I understand bodies as a fusion of energy vibrations creating the illusion of matter: this relationship between essence and form moves beyond the cartesian mind, beyond the periodic table that places nature and body as patients etherised and dissected before you. So I also see your phallic assaults, your desires to conquer as you prod and probe in the name of science and god to pacify and possess.

But if nature and body is womyn, then I do not see a mother submissive to the father, or even a widow in waiting, but I see a drugged whore who cobra-fucks you with the mutants you procreate as a new millennium of chaos is bred and nurtured, making you think - who has the ultimate control?

I was owned by the hands that carried me, by the water and the oil that they covered my body in. I was owned by the christ they placed before my lips, by the dreams and desires to multiply, possess and control.

I was owned by the roles you demand I perform to sustain and maintain the machinery and the ideals of masculinity any empire provides to its soldiers to keep this great conquest alive.

But my desires rejected the meanings you place onto my gender and my body as I sat in secrecy behind the cupboard desiring to be possessed by the body of christ - ultimately longing to discover this supreme cock that was always so well-hidden. I longed to explore my body through the bodies of other boys and these desires fermented in fear of the exorcists, the psychologists, the psychiatrists you demanded I go to. In fear of your rejection and isolation, in fear of my exile to a land of demons and death.

But now, as my pain and fear transforms into rage and defiance I emerge as the dreaded Dame from the gutter, from the ghetto and from the closet - the township and prison I helped you create.

So I became a fallen angel - rejecting the passivity that silences me, that remains me a victim, obedient to your master's voice. So I kissed your christ and moved on to celebrate orgies with the romans. And as I assert this space I refuse to be confined to your expectations and assumptions of how I express my gender, how I discover my body and what I desire.

Exhibitionism is a performance of ritual. It is in these moments, these bubbles of exposure that I release my celebration of not belonging. It is in these spaces that I exhibit my exploration of body and its desires - where I reclaim and redefine this sensuality, magic, pain and blood. This is what this piercing symbolises to me.

073kav@cosmos.wits.ac.za

In order to briefly put into context what I am about to present, I will start by quoting Jeffrey Weeks in his important essay entitled Post-modern AIDS? He writes:

Early images of people with AIDS drew on barely repressed stereotypes of the male homosexual: unresponsible, pleasure-orientated, promiscuous, diseased. 'Part of the shock of AIDS was thus the shock of identity'. It confirmed your otherness, flushed out who, and more important, what you are.

Of course, on a world scale most people living with HIV and AIDS are not gay. Most are poor, black, and many are women. But despite all the government-sponsored education campaigns, the scientific papers, the documentaries, and common sense perceptions, AIDS and gayness are indissoluble linked. To be diagnosed HIV positive, to live with HIV disease, is to risk being diagnosed as homosexual.

HIV and AIDS mark you. They have also provided the challenge and opportunities of new identities, forged in the furnace of suffering, loss and survival(1).

In my paper I will illustrate, by way of discussing Simon Watney's notion of a "confident AIDS activist aesthetic"(2), how this challenge of new identities has been met in the work of the Latino-American artist Felix Gonzales-Torres.

Identity

In our post-modern era the issue of identity has become of utmost importance and as Weeks pointed out, the great achievement of sexual politics since the late 1960's has been the recognition of the historical nature of our subjectivity.(3) No longer do we take for granted or see as "natural" our sense of self, including our sexual identity. We have come to question these identities and also how it is influenced in particular by the way social groups and individuals are represented. The same applies to gay men and AIDS has had a strong influence on the way gay men are represented. Old stereotypes were reinforced and the disease was used as yet another scientific "proof" of our otherness. Thus the importance of scholars such as Paula Treichler questioning the "given" nature of the disease as it is presented to us through the media, legal, political, social and cultural signifying practises and suggests the need for an epidemiology of signification" rather than simply epidemiological information on AIDS. "it is not unreasonable to suggest that the representation of AIDS have reached epidemic proportions."(4) David Miller in his book Living with AIDS(5) suggests that those who have AIDS and HIV should avoid reading media coverage"(6), and in another writer's words "people have been stigmatised and destroyed as much by the 'idea' of AIDS as by its reality."(7).

Since such stigmatisation is often achieved through the act of representation it will only be through a discourse of intervention and subversion of such representations that will allow for the act of de-stigmatisation and the invention of new identities.

AIDS activist aesthetic

In his essay "Representing AIDS"(8) the British art historian and AIDS activist Simon Watney calls such a proposed visual discourse a "confident AIDS activist aesthetic" and explains it as ranging from the subversion of mainstream AIDS imagery to imaginative interventions in the fields of gay culture and politics.

By way of illustrating this notion he critically looks at two initial visual responses to the AIDS crisis. The first from groups such as ACT UP and Gran Fury respectively in New York and London. Watney sites Douglas Crimp notorious assertion in his essay AIDS: Cultural Analysis/ Cultural Activism as emblematic of such a response.

We don't need to transcend the epidemic; we need to end it(9) and

the really important work being done now is out in the culture, dealing with larger issues: it's not on gallery walls.(10)

The explicitly political and didactic nature of this response is evident in their extensive use of propagandist techniques such as posters, flyers and mass demonstrations with slogans such as "Why are we here? Because your malignant neglect KILLS." and "Reagan Kills Me".

These visual activities very much defined the "look" of AIDS activism in the late 80's.

While the anger of such groups were directed at a government and public that is homophobic and ignorant, it was also in response to another area of representation which were that of AIDS photojournalism as well as portrait-projects of PWA.

Here: the camera invariably seeks out the "victims" of the most spectacular battles. Its instinct for the sensational leads it to prefer the bald and wasted AIDS patient with the feverish, haggard look, lying in his hospital bed (preferably with a few tubes up his nose), to his companion who is still able to take care of himself and speak articulately about his condition.(11)

During an exhibition of such portraits at the Museum of Modern Art, members of ACT UP staged a protest outside the gallery while handing out flyers with "No More Pictures Without Context" and "We demand the visibility of PWA who are vibrant, angry, loving, sexy, beautiful, acting up and fighting back."(12)

Watney argues for the danger inherent in this kind of oversimplified activist critique of dominant media and art world representations of PWA. He states that

(although) it is entirely understandable that AIDS activists are outraged by the relentless fatalism and negativity of most images of people living with AIDS, ( ) we should not be tempted simply to duplicate the disavowal of the mass media with our own forms of denial. For it would be profoundly misleading to imagine the totally "positive" images are ultimately more truthful or representative of AIDS than the most morbid excesses of photojournalism and documentaries..., we should be cautious of any strategic interventions that seek to 'balance' dominant images, for in this way the larger illusion that a single universal 'truth' of AIDS might be disclosed is unfortunately protected."(13)

The second response to the disease Watney discusses is for example in the work of Gilbert and George as it featured in their exhibition "Art For AIDS" in London in 1989 to raise funds for AIDS projects. Apart from being commodities with the ability to raise funds such works reveal nothing of the reality of the disease and its uselessness can be measured by the apologist responses such as "sad self-portraits, poignantly encouraging flower-pieces concerned with blossoming and rebirth, and blunt studies of blood spattered in droplets on transparent infinity,"(14)

Apart from being grossly sentimental, these images have no ability to tell us anything important about the disease.

Watney concludes: the images that will do justice to this epidemic will be those that manage to communicate something of the power and nature of the forces that justify such a murderous indifference to AIDS on the part of those, gay or straight, who have had something murdered in themselves in order to be able to achieve so total a shutdown of their own attention and sympathies.(15)

In an AIDS activist aesthetic strategy is everything. Such an aesthetic "cannot and does not prescribe a single style or even technology. Instead, it invites us to think very broadly about the most effective ways in which we might intervene against specific discursive formations."(16)

Felix Gonzales-Torres

In the work of Felix Gonzales-Torres we find a perfect example of just such an aesthetic. He does not subscribe to any particular kind of material or technique, instead he uses, in true Duchampian fashion, whatever medium seems most suited for a specific strategy of intervention whether it is the use of found objects such as clocks or shower curtains, or inventing a specific technique or method such as the stack pieces.

There is also less an interest in formal qualities such as preferring a specific shade of blue to another while what is more important is the method, not only in the sense of how the work was made, but also how it is shared with the public and distributed. Often while viewing a work by Gonzales-Torres one would be confronted with a sign inviting you to "Please Take" or in the case of buying a work of his, the client would be provided with a list of things to do as a way of looking after the work. It is in these actions that the meaning of his works reside and also its power to speak about the reality of the AIDS experience.

For example; between 1988-1992 he exhibited a series of works consisting of stacks of papers where each copy in a particular stack is of exact dimensions and with the same words or images printed on it. Although one's initial response might be the same as to the cubes and circles of minimalists such as Donald Judd or the Russian Constructivists with titles such as "Black rectangle and red square", instead we are presented with a subtle, but powerful metaphor for the experience of AIDS with titles such as Untitled (Lover Boy) or Untitled (Passport) and the invitation to take from the stack.

