english

"QUEER":HISTORY OF A WORD by PAUL B. PRECIADO



For those who grew up as lesbians in the years immediately following Franquismo, it's difficult to get used to the success of the artifact 'queer' and its transformation into 'cultural chic'. Let us remember, though, that behind every word there is a history, just as behind every history there is a struggle to fix or unmoor the words.  To all who declare their sexual identity, Mia will sing in your ear: parole, parole parole...

There was a time in which the word 'queer' existed solely as an insult.  In the English language, since its appearance in the eighteenth century, 'queer' served to name those whose condition of uselessness wrongdoing, falseness, or eccentricity might jeapordize the smooth functioning of the social machinery. 'Queers' were liars, thieves, drunks; the black sheep and the rotten apple, but also anyone who, due to their peculiarity or their strangeness, wouldn't be immediately recognized as man or woman.  The word 'queer' doesn't seem to define a quality of the object to which it refers so much as to demonstrate the inability of the subject who speaks to locate a category in the field of representation that fits with the complexity of that which they are trying to define.  Therefore, since the beginning, 'queer' is more the mark of a failure in linguistic representation than a simple adjective.  Not this, nor that, neither fish nor fowl...queer.  Which in some way amounts to saying: that which I call 'queer' poses a problem for my system of representation, leads to a disturbance, a strange vibration in my field of visibility that should be branded with the slur. 

It was necessary to distrust the 'queer' as one distrusts a body that, by its mere presence, blurs the boundaries between the categories previously divided by rationality and dignity. In the Victorian society that defended the value of heterosexuality as the axis of the bourgeois family and foundation of the the reproduction of the nation and of the species, 'queer' would serve to name also those bodies that broke away from the heterosexual institution and its norms.  The threat came, in this case, from those bodies that, through their forms of relation and production of pleasure, placed in question the differences between masculinity and femininity, but also between the organic and inorganic, the animal and the human.  'Queers' were homosexuals, the fag and the lesbian, the transvestite, the fetishist, the sadomasochist, the zoophile. The insult 'queer' didn't have a specific content; it sought to join all the signs of wretchedness.  But the word served, in reality, to set a limit to the democratic horizon: those who called another 'queer' situated themselves comfortably on an imaginary sofa of the public sphere in tranquil communicative exchange with their heterosexul equals, while expelling the 'queer' from the confines of the human.  Displaced outside the social space by the insult, the 'queer' was condemned to secrecy and shame.  

But the political history of a slur is also the changing history of its uses, of its users, and of the contexts of its utterance.  If we pay attention to this linguistic transit, we can say that it has shot the dominant language in the foot: in less than two centuries, the word 'queer' has changed radically in use, users, and context.  We had to wait until the mid-80s of the last century for, impelled by the AIDS crisis, an assemblage of microgroups to decide to re-appropriate the insult 'queer' to make of it a place for political action and resistence to normalization.  Activists from groups like Act Up (fighting against AIDS), Radical Furies, and Lesbian Avengers decided to wring the neck of the insult 'queer' and transform it into a regime of social critique and cultural intervention.  What had changed was the subject of enunciation: now it was not the young hetero male who called the other 'fag'; now the sissy, the dyke, and the trans called themselves 'queer', announcing an intentional rupture with the norm.  This intuition was present since the gay riots of the 70s.  Guy Hocquenghem, for example, had already revealed the historical and constructed character of homosexuality: 'The capitalist society constructs the homosexual just as it produces the proleteriat, giving rise each moment to its own limit. Homosexuality is a construction of the the normal world".  Yet he was not trying to ask for tolerence and keep a low profile in order to gain entry into the heterosexual institutions of marriage and family, but to affirm the political (but not to say policeable) character of concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality, placing in question their validity to define the social field. In this second round, the word 'queer' has ceased to be an insult to become a sign of resistance to normalization, has ceased to be an instrument of social repression to become a revolutionary index.  

