Course:WMST307:Student Pages:Daniel Swenson

Gerbilling

Gerbilling is a process wherein a gerbil (or other rodents, ranging from mice to hamsters) is inserted live into the anus for lascivious pleasure (Dresser 1994). The term is typically invoked around contemporary folklore and urban legends, or in rumours about celebrities (Young 2002). The term itself is almost always used around a particular type of masculinity, that is, by hegemonic powers working to shame, queer, or question a male body. In such a way, the act of gerbilling becomes an in-between space of queerness; existing in the borders of queerness as an unspeakable act of kink, while also evacuating any legitimate proof of ever having actually happened. Gerbilling then begins to work in the same totalizing way that heteromasculine viewings of queerness work—through the eye of the Other, misunderstood, and affectively subversive.

We are never confronted with the happy queer gerbilling with his husband after a hard day at the office; rather, this act is only used in the shady macabre of a closeted gay man. For instance, a persistent rumour about the actor Richard Gere is that he was admitted to the emergency room for gerbilling in the late ‘90s (Emery 2006). While this has since been disproven as an urban legend meets rumour, the queerness of Richard Gere is still summoned when discussing gerbilling in popular culture; there are spectres of his queerness implicit in the term.The claims are outrageous enough to draw the attention of tabloids and the public, but almost impossible to prove or disprove. Furthermore, the term gerbilling is almost never used on the female body.

I argue that since women do not need to be policed into normalized heternomormativity in the same ways that militant masculinity requires of men, women are never queered into gerbilling. One notable exception is in Brett Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho (1991) in which the protagonist, a serial killer named Patrick Bateman kills a woman and puts a mouse in her vagina. Again however, heteropatriarchal notions of the female body are kept intact within this use of gerbilling; it is only after killing her that the male body can gerbil the female body. It is never an act driven out of agency as much kink is being reframed, but always as an act of the utmost deviancy.

References

Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho: A Novel. New York: Vintage, 1991. Print.

Emery, David (2006). “About That Thing With Richard Gere and the Gerbil” Urban Legends. http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/celebrities/a/richard_gere.htm

Norine Dresser (July 1994). "The Case of the Missing Gerbil". Western Folklore 53 (3): 229–242. American Psycho

Young, Paul (2002). L.A. Exposed: Strange Myths and Curious Legends in the City of Angels. St. Martin's Griffin. p. 20.