mona is quiet and
submissive, and the play always treats him as an honest, sensitive character who cannot
quite take care of himself.120 Rocky, by contrast, is brutal and mean, insulting everyone
in the cell as often as possible and constantly differentiating himself from the two
queers with whom he is forced to bunk.121 Like the characters in prison dramas such
as William Douglas Home s Now ”arabbas… (1947) and Tennessee Williams Not about
Nightingales
/
, the young men in Herbert s play represent a most
bewildering variety of different types. Each man is distinct and completely different
117
John Herbert, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 9.
118
Herbert, Fortune, 9.
I will consistently use female pronouns when describing Queenie in this play, but have opted for male
pronouns when describing Mona. My explanation for this is that Queenie uses female pronouns to
describe herself, but though Queenie and Rocky both use female pronouns to describe Mona, he uses
male pronouns when he refers to himself. This is purely a personal preference.
119
120
Herbert, Fortune, 8.
121
Herbert, Fortune, 12.
53
from each of the others. “s “lexander Paterson says in his introduction to Home s
play, The only thing they have in common is that they are all in prison.
122
Before Herbert throws the naive everyman Smitty into this mix, he offers the
audience a brief exchange of prison argot as the three convicts try to figure out what s
going on outside their cell:
MONA.
It s the new arrivals.
ROCKY.
Anybody ask you to open your mouth, fruity?
QUEENIE.
ROCKY.
Always getting her jollies looking out that hole.
QUEENIE.
ROCKY.
Well she ain t in yours, so dummy up!
Don t mess with the bull, Queenie!
QUEENIE.
ROCKY.
Does Macy s bother Gimbel s?
They got their own corners.
QUEENIE.
ROCKY.
Oh, lay off the Mona Lisa, for Christ sake, Rocky.
Your horn ain t long enough to reach me, Ferdinand.
You might feel it yet.
QUEENIE.
Worst offer I ve had today, but it s early.123
This rapid-fire dialogue immediately accomplishes a number of things for Herbert s
dramaturgy. It disorients the play s audience by mobilizing unfamiliar language it also
demonstrates the power structure of the cell as Rocky bullies Mona and Queenie
defends him. The struggle for power in this dormitory is, so far, not a violent one, but
the terms of this struggle are, even from these first few minutes of Fortune, intensely
sexualized and sexualized, moreover, in a homoerotic way.
It is important to note, as well, that the winner in this miniature verbal battle is
obviously Queenie. That is, Herbert sets up a convention, from the first minutes of the
Alexander Paterson, introduction to William Douglas Home, Now ”arabbas… (London: Longmans,
Green & Co., 1947), viii.
122
123
Herbert, Fortune, 11.
54
play, where Rocky s threats of violence are revealed as empty through the skill of
Queenie s pointed humor. In this way, Queenie establishes her power as the cleverest,
shrewdest character both in the cell onstage and with the audience in the theatre.
Queenie s relationship with the audience depends, as well, on another mode of
knowledge that she and the audience share. For if Herbert intends the prison argot to
indicate to the audience its distance from the world portrayed onstage in the play, not
all of the language Queenie and Rocky use in these first few moments is particular to
prison life. Take, for example:
ROCKY. Look
at the queer watchin the fish! See anything you can catch,
Rosie?
QUEENIE.
MONA.
How s the new stock, Mona? “nything worth shakin it for?
They re all so young.
QUEENIE.
That ll suit Rocky. If he could coop a new chicken in his yard, he
might not be so salty.124
This dialogue is not simply prison argot; it is also an exchange highly inflected with gay
male camp. Queenie s ability to make the audience laugh
related to her adeptness at verbally trouncing Rocky
a skill dramaturgically
is, in fact, heavily dependent on
her ability to communicate in code to a gay and lesbian audience already familiar with
the conventions of camp.
As soon as Smitty enters the scene, the three young men begin to school him in
the workings of the reformatory. Talk turns immediately to violence as Queenie and
Rocky describe a young Iroquois convict who was severely beaten by three of the
guards. They also teach Smitty some of their slang
warning
say six instead of nix … a
and describe the politics of the prison.125 The world of the prison in Fortune
124
Herbert, Fortune, 11.
125
Herbert, Fortune, 24.
55
and Men’s Eyes seems to circulate around sex, and Queenie, Rocky, and Mona each play
particular sexual roles. The dialogue remains campy, but it is not frivolous: sexual
positions indicate positions of power, even as the young men squabble.
QUEENIE. You
ROCKY.
ve got a one-track mind, and it s all dirt.
My shovel s clean.
QUEENIE.
I don t know how. Every time you get in a shower, you ve got it
in somebody s ditch.
ROCKY.
Don t be jealous. I ll get around to shoveling it in yours. 126
Queenie describes Rocky s sexuality as a top, but a bit later, as the two tell Smitty how
best to survive among the other convicts, Rocky describes submitting sexually to the
older prisoners You ll have to serve a little keester to the politicians who wanna put
you in the barn, he says. ”ut I guess you been in the hay before. Queenie s all for
fixin you up with an old man. You re ripe for tomato season. Smitty quickly informs
the three homosexually active young men that he s not… queer and that he has a
girlfriend, but Mona informs him that life inside is different.
127
According to Queenie,
Rocky, and Mona, there is no such thing as a convict who isn t sexually attached to
someone else for protection or political gain. “t no point does Herbert s play diverge
from this sexualized representation of the hierarchies of carceral life, and as the inmates
describe it, the punishment for aspiring to independence from this sexual economy is
rape.
Queenie, attempting to convince Smitty to get himself an old man, describes a
time when Mona was repeatedly raped. One day in the gym, Queenie tells us, a
bunch of hippos con her into the storeroom to get something for the game, and teach
her another one instead. They make up the team, but she s the only basket. They all
126
Herbert, Fortune, 21.
127
Herbert, Fortune, 22.
56
took a whack, now she s public property. […] Don t wait until they give you a gang
splash in the storeroom. Mona had to hold on to the wall [to walk] for a week.
128
Queenie s description of Mona s rape is brutal and by the end of scene one the idea of
being gang-raped has so terrified Smitty that he agrees when Rocky offers to be his old
man. “pparently, however, Smitty hasn t quite understood the arrangement, and his
confusion prompts the play s first scene to end with the following terrifying sequence
ROCKY.
Get movin … into that shower room.
SMITTY. Rocky,
ROCKY.
I said move, boy!
SMITTY. No!
ROCKY.
you re not…
I changed my mind. I don t want an old man.
You got a old man, an that s better than the storeroom, buddy
boy!
SMITTY. I
ROCKY.
ll take a chance.
I ll make sure it s no chance. It s me or a gang splash. Now move
your ass fast. I m not used to punks tellin me what they want.
He grabs Smitty’s arm, twisting it behind the boy’s back. SMITTY gives a small cry
of pain, but ROCKY throws a hand over his mouth, pushing him toward the
shower room. SMITTY pulls his face free.
SMITTY. Rocky…
ROCKY.
please… if you like me…
I like you… an you re gonna like me!129
The stage goes to black. Herbert does not dramatize Rocky s rape of Smitty, substituting
the violence described in the stage direction: arm-twisting and silence. The rape remains
unspoken as rape and unseen as anything other than the violence Herbert describes.
128
Herbert, Fortune, 23.
129
Herbert, Fortune, 35-6.
57
Act one of Fortune continues with Smitty revolting against Rocky at Queenie s
urging. She tells Smitty that he needs to be nobody s punk and convinces him to get
out from under Rocky by beating him up.130 Smitty agrees, and Queenie offers herself
sexually to him. To the offer of sex Smitty responds with an unenthusiastic but
assenting It d be a change, anyway.
131
Act one ends with Smitty severely beating
Rocky in the shower room, and this sequence of violence, like the rape in the previous
scene, takes place offstage, the particulars of the beating left to the audience s
imagination. Whether or not Smitty rapes Rocky or only physically assaults him
Herbert never makes explicit in the play s text.
Fortune s second act begins with Queenie rehearsing her routine for the prison
Christmas show. Queenie does a fan dance in drag looking like a combination of
Gorgeous George, Sophie Tucker and Mae West
she sings a camp version of the
Tucker tune “ Good Man Is Hard to Find but, in a Mae West flourish, she has twisted
the lyrics to “ hard man is good to find.
132
Smitty, Rocky, and the guard are all
sexually aroused by the dance, and in contrast to Smitty s lack of enthusiasm at sex with
Queenie at the end of act one, he now says you look sexy as hell and tells her to sing
it for Daddy, and don t forget I like the wiggle accompaniment.
133
After Queenie, Rocky, and the guard go off to the Christmas show, Smitty tells
Mona how much he likes him and that he wants to be Mona s old man. Smitty has,
over the course of the play, become a hardened convict, and Herbert makes clear that
the prison system is responsible for this transformation. Mona reveals that he is in jail
on a sex charge
he was robbed and beaten by a gang of men and then accused of
130
Herbert, Fortune, 50.
131
Herbert, Fortune, 53.
132
Herbert, Fortune, 70.
133
Herbert, Fortune, 70, 71.
58
making a pass at them
but Mona refuses to have sex with Smitty.134 Mona is in love
with Smitty and doesn t want him to be a part of his real life, his life of constant sexual
abuse at the hands of other convicts I
separate! he tells Smitty, I separate things in
order to live with others and myself. What my body does and feels is one thing, and
what I think and feel apart from that is something else. […] It s to the world I dream in
you belong.
135
The two reconcile and are laughing together when Rocky and Queenie
enter and (apparently out of jealousy) cause a fight. The guard breaks up the brawl and
blames Mona for it. He is accused, as he was in court, of making a pass, and the guard
hauls him offstage to be beaten. Smitty threatens Rocky and Queenie; he then listens as
Mona is beaten
again Herbert asks us to imagine the offstage action. Smitty returns to
center stage a changed man. His face now seems to be carved of stone, Herbert
declares; the mouth narrow, cruel and grim, the eyes corresponding slits of hatred. He
speaks in a hoarse, ugly whisper. […] Looking coolly out to the audience with a slight,
twisted smile that is somehow cold, sadistic and menacing, the play ends with Smitty
directly threatening the audience with revenge for the violence against Mona to which
he has just been listening
I m going to pay them back. […] I ll pay you all back.
136
Strange Bedfellows: Social Justice with a Camp Sensibility
On paper, Fortune and Men’s Eyes is a complex
perhaps awkward
combination of
social critique, gay romance, and campy humor. David Rothenberg, moved by the story
and the fact that it was based on the author s own experiences in a Canadian prison,
produced the play s original theatrical run using his own life savings when he couldn t
The film differs here. In the film, Mona is also the victim of rape at the hands of these men on the
outside. In the play, rape appears to be restricted only to the world of the prison.
134
135
Herbert, Fortune, 89.
136
Herbert, Fortune, 96.
59
find anyone else to fund it.137 For Rothenberg, the production of Fortune was intended as
a critique of the prison system in the United States, an intention made clear by the
weekly discussions following shows. Post-performance discussions between the cast
and the audience soon became a Tuesday night tradition. Together with [Rothenberg],
notable participants Pat McGarry and Clarence Cooper
both formerly incarcerated
spearheaded discussions about prison conditions in the United States.
138
Rothenberg
himself moderated these discussions, and by all accounts, they were productive,
provocative, and exciting.139 The New York Times covered the post-show discussions and
reported that gradually, out of this experience, there grew the decision to do
something about prison reform. In November,
name derived from the play
, an organization took shape, its
the Fortune Society, a charity designed to help convicts
after they are released from prison, to speak to young people about the horrors of
prison-life, and to work for reform of the prison system itself.140
The establishment of this charitable and political organization designed to help
improve the lives of convicts came directly out of the publicity garnered by the first
production of Fortune and Men’s Eyes off-Broadway. Caoimhe McAvinchey credits the
play itself for this effect, arguing that Fortune dared to reflect a version of the world
that was raw, brutalised and unjust and demanded that theatre audiences think about
what happens in prison and do something about it.
141
Theatre scholar Neil Carson calls
Michael D. Minichiello, West Village Original: David Rothenberg, West Village News 21 Feb 2010,
http://www.westviewnews.org/cms/component/content/article/43-articles/763-west-village-originaldavid-rothenberg.html (accessed 23 Oct 2011).
137
Fortune Society, History
, http://fortunesociety.org/learn-more/what-is-fortune/timeline/
accessed
Oct
. McGarry and Cooper were not involved in the show s production process.
138
139
Sylvan Fox,
Ex-convicts, Onstage, Tell of Living Hell , New York Times 13 Jul 1967, 29.
140
Gertrude Samuels, “ New Lobby
141
Caoimhe McAvinchey, Theatre & Prison, (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 50.
Ex-Cons, New York Times 19 Oct 1969, SM36.
60
Fortune a hard-hitting drama about prison life
142
that exhibits in a particularly
emphatic way the violence and corruption of prison society.
143
For him, the play is a
meditation on dehumanization and the effects of incarceration; he asserts for example
that the significant human problems […] are not those related to glandular functions
or even to social conventions. They are the problems which transcend sexual
categories
prison.
144
the problems which arise in moments of crisis in war, in emergencies, in
These discussions of the play frame Fortune as a very serious drama about
conditions prisoners are made to suffer, and place the play in conversation with new
debates in the late 1960s about prison reform and inhuman prison conditions. 145
Several of New York s theatre critics saw the first production differently. Dan
Sullivan, in the New York Times, understood that Herbert intended the play as a critique
of the prison system
Obviously, he feels strongly about his subject; obviously, he
wants us to feel as enraged, as disgusted at the system that breeds such corruption
but he noted that, rather than accomplishing its critique, the play s only live character
[…] is an outrageously funny queen played in the style of the immortal Mario
Montez.
146
Edith Oliver of the New Yorker offered a similar critique, remarking that
the play appears to have been written in good faith there was no evidence
to me, at
any rate of pornographic intent, but adding that there is no overwhelming evidence
Neil Carson, Sexuality and Identity in Fortune and Men’s Eyes, Twentieth Century Literature 18.3 (1972):
207.
142
143
Carson 208.
144
Carson 208.
See also Linda Charlton, The Terrifying Homosexual World of the Jail System, New York Times 25
“pril
,
and David Rothenberg, “s If Imprisonment Itself Is Not Horrendous Enough… New York
Times 29 Jan 1977, 19.
145
Dan Sullivan, “ Distressing Fortune and Men’s Eyes, New York Times 24 Feb 1967, 29. Mario Montez
was born Rene Rivera and was one of “ndy Warhol s stars, also working with Charles Ludlam and Jack
Smith in the
s and
s. “ccording to Laurence Senelick, Ludlam named him The Guru of Drag ,
towering over the others on eleven-inch fuck me pumps. See Senelick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and
Theatre, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 423.
146
61
of talent, either, in anyone concerned. Fortune and Men’s Eyes is repulsive, but it is not
disturbing, for beneath it beats a heart of corn.
147
Both Oliver and Sullivan see that the
play aspires to seriousness, but find those aspirations undermined by the marriage of a
social critique to sentimentality and a camp sense of humor.
The Boys in the Band Get Busted148
In this first production
sentimental
whether viewed as pornographic, sensational, depraved, or
Fortune and Men’s Eyes was a hit. But although advertisements for the play
emphasized its profundity and gritty realism, comparing Herbert to Peter Weiss and
Jean Genet (Figure 1), audiences for the play appear to have been overwhelmingly gay
men.149 Perhaps even more importantly, Fortune was unquestionably a play about gay
men. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times about gay characters in literature, Ronald
Forsythe complains that Fortune is yet another drama where gays are only shown in a
negative light,150 and Margaret Harford, in her précis of the play for the Los Angeles
Times, ignores the act of rape and states that Fortune deals with homosexuality and
other indignities of prison life.
151
Variety’s review of the film version of Fortune was
even subtitled The ”oys in the ”and Get ”usted.
152
Edith Oliver, reviews of People Is the Thing That the World Is Fullest Of, The Rimers of Eldritch, and Fortune
and Men’s Eyes, New Yorker 4 Mar 1967, 134. The Village Voice also saw the play as sentimental, but found it
more effective than Oliver and Sullivan did. See Michael Smith, reviews of Fortune and Men’s Eyes,
MacBIRD!, People Is the Thing That the World Is Fullest Of, and June Bug Graduates Tonight, Village Voice 2
Mar 1967, 21-4.
147
Mart Crowley s The Boys in the Band (1968) is widely considered the first gay hit. It ran off-Broadway
for more than one thousand performances. It was made into a film, directed by William Friedkin, in 1970.
148
149
Rosalyn Regelson, Up the Camp Staircase, New York Times 3 Mar 1968, D14.
Ronald Forsythe, Why Can t We Live Happily Ever “fter, Too? New York Times 23 Feb 1969, D1ff.
Ronald Forsythe is a pseudonym.
150
Margaret Harford, Mineo s Star on Rise “gain as Stage Director, Los Angeles Times 2 Jan 1969, F1ff.
Note that Harford is not talking about Mineo s production here but the play itself. Mineo s production
had yet to open.
151
152
Addison Verrill, review of Fortune and Men’s Eyes, Variety 19 Jun 1971, 17.
62
Figure 1: Advertisement for Fortune and Men’s Eyes emphasizing the gritty realism of
the production from page 28 of the New York Times 3 Mar 1967
If audiences equated male/male rape with homosexual sex when they saw the
1967 production of Fortune and Men’s Eyes, then the London premiere in 1968 and Sal
Mineo s productions in Los “ngeles and in New York City in
cemented this
association. In London, in a new production directed by Charles Marowitz, the show
added an element of nudity never present off-Broadway. Variety reported that the play
has been ballyhooed over a scene in which three men were said to emerge from a
63
shower room and dry themselves. ”ut although the Variety critic called the scene
over-publicized, his description is all the more aimed as a promise of titillation
There are swift backviews of two of the men and only a theatergoer with swift, keen
eyesight will catch a glimpse of the genitals of the other actor as he turns on stage. The
critic seems almost to invite those with keen eyesight to test their skill! Variety s review
of the London production focused solely on sex and never on prison conditions,
synopsizing that the thin storyline concerns a young heterosexual serving his first
reformatory term, sharing a dormitory with three convicted homos and swiftly
becoming depraved.
153
In the United States, Hollywood movie-actor Sal Mineo
who rose to fame in
Nicholas Ray s Rebel without a Cause (1955), but whose star had been on a slow fade
since the early 1960s
directed Fortune s West Coast premiere. Taking onstage male
nudity several steps further than London for the Los Angeles production, Mineo, who
played the rapist Rocky, decided to strip at stage left and walk across the stage with
just a towel tossed over his shoulder.
154
Mineo biographer Michael Gregg Michaud
described the director s modified version of the rape sequence in the following
way:
[Rocky] then grabs Smitty, pushes him into the shower [onstage for this
production], tears off his clothes, shoves him against the prison bars, and
begins to sodomize him. “ prison guard s whistle blows as the lights fade
to black and Smitty painfully screams. Theater audiences had never seen
anything like it before, and they had never seen a famous American actor
Rich., review of Fortune and Men’s Eyes, Variety 13 Nov 1968, 153. Reviewers in Variety were, for years,
designated by four-letter appellations only.
153
154
Michael Gregg Michaud, Sal Mineo: a Biography, (New York: Crown Archetype, 2010), 259.
64
(especially one twice nominated for an Academy Award) appear nude in
a film or onstage.155
Mineo also changed the play s ending. “fter Mona is dragged offstage, Smitty
masturbates as he listens to Mona being beaten by the guards, an auto-erotic ending
that the Los Angeles Times noted was the director s idea, not the author s.
156
According to Daily Variety, the controversial piece is handled with such good
taste that it rises far above the somewhat objectionable subject and results in an
entertainment that should assure tingling tills [sic] through a long run
they also
offered that the simulated [rape] scene is candidly presented but so well blocked that it
is in no way obscene.
157
Mineo, too, claimed to be more interested in treatment of
convicts and prison-conditions than in sexuality, visiting California s San Quentin
prison in order to research the play and appearing extremely conscientious in all of the
interviews he gave promoting it.158 Mineo s changes to the show also involved an
attempt at a greater degree of realism, installing a working shower onstage and
bringing the scenic design out into the audience. He even had ushers dressed as prison
guards. Still, the majority of critics
Daily Variety included emphasized the play s
eroticism. The Los Angeles Times while mostly kind to Mineo, referred to the cell s
inmates as young perverts, and reported that the staging is graphic enough for
reverse peristalsis.
159
Mineo, for his part, continued to emphasize the play s interest in
prison-reform with statements like my intention was not where can I put a nude
scene. I didn t believe the kid s transition from a typical nice boy into a boy-slave just
155
Michaud 259.
156
Sullivan, Dark Side, T .
157
Bill Edwards, review of Fortune and Men’s Eyes, Daily Variety 13 Jan 1969, 10.
See Harford, F9, Michaud, 255-78, and H. Paul Jeffers, Sal Mineo: His Life, Murder, and Mystery, (New
York: Carroll & Graf, 2000), 132-43.
158
159
Fredric L. Milstein, Fortune Opens at Coronet, Los Angeles Times 11 Jan 1969, B7.
65
like that
with no sign of it at all. I mean, they don t show anything in the original play
not one moment of physical violence.
160
“s I have already noted, I believe Mineo s
assessment of the original play s offstage violence to be a critique with a sound basis.
His attempt to make the violence visible to Fortune s audiences reflects, therefore, a
particular ethical point of view related to representations of violence. For Mineo, the
effects of the violence that Smitty experiences in Fortune ring false because the audience
has not actually witnessed the violence to which Rocky subjects Smitty, and so he aims
to place that violence where his audience can see it.
That these interviews about the ethics of nudity were given to publications with
a predominantly gay-male readership such as In, After Dark, and Avanti, suggests,
however, that Mineo knew his play s intended audience. Michaud reports that
publicity targeted a predominantly homosexual demographic, also providing these
magazines with provocative photographs of the cast taking showers and in various
stages of undress.161 As with the first New York production, audiences were
overwhelmingly male,162 and Dan Sullivan offers that a tip-off to the essential thrust of
this particular production […] was the irreverent giggle heard from the audience
recently during a tender scene between the boyish hero and [Mona] Oh, give IN! I
would!
163
In Los Angeles, Fortune and Men’s Eyes ran for seven months.
The show did so well in Los Angeles that Mineo found backers for a second
production in New York City only two years after its first production. This time the
show opened at Stage 73 in the Upper East Side, far away from the predominantly gay
neighborhood of Sheridan Square (which had been the site of the Stonewall Riots earlier
in the year). Mineo kept all of the elements he had added
160
Sal Mineo quoted in Michaud 261.
161
Michaud 262.
162
Jeffers 137.
163
Sullivan, Dark Side, T .
66
the nudity, the onstage rape,
the autoeroticism
and also extended the rape scene from a brief one into a three-
minute gladiator battle in the shower.
164
This time, reviews were brutal. Clive Barnes
in the New York Times said that Mr. Mineo s version of this play is pure and tawdry
sensationalism, and his bitter review included vilifications such as If this sounds like
the kind of play you would like, it is to be found at Stage
, […] but Sir or Madam, I
suggest that if this does sound like the kind of play you would like, you need a
psychiatrist a lot more than you need a theater ticket.
165
The Village Voice opined that
Mineo s lively presentation of prison life has all the authenticity, depth, and social
consciousness of a gay-oriented 42nd Street [i.e. pornographic] novel on the subject.
166
Variety described the revival as crass sensationalism and a blatantly pandering
production. It s poorly directed and even more poorly acted, but it has a lot of boxoffice
impetus and should run indefinitely,
167
and the Los Angeles Times referred to this New
York revival of Fortune as a play of singular sleaziness.
168
John Herbert himself even
wrote an op-ed piece in Variety criticizing Mineo s directorial choices.169
One of the chords consistently sounded in reviews of Mineo s
production
was its alleged departure from John Herbert s original intentions. ”arnes claimed that
the play s first production was fundamentally a serious indictment of the North
“merican prison system,
170
Variety seemed to remember the original Fortune as a
thought-provoking blast at the inhumanity engendered among inmates by prison
164
Joe Bonelli quoted in Jeffers 140.
165
Clive ”arnes, Question Marks at Stage
166
David De Porte, review of Fortune and Men’s Eyes, Village Voice 6 Nov 1969, 45.
167
Richard Hummler, review of Fortune and Men’s Eyes, Variety 29 Oct 1969, 70.
168
Sandra Schmidt, “uthor Disavows Fortune Version, Los Angeles Times 25 Oct 1969, B8.
, New York Times 23 Oct 1969, 55.
John Herbert, Men’s Eyes Playwright Deplores Sex Emphasis in Sal Mineo Staging, Variety 8 Oct 1969,
66ff.
169
170
Barnes 55.
67
life,
171
and Sandra Schmidt claimed in the Los Angeles Times that even the fan dance
that is such a centerpiece of act two had nothing to do with the play.
172
I have
observed above, however, that critics had been hostile to Fortune from the play s first
production; by 1972 Neil Carson could argue in the journal Twentieth Century Literature
that neither producers nor critics had understood Herbert s play. For Carson, Fortune is
marred by moments of awkward dramaturgy and by an underlying sentimentality,
and so should be rescued both from sensationalistic producers and
move also made by Ann P. Messenger in Dramatists in Canada
own failings as a playwright.
173
in a strange critical
from John Herbert s
Fortune and Men’s Eyes had never been the ideal play
about social justice in American prisons that scholars and critics had wanted.
Despite the pans in the Times and Variety, the play continued to run at Stage 73
for nearly seven months. Mineo biographer Paul Jeffers attributes the show s longevity
to gay male audiences, claiming that gay men who hailed the Stonewall rebellion
considered it a duty and act of loyalty to flock to the box office of the small theater on
73rd Street.
174
Mineo s production may not have been to Clive ”arnes s taste, but it
hadn t offended New York s gay male population, and audiences clearly remained
interested in what the Village Voice
despite its objections to the show
honest, […] accurate, portrayal of four homosexuals.
175
called an
Audiences for productions of
Fortune and Men’s Eyes, at least in the United States, have always been overwhelmingly
gay and male. As I demonstrated at the beginning of this chapter, Fortune and Men’s
171
Hummler 70.
172
Schmidt B8.
Carson
. See also “nn P. Messenger, Damnation at Christmas John Herbert s Fortune and Men s
Eyes , in Dramatists in Canada: Selected Essays, edited by William New, (Vancouver: University of British
Columbia Press, 1972), 173-8.
173
174
Jeffers 142.
175
De Porte 45.
68
Eyes
power
with its campy humor, gay love story, and frank portrayal of sex exchanged for
was, in fact, aimed at gay male audiences as originally written.
Perverting the Prison-Reform Play
Prison dramas have often included queer characters, of course, but they have,
from the first, been documents interested in the brutality of prison life. What I want to
chart here is a shift in the way that prison dramas work following John Herbert s play.
Fortune and Men’s Eyes marks a historical moment when dramatic representations of the
brutality of prison life transform into representations of the brutality of prison sexual
hierarchies. Traditional prison dramas in the Realist genre
Galsworthy s Justice
beginning with John
and continuing with plays such as “lbert ”ein s Little Ol’ ”oy
(1933), Tennessee Williams s Not about Nightingales, and William Douglas Home s Now
”arabbas…
all follow a similar pattern, in which a young, innocent, or otherwise
naive protagonist is incarcerated and attempts to survive life behind bars.176 These
playwrights uniformly represent prison life itself as damaging, documenting
overcrowding, mistreatment by guards and wardens, and substandard living
conditions. Although the protagonists invariably try to behave properly and stay out of
trouble, they are uniformly crushed. They are destroyed by the prison system itself,
which the playwrights indict as corrupt and damaging. Many of their protagonists have
been killed by play s end others have been transformed from good, honest people into
hardened criminals.177 In either case, the prison play engages in a call for social justice
by using a kind of perverted Bildungsroman in which the young prisoner is not allowed
See John Galsworthy, Justice: a Tragedy in Four Acts, New York Charles Scribner s Sons,
,
especially pp. 81-84, and Albert Bein, Little Ol’ ”oy: a Play in Three Acts, (New York: Samuel French, 1935).
176
This pattern holds for prison dramas in the movies, as well. I am thinking particularly of Wallace
Beery s doomed character in George W. Hill s The Big House (1930), as well as the nineteen-year-old naïfcum-criminal played by Eleanor Parker in John Cromwell s Caged (1950).
177
69
to come of age but, instead, is either killed or becomes an anti-social figure to be
feared.178
Fortune and Men’s Eyes attempts to follow this traditional pattern of the prisonreform play, and Herbert makes it quite clear in his play that the administration of the
prison is what needs reform. The guards look the other way while Smitty is raped; their
actions condone all of the sexual violence that occurs in the prison. Mona, we find out
by the play s end, has been incarcerated not for a criminal act, but because of the
failings of a Canadian justice system that sees an effeminate man as de facto deserving of
incarceration. If, therefore, the play ends with Smitty vowing revenge against Rocky
and Queenie, he also breaks the fourth wall, looking out to the audience and promising
to revenge himself on the entirety of the prison system.
As Herbert updated the social justice plays of the
s and
s, he naturally
described the brutalities of prison life that he saw as reflective of his contemporary
moment. The playwright s attempt at a realistic depiction of prison conditions
necessitated a depiction of prison sexual hierarchies and the ubiquity of sexual violence
in prison systems. I have already noted that the early critical reception of Fortune in the
press focused on the play s attention to homosexuality, but the overwhelming majority
of scholarly work on Fortune has also addressed the play from the point of view of the
newly visible homosexual. Peter Dickinson notes that Fortune and Men’s Eyes is often
considered the beginning of modern gay drama in Canada,
179
and “lan Sinfield s Out
on Stage emphasizes sexuality as the play s most important subject. Extraordinarily, in
Sinfield s gloss of the play there is no reference to rape anywhere. Reading Sinfield,
Fortune becomes a play about bullying Rocky doesn t rape Smitty, he exploits him.
I am indebted to Mary Karen Dahl for this absolutely perfect phrase. She knew what I was trying to
say even when I wasn t quite saying it.
178
Peter Dickinson, Screening Gender, Framing Genre: Canadian Literature into Film, (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press,
,
. Dickinson further cites Jerry Wasserman s introduction to his edited volume
Modern Canadian Drama (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1986).
179
70
Further, Out on Stage places Fortune on a historical timeline with prison plays such as
Little Ol’ ”oy (1933),180 Haute Surveillance (1949), and Now ”arabbas… that include
queer characters but do not include any male/male sexual violence.181 Although William
Douglas Home s Now ”arabbas… , for example, includes the suggestion of sexual
relations between prisoners, the play only describes homosexual desire and does not
characterize that desire as violent. Sinfield s reading figures Fortune as a kind of
thematic heir to these other three plays, and he therefore ignores the rape that is central
to the action of Fortune; on the contrary, his reading works to characterize Fortune s
descriptions of violence as simply one more aspect of male homosexual relations.
I note Sinfield s conflation of male/male rape with homosexuality in Fortune and
Men’s Eyes because nearly every critic of the play s original production framed the play
in exactly this way.182 Martin Esslin, speaking about a growing trend of nudity in the
theatre, refers to the naked men in John Herbert s play about homosexuality in a
prison,
183
and in the New York Times, Sylvan Fox referred to the brutal,
homosexualized world of a prison cell.
examined the dark side of gay life,
185
184
The Los Angeles Times claimed that the play
and in her very perceptive piece for the New
York Times entitled Up the Camp Staircase, Rosalyn Regelson offers that Herbert
Why Sinfield includes Little Ol’ ”oy in his discussion is a bit of a mystery to me. The boys at the
reformatory in ”ein s play exhibit no queerness or indeed any sexual desires at all as far as I can tell,
and the play is a prison-reform play like Justice and Not about Nightingales, not one that is primarily a
document of prison-life like Short Eyes or The Cage. What Little Ol’ ”oy is not is a play chiefly concerned
with gender, as Sinfield implies.
180
Alan Sinfield, Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century, (New Haven CT: Yale
University Press,
,
. Williams s Not about Nightingales also includes a prison queen.
181
“nton Wagner s discussion of Canadian critics responses to the play is especially telling. See
Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1999), 38-9.
182
183
Martin Esslin, Nudity ”arely the ”eginning? New York Times 15 Dec 1968, D18.
184
Fox 29.
185
Dan Sullivan, Three Plays Examine Dark Side of the Gay Life, Los Angeles Times 30 Mar 1969, T32.
71
equated the degradation of prison life with the homosexuality in the prison dorm.
