You might be looking for a short and quick answer to your questions “exactly what a treatment would look like, or how effective it can be against anxiety.” Those are good questions to ask, but there are no short answers. Psychedelics-assisted psychotherapy is a pretty big field with a lot to unpack. There’s a lot of information available about how treatments look and what’s known about their efficacy in treatment depression and anxiety. But I understand that if you’re just starting out, the sheer volume of information online may be overwhelming.
Let me tell you what I’m available for and what I’m not available for.
I’m not available to deliver treatment or supplies.
I am available for an informational session, which would include:
asking you some questions about where you’re at right now, how your anxiety manifests, how you’ve been treating it, what has helped and what hasn’t;
explaining to you the various plant medicines and master molecules that are currently in use for psychedelics-assisted psychotherapy (psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, ketamine, etc.);
answering any questions you have about them;
giving you a framework to think about preparing for doing some medicine work (for instance, meditation and breathwork practices);
and brainstorming with you how to locate resources local to where you live.
If you’d like to schedule that kind of session with me, let me know.
In my experience and observation, many if not most guys look at some version of porn on a regular basis, whether viewing XTube sites, pic-swapping on hookup apps, or scrolling through Twitter/Tumblr/Reddit feeds. But we hardly ever talk about it or compare notes with others.
Last year Craig Cullinane and I conducted a five-week Zoom class called “The 30-Day Porn Cleanse,” inviting men to undertake an inquiry into their consumption of pornogaphy. It turned out to be a rich and productive experience, so we’re bringing it back this year for five weeks, March 5- April 2.
What would it be like to take a break to evaluate and refine your porn practice?
“The 30-Day Porn Cleanse” is an opportunity to consider the Marie Kondo principles: how does porn bring me joy, and how does it not? How does it expand my erotic imagination, and how does it constrict it?
Using my book “The Paradox Of Porn: Notes on Gay Male Sexual Culture” as a jumping-off point, Craig and I invite you to examine your relationship with pornography in a non-judgmental and supportive environment.
This is not about “treating porn addiction” – this course views erotic imagery as a portal to pleasure and self-discovery and offers “the pause that refreshes,” so you can return with mindfulness and choice to the porn-watching practice that serves you best.
For more information and/or to sign up for the class, go here.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me directly.
Grief is a perennial topic in the soul work that we call psychotherapy. I’m always on the lookout for tools to help in the tender task of processing grief, starting with my own. I have found that there are no short-cuts. You have to go through all the tears, sadness, anger, and numbness, though it helps not to do it alone.
There is a whole industry devoted to workshops and books about working through grief. However well-meaning, I find most versions of what I call “designer grief” simplistic and enraging. Alan D. Wolfeit’s Complicated Grief is a perfect example of what I mean; it seems to be written by someone who has never lost anyone but knows exactly how you should manage your grief.
John W. James and Russell Friedman’s The Grief Recovery Handbook is considerably better. The authors’ Grief Recovery Institute has devised a practical step-by-step process which may indeed be helpful to people who need a highly structured approach. I resisted what felt like heavy commercial branding, and nothing in the book addresses multiple losses (war, natural disaster, AIDS, covid-19). What I found most useful were some of the book’s foundational principles, such as: “Grief is the conflicting feelings caused by the end of or change in a familiar pattern of behavior.” Although it primarily focuses on death and divorce, the book intends to widen the scope of grieving to include any loss, which makes sense to me.
A few other passages that leapt out at me:
When someone you love dies after suffering a long illness, you may feel a sense of relief that your loved one’s suffering is over. That is a positive feeling, even though it is associated with death. At the same time, you may realize that you can no longer see or touch that person. This may be very painful for you. These conflicting feelings, relief and pain, are totally normal in response to death [or any loss].
Loss-of-trust events are experienced by almost everyone and can have a major, lifelong negative impact. You may have experienced a loss of trust in a parent, a loss of trust in God, or a loss of trust in any other relationship. Is loss of trust a grief issue? The answer is yes. And the problem of dealing with the grief it causes remains the same. Grief is normal and natural, but we have been ill prepared to deal with it. Grief is about a broken heart, not a broken brain. All efforts to heal the heart with the head fail because the head is the wrong tool for the job. It’s like trying to pain with a hammer – it only makes a mess.