As Gonzales-Torres stated:

I wanted to do a show that would disappear completely. ..Freud said that we rehearse our fears in order to lessen them. In a way this "letting go" of the work, this refusal to make a static form, a monolithic sculpture, in favour of a disappearing, changing, unstable, and fragile form was an attempt on my part to rehearse my fears of having Ross (the artist's partner who died of AIDS around that time) disappear day by day right in front of my eyes

Not only does a work like Untitled (Lover Boy) speak of the experience of AIDS, but it also becomes a metaphor for the body with AIDS in its condition of fragility, disease, unsuitability and disappearance. The method by which the work is being consumed by a public, becomes a metaphor for the process of dying from AIDS and then death.

Freud's essay on the subject of death in the context of the Second World War, although irrelevant by way of comparison, can be applied in the following:

"Should we not confess that in our civilised attitude towards death we are once again living psychologically beyond our means, and should we not rather turn back and recognise the truth? . Death will no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in it. People really die; and no longer one by one, but many.(18)

In Gonzales-Torres' work there is a continuous acknowledgement of death, while at the same time presenting it as something that, as life, has the power to be a transformative experience. In the twin stacks of white paper called Untitled (Perfect Lovers) 1990 there is printed on the one stack "Somewhere better than this place" and on the other "Nowhere better than this place". Death is almost equated to the act of leaving one place for another, one which proves perhaps to be better than the first. Death is also implied in terms of the passing of time while the act of taking copies from the stack leads to erasure and disappearance. Life is defined by death and the act of dying while at the same time there is the suggestion of the body's ability for regeneration and growth, even if it is in another realm or time.

Also the idea of a body in need of constant care and looking after during a time of extreme illness is suggested in the fact that there is the responsibility on the owner of such a work to keep replenishing the stack by means of a printing plate provided for the purpose, and by implication the public responsibility to take care of such a body as a collective, whether by physical means or by seizing to be ignorant of AIDS and its disastrous effects.

Another series of works where the condition of the AIDS body is explored through metaphor are the piles of sweets. Explicit reference is made to the body in, for example Untitled (Revenge)1991 where 200 pounds, which was the combined weight of the artist and his lover, of individually wrapped ice-blue mint candies were presented to the viewer on the floor with the invitation to take and eat. Again the gradual wasting and loss of appetite, which is so often and so painfully experienced by people with AIDS is presented to us in the most subtle, but powerful way. Another work from the same series called Untitled (Placebo) involves us in the cultural field of the medical trials of potential treatment drugs which carries with it a profound supplement of hope

While on the one hand presenting the viewer with intimate biographical experiences of death and loss through the use of the metaphor, Gonzales-Torres also engages in a political activism of subversion akin to the strategies of such groups as ACT UP and Group Material, of which he was a member. For example the constant subversion of the art historical notion of the artwork as an unique image that cannot be reproduced by presenting the public with multiples, and on top of it inviting the viewer not only to touch, but take copies for free. Also the use of the floor space, as opposed to the wall or pedestal, with its distinctly "marginal" nature for the display of these fragile works about identity, loss and death. Thus the assertion of an identity that is distinctly queer in its subversive nature.

I admire artists that break the rules, that break with the expected unctions of an artist,...; artists that can recite economic facts at the drop of a hat; artists that can tell you how much money has been eliminated from programs for pregnant women and infants over the last twelve years by the Republican "pro-family" administration; ..."(19)

In his many jigsaw puzzle editions the images are from C-prints and could therefore not be handled as puzzles are supposed to be. Thus the "fun for the whole family"(20) is denied and the owner is instead left with the responsibility of preserving something that is fragile, precious and rarefied.

The political content of Gonzales-Torres' work is often suggested in titles such as "Death by Gun' or "Republican Years" or "Loverboy" or "National Rifle Association". Without didactically trying to deliver a message unto a receptive audience in need of reformation, the artist simply invites us to think about the social implication of for example the notion of "Death by Gun" in the context of the countless teenage suicides due to an inability to cope with a sexuality that is repressed in a homophobic society, or violence as a result of homophobia where countless gay men gets killed in the most horrific ways imaginable, or the stupidity of war and violence in general.

Finally, in Gonzales-Torres' work the personal and political becomes almost indistinguishable in the true fashion of feminism and gay politics. His series of billboard-works are an example of such a fusion where the personal/private becomes and informs the political/public and vice versa. In Untitled 1991 he presented the intimate image of a recently vacated bed on billboards all over New Work city. The bed, a site where people are born, lover's make love, and if you are lucky, die, is presented in a distinctly public site.

Conclusion

In Gonzales-Torres' work there is thus the refusal to present any one "truth" about the lives and experiences of all gay men within a single representational image of the body, instead careful metaphorical strategies are invented through which the body is courted and referred to in its fragile and complex state of being human in such a murderous time of AIDS.

Notes:

1. Weeks Jeffrey, "Post-Modern AIDS?" Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS mythology, Boffin Tessa & Gupta Sunil (eds), London, River Oram Press, 1990.

2. Watney Simon, "Representing AIDS", Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS mythology, Boffin Tessa & Gupta Sunil (eds), London, River Oram Press, 1990.

3. Weeks Jeffrey, "Post-Modern AIDS?" Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS mythology, Boffin Tessa & gupta Sunil (eds), London, River Oram Press, 1990.

4. Treichler Paula, "AIDS, Homophobia and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification, October, no 43, Winter 1987, p 68.

5. McGrath Roberta, "Dangerous Liasons; Health, Disease and Representation", Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS mythology, Boffin Tessa & Gupta Sunil (eds), London, River Oram Press, 1990, p 144.

6. Miller David, Living with AIDS, McMillan, 1987, p 105.

7. Gillman Sander L., "AIDS and Syphilis: The Iconography of Disease", October, no 43, Winter 1987, p 88.

8. Watney Simon, "Representing AIDS", op.cit.,

9. Crimp Douglas, "Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism", AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, Crimp Douglas, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1988.

10. Ibid.

11. Dreuille Emmanuel, Mortal Embrace: Living with AIDS, New York, Hill & Wang, 1988, p 122.

12. ACT UP Handout, New York, 1989.

13. Watney Simon, "Representing AIDS", op.cit., p 179.

14. Core Philip, "Unseen Enemy", The Independent, London, 14 April 1989, p 18.

15. Watney Simon, "Representing AIDS", op.cit., p 181.

16. Ibid, p 184.

17. Gonzales-Torres Felix, Felix Gonzales-Torres, New York, A.R.T. Press, 1993, p 13.

18. Freud Sigmund, "Thoughts For the Times On War and Death", Pelican Freud Library, vol 12, Harmondsworth, 1985.

19. Gonzales-Torres Felix, Felix Gonzales-Torres, op.cit., p 11.

20. Tallman Susan, "Felix Gonzales-Torres: SOCIAL WORKS" Parkett, no 39, New York, 1994, p 65.

Biographical note:

I am an artist currently involved in research towards an MA in fine arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. My gay sexual identity in the context of a changing South Africa with its many histories of oppression and apartheid is of great importance in my work.

rjhentie@mail-jhb.sprintlink.co.za

"QUEER!"

could be pejorative, it could be celebratory, but whatever "Queer" is made to mean, it remains an act of distancing. This distance can be judgmental and prejudicial when it invokes the norm and deviancy; it can be subversive when reappropriated within gay politics; or it can be critical by defamiliarising and fragmenting our webs of meaning to reveal their constructedness in claims to knowledge and power. It is the last meaning of the word that this paper wishes to pursue to throw up the ways in which we have constructed homosexuality. "Queer!" allows us to note how erotic same-sex feelings, thoughts and actions are negotiated to be either represented within categories of sexuality or avoid them. "Queer!" notes our reactions to sex and the ways in which we try to circumscribe and control that most pleasurable and 'dangerous' phenomena. I seek to use "Queer!" as an analytic hammer whereby to smash the scientific category of "homosexuality" which has come to construct silences and implying differences without understanding the "shades of grey" - that illusive, discursively faint, twilight zone within which practices allow new subjectivities (new ways of relating) to emerge. "Queer!" does not respect reified categories since it is implicated within multiple uses. It is with this critical agenda that I seek to ask "Queer Questions" about the way we have come to understand homosexuality and showing up the sacred adherence to normality and science as particularly QUEER!

Psychology as a science is just one amongst many discourses on homosexuality. Its devotional popularity of positivism becomes dangerous when it so embroils the discipline that it no longer takes a reflexive positional or contextual look at itself within the different cultural narrations of which it is but one.