186
These responses reflect reviews for the productions of Fortune in London and Los
“ngeles, for both productions in New York, as well as for Harvey Hart s film.
It is fundamental to understand that male/male rape and homosexuality in
Fortune and Men’s Eyes were interpreted as though they were identical to one other.
Because of this, reception of the play by both scholars and mainstream critics has
focused not on the play s portrayal of male/male rape as one of the harrowing
conditions obtaining in Canadian and USAmerican prisons, but rather on the pernicious
effects of homosexuality as such, as though what is wrong with American prison
systems is homosexuality itself and not the conditions under which prisoners are forced
to live. For the majority of critics the play was a melodrama about male homosexual sex
much more than it was a play about the brutality of prison life, male/male rape, the
flaws in American justice systems, or an inability to rehabilitate young criminal
offenders. Perhaps even more accurately put, male homosexual sex was interpreted as
equivalent to the brutality of prison life, male/male rape, the flaws in American justice
systems, and an inability to rehabilitate young criminal offenders. As the former
warden at San Quentin prison put it, There s plenty of sexual activity in our prisons,
but it s the wrong kind. No inmate […] is entirely spared homosexual advances, and
many succumb.
187
Rape, here, is not read as rape but as sex, and homosexual sex is what
makes prison-life brutal.
Fortune’s Legacy as Rape-Drama
The interpretive frame for male/male rape set up by these productions of Fortune
and Men’s Eyes ought not to be underestimated. Fortune is the first attempt by any
dramatist at a portrayal of male/male rape, and its legacy was to have far-reaching
186
Regelson D14.
187
Clinton T. Duffy quoted in Samuels 46.
72
effects. The play opened the door to prison drama about sexual violence, and it was
released in a film version by MGM in 1971. Fortune was also followed almost
immediately by two other notable plays about prison life in the United States: Rick
Cluchey s The Cage
and Miguel Piñero s Short Eyes (1974), which was itself made
into a film in 1977.188 Fortune s influence on both of these plays is undeniable. This is not
because Cluchey or Piñero would have read Herbert s work
in fact, Cluchey began to
sketch his play almost at the same time as Herbert finished his writing in Toronto
but
because, as a public event, Fortune set up a series of expectations and paradigms for the
new prison drama that deeply affected reception of The Cage and Short Eyes. Many
reviews of both plays mention Fortune as an interpretive touchstone, often comparing
the authenticity of these newer plays with Fortune s model. The remainder of this
chapter will describe what I see as the three important aspects of the interpretive frame
that Fortune outlined for prison dramas that would follow it, and the implications of this
dramaturgy for the male/male rape trope.
Homosexual Desire Causes Rape
First, we have noted that in Herbert s original play
and London productions
and in the first New York
the male/male rape sequence happens offstage. By initially
ending his rape scene before the rape itself occurs, Herbert does more than echo the
Cluchey s play was written as a part of the San Quentin Drama Workshop. It had its first reading in
1965 in the prison itself. The play premiered in December of 1965 as part of the season of the San
Francisco “ctor s Workshop, which famously performed ”eckett s Waiting for Godot for San Quentin s
prisoners. It was directed by Kenneth Kitch. It was not widely known at the time, and is still produced
infrequently, but it also played at Arena Stage in 1969 in a production directed by Kitch. Short Eyes
premiered in 1974 at the Theatre of the Riverside Church, moving to the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at
Lincoln Center in New York City as a part of Joseph Papp s New York Shakespeare Festival in May of
that year. It was directed by Marvin Felix Camillo. The 1977 film version of Short Eyes is available in
several formats, including streaming online and on DVD (New York: Fox Lorber [Wellspring Media],
2003). It was released following a renewed interest in Short Eyes playwright Miguel Piñero, about whom a
biographical film was made in 2001 starring Benjamin Bratt. See also Piñero, DVD, (New York: Miramax,
2002).
188
73
alleged ancient Greek tradition of placing violent actions offstage,189 he also follows a
Realist tradition where playwrights place sexual activity offstage.190 Silence, in these
dramas is made to signify sexual activity by encouraging imaginative activity, and the
tradition of placing sex just offstage is widespread in both melodrama and Realist
drama. Herbert has said that he intended the violence of the rape to be imagined by his
audience, but by placing scene one s rape offstage, he also taps into a set of cultural
expectations whereby audiences are asked to imagine that the activity offstage is sexual
activity. Although the rape was moved onstage and played in view of the audience in
Sal Mineo s
productions, I have argued that both audiences and critics read the
rape as though it were a homosexual sex act. The Village Voice claimed that the play was
an accurate portrait of four homosexuals, the Los Angeles Times believed that it showed
the dark side of gay life, Clive ”arnes review in the New York Times accused Mineo of
being a sadomasochistic pornographer, and gay male audiences turned out in full force
to watch the play
whether for purposes of titillation or simply the pleasure of seeing
themselves represented onstage, even as criminals. Rape, if it manages to be legible at
all, is legible only as normative or perhaps slightly sensational gay male behavior.
Male/male rape in Fortune and Men’s Eyes is a gay thing.
If the play s reception deviated from Herbert s dramaturgical intentions, it is
here, perhaps, where that discrepancy is most apparent. I have already claimed that
Fortune attempted to follow a tradition of social-reform Realism, but I want also to
argue briefly that in Herbert s text, rape and homosexuality are polar opposites. Rocky
rapes Smitty at the end of the play s first scene Smitty begins to have consensual if
hateful) sex with Queenie over the course of the play, and then in act two Smitty
attempts to seduce Mona. When Mona refuses to have sex with Smitty, he describes
189
See Herbert, Sal Mineo Staging.
Some notable examples are Alexandre Dumas fils s La Dame aux Camélias (Camille) (1852), August
Strindberg s Fröken Julie
, and George ”ernard Shaw s Heartbreak House (1919).
190
74
homosexuality as something beautiful and precious, a kind of ideal love that he is not
willing to abandon. Mona says he loves Smitty, and when he characterizes himself as
separating his real world from his dream-world, Mona places his love for Smitty in the
dream-world and his experience of rape at the hands of other convicts in the real world.
What my body does and feels is one thing, and what I think and feel apart from that is
something else, Mona tells Smitty. It s to the world I dream in you belong. […] I
won t let you move over, into the other, where I would become worthless to you
myself. I have a right to save something.
191
and
In Mona s imagination, homosexuality is
redemptive and beautiful, an ideal love set apart from the quotidian; male/male rape is
its opposite, simply a component of the violence and brutality of the world as it really
is. In this way, Herbert places male/male sexual violence in stark contrast to
homosexuality. They are, in Fortune, each other s thematic opposites.
This aspect of Herbert s play appears, for whatever reason, not to have made a
significant impression on either reviewers or scholars. For most of Fortune s critics, rape
is productive of homosexuality: Smitty is transformed into a homosexual by the prison.
“s noted earlier, many of the play s reviewers saw homosexuality as a de facto part of
the punishment of American prison systems. This way of thinking was to become
widespread across Anglo-American society; Regina Kunzel demonstrates in Criminal
Intimacy that accounts of prison-sex in the
s and
s were newly ubiquitous,
newly graphic and newly univocal in depicting sexual violence and brutality, so much
so, in fact, that rape would come to be understood as the defining practice of sex in
men s prisons.
192
Further, if to be raped was equivalent to a homosexual experience,
then homosexuality was, again, reproducing itself, finding new recruits and converting
them.
191
Herbert, Fortune, 89.
192
Kunzel 153.
75
Homosexuality and male/male rape would remain equivalent in the two prison
dramas that immediately followed Fortune. In Short Eyes, for example, Paco attempts to
seduce Julio
also known as Cupcakes
in the shower by kissing his neck; Julio spurns
his advances, but the two have a dangerous conversation where they frankly discuss
male/male rape and link it explicitly to homosexuality.
PACO. Man,
CUPCAKES.
cause I kiss you doesn t mean you re a faggot.
It means you re a faggot… don t do it again. […] Que me deje
quieto… Yo no soy un maricón…
PACO. Papisito,
yo no estoy diciendo que tú ere maricón… Yo no pienso
así…
CUPCAKES.
¿Y que tú piensa?
PACO. Que
te quiero y que te adoro… […] Hijo la gran puta… Punk, I
ought to take you now.
CUPCAKES.
PACO. I
Leave me alone… déjame. […] You re sick.
m what? Sick
don t you say that to me… Sick… Shit, I m sick
cause I m in love with you… […] Push comes to shove, I ll take you.
”ut I don t wanna do that cause I know I m gonna have to hurt you in
the doing. Look, man, I ll go both ways with you.193
Piñero describes rape here as an extension of homosexual desire: Paco offers Julio sex,
then threatens to rape him, and then offers sex again, all while telling him that he loves
him. Paco is willing to go both ways
he offers to allow Julio to penetrate him as well
but what Paco cannot get through seduction he will take through violence. In this
sequence Piñero figures rape as a clear result of Paco s frustrated homosexual desire for
Julio, and Julio explicitly identifies Paco more than once as a homosexual, not simply as
a frustrated heterosexual.
193
Miguel Piñero, Short Eyes, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 65-9.
76
The Cage is a more complicated play, formally, than both Fortune and Short Eyes
it has a ritual, dreamlike quality to it that differentiates it from Realism
but in The
Cage, too, sexual violence and sex are equivalent. Though Doc and Al are lovers at the
beginning of Rick Cluchey s play, Doc threatens Al with rape over the course of the
narrative, and both of them threaten the new inmate Jive. Their advances are seductive
at first, but grow violent when seduction doesn t work, utilizing violence as a means to
achieve sexual satisfaction.194 In all three plays rape was equivalent to homosexuality,
and homosexuality was inseparable from rape. And although Fortune and Men’s Eyes
attempts to distinguish the two, their identity was emphasized by critics who collapsed
the two. The plays that immediately followed Fortune figured homosexuality and
male/male rape as altogether identical.
Rape Is Separate from Society
Herbert s placement of male/male rape inside a prison also worked to separate
male/male sexual violence from normative heterosexual behavior. The second paradigm
set up by Fortune and Men’s Eyes was that it contained male/male rape within the walls
of the prison. “s critics discussed the brutal, homosexualized world of the prison,
they restricted male/male sexual violence to an activity created by the monosexual
world of the prison, and they rhetorically cordoned male/male rape off from the world
outside the prison system. Fortune, Short Eyes, and The Cage all portray prison as a world
entirely incommensurable with society at large. Each drama, in fact, is identical in its
exposition, introducing a young, white, male convict who has never before been
incarcerated. In all three plays this man is inexperienced in criminal activity, believes
himself to be innocent, and has no idea of the dangers, rules, or language of the prison.
Another character in each play quickly explains carceral society to the convict in the
play s first scene. The audience, of course, needs these expository sequences in order for
Rick Cluchey, The Cage: a Play in One Act, (San Francisco: Barbwire Press, 1970), see especially pp. 1822.
194
77
the plays themselves to work, but the very structure of these sequences requires an
emphasis on the differences between society outside and society inside.
The effect here is to depict the world of the prison as a discrete system,
populated by people very different from the audience, operating according to rules that
differed widely from normative society, and using a language only partially
comprehensible to speakers of Standard English. What is taken for granted, then, in this
prison world (dense prison argot, monosexuality, hierarchical structures of violence) is
represented as inherent to and the result of the processes of everyday life within prison
society. As portrayed in Fortune, Short Eyes, and The Cage, male/male sexual violence is
the result of the prison system itself. In this way, these theatrical representations give
voice to male/male rape as a problematic and then locate that problematic within a
community that needs reform but remains outside of and separate from normative
society. “s Kunzel argues, Prisons were often represented as hermetic institutions in
which residues of past and more primitive sexual cultures persisted and thrived.
195
In
fact, prison is itself designed to create a discrete field separate from mainstream society,
and the dramaturgy of these three plays works to emphasize precisely this difference.
The plays characterize prison as a space for deviants and criminals, where activities
take place that do not take place and never would take place among normal people.
Fortune and its successors, then, ideologically place male/male rape outside of the realm
of possibility for normative society by placing it inside the four walls of the American
prison.
What these early prison-rape plays do not do what, indeed, they have no
interest in doing
is question the structures of masculinity, of penetration, of
receptivity, which I argued adhere to representations of rape. Rather, because these
dramas are focused on the damaging effects of incarceration and the failings of the
195
Kunzel 6.
78
US“merican and Canadian justice systems, it is in the drama s interests to represent
prison life as shockingly as possible. In this way, the plays portray prison-rape as
simply the way things are in prison, an attitude toward sexual violence that avoids
interrogating rape as a problem inherent to societal structures outside the prison
system. So in 1968, when Rosalyn Regelson opined in the New York Times that another
interpretation of the action of Fortune and Men’s Eyes might be that behind the brutal
sexual assaults made on the weaker prisoners by the stronger was the need to assert our
culture s sick idea of masculinity,
she would be the lone voice in the medium of print
to do so.196 The overwhelming majority of critics saw the world of the carceral in Fortune
as unconnected to their own society, and although I recognize it is not these plays
intentions, neither Fortune, Short Eyes, nor The Cage discusses the hierarchical structures
of prison sexuality as reflective of the masculinist hierarchies which obtain in the world
outside of carceral systems. Instead, prison-rape and the intra-carceral power that it
produces appear to be hermetically sealed off from the society which has, in fact,
created the space that makes such power possible. In Fortune and Men’s Eyes, prison
sexual violence is not caused by gender dynamics which were invented outside of the
prison but appears, rather, to have emerged, fully formed, from the discrete space of the
prison itself.
Rape Authenticates Representations of Prison
The final aspect that I wish to emphasize about Fortune and Men’s Eyes and the
prison plays that immediately followed it is that rape in these plays is not a metaphor.
In the previous chapter I emphasized rape s consistent metaphorization and
mobilization as a rhetorical device, so it is important that we note rape s dramaturgical
function in these, the first prison dramas to treat the subject of male/male rape with any
amount of frankness. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, later authors ask rape
196
Regelson D14.
79
to stand in for numerous other concepts
genocide, primitivism, colonialism, depravity
but in these plays, the presence of sexual violation works to emphasize the authenticity
of these dramas. Herbert, Piñero, and Cluchey do not present rape as a symbol. For
better or worse, they do not even place sexual violence on a continuum with other
violent activities. These plays do not ask their audiences to read rape as though it
signifies anything other than itself. Rather, in Short Eyes, The Cage, and Fortune,
male/male rape is simply a fact of carceral existence, displayed mostly through Realist
techniques and designed to demonstrate and expose the inhumane conditions of life
behind bars.
The plays frank portrayal of male/male rape as a normal if terrifying component
of life in prison was so convincing that representation of rape would become a
dramaturgical technique that could indicate a play s authenticity as a prison drama. The
lasting effects of this authenticating gesture remain with us. If The Cage and Short Eyes,
the two prison dramas following Fortune most immediately, could not claim
authenticity without a portrayal of sexual violence among prisoners, virtually no play
or film produced in the last forty years with prison as its subject has been able to avoid
some portrayal of rape or the threat of rape. Representations as different as David
Mamet s play Edmond (1982), the BBC television miniseries The Jewel in the Crown (1984),
the award-winning film The Shawshank Redemption (1997), the 2004 science fiction film
The Butterfly Effect, the U.S. television series Oz (1997-2003), and the 2008 USAmerican
stoner-film Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay all explicitly include reference
to rape as though it were a conventional aspect of prison life. In film, this list could go
on almost indefinitely, including forgettable comedies like Let’s Go to Prison (2006) and I
Love You, Phillip Morris
as well as serious dramas such as Spike Lee s 25th Hour
and Tony Kaye s American History X (1998). The link between rape and prison life
has become so widespread that in 2001, Human Rights Watch confidently asserted that
few members of the public would be surprised by the assertion that men are
80
frequently raped in prison, given rape s established place in the mythology of prison
life and also offered that judging by the popular media, rape is accepted as almost a
commonplace of imprisonment, so much so that when the topic of prison arises, a
joking reference to rape seems almost obligatory.
197
After Fortune and Men’s Eyes,
mention of rape became a way for a representation of prison to demonstrate its
authenticity as such, and so prison-rape became a commonplace in drama about prison.
Human Rights Watch, No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2001), 3.
Human Rights Watch does not credit her, but this citation is a word-for-word direct quotation from
Joanne Mariner s ”ody and Soul the Trauma of Prison Rape in ”uilding Violence How “merica’s Rush to
Incarcerate Creates More Violence, edited by John P. May, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000),
125-31.
197
81
CHAPTER 3
TROUBLE DEAF HEAVEN198
Superego and Id are themselves historically conditioned categories; they are, in
fact, Freud’s internalized reworking of the concepts of Civilization and Nature,
which he took for granted as objectively given in the external world. Thus
rather than saying that the forest symbolizes the id, it is perhaps better to say that
the forest and the id are parallel constructs, both standing in for a deeper
universal reality. Indeed, in terms of the historical development of ideas, one may
say that it is the id that symbolizes the forest.
Rodger Cunningham, Apples on the Flood199
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smiritta
In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for the
straight way was lost.
Dante Aligheri, Inferno200
While Sal Mineo s production of Fortune and Men’s Eyes was still running Off-Broadway
at Stage 73, readers were treated, in the Atlantic Monthly s February 1970 issue, to the
first excerpts of the novel that would serve as the ur-text for the most spectacular
“ccording to biographer Henry Hart, as early as
Dickey had considered using a title for the
novel Trouble Deaf Heaven suggested by [Lester] Mansfield. The phrase fit the existentialist conviction
that heaven was deaf to human misery because it and God did not exist. The phrase is from
Shakespeare s Sonnet , which begins, of course, When in disgrace with fortune and men s eyes….
The coincidence here seems an impossible one, and I have no idea what to make of it. See Henry Hart,
James Dickey: the World as a Lie, (New York: Picador, 2000), 174.
198
Rodger Cunningham, Apples on the Flood: the Southern Mountain Experience, (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1987), 123.
199
Dante Aligheri, The Divine Comedy: Volume 1: Inferno, translated by Robert M. Durling, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 26-7. It is Peggy Goodman Endel who first made the association from
Dickey to Dante. See Endel, Dickey, Dante, and the Demonic Reassessing Deliverance, American
Literature 60.4 (1988): 611-24.
200
82
male/male rape in all of cinema. The book was Deliverance, and its author was the wellknown poet of the American South, James Dickey. Deliverance was published in the
summer of 1970; it received raves in the Nation, the Washington Post, the New Republic,
and the New Yorker, and it quickly became a New York Times bestseller. The book also
had its detractors, most notably Fredric Jameson, who called the novel repellant
201
in
the journal College English, and “nthony Thwaite, who scathingly remarked in London s
New Statesman that though [Dickey s narrator] tells the story in a manner compounded
of the rhetorical flatulence of Mr Dickey s own poems, Hemingway and the King James
”ible […] his actual dialogue and that of his companions is banal, debased, the argot
of […] a high-school locker-room , as is his philosophising.
202
Nearly everyone,
however, agreed that the novel was enjoyable to read, and even its harshest critics
acknowledged Dickey s abilities as a storyteller. Rights to a film version were
purchased nearly immediately, and the film of Deliverance was released in the summer
of 1972. The book, in fact, continues to delight readers. As recently as 2010, forty years
after the novel s first publication, the New York Times published a piece praising
Deliverance Dwight Garner referred to it as the kind of novel few serious writers
attempt any longer, a book about wilderness and survival whose DNA contains shards
of both Heart of Darkness and Huckleberry Finn. […] It s lonely work looking for its
serious successors.
203
Deliverance is narrated by Ed Gentry, an Atlanta businessman who is incredibly
bored with his own life and seeks a kind of escape from the middle-aged flaccidity of
his office job and his perfectly acceptable but no-longer-exciting marriage. The
possibility of deliverance is provided by Ed s athletic friend Lewis, whom Ed describes
Fredric Jameson, The Great “merican Hunter, or, Ideological Content in the Novel, College English
34.2 (1972): 186.
201
202
“nthony Thwaite, Out of ”ondage, New Statesman 11 Sep 1970, 310.
203
Dwight Garner, Deliverance a Dark Heart Still ”eating, New York Times 25 Aug 2010, C1.
83
as one of the strongest men I had ever shaken hands with.
204
Lewis proposes a canoe
ride down the (fictional) Cahulawassee River before the river itself is destroyed by a
government project that will dam up the river to create a lake. Ed s friends ”obby
smooth thin hair and a high pink complexion
fellow,
devoted to his family
206
205
and Drew
a straightforward quiet
) also go on their canoeing excursion. The novel is a
first-person account and focuses on Ed s subjective experience of the trip, particularly
his attention to the natural world: the river, wildlife, and the forest. On their way down
the Cahulawassee, the campers are accosted by a pair of mountain men. One of the men
rapes Bobby, and Ed is forced to watch. While the other man prepares, in turn, to rape
Ed, he is killed by Lewis, who shoots the man with an arrow; the first rapist escapes.
The four suburbanites bury the man they ve killed and continue down the river until
they hit a particularly bad patch of rapids. The river pitches all four into the river, and
when they find that Drew has been shot, the men realize that they are being hunted by
the second mountain man. Lewis s leg is broken, Drew is dead, and ”obby is inept and
terrified, so our narrator embarks on a climb up a nearly vertical cliff-face in order to
find and kill the man hunting them.
This climb comprises an extensive portion of the book, and Ed reaches a new
awareness of himself as a part of the phenomenal world as he scales the cliff to hunt the
rapist. He also experiences a peculiar kind of intimacy with his prey, an intimacy he
describes as a kind of spiritual oneness.207 Ed kills the man but is unsure if his victim is
actually the same man who raped Bobby. Nevertheless, he and Bobby hide the body,
canoe the rest of the way down the Cahulawassee, get Lewis to a hospital, concoct an
explanation to appease the local lawmen, and head home to Atlanta. The entire
204
James Dickey, Deliverance [novel], (New York: Dell, 1970), 6.
205
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 5.
206
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 9.
207
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 191.
84
experience changes Ed s life he returns to his suburban existence with a new sense of
himself and a renewed appreciation of his wife, son, and career. The river, Ed says at
the book s end, became a possession to me, a personal, private possession, as nothing
else in my life ever had. […] The river underlies, in one way or another, everything I
do.
208
Through his journey on the river, Ed has learned a new way to live, even in the
suburban boredom of Atlanta, Georgia. The novel is, then, an exploration of manhood
tested by intense physical and spiritual demands. Deliverance s narrator is able to pass
these tests and returns to his life better, wiser, and more aware of his own existence.
Jokes about Banjos
Although the novel is ostensibly a tale of physical and spiritual growth
visualized through the lens of masculinity, a considerable portion of the book s fame is,
of course, due to its infamous sequence of male/male rape, a scene represented in detail
in John ”oorman s
film of the novel. ”oorman s film, with its important stars ”urt
Reynolds and John Voight) and wide distribution has become a much more visible
cultural product than Dickey s novel, and the rape at the film s center is the most
memorable of the film s scenes. For many, Deliverance is simply a film about male/male
rape. Henry Hart reports that even while the movie was still in production, [Dickey s
son] Chris pointed out that audiences were going to come away from the film thinking
of only one thing
the homosexual rape. His father disagreed.
209
History has peroved
Dickey to be incorrect. Pamela ”arnett argues that the rape scene in Deliverance has
become a broadly shared cultural joke,
210
and Jennie Lightweis-Goff has noted that at
the mention of Dickey s Deliverance, there is often laughter. The film s rape, with its
famous piglike squeals of pain and humiliation, has become a cultural point of
208
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 275-6.
209
Hart 487.
Pamela E. Barnett, Dangerous Desire: Literature of Sexual Freedom and Sexual Violence since the Sixties,
(New York: Routledge, 2004), 59.
210
85
reference.
211
Even the Duelling ”anjos theme music that recurs throughout the film
has come to signify male/male rape: a connotation evidenced by the popularity of teeshirts bearing the phrase Paddle faster, I hear banjos! The link from banjo music to
male/male sexual violation is certainly not a natural one, but it is one that has been
cemented through the popular repetition and the power of the film s male/male rape
sequence.
J.W. Williamson has stated flatly that the impact of Deliverance on popular
culture cannot be exaggerated, and that squeal like a pig, the phrase the rapist yells
as he rapes his victim in the film, long ago entered the demotic vocabulary.
212
By the
mid 1990s, there were, in fact, countless references to Deliverance in Canadian,
USAmerican, and British popular culture, and most had rape as their punch-lines. In a
1995 episode of the situation comedy Married with Children (a show primarily targeted
toward young and middle-aged men , the show s main character “l and his son ”ud
are camping alone in an ostensibly scary forest.213 They are not frightened by the hoot of
an owl or the sound of crickets, but when banjo music strikes up, both men jump out of
their sleeping bags and Bud covers his (clothed) rear end with his hand.214 LightweisGoff similarly reports that on Canadian television in
, comedy troupe Kids in the
Hall featured a skit in which a heterosexual couple fights over the man s insistence that
all of their dates involve watching the rape scene from Deliverance and the sex scenes
Jennie Lightweis-Goff, How Willing to Let “nything ”e Done James Dickey s Feminist Praxis, in
The Way We Read James Dickey, edited by Willam B. Thesing and Theda Wrede, (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 2009), 239.
211
J.W. Williamson, Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the
Movies, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 291.
212
Michele Hilmes notes that even as Married with Children took a while to attract viewers, it did well with
young males. The show s creators also claimed explicitly to target a male demographic for the program.
See Only Connect: a Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 3rd edition, (Boston: Wadsworth,
2010), 348.
213
”early Men, Married with Children, season 10, episode 12, original air date 3 Dec 1995, written by
Russell Marcus, directed by Gerry Cohen.
214
86
from Last Tango in Paris over and over again.
215
A year later on Married with Children,
when the family goes on vacation to Branson, Missouri, they stay at a place called the
Deliverance Inn; the man at the front desk of this establishment predictably promises Al
that you ll squeal like a pig at our hospitality.
216
The joke translates just as well to the ”ritish idiom. In a
episode of the UK s
comedy program The Office, a character harasses a woman by miming sexual
intercourse while saying squeal, piggy, squeal and snarling in a mock-villainous
manner; this is played for laughs.217 Even the animated movie Shrek Forever After (2010),
a film presented in 3D and aimed for family audiences, contains a sequence where the
King and Queen walk into a scary forest. While they do this, Duelling ”anjos can be
heard in the background.218 The filmmakers of Shrek Forever After, in other words,
threaten these characters
to comic effect
with rape.
I will not continue to cite references to Deliverance in television and film; there are
dozens more than I have mentioned, there can be no comprehensive list, and more
would have to be added on a constant basis. I do, however, want to note two more
fascinating references to Deliverance in USAmerican culture. Michael Scarce relates the
story that
WLVQ,
a radio station in Columbus Ohio, promoted a
Ohio State Fair
pig race by asking listeners to call the station for a chance to win $500 worth of pork
products. Listeners to WLVQ were to wait until they heard a sound clip from
Deliverance of Ned ”eatty squealing like a pig and then phone the station. When the
station received complaints from some of its listeners, WLVQ s promotion director
215
Lightweis-Goff, 239.
The Juggs Have Left the ”uilding, Married with Children, season 11, episode 7, original air date 1 Dec
1996, written by Vince Cheung and Ben Montanio, directed by Gerry Cohen.
216
Charity, The Office, season 2, episode 5, original air date 28 Oct 2002, written and directed by Ricky
Gervais and Stephen Merchant.
217
218
Shrek Forever After, 2010, directed by Mike Mitchell, DVD, (Los Angeles, CA: Paramount, 2010).
87
actually referred to the squeals of pain of the rape victim in Deliverance as the most
common pig noise, more common, it would seem, than the grunt of an actual pig.219
A final example of Deliverance s pervasive impact on US“merican culture comes
from historian J.W. Williamson, who reports that:
[The film] Deliverance had a profound significance for many urban males
who saw it. To them, ”oorman s movie constituted a dare, and soon real
joyriders flocked to the real Chattooga River and chanced the same rapids
in rubber rafts […]. Within a year of the movie s release, no fewer than
eleven people had drowned in the Chattooga, all but one of them with
significant blood-alcohol levels (revealed by autopsy). This irresistible
urge among flocks and hordes of mainly suburban and college males to do
the river
the Deliverance syndrome
became a topic in the mainstream
press […]. One of the more interesting manifestations of the Deliverance
syndrome was that rafters would squeal like a pig, especially on that part
of the river where the rape scene was filmed.220
Williamson offers that these urban males intended their squealing as a mockery of the
character who was raped in the film, but such a claim simplifies the much more
complex relationship that masculinity has to rape, and indeed popular culture s
ambivalent relationship with male/male rape as a trope.221 The relationship of
masculinity to male/male rape is infinitely more complicated than a straightforward
equation that sees quotation as equivalent to ridicule.
219
Scarce 117-8.
220
Williamson 162-3. My emphasis.
Williamson focuses insistently on the homoerotic in the novel, basically naming the four men as
homosexuals. He titles his section on Deliverance Ed and Lewis and ”obby and Drew
a
homosexualizing twist on Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice apparently as a way of ridiculing them in a
kind of homophobic retaliation for the film s two-dimensional portraits of the mountain people.
221
88
Although Deliverance, squeal like a pig, and Duelling ”anjos have become
easy comic reference points for male/male rape, viewers and readers of Deliverance have
responded in various and complicated ways to Dickey s tale of man, nature, and
violence. The significatory power of Dickey s tale of violence and Southern, white
masculinity has accumulated over time and is a product of its own historical moment,
changing attitudes toward and public awareness of male/male sexual violation, shifting
definitions of masculinity, and the popularity of the film version of the novel. Most
importantly, I want to argue that an overwhelming amount of the scholarly analysis of
the novel has made use of precisely the same metaphoric associations with Deliverance
that Married with Children, The Office, and Kids in the Hall have. Both scholars and
comics have insisted on reading the rapes in the novel and film as signifiers for
something other than rape.
Underneath all of this baggage is Dickey s original novel, which I will argue
takes a much different and indeed more nuanced attitude toward male/male sexual
violation than its popular use as a metonym for rape would seem to indicate. As Jennie
Lightweis-Goff argues, Though [Deliverance] has provoked four decades of laughter,
that laughter does not reside within the text.
222
Further, it is my contention that the film of
Deliverance and the book on which it is based differ significantly in their depictions of
sexual violation, though scholarly and critical analyses have often treated the novel and
the film as though they are no different from one another.223 My discussion of
Deliverance will attempt, then, to leave behind the cultural associations that have
attached themselves to Dickey s story in the last forty years, to explore the novel and
the film separately, and to discuss the ways in which their treatments of the topic of
222
Lightweis-Goff 248.
Even a text like Sally Robinson s Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000), which aims to treat the novel and the film separately, cannot help but place the
two next to one another, and does so frequently enough that reading her analysis, it is difficult to keep
the film and the novel separate.
223
89
male/male sexual violence are distinct. The remainder of this chapter will read Dickey s
original novel as an important event in the history of representations of male/male rape
in its own right, and I will attempt, as much as possible, to avoid discussion of John
”oorman s film version of Deliverance until the next chapter.
Taking my cue from Lightweis-Goff, I will be making what might easily be
considered an outrageous argument: viz. that the novel is interested neither in the
misogyny nor the homophobia of which it has been accused, but argues instead for a
revision of traditional masculinity, spiritual growth, and a humble approach to the
world in which men and women live. Essential to this argument is my own resistance to
reading male/male rape as a metaphor for something other than itself. This chapter will
suggest that the already existent trope of male/male rape into which Deliverance was
introduced in
constricted Dickey s own project, one much more complex than forty
years of scholarly exegesis have suggested. I make this argument not to offer a correct
reading of Deliverance: I am less interested in arguing for or against any particular
objective meanings inherent to the novel, but wish, rather, to draw attention to the ways
in which specific critical lenses have produced meaning in the novel and have
themselves bolstered the significatory power of the male/male rape trope.
It’s got me, I said. / What’s got you? / It.
224
Deliverance was published in 1970, during the height of USAmerican involvement in the
Vietnam War. The novel s insistence on its chosen themes of masculinity and nature
and its lack of focus on armed conflict and the Cold War earned it the scorn of a few
critics. In his review, Anthony Thwaite calls Deliverance an almost totally enclosed book:
the world that lies outside might as well not exist for all the notice that is taken of it.
That a real and bloody war is going on, in which real Americans prove
or do not
prove the book s sub-Hemingway values of courage, endurance, physical toughness
224
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 72. In this sequence, it is the river itself.
