Becoming-queer

The critical energy with which queer theory interrogates and refuses stable categories of being and knowledge finds its analogue in the resistance to totalitising notions of ‘truth’ and ‘the human’ to be found in all Deleuze's work. In this paper I aim to explore how Deleuze's critical energy and concepts can be marshalled into challenging the totalising notions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘the body’. I will present a reading of the Schreber case as a DeleuzoGuattarian becoming-minoritarian/woman/ queer which shatters the neat and stable confines of the concept ‘man’ – no longer a universal, unmarked and neutral monolith but a flux of radical jouissance, a surface shot through with holes into which and out of which sensations flow, deterritorialising masculine subjectivity and locating the penetrated/penetrable (male) body as a condition of territorialised male subjectivity. I am calling this move or phenomenon ‘the behind’, for reasons which will become clear as the discussion unfolds.

Following the logic of the neither/nor, this paper focuses on one aspect of embodiment so far ignored or misunderstood within critical theory: that of the penetrated male body. For too long the discussion on masculine embodiment has taken place within the confines of a binary understanding of gender subjectivity predicated on sexual positioning, with the consequence that the penetrated partner – regardless of gender – becomes understood as somehow ‘female’. Only a culture characterised by high levels of anxiety concerning the visibility of the penetrated male body such as our own feels the need to rely on this feminine paradigm, because it is a culture that has always already hierarchised the so-called two genders.