



























Puzzle Box: Chiasmus, Queering, and Subjective Finitude in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser


 

 
 
 

Puzzle Box: Chiasmus, Queering, and Subjective Finitude in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser 
Marley Goldman, Emory University ‘24 

 
 

Abstract: This essay, an analysis of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, enters into the conversation of 
queer negativity by utilizing a Foucauldian framework for understanding queerness and 
subjectivity. This framework is expanded by Eve Sedgewick and Susan Sontag’s analyses of 
queerness and camp, alongside Leo Bersani’s groundbreaking essays of queer negativity. In 
addition to queer-focused philosophy, the chapter takes inspiration from Eugenie Brinkema’s 
book Life Destroying Diagrams (2022) in which she employs a formalist approach to reading 
film. At the core of this essay lies the queer subject-other positionality of the Cenobites in Clive 
Barker’s Hellraiser. The Cenobites’ freedom, and their queerness, is found in their continued 
sadomasochistic illegibility. Though they are trapped at one’s fingertips, always summonable 
through the iconic puzzle box, they are ephemeral: specters discernible only in discrete collisions 
with the mortals who summon them. By illuminating the intertwined relationship between 
perceived interior (the home) and exterior (the sadistic hellscape of the Cenobites), the essay 
rejects the premise of an outside and presents queerness as a disruption within a Foucauldian 
grid. Hellraiser’s Frank Cotton becomes the site of such a disruption through his summoning of 
the Cenobites, but his refusal to relinquish subjectivity bars him from becoming queered in the 
way that they are. Frank thus finds himself dragged between forces as the film 
unfolds—agonized by continued visibility, yet trapped within the grid he sought to transcend. 
The chapter will juxtapose Frank’s adhesion to sexual legibility against the sadomasochistic 
Cenobites’ embrace of inscrutability. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

 



 

This essay begins with a scene of horror.  
 
The horror is an answer.  
 
An answer to the question that opens Clive Barker’s Hellraiser:  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

“What's your pleasure, Mr. Cotton?”  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

This question is posed within the film, but it is also posed extra-diegetically. The viewer 
wants the same thing as Frank Cotton: a reckoning with the limits of experience. Frank finds his 
answer in the shaded anonymity of a mysterious market, a puzzle box capable of bringing the 
possessor unparalleled pleasure. The viewer finds their answer in the play button, pressed with a 
trembling hand. The viewer, however, is to remain pinned until the next chapter. Let them 
agonize a little longer.  
 
The scene of horror must now unfold.  
 

So it begins. Seated shirtless on the floor within his attic, bare skin gleaming within the 
light of a square of candles, Frank watches as the box morphs—folding into countless prismatic 



 

shapes as it reveals its promises. His eyes widen as the boarded walls thrum, blue light beginning 
to seep through the cracks. Strange steam swirling within the room, hitherto unseen, becomes 
illuminated by this intruding light—forming linear shapes in the air around Frank’s reverie. Then 
the walls themselves recede, tangible plaster rising to the heavens to allow greater presence of 
that brilliant blue light.  

When the box completes its transformations, electricity, as vivid as the light subsuming 
Frank’s room, arcs into his flesh. Hooks of ambiguous origin bury themselves in his skin, 
rending it, his blood beginning to slide in rivulets. The camera work is close, capturing the 
tortured flesh in shocking relief—a stark contrast to the foggy inscrutability displayed by the rest 
of his surroundings.  
 
Frank screams, his face distorted by the wicked sensation of promised agony, and the film cuts 
abruptly: an elegant family home filling the screen where the tortured hedonist had been.  

The series of vignettes presented are domestic and yet unsettling: a family dining table, 
heaped with rotting food; an empty hallway adorned with portraits; a poorly illuminated statue of 
Christ keeping watch over unseen household members; a bed with filthy sheets upon which a 
cockroach scuttles. Then comes the nondescript attic door, swinging slowly inwards to reveal a 
sliver of light.  

Finally the viewer is privy to what lies beyond. It no longer resembles Frank’s attic. The 
physical structure revealed is ambiguous—the walls, ceiling, and floors are obscured by inky 
haze, as though filthy. Windows, identical to those in the earthly home, are discernible among the 
filthy and nondescript panels. First concealed by a myriad of chains and hooks descending from 
the concealed ceiling, the realization of their identical nature is discordant to the viewer.  

Within the room stand pillars adorned with human flesh: chunks of viscera, iridescent 
with blood, attached with hooks and chains. The pillars reject stagnation in favor of rotating 
constantly, presenting a never-ending morphology of shapes. With each revolution, the tangible 
space is torn apart and reconstructed. The result is an ephemeral simulacrum of the attic room, 
identical and yet illegible, wet with blood.  

