Today I am continuing on the same topic. Foucault understands pleasure to be something that should not be solely understood as necessarily involving genitals and/or orgasm.
Halperin gives a fascinating description of fisting as an effective illustration of a pleasurable act that de-genitalizes pleasure:
The creative and transformative potential of queer sex is especially clear in the case of fist-fucking, the practice that Foucault singles out for mention and that he seems to have in mind when he speaks of “produc[ing] pleasure with very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies.” Fist-fucking, after all, is a sexual practice that nonetheless differs in several important respects from “sexual intercourse” as the latter is conventionally defined. It is less an end-driven, teleological action aimed at achieving release of sexual tension through orgasm (as in the Freudian model of “full heterosexual genitality”) than a gradual, lengthy process–“an art,” as Gayle Rubin describes it, “that involves seducing one of the jumpiest and tightest muscles in the body.” Intensity and duration of feeling, not climax, are the key values: the process can sometimes go on for hours, and it is possible that neither partner may come–or (in the case of men) even maintain an erection for long. It is also possible for the receptive male partner to come without being in a state of erection at the time. Hence, fist-fucking has been spoken of by its practitioners not as sex but as a kind of “anal yoga.” As such, it would seem to represent a practical refutation of what Foucault considered, as we have seen, the mistaken “idea that bodily pleasure should always come from sexual pleasure, and the idea that sexual pleasure is the root of all our possible pleasure.” The emergence of fist-fucking as both a sexual and a sub-cultural phenomenon therefore has the potential to contribute to redefining both the meaning and the practice of sex along the lines sketched out by Foucault in 1977 when, in an interview entitled “Down with the Dictatorship of Sex!” he announced, “I am for the decentralization, the regionalization of all pleasures.”
Halperin goes on to talk about how, interestingly, fisting
“may be the only sexual practice invented in the twentieth century” (or, to be more precise, it was the only such practice invented in the twentieth century until the … discoveries of phones sex and fax sex).
Again, I’m not going to interpret or anything yet. Trust me, this all comes together. Tomorrow…
What a Whimsical World 