Session 3: Erotic Subjectivities

5th Global Conference

Friday 6th November – Sunday 8th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Youth ~ Self, Sex, and Spirit
Melissa Michaels and Mariah Tuffy
Boulder, Colorado, USA

No abstract is presently available

Writing from Breast Cancer Patients´ Lives: The Erotic Significance of the Lived Nipple
Ana Porroche Escudero
Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom

: I suggest that the (absent) nipple in the breast cancer discourse provides a powerful lens magnifying the social construction of the erotic breast based on the commodification of breasts as men´s objects of sexual pleasure. The world of cosmetic surgery has turned more and more attention to nipple loss as the primary factor affecting breast cancer patients´ feeling less sexually attractive, very much like biomedicine emphazing the severe impact of breast loss on women´s sexuality. Indeed, the banner “look good, feel better” has been heavily marketed to promote enhancing technologies (i.e. breast and nipple reconstruction) as a panacea for women´s (“mental”) sexual problems. However, little attention has been given to the breasts and nipples focusing on women´s erotic and sexual embodied experiences. The focus of this paper will be on the erotic lived nipple as a source of incommensurable pleasure, sexual excitement, joy and even orgasm for women, but also pain, alienation, disappointment and sadness when mastectomy removes them, and the promise of magical cosmetic surgery cannot restore their erotic experience. This paper is based on a case study of an informant during my PhD fieldwork in Spain during 2007-2008. Federico, partner of a breast cancer patient, takes up the idea of the lived breasts to give an alternative understanding of the erotic breast. He depicts his partner as a woman who delighted herself in the pleasure of her nipples being rubbed, caressed, squeezed and sucked to the point of orgasm. Thus, the lost of the lived breast will be emphatically mourned as a castration of his partner´s key sexual and erotic body part. Federico´s account further raises the questions as to who defines eroticism and for whom breasts should be erotic.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

The Erotics of the Uncanny: Re-Inhabiting Vulnerability
Cara Judea Alhadeff
Visual Artist, PA, USA

As a sex activist, photographer, and yoga teacher, my work is about making the private public, the invisible visible, drawing the mysterious into the explicit. The ever-fertile uncanny becomes my political strategy–an erotic ethic that is a commitment to aesthetics and vulnerability. My photographs explore eroticism as a tool for cultural resistance. Eroticism is any intensely satisfying sensation of connectedness to oneself, to others, and to our environment in which creativity and work (Bataille and Bhagavad Gita) enhance our own and others’ sense of vitality. Eroticism resists homogenized social relations and self-censorship and offers a key to examine the unconscious mind by interweaving the very interactions that are often prohibited or suppressed under social norms. The link with repression illuminates the definition of the uncanny as “something that should have remained hidden and has come into the open”(Freud).

My intention is to open up spaces for viewers to re-inhabit their bodies’ potential for presence and pleasure. Using queer politics as deconstructive and non-normative, I engage multiple discourses in order to disrupt taken-for-granted binaries and challenge the hegemonic categories of self/other, certainty, gender, pleasure, and political action/personal empowerment. This is a practice of dissolving and re-arranging the artificial boundaries between art, daily life, and radical democracy in which we make choices about our own bodies.

In cultural production as in its reception, vulnerability becomes a vital intervention in public-private discourse. Since the private is construed and constructed as vulnerable and ambiguous, it “requires“ unquestioned taxonomies of regulation and normalization. The sanctity of normalcy constitutes a hegemony of representation that colonizes our relationships with our own bodies. In contrast, erotic politics reorients our cultural notions of pleasure and vulnerability, and ultimately who has power, imagination, and control over our bodies.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)