On Jun 22, 2008, at 4:14 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> I doubt very much that most males have given this
> possibility the remotest thought, conscious _or_ "unconscious." Can
> you
> produce any evidence. It would have to be powerful to get me to even
> give much thought to such an absurdity.
Here's a start, from Raz Yosef's "Homoland" (GLQ, 2000:3). More later!
> In a dazzling analysis of the Wolf Man case, Lee Edelman argues
> that the anus
> evokes castration anxiety in the male subject because it marks on
> his own body
> the anatomo-phantasmic potential of being in his mother’s place.
> The anus oper-
> ates as a “phobically charged” orifice that the male subject must
> “repudiate” in
> order to submit to “the law of castration” and to the imperative of
> heterosexualiza-
> tion. Edelman writes:
>
> Obedient to the law of castration . . . the male . . . must
> repudiate the plea-
> sures of the anus because their fulfillment allegedly presupposes, and
> inflicts, the loss or “wound” that serves as the very definition of
> the
> female’s castration. Thus the male who is terrorized into
> heterosexuality
> through his internalization of this determining narrative must embrace
> with all his narcissistic energy the phantom of hierarchically
> inflected
> binarism always to be defended zealously. His anus, in turn, will
> be phobi-
> cally charged as the site at which he traumatically confronts the
> possibility
> of becoming “like his mother,” while the female genitalia will
> always be
> informed by their signifying relation to the anal eroticism he has
> been
> made to disavow.14
>