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This roundtable contains a lush range of writing. It came about through the initiative of Steven Botticelli, who, as a contributing editor of this journal, proposed two essays, one by him and the other by Jeffrey R. Guss, that would address anal sexuality in the history of psychoanalysis and as currently lived within gay men's sexual practice. The papers make an important contribution to psychoanalytic literature: They represent an experience-near quality of gay male anal eroticism, in part through the inclusion of clinical material, which has tended to be absent from both classical and contemporary psychoanalytic accounts of gay male anal sexuality. Because the resonance of these papers, and their interdisciplinary reference, called for nuanced commentary in two languages, psychoanalysis and culture theory, invitations were extended to Mark J. Blechner, Stephen Hartman, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, all of whom graciously accepted.
The result is a fascinating conversation. In “Thinking the Unthinkable: Anal Sex in Theory and Practice,” Botticelli draws on relational psychoanalysis to reconsider Guy Hocquenghem and Leo Bersani on anal sexuality. His clinical data then raise questions about not only mentalization and recognition but also the absence of serious psychoanalytic consideration of the anus as a zone of affect and relatedness/disconnection. In “The Danger of Desire: Anal Sex and the Homo/Masculine Subject,” Guss critically assesses, on one hand, the traditional psychoanalytic construal of anal eroticism as the basis for character formation and, on the other, the work of several protoqueer theorists who extol anal sex precisely for its potential to destabilize identity; subjectivity; and, in some of their grander claims, society itself.
There follows an intricate interchange between discussants and authors. Within a doubled perspective from both clinical psychoanalysis and social theory, Hartman discusses both. Blechner, with reference to psychoanalysis' take on