37 research outputs found
Sticky Stories: Joe Orton, Queer History, Queer Dramaturgy
This paper investigates the resonances of Ortonâs work for contemporary queer audiences. By presenting potential reasons for the rise and fall in popularity and visibility of Ortonâs work for queer and gay audiences through the 1980s and 1990s, this paper looks to the queer context in which Joe Ortonâs work developed in order to explore the queer social history into which it fits. Â This sense of queer history is linked to contemporary notions of queer theorising about temporalities and queer dramaturgy, which offers potentially novel ways of engaging with Ortonâs work queerly without twisting it to fit a âneatâ reading, in part because such readings tend to âsmooth outâ the more difficult elements of the work. Â In particular, the paper explores the theatrical form of farce, often articulated as conservative, in relation to queer positions, which are quite the opposite. Â In so doing, the paper, by way of queer temporalities and work on queer dramaturgies, sketches out a reading strategy that does not ignore Ortonâs more difficult or stickier elements, in particular his treatment of women and race
Countersexual manifesto /
Countersexual Manifesto is an outrageous yet rigorous work of trans theory, a performative literary text, and an insistent call to action. Seeking to overthrow all constraints on what can be done with and to the body, Paul B. Preciado offers a provocative challenge to even the most radical claims about gender, sexuality, and desire. Preciado lays out mock constitutional principles for a countersexual revolution that will recognize genitalia as technological objects and offers step-by-step illustrated instructions for dismantling the heterocentric social contract. He calls theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and Haraway to task for not going nearly far enough in their attempts to deconstruct the naturalization of normative identities and behaviors. Preciado's claim that the dildo precedes the penisâthat artifice, not nature, comes first in the history of sexualityâforms the basis of his demand for new practices of sexual emancipation. He calls for a world of sexual plasticity and fabrication, of bio-printers and âdildonics,â and he invokes countersexuality's roots in the history of sex toys, pornography, and drag in order to rupture the supposedly biological foundations of the heterocentric regime. His claims are extreme, but supported through meticulous readings of philosophy and theory, as well as popular culture. The Manifesto is now available in English translation for its twentieth anniversary, with a new introduction by Preciado. Countersexual Manifesto will disrupt feminism and queer theory and scandalize us all with its hyperbolic but deadly serious defiance of everything we've been told about sex. --Publisher.Translation of: Manifiesto contrasexual. Barcelona : Anagrama, 2011.Includes bibliographical references and index.Countersexual society -- Countersexual reversal practices -- Theories -- Countersexual reading exercises.Countersexual Manifesto is an outrageous yet rigorous work of trans theory, a performative literary text, and an insistent call to action. Seeking to overthrow all constraints on what can be done with and to the body, Paul B. Preciado offers a provocative challenge to even the most radical claims about gender, sexuality, and desire. Preciado lays out mock constitutional principles for a countersexual revolution that will recognize genitalia as technological objects and offers step-by-step illustrated instructions for dismantling the heterocentric social contract. He calls theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and Haraway to task for not going nearly far enough in their attempts to deconstruct the naturalization of normative identities and behaviors. Preciado's claim that the dildo precedes the penisâthat artifice, not nature, comes first in the history of sexualityâforms the basis of his demand for new practices of sexual emancipation. He calls for a world of sexual plasticity and fabrication, of bio-printers and âdildonics,â and he invokes countersexuality's roots in the history of sex toys, pornography, and drag in order to rupture the supposedly biological foundations of the heterocentric regime. His claims are extreme, but supported through meticulous readings of philosophy and theory, as well as popular culture. The Manifesto is now available in English translation for its twentieth anniversary, with a new introduction by Preciado. Countersexual Manifesto will disrupt feminism and queer theory and scandalize us all with its hyperbolic but deadly serious defiance of everything we've been told about sex. --Publisher
Porn, pantomime and protest: the politics of bawdiness as feminine style
This article explores the significance of the recent âFace-Sittingâ protest that took place outside Westminster in 2014. A carefully staged response to changes to pornography legislation that criminalized particular sexual practices pertinent to womenâs pleasure, this porn-panto protest put the spectacle of the âkinkyâ woman and her desires centre stage. The activistsâ unique use of fetish dress, class and humour is explored in relation to the protest by brothel keeper and campaigner Cynthia Payne in the 1970s/1980s. Payne deployed bawdy humour and a particular high camp use of âkinkyâ dress and English etiquette to undermine contemporary sexual norms. The 2014 protest also clearly reclaimed two traditional roles within English pantomime: the Dame and the Principal Boy. These examples will be used to examine the political function of humour in relation to cross-dressing and the âwoman-on-topâ. Ultimately, this study argues that âbawdinessâ is a politics that offers us potential promise but not without critical limitations established through media representations