Through this uncanny scape drifts the Cenobite—illuminated by a single swaying bulb 
amidst the chains. The glow of the bulb is warm and familiar compared to the blue seeping 
through the fragmented walls where boards have given way to light.  

A human face lies disassembled upon the floor, the pieces placed like a macabre puzzle. 
The attempt at reassembly is farcical, for the face is torn so significantly it no longer coherently 
resembles a face at all. The Cenobite looms above it, its own face similarly ravaged by a grid of 
pins emerging from deep within the flesh. With a deft caress, it slides the puzzle box into the 
original configuration and all traces of the Cenobites are expunged in an instant. The attic is 
tightly walled once more, illuminated with the earthly glow of a curtain-covered window.  
 
 
 



 

The Chiasmus 
 

When Frank summoned the Cenobites, he carved a crossing into the fabric of his world. 
The spatial and ontological relationships occurring between human and cenobite, between home 
and exterior, were chiastic in nature. It was a cataclysmic collision of forces which tore poor 
Frank Cotton beyond repair.  

The term chiasmus is a literary one, referring to an inverted relationship between the 
syntactic elements of parallel phrases (Merriam Webster Dictionary Definition of “Chiasmus,” 
2024). ABBA—pleasure’s a sin, and sin’s a pleasure. Within the reversal of two antithetical 
statements lies the power of the chiastic sentence. Through such intimate juxtaposition, the 
irreconcilability of conflicting sentiment is both emphasized and forced into discordant unity.  

This is because, despite containing only two overt terms (A and B), a chiasmus actually 
produces an invisible third term: C. In order for A and B to work in linguistic tandem, they must 
somehow generate a bridge between their contradictions. The bridging concept (C), acts as a 
figurative stage upon which antithetical A and B can operate in conversation with one another. In 
short, the “chiasmus works not simply through a logic of crossing or exchange between two 
terms, but also through the generation of a third term” (Wiseman & Paul, 2014). Thus chiasmus 
is not powerful merely for its ability to juxtapose, but also for its ability to generate something 
new—something akin to the collision between Frank’s attic and Cenobite, something born from 
dissonant forces amalgamating.  

An example to illuminate this point: the aforementioned pleasure and sin. In this case, the 
third term that emerges, which acts as a site of interaction between sentiments, comes from a 
religious matrix of pleasure versus sin. That is because, through the employed language of sin, a 
greater religious world is invoked. Pleasure’s a sin, proclaims Puritan morality; but sin’s a 
pleasure, retorts the dissenter. Though their perspectives are dissident, these antithetical 
statements are both legible upon a moral stage of religiosity. This cultural context is both present 
and absent within the chiastic sentence: its contextual contingency is not verbally established and 
yet the implicit context is necessary for both the declaration and the refutation to be uttered.  

As seen in this simultaneous presence and absence of context, the chiasmus implies a 
larger world, or a subject who utters it, without those forces being visible within the confines of 
the sentence. As argued in Chiasmus + Culture “there is, within the third element, an implication 
of the larger ground the claim occurs in—or the ‘I’ that speaks it…and yet it is not present within 
the moment” (Wiseman & Paul, 2014). This implied world context is how the unnamed site C, or 
crossing, is able to briefly unite the disagreeing clamor of unnamed voices.  

The third site is intangible and, were it to be overtly written, the chiastic sentence would 
be destroyed. Its absence within the chiasmus is not due to any neglect of its written inclusion, 
rather its absence stems from its status as the unsaid. In that sense site C is apophatic: speech that 
says by unsaying. Site C is a place of transformation, obscurity, and possibility where 
reconciliations occur that are impossible in verbal logic. Were the aforementioned example 
expanded to read: “pleasure’s a sin on the religious stage, and sin’s a pleasure”, it would be 



 

nonsensical. It would be a mere contradiction. By defining site C, the chiastic powers of 
juxtaposition are murdered in favor of irreconcilability. The sentence has been rendered 
incoherent because the confines of coherence, either of subject or location, cannot support the 
antithetical A and B.  

As such, C is not specific or tangible, and often lacks verbal comprehensibility; this 
means that it often signals as an affective state. The third “term often registers entirely as 
laughter, delight, awe, or other emotional response,” (Wiseman & Paul, 2014) all of which arise 
from the inability to express conflicting states. C is not a logic proof which solves for A and B’s 
commonality. It is an expression of something nebulous— awe,  

confusion,  
tension,  

overwhelming sadness.  
     ?????? 

