Between becoming and belonging : on the representation of queerly abject white male bodies

Abstract

In B. LaBruce ’s 2008 cult magnum opus and genre blender, Otto, or Up with dead people and its ballsy spiritual sequel, LAZombie ( the director seeks to reconc eptualise traditional filmic ways of representing desire. The two films, filled with schlocky exclusionary politics, social marginalisation, and tropes of desiring zombies, posit belonging as the interplay between the social mechanics of exclusion and the lived experience of corporeal, desiring bodies, thus politicising sexual economy as G. Deleuze and F. Guattari notably do in Anti Oedipus ( By portraying undead characters who desire intimacy and relationality, the film tasks the spectator with recog nising relational desire in these abject cinematic bodies in essence, to reconsider the intimate humanity of zombies what amounts to, in many texts on the abject, arriving at a “new comprehension of humanness/humanity” ( Nel, 2012b:547). To state it differently, the spectator is tasked with recognising the abject as immanent to desire, as immanen t desire. LaBruce explores themes of male belonging through becoming that is, being that is not static, fixed or filial but always in the process of change and adaptation/adoption in scenes that are explicitly sexual in nature and, as such, his work forms part of a category of post millennial texts that reflect changing social norms and values regarding desire, sexual praxis, and love. LaBruce’s provocation lies in the simultaneous arousal and repulsion of the viewer in essence, how they eschew palat ability by amalgamating cinematic contours of desire and the abject in scenes that are at the same time both highly sexual and also impressionably abject.