Sexual Distancing: Remembrance of Sex Past in Robert Chesley’s Jerker

• Main Author: Charalampos Keivanidis
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès 2021-04-01
• Series: Miranda: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone
• Subjects: social distancing; sexual distancing; AIDS; homosexual desire; memory
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/39689

Inspired by recent analogies drawn between the Covid-19 pandemic and the early stages of the AIDS epidemic, this essay addresses the ways in which AIDS plays attest to a “sexual distancing”, in particular with reference to Robert Chesley’s Jerker or the Helping Hand. Even though other plays also explore exclusion and stigmatisation, Jerker tackles not only physical sexual distancing but also the displacement of the sexual into the past. Indeed, both characters in Jerker resort systematically to their memory not only to feed their masturbatory fantasies but also to recount, through a process of regression, their homosexual desire down to its most primitive form. Inasmuch as sex acts in it refer exclusively to the past, Jerker (1986) advances a new paradigm that AIDS plays would follow for several years.