Of Housewives and Saints: Abjection, Transgression, and Impossible Mourning in Poison and Safe

Christian, Laura.
Camera Obscura, 57 (Volume 19, Number 3), 2004, pp. 92-123 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/co/summary/v019/19.3christian.html

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James Lyons as Jack Bolton in Poison (US, 1991). Courtesy Killer Films

Of Housewives and Saints: Abjection, Transgression, and Impossible Mourning in Poison and Safe
Laura Christian

In the opening sequence of Velvet Goldmine (dir. Todd Haynes, UK/US, 1998), future glam-rock trendsetter Jack Fairy stands in front of a mirror and, having been brutalized earlier by a pack of schoolyard bullies, smears the blood from his split lip into a glistening, cherry-red smile, satised in the knowledge that one day the whole bloody world would be his. This is a signature Haynes moment: Fairy converts the corporeal sign of his abjection into the brazen emblem of his star power. The very stigmata that brand him as a pariah literally provide the raw materials for his transformation into a aming proto-pop icon. Though characterized by extraordinary stylistic diversity, the lms of Todd Haynes have maintained a consistent focus on the theme of abjection. This is as true of the so-called womens lms as it is of his more explicitly queer works. The release of Far from Heaven (US/France, 2002), in fact, makes it possible (if it was not so before) to discern in Hayness oeuvre a pattern of alternaCopyright 2004 by Camera Obscura Camera Obscura 57, Volume 19, Number 3 Published by Duke University Press 93

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tion between two key problematics, each of which approaches the issue of abjection from a different angle. The rst concerns the performative resources provided by the condition of abjection or rejection by the social order at large. Jack Fairys tactics of resignication, for example, unmistakably recall the performative strategies adopted by the outcast characters in Hayness earlier lm, Poison (US, 1991). Based on the autobiographical novels of Jean Genet,1 and intercutting three different narratives rendered in three distinct visual modes, Poison introduces us to a host of marginal gures who, in masochistically embracing their abjection, ascend (or perhaps one should say descend) into Genetian sainthood. The second problematic to which Hayness lms repeatedly return concerns the psychosomatic costs of a too-forceful repudiation of the abject, or of the constitutive exclusions that are a precondition for the achievement of normative femininity. Safe (US/UK, 1995) and Far from Heaven, for instance, take up the cinematic conventions associated with the maternal melodrama (the former in a much quieter way than the latter, to be sure) in order to foreground that which cannot be accommodated within the bounds of bourgeois domesticity life-threatening illness and racial and sexual otherness. In Safe, Carol Whites ( Julianne Moores) body itself becomes the site of the abjects disruptive return, which manifests in the form of environmental illness. This essay examines Hayness handling of the abject in Poison and Safe, with a particular view toward the question of what kinds of political work these lms perform. Poison and Safe form a complementary pair, in my view, despite their discontinuous treatment of gender and their striking formal differences, because both lay out in paradigmatic terms the issues that have continued to preoccupy Haynes in his more recent lms. Both works were also palpably born out of the rst phase of the AIDS emergency in the United States. Poison opens with a quote from Genets Our Lady of the Flowers: The whole world is dying of panicky fright. This intertitle sets all three of the lms narratives in an atmosphere of mass panic, while clearly referencing the extradiegetic scene of the AIDS pandemic.

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Safe, too, has generally been read as an AIDS metaphor. After all, environmental illness is a recently identied syndrome (often referred to as twentieth-century disease) that, like AIDS, compromises the immune system. AIDS itself is only referenced a handful of times in the course of the lm, but its very absence from the plot makes it one of the lms most powerful structuring elements. One of the arguments I wish to make here, however, is that the relationship between the major problematics to which Hayness work again and again returns is not so much a metaphoric as a metonymic one. That is to say, it does not so much suggest an analogical relation between the condition of femininity and that of male subjectivity at the margins,2 but instead outlines their interfaces and the foreclosures on which each is founded. For instance, in a scene remarkable for the economy of its dialogue, Carol Whites best friend, Linda (Susan Norman), reveals that her half brother has died but denies that the cause of death was AIDS a suspicion apparently provoked by the fact that he was not married. The entire exchange, which comprises just a handful of halting, truncated utterances, takes place without the words gay or AIDS ever being spoken. Set in Lindas startlingly immaculate kitchen clearly not a space that can accommodate sexual deviance or death the scene attests to how loudly the unspoken can be made to signify. Analyzing Hayness lms in terms of the psychoanalytic concept of abjection necessarily means placing them in dialogue with Julia Kristevas foundational text on this topos, Powers of Horror.3 Read alongside and against each other, Hayness lms and Kristevas theoretical work do much to illuminate one another. Poison and Safe are indeed rife with bodily elements of abjection spit, shit, cum, blood, pus. In Poison, these elements frequently serve as symbolic tokens of lth in ritualistic acts of violence that mark the victim as a deject, while fortifying the subjecthood of the perpetrator. At the culmination of Homo, for instance, the protagonist John Broom (clearly a surrogate gure for Genet,4 played by Scott Renderer) rapes Jack Bolton ( James Lyons), a fellow prison inmate and the object of his desire. He violently breaches a bodily margin and ejaculates across it in order to put

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Bolton back in his place when Bolton begins to ascend the ranks of the prisons homosocial hierarchy. In Hero, the mock television tabloid segment that revolves around the mystery of a seven-year-old boy named Richie Beacon who killed his father and then ew away, a neighbor describes an episode in which Richie entered her backyard naked and made a BM right before her eyes, submitting her to a humiliating spectacle that was also a theatrical display of his own abjection. And in Horror, the blackand-white sci- segment, scientist Dr. Thomas Graves (Larry Maxwell) distills the sex drive into a liquid form and accidentally drinks it, infecting himself with a lethal contagion that makes him the target of a hunt for a menacing leper sex killer. At one point in the narrative, a little girl disgusted by the grotesque, oozing sores on his face spits on Graves as he is walking down the street. In each of the above scenes, a token of abjection forcibly transferred across a bodily or topographical boundary marginalizes the victim, excluding him or her from what Judith Butler calls the domain of the subject.5 Safe begins with a more mundane episode of violence: Carol having sex with her husband, Greg (Xander Berkeley). An overhead shot taken from above the bed shows her on her back, facing the camera, her face unresponsive as Gregs bare back undulates over her body. Though this is sex not rape, as in Poison it nevertheless marks Carols body as a passive receptacle, a repository of the abject. The abject later returns to haunt the conjugal bedroom in an episode that presents an ironic counterpoint to the sex scene. Having lashed out at Carol when she declined to have sex with him the night before, Greg apologizes. He embraces Carol consolingly, and she buries her face in his shirt. Carols body then begins to convulse in a manner that visually rhymes with Gregs spasmodic movements in the sex scene. She suddenly pushes away from Greg and violently pukes on the oor in front of him. What at rst looks like crying that classic act of feminine catharsis that so often facilitates the renewed bonding of the couple turns out to be repulsion. It is as though Carols body can no longer tolerate the sexual misuse it has endured in the interests of adhering to a normative ideal of femininity. In situating the concept of abjection, Kristeva summons