 
Chiastic reversal has a ludic quality. Further, the fact that C “is often expressed as 

laughter is a welcome mystification of social relations” (Wiseman & Paul, 2014) which require 
coherence or legibility as a requirement for existence. C insists on its own existence despite its 
inscrutability! Its presence is demonstrated through effects both absent and tangible in the 
sentence.   

The expansive abyss of this third site occurs only within the confines of the crossing 
between A and B and is thus paradoxical in form—implying something limitless and yet utterly 
confined to a moment. There is no permanence to be found within this new site of formal 
innovation. Rather “the basis for resolution is always signified only by the crossing, which itself 
supplies no principle of resolution but rather perpetual oscillation” (Wiseman & Paul, 2014). 
This is because the space between A and B is contingent and ephemeral, born of the elements 
which imply it and consisting of nothing but the space upon which they engage one another. 
Were it altered or applied broadly, it would dissipate forever.   

While its roots are mired in the poetic, the chiastic structure is also useful in 
conceptualizing matters of philosophy. The philosophical appeal of the chiasmus “stems from its 
capacity to imply an additional dimension of thought, experience, or social organization in which 
incommensurables can be joined harmoniously or productively” (Wiseman & Paul, 2014). 
Similarly to how the prior example of pleasure and sin generated an unspoken battleground of 
morality upon which to reconcile itself, philosophically chiastic crossings are ripe with 
generative collisions that resist verbal categorization.  

Another philosophical appeal of the chiasmus is that it can generate an ontological 
paradox as well as a linguistic one. This occurs because the speaker, the subjective “I” within the 
chiasmus, is highly unstable. The two sides of the chiasmus imply either divergent perspectives, 
each referring back to the other, or that both sides are the product of a single shattered subject 
with no consistent self-orientation. In either event, there is no coherent “I” who speaks: the 
speaking, knowing subject is either absent or so fragmented that it contradicts itself. And though 



 

Site C generates vital context, it does not reconcile this befuddling ontological condition by 
attributing subjectivity to the phrases.  

Drawing on its complexity as a rhetorical and philosophical figure, chiasmus can be 
utilized to conceptualize spatial relationships of crossing and inversion within Hellraiser. Its 
operation at the level of physical space within the film, as opposed to at the level of the sentence, 
still produces the elusive site C—and the crossing produced comes with even higher ontological 
stakes. The simulacrum attic room, Figure 1, in which Frank’s body is tormented is a physical 
representation of site C.  
 
Figure 1 
The Attic  

 
 

 
The attic, a representation of the abyss at the heart of chiasmus, is a meeting ground upon 

which both cenobites and family are legible, a clutter born of both worlds, gore and civility 
shockingly juxtaposed. It is as exquisitely ephemeral as it is dangerous. It is a site with no 
identity of its own, whose blood slicked floors allow the forces to converge. It is an attic that is 
not an attic, lit from within and without, whose pillars of flesh spin with endless possibilities.  

As Frank’s actions initiate this crossing of worlds, he himself becomes the broken subject 
that is implicated in the ontological paradox of the chiasmus. His body is rendered void as the 
hooks tear into his skin and yet he is not destroyed; he becomes the very point of crossing. The 
Cenobites do not storm the attic walls, or manifest in some other earthly fashion. Their presence 



 

bursts forth as the crossing occurs at the site of Frank—an inversion which turns him, literally, 
inside out. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



 

The Crossing 
 

A leap outside of the limits of pleasure, achieved through a finite reckoning with the 
Cenobites—that is what Frank dreamed of when the puzzle box was first placed into the palm of 
his curious hand. Frank wanted to pursue a limit experience. He wanted to access that figurative 
ambrosia which lies outside of the conventions that hem him in. Limit experiences1 vary in 
method, they are attempted through sex, mind-altering drugs, or enduring deliberate pain, but 
their purpose is always the same: allowing the subject to experience the most triumphant and 
cataclysmic sensations possible, so dazzling that it shatters the light of their subjectivity.  

 
Ego death  
catharsis  
horror  
ecstasy   

 
Frank summoned the Cenobites with the intent of stepping into their world to pursue such 

an experience, leaving his own world untouched for his inevitable return. The stark divide he 
conceptualized between interior (his home waiting, untouched) and exterior (the twisted world of 
ultimate experience) purports that one can exist within the confines of subjectivity or one can 
transcend, breaking free into the dazzling Elysian nights of unbridled sexual ecstasy. That is the 
neat duality of space which Frank so confidently bet his flesh on—one that would have allowed 
him safe passage into the Cenobites’ outside and back again, resituated in the seat of subjectivity 
with memory enough to pacify monotonous days.  

