Handle with Care

Eric Daffron

doi:10.4000/angles.3628

Abstract

This essay examines two sets of coronavirus-prevention guidelines issued by New York City’s health department in early spring 2020. The department advised residents not to touch their faces “unless” they had washed their hands but advised them to masturbate “especially if” they had washed their hands. Those recommendations reshaped New Yorkers’ relationship to their bodies and, in so doing, contributed to a new permutation of biopower. Drawing on several theories of biopower, this essay’s first section explains that the department’s recommendations used large-scale biopolitical tactics with small-scale implications to encourage New Yorkers to meet the expectations of what Nikolas Rose has called “biological citizenship.” Exploring potential responses to the body’s biopolitical regulation, this essay’s second section considers the prohibition against touching in Sigmund Freud’s outdated but culturally resonant theory of obsessional neurosis. While obsessional neurosis may transgress, cancel, or achieve a compromise with that prohibition, only a ceremonial such as handwashing offers promise for responsible action. However, it, like the obsessional’s other actions, operates in a cycle of desire and prohibition which cannot fully account for how biopower now promotes and regulates bodily knowledge and movement. In search of alternatives, this essay’s final section turns to four coronavirus-themed pornographic videos produced by gay and bisexual men. These videos troubled public-health guidelines while providing potential viewers in New York and beyond with critical and creative options for pandemic-era action. In sum, these productions revealed that creation can come out of crisis.

Highlights

Section 1: BiopowerSection 2: Obsessional Neurosis10 Let us begin with the prohibition against touching, the obsessional neurotic’s foundational symptom
2 Those two self-touching recommendations might initially strike us as straightforward and pragmatic. If we examine those guidelines more closely, we will see that they invited New Yorkers to engage in a new relationship with their bodies
We should persist even in a postpandemic world that will likely require our collective creativity and test our mutual resolve

Summary

Section 2: Obsessional Neurosis

10 Let us begin with the prohibition against touching, the obsessional neurotic’s foundational symptom. Given its orgasmic-like pleasure, face scratching too eventually falls under an injunction, obsessional neurotics would likely find another substitute They might follow the advice, offered in one New York Times article, to squeeze a stress ball (Gross 2020). As Rose explains (2007: 40), the current biopolitical field has “opened up” our bodies “to experimentation and to contestation,” we should anticipate responses that take “biological citizenship” in unanticipated directions With both sets of questions in mind, the following section seeks fresh options for pandemic-era biopolitical practice. In so doing, it parts ways with Freud (1989a: 45-6), who uses the curious phrase “negative magic” to describe the obsessional neurotic’s habit of cancelling an act of prohibition with another act. This section gives priority to affirmation over repudiation: to expressions of corporeality that trouble public-health recommendations without disavowing them altogether

Section 3: Critical and Creative Action

Conclusion