The Fixity--or Not--of Sexuality

At one point in his essay “Against Monogamy,” Leo Bersani discusses how “nothing is more important than ‘the relative strength of the masculine and feminine sexual dispositions’…in the determination of our lifelong sexual identity.” He describes the sexual dispositions, and by extension sexuality, as being fixed for one’s entire life once they are decided, but later he also discusses the ever-shifting nature of desire. This instability inherently subverts the stability of sexuality that he previously upheld.

In fact, Bersani decries monogamy for limiting the fluid nature of desire; so if desire can change then why should the “sexual dispositions” be so rigid and unalterable? He even says that the “stable sexual identity” is false by virtue of the effect of the Oedipus complex. So if sexual disposition can change early in life, then who’s to say, again, whether sexual disposition can’t change again later in life, or multiple times in a life? If that’s the case, Bersani may have to change the details of his argument against monogamy.

Free Love Vs. Monogamy

Leo Bersani argues "Against Monogamy", claiming it to be a construct that is paradoxically revered by society, despite the contradictions it has with humans' innate polygamous desires. In repressing the need for humans to experiment and attempt to satisfy their "whirlwind of desiring mobility". Not directly advocating polygamous relationships, Bersani merely explores the irrationality of monogamy through the psychoanalytical understanding of the subconscious. Bersani is not alone in this thinking. Much of his arguments resonate with the feminist movement that anarchist Emma Goldman represented, as discussed in Vivian Gornick's lecture--albeit with some clashes.

Vivian Gornick depicted Emma Goldman as a passionate woman who spoke for anarchy, devoting herself to the idea of "free love", that relationships are sprung from erotic desires and that monogamous relationships are restrictive of innate freedom to love whomever one wishes. Goldman firmly believed that "free love" is the harbinger of hope and ecstasy, the most genuine expression of freedom for one's unalienable right to think and to feel freely. Similar to Goldman, Bersani understands that in civilization there is a repressive nature on sexuality, in which "present-day civilization" only "permits sexual relationships" in the form of ultimate monogamous bonds and "does not like sexuality as a source of pleasure" and only "tolerates [sexuality] as a means of propagating the human race" (page 12). And as the feminists who resurrected Goldman for their cause would argue like Bersani, monogamy is a repressive system on women because its essence is the "right to exclusive possession of a woman".

However, there is a difference in Goldman's anarchistic thinking and Bersani's psychoanalysis. Unlike Goldman who fought against "civilization" and monogamy in the name of free love, Bersani sees an already inherent paradox in a civilization based on monogamous relationships. Bersani noted an ironic disconnect between "society's goal" of upholding monogamous relationships to foster stable families as a means of creating a collective community and the "sexual love between two individuals that resists" such communal bonds. While both Bersani and Goldman argue against monogamy for the benefit of peace in the individual, one for the satisfaction of the subconscious promiscuous self and the other for the fulfillment of one's innate right to free love, the inherent understanding of the freedom to love is different. Bersani sees the end of monogamy as allowing people to form communal bonds through love, but Goldman sees the free love as a individualistic anarchistic pursuit.

Narcissism

Thumbing through a tattered album, bounded by an ivory silk cover and pink lace, I love nothing more than look through my oldest photo album of childhood pictures. I do it just to revisit the moments in which I had the greatest, as Fitzgerald would say, “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life”, and I think it is the same “ruthless promiscuity of [children’s] attention” that Bersani points to that I often find myself trying to rekindle. His analogy follows a logical train of thought that if a child’s curiosity is not monogamous, why should relationships, and our way of thinking for that matter? And while I cannot imagine a world without the familial securities grounded within institutions such as monogamy and marriage, Bersani presents a compelling case.

But as he challenges to step back, or out, and to think in a “nonbiological, perhaps even nonpsychological way”, I found it difficult grappling with the vision of a world without such subjectivities. It is one thing to transcend the established institutions and its prejudices, such as the ideal of marriage, but to do so also has some unsettling implications. By uprooting the model of a monogamous couple and denouncing the psychoanalytic tendency to create differences “between the self and world”, we must also probe and question the idea of an identity, and how we construe that sense of self. Depicting a world in which terms like “couple”, “marriage”, and identifications by gender,race or class would lead to problems, Bersani calls for a sense of depersonalization, of both sexuality and identity, and it is this fluidity that I cannot entirely grasp yet. On the surface this type of “nonidentitarian” community without a (concrete) means to describe a sense of self would seem to embody an amorphous “sameness” that would ultimately be immobilizing. So while it is indeed quite a convincing notion that monogamy leads to “the arrested deployment of desire’s appetites and curiosities”, it is strange to think of eliminating the things that label us as different, especially the things I would hope to hold onto, such as culture and language. Yet at the same time, I don’t believe Bersani cared so much to eliminate those differences as much as he wanted to lift the violence and negative stigmas associated with those distinctions. Still, it leads me to question the possibility of whether a world like that can really exist. So while I still can’t fully comprehend it, his idea of “limitless narcissism” or the “self-shattering notion” put me in a wholly different, utopian way of thinking; he says -- “I am interested in a pleasure in losing of dissolving the self that is in no way equated with loss, but comes rather through rediscovering the self outside the self. It is a kind of spatial anonymous narcissism.”