Most of the comments that grievers hear following a loss, while intellectually accurate, are emotionally barren. As a direct result of these conflicting ideas, a griever often feels confused and frustrated, feelings that lead to emotional isolation.
The subject of forgiveness carries with it many beliefs passed on from generation to generation. Some people have developed such a massive resistance to the word forgive that they cannot use it…We offer the following phrase: I acknowledge the things that you did or did not do that hurt me, and I am not going to let them hurt me anymore. A variation is: I acknowledge the things that you did or did not do that hurt me, and I’m not going to let my memory of those incidents hurt me anymore. The insensitive, unconscious, and sometimes evil actions of other people have hurt us. Our continued resentment and inability to forgive hurts us, not them. Imagine that the perpetrator has died. Can your continued resentment harm him or her? Clearly not! Can it harm you? Unfortunately, yes. As with all recovery components, the objective of our actions is to set us free. We forgive in order to reacquire our own sense of well-being. Forgiveness has nothing to do with the other person.
The best book on this subject that I know of is Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow, whose poetic spiritual and practical exploration is reflected in its subtitle: “Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief.”
Weller insightfully identifies what he calls The Five Gates of Grief:
The First Gate: Everything We Love, We Will Lose
The Second Gate: The Places That Have Not Known Love
The Third Gate: The Sorrows of The World
The Fourth Gate: What We Expected and Did Not Receive
The Fifth Gate: Ancestral Grief
He says, “What is often diagnosed as depression is actually low-grade chronic grief locked into the psyche, complete with the ancillary ingredients of shame and despair.”
A key passage that gives a good sense of his nuanced overview:
Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “What we cannot speak about, we pass over in silence.” We have forgotten the primary language of grief. As a consequence, the terrain of sorrow has become unfamiliar and estranged, leaving us confused, frightened, and lost when grief comes near. The haunting silence that Wittgenstein speaks of lingers as a fog over our lives, placing large areas of experience outside of our reach. When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms. So many of us are depressed, anxious, and lonely. We struggle with addictions and find ourselves moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture…An apprenticeship with sorrow offers us the chance to build our capacity to stay present when the intense feelings of grief arise. Through meaningful rituals, a community of friends, some time in benevolent solitude, and effective practices that help us stretch into our bigger selves, we are offered the opportunity to develop a living relationship with loss.
In ritual space, something inside of us shimmers, quickens, and aligns itself with a larger, more vital element. We are released from the limiting constraints of our collective agreements, such as not showing our emotions in public, not bothering anyone with our troubles, and remaining stoic and self-contained with our pain. This release allows us to enter into a fuller expression of who we are. This is both freeing and frightening. We become vivid in ritual space, exposed and transparent. This is exactly what we need and what we fear.
I was pleased to be invited as a guest on the New Body Electric School’s “Erotic Liberation Podcast.” The hosts, Craig Cullinane and G. Love, conducted a lively and frank hour-long conversation about sacred intimacy, pornography, and more. Check it out on the Body Electric website or, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts.
The psychedelic renaissance is in full swing. Mainstream coverage of new developments in clinical studies on treating physical and mental health issues with plant medicines and master molecules has gotten so ubiquitous that it’s impossible to keep up with all of it. For those who interested in psychedelics-assisted psychotherapy and/or those who are curious about the value of psychedelics for “the betterment of well people,” we’ve entered a whole new paradigm. Michael Pollan’s best-selling book How To Change Your Mind went a long way toward making these subjects known and speakable to a wider audience. The Netflix series based on his book dropped this summer and also provides a valuable introduction, alongside Louis Schwartzberg’s documentary Fantastic Fungi.
