Post Pink

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. 

caro.