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  • Erotic Uncreativity: A Response to Steven F. Kruger
  • Scott Herring (bio)

I want to first thank Steven Kruger for introducing me to medieval porn. I deeply appreciate the medium—and his keen analysis of it—because both demonstrate how remarkably dull gay male sex can be. It’s as if many of the authors and artists that Kruger surveys set out to achieve the opposite of Gayle Rubin’s clarion call “to encourage erotic creativity” at the end of her 1984 essay “Thinking Sex” (35). At this they succeed beyond anyone’s dreams. “Sex,” we find again and again in this “conservative medium,” “is decidedly secondary” for many of these homoerotic Internet stories. When deeds do take precedence, the authors cited script “relatively unexceptional” scenes that envision typical fare like “sucking and fucking.” To his credit, Kruger is on to all of this. Amidst the hundreds of circulating tales about Vikings and chained muscle, he finds “the projection of a fairly mainstream, identitarian, late-twentieth/early-twenty-first-century gay male identity back onto the medieval past.”

At first, “fairly mainstream” sounded to me like a code for the queer eroticization of neoliberalism, that late-twentieth-century shift from a radical sexual politics that critiques assimilation via the mass public sphere to political normalizations such as state-sanctioned gay marriage. Here there is evidence aplenty. For starters, “clear opportunities for dominance/submission scenarios” that turn into the “assertion of equality in love than toward an exploration of power differentials.” This is the hallmark, we might recall, of equalized partnership (itself a hallmark of the modern ideal of companionate marriage—and also a hallmark in the sense of the new line of greeting cards issued by the corporation to honor same-sex weddings). “‘Authentic’ interpersonal relationships” that [End Page 945] flower into “the possibility of stable same-sex unions” and the “clear fantasy of the possibility of gay marriage.” And, last but not least, the familialization of same-sex male intimacies whereby queer narrative turns into the kinship tale of your great-great-great-great granddad. It all goes to show how stunningly lackluster fantasy lives can be once homonormativity seeps into the Middle Ages, as well as how easily the situation can turn from bad to worse.1 In fact, though the emphasis here is on post-Stonewall males in the US, this lack of inspiration may be a globalizing phenomenon, as the large number of Men on the Net’s “Erotic Stories” identified as Croatian, Filipino, French, Greek, Indonesian, Macedonian, Malaysian, Portuguese, Korean, Italian, Serbian and “in Singapore” attest (“Men”).

In the wake of this unlimited lack of choice, these standardized tales also reveal how difficult it is to enact—across the imbrications of late-modern print culture and new media—those “bodies and pleasures” that so famously close down Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (157). Cited by Kruger, this concept has often been a “rallying point” for a sexual “counterattack” by queers (157). Less famously, Foucault also relegated these “bodies and pleasures” to an unnamed posterity that he was very quick to qualify: “[O]ne day, perhaps, in a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of sexuality . . . were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex” (159). Here Foucault stumbles over three commas to get to his main subject, and I have to wonder if this hesitant remark is germane to 1976 (the French publication date of Volume 1), or to 1978 (the English translation date), or to the present moment, or to the future at hand. At any rate, Foucault quipped—in a statement that has been attributed to the philosopher via the testimonies of Edmund White, David Halperin, and David Macey—that the twentieth century produced a startling total of one new erotic activity—that of fist-fucking. As White noted when he cited a certain “French savant,” “fist-fucking is our century’s only brand-new contribution to the sexual armamentarium” (qtd. in Halperin 92). This apocryphal claim can be read as a celebration, a testament to the progressive erotic inventions of sexual modernity in the West.2 But...

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