One of the most interesting media manifestations for me is a recent podcast by groovy queer musician Frank Ocean in conversation with guest speaker James Fadiman. Fadiman is one of the chief authorities on the subject of microdosing. He and his collaborator Sophia Korb have collected thousands of anecdotal reports from people who have experimented with microdosing, and they are doing their best to create solid data from these reports. On this podcast, Fadiman gives an excellent and succinct description not only of the purposes and effects of microdosing but also, at Ocean’s prompting, provides a wonderfully detailed explanation of what it feels like to undertake a high-dose LSD session, with valuable information on the conditions under which such an experience would best take place. The entire conversation is underscored with a groovy loop, so it sounds like a lecture taking place at Burning Man with an art car nearby cranking in the background. The podcast can be found on Apple Music. You can listen to it here. If you’re not a subscriber, you can sign up for a three-month free trial. Check it out and let me know what you think.
I recently had the pleasure of appearing as a guest on Gay Men’s Life Lab, a podcast that dives deep into the many issues facing gay men today. Host Buck Dodson is a board-certified life coach and licensed therapist who has been helping other gay men realize their full potential for over 15 years.
Our conversation revolved around my book “The Paradox of Porn: Notes on Gay Male Sexual Culture.” We talked about, among other things, my journey to being a pleasure activist and Sacred Intimate; the integral yet complex role pornography plays in gay men’s self-discovery; how porn both helps and hinders our views of our bodies, sexuality, and relationships; learning to distinguish sex, porn and masturbation; and the role of pleasure and desire in addressing issues with porn.
Check it out here or wherever you get your podcasts and let me know what you think. @buckdodsoncoaching@gaymenslifelab
The Sunday New York Times Magazine’s May 15 “Health Issue” really GOES THERE. Informative unflinching articles cover breast-reduction surgery (as a feminist issue), Brazilian butt-lifts (the women who have them and the women who take care of the women who have them), gender-affirming phalloplasty (reported by a trans-identified journalist, which makes a huge difference), and a straight cismale’s experience with the weight-reduction app Noom. These excellent articles follow on the heels of last week’s cover story by the scrupulous, ever-deep-diving journalist Susan Dominus on how war has turned Ukraine’s booming surrogacy business into a logistical and ethical nightmare for surrogate mothers, their existing families, and the families anxiously awaiting new arrivals in the midst of this unpredictable conflict. The New York Times doesn’t always live up to its reputation as the gold measure for American journalism — its recent lame portrait of late Mayor Ed Koch’s sad love life as a closeted homosexual rightfully drew the fury of observers who remember just how Koch’s destructive homophobia impacted New York City’s response to the AIDS crisis — but then sometimes, like this week’s magazine, it does.
photo by Naila Ruechel for the New York Times Magazine
Thirty years ago, someone whom I helped uncover hidden patches of desire and playfulness christened me with the title “pleasure activist.” I’d never heard the term before. I don’t know where he heard it or if he pulled it out of thin air. But I recognized myself in it and started including it in my professional bio. In the intervening years, the phrase has entered the culture to the extent that a young queer black-bodied woman from Detroit named adrienne maree brown can publish Pleasure Activism (2019), an entire volume of stories, essays, poems, lists, and interviews celebrating the pleasures of not only sex and intimacy but also drugs, dance, fashion, organizing, and social justice advocacy. I love that, among other personal treasures she imparts, amb has a posse of friends who refer to each other as “woes” because they are Working On Excellence.
Early on in the book, amb presents in passing a kind of manifesto:
Pleasure activists seek to understand and learn from the politics and power dynamics inside of everything that makes us feel good. This includes sex and the erotic, drugs, fashion, humor, passion work, connection, reading, cooking and/or eating, music and other arts, and so much more. Pleasure activists believe that by tapping into the potential goodness in each of us we can generate justice and liberation, growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists. Pleasure activism acts from an analysis that pleasure is a natural, safe, and liberated part of life – and that we can offer each other tools and education to make sure sex, desire, drugs, connection, and other pleasures aren’t life-threatening or harming but life-enriching. Pleasure activism includes work and life lived in the realms of satisfaction, joy, and erotic aliveness that bring about social and political change. Ultimately, pleasure activism is us learning to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have on this planet… Pleasure activism is not about generating or indulging in excess. I want to say this early and often, to myself and to you Sometimes when I bring up this work to people, I can see a bacchanalia unfold in their eyes, and it makes me feel tender. I think because most of us are so repressed, our fantasies go to extremes to counterbalance all that contained longing. Pleasure activism is about learning what it means to be satisfiable, to generate, from within and from between us, an abundance from which we can all have enough.
