UPCOMING LECTURES
Thursday, May 19:
San Francisco
“The Sexual Grotesque: Pomosexualities and Robopathologies on the Web.” (Details below, after address and directions).
Rx Gallery (part of Blasthaus)
Realspace, LLC
132 Eddy Street @ Mason Street
San Francisco, CA 94102
1 Block west of Powell Street BART
For MapQuest map and directions, click here.
TIME: 7:30pm; doors open at 7pm.
PHONE: (415) 756-8825
WEBSITE: http://www.rxgallery.com
Lecture synopsis:
Posthuman relationships with anatomically accurate androids called RealDolls, extreme bukkake, ultra-violent Japanese hentai cartoons: Depending on your perspective, the Web is a libidinous interzone—a torture garden of unearthly delights—or a sinkhole of depravity.
What are we to make of the runaway proliferation of fetishism, in the Web age? (Tentacle rape, anyone? Decapitation fantasies? Amputee worship?) Is fetishism becoming the default modality of our post, post, postmodern sexuality? If so, is it transgressive or repressive—one more example of the iron cage of techno-industrial rationale constricting our desires, or an inspiring example of subcultural sensibilities rebelling against normative notions of sexuality?
As well, what are the cultural politics of the Web-enabled “democratization of exploitation”: the niche-marketing of nonstandard body types that, ironically, realizes the feminist dream of dethroning normative notions of beauty by peddling the flesh of the morbidly obese and the mind-crushingly ugly. Does this stuff subvert the Beauty Myth? Or is it simply extending its exploitative logic to the far margins of society?
“Sex organs sprout everywhere,” wrote William S. Burroughs, in Naked Lunch. Even as the self-appointed morals czars of the Bush administration try to childproof the Web, exotic new toadstools spring up in its danker corners. In “The Sexual Grotesque,” I’ll examine the Newtonian physics of our culture—the equal and opposite reactions of official culture and the Web’s sexual underworld.
Saturday May 21:
Santa Barbara
LECTURE: “Beyond Afrofuturism”
Afrogeeks conference at UC Santa Barbara
I’ll be doing a keynote address from 9:15 AM-10:45 AM, along with two other keynote speakers.
DETAILS:
AfroGEEKS Conference
UCSB Center for Black Studies
4603 South Hall
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3140
Ph. 805.893.3914
Fax: 805.893.7243
Email:
If you make it to either event, do come up and say hello.