Like Miller's later essays on homosexuality and Hollywood cinema "Visual Pleasure in 1959" (1997) and "On the Universality of Brokeback Mountain" (2007), "Anal Rope" maintained that this threat was not marginal, but rather "central" to the making and maintenance of heterosexual identity.
Place for Us shared The Novel and the Police's suspicion of emancipatory narratives and Bringing Out Roland Barthes's refusal of the politics of "gay avowal".
Indeed, by the contrary application of the same cruel logic, Gypsy and its closeted kind can now seem to have rendered a far richer account of this desire than anything we are likely to owe to a counter-tradition of gay avowal.
No doubt we like La Cage [aux Folles] and its meager progeny even less for obliging us to admit, to our confusion, how keenly we miss this sublime vision, though it may have been the only truth that the closet's mendacity ever told."
Framed as a response to critics’ complaints about Fellini's having (like his director-protagonist) "nothing to say" – complaints, that is, about the auteur's "self-indulgence" and the film's lack of substance and legible "social engagement" – Miller's 8½ contended that the film mapped out "two ways": "In one direction lies the man, marked out by his fearful shortage of being and meaning; in the other lies style, which never acknowledges, unless it be to destroy, any order besides its own to which it is required to be sufficient.
In style, substance loses any such power of pressure, dissolving into a play of movement and light; marks of dishonor, feelings of shame, behaviors of abashment—these suddenly have no more pertinence than the rules of a schoolmarm in the Wild West, or the laws of a nation in a foreign embassy."
For every 'strong' style — I mean one, like Fellini’s, of blatantly insufficient substance — marks a refusal to come to terms with a world whose social organization it lets us perceive, in specific ways as intolerable.
Miller’s parenthesis marks his love for and affinity with Austen, and his references to "the mother-text" and a coming out into "infantile desire" call Miller's Barthes to memory: "far from having the sense to be ashamed of his prolonged dependency", this critic "shares with, say, the clone whose much different body is devoted to signaling its various sexual availabilities this common refusal: of the desirability, even the possibility, of the male body’s autonomy" (Bringing Out Roland Barthes).
Likewise, for Miller, "[t]he adept in close reading must assert an autonomy of which he must also continually betray the weak and easily overwhelmed defenses."