And she closes the book with this benediction:
Pleasure is the point. Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom. We can gift it to each other in a million ways: with authentic presence, abundant care, and honesty; with boundaries that keep us from overextending; with slower kisses; with foot massages in the evening; with baby hugs and elder hugs; with delicious food; with supported solitude and listening to our bodies, our shameless desire, and coordinated longing. Find the pleasure path for your life and follow it. Let it reverberate healing back into your ancestors’ wounds. Let it open you up and remind you that you are already whole. Let it shape a future where feeling good is the normal, primary experience of all beings.
When I started writing my book THE PARADOX OF PORN several years ago, I was aware that almost everybody I know looks at some version of porn on a regular basis but we hardly ever talk about it. And I get that. Looking at porn – really, anything related to sex – is quite personal and intimate and individual. You don’t reveal your habits to just anyone. Nobody wants to be shamed or judged for their habits or their preferences or their pleasures. Gay men have been shamed and judged enough in their lives. At the same time, stuff that doesn’t get talked about can reinforce shame and inhibition and ignorance, so it’s a bit of a dilemma.
Personally, I love talking about sex, and in my life as a sex therapist and pleasure activist I do a lot of that. I will say that the only context in which I’m interested in talking about sex and pornography is one of complete lack of judgment, led by curiosity and pleasure and shared interest. As the saying goes, “Don’t yuk my yum.”
One of the main skills that a therapist has to cultivate is the ability to make the space safe for people to talk about intimate, personal, sometimes scary, sometimes shameful stuff. When you do that, it’s amazing what insights and self-knowledge and self-acceptance can emerge. As a sex therapist, I’m pretty much required to ask people detailed personal questions about their sexual histories, including their experience of pornography. And once it’s been established that they’re safe to talk freely about pornography, clients open up and I learn fascinating things about what they look at, what they search for, how they first encountered pornography. Guys will mention their favorite porn stars, often rattling off lists of people I’ve never heard of – and of course I Google the names afterwards. You know, professional research! Continuing education!
Writing the book and talking to people about it after it was published also gave me a chance to consider my own history with porn, what I like and don’t like, where I started and where I am now. You may or may not remember the period of time in the 1980s when there was a huge uproar about government arts funding and objections to artists whose work had “homoerotic” elements. Those culture wars haven’t completely come to an end, but it seems pretty silly, considering the more important things to worry about. But I’ll never forget seeing a show by the downtown performance artist Penny Arcade who proudly stated, “I need a little homoerotica to get me through the day.” I could relate! And I think it’s still true!
There was a time when “looking at porn” meant viewing commercial movies, videos, and magazines showing buff hot guys getting it on. With the advent of the internet and smartphones and social media, now there are nine zillion different ways to encounter and enjoy erotic imagery. When I get up in the morning and check my email, I’m likely to find an email from a guy in Hawaii who publishes the “gRUFF list,” a stash of anywhere from 5 to 60 sexy pics in a multitude of categories. In my “Promotions” folder I will undoubtedly have several emails from sex-toy emporia like Mr. S Leather or Fort Troff, announcements from the Tom of Finland Foundation, and discount offers from porn sites like Naked Sword, Himeros, and Antonio DaSilva, all of them containing tantalizing stills and short clips.
My husband and I have a running text exchange with two other friends we call The Pervs Thread, where the four of chat about everything, occasionally tossing in a sizzling JPEG we’ve come across online. Over my desk I have the Colt Hairy Chested calendar, and the first day of every month I send the Pervs Thread greetings from the model of the month. When I have a few moments to kill – when I’m on the toilet, or waiting for clients to arrive, or winding down at the end of the day – I will often cycle among Instagram thirst traps, gay Twitter, Scruff, and Tumblr. Homoerotic imagery is so built into my day, it’s like the air that I breathe.
