shortbus clip

Here's a clip of the film I've written a review essay on. Fedde has another clip on his website. It's sooo good! Do go and watch. I'll post my review soon.

From one paper to the other

In my research for the Fascism & Psychoanalysis paper, which I am writing on the fact that I perceived a subtle but recurrent conflation between Fascism and Homosexuality, I came across an article written by a self-confessed progressive homosexual which ends as follows: "Many of the mainstream elements of gay culture - body worship, the lauding of the strong, a fetish for authority figures and cruelty - provide a swamp in which the fascist virus can thrive". So this would strongly subscribe both my thesis and the idea that when you are exposed to certain figures of thought often enough, you will eventually end up (partly) believing in them.

But when you think you think things can't get any worse you come across a book called The Pink Swastika (I link to an annotated version, because we alll know hoe Google works) which claims to uncover ‘homosexuals as the true inventors of Nazism and the guiding force behind many Nazi atrocities’. The book fulminates against the ‘aggressive’ homosexual power that both forces the acceptance of sodomy—a ‘corruption of the natural and moral orders of creation’—as a normal variant of human sexuality and enforces a ‘politically correct’ whitewash of this conflation in the media and academia.

On the contrary, I would say, the imaginary link has been endlessly recycled, but that is not what I want to elaborate on here. Discovery of this kind of supposed 'independent' research, used to underpin their homophobic political agenda, made me realize how much I myself am caught in very specific ideological construction of reality, and how much I like that construction. So much so that I became somewhat zealous and started to purge wikipedia of false references to the book (under the illusion that once you offer people the truth they will see it is the true truth, a remnant of my Catholicism I guess). It made me realize that stoicism, despite its attractions, is ultimately not 'my thing'. So my paper subject for the stoics course (for which I haven't had much time yet to think of a definite subject) must be a critical engagement with it. I've started reading Badiou's Deleuze in which he is critical of Deleuze's engagement with the Stoics. Wonder whether he gives some more body to his short remarks on this in the introduction.

Shortbus

Over the weekend I have been writing a review essay on Shortbus, the succès fou of independent filmmaker James Cameron Mitchell about a few visitors of a New York sex-club which I've seen in London last week. It's a great film, though it is not as subversive as it might seem at first glance or as Mitchell seems to put forward in several interviews. It engages interestingly with the almost total disappearance of the distinction between reality and fantasy, but, I guess as a result of the development of the plot on the basis of improvisations with the actors, the message is diluted as the narrative strands are tied up neatly at the conclusion of the film. Still the film offers interesting connections with both research themes I'm working on right now. For one thing it questions the possibility of authentic desire which could lead to an interesting dialectic with Reich's theories. On the other hand it poses questions on when something could 'count' as an authentic event, or when it is rather a pseudo-event. I will not, at this moment, proceed these connections, however, as I have several deadlines closing in on me.

it's a war-time thing?

Some of the things I have read suggest that the connection between homosexuality and fascism is based on the strong male bonding and misogynist stance of prewar Nazi groups. I remember, however, an undergraduate paper about masculinity in American post-war films, which, I argued, was problematised by the war-time experience of American men. Disciplining men as soldiers compromises their psychological makeup and identity and brings about an 'intensification' of traditional notions of manhood (misogynism, swearing and such) and a ban on effeminate behaviour. At the same time, however, strong emotional ties are forged between the soldiers and as John D'Emilio remarks:

The sex-segregated nature of the armed forces raised homosexuality closer to the surface for all millitary personel. Soldiers indulged buffoonery, aping in exaggerated form the social stereotype of the homosexual, as a means of releasing the sexual tensions of life in the barracks.

Of course this has to be done in a exaggerated way (just like the way they perform their masculinity) so as to make sure that they are not 'really' gay. Nevertheless, there is a sort of tension here. And what's more,
to make a link to the animal world: in several animal species one sees homosexual acts (which obviously is not the same to the social construction of the homosexual identity that we know in the West today) outside the rutting season. Obviously, in an (almost) exclusively male environment such as the army in WWII, homosexual acts must have soared.

Anyway, my point is, could not this 'schizophrenic' structure of masculinity be the cause for the emotional and behavioural 'oddities' of the prewar Nazi groups? And if so, is this not much more a general feature of war time mobilization? If so, it makes it even more interesting why exactly the link between specifically fascism and homosexuality has endured.

Fascist Aesthetic?

The German painter Norbert Bisky paints young blond boys with blue eyes and bare torsos. His work is widely regarded as provocative because it would refer to the aesthetic ideals of the German fascist regime. Blond hair and blue eyes, maybe, but young boys without T-shirts? I would say that the critics that hold these opinions are unconsciously influenced by the connection that we too easily make between homosexuality and fascism. If fascists were gay, they might have idolized Bisky's young 'gods' (just as Germaine Greer does, by the way, in her The Beautiful Boy), fact of the matter is that, although undoubtedly some Nazi's were gay, they actively persecuted gays, so the link that is so often and easily made is quite absurd. Bisky himself comments that his paintings are inspired by the East German communist youth groups that he witnessed as a young boy.

retroactive revolutions

someone suggested to me that a revolution might also be called a revolution when we decide afterwards that someting was a defining moment or a distictive set of events. It got me thinking that the minimum qualifiers I identified in my paper, which do not allow retroactive revolutions, are to strickt.