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the image of an infant who, gagging on a surfeit of milk, choking on the enigmatic signiers of its mothers desire, vomits itself out, expelling itself, abjecting itself with the same convulsive motion through which it establishes itself as provisionally and tenuously separate from the mothers body. This process, coincident with what is known in classical Freudian discourse as the primal repression, lays the psychic foundations for the separation between self and other, subject and object, concomitantly establishing the conditions for the infants entry into language. The return of the abject is thus associated with various borderline phenomena the collapse of bodily boundaries, as well as the breakdown of structures of signication. In a sense, one encounters the limits of Kristevas concept of abjection precisely at the point where it promises to be the most generative. As soon as Kristeva attempts to position this psychical mechanism of foreclosure (forclusion) within a broader sociosymbolic system, her analysis succumbs to a mystication of the maternal body as the universal locus of a presymbolic multiplicity of drives (the semiotic). Butler and others have observed how Kristeva subsumes not only homosexual desire but that which is marked as primitive or Oriental under the ultimately metaphysical category of the maternal-feminine.6 Hayness lms trouble this category, suggesting that the abject assumes different codings and is identied with different marginal zones of social life in different sociohistorical contexts. When the abject erupts in Hayness lms, virtually rending the fabric of the text, it is not simply equivalent to the return of the demoniacal potential of the feminine.7 It is always situated in a specic sociosymbolic economy.

Transgression and Saintly Jouissance: Poison

The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior. . . . Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

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In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler asks what it means to occupy the discursive site of injury or to inhabit the abject positions marked out by certain pathologizing, degrading, or criminalizing names. She suggests that, insofar as an injurious term confers a social existence on the deject, it is at once disabling and enabling, and that only by occupying being occupied by [an] injurious term can I resist and oppose it.8 In Poison, identity is instituted through injury. The opening credits of the lm take place against a single long take of a disembodied hand a childs hand, which we soon learn belongs to the young John Broom (Tony Pemberton) as it handles an assortment of objects in an adults bedroom (a feather, a change purse, a brush-and-comb set, a magnifying glass, a collection of silk scarves, etc.). The shot is extraordinarily tactile, the small hand moving lightly but intently from one object to the next. Its rapturous explorations are interrupted by a violent and unexpected slap, at which point the camera pivots to frame Brooms guardians, who begin to shout at him. The soundtrack then blurs into a desynchronized stream of criminalizing invective. Among the words we can make out are: Youre a beggar! A bandit! A thief! The use of reverb gives this episode of name-calling the quality of a founding scene of interpellation: the names seem less to issue from the actual mouths of Brooms guardians than from the social order at large from the enunciative position of what Louis Althusser called the Subject.9 As the names reverberate seemingly within the space of the bedroom chamber, as well as within the space of Brooms interiority the camera whip-pans back and forth in the same long take between the looming forms of the adults and Brooms small frame.10 He stands before them paralyzed, struck dumb with horror. Haynes closes the scene with an intertitle bearing a quote from Genets The Thiefs Journal: A child is born and he is given a name. Suddenly, he can see himself. He recognizes his position in the world. For many, this experience, like that of being born, is one of horror. The injurious interpellation that denes Broom as a thief initiates him into a social existence he nds himself positioned within a social hierarchy that differentiates adults

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from children, respectable citizens from deviants. While provoking horror, this experience simultaneously creates the conditions for his being able to act as a social agent in the world. Signicantly, the epithets cast at the young Broom misconstrue the nature of his furtive activity in the bedroom, which was more a perverse indulgence in the pleasures of various textured surfaces than an attempt to steal something. Apparently the injurious interpellation has a formative effect, however, for we learn in the next scene of the narrative that by the time he was an adolescent, Broom had become notorious as a kid with a knack for theft. After a childhood spent in and out of foster homes, he was sent to the reformatory at Baton. Now an adult, he has been transferred to the prison at Fontenal. In submitting to prison life, he tells us in a voice-over, embracing it, I could reject the world that had rejected me. Brooms deant identication with the injurious term that effected his marginalization enables his survival. It endows him with a measure of pride in the face of a hostile world. Broom has answered to the charges leveled against him by becoming what [he] had been accused of being, to recall one of Genets statements in The Thiefs Journal.11 His performative enactment of the criminal behaviors that mark him as a thief and his willful embrace of prison life allow him to lay claim to the terms used to punish him. The scene of young Brooms interpellation as a thief fuses the stigma attached to his signature (though initially misrecognized) transgression with the stigma attached to his deviant, if still inchoate, desire, thus conjoining his willful criminality indissolubly with his perverse eroticism. It pregures a later scene in which the adult Broom attempts to feel Bolton up while Bolton is sleeping. A random background noise awakens Bolton, and he grabs Brooms hand once again, Brooms absorption in a covert tactile pleasure is jarringly interrupted. The scene ends abruptly with another intertitle: My hearts in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hands in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught. This breathless string of phrases, each of which ends alternately with a reference to a nested object (the rst is enclosed by the second which is enclosed by the third) or a past