Is that a problem? I don’t think so. Sometimes when I’ve gorged on a bunch of hot photos or taken time to watch a Joe Gage porn clip on Naked Sword, I may find myself in a trance and start cruising for sex when half an hour before I wasn’t horny at all. That goes with the territory. At the same time, I had a conversation this afternoon with a friend who said he doesn’t look at porn a lot but when he does it reminds him that, “Oh, I’m a sexual being, and I’ve been neglecting my pleasure body lately.”
Think about what you look at, what you like and don’t like, what it adds to your life, what it takes away. If this is a conversation that interests you, consider signing up for the Body Electric School’s five-week class “The 30-Day Porn Cleanse — The Pause That Refreshes.” Over five Sunday-evening sessions starting January 9, Body Electric’s Craig Cullinane and I will invite you to examine your relationship with pornography in a non-judgmental and supportive environment. This is not about “treating porn addiction” – this course views erotic imagery as a portal to pleasure and self-discovery and offers “the pause that refreshes,” so you can return with mindfulness and choice to the porn-watching practice that serves you best.
As a longtime journalist and interviewer, I’ve always loved reading Q&As, so of course my favorite feature in the New York Times Book Review is the column called “By the Book.” And my favorite standard question that authors get asked is “What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned from a book recently?”
For me, the answer right now would be learning from Paul B. Preciado’s An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossingabout the Silent University created by and for refugees in an occupied house in Athens. In the hall, they speak almost as many languages as there are people. A chain of translators explains the functioning of this university created in London in 2012 by the artist Ahmet Ögüt and set up since then in (among other places) Stockholm, Hamburg and Amman. The phrase “everyone has the right to teach” resounds a dozen times, in Urdu, Farsi, Arabic, French, Kurdish, English, Spanish, Greek. Thought of as an autonomous platform for exchange of knowledge between migrants, this university allows those who know something and those who want to learn it to meet, regardless of academic accreditation or institutional recognition of titles, language spoken, or processes of acquisition of residence or nationality. Someone says, “Ever since I asked for asylum, I’ve had nothing. The only thing I have is time, and during this time, I could learn and teach.” It’s during this seemingly dead time of administrative delay that the exiled artist Hiwa K learned to play classical guitar, taking classes with Paco Peña in England—the reply from the English government never arrived, but Hiwa K plays flamenco as if he were born in Córdoba. Here are some of the courses on offer at the Silent University: Iraqi history, Kurdish literature, Herodotus and the civilization of the Medes, the foundations of political asylum according to the 1951 convention, how to start up your own company, history of food as revealed in the visual arts, Arabic calligraphy… By having his status as political citizen denied, the migrant in exile is reduced to passivity and to “silence.” By acknowledging the migrant as subject of knowledge, the Silent University seeks to activate a new global citizenship.
That’s only one of numerous passages that leapt out at me from Preciado’s book, which is a collection of essays he wrote for the legendary left-wing French daily newspaper Libération and other European publications between 2013 and 2018. Preciado is a widely respected academic, philosopher, and cultural commentator whose 2008 book Testo Junkie (published in an English translation by Bruce Benderson in 2013) blew my mind. Like Testo Junkie, An Apartment in Uranus is a kind of intellectual memoir that takes the form of commenting with poetic incisiveness on everything that meets the author’s eagle-eyed gaze during a specific period of time – in this case, the time it took to acquire a legal name change to reflect Preciado’s correct gender identity.
Preciado draws on deep draughts of history and wide-ranging readings to produce astonishing outbursts of original thinking on a vast array of topics that Susan Sontag would admire and envy.