Leo Bersani's: Against Monogamy

I found this essay very interesting and thought provoking. As Bersani gives is compelling critique of monogamy, I found myself asking questions that I had never asked before. One of the ideas that I found the most interesting was the correlation between sexuality and childhood experiences and identity. Thinking about how true it is that parents really do repress chilhood curiosity and promiscuity made me then think about how different our world would be if this restraint was not put in place by society. Bersani also explains bisexuality as "the coincidence of two heterosexual desires [that of the masculine boy for his mother, that of the feminine boy for his father] within a single psyche'. This explanatin of bisexuality makes Freud's theories seems plausible and supports the Oedipus complex as is blends the feminine and masculine Oedipus complexes together. This essay as a whole caused me to think about questions involving natural sexual desires as opposed to desires that are set in place by society.

Bersani's conclusion of his essay I found was very effective in both summing up the argument he presented in his paper, as well as succussful at reminding readers of his point of view. Bersani says that, " If psychoanalysis, in its account of the extraordinary mobility of childhood and, more specificall, even Oedipal desires,has itself described for us the original inconcievability of monogamous fixity of diser, and therefore of a stable sexual identity, monogamy nonetheless is the relational figure most congenial to what we might call the psychoanalytic fidelity of the self to the self, its indifference to signs of self that are not signs of interpretation, and, finally its profoundly immoral rejection of out promiscuous humanity." Bersani's aregument about monogoamy that I fount most interesting what that monogamy is a profound rejection of our promiscuous humanity. When thinking about the idea of promiscuous humanity, it beckons the clarification about what it innate and what is learned by society. Although I would agree with the assertion that children are naturally curious and show little restraint when descovering more about their sexual desires, I also think that there is a tendancy to find heterosexual desires most natural. Although many would disagree with this, I even think that many homosexual couples have heterosexual tendencies as couples most often are seen to have a masculine and a feminie member. The asserstion that monogamy rejects promiscuous humanity seems put this rejection into a negative light. Just and monogamy can restrict from options, it can protect dangerous promiscuity.

Would you f*ck me? I'd f*ck me; I'd f*ck me so hard.

Personally, the title of my post is probably one of my favorite quotes from a movie ever. Not just because it's explicit and fun to say aloud but because it stuck out to me so deeply the first time I watched Silence of the Lambs in a way that few movies ever had. I saw the film when I was young and at a point where I didn't exactly know how I felt about my own sexuality because I wasn't as consumed with giving Valentine's hearts and blowing kisses to the boys in my class as the other girls were. I knew that I deviated from the norm and I felt guilty because of it. So, when I saw this film and realized that there are other people who are just as (maybe not just as but in the neighborhood of) strange as I am, I didn't feel quite so alone. What went over my head when I was girl was that Buffalo Bill wasn't meant to empower and encourage those of differing sexual backgrounds but villainize and ostracize them. Albeit he is a crazed murderer, but why does he also have to be a pan-sexual crazed murderer?

I feel that part of this answer is in Bersani's essay "Against Monogamy." In a certain section Bersani dissects the Oedipus complex and how it is relative to the formation of bisexual desire. Refering to Freud, Bersani concludes that bisexuality is not a mixture of homo- and hetero-sexuality but more so double heterosexuality in which two different psyche's are attracted to each parent (and therefore each sex) within one person. I thought this was really fascinating in that the Oedipus complex is generally described as a set in stone thing that happens to boys which determines their sexuality, vice versa with the Electra complex for girls. This essay works to call this into question, as what place do gender roles really have in psychoanalytic observation; none, if it's legitimate science. When I thought of this further, I wondered why the essay made no case for pan-sexuals, considering that their explanation of bisexuality sounds kind of similar. Then I again realized that I was a reading an essay on monogamy and it's place in popular culture, something which pan-sexuality for the most part has no place in. Bisexuality, though it also supposedly screws with monogamy is more easily digested by society because although it calls your sexuality into question, it still allows one to retain a tiny bit of socially normative heterosexuality. Pan-sexuality throws away not only the categorizations of sexual orientation but also sex as a whole, rattling structures not just of gender assignment but of human physiology. To accept pan-sexuality as legitimate is tear down and rebuild much of our culture, effort which we have not shown to want to put in for a group that tramples all over the things we've worked to put in place. Therefore, the only logical way to respond is to blacklist pan-sexuality as another weird thing that only weird people (like serial killers apparently) do. So much for psychoanalytic understanding.

-Jheanelle G.

p.s. Look how early I did my blog!! First time for everything lol.