“It is a contradictory feature of bourgeois ideology that effort gets causally associated with power in a society premised precisely on the opposite: power derives from the exploitation and appropriation of others’ activeness. It’s remarkable how quickly this supposed link between power and effort is forgotten where blowjobs are concerned.” - Bini Adamczak
“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point however is to change it.” - Karl Marx
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It is one of the oldest traditions of queer/feminist movements to remake a vocabulary, whether to form new terms for old things, or to speak new things into being, or to name something that has long gone unspoken. It is in this spirit that Bini Adamczak opens her essay ‘Come on’;
I wish to propose to you a new term, one that has been missing for a long time: “circlusion,” or, if you prefer a purer latinate, “circumclusion.” It denotes the antonym of penetration. It refers to the same physical process, but from the opposite perspective. Penetration means pushing something––a shaft or a nipple––into something else––a ring or a tube. Circlusion means pushing something––a ring or a tube––onto something else––a nipple or a shaft. The ring and the tube are rendered active. That’s all there is to it.
What Adamczak attempts to achieve can be read as what her co-translator, Sophie Lewis, calls a kind of ‘theorizing from the bottom’, that is, naming what sex is to those of us who are “getting screwed”. Part of the value of the term is that it performs multiple functions at once. It undoes a formula of equation between penetration and power; simultaneously, it offers a way to articulate the activity of the vagina, anus, and other orifices precisely as activity, and at the same time suggests a possible re-encoding of the role of cocks, dildos, and fists, for example, as passive. As these symbolic relations between masculine activity and feminine passivity are so central to the gendered structures of our social world, Adamczak’s renaming rhetorically suggests significant ruptures, opportunities for social transformation.
Rhetoric is, however, unfortunately slippery. That circlusion is not a new activity, but rather, a new way of interpreting already existing activities, suggests that we are also interpreting already existing violences, rather than changing them. Circlusion, Adamczak writes, “denotes the antonym of penetration.” To expose this often unspoken area of sexuality is only step in transforming how we approach sex. My worry is similar to Adamczak’s own; by structuring circlusion as antonymic to penetration, does she not risk cloaking the equation between penetration and power in a veneer of other sexual acts, rather than undoing it? If circlusion is the opposite of penetration, is it not more obvious to posit circlusion as nonviolent, versus the violence of the penetrative Male? Might not circlusion name a very womanly mysticism, an organic philosophy of care rooted in the integrity of the Female Body, from which all exterior threats must be carefully policed and bordered?
Engels says, “Motion is itself a contradiction.” Lenin defined the law of the unity of opposites as “the recognition (discovery) of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature (including mind and society)”. Are these ideas correct? Yes they are. The interdependence of the contradictory aspects present in all things and the struggle between these aspects determine the life of all things and push their development forward. There is nothing that does not contain contradictions; without contradiction nothing would exist.
- Mao, On Contradiction
Circlusion, as its opposite, implies penetration; penetration implies circlusion. At one point Adamczak says “Let’s say: rotating a bolt into a nut is penetration; and rotating the nut onto the bolt, circlusion... Obviously, both processes are happening at the same time.” There is a unity of opposites here; that one is naturalised and the other erased can disguise the fundamental pleasures and violences at the core of each - violences themselves at the core of the social processes driving capitalist society.
One of these processes that has preoccupied me for a while now, is that by which capital and its mechanisms of extraction and appropriation take root in a society previously operating by different economic forms. Traditionally, this process is labelled by Marxists as ‘capital penetration’, with ‘penetration’ indicating both the activity of capital’s entry and entrenchment in the society’s economic life and also the violence necessary for this economic transformation. My preoccupation is with this identification, the equation Adamczack and many queer/feminists have identified between penetration and power. In practice, this process is slow, contradictory, a history by which relations of dependency and authority are forged between a variety of actors that rarely recognise their nature as a confrontation between coloniser and colonised until the encroachment of capital is already well underway. I worry that in this context, a normative identification between penetration and power - in this case, the power of imperialist capital - might invisibilise many of the means by which imperial hegemony asserts itself, the subtle extensions of economic influence and dependency, rather than the accompanying acts by which the social fabric of the indigenous society is openly violated; that the role of local bourgeois and reactionary classes may be obscured by an emphasis on the pre-existing organic unity of the social body against the external enemy; that anti-imperialism might become bound to such a normative conception of sexual power, such that dissident corporealities find themselves stigmatised as imperialist agents (this is not a hypothetical risk).[1]
As some among the second wave of gay liberation in the 60s and 70s understood, capital is constantly pursuing new terrains of pleasure and desire through our bodies.[2] Capital circludes in our socialities, encircling and absorbing whatever it encounters, and in so doing, remakes them in ways that suit its purposes. This process is haphazard and experimental rather than rigid and omnipotent, and in so doing, capital may - and frequently does - stumble into forms, capacities, pleasures, that may become its undoing. Capital circludes, but so do the popular classes. Bolt into nut, nut onto bolt, we are locked into the class war that will one day, finally, burst its joints.
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[1] The phrase ‘dissident corporealities’ comes from the documentary ‘Our Bodies Are Your Battlefields’ (2021), about trans/travesti feminist organisers in Argentina. A group of travesti/trans women are sat around, talking about their sex lives together, and one young woman says her taste is “in dissident corporealities, not men.” The people the documentary depicts deserve a much better documentary than this one, but it’s a great line.
[2] The phrasing of this sentence, and the wider paragraph, owes much to Mario Mieli - the framing of gay liberation as having ‘first’ and ‘second’ waves, explicitly, and the wider reading of capitalism, implicitly. I may say more about this another time.
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