Perversion: transgressive sexuality and becoming-monster

Perversion is traditionally thought as acts that depart from traditional heterosexuality through object, aim or performance. This article excavates the ways in which thinking desire through perversion can renegotiate how we think the body and subjectivity. By actively repudiating dominant paradigms of sexuality it is possible to understand subjectivity as flux, perversion as political and the body defined by its capacity to dissipate and refigure socio-sexual limits. Perversion is not simply against the normal but comes to present a means by which subjectivity may become-otherwise according to Deleuze and Guattari. Considering woman’s historical definition as the ‘perverted’ version of the male (be it castrated, maternal or otherwise), actively engaging in becoming-perverse calls for all subjects to negotiate the political potentials and risks of defining sexual habituation. Occupying the non-dominant position does not necessarily align one with being pervert, however this article will suggest perversion can be used as a means by which those in othered positions, and indeed all subjects, can volitionally explore the position of the other. Perversion is not that which one is named but can be a sexual-political project one undertakes

Necrosexuality

Subjectivities configured as post-human may challenge investments in former configurations of what it means to be human, but there remains enough of a residue of ‘the human’ for culture to persist in defining the non-human, or specifically non-humans. If it is conceived by what remains of culture as human, sexuality implies an involvement with the human. Whether it is within or between entities or as ubiquitous dissipative force sexuality effectuates alterations in patterns of subjectivity through desire, pleasure, sexual events and affects. Ethically this definition impels the need to theorise those who don’t count. Corpses provide an ambivalent point within the human/nonhuman issue as they are both and neither human/nonhuman – the were that do and don’t count. The corpse is the actual material residue of ‘the human’. Necrophilic desire is located around this involvement. Even the discrepancy in describing desire for corpses or for the corpse raises issues of necrophilia being a generic sexuality – the necrophile – or a specific dialectic – desire for a corpse invested with particular individual qualities or memories of those qualities. ‘Non/Human’ invokes machines, animals, epistemes, powers, inanimate objects. Corpses share everything with humans except life, so the non-human element in necrophilia is the absence of life rather than genus or organic alterity. Animation, rot and other material differences follow. This chapter explores the navigations of the human raised when the corpse – human non-human and simultaneously non-human human – enters into a desiring pattern with a living force tactically described as human

Mucous, monsters and angels: Irigaray and Zulawski's possession

This article will offer an analysis of Andrej Zulawski’s Possession (1981) with the work of Luce Irigaray to suggest female desire both is and can create monsters. Through the parabolic configuration and ultimate collapse of the transcendental mystical with the carnal, mucosal monsters can be understood as angels enveloping and unfurling configurations of pleasure beyond phallologocentrism. Extending this exploration I will suggests spectatorship as mucosal, and the screen as angelic-monstrous, which through shifting from signifying to mystifying, forms with the spectator a mucosal ethical relation. Irigaray states: “Perhaps the visible needs the tangible but this need is not reciprocal.” She directs us away from the visible as the phallic apprehensible through demarcation of form as solid, subjectivity as rigid and recognition or repudiation as objectifying dialectic distance toward mucous as feminine carnal interaction

Metagenomic strategies identify diverse integron-integrase and antibiotic resistance genes in the Antarctic environment

