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The Penetrated Male
Through nuanced readings of a handful of modernist texts (Baudelaire, Huysmans, Wilde, Genet, Joyce, and Schreber’s Memoirs), this book explores and interrogates the figure of the penetrated male body, developing the concept of the behind as a site of both fascination and fear. Deconstructing the penetrated male body and the genderisation of its representation, The Penetrated Male offers new understandings of passivity, suggesting that the modern masculine subject is predicated on a penetrability it must always disavow. Arguing that representation is the embodiment of erotic thought, it is an important contribution to queer theory and our understandings of gendered bodies.
250 pages, Paperback
First published September 12, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 7, 2014
First of all, the wonderful cover image is half of the 1998 oil-on-canvas painting by Matthew Stradling entitled All Fours, which Jonathan Kemp refers to in his Acknowledgements (the other half, actually the front of the painting, is on the back cover, which is an ironic inversion).
The painting is a perfect summation of this elegant and provocative non-fiction book by Jonathan Kemp, author of the novel London Triptych, in which he examines the gender and power relation issues associated with penetrative gay male sex, particularly how this impacts on the concept of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’.
That is, to be ‘penetrated’ means to be reduced to a submissive and feminine categorisation associated with powerlessness and social disenfranchisement.
Why this continues to be so, particularly in this day and age of concerted LGBT and gender activism, is a very complex and intertwined story, which Kemp unravels with fierce skill and insight, starting with Michel Foucault’s work on the history of sex in Greece and Rome, where “male-male eroticism was governed by a strict understanding that the penetrated partner was a non-citizen: that is, a slave, a woman, or a young boy”.
Although based on a PhD thesis, this is no dry or formidable academic treatise. Instead it is impassioned and beautifully written, wearing an incredible amount of qualitative research lightly on its sleeve.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with Queer Theory, and the work of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuzes, Sigmund Freud, Leo Bersani, Guy Hocquenghem and a veritable panoply of related theorists and writers, will find much that is familiar here, but also a lot to reflect upon.
What I found most interesting is Kemp’s attempt to reclaim the anus as an instrument, as well as an arena, of eroticism, and why the anus and excrement are such loaded terms, associated with a range of negative connotations, from death to uncleanliness. Kemp quotes Freud:
Where the anus is concerned it becomes still clearer that it is disgust which stamps that sexual aim as a perversion. I hope I shall not be accused of partisanship when I assert that people who try to account for this disgust by saying that the organ in question serves the function of excretion and comes in contact with excrement … are not much more to the point than hysterical girls who account for their disgust at the male genital by saying that it serves to void urine.
While perusing this I was simultaneously reading The Cool Part of His Pillow by Rodney Ross, where Barry wakes up to find his pugs Noel and Gertie sticking their asses in his face. His partner Andy comments:
“But wouldn’t mankind be better off if we all did the Presentation of the Anus? Summit meetings of world leaders should be perceived by a Presentation of the Anus.”
To which Barry replies: “It would give new meaning to dirty politics.”
Non-gay people always tend to get a little green around the gills when contemplating the mechanics of gay (male) anal sex, a natural squeamishness that John Irving picks on mercilessly in In One Person when he ponders the line “the stink of love” from James Baldwin’s In Giovanni’s Room:
… it made me feel so awfully naïve. What had I thought making love to a boy or a man might smell like? Did Baldwin actually mean the smell of shit, because wouldn’t that be the smell on your cock if you fucked a man or boy?
That, in turn, reminds me of the immortal lines by Yeats, quoted by Samuel R. Delany in The Mad Man:
Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.
The painting is a perfect summation of this elegant and provocative non-fiction book by Jonathan Kemp, author of the novel London Triptych, in which he examines the gender and power relation issues associated with penetrative gay male sex, particularly how this impacts on the concept of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’.
That is, to be ‘penetrated’ means to be reduced to a submissive and feminine categorisation associated with powerlessness and social disenfranchisement.
Why this continues to be so, particularly in this day and age of concerted LGBT and gender activism, is a very complex and intertwined story, which Kemp unravels with fierce skill and insight, starting with Michel Foucault’s work on the history of sex in Greece and Rome, where “male-male eroticism was governed by a strict understanding that the penetrated partner was a non-citizen: that is, a slave, a woman, or a young boy”.
Although based on a PhD thesis, this is no dry or formidable academic treatise. Instead it is impassioned and beautifully written, wearing an incredible amount of qualitative research lightly on its sleeve.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with Queer Theory, and the work of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuzes, Sigmund Freud, Leo Bersani, Guy Hocquenghem and a veritable panoply of related theorists and writers, will find much that is familiar here, but also a lot to reflect upon.
What I found most interesting is Kemp’s attempt to reclaim the anus as an instrument, as well as an arena, of eroticism, and why the anus and excrement are such loaded terms, associated with a range of negative connotations, from death to uncleanliness. Kemp quotes Freud:
Where the anus is concerned it becomes still clearer that it is disgust which stamps that sexual aim as a perversion. I hope I shall not be accused of partisanship when I assert that people who try to account for this disgust by saying that the organ in question serves the function of excretion and comes in contact with excrement … are not much more to the point than hysterical girls who account for their disgust at the male genital by saying that it serves to void urine.
While perusing this I was simultaneously reading The Cool Part of His Pillow by Rodney Ross, where Barry wakes up to find his pugs Noel and Gertie sticking their asses in his face. His partner Andy comments:
“But wouldn’t mankind be better off if we all did the Presentation of the Anus? Summit meetings of world leaders should be perceived by a Presentation of the Anus.”
To which Barry replies: “It would give new meaning to dirty politics.”
Non-gay people always tend to get a little green around the gills when contemplating the mechanics of gay (male) anal sex, a natural squeamishness that John Irving picks on mercilessly in In One Person when he ponders the line “the stink of love” from James Baldwin’s In Giovanni’s Room:
… it made me feel so awfully naïve. What had I thought making love to a boy or a man might smell like? Did Baldwin actually mean the smell of shit, because wouldn’t that be the smell on your cock if you fucked a man or boy?
That, in turn, reminds me of the immortal lines by Yeats, quoted by Samuel R. Delany in The Mad Man:
Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.
January 28, 2014
Leans heavily on Foucault. Interesting how it challenges the very definition of modern masculinity.
December 4, 2024
Some fascinating ideas, althought it feels at times that Kemp is more interested in making anus-based wordplay, and throwing in as many references to Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida as possible.
The book certainly grew on me; it really comes into its own in the final chapter, and many of the issues I had reading this book (especially the binary nature of the arguments) were addressed in the final two chapters. I’m not sure if this shows Kemp to have not sufficiently set up his arguments, or rather that he very effectively sets up his ideas before complicating and even knocking them down (or if it was just my failure to understand everything he set out).
I especially enjoyed thinking about how transgression relies on the status quo, and as such often doesn’t actually want to change it, which is something I have been thinking about recently in relation to the role of Queer politics in the current climate and moving forward.
The book certainly grew on me; it really comes into its own in the final chapter, and many of the issues I had reading this book (especially the binary nature of the arguments) were addressed in the final two chapters. I’m not sure if this shows Kemp to have not sufficiently set up his arguments, or rather that he very effectively sets up his ideas before complicating and even knocking them down (or if it was just my failure to understand everything he set out).
I especially enjoyed thinking about how transgression relies on the status quo, and as such often doesn’t actually want to change it, which is something I have been thinking about recently in relation to the role of Queer politics in the current climate and moving forward.
January 27, 2026
"Amongst other things, this book wants to stress the anal in analysis." And so it did. Kind of.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews