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Calvin Thomas. Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture, and Film. New York: Palgrave, 2008. xvi + 224 pp.
Calvin Thomas says on the first page that he wanted to call his book Adventures in Abjection-a title whose éclat is sadly lacking in the string of nouns concocted by his publisher. The official title faithfully itemizes the book's subject matter and focus, while the wished-forone suggests the spirit in which Thomas's research and writing were undertaken. Part of what makes this work so appealing is the evident relish with which its author embraces all things abject. If, according to Julia Kristeva, abjection depends on excluding filth, then the logic of Thomas's project consists in getting down and dirty with the contaminants that normative masculine subjectivities constitutively exclude.
In the psychoanalytic theory of abjection developed most notably by Bataille, Lacan, and Kristeva, the abject threatens identity by virtue of transgressing those boundaries that differentiate one body from another. Of the many corporeal substances that qualify as abject, Thomas is most interested in the anal and the scatological. He aspires to harness the equivocal energies of the abject for a critical project that contests normative masculinity from within-or, rather, from either side of its most vulnerable borders. The book thus contributes to queer theory's critique of sexual identity politics, albeit with a significant difference. Whereas psychoanalytically inflected queer theory attacks imaginary identities by emphasizing the ungovernable displacements of polymorphous desire,...