On the origins of transgender identity:
The German lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs…came up with the word “Uranian” [Urning] in 1864 to designate what he called relations of the “third sex.” … What does it mean to speak for those who have been refused access to reason and knowledge, for us who have been regarded as mentally ill? With what voice can we speak? Can the jaguar or the cyborg lend us their voices? To speak is to invent the language of the crossing, to project one’s voice into an interstellar expedition: to translate our difference into the language of the norm; while we continue, in secret, to practice a strange lingo that the law does not understand.
So Ulrichs was the first European citizen to declare publicly that he wanted to have an apartment on Uranus. He was the first mentally ill person, the first sexual criminal to stand up and denounce the categories that labeled him as sexually and criminally diseased.
On consumerism vs. citizenship:
We are not going to play the disciplinary state against the neoliberal market. Those two have already come to an agreement: in the new Europe, the market is the only government motivation, the State becomes a punitive arm whose sole function will be to recreate the fiction of national identity through security-inspired terror. We do not want to define ourselves either as cognitive workers or as pharmaco-pornographic consumers. We are not Facebook, or Shell, or Google, or Nestle, or Pfizer-Wyeth. We do not want to produce French goods any more than we want to produce British goods. We do not want to produce. We are the living decentralized network. We refuse a citizenship defined by our labor force or our reproductive force. We want a total citizenship defined by the sharing of technologies, fluids, seeds, water, knowledge…They say the new clean war will be carried out by drones. We want to make love with drones. Our insurrection is peace, total feeling. They say crisis. We say revolution.
Along the same lines, this hilarious analysis of Candy Crush:
The key to success for Candy Crush lies precisely in its defects: the childlike, inoffensive nature (there’s no violence or sex), the constant beginning-again (there are up to 410 levels), along with the absence of specific cultural content that could arouse acceptance or rejection. Chastity, idiocy and disinterestedness are the conditions for the globalization of dependence…The apps that can be downloaded from Facebook, Google Play or Apple Store are the new operators of subjectivity. We should be aware of the fact that when we download an app, we don’t install it simply on our mobile phone, but directly onto our cognitive apparatus. While René Schérer teaches us that pedagogical disciplines developed during modernity have served to set the masturbating hand to writing and working, we now understand that the new digital disciplines set the assembly-line hand that used to write and work to masturbate the screen of cognitive capitalism.
Speaking of masturbation, Preciado comes to the defense of sex work:
Making and selling weapons: work. Putting someone to death by applying capital punishment: work. Torturing an animal in a lab: work. Jacking off a penis by hand to provoke an ejaculation: crime! How can we comprehend that our democratic, neoliberal societies refuse to consider sexual services work? … The sex worker does not put her body on sale, but, like the chiropractor, the actor or the publicist, transforms her somatic, cognitive resources into a lively force of production. Like chiropractors, sex workers use their muscles, they give head with their mouths with the same precision that the chiropractor manipulates the client’s skeletal-muscular system. Like actors, sex workers’ practice stems from their ability to dramatize a scene of desire. Like publicists, sex workers’ work consists of creating specific forms of pleasure through communication and social relations. Like any work, sex work is the result of a cooperation between living subjects based on the production of symbols, language and emotions.
On the origins of queer theory:
Queer theory, a punk phrase invented by Teresa de Lauretis in 1990 (theory of the abnormal, knowledge of deviants, as if to say: a theory of madness created by the mad to denounce the horrors of the civilization of sanity), was the result not just of the feminist reading of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, but also of a “pragmatic turning point” in understanding the production of gender identities. In 1954, the linguist John Austin stated that there was a difference between constative and performative utterances. The former describe reality; the latter seek to transform it.
On being praised as courageous:
Today you are granting me the privilege of talking about “my” courage to be me after making me bear the burden of exclusion and shame throughout my entire childhood.
When I received this invitation to speak of the courage to be me, at first my ego purred as if it were being offered a full-page ad for which it would be both the product and the consumer. I saw myself already awarded a medal, a hero…then the memory of oppression attacked me and erased all complacency….