But that was never to be. Frank’s lust for a mere glimpse of the outside was unable to be 
resolved, for such resolution would require division between the Cenobite world and the home. 
He wanted the box open for his pleasures and closed whenever agony was inconvenient, but that 
tidy theoretical division crumbled into a gruesome paradoxical reality.  

Why? Because the box is not a ticket out from the confines of the repressive hypothesis 
famously critiqued by Foucault. Were the box a portal, as was assumed by Frank, then it would 
possess a tidy relationship to exteriority and interiority. When in the tightly-sealed starting 
position, the box would contain the latent power to access the Cenobite realm: the “outside” 
according to the world of the family. Then, when the box’s structure is interfered with and the 
“portal” is activated, as occurred during Frank’s seance, the fabric between Cenobite and human 
would be diminished—allowing the subject to step, or be dragged, into that exterior space. Once 
within the Cenobite world, the return would consist of inverse operations. This conception of the 
box is, at its core, a metaphysical doorknob. 

But that model of the human world and Cenobite world does not capture the true spatial 
intricacy of their relationship—one that is chiastic in nature. The portal framework relies on the 
assumption that the action occurring is the passage of a subject who is only partly undone 

1 A notion that Michel Foucault borrowed from George Bataile.  



 

through a departure and subsequent return facilitated by the box. However, the true mechanism 
of interaction is a veritable collision of Cenobite and mortal within the confines of the 
summoning space. Therefore, when Frank intends to move from the figurative A to B, the box 
creates C. As such there is no departure, he is never free of the attic; for the family home and the 
Cenobite realm become the integral forces whose irreconcilable interplay rips the liminal C into 
existence.  

C is therefore neither attic nor Cenobite, it is not even a corrupted attic or a failed site of 
departure, it is a crossing. Frank’s initiation caused elements of the intertwined realms to bleed 
into one another, creating an unsettled space that eludes direct categorization. It is an ephemeral 
space which is contingent on the chiastic powers the box contains—it is an empty space, an 
unnamed void. With each revolution of the flesh-pillars, the simulacrum room is remade anew, 
demonstrating endless spatial adaptation. The chains that sway from the ceiling lend a Cenobite 
air to the borrowed attic facade, providing a stage upon which both realities can carve their 
meanings into Frank’s flesh. Though fleeting, the carnal impact it allows is viscerally real.  

It is a space of high ontological stakes, and within it Frank is dragged between 
paradoxical hooks. He is a subject. He is within his home. He belongs to the family. He is a man. 
He is legible. And: he is other. He is in a place beyond conception. He belongs to no one. He is 
an object, illegibility is written across his ruined flesh. Spatially and subjectively, Frank has been 
quartered much like Damiens in the infamous opening of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. 
Though Frank’s intended limit experience failed, he reckoned with a limit nonetheless, and it was 
a collision after which he will never be the same.  

This confrontation which produces a crossing at the site of the former subject is queer. 
Queer here does not designate an identity, like a species of flower within a greenhouse of 
variants, for there is nothing queer about such a legible position on a normal curve of sexuality. 
Nor is queerness transgressive in the sense that it crosses or transcends norms, as was Frank’s 
intent. That cannot not be the case because there is nothing “outside” of the limit. The crossing 
occurs at the site of Frank; Frank himself crosses nothing. The queering action Hellraiser 
performs is a hollowing out in which Frank’s very flesh is inverted by the forces which act upon 
him. Therefore this queering is a disruption—Frank’s body is shattered, turned inside out, as are 
the divisions between worlds, as are the delineations of Cenobite and human, as is subjectivity 
itself. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



 

“The Leap” 
 

It is only after the refuse of Frank is expunged that the viewer is made privy to the 
collision’s location: the bastion of domesticity that is the attic of a family home. The unmoored 
viewer drifts backwards down the stairs, gaze hesitant to leave the attic door which is now tightly 
closed. How tidy it looks, how utterly incapable of concealing torment.  

The fact that the crossing occurred between Cenobite and a domestic space is intimately 
implicated with the film’s queerness. The scene’s location illuminates how Frank’s debauchery 
was a deviation from within as opposed to an invasion from some outside space where Cenobites 
proliferate freely. The origin of deviance, then, is from within the family home. Frank was born 
within it, lived within it, and was ripped apart within its similacrum’s walls. This view of 
deviation is a Foucauldian one; a perspective oriented not around the escape of repression, but 
around the production of queerness within the confines of a grid of quadrillage2.  

