Loving Objects*
Jennifer Terry (University of California at Irvine) “Loving Objects” explores the formation of a newly named sexual orientation, objectum-sexuality (OS), claimed by people who openly declare their desire for objects, not as fetishes, but as amorous partners. The article examines popular media depictions of OS which take a suspicious view of OS, arguing that these are symptomatic of worries about what constitutes proper objects of love in the context of proliferating discourses about emotional and territorial security. Comparing OS to commercial consumption of objects as well as to scientists’ enchantments with their objects of study, the article draws on feminist technoscience studies to argue that OS is not as strange as it would, on first contact, appear. Keywords: objectùm-sexuality, feminist technoscience, intimacy, heteronormative nationalism, security, synecdocal marriage
In her 1984 essay, “Thinking Sex,” Gayle Rubin outlines episodes in which the policing of sexuality takes particularly intensified forms in contexts of social upheaval “Consequently,” she writes, “sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great social stress” (267). Under these circumstances, Rubin calls for a “radical theory of sex [which] ... must build rich descriptions of sexuality as it exists in society and history.” Such a theory, she emphasizes, should attend to “the barbarity of sexual persecution” by identifying how and why the policing of sexuality occurs when it does and by seeking to redress the damage “moral panics” inflict * Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Inderpal Grewal, Emma Heaney, Lucas Hilderbrand, Kimberly Icreverzi, Caren Kaplan, Elizabeth Reiss, Karen Tongson and participants in the Embodiments of Science workshop convened by the Columbia University Institute for Research on Gender and Women and Barnard College’s Center for Research on Women, November 2009, for their thoughtful comments on an early version of this work. Trans-Humanities, Vol. 2 No. 1, June 2010 33-75 ⓒ 2010 Ew ha Institute for the Humanities
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upon subaltern sexual communities (265). In this article, I take up Rubin’s call for a rich description of sexualities that disturb the dominant orders of sex, as a way of diagnosing the scenarios in which stigmatized sexualities (and the way they are put into discourse) tell us something about the social and historical context from which they emerge. To do this, I turn my attention to analyzing a putative newcomer to the scene of sexual culture: objectùm-sexuality, a political and cultural formation of people who declare their sexual orientation and love toward objects.1 My research suggests that objectùm-sexuality, and the suspicions it arouses, provides an illuminating way of theorizing post-human social and erotic relations in a world increasingly preoccupied with security — emotional, economic, and territorial. Taking objectùm-sexuality seriously allows us to question conservative mandates designating the proper objects appropriate to “real love.” On first contact with objectùm-sexuality, many people seem inclined to pathologize it and to assume those who claim this sexual orientation are strange and disturbed. In this article, I interrogate those opinions and ultimately argue that objectùm-sexuality is only strange to those who disavow the multi-faceted pervasiveness of object love in postmodern society and, therefore are complicit in the oppression of people who openly declare their desire for objects, not as fetishes, but as amorous partners.
I. What is Objectùm Sexuality? According to Erika Eiffel, a member of the Objectùm-Sexuality Internationale, objectùm-sexuality (OS) is “an orientation just as hetero and 1. Objectùm-sexuality (OS) is the term coined in the early 1970s by Eija-Riitta Eklöf Berliner-Mauer and two of her friends. She is a self-identified objectùmsexual. In 1996, she started a website dedicated to OS and posted material in four languages (Swedish, French, German, English), taking the Röda Stakete (Red Swedish Fence) as its key emblem. In recent years the Objectùm-Sexuality Internationale (OSI) emerged as an internet-based network that offers information about objectùm-sexuality and support to those who identify as objectùm-sexuals (also known as objectophiles or OS people). For more on the history of the OS movement, see the Objectùm-Sexuality Internationale website at http://www.objectum-sexuality.org. 34
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homo sexuality are orientations of one’s innate sexuality” (Eiffel FAQs). Eiffel, who changed her name from Naisho after marrying the Eiffel Tower, stresses that her personal definition is “to be emotionally and physically attracted to objects” (Ibid.). Rudi, another self-identified OS person, states that OS people are in love with specific objects and that this love is reciprocal, citing the presence of a soul or spirit in the objects through which the lovers telepathically communicate. A small but growing number of people, so far primarily in Western Europe and the United States, are claiming the identity of object-sexual and providing accounts of their desires. Though the story of Eija-Riitta Eklöf Berliner-Mauer, from Sweden, began to circulate over a decade ago, it is as a result of a recently televised episode of U.K. Channel 5’s Strangeloves series, titled I Married the Eiffel Tower, that the phenomenon going by the name of objectùm-sexuality has gained growing attention (Piotrowska).2 On her 2. Objectùm sexuality has been featured recently in dramatic films and television shows in the