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You guys wanted the text of Outta My Endzone. So here it is:

i may have to break this into a couple of posts due to lengt...
Razzmatazz maroon step-uncle's house giraffe
  11/19/17
Because the 'insult' of penetration is part and parcel of ev...
Razzmatazz maroon step-uncle's house giraffe
  11/19/17
btw, by the standards of postmodern-influenced academic lite...
Razzmatazz maroon step-uncle's house giraffe
  11/19/17
thanksgiving is the perfect time to remember that the guys p...
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  11/23/17
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i learned a lot by reading this. not necessarily anything u...
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Date: November 19th, 2017 3:41 AM
Author: Razzmatazz maroon step-uncle's house giraffe

i may have to break this into a couple of posts due to length. hopefully the formatting is not all fucked-up.

FOCUS

OUTTA MY ENDZONE

Sport and the Territorial Anus

Brian Pronger

Journal of Sport & Social Issues. Volume 23. No. 4. November 1999. pp. 373-389

© 1999 Sage Publications. Inc.

AUTHOR

Brian Pronger is assistant professor of philosophy at the Faculty of Physical Education and Health at the University of Toronto. He has written extensively on sexuality and sport, including The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex.

...

This article proposes an analytical framework for sport that emerges from the interplay of elements of postmodern, gay, and queer theories. Embarking on a demythologising trajectory, the article suggests that competitive sport fosters the emotional logic that is embedded in the will to power produced by the mythical union of an ever-expanding phallus and territorially enclosing anus - these work together in sport in the desire to conquer the space of the other and protectively enclose the space of the self. Drawing parallels, the violating phallus with the desire to win and the closed anus with the desire not to lose, the article deconstructs the emotional logic of sport as a celebration of patriarchal violation and homophobic resistance to penetration. As an immensely popular cultural spectacle and practice, therefore, competitive sport plays an important role in the reproduction of phallically aggressive and anally closed cultures of desire.

Desire and competitive sport - a nexus that is usually ignored. It is seldom a focus of the sport media, except where there are sex scandals, such as the recently publicized homosexual subculture in Canadian boys' and men's ice hockey: National Hockey league player Sheldon Kennedy, fine example, has revealed that when he was a young man playing in the Canadian Hockey League, he submitted more than 300 times to the sexual demands of his coach, Graham James, who subsequently has been jailed for the offense. It has been widely reported in the media that numerous boys exchanged sexual favors for hockey tickets and other perks with employees of Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens. It has also been revealed that there is widespread sexual violence in hockey club initiations. And the regular sexual exploitation of women who follow professional and semiprofessional male athletes in many competitive sports - in hockey, they are called puck-bunnies - is now frequently cited (Robinson. 1998).

Of course, athletes. both female and male, are often seen, indeed marketed, as sexy. Their sexual desirability, however, is a by-product of their sport, not inherent in the activity itself. Athletic training builds taut muscular bodies that fit contemporary molds of the desirable body in consumer culture (Balsamo. 1998; Bordo, 1993b; Crawford, 1984; Featherstone, 1991; Goldstein, 1997; Harvey 8; Sparks. 1991: Hoberman, 1994). Because the culture of Euro-American competitive sport is popularly understood to confer orthodox masculinity on the men who engage in it, or are even simply fans of it (Connell, 1990; Kidd, 1987; Messner, 1992; Messner & Sabo, 1994; Pronger, 1990; Whitson, 1994), it is often considered by men, and some women, to confer an especially potent heterosexual aura - its amplification of masculinity stresses the participants' difference from femininity, dressing up the culturally produced difference between men and women, which is the very pulse of heterosexuality. The youthful masculinity of the athlete has been a feature of gay male erotic culture for at least the last 50 years (Pronger, 1990); it also had an important niche in the homosexual pedophilic culture of ancient Greece (Dover, 1978). Somewhat similarly, the physical power of the athletic female body has held an important place in Euro-American lesbian culture (Burton-Nelson, 1994; Cahn, 1994; Griffin, 1998; Jay, 1995; Rogers, 1994; Roxxie, 1998; Syke, 1998). The aura of competitive sport, the sporting arena, the erotic power it confers on the bodies of athletes, then, is aphrodisia to sexual commerce outside the arena.

Almost all competitive sports are segregated along the lines of gender. This means that the practice of competitive sport itself can have homoerotic dimensions: the contact of the playing field, the spectacle of the partially clad body, the steamy environment of the showers and locker room. I have previously written positively about the covert homoeroticism of men's sport, suggesting that it affords opportunities for homoerotic vision and contact that are desirable not only for gay-identified boys and men but also for those whose homoerotic imaginations have not become explicit, integrated aspects of their lives. In The Arena of Masculinity (Pronger, 1990), I argued that men's sport allows men and boys to exclude women and girls from their all-male environments, permits them to play with each other's bodies, to surround themselves with naked men in the showers and locker rooms, to enjoy that all-male contact, without suffering the vilification that usually comes from the open acknowledgment and pursuit of masculine erotic contact, the stigma of 'being homosexual.'