The 'queer' movement is post homo-sexual and post-gay.  Now it does not define itself with respect to the medical notion of homosexuality, nor settle for a reduction of gay identity to a lifestyle accessible within the society of neoliberal consumption. It is, therefore, about a post-identitarian movement: 'queer' is no longer an identity in the multicultural folklore, but a position of critique attentive to the processes of exclusion and marginalization that generate every identitarian fiction.  The 'queer' movement is not a movement of homosexuals nor gays, but of gender and sexuality dissidents that resist the norms imposed by the dominant heterosexual society, attentive also to the processes of normalization and exclusion internal to gay culture: marginalization of dykes, of transexual and transgender bodies, of immigrants, of workers and sex workers.

Because to wring the neck of the insult is even more necessary than to have been the object of it.  The blah blah of a conservative fag is no more 'queer' than the blah blah of a conservative hetero.  Sorry.  To be a fag is not enough to be 'queer': it's necessary to subject your own identity to critique.  When we talk about 'queer' theory in reference to texts by Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, Eve K. Sedwick, or Michael Warner we speak of a critical project, heir to the feminist and anticolonial tradition that holds as its objective the analysis and deconstruction of the historical and cultural processes that have brought us to the invention of the white heterosexual body as the dominant fiction in the West and to the exclusion of difference from the scope of political representation. 

Perhaps the key to the success of 'queer' in the face of the difficulty of publishing or producing interpretations or representations that come from fag, dyke, transexual, anticolonial, postporno, and sex worker cultures lies, unfortunately, in its lack of connection in the Spanish language with the contexts of political oppression of those to whom 'queer' refers to in English.  If we keep in mind that the political efficacy of the term 'queer' stems precisely from being the reappropriation of a slur, and its dissident use against the dominant language, we will have to accept that this displacement does not function when the word 'queer', deprived of historical memory in Spanish, Catalán, or Valencián, is introduced in these languages.  We escape, then, to a brutal movement of decontextualization, but also deprive ourselves of the political force of the gesture.  That explains, perhaps, why many of the new initiates that wish to identify themselves as 'queer' - as they wish to be in the circle of friends of Manu Chao or acquire the latest e-book - will not be so eager to be identified as 'transexuals', 'sadomasochists', 'crips' or 'dykes'. It will be necessary in each case to redefine the contexts of use, change the users, and above all mobilize political language that we have constructed as vile...otherwise, 'queer' theory will be simply parole, parole, parole....


Article by Paul B. Preciado for Parole de Queer-2009

Translated by Sam Smith


Paul B. Preciado is a queer philsopher and activist. He pursued his studies in a number of universities in the United States. Currently he teaches gender theory in several universities in the Spanish State and abroad, participating in the Program for Independent Studies at MACBA. He is the author of the books: Countersexual ManifestoTesto Junkie, and Pornotopia, and of numerous articles published in Multitudes, Eseté, and Artecontexto.







Interview with DEL LAGRACE VOLCANO

Del Lagrace Volcano
Hi Dell, To tell us how you started out as a photographer.
When I was a girl of 18 I hitchhiked around Europe with a girlfriend who had a medium format camera, which impressed me greatly. When I got back to California, where I grew up, I enrolled in all the photography and film classes my local community college offered. After 3 months I had a job in the photography lab and within a year I was the photographer for the theatre. I have always stuck close to home, no matter how far way I have been geographically. I photographed and filmed my family, who are all complete characters in their own right. When I moved up to San Francisco after a few years I continued to create images of my new family, sex positive SM dykes and fags. Expanding the definition of ‘family’ is still one of the primary movitivations in my work and life.

To talk to us about your books the difference between them and the important concepts in each of them.
LOVEBITES, Gay Men’s Press, London, 1991
Loverbites.1991
In the late 1970s when I started making photos it was rare that you ever saw images of lesbians and if you did they were completely de-sexualized. At the time I was on a scholarship at the San Francisco Art Institute and feeling completely alienated by the pervasive white middle classness of that environment. I started hanging out at Scotts Bar, a working class neighbourhood bar where the working class queers hung out and where I met the British dyke who I moved to London with in 1982.  In 1987 I became part of Chain Reaction, a collective of SM Dykes that produced a sex/performance club once a month. Rather than photograph what happened in the club I created events where we went outside and climbed the highest buildings we could find and then performed our queer kinks, for our own pleasure, for posterity and as a way of claiming space for ourselves.
Serie Scott's Bar.Lovebites 
THE DRAG KING BOOK amb Judith “Jack” Halberstam, Serpent’s Tail, London, 1999




The Drag King Book.1999
It was around the mid 90s that the phenomenon of drag kings really started to take off and lots of my friends and lovers were well into it. I made the first images quite casually, not thinking about it becoming a book. I showed these images at some event and a publisher approached me and asked me to make a book. Judith Halberstam was already working on the subject and I invited her to write the main body of text for the book. I find it sad and alarming that 10 years later there has not been another photographic book on drag kings! There are 100s about MTFs and drag queens out there but only one about Drag Kings?! I know for a fact that there are so many other photographers making amazing Drag King images out there!
HeadscarfWS.The Drag King Book

SUBLIME MUTATIONS, Konkursbuchverlag, Germany, 2000
Sublime Mutations.2000
Claudia Gerkhe approached me in the late 90s and asked me to make a book with her. I was pleased because although I love THE DRAG KING BOOK and LOVEBITES they are singular subjects and my body of work encompasses so much more. It was gratifying to produce a book that consisted of 10 years worth of work and was so beautifully reproduced AND hardcover AND not expensive! Unfortunately Konkursbuchverlag does not have good distribution or marketing so it’s hard for people to get hold of it.

SEX WORKS con un texto de Beatriz Preciado, Konkursbuchverlag, Germany 2005
Sex Works.2005
A lot of the work Konkursbuchverlag publishes is about sexuality and once again Claudia asked me to make a book which focused on my fetish and sex work. I asked the queer academic/activist Beatriz Preciado to write a text for it and so it was. Unfortunately this book is not what it could be and should be. I know I should not point it out how badly designed it is but I really can’t help myself.  I wish like hell I had been a control freak and not believed it would be okay because it wasn’t.


FEMMES OF POWER: EXPLODING QUEER FEMININITIES amb Ulrika Dahl, Serpent’s Tail, London 2008
Femmes of Power.2008
I’m very happy with this book, both in terms of the collaborative process with Ulrika Dahl and others but also with the demographics of representation. We were both very aware of our privilege as white able-bodied educated queers and the responsibility that we believe comes with it. Femmes of Power was in part a response to the hype surrounding the drag king movement, which like mainstream society and the LGBT movement privileges masculinity at the expense of femininity. It was also created because there is a vital and growing femme movement out there that has all too often been overlooked and undervalued. Femmes of Power is a challenge to misogynist mindsets.

To tell us what you are working on at the moment.

Right now I’m preparing to perform at GENDER FUSION in Chicago this April, kick off the USA release of Femmes of Power in San Francisco and pay tribute to my mother who died two years ago this April. I’m also researching whiteness, writing about white privilege and working on a photographic/video project about creating community across cultures and explores issues connected to belonging, immigration and integration, starting in Sweden and hopefully spreading outwards.