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participle (indicative of a violence already committed, a treacherous fait accompli), accelerates only to be brought to a halt with caught. Rhetorically mimicking the rhythm of the parallel scenes that preceded it, it evokes the successive displacements of a mobile, perverse desire a desire arrested when caught in the act. While Broom is the narrating presence into whose interior life we have access throughout Homo, Richie Beacon is the absent center of the mock documentary Hero, which revolves around the mystery of his identity. The opening sequence alternates between close-ups of a grainy picture of the Beacon family an image that positions Richie squarely within the classic nuclear-familial triad, at the pivot point of an oedipal triangle and a shaky track-in to the Beacons front door, as the commentator asks: Who was Richie Beacon? Although the members of Richies community interviewed in the documentary teachers, neighbors, schoolmates, medical professionals present radically contradictory views in response to this question, they consistently testify to the abuses he suffered at school. Signicantly, Richie never fought back when assaulted. Idealizing Richies victimization, his mother, Felicia, attributes it to his essential passivity: He was a meek soul. People pick on meek souls. Yet as the documentary unfolds, we learn the extent to which Richie actively sought to perform the masochistic reenactment of his abjection. At school, for instance, he repeatedly manipulated an older boy named Gregory Lazarre into playing the father to him in a sadomasochistic scenario that recapitulated his real fathers beatings. Ostensibly a passive victim of abuse, Richie was in fact the author of his own scripts, exercising control over others through the aggressive assertion of his abjection. Richies role-playing activities with Gregory recall the fantasy scenarios outlined by Freud in the essay A Child Is Being Beaten. 12 Freud understands male masochism specically as the product of the negative Oedipus complex, the male subjects identication with his mother and homosexual attachment to his father. He interprets his male patients desire to be beaten by the mother as encoding their repressed wishes to be beaten/loved by

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the father. Gilles Deleuze reinterprets the male masochistic fantasy, emphasizing, in contrast to Freud, the sons transfer of the authority to punish from the father to the mother, who is thereby reinvested with the phallus.13 By inviting the mother to beat him, the son allows himself to be stripped of all virility and is reincarnated as a castrated gure. In the process, he repudiates his claims to the endowment of power and authority promised him under the paternal law. Hence the one beaten in the masochistic scenario is not so much the male subject, but the father, or the father in the male subject. The father is thereby expelled (at least in fantasy) from the symbolic order. Deleuze insists that the masochistic scenario is essentially an affair between mother and son: A contract is established between the hero and the woman, whereby at a precise point in time and for a determinate period she is given every right over him. By this means the masochist tries to exorcise the danger of the father (58). Two key scenes in Hero show such a contract to be established between Richie and Felicia through a silent exchange of glances. These are the only two scenes in which Richie himself appears within the frame. The rst replays a kind of primal scene in which Richie walks in on his mother having sex with the Beacons gardener, Jos. Though Felicia narrates the scene in a voice-over, the handheld camera traveling through the downstairs rooms of the house and up the stairs to the bedroom door reects Richies point of view. The door rst opens to reveal, anticlimactically, an empty bed covered by a pristine white bedspread. Replaying the moment of revelation but this time gratifying our expectations of a primal scene the shot that follows shows Richie himself standing against the bedroom door. When he opens the door to discover Jos on top of his mother, the screen splits: the bedroom scene appears within an inset frame bordered by the bedroom door, and this frame within the frame zooms in onto Felicias face, so that mother and son appear to be looking at one another intensely, though from discontinuous spatial positions. The image also features contrasting lm stocks: the scene within the inset frame is shot in 8mm, while the rest of the frame remains in the

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standard presentation format of the documentary. The grainy, home-movie look of the image in the inset frame imparts an even greater intimate quality to the nonverbal exchange between Felicia and Richie. Felicia recalls that Richies look was weird, and that it reminded her of a time when she watched her husband spank him. The second scene in which Richie appears conforms to the same split-frame format: he is shown in his underwear, slung over his fathers knees with his bottom facing the camera, impassively resting his chin in his hands as his fathers disembodied hand mechanically spanks him. Felicias face appears again in the right half of the frame opposite Richie in an inset frame bordered by the bedroom door. Felicia recalls that Richies gaze as he was being spanked conveyed a kind of oath. She describes how, when her husband Fred (Edward Allen) learned of her adulterous affair, he bought a gun, which he would wave in front of Richie in a self-aggrandizing display of phallic power as if to promise him future rights over his mothers or another womans body. Signicantly, neither Joss nor Richies fathers face ever actually appears on screen. Once exposed in agrante delicto with Felicia, Jos almost immediately ees offscreen, and Fred Beacon is always shown either facing away or cropped from the waist up. This reinforces the sense that a contract has been forged between mother and son that excludes the father and his surrogates.14 When Fred ies into a rage toward Felicia one night and begins to strangle her to death, Richie feels through his parents dresser drawer for the gun and shoots his father, repudiating his claims to a paternal legacy and literally exorcising the danger of the father by abolishing him forever from the familial domain.15 He then mounts the bedroom windowsill and ies away. As the sole witness to Richies miraculous ight, Felicia has constructed a narrative of divine transcendence around her childs disappearance, calling him a gift from God and an angel of judgment. If Richie is indeed a divine gure a Genetian saint then it surely is not in the sense that Felicia imagines. For Genet, transcendence is achieved through transgression, and while Homo is the narrative in Poison most closely based on

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Genets work, the entire lm is framed by a Genetian aesthetics and ethics. Powers of Horror sheds light on the symbolic power of the Genetian saint. Tracing a semiotics of Biblical abomination, Kristeva draws out one strand of exegetical thought according to which sin may be considered a form of subjectied abjection.16 As a created being, man is subordinated to God and yet independent of him by virtue of his endowment with free will. He can commit sin only through willful nonobservance of the rule. Sin is thus an afrmation of ones God-given will and judgment, and a means of integrating the abject into language and logic. It is a requisite for reconciliation between the esh and the law. According to Kristeva, to set oneself up as evil is to abolish evil in oneself (128). Like Deleuze, Kristeva reads the masochistic martyr-saint as a gure whose forfeiture of self and bodily integrity signies his abdication of the privileges promised him under the paternal law. Communion with the abject is not a deferential gesture vis--vis paternal or divine authority, but a fount of innite jouissance. For the Genetian saint, then, the abject is no longer something to be ejected, but the the point where the scales are tipped toward pure spirituality (127). This pure spirituality, however, instead of transcending the esh, is thoroughly grounded in the corporeal, in a masochistic state of embodiment.