90
and heroism in adversity, nowhere intrudes.
225
But many critics have understood the
novel as addressing precisely the conflict Thwaite supposes that the book ignores.
Ronald ”aughman believes that the ordeal shared by the four suburbanites who travel
down the river in Deliverance clearly parallels that confronting the soldier in combat,
226
and Douglas Keesey argues that Dickey has attempted to re-create the life-and-death
situation that was the war, to find in a trivial postwar society […] arenas for warlike
combat in which a man can assume his macho persona and prove he has the power to
survive.
227
Pamela ”arnett is even more explicit, noting that Deliverance imagines
threats to masculinity in the terms of the Vietnam War, and appropriately so given the
way the war forced “mericans to confront male vulnerability on a mass scale.
228
More
importantly, though many critics who saw the novel as a parable for war ignored this
aspect of Deliverance, Dickey s novel is fundamentally interested in the ethical quandary
of military combatants.229 Faced with the ostensible necessity of killing, the hero of
Deliverance must struggle with the need to do violence and the moral weight of actually
having done it; far from simply advocating violence as a kind of masculinist
regenerative, the novel explores the psychological effects of this quandary and of the
protagonist s ability to reconcile the necessity of violence with civilization s taboo
against it.
But if the novel, with its guerilla-type conflicts, can be loosely interpreted as a
parable for the Vietnam War, many critics who see the rape sequence as central to the
225
Thwaite 311.
Ronald Baughman, Understanding James Dickey, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985),
109.
226
Douglas Keesey, James Dickey and the Macho Persona, in Critical Essays on James Dickey, edited by
Robert Kirschten, (New York: G.K. Hall, 1994), 205.
227
228
Barnett 36.
Joyce M. Pair misses this aspect of the novel in her piece Measuring the Fictive Motion: War in
Deliverance, Alnilam, and To the White Sea, Texas Review 17.3-4 (1996): 55-92, but Baughman and Keesey
both note it.
229
91
novel have read Deliverance as a literalization of USAmerican class conflicts. Much of
this criticism has been perceptive and humane, seeking to criticize what Casey Howard
Clabough euphemistically referred to as Deliverance s non-bucolic portrayal of the hill
people, but which we might more accurately describe as a two-dimensional
construction of the hillbilly rapist figured as a symbol of terror.230 Fredric Jameson, in
his significant
essay on the topic, decries the novel as a fantasy about class
struggle in which the middle-class American property owner wins through to a happy
ending and is able, by reconquering his self-respect, to think of himself as bathing in the
legendary glow of a moderate heroism.
231
Jameson s essay is, however, not really about
Deliverance s treatment of male/male rape but about class conflict in the United States
writ large. In what is probably the most perceptive essay on class in Deliverance, Ed
Madden argues that the novel substitutes two things that “mericans really are unable
to grapple with: social class and sexuality
or, more precisely, social class figured as
sexuality, the rural poor represented as sexually deviant. For the American middle-class
suburban male, poverty is emasculating, and Dickey renders this clearly through the
narrative of anal rape.
232
narrative as a metaphor
For Madden, Deliverance’s bugger hillbilly functions in the
lower social class is figured as sexual deviance, and sexual
deviance is figured as social and economic marginalization.
233
The novel s hillbilly
rapist, in Madden s reading, is an embodiment of US“merican anxieties about both
class and homosexuality, and Dickey s novel figures the two as equivalent these dual
anxieties are then symbolically destroyed in the book s penultimate chapter with the
arrow shot that finally kills the rapist.
Casey Howard Clabough, Elements: the Novels of James Dickey, (Macon GA: Mercer University Press,
2002), 38.
230
231
Jameson 186.
Ed Madden, The ”uggering Hillbilly and the ”uddy Movie Male Sexuality in Deliverance, in Thesing
and Wrede, The Way We Read James Dickey, 199.
232
233
Madden 200.
92
Readings of Deliverance that concern themselves with war or class are interested
with the novel mainly as a large-scale metaphor for other conflicts (Vietnam, World
War II, class warfare). This notion of Deliverance-as-metaphor has been used even more
frequently as a kind of hermeneutic methodology to address the novel as though it is
about conflicts between masculinity and femininity or between civilization and
nature. The enigmatic mountain man who rapes ”obby, shoots Drew, and whom Ed
eventually kills serves a metaphorical function in all of these readings, and rape is
designated as a specific stage in a series of conflicts that comprises a larger
(metaphorical) conflict. In this way, rape is put to use by these scholars, who understand
the rape in Deliverance as having a metaphorical effect on the novel s protagonist and,
by extension, all of white, middle-class masculinity.
Readings of the novel that utilize rape as a fulcrum for discussions of
masculinity/femininity or civilization/nature are plentiful and have been widely
disseminated in the academic literature on Deliverance. Before addressing my own
understanding of how the novel frames rape, then, I want to address the metaphoric
pairs (masculinity/femininity, civilization/nature) for which critics have shown the most
fondness. But I wish to note again that it is the argument of this book that a discussion
of rape qua metaphor ignores the material and psychological effects of rape on violated
bodies and psyches at the same time as it effaces the ideologically charged sources of
rape s power as a metaphor. Cultural taboos against male/male sexualities, anality, the
penetrated body, and desire itself invest the rape metaphor with power, and these
taboos are, in turn, reinforced and strengthened through the metaphor s use.
Nature and Civilization
A sizable number of Deliverance s critics have understood the novel as a metaphoric
battle between man and nature. Cherry Levin, for example, finds that Ed prevails
against not only the forces of human nature but also those of Nature itself and is
93
transformed in the process.
234
Theda Wrede similarly argues that with historical and
fictive Daniel Boones as his predecessors [Ed] fights and defeats a fiend, he symbolically
defends his civilization from a threatening wilderness, finding that in due course
nature gives in to what passes for progress.
235
Allison Graham, referring to what she
calls Ed s insistent homoeroticism, claims that the novel s alleged homoerotics are
manifestations of the urban men s ultimate emasculation at the hands of Nature. The
river, she argues, which is feminized by the men as a force to be mastered, […]
becomes the master by novel s end.
236
Scott Slovic agrees
Nature, in this narrative,
despite the imminent construction of the dam that has occasioned this final trip on the
wild river, appears indomitable, indestructible.
237
In Slovic s reading Ed and his friends
attempt to dominate and destroy the river, but find that the river will not yield. For
Levin and Wrede Civilization wins out, and for Graham and Slovic the river finally
triumphs. In each of these four readings
readings which stand in for an enormous
body of exegetical work on Deliverance
Nature is set up in opposition to
Civilization, and one or the other of these parties must emerge victorious. “s Dickey
scholars Richard Calhoun and Robert Hill declare, the conflict becomes twofold, with
nature and with man. It pits the suburbanites against the beautiful yet dangerous river.
[And] the river is, first of all, a naturalistic symbol of the indifference of nature to
man.
238
Cherry Levin, “dherence to Propp James Dickey s Deliverance in Novel and Film, in Thesing and
Wrede, The Way We Read James Dickey, 83.
234
Thed Wrede, Nature and Gender in James Dickey s Deliverance an Ecofeminist Reading, in Thesing
and Wrede, The Way We Read James Dickey, 177.
235
Allison Graham, Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle,
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 24.
236
Scott Slovic, Visceral Faulkner Fiction and the Tug of the Organic World, in Faulkner and the Ecology
of the South: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2003, edited by Joseph R. Urgo and Ann J. Abadie, (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 128
237
238
Richard J. Calhoun and Robert W. Hill, James Dickey, (Boston: Twayne, 1983), 114.
94
Each of these metaphorizing readings also necessitates a metaphorization of
”obby s rape by the mountain man so that sexual violence signifies nature s ability to
dominate civilization however much civilized society might try to tame nature. Ronald
”aughman makes this metaphor explicit when he describes the book s sequence of
sexual violation with the phrase Nature s men in nature s setting sodomize ”obby and
threaten Ed.
239
Pamela ”arnett agrees
The rape can be read as a brutal punishment
against figurations of destructive administrative machines and encroaching urban life.
The poor, white, rural men rape privileged, white, city men who, by association, are
responsible for their own divesture.
240
These analyses are, in turn, indebted to Leslie
Fiedler s now-classic reading of USAmerican fiction, where the forest is a symbol for the
hidden world of nightmare that is part and parcel of the most intimate aspects of our
own minds.
241
In Fiedler s schema, the forest and the rapists become products and
embodiments of the men s own guilty consciences and unspoken desires. Thus, in many
analyses of the rape in Deliverance, the rape becomes less a physical event than a
symbolic one, signifying the penetrability of Civilization and its weakness in a
confrontation with Nature. Readings such as these utilize the terms of the male/male
rape trope that are already in place as a way of interpreting the event in Dickey s novel.
They describe Dickey as though he wrote a novel in which Nature is able to establish
dominance over Civilization through an act of penetration. Scholars who read the
novel in this way often attempt to criticize what they see as Dickey s misogyny, but, as I
argued in chapter one, these readings uncritically re-inscribe the widespread
239
Baughman 115.
240
Barnett 46.
Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, (New York: Criterion Books, 1960), xxxiv. Note
the epigraph to this chapter in which Rodger Cunningham points out that Nature and the Id are
parallel constructs.
241
95
understanding of hydraulic sexual hierarchies in which the partner who penetrates is
powerful, whole, male and the partner who is penetrated is weak, lacking, female.
The antagonism between Nature and Civilization, which has so often been
excavated from Deliverance in analyses of the text, is one that has, in fact, been produced
more by critics than by Dickey himself. Rather than setting the two against one another,
the text itself advocates a kind of merging, where Ed understands himself as a part of
the natural world and not in opposition to it.242 In an extraordinary passage in the text,
as the rapids dump Ed and his companions into the Cahulawassee, Ed struggles against
the river but begins to realize that the only way to survive is to allow the river to
command him. I got on my back and poured with the river, Ed says, sliding over the
stones like a creature I had always contained but never released.
243
And as Ed does this
he understands the river. The water is in complete control; as Ed abdicates his own
power, the river grants him knowledge:
Body-surfing and skidding along, I realized that we could never have
got through this stretch in canoes. There were too many rocks, they were
too haphazardly jumbled, and the water was too fast; faster and faster.
[…] We would have spilled one way or the other, and strangely I was just
as glad. Everything told me that the way I was doing it was the only way,
and I was doing it.
It was terrifyingly enjoyable.244
These moments of communion with the river are echoed later in the novel as Ed
prepares to climb the cliff-face
My heart expanded with joy at the thought of where I
was and what I was doing […], not thinking of anything, with a deep feeling of
242
See Baughman 117 and Calhoun and Hill 115.
243
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 144.
244
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 144-5.
96
nakedness and helplessness and intimacy
245
and again as he nears the top of the cliff
I lay there sweating, having no handhold or foothold […]. Fear and a kind of
enormous moon-blazing sexuality lifted me, millimeter by millimeter.
246
Finally, when
Ed leaps from the cliff back into the river, he describes it as feeling the current thread
through me, first through my head from one ear and out the other and then
complicatedly through my body, up my rectum and out my mouth and also in at the
side where I was hurt. Ed feels the water going in like an ice pick but understands
this pain as almost luxurious
knew.
247
in the water he realizes that I was in something I
The river can in no way be construed as Ed s enemy in the novel.
In each of these passages, Ed submits to the world around him. He listens to his
environment, or rather senses his environment and allows himself to follow rather than
lead. If Dickey describes each of these sequences using the terminology of pleasure
(moon-blazing sexuality, enjoyment, intimacy, luxuriousness , he also emphasizes Ed s
vulnerability (helplessness, fear, nakedness) and penetrability (through his body, on his
back, in at his side). Ed finds himself following the lead of the world around him,
opening himself up to the power of his environment, and divesting himself of a need to
control that environment. For Dickey, man is at his best and human experience at its
richest when man begins to understand himself as in relationship with and at the mercy
of the natural world. Even if one insists on a dichotomy between Nature and
Civilization, there can be no winners or losers in Dickey s vision. The end of Dickey s
novel finds nature and civilization merged inside the protagonist. If the river, as Ed
says, comes to underlie everything he does, then we must abandon the notion that
Deliverance is a large-scale metaphor for the rape of the latter by the former (or vice
versa). Dickey is fundamentally interested in man learning from his environment, or
245
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 161.
246
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 176.
247
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 208.
97
recognizing himself as a part of his environment, not in the violent subjugation of one by
the other, sexual or otherwise.
Masculinity and the River
The reading of Deliverance as a metaphor for a battle between Nature and
Civilization is itself dependent upon a binary that sees Dickey s novel as symbolic for
an ancient battle of the sexes. The terms for this reading are always the masculine and
the feminine, where
as I noted in chapter one
the rapist is always asked to represent
masculinity and the victim of rape made to represent femininity. The rape of Bobby by
the mountain man, in these critics figurations, performs the work of gendering so that
whatever metaphor the critic attempts to address is always already gendered by his or
her focus on the rape as the novel s most significant sequence. Thus, Richard Calhoun
and Robert Hill can say that Ed and ”obby are confronted by two sardonically
threatening backwoodsmen, who launch a kind of taunting homosexual attack on the
effeminate ”obby,
248
and Theda Wrede can argue that the metaphor of the land as
female lover […] becomes one of the dominant images in the novel, fostering the hero s
transition from figurative boyhood to manhood
249
Pamela Barnett is perhaps the
theorist who has most insistently described the rape in Deliverance as a creator or
destroyer of masculinity. In Dangerous Desire, she argues that the rape recognizes the
city men as representatives of the powerful administrative class and then violates them
as if to express that this social power, divorcing them from their brute bodies, is the root
of their feminization and queering. ”arnett is one of many critics who share this point
of view of the novel: Deliverance, these critics believe, clearly portrays rape as an
emasculating event for the victim-object.250
248
Calhoun and Hill 109.
249
Wrede 182.
250
Barnett 47.
98
Linda Wagner has argued that Dickey uses the rape as a metaphor for
masculinity s triumph over femininity in the novel s opening image of the map of the
river. The tone of the active verbs, she says, darkens the image, suggesting rape
through the words forced and bled away, and the figure of the land (usually feminine)
being unrolled, then curling, snapping, is also suggestive. The physicality of the men s
force is emphasized too in the dehumanization of Lewis s hand, acting as if without
conscious direction in its small strong mark.
251
Casey Howard Clabough, however,
argues precisely the opposite when he says that Dickey seeks to feminize “tlanta while
simultaneously emphasizing the dull, unnatural and unsatisfactory quality of that
femininity, as opposed to its powerful manifestations in nature.
252
For Wagner, the
campers rape the land (who she says is figured as a woman) and for Clabough, the
campers are feminized by their association with Atlanta and urbanity; nature asserts its
own masculinity over the suburbanites through the act of rape.
But although urban Atlanta is filled with women (and the novel insists upon this
in its first chapter), Dickey links neither the city nor its women to the act of rape he
describes much later in the novel.253 Further, though several critics have assumed that
Nature necessarily signifies the feminine in the novel, such a link is, again,
unsupported by the novel itself. Some critics, including Barnett, have argued the
opposite that the wilderness […] is figuratively masculinized in the book.
254
Dickey,
to the contrary, neither masculinizes nor feminizes Nature in his text. What he does
instead is consistently associate the river with power and with beauty. As the campers
first push out on the river, Ed says that a slow force took hold of us; the bank began to
Linda Wagner, Deliverance Initiation and Possibility, in James Dickey: Modern Critical Views, edited by
Harold Bloom, (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 110.
251
252
Clabough 50.
253
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 15-6.
254
Barnett 41.
99
go backward. I felt the complicated urgency of the current, like a thing made of many
threads being pulled, and with this came the feeling I always had at the moment of
losing consciousness at night, going toward something unknown that I could not avoid,
but from which I would return.
255
“ bit later he describes the current enter[ing his]
muscles and body as though [he] were carrying it.
256
Dickey is obviously focused on
his narrator s communion with the river, but neither the river nor the forest is gendered
in these passages. More specifically, Ed finds himself keenly aware of the beautiful
impersonality of the place.
257
Ed describes the river and its wild environs as
fundamentally different from his experience of living in the city, but Dickey figures this
difference as neither masculine nor feminine. The river and the forest exist simply as a
force of otherness that remains
in this section of the novel, at least
separate from Ed.
Deliverance, of course, is clearly an exploration of masculinity; to suggest
otherwise would be absurd. But Dickey never describes masculinity as a coherent
concept in his novel. He allows none of the characters in the novel
neither camper nor
mountain man to achieve a concrete masculinity to which we might point as ideal or
even reflective of the dominant image of such a concept. Joyce Pair has argued that
when Bobby is raped and Ed is threatened with rape, Ed finds himself robbed of his
masculinity until he takes on Lewis role and becomes the death-dealing commando,
but Ed is never figured as a commando, death-dealing or otherwise.258 Dickey describes
him as a hunter. Neither does Bobby s rape rob Ed of his masculinity. In fact, the rape
cannot take Ed s masculinity from him because he does not have it in the first place. Long
before the mountain men appear in the novel, Ed, enjoying his own presence in the
forest, tells us that, I touched the knife hilt at my side, and remembered that all men
255
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 73.
256
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 80.
257
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 80-1. My emphasis.
258
Pair 62.
100
were once boys, and that boys are always looking for ways to become men.
259
In this
passage Dickey makes clear not only that Ed has not quite achieved masculinity, but
that Ed understands himself as not having achieved it, that this is one of the continual
projects of his own life.
Scholars who have described Ed as crafting a masculinity in opposition to a
feminized nature have often pointed toward the sequence where Ed finally surmounts
the cliff. As I noted earlier, Dickey constantly inflects his language with the erotic, and
Ed describes his climb in the following way
I would begin to try to inch upward
again, moving with the most intimate motions of my body, motions I had never dared
use with [my wife], or with any other human woman, and a bit later he says, I was
crawling, but it was no longer necessary to make love to the cliff, to fuck it for an extra
inch or two in the moonlight, for I had some space between me and it.
260
Theda
Wrede s gloss of this passage interprets the climb as a rape in its own right. For Wrede,
Ed subdues the cliff to regain control, fight its attractiveness, humiliate it.
Yet this violent rejection suggests his disregard for it. His attitude implies
the clandestine contract of rape and abuse more generally, in which the
object of desire is also its victim, but the perpetrator justifies his guiltless
subjection and abuse of the cliff.261
It is important to note, however, that the intimate motions Ed describes
idea of making love to the cliff
even the
exist apart from a gendering of this sexual partner. The
cliff remains neither masculinized nor feminized in Dickey s cosmology. Even Ed s
comparison of the climb with heterosexual sex need not necessarily feminize the cliff; it
serves only to relate the cliff to Ed s past intimate experiences. If Ed s climb is
something akin to a sexual act, his act implies no sexual identity, or if it does, it implies
259
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 69.
260
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 176-7.
261
Wrede 184.
101
an identity that cannot easily be assimilated to our twentieth-century binary taxonomy
of sexuality. I noted earlier that Ed is penetrated by the water and understands himself
standing before the cliff naked and vulnerable. You will also remember that Ed is lifted
as much by fear as he is his moon-blazing sexuality
he can climb only by submitting
to the cliff, listening to it. He even finds himself crying as he reaches the top of the cliff:
this climb is painful and difficult and terrifying. If Ed achieves masculinity by scaling
this cliff, then, it is a masculinity very different from the dominant representations of
that identity position in USAmerican culture.
Earlier I noted that a persistent critical focus on the image of rape in the first half
of the novel has led, because of the gendering power of an act of rape, to the frequent
assertion that gender is the lens through which the novel ought to be read. An
insistence that Deliverance is about rape is, in turn, the result of a kind of critical
fixation on sexual violation
one roundly critiqued by William Beatty Warner
whereby rape is asked by the critic to multiply and transpose itself so that it becomes
the hidden referent and true meaning of a lot of social forms that are not rape.
262
In this
way, climbing the cliff becomes a metaphor for rape, being tossed by the rapids
becomes a metaphor for rape; shooting an arrow, too, is a metaphor for rape, as is
canoeing down the Cahulawassee. I am speaking here of a critical multiplication of the
rapes in the novel that is necessitated by the reading of rape as a metaphor. Because
critics have understood the rape of Bobby in Deliverance as a metaphor for something
else
the destruction of nature, the feminization of the white, middle-class male
they
have needed to produce rape in other places in the novel, places where Dickey has not
actually described sexual violation.
I have tried to demonstrate that Dickey s novel resists an easy translation into
metaphor and that it insists, instead, on experience, rather than a coherent set of
262
Warner, Reading Rape,
.
102
symbols from which meaning can be excavated. Dickey himself always argued that
Deliverance was about a ritual transformation. In a letter to John Boorman, the director
of the film, for example, Dickey writes, What I really have in mind for the whole story,
both in the novel and the film, is an updated version of Van Gennep s Rites de Passage a
separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and life-enhancing
return.
263
Historian Rodger Cunningham, too, has noted that Deliverance has the
structure of a rite of passage to adulthood.
264
I propose to accept Dickey s own frame
for the novel, and to turn, now, to the rite of passage, shifting our attention toward
Dickey s use of rape and the threat of rape in Deliverance and, more importantly, to the
role of male/male rape in the narrator s life-enhancing return. “n examination of the
novel s circular structure will allow us to move away from readings of the novel and its
infamous rape sequence as signifiers for something other than themselves and in the
direction of something much more complicated.
Ritual Violence and the Making of a Man
I have argued that masculinity in Deliverance is something of a moving target, a goal
that remains just out of Ed s reach for most of the novel. ”ut if the rite of passage of
Dickey s novel is as Ed hints when he says that boys are always looking for ways to
become men a transition from childhood to adulthood or, perhaps, from boyhood to
manhood, how does Ed accomplish this transformation? Dickey s approach to this
question appears to be even more unique if we consider that
as I argued in chapter
one rape is a performative act, functioning to solidify the rapist s subjectivity as a
male.
The novel s ritual structure is a rather standard one. The campers drive far away
from the urban center where they live and prepare for an adventure on the
263
James Dickey quoted in Hart 473.
264
Cunningham 130.
103
Cahulawassee. They step outside of the temporal structures that normally govern their
lives. On the river they find that they are hunted
potentially lethal one
their situation has become a
but Ed is able to pass through dangerous rapids mostly
unscathed, climb an impossible cliff-face, and violently subdue his enemy. How might
we, then, characterize the relationship of the mountain man s rape of ”obby to this
mythic separation-initiation-return structure Dickey has penned?265 In the terms of a
rite of passage, how might we think about the rape? How does Dickey represent this
violation?
It is essential to understand that Dickey s characters treat the act of rape as a
fundamentally serious one. Drew refers to the rape as sexually assaulting,
266
and Ed is
concerned about ”obby s physical health, even if he finds that there was no way […] to
ask him how his lower intestine felt or whether he thought he was bleeding internally.
“ny examination of him would be unthinkably ridiculous and humiliating.
267
In other
words, the men consistently describe the rape as a physical act and not a metaphorical
one. Certainly none of the men understands the rape as a sex act Ed s descriptions are
completely devoid of any eroticism whatsoever and focus rather on the possibility of
damage done to ”obby s body. In Deliverance, rape is unquestionably an act of violence
unrelated to sex or sexuality.
“dditionally, Dickey s focus is on the narrator s experience of rape, the
perspective, that is, of a witness. Before the rape, as Ed becomes aware of the danger he
and ”obby share, he tells us that I shrank to my own true size, a physical movement
known only to me.
268
And when the mountain man draws a knife-blade across Ed s
Harold Schechter, The Eye and the Nerve a Psychological Reading of James Dickey s Deliverance, in
Struggling for Wings the “rt of James Dickey, edited by Robert Kirschten, (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1997), 186. Originally published 1980.
265
266
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 121.
267
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 119.
268
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 108.
104
chest, he reports that he had never felt such brutality and carelessness of touch, or such
disregard for another person s body,
269
a description commensurate with what Jean
“méry has called the first blow, an act of violence that brings home to the prisoner
that he is helpless. […] They are permitted to punch me in the face, the victim feels in
numb surprise and concludes in just as numb certainty: they will do with me what they
want.
270
As the two mountain men move toward Bobby, Dickey focuses on the moment
it becomes clear what it is that the men want:
The white-bearded one took [Bobby] by the shoulders and turned him
around toward downstream.
Now let s you just drop them pants, he said.
”obby lowered his hands hesitantly. Drop…? he began.
My rectum and intestines contracted. Lord God.
The toothless man put the barrels of the shotgun under ”obby s right
ear and shoved a little. Just take em right on off, he said.271
Dickey attends to Ed s physical responses here, registering, through a description of his
bowel contracting, Ed s understanding that ”obby and probably he, too will be raped.
When the mountain man violates Bobby, Dickey avoids a description of the
violence itself. Instead, the narrator tells us, “ scream hit me, and I would have
thought it was mine except for the lack of breath. It was a sound of pain and outrage,
and was followed by one of simple and wordless pain. Again it came out of him, higher
and more carrying. I let all the breath out of myself and brought my head down to look
at the river.
269
272
Ed literally looks away from the act of violation, and Dickey asks his
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 112.
Jean Améry, “t the Mind’s Limits Compilations by a Survivor of “uschwitz and Its Realities, translated by
Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 27.
270
271
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 113.
272
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 114.
105
readers to look away from it, as well. Instead of describing a visual representation of the
rape, he reports a shared experience of pain that is both ”obby s and Ed s.
After he is raped, Bobby is confused and ashamed. Ed describes him as
furiously closed off from all of us, noting that he stood up and backed away still
naked from the middle down, his sexual organs wasted with pain.
273
The description
echoes Ed s own earlier experience of shrinking to his own true size, when they are
first threatened, as well as the contracting he feels in his own intestine as Bobby is
raped. Ed and Bobby both become literally smaller. Their experiences, however, are not
identical; later, as the campers bury the body, Ed actively move[s] away from ”obby s
red face. None of this was his fault, but he felt tainted to me. I remembered how he had
looked over the log, how willing to let anything be done to him, and how high his voice
was when he screamed.
274
Ed begins to distance himself, physically and psychically,
from Bobby.
For Pamela ”arnett, Deliverance has had amazingly persistent cultural
resonance, perhaps because it responds to a prevailing set of concerns about white men
as victims in the postsixties era. True to his cultural moment, Ed perceives himself as
feminized[,] and feminization is insistently figured here as queer. Homosexual rape is
the ultimate threat to his masculinity.
275
But queerness and even feminization, here, are
the critic s fantasy and not Dickey s own. Queerness simply does not appear in the
novel, although the figuring of men as homosexual was, at the time, a quick rhetorical
way to emasculate them. Amiri Baraka, for example, in an essay on black masculinity,
describes white males as trained to be fags and refers to them as having silk blue
273
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 119.
274
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 128.
275
Barnett 45-6.
106
faggot eyes.
276
These terms were common in USAmerican popular parlance even in the
1960s (as, indeed, they are in the twenty-first century), and though it would have been
quite easy for Dickey to figure Bobby as queer, he chooses not to do so. Instead, at the
end of Deliverance, Ed describes ”obby as dead weight, an appellation he has used
much earlier in the novel.277 Long before Bobby is raped, in fact, he proves himself
ineffectual at paddling the canoe, wheezing and panting after the first hundred yards.
”obby had no coordination at all and spends his time complaining about the river,
the forest, the mosquitoes, and everything else. Ed is sure that Lewis was disgusted
with ”obby, and just as sure that I would be, also, before much longer.
278
This passage
precedes the rape, and the rape has little effect on how the other men perceive Bobby. I
am arguing, here, that the difference between the men is not a metaphorical one but one
related to their different experiences of the rite of passage. If ”obby is furiously closed
off from his companions it is not necessarily because the men suddenly understand
him as queer or feminine, but rather because he has been violated and they have not.
Queer Pleasure in Deliverance
Dickey biographer Henry Hart has argued that the accusation that Dickey applauded
hairy-chested, macho stereotypes in Deliverance was misguided. The novel, he says,
endorses almost nothing except tight-lipped endurance. The book focuses on men, but
the focus is withering rather than celebratory.
279
Against claims such as ”arnett s that
misogyny and homophobia […] drive the plot of Deliverance, I want also to argue that
the novel is opposed in no way to homosexual sex or even queerness considered
“miri ”araka, “merican Sexual Reference ”lack Male, in Home: Social Essays, (New York: Akashic
Books, 2009), 243. Originally published in Cavalier 1965.
276
277
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 276.
278
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 100.
279
Hart 452.
107
broadly.280 On the contrary, Ed Madden has shown that Dickey, even in the book s first
chapter, renders sexual arousal as anal not phallic, not through the erect penis and the
desire to penetrate but through a deep and more complex thrill of an organ more
frequently tied to being penetrated.
281
Madden refers specifically to Ed s sexual
attraction to a female print-model in chapter one the narrator describes this feeling as
if something had touched me in the prostate,282 and Ed s attention to the anal returns
time and again throughout Deliverance.283 I noted earlier that he describes the river
entering his rectum, translating this penetration as pleasure, but Ed also meditates on
the possibility of being physically entered by a man, and does so without apparent
disgust. Staring at the man he has finally killed, Ed tells us that If Lewis had not shot
his companion, [this man] and I would have made a kind of love, painful and terrifying
to me, in some dreadful way pleasurable to him, but we would have been together in
the flesh, there on the floor of the woods.
284
Critics have consistently pointed toward
Ed s awareness of his own anality as though moments such as this one rupture the
homophobic and masculinist metaphors of Deliverance as a whole.285 Such readings,
however, assume that Dickey intended something different from what his novel
contains, as though the critic has seen through Dickey s masculinist posturing to the
true homoerotics beneath.
Dickey was, without question, aware of his novel s insistence on anality. Henry
Hart, James Dickey s biographer, reports that:
280
Barnett 36.
281
Madden 202.
282
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 22.
283
See, especially, Madden and Endel.
284
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 180.
See Barnett, Williamson, Pair, Wrede, and especially John M. Clum, He’s “ll Man
Masculinity, Gayness, and Love from American Movies, (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
285
108
Learning
Throughout his career Dickey wondered and worried about his love of the
male body. […] ”ecause Dickey cultivated the mystique of an avid
womanizer, gay literary friends like Richard Howard found Dickey s
interest in homosexuality and his friendliness toward gay men surprising
and charming. Other friends found Dickey s attitude toward
homosexuality divided and disturbing. He propositioned men (sometimes
crudely and in jest), he claimed to have had sex with men (partly to
shock), and he discussed homosexuality as if it might deliver him into a
new region of risk and inspiration (he romanticized the breaking of all
taboos in such a way).286
Dickey later told John ”oorman, I have never made love to a man, but if it gave me the
slightest pleasure I would do so immediately.
287
Perhaps most bizarrely, after the
release of Deliverance s film version, Dickey even told several people that he had had a
homosexual affair with ”urt [Reynolds] in order to save the movie .
288
The author of
Deliverance was prone to wild claims, and he was an extraordinarily complex and
contradictory individual. I report these elements of biography not in order to
demonstrate James Dickey s homosexuality
on the contrary, he actively cultivated
what we might even term a flamboyantly heterosexual image
rather, I wish to argue
that Dickey s version of heterosexuality was itself deeply inflected with anality. Pamela
”arnett finds it shocking that Ed should describe his penetration by the river as
pleasurable, since Ed has spent the novel trying to distance himself from his raped,
feminized friend,
289
but Ed s pleasure at being penetrated is only surprising if the critic
interprets, as ”arnett and Pair do, the mountain man s anal rape of ”obby [as] situating
286
Hart 90.
287
James Dickey quoted in Hart 470.
288
John Boorman, Adventures of a Suburban Boy, (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 202.
289
Barnett 57.
109
him forever outside the phallocentric group.
290
If the critic avoids translating the rape
in Deliverance into a signifier for something other than itself, it becomes possible to read
the figuration of desire in Dickey s novel as both phallic and anal, and to read ”obby s
rape as productive neither of femininity nor queerness.
Although Dangerous Desire argues that ”obby s initiation [is] anything but a
masculine rite of passage,
291
Henry Hart argues precisely the opposite that Dickey
treats buggery as a rite of passage, and no doubt that s how he viewed his own
homosexual encounter
place earlier in his life.
or at least the imagined version of the encounter
292
that took
Speaking disparagingly about Deliverance in the early 1970s,
USAmerican poet Allen Ginsberg reminded readers that his poem Howl includes the
phrase who let themselves be fucked in the ass by handsome sailors, and screamed
with joy.
