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Of Housewives and Saints: Abjection, Transgression, and Impossible Mourning in Poison and SafeChristian, Laura. Camera Obscura, 57 (Volume 19, Number 3), 2004, pp. 92-123 (Article) Published by Duke University Press For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/co/summary/v019/19.3christian.html Access Provided by Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona at 03/30/12 8:07AM GMT James Lyons as Jack Bolton in Poison (US, 1991). Courtesy Killer Films Of Housewives and Saints: Abjection, Transgression, and Impossible Mourning in Poison and Safe Laura Christian In the opening sequence of Velvet Goldmine (dir. Todd Haynes, UK/US, 1998), future glam-rock trendsetter Jack Fairy stands in front of a mirror and, having been brutalized earlier by a pack of schoolyard bullies, smears the blood from his split lip into a glistening, cherry-red smile, satisfied in the knowledge that “one day the whole bloody world would be his.” This is a signature Haynes moment: Fairy converts the corporeal sign of his abjection into the brazen emblem of his star power. The very stigmata that brand him as a pariah literally provide the raw materials for his transformation into a flaming proto-pop icon. Though characterized by extraordinary stylistic diversity, the films of Todd Haynes have maintained a consistent focus on the theme of abjection. This is as true of the so-called women’s films as it is of his more explicitly queer works. The release of Far from Heaven (US/France, 2002), in fact, makes it possible (if it was not so before) to discern in Haynes’s oeuvre a pattern of alternaCopyright © 2004 by Camera Obscura Camera Obscura 57, Volume 19, Number 3 Published by Duke University Press 93 . each of which approaches the issue of abjection from a different angle.94 • Camera Obscura tion between two key problematics. 1995) and Far from Heaven. because both lay out in paradigmatic terms the issues that have continued to preoccupy Haynes in his more recent films. In Safe. Carol White’s ( Julianne Moore’s) body itself becomes the site of the abject’s disruptive return. or of the constitutive exclusions that are a precondition for the achievement of normative femininity. Poison opens with a quote from Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers: “The whole world is dying of panicky fright. ascend (or perhaps one should say descend) into Genetian sainthood.1 and intercutting three different narratives rendered in three distinct visual modes. 1991).” This intertitle sets all three of the film’s narratives in an atmosphere of mass panic. The second problematic to which Haynes’s films repeatedly return concerns the psychosomatic costs of a too-forceful repudiation of the abject. while clearly referencing the extradiegetic scene of the AIDS pandemic. to be sure) in order to foreground that which cannot be accommodated within the bounds of bourgeois domesticity — life-threatening illness and racial and sexual otherness. Both works were also palpably born out of the first phase of the AIDS emergency in the United States. with a particular view toward the question of what kinds of political work these films perform. Based on the autobiographical novels of Jean Genet. Poison (US. unmistakably recall the performative strategies adopted by the outcast characters in Haynes’s earlier film. take up the cinematic conventions associated with the maternal melodrama (the former in a much quieter way than the latter. in my view. The first concerns the performative resources provided by the condition of abjection or rejection by the social order at large. for example. for instance. Poison and Safe form a complementary pair. This essay examines Haynes’s handling of the abject in Poison and Safe. which manifests in the form of environmental illness. Safe (US/UK. in masochistically embracing their abjection. Jack Fairy’s tactics of resignification. Poison introduces us to a host of marginal figures who. despite their discontinuous treatment of gender and their striking formal differences. but its very absence from the plot makes it one of the film’s most powerful structuring elements. Poison and Safe are indeed rife with bodily elements of abjection — spit. blood. That is to say. however. takes place without the words gay or AIDS ever being spoken. like AIDS.3 Read alongside and against each other. cum. compromises the immune system. reveals that her half brother has died but denies that the cause of death was AIDS — a suspicion apparently provoked by the fact that he was not married. He violently breaches a bodily margin and ejaculates across it in order to put . For instance.Of Housewives and Saints • 95 Safe. AIDS itself is only referenced a handful of times in the course of the film. Carol White’s best friend. in a scene remarkable for the economy of its dialogue. which comprises just a handful of halting. truncated utterances. environmental illness is a recently identified syndrome (often referred to as “twentieth-century disease”) that.”2 but instead outlines their interfaces and the foreclosures on which each is founded. The entire exchange. Haynes’s films and Kristeva’s theoretical work do much to illuminate one another. these elements frequently serve as symbolic tokens of filth in ritualistic acts of violence that mark the victim as a deject. After all. has generally been read as an AIDS metaphor. the protagonist John Broom (clearly a surrogate figure for Genet. while fortifying the subjecthood of the perpetrator. too. Set in Linda’s startlingly immaculate kitchen — clearly not a space that can accommodate sexual deviance or death — the scene attests to how loudly the unspoken can be made to signify.” for instance. it does not so much suggest an analogical relation between the condition of femininity and that of male subjectivity “at the margins. At the culmination of “Homo. pus. a fellow prison inmate and the object of his desire. Linda (Susan Norman). Analyzing Haynes’s films in terms of the psychoanalytic concept of abjection necessarily means placing them in dialogue with Julia Kristeva’s foundational text on this topos. Powers of Horror. In Poison. One of the arguments I wish to make here. shit. is that the relationship between the major problematics to which Haynes’s work again and again returns is not so much a metaphoric as a metonymic one.4 played by Scott Renderer) rapes Jack Bolton ( James Lyons). Thomas Graves (Larry Maxwell) distills the sex drive into a liquid form and accidentally drinks it. An overhead shot taken from above the bed shows her on her back. The abject later returns to haunt the conjugal bedroom in an episode that presents an ironic counterpoint to the sex scene. excluding him or her from what Judith Butler calls “the domain of the subject. Though this is sex — not rape. as in Poison — it nevertheless marks Carol’s body as a passive receptacle. a token of abjection forcibly transferred across a bodily or topographical boundary marginalizes the victim. She suddenly pushes away from Greg and violently pukes on the floor in front of him. And in “Horror. and she buries her face in his shirt. infecting himself with a lethal contagion that makes him the target of a hunt for a menacing “leper sex killer. her face unresponsive as Greg’s bare back undulates over her body. Carol’s body then begins to convulse in a manner that visually rhymes with Greg’s spasmodic movements in the sex scene. a little girl disgusted by the grotesque. scientist Dr.” the blackand-white sci-fi segment. facing the camera. In “Hero. It is as though Carol’s body can no longer tolerate the sexual misuse it has endured in the interests of adhering to a normative ideal of femininity. a repository of the abject. Having lashed out at Carol when she declined to have sex with him the night before. Greg apologizes. a neighbor describes an episode in which Richie entered her backyard naked and “made a BM” right before her eyes. In situating the concept of abjection. oozing sores on his face spits on Graves as he is walking down the street. He embraces Carol consolingly.”5 Safe begins with a more mundane episode of violence: Carol having sex with her husband. In each of the above scenes.” At one point in the narrative. Kristeva summons .96 • Camera Obscura Bolton “back in his place” when Bolton begins to ascend the ranks of the prison’s homosocial hierarchy. Greg (Xander Berkeley).” the mock television tabloid segment that revolves around