I also argued that the well-known homophobia of competitive sport serves an important structural sociocultural function. It prevents the implicit homoeroticism of competitive sport, the pleasures of male bodies playing with each other, from proceeding to explicit sexual expression. That is to say, it maintains the panoptic line that must not be crossed if the orthodox masculine - which is to say the patriarchal heterosexual - credentials of competitive sport are to be maintained. In other words, the homophobia of competitive sport allows men to play with each other's bodies and still preserve their patriarchal heterosexist hegemony; they can have their (beef)cake and eat it, too.

The homoerotic/homophobic dynamics of women's competitive sport operates in a similar though not perfectly parallel way. Whereas men's competitive sport, especially the rougher team versions, is widely seemed to confer on men the mantle of respectable heterosexual masculinity, similar women's competitive sport is routinely suspected to undermine traditional heterosexual femininity. The homophobia of women's competitive sport finds its expression in the repeated renunciation by athletes, coaches, and sport administrators that there is a significant lesbian presence in women's sport. That homophobic culture of denial often ends in public purges of lesbian athletes and coaches and functions to prevent the implicit homoeroticism of women's sport from becoming an explicit, indeed celebrated practice.

The Euro-American globalized lesbian and gay 'community' has attempted to address the homophobia of mainstream competitive sport by developing lesbian and gay community sports. In most major European and American cities, lesbian and gay sport groups are the largest community organizations. The Gay Games, which have been held quadrennially since 1982, are major commercial, cultural, and athletic events that attempt to combat the stigma of being homosexual by highlighting the fact that lesbians and gay men engage in "normal, healthy" activities such as sport. The competitive sports themselves are practiced in the same way that they are in mainstream competitive sport; indeed, they are often sanctioned by mainstream sports-governing bodies. Gay community competitive sports are essentially the same as masters sports, or ethnic and other community sports, where participation is a high priority. Depending on the individual athletes and the priorities of particular leagues, interpersonal competition may or may not be an important part of the phenomenon. The lesbian and gay communities' appropriation of competitive sport, more than any other cultural production of sport, has attempted to address the problematic homophobic organization of sexual desire in the athletic milieu. As I have argued elsewhere, however, that embrace of sport has not changed the principal structure of desire in competitive sport; it has only made it less brutally exclusionary of lesbians and gay men (Pronger, 1999, in press).

During the past 20 years, competitive sport has been criticized on a number of fronts, mostly in the emerging academic discipline of the sociology of sport. (1) A survey here of the various critical paths that have been developed in the sociology of sport neither would be appropriate nor could it do the field justice. Suffice it to say that while there have been important critiques of sport along the lines of class, nationality, race, ethnicity, and gender, there has been little attention given to the construction of desire in competitive sport. (2) Feminist and pro-feminist critiques have come the closest by problematizing issues of sexual discrimination in sport, pointing out the ways in which lesbians and gay men are harmed by hegemonic masculinities, femininities, heterosexism, and homophobia. (3) The sociocultural organization of desire, the libidinal economies of bodily interactions required by the competitive structure of sport, however, have not been examined.

I propose an analytical framework for the construction of desire in competitive sport that emerges from the interplay of elements of feminist, postmodern, gay, and queer theories. I am confining my argument to competitive sport, which is to say bodily games where the economy and logic of winning and losing are truly important. This means my analysis focuses on the formal structure of the competitive relationship. That relationship is more important in some settings and for some people than it is in others.

There are informal pickup games where there is no score keeping and where each event of scoring is of little or no significance. There are recreational sports leagues that downplay the significance of scoring and being scored on, of winning and losing. My argument, on the other hand, is aimed primarily at spectators, governments, leagues, schools, teams, and individuals for whom competition is important, where the desire to win and not to lose is very strong, where winning is deeply satisfying and losing is genuinely disappointing. Indeed, there are many individuals and sports organizations who are willing to put enormous effort and expense into the project of winning and not losing. They are ready, for instance, to exclude people from their sporting organization who they think will undermine their efforts to win. There are many whose desire to win is so great that they will break the rules of the game, or injure their opponents during a game, and even injure themselves in abusive training regimes. There are people who, in the most casual game, take personal satisfaction in beating others and feel somehow undermined when they themselves lose.

Of course, there is more to sport than competition. For instance, the individualized striving for existential expression in the swimming pool and on the playing field, track, or ice; the disciplinary process of physical and mental training in the Foucaultian dynamic of docility and productivity (Foucault, 197 9); in team sports, the interpersonal dynamic of working together; the subordination of individual will to that of coaches and sports governing bodies; the different aesthetics of various sports in their varied cultural millieux; the complex class imperatives that compel different actors into the sports arena; and so on. These and many other sociocultural dynamics frame the discursive construction of desire that I will attempt to analyze here. The extent to which the discourse I am describing is operative in various cultural contexts is an empirical question beyond the scope of this theoretical analysis. It would be interesting to take the analytical framework that I am proposing and consider specific empirical instances of competitive sport and see how this discourse of desire affects and is affected by the different cultures of women's, masters', workers', lesbian and gay, and non-Western sports, for instance.

