Movement and Desire: On the Need to Fluidify Academic Discourse on Sexuality

Hundreds of unusual events and the narratives that frame them, incorporating feelings, memories, and observations of (mostly) male bodies—friends, lovers, strangers, research interviewees, fellow travelers in pleasure and pain—have pestered me for a while now. Here I am with a myriad of microscopic sexual effects thrown at me like a challenge to go and figure them out, a punishment for my insolent insistence on some explanation within the categories of knowledge given to me by contemporary cultural theories of sexuality. In what follows I give two admittedly sketchy examples of what I mean by these unpredictable microsocial sexual rearrangements.

Once I saw a beautiful, muscular, exclusively gay man throw himself passionately into an erotic act with a plain-looking, overweight woman at a big dance party. This freaked out both his ex-boyfriend and his other gay male friends. Another time I saw a beautiful, twenty-something, middle-class, lean, athletic, blond, WASP gay boy—a boy well known in Sydney's gay sex subculture for his vanity, his nonnegotiable sexual interest in guys who were almost spitting images of himself, and his cruising attitude—furiously plugging his ass and mouth with the white, Asian, black, working-class, and middle-class dicks of ugly, older men with grotesque bodies in front of the stunned and disgusted gazes of the body beautifuls of his class and ethnicity at a Sydney gay cruise club.

In both scenarios I saw years of corporeal training vanish in a movement from a body solidly placed on the sociocultural map to a febrile flesh full of surprises. The conceptualizations of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari offer me a framework for interpreting such transformations.¹ The apparatuses of social actualization and implantation—the capitalist economy, the family, the school system, the media, the state, various systems of knowledge, and so on—insert human bodies in various social fields, discourses, and practices and induce them to exist as either men or women, workers or capitalists, gay or straight, law enforcers or criminals, white or black, lean or flabby, beautiful or ugly, desirable or repulsive. In a state of freakish desiring, however, a subject node implanted by these apparatuses reaches a level of criticality at which it temporarily experiences a phase shift to another mode of existence, in the same way that frozen water becomes liquid or even gas under the right atmospheric conditions. Suddenly, there is an "impulse of virtuality," a "transmission of a force of potential that cannot but be felt, simultaneously doubling, enabling, and ultimately counteracting the limitative selections of apparatuses of actualization and implantation."² The proper name for this transmission of potential is transduction.

That is exactly what happened in these two scenarios. A transducting sensation, an expression event, an attractor (to borrow a term from chaos theory) made these gay bodies behave in unusual and unpredictable ways. To a stale social brew in which a habituated human body depressingly existed, a surprising element—a catalyst—was suddenly added, forcefully synthesizing many of the foundational exclusive disjunctions of society and culture into a powerful desire temporarily deterritorialized both from the social structures of identity,differentiation, hierarchy, and exclusion and from myths that supported them.

These examples hint at the existence of an erogenous composite body that is an unpredictable collection "of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects [limbs, dicks, butts, skins, muscles, fat tissues, viscera, sound machines, light machines, built spaces and interiors, props of all sorts and descriptions, foods, chemicals], flows [of affect] and [monstrous, composite] bodies, and that function as units of production [not meaning]."³ This body works according to regimes of synthesis that have little to do with how the relations between the large aggregates—genders, sexes, sexualities, races, classes, nations, age groups—are organized on a molar level.

The existence of this body poses serious epistemological...