"Long Live the New Flesh". Notes on amputation (and) pornography

Gender Forum - An Internet Journal for Gender Studies, 2012

The article examines different-and in particular conflicting-feminist positions with respect to pornography which have been developed from the 1970s until today, focusing on the issue of the construction of sexual and gender identities. An analysis is carried out on how these identities in regards to the pornographic body are negotiated or even shifted within these different feminist discourses and practices. Starting with a brief examination of the discourse about pornography in the phase when the sexual revolution ended, subsequently the PorNO-campaign of the German feminist journal Emma-launched in 1987-is discussed more precisely. This campaign represented anti-pornographic feminism which had been criticized by sex-positive feminism developing the so-called post-pornographic approach. The second part of the article looks into the post-porn discourse from the early eighties-Annie Sprinkle-until the queer-feminist-posthumanist intervention in the field of sexuality and pornography by Beatriz Preciado. Finally, the political potential of queer-feminist post-porn in subverting the existing regime of sexuality is considered.

2016

One+One Filmmakers Journal, 2013

Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 2008

In 1977 John Money published the first modern case histories of what he called 'apotemnophilia', literally meaning 'amputation love' [Money et al., The Journal of Sex Research, 13 : 1977], thus from its inception as a clinically authorized phenomenon, the desire for the amputation of a healthy limb or limbs was constituted as a sexual perversion conceptually related to other so-called paraphilias. This paper engages with sex-based accounts of amputation-related desires and practices, not in order to substantiate the paraphilic model, but rather, because the conception of these (no doubt) heterogeneous desires and practices as symptoms of a paraphilic condition (or conditions) highlights some interesting cultural assumptions about 'disability' and 'normalcy', their seemingly inherent (un)desirability, and their relation to sexuality. In critically interrogating the socio-political conditions that structure particular desires and practices such that they are lived as improper, distressing and/or disabling, the paper constitutes an exercise in what Margrit Shildrick [Beyond the body of bioethics: Challenging the conventions. In M. Shildrick and R. Mykitiuk (Eds.), Ethics of the body: Postconventional challenges (pp. 1-26). New York: MIT Press, 2005] refers to as "postconventional ethics".

2014

Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

Abstracts Introduction/Chapter 1. : The Dynamics of Affects and Experiences of the More- and Other-than-Human Bodies When eroticism and sex are discussed, the attention most often focuses on what takes place between people. In this work, the erotic spectacle is more comprehensive and features non-human actors: things, stuff, objects. I set out from the assumption that objects, such as clothing, undergarments, footwear, and jewellery play an important role in stimulating erotic imagination, becoming participants in that process. The theoretical foundation for acknowledging things as active contributors to social relationships (as one should approach amorous-erotic-sexual relationships) derives from the anthropology of things. This perspective is also tangibly present in my analyses, since I seek to show the (post)human, transversal, liminal bodies as they become fused with other—animate and inanimate—bodies and objects. The attribute of “more- and other-than-human” in the title refers to the human, but a human construed in accordance with the concepts posited by the posthuman, new materialism and anthropology of things; an entity functioning in complex networks that link them inseparably with other beings: things, objects, animals, plants, sand, or water. Chapter 2. More-than-human Network of Relationality In this chapter I present theoretical and methodological issues. I show that research, generally referred as study of things, functions in different contexts. The baseline standpoint adopted by Daniel Miller, Peter Pells, Ikuya Tokoro and Kari Kawai is that of social sciences and anthropology, whereas Donna J. Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Rosi Braidotti take into account the outcomes of advances in science, biomedical ones in particular, as well as examine languages and images we employ to convey them. Natural sciences, medicine and biotechnology have long questioned the traditional conceptions of the human as a being apart with respect to other forms of life. Although the main research perspective in this chapter is anthropology of things, I also present here the issues developed in the framework of new materialism, posthumanism and transhumanism. Chapter 3. Nature as a Phantasm of Culture In this chapter I focus on the ambivalence of the duality ‘animal sex – human erotica’. I depart from such clear-cut oppositions which juxtapose the animal against the human, nature against culture, and the normative against the non-normative. This owes to reflection inspired by the ideas of the posthuman, new materialism and the concept of posthuman sexuality which grew out of that intellectual background. In the perspective I have adopted, the dichotomy of “animal sex” versus “human eroticism” is hardly tenable. One can still track down and deconstruct such notions as well as suggest new ways of conceiving and presenting the complex relationships between the human and the non-human, or else still—to portray the sphere of eroticism within a nexus of manifold, non-binary but yet mutable, networked relations. What does not reveal directly returns in secret form: in costumes, utility items, design and eaten products. Chapter 4. The Obsession of Artificial Bodies The heroes and heroines of this chapter are: mannequins, dolls, androids, cyborgs from literature and science fiction. I showed the gender context of those phenomena, as I am convinced that the aesthetic paragons of male and female physiques with their erotic overtones enact certain models of social relationships, and thus impose roles to be performed due to gender. Stories, novels, films – these are the areas of analysis of this chapter. Analyzing various literary, film, art works, I ask about the attitude of people to technology: its potential, limitations, entanglement in new forms of discrimination and oppression. Chapter 5. The “Beloved” Objects This chapter looks at things closest to one’s body (in the literal sense): clothes, underwear, footwear and considers the affects engendered by those objects. These roles are perpetuated (and much less often undermined) not only by dedicated systems of laws, morality, and customs, but also by a plethora of items, things, and objects by means of which we assume certain roles. The main category organizing the analysis of eroticism and sexuality in this approach is “obscenity”. I show ambivalent and related this term in the contemporary culture. Conclusion/ Chapter 6. This work is concerned with bodies, items, and substances in the material sense, as well as in the relationships between humans and nonhumans, other-than-humans, more-than-humans. The ties and associations with the things we produce, use, watch, and touch are by no means straightforward and limited to mere functionality. I perceive them rather as complex relationships of interwoven ingenuity, impulses, and affects. The goal I strove to accomplish was to show that in the erotic sphere the relationships are multilayered and exceedingly intricate. The eroticism of arch-non-human bodies spans affects and conscious modes of (self)creation, while things, objects do take part in these “dealings”. In the afterword, I showed that thinking about our-human, relationships with stuff, objects, and no human, more-than-human, finding non-human in ourselves, opens up new cognitive, emotional and social/community perspectives.

Postmodern Openings, 2017

The principles of extropy, supported by Max More, which are the foundation of transhumanist philosophy, are increasingly more often found in the individual's incidence space, through the effects of the augmentation, technologization and artificialization of sexuality, through pornography. Here, pornography leads to a deterritorialization of the natural regions of sex and to a reterritorialization of artificial and technologized pornography into a simulacrum of sexuality. The general objective follows the operating mechanism, together with the possible effects/benefits of a situation where we are talking about sexuality/pornography within the limits of singularity, starting from Ray Kurzweil's theories. That is where sexuality in pornography transitions from the physiological and natural paradigm, to the artificial paradigm of neural implants or nanobots. The theoretical objective is aimed at analyzing the shift of paradigm (in the sexual field) from the humanist man to the transhumanist individual, involving the Nietzschean argument of the Overman. With the purpose of emphasizing the often-ignored importance of technology's imminence into the life of human nature, resulting in the death of metaphysics and, in this situation, to human sexuality being reduced to functionalism. The methodology used is the argumentation of Friedrich Nietzsche's and René Descartes' philosophy, of Ray Kurzweil's theories, of Gilles Deleuze's deconstruction, together with the principles of Max More's extropianism.

Pornographic Sensibilities, 2021