In order to escape discriminating ways of thinking, one needs to extricate oneself from the form of reasoning that is utilised by an oppressive discourse. This would mean looking at the ways in which the psychological discipline has been talking about homosexuality, and how these ways have prevented a radical re-understanding of homosexuality and have just pandered to discriminative practices, even unintentionally. We need to start from the practical position of asking, "Why has the discipline not contributed vastly to the lifting of victimising laws?" even more seriously, "How is it possible that the discipline's form of knowledge on homosexuality is able to be utilised to oppress people with same-sex desires?". In our current politically correct climate, "the love that dare not speak its name" (as Oscar Wilde so eloquently bemoaned) is now freely spoken about, albeit within a climate where there's a 'prejudice that dare not speak its name'. An essential part to being a psychologist or student-of-people is to acknowledge one's limitations and complicity in being at the same time the very object one wishes to study. The student's inextricability from her own study entails its own prejudice that needs to be acknowledged and understood for the inevitable bias it introduces.

This paper's bias is clearly that of working for an emancipatory position from which an experience of same-sex desire can be creatively employed to create a knowledge of the self that cannot be laid claim to by any institution of learning or supposed authority. Rather the position of any knowledge institution should be to understand the processes whereby knowledge is created and applied to create various effects within the self and the world. This is a bias as much as any other bias in science, religion or explicatory world views. The aim here is not to point out the emancipatory bias as any more legitimate than another. Rather, this academic perspective seeks to ascertain the context in which psychology can take a facilitative stand and the effects it is creating by doing so. The litmus test of the legitimacy and preferableness of the emancipatory view as a means of investigating the world, resides in the desirableness of its effects, namely that of enabling people with same-sex desires to give full blossoming to their erotic creativity by establishing constructive same-sex relationships. If the reader's philosophy of justice does not abide by this premise then she or he may now discontinue reading this paper.

The first starting point of the emancipatory perspective would be the investigation of the epistemological forms in which psychology has trapped homosexuality. This may be done by deconstructing the form of subjectivity employed in mainstream thinking. The subjectivity in question is that of the modernist monadic form, which assumes that the subject is an indivisible unit that is a complete, independent, separate and bounded unit that can be clearly defined in a fixed form. In order to illustrate the operation of this form of subjectivity in psychological discourse, a critique of two South African research studies may assist us, namely, A Psychobiographical Study of a Male Homosexual (Van Wyk and Simbayi 1995) and Geslagsoriëntasie, Kognetiewe vermoëns en Hormonale Status (Erasmus 1992).

Individuality: The Modernist Trapping of Homosexuality

Research on homosexuality immediately raises the concern, "What is homosexuality?" and "Who are homosexuals?"

In their paper Van Wyk/Simbayi (1995:1) defined homosexuality as including sexual orientation, sexual behaviour and sexual identity (attraction to the same sex, acting on those attractions and assuming an accompanying identity). They note that the distinguishing feature between homo- and heterosexuality is not the mode of sex, but "that homosexuals are attracted to partners of their own sex"(p.3). Homosexuality is thus constrained as a categorical trait that illustrates an internal property of the person within the boundaries of her individuality.

The study by Erasmus (1992) stated that homosexuality needs to be considered as a broad phenomenon that ranges within a continuum from exclusive homosexuality to exclusive heterosexuality, and thus includes a spectrum of vast differences in behaviour, physical constitution and personalities. Her sample however only contained 'exclusively homosexual' men, and without giving detailed illustration, it is suggested that this entails exclusive same-sex behaviour and erotic attraction for the same sex as the defining criteria (Erasmus 1992:37). Her definition is thus also one that focuses inwardly on the individual within the boundary of his individuality.

The two studies' inward foci are tied to their research enterprise to find the origin, cause or truth about homosexuality, namely that which is assumed to be responsible for the person's outward presentation in word and deed as "a homosexual".

By defining her subjects as "exclusive homosexuals", Erasmus assumes that her subjects are constitutionally different from heterosexual men as she proceeds to measure their hormonal and cognitive capacities. This assumption she is able to make because of her monadic understanding of subjectivity. Her subjects confessed to be "exclusively homosexual" and within the framework of a subject as a unitary, stable individual, this confession is taken as a revelation of internal truth, rather than a statement of how the person relates to the world. Erasmus fails to note the social construction of homosexuality as a person's means to find his fit in power relations i.e. that the person is not just self-defined as homosexual in relation to his internal feelings, but also (and especially) in relation to the understandings of others.

Erasmus (pp.37-42) does explicitly mention that a multitude of factors influence the nature and form homosexuality takes on in an individual, some of these factors being cultural influences. Unfortunately this acknowledgement does not stop her study from narrowly constraining homosexuality within the discourse of science. Her experimental research necessitated that, for the duration of its investigation, homosexuality was to be understood reductionistically i.e. that differences in (that broad phenomenon of) sexuality can be spotted by looking at hormones and performance on a cognitive test. Although she noted these as only contributing factors in the etiology of homosexuality, she still thereby manages to trap her subject's sexuality within the illusion of an exclusive homosexual individuality, and negate the very relations of persecution her subjects' identities are partly a response to. If you like, the multifaceted relational nature of the person is reduced to the singular internal properties of the individual.

What is thus interesting is that Erasmus (1992) found a statistically significant difference for her sample of male homosexuals who had lower testosterone counts and lower visual-spatial abilities than heterosexual men. It would seem that this confirms Erasmus' definition of "exclusive homosexuals", given that her results show a hormonal and cognitive similarity within that group. But such a conclusion would ignore some fundamental empirical considerations. Her sample is in no way representative of all people with the experience of same-sex desires. There seem to also be far more powerful factors (than hormones and cognition) at play, such as cultural dictates and constraints, that determine whether a person will define and realise herself as homosexual or not. It is also dubious how much of one's sexuality is determined by these organic or cognitive factors e.g. do hormones affect the way you express your same-sex desire, or are they merely contributive to having such desire? When we talk about homosexuality we are not talking so much about a particular internal composition of a person as about the way he chooses to relate socially and sexually to other people. What concerns the topic of homosexuality is far more about the politics of relationships, than about the truth of chemical composition.

Erasmus' use of the monadic subject illustrates how the construct of "the individual" is employed in order to provide boundaries to the person. Individuality becomes a circumscribed unit within which a construct (like homosexuality) can be operationalised (e.g. hormone level and cognitive performance) to explain its boundaries (e.g. to act and profess to be homosexual). In this way it is assumed that psychology can generate an explanatory theory of cause and effect that analytically highlights certain aspects of the person whilst suspending the entirety of the person. Within the epistemological mould provided by the monadic subject, individuality provides a means to capture a neat, contained understanding of the person as homosexual. This subjectivity allows the creation of a scientific truth about the person to which psychology lays superior claim by virtue of having the instruments of investigation that "discovered" this truth.

The question to consider is whether this is really what we want to, or ought to know about homosexuality, is that what concerns gay people, is that what will enable emancipation and the facilitation of people with same-sex desires to assume positions of psychological well-being in a world that discriminates?

Van Wyk/Simbayi (1995) tried to avoid the reductionistic effect Erasmus' quantitative method had in using the monadic subject, but they stepped into a different sort of scientific fiction.

Narrative: The Unacknowledged Legitimator of Scientific Constructs

Van Wyk/Simbayi (1995) attempted to avoid the quantitative bind of depersonalising homosexuality, by employing the entirety of the person in a qualitative autobiographical series of interviews of one male homosexual. This qualitative method was seen to consider the individual "as a person with thoughts, feelings and a history" (p.10). This hermeneutic approach was seen to allow an understanding of the person in context, thus giving a more complex multifactorial view of the etiology of homosexuality through drawing on the experiences of the person. Ironically the researchers end up breaking homosexuality "down into specific units" (p.10), a consequence which they sought to avoid by using their method. This resulted from their attempt to seek the best fit between the subject's autobiographical narrative and the available range of scientific theories on etiology.

In their conclusion the authors used the narrative account to inconclusively suggest that, in this case, family studies (overprotective mother and harsh father) together with unconscious phenomena (overidentification with mother and underidentification with father) provide the best predictive explanations of their subject's homosexuality. The authors thereby effectively employed their subject's narrative to justify scientific discourses whose methodologies remain disconnected from and nullify the subject's narrative as knowledge in its own right.

Lyotard (1984) noted this as a distinctive feature of the legitimacy process of modernist science. Scientific and narrative knowledge employ different language games. Each knowledge defines the criteria of authority differently. For science, authority is accorded to the technocrat who has been certified as competent to speak truthfully about the referent (construct e.g. homosexuality/homosexual). The referent plays no active role in its representation within the scientific statement. Narrative knowledge on the other hand does not require a community of technocrats and their evaluative standards. The authority lies in the uttering of the narrative by a person. This utterance positions the person in relation to the referent in such a way that what the person says is truthful. In effect the utterance is the referent.

The culture of science does not recognise the authority of narrative knowledge to be a legitimate professing of truth, yet relies heavily on that form of authority/knowledge in order to legitimise itself.

"Scientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the true knowledge without resorting to the other, narrative, kind of knowledge, which from its point of view is no knowledge at all." (Lyotard 1984:29 emphasis mine)

Van Wyk/Simbayi show this by gaining a narrative autobiographical testament from their subject, which was taken as knowledge about the person authorised by the subject's utterance. They then sought a fit between the way the subject had described himself and his life situation and the different scientific etiological constructs. The researchers/authors thereby appropriated and reprocessed the subject's narrative knowledge into a scientific form of knowledge. In this way the scientific community may come to respect the reworked narrative as knowledge, since it is now contained within a positivistically constructed understanding of individuality which acts as a higher order of knowledge to the subject's own narrative account of himself. But the narrative is essential to the legitimation of the scientific idea, since it can be claimed by science to be the true source of its knowledge without narrative being acknowledged as knowledge in itself. This is the knowledge credo employed by Van Wyk/Simbayi and many other modernist research projects.

The contingency of science upon narrative for its legitimation is unacknowledged within scientific discourse in order to maintain a scientific prerogative on the interpretations of what is to be legitimate knowledge or truth. But this hidden contingency also has a number of other unacknowledged power effects on the subject.

The Unacknowledged Effects of Scientific Constructs

Both studies cited thus operate with the implicit assumption of an individual within whom erotic same-sex feelings occur and from which same-sex behaviour is expressed. Their respective research aims are to try and find explanations or causes for homosexuality and to locate that point within the person and not within the relationship a person has with others. The person is seen as a product of various influences that range from the environmental to dispositional. Van Wyk/Simbayi and Erasmus' papers illustrate how homosexuality is appropriated by science and a particular homosexual constitution is mapped out that creates a new homosexuality.

There is a disjunction between the way in which people must politically use knowledge in their daily lives and the way science structures knowledge. Van Wyk/Simbayi and Erasmus are respectively asking the homosexual person to defend himself from discrimination using the excuse that he is that way because of his familial and unconscious dynamics and that he has a testosterone level that is lower than that of heterosexual men. Scientific knowledge in this way provides no affirmation, only excuses for homosexuality.

Through the scientific search for origin or explanation of homosexuality the person is individualised as a construct-containing unit, which is regulated by being accorded a certain scientific knowledge of itself, which serves to guide and control the subject within discourses. Science only allows the subject to speak of himself by referring to a truth outside the realm of his agency. Our research practices therefore create a knowledge that only allows for scientifically guided agents. Ordinary people become objects determined by scientific truth, loosing any legitimate agency and self-understanding of their own. This cult of scientific truth may explain why people who come out immediately grab and search for explanations for why they have the same-sex desires they have. The person experiences a profound illegitimacy in her experience of self when she does not refer to an authority outside of her body. The person experiences no integrity, no authority to be bound up in her self- experience. To feel same-sex desire is therefore problematically experienced as not really constituting a knowledge of the self, rather such a knowledge can only be granted by another i.e. scientific authority. This makes the person with same-sex desires profoundly vulnerable to the inconsistencies in scientific debates about the healthiness and nature of his own desires.

Discourses citing origin are more likely to evoke pity or accord the secondary status of a sexually disabled/disadvantaged person rather than provide equality and emancipation. These discourses also tap into the curative views that uses an understanding of origins in order to change a homosexual orientation into a heterosexual one. The assumption is that once you know what caused it you can cure/change it. People who seek to label their homosexuality positively and non-reductionistically are left out in the cold. The focus on origin ignores how homosexuality can be creatively applied in the world.

Identity: the political application of the knowledge form of individuality

So far we have considered psychology's paradigmatic use of the monadic subject as creating a particular epistemological framework of individuality within which people can be understood and can understand themselves. The concept of 'an individual' thereby allows certain forms of knowledge to operate with a prerogative that can be oppressive.

But individuals do not exist in vacuums, rather, in social systems. The positioning of one individual to another entails acts of power which create a political facet to individuality. This political nature of the subject is embodied by an identity. Identity establishes in and out groups, as well as what is in and outside of the subject. We thus come to consider not just boundary and content of the individual but also the centres and margins of society or knowledge communities that have certain identities. Identities are intimately wrapped up in knowledge i.e. what is known about the self and the other. An identity thus establishes a certain knowledge of self and the world as primary, constitutional or central, and other forms of knowledge secondary, marginal and fragmented. Thus knowledge wrapped up identity enables individuals to establish alliances and opposition, to include and exclude.

Given the political context of discrimination in which homosexuality is couched, research on it inevitably constructs homosexuality as an identity, i.e. a construct of knowledge that occupies a particular position within the political arena of margins and centres.

Psychology, with benevolent intent but still seeing itself as a defining authority of truth, has tried to reformulate the classically marginalised and pathologised experiences of homosexuality. But this has remained a benevolent despotic control exercised over the meaning of homosexuality. Psychology has restored (or rather created) this missing 'alternative' sexual form in psychological discourse as a coherent, autonomous, illusory identity constructed through the knowledge of the origin of homosexuality. The construct of "homosexuality" has centred same-sex behaviour, feelings and thoughts within Psychology's own discourse, the province of normality. "Homosexuality" became one of the legitimate sexual categories along with "heterosexuality" and "bisexuality" with an antecedent binary definitional requirement of either belonging or not belonging to one such category. And so psychology constructs the centre of homosexual health (through supposed objective measures) which is opposed to the marginality occupied by all other sexual practices that are not configured by psychology in its own particular way. Psychology thus constrains the legitimate ways of understanding and evaluating yourself. Sexual behaviour and attraction are 'objectively' reified into sexual orientation (Hencken 1984).

Claims to objective methods in psychology essentialise categories, missing many of the grey areas within which people make sense of their sexuality. Hencken (1984) illustrates the multitude of ways in which people construct labels to categorise their sexual behaviour and intentions within a political/power field where homosexuality is denigrated. Constructs such as, "Christ-I-was-drunk-last-night", "I was just horny", "It's more available with guys" or "I didn't really like it" (Hencken 1984:54-59) are all ways of labelling homosexual behaviour and feelings without self-labelling as homosexual. Psychology will find it hard to slot these labellings into its own preordained categories of understanding. What cannot be locked into a category will fall short of and be marginal to the discipline's understanding and be devalued consequently. Given the paradigm of the monadic subject, the person who does not conform to a delineated boundaried category of meaning is constituted as occupying an unarticulated, empty cite of rejection (Kirby 1996). In other words one is in crises.

Centring Crises: Regulating Identities and the Knowledge they Embody

Crises separate and alienate us from others. They are an experience of falling outside the boundaries of normalcy. The modernist response is generally to find a route back to the safe centre of a fixed identity or category, wherein research on causation has been instrumental by trying to define the categories we are supposed to return to for health.

Being in a crises makes a person feel as if he is in a state of incoherence and a loss of identity. The crisis position is unfortunately construed as a destructive fragmented margin from which the person needs to move towards a unified meaningful identity. But, although crises seems to be on the margins, it remains a discursive construction, a quality that centres it within dominant discourses that have constructed it (McNamee 1995). The discipline thus holds the knowledge on what is and how to understand marginalities. A paradox occurs in that the process of understanding the margins ascribes a definable identity/category to it (e.g. a state of sexual orientation confusion) in order to contain and capture the multiple natures or possibilities that occur at the margins, but at the same time the margins are treated as a condition of incoherence and fragmentation. This marginal identity as defined by the centre does not involve one of inclusion within the political/knowledge community and is therefore not attributed to a full person; the premise being that a complete person is also a social being. What is thus contained by science as an identity of marginality is effectively a non-identity composed of actions or states that are extra-social, devalued and considered dire to get out of.

Modernist knowledge practices avoid the marginal state of extra-categorical multiplicity and fragmentation and exploit it as a way of defining normality, community and health through exclusion, rejection and negation. In order to exclude you need to understand what it is you are excluding and it is in this capacity that knowledge of "the other" is vociferously pursued. Normality is deployed by totalising administrations and sciences as a way to identify people and getting people to identify themselves, and so individualise and categorise them, in order to make them governable (Rajchman 1991).

This is the political regulative aspect that the paradigm of the monadic subject commands by mapping identity onto knowledge and thereby positioning people hierarchically. Research has not aided in illuminating this experience of homosexuality i.e. the experience of being marginalised and searching and fighting for a valued and reaffirming knowledge of the self. This lack has flown from research using the monadic form of subjectivity which may have two disempowering effects for people who have experiences of same-sex desires that place them in a marginal position to the heterosexually centred majority who rate such desires as pathological or sinful.

1 People experiencing same-sex desires may feel a great pressure to go the normative heterosexual route. Where psychological research has omitted any narration of homosexuality, there it has condemned the same-sex desiring subject to official discursive silence. No opportunity is made to place a person with such desires in relation to socially acknowledged identities (i.e. no knowledge framework is created of same-sex desiring subjects in relation to being a member of community). Although the discipline may not actively discriminate in such instances, its active creation of silences relegates the homosexual subjectivity to the mercy of discriminating societal discourses. The monadic subject paradigm within its accompanying centre-margin framework enables the discipline to engage in such acts of silencing. This is because the centre is construed as being of all importance to the concerns of normality, stability and health. The margins exist merely to show what is not-health so that the margins are not attended to when they are not useful in defining the centre.