Illness and Redemption: Safe

Instead of sounding himself as to his being, [the deject] does so concerning his place: Where am I? instead of Who am I? For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic. . . . The deject is in short a stray. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

Genets world brings us the pervert-criminal, whose crime draws attention to the fragility of the law, and the masochistic martyrsaint, whose ascendance is predicated on his surrender of phallic authority. These are two gures who subjectify the abject, laying

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claim to the injuries that institute their identities, owning them fully, and thus performatively enacting what Jonathan Dollimore has described with reference to Genet as a transgressive reinscription of the terms of their exclusion.17 Their abandonment of all pretensions to (self-)mastery assures their transcendence. Safe, by contrast, quotes an array of redemptive discourses that promote precisely the opposite approach to the abject. Emphasizing dissociation from the body and its affects, and prescribing various exercises in self-purication as a means to restoring what Kristeva describes as the clean and proper self, these discourses merely reinscribe the regulatory terms of a normative culture, thus reinstating the conditions for the abjects disruptive return.18 One of the striking features of Safe is its polyvocal soundtrack: at almost any given moment, we hear the sounds of the radio or television in the background. Carol often falls asleep in front of the television. One non sequitur interlude in the lm shows an extended clip on an alternative environmentalist movement known as deep ecology. Presented to the viewer without even the mediating frame of the television set (which would mark it more clearly as a quotation inscribed within the plot), it presents a montage of picturesque natural landscapes as a male commentators voice-over cites the testimony of a prominent ecophilosopher. The lm cues us neither to accept the viewpoint espoused in the clip nor to dismiss it. It is but one of the rhetorics of redemption with which Carol is barraged on a daily basis. Driving along a thoroughfare in the San Fernando Valley, for instance just before choking on the toxic fumes released by the truck in front of her Carol listens absentmindedly to a woman on the radio declaring her faith in Jesus Christ. Even Carols upper-class social set subscribes to its own secular brand of redemptive rhetoric. In the locker room, Carol overhears the testimony of a woman from her aerobics class who has traded Twelve Steps (which she claims eventually just became another form of addiction) for the teachings of a prominent self-help writer who aims to put his followers back in charge of their emotional lives. A technology of the self based on

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an ideal of self-mastery, the self-help discourse presumes that suffering is an individual problem over which one may willfully choose to take control. The locker-room woman touts the selfhelp writers program for emotional maintenance as if it were a practice of self-care as casual and user-friendly as a regimen geared toward improving ones physical health. Ironically, Carol would appear to be a kind of living incarnation of the very model of self-mastery to which her peers aspire. In the locker-room scene, the self-help advocate pauses at one point to marvel at the fact that Carol does not sweat. A source of status in a context where being a lady means doing ones utmost to mask ones bodily processes particularly those in which bodily uids traverse the supercies of the skin this bizarre feature of Carols constitution is, we might venture to guess, one of the factors contributing to her illness. Her body, gured as virtually nonporous, has little means of disposing of the toxins to which it is exposed on a daily basis. It would seem that Carols body is the product of an all-too-successful materialization (to use Butlers suggestive term) in accordance with bourgeois, heteronormative standards.19 A dutiful daughter and wife, the near-perfect embodiment of upper-middle-class, docile femininity, Carol has become a fortied castle, to borrow a metaphor from Kristeva.20 An overly exacting internalization of the law has made the limits of her bodyego as rigid as a prison wall. Paradoxically, the more impervious the ego, the more it suffers libidinal impoverishment. Kristevas fascinating nosography of abjection in many respects offers an illuminating framework for apprehending the psychosomatic logic of Carols ever-shifting and elusive symptoms. Kristeva notes, for instance, that the deject typically attempts to repair her or his wounded narcissism by plunging into the pursuit of various compensatory identications, which are ultimately experienced as empty or devitalized (49). On discovering the obscure diagnostic category environmental illness about a third of the way through Safe, Carol zealously takes up an identication as a chemically impaired individual. At rst this seems to offer a measure of relief: in a conversation with Linda about her newly identied condition, Carol is notably more animated and verbally

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agile than at any other moment in the lm. For one beset by the abject, however, language itself becomes a fetish, employed as a counterphobic object in the attempt to keep fear at bay (41). Carols speech in general has a disturbingly hollow quality. Her conversations with mother, husband, and maid are painfully rote. Dialogue in Safe is spare and riddled with drawn-out silences. Carol often does not nish her sentences. When probed by a psychiatrist to say what is going on in her, she nds herself at a complete loss. It is as though, as Kristeva describes it, a kind of disconnect has occurred for Carol between verbal signs and their somatic underpinnings (what Freud called the thing-presentations or representatives of the drive). Secondary and primary processes have become utterly disarticulated. Discourse has been reduced to a fragmentary collection of pure signiers, disengaged from any embodied signied. The subject speaks, but does not manage to feel what she speaks. Lacking any other recourse to symbolization, the abject nally emerges in the form of inexplicable pains, paralysis, even the uncontrollable eruption of abject bodily elements. In this light, we might identify Carols illness as an instance of the body speaking when Carol cannot, much like in the case of the nineteenth-century hysteric. The body performs an act of articulation that the enunciating subject herself cannot execute, except that here it is not so much by way of the symptom, which indirectly expresses a repressed wish (a set of contents already raised to the level of the sign), but by way of a direct semantization of the abject (53). Carols body, so precariously sealed, issues forth blood, vomit, snot, tears. Safe nevertheless stops short of attributing Carols condition of lack to the foreclosure of some primordial maternalfeminine realm of experience on this point it sharply parts ways with the Kristevan model of abjection. Whatever the constitutive exclusions that found Carols subjecthood, they are not identiable in the lm with any particular set of repressed contents. To be sure, some of the causes of Carols badly attenuated narcissism or emptiness are quite evident it is no coincidence that she has developed an allergic reaction to her husband. But Safe for

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the most part leaves us to speculate as to just what it is that Carol is missing. Insisting on the fundamental links between the social and the psychic, the symbolic and the corporeal, Safe maps these relations in topographical terms through an examination of discursive construction of safe and unsafe spaces. This focus on space is reected in the predominance of long shots (also frequently of extended duration) that frame various suburban vistas and domestic interiors. Within these shots, Carol is often dwarfed by the frame, presented at a distance, and this distance contributes visually to her inaccessibility to the viewer. Though the spaces through which she moves are extravagant and expansive, they evoke an atmosphere of claustrophobia rather than of luxury or freedom. Kristeva describes the space that envelops the deject as divisible, foldable, and catastrophic; threatening danger from out of nowhere, it gures as an externalization of the abject within though, of course, it is precisely the boundary between inside and outside that the abject destabilizes (8). In the rst half of the lm, Carol takes on the appearance of a kind of ghost, drifting through the rooms of her house or its impeccably manicured environs at night, clad in a long, white nightgown. She becomes what Kristeva describes as a stray, a kind of frantic cartographer or deviser of territories whose constant sense of disorientation sets her off on a quest to demarcate the unstable connes of her world (8). Carol nds that the most familiar spaces have become unfamiliar, uncanny. Unable to sleep in her own bed, she tells Greg that she smells fumes in the house. At one point, she inexplicably bursts into tears: Where am I? she asks Greg. Right now? The return of the abject in Safe is not only identied with the invisible toxins that pollute Carols environment, however. As Haynes illustrates, Carol lives in a social world that is intensely preoccupied with shoring up its boundaries against the threat of all kinds of encroachments from an exorbitant and unthinkable outside. One night at the dinner table, Carols stepson, Rory (Chauncy Leopardi), reads aloud an essay he has written titled An American Problem. The problem to which it refers is that of

