The (Bad) Taste Test: Radical Acts of Queer (Self) Pleasure in The Masturbatory Reader
Make it stand out
Pleasure can be a difficult word to define. On the surface it might mean enjoyment or satisfaction, and there are a lot of things available to take pleasure in. You could take pleasure in listening to a song; in how a certain outfit clings to your body; in reading (or writing) this. And in spite of what its name might imply, the Masturbatory Reader - a new anthology of queer writing published by Sticky Fingers - opens up this idea of pleasure, asking both its contributors and readers to define it as widely as possible. It’s a book that asks not just how pleasure feels - physically and emotionally - but also where we find it, and why we might seek it out. Whether through examinations of the body, the soul, or the act of writing itself, this Reader tries to take pleasure - as a word, an act, as something examined through a uniquely queer lens - and put it on the page. It’s no wonder that the first piece in the anthology - ‘Pleasure \ \/ / Seeker’ by D Mortimer - opens with the line “let’s offer up our hearts to each other, and by hearts I mean first drafts.”
It’s an exercise in searching - through the body, the archive - in trying to find pleasure as much as to experience. There’s something radical in this, in the refusal to define pleasure or desire through a normative lens; taking only the weird and the wonderful, and seeing how good it can make you feel.
Libraries and all that they hold, the act of reading as much as the act of writing, are all loaded with meaning in The Masturbatory Reader. In the basement of a gallery on Cork Street, a friend tells me that they think The British Library is one of the sexiest buildings in London; that bringing together researching and cruising creates a unique, magnetic kind of erotic possibility. In this anthology, reading is cruising, and cruising is reading. In a diaristic essay on plagiarism, Wes Knowler advocates for “the joyous, ravenous internalisation of [plagiarism].” There are references to Kathy Acker and Susan Sontag; small pieces of a history both literary and personal, finding pleasure in the self as reflected through and by others. It echoes the first of the anthology’s epigraphs, a few lines from Kate Zambreno’s Heroines: “my mode of reading is masturbatory.” Heroines, like this very anthology, is a kind of dialogue between a literary past and its speculative, still-formless present. It’s through the act of (self) pleasure that these things are given form, made possible.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
In ‘Deadname [Redacted]’ this possibility is literally written on top of the archive. Memory, naming, and the (re)creation of the self contend for space on the page with pink lines and symbols that feel like remnants of an alien language. The only decipherable words in this shocking pink layer are “I don’t exist.” But ‘[Redacted],’ and much of the work in the Reader, is a riposte to this. More than just a reminder of an existence that’s always been there, it’s a refusal to live on the margins; a desire not just to live, but to desire. ‘Redacted’ ends with the line “don’t bother drawing on your passport. You are more than the markings you leave.” Permanence made from the ephemeral; the feeling of desire made real, corporeal.
When I first started to thumb through The Reader, it was on my laptop. I was waiting for the physical copy to arrive. It felt right to finish with an object; To have the physical thing in my hands. Because the Reader itself grapples with the idea of the object: whether it’s book, archive, or body. The cover emblazoned in silver text that feels tactile, gratifying to touch: “We are writing to you so many surfaces apart - skin, keyboard, screen, mesh, master ink, paper, all stacked and layered to land in your hands.” In ‘Touching Desire,’ Alice Butler writes in an essay on fabric, department stores, and kleptomania, that “things become bodies, and bodies become things.” A fetish object, which, in the right hands, this book itself becomes. In ‘Fucking the Reader,’ Tallulah Griffith calls fetish “object worship, devotion to a bewitching thing,” before going on to describe the sensory pleasures of a physical book. I’m tempted to mirror these descriptions with my copy of the Reader. To thumb the spine, leave stains on the pages. To physically hold on to something like this is at once erotic and tender; can stop it from fading away.
‘The World and the Words Fuck Each Other’ by Nat Pyper is, among other things, a history of Fuzz Box, a Canadian queer zine published “during the height of the AIDS epidemic and ensuing culture wars.” This language, of epidemics, of culture wars, feels familiar, an echo through the years. Pyper writers that “the page is a shifting horizon. It resets as it renews.” There’s something cyclical in this, and Pyper is arguing for the cycle to be broken. And that desire is the way to do it, to remake and redefine: “I desire that which I do not yet know.”
“The Masturbatory Reader refuses to have the last word on desire; instead it undresses the term, strips it down and gives you the chance to touch it in any way you want.”
There’s a speculative mirror to Fuzz Box, and the histories that print makes available to us, ‘The Uses of the Pornographic’ by Donna Marcus Duke; where the author imagines themself at a chalet with Andrea Long Chu, Valerie Solanas, and Audre Lorde. They write that Andrea’s collection of porn mags are “mainly Forced Feminisation from the 80s and 90s. WARNING: If you read this magazine YOU TOO might become a SISSY!” They talk about a conversation with Andrea, about how the latter’s “addiction to Tumblr sissy porn informed her desire to transition.” I wonder how many desires The Masturbatory Reader will inform.
Duke describes a “Twink in pink” who wants to take them to a back room, an offer they refuse because they’re “still not sure what porno I want to be made of my body, how I want to be desired.” How to be desired, and how to desire, is a fluid state. A messy one. Sticky. The Masturbatory Reader refuses to have the last word on desire; instead it undresses the term, strips it down and gives you the chance to touch it in any way you want.
Words: Sam Moore