2 Same-sex desire does not have to be silenced, but can be constructed as a valid construct within the centre e.g. in today's politically correct climate homosexuality is researched as being a valid sexual orientation as part of a community's repertoire of healthy categories. However, homosexuality may still be pathologised in the process that is set up whereby a person must select which scientifically preordained category of being should apply to him. During such a process a person may run into categorical difficulties and be diagnosed with ego-dystonic homosexuality (officially removed from the DSM but still used by therapists today see Hartman 1995). This is the condition whereby the person experiences his same-sex feelings as imposing an ontological category upon him (i.e. homosexuality) and is highly distressed by this. The problem thereby becomes situated within the person.

Ego-dystonic homosexuality as a diagnosis pathologises homosexuality because it problematises sexuality and the individual rather than societal prejudice. Malyon (1982) states that the ego-dystonic focus should be shifted from homosexuality to homophobia. It is homophobia that opposes the very organismic homosexual feelings that emerge from within the person. Homophobia introjected may form an ego-baseline from which all feelings defined as 'homosexual' become ego-dystonic. It is therefore archaic self-restriction and societal/parental injunctions that are primarily ego-dystonic. Resolving difficulty with homosexuality should target the manifestations of homophobia and not the content of the person's homosexual experience. The paradigm of the monadic subject does not seem to encourage this, but rather entail the reverse, because of its unitary approach to the person that neglects the effects created in him by being relational.

Seeking an Emancipatory Subjectivity

In order to counter these oppressive effects made possible by the old paradigm, subjectivity in research needs to encompass the experiences that have been classically marginalised as being valid and constructive in their own right, and not as positions fallen from categorical grace. Foucault's ideas on freedom may assist us in this regard to draw in the missing dimensions of subjectivity. Foucault defines freedom as a critical experience which is

"a constant attempt at self-disengagement and self-invention" (paraphrased by Sawicki 1991:101).

Self-disengagement entails noting how one's identity is a product of its historical location. Identity becomes a target for questioning rather than a means of self-assertion and exclusion (Rajchman 1991). We need to ask what is desirable about our identities rather than what desire or act our identity is a response to. Freedom constitutes moments when we don't accept practices that define us and when we note the cost in maintaining our definition of ourselves. We note the ruptures and discontinuities in our identities (i.e. the things that don't seem to fit, the things in between categories). (Rajchman 1991)

Self-invention is not about transcending our present view of ourselves, but seeking new experiences; not to discover the self but cross our boundaries into new ways of being or understanding; to open up new possibilities of acting and suspend adherence to old interpretations in order to invent new ones. To do this we need to choose amongst the range of discourses available and reflect on the implications of our choices (Sawicki 1991).

For the gay person choice does not always seem to be an option, since choosing to be homosexual in a world that wishes its demise seems irrational. For that reason the homosexual person may feel subject to fate (Siegel/Lowe 1994). This sense of lack of control over one's life can make a gay man vulnerable to the various manifestations of disempowerment e.g. to surrender carelessly to self-destructive risky sexual behaviour owing to experiencing an external locus of control over one's destiny (Cave 1993). Research thus need to focus on how people with same-sex desires gain a sense of empowered agency in defining themselves.

Empowerment requires self-disengagement and self-invention which would constitute becoming aware of the effects discourses are trying to create in us i.e. how they try to both affect our way of relating to ourselves as well as to others. Once aware, we are able to choose how we will articulate with the political intent of these discourses i.e. we can choose to conform or choose to do and be different.

The virtue of self-disengagement and self-invention draws us a picture of a postmodern celebration of the critical experience of fragmentation and awareness of a multiplicity of subjectivities. A major criticism directed against this view is that it negates a self-managing executive self, which is required to hold the person in her crisis in order to avoid psychotic distress. But Wolf and Klein (1988) show that we are not faced with choosing either unified identities or fragmented subjectivities as a road to health. We can maintain the importance of definition and boundaries (and executive selves), whilst respecting, utilising and making space for the 'unformed' or undecided state. They reformed their client's negative assumptions as follows: "bisexual confusion was described to him as an innate flexibility that he was 'lucky' to have" (p.75). Their emphasis was that whatever decisions a person makes "would consider all parts of himself" (p.73). This conceptualisation acknowledges the modernist endeavour of establishing forms (i.e. "consider all parts") as well as the postmodern critique that involves and accords choice (i.e. "innate flexibility").

Our new paradigm of subjectivity may thus be described as containing two forms of being, between which the experience of self oscillates. On the one hand we have the inward origin-focused monadic subject that has a clearly defined boundary, and on the other the self-critical outwardly focused subject who speaks from no particular origin and sets no boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. This paradigm (which is straddling a modernist and postmodern one) enables knowledge of the subject to operate in the following ways:

1 Classical investigations of cause and boundary are still of value albeit being only a partial, incomplete way of understanding the person.

2 A critique of the coherent unitary self is endemic to having a knowledge of the self. This means that one cannot take a snapshot of a subjectivity (like being homosexual) and define its unchanging stable predictable configuration that may be assumed by a person. This would miss how a subjectivity is also idiosyncratically defined and reworked as a response to inner experiences (of e.g. desires) and outside discourses within which the person comes to relationally position the inner. Knowing who a person is also requires knowing how a person is, i.e. how the person changes her nature by being critical of the ways in which she is defined, ways that are non-essential and constructionist.

3 Moments of definition and coherence of self provide stability, security and a position from which a person may narrate herself by being able to choose discourses appropriate to her inner experiences and disagree with and change discourses available for self-understanding and self-promulgation. Emancipation requires identification with a stable construct of self from which claims can be made for equality and political rights.

4 Subjectivities entail conditions of fragmentation, the person need not be subordinated to her own self-definition or those prescribed by others. An oscillating subjectivity between centration and decentration, unison and fragmentation, creates permission for the person to experience parts of the self as undefined without devaluing it or labelling it as pathological/sinful or in crises. It creates permission for moments of crises to be reinterpreted as critiques of the self-order and social order, knowing that their constructedness have no deterministic bind on one's subjectivity. Agency is thereby broadened from a purely scientifically legitimated agency to a narratively legitimated agency as well. The subject contains authority within herself by virtue of being able to be critical and not just having to accept scientific dogma.

The Relational and Oscillating Subjectivity

This picture of subjectivity notes the person as existing partly within and because of relations with others, i.e. the self cannot be understood without understanding the way others relate to it. but his relational nature of the person has been ignored by the modernist monadic subjectivity. The knowledge created by this aspect of subjectivity is also lost to this paradigm. This is most clearly seen in research studies where the researchers omit their own sexuality and own interest from the design of the study. They also omit the reasons why people are willing to submit to their research studies. If we had to consider these reasons we would become aware of the relational understanding that researcher and researched have of oneanother. By that I mean, the meaning each party will construct of itself and the other as a result of their relating. This will shape people's conceptions about who should know and is able to know what, which will be influenced by the position of power each person has in relation to the other.

What this paper has tried to show is that through the manipulation of the scientific researcher-subject power relation a knowledge of the subject is created that is oppressive if the assumptions of monadic individuality are employed. Using instead a relational oscillating paradigm of subjectivity in research, the subject will be given far greater authority in defining what is to be considered as knowledge about herself and that this knowledge is contingent upon the context she moves in, and is not static, but self-critical and constantly changing within the political field of everyday life. A greater agency is thereby accorded to the subject whose concerns may then come to influence the nature of the research and enable the researcher to assist knowledge construction that may enable emancipation i.e. provide discourse that opens possibilities of new ways of understanding and being.

The assumption of objectivity has allowed us to think that the homosexual person and the discipline that seeks to understand him are untainted by homosexuality's pathologised past and present subordinated position. Surfing on the assumption Van Wyk/Simbayi and Erasmus' studies expressed the intent to aid homosexual emancipation via their empiricist proclamation of the truth of homosexual origins. But the position of this paper is that there is no such clear objective viewpoint from which a person can pronounce truth. Instead, as has been illustrated, trying to assume such a position results in creating a notion of legitimate knowledge that disempowers the person-on-the-ground by subjecting him to the dictates of a scientific knowledge empire whose knowledge concerns may even aid the oppression of the subject.

H Conclusion

What would constitute a politically responsible research practice in psychology? This would be a critical position that both questions the subject's worldview as well as psychology's own theoretical assumptions by allowing the subject's perspective to alter theory, and not pin down and segment the subject through method. The discipline must always be open to articulate with its subjects without appropriating and reprocessing their meanings. Using the subjectivity of fragmented critical experience is not to advocate the decentred, fragmented subject as the new postmodern construct that will perfect data collection. No! considering critical experience is a means of injecting a critical conscience into the directions and aspirations set up by our modernist research striving to discover some form of truth with which we can promote change for a better world. This post-structural conscience may always check up on our universalising tendencies that obscure differences and oppress minorities.

