Nice post, lotu5. Thoroughly Illuminating. I would concur and like to further Add.

If a Man can Project EMPathy and Conscious Surrender to AI Total Submission in a Woman’s SeXXXXual Desires, will he/she be Polyamoral and XSSXXXXually Androgynous? Addictively Ambiguous or AAA Rated Purely Sexual Being……. for another Classification in the Gene Genie Pool.

AI Pleasure Robot ….. and ur Perfectly Real Virtualised Friend, Created in this NeuReal Medium of CyberSpace and therefore a First to the Markets.
Is that Zero dDay Trade and Underground Movement/Shifting Tectonic Plates?

The Posit here is ……. Yes. A Virtually Real Possibility or because IT Shares IT here with you now …… AI Fact and Present Future Perfect Truth.

Thank you for teaching me about Bunnies & Dragons. I had no idea this culture existed. I was able to use this term in context to an anarchist friend and she already knew about Bunnies & Dragons. Damn, I’ve yet to learn more.
When will the learning end?
I want to drink a margarita at the beach already…
tee hee
z

I facilitated a discussion the other day on FTM sex and sexuality. It is interesting, this conversation led me to process even further some of the things I have been thinking and blogging about already. Alex, doesn’t necessarily want to continue operating under the gender binary, as many FTM’s don’t. He is especially weary of “passing as a hetero white male.” Race is a whole other discussion when intersected with sexuality and other links for that matter. Anyway, I think it’s definitely an assumption we make about the trans community, so YES, there is definitely is more to it. One of the things we discussed was the idea of floating in a third gender, a third space, identifying as “trans men” or as “hybrid beings” not necessarily men or women, not stealth, not ever truly passing, but creating a third space. Its an interesting concept, something I think a lot about, which is part of why I took issue with how Kimberly Dark generalized the FTM community in her performance.

I think we are developing language for the kind of liberation we want to see. It’s just a matter of continuing to have these dialogues…

Here is my new wordpress blog, and i uploaded my most recent entry from myspace: “Queer This”

http://djqueenb.wordpress.com/

A new language for the world we want, yes I believe so but also a new aesthetics? What if we stopped thinking about identification? What if we took aesthetics as a starting point and looked at affect, desire and pleasure, rather than gender, sexuality and identity? What productive connections can we make between our subjectivities ––or subjections–– and desire? How are “who I feel I am” and “who I want to fuck” interrelated? Why do people need to know? Is it to know who to fuck? Did Foucault answer any of these questions? I don’t recall.

I am not even asked about my sexual orientation, I pass well, as you probably noticed, and when I am with my lovers I often get snarky smirks for being a lipstick lesbian or boys offer to buy me drinks since I am putting up a sexy show for their “transgressive pleasures”. If I am with “a man” they assume we are the usual hetero couple. Do I care? Yes I do, if anything because I hate when people make assumptions.

Beatriz Preciado in Kontrasexualles Manifest talks about the dildo as that which was before the penis. As the origin of the penis. The dildo as the supplement that produces what it completes. She also talks about the anus as the site of contrasexual practices: “the appropriation of the anus as contrasexual centre of lust has a lot in common with the logic of the dildo, every body part is not only a body surface [plane] on which a dildo can be inserted but also an opening, a point of flight, a centre of discharge, a virtual axis of action-passion” (19).

Last night I was talking to a queer artist and theorist about the limitations of identity politics, even as something to be rid of, deconstruct, oppose or dis. We talked about the potential of an esthetics of surfaces ––organic and inorganic–– as alternative sites for sense, for affect, for the grafting of new meanings onto the surface of a body, for the unfolding of desire. It all started with a mention of the bathroom door one stares at in anticipation of an encounter. What that surface begins to mean even in the absence of any anticipation (John Paul Ricco 2002 The Logic of the Lure. University of Chicago Press).

