Vibrant Matter

Jane Austen
and the Masturbating
Girl

so it seems that this page proposes only blue squares

I'll take it

Isn't this website is called Hotglue,
after all?

"And in the context of hierarchically oppressive relations between genders and between sexualities, masturbation can seem to offer - not least as an analogy to writing - a reservoir of potentially utopian metaphors and energies for independence, self-possession, and a rapture that may owe relatively little to political or inter-personal abjection."

"The Muse of Masturbation,"

One "sexual identity" that did exist as such in Austen's time, already bringing a specific genital practice into dense compaction with issues of consciousness, truth, pedagogy, and confession, was that of the onanist. Among the sexual dimensions overridden within the past century by the world-historical homo/hetero cleavage is the one that discriminates, in the first place, the autoerotic and the alloerotic. Its history has been illu- minated by recent researches of a number of scholars." According to their accounts, the European phobia over masturbation came early in the "sexualizing" process described by Foucault, beginning around 1700 with publication of Onania, and spreading virulently after the 1750s.

Far from there persisting a minority identity of "the masturbator" today, of course, autoeroticism per se in the twentieth century has been conclusively subsumed under that normalizing developmental model, dif- ferently but perhaps equally demeaning, according to which it represents a relatively innocuous way station on the road to a "full," that is, alloerotic, adult genitality defined almost exclusively by gender of object choice.

The identity of the masturbator was only one of the sexual identities subsumed, erased, or overridden in this triumph of the heterosexist homo/hetero calculus.

(Here, of course, I'm inviting a meditation on the history of the term self-abuse, which referred to masturbation from the eighteenth century until very recently-when it's come, perhaps by analogy to child-abuse, to refer to battering or mutilation of oneself. Where that older sense of abuse has re- surfaced, on the other hand, is in the also very recent coinage, substance abuse.)

...the great and estranging force of the homo- erotic longing magnetized in it by that radiant and inattentive presence- the female figure of the love that keeps forgetting its name.