One of the aims of Reading from Behind is to consider how we might go about displacing—though not replacing or destroying—the primacy of the phallus in literary and cultural criticism. Although van Driel notes that the penis has been “abused by feminists,” a claim that many men’s rights activists would surely agree with, I believe that it is necessary to return to feminist theory, at least briefly, because it has provided some of the most exciting and innovative—though also problematic—critiques of the phallus. I am not writing this as a feminist study but attempting to show how feminism enables some of the questions behind this book. That is, there is both an implicit and an explicit debt to feminism even though the book is more comfortably aligned with queer theory and masculinity studies.

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar open their agenda-setting The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination with a question: “[I]s the pen a metaphorical penis?” They contend throughout their volume, and in subsequent works, that “male sexuality . . . is not just analogically but actually the essence of literary power” and that the “poet’s pen is in some sense (even more than figuratively) a penis.”6 On the one hand, though there is undoubtedly a critique of phallic power about to unfold in their work, on the other there is an undercutting effect insofar as they need to reify the penis in order to deconstruct it. In a later book, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Gilbert and Gubar ask a similar question: “[I]s a pen a metaphorical pistol?”7 Their readers will note, of course, the resemblance between their opening questions. And Gilbert and Gubar are not alone, for instance, in thinking of the pen as a penis: Elaine Showalter writes that “the text’s author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is the instrument of his generative power like his penis.”8

The penis-as-pen has been a productive analogy for feminist critics; however, I am not content that this site of criticism itself is advantageous to a greater project that aims to deconstruct the phallocentric discourse called into question by feminist critics. Indeed, I contend that, by highlighting the symbolic reference, feminist theorists arguably maintain a necessary status quo (even if the ultimate goal is to deconstruct it) insofar as they need something on which to reflect and establish an argument. The object to which feminist critics disagree must be established and affirmed so as to allow for disagreement, deconstruction, and so on. Moreover, it creates the false and highly problematic assumption that all pens are necessarily, essentially, and equally penises, all of them involved in creation. Surely we cannot agree that all penises are the same, have the same function, and are used in the same way. Judith Butler, though not making a critique of the penis proper, makes an important observation about patriarchy and feminist theory in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity:

But we should take a closer look at Gilbert and Gubar. They argue that male sexuality, which surely includes but is not limited to the phallus, is what motivates and confirms “literary power” and indeed, I would argue, simply put, “power.” To read Gilbert and Gubar carefully is to admit that, though they are fundamentally interested in the penis, we must recognize that it is but a part of male sexuality and that the male body is rich in erotic and sexual potential, much like the female body. To be sure, there is nothing wrong with the existing readings of Gilbert and Gubar, but we have not fully recognized the complexity of male sexuality. Gilbert and Gubar are not alone in this perspective. Hélène Cixous, for instance, argues that, “Though masculine sexuality gravitates around the penis, engendering the centralized body (in political anatomy) under the dictatorship of parts, woman does not bring about the same regionalization which serves the couple head/genitals and which is inscribed only within boundaries. Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide.”10 Likewise, Luce Irigaray suggests that “Woman has sex organs just about everywhere. She experiences pleasure almost everywhere. . . . [T]he geography of her pleasure is much more diversified, more multiple in differences, more complex, more subtle than is imagined—in an imaginary [system] centred on one and the same.”11 Each perspective does a disservice to the male body and male sexuality and reduces that body to nothing more than an appendage that totally informs and defines male sexual experience. Although the penis is a synecdoche of the male, a part that can represent the whole, we must be careful to resist the temptation that the penis is the man. We must treat cautiously “microcosm-macrocosm relationships”12 that inform a theory of masculine sexuality through the penis and it alone. We must move beyond the reductive logic that informs this simple version of male sexuality, largely because it excludes any number of erotic potentials that often inform this study, which proposes a new mode of reading, not just of literary texts, but also of culture. We must begin to read from behind, focused on the complexity of male sexuality.

Since we all have an anus, it seems to me that this “private part” contains a utopian potential for a theory of sexuality, gender, sex, desire, and pleasure that is inherently inclusive. The anus is not exclusive, like the penis or the vagina, to one sex, to one type of body. Indeed, even aberrations of the penis and vagina, for instance in cases of intersexuality, are not inherently problematic to the logic of this study, which argues that we must read from behind. The anus is a key part of the human body, a remarkably complex organ that has significant symbolic potential, not least because of the numerous ways in which we have desperately tried to keep it repressed. It is also the organ that most makes many of us rather uncomfortable because of its alignment with abjection, dirtiness, shame, and, in our homophobic culture, male homosexuality. This is largely the interest of this study—deflating not just the phallus but also, more particularly, the primacy of homophobia.

Thus, though I am fundamentally interested in critiquing the assumption that the anus is the “essence of homosexuality, the very ground zero of gayness,”13 it must nevertheless be admitted that this is a perception, an assumption, rooted in seemingly significant historical truth and value. This observation that the anus is gay—rightly or wrongly—does not quite make sense. After all, it seems to be fair enough to suggest the obvious: we all have one. Admittedly, with these statements, I run the risk of “degaying” the very subject that I set out to explore. Leo Bersani cautions that “de-gaying gayness can only fortify homophobic oppression; it accomplishes in its own way the principal aim of homophobia: the elimination of gays.”14 My intention here is neither to erase homosexuality or gayness nor to suggest that anality, anal eroticism, and anal sexuality are somehow unique to gayness. Anal sexuality is not unique to gay men, as even the most cursory review of the history of sexuality demonstrates. Anal sexuality might well mean very different things in very different scenarios; this is precisely Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s point in the opening axiomatic claim of Epistemology of the Closet: “[E]ven identical genital acts mean very different things to very different people.”15

What does the ass, the rectum, the anus mean for masculinity, for the male body? How do men, perhaps especially straight men, conceptualize this site of eroticism, especially when it is imagined as somehow being gay? While engaging this question, one might be accused of degaying gayness, but why does gayness become the b...