Minority sexualities are the subject of numerous discussions, not necessarily proportional to their diffusion: as much as the ways of practicing them, it is the ways of talking about them that raise questions. Halfway from essay to fiction, Marco Vidal offers avenues to explore.
Devoted to the practice of fist penetration into the anus or vagina, Marco Vidal’s book, Fistingbrings together chapters between which the links are loose, for the most part composed of short paragraphs, close to aphorism. Presented as an “investigation”, the book combines several registers of discourse: testimonies, literary analyses, technical points, evocation of personal experiences. At the center of the book, however, is a question, that of the historical emergence of this practice. Following Foucault’s analyzes of the birth of the homosexual in XIXe century, the idea of a recent invention of homosexuality, and more broadly of a historicity of sexual practices, has taken hold in studies on sexuality. The debate that has taken place has not obscured the long temporalities, nor the complex relationships between scholarly discourses and ordinary practices (Halperin, 2002). Marco Vidal joins these questions, without abandoning the register of fiction: “It will not be a question of revealing what has been hidden, nor of substituting a truth for a truth. It will be enough to let the living heart of history beat, never as unambiguous as we would like to believe” (31). Its objective is then to show that far from being a recent invention, we find traces of fisting in history, even in the Bible.
“Essay fiction” which sets out avenues without always taking the trouble to follow them to the end, the book is more of an exercise in style than an investigation. This is also what makes it interesting. Alongside that of the historicity of sexuality, the book also raises the question of ways of speaking about sexuality, and in particular minority sexualities. If Marco Vidal can write that “no language register corresponds to the fist fucking. Nothing or almost nothing to say, apart from the breath that makes it resonate, like the cries of the child in his mother’s ears, the encouragement to move forward, the order to keep a distance, to insist, to withdraw or simply to wait” (47), it is on the contrary the diversity of registers mobilized in the book which is striking, which ultimately leads to ruling out any linear reasoning and any assignable position of the speaker, who becomes at once a historian, witness, amateur and writer.
From this point of view, the break with what the author presents as a Foucauldian orthodoxy is also a break in tone. Historical studies and the sociology of deviance have long been interested in minority sexualities, by distancing themselves from the moral and political condemnations to which they have been and still are the subject, condemnations which force sexual minorities to live out their fantasies in the ‘shadow. From this perspective, these sexualities no longer correspond to perverse individuals, as is the case in medico-psychological discourses since the end of the XIXe century. These are sexual behaviors that illuminate the diversity of human sexuality. They can also be approached as sexual subcultures, which involve collective organization, codes and specific modes of transmission (Rubin, 2010). This is not quite what Marco Vidal wants to establish, who favors three registers to approach fisting: literary evocation, technical discourse, and the search for origins.
Love of fisting
The literary evocation allows the euphemization of a practice which, said as it is, can be shocking. It also helps to establish that the issues and meanings of fisting go beyond the simple introduction of a fist into an orifice: “what was the obstacle that delayed the appearance of fisting? The answer seems obvious: violence and death” (40): violence of the dilation of an orifice, possible death of the recipient, when the fisting approaches impalement, as we see in Sade. Marco Vidal mobilizes scholarly references to make fisting a practice, if not legitimate, at least revealing, whose symbolic issues must be revealed. It is then a question of finding the gesture in the works of the literary canon. Thus the metaphors of penetration and burial in Henry James or Melville become so many allusions. Ultimately, fisting can be presented as “a victory of civilization over nature, of pleasure over violence, of the mind over the body, and ultimately of the body over itself” (141).
For Marco Vidal, it is ultimately love which is the key to this practice, in which “bodies adjust themselves in a final and infinite agreement” (142). Making a practice supposedly violent, and often categorized as sadomasochistic, into an act of love takes up a commonplace in literature and subcultures BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination, domination and submission, sadomasochism). As P. Lejeune notes about the episode of the spanking of Confessions of Rousseau, the reference to love has in this case a strategic dimension: “for him it is a question of showing that his depravity, far from being due to a banal abandonment to carnal pleasure, finds on the contrary its origin in the purest feelings” (Lejeune, 1975, 56). In any case, it contributes to the dramatization of what would otherwise remain vulgar. This first register of discourse takes the risk of making fisting a pretext, the meaning identified seeming somewhat gratuitous. It can also lead to taking the position of “aesthetes of transgression” (Bourdieu, 1994) who, such as Bataille or Klossowski, romanticize the constraint of bodies and thus obscure the violence and dependencies in which they are caught, in a praise of masculine impulses. Marco Vidal takes the risk of this aestheticization, but suggests that in the case of fisting, it is less a question of constraint than of sharing, of self-abandonment and ultimately of a certain gentleness.