293
Ginsberg offered that in traditional masculinity, the macho reaction to that
image of being fucked in the ass would be just like in […] Deliverance where it s
supposed to be the worst thing in the world.
294
But neither Dickey nor his protagonist
appears disgusted by the idea of being anally penetrated or even of homosexual sex. On
the contrary, anal penetration as a rite of passage is incorporated into Dickey s concept of
heteromasculinity. What Ed says terrifies him is not a fear of penetration per se, but the
rapists violence, their brutality and disregard for the bodies of others.
Rape in Dickey s Deliverance is figured as a metaphor for neither Civilization
nor Nature. Instead, the novel s author describes the rape simply as an event
experienced by the men, a terrifying and brutal event, to be sure, but not one that
signifies anything other than its own violence. ”obby s rape effectively renders him
290
Pair 62.
291
Barnett 46.
292
Hart 448.
293
Allen Ginsberg, Howl, in Howl and other Poems, (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1954), 13.
294
“llen Ginsberg, Gay Sunshine Interview, College English 36.3 (1974): 394.
110
neither homosexualized nor feminized. On the contrary, Dickey s novel demonstrates a
fascination with not-quite-heterosexual eroticism, affecting no horror at what it finds.
Further, Dickey s sequence of male/male rape focuses consistently on the victims
perspective of pain and terror, refusing to sexualize the event. As Martha McCaughey
reminds us in the Encyclopedia of Rape, it is the victims who describe rape as not sexual
and as rendering them powerless or subordinate to the perpetrator.
295
Rape in
Deliverance is described in precisely this way: from the point of view of rape victims.
And if the men in the novel are, finally, silent about what they experienced while
canoeing down the Cahulawassee, this silence is caused by a need to cover up the
violence they have committed in order to save their own lives.
When Ed describes ”obby s reasons for silence, Dickey provides us the image of
rape one final time in the novel. Ed tells us that he knows that what would keep
[”obby s] mouth shut about the truth was himself kneeling over the log with a shotgun
at his head, howling and bawling and kicking his feet like a little boy. He wouldn t
want anybody to know that, no matter what no matter how drunk he was. No, Ed
reassures himself, he would stay with my version of things.
296
This final rendering of
the image of rape in the novel is a complex one to be sure, and one that reflects Ed s
feelings of derision toward Bobby, but neither femininity nor queerness appears in this
last image, and Dickey again avoids any notion of the sexual. Instead, he draws our
attention, not to ”obby s penetration, but to the violent potentiality of the shotgun at his
head and a figuration of Bobby as a little boy. If Bobby ultimately does not achieve
masculinity, it is not because he is a woman or a homosexual or even because of
weakness or powerlessness
feminized in the novel
weakness and powerlessness are neither queered nor
but because ”obby is still the petulant little boy he was when
295
McCaughey 167.
296
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 268.
111
he left “tlanta in the first place, giving the classic single-finger to his companions.297
Unlike Ed, Bobby has not learned from the ritual process to which Deliverance subjects
him, and it is this refusal to change that Dickey s novel criticizes.
This is not to say that I do not share José Muñoz s anxiety about recuperating
the term masculinity because, as a category, masculinity has normalized heterosexual
and masculinist privilege. Muñoz has argued that masculinity is, among other things,
a cultural imperative to enact a mode of manliness that is calibrated to shut down
queer possibilities and energies. The social construct of masculinity is experienced by
far too many men as a regime of power that labors to invalidate, exclude, and
extinguish faggotry, effeminacy, and queerly coated butchness.
298
But my reading of
Deliverance finds that the novel itself insists that masculinity is always incoherent and
inchoate. I thus take direct issue with Pamela ”arnett s contention that The novel is, of
course, resistant to the idea that masculinity needs to be shattered and thus remade.
299
To the contrary, I find that the novel insists upon the shattering and restructuring of
masculinity. Far from having an interest in bolstering the social construct of
manliness criticized by Muñoz, Deliverance repeatedly figures whatever masculinity it
does describe as helpless, naked, relaxed, vulnerable, and, yes, even penetrable.
297
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 36.
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 58.
298
299
Barnett 46.
112
CHAPTER 4
PIG LATIN
The fog of history swirls about the thick forest where purely imaginary animals
howl pitifully, not for blood, but for the pain of trying to escape from metaphors.
Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide 300
It is an ancient litigation,
this turning of horror into stories,
and it is a lonely piece of work,
trying to turn the stories back into horror
Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me 301
I have argued that Dickey s novel Deliverance treats male/male rape as a rite of passage
to be experienced, but John Boorman, who was eventually hired to direct the Warner
”ros. film version of the novel, saw the sexual violence in Dickey s tale as a metaphor, a
symbolic attack committed by the natural world upon men from civilization who were
bent upon the destruction of nature. Explaining why he was interested in Deliverance in
the first place, ”oorman says in his biography that its themes coincided with my own
man s relationship to nature, the attempt to recover lost harmony, the Earth s anger at
the despoiling human race. At its centre was the rape of the city men by the mountain
men. It was a metaphor for the rape of “merica.
302
Boorman, a Brit, was critical of what
he saw as the desecration of the North “merican continent by its civilized
inhabitants, and his film version of Deliverance explores this destruction in explicit
terms. This chapter follows Deliverance’s translation from novel to film, as we transition
Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2009), 121.
300
301
Tony Hoagland, Fire, What Narcissism Means to Me, (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2003), 56.
302
Boorman 181.
113
from literature to the medium of cinema, exploring precisely what the terms were for
cinematic rape in the years after the fall of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1968.
We will use Deliverance as a natural point of departure, but I wish also to discuss other
early representations of male/male rape in film. The goal of this chapter is to develop a
language for the way cinema mediates rape narratives. As we shall see, metaphors are
everywhere in movies, and filmmakers represent rape through metaphor as often as
they ask rape to work as a metaphor for something other than itself.
The film Deliverance begins with shots of a man-made lake; bulldozers and trucks
move dirt as they transform the land. Over this, we hear three men talking. Lewis (Burt
Reynolds) describes the Cahulawassee River as just about the last wild, untamed,
unpolluted, un-fucked up river in the South, telling us that they re gon stop the river
up. They ain t gon be no more river. There s just gon be a big, dead lake.
303
As the
men argue about the value of this public works project, Lewis s voice again dominates
as we hear him say, You just push a little more power
you push a little more power
into Atlanta, little more air-conditionin s, for your smug little suburb, and you know
what s gon happen? We re gon rape this whole god-damn landscape. We re gon rape
it. The other men protest this as an extreme point of view, but as the argument ends,
”oorman punctuates what we re hearing with a bang. We watch as explosives detonate,
actively destroying a portion of the land about which Lewis is speaking.
Lewis s reference to the river as un-fucked up and his repetition of the word rape
in the film s opening sequence set the terms for the movie, actively framing the film
using rape as a metaphor. Boorman describes the rape scene as the heart of the film,
and the film s treatment of ”obby s rape by the mountain man uses the rape as
Deliverance, deluxe edition DVD, directed by John Boorman (1972; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video,
2007).
303
114
metaphoric revenge for suburbia s rape of the land.304 Note here that as Boorman
speaks of the despoiling of the continent, and as he has Lewis speak about raping
the land, Boorman introduces the term rape where no actual rape has occurred. As I
argued in chapter one, the use of the word rape does the ideological work of asking us
to respond to something that is not a sexual violation as though it were violently sexual.
Boorman, here, means the word rape as a metaphor for what he considers the greedy
and heedless despoiling of the natural world, and introduces rape as a metaphor in
Deliverance long before he presents his viewers with the images of rape at the film s
center.
”oorman s treatment of rape, then, is fundamentally different from the way
Dickey approaches it in his novel, and it is difficult to argue with critics of the film who
saw the mountain men/rapists as symbols for the evil in nature, […] much as T.S.
Eliot used Jews as symbols of the modern separate, rootless selfhood
305
or those who
understood that what happens to the Ned ”eatty character, ”obby, in the
rhododendron hell on the banks of the river […] is not the only rape. There is a larger
one that in ”oorman s eyes ought to make us just as queasy.
306
Numerous critics
interpreted the rape of ”obby in the film as the landscape s metaphoric revenge for the
suburbanites
rape of the river because that is exactly how ”oorman understood the
novel and precisely what he intended his audience to understand.
If critics, however, found themselves reading the rape at the center of Deliverance
as a metaphor for something else, many audience members had a much more visceral
reaction to the violence in the film. Carol Clover reports that the film has often been
experienced by audiences as a horror film, noting that although Deliverance is
John Boorman, interviewed in Deliverance: Betraying the River, a short, documentary film directed by
Laurent Bouzereau, which is included on the 2007 deluxe edition DVD of Deliverance.
304
305
Cunningham 122.
306
Williamson 157.
115
commonly taken less as horror than as a literary rumination on urban masculinity, its
particular rendition of the city-country encounter has been obviously and enormously
influential in horror
so much so that it is regularly included in cult/horror lists.
307
Clover s book Men, Women, and Chain Saws is the foundational text for discussions of
gender as it is mobilized in the genre of the horror film, and the amount of space her
book devotes to reading Deliverance is indicative of the film s lasting and powerful
effects qua horror film on audiences and, perhaps even more importantly, later
filmmakers in the horror genre. It is fundamental to remember, then, that although
critics
as Susan Brownmiller acidly remarks
interpreted Deliverance s rape sequence
as some sort of metaphor for the rape of the environment, there can be no doubt that
the scene both shocked and horrified its audiences.308 Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick
the
man who staged the unforgettable rape scene in A Clockwork Orange (1971) has
described Deliverance s rape sequence as the most terrifying scene ever filmed,
309
and
the men s magazine Maxim named ”obby s rapists as the number one film villains of all
time, referring to the phrase Now let s you just drop them pants as undeniably the
most terrifying words ever spoken on celluloid.
310
I do not wish to create an opposition
between audience responses to metaphor and audience responses to so-called realistic
depiction. The two are in no way mutually exclusive, and, as I have demonstrated,
depictions that aim to be realistic are themselves metaphorized by audiences. But
whether or not audiences understood the metaphor intended by Deliverance s director, it
is undeniable that many audiences responded viscerally to the violation that the movie
depicts.
307
Clover 126.
308
Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975), 304.
309
Stanley Kubrick quoted in Boorman 197.
310
See ”ill McKinney s website http //www.squeallikeapig.com accessed
116
Jan
.
I will return to some of the more curious audience responses to Deliverance at the
end of this chapter, but at this juncture it is more important to understand how the film
approaches its subject matter. Carol Clover s focus on the influence that the film had on
the horror genre draws attention to the way the scene in Deliverance is shot and edited,
how the film styles its violence for viewers. Film scholar Stephen Prince refers to these
techniques of representation as stylistic amplitude. He argues that once filmmakers
learn compelling ways of styling violence, the methods can t be unlearned. They go into
the storehouse of cinema syntax and stay there, available to subsequent filmmakers
whose interests incline them in this direction.
311
For Prince, images that indicate violent
action, even those that represent violence using the language of metaphor, such as a
round of machine-gun fire ripping into a plaster wall or a man banging away furiously
on a drum set, can be enormously effective at communicating the experience of
violence to an audience. Stylistic amplitude
filmic violence
what he also terms the visual rhetoric of
is, for Prince, more important to a film s reception than whether or not
a film is violent per se.312 This chapter will explore Deliverance s stylistic amplitude,
describing ”oorman s approach to the rape at the film s center in this way, this chapter
attempts to articulate the terms used in the representation of male/male rape for all
movies following Deliverance. The importance of this film to the history of violence in
cinema cannot be over-estimated; the visual rhetoric for male/male rape in Deliverance
will be utilized again and again by filmmakers after John Boorman
from artists as
diverse as Barbra Streisand and Edward James Olmos to Quentin Tarantino and the
creators of South Park.
Stephen Prince, Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 19301968, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 88-9.
311
312
Prince 9.
117
Joe ”uck’s Nightmare: Midnight Cowboy
Barton Palmer has referred to Deliverance s rape sequence as a scene with no
antecedents in the “merican cinema, but this assessment is not quite correct.313
Male/male rape had, in fact, been shown on movie screens in the United States prior to
1972. In chapter two I mentioned that Harvey Hart s film version of Fortune and Men’s
Eyes was released in the U.S. in the summer of 1971. It would, of course, have been
fairly easy for most moviegoers to miss Fortune “ddison Verrill s review in Variety
expected the film to do well only in urban gay markets.314 In addition, the only onscreen
rape in Fortune is very brief and significantly obscured, and it is easy to understand why
the rape in this Canadian film has been considerably less widely remembered than the
one in Deliverance. There is, however, another male/male rape sequence that predates
Deliverance in the history of Anglo-American cinema: one that is also consistently
forgotten in discussions of onscreen sexual violation. What s fascinating about this
particular film is that its audience was much, much wider than Fortune s. In fact, though
it was released with the prohibitive X rating in 1969, this film made nearly as much at
the box office as Deliverance would three years later with a rating of R. This movie was
released in the summer of 69, earned over forty-four million dollars at the box office,
and won three Academy Awards, including the Oscar for Best Picture of the year.315 The
film to which I refer is John Schlesinger s Midnight Cowboy.
Parallels between Midnight Cowboy and Deliverance abound. Both films, for
example, were made by British directors from novels by USAmerican authors (Midnight
Cowboy is by James Leo Herlihy), and both films, coincidentally, star Jon Voight. Both
R. ”arton Palmer, Narration, Text, Intertext the Two Versions of Deliverance, in Kirschten,
Struggling for Wings , 194. Palmer is not alone in his belief that Deliverance is the first male/male rape in
cinema: see also Levin 79.
313
314
Verrill 17.
Midnight Cowboy, DVD, directed by John Schlesinger, 1969, (Culver City, CA: MGM Home Video,
2000).
315
118
explore male homosocial relationships and explicitly concern themselves with the idea
of the future, studying characters who feel left behind by the direction in which
civilization is headed. Each film includes a sequence of male/male rape and,
significantly, the rape in each film is perpetrated by a group of nameless, apparently
poor, uneducated white men. Parallels aside, the differences between the ways the two
films present male/male rape to their audiences are also notable, and these differences
are most significant at the level of the formal conventions their filmmakers employed.
In other words, each film figures the trope male/male rape using a set of distinct
styles or techniques that considerably impacts the ways in which audiences are given to
understand male/male rape. It is my argument that it is the visual rhetoric employed by
John Schlesinger for the male/male rape in Midnight Cowboy which has allowed it to be
all but forgotten by cinematic history, while the stylistic amplitude of Deliverance has
elevated it to what many still reference as the most spectacular male/male rape in
cinematic history.
In Midnight Cowboy the main character, a neglected young man from New
Mexico named Joe Buck (Voight), is gang-raped by a group of men who discover Joe
and a young woman (Jennifer Salt) kissing in a truck at night. The men, attired in
cowboy hats, denim, and boots, separate the two lovers, drag Joe from behind the
wheel, rip off his jeans, bend him over the hood of his vehicle, and rape him. This plot
sequence, then, is very straightforward, perhaps even more so than the rape in
Deliverance with its outside perspective and its second attempted victim. The sequence
in Midnight Cowboy is also surprisingly graphic, and there can be no doubt for members
of the audience that Joe has been raped. Furthermore, the scene contains no hint of
eroticism: the male/male rape in Midnight Cowboy is contained within a violent sequence
that depicts no more or less than sheer terror for its victim.
But if the narrative details for the rape in Midnight Cowboy are simple, the way
Schlesinger relates the violent attack on Joe is anything but straightforward. The
119
cinematic techniques Schlesinger employs to tell the story of Joe ”uck s rape allow
viewers a certain distance between ourselves and the attack on Joe. In the reality of the
film, Joe s experience of rape occurs before Midnight Cowboy begins. The film s
audience, however, doesn t find out about the rape until halfway through the movie,
long after Joe has moved from his hometown to the bustling streets of New York City.
Schlesinger presents the rape in a nightmarish flashback sequence intercut with other
childhood memories and confused dream imagery. He also narratively frames the
flashback sequence with images of Joe Buck falling asleep at the beginning of the
nightmare and an image of him waking abruptly at nightmare s end. The nightmare,
further, is filmed in black-and-white, and it is the only sequence in Midnight Cowboy not
in color. Frequently in color films, black-and-white can be a filmic indication that what
the audience sees happened in the past
if it happened at all
but Midnight Cowboy
contains numerous flashback sequences, all of which are in color; the rape sequence is
the only one Schlesinger presents monochromatically.
While telling the story of Joe ”uck s rape, Schlesinger also utilizes a cinematic
technique that Stephen Prince has called metonymic displacement. As Prince defines it,
metonymic displacement is a form of spatial displacement in which the occlusive or
evasive composition contains some object or action that stands in for the violence that is
occurring out of view. In order to keep a violent image off of the screen, metonymic
displacement replaces that violence with a coded image that an audience can easily read
as violence itself. Prince argues that these metonymic elements are typically quite
explicit and denotative […] Too much subtlety in their design, in fact, will tend to
nullify the purpose and utility of this code.
316
Midnight Cowboy’s metonymic displacement is fascinating and extremely
complex. The sequence moves very, very quickly, and the rapid editing has a
316
Prince 220.
120
disorienting effect on the viewer. As Joe and his girlfriend kiss in their vehicle, they are
discovered by the gang of men; in the dream-logic of the flashback, however, Joe is
surprised, not by his rapists, but by his grandmother, Sally Buck (Ruth White). The
image appears to be a memory, perhaps one of Sally discovering Joe masturbating in his
bedroom or happening upon him while he is in bed with a different lover. Joe s
grandmother turns on the light in the bedroom the light becomes the rapists flashlights
as they shine them in Joe and his girlfriend s faces. “s the men drag Joe and his
girlfriend from the car, they pull down his pants, exposing his buttocks; the film cuts
immediately to an ostensible memory of Sally spanking a very young Joe on his bare
buttocks. Throughout this rape sequence, Schlesinger intently studies the rape victim s
emotional and physical anguish by focusing the camera on Joe s face as he struggles to
break free of the men. Next, the camera displays Joe s bare legs as the men wrench them
apart. The moment of Joe s penetration, however, is metonymically displaced with
another memory of Joe s grandmother as she gives the young Joe an enema; the film
then cuts quickly back to Joe s face as he is raped by the first of his assailants.
From this point in the flashback, what has so far appeared to be a memory
becomes increasingly confused and bizarre as a group of policemen enters the scene.
Included in this group of policemen is Joe s friend Ratso Dustin Hoffman , whom he
has only just met and who, therefore, could not possibly have witnessed the gang-rape.
The dream switches to other possible memories or fantasies here, as well: Joe appears to
go to jail, his girlfriend is taken away in a car, his grandmother chews sadistically on a
piece of candy, and (still in black-and-white) a building is demolished by a wrecking
ball. Schlesinger, finally, is most interested in the rape s victim. He clearly portrays the
violence of the event and the physical pain the rape causes for Joe, and the film neither
names nor characterizes the men who commit this sexual violence, but the entirety of
the dream sequence lasts ninety seconds, with the rape consisting of a maximum of one
minute. It is also important to note that though this nightmare sequence includes
121
images of both Joe and his girlfriend screaming
loud struggle
in what would certainly have been a
the soundscape of the nightmare is made up primarily of electronic
effects, plucked wires, and a single moment of breaking glass. There are no cries for
help, and we do not hear the voices of Joe, his girlfriend, or their assailants.
I highlight Schlesinger s complex and dizzying narrative technique here in order
to remain clear about how very different, stylistically, the rape perpetrated on Joe in
Midnight Cowboy is from the rape suffered by ”obby in John ”oorman s Deliverance.
Schlesinger distinguishes the flashback of the rape from Joe s other memories by
switching from color to black-and-white, he displaces the violence metonymically by
intercutting ostensibly traumatic childhood memories of Joe and his grandmother with
Joe s memory of the rape. Schlesinger further calls the reality of the entire sequence into
question by introducing anachronism (in the person of Ratso) into the memory. Each of
these techniques works to confound the audience s comprehension of and emotional
responses to the male/male rape onscreen. The Los Angeles Times s Charles Champlin,
for example, found the flashbacks fragmentary, almost inchoate, adding that they are
frequently difficult for the watcher to decipher until he can at last assemble the whole
mosaic in his own mind.
317
Champlin s response describes the entire, confusing effect
of the nightmare sequence, which leaves the viewer with the idea of what has happened
or what might have happened
only after the sequence has ended and its mnemonic
pieces can be puzzled out through the viewers own memory. The New York Times s
Vincent Canby does not mention the rape sequence at all, but does refer to the film s
narrative digressions as abbreviated, almost subliminal fantasies and flashbacks.
318
For Canby, then, the difference between memory and fantasy in Midnight Cowboy is
unclear. In fact, every review of the film in the major papers noted this effect. Louise
Charles Champlin, Midnight Cowboy Rides Manhattan s Lower Depths, Los Angeles Times 27 Jul 1969.
P22.
317
318
Vincent Canby, review of Midnight Cowboy [film], New York Times 26 May 1969, 54.
122
Sweeney in the Christian Science Monitor found the film chaotic and confusing as it
substitutes abrupt flashbacks and intercuts for the linear effect of the novel,
319
and the
Washington Post objected to the flashbacks, calling them repetitive and digressive. 320
Variety, the only other periodical even to mention the gang-rape sequence, uses
language that directs the reader away from the gender of the rape victim, referring
vaguely to cruel group ravishments and forced colonic irrigation.
321
These flashback
sequences, though they may have irritated critics, irrupt constantly during the film s
narrative, and provide Midnight Cowboy with a protagonist who seems constantly lost,
who cannot get a purchase on his present because of the repetitive insistence and
lingering importance of his own past. What remains unclear throughout Midnight
Cowboy, however, is whether or not these sequences that Joe Buck appears to remember
ever happened at all.
It is worth mentioning, at this point, that though Louise Sweeney is certainly
correct when she refers to the novel s linearity, the rape sequence in Herlihy s book is
just as unclear as it is in Schlesinger s film. In the novel, Joe s story is told from his
perspective, and because Joe himself doesn t understand exactly what is happening
when he is raped, what Herlihy describes is as confused as Joe s experience. He refers,
for example to soft damp hands […] all over his back and along his thighs, but before
the reader can get any purchase on what is happening, Herlihy describes a crash in
which everything was at once obliterated, and instantly re-created, but in a totally
different perspective.
322
The novelist s description stays firmly in the realm of
nightmare, and Joe s relationship to space and to what is happening to him are never
319
Louise Sweeney, Hoffman, Voight in Schlesinger Film, Christian Science Monitor 13 Jun 1969, 4.
320
Gary Arnold, review of Midnight Cowboy [film], Washington Post 31 Jul 1969, C1ff.
321
Robert J. Landry, review of Midnight Cowboy [film], Variety 14 May 1969, 6.
James Leo Herlihy, Midnight Cowboy, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), 89. It is worth noting, too,
that Joe is apparently raped by only one man in the novel, and in the book it remains unclear whether Joe
is anally penetrated.
322
123
without ambiguity. For Joe, the room had become a hole, shaped something like a
well, and Joe was lying in the bottom of it, looking up. […] “nd then the opening at the
top of the hole was completely covered over by this fat form darkening everything so
that it was no longer possible to see. Joe becomes
aware that some effort was being made up above, someone was trying to
release him from the anguish and the darkness. […] He fought hard to
cooperate with the force that was drawing him upward, straining every
muscle in order to help. And then, just as it became clear what exactly was
being enacted upon him, something broke deep inside of him.323
At the end of this passage in the novel, Joe describes what he has experienced neither as
rape nor as sex but rather as having been pushed into a hole. Shove me down no hole!
he tells himself defiantly when he is back in his room
I may be shee-it, but f m now
on, anybody look like they gonna flush me down better look out!
324
Although the rape
sequence in the film, then, left critics confused as to whether they were watching a
memory or a fantasy, Schlesinger s artistic choices cleverly attempt to match the effect
of the film s source material. Joe Buck is confused about what has happened, and
Schlesinger s film reflects this confusion.
Although Midnight Cowboy clearly represents a male/male rape, and though
Schlesinger focuses his camera on Joe ”uck s face, emphasizing the traumatic
experience of the victim of sexual violence, the final effect of Midnight Cowboy s rape
sequence is to leave viewers confused, never quite sure whether the gang-rape actually
occurred or whether Joe s fears of being violated have simply come to life in a
nightmare. Bracketed by images of Joe falling asleep and waking up, and intercut with
so many other bizarre and confusing images, the rape sequence in Midnight Cowboy is
323
Herlihy 89-90.
324
Herlihy 91.
124
easy to construe as simply a nightmare and not a memory. Joe literally wakes up from
these terrifying images of sexual violation. He removes himself from them, away from
any immediate danger, and finds himself back in the relative safety of Ratso s squat in
New York City. Further, the rape sequence is tiny in proportion to the rest of the movie,
and it doesn t seem to affect Joe ”uck s present-tense activities or actions in any
significant way. In other words, the film s viewers are likely to be confused as to the
veracity of what they see in the flashback sequence; its critics certainly were. And if Joe
Buck has been raped, the film does not present him as significantly troubled in any longterm way by what he has suffered. Importantly, because the rapists are nameless and
nearly faceless, the film allows them to remain relegated to the unreal world of the
dream. As oneiric manifestations, they are free to function as figures of terror,
embodiments of immaterial drives or inchoate forces. The male/male rape in Midnight
Cowboy is significantly less real than the real world of the film itself, and remains a part
of the realm of fantasy, psychically, perhaps, but not physically threatening.
Deliverance in the Language of the Movies
In contrast to Midnight Cowboy s ninety-second nightmare/flashback (less than
one percent of the film s length , the rape of ”obby in Deliverance lasts over four
minutes. After the attack, it takes Bobby an additional five minutes before he is
completely dressed, and the full sequence concerning the rape and its immediate effects
lasts a harrowing thirteen minutes. This is followed with a nine-minute sequence
during which the four suburbanites argue about how to dispose of the rapist s body
before they bury it. In total, the encounter between the film s four characters and the
rapists comprises more than twenty minutes of Deliverance, over a sixth of the film s
entire length. If critics and audiences have remembered the male/male rape sequence in
Deliverance much more vividly than they have remembered those from the film
adaptations of Midnight Cowboy and Fortune and Men’s Eyes, one of the reasons for this is
that Deliverance simply devotes much more time to the subject than do its predecessors.
125
As I noted earlier in this chapter, for Boorman Deliverance is a film in which rape is the
central image and overriding metaphor, and the sequence in his movie is not only
longer than other male/male rape sequences from the time period, it also takes up more
space, proportionally, than does the same series of events in Dickey s novel the
sequence that comprises more than one-sixth of the film takes up less than one-eighth of
the book s length.
Obviously, the medium of film has the capacity to literalize acts of violence in
visual ways that differ drastically from the capabilities of a novel, but ”oorman s visual
approach to the rape in Deliverance also differs from the novel s imaging of sexual
violation. In the previous chapter, as I described the rape in Dickey s novel, I pointed
out that Ed Gentry looks away from Bobby as he is being violated and turns his gaze,
instead, toward the river, toward the possibility of being rescued. I argued that instead
of a description of Bobby as the man rapes him, Dickey relates an experience or
sensation of anguish that Ed and ”obby share, a sound of pain and outrage, […]
followed by one of simple and wordless pain.
325
Boorman s film, by contrast, visualizes
the act of rape in detail. We might even more appropriately describe the film Deliverance
as fundamentally invested in this visualization of male/male sexual violence. For although
the rape scene has no overtly erotic charge
one of the ugliest rapes committed by
some of the ugliest rapists in cinematic history. […] In no way can it be construed as a
sexual turn-on, Susan ”rownmiller once remarked , ”oorman asks his viewers to look
at Bobby frequently, both before and during his violation, and the director does not
avert his camera or metonymically displace the act of violence as Schlesinger does in
Midnight Cowboy.326
325
Dickey, Deliverance [novel], 114.
326
Brownmiller 303.
126
In Deliverance, the rape of Bobby as adapted for film is very similar to its source
material in terms of who the victims and perpetrators are and in respect to the actual
violence that occurs. The additions Boorman makes to his film version, however, are
what give the film its terrifying quality and make the sequence harrowing enough to be
so frequently classed as a horror film. As in the novel, in the film Ed (Jon Voight) is tied
to a tree while ”obby remains untied. Now let s you just drop them pants, the first
rapist ”ill McKinney says to ”obby. The second man Herbert Cowboy Coward
adds that he should take off his shirt, and finally the first rapist growls, them panties
take em off. The film keeps ”obby in a medium shot while he undresses, and
departure from Dickey s novel
in a
the audience, the rapists, and Ed all watch him as he
disrobes. Bobby also prays while he removes his clothing, and his prayer can be heard
distinctly on the film s soundtrack, even when the camera focuses on the rapists and Ed
as they watch Bobby undress.
Immediately after the rapist tells Bobby to remove his underwear, Bobby turns
and begins running away. The chase sequence which follows is also a departure from
Dickey s novel, and ”oorman uses both medium-shots and close-ups for this sequence.
The rapist follows Bobby up a hill, smacking his buttocks and tugging him back down
the slope again. He grips ”obby s chest and belly, and then in the film s most
memorable departure from the novel) the rapist begins to refer to Bobby using pig
imagery. You look just like a hog, he tells his victim, and then he calls him piggy,
piggy, pulling on his nose to make a snout and forcing ”obby to give him a ride as
though he were a large pig. Next, in a longer shot, we watch as Bobby struggles and
even escapes from the rapist momentarily before he is caught again. At the point at
which ”obby is caught for this second time, the rapist tells his friend looks like we got
a sow here instead of a boar. He grabs ”obby s ear, saying I bet you can squeal like a
pig. Squeal, now. Squeal. Bobby squeals desperately as the rapist begins to remove his
own overalls, and the film looks away from Bobby for a moment, finding the man with
127
the gun laughing heartily, either at his friend s pleasure or ”obby s agony. “s the man
brings Bobby down to his knees and places himself behind his victim, he and Bobby
both continue to squeal ”obby s squeals are consistently high-pitched and desperate.
Boorman gives his audience one last instruction as to how we should watch what he is
about to show us by giving us an image of Ed as he stares helplessly at this scene. Ed
clutches the tether at his neck and attempts to escape it: he would help his friend if he
could, but he cannot. He must simply watch.
The rape itself is shot using four separate close-ups one for each of the actors,
and Boorman cuts back and forth between these close-ups. The rapist, sweaty and
terrifying, squeals throughout, his companion with the gun laughs, and Bobby squeals.
You will remember that in Midnight Cowboy John Schlesinger metonymically displaces
the moment of penetration by presenting the audience with an image of Sally Buck
giving young Joe an enema instead of an image of rape. In Deliverance, John Boorman
effects no such displacement. The scene unfolds in real time, and the camera does not
cut away.
The rapist continues to squeal almost rhythmically with Bobby rhythmically
repeating him. A viewer might even become slightly accustomed to the shrill sound
that he makes, as it is followed, at regular intervals, by ”obby s own squealing the
rapist models the squeal, and Bobby repeats it
Whee!
Whee! “s the rapist squeals a
final time, however, Bobby lets out a different sound altogether, a low, dissonant,
irregular cry of pain that lasts much longer than his squeals did. In the camera s next
shot we see the man with the gun (in close-up) look lecherously at Ed. Because this
close-up is shot from Ed s perspective, the man with the gun looks directly into the
camera and at the audience, toothlessly grinning with pleasure at the rape we have all
just watched and also, presumably, at the violation he imagines he will commit on Ed.
Finally, Ed looks away from his friend and toward the river, and the film resumes the
novel s approach to the event, asking the viewers, too, to turn our gazes away from the
128
rape victim. From here, Boorman returns to the plot points of the novel: Lewis shoots
the rapist with an arrow, and the men argue about whether or not to bury the body or
alert the authorities. I ought also to note, perhaps, that in a fascinating bit of staging,
Boorman focuses for an extended period of time on the rapist as he dies from his
wound, and he keeps the man s dead body in nearly all the shots of the men as they
discuss what to do with the corpse.327
It should be clear by now that the film approaches the attack on Bobby as an
event that ought to be viewed for as long as possible. More than one reviewer has
remarked on the discomfort that Deliverance appears to want to engender in its viewers,
and the film is able to create this feeling by insistently turning its gaze toward the act of
rape. When Boorman aims the camera away from the attack itself, he directs it either at
Ed or at the man with the gun, both of whom stare intently at Bobby and his rapist. In
this way, even when the film averts its gaze from the rape, it does not completely look
away, registering instead either Ed s horror or the man with the gun s pleasure. “s I
noted earlier, the film sustains its visualization of the rape for over four full minutes.