In research we cannot assume that "exclusive homosexuals" used as subjects are non-relational, non-political and definitive. The realisation of the person is a combination of internally emergent qualities for which the person is trying to find meaning and negotiate justification in this world of conflicts. By heeding this emergent struggle, research's responsibility is to investigate the person's life journey by concluding with questions and not just synthesis.

Queer Questions highlight the dialectical process between an exclusive adherence to the virtues of a decentred, fragmented, postmodern experience of self and the pursuit of a definitive identity. Within and between these two positions we all find ourselves i.e. our experiences of ourselves as whole and purposeful are intermittently critiqued by experiences of being dissatisfied with the constraints of our self-understanding. Research should include both in order to avoid losing and dominating the processual beings we all are.

References

Cave, H.A. (1993) Acquired immune Deficiency Syndrome: Its Impact on Gay Male Lifestyles Unpublished Masters Thesis in Clinical Psychology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Erasmus, M.M.M. (1992) Geslagsoriëntasie, Kognetiewe Vermoëns en Hormonale Status Unpublished Masters Thesis in clinical psychology, Rand Afrikaans University, Johannesburg

Hartman, W. (1995) From Symptoms to Allies: An Eriksonian Utilization Approach in the Treatment of Sexual Orientation Distress, Paper presented at the First National Congress of the Psychological Society of South Africa, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg

Hencken, J.D. (1984) "Conceptualisations of homosexual behaviour which preclude homosexual self-labelling" in J.P. De Cecco (ed) Bisexual and Homosexual Identities: Critical Clinical Issues, The Haworth Press, NY

Kirby K.M. (1996) Indifferent Boundaries: Spatial Concepts of Human Subjectivity The Guildford Press, London

Lyotard, J-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition Manchester University Press, Manchester

Malyon, A.K. (1982) "Psychotherapeutic implications of internalised homophobia in gay men" in J.C. Gonsiorek (ed) Homosexuality and Psychotherapy: A Practitioner's Handbook of Affirmative Models, The Haworth Press, N.Y.

McNamee, S. (1995) "Reconstructing Identity: The communal construction of crisis" in S.McNamee and K.Gergen (eds) Therapy as Social Construction

Rajchman, J. (1991) Truth and Eros:Foucault, Lacan, and the question of Ethics, Routledge, N.Y.

Sawicki, J. (1991) Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the body, Routledge, N.Y.

Siegel, S. and Lowe Jnr, E. (1994) Uncharted Lives: Understanding the Life Passages of Gay Men, Dutton, N.Y.

Van Wyk, R.E. and Simbayi, C. (1995) A Psychobiographical Study of a Male Homosexual, Paper presented at the First National Congress of the Psychological Society of South Africa, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg

Wolf, T.J. and Klein, F. (1988) "Ericksonian Hypnosis and strategic interventions for sexual orientation confusion" in E.Coleman (ed) Psychotherapy with Homosexual Men and Women: Integrated Identity Approaches for Clinical Practice, The Haworth Press, N.Y.

Note:

1. The generic "he" and "she" is used interchangeably in this paper in order to avoid the cumbersome he/she as well as prevent alignment with any sexist discourses.

Biographical note:

Completing a BA with majors in Psychology and Social Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. Qualified counsellor with the Gay and Lesbian Counselling (GLC) Service in Johannesburg. Current projects: I am currently investigating a topic for my honours research dissertation to be conducted in 1997. This topic is investigating the trauma dynamic in the closet experience of homosexuality. The intent is to discover to what extent the relational dynamics of post-traumatic stress can be found in the closeted person who experiences same-sex desires.

018ANT@muse.arts.wits.ac.za

PO Box 364

Wits 2050

This study started as an attempt to explore common themes in what were in their inception two separate studies: one on the use of corporal punishment (CP) in a specifically sexual context and the other on the use of punishment (in general) in a high school in the Northern Province. The rather vague and general purpose of this effort was to begin to develop a better understanding of discourses around corporal punishment.

We will begin with a very brief reveiw of the literature in our area of study. Psychoanalytic thought has largely been concerned with understanding the relation between the aggressive and the sexual instincts. An early milestone was Freud's (1905) view in `Three essays of sexuality' that sadism is a normal, aggressive component in the sexual impulse of man. SM is conceived as an instance of identification with the aggressor and thus derives from sadism. In `Beyond the pleasure principle' Freud (1920) posits masochism not as a derivative of sadism but as a self-injuring tendency from which both destructive and sadistic impulses are derived. They are seen to have their origins in a primary death instinct. More recent work in psychoanalysis, has seen sexual excitement as a basic affect which serves to overcome primitive splitting of love and hatred, and serves to support the toleration of ambivalence in normal development (Kernberg, 1991). Benjamin (1990) situates understanding of relationships of domination in the context of the childhood environment and develops a less drive oriented and more relational view of SM.

A recurring theme that weaves through the literature is the relation between pain and sexuality. Other important themes are: the construction of the self in SM (Baumeister, 1989, 1991; Dean, 1992; Klossowski, 1994); moral discourse and CP (Gibson, 1978); and the relation between power and sex (cf. Tompson 1994: "There are enormous hard ons behind the facade of authority and power"!)

It should be said that there is a lack of conceptual clarity in the literature about the distinction between different forms of sado-masochistic practice. For example, between moral masochism and sexual masochism; between non-sexually oriented self-destructive behaviours (risk behaviours) and sexually oriented SM; and between sado-masochism as a character (or cultural) trait and SM as pathology. There is a tendency to lump together all forms of SM practice as if they are one and the same.

Having given a very brief introduction to some of the ideas addressed in the literature we will proceed to our own analysis. We are not going to address the sexual dimension of official CP (in the school context). The material thus far collected in this project does little to supplement the literature on this subject and we have not developed new ideas in this area.

(As an aside may we comment on the fairly widespread view that the sexualisation of CP is a product of the site of punishment; i.e. the buttocks. In Scotland caning has traditionally been delivered to the hands and it seems, from Woolaston's (1993) story, that there are those in Scotland for whom caning on the hands has taken on erotic significance. Unless the hands have somehow (in these people's imaginations) come to stand for the arse, this poses a threat to the theory!)

Before proceeding any further, we would like to state an assumption that underlies our study of sex CP. It is our view that people do not enjoy the pain they desire to suffer. They most certainly pursue it avidly, but if anything it is the mastery or control of pain that is sought. As exquisite as pain may be in the context in which it is set, it is still pain in the normal sense of the word, and sex CP may be seen as a treatment of pain. It transforms pain. It makes `a work' of pain. Undoubtedly the pull of sex, the sense of unequivocal purpose which sex gives to the senses is deeply involved in this work. Somehow sex is an essential ingredient in this work. We say `somehow' because we do not yet understand the roles that sex plays. What we have come to believe is that connoisseurs of the art of receiving a good beating tend to be able to enjoy the scene without the added pleasure of sex. The scene itself, played out over a period of time, becomes what is desired. The climax that is often, but not always sought as the object of the event, is not, however, its primary objective. We believe, based on interviews with informants, that while it is undeniably set in a sexual context, this is not so much a sexual perversion as an entertaining of a particular kind of relational scene. It draws on sex for its energy and direction, and it perhaps draws on sexual intimacy for its sanction, but this is not the primary story involved in the art of receiving a good spanking.

Before going further, we would like also to justify our bypassing of another concern to be found in the literature. This is the concern with pathology. It should be said that there does not appear to be a simple relation between early childhood trauma and the desire for a beating. Mollinger (1982) has shown that it is possible to explain SM from any of the basic developmental stages. It has variously been seen as a form of manipulation, a plea for help, a method of making oneself lovable, the down-side of artistic creativity and a religious expression. There seems to be little evidence in favour of it stemming from childhood abuse or a particular type of upbringing. Yet sex CP does have a particular fascination with historical detail. It is as if practitioners are strongly interested in historical detail and this may lead one to suppose that they are interested in rewitnessing or re-experiencing a childhood trauma of some sort.

There is a close mimicking of actual instances of corporal punishment situations in sex CP. The Wildfire Club is a WWW site specialising in female discipline. It advertises itself thus "The special feature of this forum is that it deals with real discipline in a serious manner; bad language, overt sexuality and crude behaviour in general are excluded. The Wildfire Club is also the world's finest source of authentic school-type disciplinary implements, including English school canes and Scottish school straps, made exactly as they always have been." There is a strong linking to real life situations.

