Queering breast cancer through post porn: an approximation to post-pink
With this approximation, I aim to break into/through
the imaginary of mainstream pink ribbon culture while expanding the notion of
post-porn modernism initiated by Annie Sprinkle almost twenty-five years ago.
Let’s name it post-pink, for now. Honoring post porn politics, I aim at
complicating normative [sexual] representations
of breast cancer (read as) female bodies, at the same time than opening new
forms of [sexual] subjectivity and relationships.
In addition to medical interventions that impose normative
readings of female bodies, breast cancer mainstream culture, through media
representation, social mobilization campaigns and fundraising events, is
creating a caricature of the disease and of the female who transits through it.
Infantilization and ‘feminization’ is pervasive through the depiction of pink
teddy bears and masses of real (pink) fighters against cancer running for the cure. (An almost
inescapable) braveness, cheerfulness and unusual handcraft ability, as well as
a pervasive ‘positive attitude’ are re-inscribing women to a docile, uncritical,
unemotional, private, and an either-pleasant-to-view/pretty or invisible
position.
Although cancer treatment protocols in women below
forty in Spain focus on the preservation of fertility to fulfill the expectancy
of women/ mothers-wanna-be/ to keep ahead with their lives, sexuality is
completely neglected in those protocols. No previous information is offered on
the effects that treatments might cause on sexuality. Premature menopause,
invasive interventions on erogenous parts of the body, general discomfort and
the distressed caused by identity disruption or image transformation.
Nevertheless, the potentially-breast-cancer-woman body is feminized and sexualized
for the others with prevention campaigns that focus on the relevance of breasts
to breastfeeding and the pleasure that breast proportionate to men. Nobody seems to remember that breasts are
erogenous zones and a site of pleasure for women.
Oncogrrrls aims at engaging in creative and critical
collaborative body-based performance making with (read as) women diagnosed with
breast cancer, to resist imposed oppressions. We create spaces of intimacy in
which we work with our bodies to explore and resist these impositions. Through
dance and movement, our bodies are our raw material to fight back with the
invention of counter/strategies and alternative desires. As Annie Sprinkle said
after viewing (Parèntesis), we create pieces that are very ecstatic. ‘I saw the ecstasy of expressing yourself
through your body. Expressing those deep emotions; that, (it) is so intimate.
Everybody working together on deep emotions, that’s sex to me’.
We take on the understanding of post porn as a political
space that aims at critically challenging normative representations at the same
time that produces new forms of sexual subjectivity. Similarly to Preciado’s move
(2004), we aim to deterritorialize (erogenous zones/ bodies) and to open up new
ones that have nothing to do with the binary healthy/unhealthy. Post pink also aims at creating articulations
of the body that has ownership over time and space and that enables alternative
forms of sexual identity and subjectivity. Or as Diefenback (2007) conceives post-pornoghrapy,
post pink is a ‘gesture of transgression
and liberation, a non-utopian strategy aiming at different economies between
bodies and desires’.
Cited works
Diefenback, K. Post
port politics and the deconstruction of fetishism in Post Porn Politics
(Stüttgen, T. (year).
Preciado, B. (2004) Manifiesto contrasexual. Berlin.
Sprinkle, A. (1998). Post-Porn Modernist. My 25 years as a Multimedia Whore.
Sprinkle, A. (2013). Personal communication
Stütgen, T. (2007). Ten fragments on a Cartography of Post-Pornographic
Politics. In Jacobs, K. & Janssen, M. & Pasquinelli, M. (Eds), C’lickme. A netporn studies reader (277- 284) Amsterdam: Insitute of network cultures.
Oncogrrrls (2013). (Parentesis)
Oncogrrrls at http//: www.oncogrrrls.wordpress.com
Ahí queda eso.
Ahí queda eso.
caro.
