Jouissance at the Margins Revisiting Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a
        Grave?” Through the Lens of Swallowed Felicia Cosey Carter Smith’s film Swallowed offers an
        interesting paradox. Smith, an openly gay filmmaker with an extensive resume in the horror
        genre, crafted a story that is unapologetically queer. Yet, Swallowed’s central message
        reinforces the following heteronormative ideology in artistic representation: when a
        straight man engages in sexual acts with a gay man, he must either abandon his straight
        identity or face death. Swallowed suggests that straight masculinity is destroyed when
        exposed to the realm of gay-straight intimacy. Once Dom, the straight character, loses his
        straight identity, the narrative discards him. His identity as a straight man defines his
        role in the film. Without this identity, Dom loses not only his power but also his purpose.
        Swallowed is about two friends’—Dom and Ben—last night together. Ben, who is gay, is leaving
        their small town in Maine to become a gay porn star in Los Angeles. To help finance Ben’s
        trip, Dom tries to secure quick cash. He transports drugs, as a drug mule, across the
        US/Canada border. When a gaybasher punches Dom in the stomach, he ruptures one of the drug
        baggies, which contain bug larvae, not drugs. The larvae hatch inside Dom and release a
        venom that causes intoxication, paralysis, and sexual euphoria. The larvae must be removed
        from Dom before he dies. He asks Ben to remove them, meaning Ben essentially must fist him.
        Yet, after removing the last larvae, Dom still dies. This narrative inspired my “queer
        reuse” (Ahmed 2019, 198) of Leo Bersani’s 1987 essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?”1 I sought to
        explore why Swallowed, like many other stories, clings to the notion that a straight man who
        engages in gay sex cannot remain straight or even survive. Bersani’s essay provides a
        curious counterpoint because it advocates the notion that anal sex is a destabilizing force
        that shatters illusions of power and identity. Bersani views gay male anal sex, often seen
        as feminizing, as a form of jouissance—an overwhelming pleasure that disrupts the notions of
        a unified self (Bersani 2010, 30). Jouissance, as Jacques Lacan theorizes, exists beyond
        language in the pre-symbolic Real. Jouissance is not simply pleasure, but an intense form of
        pleasure that is experienced as suffering or pain. Lacan states that jouissance “implies the
        acceptance of death” (Lacan and Miller 2008, 189). Bersani embraces this surrender as a path
        to liberation. Giving up power disrupts the ideological structures that define traditional
        masculinity. Swallowed briefly acknowledges this potential in its climax, where Dom,
        overcome by the larvae’s venom, writhes on the cabin floor in a euphoric, agonizing state.
        His body contorts in torment, caught between the extremes of pain and pleasure. But where
        Bersani identifies jouissance as liberatory—a way to abandon the unified self and escape
        rigid structures of identity—Swallowed resists this idea. The film portrays straight
        masculinity as too fragile to endure such a loss of control. Dom’s submission reinforces the
        idea that surrender leads to annihilation. Yet, the film also complicates this notion by
        shifting power to Ben after Dom’s death. In the final act, Ben takes on the active role
        commonly associated with the “final girl” trope in horror films. He exacts revenge against
        drug kingpin Rich by subjecting him to a painful, yet pleasurable death—as a victim of larva
        venom—at the bottom of an outhouse. Ben’s assumption of power, while decisive, remains
        feminized, echoing the horror genre’s tradition of the final girl—empowered yet shaped by
        vulnerability and trauma. Bersani’s essay, which was originally written to address
        right-wing conservatives who blamed the AIDS crises on gay men and their alleged
        promiscuity, imagines the loss of control as a means for rejecting the masculine/feminine
        binary. Swallowed, however, clings to the cultural anxiety that equates the loss of
        masculine identity with death. My video essay answers the call for “queer reuse” by
        investigating cultural resistance to challenging heteronormative ideology and by exploring
        the ways Swallowed embodies the tension between queer liberation and the persistent grip of
        heteronormative ideology. By focusing on the film’s depiction of gay-straight intimacy and
        its refusal to embrace the liberatory potential of jouissance, my video essay engages with
        the tension between queerness and horror. It explores how horror, as a genre, can both
        expose and reinforce cultural anxieties about masculinity and queerness. In this way, my
        video essay critiques Swallowed for its inability to confront heteronormative ideology,
        while also acknowledging its ability to imagine new possibilities for queer horror
        storytelling. Click *** to view the video essay. __________________ Felicia Cosey is an
        assistant professor of film and media studies at Western Washington University. Her research
        and teaching focus on psychoanalytic theory, race and representation, and gender and
        sexuality in media. Her work, published in journals such as Popular Culture Review and the
        International Journal of Žižek Studies, examines Black representation in popular film and
        depictions of post-apocalyptic narratives in animated cinema. Felicia is passionate about
        fostering critical engagement with media through courses on race, gender, sexuality, and
        psychoanalytic theory. References Ahmed, Sara. 2019. What’s the Use?: On the Uses of Use.
        Durham: Duke University Press. Bersani, Leo. 2010. Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays.
        Chicago, Ill. London: The University of Chicago Press. Lacan, Jacques, and Bruce Fink. 2004.
        Ecrits: A Selection. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, Jacques, and Jacques-Alain
        Miller. 2008. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960 : The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book
        VII. Routledge Classics. London: Routledge London. Smith, Carter, dir. 2022. Swallowed.
        Momentum Pictures. _________________ - 2024 - MONSTRUM is Published in Montréal, Québec by
        the Montréal Monstrum Society. Copyright and intellectual property rights are held by the
        individual author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
        International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 1. Sara Ahmed’s phrase
        “queer use as reuse” informs the conceptual framework of Monstrum’s special issue. For my
        project, I take up this idea by reusing Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” as the foundation
        for my theoretical investigation.

## Références

Ahmed, Sara. 2019. *What’s the
                Use?: On the Uses of Use*. Durham: Duke University Press.

Leo. 2010. *Is the Rectum a Grave? And
                Other Essays*. Chicago, Ill. London: The University of Chicago Press.

Lacan, Jacques, and Bruce Fink. 2004. *Ecrits: A
                Selection*. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Lacan, Jacques, and Jacques-Alain Miller. 2008.
                *The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960****: The Seminar of
                Jacques Lacan, Book VII*. Routledge Classics. London: Routledge London.

Smith, Carter, dir. 2022. *Swallowed*.
                Momentum Pictures.