So keep your courage for yourselves. For your marriages and your divorces, your infidelities and your lies, your families, your maternity, your children and grandchildren. Keep the courage you need to maintain the norm. The cold blood to lend your bodies to the constant process of regulated repetition. Courage, like violence and silence, like force and order, is on your side. On the contrary, I claim today the legendary lack of courage of Virginia Woolf and Klaus Mann, of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, of Angela Davis and Fred Moten, of Kathy Acker and Annie Sprinkle, of June Jordan and Pedro Lemebel, of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Gregg Bordowitz, of Guillaume Dustan and Amelia Baggs, of Judith Butler and Dean Spade.
But since I love you, my courageous equals, I hope you will lack courage in turn. I hope you will no longer have the strength of reiterate the norm, no longer have the energy to fabricate identity, to lose faith in what your identity documents say about you. And once you’ve lost all courage, weary with joy, I hope you will invent other and unknown uses of your body. Because I love you, I desire you to be weak and contemptible. Because fragility, and not courage, is what brings about revolution.
On recognizing a body of scholars, artists and thinkers little-celebrated in the West:
I am going to Beirut to attend the inauguration of Home Works 7, a ten-day forum of cultural practices organized by Ashkal Alwan…Around the exhibition over 300 people gather every day in seminars, conferences, workshops or performances. Rasha Salti, Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige, Walid Raad, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Bassam El Baroni, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Ahmed Badry, Walid Sadek, Christine Tohme, Marwan Hamdan, Akram Zaatari, Ahmad Ghossein, Leen Hashem, Haytham el-Wardany, Ayman Nahle, Arjuna Neuman, Rabih Mroué, Manal Khader, Lina Majdalanie, Marwa Arsanios, Bouchra Ouizguen, Nahla Chahal…The artist renaissance of the Middle East.
On school:
School functions according to an essentialist anthropology. The idiot is an idiot, the queer is a queer. School is the most brutal and manipulative of the factories of heterosexuality.
On changing his legal name and gender identity:
I feel as I’ve embarked on a sort of epistemological astral journey, or in an experience at the threshold of semiotic-legal death. I am leaving the biopolitical and historical fiction that I was embodying—the femininity that the binary sex-gender system at the end of the twentieth century constructed in a Francoist society that relied on a medico-legal system for which the notion of trans-sexuality did not exist—and I am observing from the outside the physical destruction and administrative, legal construction of a new biopolitical fiction where my body is denied as well as acknowledged as “masculine.” There is coercion and agency. Subjection and distortion of the norm. I myself signed the authorization to destroy my birth certificate; I also signed the request to issue a new one. Like a monster who has learned how to speak, I am seated in the center of the baroque administrative machine that produces the truth of sex, and I am touching all its keys at once, until the system enters a blackout phase. I feel a certain dizziness.
On the faux-intimacy of videoconferencing:
We look at each other and I wonder where this gaze is, wonder how it is possible to look at each other when what the eyes see are not other eyes but eyes on a screen. I watch her as she looks at a map on her screen. It is impossible to say at what instant her eyes stop seeing me, at what instant she has replaced my image with another. Our screens look at each other. Our screens love each other. When that happens, we are properly speaking neither here nor there.
On psychedelics and evolution:
Terence McKenna, ethnobotanist and theoretician of the prematurely vanished rave culture, stated that we are monkeys whose neural cortex exploded after the accidental consumption of the hallucinogenic mushroom Psilocybe cubensis. If that were true, the time has undoubtedly come for us to take another dose.
On San Francisco:
Entering [the women’s sex-toy emporium] Good Vibrations with Annie Sprinkle is like entering a football museum with Lionel Messi. All the sex-toys seem to vibrate as she walks by…We arrive in San Francisco: the streets undulate like the backs of seals turned to the ocean, the stately modernist and Victorian houses mingle with others reminiscent of garages, barns and ranches. We pass through the Castro and see Harvey Milk’s house. This city is the city of the “Summer of Love,” the Compton riots, the place where gender dissidence became a political movement, the place people said had the most sex workers and gender activists per square foot. Annie Sprinkle tells me that San Francisco is “the clitoris of America,” the tiniest and most powerful organ in the country: 121 ultra-electrified square kilometers from which the silicon networks that connect the world emanate. Once there was gold fever; now it’s cybernetic fever. Sex and technology. Sun and dollars. Activism and neoliberalism. Innovation and control. Google, Adobe, Cisco, eBay, Facebook, Tesla, Twitter… 121 square kilometers that concentrate one-third of the risk-capital of the United States.