the mystery of a seven-year-old boy named Richie Beacon who killed his father and then flew away. submitting her to a humiliating spectacle that was also a theatrical display of his own abjection. What at first looks like crying — that classic act of feminine catharsis that so often facilitates the renewed bonding of the couple — turns out to be repulsion. choking on the enigmatic signifiers of its mother’s desire. gagging on a surfeit of milk.”7 It is always situated in a specific sociosymbolic economy.”6 Haynes’s films trouble this category. virtually rending the fabric of the text. the criminal with a good conscience. the killer who claims he is a savior. The return of the abject is thus associated with various borderline phenomena — the collapse of bodily boundaries. In a sense. This process. lays the psychic foundations for the separation between self and other. When the abject erupts in Haynes’s films. Transgression and Saintly Jouissance: Poison The traitor. As soon as Kristeva attempts to position this psychical mechanism of foreclosure (forclusion) within a broader sociosymbolic system.Of Housewives and Saints • 97 the image of an infant who. subject and object. vomits itself out. as well as the breakdown of structures of signification. it is not simply equivalent to the return of the “demoniacal potential of the feminine. the liar. Powers of Horror . Any crime. but premeditated crime. her analysis succumbs to a mystification of the maternal body as the universal locus of a presymbolic multiplicity of drives (the semiotic). cunning murder. is abject. expelling itself. suggesting that the abject assumes different codings and is identified with different marginal zones of social life in different sociohistorical contexts. abjecting itself with the same convulsive motion through which it establishes itself as provisionally and tenuously separate from the mother’s body. . concomitantly establishing the conditions for the infant’s entry into language. hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility. . — Julia Kristeva. the shameless rapist. coincident with what is known in classical Freudian discourse as the primal repression. one encounters the limits of Kristeva’s concept of abjection precisely at the point where it promises to be the most generative. . because it draws attention to the fragility of the law. Butler and others have observed how Kristeva subsumes not only homosexual desire but that which is marked as “primitive” or “Oriental” under the ultimately metaphysical category of the “maternal-feminine. and that “only by occupying — being occupied by —[an] injurious term can I resist and oppose it. etc.” The injurious interpellation that defines Broom as a thief initiates him into a social existence — he finds himself positioned within a social hierarchy that differentiates adults . a brush-and-comb set.98 • Camera Obscura In The Psychic Life of Power. like that of being born.”9 As the names reverberate — seemingly within the space of the bedroom chamber.”8 In Poison. a change purse. at which point the camera pivots to frame Broom’s guardians. or criminalizing names. is one of horror. which we soon learn belongs to the young John Broom (Tony Pemberton)— as it handles an assortment of objects in an adult’s bedroom (a feather. Its rapturous explorations are interrupted by a violent and unexpected slap. The opening credits of the film take place against a single long take of a disembodied hand — a child’s hand. The soundtrack then blurs into a desynchronized stream of criminalizing invective. She suggests that. it is at once disabling and enabling. a collection of silk scarves.10 He stands before them paralyzed. Haynes closes the scene with an intertitle bearing a quote from Genet’s The Thief’s Journal: “A child is born and he is given a name. a magnifying glass. struck dumb with horror. For many. who begin to shout at him.). Suddenly. this experience. He recognizes his position in the world. he can see himself. The shot is extraordinarily tactile. as well as within the space of Broom’s interiority — the camera whip-pans back and forth in the same long take between the looming forms of the adults and Broom’s small frame. Among the words we can make out are: “You’re a beggar! A bandit! A thief!” The use of reverb gives this episode of name-calling the quality of a founding scene of interpellation: the names seem less to issue from the actual mouths of Broom’s guardians than from the social order at large — from the enunciative position of what Louis Althusser called the “Subject. degrading. insofar as an injurious term confers a social existence on the deject. the small hand moving lightly but intently from one object to the next. identity is instituted through injury. Butler asks what it means to “occupy the discursive site of injury” or to inhabit the abject positions marked out by certain pathologizing. Apparently the injurious interpellation has a formative effect. and my hand’s in the bag. The scene ends abruptly with another intertitle: “My heart’s in my hand. Significantly. “In submitting to prison life. and my hand is pierced. While provoking “horror. thus conjoining his willful criminality indissolubly with his perverse eroticism. and my heart is caught. A random background noise awakens Bolton. It prefigures a later scene in which the adult Broom attempts to feel Bolton up while Bolton is sleeping. Now an adult. I could reject the world that had rejected me. The scene of young Broom’s interpellation as a thief fuses the stigma attached to his signature (though initially misrecognized) transgression with the stigma attached to his deviant. the epithets cast at the young Broom misconstrue the nature of his furtive activity in the bedroom. each of which ends alternately with a reference to a nested object (the first is enclosed by the second which is enclosed by the third) or a past . Broom has answered to the charges leveled against him by “becoming what [he] had been accused of being.” This breathless string of phrases. which was more a perverse indulgence in the pleasures of various textured surfaces than an attempt to steal something. and he grabs Broom’s hand — once again. he was sent to the reformatory at Baton. and the bag is shut.” this experience simultaneously creates the conditions for his being able to act as a social agent in the world. Broom had become notorious as a kid with “a knack for theft.” to recall one of Genet’s statements in The Thief’s Journal. for we learn in the next scene of the narrative that by the time he was an adolescent. Broom’s absorption in a covert tactile pleasure is jarringly interrupted.” Broom’s defiant identification with the injurious term that effected his marginalization enables his survival.” he tells us in a voice-over. he has been transferred to the prison at Fontenal.11 His performative enactment of the criminal behaviors that mark him as a thief and his willful embrace of prison life allow him to lay claim to the terms used to punish him. desire. respectable citizens from deviants. if still inchoate. however. “embracing it.” After a childhood spent in and out of foster homes. It endows him with a measure of pride in the face of a hostile world.Of Housewives and Saints • 99 from children. exercising control over others through the aggressive assertion of his abjection. At school.” Rhetorically mimicking the rhythm of the parallel scenes that preceded it.” which revolves around the mystery of his identity. He interprets his male patients’ desire to be beaten by the mother as encoding their repressed wishes to be beaten/loved by . they consistently testify to the abuses he suffered at school.’ ”12 Freud understands male masochism specifically as the product of the negative Oedipus complex. People pick on meek souls.” Richie Beacon is the absent center of the mock documentary “Hero. While Broom is the narrating presence into whose interior life we have access throughout “Homo. at the pivot point of an oedipal triangle — and a shaky track-in to the Beacons’ front door. Idealizing Richie’s victimization. The opening sequence alternates between close-ups of a grainy picture of the Beacon family — an image that positions Richie squarely within the classic nuclear-familial triad. his mother. as the commentator asks: “Who was Richie Beacon?” Although the members of Richie’s community interviewed in the documentary — teachers. the male subject’s identification with his mother and homosexual attachment to his father. attributes it to his essential passivity: “He was a meek soul. Richie never fought back when assaulted. accelerates only to be brought to a halt with “caught. he repeatedly manipulated an older boy named Gregory Lazarre into playing the father to him in a sadomasochistic scenario that recapitulated his real father’s beatings. a treacherous fait accompli). we learn the extent to which Richie actively sought to perform the masochistic reenactment of his abjection.100 • Camera Obscura participle (indicative of a violence already committed. neighbors. it evokes the successive displacements of a mobile. Felicia. for instance. Richie was in fact the author of his own scripts. Richie’s role-playing activities with Gregory recall the fantasy scenarios outlined by Freud in the essay “ ‘A Child Is Being Beaten. Ostensibly a passive victim of abuse.” Yet as the documentary unfolds. schoolmates. medical professionals — present radically contradictory views in response to this question. Significantly. perverse desire — a desire arrested when caught in the act. while the rest of the frame remains in the . The first replays a kind of primal scene in which Richie walks in on his mother having sex with the Beacons’ gardener. José. or the father in the male subject. Deleuze insists that the masochistic scenario is essentially an affair between mother and son: “A contract is established between the hero and the woman. and this frame within the frame zooms in onto Felicia’s face. the screen splits: the bedroom scene appears within an inset frame bordered by the bedroom door. who is thereby reinvested with the phallus. but the father. the son allows himself to be “stripped of all virility” and is reincarnated as a castrated figure. Hence the one beaten in the masochistic scenario is not so much the male subject. In the process. The image also features contrasting film stocks: the scene within the inset frame is shot in 8mm. By this means the masochist tries to exorcise the danger of the father” (58). The father is thereby expelled (at least in fantasy) from the symbolic order. The door first opens to reveal. the handheld camera — traveling through the downstairs rooms of the house and up the stairs to the bedroom door — reflects Richie’s point of view. Though Felicia narrates the scene in a voice-over. the son’s transfer of the authority to punish from the father to the mother. so that mother and son appear to be looking at one another intensely. Gilles Deleuze reinterprets the male masochistic fantasy. anticlimactically. Two key scenes in “Hero” show such a contract to be established between Richie and Felicia through a silent exchange of glances. in contrast to Freud.13 By inviting the mother to beat him. though from discontinuous spatial positions. he repudiates his claims to the endowment of power and authority promised him under the paternal law. an empty bed covered by a pristine white bedspread. whereby at a precise point in time and for a determinate period she is given every right over him. When he opens the door to discover José on top of his mother. Replaying the moment of revelation — but this time gratifying our expectations of a primal scene — the shot that follows shows Richie himself standing against the bedroom door.Of Housewives and Saints • 101 the father. These are the only two scenes in which Richie himself appears within the frame. emphasizing. As the sole witness to Richie’s miraculous flight. and Fred Beacon is always shown either facing away or cropped from the waist up.” She describes how.” If Richie is indeed a divine figure — a Genetian saint — then it surely is not in the sense that Felicia imagines. The grainy. José almost immediately flees offscreen. The second scene in which Richie appears conforms to the same split-frame format: he is shown in his underwear. For Genet. Significantly. Felicia has constructed a narrative of divine transcendence around her child’s disappearance.102 • Camera Obscura standard presentation format of the documentary. Felicia recalls that Richie’s look was “weird.15 He then mounts the bedroom windowsill and flies away. and while “Homo” is the narrative in Poison most closely based on . Felicia’s face appears again in the right half of the frame opposite Richie in an inset frame bordered by the bedroom door. when her husband Fred (Edward Allen) learned of her adulterous affair. repudiating his claims to a paternal legacy and literally “exorcising the danger of the father” by abolishing him forever from the familial domain.14 When Fred flies into a rage toward Felicia one night and begins to strangle her to death. he bought a gun. Richie feels through his parents’ dresser drawer for the gun and shoots his father. home-movie look of the image in the inset frame imparts an even greater intimate quality to the nonverbal exchange between Felicia and Richie. transcendence is achieved through transgression. slung over his father’s knees with his bottom facing the camera. neither José’s nor Richie’s father’s face ever actually appears on screen.” and that it reminded her of a time when she watched her husband spank him. calling him a “gift from God” and an “angel of judgment. Once exposed in flagrante delicto with Felicia. This reinforces the sense that a contract has been forged between mother and son that excludes the father and his surrogates. impassively resting his chin in his hands as his father’s disembodied hand mechanically spanks him. Felicia recalls that Richie’s gaze as he was being spanked conveyed a kind of “oath. which he would wave in front of Richie in a self-aggrandizing display of phallic power as if to promise him future rights over his mother’s — or another woman’s — body. Powers of Horror Genet’s world brings us the pervert-criminal. man is subordinated to God and yet independent of him by virtue of his endowment with free will. Kristeva reads the masochistic martyr-saint as a figure whose forfeiture of self and bodily integrity signifies his abdication of the privileges promised him under the paternal law. is never one.” [the deject] does so concerning his place: “Where am I?” instead of “Who am I?” For the space that engrosses the deject. “to set oneself up as evil is to abolish evil in oneself” (128). but the “the point where the scales are tipped toward pure spirituality” (127). the entire film is framed by a Genetian aesthetics and ethics. is thoroughly grounded in the corporeal. .”16 As a created being. Illness and Redemption: Safe Instead of sounding himself as to his “being. Powers of Horror sheds light on the symbolic power of the Genetian saint.” laying . instead of transcending the flesh. According to Kristeva. and catastrophic. The deject is in short a stray. whose crime draws attention to the fragility of the law. nor totalizable. the abject is no longer something to be ejected. nor homogeneous. Communion with the abject is not a deferential gesture vis-à-vis paternal or divine authority. and a means of integrating the abject into language and logic.” Kristeva draws out one strand of exegetical thought according to which sin may be considered a form of “subjectified abjection. and the masochistic martyrsaint. foldable. whose ascendance is predicated on his surrender of phallic authority. He can commit sin only through willful nonobservance of the rule. — Julia Kristeva. but a “fount of infinite jouissance. It is a requisite for reconciliation between the flesh and the law. This “pure spirituality. These are two figures who “subjectify the abject. Tracing a “semiotics of Biblical abomination. the excluded. .” however. in a masochistic state of embodiment.” For the Genetian saint. but essentially divisible.Of Housewives and Saints • 103 Genet’s work. Sin is thus an affirmation of one’s God-given will and judgment. Like Deleuze. . then. we hear the sounds of the radio or television in the background. Safe.17 Their abandonment of all pretensions to (self-)mastery assures their transcendence. it presents a montage of picturesque natural landscapes as a male commentator’s voice-over cites the testimony of a prominent “ecophilosopher. thus reinstating the conditions for the abject’s disruptive return.” Presented to the viewer without even the mediating frame of the television set (which would mark it more clearly as a quotation inscribed within the plot). In the locker room. and prescribing various exercises in self-purification as a means to restoring what Kristeva describes as the “clean