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Session 5: Monstrous Erotic (Joint session with Erotic Conference)
Chair: Nane Cantatore

Monstrous Sexualities: Sexual Ethics in a Cold Climate
Paul Reynolds
Department of Social and Psychological Sciences, Edge Hill College, Ormskirk, Lancashire, United Kingdom

Recent representations of sexual 'monsters' - paedophiles, sado-masochists,  those who commit bestiality, incest and so on - demonstate that patholigical construction and individuation of sexual difference and illegitimacy remains a significant feature of the representation and articulation of sex in the 21st. This paper strips bare the nature of the pathologising of difference and the construction of the monstrous 'other'  as a means of objectifying and separating the guilty 'other' from 'us' , and so veiling the monstrosity' that underpins key features of mainstream sexual  representations and articulations. This 'othering' gives the appearance of a sexual ethics that is embedded and reasoned in contemporary society, when quite the opposite is the case. This paper is a critical engagement with the poverty of sexual ethics and a pleas to deconstruct and see the 'monsters for what they are - too close reflections of ourselves and the ethical squalor we allow to continue around us.

Zoocentrically About Bestial Porno and Erotic Zoophilia
Suzana Marjanic
Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, Croatia

As one of the unfortunately numerous incentives for writing about bestial porno (bestiality) and erotic zoophilia, I took the fact that zoosodomy is prohibited today by the criminal codes of many Western countries – not, of course, because of concern for nonhuman animals but largely as a result of the ethical paradigms of Christianised human animals – and the fact that the Croatian Animal Welfare Act did not express the need for prohibition of the abuse of animals in zooporno practices. However, the Amendment Proposal of the new Croatian Animal Welfare Act, put forward by the Animal Friends Association (Croatia) in 2004, did contain, among other things, an added ban on "using animals for pornographic purposes and sexual abuse". (Unfortunately, the Croatian Parliament, did not, of course, accept the proposed Amendment of the Act in question.)
On the trail of the tentative differentiating definition of erotic zoophilia and of bestiality (bestial porno, bestial sadism) – the latter of which is a zoosexual strategy akin to the concept of brutality, I also draw attention to the concept of anthropornography by which Carol J. Adams designated "the depiction of nonhuman animals as whores" that is present, for example, in advertisements in which animals pose as strippers and prostitutes, who allegedly "desire" to be eaten. In zoopornographic strategies, we are speaking of androzoons – male animals that are trained for sexual relations with human females and inversed zoopornographic training – of gynezoons that are designated for porno practices with human males. Within the tentative distinctions between zoophilia and bestiality, I shall briefly monitor the meanings of these two concepts among individual authors who have taken as their theme the mentioned sexual strategies of "human animals". For example, as opposed to the therapist and professional in the field of (human) sexuality, Hani Miletski, who understands bestiality to mean "any sexual contact between a human being and a nonhuman animal", and defines zoophilia as "an emotional attachment and/or sexual attraction to an animal", pointing out that she does not give bestiality a negative connotation, since she uses it as a general term for those who practise sexual relations with animals, which includes both bestialists and zoophiles, the feminist-vegetarian theorist Carol J. Adams shows that the distinctions between bestialists (animals sexual abusers) and zoophiles (those who erotically love animals) are only self-justifications.
As a counterpoint to the above uses of members of the nonhuman animal world, I posit a symbolic "zoophilic" strategy in artistic practices, within which I emphasise, for example, the deep ecology program of Oleg Kulik and his call for cultivation of an interspeciesistic love, by which he negates the anthropocentric and speciesistic "comprehension" of nonhuman animals.

Towards a Grotesque Phenomenology of the Erotic
Sara Cohen Shabot
Lafer Center for Women's Studies, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

In this paper I argue that the grotesque subject as presented mainly by Bakhtin in his Rabelais and His World, might clearly be used as a figuration in order to build a phenomenological conception of the erotic. Such a conception will consider the erotic as resulting from an embodied, hybrid, exceeding, monstrous subjectivity. Moreover, I will argue that the erotic cannot be fully understood without analyzing it from the perspective of a phenomenological fleshed, connected-to-others subjectivity. This subjectivity, I will show, is best represented by the figuration of the grotesque embodied subject.
The grotesque figuration succeeds in presenting the subject the way phenomenological theories had try to conceive of it, namely, as embodied, strongly rooted in concreteness and yet ambiguously intertwined with the world and the others. The exceeding , monstrous subject, represented by the grotesque, cannot be absolutely contained, that is, it cannot be disconnected from the rest of the world or the others: it finds itself in a constant and intensive intertwining and mingling with its outside. The grotesque body grounds its connection to the world on the very condition of human subjects: the embodied subject is in itself open, ambiguous, fragmented and connected to the world and to the others.
A full account of the erotic as a phenomenon must present the erotic above all as a consequence of the subject's being embodied and of its being-with-others. The erotic subject, then, must be understood as constantly re-emerging from its intersection with the world outside itself and the others: no monolithic, closed, immutable and well defined Cartesian subjectivity is possible any more. The erotic subject is, then, above all, a fleshed, hybrid, monstrous subject. This kind of erotic subject is the one that I will exemplify and explain in the light of Bakhtin's figuration of the grotesque body.

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