Drawing selectively on aspects of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983, 1987), I will suggest that modern competitive sport constructs desire by systematically limiting its expression to a libidinal economy of territorial domination. I question what Drusilla Cornell (1992) has called the philosophy of the limit as it is operative in competitive sport. I will argue that competitive sport demands a libidinal economy and emotional formation that is embedded in the masculine colonizing will to conquer the space of an 'other' while simultaneously protectively enclosing the space of the self, in an attempt to establish ever greater sovereignty of self and consequent otherness of the other. This construction of desire is not unique to competitive sport: It is common to most masculine business, academic, and sexual practices. In competitive business, it shows in the desire to accumulate and safeguard wealth by taking it from others, keeping it for oneself and one's family, class, or nation.

In academe, it shows in the desire to take intellectual pleasure and credit by discrediting the work of others while constructing an impenetrable edifice/orifice out of one's 'own' work; this is the standard way to build an academic career. In sex, it shows in the desire to penetrate the holes of others and the desire to resist having the same happen to oneself. In competitive sport, it shows in the offensive desire to get points for oneself by taking them from an opponent and to defensively prevent the challenger from doing it to oneself, or one's team. I will critique competitive sport as a problematic construction of desire by showing how it parallels phallocentric, homophobic sexual desire. But I must emphasize that I am not suggesting in Freudian fashion that sexual desire is some sort of primordial drive that finds its repressed expression in competitive sport. On the contrary: I argue that the masculine construction of desire in competitive sport, commerce, academe, and sex formulates particular sociocultural economies of desire in more or less parallel ways, all of which reproduce oppressive modes of being in the world. The phallocentric formation of desire that I will describe in competitive sport constitutes an essential element of what Foucault (1980), if he had concerned himself with sport, might have called the 'biopolitics' of competitive sport.

First of all, competitive sport as a system of desire. Reworking Derrida's method of deconstruction, the feminist legal philosopher Drucilla Cornell (1992) says that systems (be they linguistic, judicial, musical, visual, sexual, economic, or athletic) impose limits on the power to appreciate, experience, and indeed create realities. Deconstruction, by the seeming negativity of the word itself, is sometimes confused with a kind of cynical, nihilistic reductionism: Take apart the constructs, and you are left with nothing. Some sociologists, philosophers, and political activists think that because deconstruction reduces everything to a cynical and unreconstructable litter, political action is rendered impossible (Dews, 1987; Ebert, 1996; Habermas, 1983). To counteract such misunderstanding, Drusilla Cornell has suggested renaming the project 'the philosophy of the limit.' Questioning limits has been the source of many politically active liberation movements: feminists questioning the limits of gender, anti-racists the limits of race, postmodernists the limits of modernity (Game, 1991; Gray, 1995; Hutcheon, 1989; Jameson, 1984; Lyotard, 1984; Miller, 1993), the handicapped the limits of ablism, gays the limits of homophobia, queers the limits of gay culture (Champagne, 1995; Kipnis, 1993; Warner, 1993), and post-queers the limits of queer (Simpson, 1996). All of these have engaged in some philosophy of the limit, questioning the ways in which social, economic, cultural, and bodily systems construct the limits of human possibilities.

Clearly, there are activist political agendas in them all. Simply put: what limits are operative? How can they be justified? And, where and how might it be wise to dismantle them? The questions of limits are often most poignant for those who find themselves outside them; that's why deconstruction is so popular with deviants, such as homosexual academics who are drawn to physical culture but alienated by competitive sport. The philosophy of the limit seeks to reveal what is left out of systems and to show how such exclusions prohibit just, ethical relations. A philosophy of the limit of competitive sporting desire, therefore, will seek to expose the limits of that configuration of desire, and to question the ethics of those limits.

For the purpose of this short article, I will briefly call attention to three important and related elements that Cornell explores in The Philosophy of the Limit and which I think are particularly apt for the question of desire in competitive sport: the logics of parergonality, secondness, and alterity. The logics of parergonality names the way in which the establishment of any system as a system suggests a beyond to it: that which the system excludes, by virtue of what the system cannot comprehend, or by what it prohibits to accomplish its systematic objectives. The philosophy of the limit asks: What lies beyond a particular system by virtue of its existence as a system? What are the system's limits? In the context of this article: What kinds of desire does competitive sport exclude? Why?

Cornell (1992) also draws on what Charles Pierce in his critique of Hegelian idealism has called secondness, which is "the materiality that persists beyond any attempt to conceptualize it. Secondness, in other words, is what resists" (p. 1). The philosophy of the limit, then, asks about what realities resist and persist beyond the systems that produce and interpret these realities. Where the system happens to be a dominating force, such as the formal and informal rules for the conduct of desire in competitive sport, the realities that either succumb or resist inside and outside a given system are extremely important. What material realities in sport, for instance, resist the system of competitive sport? Even more significantly, how do those systems either foster the potentialities of secondness, or attempt to control or erase them?