On what history teaches us about the inexhaustible creativity of human brutality:
History teaches us that the most absurd, most brutal thing has always been politically conceivable: it was possible in ancient Greece to build a democratic system (which we still admire today) that excluded women, children, slaves and foreigners; it was possible to exterminate the native populations of the Atlantic islands and the American continent; it was possible to construct the economic system of the plantation in which the white 15 per cent of the population subjected 85 per cent of the population captured in Africa to slavery; it was possible to settle in Algeria and call idiotic the population that was born there; it was possible to expel the Palestinians from their own homes; it was possible to say to women that if they did not give birth they did not exist; it was possible to build a wall in the middle of Berlin to divide the West from the East, the good from the bad; it was possible to convince people that sex is the work of the devil.
On strategies used to wipe out indigenous populations:
During the nineteenth century, over 40 million bison were killed in North America. These sublime, imposing herbivores were sacrificed neither for their meat nor for their skins. Their flesh rotted in the sun and only their ground-up bones were used as fertilizer for the new colonized lands. The bison massacre was thought up by the federal government, then carried out by the army and by thousands of anonymous colonists—anyone who owned a rifle—as a way to displace the native peoples by starving them to death, since their food and way of life depended entirely on the ritual buffalo hunt. Colonel Sheridan applied an old rule from the art of war: “Destroying the enemy’s resources is the most effective, certain way to finish him off.” By 1890 there remained only 750 bison, who found refuge in Yellowstone Park—which allowed the race to survive ’til today. In 1890, the native populations had been almost completely exterminated or enclosed in federally controlled reservations. No doubt to symbolically atone the sin of the genocide and compensate for a debt that can’t be repaid, a little while ago, President Obama made the bison the national mammal of the United States.
On public protests:
These days [September 2017], in Catalonia, what is surprising is the citizens’ co-operation with the organization of a process of peaceful insurrection. Opposing the law courts and the police station, thousands of people are gathering to speak and sing. A wave of metallic noises resounds through the streets at ten o’clock every night. In all cities “casserolades” are being organized (people bang on casseroles—pots—from their windows, or on tables, at outdoor cafés) to protest against the detention of the fourteen political prisoners. Leaning on the balcony of a building in the Gothic quarter, I’m getting a lesson in democratic culture given by a neighbor to a tourist. When the tourists sitting on the first-floor terrace complain that the noise from the demonstrations is disturbing them, the third-floor neighbor replies: “If the rights of the people who live here don’t interest you, what are you doing here? You should go find a pot in your kitchen and join us.”
Steeped in academic writing, Preciado periodically succumbs to prose so jargon-clotted as to become hilariously incomprehensible: “For the subaltern, speaking implies not simply resisting the violence of the hegemonic performative, but above all imagining dissident theaters where the production of a different performative force can be possible. Inventing a new scene of enunciation, as Jacques Rancière would say. Disidentifying oneself in order to reconstruct the subjectivity damaged by the dominant performative language.” But that happens rarely in this volume. All things considered, it’s most remarkable how lucidly and generously Preciado shares his nuanced perceptions.
On monuments and celebrations:
The most beautiful commemorations are those celebrated by invisible revolutions, the transformations without beginning-date or expiry date. Who celebrates the grass when it grows? The sky changing color? Who celebrates reading a book? Learning a new gesture? Who celebrates the last instant of happiness before a sudden death? We have to forget birthdays. We have to forget landmarks and let relics fall. To celebrate all our other possible births.
By the way, a PDF of the entire book is available (for the moment, anyway) online — click here.
I don’t read a lot of academic writing this intellectually challenging and yet aesthetically satisfying. Are there other authors this good I should know about?
food for the joybody 