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black and Chicano gangs invading white neighborhoods. In an over-the-top indulgence in action-lm imagery, the essay describes in orgiastic detail the murderous and maiming acts of violence that supposedly occur every day on the streets of Los Angeles. When Carol asks, Does it have to be so gory? Rory replies indignantly, Gory! Thats how it really is. (Not incidentally, the entire exchange occurs as the familys Latina maid, Fulvia [Martha VelezJohnson], moves silently in and out of the dining room clearing the dishes.) In Bodies That Matter, Butler invokes the abject in relation to the mapping of social domains, the demarcation of imaginary territories. She writes: The abject designates . . . precisely those unlivable and uninhabitable zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject. . . . This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the dening limit of the subjects domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded identication against which and by virtue of which the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life.21 Rorys essay clearly reects his wholesale assimilation of (and fascination with) the medias construction of an unlivable zone the urban ghetto against which the domain of the subject the white, upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood denes itself and that constitutes the latters necessary border. Carols efforts to circumscribe the domain of the subject are concentrated on the upkeep and renovation of her home. All the ladies in her social set are continually involved in refurbishing their houses. Ironically, Carols very efforts to beautify her home create the conditions for her attacks: her brand-new couch, for instance, proves completely toxic. As Carol begins to experience her own home as itself an unlivable zone, she seeks rst to seal herself off from the abject within by establishing an oasis, or chemical-free space, in a small room inside the house. As the narrative progresses, however, she increasingly nds herself drawn toward the limits of her native domain rst, toward the perimeter of her home, the grounds beyond its claustrophobic connes; then, toward Wrenwood, a New Age healing center in a chemicalfree zone in the heart of the New Mexico desert; and nally, at

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Wrenwood, to a porcelain-lined, igloolike structure that could not be any more insular. Her struggle to ward off the abject thus leads her further and further into a state of marginalization and isolation. In Safes nal, haunting scene, Carol stands before a mirror in her new enclosure and, following the example of a staff member, tells herself, I love you. I really love you. She performatively cites Wrenwoods rhetoric of self-afrmation in the hopes that it will lead to the rematerialization of the body she so desperately wishes to restore to health and sexual normalcy. Clearly, however, her problem lies not in a lack of self-love, per se, but in her inability to articulate her abjection to produce what Kristeva describes as an incarnate speech, so as to achieve a catharsis that would be the equivalent of not self-purication but an actual symbolic parsing of the corporeal signiers of the abject.22

The Politics of Genre and the Violence of Medicalization: Safe and Horror
Science tells us that there is always a reason why a star falls or a body is ill . . . and religion does the same. Poison

Nothing could be more meaningless than a virus, notes Judith Williamson in an essay titled Every Virus Tells a Story: The Meanings of HIV and AIDS.23 Whatever destruction it wreaks on the body, a virus is not a volitional agent. Yet almost nothing is more difcult to confront than the absence of causality and meaning, which in Kristevas terms signals the threat of abjection. In the 1980s and early 1990s, perhaps no other sociobiological phenomenon quite summoned the specter of the abject in the way that the AIDS crisis did in the First World imagination. AIDS and the virus that causes it are closely wedded to the abject in that both are intrinsically associated with the breakdown of bodily and social boundaries. Typically transmitted through sex, blood transfusions, or intravenous needle sharing, HIV secures its own perpetuation by crossing over the border between the self and the other. It then proceeds to break down the infected persons

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immune system, letting in the infections that a healthy body keeps out. Popular AIDS discourses analogize HIVs bodily effects at the level of the sociosymbolic system, propagating fear about the breakdown of social order. In the US context, the initially disproportionate destruction that AIDS wreaked on the gay male community identied it with what was then an already abject area of social life, an unlivable zone. By extension, its purported origins in Africa, where it was believed to have crossed over into human populations from chimpanzees, only too seamlessly t in with a repertoire of racist images and representations that condensed notions of blackness with the primitive, the bestial, and the pathological. As Williamson observes, because the abject draws the subject toward the vanishing point of the signifying chain, ominously signaling the collapse of meaning, it is a powerful spur to the formation of explanatory ctions. The narrativization of AIDS occurs not only in ctional representations in movies, novels, and television but also in media representations and ordinary conversations. Two genres in particular, Williamson notes, have been widely mobilized in the narrativization of AIDS: horror and melodrama. Not coincidentally, these are the two genres that Haynes takes up, respectively, in Horror, the sci- segment of Poison, and Safe, both of which engage with AIDS discourse. Many of the conventions associated with the horror genre in lm can be traced to the form of the nineteenth-century gothic novel, in which monsters threaten the innocent and nature is an overwhelming and fearsome force. These conventions are often taken up in reportage and public health campaigns that ascribe particular characteristics, goals, and functions to HIV. The virus is anthropomorphized as a sinister killer on the prowl; or, in the more progressive version of this narrative, as a dangerous agent of death that doesnt discriminate (even if AIDS-phobic people do). The modern genre of television and lm known as the melodrama, on the other hand, has provided a ready-made narrative format for sympathetic understandings of AIDS. In this genre, as Williamson puts it, things happen to people, and then they suffer (75). First World representations of the thousands of chil-