John was also telling me about one of his performances in which he lays still, on a bed, inert and bound in leather, between images from Catherine Breillat’s film Anatomy of Hell and Maragrite Dura’s novel The North China Lover, trying to gauge the reactions of the audience once they cannot make sense of what his “queer body” signifies. Minimalist aesthetic to push the body past the limits of its signification…The conviction that some things cannot or should not be fully explained, exposed. That there is something about our desires that goes beyond identity politics or the representable.

I was telling him about the choice of my video collective to take pornography as a site to affirm desire as something that cannot be reduced to codes, perversions, gender identities, or sexual orientations––to cut-up bodies and organs that are arranged to form a social order. Of how, starting with our frustration with identity politics, my friends and I had first decided to focus our work on the limitations of identity, but how we quickly moved away from this kind of struggle, and from theory as a lens to look at the world, to practice as the purest affirmation of already existing, albeit unarticulated visions of desire, and of the role of sex within them. After all, some people may look at the world without expecting to see what they were told they’d see. Ours is just a gesture that says you can’t see us because you are not looking but we are here and there is many of us.

Many of us who don’t really need to identify (but are often forced to do so), however fluid that identification may be. Many of us who are attracted to anyone or anything with which they can establish a productive relation, no matter how transitory. How are we created as subjects? On that I am with Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault: by folding the outside into the inside. You only perceive of yourself at any given moment while you are in interaction, subjectification is a collective process. So, maybe, I am what I am at the moment I desire something, which changes all the time and I with it. We are metastable systems (bodies) constantly affecting and being affected by other bodies not all of which are organic, there are dildos, anuses, images, surfaces…––and they are themselves multiplicities… “we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do.” (A Thousand Plateaus).

My question lately is how do you get away from other people’s need to identify you, read you according to what they already know or want to know, and more than anything, how do you convey such private, intimate and non-referential experiences through images? Surfaces, objects, body parts (organic and inorganic) seem to be a thread to follow, an erotics of the detail versus coded sexual beings. Here, the question as to whether this will ever become the new politics of sexuality is not even really as important as the actual experience of sharing and coming into contact, exploring. Bunnies and dragons are an example, for sure, of how these new relational modes can unfold, and so is the invention of a new language. Anything goes really!

A couple of weeks ago, on the IDC mailinglist there was a thread on the midlife crisis of pornography. The opening question for the discussion was: “The question is how can we reclaim online porn exposure as a soft and sensual devices? In short, approaching the third phase of porn scholarship (first phase=critiques of porn as owned by solidified industries, second=atomization of porn as alt/indie/queer/art), I will end with a lust question for the list. Where do we find lust as lively porn-aided dating networks or sensual porn-sharing? How can we participate in sex and swingers sites without killing our own sex drives? Is this just my own problem? How can we use porn to get aroused in sexual encounters (widely defined) and relationships?” I didn’t reply. I don’t have an answer if not “get down to busuness”. Netporn and internet dating sites are only an extension of what’s out there. So, can we use this question to ask why so many of us are willing to look and visit lively porn-aided dating networks that do not kill our sex drives, yet very few can articulate their own openly and unapologetically to start producing the spaces we are evidently looking for?

Word…

Ale! Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I really need to chew on it and reply longer, and reread that netporn midlife crisis post too…

But in short, I totally agree, isn’t this acceptance and exploration of a constantly shifting identity a way of moving away from rigid conceptions of identity based groupings? Isn’t it just a furthering of Donna Haraway’s concept of the temporary, fractured identity? As Lacan says “it is always a question of the subject qua [as] indeterminate”.

Still, I have a hard time with the concept of aesthetics. I’m strongly interested, as I said in the post, in developing practices, new bodily practices, new forms of movement, uses, functions, more than new identities. Thank you for making that important distinction. That is part of why I’m interested, like you, in making porn, in exploring my sexuality in lots of various ways, with http://sharingissexy.org . A major part of this process is to see what new parts of ourselves are activated, excited or transformed through these practices, similarly to the way a new lover activates new parts of yourself, or long neglected parts of yourself… But, like I asked Agamben, are we privileging the new?

I’m all for developing a language of process, like Deleuze’s process ontology, and learning to move from categories to multiplicities, but there’s so much to learn…