U.S. The 2007 Oscar nominated feature film, Lars and the Real Girl, starring Ryan Gosling, offers a sympathetic portrayal of a lonely young an’s love for his silent and synthetic lover. In its fourth season, originally aired in 2007, Boston Legal featured character Leigh Swift as a female client with OS and Asperger’s tendencies who retained the law firm to help her find the object she loves (Kelley and Brinkerhoff ). Nip/Tuck, the drama series centering on cosmetic surgery, featured a male Dr. Logan Taper, in the early 2009 season, who was to replace one of the lead doctors in practice while the other was recuperating from cancer. Taper was caught having sex with an office couch and then fired; on his way out of the clinic he could not resist having a tryst with an appealing operating table (Jablonski). Nip/Tuck presented OS as a kind of perverse hypersexuality. In an overtly humorous vein, the situation comedy, 30 Rock, featured the character Jenna agreeing to pose as the girlfriend of guest star James Franco who is hounded by the paparazzi and needs a way to quell rumors about his secret love for a Japanese body pillow named Komiko (Carlock). Machinehuman intimacies are, of course, a rich element in scientific fiction. For example, the Battlestar Galactica series portrayed the Cylons (Cybernetic Lifeform Nodes) as a cybernetic civilization whose religion is founded on love and whose bodies are humanoid, comprised of synthetic biology. The Cylons regard humans as sinful and inherently flawed, and who therefore deserving extinction. Cylons express desire and love for machines of humanoid and non-human form, providing a sci-fi fantasy version of post-human OS relations. They are not portrayed as innocent and instead trigger apocalyptic fears among the humans that machines/objects are capable of manipulating human desires and 35
website, Berliner-Mauer, born in 1954, captions a photograph of her beloved Berlin Wall by stating, “This is my husband. His name is the Berlin Wall and he was born on August 13, 1961. I expect you’ve heard of him; he is quite a celebrity. He lives in Berlin. I used to work in a pharmacy. Now I own a museum. My husband’s job was to divide East and West Berlin. He is retired now” (The Berlin Wall ). Below a photo of the wall from the 1960s, she exclaims: “I needed a strong support in my life ... and I found YOU — my beloved Berlin Wall!” Explaining how the two met, she continues, We’ve been in love for many years. I was attracted to him ever since he was born. Yes, he is some years younger than me. But neither of us feels that this age difference matters. True love can easily transcend a few years. It was very much a long distance romance as neither of us likes to travel. For much of the time, I had to make do with photos of him. And of course seeing him in newspapers and on the television. But the distance between us only served to intensify our feelings for each other. (Ibid.)
They married in 1979 and Eija-Riitta took his name (mauer in German means wall). “Like every married couple,” she continues, “we have our ups and downs. We even made it through the terrible disaster of November 9, 1989, when my husband was subjected to frenzied attacks by a mob. But we are still as much in love as the day we first met. We may not have a conventional marriage, but neither of us cares much for conventions. Ours is a story of two beings in love, our souls entwined for all eternity” (Ibid.). Eija-Riitta explains that her attraction to the Berlin Wall and to other “constructions” is based on how they look, and she cautions that this is “not as superficial as it sounds.” She desires things that are rectangular, have parallel lines (usually horizontal) and all of them divide or delineate things. She is not concerned with the function of the things and “is not interested in politics.” It is the form that seems most to matter to her so that fences, compromising security. The narrative centrality of a seemingly inanimate object becoming animate can be seen in classics of early gothic literature, science fiction, and children’s literature. See, for example, E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Sandman (1816), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Margery Wilson’s The Velveteen Rabbit (1922). A recent novel of note in this vein is Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2008). 36
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walls, bridges, railway rails, and gates arouse equally strong feelings in her. Fences are particularly meaningful to her as they are to other OS people involved in the Objectùm-Sexuality Internationale. Its website states “[t]he Red Fence is cherished by Eija-Riitta as an object she holds dear to her heart. As a tribute to her courage and devotion, Röda Staketet is to the objectùm-sexual community ... our symbol. Fences exist throughout society. We put them up to protect ourselves but not to shut people out. One can look over a Fence and see what’s on the other side. If the grass is indeed greener or not ... this we decide for ourselves” (OSI, “The Red Fence”). Eija-Riitta attributes her desire to an abiding adherence to Animism, a faith that has allowed her, from an early age, to question the notion that “man is the Crown of Creation” (Berliner-Mauer, What Exactly Interests Me).3 “We share this planet with other beings like animals, things etc. We have all the same worth independent of what we are — an object, an animal or a human being or a plant if it comes to that” (Ibid.). She pleads for openmindedness and tolerance: The human race has a long way to go and to learn — and not be so intolerant and evil, because that is what the human race is when it concerns objects — plain evil. Evil because the human race is stupid, ignorant, selfish and — above all — they have made themselves the ‘master race.’ I don’t think I need to tell you what happened when the Nazis decided that Arian people were the ‘master race.’ I am ashamed to be born as a human in this life. (Berliner-Mauer, This is Objectùm-sexuality)