By alterity, Cornell refers to an ethical philosophy that remains open, indeed committed, to appreciating the ways in which the other is differentiated from and inaccessible to systems of interpretation and social organization. Cornell (1992) grounds the philosophy of the limit in the ambitious ethical quest to engage the other and otherness nonviolently:

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"The entire project of the philosophy of the limit is driven by the ethical desire to enact the ethical relation . . . the aspiration to a nonviolent relationship to the Other and to otherness more generally, that assumes responsibility to guard the other." (p. 62)

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Thus, the ethical question of the limit in competitive sport is: to what degree does competitive sport as a system of desire foster nonviolence, guarding that which is other to it as a system?

With the philosophy of the limit as an ethical framework, I will now suggest that competitive sport is a sociocultural system that limits the body, by ordering modalities of desire. To do so, I call selectively on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who say that the body is a term of energy that is produced in historical discourses. It is the power of desire, which Deleuze and Guattari understand not a lack (the desire for that which one does not have) but as the fundamental flow of productive energy, the power of human being/becoming/actuality. Desire extends well beyond what is known generically as sex (love making, casual genital encounters, sadomasochistic scenes, and the like). Desire is the life force by which we move, by which we are being or becoming at all.

At the risk of oversimplifying their work, I suggest that Deleuze and Guattari say that desire (the body) is produced historically in the tension between two forms of power: puissance and pouvoir. The puissance of the body is its power to connect, to be connected. to make connections. Pouvoir is a form of power that 'territorializes' puissance, our capacity for making connections, thus governing the connective potential of lite. There are many forms of pouvoir. Gender, race, class, ethnicity, and so on are all forms of pouvoir, powers that govern the possibilities for making connections precisely by their logics of parergonality. Similarly, I suggest, desire is governed by the configuration of competitive sport. Competitive sport, clearly, is a social form that orders the capacity of bodies to connect. There are many rules, both written and unwritten, that govern not only where and when bodies can move, and the ways in which they connect, but also conventions that govern the libidinal economy of bodies. Competitive sporting conventions govern how energy should be expressed, what its texture should be in sport, and how various kinds of space should be created, distributed, occupied.

Our free capacity to exist, to connect, to affect and be affected, which is to say our puissance, is channeled by the pouvoir of competitive sport. How does the pouvoir of competitive sport establish a logic of parergonality for the exercise of desire? I suggest that competitive sport renders desire selectively concrete, which is to say simulates desire, within the libidinal economy of territorial domination. Puissance is ordered by the pouvoir of a socially constructed territorial imperative, if you will. In the context of the philosophy of the limit, the question becomes: how does this ordering of desire construct a logic of parergonality? What is included? What is excluded? What is rendered second?

Considering the logic of parergonality: What does the competitive sport system of desire fail to comprehend or simply prohibit? I will answer the question of what competitive sport excludes by first suggesting what it definitively includes. Competitive sport, like warfare, is historically a masculine phenomenon. Women can, and indeed do, participate in this historical expression of masculinity, just as some have embraced other masculine forms in business and politics - Margaret Thatcher is often cited as a prime example of the ways in which women are more than capable of engaging in domineering, indeed blatantly aggressive, masculine practices. Participation in a cultural form such as masculinity clearly is not dependent on cultural identities such as manliness or physiological sex.

Masculinity is a term of pouvoir that territorializes puissance, organizes the life force, the capacity to connect, to affect and be affected, in the economics of spatial domination. Some feminists have criticized that masculine organization of desire under the sign of the phallus. Phallocentrism could be defined as the despotic imperative to take up more space and yield less of it, be it physical, cultural, emotional, fiscal, hierarchical, or other kinds of space. Phallocentrism, like sexism and racism, territorializes the body, organizing its parts, its organs, as concrete simulations of the phallic enterprise.

I am referring here to Deleuze's concept of the simulacrum (Massumi, 1997). For Deleuze, the simulacrum is not the ethereal copy for which there is no original, which is Baudrillard's well-known formulation of the simulacrum.

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"A common definition of the simulacrum is a copy of a copy whose relation to the model has become so attenuated that it can no longer be properly said to be a copy. It stands on its own as a copy without a model. Fredric Jameson cites the example of photorealism. The painting is a copy not of reality but of a photograph which is already a copy of the original." (Massumi 1997, p. 2)

...