What it means“:"A gender abolitionist. A part time gender terrorist". (We like it!!!!!).
A gender abolitionist seeks to—wait for it—abolish the concept of gender. A gender terrorist is a person which refuses to conform to the contraints of gender presentation and therefore creates terror in others who inhabit belief systems based on a two gender paradigm. To be honest I’m not sure I’m either. I pass, as male, and most of the time no one would have the slightest clue that I am intersex or trans, but of course it depends on where you are! In San Francisco people like me are a dime a dozen. I make little interventions these days. When I go through customs I mark both FEMALE and MALE on my landing card. So far, after doing this over 100 times, no one has ever asked me about it or challenged me. I sincerely wish I lived in a world where it was safe for me to dress as I would like and wear make-up when I feel like it. The front line gender warriors out there, who don’t or won’t pass, like some MTF women, some ‘bearded ladies’ I know are people we all need to give more appreciation to. On the otherhand I believe it’s super important NOT to create heirarchies of transgression but to be aware of one’s privileges in respect to others.  We all make choices about how to present and perform ourselves based upon many factors and no one should be vilified for not conforming to ‘queer norms’! 
Jax Back.Londres.1991
Jax Revealed.Londres.1991
Torso Hermafrodita.Londres.1999




web  Del Lagrace Volcano:www.dellagracevolcano.com












Interview with Lazlo Pearlman:"I would say that I USE my body as an artistic tool – all performers do, of course - I am specifically often using my naked body to illustrate the non-binary, non-fixed nature of gender, and from that the non binary, non-fixedness of the human experience. I use myself often as a kind of a sculpture, I guess, a moving one"




Lazlo Pearlman

-Tell us about your beginning and how you approached your adaptation of the classic works such as: Macbeth, Medea, Romeo and Juliet.
My beginnings were long, long ago! I got involved in theatre when I was ten years old, and lots of my tastes are from that time – the absurd, the dark and the sexy – my favourite movie when I was ten was “Cabaret” with Liza Minella and Joel Grey, from the novel by Christopher Isherwood about Weimar Germany between world wars I and II. The dark sexiness and out queerness of that time (although, of course, I didn’t know about that at ten and queer was not a word they used in 1930s Germany) really touched something in me – was the beginning of my finding both my theatrical and my sexual self. 
Many years later, in Seattle, Washington (USA), I got involved with a queer theatre company called “Greek Active,”  - which was a play on words: it referred to classic Greek plays like Euripides’ “Medea,” and also to American gay personal add English from the 1970’s through the 90’s. “Greek” sex means anal sex and so to be “Greek Active” meant you were a buttfucker! 
The first show we did was “Medea,” which was the impetus for the company name. Our first theatrical approach was, in the tradition of companies like Charles Ludlam’s “Ridiculous Theatricals” in New York City and others, to reverse the genders of all the characters, so Medea was a big tall drag queen, and I was Jason. There weren’t many of us, so I played Creon and Ageus too – all the main male roles in fact. 
With Medea, as well as with Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet, we changed no dialogue (except to cut the long and ‘boring’ parts for club audiences), but we created a travesty of place and time and gender. The comedy came from the travesty, and often from fore-fronting the queer sex/sexuality – For example, in one scene in our Macbeth, Lady Macbeth buttfucked Macbeth on stage (simulated), which was travesty and genderfuck, but also a representation of the relationship between Lady and Macbeth that came from Shakespeare, so not gratuitous, but absurd, irreverent, exaggerated. 
For my Romeo and Juliet, which was my directing debut, because I was in the lesbian community at that time, and all the other shows had been gay male centered, I set the show in a dyke bar (and we played the show in a bar). I made the Montegues and the Capulets into rival softball teams (softball in the US used to be a dyke cliché of a sport!). I liked to pull in (gay, lesbian) references from all over the place to raise the absurd factor, so we used Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” our nurse character was a dominatrix, Romeo was banished from the dyke bar to a gay male bar where he had to watch a traditional drag queen (played by a woman, the amazing “Swedish Housewife,”) doing a classic (and fantastic!) drag lipsync; messengers were drug dealers, etc, etc, etc.   
Can you provide is with more information about Madame X.


