Eat, sex, race

Feminist and queer studies of the last three decades have redrawn- undressed, perhaps-the political map of the Western human body, unpacking and reorienting the genealogy of the viscous, somatic, neurologically vital, mucosal matter that is, in the West, called “body” Much attention has been paid to those parts whose political and erotic baggage is clearly overdetermined by their relationship to normative and reproductive-or, coevally, threateningly nonnormative and counterreproductive-erotic behaviors. Leo Bersani, most famously, has taken up anality as a site of fraught sexual politics: for Bersani, anal sex, particularly in the age of AIDS, represented the apotheosis of counteridentification with both the heteronormative and liberal selfhood: “if the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal … of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death.”.