Baudrillard says that the process has gone so far that there is no longer a real referent for signs, but only signs of signs. Deleuze has a much more materialist understanding: The simulacrum is a partial concretization of potential in a form that serves political or ideological ends, which I am arguing in the case of the phallus is the biopolitical quest for spatial domination. "Simulation does not replace reality . . . it appropriates reality in the operation of a despotic overcoding" (Massumi, 1997, p. 3). By codifying desire, the simulacrum insinuates a reality that replaces desire's puissant capacity to create free connections. The simulacrum, thus understood, abstracts from bodies a "transcendental plane of ideal identities [e.g., the phallic ideal] . . . and then folds that ideal dimension back on to bodies in order to force them to conform to the distribution it lays out for them" [e.g., the traditional masculine desire to take space] (Massumi, 1997, p. 2). The preeminent site for this simulation, this 'despotic overcoding,' is the penis. (4) The phallus is simulated in the penis by the act of taking up space: It goes without saying that a limp, shriveled penis is not effective in simulating the domineering masculine organization of desire. Given that no penis can live up to its phallic boast, no matter how swollen it gets, phallocentrism finds other ways to territorialize the body: innocuously, possibly, in body building, and more despotically in the territorial violence of warfare and competitive sport, for instance.

Less boastful than the phallus, perhaps because of its embarrassing vulnerability or even more terrifying potential openness, is the phallus's companion, the protective side of phallic desire, the side that can repel or admit others into the space carved out by phallic aggression. The simulacrum of this other side of phallic desire, I suggest, is the asshole. It is the tightly closed orifice of the phallic conqueror, as well as the (perhaps) reluctantly opened orifice of the phallically conquered. Masculine desire is thus produced in the play of phallus and asshole. It simulates desires as both homoerotic and homophobic: homoerotic in its preoccupation with phallic intent, homophobic in its resistance to penetration. Masculine desire protects its own phallic production by closing openings, preeminently the anus and mouth; but just as important by closing eyes, ears, touch, smell, mind, spirit - in short, any vulnerability to the phallic expansion of others. Rendered impenetrable, masculine desire attempts to differentiate itself, to produce itself as distinct and unconnected. Its quest is to be conquering and inviolable, sovereign. The pouvoir of masculinity territorializes puissance by simultaneously channeling it and damming it up.

I should caution that I am not suggesting here that the symbolic power of bodies and their parts is constructed in any essential way to convey particular meanings or accomplish particular ends. In more emancipated libidinal economies than sport (with its patriarchal and homophobic cultural origin), the different parts of the body can mean very different things and accomplish very different programs (Delsuze & Guattari 1987, p. 151). Bodies need not be culturally constructed in only one way. In more open libidinal economics, the asshole may well be a 'gate endow'd with many properties," as Phineas Fletcher suggested in 1633 (cited in Masten, 1997, p. 138). Jeffrey Masten (1997), ironically paraphrasing St. Paul in I Corinthians 2: 9-10, says, "imagine a body in parts set loose from their customary meanings and functions: hearing eyes, seeing ears, tasting hands, conceiving tongues, reporting hearts. What is a fundament [an asshole] in this context? What does a bottom do?" (p. 140) Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) say, 'Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly' (p. 151).

Although masculine desire is not restricted to men and boys, it is expected of them, and women and girls are largely discouraged from producing their desire so assertively and protectively. Since, on their own, no penis and anus as mere body parts could ever produce the incessant territorial aspirations of their phallocentric master and society, a host of strategies and practices are promoted to encourage men and boys to take and enclose more space beyond the limited purview of their 'private parts.' The point of this conquering and enclosure of space is to make bodies differentiate themselves from the vortex of unbounded free-flowing desire (which Deleuze and Guattari call the deterritorialized body-without-organs) and thereby establish territorial, sovereign, masculine selfhood. Men traditionally cherish such sovereignty among themselves and resent it in women. Not all men and boys are equally territorial, or sovereign, of course. Consequently, there are vast systems that aid in the simulation of masculine desire and many rewards for its success. One of the most influential training grounds for masculine spatialization is competitive sport (Kidd, 1987; Messner & Sabo, 1994; Sabo & Gordon, 1995; Whitson, 1990, 1994). Sovereignty need not, of course, be a purely individual pursuit; adversarial team building is a well-known phallic extension.

Competitive sport is masculinizing, which is why women in patriarchal societies have been mostly discouraged from participating. (Of course, women and girls have participated, but usually against great odds and seldom with the same legitimacy as boys and men, a legitimacy that, I argue, the philosophy of the limit will reveal to be profoundly unethical.) Boys raised on competitive sport learn to desire, learn to make connections according to the imperative to take space away from others and jealously guard it for themselves. Competitive sport trains desire to conquer and protect space, which is to say it simulates phallic and anal desire on the playing field. The most masculine competitive sports are those that are the most explicitly spatially dominating: boxing, football, soccer, hockey. In these sports, players invade the space of others and vigorously guard the same from happening to themselves. The only honorable form of desire in these competitive sports is domineering and protective; it is anathema to welcome other men into one's space. The team whose desire produces the most invasive phallus, which is called offensive strategy, and tightest asshole, known as defensive strategy, wins the game.