A Cape Town professional spanker reports that his clients often request a spanking in gym shorts and South African spanking fantasies are frequently placed in schools. While it may seem that the spankophiles are in general a fantastical lot, they are, unlike some other CP practitioners, not all that inventive. They seem to draw on the past for material, and on actual situations of beating. Some spankophiles are avid collectors of real-life CP memorabilia, for example film footage. The place of the `actual' or `real' in CP fantasies, is in our view not really evidence of the phenomenon being an attempt to come to terms with real-life CP, but has another function. It serves to set sex CP in an imaginary context, which is real enough, but without whatever it is that would make the real situation truly intolerable. However, at this point we will not pursue this line of thinking further, because it is central to our thesis and needs to be more properly introduced. It is pursued more fully later.

The particular line we are going to take, and which allows us to find some interesting parallels between our two sources of material concerns the notion of rules. We will argue that CP in both its official and sex context is about rules: the setting up of rules, the testing of the limits of rules, and the enforcement of rules. Secondly we will look at what sex CP practitioners may be attempting to do with their practices. We will at this stage try to see it as a legitimate form of cultural work; i.e. as art or theatre. We will look at what sex CP does with domination, coercion, suffering, humiliation and how it plays with our languages for experiencing these.

The most general psychology which we are following is the psychology of rule following. By this we obviously refer to the psychology of morality and ethics and the psychology of the law. But more fundamentally and generally we are concerned with the place of rules in social life and the use of rules in regulating mental life through `discipline'. We must say at this point that we are aware of Foucault's concern with these issues and his work `Discipline and punish' (Foucault,1979) still needs to be properly consulted. We are trying to stay as close as possible to the material we have collected and are wary, at this stage, of grand narratives which might be too leading.

We will proceed by briefly describing the parameters of the two distinct studies which we are pursuing, and will work our way into the core of our argument through discussing why it might be of value to consider these studies alongside each other.

The one project examines the meaning and justification of punishment in a high school in the Northern Province. It compares and contrasts the different discourses of punishment subscribed to by parents, teachers and pupils. It has used focus groups and questionnaires to gather material and the literature on punishment justification as a theoretical resource.

Unfortunately much of the material collected in this study concerns punishment in general, although there was a fair amount of material relating to CP in particular. Much that was said about punishment in general is of relevance to the particular line taken here and we assume that these general sentiments refer also to CP.

The second project consists of a wide ranging exploration of the practice of corporal punishment in sexual contexts. This study incorporates a wide-ranging exploration of the literature on sado-masochism, beginning with the work of de Sade and Sacher-Mosach. It also includes indepth interviews with practitioners of sex CP, and extensive exploration of internet resources. The latter, it might be said, as an aside has been strong testimony to the value of the internet as a resource for conducting cultural studies.

CP for sex and CP for the purposes of social control in school contexts might be said to share no more than a particular form of body practice. The meaning of the practice in both settings might be as varied as the meaning of a wink, in which case there is scant reason to regard them as the same type of practice. However, we will argue differently.

For the purposes of this presentation we will focus on a particular subset of the CP sex scene, the adherents of which are strongly committed to the practice, in a sexual context, of what Colin Farrel's internet homepage calls `official CP'.

The discussion will be limited to this particular form of CP. The CP scene has many other subgroup and there is good reason to understand that the varieties of CP experience are really quite distinctive in their motivations. However, the particular form of CP experience examined in this context is characterised by a close mimicking of school CP situations.

In the high school in this study the desirability of CP as a form of punishment was not unanimously supported by any of the three groups surveyed and interviewed (focus groups). In general parents were possibly most in support of the practice and felt that teachers assume parents roles whilst children are at school. Since parents in that particular cultural context generally do apply corporal punishment there is no strong sentiment against CP. Teachers, on the other hand are now bound by a law outlawing CP. It has been deemed cruel, inhuman and degrading and inimical to constitutionally guaranteed rights of children.

At least some teachers feel that the recent outlawing of CP has denied them of a useful tool for maintaining order. In their view some form of punishment is necessary in order to instill a tendency to self-regulation, and CP is an easily administered option in this regard. Both parents and teachers tend to think in instrumental terms about punishment. They believe that punishment serves a constructive social purpose. They agree that it should be closely regulated and there should be policies about how pupils should be punished and for what. Pupils do not disagree with this, so much as feel threatened by punishment because the punishment scene provides an opportunity for the expression of what they perceive as sadistic enjoyment of the punishment of pupils. The motives ascribed to teachers in administering punishment in general, and CP in particular, range from venting of their own frustrations to sexual enjoyment. All parties agree that clear, consensually agreed upon rules should be set to regulate school behaviour and there should be clear and consensually agreed upon ways of ensuring that these rules are followed; and constructive ways of dealing with violations of these rules. The central concern seems to be to move away from a retributive, punitive mode of thinking about CP, towards a purposeful one. It must be rid of its emotionality and personal motivation and there must be strictly followed and commonly agreed upon rules for its administration. Furthermore, the rules which punishment in general and CP in particular are concerned to protect must be agreed upon. There is a general feeling amongst all three groups that the consultative process leading to formulation of school rules and rules of punishment, should be broad and might even incorporate community agencies such as the police and churches.

The pupils do not wish not to be punished; i.e. they do not desire freedom from punishment. Nor do they want the absence of rules. Rather, they wish punishment to be regulated, controlled so that more does not creep into it and so that it is unwaveringly bound to their act of transgression and their guilt. In general it might be said that they consent to being rule-bound and they believe that CP like any other form of punishment must be tightly rule-bound. Retribution discourse knows no place in this desire. Retribution involves personal feelings. It requires a judgement of guilt followed by some form of atonement. This form of atonement is achieved when there is public acknowledgement or witnessing of the suffering of the other. It follows `the talion law', `an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'. Retribution discourse is distinct from more utilitarian, instrumental discourses aimed at resocializing, or correcting or rehabilitating offenders. It comes out of a deep personal psychology and cultural psychology of revenge which sees the personal suffering of the offender as a natural form of justice. Punishment is thus seen as intrinsically corrective because a perpetrator is seen to suffer. While this kind of discourse shows itself in punishment acts in schools, it is not, so to speak, official policy. Officially, punishment must be directed towards the aim of instilling discipline; i.e. it must have rehabilitative intent. Whatever retributive emotions might be felt, will not be given expression when the rules are followed.

Pupils use the fact that teachers seem to enjoy or at least be personally motivated to punish as an argument for the better control of punishment practices. We read this as their wanting to take humiliation, personal victory out of the punishment scene. Atonement is in this view not the objective. Punishment has the optimal outcome when the pupil is shown how to adapt better to the school environment and not when the pupil is publicly humiliated and experiences pain and suffering.

The pupils ironically do not protest the rules themselves. They seem to believe in rules, and are interested in being part of a process within the school system of redefining the rules within which they must operate. They are interested in having a say in making the system of punishment more impersonal and more rehabilitative. We cannot say why they might wish to make their own bondage less retributive, less punitive and less interpersonal. Perhaps because (most of them) have not shame, they do not carry a psychological burden of guilt which they need to find atonement for. Sex CP practitioners, on the other hand, do; or at least they have a need to sometimes act as if they do. The pupils seem to have no psychological motive to be on the receiving end of moral reprehension and be made to suffer for it.

Practitioners of sex CP, and we will concentrate specifically on `the bottoms' (recipients rather than spankers) are artistes of rule-making, rule-testing and the art of receiving punishment in its retributive sense. They hone to essentials the psychology of suffering, humiliation, mercy and forgiveness. Practitioners push the experience of pain to limits where it becomes close too unbearable, excruciatingly unpleasant. Here on the edge of what is only bearably tolerable to them, they experience and refine their direct knowledge of shame and guilt. They come to know it better, and better. May we again say that the reasons for this being sexualised and taking the form of caning remains somewhat of an unexplored dimension in our study. We have already said that whatever the sexual role is it seems to be a vehicle rather than the object of the experience. The reason for wanting CP, rather than say a good psychological dressing down, is possibly because it assuages a particular kind of guilt, which is the object of their compulsion to repeat. It is set in a particular form of relations of domination; one which involves a teacher who has a socially (as opposed to say, `spiritually', which takes shape in religious forms of sex CP experience) granted role of keeping order. The headmaster is the one who judges how naughty one has been and decides the punishment. He is also the guardian of a relatively petty form of morality; around the following of school rules such as `You may not put your hands in your pockets'. It is also a kind of morality the breaking of which does not earn peer disfavour. On the contrary it is associated with peer approval. There seems to be a form of pride and social status associated with being able to take the punishment in situations where there is no real questioning of authority. Possibly it is a way of coping with an unpleasant situation which knows not the vaguest possibility of protest. In the case of the high school pupils in the Northern Transvaal this is far from the case. They feel entitled to co-determine the rules, and the manner of their administration. The sex CP practitioner reenacts situations where this is explicitly not the case. However, very significantly while sex CP practitioners expose themselves to domination beyond their own right of protest, they do so within a system of finely thought out rules, which are their own. In this way they suffer the agonies of punitive justice, but because of themselves. This seems to represent a form of reversal where they pursue what is unpleasant, and in this pursuit they engage in an undoing of their domination by the other. It is finally `all theirs', by virtue of their desire, by virtue of their rules.

Let us say more about these rules. The use of `safewords' well illustrates that the infliction of pain is set in a regulated context. In spite of the need to experience pain and protest and begging for mercy and forgiveness and suchlike, the parameters of the activity are very well regulated. A safeword is a word that a spankee may use to stop spanking play immediately. It functions as a safety valve to prevent the prolonged violation of limits. And it allows the spankee to engage in mock protests without confusing the spanker. Common safewords are `red', `mercy', `uncle' and, believe it or not, `aardvark' (FAQ document in alt.sex.spanking). Some people also use cautionary word such as `yellow' to signal that the play is getting close to the limits and should be softened but not stopped. There is a careful sense of limits and boundaries and great care is taken not to transgress these. This is a closely regulated environment.

We would like to quote from a document written by one connoisseur of the art written as instructions for professional spankers whom he consults:

I want to give you the instructions before we start... You can cane me on the buttocks as hard as you can but not on the upper thighs or the small of the back. Try to spread the strokes fairly evenly over the buttocks. It does not matter whether the marks take a couple of weeks to go away. I would rather have a small number of really painful strokes rather than a larger number of not so painful strokes. It's OK if the cane breaks - it means you are doing your job. During the whole session you may pinch me, pull me etc., on the buttocks or on the genital area including the penis but not on the balls. You may fondle these but not cause pain with them... We have agreed on the details. I will say certain things basically putting myself in your control. Do not interrupt me until I lie flat on the ground before you and kiss your feet. Then you take over and are in charge and I will submit to you and your will.

One may ask who's in charge, who's in control? This is more like a play about control. The writer willingly places himself at the mercy of his master, but the master operates by the rules of the dominated.

Being a rule-governed game, the CP scene allows the enactment of high levels of brutality, coercion, suffering and humiliation. As Huizinga (in Gadamer,1975) has pointed out, in the confines of the rule-governed space of a game a particular form of life can be enacted in all seriousness, but given the safety of the fact that it is a game. The rules guarantee this. Although the game is as-if real it finally is set off from the reality of everyday life. CP sex practitioners do not necessarily like to be abused in everyday life and nor are they abusive of others. They need the safety of the game to entertain their predilection. Some have likened their activities to theatre. The representation is designed to be more than just fantasy. It must be close to real. The scene in CP generally borrows its imagery, as has been pointed out, and it uses real life situations and equipment to augment the play. One informant says that he instructs spankers to induce a feeling of fear in him, and this is important.

So the whole play must seem as real as possible, but finally it is a game and not for real.

The next point which we wish to make about this is that the bond between the parties, like the bond between two boxers, is generally respectful and consensual. A quote extracted from an internet FAQ document (alt.sex.spanking) makes this point: "There has to be a clear understanding of the conditions of that framework, and the consent of the receiver to those conditions".

In a quote out of an informant's document to potential spankers the prescribed CP relationships is seen to be given particular characteristics:

You will regard me as a person that you like or love and therefore you will want to embrace me and caress me. At the same time you believe that I deserve to be punished and you wish to inflict the maximum pain on me and you believe that I will be better for some severe discipline... You will inspect my buttock (with suitable pinching etc.) To see whether I am worth beating.

Here we find a strange bond which binds together respect, authority and fear in what is finally experienced as a delicious intimacy. It is not the pain on its own which is delicious, but the whole scene. The pain is made delicious by virtue of the context. In any other context this pain would be unbearable.

The object of the desire is the entire staged scene. Sex may or may not follow such scenes and questions such as "Did you enjoy it?" tend to trivialise what is a profound and deeply felt experience for the spankee. There is much, much more to this than pain or sex. While sex often `rounds off' such experiences, it appears that it is something of a salve which soothes any residue of brutality or disappointment in the scene. But isn't sex always like this, never quite delivering what it promises? In CP sex the sexual arousal, the nuances of the scene, and the relationship are so commingled that it is not easy to prise one from the other for the purposes of understanding.

However, we do know that CP practitioners enact the same type of scene which our study shows school children objecting to, and in so doing give it a desirable face. They take extreme punishment and the domination that accompany it and enculturate it; they put it in a form that is tolerable and liveable. Why they so long to do this, we cannot say, but indications are that the biography of each individual in deeply personal ways has led to these desires. In a very real sense they seem to aim to undo and subvert real suffering, real subordination. They subvert it in making it an object of desire, and by placing it in a consensual context. Like the school pupils they want to undo and control real sadism, the enjoyment of the spanker of his work. Both contexts have a disdain for real relations of domination.

The school pupils have the means to protest their domination and the opportunity to negotiate the rules by which they can be bound. On the other hand, CP sex practitioners are drawn, for reasons unknown to themselves, and to us, to again and again experience subordination and to beg for forgiveness, mercy, atonement. They have a different language for dealing with the same thing. In the school there is the possibility of challenging domination. In CP sex there is no challenge to real relations of domination. The practice does not hope for change, but is endlessly caught in a cycle of repetition, ever getting closer to the elusive, essential, object of desire. Finally, however, there is no satiation of the desire. It is bound to be repeated.

This latter encounter with forces of subjugation in a way represents a subversion of the domination scene; an attempt to undo what is brutal and oppressive in it, by setting it in a system of rules and by personally regulating its practice. And not least by desiring it. By desiring what one does not choose, but which is forced upon one, one gains a sense of mastery after all.

We wish to close by briefly reflecting upon a debate which has attended readings of the work of the Marquis de Sade. de Sade is known for statements such as:

It is the privations of others which make our pleasures felt; in the midst of equals we could never be content; that is why is said so rightly that to be happy one should look down, not up. If then it is the spectacle of others' misery whose comparison must complete our happiness, one must obviously not relieve them... Not only that: we must create unfortunates whenever the opportunity occurs to multiply that class and to compose one which, since it is your own work, will make far sharper the pleasures provided. So the full enjoyment would be to reduce this girl to asking charity and then refuse her cruelly, and thereby increase your pleasures by a comparison the more striking and enjoyable since it will be your doing. (de Sade in Gorer, 1953, p.194).

It is the pleasure one takes in the power that one has to make another suffer, and the exercise of this, that defines the sadist. There has been much written in trying to understand the morality of de Sade's position, considering that after all he was an author, and not as far as we know a real-life sadist of any note.

The libertine line of socio-political thought followed by De Sade (and which incidentally had him jailed for almost thirty years) has been said (Dean, 1992; Klossowski, 1994) not to transgress categories of good and evil, but only to invert them. The sadist remains within a dialectical struggle of mutual recognition. The bottom's suffering is necessary to the top's mastery, and the bottom is a mirror without which the top cannot experience, identify, or 'See' himself (Dean, 1992, p.177). The sadist cannot destroy the object of his attentions without risk to his very mastery, without ensuring the self-annihilation of desire. This kind of argument eventually leads Klossowski (1994) to say that the libertine's revolt is really only masochistic reenactment of God's original indifference towards man. Like the child who is being beaten, the libertine desires a beating that will be interpreted as proof of God's love. Insofar as the sadist depends upon others for his sense of `mastery', he cannot eliminate his moral conscience without eliminating a consciousness of his own mastery. Dean (1992) goes on to ask whether the masochist desires pure emptiness. Pure emptiness in this context refers to the absence of the dialectic of domination-submission between two selves. In the play of the CP game in its sexual context the dialectics of morality are finally transcended and replaced by the purely sensual realm of intense body experience.

For school pupils hoping to somehow determine the manner of their own punishment how different is it? Perhaps this is the only game there is? When there is real power and real submission we can but desire to be there at its origins, to be part of its inception, and thus to make a difference. If we are resigned to the inevitability of the dialectic of domination-submission it is altogether more desirable to make it a game, and possibly to sexualise it. If sexuality is already at the heart of domination-submission we are all the more trapped in the dialectic and the more so the reason to enculturate it through game playing. If we think we can overcome the punitiveness and the sense of righteousness in the punishers we face, we can do this only through hoping to be master-victim. This is in our view another version of the same game and one played by the school pupils in our study.

May we close by saying that we are inspired by this project to better understand the relation to rules and particularly the psychology of rule-following and rule-making. We believe that it would be a fruitful area of study to look more systematically at the different forms of relation we might adopt in the game of domination-submission, when we simultaneously face the strictures and the corrigibility of rules.

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PSKK@warthog.ru.ac.za

Psychology Department

Rhodes University

Grahamstown

6140

Headline reports on the sadistic and sexual abuse of children has created a moral panic. Social concern over the welfare of children has become a pressing concern. Solutions to the problem are focused on safeguarding children from abuse and the effective detection and prosecution of offenders. A primary concern in solving such social issues ought to be arriving at a better understanding of the paedophiles personality traits and motivations. Explanations of paedophiles behaviour have been clearly outlined by mainstream psychology in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders(DSM). David Finkelhor, a prominant child-abuse theorist, has also offered etiological explanations, through his research with convicted child-rap