The opposing, and more commonly employed, conceptual model of queerness and its 
assumed opposite is that of diametrically opposed spaces. On one side lies all which is 
sanctioned by the heterosexual, utilitarian mechanism of repression; on the other side lies 
queerness. They are divided and yet the queer side is accessible with the correct method of 
self-liberation. This conceptual model allows a subject the “opportunity to speak out about the 
powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and 
manifold pleasures” (Foucault, 1976) with the intent of transcending the repressive powers of 
confinement. The leap is not easy, for the barrier, though permeable, is iron-fisted in its 
constraint, but the outside is distinct and vivid in nature. Rebellion, blasphemous speech in the 
face of repression, kinky sex, gay sex, non-procreative sex, sadomasochism, such are the 
mechanisms of the leap. 

Through figurative freedom of movement, from one side of the metaphorical divide to the 
other, a sexualized self might access unfettered, unrepressed pleasure as well as freedom from 
the effects power places on sex. The sex club is a place where such a departure might occur: a 
two-way train ticket to and from the realm of queerness. In this enclave of rebellion, the subject 
is able to experience pleasure beyond the edict of taboos governing their daily life, thus 
temporarily shedding the effects repressive power exerts on them. On one side lies the power of 
repression and its products: dismal heterosexuals in procreative missionary positioned within the 
sterile home of the married couple. On the opposing side lies the queer, kinky, salacious “garden 
of earthly delights” (Foucault, 1976) outside of power’s reach: the place Frank so eagerly sought 
to step inside of, salivating for its forbidden fruit. 

Conceptualizing queerness as wholly removed from repression is enticing because it 
promises an outside to the effects of power. Were such a schematic true, then it would inherently 
allow for the possibility of fruitful transgression, a space the subject might escape to. The subject 
need only resist, and they would “place [themself] to a certain extent outside the reach of power” 
(Foucault, 1976) because it would be a power whose only weapon is repression. Each act and 

2 Used to refer to partitioning as a form of control.  



 

word of defiance hence would appeal to a future where sex would be free, where sex would be 
fantastic. Queer joy, queer lust, freedom—these would be the boons of sexual revolution. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

Wouldn’t that be nice? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



 

Deviance 
 

But queerness is not an autonomous haven outside of the grid’s reach, it is produced 
within the very structure it appears to resist. Freedom of movement, a leap from one side to the 
other, is thus impossible. The subject cannot hope to resist the repressive effects of power, not 
because methods of rebellion are rendered inaccessible, but because the mechanism of power 
was not primarily repressive to begin with. Queerness is not rebellion, nor is it the sweet and 
dripping promise within the core of a forbidden fruit. Queerness is a deviance produced by the 
very lines of grid, slashed into the flesh of the subject. Queerness was born from the “setting 
apart of the ‘unnatural’ as a specific dimension in the field of sexuality,” (Foucault, 1976) a 
process of categorization whose goal was not to remove the deviant, but to churn further power 
from the prescription of its features.  

Power does not stifle sexuality with the intent of exterminating it, instead power incites 
its constant proliferation—splintering sexuality into a myriad of options to be observed and 
categorized. The power that forged queerness from the quagmire of sexual potential “gave it an 
analytical, visible, and permanent reality” (Foucault, 1976) which demanded constant pursuit. 
Examination and definition were the knives that excised queerness from obscurity and bottled it 
up for constant observation. The homosexual (Figure 2), the sadist, the sexoesthetic invert—each 
cut gridded deviance further along the definitional lines inscribed. The result was a sexual 
mosaic so precise, whose lines had proliferated with such intensity, that its object of deviance 
could be found in exponentially increasing sites.  
 
Figure 2 
The Homosexual  



 

 

 
In the same way that collision site C does not exist with autonomy from the mortal realm, 

queerness is not outside of normativity. There are striking parallels to these two existences: both 
are aberrant and yet both are born within a productive power mechanism. In the words of 



 

Foucault, “the machinery of power that focuses on [the] whole alien strain [of queerness does] 
not aim to suppress it, but rather to give it an analytical, visible, and permanent reality: it was 
implanted in bodies…made a principle of classification and intelligibility” (Foucault, 1976). 
Queerness was not born of natural origin, deemed aberrant, and then excluded. Nor does it 
possess an outside existence wholly untouched, inaccessible except via transcendent measures. 
Queerness is not about the crossing of a line in the same way the box is not a portal.  

Queering occurs when the former subject becomes a site upon which forces produce a 
crossing that, in turn, undoes the subject. The legible sexual subject is undone at the site of 
queerness, and in that sense it can be considered a verb: a queering. Queerness thus cannot be 
conceptualized as a stable and generalizable state, one which can be adopted as identity. But that 
is not to say it is not powerful in its effects, or that it cannot be embodied. For the Cenobites, it is 
their continued illegibility that queers them. They are a figure only visible at the crossing, 
illuminated in the blue light of worlds collapsing upon one another.  