and proper” self.104 • Camera Obscura claim to the injuries that institute their identities. and thus performatively enacting what Jonathan Dollimore has described with reference to Genet as a “transgressive reinscription” of the terms of their exclusion. It is but one of the rhetorics of redemption with which Carol is barraged on a daily basis. Carol overhears the testimony of a woman from her aerobics class who has traded Twelve Steps (which she claims “eventually just became another form of addiction”) for the teachings of a prominent self-help writer who aims to put his followers “back in charge” of their emotional lives. these discourses merely reinscribe the regulatory terms of a normative culture. One non sequitur interlude in the film shows an extended clip on an alternative environmentalist movement known as “deep ecology. Carol often falls asleep in front of the television. Driving along a thoroughfare in the San Fernando Valley. quotes an array of redemptive discourses that promote precisely the opposite approach to the abject. for instance — just before choking on the toxic fumes released by the truck in front of her — Carol listens absentmindedly to a woman on the radio declaring her faith in Jesus Christ. owning them fully. Emphasizing dissociation from the body and its affects. by contrast. A technology of the self based on .18 One of the striking features of Safe is its polyvocal soundtrack: at almost any given moment. Even Carol’s upper-class social set subscribes to its own secular brand of redemptive rhetoric.” The film cues us neither to accept the viewpoint espoused in the clip nor to dismiss it. docile femininity. At first this seems to offer a measure of relief: in a conversation with Linda about her newly identified condition.” to borrow a metaphor from Kristeva. Ironically.Of Housewives and Saints • 105 an ideal of self-mastery. Carol would appear to be a kind of living incarnation of the very model of self-mastery to which her peers aspire. the near-perfect embodiment of upper-middle-class.20 An overly exacting internalization of the law has made the limits of her bodyego as rigid as a prison wall. the self-help discourse presumes that suffering is an individual problem over which one may willfully choose to take control. On discovering the obscure diagnostic category environmental illness about a third of the way through Safe. the self-help advocate pauses at one point to marvel at the fact that Carol does not sweat. In the locker-room scene. the more it suffers libidinal impoverishment. the more impervious the ego. Her body. It would seem that Carol’s body is the product of an all-too-successful materialization (to use Butler’s suggestive term) in accordance with bourgeois. figured as virtually nonporous. one of the factors contributing to her illness. Carol zealously takes up an identification as a “chemically impaired” individual. has little means of disposing of the toxins to which it is exposed on a daily basis. we might venture to guess. that the deject typically attempts to repair her or his wounded narcissism by plunging into the pursuit of various compensatory identifications. Paradoxically. heteronormative standards.19 A dutiful daughter and wife. A source of status in a context where being a “lady” means doing one’s utmost to mask one’s bodily processes — particularly those in which bodily fluids traverse the superficies of the skin — this bizarre feature of Carol’s constitution is. Carol is notably more animated and verbally . Kristeva notes. which are ultimately experienced as “empty” or “devitalized” (49). Kristeva’s fascinating nosography of abjection in many respects offers an illuminating framework for apprehending the psychosomatic logic of Carol’s ever-shifting and elusive symptoms. Carol has become a “fortified castle. for instance. The locker-room woman touts the selfhelp writer’s program for “emotional maintenance” as if it were a practice of self-care as casual and user-friendly as a regimen geared toward improving one’s physical health. a kind of disconnect has occurred for Carol between verbal signs and their somatic underpinnings (what Freud called the “thing-presentations” or representatives of the drive).” she finds herself at a complete loss. The body performs an act of articulation that the enunciating subject herself cannot execute. In this light. and maid are painfully rote. paralysis. the abject finally emerges in the form of inexplicable pains. vomit. Safe nevertheless stops short of attributing Carol’s condition of lack to the foreclosure of some primordial maternalfeminine realm of experience — on this point it sharply parts ways with the Kristevan model of abjection. Whatever the constitutive exclusions that found Carol’s subjecthood. some of the causes of Carol’s badly attenuated narcissism or “emptiness” are quite evident — it is no coincidence that she has developed an allergic reaction to her husband. language itself becomes a fetish. we might identify Carol’s illness as an instance of the body speaking when Carol cannot. tears.106 • Camera Obscura agile than at any other moment in the film. husband. so precariously sealed. It is as though. but does not manage to feel what she speaks. disengaged from any embodied signified. Carol’s body. as Kristeva describes it. issues forth blood. Secondary and primary processes have become utterly disarticulated. except that here it is not so much by way of the “symptom. Lacking any other recourse to symbolization. even the uncontrollable eruption of abject bodily elements. Her conversations with mother.” which indirectly expresses a repressed wish (a set of contents already raised to the level of the sign). But Safe for . much like in the case of the nineteenth-century hysteric. For one beset by the abject. Carol often does not finish her sentences. but by way of a “direct semantization” of the abject (53). however. snot. Carol’s speech in general has a disturbingly hollow quality. Dialogue in Safe is spare and riddled with drawn-out silences. they are not identifiable in the film with any particular set of repressed contents. Discourse has been reduced to a fragmentary collection of pure signifiers. To be sure. The subject speaks. employed as a “counterphobic object” in the attempt to keep fear at bay (41). When probed by a psychiatrist to say what is going on “in her. and catastrophic”. Rory (Chauncy Leopardi). the symbolic and the corporeal. they evoke an atmosphere of claustrophobia rather than of luxury or freedom. As Haynes illustrates.” a kind of frantic cartographer or “deviser of territories” whose constant sense of disorientation sets her off on a quest to demarcate the unstable confines of her world (8). One night at the dinner table. it is precisely the boundary between “inside” and “outside” that the abject destabilizes (8). drifting through the rooms of her house or its impeccably manicured environs at night. Within these shots. Unable to sleep in her own bed. of course. Though the spaces through which she moves are extravagant and expansive. foldable. however. reads aloud an essay he has written titled “An American Problem. clad in a long. She becomes what Kristeva describes as a “stray. she tells Greg that she smells fumes in the house. Carol is often dwarfed by the frame.” The “problem” to which it refers is that of . Carol takes on the appearance of a kind of ghost. it figures as an externalization of the abject “within”— though. In the first half of the film. Carol finds that the most familiar spaces have become unfamiliar. presented at a distance. Insisting on the fundamental links between the social and the psychic. “Right now?” The return of the abject in Safe is not only identified with the invisible toxins that pollute Carol’s environment. This focus on space is reflected in the predominance of long shots (also frequently of extended duration) that frame various suburban vistas and domestic interiors. she inexplicably bursts into tears: “Where am I?” she asks Greg. threatening danger from out of nowhere. Kristeva describes the space that envelops the deject as “divisible. and this distance contributes visually to her inaccessibility to the viewer. Safe maps these relations in topographical terms through an examination of discursive construction of “safe” and “unsafe” spaces. white nightgown. Carol’s stepson. Carol lives in a social world that is intensely preoccupied with shoring up its boundaries against the threat of all kinds of