The objective of this study is to identify and analyze integrons and antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in samples collected from diverse sites in terrestrial Antarctica. Integrons were studied using two independent methods. One involved the construction and analysis of intI gene amplicon libraries. In addition, we sequenced 17 metagenomes of microbial mats and soil by high-throughput sequencing and analyzed these data using the IntegronFinder program. As expected, the metagenomic analysis allowed for the identification of novel predicted intI integrases and gene cassettes (GCs), which mostly encode unknown functions. However, some intI genes are similar to sequences previously identified by amplicon library analysis in soil samples collected from non-Antarctic sites. ARGs were analyzed in the metagenomes using ABRIcate with CARD database and verified if these genes could be classified as GCs by IntegronFinder. We identified 53 ARGs in 15 metagenomes, but only four were classified as GCs, one in MTG12 metagenome (Continental Antarctica), encoding an aminoglycoside-modifying enzyme (AAC(6´)acetyltransferase) and the other three in CS1 metagenome (Maritime Antarctica). One of these genes encodes a class D β-lactamase (blaOXA-205) and the other two are located in the same contig. One is part of a gene encoding the first 76 amino acids of aminoglycoside adenyltransferase (aadA6), and the other is a qacG2 gene.Fil: Antelo, Verónica. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas "Clemente Estable"; UruguayFil: Giménez, Matías. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas "Clemente Estable"; UruguayFil: Azziz, Gastón. Universidad de la Republica. Facultad de Agricultura; UruguayFil: Valdespino Castillo, Patricia. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Estados UnidosFil: Falcón, Luisa I.. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; MéxicoFil: Ruberto, Lucas Adolfo Mauro. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Comercio Interno y Culto. Dirección Nacional del Antártico. Instituto Antártico Argentino; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Nanobiotecnología. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica. Instituto de Nanobiotecnología; ArgentinaFil: MacCormack, Walter P.. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Comercio Interno y Culto. Dirección Nacional del Antártico. Instituto Antártico Argentino; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Nanobiotecnología. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica. Instituto de Nanobiotecnología; ArgentinaFil: Mazel, Didier. Institut Pasteur de Paris.; FranciaFil: Batista, Silvia. Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas "Clemente Estable"; Urugua

A cinema of desire: cinesexuality and Guattari's a-signifying cinema

This article will first describe the benefits and risks in challenging projects of signification as they relate to feminism. I will then point out the ways in which the desiring event of cinema – what I have termed ‘cinesexuality’ – can reorient and rupture structures of signification through a focus on expression. The relation of cinesexuality to feminism will then be drawn, using Guattari’s notion of asemiotic bodies: the ‘homosexual’ and ‘woman’. This will be followed by some brief sketches toward thinking cinesexuality as a form of ‘becoming-woman’. The cinesexual emphasises cinematic pleasure as asignified, pleasure beyond signification that then challenges how genders, and indeed individuals as their own collective of disparate modalities, desire cinema

The great ephemeral tattooed skin

The skin is always and already a series of planes which signify race, gender, age and such. Tattooing creates a new surface of potential significance upon the body. Tattooing can call into question concepts of volition in reference to the power to inscribe and define one’s subjectivity through one’s own skin, and the social defining of the subject. Skin is the involution or event between subject and object, will and cultural inscription, the social and the self. Feminism, particularly corporeal feminists, have attempted to think ways in which the female flesh may be recognized and self-defined without risking essentialism through reification of the meaning of ‘woman’s body’. Thinking the tattooed female body thus resonates with some of the risks and benefits feminism has found in theorizing a marginalized body. Using Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard and other major influences on corporeal feminists this article explores ways in which significance is sought in skin and possible configurations of skin and world which challenge the desire to read the flesh as a legible incarnation of subjectivity

We’re All Infected: Legal Personhood, Bare Life and The Walking Dead

This article argues that greater theoretical attention should be paid to the figure of the zombie in the fields of law, cultural studies and philosophy. Using The Walking Dead as a point of critical departure concepts of legal personhood are interrogated in relation to permanent vegetative states, bare life and the notion of the third person. Ultimately, the paper recommends a rejection of personhood; instead favouring a legal and philosophical engagement with humanity and embodiment. Personhood, it is suggested, creates a barrier in law allowing individuals in certain contexts (and in certain embodied states) to be rendered non-persons and thus outside the scope of legal rights. An approach that rejects personhood in favour of embodiment would allow individuals to enjoy their rights without being subject to such discrimination. It is also suggested that the concept of the human, itself complicated by the figure of the zombie, allows for legal engagement with a greater number of putative rights claimants including admixed embryos, cyborgs and the zombie

Gender Monstrosity

Deadgirl (2008) is based around a group of male teens discovering and claiming ownership of a bound female zombie, using her as a sex slave. This narrative premise raises numerous tensions that are particularly amplified by using a zombie as the film’s central victim. The Deadgirl is sexually passive yet monstrous, reifying the horrors associated with the female body in patriarchal discourses. She is objectified on the basis of her gender, and this has led many reviewers to dismiss the film as misogynistic Torture Porn. However, the conditions under which masculinity is formed here – where adolescent males become "men" by enacting sexual violence – are as problematic as the specter of the female zombie. Deadgirl is clearly horrific and provocative: in this article I seek to probe implications arising from the film’s gender conflicts