Deliverance sets itself apart both from its contemporaries in the cinema and its
source material through the use of another formal device, as well. I remarked that we
can plainly hear Bobby praying as he is forced to remove his clothing. In fact, the entire
time that the rapist chases Bobby up the hill, Bobby mutters the words no and
don t. These words are constantly repeated, mantra-like, in a manner more evocative
of the prayer he utters as he undresses than anything else. In this way the film
underlines the terror inherent to the situation, as Bobby unsuccessfully pleads with the
rapist. As the rapist begins to refer to Bobby as a pig, Deliverance moves toward the
grotesque. And because the pig imagery and noises are so unusual, so dehumanizing,
and because, indeed, they differ so markedly from the ways in which movies
The intended effect here is to emphasize the gravity of the situation, the violence that has been done to
the dead man, and the moral conundrum the men face.
327
129
traditionally represent either violence or sex, these squeals become instantly
memorable, even haunting. It is extremely significant that we hear ”obby s anguish as
he is raped. “ccording to Stephen Prince, empirical studies of viewer reactions to
screen violence have shown that when expressions of pain and suffering are present in
a scene, viewers tend to attribute a greater level of violence to the depicted action.
Prince also argues that by the mid-
328
s, the evolving politics of screen violence had
resulted in a widespread suppress[ion of] the use of sound to delineate physical
suffering. This suppression would, Prince says, have lasting consequences for
American film, helping to make screen violence into the largely pain-free phenomenon
that it remains even today.
329
Prince s argument in regard to the auditory information
of violent action on the screen draws attention to just how unaccustomed movie
audiences are to the sound of a victim s pain. This tradition of occluding the auditory
information related to pain and anguish can be traced back to the first years of the
Production Code, and though the PCA had been wholly dismantled by 1972,
Deliverance s sound information still startlingly broke with filmic convention.
”oorman s cinematic choices, then his sustained and insistent attention to the
act of violation, his staging of the terrified victim as he attempts to escape the rape, his
inclusion of the sounds both of ”obby s resistance and his anguish, his decision to shoot
the sequence in real-time without a cut or a blackout, the bizarre quality of the pig
imagery and the squealing
explain both the scene s formal influence on the horror
genre and the lasting impression it has had on all audiences.
The total unexpectedness of the rapist s use of pig imagery and his command
that Bobby squeal like a pig also work to place the male/male rape in Deliverance into
Prince 69. Prince cites D. Caroline Blanchard, Barry Graczyk, and Robert J. ”lanchard, Differential
Reactions of Men and Women to Realism, Physical Damage, and Emotionality in Violent Films,
Aggressive Behavior 12.1 (1986): 45-55.
328
329
Prince 75.
130
the realm of the fantastic. The rapists
with their bizarre language, inscrutable
motivations (the attack does not appear to be spurred by lust), unknown origins, and
scant attention to hygiene
might be better described as wood-demons or spirits than
men. Rodger Cunningham argues that ”oorman s film explicitly links the rapists with
the forest, remarking that the campers, and Lewis in particular, are generally shot in
front of the green of the forest, standing out against it. In contrast, the first rapist is
initially seen moving within a wall of green, as if belonging to it, a living extension of
its threat.
330
We might also note, as Carol Mason does, that “ppalachia is one of the
backward places to invoke if [a writer] want[s] to depict sadism and coerced sex as
inevitable and inherent. Sexual deviance is portrayed as endemic to the region and its
people.
331
The rapists, in other words, are not the same kind of people as the campers, if
indeed they are people at all. For all the immediacy and terror of the act of rape in
Deliverance, the film s unmistakable treatment of the rapists as subhuman works to
distance the act of male/male rape from the realm of the possible, framing it instead as
something that hillbillies or rednecks do. Male/male rape is something that
happens in the forest, far away from the city. Deliverance characterizes male/male rape
as fantastic, locating it firmly outside of the realistic world inhabited by the film s
intended urban and suburban audiences.
As Allison Graham argues conclusively in Framing the South, the cretinous
redneck would become an increasingly popular film villain in the late
s and early
1970s.332 For Carol Clover, films with hillbilly villains invest the city/country axis with
violence sexual and otherwise as a way of exploring the confrontation, cast in almost
Darwinian terms, of the civilized with the primitive. The scenario to which city/country
horror obsessively returns is one in which the haves, the civilized urbanites, are
330
Cunningham 125.
331
Mason 52.
332
Graham 182.
131
separated from the system of supports that silently keep their privilege intact.
333
This
confrontation between the civilized and the barbarous is plainly evident in horror films
such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), but also
recognizable in films classified under more respectable movie genres: Midnight Cowboy
and Deliverance, certainly, but also In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Easy Rider (1969).334
Each of these narratives involves an urban protagonist who travels to the South and
must confront, in a situation always fraught with metaphorical signifiers, the
uncivilized or backward residents of the country and learn what he or she can. In
Deliverance and Midnight Cowboy, male/male rape is something that happens far away
from manageable, civilized lives: in Cowboy, the rape interjects itself into the city-life of
New York as a nightmare, a black-and-white fever dream from which Joe Buck quickly
awakens; in Deliverance, there is no way for Bobby or the audience to wake up from a
dream, but the men can, and eventually do, return to their lives in the city, far away
from the forest and its demonic sexual violations. In both films, male/male rape remains
something that simply does not happen in the lives of regular people. Or perhaps it
becomes, like Joe ”uck s nightmare, an image that haunts the viewer, revisiting the
film s audience at unexpected times and recurring only in inchoate, troubling ways.
Pork Products: Apocrypha
Before I close my discussion of Deliverance, I want briefly to turn to the urban
legends surrounding the filming of this sequence in the movie. The iconic status of the
rape in Deliverance has engendered many apocryphal tales, and the truth of how the
rape sequence was filmed appears to have fascinated many. In the previous chapter I
reported J.W. Williamson s description of Deliverance syndrome, a term that described
urban males who screamed squeal like a pig on their trips down the river. I want, for
333
Clover 131.
334
Clover s chief example is I Spit on Your Grave (1977), see 114-65.
132
a moment, to return to these men and to the curious power of their chosen phrase, as
the men who filmed Deliverance create their own legends around cinema s most famous
male/male rape.
The mountain man who rapes Ned Beatty in the film was played by actor Bill
McKinney, a man Jon Voight says was an actor, singer, and a tree surgeon from Los
“ngeles.
335
”y nearly all accounts, McKinney was a skilful and disciplined actor, but
stories about the supposed reality of the scene and the real terror of filming it have
persisted.336 The most incredible account comes from Burt Reynolds, who played Lewis
in the film. In My Life, Reynolds says he thought McKinney was a little bent, claiming
that as we got closer to the rape scene, I caught him staring at Ned in an odd,
unnerving way.
337
Reynolds claims that, referring to the rape, McKinney told Ned
”eatty I ve always wanted to try that. “lways have, and relates the following
sensational tale:
McKinney, I swear to God, really wanted to hump Ned. And I think he
was going to. He had it up and he was going to bang him. It s the first and
only time I have ever seen camera operators turn their heads away.
Finally I couldn t stand it anymore. I ran into the scene, dove on
McKinney and pulled him off. Boorman, hot on my tracks, helped hold
him down. Ned, who was crying both from rage and fear, found a big
stick and started beating him on the head.338
”oorman has referred to this account of the day s events as utter nonsense,
339
and
Christopher Dickey, who worked as a production assistant on the film, states flatly that
335
Jon Voight, interviewed in Deliverance: Betraying the River.
336
Boorman 196-7.
337
Burt Reynolds, My Life, (New York: Hyperion, 1994), 157.
338
Reynolds 157-8.
339
Boorman 196.
133
Reynolds was not called to the location the day the rape sequence was filmed.340 Indeed,
there would have been no reason for Reynolds to be onsite.
Apocryphal stories such as this one have proliferated around the filming of the
rape scene. Many have noted that the film s most famous line, squeal like a pig, is not
in Dickey s novel it appears nowhere in his original screenplay, either.341 That the film s
most iconic bit of dialogue cannot be officially attributed either to James Dickey or John
Boorman has led to a curious tendency among those working on the film to claim credit
for this invented text. In the director s commentary on the
DVD
release of
Deliverance, Boorman credits his creative assistant Rospo Pallenberg with the line,
saying that squeal like a pig was originally intended to take the place of a more
powerful kind of language in a cleaned-up-for-television version of the movie, but it
was so good that I decided to keep it in the main version.
342
Frank Rickman, who
worked on Deliverance as the liaison between Boorman and the locals in Rabun County,
Georgia, claimed in the winter 1973 issue of Foxfire that You know, they made him
squeal like a hog. I added that part to it. James Dickey really commended me for adding
the pig squealing to it.
343
”oth J.W. Williamson and Dickey s biographer Henry Hart
have repeated Rickman s story, but Ned Beatty himself has also taken credit for the line.
At the RiverRun International Film Festival in
, ”eatty claimed that the whole
Squeal Like a Pig thing… came from guess who. Mark ”urger reports that as the
audience laughed, [Beatty] theatrically put his head in his hands and silently pointed to
himself, before elaborating how director Boorman encouraged him to improvise the
Christopher Dickey, Summer of Deliverance: a Memoir of Father and Son, (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1998), 178.
340
See James Dickey, Deliverance [screenplay], (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 63-5.
The famous phrase he got a real pretty mouth, ain t he? does not appear either.
341
342
John ”oorman, Director s Commentary, Deliverance deluxe edition DVD.
”arbara Taylor and Mary Thomas, He Shouted Loud, Hosanna, Deliverance Will Come,
(1973): 304.
343
134
Foxfire 7.4
scene with his onscreen tormenter.
344
If ”eatty s tale strikes readers as improbable,
”oorman s story ought to seem equally specious. “s I have demonstrated above, the pig
references last throughout the entire sequence, including extremely specific
choreography and three unique pieces of text. Further, the extended sequence of
squeals and their repetition is integral to the way Boorman presents the moment of
”obby s violent penetration. The pig imagery is, in other words, part of the very
structure of the sequence and cannot be explained away as a simple linguistic invention
necessitated by television censorship.
Whatever the true origin of the line, Rickman and ”eatty s claims that they
invented it betray a curious need to align themselves with the rapist in the film. In her
famous 1975 text Against Our Will, Susan ”rownmiller said that she doubt[s] if there
exists even one viewer of this powerful film who identified his manhood with the
rapist-aggressors, but a claim to having written the famous line spoken by the rapist is
precisely such an identification, and the men who shouted squeal like a pig as they
rafted down the Chattooga performed a similar identificatory gesture.345 A desire to
identify with the rapist in Deliverance can be understood much more clearly if we return
this cinematic rape to the realm of the metaphor. “s ”rownmiller argues, far from
being glamorized and heroic, the backwoods rapists in Deliverance are physically
repulsive and appear to be possessed of subnormal intelligence.
346
Identification with
such abhorrent figures, then, is not an identification with the rapist as a character, but
with the rapist as a meaning-bearing signifier for masculinity itself, a masculinity that
appears all the more coherent because of the very trope cited by those for whom this
identification is desirable. Screaming squeal like a pig
or, indeed, claiming to have
Mark ”urger, ”eatty Given Master of Cinema Award: Character Actor Is a Veteran of More Than 200
Film and Television Productions, Winston-Salem (NC) Journal 19 Mar 2006, B1.
344
345
Brownmiller 304.
346
Brownmiller 303-4.
135
invented the line
is a way to protect oneself symbolically from having to identify with
the man who has been raped. Claiming squeal like a pig for one s own is a way to
align oneself with the rapist s violent masculinity, and to distance oneself from the
victim of Deliverance s cinematic rape and, indeed, victims of rape in the real world.
Further, we might think of inventing (like Beatty) or reinventing (like the
Deliverance-syndrome men the squeal like a pig line as a way of going behind the rape,
as Henry James has put it.347 I mean by this that claiming to have created squeal like a
pig is a way of pointing up the constructedness of the rape, of reminding us all that the
rape in Deliverance is not real. The Deliverance-syndrome men surely mock Bobby as
they yell squeal like a pig, but they also mock the rapist, triumph at his death at the
hands of Lewis s center shot.
348
Yelling squeal like a pig, allows the men, in effect,
to disidentify with the rapist, distancing themselves from Bobby while simultaneously
revealing the rapist as a paper tiger, a fictional bogeyman of the forest with no power
over them.
If the film s most memorable components
”anjos
squeal like a pig and Duelling
have become punchlines on U.S., Canadian, and British television, the causes
of this laughter are as complicated as laughter itself and differ according to the subject
doing the laughing. Freud suggests in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious that the
production of the comic is deeply linked to the unconscious. Where, after all, does the
laughter that is apparently aimed at Bobby, Deliverance s rape victim, originate? Do we
laugh merely at the situation in which ”obby finds himself? If ”obby s situation is what
See Kaja Silverman s excellent discussion of James in Male Subjectivity at the Margins, (New York:
Routledge, 1992) beginning on pp. 157-8.
347
348
I direct your attention once again to Williamson 162-3.
136
produces this laughter, Freud suggests that we laugh at a situation even if we have to
confess that we should have had to do the same in that situation.
349
Freud offers that:
we only find someone s being put in a position of inferiority comic where
there is empathy
that is, where someone else is concerned: if we ourselves
were in similar straits we should be conscious only of distressing feelings.
It is probably only by keeping such feelings away from ourselves that we
are able to enjoy pleasure from the difference arising out of a comparison
between these changing cathexes.350
Freud notes, here, that the person who laughs first feels profoundly his own
vulnerability
inferiority , and then laughs because he is not obligated to feel the
distress that should accompany those feelings. The person who laughs experiences
himself as though he is the person who is the object of his laughter, and laughs because he
has not experienced materially the distress which the object of his laughter experiences.
Perhaps, however, this laughter directed at ”obby s squeals is simply about
mocking Bobby for his own weaknesses (which are, we should remember, purely
fictional . Freud understands this as comic unmasking, which he argues is the
method of degrading the dignity of individuals by directing attention to the frailties
that they share with all humanity, but in particular the dependence of their mental
functions on bodily needs.
351
In other words and here Freud again focuses on the
identity of the person laughing and the object of his laughter
we are permitted to
laugh at Bobby because he is like us, because he has been proven to possess frailties which
we know to possess ourselves.
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, the Standard Edition, translated by James
Strachey, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1960), 243.
349
350
Freud, Jokes, 244. My emphasis.
351
Freud, Jokes, 250.
137
Following Kaja Silverman, we might suggest that the spectacle of male/male rape
in Deliverance served as a powerful historical event which br[ought] a large group of
male subjects into such an intimate relation with lack that they [we]re at least for a
moment unable to sustain an imaginary relation with the phallus and so withdr[e]w
their belief from the dominant fiction.
352
Laughter is a way of what Freud would call
binding that historical event, of bringing a series of unwieldy or intense feelings
under linguistic control. This involves not only a transformation of something over
which the man feels he has no control (vulnerability) into something over which the
man has power laughing at ”obby , but also the gradual reaffirmation and
reconstitution of the dominant fiction
the widespread fantasy that men actually do
possess the phallus and can rightfully, therefore, claim to be powerful.353
The Last Word
In 1982, Dickey somewhat bitterly published his screenplay for Deliverance so
that readers could compare his version with ”oorman s film. He wanted to have his
final say on the subject of Deliverance.
premiere
354
By this time
ten years after the film s
even Dickey himself was using the squeal in order to indicate that a rape
had occurred. Promoting the publication of his screenplay, Dickey mused that:
By the time the film begins to move into the actual production process […]
the writer has begun to feel like the pig in Randall Jarrell s parable of the
Poet and the Critic. The filmmaker, like the Critic, like the judge of pork at
the county fair, says to the pig-poet-novelist-screenwriter as he pokes him
contemptuously in the ribs
352
Silverman 55
353
Silverman 64.
Huh! What do you know about pork?
William W. Starr, Dickey Gets Last Word on Deliverance, Evening Herald Leisure (York County, SC) 27
Mar 1982, 2.
354
138
Though he is, unfortunately, pork, the novelist can in fact find little by the
way of answer.355
The rape imagery in Dickey s parable is covered by only the thinnest of veneers. Dickey
unmistakably styles himself as the victim of sexual violence in this allegory, casting
John Boorman and the studio-heads at Warner Bros. in the role of filmmaker-criticjudge-rapist. Ten years after Deliverance appeared in movie theatres, the association of
pig imagery with male/male rape had become so pervasive in USAmerican culture that
Dickey could trust that his pork metaphor would be easily decipherable. Neither John
Boorman nor the executives at Warner, of course, raped James Dickey: making a film in
a way that differs from the screenwriter s initial vision is neither violent nor sexual. I
have argued that Dickey s novel eschews the treatment of rape as a metaphor, opting
instead to describe the victims shared experience of sexual violence; in 1982, Dickey s
own use of the rape metaphor is indicative of just how common this rhetorical device
had become only twelve years after Deliverance was published.
The publication of Dickey s screenplay has hardly been the last word on
Deliverance. I have already mentioned Carol Clover s argument regarding Deliverance s
pervasive influence on the generic conventions of the modern horror film. Deliverance
has also had powerful and lasting effects on the way filmmakers have chosen to
represent male/male rape at the movies. Joe Wlodarz has referred to the increase of
cinematic images of male/male rape in the
Deliverance,
s as the proliferation of the children of
and filmmakers approaches to male/male rape in these
s films The
Prince of Tides [1991], American Me [1992], Pulp Fiction [1994], The Shawshank Redemption
[1994], Sleepers [1996], American History X [1998], and several others) simply cannot
escape comparison to ”oorman s
355
film.356 This chapter has described the filmic
Quoted in Starr 2. This is also cited in Hart 490.
Joe Wlodarz, Rape Fantasies Hollywood and Homophobia, in Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture,
edited by Peter Lehman, (New York: Routledge, 2001), 68.
356
139
terms that both John Schlesinger and John Boorman used to represent male/male rape
in Midnight Cowboy and Deliverance. As images of male/male rape at the movies
proliferated in the 1990s, later filmmakers used the terms set out by Schlesinger and
Boorman over and over, deviated from them in productive and interesting ways, and at
times even directly acknowledged their antecedents.
By way of concluding this analysis of the first films to represent male/male rape,
we might begin to address some of the questions posed by Midnight Cowboy and
Deliverance to the films in the 1990s that are their heirs. How, for example, does the
sound information that accompanies the rape in American History X convey the anguish
of victim in that film? How does the metonymic displacement of the act of male/male
rape in American Me relate to the heterosexual lovemaking that displaces it? How is
rape metaphorized in Pulp Fiction? How do the filmmakers of The Prince of Tides and
Sleepers convey rape as a traumatizing memory? And when and why do we laugh at
these representations?
I ended chapter three by recalling José Muñoz s critique of dominant
masculinity, and I wish to end this one by emphasizing the frailty of that masculinity,
despite its apparently hegemonic power. James Dickey s attempts to have the last
word on Deliverance by publishing his screenplay, Ned ”eatty and Frank Rickman s
separate claims to have written the line squeal like a pig , and ”urt Reynolds and
Christopher Dickey s definitive accounts of what really happened on the day the
rape in Deliverance was filmed all direct our attention toward an enormous cultural
concern that persists in relation to this film: whose rape is it? Both disavowed and
claimed, metaphorized and literalized, the rape of Bobby is something with which
USAmerican masculinity has been forced to cope. The constant reiteration of the joke
of Deliverance in popular culture
Duelling ”anjos
whether in the form of squeal like a pig or
betrays a persistent masculinist need to deal with what none of us
can forget happened to Bobby on the banks of the Cahulawassee river, to contain this
140
spectacularization of male vulnerability and integrate it within masculine identity. That
this single cinematic representation of an act of male/male rape has maintained the
power to challenge hegemonic masculinity for thirty years attests, certainly, to the
filmmakers abilities to visualize this violence onscreen, but also to the vulnerability of
dominant masculinity itself.
141
CHAPTER 5
AFTER ROMANS
The law is clearly a system of desire, in which provocation and voyeurism have
their own place the phantasy of the cop is not some creation of the homosexual’s
deranged mind, but the reality of a deviant desiring operation on the part of police
and judiciary.
Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire357
If you are sick of death Sir, you are sick of your Kingdom.
Holst, The Sons of Light358
Don’t try to shock me. Leo. I’ve given birth to two children, I’m nearly forty and
married to an Englishman who loves his mother. I can’t be shocked.
I am at a dangerous age.
Virginia, The Genius359
To speak about Howard ”renton s The Romans in Britain is to speak about scandal.
When the National Theatre in London, under the artistic direction of Sir Peter Hall,
produced the play in 1980, it caused an immediate uproar. Brenton, always a
provocateur and no stranger to scandal, had previously penned Magnificence (1973), a
play following a group of British revolutionaries, and Christie in Love (1969), a strange,
small, ritual-drama about a serial killer who targeted women and his eroticization of
their corpses. Prior to the premiere of The Romans in Britain, ”renton s most recent
theatrical foray had been to co-write with Tony Howard a vicious skit for the
Theatre Royal Stratford East entitled A Short Sharp Shock that criticized Margaret
357
Hocquenghem 66.
358
David Rudkin, The Sons of Light, (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981), 57.
359
Howard Brenton, The Genius, in Plays: 2, (London: Methuen, 1989), 179.
142
Thatcher.360 The Romans in Britain was to become ”renton s most scandalous theatrical
effort to date, and the play has, since its premiere, developed into the case study for
censorship, decency, and aesthetic distance par excellence. The scandal of The Romans in
Britain was caused by the play s representation
in the middle of act one
of an act of
male/male rape.
A great deal of my argument in the previous chapters hinges on the idea of
male/male rape as a floating signifier. Critics and scholars have interpreted the
male/male rape in Deliverance as symbolic revenge for the destruction of Nature by
Civilization. I demonstrated, however, that although many critics were able to
distance themselves from the violence depicted in the film and interpret this symbology
for their readers, many movie-goers (and filmmakers) in the early 1970s responded to
the film viscerally, even when they intellectually understood ”oorman s
metaphorization. I argued, as well, that our attitudes toward male/male rape are
profoundly affected by the stylistic amplitude with which this violence is presented to
its audience. The Romans in Britain would become a touchstone for these tensions in the
British theatre, and this chapter uses Romans as a way to discuss the ethical questions
inherent in the staging and viewing of representations of male/male rape. Using Romans
as a case study, I will argue that male/male rape is frequently eroticized by audiences,
and I will analyze that eroticization in order to question the ethical positions of
audience members as we watch representations of male/male rape in particular and
violence in general. This chapter, then, interrogates the identificatory practices of
audiences as we watch images of rape and the ethical conundrums presented by the
pleasure we derive from such images.
Mark Lawson, Passion Play, Guardian
Oct
,G
. The play s title was taken from Gilbert and
Sullivan s The Mikado. Brenton and Howard had previously called their skit Ditch the Bitch, a title which
was, I think, rather wisely jettisoned.
360
143
Spoil, Ravage, Sack, Pillage, Ruin: Caesar Invades Britannia
The Romans in Britain as its title suggests, is a portrayal of the island of Great Britain at
the time of Julius Caesar s successful second invasion of the island in BC 54. The play
shifts from scenes with the Celtic native peoples to the Roman invasion. Caesar invades
the land of the Trinovante and Iceni tribes near present-day Essex, but the play does not
stage a large battle between the natives and the Romans. Instead, The Romans in Britain
apostrophizes the fighting, using smaller acts of violence to substitute metonymically
for full-scale invasion. The act-one finale is a stunning coup de théâtre in which a tank
rolls onstage and Caesar returns in modern dress riding in a jeep. In a clever blending
of temporalities, the play s second act divides its time between a portrayal of presentday (late 1970s) Northern Ireland and 515 AD during the time of Saxon settlement. Put
simply, The Romans devises an equation in which Rome s imperialist invasion of the
island is comparable to England s violent imperialist policy in Ireland.
Brenton is interested in exploring the deep legacy of violence on the island: the
blood on the land. I keep on seeing the dead, a character says very late in the play, “
field in Ireland, a field in England. And faces like wood. Charred wood, set in the
ground. Staring at me. / The faces of our forefathers.
361
”renton s other themes are the
persistent and popular dream of Britain as an empire and the mythos of imagined
English community. His play even ends with a bittersweet sequence where two out-ofwork cooks in 515 AD decide to become storytellers in order to make ends meet. On a
whim they invent the tale of a King who never was. / His government was the people
of Britain. His peace was as common as rain or sun. His law was as natural as grass,
growing in a meadow. The cooks female companions tell them it is a pretty story.
What was his name? they ask. The cooks haven t quite thought that far:
361
Howard Brenton, The Romans in Britain, in Plays: 2, (London: Methuen, 1989), 89
144
FIRST COOK.
Any old name, dear. (To the SECOND COOK:) What was his
name?
SECOND COOK.
Right. Er
any old name.
Arthur?
Arthur?362
It is an almost absurd, whimsical but heartbreaking ending to a brutal play whose chief
subjects are the evils of imperialism and the history of violence in Britain.
The immediate uproar that the play provoked in the British government and in
the popular newsmedia, however, was unrelated to ”renton s anti-imperialist politics.
The Romans in Britain is famous in British theatre because it created a sex scandal. The
play contains numerous acts of violence, many of which happen onstage and in full
view of the audience. In act one, for example, a group of entitled young Celts strings up
a vagabond, slitting his throat and letting his blood drain into a bowl. There are
numerous murders at one point Caesar s men enter carrying the bodies of the Celtic
rulers and these corpses are discarded almost without comment. Act one ends with a
soldier machine-gunning down a young girl armed only with stones, and nearer the
middle of act two, a man is bludgeoned to death by his own daughter. ”renton s
portrayal of life on the island is one of constant violence and always-precarious
existence; both the range of these violent activities and the ubiquity of violence itself are
a fundamental part of ”renton s analysis of Great ”ritain s history. “mid this panoply
of bloodshed and violation, the play also contains the violent rape of a young male Celt
by Roman soldiers. And it is this sequence, a scene many commentators have referred
to as a homosexual rape, which caused the Romans in Britain scandal and made the
playwright newly infamous overnight.
362
Brenton, Romans, 94-5.
145
In his 1989 preface to the play Brenton describes how he intended the scene to
work:
I tried to imagine what it must have been like for three young Celts, seeing
Roman soldiers for the first time. I titled the scene Two Worlds Touch .
The Celts had been swimming on a fine summer s day. On the river bank
they fool about, brag and laugh, then stretch out in the sun. From out of
the trees come three Roman soldiers. They have had a bad day, losing
touch with their platoon in a confused skirmish in the trees, and want a
swim. The Celts are between them and the river. To the Romans it s
nothing, there are three natives, three wogs , between them and their
needed swim. The Romans kill two of the Celts and grossly abuse the
third, who runs off. To the soldiers it is nothing, nothing at all. To the
Celts it is worse than death, it is the end of their world.363
”renton s description of the passage is not inaccurate, but his words grossly abuse
euphemize some rather grisly events. I will describe the sequence
male/male rape
an explicit scene of
in detail in the following paragraph.
After a brief standoff between three soldiers, armed with swords and covered in
armor and three naked, unarmed Celts, the soldiers seriously wound one of the boys,
who pulls himself along the ground, groaning in pain throughout the entirety of what
follows. The soldiers then kill the second of the boys, crushing him between their
shields. Finally, they capture the third boy, a young priest named Marban. While the
first soldier goes off to have a swim, the second and third soldiers are more interested in
sexually abusing Marban. Using the Celt s own knife, the two Romans lacerate Marban
on his shoulder blade and then make an incision on his buttocks. These cuts are said to
be funny little ways the third soldier/rapist has picked up on his travels in Persia,
363
Howard Brenton, preface to Plays: 2, vii-viii.
146
ostensibly some kind of Orientalist kink.364 Their young victim suddenly begins to
defecate out of terror. The third soldier, undeterred by this, anally penetrates him, but
stops after a minute or two when he loses his erection. He blames Marban s hygiene,
referring to him as an arseful of piles.
their attitudes cavalier
365
The language of the two Romans is crass,
like fucking a fistful of marbles, the third soldier says, I
mean, what do they do in this island, sit with their bums in puddles of mud all year
long? The third soldier goes off to wash in the Thames. The second soldier then
caresses Marban s naked body, telling him the story of how he joined the Roman army.
Marban, in turn, attempts to communicate with the soldier, speaking to him in Latin.
The second soldier, amused and presumably sexually aroused by this, rapes the young
man again, this time forcing Marban to fellate him in front of the other two soldiers as
the scene ends.
The scene is certainly shocking, and the public outcry was energetic. Sir Horace
Cutler, who was leader of the Greater London Council at the time, and Geoffrey Seaton,
also a member of the Council, both attended the first night s performance, and both
gave outraged interviews to the press. Mary Whitehouse, the founder of the National
Viewers and Listeners Association
now called Mediawatch UK
opened a private
prosecution of the play s director, though it was ultimately unsuccessful. ”ernard
Weiner detailed this political end of the controversy in a 1981 article for TDR 25, noting
that the topic even surfaced during Question Time in Parliament when the Minister for
the Arts, Norman St. John-Stevas, was asked, in effect, why the government didn t cut
back its grants to the “rts Council because some of that body s monies went to the
364
Brenton, Romans, 34.
365
Brenton, Romans, 36.
147
National, which had produced such an outrage.
366
The reading of this staged act of
violence became instant public fodder for ”ritain s newsmedia.
I describe the rape sequence from The Romans in Britain in detail because I believe
it is important to be specific about the activities represented in the play. Many of
”renton s critics, however, were decidedly less discriminating with their semantic
choices. Weiner and many others quote Sir Horace Cutler as saying my wife covered
her head during the sodomy scene,
367
the British National Front protested the
production with signs that read smut and keep queers off our stages,
368
and the
conservative weekly Spectator ran a cartoon by Michael Heath equating The Romans in
Britain with illicit male/male sex in public restrooms.369 Mrs. Whitehouse
saw the production
who never
can be credited with what is perhaps the most egregious
statement made about the play s content
One is concerned, she said, about
protecting the citizens, and in particular young people. I m talking about men being so
stimulated by the play that they will commit attacks on young boys.
370
Significantly,
none of these comments deals with the critiques of either violence or imperialism that
Brenton levels in his play. The responses, instead, consistently read the representation
of an act of brutality as though it is intended to function as pornography and interpret
the act of rape as though it were a part of gay male erotic culture. Each remark is, in
other words, a (homophobic) response to an imagined homosexual sex act rather than a
response to an act of rape or imperialist slaughter.
366
”ernard Weiner, The Romans in Britain Controversy, TDR: the Drama Review 25.1 (1981): 60.
367
Horace Culter quoted in Weiner 59.
368
Weiner 61.
In Heath s cartoon, an angry policeman shines a flashlight in the faces of two shamefaced men under
the sign GENTS. The caption reads It s all right, officer, we re just discussing Romans in Britain.
369
370
Mary Whitehouse quoted in Weiner 59-60.
148
For Howard Brenton, the poetic intentions of the rape sequence are very clear.
He believes that for the Celts the appearance of the Roman army is the end of their
culture, its touch is death, and he intends the rape to function metonymically as a
substitution for the invasion in its entirety.371 Worse than death, he corrects himself
It is the end of their world.
372
One needn t have read the playwright s preface to
understand his intention; the gravity of this event is, in fact, quite clear in the text of the
play. Several scenes after he suffers the rape by the Roman soldiers, Marban begs some
of his kinsmen to give him a knife so that he can kill himself, and before he commits
suicide he mourns the loss of their way of life
The ghosts of our ancestors, slink away.
The fabulous beasts, their claws crumble. The Gods grow small as flies.
373
Marban does
not mourn the violation of his own body or the loss of his mother and father (both
killed in the invasion) but rather the absolute destruction of his culture.
In ”renton s schema, the rape in The Romans is intended to signify an event much
larger than rape per se he intends for the audience to read the boy s violation as a
metaphor for the destruction and pillage of the island by a group of unthinking and
insensitive soldiers who represent a cruel and behemoth imperialist power. Brenton
attempts to access a pre-existing cultural symbology of male/male rape in which such
violation possesses its own poetics in culture. The playwright expects his audience to
read the sexual violation of a society s most spiritual young man as the worst fate that
society could suffer, as though, perhaps, Hamlet had been violated by an unnamed
band of Swiss mercenaries or Moses sexually assaulted by the Egyptians instead of
being taken in by the pharaoh s daughter. For ”renton, male/male rape signifies an end
to the future, a complete foreclosure of possibilities. The playwright, however, misses
his target by choosing an act of violence that turns out to be too provocative for
371
Brenton, preface to Plays: 2, vii.