The masculine desire to conquer and enclose is constructed similarly in other domains. The accumulation of capital and property, for example, depends on an equivalent desire for acquisition and retention. Certainly, much of academic debate is phallically aggressive and anally closed. The problem, of course, with masculine desire, is that it is essentially dominating, seeking to dominate others in ever-expanding phallic spaces and to dominate the self by tightening the holes that could be the undoing of the masculine self. Turned out in phallic prominence, masculine desire dominates surrounding space by appropriating it as its own. Turned inward as anal closure, it remains impervious to external probing influences, thus dominating internal space with the insistence of self-centered phallic/anal integrity. The closed orifices of masculine desire territorialize the freedom of desire by enclosing the masculine differentiating individual; this is the partial concretization of potential that marks the simulacrum in action. This phallic/anal ideal is "folded back on to bodies in order to force them to conform to the distribution it lays out for them" (Massumi, 1997 , p. 2). This simulation of desire in the parergonal logic of phallic conquest is the essence of competitive desire.

This simulacrum is most obvious in those sports where the quest to forcefully take and maintain physical territory by bodily invasion is central to the game: football, hockey, basketball, lacrosse, and so on. Other sports are similarly territorial but invade only with projectiles (flying phalluses, as it were), racquet sports and curling, for example. Because the body itself does not enter the space of the other, these sports are typically seen to be less violent and thus less masculine than the former. Less masculine still are sports in which spatial domination is more abstract, such as various forms of racing, where the space is only temporal; or in jumping and throwing sports, where the space is marked by height and distance. In these sports, the competitors invade the abstract space of each others' yearning. The territories of bodies and their surroundings remain unviolated. The relative abstraction of such competitive sports makes them less brutally violating. But in all cases, hierarchical space is taken and violated in the differentiation of winners and losers, tops and bottoms, triumphant phallus and routed asshole.

Since one's participation in competition indicates one's commitment to phallic potency and one's defeat shows one's anal vulnerability and therefore phallic impotence, there is humiliation in defeat, in being penetrated by one's competitor. In his novel, Ancient Evenings, the infatuated student and lover of masculinity, Norman Mailer (1983), describes the humiliation of penetration, when the character Meni is penetrated by a male god: "The last of my pride was gone. . . . For I have never known more shame in the days that followed. . . . I was not like other men, although I felt more of a woman" (pp. 288-289). Being opened to the penetrations of phallic desire is feminizing, which in patriarchal culture is humiliating.



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3802312&forum_id=2#34722158)



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Date: November 19th, 2017 3:44 AM
Author: Razzmatazz maroon step-uncle's house giraffe

Because the 'insult' of penetration is part and parcel of every competitive game, there are psychological strategies that help participants weather the denigration. It is called 'being a good sport.' Which is to say that one acknowledges defeat in the game, while refusing to acknowledge one's manifest feminization in the same. The expression, 'take defeat like a man,' means: maintain emotional closure; don't let it show that your phallic esteem, your phallic self-worth, has been penetrated, that your emotional vulnerabilities have been probed; there's always another game, another chance to show your phallic and anal power. Indeed, the ultimate defeat, which is to say the ultimate feminization, is to be seen crying at one's defeat - the only sport where such emotion is tolerated is the most feminine of sports, figure skating. Another sportsmanlike strategy is to deflect attention from one's defeat, from one's diminution, by admiring the phallic skill of the victor. This valorizes the phallic project by de-emphasizing the anal violation.

The logic of parergonality in competitive sport simulates sovereign, masculine selfhood in the desire of phallic conquest and anal closure, which systematically excludes the desire of deference, openness, and vulnerability. The philosophy of the limit shows what kind of desire is excluded or rendered second in competitive sport: the desire to give oneself to the other, which is the desire to deconstruct the sovereign boundaries of phallic selfhood, the desire to open one's self. Simply put: competitive sport as a system of desire has no room for willing bottoms. The desire to open the body to the other, the desire to deterritorialize the limits of the self as a closed and sovereign subject, is rendered incomprehensible to the systematic objectives of playing competitive sport, which is a rude production of self by conquest and closure. The desire to open ends self to the other, the desire to deconstruct the limit of self and other by giving and sharing space in such a way that sovereignty disappears, is structurally prohibited in competitive sport. (5) The desire to be a welcoming and open space is unfathomable to the competitive logic of sport. The materiality that is rendered second and thus resists the libidinal economy and emotional logic of competitive sport is the desire to give up sovereignty, to open oneself to the other, so that sovereign other and sovereign self collapse, so that sovereignty itself loses its territory.

This is not to say that such desire doesn't continue to exist: It is rendered second and finds its subordinate expression in the vast ironic, homoerotic subterfuge of body contact, team membership, and the spectacle of the locker room and showers, which I discussed in The Arena of Masculinity. Indeed, an important subversive reading of losing in competitive sport, is the secret pleasure of being penetrated against one's will. Such subversive pleasure transgresses the masculine point of competitive sport, which is the production of impenetrable sovereign selfhood. The philosophy of the limit of desire in competitive sport is fundamentally the productive parergonality of patriarchal homoerotic homophobia. In this still hegemonic moral system, the wrong kind of desire is the desire to be penetrated, the desire to be an open vessel for the pleasure of another, which in masculine terms would be the desire to undermine the phallic, space-enclosing, sovereign self. The humiliation of defeat is the revelation that one is not sovereign; that one has been shown to be more a gaping hole than a jutting phallus; that one is more like a woman than a man, as Mailer suggested; that one is permeable.

