Refusing the Role, Embracing the Hole

Jonathan Allan's Reading from Behind: A Cultural Analysis of the Anus is a timely addition to sexuality, gender, affect, queer, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. Allan probes what the anus signifies through a variety of cultural texts and theoretical genealogies. I write this in the aftermath of the feuding derrières of Kim Kardashian and Nicki Minaj attempting to "break the Internet" and the barrage of "booty selfies" emerging from the likes of Justin Bieber, Orlando Bloom, and Nyle DiMarco. This rise in visibility of the ass has led to popular media companies such as Vogue and The New York Times publishing on "belfies" (a combination of "butt" and selfie" [Connor]), to the rise in cosmetic surgeries involving the butt (Meltzer), to the virality of what I would call anal horror in films such as the Human Centipede trilogy, through to bell hooks leading a panel entitled "Whose Booty Is This?" And in the wake of RuPaul's Drag Race becoming mainstream, I cannot not hear All-Stars winner Alaska Thunderfuck telling me "anus thing is possible" while writing this review. It then comes at no surprise that we are baring witness to the hyperpopularization of all things anal in our current cultural productions.

Allan grounds us in all things anal by reminding us that the anus was, and remains, a site of contestation and surrounds itself with affects that include shame, anxiety, fear, and paranoia. He argues that the anus works to orient sexualities, calling it "the very ground zero of gayness" (8). In his introduction, "No Wrong Doors: An Entryway" he asks if there are methods to "engage the anus but not fall victim to a hermeneutics of suspicion, a paranoid, anxious, or nervous reading practice, one that always insists on a certain orientation?" (9). Allan insists that in order to read from behind, we must procure a blend of theoretics to shift our optics from our phallocentric trainings to this very ground zero from which he asks us to peek. Producing a methodology for reading from the bottom, Allan aligns himself closely with the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, primarily her essay "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You." Reading from Behind seeks to reset the affective interpolations of the anus in its homophobic and effeminophobic understandings to produce a new kind of reading, one motivated by the reparative and its unknowing. This new methodology works within the boundaries (re: buttocks) of affects, both negative and positive, to "negotiate our relations to these affects, thinking through the complicated and complex ways in which affect informs idea … it is worthwhile to benefit from the tension" (14). In doing so, Allan affords us a rich and complex constellation of readings by highlighting those affects that make us uncomfortable in texts we hold dear, in order to further our understanding that "[t]he anus is remarkably rich with hermeneutic potential, and critical theory has done a disservice to its complexity by privileging the phallic referent" (70).

In the first chapter, "Anal Theory, or Reading from Behind," Allan expands the scope of his methodology. "The anus," he writes, "is an opening to the text that has remained obscured by critical, intellectual, and affective anxieties that have not permitted readers the chance to engage with the other side of textuality" (6). Reading from Behind seeks to make the phallus peripheral in order to hone in on a median ground we all share. For the anus, Allan notes, "is inherently inclusive" (17) and vastly complex in its significations across race, orientation, sex, sexuality, ethnicity, and so on. Attempting to universalize the anus, to remove it from its ground zero and significations with gay men, we are asked "[w]hat does the ass, the rectum, the anus mean for masculinity, for the male body?" (28). To flesh out his provocation, Allan recruits Eric Anderson's conceptions of "homohysteria" to return us to a place of paranoia and...