Rustle in the Bush

Tim Dean

I’ll start with my feelings on The Gift. It was utterly ‘alright’. The only problem Is in the documentary’s aesthetics, really. I thought that the editing, camera work, and visual choices didn’t square with the emotional weight of the topic. I mean, its a devastating watch and even some silence would have helped because I believe the purpose and the effect no matter your attitude, of watching the Documentary is didactic. This is supposed to be not a fear campaign (They group of older gay men with the younger black man talk about the ineffectiveness of previous campaigns making general negative comments about the virus), but to rather a chance to explore the tragic destruction caused by the virus in light of the culture which it helped to breed (Pun intended). 

And what Dean captures well are the intimate ties (Conceptions;fantasies) to/of life and especially death in its place as a kinship structure (Page 6). Immediately, and what would be controversial to many classical anthropologists I think, even traditional structuralists, is the idea that this sub culture creates not just a form of kinship, but of consanguinity. Dean however recognizes this is a reaction around death and doesn’t make light of crises. But it is also about life, how to maintain life under the threat of death (Sex in its most functional definition is a life making activity, and under its actual use I think we’ve (Society) come to uncover its place as a life (Fulfilling) maintaining activity as well). 

However none of the categories are a bough to detail this relationshi. Dean pronounces overdetermination through these processes for example Risk as a masculine procedure and during the sexual act (Through ‘poking, humiliation, quantity of sex, infection exposure (Ph.52), through the reversal of gay identity as an inversion of traditional manliness ‘The….understanding of male homosexuality as female inversion….has been expunged from bareback subculture”(Pg.50) and a desire to ‘conquer’ the virus and become master of one’s own erotic destiny(530) which is sustained by a logic of sacrifice that I would like to connect to the work of George bataille who also explores equalities of excess especially the connection to war.)

But risk is also a feature of modern society which has fundamentally opposed the idea of sexual pleasure and health in turn making subcultures which find their expression in choosing the one over the other. (60-62). However, this also opens the opportunity for Dean’s kinship argument because the subculture, in opposition to the main culture develops a logic of gift exchange to maintain its social relations (In terms of disseminating the virus) (74-78) which acts not only on the fantasy grounds of indefnieatly expending life through this reciprocal commitment (A beautiful side about Ginsberg having sex with Walt Whitman ( Page88), but also seeks to buttress fear of death since ‘you dont have to worry about getting it’. Pages 90-96 are very interesting for their historical parallel to the ’gayby’ booms visibility vs the invisibility of barebacking culture which has an element of material visibility, namely the fact that it is a form of actual ‘blood sharing’ involved in the act of infection and fluid sharing.

I agree with Dean’s argument about the barebacking porn scene evolving out of already old practices, and even may agree with him as a form of thinking (Reminding me of Deleuze’s book on cinema; Dean treats deiiferent sexual acts as kinds of signs from which we can read the meaning both in their acts and how they’re filmed – The pull out (Page 107),  the visibility of sex and ‘sexual truth’ (107) Even fetching and the ‘money-shot can be read as expressions of particular social relations). We might say not all pornography is cinematic, but all cinema is pornographic. Though I think that this has definitely changed as pornography has become thought still mainly secret, a powerful institutional force and become monopolized as well as of our awareness of sexual addiction.

I agree with the ideas of the 3rd chapter, that feithizzation is a creative principle and it increasingly becomes so as our contemporary sexual relation to pornography is much more reflexive, I’m also not sure about the idea that straight porn copies gay porn (He says so too, 171). Maybe in the case of anal sex more than others. I say less about chapter 4 because Delaney is cited so heavily and because I’ve reached a lot of word count. But the idea that crushing can evolve its own ethics and way of life is valid, and it also is most definitely corrupted into “The accelerating privatization of public life” (192). This section of the study needs the most update, especially since I think the gay community culture has become so much more generalized the trans community now stands at the margins for DL related complications. Especially in terms of online pornorpahgy production/‘blegh’ I hate to say it but the porn community.