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153 Notes on Black (Power) Bottoms H O M O PH O B I A , M O R E T H A N heterosexism, on the part of readers (anticipated and actual) and perhaps even to some degree the author herself , cordons off Paul D’s sexual humiliation by white men in Beloved. Paul D and Sethe know and yet choose not to take up fully the implications of Paul D’s experience, and this choice is both a reflection and an emblem of what is effectively (though I expect not intentionally) a homophobic collusion between Morrison and her readers. This compromise acknowledgment of the painful, partially self-constituting past—the compromise being the decision, psychically agreed to as a foundation for Sethe and Paul D’s heterosexual pairing, that they will name and shape a “manhood” with the chain-gang event at its back without examining that event explicitly, thus no longer “beating back the past” but nevertheless holding off the full investigation of the past—does not prevent them from exploiting the sociogenic power to which the abject past grants them access. But it should be clear enough to us that a further investigation of the implications of that past, an investigation that pulls out the stop!s, as it were, of homophobic reaction, would be useful in elucidating the abilities, the powers, inhering in blackness-as/in-abjection that are this study’s object. One question that arises when the barrier of homophobia is removed has to do with an assessment of the sexual in this scene of sexual domination . What is erotic for the white guards might be clear enough (though see the discussion later in this section), but in pursuing the implications of the scene, how do we account for the sexual, let alone the erotic, in the experience for Paul D, and for all whom he represents? Is it even possible, or productive, to do so? Or merely perverse? A set of narratives and images that repeat in the discourses and imaginary of contemporary Western gay male identity cuts a tangent across Paul D’s scene and finds erotic potential, fodder for lust, despite—and because of—the domination, degradation, and horror that are at its heart. Leo Bersani charts the political potential of the seemingly (and to some degree, actually) self-defeating “commitment to machismo” of gay male 154 Notes on Black (Power) Bottoms desire, evidenced by gay male erotic practices and commercially circulating pornographic fantasies, which stoke sexual excitement by reiterating domination/submission scenarios in which the same despised faggot that the dominant homophobic culture insists gay men are is demeaned for the glory and ejaculatory satisfaction of the gay male participants and consumers. For Bersani, this apparent self-defeat finds its value in its momentary abolishment of the fiction of the self, and in its endorsement of powerlessness, even as it obsessively identifies with power—for no matter whether one enters the fantasy or scenario choosing the role of top or bottom, that it is a fantasy mandates that all parts of it are occupied and identified with by the fantasist/actor, who has distributed various aspects of his psychic needs and desires throughout. “If . . . gay men ‘gnaw at the roots of male heterosexual identity,’” Bersani asserts, “it is . . . because, from within their nearly mad identification with it, they never cease to feel the appeal of its being violated”—which is to say, of the it that is also them being sexually violated (as the bottom) in the fantasy/scenario and of the “self that swells with excitement at the idea of being on top” simultaneously becoming extinguished. This self-abolition is for Bersani an inescapable aspect of sexuality itself, which by his Freudian reading is constituted as, or in, masochism: sexual pleasure occurs at a threshold of intensity when the psychic organization of the self—the organization Freud gives us as ego-centered—is “momentarily disturbed by sensations or affective processes somehow ‘beyond’ those connected with psychic organization. . . . [T]his sexually constitutive masochism could even be thought of as an evolutionary conquest in . . . that it allows the infant to survive, indeed to find pleasure in, the painful and characteristically human period during which infants are shattered with stimuli for which they have not yet developed defensive or integrative ego structures.”1 Bersani in his discussion of the appeal of violation and powerlessness is of course not consciously referencing the sort of scene that Morrison writes for Paul D in Beloved...

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