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dren orphaned by AIDS in Africa often draw on melodramatic tropes. As Williamson observes, the sentimentality of the melodrama is in a sense simply the ip side of horrors brutality. Whereas in horror the emphasis lies on the activity of the monster, in the melodrama it lies on the passivity of the victims. The victims suffering, while intended to evoke pity, is essentially treated in isolation, as an individual problem or matter of fate, while the social and systemic factors that have produced it remain beyond the scope of the diegesis. Williamson argues that insofar as the narrative structures through which AIDS becomes invested with meaning fundamentally inuence attitudes and behaviors, they ought to be considered as objects not just of literary but also of political analysis. Horror and Safe take up the conventions associated with horror and the melodrama only to subvert them, suspending the usual mechanisms of narrative closure in order to militate against the recontainment of the abject. In this way they intervene on the eld of AIDS speech. Rather than recur to realist codes in order to present a direct counteroffensive against homophobic and AIDS-phobic discourse, they draw attention to the politics of genre itself, while playing with the expectations that lm spectators bring to these genres. On a surface level, Safes plot would appear to proceed along a fairly linear narrative trajectory. Its seeming transparency quickly proves deceptive, however. Offering the viewer few clues as to how to navigate its narrative space, the lm employs a variety of familiar cinematic techniques to provoke a sense of anticipation that it stubbornly refuses to gratify. For instance, when Carol rst learns about environmental illness, we are led into a shot that tracks across the family photographs displayed on her bedroom dresser as Carol reads aloud in a voice-over a letter she is writing to an organization that might provide her with more information on her condition. Seemingly signaling a kind of wrapping-up of the narrative, this scene cues us to expect a resolution: Carol has found the answer to her problem; we are about to be led into the lms denouement. We nd ourselves scanning the photos in the frame as though they might nally reveal the missing piece of

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Carols life, the root cause of her illness. Unlike in other feminine afiction narratives, however, the revelation of the nature of Carols disease is not at all a means of reaching closure in Safe; it merely leads the viewer into a new set of ambiguities, as he or she is left to decide what attitude to adopt toward Wrenwoods prescriptions for wellness. The classic melodrama elevated suffering to an art form, offering the spectator the chance to indulge in pleasurable acts of identication with the suffering heroine. Safe provides us with little access to Carols interiority and thus denies the viewer such opportunities for sentimental vicariation. Carols passivity, moreover, instead of eliciting pity, tends to evoke frustration. One cannot help but squirm in ones seat while watching Carol passively submit herself to the careless and sometimes cruel manipulations of various institutional and medicalizing authorities if only she would manifest some resistance! Her position of privilege, on the other hand, makes it difcult to view her as a victim: Carol is maddeningly condescending in her relationship with her maid, Fulvia, for instance, to which the lm devotes pointed attention. In most melodramatic narratives, suffering paves the way to some sort of enlightenment: the previously selsh or prideful character is compelled to adopt a more magnanimous or encompassing perspective on her life and on those around her; even better, she develops an oppositional consciousness that drives her newfound mission to advocate for others who share her plight. Safe, on the contrary, refuses to gratify the viewers desire to see Carol transformed from an ailing deject into an articulate subject of resistance. It belies the romantic belief that suffering has a necessarily edifying effect. While Safe never affords the viewer an easy point of identication in Carol, neither does it allow for a wholly distanced viewing experience; I would say that it offers an extraordinarily compassionate rendering of her character. While exposing Carols many blind spots, it also carefully shades in the contours of her social position. It thus manages to elicit from the viewer sympathy without pity, criticism without facile condemnation. Much more agrantly campy than Safe in its redeployment of the horror genre, Poisons Horror allegorizes popular

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Dr. Graves in Poison. Courtesy Killer Films

homophobic discourses on AIDS. It parodies the classical science ction narrative in which a scientists efforts to harness the forces of nature to philanthropic ends go tragically awry, resulting in mass destruction. Instead of creating a monster, however, Graves becomes one. Figuring the sex drive as a liquid substance distilled by means of a high-tech scientic procedure, Horror furthermore conjures a quite literal trope for the historical process that Michel Foucault has described as the medicalization of sex, the discursive development whereby sexuality was constituted as an object of scientic inquiry. As Foucault observes, nineteenthcentury sexual taxonomies largely displaced the moralizing notions of sin and transgression through which sexuality had traditionally been understood. These taxonomies nevertheless by and large represented a mere transposition of moralistic sexual prescriptions into scientic discourse, in the guise of a concern for the individuals health.24 Extolling the healthful properties of the sex drive, Graves tries to convince his colleagues that if administered with care, it could revolutionize geriatric medicine and end paralysis as we know it. When ingested in excess, however, as Graves does accidentally, it results in an irreversible process of transmogrication that culminates in death. Gravess

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disgusting skin condition recalls the cautionary myth that masturbation or any form of nonreproductive, sexual excess will lead to disease. At the time of Poisons release, the parodic reinscription of this myth no doubt would have brought to mind Moral Majority spokesperson Jerry Falwells crude retribution theory that AIDS was delivered by God as a punishment to homosexuals for their sins. Gravess persecution as a leper sex killer gures the rhetorical slide through which sexuality, disease, and death become interchangeable terms on the signifying chain, and whereby the threat of all three is projected onto at-risk groups. The narrative thereby draws attention to the ways in which the horror genre has channeled popular perceptions of AIDS. Yet Horror ultimately subverts the expectations we as viewers bring to this genre. For instance, the sci- or horror ick usually involves a search for specialized knowledge that will neutralize the threat of the monster (even if it is the agent of that knowledge who has himself become the monster). Here Graves lacks the ability to reverse the destructive process he has set into motion. Not only that, but at the end of the narrative, we discover that it was not he who was responsible for the epidemic in the rst place. From her deathbed, his lover Nancy relieves him of culpability by explaining that a random atmospheric shift caused the spread of the contagion. Horror compels us to suspend our wish to know why some people get sick, to seek a denitive cause for human suffering in the hubris of immoral individuals or a solution in the supposedly universal good of scientic knowledge. Though campy from start to nish, this segment ultimately leaves the viewer (or at least this viewer) with a profound feeling of sadness. Unexpectedly, it seems to open up a space in which loss can be acknowledged and mourned (a point to which I shall return). If Horror allegorizes the medicalization of sex, Safe dramatizes how what Foucault has described as a society increasingly governed by normative injunctions, rather than by the topdown imposition of a sovereign law, facilitates the increased intervention of experts in the lives of those whose bodies are imagined to be particularly prone to pathology. Constructed by medical

