Kaleidoscopic Codes: Queer Identity Construction in Pink Narcissus

Surrounded by shimmering decor, a young man lays in bed before a gaudy mirror. He inspects his striking reflection with amorous eyes, his fulls lips resting in eternal pout. Suddenly, we see him transferred to a soft-focus field; in a masturbation sequence, he clutches sprouting ferns until a ghostly butterfly signals completion. We then return to his bedroom, his face still locked in reflective stare. This man is the nameless protagonist of James Bidgood’s 1971 erotic art film Pink Narcissus. The film follows his invention of lush fantasy worlds, each one affirming his selfhood as a white cis queer hustler; barely leaving his bedroom, he asserts a bewitchingly contained identity. However, his truly masturbatory containment is threatened by outside turmoil lurking just beyond his window.

In the following, I pose a theoretical scaffold for Pink Narcissus before analyzing the protagonist’s fantastic selfhood. I first discuss Judith Butler’s notions of pliable identity regarding normative and non-normative subject formation; I then explore camp in terms of parodic code-making to affirm queer subjecthood; I lastly detail three aspects of Pink Narcissus, namely the protagonist’s empowerment through campy construction, the film’s outside world parodying such empowerment with an abject form of the same camp, and the hustler trope as a further code for queer subjecthood. The curated self both contests and is contested, outlining ambivalence in the political and aesthetic project of maneuvering queer identity: for a final note, I consider this ambivalence relative to the protagonist’s white masculinity and the rise of a contemporary homonormative subject.

In “Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions,” Judith Butler posits a codified notion of subjecthood. Rather than certain traits naturally following certain bodies, Butler outlines the body as “a surface and the scene of cultural inscription” (104). For instance, a masculine cis male is not naturally masculine but repeats the cultural codes of cis masculinity. In other words, we have culturally agreed on manners that signify masculinity and must be constantly processed for subjects to be read as masculine. However, normative subjects are naturalized within dominant society. If normative subjects are assumed to display innate selfhoods apart from culture, they are seen as naturally upholding dominant values. Dominant society then insists its own innateness from the supposed innateness of normative subjects.

Non-normative subjects deviate from dominant prescriptions and thus expose the falsehood of normative innateness. Butler illustrates this principle with a discussion of drag performance relative to sex and gender precepts:

In the place of the law of heterosexual coherence, we see sex and

gender denaturalized by means of performance which avows their

distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated

unity. The notion of gender parody defended here does not assume that

there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the

parody is of the very notion of an original. (112)

If subjects already perform identities by repeating codes, drag simply makes such performance explicit. A cis male body is displaced from feminine meaning until animated by femininity through drag. Such animation undermines society’s “notion of an original,” that is, feminine women and masculine men within a heterosexual order. Gendered traits are rather detachments which any body can absorb to be read accordingly.

As one of drag’s governing precepts, camp clarifies Butler’s parodic notions. Philip Gefter describes camp as a queer “secret language or code” marked by “self-deprecating wit, ironic interpretation, an ever-present subtext of eroticism, and an acutely cultivated style, in all of its sublime artifices” (62). Gefter moreover quotes Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” underlining that “what is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is the most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine” (62). Androgyny is maintained as the bodily syntax by which camp asserts its productive artifice. Where dominant society renders queer bodies illegible, such alternative culture allows self-made legibility within its own system. By indulging its constructed detachment, camp again avows mobile identities to erode supposedly original orders.

The protagonist of Pink Narcissus crafts exquisitely campy fantasies to encode his queer selfhood. By repeating this queerness through encircling accommodations, he amplifies camp as personal legibility beyond dominant modes: if his aberrant body is necessarily outside of, he truly fortifies an alternative inside. Most scenes boast the aesthetic of pastel hues, sweeping classical music and opulent props. In one scene, the protagonist stages a bullfighter match against a motorcycle leather daddy; in another, he plays a Roman ruler surrounded by erotic statues; in a third, he reclines in the aforementioned field while tracing a titillating grass blade along his body. Such self-absorption is only fitting since the title rifts on narcissism’s Greek namesake. The protagonist may be endlessly self-indulgent, but he does possess power: scenes like the Roman vignette allow an unabashed agency in historical intervention. If identity is produced by codes animating bodies, the Roman scene animates the protagonist's queerness with the code of Roman power.

No matter the security of his campy feedback loop, the protagonist is menaced by the unsettling outside city. In one scene, a grating noisescape escorts bedraggled figures as they stagger in a stormy dystopia: a man wraps himself wildly in pizza dough, a woman flings religious pamphlets, a corpse-like body lurches forward. The scene is further populated with naked men, masturbating furiously or plodding in zombie-like stride past vendors selling phallic merchandise. Displaying the same camp through a different tone, these scenes heighten the film’s theatricality to abject-funhouse peaks. The protagonist may parody dominant culture with his lavish queerness, but the city turns his own terms against him; this second parody is most evident in the city’s sexual chaos, grotesquely inverting the protagonist’s idyllic eroticism.

