Anal Bodies / Anal Politics

Abstract

The text explores what I call the ‘anal body and politics’, that is the potentiality and the political implications of the body when mapped and morphologically rearticulated from another standpoint than the hegemonic ones of the Phallic body, the frontal body, the heteronormative body, the reproductive body, the (liberal) individual body and so on. Instead, the anal body proposes something more vital to the body itself, without reinforcing a hetero-racialcapitalistic logic of reproduction, self-possessiveness, verticality, and property/propriety. The body that could be, and continues, as always already, being a multitudinous body of differences, transversally configured in provisional, yet unstable, unity; the body which brings the politics of co-existing and transindividuality. I develop my argument by reparative reading, from behind, of feminist theories of sexual difference, followed by a critical excavation of the politics of refusal specific to the anti-social thesis in queer theory, and ‘rehabilitation’ of the forgotten liberationist theory of Guy Hocquenghem.