372
Brenton, preface to Plays: 2, viii.
373
Brenton, Romans, 54.
149
audiences in 1980. For if the male/male rape in The Romans is a critique of imperialist
violence, the popular readings that surround the play are not about violence at all, but
are all about homosexual sex: my wife covered her head during the sodomy scene. The rape
in The Romans functions, in other words, as a kind of bet, Brenton gambles that
male/male rape will mean the end of the world, but the audience s responses indicate
that male/male rape meant, in 1980, male/male eroticism.
Gross Indecency
This miscalculation was to have lasting consequences. I have already noted that the
National s government grant was threatened though it was not revoked . Sir Peter
Hall, director of the National, came under fire for having produced the play
the most
artfully phrased of these critiques came from James Fenton in the Sunday Times, who
offered that If I were Sir Peter Hall and had instigated such a production, I would take
myself out to dinner and very tactfully but firmly sack myself over the dessert.
374
More
materially threatening, Michael ”ogdanov, the play s director, was sued by Mary
Whitehouse for having procured an act of gross indecency by Peter Sproule with Greg
Hicks [the two actors involved in the rape] on the stage of the Olivier Theatre contrary
to the Sexual Offences “ct of
.
375
Whitehouse had accused Bogdanov of
solicitation, an actual sex crime. Her suit assumed that the two actors onstage at the
National were actually having homosexual sex in view of the audience. Mark Lawson
reports that it caused shock at the time
and seems astonishing now
that an act of
parliament designed to prevent hand-jobs in lavatories had been applied to an
evening's theatre. At the time [that the suit was first brought], when no one thought the
prosecution could succeed, there was much amusement in the theatrical establishment
374
James Fenton quoted in Weiner 60.
375
Lawson 10.
150
that putting on a play was equivalent to soliciting.
376
Due in large part to this
enormous amount of free publicity, the show became an enormous hit, but the
prosecution would, indeed, continue.
Only one witness was ever called in the trial, which turned out to be a bit of a
laughingstock, ending almost as soon as it saw the inside of a courtroom, but the
brouhaha surrounding The Romans lasted for nearly a year and a half
until March
1982. Furthermore, though the prosecution of Michael Bogdanov was abandoned,
Helen Freshwater reports that by the end of the trial the judge had found that:
the 1956 Sexual Offences Act […] could be applied to dramatic
performance. [Justice] Staughton s ruling clearly went against the spirit
and intention of the 1968 Theatres Act, overturning assurances given by
then Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, and Home Office representatives that
there would be no private prosecutions of theatres and that the Sexual
Offences Act would not be applicable to the theatre.377
In other words, though many in the entertainment business thought it absurd that Mrs.
Whitehouse had sued a theatre as though it had committed a sex crime, the British
justice system left open the possibility that similar suits might, in the future, be brought
against similar defendants. The jurist, in this case, was decidedly not amused. I am less
interested, however, in the attempted censorship of The Romans or in the possible
censorship of future theatre in Britain than I am in the fact that, though Brenton places
the rape in his play next to numerous other acts of violence and even genocide, many
376
Lawson 10.
Helen Freshwater, Theatre Censorship in Britain: Silencing, Censure and Suppression, (Basingstoke,
Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 93. My emphasis.
377
151
audience members understood the male/male rape in act one as equivalent to
male/male eroticism.378
Mark Lawson reports that in rehearsals for The Romans, Sir Peter Hall suggested
to the director and the playwright that if, perhaps, the rape were moved upstage
behind a tree, they might have a succès de scandale, but eventually all agreed that to
place the violation offstage would de-emphasize the violence of the rape and, instead,
work to eroticize the event.379 Whether or not Hall, Brenton, and Bogdanov were correct
in their understandings of eroticism and violence onstage, their decision to stage the
rape in full view of the audience was plainly an effort to de-eroticize the rape, to make
the event about horror rather than sex. ”renton s particular ethical stance was that
what you must never do is pretend, by stagecraft sleight of hand, that the cruelty is not
as bad as it is. […] You must not sell human suffering short.
380
But Sir Horace, Geoffrey
Seaton, and Mrs. Whitehouse did not see human suffering on the stage of the National.
What they saw was a homosexual sex act
gross indecency
indeed what they saw was
a criminalized homosexual sex act.
Playwright Mark Ravenhill, while promoting his 2001 epic Mother Clap’s Molly
House, lamented that despite the increased frequency of male/male sex on ”ritain s
stages, portrayals of sex between men have followed a fairly consistent pattern: one of
violence and humiliation; rape rather than consensual sex; one man penetrating another
as the ultimate power game. Erotic anality, in other words, is frequently represented as
identical to violent anality. It's enough to give sodomy a bad name, Ravenhill
The events of this case of censorship, ticket sales, and sodomy, are rather famous, and they have been
well detailed by a few theatre historians. I would direct readers who are interested in reading this tale
from theatre history toward ”ernard Weiner s
piece The Romans in Britain Controversy in TDR 25,
Mark Lawson s Passion Play for the Guardian in
, and Helen Freshwater s chapter Mary
Whitehouse, The Romans in Britain, and the Rape of Our Senses in her
book Theatre Censorship in
Britain.
378
379
Lawson 10.
380
Brenton, preface to Plays: 2, x.
152
quipped in the Guardian.381 Ravenhill is certainly correct about the last two decades of
”ritish theatre. From “nthony Neilson s Penetrator
to Sarah Kane s Cleansed
and Caryl Churchill s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (2006)
which figures the
relationship of the United States to the UK as a violent sexual affair between two men
playwrights in the UK have tended to represent sex between men as immanently
violent. Ravenhill s own output has not represented male/male sex as a particularly
pleasurable activity either: the sexually active men in Shopping and Fucking (1996), Faust
(Is Dead) (1997), Sleeping Around (1998), Some Explicit Polaroids (1998), and Mother Clap’s
Molly House (2001) often find sex with other men to be a painful experience; it is
frequently bloody and occasionally even deadly.382
If, however, male/male sexual activity is frequently, even primarily, represented
as violent and linked more closely to power than to erotics (and this is true, I think of
the United Sates as much as it is true of the UK383), The Romans in Britain is a case of an
extremely violent scene about power and humiliation that its audience interpreted as a
sequence with the potential to titillate. And this is true not only of Mrs. Whitehouse and
her colleagues in the anti-sex crusade; as I noted earlier, Sir Peter Hall met with Brenton
and ”ogdanov precisely to discuss the problem of the play s possible erotic
misinterpretation. I am arguing here that male/male sex and male/male rape have
attained a kind of identity where not only does sex read as violence, as Ravenhill
argues, but where sexual violence cannot help but read as erotic. For anti-gay audience
members such as Whitehouse or the protesters from the British National Front
male/male rape and male/male erotics look the same
381
I m talking about men being so
Mark Ravenhill, The ”ottom Line, Guardian 20 Jun 2001, 15.
See Mark Ravenhill, Handbag, in Plays: 1, (London: Methuen, 2001), 225-6, as well as Mother Clap’s Molly
House, (London: Methuen, 2001), especially pp. 86 and 95. See also Hilary Fannin, Stephen Greenhorn,
Abi Morgan, and Mark Ravenhill, Sleeping Around, (London: Methuen, 1998), 36.
382
383
I am thinking, here, of Ira Levin s Deathtrap (1978) in particular.
153
stimulated by the play that they will commit attacks on young boys. Male/male rape is
always already eroticized because sex between men is here assumed to be essentially
predatory or violent.
That Which Is Unseemly: Male/Male Rape and Eroticism384
One of the reasons the rape in The Romans is so fascinating, however, is that the
sequence is eroticized as written. The scene begins with three nude young men having
finished a swim. But it is clear from the moment the three soldiers walk out of the
woods that the third soldier, unlike his companions, is thinking not only about
swimming but about sex:
FIRST SOLDIER.
Three wogs.
A silence.
SECOND SOLDIER.
THIRD SOLDIER.
FIRST SOLDIER.
What are they, d you know?
A wog is a wog.
Not Trinovante. Not round here.
THIRD SOLDIER.
Pretty arses. Give em something.
The SOLDIERS laugh.385
The soldiers quickly kill or dispose of two of the men, and when they do, the third
soldier again speaks about the young men as sexual objects what a waste of pretty
arse.
386
Later, while anally penetrating Marban, the third soldier tells his friend to
make him look pretty and asks him to give us a kiss. The second soldier makes
more than one reference to his friend s deviant behavior
I wonder about you
sometimes, he says, while he helps him rape the priest and he calls him a Greek and
a veteran of Persia.
384
From a different
385
Brenton, Romans, 30.
386
Brenton, Romans, 33.
387
Brenton, Romans, 34-5.
387
The second soldier, as I said before, takes the time to caress the
Biblical
Romans; see Romans 1:27.
154
boy s body and face and, before he rapes him, kisses him on the mouth. No matter how
violently the rapists treat their victim, then, these rapes are also sex acts for the two
soldiers, and Brenton takes care to indicate the erotic quality of rape for both rapists in
The Romans
funny little ways that he picked up in Persia. Mrs. Whitehouse and
company cannot, then, be completely blamed for seeing homosexuality where
Brenton says they ought to have seen violence. The erotics are already deeply
embedded within the rape Brenton stages.
Where ”renton s play differs from all of the texts I have mentioned thus far in
Enter the Man is that The Romans in Britain explicitly places male/male rape and the
hydraulic sexuality that attends it within a history of power relations that might appear
to be nonsexualized. After the third soldier loses his erection and cannot continue to
rape Marban, he demands that his companion keep quiet about the day s events.
Marcus Clavius, he tells his friend, I do not want to hear, one night out drinking,
back home, years from now, on a lovely evening, surrounded by admirers, sons. I do
not want to hear
of me not getting it up a ”ritish arseful of piles. Right? […] I know
how rumours start.
388
The soldier s anxiety is unrelated to the gender of his victim but
concerned, rather, with his own penetrative abilities. His failure to execute an activity
that would (performatively) render him male makes his masculinity suspect, and he
would prefer not to have his cocksmanship impugned in front of his sons.389 Brenton is
careful to remind his audience of the power differential between the second soldier and
Marban, as well. After the third soldier leaves to take his swim in the Thames, the
second soldier pulls a lump of phlegm from Marban s nose and tells him he s saved his
life
388
“ legionary saved your life, nig nog. Nephew of a slave. Now, a citizen, upon my
Brenton, Romans, 36.
“ little nod to Paddy Chayefsky s Network (1976), a text unrelated to male/male sexual violence but one
close to my heart.
389
155
discharge. […]My discharge, upon a little bit of bronze
Citizen .
390
The soldier says
this right before he rapes him for the second time, and in this way Brenton directly links
the sexual violation of the young man to the rapist s own pleasure at becoming a
Roman citizen. The playwright, in other words, locates the rape of the young Celt not
within a context of a gay male sexual culture but as a component of a normalized erotic
economy of power in which the terms of masculinity, citizenship, and male homosocial
belonging are insistently and anxiously circulated. The male/male rape in The Romans in
Britain concretizes the always sexualized (but invisibly so) exchanges in the economy of
authority, masculinity, and nationhood that inhere in ostensibly heterosexual power
relations. It does this by reminding its audience that although the two soldiers who rape
the young man in the play have eroticized their violent encounter, that eroticization is
simply a smaller component of their contemporary political and sexual relations,
relations that we might anachronistically dub heterosexual but which might more
accurately be described simply as normative.
Viewing Positions: Identity and Victimage
Adapting a phrase from Kaja Silverman, I noted in the last chapter the distancing
strategy of going behind the rapist, of claiming to have invented the line squeal like a
pig as a way of disclaiming male/male rape and avoiding an identification with a rape
victim. I wish now to argue that accusing the actors in The Romans in Britain of
sodomitical sex works as a similar strategy of disavowal. In the small section that
follows, I will be examining Mrs. Whitehouse s view of the play critically. I wish to be
clear, however, about the purpose of this project. The standard view of Whitehouse s
attack on the play in 1980 is now one that consists mostly of derision. In 2006 Michael
”illington remarked that ever since Mary Whitehouse s ludicrous private prosecution
years ago, Howard ”renton s play has been virtually lost to the professional stage,
390
Brenton, Romans, 37.
156
mocking, as well, her prurient preoccupation with simulated sodomy.
391
Simon
Fanshawe in the London Times referred to her as the wicked witch of censorship,
392
Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail condescendingly but humorously noted that Dear old
Mrs Whitehouse never actually saw
393
The Romans, and Paul Taylor in the Independent
confessed that he would find it a pleasure to vex Mrs Whitehouse s ghost.
394
It is quite
easy, and indeed now commonplace, to view Whitehouse s approach to the play as a
laughably old-fashioned relic of Thatcher-era Britain. Whitehouse necessarily emerges
from an analysis as foolish if the terms of inquiry are restricted to censorship and
artistic freedom. I propose, instead to take Mrs. Whitehouse seriously and examine her
position from the point of view of audience identificatory practices. Her response to the
play, homophobic and sex-negative though it surely is, has been documented in some
detail, and can therefore illuminate the way some, though certainly not all, viewers saw
the male/male rape in The Romans in Britain.
The arguments of Sir Horace, Mr. Seaton, and Mrs. Whitehouse indicate that they
have taken up an identificatory position outside of the male/male rape. The Romans
itself accuses its viewers of rape
the metaphoric rape of Ulster by the British
government and its citizenry. Audience members equating male/male rape to
male/male sexuality work, then, to distance themselves from their own culpability in a
metaphoric rape by ascribing (sexual) deviance to a group of actors and a theatre
director and not to themselves. For Mrs. Whitehouse and co., the rape in The Romans in
Britain was not a rape at all, not even a representation of a rape. Although Brenton is
careful to indicate the (hetero)normativity
perhaps even the banality
of the pleasure
Michael ”illington, Parable for the Troubles That Generates More Heat than Light The Romans in
”ritain, Guardian 9 Feb 2006, 38.
391
392
Simon Fanshawe, When ”ritons Were Revolting, Times (London) 4 Feb 2006, 18.
393
Quentin Letts, Romans? It s Still No Holiday, Daily Mail (London) 10 Feb 2006, 53.
394
Paul Taylor, review of The Romans in Britain [Crucible Theatre], Independent (London) 10 Feb 2006, 35.
157
that the Romans take in sexually abusing their male victims, and though he similarly
takes pains to indicate the absolute anguish suffered by the young Celts (you will
remember that the young Celt with the stomach wound groans in agony throughout the
entirety of the rape sequence , Mrs. Whitehouse s suit changes completely the terms
under which The Romans in Britain might have been evaluated as a representation of
violence, demanding instead that it be evaluated as a representation of sex, indeed as
sex itself. Her suit effectively goes behind the male/male rape in the play, dismantling the
play s power as a critique of imperialism by transforming a rape into pleasurable sexual
activity.
When Mrs. Whitehouse imagines the possibility of men being so stimulated by
the play that they will commit attacks on young boys, she also envisions an
identification with the Roman soldier, the perpetrator of the rape. Whitehouse has no
capacity to imagine that an audience member
homosexual or heterosexual
might
identify with the rape victim in the scene: the identificatory practice she envisions, in
fact, is one that sees the rapist as the only possible surrogate for the audience. The play s
original poster imagined audience identification similarly, emphasizing
eroticizing
indeed,
the phallic qualities of the Roman soldier s bayoneted machine gun.395
What Whitehouse articulates is a disavowal of the rape victim. She asserts that the act of
rape is a homosexual sex act and not an act of violence; in this way she forecloses
identification with the rape victim. This way of seeing transforms the rape from an act
of power or violence
in which one person violates and the other is victimized
into a
sex act, and there is no victim in a consensual homosexual sex act. Or rather, because
One might compare the Romans in Britain poster (http://www.ntposters.org.uk/image/65392/romans-inbritain-the) with contemporary homoerotic artwork by the artist Tom of Finland, which had gained an
enormous following by the late 1970s. See, for example,
http //www.queermusicheritage.us/M“R
/finland.jpg. See also J. Halberstam s discussion on the
eroticization of Nazi imagery in her chapter The Killer in Me Is the Killer in You Homosexuality and
Fascism in The Queer Art of Failure, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 147-72.
395
158
this particular homosexual sex act (public sex) has been criminalized by statute, its
victims are understood as British society at large, those who could potentially, even
accidentally, witness an act of sex in a public place. Mrs. Whitehouse transforms a
fictional rape scenario in which a fictional ancient Briton is victimized into a real-world
scenario in which it is she who has been victimized.
The consequences of this disidentification are profound. By failing to identify
with the victim of the rape in The Romans, Whitehouse obviously fails, as well, to
identify with the victims of the metaphorical rape of British imperialism. She assumes,
in fact, that such an identification is an impossibility. For Brenton, audience
identification with the victims in the play is precisely the goal. The greatest difficulty I
had when I began to try to write the play is a weighty matter, the playwright said in
It was what to do about a sense of overwhelming sorrow, a grief for the nameless
dead, with which the material of the play is drenched. This is, itself, difficult to
express.
396
”renton has a character imagine just such an identification in the play s
penultimate scene
The weapons. I want to throw then down. / “nd reach down. To
the faces. Hold the burnt heads in my hands and pull them up. The bodies out of the
earth. Hold them against me. / Their bones of peat and water and mud. And work them
back into life.
397
This is one of the final images of the play, and it is a poetic rendering
of the task of the playwright, to work the nameless dead back to life and hold their
bodies against his own.
Brenton implores his audience to identify with the victim of a rape. If the viewer,
however, identifies with the rapist, the entire idea of the play crumbles: imperialism
does not victimize, and the victim is no victim at all. It is this perspective on the play
that has triumphed. Whitehouse set the terms for discussion of The Romans in Britain,
396
Brenton, preface to Plays: 2, x.
397
Brenton, Romans, 90.
159
and any examination of the play turns first to her lawsuit and only secondarily to
”renton s content this was borne out in every single review of the play s
the Crucible Theatre. Even ”ernard Weiner s
revival at
discussion of the Romans scandal in
TDR approaches the play through an identification with the rapist and an objectification
of the rape victim. The first page of the TDR article presents its readers with an image of
a Celtic man s bare buttocks, his face only in profile (Figure 2). Identification with this
young man is foreclosed by the image. Instead we are invited (as scholars, no less) to
take the position of the rapist as he judges the pretty arse of the young Celt whom he
is about to violate. The profound gap between the playwright s own goals for his text
and the way both Whitehouse and her critics responded to the images he crafted
illustrates the enormous difficulty so many people have identifying with male/male
rape victims in 1980 as now.
Keeping Our Distance
In the history of representations of male/male rape, The Romans in Britain is an
extraordinary entry. One of the arguments of this chapter has been that Brenton
carefully and uniquely places male/male rape in the context of normative,
heterosexualized power dynamics. I have noted, as well, the playwright s profound
sympathy and sorrow for the rape victim in his play. This, too, makes The Romans
exceptional. In certain key ways, however, ”renton s play functions similarly to other
iterations of the male/male rape trope. The argument of Enter the Man is that by
disarticulating the components of male/male rape representations we can see more
clearly how the trope functions in our culture. If representations of male/male rape do
not all function in the same manner
and that they do not is inarguable
there are,
however, aspects of the trope that have attained a kind of longevity, that have become
standard. As we examine the history of these representations, patterns emerge.
Standard aspects of the male/male rape trope, such as metaphor and distance will be, as
Homi Bhabha might say, anxiously repeated at the movies in the 1990s, and they will
160
Figure 2: Frontispiece from ”ernard Weiner s TDR
s article describing the Romans
in Britain controversy
work, in fact, to make later representations of male/male rape into powerful cultural
signifiers, freighted with meaning.398
I noted in the introduction that the word rape is frequently used to describe
something that is neither sexual nor violent. Recently, for example, rock musician
Courtney Love accused the makers of the film The Muppets of raping the memory of
her husband Kurt Cobain by covering the Nirvana song Smells like Teen Spirit with a
muppet flair.399 And actress Kim Novak went as far as to take out a full-page
advertisement in Variety featuring the text I want to report a rape. I feel as if my body
398
See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (New York: Routledge, 1994), 75.
“aron Couch, Jack ”lack Slams Courtney Love over “ttack on Muppets Nirvana Cover, Hollywood
Reporter 15 Mar 2012, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/muppets-nirvana-cover-jack-blackcourtney-love-300790 (accessed 17 Mar 2012).
399
161
or, at least my body of work
has been violated by the movie, The Artist.
400
Novak was
taking issue with the composer Ludovic Bource, whose score for The Artist quotes from
”ernard Hermann s score for
s Vertigo. In both of these instances from the 2011
movie-awards season nothing even remotely comparable to an act of rape occurred.
These two performers deploy rape as a metaphor; they are attempting to communicate
the depth of injury and pain that they feel at an inappropriate or frivolous use of music
that means a great deal to them. It is incredibly important, however, to note that each of
these performers utilizes a rape metaphor in order to garner an impassioned response
to musical quotation, an act manifestly unrelated to the violence, humiliation, and
trauma associated with actually having been victimized by rape.
In the instances above, a perceived injury that is much less powerful than rape is
described as a rape in order to intensify our response to the damage done. In The
Romans in Britain
as in Fortune and Men’s Eyes and in the films of Deliverance and
Midnight Cowboy
rape also functions as a metaphor, but in these cases for something
larger, a more diffuse evil that rape is asked to concretize through metonymic
substitution. In The Romans rape stands in for the despoiling of the land, for cultural
destruction, for the end of an entire way of life. Brenton chooses rape as a
representation of the suffering caused by the evils of imperialism. It is important to
note, however, that whether rape is either deflated Love and Novak or inflated
(Brenton) through rhetorical use, the deployment of rape as a metaphor always fails to
address the actual responses, physical, emotional, and psychic, felt by victims of rape in
the real world. The use of rape as a metaphor works, instead, continually to foreclose a
discussion of rape itself and to deflect attention toward an impassioned response to
something other than rape.
Gregg Kilday, Kim Novak Cries Rape over The Artist s Use of Music from Vertigo, Hollywood
Reporter 9 Jan 2012, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/the-artist-kim-novak-rape-vertigo-279690
(accessed 20 Jan 2012).
400
162
The Romans also places rape at a distance from its audience. In chapter one, we
saw that Fortune and Men’s Eyes figured male/male rape as an act of violence removed
from the real lives of the play s audiences. In Fortune and its contemporaries, male/male
rape is restricted to the prison system; the young man who enters the correctional
facility has no understanding of the politics of sexual humiliation at work in the world
of the carceral. In these dramas, male/male rape is a result of the isolation inherent to
imprisonment, and it is represented as unrelated to the world outside of the prison s
walls. Deliverance and Midnight Cowboy, too, keep male/male rape at a distance. Bobby
and Ed are threatened with rape in a location far from their own suburban lives, and Joe
Buck is raped
if he is raped
in a backwoods town by a group of unnamed
Southerners. Both James Dickey and John Boorman represent the threat of rape as
though it emerges from the wilds of the forest; rape is a kind of natural force,
attributable to chthonic powers and impossible to imagine in the civilized
environment of Atlanta. John Schlesinger represents rape as a part of a nightmare
sequence, almost wholly contained by the past and only allowed into the present as an
echo or traumatic irruption. In each of these narratives, male/male rape is a kind of
mystical or spiritual haunting, a specter that circulates outside of what passes for
civilization and works to form the very limits of the civilized.
Howard Brenton imagines what the British are doing in Ulster as a metaphorical
rape, but he figures the Romans destruction of the Celts as an actual rape, represented in
vivid detail. Though the audience watches the representation of male/male rape in the
present, Brenton places male/male rape in the past. He locates its source in a primitive
mode of behavior, distancing the act from modern civilization.
401
As I noted when I
described the play s sequence of violation, ”renton further distances the act of
David Rudkin s superb epic drama The Sons of Light (1977) also contains scenes of male/male rape.
These take place on an island outlying Scotland, a location which Rudkin explicitly indicates is removed
from civilization.
401
163
male/male rape from civilization by orientalizing it the rapist, you will remember, is
a veteran of Persia. In BC 54, Roman soldiers rape a nearly helpless young man, and
The Romans says that as imperialists we have not evolved very much in two thousand
years. ”ut in the play s figuration, we have evolved in at least one important way.
England may commit metaphoric rape on Northern Ireland, but the play relegates
actual male/male rape firmly in the past and in the East
and has no desire to
imagine the possibility of such violation in England s present.
Graham Ross-Cornes, the solicitor who saw The Romans in Britain as Mary
Whitehouse s proxy, was forced in court to admit that he couldn t be sure whether he
had seen a thumb or the tip of a penis while watching the actors in Howard ”renton s
play. He had been sitting ninety feet from the alleged act of gross indecency, much too
far to make a judgment with any accuracy.402 But The Romans in Britain works in its own
ways to place male/male rape at a remove. And if Mr. Ross-Cornes, in the very back
row, remained a discreet distance from the stage of the National Theatre, Mr. Brenton
allows the rest of his 1980 audience to maintain its own two-thousand-year distance
from male/male sexual violation. The Romans in Britain, however, is the last of its kind.
In the British theatre of the 1990s, we will see this distance evaporate, and male/male
rape will move from the wilderness toward the urban, from a forgotten past in the
direction of an extremely troubled present, and from the isolated sphere of the prison
into our very homes.
402
Lawson 10.
164
CHAPTER 6
THE WAY THINGS ARE
I’ve always had you down as a right nasty little cunt underneath. Like, all
sweetness and light to your face, and then as nasty as can be in the real world.
“lso, you’re not very bright, and I think you only hang around Sid all the time
because you want his cock up your arse. You know? To be frank.
Baby, Mojo403
”ut when you look into the eyes of doctors an’ screws, raw fuckin’ insanity. Good
’as waved the white flag of surrender while evil pins ya to the floor an’ sticks a
needle up ya arse. You’d probably like that…
Ray, Drummers404
Here, you’ll like this. I saw, one time, a group of guys, at Pirbright, get another
lad, a younger lad no listen to this, this is right up your street. They get him.
Hold him down. Get a broom handle. Fucking push it, right up his rectum. Right
up there. […] And we all watched that. Joined in. That was funny, to be fair. It
did feel funny. I imagine it’s the same kind of feeling, is it?
Danny, Motortown405
Rape me. / Is it possible?
B / M, Crave406
David Rudkin s
play The Triumph of Death, a dark meditation on Christianity and
violence, contains an extraordinary and shocking image. In a segment exploring the
Children s Crusade of the thirteenth century, a figure recalling Pope Innocent III
describes the numerous dead and captured he then discovers a boy skeleton,
hanging in a tree. The audience sees the skeleton clearly as a human figure because it is
403
Jez Butterworth, Mojo, (London: Nick Hern Books, 1996), 70.
404
Simon Bennett, Drummers, (London: Nick Hern Books, 1999), 47.
405
Simon Stephens, Motortown, (London: Methuen, 2006), 65.
406
Sarah Kane, Crave, in Complete Plays, (London: Methuen, 2001), 199.
165
covered in golden armor. Rudkin specifies that the skeleton has been anally impaled
by a spear. The Pope-figure seems grieved, haunted, but impressed as he speaks to the
skeleton
Some long while this must take, and skill. Drive this sharp iron tip way up in
you till out again between your shoulderblades and yet not puncture any vital organ.
Liver, lung, heart. Here s a guard must live on his post three days.
407
Rudkin s Pope-
figure describes a medieval version of impalement, a torture method that
by avoiding
the vital organs did not kill its victims immediately, leaving them alive to suffer, some
as long as three days.408
Seventeen years after Rudkin s play, at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs,
audiences attending Sarah Kane s third play heard a similar torture described in
.
In Cleansed’s fourth scene, a young man named Carl is beaten until he is unconscious in
the gymnasium of a university. “fter the beating, Tinker, Carl s torturer, gently wakes
his victim up, and as the young man opens his eyes, the torture begins anew.409 First,
Tinker describes what he will do to Carl:
TINKER.
There s a vertical passage through your body, a straight line
through which an object can pass without immediately killing you.
Starts here.
(He touches CARL’s anus.)
CARL.
407
(Stiffens with fear.)
David Rudkin, The Triumph of Death, (London: Eyre Methuen, 1988), 7.
Rudkin s play is not quite a history play, and he makes no claims to historical accuracy. The so-called
Children s Crusade of
was probably not really a crusade of children at all, and the torture-method
described was likely not popularized until the reign of Vlad Țepe;, The Impaler, who conquered much of
the Ottoman Empire in the middle of the fifteenth century, two hundred years later. See Peter Raedts,
The Children s Crusade of
, Journal of Medieval History 3.4 (1977): 279-323.
408
In In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, London Faber and Faber,
, “leks Sierz offers that the
play s sadist is named after [Jack Tinker,] the Daily Mail critic who d led the charge against Blasted. See p.
113.
409
166
TINKER.
Can take a pole, push it up here, avoiding all major organs, until it
emerges here.
(He touches CARL’s right shoulder.)
Die eventually of course. From starvation if nothing else gets you first.410
Kane s script then directs that
CARL
s trousers are pushed down and a pole is pushed a
few inches up his anus. With the pole partially inside of Carl s body, Tinker subjects
Carl to a series of questions
the standard image of the torturer as interrogator
asking
him for the name of his lover. Carl capitulates in a little over a minute, begging for his
life. Tinker does not kill Carl, and after the interrogation Kane directs that the pole is
removed.
411
As in The Triumph of Death, this rape sequence in Cleansed is one of many scenes
of torture. Carl undergoes a slow progression of torments throughout the play: his
tongue, for example, is bloodily removed with a pair of scissors, and as the play
continues Tinker eventually cuts off both Carl s hands and his feet. The anal rape in
scene four is, therefore, only one item in a horrifying litany of tortures to which the
bodies in Cleansed are subjected. Kane s play is, in many ways, a play about torture, and
in the 1990s, the addition of male/male sexual violation to onstage torture sequences
became frequent if not de rigueur. In the 1990s, when anal impalement was, once again,
a practice made spectacularly visible via global newsmedia, the male/male rape in
Cleansed was no more or less than a representation of a real event, and its inclusion in a
representation of torture had become, in fact, necessary.412
410
Sarah Kane, Cleansed, in Complete Plays, (London: Methuen, 2001), 116.
411
Kane, Cleansed, 117.
Aleks Sierz notes that the impalement scene was suggested to Kane by reports from the Bosnian war.
Scenes of impalement from the ethnic cleansing and mass rape of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian armed
forces, however, are themselves linked in Serbian cultural poetics to the medieval practice of impalement
Rudkin describes in The Triumph of Death. See Lynda E. ”oose, Crossing the River Drina ”osnian Rape
Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
28.1 (2002): 71-96.
412
167
This chapter will necessarily continue in a gruesome vein, as we turn our
attention to the British drama of the 1990s. Images of male/male rape proliferated on
British stages in this decade, and I will discuss many of the important playwrights from
this period, but I want first to chart a shift in location. The printed playtext of The
Triumph of Death begins with the epigram The past is another country. The past is not
another country. Rudkin s play
which pre-dates Cleansed by nearly two decades
represents a practice of male/male sexual violation from the thirteenth century. Just as
Howard Brenton did with his Romans in Britain
Rudkin intends his images of violence
in general and male/male sexual violation in particular to comment on British culture in
the early 1980s. In order to achieve this critique of his contemporaries, Rudkin, like
Brenton, uses scenes of male/male rape, drawing connections with the present, but
locating these images of sexual violation in the past, in settings far removed from the
present.
The work of Sarah Kane and her contemporaries in Britain not only brings
male/male rape alarmingly into the present day, but directly into the spaces in which
we live. Brenton and Rudkin had the audacity to represent male/male rape on stage in
the late 1970s and early 1980s, but they constructed a certain amount of distance
between such violation and the audiences witnessing it. Playgoers might have been able
to console themselves that such things happened only in prisons or forests, in secluded
areas far removed from civilization, in the distant pasts of the Roman conquest, or the
dark period of the medieval era. Kane and her contemporaries provided their audiences
with no such comfort. The male/male rapes in their plays take place in dormitories, in
seedy apartment complexes, in expensive hotel rooms, in middle-class houses. In British
drama of the 1990s, male/male rape finds its way into the home.