encroachments from an exorbitant and unthinkable outside.Of Housewives and Saints • 107 the most part leaves us to speculate as to just what it is that Carol is missing. At one point. uncanny. toward the perimeter of her home. . the entire exchange occurs as the family’s Latina maid. the essay describes in orgiastic detail the murderous and maiming acts of violence that supposedly occur every day on the streets of Los Angeles. “Gory! That’s how it really is. and finally. the grounds beyond its claustrophobic confines. She writes: “The abject designates . upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood — defines itself and that constitutes the latter’s necessary border. . This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject’s domain.” As Carol begins to experience her own home as itself an unlivable zone. a New Age healing center in a “chemicalfree zone” in the heart of the New Mexico desert. for instance. “Does it have to be so gory?” Rory replies indignantly.) In Bodies That Matter. All the ladies in her social set are continually involved in refurbishing their houses. precisely those ‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject. then. Carol’s efforts to circumscribe the domain of the subject are concentrated on the upkeep and renovation of her home. moves silently in and out of the dining room clearing the dishes. In an over-the-top indulgence in action-film imagery. As the narrative progresses. Fulvia [Martha VelezJohnson].” or chemical-free space. . . . When Carol asks. it will constitute that site of dreaded identification against which — and by virtue of which — the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life.” (Not incidentally. toward Wrenwood. Carol’s very efforts to beautify her home create the conditions for her attacks: her brand-new couch. she increasingly finds herself drawn toward the limits of her native domain —first. she seeks first to seal herself off from the abject within by establishing an “oasis. at .”21 Rory’s essay clearly reflects his wholesale assimilation of (and fascination with) the media’s construction of an “unlivable” zone — the urban ghetto — against which the “domain of the subject”— the white.108 • Camera Obscura black and Chicano gangs invading white neighborhoods. Ironically. in a small room inside the house. however. Butler invokes the abject in relation to the mapping of social domains. the demarcation of imaginary territories. proves “completely toxic. ” She performatively cites Wrenwood’s rhetoric of self-affirmation in the hopes that it will lead to the rematerialization of the body she so desperately wishes to restore to health and sexual normalcy. tells herself. haunting scene. “I love you. per se. AIDS and the virus that causes it are closely wedded to the abject in that both are intrinsically associated with the breakdown of bodily and social boundaries.”23 Whatever destruction it wreaks on the body. Typically transmitted through sex. a virus is not a volitional agent. blood transfusions. and religion does the same.22 The Politics of Genre and the Violence of Medicalization: Safe and “Horror” Science tells us that there is always a reason why a star falls or a body is ill . following the example of a staff member. Carol stands before a mirror in her new enclosure and. igloolike structure that could not be any more insular. In Safe’s final. Yet almost nothing is more difficult to confront than the absence of causality and meaning. . Her struggle to ward off the abject thus leads her further and further into a state of marginalization and isolation. . —Poison “Nothing could be more meaningless than a virus.” notes Judith Williamson in an essay titled “Every Virus Tells a Story: The Meanings of HIV and AIDS. so as to achieve a catharsis that would be the equivalent of not self-purification but an actual symbolic parsing of the corporeal signifiers of the abject. It then proceeds to break down the infected person’s . Clearly. perhaps no other sociobiological phenomenon quite summoned the specter of the abject in the way that the AIDS crisis did in the First World imagination. but in her inability to articulate her abjection — to produce what Kristeva describes as an “incarnate” speech. her problem lies not in a lack of self-love. which in Kristeva’s terms signals the threat of abjection. however.Of Housewives and Saints • 109 Wrenwood. to a porcelain-lined. In the 1980s and early 1990s. HIV secures its own perpetuation by crossing over the border between the self and the other. or intravenous needle sharing. I really love you. propagating fear about the breakdown of social order. the bestial.110 • Camera Obscura immune system. First World representations of the thousands of chil- . goals. letting in the infections that a healthy body keeps out. and then they suffer ” (75). and functions to HIV. only too seamlessly fit in with a repertoire of racist images and representations that condensed notions of blackness with the primitive. in “Horror. on the other hand. Popular AIDS discourses analogize HIV’s bodily effects at the level of the sociosymbolic system. have been widely mobilized in the narrativization of AIDS: horror and melodrama. or. and Safe. These conventions are often taken up in reportage and public health campaigns that ascribe particular characteristics. both of which engage with AIDS discourse. Many of the conventions associated with the horror genre in film can be traced to the form of the nineteenth-century gothic novel.” the sci-fi segment of Poison. because the abject draws the subject toward the vanishing point of the signifying chain. its purported origins in Africa. Two genres in particular. The virus is anthropomorphized as a sinister “killer on the prowl”. as a dangerous agent of death that “doesn’t discriminate” (even if AIDS-phobic people do). and television but also in media representations and ordinary conversations. As Williamson observes. In this genre. in the more progressive version of this narrative. and the pathological. “things happen to people. The narrativization of AIDS occurs not only in fictional representations in movies. novels. where it was believed to have crossed over into human populations from chimpanzees. In the US context. ominously signaling the collapse of meaning. it is a powerful spur to the formation of explanatory fictions. The modern genre of television and film known as the melodrama.” By extension. an “unlivable zone. as Williamson puts it. the initially disproportionate destruction that AIDS wreaked on the gay male community identified it with what was then an already abject area of social life. Williamson notes. has provided a ready-made narrative format for “sympathetic” understandings of AIDS. these are the two genres that Haynes takes up. Not coincidentally. respectively. in which monsters threaten the innocent and nature is an overwhelming and fearsome force. the sentimentality of the melodrama is in a sense simply the flip side of horror’s brutality. The victims’ suffering. suspending the usual mechanisms of narrative closure in order to militate against the recontainment of the abject. Its seeming transparency quickly proves deceptive. while intended to evoke pity. We find ourselves scanning the photos in the frame as though they might finally reveal the “missing piece” of . while the social and systemic factors that have produced it remain beyond the scope of the diegesis. Whereas in horror the emphasis lies on the activity of the monster. Offering the viewer few clues as to how to navigate its narrative space. they ought to be considered as objects not just of literary but also of political analysis. in the melodrama it lies on the passivity of the victims. Seemingly signaling a kind of wrapping-up of the narrative. this scene cues us to expect a resolution: Carol has found the answer to her problem. As Williamson observes. On a surface level. Rather than recur to realist codes in order to present a direct counteroffensive against homophobic and AIDS-phobic discourse. the film employs a variety of familiar cinematic techniques to provoke a sense of anticipation that it stubbornly refuses to gratify. we are about to be led into the film’s denouement. is essentially treated in isolation. however. they draw attention to the politics of genre itself. as an individual problem or matter of fate. we are led into a shot that tracks across the family photographs displayed on her bedroom dresser as Carol reads aloud in a voice-over