Madame X is a story that was first played on stage at the turn of the 20th century and was made into a film 5 or more times, most famously with Lana Turner, directed by Douglas Sirk, in 1966. Douglas Sirk was a gay camp filmmaking icon, who’s work most famously inspired Todd Haynes' 2002 film “Far From Heaven.” 
However, in 1999 (still in Seattle, but with my own company “Hell’s Elevator Productions”) when I found the film and adapted it for the stage, I didn’t know anything about Douglas Sirk. I rented Madame X because it looked like it would be fun to watch, that was all – and immediately wanted to use it. I rewrote it, creating it as the lost “Film Noir” 1950s version, costumed it in lots of greys and blacks to create the illusion of a black and white film, used lots of “Noir” film techniques and parts of other noir films onstage, and cast it in a “gender blind” way, meaning I had auditions and cast actors in the roles I thought they were best suited for, regardless of what genitalia they had. We toured it to Vancouver, and played in Seattle. It’s still one of my favourite shows. I only wish I had it on video!
Lazlo Pearlman 
-We have followed your progress for some time now and the various body transformations that you have adopted. How have these body transformations influenced your work?
For some years before I transitioned, I was always playing male roles. In these pre-drag king days, cross-gender casting in plays, particularly in alternative productions, was a common way to “queer up” a show, to make it absurd, fun and also to comment on gender roles and stereotypes. And as a “masculine woman” it gave me a place to be seen, and also roles to play, as I was never going to be cast in typical “female” parts. When I transitioned, and was then seen as a man, for a while I had no idea what roles to play! I didn’t want to just play male roles, as that was no longer “queer” for me, and I had no interest in doing drag queen roles. For six years I just directed. When I went back to the stage I began to explore what it meant to have a non-visible trans body there. It meant I began trying to create work about the transgender experience – but I was never interested in strict biographical work, so I immediately began trying to find metaphors to use. One of the biggest changes for me was probably the fact that I no longer was adapting other scripts, because none existed that were useful. It was then that I started writing original works. 


Lazlo Pearlman in "Le grand bouffe"


-From this body transformation background, could you tell us more about the Unhung hero and the Unhung?
The first original script I wrote for the stage was “Unhung,” which I created and performed at Highways Performance Space in Los Angeles, California, in 2000. Unhung was as close as I will ever come to putting my own story on the stage. It took place in a Carnival freak show, and the story was about a Freak (who had no name) who was kidnapped from his tribe of fellow freaks and put in a sideshow to help the carnival promoter make money selling products that would “fix” your gender – an elixir, like a hair tonic, to make you more masculine, a skin cream to make you more feminine, etc - but the freak could not be “fixed,” so each time the products failed. In the midst of this, I also provided bits of history of gender “freaks,” cross-dressers, trans folks, etc, and every so often would stop and answer a question about my own transition. Oh, and there were songs, too.  
“Unhung Heroes” is my first film, and is only related to “Unhung” by the title. I wrote the script in a day while resting up from the production of “Unhung!” At that time (2001) I had gotten very tired of the fact that the only films out there about transpeople were tragic documentaries. I wanted some lightness, some fun, some “fiction.” “Unhung Heroes” is a fifteen-minute comedy about five transguys who find an internet article announcing the first possible penis transplants. They then remember, through flashbacks what life has been like without a dick, imagine what it would be like if they got a dick, and then imagine how they’d get the enormous amount of money it would take to get one – or actually, to get one each, so five dicks(!). They imagine a jewelry store robbery, straight out of the film “Reservoir Dogs,” which goes wrong. The film ends with them realizing having a dick is no big deal, which was my point at the time (and one of my points still) - that there is no tragedy in being “a man without a dick.” I fictionalized a lot of my own experiences from transition, focusing on their humour and absurdity, rather than any sadness or tragic qualities. 