Generic Taxonomies: the 1990s on British Stages
There was something different about new British theatre in the 1990s. Most summations
of this period in ”ritish drama contain phrases such as by the mid-90s, a divergent
168
group of young writers had emerged whose plays addressed violence and sexuality in
an unflinching manner,
413
or the
s wave of ”ritish dramatists was collectively
characterized by a more widespread emphasis on challenging physical and verbal
immediacy, and bleak (arguably nihilistic) observations of social decay, severed
isolation and degradation into aimlessness.
414
Even more frequently, critics simply opt
to catalog the atrocities contained in a production, so that one reads descriptions such
as this one
a play rich with grotesque cruelty in the form of torture, sodomy,
masturbation, corpses (most particularly that of an infant child), and overt sexual
abuse,
415
(Kane s Blasted, 1995); or the play takes its paranoid schizophrenic of a
protagonist through a litany of matricide, rape and child murder,
416
(Bernard-Marie
Koltès s Roberto Zucco, 1997); or among its effects were a gay gang-rape of a minor, lots
of drugs, thieving and prostitution, as well as
middle-class feelings
and this really was an outrage to British
an incident of oral sex in Harvey Nichols,
417
(Mark Ravenhill s
Shopping and Fucking, 1996). I wish first to note (with a nod to Martin Crimp) that
compiling a list of quote outrage unquote after quote outrage unquote after quote
outrage unquote is a technique that cleverly manages to avoid doing the work of the
critic.418 A catalog of atrocities attempts to function as a series of answers or facts
what it is not is an exploration of a set of questions, dramaturgical, aesthetic, or ethical.
To the contrary, this technique of reportage enables a critic, either popular or academic,
Ken Urban, “n Ethics of Catastrophe the Theatre of Sarah Kane, PAJ: a Journal of Performance and Art
69 (2001): 37.
413
414
David Ian Rabey, English Drama since 1940, (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2003), 192.
415
Peter Zazzali, The ”rutality of Redemption, PAJ: a Journal of Performance and Art 91 (2009): 124.
Paul Taylor, A Bleak Vision of Humanity: Roberto Zucco, RSC Other Place, Stratford-upon-“von,
Independent (London)
Nov
, . Koltès s play was first produced in Germany in
after the
playwright s death. The year listed above is the date of its first production in London.
416
417
John Walsh, Shakespeare and F*%!ing, Independent (London) 3 Dec 2011, 20.
418
Martin Crimp, Attempts on Her Life, in Crimp: Plays 2, (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 244.
169
to acknowledge, first, a sort of discomfort with the material while placing her- or
himself at a distance from the activities described.
For a more nuanced portrait of British playwriting in the 1990s, we might turn to
David Edgar, who offered in 2007 that:
The explosion of new writing in the mid-nineties the movement known,
variously, as the Bratpack, in-yer-face theatre, smack and spunk theatre,
the New Brutalism and, on the other side of the channel, new European
drama
put theatre up there with pop, fashion, fine art419 and food as the
fifth leg of the new Cool Britannia, and not for revivals of [Lope] de Vega
or deconstructions of Measure for Measure.420
For Edgar, what was new about this theatrical explosion was that writing and writers
had become important in the theatre once again and that, in Britain, theatre itself had
returned to popularity. In contrast, theatre-going achieved no comparable resurgence of
popularity in the United States during the 1990s.
“leks Sierz s oft-quoted In-Yer-Face Theatre (2000) is still the standard text on this
period. His book is a project of legitimation intending both to schematize and take
seriously a body of theatrical output much like Martin Esslin s The Theatre of the Absurd
had intended to do for Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet forty years earlier. The generic
classification of dramatists as different as Tracy Letts, Patrick Marber, Martin
McDonagh, Martin Crimp, Phyllis Nagy, and Jez Butterworth together may, in
hindsight, seem precipitate (as grouping Genet, Pinter, and Havel perhaps now seems
In fine art, the so-called Young British Artists or YBAs (including Damien Hirst, Sam Taylor-Wood,
Tracy Emin, and Henry Bond) make an interesting parallel with the New Brutalists in theatre. Their work
addresses themes similar to the New Brutalists, values similar aesthetics, makes use of nontraditional
spaces, covers a similar time period in Britain, exploded onto the art scene in a similar manner, and was
canonized in a similar (exceedingly short) amount of time.
419
David Edgar, Secretary of the Times, Irish Pages 4.2 (2007): 109. Though not one to which I am
personally partial, blood and sperm plays seems also to have been a favorite designation of many
people.
420
170
so many years after Esslin s book , and numerous critics following Sierz, notably Janelle
Reinelt, have attempted to dismantle the taxonomy he put in place in 2000.421 But
something really was different. As early as 1996, Benedict Nightingale referred to
Shopping and Fucking as no mere exercise in titillation but the latest contribution to a
growing genre, the drama of disenchantment, the theatre of urban ennui.
422
By 2007,
when David Edgar said that this new theatre was characterised by being largely about
young people, possessed of a cool and sheeny style, and containing the representation
of explicit sex, drug-use and violence, he referred to a group of plays that had become
widely recognizable qua genre.423 If some scholars have argued that In-Yer-Face Theatre
too easily creates divisions between older playwrights and younger playwrights, Sierz
himself describes the longstanding tradition of explicit sexuality and violence in British
theatre so well that the works on which he chiefly focuses
Neilson, Sarah Kane, and Mark Ravenhill
the plays of Anthony
come to seem less like an aberration of the
1990s and more like the logical next step in a tradition moving from John Osborne and
Joe Orton to Edward Bond and David Edgar to Howard Brenton and Howard Barker.424
It is undeniable that this new genre claimed male/male rape as one of its
characteristic images. Even in plays where it isn t explicitly enacted onstage, male/male
sexual violation haunts plays such as Philip Ridley s The Pitchfork Disney (1991),
”utterworth s Mojo (1995), and Letts s Bug (1996); British theatre of the 1990s is hounded
Janelle Reinelt, Selective “ffinities ”ritish Playwrights at Work, Modern Drama 50.3 (2007): 305-45.
Several essays in the edited volume Sarah Kane in Context make the argument that Sarah Kane s work is
neither realistic nor concerned with urban ennui and therefore fits uneasily with the work of her
contemporaries. See Laurens de Vos and Graham Saunders, eds., Sarah Kane in Context, (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2010).
421
422
”enedict Nightingale, “ Four-Letter World, Times (London) 3 Oct 1996, F1.
423
Edgar 110.
I am thinking, in particular, of the first chapter of Sierz s book, which meticulously describes how
playwriting in the
s came into being. David Ian Rabey s British Drama since 1940 also charts this
progression as a natural one.
424
171
by the specter of male/male rape as a constant and ubiquitous possibility. In the
conclusion to Sierz s book, the critic notes that by
, in-yer-face theatre had become
a new orthodoxy. “udiences were no longer surprised by […] the insistent use of words
such as cunt , nor by scenes of anal rape or drug injection. Rawness, pain and
degradation became common means of representing the world.
425
By the end of the
millennium, the Guardian even playfully subtitled its review of Simon ”ennett s
Drummers
Michael ”illington Sees One Too Many Plays about Drugs and Rape.
The following section from the review s opening paragraph gives a good indication of
just how commonplace stage images of male/male rape had become by 1999:
In Simon Bennett's Drummers, premiered by Out of Joint at the Traverse,
we get [note the obligatory list of atrocities ] a tough, rasping gangland
argot, a good deal of shooting up of heroin and even incestuous male
rape. The play may shock the sheltered, but to anyone who has been going
to the British theatre for the past decade the world depicted is almost as
recognisable as that of the French windows and anyone-for-tennis?
dialogue of the early 50s.426
“lthough ”illington didn t particularly care for Drummers, he saw the visible influence
of Jez Butterworth's Mojo, Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking and, most especially,
of early ”ond, and noted that these are not bad masters to have. Male/male rape as a
topic had clearly come of age.
Sierz s In-Yer-Face Theatre focuses chiefly on the careers of three playwrights
Anthony Neilson, Sarah Kane, and Mark Ravenhill
as the most characteristic of 1990s
British drama. This chapter focuses on a single play from each dramatist, charting
differences between their uses of the stage image of male/male rape. Each of the plays is
425
Sierz 248.
Michael ”illington, Cheap Tricks Michael ”illington Sees One Too Many Plays about Drugs and
Rape, Guardian 17 Aug 1999, 13.
426
172
exemplary of the aesthetics and subject matter of British playwriting of the 1990s, and
each had its London premiere in the small space of the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs.
As a group, therefore, they capture the spirit of this time period in London, even if they
avoid easy points of identity among themselves. We will first examine Neilson s
Penetrator (1993), which premiered in London in 1994 and explored homosocial violence
and eroticism. This chapter then examines Sarah Kane s Blasted, which had its London
premiere in 1995, exactly one year to the day after Penetrator. Blasted has, of course, been
widely discussed in theatre studies and, indeed, in popular criticism, but almost no
attention whatsoever has been paid to the function of the male/male rape that is the
focal point of the play s second half. Finally, we will look at Mark Ravenhill s Shopping
and Fucking, a play about shopping and sex, certainly, but also a play that takes up
male/male rape as serious subject matter even as it makes use of the old trope of rape as
a metaphor.
I will not have been the first academic to argue that these three plays are much
more interesting than their reputations as shock-dramas would make them seem. My
argument, however, pushes this judgment further, exploring the male/male trope s
centrality to their narratives. Images of male/male rape, because of the enormous
influence of Neilson, Kane, and Ravenhill, become central to the imagistic system of
new British writing in the final decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of
the twenty-first. Although Michael Billington, other critics, and audiences alike may feel
as though they have all seen simply one play about rape too many, this chapter argues
that Neilson, Kane, and Ravenhill have represented male/male rape in fascinating and
ethically responsible ways. I will demonstrate that the work of these dramatists
enquires deeply and sensitively into the sexual violence prevalent on their
contemporary global scene, as well as the new, seemingly revitalized misogyny of late
twentieth-century masculinity. I also wish to represent their dramatic work as invested
173
for the first time in examining the causes of male/male sexual violence in ways little
scene in culture at large much less in the theatre.
Although playwrights of the 1990s were willing enough to write about
male/male sexual violation, and although their directors were daring enough to stage it,
few critics, popular or academic, have felt comfortable critically analyzing the use of the
male/male rape tropes they put to dramaturgical use. Instead of critical engagement,
rape is added to lists of so-called shock tactics as though it is just one more act of
violence that makes a play urgent or disaffected or antagonistic. “ recent review
of Blasted in PAJ is characteristic of critical treatment of the subject even among
academics. The critic notes that whether it was anal-rape, fellatio, or the cannibalizing
of an infant, Blasted is filled with unusual aggression and sexuality.
427
The critic s
gratuitous hyphen in anal-rape confesses to more than simple discomfort with the topic.
This neologism is plainly an attempt to be clear about what happens in the play, but the
critic s hyphen, in fact, asks its own series of questions. Is his compound noun anal-rape,
for example, something different from what we usually mean by the noun rape,
modifiable by an adjective? Is it, perhaps, not rape at all? A different noun altogether?
Does the critic intend to indicate that anal-rape, with its lack of gender signification, is a
descriptor for something that is always already gendered as an act that occurs between
men? As for the unusually aggressive and sexual activities listed by the critic
male/male rape, fellatio, and cannibalism
they sit uneasily beside one another. The
critic s list serves to equate the three acts, or at least to construct them as comparable,
but, in fact, it ought to be quite obvious that anal rape, fellatio, and cannibalism share
very few points of identity, either as stage images or as phenomenological experiences
in the real world.
427
Zazzali 124-6.
174
At the end of his book, Sierz refers to stage images of abuse, anal rape and
addiction as the metaphors typical of nineties drama, and he argues that although
the urgency of in-yer-face drama […] reached out and dragged audiences through ugly
scenes and deeply disturbing situations, its motives were not to titillate but to spread
the knowledge of what humans are capable of doing.428 The dissemination of
knowledge seems like a rather simple platitude to use as a descriptor for what these
absolutely shocking plays did, but if spreading the knowledge of the human capacity
for depravity was, indeed, one of their aims, it is indicative of the extraordinary shift in
the sensibility of this historical moment that many of the characters so typical of British
drama in the 1990s are capable of male/male rape. Male/male sexual violence in these
plays, however, does not function exclusively as a metaphor, and it has all along been
the argument of this document that a closer examination of the different dramaturgical
uses to which playwrights put such violence gives us a much clearer picture of how
embedded the idea of male/male sexual violence is in our culture, how playwrights
have used (and continue to use) this image to represent contemporary late-twentiethcentury phenomena, and how this image works to structure male homosocial relations
in general. We might further note that even at a time when images of genocidal violence
are disseminated via numerous media, images of male/male rape somehow remain
shocking, and although these playwrights pushed the boundaries of decency onstage
with their shocking images, it is the very power of this trope that makes Neilson, Kane,
and Ravenhill s stage images shocking. These writers did not invent the trope, nor are
they responsible for its continued power in Anglo-American society.
On the Playground: “nthony Neilson’s Penetrator
“nthony Neilson s Penetrator begins with the language of the sexually explicit. A young
man hitchhikes while the audience listens to a voice-over that consists of a
428
Sierz 239
175
pornographic narrative. The content of this story has obviously been designed for erotic
purposes, but Neilson indicates that the voice speaking the lines is deep and
subhuman. The voice-over says things like I got into the car. My cock was like a
truncheon in my jeans. I saw her looking at it, licking her sluttish red lips.
429
The
language becomes even more explicit as the described scenario moves forward, yet the
effect of the voice-over remains disturbing, unsettling. From the beginning, Neilson
explicitly links sexuality to violence: the young man in the narrative imagines his penis
as a truncheon in his jeans
a standard sexual metaphor
but at the end of this first
scene, a woman on the video moans Fuck my brains out and Fuck me until I
scream, and this becomes a cry of I want you to / I want you to shoot / I want you to
shoot me.
430
As Penetrator’s second scene begins, lights come up on a seedy apartment
where we find Max masturbating while watching a video. The phrase I want you to shoot
me reveals itself to be the beginning of the explicit but not-quite-sinister sentence I
want you to shoot me full of / your thick / of your thick salty cum. Neilson is
interested, here, in drawing connections between the ways that men think about sex
with women and the ways that they think about their bodies own potential for
violence. The play unambiguously asks whether murderous violence and hatred of
women is inescapably embedded in the relationship between men and heterosexual
pornography.
Scene two is characteristic Anthony Neilson and is the kind of scenario that was
to become exemplary of 1990s British theatre: a scene from contemporary life that
involves drug use, sexually charged and offensive language, disaffection, urban ennui,
and barely repressed anger. Max and his roommate Alan joke with one another, sit
down, pass around a joint, and then a silence settles on them before:
429
Anthony Neilson, Penetrator, in Plays: 1, (London: Methuen, 1998), 61.
430
Neilson 62.
176
ALAN.
MAX.
Good night last night?
(pause) Got stoned, got pissed, took some E, ate a kebab, puked up a
kebab, I presume it was the same one (Sighs.), went to the Archers, got
dragged along to Subsonic where I became as one with a faceless mass
of space cadets dancing to a three-hour-long song which sounded like
various international dialling tones and woke up at seven this morning
in Mikey s toilet in a puddle of piss with speed cramps.
A pause. Simultaneously:
ALAN/MAX.
It was a great night!!431
The two mostly discuss women, their various troubles with them, their contempt for
feminism, their excuses for using language demeaning to women. They also make
casual use of the standard vaguely homophobic remarks shared between males
Switch is for faggots. / Well, I m a faggot then. / I had my suspicions.
432
None of this
talk is particularly violent, although Max reports that a woman with whom he went on
a date told him that because I use the word cunt, I m a potential rapist.
433
These
characters, it would appear, have no ability to reflect upon their own assumptions of
masculinity, but their masculinist posing is so obvious and their boredom and lack of
power so pronounced that the play s critique of them is immediately apparent.
Penetrator as a play about urban ennui takes a new turn, however, when Tadge, the
hitchhiker from scene one, knocks on Max and “lan s door.
Tadge is an obviously disturbed young man. Neilson says that he looks quite
mad, and the scene is filled with long, uncomfortable stretches during which Tad
stares at Max or Alan or buries his face in his hands. He watches both of them, but
particularly “lan, in an unsettling way, asking about “lan s hair and weight. Tadge also
431
Neilson 67-8.
432
Neilson 69.
433
Neilson 70.
177
says that he believes his real father to be the USAmerican general Norman
Schwarzkopf. Why Tadge has arrived remains a mystery, and he asks very little of his
friends except for a place to stay and a cup of tea. “lan attributes Tadge s strange
behavior to the fact that he s been in the military, arguing that he s been totally
brainwashed! He s been out there learning to kill people! “lan has little sympathy for
Tadge s clearly troubled state his emphatic position is that when you join the Army
you forfeit your right to be treated as a human being!
434
Max disagrees with “lan s
attitude toward Tadge, but, significantly, Max s defense of Tadge is in fundamental
agreement with “lan s anti-military principles. Look, he says. It was a fucking insane
thing to do I agree
but there were many reasons why he joined up and he s been
discharged now and he s obviously a bit fucked-up about this news. He s our friend.
435
Max and “lan s fears about the longterm effects of military conscription become
justified when Tadge finally tells the pair that he s in trouble and that the
Penetrators are following him.
Penetrators? Max asks if they are an undercover unit, but Tadge shakes his head
and, without preface, explains. They stick things up you, he tells his friends. Up
your arse
“ll sorts of things. I found out about them and they kept me in this …
black room, it was a … just a black room. They drugged me. I never saw
their faces. They d bring me round every now and then so they could do
more things to me. It must have been weeks. I don t know how long.
Maybe months. […] Three of them came this time. They had a wooden
pole. They were going to stick it up me.436
434
Neilson 81.
435
Neilson 81-2.
436
Neilson 85.
178
The men are stunned, of course, and next Tadge explains how he escaped. Or, rather,
instead of relating the story of his escape, Tadge is menacing enough that when he
insists, the men agree to re-enact Tadge s escape physically, a scenario that ends as
Tadge mimes beating his rapist (enacted by Alan) until he is unconscious. The reenactment is mimetically if not actually violent, and Alan is terrified.
Up until this point, Penetrator is a play that follows the standard aspect of the
male/male rape trope that I described at the beginning of this chapter. Sexual violence
between men has often been represented as something that happens somewhere else,
outside of civilization. In Penetrator, Alan locates male/male sexual violence in the
military, vaguely saying that he s heard stories like that before. We don t know half of
what goes on in these places.
437
Neilson literalizes the movement of rape into civil
society: in the person of Tadge, rape is transported from the barracks directly into the
homes of these men. Civilization is no longer safe.438
Alan and Max, however, have trouble believing Tadge s story about gang rape
and black rooms. Feeling slightly safer as Tadge goes to lie down, the men discuss the
situation in a surprisingly calm manner:
MAX.
Maybe there s some truth in this Penetrator thing.
ALAN.
MAX.
Or an actual rape. It s bound to happen.
ALAN.
MAX.
(nods) An initiation thing.
(nods Maybe it wasn t even rape. Maybe he consented.
(pause Consented? I can t see it myself. Pause.) But it might have
been something less serious than rape…
ALAN.
(nods) In the showers, an incident, that he s blown up in his mind.
Pause. They smile.
437
Neilson 85.
438
Cf. both Simon ”ennett s Drummers and Simon Stephens Motortown.
179
There s a joke in there somewhere.439
The dialogue is callous, of course, even flippant. Max and Alan theorize that
penetration is something Tadge desires, a taboo fantasy that he has sublimated and
transformed into something dark and terrific. And Neilson confirms the men s
assessment of their friend when Tadge asks Max if Alan has a girlfriend and then
abruptly notes that he saw Malky [a character mentioned only this once] the other day.
[…] He had a knife. He said I owed him money. He said he was going to stab me up the
arse.
440
It becomes apparent that Tadge is repressing his own sexual desire for Alan by
relating a story about violent anal penetration. Neilson is clear that the character has
sublimated his homosexual desires. For Tadge, positively everything appears to come
back to penetration. “ few minutes later, he indicates his elbow and says that One of
them, he put his arm up my arse, right up to here.
441
Penetration is a fantasy for Tadge,
something taboo that he desires profoundly. But descriptions of penetration in
Penetrator are never pleasurable. They are always figured as rape, always extreme,
always violent, always terrifying.
The enormous amount of tension generated so far in the play comes to a head as
Tadge accuses Alan of being one of the Penetrators, producing what Neilson calls a
big, ugly hunting knife a knife to end all knives. “gain, Tadge insistently returns to
violent anal penetration, saying that I took it off one of them. He was going to stab me
up the arse.
442
Wielding the knife, Tadge starts going into exaggerated poses with it,
Bruce Lee-style. Neilson indicates that
439
Neilson 91.
440
Neilson 88.
441
Neilson 99.
MAX is
amused. ALAN is not. TADGE is like a
Neilson 101. The repetition of imagery of violent anal penetration in Penetrator actually becomes
exhausting.
442
180
thirteen-year-old.
443
The playwright purposely blurs distinction between childish play
and real violence, a confusion that recalls the men s earlier discussion of Tadge s
behavior: the men are simultaneously able to make puerile jokes about rape even as
they take his condition very seriously. The playwright further links this imminent threat
of violence with childhood when Tadge grabs a stuffed teddy bear and disembowels it
onstage. Neilson directs that this should be a vicious and frightening action, all
humour going from his face.
444
Sierz has called the disemboweling of the bear
astonishing, and Paul Taylor even begins his review of the play by describing this
moment.445 The destroyed teddy bear works to enact in part the horrific acts of violence
that Tadge continually describes for his friends. Tadge eviscerates the stuffed bear with
the enormous knife, and the image doubles as the penetration Tadge has already
described: he was going to stab me up the arse. If Neilson, then, does not put a literal
representation of male/male rape onstage in this moment, he substitutes a powerful
metaphor for violent penetration that evokes a childhood destroyed and effectively
represents a body damaged through brutal sexual violence.
The play s final scene reveals that as boys Tadge and Max played a rather benign
but unmistakably erotic game in the woods one night, undressing each other and
touching one another s genitals. “lan confesses that he betrayed Max by having sex
with Max s ex-girlfriend, and Max kicks Alan out of the flat. The violent Tadge settles
into the apartment, and after he repeats yet another pornographic fantasy, he and Max
calmly eat candy, remembering their childhood together. The playwright reveals his
characters to be barely more than overgrown boys, still joking about the locker room,
still stealing each other s girlfriends, and still hung-up on their homoerotic childhood
explorations of sexuality. They treat women with the casual violence and callous
443
Neilson 104-5.
444
Neilson 106.
445
Sierz
. See also Paul Taylor, How Deep Is Their Love? Independent (London) 18 Jan 1994, 22.
181
disregard with which they treat their playthings in the nursery-yard. Like the
twentysomethings in ”utterworth s Mojo, Neilson s characters are, of course, all the
more dangerous because of their inability to be adults. They can only play at being
adult, masculine figures, and they approach this masculinity without reflexivity of any
kind.
In Penetrator, Anthony Neilson echoes many of the ideas that we have so far
found linked in representations of male/male rape. Max and Tadge s remembered
homoerotic play took place in the forest
that frequent signifier for the concept of the Id
a place outside of civilization.446 Tadge and Alan even re-enact a scene from
Deliverance when Tadge slowly drags the knife down over whimpering ALAN s chest
and stomach to his crotch.
447
Neilson also locates male/male sexual violence in the
monosexual arena of the military, echoing representations of male/male rape by
Howard Brenton and David Rudkin. Most importantly, however, Penetrator represents
rape as a fantasy, simultaneously desired and feared by men, irrespective of so-called
sexuality. Whether or not Tadge really experienced what he described in the black
room, Neilson presents the horrors he describes as something that Tadge desires. In
Penetrator, the repressed homosexual wishes to be raped.
Paul Taylor understood the descriptions of rape in Penetrator as a metaphor. He
objected to the play s conversion of a heinous violation of human rights into a
convenient psycho-dramatic metaphor for repressed homosexual desire.448 Claire
Armitstead s review in the Guardian echoes precisely the same critique, noting that
Neilson s play presents homosexuality [as] a monster waiting to devour men whose
446
See Cunningham 123.
Neilson 109-10. The sequence in Deliverance is on p. 112. It is this moment as the rapist scrapes the
knife across Ed s chest that Ed describes by saying he had never felt such carelessness of touch, or such
disregard for another person s body.
447
448
Taylor, How Deep?
.
182
defences are destroyed.
449
But it is significant that no character in Penetrator is actually
raped. Tadge describes being violated in grisly detail, and his descriptions are haunting
and disturbing, but Neilson does not attempt to depict with the violence he describes in
any realistic fashion. Instead, Tadge s entrance into Max and “lan s apartment is a
literal intrusion of the possibility of sexual violence into a domestic, homosocial world.
In fact, it is more accurate to say that Tadge s entrance reveals a potential for male/male
rape that was already present in the structure of the men s homosocial interactions. Max
rejects the idea, at the play s very beginning, that using the word cunt makes him a
potential rapist, but Neilson, for his part, does not: Penetrator sees all men as potential
rapists and all homosocial interactions as subtended by the possibility of sexual
violation.
Even more specifically, Neilson places responsibility for Tadge s truly terrifying
behavior with the military training he has received. I noted earlier that both Max and
Alan believe the military brainwashes young men. This criticism is very specific in the
play. Max may object when Alan says that Tadge has become a fascist, but Max does
not disagree with “lan s assessment that what the military teaches is not how to love
God and furry animals but instead how to hate niggers and queers and Irish people
and “rabs! […] He s been learning how to bayonet people for Christ s sake!!
450
The
British military, in Neilson, is an institution that legitimizes and works to propagate
violent white masculinity.
The final image of the play finds Max and Tadge sitting uneasily together on the
sofa. Max has kicked Alan out of the house and returned to his friendship with the
disturbed Tadge in a cyclical pattern reminiscent of John Osborne s Look Back in Anger
449
Claire Armitstead, review of Penetrator, Guardian 17 Jan 1994, 7.
450
Neilson 81.
183
(1956).451 The men return to their childhoods, munching on caramels and reminiscing
about being boys. Penetrator reveals the potential of boyhood play to become sexually
violent, finding sexual violence as a structuring principle of the men s relationships. If
Neilson does not offer a revisioning of masculinity for his characters, and if he allows
them basically to return to the tableau with which Max and Alan began the play, he has
not allowed their masculinity to remain uncritiqued. Neilson calls the masculinity of all
three of the men in question, or to put it more clearly, what Neilson critiques is the
dominant masculinity to which the three men aspire and the government institutions
that work to bolster that masculinity s hegemony.
It’s Nothing: Sarah Kane’s Blasted
Neilson s Penetrator keeps rape onstage in the form of an ever-present potential.
Sarah Kane s Blasted, infamously and rashly referred to as a disgusting feast of filth
after its first London production, stages it.452 The play follows Ian, a forty-five-year-old,
racist, misogynist, homophobic journalist and his relationship with Cate, a young
woman of twenty-one who used to be his lover. The play makes a strong first
impression of Ian as he uses numerous racial slurs within his first few minutes onstage,
and he refers to Cate s brother as a retard and a spaz even though she specifically
asks him not to do so.453 Cate and Ian s relationship is a complex one, and Cate is
visiting Ian in a very expensive hotel room in Leeds, apparently out of pity for the man,
who isn t well and repeatedly falls into coughing fits in the play s first scene. Cate is
clearly interested in Ian s well being, and she also says that she once was in love with
him, but she is emphatic that she has not come to the hotel room to have sex with Ian.
Jimmy Porter and his friend Cliff Lewis part ways at play s end, while Jimmy and his wife Alison
return to a childlike/erotic game of bears and squirrels. See John Osborne, Look Back in Anger, (New
York: Penguin Books, 1982).
451
452
Jack Tinker, The Disgusting Feast of Filth, Daily Mail (London) 19 Jan 1995, 5.
453
Sarah Kane, Blasted, in Complete Plays, (London: Methuen, 2001), 5.
184
Still, as Sean Carney has noted, a vacillating ambiguity in terms of their behavior
toward one other emerges: Cate is alternately attracted to and repulsed by Ian; Ian is
alternately affectionate and insulting to Cate.
454
Ian s opinions about everyone outside his hotel room, however, are as without
conflict as they are offensively malevolent. You dress like a lesbos, he tells Cate
I
don t dress like a cocksucker.
CATE.
IAN.
What do they dress like?
Hitler was wrong about the Jews who have they hurt the queers he
should have gone for scum them and the wogs and fucking football
fans send a bomber over Elland Road and finish them off.
(He pours champagne and toasts the idea.)455
Diatribes such as this one, in which Ian calls for the extermination of large numbers of
people because of his racism, homophobia, classism, and other privileged positionalities
are characteristic of Ian, and Kane makes it clear that he is an extraordinarily hateful
person.
This first scene ends in an apparent detente as Ian tells Cate that he loves her and
she responds that she does not love him. “s the play s second scene begins, it is
apparent that Cate has been raped during the night. The flowers Ian presented to Cate
in scene one are ripped apart and scattered around the room, and when Cate wakes
she stares at Ian with contempt, her first word the insult cunt.
456
As the scene
continues, Ian locks Cate in the room, pocketing the key, and while Cate has fainted, he
lies her on the bed on her back. / He puts a gun to her head, lies between her legs, and
simulates sex. As he comes, CATE sits bolt upright with a shout.
457
Though in the plot of
454
Sean Carney, The Tragedy of History in Sarah Kane s ”lasted, Theatre Survey 46.2 (2005): 284.
455
Kane, Blasted, 19.
456
Kane, Blasted, 25-6.
457
Kane, Blasted, 27.
185
the story Ian has raped Cate during the night, Kane does not stage this rape, choosing
instead to represent an echo of the rape as Ian stimulates himself using Cate s insensate
body. As Kim Solga has noted in her perceptive essay on seen and unseen rapes in
Blasted, Ian s rape of Cate takes place offstage but returns to realism s visual plane as a
series of oblique mirrors.
458
When Kane does choose explicitly to tell the audience that
Ian has raped Cate, she uses the terse, crude language typical of British theatre of the
1990s:
CATE.
IAN.
Drink lots of water.
CATE.
IAN.
I can t piss. It s just blood.
Or shit. It hurts.
It ll heal.459
Kane has taken time to clarify that Ian has violated Cate both vaginally and anally.
From here, Cate exits to the bathroom for a shower, and the play takes the astonishing
formal turn for which it has become famous.
“s Graham Saunders describes it, the opening scene of Blasted is firmly founded
in the theatrical traditions of Naturalism and psychological realism […], and even the
stage set showing the hotel interior is the very model of the fourth wall inherited from
Ibsen and Chekhov, but near the end of scene two, a soldier with a sniper s rifle bursts
into the room, quickly consumes both Ian s and Cate s enormous English breakfasts,
and rummages through the bedroom.460 He looks for Cate in the bathroom, but she has,
apparently, escaped out of the window. The final images of the play s second scene are
the soldier standing on the bed and urinating all over it and a blinding light, then a
Kim Solga, Blasted s Hysteria Rape, Realism, and the Thresholds of the Visible, Modern Drama 50.3
(2007): 365.
458
459
Kane, Blasted, 34.
Graham Saunders, Love Me or Kill Me’ Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes, (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2002), 41.
460
186
huge explosion. The hotel room is literally blown apart. There is a large hole in one of
the walls, and everything is covered in dust which is still falling
Ian and Cate find
themselves in a war-zone intended to evoke Srebrenica circa 1995.461
As the dust settles, Ian learns more about the soldier and the life he has led. The
soldier describes unthinkable war-crimes. ”ecause the soldier s own life-story locates
what Kane has scripted to happen in scene three into a contemporary global context, I
intend to quote some of what the soldier reports, although reading the atrocities the
soldier describes might at times be difficult. As the soldier speaks about these horrors, it
is notable that Ian as the audience, too, might wish to do
asks for the soldier to stop
talking:
SOLDIER.
IAN.
Three of us
Don t tell me.
SOLDIER.
Went to a house just outside town. All gone. Apart from a small
boy hiding in the corner. One of the others took him outside. Lay him
on the ground and shot him through the legs. Heard crying in the
basement. Went down. Three men and four women. Called the others.
They held the men while I fucked the women. Youngest was twelve.
Didn t cry, just lay there. Turned her over and
Then she cried. Made her lick me clean. Closed my eyes and thought of
Shot her father in the mouth. Brothers shouted. Hung them from the
ceiling by their testicles.462
The soldier s description of raping the young girl
the girl is raped both vaginally and anally
461
Kane, Blasted, 39.
