how do i know you see me?

between our wants, our need returns to the first time we slept together. With my feet thrown over my head I accidentally pulled a glass of wine and a potted plant down onto my chest, covering both of us with red wine and soil. In this split-second I believed my chest to have burst open, a violent rupture that thrust us into the present.

I frequently wonder what might have happened if we’d have stuck around in the mess, or if we’d carried on fucking through the debris, like they would in the movies. I return over and over to this moment, partly because it makes an excellent story - it’s hot and ridiculous - but also because it crystallised to me something about the nature of sex and the interrelation between intimacy and alienation within. Dominic Johnson defines intimacy as a situation that ‘aims (to varying extents) at pleasure, but necessarily involves less pleasurable eventualities’.² Sex conjures a fragile kind of intimacy; one in which the participants are only ever a breath away from humiliation, violence or dislocation; negative affects which nonetheless are ripe with potential, as discussed by Jennifer Doyle in Sex Objects.

Coining the term ‘Bad Sex’, Doyle stages an intervention in contemporary discourses that allow for only two kinds of sex: good/consensual/ fulfilling, or bad/assaultive/damaging.³ She adds that experiences of boring, humiliating or painful sex may be both consensual and formative, and that ‘states like self-abandonment, submission, objectification - the experience of being made the object of someone else’s pleasure - are not only exciting and fun, but important, even necessary, to experiences of sexual pleasure.’ (100) The moment when my chest exploded at first felt violent, but ultimately that violence was an illusion, an objectification that was then willingly woven back into the fabric of my desire.

My chest may not have actually burst open, but the moment did mark a brutal reemergence of selfhood. Leo Bersani describes a vision of the sexual encounter as ‘moving between a hyperbolic sense of self and a loss of all consciousness of self’.⁴ Interrupted by falling debris, the two of us were wrenched from one state to the other. In that moment I saw myself and simultaneously felt the inevitability that your projection of me is different from my own. In that moment, and perhaps in all sexual encounters, I ask:

How do I know you see me?

I don’t.

Though the temporary dissolution of the self is a desirable and perhaps inevitable part of sexual encounters, ‘the possibility of taking pleasure from being relieved of personhood is deeply contingent and political’ (100). For those who are subject to such dynamics outside the bedroom on account of their gender or race, the stakes of having their selfhood abandoned are high. As a feminine nonbinary person, once the fear of homophobic/transphobic violence has subsided, I find myself returning to the question:

How do I know you don’t think you’re fucking a man?

Again, I can’t.

Losing oneself is the joy, but in a society where it is impossible to ‘pass’ as nonbinary, being lost ‘in the rub’ risks being lost altogether:

Gender exists, if it is to exist at all, in the structural generosity of strangers. [...] The truth is, you are not the central transit hub for meaning about yourself, and you probably don’t even have a right to be. You do not get to consent to yourself, even if you might deserve the chance.⁵

Facing the possibility that we may never truly meet, between our wants, our need attempts to render in poetry that which goes unsaid, expanding a split-second in time into a sustained one-to-one encounter. It charts the unfiltered yet choreographed meanderings of a person attempting to understand how they want to be seen, to be desired. The viewer is transported into the place of my lover, who holds the camera, but our eyes cannot meet. This failure, this gap, threatens to leave us ‘feeling more alone that ever’,⁶ an experience which Tavia Nyong’o would describe as extimate: ‘a scene palpitating with the felt absence of connection’.⁷

Conversely, Laura Marks suggests that some video works can solicit
a haptic experience, drawing the viewer into feeling they can touch what they see, creating a fluctuating motion towards and away from an artwork, which she designates as erotic: ‘What is the erotic? The ability to oscillate between near and far... to have your sense of self, your self-control, taken away and restored—and to do the same for another person.’⁸

In sex, I don’t only want to experience pleasure, I want to see and be seen. But if it is the personal travel between subject and object that defines the erotic, this desire to be seen must be abandoned, if only for a moment. Like the unexpected joke told during sex, the moment when debris fell forced the two of us to observe our transition from self-annihilation to selfhood. In that moment we couldn’t pretend the gap between ourselves didn’t exist. And yet, for a split-second, perhaps we were brought closer to experiencing those irreconcilable selves at the same time. /

______________
¹ Wark, McKenzie, Reverse Cowgirl (South Pasedena: Semiotext(e), 2020) p. 141.

² Dominic Johnson, ‘Dominic Johnson’, in One To One Performance: A Study Room Guide on Works Devised for an ‘Audience of One’ (London: Live Art Development Agency, 2006) p. 38.

³ Jennifer Doyle, Jennifer, Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) p. 99.

⁴ Jennifer Doyle, p. 99.

⁵ Andrea Long Chu, Females (London ; New York: Verso, 2019) p. 38.

⁶ Jennifer Doyle, Hold It against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (London: Duke University Press, 2013) p. 6.

⁷ Tavia Nyong’o, ‘Brown Punk: Kalup Linzy’s Musical Anticipations’, TDR: Theatre and Drama Review, 54.3 (2010) p. 73.

⁸ Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) p. xvi.

But in the rub, the selves disappear anyway. They don’t exist. For a moment it all merges into a particular and fleeting splash into time of a universal animal.¹ Mckenzie Wark