-Would you describe your body as a work of art? And is it ok/permissible for us to use this phrase when writing about you?
I would not say that my body IS a work of art, but I would say that I USE my body as an artistic tool – all performers do, of course - I am specifically often using my naked body to illustrate the non-binary, non-fixed nature of gender, and from that the non binary, non-fixedness of the human experience. I use myself often as a kind of a sculpture, I guess, a moving one. These days I do a lot of “strip” shows, to confront the audience expectations of me as male – I often play with masculinity, and with sexual expectations (phalluses of various kinds) and then end up naked in the end. And yes, if you want to call my body a work of art, I won’t complain! 
Lazlo Pearlman en "Le grand bouffe"
-What is the origin of your fascination with absurd theatre and where does your particular approach come from? We love it!!!!!
Hmmmm… I think I like the absurd because it is - and does - a lot of things at once – First, it offers another/alternative/upside down view of the world, but doesn’t tell us what or how to think of that world, this world, our world. The absurd doesn’t preach, doesn’t offer answers, it poses questions.  It is funny, it is usually poignant, it’s playful, it is not always nice, or sweet, but is not (rarely? Never?)  “angry,” or “preachy.” It is the ridiculous – and it ridicules itself while it ridicules its subject. Perhaps it’s that – there is some way in which the absurd does not judge. It makes us look at things differently, but it does not tell us what to think about them. Absurdist theatre, absurdist material is always human, always has a strange kind of compassion for its subject, its audience, itself. That’s important to me as an artist. I believe in questions, not answers, compassion, not anger, and I am in the midst of this world, these issues, these problems, not above or outside them, so I cannot and won’t judge –  and I LOVE the playful, the dark and the silly together.


Lazlo Pearlman in "Devil"


-Nowadays you are working with Jo Sol, can you tell us more about your working partnership with Jo Sol.
(Jo Sol and Lazlo Pearlman premiered the film"Fake Orgasm" in 2010)
I met Jo when I was performing one of my absurdist strips at Arteleku in San Sebastian, through Beatriz Preciado, and he contacted me a couple of months after that asking me to take part in a film project. From our first conversation we hit it off right away. He has opened my mind to new ways of seeing political and philosophical ideas and work – particularly around anarchy - though not only that - in part through his film “Taxista Ful,” and especially through our many conversations. He has been a big catalyst in my finding the next stage of my work AND my politics!  
In practice, Jo makes work very differently than I do, he is a very improvisational filmmaker, so creating this film has been a new, exciting and ongoing collaborative process. We are about to go into the third round of creation, and the film has changed many times since we began. Even though this is the first partnership between us and we do not know the outcome yet, I have a feeling it will be a fruitful one, and that we will work together again. I love the fact that his perspective is both compatible with and completely different from mine – I think our partnership has changed and expanded both of our minds and our work!  
And I think the film will be something special – in fact I am sure it will be, but because of the process we are in, and the improvisational nature of it, I can’t tell you much about what it will be – because by the time it’s finished, it may be something completely different! We will all have to wait and see… and I look forward to meeting you all at the premiere!



Documentary "Fake Orgasm".2010





POSTPORNO ACTIVISM by PAUL B. PRECIADO



Sexuality isn't natural: it's a cultural construction. It relates to a psychosomatic apparatus constructed collectively through language and image, supported by norms and social controls that modulate and fashion desire. Therefore, the relationship between sexuality and pornography isn't of the order of representation, but of production. Feminist critic Teresa de Lauretis asserts that, in modernity, photography and cinema function as authentic technologies of sex and sexuality: they produce the differences of sex and sexuality that they claim to represent. Porn doesn't depict a sexuality that precedes it, but is rather (alongside medical, juridical, literary, and other discourses) one of the devices that construct the epistemological framework and trace the boundaries within which sexuality appears as visible. 

Sexuality resembles cinema. It's made of fragments of space-time, abrupt changes of shot, backlit sequences, opening shots, high- and low-angle shots, bird's-eye shots, zooms, voiceovers...desire, locked in the editing room, cuts, colors, reorganizes, equalizes, and assembles. With the invention of the audiovisual industry, this process that takes place in the private neuronal system (others will say unconscious) assumes a collective, public, and political dimension. The audiovisual industry is the political editing room where public sexuality has been invented, produced, and broadcast as a visible image since the end of the nineteenth century. 

