I Confess! : Constructing the Sexual Self in the Internet Age

Description

In the postwar decades, sexual revolutions - first women's suffrage, flappers, Prohibition, and Mae West; later Alfred Kinsey, Hugh Hefner, and the pill - altered the lifestyles and desires of generations. Since the 1990s, the internet and its cataclysmic cultural and social technological shifts have unleashed a third sexual revolution, crystallized in the acts and rituals of confession that are a staple of our twenty-first-century lives. In I Confess!, a collection of thirty original essays, leading international scholars such as Ken Plummer, Susanna Paasonen, Tom Roach, and Shohini Ghosh explore the ideas of confession and sexuality in moving image arts and media, mostly in the Global North, over the last quarter century. Through self-referencing or autobiographical stories, testimonies, and performances, and through rigorously scrutinized case studies of "gay for pay," gaming, camming, YouTube uploads, and the films Tarnation and Nymph()maniac, the contributors describe a spectrum of identities, desires, and related representational practices. Together these desires and practices shape how we see, construct, and live our identities within this third sexual revolution, embodying both its ominous implications of surveillance and control and its utopian glimmers of community and liberation. Inspired by theorists from Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to Gayle Rubin and José Esteban Muñoz, I Confess! reflects an extraordinary, paradigm-shifting proliferation of first-person voices and imagery produced during the third sexual revolution, from the eve of the internet to today. Cover I Confess! Title Copyright Contents Foreword: Falling in Love with Johnnie Ray: Sixty Years of Telling Sexual Stories Introduction PART ONE SCIENTIA SEXUALIS Activism 1 The Treachery of Rape Representation 2 More Than Just Selfies: #Occupotty, Affect, and Confession as Activism 3 Against Authenticity: The Feminist Turn in N. Maxwell Lander’s Video Work 4 Blogging Affects and Other Inheritances of Feminist Consciousness-Raising 5 “YES I’M GAY”: The Mediality of Coming Out Author, Subject, and Audience 6 “Aren’t You Worried about What People Might Say? What People Might Do?”: Lady Gaga and the “Heeling” of Queer Trauma 7 Letters to Nina Hartley: Pornography, Parrhesia, and Sexual Confessions 8 Femininities of Excess: The Cinematic Confessions of Rituparno Ghosh 9 The Videomaker and the Rent Boy: Gay-for-Pay Confessional in 101 Rent Boys and Broke Straight Boys TV 10 Confessions: Watching the Masturbating Boy (Excerpts) PART TWO ARS EROTICA Pornographies 11 Like a Prayer: Confessing My Beatific-Cum-Demonic Visions of Men (and God?) 12 Camming and Erotic Capital: The Pornographic as an Expression of Neoliberalism 13 Confessions of a Masked Pornographer: Reorienting Gay Male Identity via Bodily Confession 14 Sadean Confessions in Virginie Despentes’s Punk-Porn-Feminism 15 Fuck Yeah Levi Karter! and New Authenticities 16 Circuitous Pleasures, Guilt, and Pain: Nymph()maniac and the Pornographic Hard Code 17 Porn Fast Documentaries 18 “I Confess: I Was the Girl in the Shadows” 19 Queer Auto-Porn-Art: Genealogies, Aesthetics, Ethics, and Desire 20 On Not Seeing All: The Incomplete, Sexual Play, and the Ethics of the Frame 21 To Queer Things Up: Sexing the Self in the Queer Documentary Web Series 22 A Man with a Mother: Tarnation and the Subject of Confession Transmedia 23 Looking, Stroking, and Speaking: A Queer Ethics of MAP Desire 24 Playing Confession: Gaming, Autobiography, and the Elusive Self 25 From a “Disappeared Aesthetics” to a “Trans-Aesthetics”: Derek Jarman and Ming Wong’s Image-Based Technologies of the Self | 489 26 Writing Intimacy: Fantasy, New Media, and Confession in Marie Calloway’s what purpose did I serve in your life 27 Hentai Confessions: Transgression and “Sexual Technologies of the Self” in Akihiko Shiota’s Moonlight Whispers 28 Porno-Graphing: “Dirtiness” and Self-Objectification 29 Shut Me Up in Grindr: Anti-confessional Discourse and Sensual Nonsense in MSM Media Figures Contributors Index