Abstract
The three articles I have been invited to comment on indicate that the discipline of anthropology has inched forward slightly since the mid-1990s, when Margaret Willson and I published Taboo: Sex, Identity and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork (Kulick and Willson, 1995). But it is also apparent that the propulsion is only ever so slight. Many of the conundrums and quandaries detailed in these articles are discussed in the chapters in that anthology, and all three authors spend a great deal of time justifying why they write about their experiences, doing so in the same kind of sincere, thoughtful, slightly embarrassed and meekly defiant tones that will be familiar to anyone who has read Taboo.
The very fact that these three articles are appearing in Sexualities and not, for example, in American Anthropologist or, God forbid, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI; formerly Man) says a great deal about how, while the issue of erotic subjectivity remains an object of fascination and discussion among anthropologists, it is still not one deemed respectable enough for Anthropology.
Readers of these articles presumably will be familiar with Taboo. Most anthropologists under the age of about 60 seem to have read it, or at least some of it. The curious thing is that virtually none of the book’s many readers seem to ever have actually purchased the book. Margaret and I never made a penny in royalties off it. This is partly due to the abysmal terms of the contract with the publishers, Routledge, that we felt obliged to accept, since getting a book about the sexual experiences of anthropologists in the field published, 25 years ago, was not exactly easy.
But the fact that neither of us was ever able to treat the other to so much as a cup of coffee on earned royalties is also due to the fact that the book seems quickly to have been photocopied like a samizdat communique and circulated among graduate students: quietly, furtively, under the noses and behind the backs of their supervisors, who continued to imperiously decline to discuss the topic of sexuality in their methods courses and their epistemological disquisitions, and who also declined to review the book (Taboo lived up to its title and was passed over in prim silence. It was never reviewed in any major anthropological journal, except, interestingly, JRAI).
In this spirit of clandestine illicitness, it is perhaps fitting that the entire book was illegally translated – into Turkish, of all languages, published by Öteki Yayincilik in 2000 as Tabu: Antropolojik Alan Çalışmasında Seks, Kimlik ve Erotik Öznellik.
Margaret and I were tickled by this discovery. We didn’t care that we wouldn’t make any money on the Turkish edition (we weren’t, after all, making any money on the English original). We would, though, at least liked to have been sent a copy of the Turkish imprint, as a kind of belated, backhanded courtesy (Yes, we robbed you, but look what we made!). We found a blurred photo of it on the Internet and as far as we were able to tell, the cover improbably sported an image of what looked to us like a bust of the Virgin Mary covered in scales or fungus. Or maybe it was an advanced stage of some unspeakable venereal disease. Tabu, indeed.
We would dearly have liked to see the cover in person to puzzle over it more thoroughly. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, though, the pirate publishers made themselves scarce when we tried to contact them, and Routledge decided that the stakes were too small to press the case.
The vulnerability that we as book editors experienced – in soliciting contributions for the book (an anything-but-straightforward process that we mention in the Preface to Taboo); getting the book published at all; having it haughtily ignored by most of the flagship journals of discipline once it did appear; and having its contents dispersed illegally – it seems to me, is a kind of parable that illustrates the complexity and the stigma that continues to colour any discussion of the erotic subjectivity of researchers.
If there is one theme that undergirds all of three of the articles, it is, precisely, vulnerability: Ráhel Turai comments that she at times felt ‘scared’ during her interview with Dániel, the bisexual man who is the focus of her article – even as she also felt attracted, which confused her and shook her up. Katrien Jacobs highlights the extreme precarity faced by academics who use pornographic material in their teaching.
The theme is most elaborated in Katrien DeGraeve’s poignant contribution about her reaction to being summarily rejected by a man she met as part of her research on non-monogamous communities. DeGraeve discusses the rejection in terms of vulnerability. Her point is that vulnerability can be made to do productive work. Thinking about the rejection not in the culturally encouraged frame of failure or inadequacy, but, instead, as an expression of vulnerability, DeGraeve argues that the man’s rejection, even though it hurt (or really, because it hurt), facilitated a critical distance. The man’s boorishness made DeGraeve ‘increasingly realize that [the] mask of invulnerability hampers the ability to connect to others – be it as researcher or as a lover, a friend, a companion’ (p. XXX).
