Fisting

Abstract

Beyond parody, gay men’s identification with heteromasculinity, in its dead seriousness, appears to Bersani as being almost mad. In spatial terms, madness marks a proximity to—and not a distance between—powerfully normative images of gender. In his reading of the dynamics of madness, Bersani embraces this instability of identification that may ultimately cause the subject to collapse. Gay sex practices provide the occasion for this scene of vertigo, which, in Bersani’s work, opens a space that exists after the fall of the ego and that is often further explored through a turn to art: following the death of the psychoanalytic subject, the aesthetic subject appears. This essay, however, returns to the scene of the sexual. It traces the path of sexual practices discussed by Bersani, from gay anal intercourse to rimming, finally introducing fisting as a sexual practice that deserves to be read in Bersanian terms, insofar as it produces a form of “new masculinity.”