In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies (Sexual Cultures Series)

255 Pages·2000·0.87 MB·English

by  Mandy Merck

In Your Face
SEXUAL CULTURES: New Directions from the Center for
Lesbian and Gay Studies
General Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Samuel R. Delany
Private Affairs
Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations
Phillip Brian Harper
In Your Face
9 Sexual Studies
Mandy Merck
In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies
MANDY MERCK
a
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
© 2000 by New York University
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Merck, Mandy.
In your face : 9 sexual studies / Mandy Merck.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN0-8147-5638-7 (cloth : alk. paper) —
ISBN 0-8147-5639-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Sex in mass media. 2. Sex in popular culture. I. Title.
P96.S45 M47 2000
306.7—dc21 00-056253
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction
In Your Face 1
PHANTOMS
1 The Medium of Exchange 21
2 Figuring Out Andy Warhol 38
3 Hard, Fast and Beautiful 52
4 The Queer Spirit of the Age 71
FLESH
5 MacKinnon’s Dog: Antiporn’s Canine Conditioning 89
6 “Not in a Public Lavatory but on a Public Stage”
The Prosecution of The Romans in Britain 108
7 The Lesbian Hand 124
8 Savage Nights 148
9 Fuckface
Desire and Disgust in High and Low Places 177
Notes 201
Index 235
About the Author 245
v

Acknowledgments
This book was begun at Cornell University, where in 1992 I spent a semester
teaching Women’s Studies at the kind invitation of Nelly Furman and Biddy
Martin. My thanks to them and their Cornell colleagues, particularly Shirley
Samuels and Mark Seltzer, for hospitality, friendship, and the launch of my
rather belated academic career. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the Program
in Film and Video at Duke University, to which Jane Gaines invited me to
teach cinema and queer theory in 1993. Here I must also record my great ap-
preciation to Mandy Berry, Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, Katie Kent,
Michael Moon, José Muñoz, Janice Radway, Eve Sedgwick, and Ben Weaver,
remarkable colleagues, collaborators, and friends. In spring 1994, I taught
lesbian cinema and feminist theory in the Women’s Studies Program at the
University of Santa Cruz. To the program’s then chair Wendy Brown and the
students of “L Is For The Way You Look” go my thanks for an extremely in-
structive and entertaining term. My thanks as well to Judith Butler, Sarah
Franklin, Carla Freccero, and Teresa de Lauretis for their kindness and sup-
port during my stay.
The greater part of this book was written while I was a member of the
School of Cultural and Community Studies at the University of Sussex. My
thanks to the School and to the Media Studies subject group for leave to com-
plete it in 1999. Thanks also to the students, staff, and teachers on the MA in
Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change, particularly Jonathan Dollimore,
Rachel Holmes, Andy Medhurst, Alan Sinfield, and Vincent Quinn for creating
and sustaining a remarkable postgraduate program and the “Queory” seminar.
I must also thank my new colleagues in the Media Arts Department at
Royal Holloway, University of London, for their support in the book’s final
stages. I am particularly grateful to my Head of Department Carol Lorac and
our administrator, Elodie Gouet.
vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many of the articles in this book began as conference papers. For the in-
vitations that gave rise to them, I want to thank Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan
Flatley, and José Muñoz; Nancy Hewitt, Jean O’Barr and Nancy Rosebaugh;
Claire Kahane; Teresa de Lauretis; Lynne Segal; John Fletcher; Lynda Nead;
Lisa Duggan; Yvonne Tasker; Allyson Polsky; and Paul Smith.
My thanks to Hannah Liley, Caroline Bassett, and Chris Townsend for
intrepid picture research on this volume, to Esther Saxey for her patient
preparation of the typescript, and to Cecilia Feilla at NYU Press for her edi-
torial assistance. I am especially indebted to José Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini
for commissioning it.
“Hard, Fast and Beautiful” first appeared in Annette Kuhn ed., Queen of
the ‘B’s: Ida Lupino behind the Camera (Trowbridge, Wiltshire: Flicks Books,
1995); “Figuring Out Andy Warhol” in Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and
José Estaban Muñoz eds., Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1996); “MacKinnon’s Dog” in Nancy Hewitt, Jean O’Barr, and Nancy
Rosebaugh eds., Talking Gender (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1996); “Savage Nights” in Mandy Merck, Naomi Segal, and Elizabeth
Wright eds., Coming Out of Feminism? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); “The
Medium of Exchange” in Peter Buse and Andrew Stott eds., Ghosts: Decon-
struction, Psychoanalysis, History (Basingstoke: Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press,
1999); “‘Not in a Public Lavatory but on a Public Stage’” in Costas Douzinas
and Lynda Nead eds., Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthet-
ics of Law(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); “The Queer Spirit of
the Age” in Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks eds., Literature and the Contem-
porary: Fictions and Theories of the Present (Harlow, Essex: Longmans, 1999).
Where necessary, these articles have been updated for inclusion in this col-
lection. My thanks to their respective editors and publishers for permission
to reprint them.
And a final thank you to Nel Druce, for her forbearance.
viii
Introduction
In Your Face
1. Sex!
October 9, 1998, was National British Sex Day. Noting its impending arrival,
at the climax of autumn celebrations which also included National Good Sex
Week, the critic Brian Sewall asked in the London Evening Standard:
Do we need a National Sex Day? With the retiring film censor arguing for greater free-
dom in the field of pornography, with the age of homosexual consent bitterly debated
in the Lords, with the introduction of Viagra to popular morning television, and the
remorseless exposure of President Clinton’s sexual preferences, no one of any age, any
class or any occupation can now be innocent, for sexual awareness has, these past
three months, advanced further and faster than in the past half century.1
One month later, in the U.S. weekly New Republic, Contributing Editor Lee
Siegel expanded on Sewall’s allegations about the sexualization of contem-
porary culture. After condemning Hollywood, contemporary literature,
newspaper editors, legislators, and the independent prosecutor Kenneth
Starr for seeking (and apparently finding) a “more genitally obsessed nation,”
he trained his polemic on another target: “[n]owhere,” he argued, “has the
1