a letter she is writing to an organization that might provide her with more information on her condition. while playing with the expectations that film spectators bring to these genres. “Horror” and Safe take up the conventions associated with horror and the melodrama only to subvert them. For instance.Of Housewives and Saints • 111 dren orphaned by AIDS in Africa often draw on melodramatic tropes. when Carol first learns about environmental illness. Safe’s plot would appear to proceed along a fairly linear narrative trajectory. Williamson argues that insofar as the narrative structures through which AIDS becomes invested with meaning fundamentally influence attitudes and behaviors. In this way they intervene on the field of AIDS speech. Unlike in other feminine affliction narratives. While Safe never affords the viewer an easy point of identification in Carol. as he or she is left to decide what attitude to adopt toward Wrenwood’s prescriptions for wellness. Safe provides us with little access to Carol’s interiority and thus denies the viewer such opportunities for sentimental vicariation. In most melodramatic narratives. offering the spectator the chance to indulge in pleasurable acts of identification with the suffering heroine. she develops an oppositional consciousness that drives her newfound mission to advocate for others who share her plight. instead of eliciting pity. moreover. tends to evoke frustration. criticism without facile condemnation. I would say that it offers an extraordinarily compassionate rendering of her character. While exposing Carol’s many blind spots. it also carefully shades in the contours of her social position. neither does it allow for a wholly distanced viewing experience.112 • Camera Obscura Carol’s life. It belies the romantic belief that suffering has a necessarily edifying effect. on the contrary. refuses to gratify the viewer’s desire to see Carol transformed from an ailing deject into an articulate subject of resistance. even better. it merely leads the viewer into a new set of ambiguities. the revelation of the nature of Carol’s disease is not at all a means of reaching closure in Safe. for instance. Safe. It thus manages to elicit from the viewer sympathy without pity. on the other hand. Much more flagrantly campy than Safe in its redeployment of the horror genre. however. Poison’s “Horror” allegorizes popular . Carol’s passivity. to which the film devotes pointed attention. Fulvia. suffering paves the way to some sort of enlightenment: the previously selfish or prideful character is compelled to adopt a more magnanimous or encompassing perspective on her life and on those around her. the root cause of her illness. The classic melodrama elevated suffering to an art form. One cannot help but squirm in one’s seat while watching Carol passively submit herself to the careless and sometimes cruel manipulations of various institutional and medicalizing authorities — if only she would manifest some resistance! Her position of privilege. makes it difficult to view her as a victim: Carol is maddeningly condescending in her relationship with her maid. in the guise of a concern for the individual’s health.Of Housewives and Saints • 113 Dr. Instead of creating a monster. it results in an irreversible process of transmogrification that culminates in death. Graves becomes one.” the discursive development whereby “sexuality” was constituted as an object of scientific inquiry. Graves’s . Figuring the “sex drive” as a liquid substance distilled by means of a high-tech scientific procedure. Courtesy Killer Films homophobic discourses on AIDS.24 Extolling the healthful properties of the sex drive. As Foucault observes.” When ingested in excess. These taxonomies nevertheless by and large represented a mere transposition of moralistic sexual prescriptions into scientific discourse. as Graves does accidentally. Graves tries to convince his colleagues that if administered with care. resulting in mass destruction. nineteenthcentury sexual taxonomies largely displaced the moralizing notions of sin and transgression through which sexuality had traditionally been understood. however. It parodies the classical science fiction narrative in which a scientist’s efforts to harness the forces of nature to philanthropic ends go tragically awry. however. it could revolutionize geriatric medicine and “end paralysis as we know it. Graves in Poison. “Horror” furthermore conjures a quite literal trope for the historical process that Michel Foucault has described as the “medicalization of sex. Constructed by medical . At the time of Poison’s release. but at the end of the narrative. The narrative thereby draws attention to the ways in which the horror genre has channeled popular perceptions of AIDS. sexual excess — will lead to disease. and death become interchangeable terms on the signifying chain. Yet “Horror” ultimately subverts the expectations we as viewers bring to this genre.114 • Camera Obscura disgusting skin condition recalls the cautionary myth that masturbation — or any form of nonreproductive. the sci-fi or horror flick usually involves a search for specialized knowledge that will neutralize the threat of the monster (even if it is the agent of that knowledge who has himself become the monster). Unexpectedly. and whereby the threat of all three is projected onto at-risk groups. the parodic reinscription of this myth no doubt would have brought to mind Moral Majority spokesperson Jerry Falwell’s crude retribution theory that AIDS was delivered by God as a punishment to homosexuals for their sins. rather than by the topdown imposition of a sovereign law. facilitates the increased intervention of experts in the lives of those whose bodies are imagined to be particularly prone to pathology. to seek a definitive cause for human suffering in the hubris of immoral individuals or a solution in the supposedly universal good of scientific knowledge. Here Graves lacks the ability to reverse the destructive process he has set into motion. disease. Safe dramatizes how what Foucault has described as a society increasingly governed by normative injunctions. Though campy from start to finish. From her deathbed. this segment ultimately leaves the viewer (or at least this viewer) with a profound feeling of sadness. For instance. we discover that it was not he who was responsible for the epidemic in the first place. If “Horror” allegorizes the medicalization of sex. “Horror” compels us to suspend our wish to know why some people get sick. Not only that. Graves’s persecution as a “leper sex killer” figures the rhetorical slide through which sexuality. it seems to open up a space in which loss can be acknowledged and mourned (a point to which I shall return). his lover Nancy relieves him of culpability by explaining that a random atmospheric shift caused the spread of the contagion. assumes the role of omniscient therapist-priest in the group therapy sessions through which each resident is interpellated as the subject of the treatment center’s ideology of healing. the ailing. that they got sick because they mistreated themselves in some way. highly valued body. unfazed by his condescending attitude toward her. he concludes that she is a hypochondriac who would be better served by a psychiatrist than himself. At Wrenwood. He calls Greg and Carol into his office and reaches across a monolithic desk to hand Greg the psychiatrist’s card. the participants are prompted to answer the question. In each case.25 At first Carol willingly entrusts herself to her doctor’s care. At Wrenwood. Husband and doctor are shown throughout Safe to act in concert as the authoritative custodians of Carol’s carefully tended. the bodies of women are the focus of especially intimate surveillance. “Why did you become sick?” The question calls for a directed mode of confessional self-analysis. but summarily bestows on the confessees the interpretive stances they must adopt toward the raw material of their pain in order to apprehend the true causes of their illnesses. though of course it is Carol’s psychological health that is in question. either by harboring a negative feeling toward themselves or by refusing to “let go” of a negative feeling toward another. Safe suggests that New Age discourse has become a prime relay point for the production of truth in contemporary fields of power-knowledge. she ultimately trades the expertise of traditional medical practitioners for that of the quasi-holistic