i want us to get to a place where we understand the articulation of slurs like "battyman" and "fish" as highly pleasurable.

there are all kinds of pleasures embedded in the performance of homophobia. antagonism is incredibly erotic.

this is not me saying "aha!" all these people are secretly queer.

rather, im trying to say something about the pleasures that that power induces, the power of domination, the pleasure of domination, the pleasurable power of violent intimacy w/ a degraded other. i'll give an eg.

i like kei miller's reading of buju banton's "boom bye bye" and, in my undergrad thesis titled "small states of fantasy," i tried to extend his reading.

here's a synopsis of kei's argument:

actually, here it is. again, this isn'y an "aha! we caught buju" moment.

he's saying something about how the power of homophobia often requires intimacy within the space of the imagination.

before you can be disgusted with the fantasy, you first have to get close to it.

where i depart from kei is in his assertion that the erotic fantasy is somehow disrupted by the uzi and the matic.

where he sees an *end* to the fantasy, i see its climax, its violent climax.

and if we know anything about dancehall, we know that violence and pleasure are hardly ever oppositional.

all kinds of consensual and non-consensual gendered and sexual domination are happening all the time and the gun is one of the signifiers of both violence and pleasure.

the gun functions in this way today and has for decades.

artists declare the power of their guns to kill other men which is, in some ways, a penis game. in one moment, men are singing about who has the bigger rifle, in another, they are commanding women to suck the rifle.

in both cases, it's about pleasure *and* domination, the pleasure *in* domination.

so not saying buju is in the closet.

im saying that the violence against queer jamaican people is entangled with a more general heteromasculine desire for the pleasure of domination.

see below.

in fact, that song itself often induces pleasure in queer men as well because, again, domination and pleasure are not always separate/distinct in dancehall.

another example i examine in my thesis is the graffiti in the men's bathrooms at the university of west indies.

i'm getting bored so lemme wrap this up lol. but what was interesting to me was that in the middle of this queer sexual counterpublic, there are folks trying to write homophobic slurs all over images of penises which i read, in part, again, as an attempt at intimate domination.

maybe tomorrow, i'll come back and extend this some more, but, of course, it's harder to read the slurs and admonitions as coming from someone who identifies as straight since it is a public space that allows for anonymity. i'll talk some more about that tomorrow if i remember to