Therefore queerness is an ontological paradox: it is brought into violent existence as a 
product of the power that names it; and yet it is an inexorable presence, even when gnashed like 
paper through the teeth of a shredder and thus rendered illegible within the very mechanism that 
created it. This ontological paradox is a chiastic implosion of meaning at site C, as opposed to 
psychoanalytic queer negativity’s masochistic self-negation achieved by sexually “shattering the 
psychic structures themselves.” (Bersani, 1987). Here Bersani’s rectum-as-grave is not a 
manifestation of the death drive, it is the chiastic site C—a site of irreconcilable forces that can 
only emerge through a Foucauldian analysis of the grid of intelligibility. It is a diagonal 
emergence within a Brinkemian diagram. It is a rhetorical and ontological collision that bypasses 
psychoanalytic repression and its ensuing liberation to sketch a different kind of 
freedom-as-horror.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



 

“Them” 
 

This is the paradoxical ontological experience that affords the Cenobites freedom, not 
despite the inversion of their flesh, but because of it. Imagine, for a moment, that the cenobite 
was once a human. First the delineation of gay is drawn upon them, a vertical cut through the 
center of their body. Then come the slashes, each one a specifier, each one endeavoring to 
process this subject into intelligible, ever more fine-grained, attributes. Bottom, masochist, 
dacryphile, exhibitionist…until every aspect is pinned to the metaphorical dissection tray. Now 
there is a subject, their interiority rendered visible and located precisely within the catalog of the 
grid, but there is also an object—the viscera left behind, the illegible body bared for parts.  

Therefore the Cenobites’ queerness is not due to some phantasmic external origin. Nor is 
it due to a rebellion against repressive forces seeking to confine them. Nor is it due to their 
ability to step outside of a grid of legibility which seeks to define them. Their queerness is born 
from the ecstasy of nebulous viscera left behind as subjectivity was torn beyond recognition.  

The danger of the queer is that it can undo the human. Queer theorist Leo Bersani writes 
that “what disturbs people about homosexuality is not the sexual act itself but rather the 
homosexual mode of life, which Foucault associated with the ‘formation of new alliances and the 
tying together of unforeseen lines of force’”(Bersani, 1987). Foucault elaborates in an interview, 
suggesting that queering might “reopen affective and relational virtualities not so much through 
the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but because of the slantwise position, as it were, the 
diagonal lines [it] can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light” 
(Foucault & Rabinow, 1997). Present in both quotations is a vital affirmation of queering as 
destabilization, something which runs contrary to the grid’s quest for specific delineation and yet 
exists within it; described spatially by Foucault as a diagonal line amidst an implied grid—a 
quadrillage—of horizontal and vertical lines.  

Found within this spatial description is what I want to reclaim as a crucial difference 
between queer and gay. Queer means the nonself-identical undoing of subjectivity celebrated by 
queer negativity. As opposed to the identification with a sexual category, be it gay, lesbian, 
sadomasochistic, or any such shade of delineated “perversity”3. Such designations, no matter 
how transgressive their attributes may appear, exist within a square of the grid. Their perverse 
particularity might mean the confines draw closer, more finely grained, designating them within 
a niche upon the periphery of the normal curve, but they exist legibly within the grid and upon 
the curve nonetheless. Because attempts to clearly define queerness will, in fact, destroy the 
queerness of the moment or relation, queer cannot become nearly as specific as ‘sexual 
identities’. Foucault thus does not define his aforementioned new modes of relations, which 
Bersani finds to be a “beneficial limitation, since more specific suggestions about how we might 
“become [queer]4 could operate as a constraint on our very effort to do so, while his 
under-conceptualizing of that notion can serve as a generous inspiration” (Bersani, 1987).  

4 Changed from “gay” to be consistent in language.  
3 Used in reference to Michel Foucault’s discussion of the proliferation of perversities in History of Sexuality, Vol 1.  



 

The non-self-identical conception of queerness extends to this reading of Hellraiser, 
making the Cenobites a mere example of queer relations, not one that is stable or constant. In my 
exploration of their ontology I am not arguing that they are subjects with a certain identity 
(sadomasochistic, or even queer), nor that their interactions are a blueprint for queering—Frank’s 
reckoning proved as much. Their origin is unclear and that is precisely why it is illustrative.  