healers at Wrenwood. the center’s founder. namely. he leads his followers toward the same conclusion: namely. Peter (Peter Friedman). As her condition worsens. the uncovering of past wounds. chemically sensitive person is reconstituted as a “healing individual” through an extortionary “incitement to discourse” similar to . thereupon entering into a no-less-asymmetrical relation of knowledge and power with the fringe institution’s self-appointed health experts.Of Housewives and Saints • 115 and psychological discourse as intrinsically sick. Though Carol manages to convince Greg that she must go to Wrenwood to get better. One by one. Peter does not allow his clients’ mournful testimonies to stand on their own. Conclusion: Mourning Foreclosed In Poison.116 • Camera Obscura the institutionalized procedures of confession analyzed by Foucault in The History of Sexuality. except that the truth she is compelled to excavate does not reside in her deepest sexual wishes. “Okay. which render some more vulnerable to violence than others. Peter raises his hands defensively. she declines. The limits of such an etiology are exposed. okay. when a survivor of childhood sexual abuse is told by Peter that she got sick because she failed to forgive the man who abused her. Instead it always comes down to some form of self-harm. then it is presumably within one’s power to make oneself well. The irony of both scenes is that Carol’s silence — in fact a function of her inability to engage her experience through verbal expression — actually works as a kind of unwitting resistance to the coercive effects of two confessional procedures vis-à-vis different figures of authority. His characters cope with their marginalization by willfully occu- . Though she has not been particularly vehement in her refusal to confess. saying. However. and certainly no acknowledgment of the limits of the subject’s claims to absolute self-presence and self-mastery. shaking her head nervously. There is no holding others accountable for the damage they inflict on each other (and on the environment) in Peter’s solipsistic worldview. it leaves her as powerless as ever to confront her abjection. When Peter attempts to solicit a confession from Carol. Haynes portrays two queer characters whose performative assertion of their abjection allows them to exercise a form of agency paradoxically enabled by the injuries they have sustained. no recognition of the power differentials at play in social relations. The logic of Peter’s etiology is certainly appealing: if one has made oneself sick through self-mistreatment. however.” insistent — to the point of betraying himself — on the benevolent and noncoercive nature of the exercise.” a task she is incapable of performing. This moment parallels the scene of Carol’s fruitless session with her psychiatrist in which he presses her to reveal “what’s going on in her. We might ask: what are the limits of a performative strategy that rests on a repetitive transgression of the norm? Numerous critics have remarked that Genet’s notorious transgressions. but it does not facilitate a direct challenge to the norm. I recreate the absent proprietor. while calling attention to the weakness of the law’s regulatory force. in a failure to repeat those citations of the norm that have heretofore allowed her to enjoy the status of a proper subject. only to exit the world altogether. . In so doing. Broom finally acts out against the nearest target. rather than confronting either the society that has cast him out or the bullies who dominate the prison’s homosocial order (and with whom Bolton has begun to align himself).”26 The mode of queer performativity modeled by Genet and valorized in Poison may enable the deject to reappropriate the injurious terms that have been used against him. Carol is inadequately served by the New Age treatment center’s quasi-holistic. or to identify and interrogate the conditions of her privilege. on the other hand. Bolton. he acts out his violent wish to expel the father from the sociosymbolic order without truly challenging the patriarchal structure of that order. But Carol’s subsequent efforts to reestablish her “own and clean self” through the performative reiteration of Wrenwood’s ideology of healing serve only to reproduce her abjection. individualistic approach to illness. fulfilling the contract with his mother. basically relied on the law. in her case. Is their performative strategy truly effective as a stance of resistance. A “fortified castle. suggests some of the costs of a materialization that too successfully conforms to a normative ideal of femininity. Lacking the resources to analyze and enunciate the conditions of her oppression. Their communion with the abject creates the conditions for a reintegration of discourse and the abject. even ratified its legitimacy. however? After all. Genet observes in The Thief’s Journal: “I am steeped in an idea of property while I loot property. Safe’s portrayal of Carol White. they attain the status of Genetian saints. of the law and the flesh. Richie kills his father. This results.Of Housewives and Saints • 117 pying the discursive site of injury. seeking to victimize him before he himself can be victimized.” Carol’s body itself has become a register of her abjection. Consequently. fear). Because pride is what lets you stand up to misery. on the other. Haynes’s characters in Poison are far from being model gay citizens. it merely reinforces the radically debilitating dislocation of Carol’s speech from her bodily experience. differs from his counterparts in Poison. but not before condemning the group of horrified onlookers who have gathered around his apartment building. anger. Facing the imminence of his own death. Poison might be read as an indictment of the politics of pride to the extent that the latter often give rise to their own violent foreclosures. he tells them that they are “just the same” as he. The drive to expurgate from the self the injurious effects of homophobia leads to the production of normative discursive regimes (the promotion of a vision of the “out and proud” individual who has succeeded in achieving a “healthy” relationship to her or his sexuality) no less constricting than the heteronormative discourses they seek to challenge. taking on an extradiegetic resonance: it clearly references the politics of pride enacted by gay and lesbian subjects. Inevitably. because you’ll never know what pride is. or expunging from the self all contaminating traces of so-called negative emotion (grief. the term pride detaches itself from the flow of his speech. the passing of his beloved. Instead. . he finally commits suicide. he seems to enter into a state of mourning at the losses he has sustained. the destruction of his life’s work. . and persecution by a hostile crowd. it sharply exposes the limits of their performative strategies. interestingly. in that he never embraces nor seeks to repudiate his abjection. such regimes also end up producing their own dejects at the limits of political community. From the heights of the rooftop. Graves.118 • Camera Obscura With its emphasis on self-mastery and self-purification. “only you’ll never know it . On the one hand. as well as from Carol White. Though he speaks of the value of pride. the film clearly endorses their oppositional stance toward the norm. his tone and demeanor evince a state of bitterness and despair that hardly reflect a prideful shoring-up of the self.” Graves’s speech has a curiously hollow quality. . the maternal body is rejected as that which was “never loved”— the loss itself is repudiated along with the lost (not-yet-an-)object.Of Housewives and Saints • 119 Poison does not. As Butler suggests in her work on gender melancholia. even outright murder) desecrates the memories of the dead. this is a loss that cannot be grieved. the overwhelming loss of loved ones and community members to AIDS — can be mourned. silencing. All three narratives in Poison revolve around or culminate in episodes of loss. extending it to other (non)objects whose loss cannot be mourned. But Crimp compels us to consider the costs of interrupting the grieving process for the sake of directing one’s energies toward . but of an ideal sense of self. we learn that Bolton was shot and killed by a prison guard while attempting escape. in his well-known essay “Mourning and Militancy. the characters in Poison endure a narcissistic wound (rejection by the society in which they live) that stands