Ambivalent Anality: Revisiting the Queer Ecologic of “the Jackass Moment”

The cultural roots of an aggrieved white masculinity—white man as victim—run deep in the popular imaginary. Media representation in particular has a long legacy of portraying white male bodies as injured or wounded, dating back to the bloody “hard bodies” of Reagan-era action films. This essay returns to another one of these earlier cultural moments, examining the vulgar physical comedy of the Jackass media franchise as a window into masculine formations in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century. Specifically, I examine Jackass’s “stupid” white masculinity, which combines bloody self-injury with a scatological logic of bodily incoherence displayed by the show’s pissing, shitting, and puking white stuntmen. Viewed retrospectively—against the contemporary horrors of Charlottesville, El Paso, and other places memorialized by Trumpian eruptions of murderous white masculinity—the dumb white dudes of Jackass appear almost a blip in the rearview mirror, now superseded by a return to something far more sinister. Yet Jackass in its own time expressed a hegemonic white masculinity specific to neoliberal and neoconservative forces of the Clinton and Bush years, one organized ambivalently around an excessive anality. This ambivalent anality both parodied national and gendered fantasies of “hardness” at the same time that it drew on dynamics of racial and queer mimesis to reinscribe hegemonic (white/straight) masculinity. However, the more recent development of a queer ecological perspective allows us to revisit the show’s scatology, also seeing in it what Nicole Seymour has described as an ethical “counter-phobia” which refuses the nature/culture binary that informs Western culture’s deeply embedded erotophobia and somatophobia. This essay takes up the ambivalent anality of Jackass, tracing the ways it has served as precursor to present-day logics of white male grievance, even as its spectacular scatology offers an undertheorized challenge to the cultural revulsion for embodiment and nature that informs all social (gendered, racial, sexual) logics of domination.