I’m all for adult nights out, and for cabaret atmospheres. This isn’t a tract arguing for the right to carry a baby everywhere. I guess what annoyed me is that I wanted my friend to make the call, as she had invited us. Coming from the bouncer, I felt (paranoically? he was just doing his job) the specter of what Susan Fraiman has described as “a heroic gay male sexuality as a stand-in for queerness which remains ‘unpolluted by procreative femininity’”
To counter this stand-in, Fraiman expounds on the concept of sodomitical maternity, described at length in a chapter titled “In Search of the Mother’s Anus,” which wends through Freud’s notorious Wolf Man case. A grown man in analysis (known to posterity as the Wolf Man) tells Freud about being a little boy — perhaps even a baby — and seeing his parents doing it “a tergo,” or doggy-style, on multiple occasions. “The man upright, and the woman bent down like an animal.” (It might be worth noting that this memory is pried out of the Wolf Man— it’s not his calling card of complaint.) Freud says that the Wolf Man was “able to see his mother’s genitals as well as his father’s organ; and he understood the process as well as its significance.” He also reports that that the Wolf Man “assumed to begin with … that the event of which he was a witness was an act of violence, but the expression of enjoyment which he saw on his mother’s face did not fit in with this; he was obliged to recognize that the experience was one of gratification.”
When Freud goes to interpret the scene, however, the mother’s genitals disappear. The mother becomes the “castrated wolf, which let the others climb upon it,” and the father, the “wolf that climbed.” This is no real surprise — as Winnicott has noted (along with Deleuze and others), Freud’s career can sometimes seem a series of intoxications with theoretical concepts that willfully annihilate nuance. (Or reality: Freud later suggests that the boy may have seen sheepdogs copulating and hoisted the image onto his parents, and thus asks the reader “to join me in adopting a provisional belief in the reality of the scene.” Such freely confessed swerves into the provisional are the pleasure of reading Freud; the problems come when he succumbs — or we succumb — to the temptation to mastery rather than reminding ourselves that we are at deep play in the makeshift.) In any event, at the time of his writing of Wolf Man, Freud’s plat du jour was the castration complex. And this complex demands that the woman have “nothing,” even in the face of testimony to the contrary.
Freud doesn’t disappear the pleasure the Wolf Man notes on his mother’s face, but he does twist it beyond recognition. He proposes that seeing the castrated mother get fucked in this way, and seeing her enjoy it, produces a primal, destabilizing fear in the Wolf Man, “which, in the form of concern for his male organ, was fighting against a satisfaction whose attainment seemed to involve the renunciation of that organ.” Freud summarizes the psychic knot as follows: “’If you want to be sexually satisfied by Father,’ we may perhaps represent [the Wolf Man] as saying to himself, ‘you must allow yourself to be castrated like Mother; but I won’t have that.’”
I won’t have that: for Freud, the “that” is castration — clearly too large a price to pay for whatever pleasure may be at hand. For some queer theorists writing in Freud’s wake, however, the “that” is something else entirely: the desire to be sexually satisfied by the father, in which case the penis is not renounced, but multiplied. This reading treats Wolf Man’s memory of his parents’ encounter “a tergo” as a primal, coded fantasy of gay male sex, a scene of proto-homosexuality. In which case, the Wolf Man’s subsequent fear of his father is a fear not of castration, but of his own homosexual desire in a world that “won’t have it.”
This interpretation has appeal and value. But if the woman’s genitals have to be willfully erased in order to get there, and her pleasure distorted into a cautionary tale re: the perils of castration, we have a problem. (Rule of thumb: when something needs to be willfully erased in order to get somewhere, there is usually a problem.) Thus, Fraiman aims to return the mother’s pleasure to the scene, and to foreground her access—”even as a mother“—to “non-normative, nonprocreative sexuality, to sexuality in excess of the dutifully instrumental.” The woman with such access and excess is the sodomitical mother.
Why did it take me so long to find someone with whom my perversities were not only compatible, but perfectly matched? Then as now, you spread my legs with your legs and push your cock into me, fill my mouth with your fingers. You pretend to use me, make a theater of heeding only your pleasure while making sure I find mine. Really, though, it’s more than a perfect match, as that implies a kind of stasis. Whereas we’re always moving, shape-shifting. No matter what we do, it always feels dirty without feeling lousy. Sometimes words are a part of it. I can remember, early on, standing beside you in a friend’s cavernous fourth-floor painting studio in Williamsburg at night (she was out of town), completely naked, more construction workers outside, this time building some kind of luxury high-rise across the street, their light towers flooding the studio with orange shaft and shadow, as you asked me to say aloud what I wanted you to do to me. My whole body struggled to summon any utterable phrase. I knew you were a good animal, but felt myself to be standing before an enormous mountain, a lifetime of unwillingness to claim what I wanted, to ask for it. Now here you were, your face close to mine, waiting. The words I eventually found may have been Argo, but now I know: there’s no substitute for saying them with one’s own mouth.
Sodomitical maternity was on full display in A. L. Steiner’s 2012 installation Puppies and Babies—an anarchic, colorful, blissed-out collection of snapshots, culled from Steiner’s personal archive, of friends in various states of public and private intimacy with the titular creatures. Steiner says the installation started as a kind of joke, the joke coming from “the fact that sometimes I’d find myself shooting puppies/dogs and babies and what for? Were they part of my ‘work’? How did/could they fit in to the highbrow genre of labels often attached to my work — installation-based, for mature audiences, political, etc?”
These are interesting questions. They did not occur to me, however, while beholding Puppies and Babies. I’d like to think this is because the dreary binary that would pit casual snapshots of “adorable” puppies and babies and their myriad caretakers and companions against “highbrow” genres of art has come to strike me as a malodorous missive from the mainstream: at times unavoidable, but best left unsniffed. (See the 2012 Mother’s Day cover article in the New York Times Book Review, which began: “No subject offers a greater opportunity for terrible writing than motherhood…. To be fair, writing well about children is tough. You know why? They’re not that interesting. What is interesting is that despite the mind-numbing boredom that constitutes 95 percent of child rearing, we continue to have them.” Given that nearly every society on earth peddles the notion of having children as the ticket— perhaps the only ticket — to a meaningful life (all others being but a consolation prize) — and given that most have also devised all kinds of subtle to appalling ways to punish women who choose not to procreate — how could this latter proposition truly fascinate?)