Here, obviously, I am agreeing with Leo Bersani's (1987, 1995) much cited assertion that the rectum is indeed a grave, the grave of masculinity and the sovereign self. My justification, however, is not his Freudian one, but rather a more Deleuzian take on the territorialization of desire in the logic of the masculine construction of space. Homophobia is resistance to such penetration, resistance to the destruction of the enclosed masculine self. This is the conquest logic of competitive sport: to penetrate the other as an expression of the impenetrable self. It is an essentially homoerotic simulation of desire, however. There is no pleasure to be had in sport where one penetrates an asshole that has no phallic counterpart. In sport, there is no game where there is only one phallus; the structure of playful competitive desire demands the interplay of phallic wills. I am referring here, not to penises, but to the phallic simulacrum, which can be embodied by people with either penis or clitoris. That is the parergonal logic of competitive sport, regardless of the sex of the participants.

Competitive sport reproduces a set of binaries that emanate from the traditional homophobic construction of desire: winner/loser, top/bottom, dominant/submissive, phallus/asshole. And these binaries have their fundamental logic in the patriarchal construction of masculine/feminine as the proper dispositions of men and women, respectively. Women's participation in competitive sport transgresses the 'proper' place of women in patriarchy, as the nonphallic, willing, and unresistant orifices for the phallic pleasure of men. Their successful participation in competitive sport shows that they can be just as phallically aggressive and anally closed as men. Women can be, indeed often are, masculine. To argue otherwise is to take an essentialist position: Women can take up masculine roles, but because they are women, they must do it differently, less aggressively, more kindly. Such a position suggests that when women enter traditionally aggressive masculine domains, they are incapable of doing the job in the same way as men. So, for instance, a business woman will be gentler with her competition.

A woman soldier will kill in a kinder manner. A female athlete is not as competitive as a male. In these patriarchally constructed domains, which are by definition phallic, such an essentialist position would assert that women are not as capable as men. I suggest that while certainly many women are discouraged from such 'capabilities,' and that while there are women who prefer to modify the masculinist cultures they enter, women can and sometimes do perform the same jobs as men in accordance with established phallic structures. Highly competitive sport is such structure. It is a profoundly sexist position to suggest that women cannot do it.

Sporting women can simulate the same problematic desire as men; they can reproduce the logic of the same nasty binaries. It is a logic that purports to articulate and produce authentic human subjectivity, the adequately constructed human in the dialectics of domination and submission. A sport competition is illegitimate without the clear differentiation of the dominant and submissive. This is why important championship games cannot end in a tie.

Of course, there are homosexual scenes that repeat these same binaries of top and bottom. These are variations of patriarchal heterosexuality, in which the stakes are greater than in 'ideal' heterosexuality, wherein the submissive identity of the feminine participant is known in advance. In such homosexual reformations of heterosexual scenes, there is competition to see who ends up 'losing': one might call it sporting homosexuality. It is a popular homosexual pornographic trope: A competition is held to see who gets to fuck and who gets fucked. The homosexual irony, of course, is that the loser is the winner. In homosexual sex, unlike competitive sport, being the penetrated loser is not without its intrinsic pleasures.

As I said earlier, the territorial imperative is not the only dimension of desire in competitive sport. In the physical education literature of the 1970s, especially that with an existential or phenomenological orientation, for instance, much was made of the experience of flow, which is a kind of transcendental ecstasy that comes from a high level of focus on the experience of movement. There are also aesthetic dimensions, for instance. But I would maintain that such other dimensions are not featured in performance-oriented competitive sports education or in the entertainment business of competitive sport spectacles, the content of the sports pages being proof. Andrew Cooper (1998) has argued that although competitive sport can offer its participants a powerful awareness of themselves in the experience of 'playing in the zone' and feeling the flow of the game, the competitive structure of sport precludes any true spiritual awareness, which at least from a Buddhist perspective, requires not a conquest logic but the spirit of openness and compassion.

Competitive sport, far from breaking the bonds that seal the body and desire in forms of domination and submission, simulates desire in the ugly patriarchal economy of marauding phallus and plundered hole. Which brings me to the final ethical question in my analysis of the philosophy of the limit of competitive sport: What of alterity in competitive sport?

Competitive sport, I suggest, is structurally the ethical opposite of alterity, which you will recall Cornell (1992) described as "the aspiration to a nonviolent relationship to the Other . . . that assumes responsibility to guard the other" (p. 62). Competitive sport constructs desire within a libidinal economy whose very engine of desiring production is violation: the violation of the vulnerability of another to simulate the strength of the self. An ethic of alterity would construct desire as mutual; it would do no violence to the other; it would guard the other; where penetrating, it would construct penetration for the gratification of the desire of the other; it would not subtract from the other fulfillment of the other's desire, as does competitive sport; and certainly, it would take no pleasure in doing so. Sport simulate puissance, the capacity to connect and make connections, as a form of subtraction by which the victor pleasurably adds to him- or herself by taking space from another.