A second register consists of emphasizing the technical and prosaic aspects of fisting: dilation techniques, lubricants used by amateurs, and the potential consequences on health and the body are thus discussed. We join what Michael Pollak called, regarding the development of surveys on male homosexuals, the “virtues of banality” (Pollak, 1981): without explicit sentiment or moralism, these studies are attentive to the practical organization of sexualities. minorities and with the characteristics of amateurs, often approached as a specific population. The AIDS epidemic has proliferated this type of discourse, in which sexual practices are approached from the angle of risk and public health. Marco Vidal invests this register, but often abandons it in favor of literary evocation: the chapter entitled “With or without a glove” is less a presentation on the advantages and disadvantages of the glove in the practice of fisting than an evocation of the pleasures of the hand.
These two registers have in common that they establish a distance between the speaker and his object, and therefore distance the supposedly dubious interests of the researcher for his object, often present in investigations into sexuality (Kulick, 2011). ). Here again, Marco Vidal blurs the lines. The choice of pseudonymity undoubtedly allows him to discuss his own experiences without exposing himself publicly. But he leaves in the shadows what could shed light on this practice by focusing on the gesture itself: sexual and marital trajectory, social origin, sociability practices are not mentioned, even though they can shed light on the meaning of fisting. , and any sexual practice. Fisting, like the hand that plunges into the anus in the author’s eyes, is here a “weightless” practice (142).
The fantasies of the origin
A third line runs through the book, also classic in texts on minority sexualities: the search for traces of fisting in history. Here it is The Iliad And THE Song of Songs who come to the aid of fisting. This reading is therefore explicitly opposed to what is presented by the author as a commonplace in gay and lesbian studies: fisting would have been invented during the XXe century, thanks to the development of sexual subcultures and drugs favoring the dilation of the anus.
We can, however, think that the question is perhaps not so much that of the conditions of possibility of a long history of fisting as that of the variety of meanings that can be given to this act, as to any sexual practice: the Phenomenological aspects of sexuality are always caught up in social and cultural differences, which explain historical variations in the meanings given to this or that practice, even if some are remarkably stable (Bozon, 1999). From this point of view, even if we find traces of introducing the fist into the anus or the vagina into the Song of Songs (“My friend stretched out his hand through the opening and my stomach was in tumult because of him” – as the author notes, H. Meschonnic’s translation lends itself more than others to this interpretation), nothing allows this gesture to be compared to the basements of gay bars.
Marco Vidal thus offers a reverie on fisting which makes the multiple registers of this practice sensitive. We regret that two major aspects are only sketched, for lack of a more materialist analysis. On the one hand, the register of politicization is not invested. If it has the advantage of pointing out the stigmatization to which minority sexualities are subject, it also tends to assign to them an imperative of subversion which poorly describes the ordinary investments of amateurs. This is perhaps the reason why Marco Vidal does not take it. Furthermore, the degenitalization of sexuality, of which fisting would be an indicator according to the author, is perhaps not the essential thing: if for Marco Vidal “sexualities without a phallus are the order of the day” (39), the assignment of sexuality to genital penetration and conjugality remains dominant in majority sexualities. The issue of fisting is perhaps less genitality than penetration, and all the sexual meanings that surround it. Gender relations are hardly present in the book, except to evoke “the calm virility” (20) of a bar dedicated to this practice, or in the testimony of a man noting that if he found women for him fisting, he would not have “violence problems” with his partners (34). However, gender questions run through this practice: are the meanings of vaginal fisting the same as those of anal fisting? Does fisting have the same meanings for a woman or a man, a homosexual or a heterosexual? So many questions that the work leaves unanswered, preferring to identify more general symbolic issues.