Camp rests in self-aware artifice, intentionally contesting dominant modes; returning to Butler, drag performers are present in identity as a productive response. The protagonist is productive up to a point, but his self-absorption ultimately thwarts such awareness. By relying on too caged a reality to truly interrogate social positioning, he wallows in his own sheltered complacency. Such insularity begets new naturalization, dogmatically affirming “truth” like the default nature of normative subjects. As with the city’s oppositional torrent, dominant culture still violently oppresses queerness; the protagonist may attempt to surpass the fray, but his curated selfhood is precarious.

Finally, the film’s hustler trope typifies camp’s “ever-present eroticism” through further codification. Queer conduct, especially in Bidgood’s pre-marriage equality era, is cast as hypersexual. Hustlers are also seen as hypersexual and outside of relationship norms; therefore, the queer hustler comes to stand for queerness itself. Both camp and sex work thus mobilize queer subjects towards a language of legibility. Moreover, sex work becomes a viable resort for people pushed from a prejudiced workforce. This economic reality underscores queer hustlers as distant from dominant culture, furthering the metrics by which sex work stands for queer marginality. In Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, Melissa Gira Grant relays the reduction of sex workers to criminalized actions: “In most cases, it’s not necessary for police to observe a sex act to make an arrest. (. . .) What is illegal in many jurisdictions is the ‘communication for the purposes of . . . solicitation’ or even, ‘loitering with intent to solicit” (9). Butler stresses the role of speech and action in subject production, claiming that “you will never receive me apart from the grammar that establishes my availability to you” (100). By producing sex work through speech and loitering over actual sex acts, hustlers are easier to be profiled in public spaces: “People who are profiled by cops as sex workers include, in disproportionate numbers, trans women, women of color, and queer and gender nonconforming youth. This isn’t about policing sex. It’s about profiling and policing people whose sexuality and gender are considered suspect” (Grant 9). This reality highlights the way that queerness signifies sex work and vice versa. We rarely see a sex act in Pink Narcissus; rather, the protagonist stands for hustling through his constantly-eroticized queer body. Whether reclining in bed or gazing in the mirror, he oozes the potential of sex to produce a subjecthood poised for profiling.

John Bidgood’s 1971 film Pink Narcissus is a hallmark of queer arthouse eroticism. Like its Greek namesake, the film’s hustler protagonist is fully enraptured by his reflection; by applying Judith Butler’s theories of identity to Bidgood’s camp aesthetic, we can assess the protagonist relative to his vain lilac-hued daydreams. Butler outlines identity in terms of mutable exchange, where subjects produce the substance of innate selfhood by processing socially-coded traits. She cites drag performance as revealing the production of gendered meaning by parodying dominant notions of innate normativity. Such performance relies on the camp aesthetic, which moves towards a subcultural queer legibility by signifying queerness through intentionally constructed codes. In Pink Narcissus, the protagonist rifts on this constructed legibility by avowing his queerness through lavishly parodic fantasies; the dystopian outside world ultimately parodies his parody, incriminating his insular narcissism. Lastly, the protagonist is also constructed by hustler codes which inform a hypersexual queer marginality.

As a contemporary application and angle for further study, I close by placing Pink Narcissus in dialogue with homonormative trends. I spoke of the protagonist’s danger in dogmatically affirming a new “truth” like the default nature of normative subjects: in particular, his whiteness and (softened yet still dominant) masculinity works towards securing queer subjecthood around attending privileges. Faced with his era’s rife oppression of queerness in all forms, Bidgood more vitally re-subjectivizes the white and male through a queer syntax; as a totem of cultish manhood, however, the protagonist foretells a normative mimesis where privilege increasingly concocts contemporary queer “nature.” In our post-marriage equality era, we see queer idenity less beholden to alternative codes and more contingent on formal rights and market participation. Such shifts reveal a new queer legibility in consolidating white, gender normative class privilege; where the protagonist stresses his marginality through sex work, today he could very well be a bourgeois business owner. An ultimate caged reality, the protagonist’s privilege activates his self-obsessed containment towards more insidious ends than unique identity formation. I emphasize the film’s display of queer identity as an ambivalent terrain of politics and aesthetics, where the productive and superficial mutate along poles of insurgence and normalcy.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 2015.

Gefter, Phillip. “Off to Camp: The Photographs of James Bidgood.” Aperture, no.

191, 2008, pp. 62–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24473484.

Grant, Melissa Gira. Playing the Whore: the Work of Sex Work. Verso Books, 2014.