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and psychological discourse as intrinsically sick, the bodies of women are the focus of especially intimate surveillance.25 At rst Carol willingly entrusts herself to her doctors care, unfazed by his condescending attitude toward her. As her condition worsens, he concludes that she is a hypochondriac who would be better served by a psychiatrist than himself. He calls Greg and Carol into his ofce and reaches across a monolithic desk to hand Greg the psychiatrists card, though of course it is Carols psychological health that is in question. Husband and doctor are shown throughout Safe to act in concert as the authoritative custodians of Carols carefully tended, highly valued body. Though Carol manages to convince Greg that she must go to Wrenwood to get better, she ultimately trades the expertise of traditional medical practitioners for that of the quasi-holistic healers at Wrenwood, thereupon entering into a no-less-asymmetrical relation of knowledge and power with the fringe institutions self-appointed health experts. At Wrenwood, the centers founder, Peter (Peter Friedman), assumes the role of omniscient therapist-priest in the group therapy sessions through which each resident is interpellated as the subject of the treatment centers ideology of healing. One by one, the participants are prompted to answer the question, Why did you become sick? The question calls for a directed mode of confessional self-analysis, namely, the uncovering of past wounds. Peter does not allow his clients mournful testimonies to stand on their own, but summarily bestows on the confessees the interpretive stances they must adopt toward the raw material of their pain in order to apprehend the true causes of their illnesses. In each case, he leads his followers toward the same conclusion: namely, that they got sick because they mistreated themselves in some way, either by harboring a negative feeling toward themselves or by refusing to let go of a negative feeling toward another. Safe suggests that New Age discourse has become a prime relay point for the production of truth in contemporary elds of power-knowledge. At Wrenwood, the ailing, chemically sensitive person is reconstituted as a healing individual through an extortionary incitement to discourse similar to

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the institutionalized procedures of confession analyzed by Foucault in The History of Sexuality, except that the truth she is compelled to excavate does not reside in her deepest sexual wishes. Instead it always comes down to some form of self-harm. The logic of Peters etiology is certainly appealing: if one has made oneself sick through self-mistreatment, then it is presumably within ones power to make oneself well. The limits of such an etiology are exposed, however, when a survivor of childhood sexual abuse is told by Peter that she got sick because she failed to forgive the man who abused her. There is no holding others accountable for the damage they inict on each other (and on the environment) in Peters solipsistic worldview; no recognition of the power differentials at play in social relations, which render some more vulnerable to violence than others; and certainly no acknowledgment of the limits of the subjects claims to absolute self-presence and self-mastery. When Peter attempts to solicit a confession from Carol, she declines, shaking her head nervously. Though she has not been particularly vehement in her refusal to confess, Peter raises his hands defensively, saying, Okay, okay, insistent to the point of betraying himself on the benevolent and noncoercive nature of the exercise. This moment parallels the scene of Carols fruitless session with her psychiatrist in which he presses her to reveal whats going on in her, a task she is incapable of performing. The irony of both scenes is that Carols silence in fact a function of her inability to engage her experience through verbal expression actually works as a kind of unwitting resistance to the coercive effects of two confessional procedures vis--vis different gures of authority. However, it leaves her as powerless as ever to confront her abjection.

Conclusion: Mourning Foreclosed

In Poison, Haynes portrays two queer characters whose performative assertion of their abjection allows them to exercise a form of agency paradoxically enabled by the injuries they have sustained. His characters cope with their marginalization by willfully occu-

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pying the discursive site of injury. In so doing, they attain the status of Genetian saints. Their communion with the abject creates the conditions for a reintegration of discourse and the abject, of the law and the esh. Is their performative strategy truly effective as a stance of resistance, however? After all, Broom nally acts out against the nearest target, Bolton, seeking to victimize him before he himself can be victimized, rather than confronting either the society that has cast him out or the bullies who dominate the prisons homosocial order (and with whom Bolton has begun to align himself). Richie kills his father, fullling the contract with his mother, only to exit the world altogether; he acts out his violent wish to expel the father from the sociosymbolic order without truly challenging the patriarchal structure of that order. We might ask: what are the limits of a performative strategy that rests on a repetitive transgression of the norm? Numerous critics have remarked that Genets notorious transgressions, while calling attention to the weakness of the laws regulatory force, basically relied on the law, even ratied its legitimacy. Genet observes in The Thiefs Journal: I am steeped in an idea of property while I loot property. I recreate the absent proprietor.26 The mode of queer performativity modeled by Genet and valorized in Poison may enable the deject to reappropriate the injurious terms that have been used against him, but it does not facilitate a direct challenge to the norm. Safes portrayal of Carol White, on the other hand, suggests some of the costs of a materialization that too successfully conforms to a normative ideal of femininity. A fortied castle, Carols body itself has become a register of her abjection. This results, in her case, in a failure to repeat those citations of the norm that have heretofore allowed her to enjoy the status of a proper subject. But Carols subsequent efforts to reestablish her own and clean self through the performative reiteration of Wrenwoods ideology of healing serve only to reproduce her abjection. Lacking the resources to analyze and enunciate the conditions of her oppression, or to identify and interrogate the conditions of her privilege, Carol is inadequately served by the New Age treatment centers quasi-holistic, individualistic approach to illness.

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With its emphasis on self-mastery and self-purication, or expunging from the self all contaminating traces of so-called negative emotion (grief, anger, fear), it merely reinforces the radically debilitating dislocation of Carols speech from her bodily experience. Graves, interestingly, differs from his counterparts in Poison, as well as from Carol White, in that he never embraces nor seeks to repudiate his abjection. Instead, he seems to enter into a state of mourning at the losses he has sustained. Facing the imminence of his own death, the passing of his beloved, the destruction of his lifes work, and persecution by a hostile crowd, he nally commits suicide, but not before condemning the group of horried onlookers who have gathered around his apartment building. From the heights of the rooftop, he tells them that they are just the same as he, only youll never know it . . . because youll never know what pride is. Because pride is what lets you stand up to misery. Gravess speech has a curiously hollow quality. Though he speaks of the value of pride, his tone and demeanor evince a state of bitterness and despair that hardly reect a prideful shoring-up of the self. Consequently, the term pride detaches itself from the ow of his speech, taking on an extradiegetic resonance: it clearly references the politics of pride enacted by gay and lesbian subjects. Poison might be read as an indictment of the politics of pride to the extent that the latter often give rise to their own violent foreclosures. The drive to expurgate from the self the injurious effects of homophobia leads to the production of normative discursive regimes (the promotion of a vision of the out and proud individual who has succeeded in achieving a healthy relationship to her or his sexuality) no less constricting than the heteronormative discourses they seek to challenge. Inevitably, such regimes also end up producing their own dejects at the limits of political community. Hayness characters in Poison are far from being model gay citizens. On the one hand, the lm clearly endorses their oppositional stance toward the norm; on the other, it sharply exposes the limits of their performative strategies.