The triumphant pleasure of competitive sport is the violent phallocentric pleasure of adding to oneself by subtracting from another. By its very construction as a system for the simulation of desire, it is an essentially brutal economy. One takes one's delight in the vulnerability of one's competitor, in one's phallic ability to pry open their otherwise closed openings against their will, and specifically because it is against their will. Indeed, the game is no fun at all if the opening is freely given. The more it resists, the more fun it is, and telling enough, the more 'legitimate' the victory. The pleasure of penetration in competitive sport (i.e., of penetrating territory, be it the space of the opponent's endzone, net, or hoop; or the abstract space of fastest time in races; or the highest score in judged competitions) depends on withholding the same pleasure from one's opponents and violently taking it against their will for oneself.

The pleasure of adding to oneself by subtracting from another is also the pleasure of rape. In rape, the human capacity to open oneself to the other, the puissant mode of making connections, is violently abused. The rapist takes the vulnerable space of another, adds to himself precisely by going against the other's desire, in the profoundly transgressive act of violating the human capacity to connect. It produces in the rapist, in the victor, the pleasure of enforced hierarchy, dominance, and submission. The phallic simulacrum is instantiated most horribly in the practices of rape and murder. There are, however, social conventions that purport to make those instances of the simulacrum legitimate, the social conventions of warfare, for instance.

Similarly, the conventions of various competitive sports legitimize the phallic simulacrum in their various manifestations. In some sports, the pleasures of penetration and subtraction are strictly limited to the abstractions of time and distance: For example, it is socially unacceptable for a swimmer to physically assault his or her opponent in the quest for dominance, whereas in boxing, it is an essential part of the game. It is conventionally acceptable to show great joy in scoring against one's opponent - the stadium cheers at the moment of phallic penetration, at the pleasurable sight of conquest, at the frisson that comes from taking something away from someone else. The convention of most players consenting to play also serves to legitimate sport's brutal libidinal economy. Most participants in competitive sport do consent to playing the game; but once that consent is established, the pleasures of victory and distaste of failure are distributed as a direct result of the refusal of consent by the vanquished.

When, in the context of the philosophy of the limit, we consider the conventional pleasures of sport - the cries of victory when one puts the puck in the net of one's opponent, and the visible disappointment and dejection of the loser - we see the simulation of desire in the territorial project that transforms the puissance of human connection into the pouvoir of dominance and submission. Competitive sport, therefore, is a profoundly unethical way to organize desire. Significantly, it is a dominant feature of Euro-American popular entertainment culture and basic to the physical education of many children and young people. Increasingly, girls and women are lauded for joining in and doing it just like men and boys.

Competitive sport is frequently constructed as a public festival: the World Cup, the Super Bowl, the Commonwealth Games, the Olympic Games. The competitive sports festival adore the world an opportunity to enjoy the mean libidinal economy in which destruction (pouvoir) is given the value of creation (puissance). It is, as Nietzsche would say, a festival of cruelty.

NOTES

1. A special 1997 edition of the Sociology of Sport Journal, 14(4) is devoted to the history of the sociology of sport.

2. Guttmann (1996) has written a little book of historical anecdotes on coitus and sports settings. from classical Greece to the present; but it does not analyze sport, sexuality. or desire.

3. See, for example, Burton-Nelson. 1994; Fusco, 1998; Grifi'in, 1998; lenslm'. 1995; McKay. 1997; Messner 8t Sabo, 1994; Pronger, 1990; Whitson. 1994.

4. Susan Bordo (1993a) has done a wonderful job of demythologizing that phenomenon in "Reading the Male Body."

5. It could be said that in team sports. individuals give themselves over to their own team. thus opening and sharing space. There is some truth in this. However, I would counter that such sharing takes place only within the team. which constitutes itself as a phallic body relative to the other team. One's teammates, then, become phallic extensions of oneself, and vice versa.

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Date: November 19th, 2017 4:53 PM
Author: Razzmatazz maroon step-uncle's house giraffe

btw, by the standards of postmodern-influenced academic literature, this is actually quite straightforward and readable. he actually takes the time to define the main gobbledygook terms that he uses later on.

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Date: November 23rd, 2017 5:28 PM
Author: Razzmatazz maroon step-uncle's house giraffe

thanksgiving is the perfect time to remember that the guys playing sports on the TV screen... are all fags. they are in denial and wish to have their (beef)cake and eat it, too.

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Date: December 19th, 2022 7:20 PM
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Date: July 18th, 2023 4:34 AM
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Date: December 3rd, 2023 11:02 PM
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i learned a lot by reading this. not necessarily anything useful or good, but i know more now.

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