Even before it’s been published, Jonathan A Allen’s book is up for an award: the Diagram prize for oddest title of the year. The signs are it will beat off stiff competition from William Furley and Victor Gysembergh’s Reading the Liver: Papyrological Texts on Ancient Greek Extispicy and Alan Stafford’s Too Naked for the Nazis, and so join an impressive roll call of winners that includes 1978’s Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice, 1996’s Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, and 2008’s invaluable The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais.
It’s hard not to wonder if some previous award winners and nominees – among them Mats and Enzo, authors of How to Poo on a Date (2013) – didn’t expressly title their books with one eye on the prize. But Allen, who is Canada research chair in queer theory and assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at Brandon University, is a serious scholar, someone who feels passionately that all too often, in literary criticism and contemporary life, the anus gets a bum rap. Is he right?
Allen cites popular putdowns – arsehole, pain in the arse, ass wipe – and laments that “the anus remains covered, hidden away, a site of humiliation and disgust”. Popularly it’s associated with homosexuality (it’s been described as “the very ground zero of gayness”), excrement, sterility, powerlessness. For Allen, though, it’s as much an idea as a body part: because “we all have an anus regardless of race, orientation, ability”, it shouldn’t refer to individuals who are uptight or repressed, but should rather recall the emancipatory goal of proclaiming our common humanity. Within the anus, he claims, there lies a “utopian potential for a theory of sexuality, gender, sex, desire and pleasure that is inherently inclusive”.
There follows a series of diverse (to the point of random) chapters: on Brokeback Mountain, Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, a chirpy pop novel entitled Frat Boy and Toppy – where Allen discusses the frequency with which colonised subjects were described as sodomites, and (particularly important to him) the need to decouple “anal desire and sexual orientation”. The most telling moments aren’t drawn from art, but testimonies from men who love “being bottoms”. Allen blurs the distinction between anus and arse, and has little to say about spots, piles, sciatica: his is a sunny side up account of the backside.
Given that Allen is not only eager to dismantle the phallocentrism that he thinks underwrites so much critical thinking, but also to celebrate the complexity and interpretive richness that attending to the anus permits, it’s a shame he discusses only a limited range of artefacts. The most far reaching and surprising conversations about the anus – its pleasures, capacities, mysteries – that I’ve heard have been triggered by online slide shows featuring x-rays of extraordinary items patients have managed to insert up themselves – everything from aubergines, deodorant bottles and mobile phones to pestles (the patient claimed to have “slipped while cooking Malaysian food”). I hoped, though didn’t expect, he would discuss “arsequake”, a term invented by Simon Reynolds to describe ferociously heavy, quasi-psychedelic bands such as the Butthole Surfers.
Allen thinks of the anus as a kind of philosophy and proposes something he calls both “anal theory” and a “methodology of the anus”. At times, perhaps thinking of EP Thompson’s notion of “history from below”, he equates the anus (“a proletarian body part”) with working-class, colonised and marginalised communities. He quotes the great, semi-forgotten French theorist Guy Hocquenghem – “the phallus draws on libidinal energy in the same way that money draws on labour” – before asking: “What would it mean, then, to renounce the phallus and to choose willingly the bottom?” It’s a good question, and not one that he answers. Perhaps perversely, it’s tempting to look at the etymology of the word fundamental and ask if a religious belief in capitalism – ie market fundamentalism – also has an anal dimension.
Like a nervous party host, Allen keeps promising fun. “What if we loosened up our critical inquiries, embraced the pleasure of the text, and removed ourselves from the paranoid, sphincter-tightening hermeneutics of suspicion?” “I hope,” he announces, “that my writing is playful, joyful, salubrious, slippery, (dis) comforting.” His sentences, full of references to homohysteria, psychic anal spasm and effeminophobic projects, sound like the tracklists to a John Peel show.
It’s no surprise that Allen refers to texts by Leo Bersani (author of “Is the Rectum a Grave?”) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (who asked “What about male desire for a woman’s anus? Is that anal desire?”). But I wish that he’d drawn from a broader “anal archive” (his words). Few academics are as insightful, expansive or as witty as feminist activist Tristan Taormino. And few writers as forceful as Toni Bentley, former ballerina and author of The Surrender (2004), a memoir recounting her devotion to anal sex.
• To order Reading from Behind for £16.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