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Poison does not, in my view, offer a model for contemporary queer political practice so much as it creates a narrative space in which loss above all, the overwhelming loss of loved ones and community members to AIDS can be mourned. All three narratives in Poison revolve around or culminate in episodes of loss. Broom not only loses his emotional tie to Bolton but the possibility of any relationship with him whatsoever: in the nal scene, we learn that Bolton was shot and killed by a prison guard while attempting escape. Felicia and Richie lose one another, and Felicia is left to deal with the aftermath of her husbands murder (and the memories of his abusive treatment). There is also a sense in which, even before they lose the people and things they love, the characters in Poison endure a narcissistic wound (rejection by the society in which they live) that stands as a different sort of loss the loss, not of a love object, but of an ideal sense of self. Abjection in Kristevas formulation founds a state of lack or want in the subject that rests on a foundational loss: loss of the maternal body, attachment to which is proscribed by the paternal law. As Butler suggests in her work on gender melancholia, this is a loss that cannot be grieved, precisely because it cannot be acknowledged as a loss. Encoded as abject, the maternal body is rejected as that which was never loved the loss itself is repudiated along with the lost (not-yet-an-)object.27 We might recontextualize and historicize Kristevas maternal metaphor, extending it to other (non)objects whose loss cannot be mourned. For instance, in his well-known essay Mourning and Militancy, Douglas Crimp bears witness to the difculties confronted by the gay community in collectively mourning its dead, given the interdictions that bear on our attachment to lost loved ones in the rst place. Homophobic societal responses to AIDS add insult to injury by blaming the victims for their plight. As Crimp observes, because the redoubling of violence on the bereaved (in expressions of hatred and fear, silencing, even outright murder) desecrates the memories of the dead, for many it gives rise to anger that in turn fuels political activism. Mourning becomes militancy. But Crimp compels us to consider the costs of interrupting the grieving process for the sake of directing ones energies toward

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political struggle.28 Poisons foregrounding of loss and suspension of narrative resolution can in part be understood as a refusal to preempt grief by repudiating the sense of loss provoked by both death and ego-wounding injury. Safe, too, without offering an explanatory ction that would locate the cause of Carols illness in some originary psychic wound, gestures toward the innumerable losses that cannot be mourned in a normative culture so doggedly bent on shoring up the boundaries of the ego and, by extension, on insulating the individual within hermetically sealed, safe spaces designed to keep out unnamable and unthinkable dangers. Whatever the roots of Carols illness, she is clearly ill served by Wrenwoods rhetoric of redemption and self-love, which leaves no room for either mourning or militancy. Because it is based on the presumption of having already arrived at a state of wholeness, it does not allow for any process of grieving much less the kind of circumspection and analysis that yields political awareness. In one of the few scenes in which Carol seems actually to register a spontaneous emotional response to her situation, she appears in prole within her cabin at Wrenwood and suddenly starts to cry. A member of the healing centers staff, Claire (Kate McGregor-Stewart), approaches her, reassuring her that all these feelings youre having now are just ne, without even pausing to query Carol about what she is actually feeling. In her haste to normalize Carols display of emotion, to recontain its force, she actually interrupts one of the few genuine episodes of catharsis we ever see Carol experience. Hayness lms insist on the necessity of registering psychic pain, of carrying out the vital political work of mourning, lest the losses foreclosed by normative (and many counternormative) discourses return with an even more violent force. They testify to the generative (if sometimes destructive) performative possibilities born of the condition of abjection and to the psychic and corporeal wages of blind adherence to a normative ideal. Citing the conventions of an array of popular narrative forms, his lms lay the grounds for the incorporation or reintegration of the abject, suspending those mechanisms of (fore)closure through which tra-

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ditional genres restore sociosymbolic order to the diegesis. While frustrating the viewers desire for the revelation of a direct moral message or political prescription, they present a forceful critique of any political program that promises to restore the deject to her or his clean and proper self via rituals of self-purication and the negation of grief.

Notes

1.

Poison specically draws on Genets The Miracle of the Rose, trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: A. Blond, 1965); Our Lady of the Flowers, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Paris: Olympia,1957); and The Thiefs Journal, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove, 1964). This phrase is drawn from Kaja Silvermans book of that title, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), to which this essay is indirectly indebted. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). The word genet in French actually refers to a type of brush from which brooms were traditionally made, as in ballais genet. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993). Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 89 90. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 65. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 104. Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation) ( January April 1969), in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 178.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. I am grateful to Barbara McBane for drawing my attention to the rich effects of this desynchronization and use of reverb. 11. Genet, The Thiefs Journal, 145.

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12. Sigmund Freud, A Child Is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 17:175 204. 13. Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: George Braziller, 1971). 14. It may be imprecise to speak of Jos here as a stand-in for the father. His youth, as well as his class and racial status, clearly mark him as a socially subordinate gure; no doubt Felicias choice of this improper object for a lover enrages Fred Beacon all the more. This subplot within Hero interestingly anticipates the narrative that Haynes will develop in Far from Heaven. 15. The image of his disembodied hand in this second point-of-view shot quite clearly echoes the opening scene of Homo. 16. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 129. 17. Jonathan Dollimore, Post/Modern: On the Gay Sensibility, or the Perverts Revenge on Authenticity, in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 221 36. Reprinted from Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). 18. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8 19. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 1. 20. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 46. 21. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 3. 22. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 31. 23. Judith Williamson, Every Virus Tells a Story: The Meanings of HIV and AIDS, in Taking Liberties: AIDS and Cultural Politics, ed. Erica Carter and Simon Watney (London: Serpents Tail, 1989), 69 80. 24. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978). 25. Haynes underlines this point in a telling scene in which Gregs boss, with whom Greg and Carol have gone out for dinner, tells a dirty joke to his captive audience about a shapely blonde who

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visits the doctor seeking help when her vibrator becomes lodged deep inside her vagina. After an eight-hour ordeal in the operating room, the doctor tells his patient that although he was unable to retrieve the vibrator, he was able to change the batteries (ha-ha). As the joke reveals in all-too-graphic terms, modern medicine continues to participate in what Foucault described as the hystericization of womens bodies, their saturat[ion] with sexuality (104). Here the vagina gures as the ultimate site of the abject an engulng abyss, the locus of womens insatiable sexuality, and an irremediably pathologized zone. 26. Genet, The Thiefs Journal, 129. 27. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 236. 28. Douglas Crimp, Mourning and Militancy, October, no. 51 (1989): 97 107.

Laura Christian is a doctoral candidate in the History of

Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Courtesy Killer Films