Anal Utopia
The first days of the revolution were not many, but they taught us some lessons. Here they are; these are some (only some) of the surprises that the collective use of the anus affords. Revolutionary anal virtues, one could say, were it not for the risk of seeing them transformed into Anal Facebook or MyAnuSpace.
1
The anus has neither sex nor gender; like the hand, it escapes the rhetoric of sexual difference. Situated in the rear and inferior part of the body, the anus also erases the personalizing and privatizing differences of the face. The anus challenges the logic of identification of the masculine and the feminine. There is no division of the world into two. The anus is a post-identitarian organ: "Any social use of the anus, apart from its sublimated use, creates the risk of the loss of identity" (101). Rejecting sexual difference and the anthropomorphic logic of the face and the genital, the anus (and its other extreme, the mouth) establishes the basis for inalienable sexual equality: everybody (human or animal) is first and above all an anus. Neither penis nor vagina, but oral-anal tube. On the horizon of the post-human sexual democracy is the anus, as the orgasmic cavity and receptive non-reproductive muscle, shared by all.
2
The anus is a bioport. This is not simply about a symbol or a metaphor; it is an insertion port through which a body is open and exposed to another or others. It is that portal dimension that demands, for the masculine heterosexual body, anal castration: everything that is socially feminine could enter and pollute the masculine body through the anus, leaving uncovered his status as equal to any other body. The presence of the anus (even a castrated one) in a body with a biopenetrator dissolves the opposition between hetero and homosexual, between active and passive, penetrator and penetrated. It displaces sexuality from the penetrating penis to the receptive anus, thus erasing the segregative lines of gender, sex, and sexuality.
3
The anus functions as the zero point from which an operation of deterritorialization of the heterosexual body could begin, or, in other words, of the degenitalization of sexuality reduced to penis-vagina penetration. It's not about making the anus into a new center, but rather setting into motion a process of de-hierarchization and decentralization that would make of any other organ, orifice, or pore, a possible anal bioport. Thus a set of practices unfolds here that are irreducible to masculine/ feminine, homo/ hetero identities: enemas, dilation, lubrication, penetration with the tongue, fist, or dildo ... The anal machine rises up before the heterosexual machine. The non-hierarchical connection of the organs, the public redistribution of pleasure, and the communization of the anus all announce a "sexual communism" (111) to come.
4
Historically the anus has been contained as an abject organ, never clean enough, never quiet enough. It neither is nor can be politically correct. The anus does not produce, or rather it only produces trash, detritus. No production of profits or surplus value may be expected of this organ: neither sperm nor egg nor sexual reproduction. Only shit. It is the exalted place of ecological non-production. Or better, the escape hatch through which capital may escape and return to the earth, turned into humus. Although it is imaginable for the strategies of capital production to eventually reterritorialize anal pleasure, they would have to be ready to be transformed into shit.
5
Non-reappropriable organs (bio as well as techno prostheses) in heterosexual libidinal economy are anal: dildos, nasal and oral orifices, implants, preexisting cuts or hollows or those produced with the intention of being penetrated. The vagina that does not procreate, that is extracted from the heterosexual machine, ceases to be a "hollow viscera" that tries to get "filled up" to become rather an organ with anal characteristics. Thus Monique Wittig's expression: "Lesbians do not have vaginas." In the same way, from a strictly biopolitical point of view, and within the economy of the sexual reproduction of the species, fags do not have penises, because they do not penetrate vaginas (but rather anuses, mouths...) All that's left is for me to wish you the best: Communize your anus. The weapon is modest, but the possibility of action is close by-and infinite.