462
Kane, Blasted, 43.
note that Kane again specifies that
is placed beside other heinous acts of
187
violence: the castration of the small boy, the murder of her father, the mutilation and
lynching of her brothers.
As the scene continues, the soldier describes many atrocious acts, and the
violations he relates become progressively more heinous the more he talks. What the
soldier has to say is nearly unthinkable. Kane s language is concise, clear, and powerful.
Her soldier speaks in the language of facts, conveying the realities of the war both to Ian
and to the audience. If I have stopped quoting the soldier directly it is because, though
Kane s writing is plainly well crafted, the images her character conjures are searing,
painful descriptions of casual brutality that are not easily forgotten.463 Kane, in other
words, represents violence realistically through staged images, but she also represents
violence in other ways, choosing to relate several scenarios from the ethnic cleansing in
Bosnia through powerfully indelible language.
For Kane, the connection between the domestic scene in the Leeds hotel room
and the Central-European war-zone of the play s second half is obvious. One is the
seed and the other is the tree. She argues that the wall between so-called civilization
and what happened in central Europe is very, very thin and it can get torn down at any
time.
464
Put even more clearly, for Kane the logical conclusion of the attitude that
produces an isolated rape in England is the rape camps in Bosnia, and the logical
conclusion to the way society expects men to behave is war.
465
Kane s formulation
echoes Penetrator s theatrical gesture of Tadge bringing male/male rape from the
barracks home to the apartment. Blasted s formal technique is, of course, much more
explosive and theatrically astounding, but the shift in setting is one similar to Neilson s.
The rape camp is transported from Central Europe to Leeds, and the extreme violations
to which Bosniak men and women were subjected are executed on the body of a
463
See Kane, Blasted, 46-50.
464
Kane quoted in Sierz 101.
465
Kane quoted in Sierz 104.
188
middle-aged British journalist. In Kane as in Neilson, our homes will not keep us safe;
Civilization is not allowed an outside.
Eventually, after all of his stories of atrocities, the soldier rapes Ian, kissing him
tenderly on the lips first, and telling him that his cigarettes smell like his girlfriend s.
Kane s description of this rape sequence is unique in its attention to both the rape s
victim and its perpetrator:
The SOLDIER turns IAN over with one hand.
He holds the revolver to IAN’s head with the other.
He pulls down IAN’s trousers, undoes his own and rapes him
eyes closed and
smelling IAN’s hair.
The SOLDIER is crying his heart out.
IAN’s
face registers pain but he is silent.
When the SOLDIER has finished he pulls up his trousers and pushes the revolver
up IAN’s anus.466
You never been fucked by a man before? he asks Ian. When his victim doesn t
answer, the soldier says, It s nothing. He then describes further atrocities that he has
witnessed, including another rape he committed
once again, I choose not to quote the
soldier. He details unthinkable acts of violation and then remarks casually to Ian that if
all of the things he described can happen, you can t get tragic about your arse.
467
Kane
places this single male/male rape in Leeds in the context of the Bosnian rape camps, the
site of numerous reported male/male sexual violations and where conservative
estimates of the number of women raped […] run between twenty thousand and fifty
thousand. “s Lynda ”oose notes, What happened in the rape camps of ”osnia
466
Kane, Blasted, 49.
467
Kane, Blasted, 49-50.
189
includes a list of atrocities as endless as the sadistic imagination might devise.
468
Amid
the unthinkable violence described by the soldier, and in the context of Ian s own rape
of Cate earlier in the play, the soldier s rape of Ian might, indeed, seem like nothing.
Kane, however, is not finished with Ian. He will, in fact, be further tortured.
Insatiably hungry, the soldier eats both of Ian s eyes before shooting himself.469 The
play s final scene sees Ian starved and desperate, begging for his own death and
attempting suicide. Kane portrays him as tormented by his inability to end his own life,
blind and at his own wit s end. He is reduced to the basest of bodily functions. In a
series of rapid scenes he masturbates, attempts to strangle himself, defecates, laughs
hysterically, weeps, and finally, starving, he eats the corpse of an infant and dies, Kane
notes, with relief.
470
Ian is not dead, though, and the play ends with Cate s return to
the bombed-out hotel room. She has exchanged sex with a soldier who has given her
bread, a sausage, and some gin. In a moment of grace she shares her food with Ian, and
as rain falls, he utters the play s final words
Thank you.
471
Blasted, then, ends with a
moment of grace.472 Cate bestows undeserved kindness on this hateful man whom we
have watched suffer so much.
468
Boose 71.
Mary Karen Dahl reminded me that blindness is part of a very old imagistic system of castration. It is,
perhaps, a little to the side of my project but certainly germane to a discussion of Blasted. When Oedipus
blinds himself in the Oedipus Tyrannus this act is a form of castration, a method of punishing himself for
his incest. Oedipus must be led by his daughters following this act of violence, and it is this very
castration or weakness that allows him to become the transcendent figure whom Sophocles depicts in the
Oedipus at Colonus. Ian s own experience of rape/blinding, what we might consider a metaphorical
castration, perhaps similarly refigures Ian, allowing for the moment of grace which ends Blasted.
469
470
Kane, Blasted, 60.
471
Kane, Blasted, 61.
Here Blasted echoes the play to which it has so often been compared Edward ”ond s Saved (1965) in
which a baby is infamously stoned onstage at the end of the first act. ”ond s play, though it is to some an
essay in cruelty, ends with the simple act of repairing a chair. See Bond, Saved, in Plays: 1, (London:
Methuen, 1997), 133.
472
190
Kim Solga has argued that the rape sequence is, for many, the key moment in
Blasted, the gest that explains the play; it thus forever risks oversimplification.
473
For
Solga, the soldier s rape of Ian is designed to echo Ian s unstaged rape of Cate between
scenes one and two. She offers that the onstage rape is designed in its uncomfortably
visible corporeality not to return [Ian s rape of Cate] to the stage but rather to call our
attention to its very absence.
474
Solga s argument is that the soldier s rape of Ian draws
our attention to how the play itself covers over Ian s rape of Cate and points to the ways
in which men s rape of women often goes unremarked or is taken for granted. To take
Solga s formulation further, it is clear that Kane s play also intends the act of rape
perpetrated on Ian to actively call up the heinous sexual violations committed in central
Europe during the war in Bosnia. Newsmedia were not reporting these atrocities
committed in Central Europe, and so these acts of violence were literally being made
invisible. You. You should be telling people, the soldier tells Ian, and Ian responds
that there s no human interest to stories like the soldier s
Why bring you to light? he
asks rhetorically.475 When the soldier rapes Ian, he brings the atrocities of the war in
Bosnia within the direct sightlines of the audience in Britain. Again, the audience may
wish for the soldier to stop, but this act of violence and the tales of atrocities that the
soldier relates call forth a global reality that has been allowed to remain invisible
or
rather has been forcibly hidden.
Blasted s representation of male/male rape is unique, however, in its near total
eschewal of sexuality as a cause for the sexual violence in the play. The rapist is
interested in sexual release and in staving off loneliness. He tells Ian that he has raped
many, many women, and he rapes Ian almost as a matter of course. He kisses Ian on the
lips, sniffs Ian s hair, and cries his heart out during the rape, but in the context of the
473
Solga 369.
474
Solga 359.
475
Kane, Blasted, 47-8.
191
play these are heterosexualized actions as the soldier attempts to recall a woman whom
he loved that had been raped and killed in a similar way. The soldier keeps his gun
aimed at Ian s head throughout the rape, and after he is done sexually violating his
victim, the soldier actually puts his revolver in Ian s anus. If an audience might construe
the victim to have experienced any sexual pleasure during the rape, Kane directly
works against such a reading by having the soldier anally penetrate Ian with the gun.
This is a second act of staged rape, and one that lays itself bare as an act of violence and
terror. The soldier s rape of Ian in Blasted is certainly sexual, but Kane continually
reminds us that rape is an act of violence and not one linked as in Neilson to a victim s
desire to be penetrated. Homoerotic desire on the part of the victim is totally excluded
from the realm of possibility in Blasted. Further, this act of rape takes place as part of a
sequence of violent acts committed on Ian s body directly after he is raped he is blinded
and then left by the soldier to die.
Kane also avoids linking the male/male rape in Blasted to masculinity. Ian
experiences pain, but he suffers no crisis of masculinity. The play subjects him to a
series of tortures, and because he is tormented in many ways
mutilation chief among them
starvation and
Blasted argues that there is no reason to get tragic
either about one s anus or one s masculinity. In the context of the rape camps in ”osnia,
sexual violation ceases to function as a limit for male/male violence. It’s nothing. Ian
knows and the soldier himself has told the audience
that others have been subjected
to much, much worse. These kinds of tortures became everyday occurrences in Bosnia
literally nothing.
Recognizing how male/male rape has been utilized in representation over the
thirty years prior to Blasted, let us briefly consider its central onstage act of rape as
though it were a metaphor for something else. Critical responses to male/male rape
have, as we have seen, nearly always understood representations of such violation to
stand in for a meaning greater than the act of violence itself. It is possible, of course,
192
to read the male/male rape in Blasted as a signifier for the genocide in Bosnia. One might
also read the play s central act of rape as a metaphor for the violence that journalism
both perpetrates and perpetuates with its silence about sites of conflict outside of the socalled first world. Kane s play, however, actively resists uncomplicated readings such
as these. I noted earlier that the onstage act of rape is placed beside other acts of
violence and descriptions of violence, but Blasted is also fundamentally interested
spends time interrogating
and
male/male rape as an act of rape. In other words, even if rape
in Blasted functions as a metaphor, Kane s exploration of the trope asks us to look at
rape in its materiality: its effects, its causes, and the cultures that produce such violence.
For all of its destruction of the conventions of Realism, Blasted is a play that takes rape
seriously, examining sexual violation not merely as a theoretical limit for the violent
capacities of men or a metaphoric limit between civilization and barbarianism but as a
global reality occurring within societies deemed civilized and one that has been, in turn,
silenced by those very civilizations.
Traumatic Fantasies: Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking
For Anthony Neilson and Sarah Kane, sexual violation is one of the logical
extensions of militarism and late-twentieth century British masculinity. Male/male rape,
in other words, does not exist outside of the limits of civilization, threatening society s
destruction. On the contrary, both plays argue that atrocious sexual violence is the
direction in which society is already headed, and both stage that violence in various
ways. With Shopping and Fucking in 1996, Mark Ravenhill takes the connection still
further, linking male/male rape to the very foundations of our society.
Ravenhill s play is the most frequently performed of the three plays examined by
this chapter, and so I will spend less time describing the events of its plot. Like the
Jacobean dramas to which it is often compared, Shopping follows two separate
storylines. In the first plot, Robbie and Lulu agree to sell three hundred Ecstasy tablets
for the businessman Brian. After Robbie, experiencing a euphoric moment of anti193
capitalist generosity, gives all of the Ecstasy away instead of selling it, Lulu and Robbie
are in desperate need of money and begin making money answering calls as phone-sex
workers.
In the play s second plot, heroin-addicted Mark (who is living with Robbie and
Lulu) meets Gary, a fourteen-year-old rent boy or prostitute. Shopping and Fucking
spends a good deal of time telling Gary s story. The young man has run away from his
mother s house because he was being raped by his stepfather. Gary explains that He
comes into my room after News at Ten… every night after News at Ten and it s, son.
Come here, son. I fucking hate that, cos I m not his son.
476
This abuse has taken a
physical toll on Gary s body, and he bleeds chronically from his rectum. The play
spends a great deal of time focused on the pain that Gary feels. Physically, the audience
actually sees the effect on Gary s body of having been repeatedly raped, but Ravenhill
also crafts the play so that the audience is familiar with Gary s psychic pain. In the
scene where he tells Mark about the rapes, the boy weeps profusely, saying that he tried
to fight his stepfather off but that fighting back did no good.
During a sequence in the middle of Shopping, Gary describes how he sought
public assistance from a government social worker. His story is both painful and
absurd
I said to her, look, it s simple he s fucking me. / Once, twice, three times a
week he comes into my room. He s a big man. He holds me down and he fucks me.
How long? She says. About two years, I say. I say he moved in then six months later it
starts. I told her and she says Does he use a condom?
The social worker s response is
insensitive, certainly, but it is also both ignorant and completely ineffectual. Gary
continues I tell her he s fucking me
without a condom
and she says to me
you
know what she says? […] I think I ve got a leaflet. Would you like to give him a
leaflet? The social worker has no idea how to handle this young man or what remedies
476
Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking, in Plays: 1, (London: Methuen, 2001), 32.
194
to offer him, and Gary describes a kind of panic in her eyes as she says to him What
do you want me to do? .477 This story is central to the way that Shopping and Fucking
functions. Gary s story makes Mark fall in love with the boy and want to take care of
him; it also establishes who Gary is and what he has endured over the past two years
before we as an audience have met him. This is not an irrational young man whose
problems can be explained through a psychological diagnosis. This boy has been
grossly abused, and if we later find out that he is troubled, Ravenhill makes clear in
this scene that the violation Gary has undergone is responsible for what troubles him.
Further, the social worker in Gary s story stands in, here, for the whole of the neoliberal
government system that is supposed to be helping victims of abuse like this teenage
boy. The fault does not lie only with this single social worker; the entire bureaucratic
system is ill equipped to deal with the real-world problems with which Gary presents it.
The two plots converge as Mark brings Gary back to the apartment where he
lives with Robbie and Lulu. Because the couple still needs money to pay Brian back for
the missing Ecstasy tablets they agree to enact a fantasy of Gary s if he will pay them.
This sequence comprises the play s longest and most harrowing scene. Gary s fantasy is
that a kind of father figure comes to take him away. I want to be owned, he tells
Mark. I want someone to look after me. “nd I want him to fuck me. Really fuck me.
Not like that, not like him. “nd, yeah, it ll hurt. ”ut a good hurt.
478
Although Gary
claims that this fantasy figure is not the same as the stepfather who rapes him, he
describes a situation nearly identical to the ordeal he has undergone. Gary s fantasy is a
traumatic one in which he wishes to re-enact an event that has wounded him: fort/da.479
477
Ravenhill, Shopping, 41.
478
Ravenhill, Shopping, 56.
Cathy Caruth notes that the originary meaning of trauma itself in both English and German , the
Greek trauma, or wound, originally referr[ed] to an injury inflicted on a body. See Unclaimed Experience:
Trauma, Narrative, and History, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 3.
479
195
As trauma theorist Cathy Caruth explains, trauma is not locatable in the simple violent
or original event in an individual s past, but rather in the way that its very
unassimilated nature
the way it was precisely not known in the first instance
to haunt the survivor later on.
480
returns
For Caruth and other theorists of trauma, the
originary event of a traumatic experience is traumatic because it is unassimilated by the
psyche. In other words, the person who has experienced this event is psychically
incapable of binding that event or allowing that event to become a part of his or her
subjectivity. Because of this, the person, often without being aware that he or she is
doing this, re-enacts the traumatic event in different ways as a way of attempting to
assimilate the event. Ravenhill makes Gary s fantasy an incredibly dark one, but even
when his play moves into an actualization of this violent and terrifying sexual fantasy,
the playwright makes it clear that this sequence in Shopping is about the traumatic
residual effects of repeated sexual violation.
Gary asks Robbie to penetrate him like the father figure. Robbie does so, and
Ravenhill directs that
GARY.
GARY.
ROBBIE
unzips his fly. Works spit on to his penis. He penetrates
He starts to fuck him. The directions then read Silence. ROBBIE continues to fuck
Lulu asks the teenager if he likes it, but he does not answer. Instead, Ravenhill
mercilessly directs More silent fucking. Then the men exchange Gary
away. MARK goes through the same routine
him viciously.
481
ROBBIE
pulls
spitting and penetrating GARY. He fucks
The scene is heartbreakingly sad, and Ravenhill s directions indicate
that this silent, painful sex should go on for some time. The violent sex enacted onstage
in Ravenhill s play, though it is definitely not rape
consensual sex act
on the contrary, it is manifestly a
is designed to echo or re-perform the rapes Gary has suffered at the
hands of his stepfather. Like Blasted and Penetrator, Ravenhill uses a single powerful
Caruth . Caruth s trauma theories are rooted in Freud s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1989), originally published in 1920.
480
481
Ravenhill, Shopping, 83.
196
image in order to signify a whole series of images of violation. This sequence of violent
but consensual sex is able to stand in for the acts of violation he experienced when his
stepfather repeatedly raped him. Gary is asking to be hurt, so the pain he suffers in
front of the audience is not rape, but the audience is able to see his rape all the same.
Ravenhill has made it clear that the reasons Gary wants to feel pain are the result of
previous traumatic experiences, and this staged repetition of the scenes of his wounding
vividly and immediately realizes Gary s pain for Ravenhill s audience.
The young man next asks Mark “re you him? “re you my dad? and Mark
responds by hitting him repeatedly, saying I m. Not. Your. Dad. When Lulu asks
them all to stop, Gary begs for them to continue and describes the fantasy further; he
will pay them to do it, he says. The end of the boy s fantasy is terrifying and awful
It
doesn t end like this, he tells the three. He s always got something. He gets me in the
room, blindfolds me. ”ut he doesn t fuck me. Well not him, not his dick. It s the knife.
yeah but with a knife. […] Or, or a screwdriver. Or something.
He fucks me
482
Gary
wishes to die.
The three refuse to kill Gary, no matter how much he pays them, but after Robbie
and Lulu leave, Gary asks Mark once more, and his reasons for wanting to end his life
become clearer still:
GARY.
Are you gonna do it? I want you to do it. Come on. You can do it.
”ecause he s not out there.
I ve got this unhappiness. This big sadness swelling like it s gonna burst.
I m sick and I m never going to be well.
MARK.
I know.
GARY.
I want it over. “nd there s only one ending.483
482
Ravenhill, Shopping, 84.
483
Ravenhill, Shopping, 85.
197
Mark is deeply moved by this and ostensibly agrees. The scene ends with a return to the
fantasy
“lright. You re dancing, Mark tells the boy, and I take you away. Ravenhill
is intentionally ambiguous about whether or not Mark actually goes through with
Gary s request to die. The scene ends before any further violence is enacted. The play
focuses not on whether or not Gary dies but on what Gary feels. Gary articulates in these
final moments that there is simply no cure for how he feels. He is sick and he is never
going to be well. The pain will not go away. His sadness is overwhelming and
enormous and he does not have the tools he needs to cope with this sorrow.
We are in the realm of the emotional here, of course, and
remember
we would do well to
in a fictional world created by Mark Ravenhill. Psychological diagnosis and
treatment or other healing methods certainly might work to help a victim of rape in the
real world. But in Shopping and Fucking the traumatic effects of rape are so severe that
the young man who has been victimized by it wishes to die. It is fundamental that
Ravenhill crafts the scenario at the end of his play as not as a simple sexual fantasy but
one caused by the trauma of having experienced repeated sexual violation.
As Shopping and Fucking moves into its final scene, Ravenhill displaces the scene
of Gary s death with a sequence about money. The play is, as Dan Rebellato has noted,
not just about fucking, but crucially about shopping too, and instead of the final,
horrific act of violence fantasized by Gary, the audience sees Brian, the salesman, return
to the stage to proselytize about the value of capital.484 It s not perfect, he says. I
don t deny it. […] ”ut it s the closest we ve come to meaning, Civilisation is money.
Money is civilisation. And civilisation
or be killed. And money
how did we get here? By war, by struggle, kill
it s the same thing, you understand? The getting is cruel, is
hard, but the having is civilisation. Then we are civilised. Say it. Say it with me. […]
484
Dan Rebellato, introduction to Ravenhill, Plays: 1, (London: Methuen, 2001), x-xi.
198
Money is civilisation.
485
This displacement from sexual violence to civilization and to
capitalism is crucial to the play. Gary has offered to pay to be killed, and ”rian s
capitalist logic says that they should get the money first, but there is a limit to what
Ravenhill s characters
even characters as cynical as Robbie and Lulu
will do for
money. In the world Brian imagines, money is civilization, and therefore in the world of
Shopping and Fucking, penetrating Gary with a knife or a screwdriver becomes a
civilized act, its transactional nature effectively civilizing an act of barbarism.
Male/male rape has operated, in all of the texts studied thus far in Enter the Man,
functioned outside the limits of the civilized; many texts locate male/male rape in the
prison or the forest, physically separated from civilization, and others locate it in
childhood or in the past, in a time prior to civilization or a time less civilized than the
present. Ravenhill s play finds that his capitalist civilization is capable of justifying any
act of barbarism.
Ravenhill takes the idea still further. The society in which Gary lives is able both
to justify his violent death and to make his death look like a choice, an option for which he
shopped in a marketplace filled with alternatives. ”ut Gary s desire to die is not a
choice at all. His society presents him with no other options. In the world of Shopping
and Fucking, you will remember, Gary s social worker stares at him in terror and offers
him a leaflet as a way to combat his rapist. This young man s society has absolutely no
ability to care for him. Ravenhill s play is designed as a critique of Thatcherism, of the
refusal to spend time and money to care for the citizens of Britain who needed the
state s assistance. Shopping and Fucking sees Gary s desire for his own death as the
logical result of a government that doesn t support social programs. In effect, Ravenhill
shows capitalism as having produced Gary s anomie. Capitalism creates the world in
which suicide is, for Gary, the only option. It thus, ideologically makes Gary s suicide
485
Ravenhill, Shopping, 87.
199
appear to be his own decision. Then, through the justificatory power of the transaction,
the society absolves itself of all responsibility. There are no choices for Gary, but his
society makes it appear as though he gets exactly what he wants.
Shopping and Fucking cannot, of course, avoid metaphorizing male/male rape. The
play is a critique of capitalist ethics, and Gary, the victim of violation, signifies the
person in greatest need of society s care. Male/male rape functions, therefore as a
metaphor for any number of barbaric activities justified by capital and civilized by the
ideology of the transaction. We might even think of the economic system s victimization
of Gary as itself a kind of rape. ”ut more importantly
and here is where Shopping
and Fucking is unique, even among British dramas of the 1990s Ravenhill s play is
fundamentally concerned with the victim of male/male rape as such, with voicing his
experiences of pain and with representing the trauma of his victimization. If male/male
sexual violation in Shopping and Fucking functions at the level of metaphor, victimization
by rape is also undeniably interesting to the dramatist as a story that needs to be told
for its own sake. The play asks its audience to think about society s inability to care for
its citizens, certainly, but it is also impossible to forget the young man at the play s
center who is able to say the devastating words I m sick and I m never going to be
well.
486
Shopping and Fucking, in fact, offers an alternative system of care at the play s
end. “fter ”rian s memorable civlisation is money speech, Ravenhill directs that Mark
comes forward and begins to tell a story set in the distant future. In three thousand
AD,
Mark sees a mutant in an intergalactic marketplace and buys him. The mutant is
beautiful, but his owner hates him. He s mine and I own him, the merchant says. I
own him but I hate him. If [I] don t sell him today I m gonna kill him. Mark buys the
Sarah Kane would have a female rape victim utter a very similar and equally heartbreaking phrase in
Crave (1998) I m evil, I m damaged, and no one can save me
.
486
200
mutant and takes him home, but he decides to set his beautiful purchase free. The
mutant, however, objects to freedom, and Mark s story ends this way
MARK.
He says
language
well, he telepathises into my mind
he doesn t speak our
he tells me:
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.
“nd I say That s a risk I m prepared to take.487
This is a complex parable that leaves open the possibility of many interpretations and
dramatically shifts the ending of Ravenhill s play. In one of those interpretations, we
might imagine Gary as the mutant, beautiful to Mark but reviled by the marketplace.
Mark takes the mutant home, as he takes Gary home, but the mutant asks for something
that surprises Mark. The mutant wishes to be a slave. It is all he knows. This desire for
slavery appears to be a choice, something that the mutant selects from among a range of
options. In the parable, Mark sees an option that the mutant does not see: one, indeed,
that the mutant claims not to desire. Mark will set him free anyway. He very plainly
does not give the mutant what he wants, but perhaps he is able to care for him,
nonetheless.
It is fundamentally important to Ravenhill s play to leave open the possibility
that Mark does not kill Gary, even though he says that he will at the end of scene
twelve. Mark s parable contains within it the idea that there are more possibilities than
we ourselves can imagine. Indeed
and here the critique of capital is also plain
”rian s speech claims that money is civilization, but Mark s parable offers that, perhaps,
civilization is more related to networks of care than struggling to get as much as we can.
I like that ending, Lulu says after Mark finishes his story. Mark responds that It s the
487
Ravenhill, Shopping, 89-90.
201
best I can do.
488
Mark articulates an ethical decision here: He will do his best with the
people in his life and not simply try to get the most that he can from them. Ravenhill s
play, finally, puts this idea of networks of care into practice as Shopping ends like
Blasted
with a moment of grace. As the play finishes, the three roommates share the
food they have with one another. The moment seems small, perhaps, after the intensity
of what has come before, and the scenario is far from utopian, but it contains a
paradigm for ethically living beside other people and treating those people with
generosity and care. The contrast of this image with the image of male/male sexual
violation that is central to Shopping is astounding. If Ravenhill links male/male rape to
capitalism and the conceptualizations of man that undergird the idea that capitalism is
humanity s only viable option and we might think, again, of homo homini lupus), the
playwright is also able to imagine an alternative to those philosophies: a network of
care in which man is not a wolf to man.
In each of the plays in this chapter, male/male rape is a serious and unadorned
reality. Penetrator, Blasted, and Shopping and Fucking represent male/male rape as
something that happens in the world in which its audiences live. I titled this chapter
The Way Things “re because I wished to argue that the playwrights I ve been
discussing understand male/male rape not only as a potentiality that stalks the
boundaries of civilization or as a structure that subtends homosocial relations but as a
global reality with which our society must begin to reckon. As I noted earlier, there are
many more iterations of the male/male rape trope in the British drama that follows
Neilson, Kane, and Ravenhill. The potential for male/male sexual violation is palpable
in Butterworth s Mojo, Letts s Bug, and Koltès s In the Solitude of Cotton Fields; Simon
Stephens s Motortown describes a vicious scenario of male/male rape in Simon ”ennett s
Drummers a man rapes his own brother as a humiliating act of revenge; Alexi Kaye
488
Ravenhill, Shopping, 89-90.
202
Campbell s The Pride contains a heartbreaking sequence in which a man is raped by his
own lover. The power of these staged acts of rape as metaphors is undiminished. This
document has concerned itself with the complicated, interconnected web of
assumptions that always attends images of male/male rape in Anglo-American culture.
That male/male rape is everywhere in 1990s British theatre is undeniable, but this is not
because the metaphor is a particularly easy one to use or because male/male rape seems
somehow to sum up British culture in the 1990s. My argument about Neilson, Kane,
and Ravenhill s representations of male/male rape is that they also have a clear ethical
point of view, one that demands that attention be paid to the atrocious violence that is,
in our world, a reality. The best of these plays also envision new ways of being in the
world: in which sexual violation is not simply the way things are. These theatre pieces
create indelible images of violence and pain, but they are also able to imagine an ethics
of generosity and of care, a society that is filled with violence and aggression, yes, but
one in which there is, perhaps, an alternative.
203
CONCLUSION
On the 4th of July, 2012, Swedish news service the Local reported that a sixty-oneyear-old man who had attempted to rape a woman in Örebro had been declared not
guilty of the attempted rape because his victim turned out to be transgender. According
to local newspaper Nerikes Allehanda
When the 61-year-old man had tried to commit the rape in Örebro, he
had no idea that the intended victim was born a man, and had been taking
hormonal treatment to reach the right identity, wrote the paper.
After following the woman for some time, the would-be [sic] rapist
was brutally violent in the attempted rape , tearing off the victim s
pants and grabbing at the victim's crotch, according to the paper. 489
Dan Sjöstedt of the Örebro District Court, the judge in the case, stated his belief that the
assailant wanted to rape this woman in particular. ”ut as she turned out to be a man,
the crime never was actually committed. The Local also notes that, according to
Sjöstedt, because the victim was a man, the case against rape was invalid .
Although this incident took place outside of the Anglo-American idiom that this
dissertation examines, the assumptions the jurist made in this story from Sweden
should, by now, be quite familiar to readers of Enter the Man. The judge decides that
rape is a kind of sex, that rape is related to heterosexuality, that it is motivated by a
hydraulic sexuality driven by a need for release. His decision also implies the
assumption that the truly male body is capable of defending itself against forcible
penetration in a way that the truly female body is not. The judge further understands
desire using only a homosexual/heterosexual binary system whereby a heterosexual
Man ”eats Rape Rap after Victim Found to ”e a Man, Local Sweden’s News in English 4 Jul 2012,
http://www.thelocal.se/41822/20120704/ (accessed 16 Aug 2012).
489
204
man simply could not have wanted to rape another man
though he plainly attempted
precisely that act of violence.
It is my contention that images produced in theatre, film, and other media are
able to pull apart the connections between male/male rape and the associations that
seem to be naturally attached to it. These assumptions, however, are incredibly old,
and it is plain that more work needs to be done to describe how the images of
male/male rape which are proliferating in Canadian, British, and USAmerican culture
actually work. Although this document has been an initial foray into describing these
functions, I have hinted in chapter four at the proliferation of terrifying male/male rape
images in USAmerican films of the 1990s, and at the continued presence of images of
male/male rape in British theatre of the twenty-first century. I have also noted H”O s
groundbreaking television series Oz, in which male/male sexual violence encompasses
entire story arcs in which the consequences and traumatic resonances of male/male rape
play out over multiple seasons of the show. Chapter two describes the curious
appearance of prison-rape comedies in the first decade of the twentieth-century in
USAmerican film, and in shows such as South Park and It’s “lways Sunny in Philadelphia,
comedic representations of male/male rape are also frequently disseminated on cable
television shows in the United States.
This conclusion began with a story about an attempted male/male rape in
Sweden from 2012. I want in closing to note that this story, too, is simply that: a story.
The Local reported it as a kind of curiosity in which a transgendered body is violated
but that body itself causes confusion for the juridical institution allegedly designed for
its protection. What remains unsaid in the Local is a series of assumptions that continues
to take for granted that it makes sense for men to rape women. I have focused in Enter
the Man on representations of male/male sexual violence because I wanted to
disaggregate the act of rape from the gender binary that rape performatively institutes
in order to analyze it more fully. It is fundamental, however, to remember that an act of
205
rape is about sexualized power and that that power is most often enacted by men and
executed on the bodies of women, especially poor women, women of color, queer
women, trans-women, and sex workers.
If I have demonstrated that the ways in which we speak about male/male sexual
violation have shifted enormously from the mid-1960s, I also believe that there is much
analysis to be done as interpretations of rape and talk about rape continue. None of the
images I describe in this document is bad, per se, and it has never been my argument
that male/male rape ought to be something about which we should not speak. Rather, it
has been my project to place these descriptions and images of male/male rape firmly
within the realm of discourse. It is not my intention to say that we should not speak of
male/male rape or that male/male rape should not speak, but to look more closely at
how (and indeed how often) we ask male/male rape to speak, what we ask these images
to do, and what their proliferation has produced and will produce in the future.
206
APPENDIX: PERMISSION FOR USE OF FIGURE 2
207
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Aaron C. Thomas received his BA in Theatre Arts in 2003 from California State
Polytechnic University in Pomona. Since 2006 he has been studying at the Florida State
University, where he was named a teaching fellow in his first year. He is currently a
Visiting Lecturer at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Aaron's work draws on a wide range of theoretical discourses in order to open
up questions about violent masculinity and its operations in contemporary culture. His
dissertation project analyzes representations of male/male sexual violence, and uses
violence theory, queer theory, critical race theory, and trauma theory to examine
representations of male/male rape in various media, including theatre, film, literature,
and television.
While in Pomona he worked with the Second Street Project, a theatre company
and arts organization dedicated to revitalizing the Pomona arts scene through free
performances, classes, and arts advocacy in the community. He continued his work in
Pomona, serving as both a director and contributing scholar for the Southern California
Shakespeare Festival until 2006. Since 2010 he has worked as the resident dramaturg for
Endstation Theatre Company's Blue Ridge Summer Theatre Festival, based in Amherst,
Virginia.
Other research interests include critical race studies, the Parisian avant-garde,
and queer studies. He is an active member of the LGBTQ Focus Group at the
Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and is also a member of the Trauma
Theory working group at the American Society for Theatre Research for which he is a
co-convener in 2012. His scholarship has been published in the Gay & Lesbian Review
Worldwide and the journals Studies in Musical Theatre and Cultural Studies.
223