“…. Suburban Workshops about (Heterosexual) Anal Sex”
Another trend I’ve noticed in the past few months is a trend in Academia and Literature of embracing anal sex as a subject for writing, study, and literary appreciation. I’ve collected a few articles about this and I hope to post a group of them in the next week or so. Here’s an example, in the news today, of a look at literary criticism and analysis involving anal sex…
Is the Rectum a Text?
“The most anticipated talk may have been by Paul Morrison, a professor of English at Brandeis University, who it turns out didn’t even come up with the title about the rectum (which was in part a play on a famous work of gay studies, Leo Bersani’s essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?”), but forged ahead anyway after Ladenson suggested it.
Provocative paper titles are of course something of an MLA tradition… Morrison’s paper talk was surprising because — although it contained more uses of the word “asshole” than is the norm at scholarly meetings or most other meetings, for that matter — he’s actually arguing that there’s more to life than sex and that focusing on body parts, even supposedly subversive body parts…
… The reason Morrison answers the question of his title in the affirmative is that society has declared the behind to have overtaken the breast. He quoted from a New York Times article: “After more than 50 years of breast fixation, the bottom has come into its own. Jennifer Lopez’s generous seat may be driving the trend, or it may just embody, so to speak, the current ideal.”
And it’s not just the Times, but articles about anal sex in women’s magazines, suburban workshops about (heterosexual) anal sex, and so forth, he said.
But before society applauds itself too much, Morrison said in an interview, it needs to recognize that it hasn’t really evolved in shifting the focus downward from the breast. “I’m saying we haven’t really moved in any meaningful way because we are still assigning too much meaning to the body,” he said.
“We are exerting the same kind of exaggerated, deconstructed power that we once gave to female genitalia,” he said. “We’re still within a Freudian economy of the body.” What would be a true advance, Morrison said, would be to approach the behind “under the rubric of pleasure, not meaning.”