Border patrols Book

In Beyond Sexuality (2002), Tim Dean "attempts to develop the category of the real in light of queer theory" (19) in order to to question the "intransigent, systemic assumption that sex confers the principal guarantee of subjective truth" and detach sex and desire from personhood (21).

According to Dean's reading of Lacan, desire is insatiable, distinct from biology (47). He theorizes the real as what is at the limits of the symbolic order (50), as something that "can be inferred from trauma" (51), and helping to "reveal how the outside'an alien alterity'inhabits the subject's most intimate inwardness" (53). Thus, the term "extimacy," and Dean's understanding that "The kind of protection that privacy entails has to do with personal intimacy than with one's relations to social institutions . . . since, from a psychoanalytic point of view, interpersonal intimacy is predicated on impersonal, public relations, rather than the reverse" (54).

Chapter Four explores why safe sex education in regards to AIDS is often a failure, arguing that we should view AIDS through the lens of psychoanalysis instead of individual risk (136). This affords us: 1) a move away from binary blaming (blaming those who have unsafe sex for harming the gay community (141); 2) understanding that because of "positive images" of people with AIDS, seropositive gays have developed "a certain glamour" (146); 3) understanding that "AIDS has become a new cultural identity" (147); 4) "the elimination of uncertainty'and hence anxiety'that seroconversion brings may be understood psychoanalytically as reducing the traumatic threat of the real, since the prospect of death narrows the real to a single, identifiable point on the horizon" (152). Dean proposes that one solution to sex ed and AIDS is, rather than advocating monogamy or promiscuity, that we understand sexual activity as a range of instances, as something impersonal, something related to body parts that might not even be the genitals (171-172).

Chapter FIve argues that desire is "in" language, but it is not linguistic, and argues against rhetorical understandings of desire, such as Butlers. Dean theorizes "bodies that mutter" that produce "signs that are not immediately legible even as something requiring reading," something that "obliquely indicate desire in the form of a failure in the Other's discourse" (202).

In Chapter Six, Dean argues for anti-normative politics, arguing that "the queer is not opposed to the normal, but fissures it from within" (245). Thus, he argues in his conclusion that we should move beyond "sexuality," "gentility," and "heterosexuality as paradigm and norm," and beyond identity politics (272). Sexuality should be understood as impersonal, attached to objects, not persons or gender.