2nd Global Conference
Wednesday 30th November - Saturday
3rd December 2005
Vienna, Austria
Session 12: Pornography?
Chair: Juan Ramos
Sex as Exile: Postmodern Metamorphosis
and Erotic Distopia
Chris
Moylan
NYIT
In a number of recent dystopian novels erotic experience is represented as metamorphosis involving disruption of the connection between self and the body, and self and the natural or phenomenal world. While these novels are associated, to varying degrees, with science fiction, I will read them as postmodern extensions of the theme of metamorphosis, and thus as satirical rather than speculative expressions of sexual unease. In these works, metamorphosis departs from the classical tradition of divine punishment and the Kafkaesque psychological grotesque. The erotic in these novels is a form of exile from the body and the social order, with the conventions of sexual transport and merging or dissolving of the self become bleakly ironic. Since the body has become, in the worlds of these novels, temporary and disposable, sex is ‘transport’ merely in its literal sense of motion temporarily outside of or away from a monstrous identity. In Light by M. John Harrison the body of a young woman is crushed, mutilated and immobilized to free her brain for the operation of a ship’s computer system; her erotic experience occurs through the vessel, the metal ship, through her dematerialized projections or images. In Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon the individual’s memory and personality are downloaded to a computer disks inserted in revitalized bodies or host corpses; the bodies can be disposed of as necessary and the disks placed in new bodies. Tropes similar to those in the works of Morgan and Harrison are found in the novels of Jack Womak, with the additional element of extensive references to popular culture. This sense of disjunction lends itself to a psychological, and specifically to a Lacanian reading of the erotic in these novels. My analysis of the work of these poets will draw on the writings of Slavoj Zizek in particular, but will be for the most focused on close reading of texts. In particular, I will refer to the Lacanian notions of ‘Das Ding,’ or the Thing, and the object petit a, as these bear on intrusion of the monstrous and the profoundly alien in the discourse of the body and the erotic.
Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminists Struggling
with Porn
Katerina
Liskova G
Faculty of Social Sciences, Masaryk University in Brno,
Brno,
Czech Republic
Censorship of sexually explicit imagery is currently
being called for not by conservatives but, paradoxically, by feminists.
At various places throughout Europe (Ireland 2005, Czech Republic 2005,
Germany 2003), feminist groups launch campaigns against pornography,
which they conceive in terms of crime against women, degradation, humiliation,
and silencing women.
Efforts like these are not historically unique.
Two decades earlier, American feminists fought the so called sex wars;
Canada adopted their feminist-inspired anti-porn laws in the early
90´s.
North American arguments now resonate in Europe. Using “American” reasoning,
some European feminists are lobbying for a porn-banning law. Assuming
that “everywhere, women are silenced” (Baer, 52) by pornographic
pictures, they want to enhance agency for women by framing porn within
the Civil Code on the basis of discrimination, which they hope will
bring speech back to women (MacRae). Litigation is viewed as the ultimate
way to counter a pornographic “message that women can be hurt
and hit and hated” (Itzin, 68).
Is the judicial route the only or
the best one for feminist political aims? What dangers are hidden when
the state is called upon to “have
the last word” about sexuality and its representation? Is it
really so, that “all feminist arguments, however radical in intent
and consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit
in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power
of men to name”? (Dworkin, 17) Can we step out of “either-or”,”man-woman” binaries,
and what contours would feminist politics have then? What are the other
ways a “woman” can use language? I propose porn to be one
possible way for feminists to reappropriate language as a constitutive
means of constructing social reality and politics in broader terms. “Other
uses of language” – heretical readings and subversive reiterations
of a traditionally male genre – open up space for feminist agency
and allow porn to become a site for the critical examination and reworking
of stiff gender subject positions.
My analysis of feminist anti-porn
arguments – both current European
ones and older American ones – is based on Pierre Bourdieu´s
concepts of language and symbolic power and on Austin´s notion
of performative speech acts
Re-occupying the Erotic Body: The Paintings
and ‘Performance’ of
Pauline Boty, British Pop Artist (1938-66)
Sue
Tate
University of the West of England, United Kingdom
Pauline Boty
(1938-66), colleague of David Hockney and Peter Blake, was one of the
few women artists to engage with Pop Art. Despite
being produced over 40 years ago, her work offers a radical, historical
reframing of contemporary concerns about women’s sexuality. She
was a knowing and sophisticated artist, aware of issues of sexual politics,
and also a sensual, beautiful woman who identified with popular culture,
relishing its desires and pleasures. In her exuberant work she
found a visual language to picture a female erotic imagination within
the tropes and imagery of mass culture, capturing the affective experience
of the pop culture ‘fan’: lust, pleasure and the anticipation
of sexual release.
Boty worked at a time when the paradigm of the artist
was firmly established as male and women often wished to distract attention
from their gender to gain acceptance as artists. Yet she knowingly
performed a highly sexualised, popular culture construction of artistic
identity. Posing
naked with her own work she aimed to collapse the binary opposition
between ‘sexual woman’ and ‘serious artist’ which
shaped the cultural field.
At the time the work had no discursive
resonance and went uncommented upon; the photographs were drawn into
the existing signifying practices, appearing in Men Only and Tit
Bits, UK soft porn
magazines of the era, some with the paintings cropped.
The issue
of the relationship of women artists to mass cultural imagery of the
sexual woman remains problematic. Second wave feminist art theory only
validated women’s work that subverted that imagery and Boty
has been accused of complicity with patriarchal signifying systems. Yet
this subversive/complicit binary means a denial of the real pleasures
experienced by women, effectively leaving them as tenants in bodies
that signify only sexuality for men.
This illustrated paper explores
Boty’s innovative practice,
demonstrating its relevance to contemporary debates now that changes
in the discursive field have finally allowed her work to be celebrated