Since the '60s of the last century, we've witnessed what we could call an assault from the editing room on the part of the politico-visual minorities whose practices, bodies, and desire have been, until now, constructed cinematographically as pathological. Until this time, women and sexual and racial minorities didn't have access to the editing room. They were simple objects of representation: little by little they have become subjects. Again, when I speak of minorities, I don't refer to a number but to an index of sub-alterity. Heterosexual women, for example, were and in part remain a politico-visual minority, since femininity as an image has been constructed as an effect of the hetero-normative gaze. Feminist (Trinh T. Minh-ha), experimental lesbian (Barbara Hammer), or experimental 'queer' (Freak Orlando by Ulrike Ottinger or Dandy Dust by Hans Scheirl) films don't seek to represent the authentic sexuality of women, lesbians, or gays, but to produce visual counter-fictions capable of calling into question the dominant modes of picturing norm and deviation. In the same way, the post-porno, transfeminist, and crip 'nouvelle vague', made above all with video (Eric Pussboy, Abigail Gnash, Lucie Blush, Courtney Trouble, Virginie Despentes, Gaspar Noe, Post-Op, Del LaGrace Volcano, YesWeFuck...), doesn't seek to represent the truth of sex but to question the cultural limits that separate pornographic and non-pornographic representation, as well as the visual codes that determine the normality or pathology of a body or a practice.

During the '80s and '90s, the anti-pornographic feminism of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine Mackinnon defined porn as a patriarchal and sexist language that precipitates violence against women's bodies ("porn is the theory, rape is the practice"). These arguments eclipsed the activism of pro-sex feminism that saw in the dissident representation of sexuality an opportunity for empowerment for women and sexual minorities. For their part, the feminist anti-porn movement, supported by conservative religious and pro-life movements, defended state censorship as the only means to protect women from pornographic violence. But how can one leave control of a technology of pleasure production in the hands of a patriarchal, sexist, and homophobic state?

The decisive matter, therefore, is not whether an image is a true or false representation of a particular (feminine, masculine, or other) sexuality, but who has access to the collective editing room in which fictions of sexuality are produced. That which an image shows us is not the truth (or falsehood) of the picture, but the ensemble of visual and political conventions of the society that views it. Here, the question, 'who?', points not to the individual subject but to the political construction of the gaze. The question is not whether a feminine porn is possible; rather, how can we modify visual hierarchies that we have constituted as subjects? How to displace the visual codes that historically have served to designate the normal or the abject?

It's this exercise of re-appropriating the technology of the production of sexuality that we call postpornographic. Postporno is not an aesthetic, but the assemblage of experimental productions that emerge from movements for the politico-visual empowerment of sexual minorities: pariahs of the pharmacopornographic system (bodies that work in the sex industry, prostitutes and porn actors and actresses, women dissenting against the heterosexual system, transgender bodies, lesbians, bodies with functional or psychic diversity) reclaiming the use of audiovisual devices for the production of sexuality. Postporno productions (the performative and audiovisual works of Annie Sprinkle and Elisabeth Stephens, COYOTE, Veronica Vera, Monika Treut, Linda Montano, Karen Finley, Maria Beatty, María Llopis, Emilie Jouvet, GoFist, Shu Lea Cheang, Diana Junyent Pornoterrorista) are a living archive of sexualities in resistance against the state's porno, mom and dad's porno, colonial porno, the standardized body's porno. It's a revolt in the editing room where desire is constructed.


Translated by Sam Smith


(*) Paul B. Preciado is a philosopher and transfeminist activist, professor of Philosophy of the Body at New York University and author of 'Counter-Sexual Manifesto', 'Testo Junkie', and 'Pornotopia', among other volumes.

Text shared from El Mundo.