Seeing sodomy: Fanny Hill's blinding vision

One of the oddest and most erotic moments in Cleland's Fanny Hill occurs when Fanny is knocked "senseless" by a voyeuristic vision of two young men having anal intercourse. This sodomitical passage demonstrates a dominant culture's strong phobic attraction to a socially peripheral Other against which it defines itself. The passage also represents two types of transgression. On one level, it records an inversion of sex, gender, and class paradigms that structure bourgeois subjectivity. On another level, the passage also transgresses signification itself, exploding as well as inverting those paradigms, in a movement that recalls Barthes's distinction between the coded "studium" of the pornographic and the uncoded "punctum" of the erotic. This transgressive exemption from meaning might well be read, in a Barthesian sense, as true sexual enfranchisement in that, for Barthes, the liberation of sexuality requires the release of sexuality from meaning, and from transgression as meaning.