In How to Live Together, Roland Barthes attends to a community of Cenobites, 
describing their lives as idiorrhythmic—in which they are “both isolated from and in contact 
with one another within a particular type of structure…where each lives according to his own 
rhythm” (Barthes, 2013). The word “cenobite” is derived from Latin and was coined in the 1600s 
to describe an individual living within a religious community (“Cenobite, N. Meanings, 
Etymology and More, Oxford English Dictionary,” 2023). These historical cenobites are still 
somewhat veiled in mystery among religious scholars. They are known mainly for their ardent 
faith and close-knit social bonds which existed far from the eyes of the church. Practitioners of 
cenobitic monasticism sought an egalitarian community in which to live by their faith, complete 
with daily worship, sharing of all resources, and a strong commitment to one another. Cenobitic 
monks notably engaged in ritual dance, performed by Jewish monks on the Sabbath and by 
Christian monks following prayers (Dunn, 2003). Cenobitic life typically occurred in the 
mountains, in a rapturous world of their own. So distinct from the lives of other religious 
practitioners was this form of faith, that one text notes an individual must “transform from monk 
into cenobite” (“Cenobite, N. Meanings, Etymology and More, Oxford English Dictionary,” 
2023). Even monks felt that “in the form of cenobitism, [their faith] was truly unknown” 
(“Cenobite, N. Meanings, Etymology and More, Oxford English Dictionary,” 2023). Despite 
existing within a structured religion, the cenobitic monks afforded themselves secrecy and 
freedom through their compliant avoidance—so enraptured in their faith and semi-exile that they 
were more or less untouched by laws and edicts.  

Clive Barker’s Cenobites share similarities with their historical namesakes: their 
existence contingent on transformation of the human subject, their life in a sequestered yet 
unguarded community, and their subsequent existence in disregard of their confines. As alluded 
to in Barker’s novella, and confirmed in the second film, the Cenobites were once human. Their 
origin from, and consistent location within, the grid of intelligibility affirms two Foucauldian 
assertions: that queering is a deviation from within and that “there is no outside” (Foucault, 
1975). The seemingly demonic entities are not native to an outside sphere, nor are they seekers 
of pleasure who successfully escaped to frolic beyond the confines of earthly morality. The 
Cenobites' bodies were twisted beyond repair, beyond recognition, but they remained within the 
grid nonetheless.  

Their community, which exists in a liminal relationality to the mortal world (contained 
and elusive), is both inscrutable and scrutinized—its egalitarian nature inherently queer. The 
bonds between Cenobites lack visible structure, each as close as the next. Lacking in gender 
markers or apparent hierarchy, they exist as fragments of a baffling entity; they flicker into view 
alongside one another, disappearing just as fast. Their communication is formed by clicks, 



 

gestures, and glances; oblique forms of speech which betray nothing to Frank nor the viewer. 
Nor is the viewer ever privy to their home, merely glimpsing it as it collides with Frank’s attic 
during the chiastic event.  Such secrecy does not protect the Cenobites from earthly scrutiny or 
intervention however, for their lives are accessible through the activation of the infamous puzzle 
box. They may exist, like their monastic predecessors, at the unseen periphery of experience; but 
they are simultaneously rendered hyper-visible by their entrapment. The cenobitic monks of 
history, having sworn their vows, remained held by the church despite their complete removal 
from the institution’s daily workings. Hellraiser’s Cenobites have been afforded a similar form of 
freedom—the ability to exist unseen, tethered to the grid of intelligibility nonetheless.  

The Cenobites thus epitomize the undoing of the sexual grid, by way of queering, which 
occurs within the very grid itself. Like Frank, the space of their bodies is flayed, opened, held 
apart with hooks and yet they are uncaring. They have been destroyed, both corporeally and in 
terms of their legibility as subjects. They submitted completely to the grid, the pins of which 
protrude, criss-crossing their monstrous flesh. The Cenobites have been broken, blinded, 
degendered, and dehumanized—yet it is irrelevant to them. They continue to move, feel, see, and 
exist without negating the power inscribed upon them. It is as though they have been extruded by 
the machinery of power, rendered illegible to the system that rendered them thus. 

When Frank first observes the Cenobites, he finds them most unfavorable; repulsive 
even, due to their mangled, inhuman bodies. He expected their presence to be otherworldly and 
novel, so “why then was he so distressed to set eyes upon them? Was it the scars that covered 
every inch of their bodies, the flesh cosmetically punctured and sliced and infibulated, then 
dusted down with ash? ... No women, no sighs. Only these sexless things, with their corrugated 
flesh” (Barker, 1991). It is notable that Frank considers them to be things, as opposed to people. 
The Cenobite therefore does not represent a damaged subject, a subject actively torn apart and 
cast beneath violent light—they represent an absence of subjectivity. It is a loud absence that, 
like the attic-shrouding fog upon their arrival, makes salient what it conceals. It is a false absence 
that screams its lack like a banshee.  

