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  • The Uses of Abjection
  • David Kurnick (bio)
What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity. David Halperin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. 167 pp.

Risk, the word anchoring the subtitle of David Halperin’s frequently profound and occasionally baffling new book, has at least two meanings. Explicitly, Halperin is talking about sexual risk, prompted by evidence of rising HIV infection rates among men who have sex with men. Halperin chooses, provocatively, to begin making sense of these statistics by delving into the “distinctive properties of queer subjectivity” (4) — and the risk that often feels most threatening here is the one queer critics run in talking about gay subjectivity at all. Halperin is acutely aware of how the accident of AIDS gave a grim energy to the association of the queer psyche with morbidity. Wary of colluding with such logics, Halperin makes clear that he is not presenting the truth of the gay subject; he is particularly eager to avoid “the presumptively objective, theoretically elaborated, scientific languages of psychology and psychoanalysis” (104). The book culminates by proposing abjection as a model for a sociohistorically sensitive account of queer subjectivity. Conscious that abjection is hardly devoid of psychic implications, Halperin offers a number of adjectives — “aesthetic” (82), “existential” (103), “ethical” (57), “social” (71), “phenomenological” (104) — to distinguish his approach from psychoanalytic ones. The imprecision here is the point: Halperin combines discrete conceptual lexicons to resist the authority of any vocabulary in particular.

The book opens with a meticulously documented analysis of gay men’s sexual risk taking. The figures Halperin marshals demonstrate how infrequently condomless sex between men testifies to some ineffable gay will to self-destruction. Halperin argues that what looks to mainstream media like the reckless abandon [End Page 329] of “barebacking” figures in other contexts as the prevention tool of “serosorting.” Halperin is doubtful about the effectiveness of serosorting — especially when men don’t know their status or come to sexual encounters with varying assumptions about what it means when their partners offer to fuck without latex. But he makes it clear that repeating the panicked question “What makes them do it?” is unlikely to help us recognize — and profit from — the self-preservative resources of queer culture. In the book’s less successful middle sections Halperin analyzes a 1995 Village Voice article in which Michael Warner candidly discussed his own unsafe encounters. Halperin commends Warner for making serious proposals about why gay men take sexual risks but faults him for letting his analysis slip into psychological terminology. But on the evidence of Warner’s article (reprinted in an appendix), Halperin misconstrues Warner’s tone. Warner remarks that the headiness of unsafe sex made him feel that “[his] monster was in charge,” but this description of an unsettling experience doesn’t upstage the careful social analysis that follows; when Halperin labels this a “flirtation with gay demonology” (61), the melodrama is his, not Warner’s. And Warner’s use of concepts like “ambivalence,” “identification,” and the “unconscious” leads less to Halperin’s point about the difficulty of “detach[ing] psychoanalytic reasoning from normative thinking” (60) than to the conclusion that we don’t need a purified lexicon to do vitally queer thinking. Halperin has little to say about the current therapeutic reality in the developed world, although he acknowledges that Warner’s article was published just before antiretroviral cocktails made HIV manageable for some. But today’s reality on the ground, in which the uneven but widespread availability of drug combinations makes the connection between unsafe sex and HIV infection — and between HIV infection and illness — harder to assume, is surely a factor in assessing how men understand sexual risk.

The most powerful part of the book is an excavation of the concept of abjection in the work of Jean Genet. Halperin describes abjection as an “involuntary, inverted sainthood” (73) — a process in which outcasts defiantly revel in the terms of their social exclusion and find a modicum of safety and power in their collective freedom from acceptance. Halperin offers attentive analyses of two exhilarating and weird scenes of humiliation in Genet’s work (including one involving a tube of mentholated vaseline). His...

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