That erotic subjectivity necessarily involves an openness to others – a delicate, squishy, uneasy receptivity that can result in pleasure, joy, discomfort, distress and, above all, a greater sensitivity to one’s own ontological stakes, epistemological premises and relational aspirations – is a central (perhaps the central) message of the Taboo book. In the introduction to the anthology, I noted that: more than any other type of interaction, sex can urge an exploration of the basis for, the nature of, and the consequences of relationships entered into in the field. It can be one way of putting the self at stake, and of ‘working through the desire to imagine, to inhabit, to caress, and to be with the other’ … which, in turn, may allow for a qualified and cautious extension of position and permeation of the boundaries and roles on which anthropologists for the most part uncritically depend. (Kulick, 1995: 22–23; the quote is from Probyn, 1993: 158)
Where I pause, though, is when we are encouraged to evaluate vulnerability in terms of a binary such as that proposed by Judith Butler (e.g. Butler, 2016), where vulnerability is unambiguously situated on the side of the good and the right (and on the side of the feminine and the queer), and is contrasted with an opposite: ‘invulnerability’, a phanstasmatic, delusional position linked to the bad and the unjust, as well as to the male, to neo-liberalism and, generally speaking, to everything that progressive, right-thinking agents ought to decry, resist and oppose.
I am suspicious of that contrast and of the terms in which it is cast. I agree with those who argue that Butler generally tends to collapse agency into resistance, thereby making it difficult to theorize agency in any other terms (Mahmood, 2004 is the most pungent and sustained critique). I also think that Butler’s recent moves to foreground vulnerability simply reiterate the same point she has been making for the past 30 years, namely that we are all vulnerable in the sense that we are not sovereign subjects able to control language and the social relations in which we live our lives, and that that position of vulnerability, inevitably, is also the site from which we must formulate action, resistance and protest.
But saying that we are all vulnerable is different from using vulnerability as a platform from which those who say they embrace it can decry those who they allege don’t, using claims of vulnerability to stake out the higher moral ground of counterhegemonic positionality.
In the case described by DeGraeve, for example, while I am moved by the feelings she describes, and am persuaded that acknowledging vulnerability is better than denying it, I find myself wondering whether the man who rejected her can fairly be characterized as wearing ‘a mask of invulnerability’, and his actions legitimately explained as unfeeling expressions of ‘ideals of masculine detachment’ and of ‘the prototypical, arrogantly self-sufficient, independent, invulnerable master-subject’ (p. XXX).
In order to accept that account, I would like to hear the man’s side of the story. Specifically, I would like to hear his version of why he refused to speak to DeGraeve. Could it be that maybe he, too, felt vulnerable – to revelation, to scandal, to the chilling prospect of someone he honestly (if misguidedly) felt he had some reason to identify as a ‘crazy ex-girlfriend’ stalking him?
Consider for a moment how different DeGraeve’s narrative would read if it had been written by a man recounting his rejection by a woman. The long email insisting on an explanation that DeGraeve describes sending, as well as her unannounced and uninvited visit to her former lover’s home, might easily take on menacing or sinister connotations if those actions had been undertaken by a man pursuing a woman who had rejected him curtly. In such a situation, the perception of who was vulnerable, I guess, would shift, or at least would become more complicated.
I am not questioning or contesting DeGraeves’s sense that the man who rejected her was a jerk (obviously he behaved like a complete ass). My point, rather, is that depicting herself as vulnerable doesn’t really authorize DeGraeve to portray her protagonist as harbouring fantasies of being invulnerable, or as being an unwitting representative for the demon commonly known as ‘neoliberal subjectivity’ (p. XXX). And my critique is of the theoretical suppositions that DeGraeve draws on to frame her analysis. The binary Butler-inspired understanding of vulnerability that DeGraeve cites seems to move her, once she identifies as vulnerable, to find an antimony that she can comfortably define herself in opposition to. So, if she is vulnerable, her antagonist must be, or imagine himself to be, invulnerable.
Surely, though, in any situation – especially one where sexual relations are involved – there are multiple, knotted and entangled vulnerabilities in play. And to adequately uncover them, it seems to me that the kind of auto-ethnography offered in each of these three articles – insightful as it may be – is not always up to the task. As soon as we acknowledge, as DeGraeve does, that vulnerability ‘is unevenly distributed through power structures’ (p. XXX), we need to do some sleuthing: we need some good old-fashioned ethnography to map out that distribution and follow vulnerability’s vicissitudes, its rhizomes and its scope. That kind of ethnography can and should be animated by the kind of self-reflexive meditations that these three articles all display so well. But to explore vulnerability more thoroughly and robustly, we need more perspectives than reasonably can be documented through auto-ethnographic reflection.
To be honest, I frankly increasingly wonder whether any kind of ethnography, and any kind of academic writing more generally, is the right media for grappling with ethnographers’ erotic subjectivity. I won’t go down the route seemingly suggested in Jacobs’s contribution, that ethnographers should explore the issue by making or participating in pornographic films (the last people I would ever want to see in a pornographic film are my anthropological colleagues! The horror!). But I do lament that anthropologists are not schooled in more creative writing. I bemoan the fact that as part of an anthropology education students don’t receive training in how to write short stories, novels or collaboratively produced screenplays.
When that (undoubtedly utopian) day finally arrives, perhaps then, and only then, will we truly be able to adequately grapple with the staggeringly dense complexity of erotic subjectivity in ethnographic research.
In the meantime, accounts like these three articles are all we have, and that is good enough.