The Cenobites’ relation to the Foucauldian grid of intelligibility can thus be 
conceptualized as a diagonal; eschewing the lines of the grid, despite being located within it, and 
discernible only at its chiastic points of collision. The Cenobites possess a freedom which eludes 
Frank due to this continued illegibility, due to the fact that their position on the grid is only ever 
estimated by the inscription of a diagonal line. They only truly appear within site C of the 
chiasmus, in each of the metaphorical dots upon the grid. Though a line may be drawn through 
these discrete interactions, a rough estimation of their reckoning with the legible, the delineation 
of legibility cannot touch the Cenobites. The cavernous space between points, a void both 
“empty and peopled” (Foucault, 1961/2009), is an idea without place—lacking subject, reason, 
imagery, or coherence. The Cenobites’ home, a theoretical existence which collided with Frank 
attic, is wholly inscrutable to Frank, viewer, and grid alike.  

Building upon this example of the Cenobites’ diagonal relationality within the grid of 
intelligibility, the very concept of queering can be seen as oblique—both in the spatial and 



 

discursive senses of the word. The Oxford English Dictionary defines oblique geometrically as 
“having a slanting direction or position; not vertical or horizontal; diverging from a straight line 
or course,” (“Oblique, Adj., N., & Adv. Meanings, Etymology and More, Oxford English 
Dictionary,” 2023) thus concurring with the notion of queer as a diagonal amidst gridded lines. 
Providing further evidence for the diagonal nature of queering, the etymology of “queer” traces it 
to the word “quer” of middle high German, meaning “oblique, transverse, and crosswise.” 
(“Queer, Adj. Meanings, Etymology and More, Oxford English Dictionary,” 2023) The word 
oblique also refers to verbiage which is not straightforward, but rather “obscure or confusing; 
indirectly stated or revealed.” (“Oblique, Adj., N., & Adv. Meanings, Etymology and More, 
Oxford English Dictionary,” 2023). Less frequent utilizations of oblique, dated around the mid 
1500s, synonymize the word with “aberrant,” (“Oblique, Adj., N., & Adv. Meanings, Etymology 
and More, Oxford English Dictionary,” 2023) and use it to refer to instances of exception or 
deviation. When something, or someone, is queered, they become oblique in each of these 
senses: their positionality altered and their subjectivity obscured.  

The importance of conceptualizing queerness as oblique comes from its bypass, rather 
than negation, of the grid of intelligibility. This is the bypass of repression because such a 
conception of queerness “seeks to escape transgressive relationality itself and might contest 
given categories and values by failing to relate to them either adaptively or transgressively,” 
(Bersani, 1987) it does not propose ‘queer’ as a radical, stable, and rebellious identity to be 
embodied. To be oblique is to disregard and to obscure, erasing definitional boundaries of what 
can be considered a queer relationality. Queer is thus not a sexuality, a personality, or an identity 
to be defined discursively and set against heterosexuality, homonormativity, or sexual 
repression—queer is a relational to a grid, a movement from within the grid.  

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 



 

Queer is a disruption.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Queer is the subject’s finitude. 
 



 

References 
Barker, C. (1986). The Hellbound Heart. Harper Collins. 
Barker, C. (Director). (1987). Hellraiser. New World Pictures, Entertainment Film Distributors. 
Barthes, R. (2013). How to Live Together : Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces. 

Columbia University Press. 
Bersani, L. (1987). Is the Rectum a Grave? October, 43, 197–222. 

https://doi.org/10.2307/3397574 
coenobite | cenobite, n. meanings, etymology and more | Oxford English Dictionary. (2023). 

Oed.com. https://doi.org/10.1093//OED//4875171775 
Definition of CHIASMUS. (2017). Merriam-Webster.com. 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chiasmus 
Dunn, M. (2008). The Emergence of Monasticism. John Wiley & Sons. 
Foucault, M. (1976). The History of sexuality. Volume I: an Introduction. Vintage Books. 
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books. 
Foucault, M. (2013). History of Madness. Routledge. (Original work published 1961) 
Foucault, M., & Rabinow, P. (1997). Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1988. New Press. 
oblique, adj., n., & adv. meanings, etymology and more | Oxford English Dictionary. (2023). 

Oed.com. https://doi.org/10.1093//OED//1275922823 
queer, adj.1 meanings, etymology and more | Oxford English Dictionary. (2023). Oed.com. 

https://doi.org/10.1093//OED//9610104456 
Wiseman, B., & Paul, A. (2014). Chiasmus and Culture. New York; Oxford Berghahn Books. 
 
 
 