as a different sort of loss — the loss. precisely because it cannot be acknowledged as a loss. because the redoubling of violence on the bereaved (in expressions of hatred and fear. even before they lose the people and things they love. Broom not only loses his emotional tie to Bolton but the possibility of any relationship with him whatsoever: in the final scene. Abjection in Kristeva’s formulation founds a state of lack or want in the subject that rests on a foundational loss: loss of the maternal body. and Felicia is left to deal with the aftermath of her husband’s murder (and the memories of his abusive treatment). Felicia and Richie lose one another. attachment to which is proscribed by the paternal law. offer a model for contemporary queer political practice so much as it creates a narrative space in which loss — above all. Homophobic societal responses to AIDS add insult to injury by blaming the victims for their plight.27 We might recontextualize and historicize Kristeva’s maternal metaphor. not of a love object.” Douglas Crimp bears witness to the difficulties confronted by the gay community in collectively mourning its dead. for many it gives rise to anger that in turn fuels political activism. There is also a sense in which. Mourning becomes militancy. For instance. As Crimp observes. Encoded as abject. given the interdictions that bear on our attachment to lost loved ones in the first place. in my view. In her haste to normalize Carol’s display of emotion. Safe. “safe” spaces designed to keep out unnamable and unthinkable dangers. gestures toward the innumerable losses that cannot be mourned in a normative culture so doggedly bent on shoring up the boundaries of the ego and. of carrying out the vital political work of mourning. to recontain its force. Whatever the roots of Carol’s illness. lest the losses foreclosed by normative (and many counternormative) discourses return with an even more violent force. Claire (Kate McGregor-Stewart). she is clearly ill served by Wrenwood’s rhetoric of redemption and self-love. too. she appears in profile within her cabin at Wrenwood and suddenly starts to cry. A member of the healing center’s staff. They testify to the generative (if sometimes destructive) performative possibilities born of the condition of abjection — and to the psychic and corporeal wages of blind adherence to a normative ideal. approaches her.” without even pausing to query Carol about what she is actually feeling. which leaves no room for either mourning or militancy. it does not allow for any process of grieving — much less the kind of circumspection and analysis that yields political awareness.120 • Camera Obscura political struggle. suspending those mechanisms of (fore)closure through which tra- . on insulating the individual within hermetically sealed. Citing the conventions of an array of popular narrative forms. without offering an explanatory fiction that would locate the cause of Carol’s illness in some originary psychic wound. In one of the few scenes in which Carol seems actually to register a spontaneous emotional response to her situation. Haynes’s films insist on the necessity of registering psychic pain. his films lay the grounds for the incorporation or reintegration of the abject. reassuring her that “all these feelings you’re having now are just fine. by extension.28 Poison’s foregrounding of loss and suspension of narrative resolution can in part be understood as a refusal to preempt grief by repudiating the sense of loss provoked by both death and ego-wounding injury. Because it is based on the presumption of having already arrived at a state of wholeness. she actually interrupts one of the few genuine episodes of catharsis we ever see Carol experience. Bernard Frechtman (Paris: Olympia. 1964). Poison specifically draws on Genet’s The Miracle of the Rose. and Other Essays. 1993). as in ballais à genet. 7. to which this essay is indirectly indebted. 1990). Louis Althusser. While frustrating the viewer’s desire for the revelation of a direct moral message or political prescription. 178. Julia Kristeva. trans. This phrase is drawn from Kaja Silverman’s book of that title. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books. 1965). 3. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation) ( January –April 1969).” in Lenin and Philosophy. 8. 9. 89 – 90. 1982). Judith Butler. 5. 145. The word genet in French actually refers to a type of brush from which brooms were traditionally made. 1997). 65. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove. Kristeva. trans.1957). Judith Butler. Judith Butler. Our Lady of the Flowers. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge. trans. 1971). they present a forceful critique of any political program that promises to restore the deject to her or his “clean and proper self” via rituals of self-purification and the negation of grief. The Thief’s Journal. Blond. The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford. Powers of Horror.Of Housewives and Saints • 121 ditional genres restore sociosymbolic order to the diegesis. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press. Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge. . Bernard Frechtman (London: A. 104. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge. I am grateful to Barbara McBane for drawing my attention to the rich effects of this desynchronization and use of reverb. 1992). trans. Powers of Horror. 2. and The Thief’s Journal. 6. Genet. 10. trans. CA: Stanford University Press. 11. Notes 1. Leon S. 4. 1989). Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon. Kristeva. 1999).” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Butler. Jonathan Dollimore. 25. Powers of Horror. Bodies That Matter. 17:175 – 204. Gilles Deleuze. 69 – 80. Reprinted from Dollimore. trans. 20. James Strachey (London: Hogarth. 18. 1. Powers of Horror. ed. 129. 1971). clearly mark him as a socially subordinate figure. ed. tells a dirty joke to his captive audience about a “shapely blonde” who . Powers of Horror. 3. Haynes underlines this point in a telling scene in which Greg’s boss. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde. “Every Virus Tells a Story: The Meanings of HIV and AIDS. 1. The History of Sexuality. trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage. “ ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions. Kristeva. ed. This subplot within “Hero” interestingly anticipates the narrative that Haynes will develop in Far from Heaven. Michel Foucault. 14. 24. Erica Carter and Simon Watney (London: Serpent’s Tail. 23. 15. 31. Sigmund Freud. Bodies That Matter.” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader. 1978). with whom Greg and Carol have gone out for dinner. Butler. 1991). 46.” 16.122 • Camera Obscura 12. Kristeva. 13. 1955). 221– 36.” in Taking Liberties: AIDS and Cultural Politics. The image of his disembodied hand in this second point-of-view shot quite clearly echoes the opening scene of “Homo. Powers of Horror. “Post/Modern: On the Gay Sensibility. Judith Williamson. Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty. 21. vol. 8 19. 17. His youth. Kristeva. or the Pervert’s Revenge on Authenticity. and trans. It may be imprecise to speak of José here as a stand-in for the father. no doubt Felicia’s choice of this “improper object” for a lover enrages Fred Beacon all the more. Jean McNeil (New York: George Braziller. 22. as well as his class and racial status. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. he was able to change the batteries (ha-ha). Santa Cruz. Butler. no. Bodies That Matter. “Mourning and Militancy. Douglas Crimp. modern medicine continues to participate in what Foucault described as the “hystericization of women’s bodies. Laura Christian is a doctoral candidate in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California. 28. 236. and an irremediably pathologized zone. After an “eight-hour ordeal” in the operating room. the locus of women’s insatiable sexuality. 129. 26.” October. the doctor tells his patient that although he was unable to retrieve the vibrator. 51 (1989): 97 –107.” their “saturat[ion] with sexuality” (104). The Thief’s Journal. Genet. As the joke reveals in all-too-graphic terms. Courtesy Killer Films . 27. Here the vagina figures as the ultimate site of the abject — an engulfing abyss.Of Housewives and Saints • 123 visits the doctor seeking help when her vibrator becomes lodged deep inside her vagina.