2nd Global Conference
Joint Session: Monstrous Erotic (with
Monsters 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 zoo-sodomy 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 zoo-porno 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 above and the tentative differentiating
definition of erotic zoophilia and of bestiality (bestial porno,
bestial sadism) – the latter of which is a zoo-sexual strategy
akin to the concept of brutality, I draw attention in the
text to individual examples of everyday bestialities and zoo-porno
practices – or, one could use the concept of anthropornography by
which Carol J. Adams designated "the depiction of nonhuman animals
as whores". Here, we are talking (also) 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
these tentative differentiating definitions between erotic
zoophilia and bestiality, I shall monitor the meaning of the two concepts
mentioned as conveyed by 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, Hana 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 its 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.