The Sex Lives of Saints by Burrus Virginia;

Author:Burrus, Virginia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2004-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Witnessing Ambivalence

Culture, as a colonial space of intervention and agonism, as the trace of the displacement of symbol to sign, can be transformed by the unpredictable and partial desire of hybridity.

—Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture

Taking the question of historical agency seriously (“How . . . is authority displaced?”) entails interrogating more than the ambivalences of form; it also entails interrogating the messy imprecisions of history, the embattled negotiations and strategies of the disempowered, the militarization of masculinity, the elision of women from political and economic power, the decisive foreclosures of ethnic violence and so on. Ambivalence may well be a critical aspect of subversion, but it is not a sufficient agent of colonial failure.

—Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather

Erotically charged stagings of domination and submission, boot cleaning and foot washing, fascination with the unkempt body and its “natural” appetites, the abjection of the female, and the performance of the transgressive reversibility of class and sexually gendered positionalities are the stuff of Sulpicius’s Martinian writings, as we have seen. The parallelisms of ancient and modern imperialisms and their symptomatic (or, indeed, constitutive) eroticisms are by no means exact. The multiple resonances are, however, suggestive. Anne McClintock’s subtle analysis of the Victorian love affair between the barrister and “man of letters” Arthur Munby and the domestic servant Hannah Cullwick, for example, similarly allows a glimpse of how imperial colonialism and its discourses of race and nativity invade and inflect a transgressively cross-class and queerly gendered erotic relationship characterized by “a variety of fetish rituals: slave/master (S/M), bondage/discipline (B/D), hand, foot and boot fetishisms, washing rituals, infantilism (or babyism), cross-dressing, and a deep and mutual fascination with dirt.”40 The categories of the “fetish” as well as the “sadomasochistic,” although distinctly modern, are nonetheless usefully invoked here again for interpreting (by way of analogy, if not also of genealogy) a late ancient theater of desire that likewise involves “the displacement of a host of social contradictions onto impassioned objects” while simultaneously revealing “that social order is unnatural, scripted and invented.”41 If such (interpretive) enactments do not themselves bring about “colonial failure” (then or now), they do nonetheless (re)perform “the unpredictable and partial desire of hybridity,” which always troubles the totalizing desire of empire and sometimes also effects local transformations.

Rereading Sulpicius as a “postcolonial” figure, I do not intend to inscribe a neatly linear (and dangerously optimistic) narrative of historical supersession of colonialism—though the term may indeed point toward a “late” and distinctly chaotic moment in the unfolding drama of succeeding ancient Mediterranean empires. The primary usefulness of the label lies in demarcating a complex and ambiguous sociocultural terrain, the structuring of which defies the tidy binary of “colonizer” and “colonized,” “Roman authority” and those subjugated by it.42 In such a context, to mark the “hybridity” of all subjects of desire is not to blunt the edge of theoretical precision or political critique but rather to attempt to accommodate the complex and unstable differentiation of positionalities produced and negotiated “in a colonial space of intervention and agonism.

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