Prior to falling in love with the Berlin Wall, Ejia-Riitta had an amorous relationship with a guillotine.4 She lives in a large house in northern Sweden 3. Though Animism is cited by Eija-Riitta, one can see similarities between objectùm-sexuality and Christian ecstatic traditions, especially the Eucharist and the transubstantiation of Holy Communion commemorating Christ’s Last Supper: “This is my body (bread), this is my blood (wine). When you eat or drink these, remember me.” The ritual of the Eucharist configures communion with a material object or substance as representing a spiritual connection (Holy Bible, Gospel of Luke 22:17-21). 4. Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer is also featured in a 2003 short documentary from Journey Man Pictures, which features her guillotine collection (Miss Guillotine). 37
with her mother and cats. In the basement of her house is a museum she has assembled which displays miniature models of her objects of desire, including guillotines and electric chairs and walls, having been taught by her father when she was young how to build architectural models. She has passed along these skills to a number of other objectùm-sexuals. Among those with whom she has shared these skills is Erika Eiffel, who is also featured at length in the Channel 5 Strangeloves episode. By her account, prior to Erika’s marriage to the Parisian feat of fin-de-siècle architecture, she had an intense love relationship with Lance, her archery bow. Together, Erika and Lance won an impressive number of archery championships. They slept together nightly for years but began to lose their deep connection, which became evident when Erika took third (rather than the expected first) place in a major competition. Prior to Lance, there was a Japanese sword. Erika kept the sword close to her while serving in the U.S. Army. The sword protected her following a sexual assault by another soldier, an incident that only deepened their connection. She was discharged from the army for refusing to give up the sword (Tracie). Erika prefers to attribute (or to acknowledge) the gender of her love object, since, for her, calling the object an “it” rather than a man or a woman degrades it by assuming it is inanimate. But her orientation is flexible: Lance, the archery bow, was a male. La Tour Eiffel, clearly a woman. Indeed, the French thought as much when they gave the tower the feminine grammatical designation. Erika leads a seemingly nonmonogamous life: her attraction to the Golden Gate Bridge drew her to the massive structure, one of her “boys.” And she cherishes the Berlin Wall, a love that has brought her closer to Eija-Riitta, whom she has befriended in recent years. When asked about the physical aspects of her relationships, Erika matter-of-factly replies that “everything you might expect occurs: orgasm, foreplay, afterplay. People may love objects but they do so for practical purposes provided by the object,” Erika explains. “That’s why they don’t see the soul of the object. When you are willing to bare your soul, then the object sees yours” (Piotrowska). Amy Wolfe, a third OS person featured in the Strangeloves episode, also has a variety of love objects. Believing she was born with her sexual orientation, she has loved objects from an early age. She fell deeply in love with Paul, the organ she played at her church until the pastor interceded and ended their relationship by removing Paul and replacing him with a 38
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digital organ. Amy also adores mighty structures, including the Empire State Building and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Her love for the Empire State Building enervates her on trips to New York City. During the filming of the episode, she tries to balance passion with discretion in her caresses of the building; eventually their intimacy is interrupted by a pesky security guard who commands her to move on. A particularly significant journey takes her, along with Erika Eiffel, to an amusement park in upstate New York, which features the 1001 Nacht thrill ride, whose grandeur, for Amy, emanates from the massive vertical arm of the mechanical ride and the ascending and descending gondola that animates him when in operation. At home in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where she lives with her mother, Amy spends hours of pleasure with a stair banister and with the miniature models she has constructed of some of the buildings she loves.
II. Strangeloves and Sensationalizing Objectùm-Sexuality This and other episodes of the Strangeloves series, later aired by BBC America in its BBC America Reveals series, traffic in a kind of exoticizing sensationalism, using the pretense of didactic documentary film to pull back the curtain and reveal the oddities in our midst.5 Though the tone of the narration and the structure of the episodes are subdued compared to the overtly voyeuristic and carnivalesque “reality TV” we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in the U.S.,6 the Strangeloves series performs a number of recognizable moves that create distance between the viewers and the subjects they are watching: through mobilizing sentiments of horror, disgust, pity, and tepid toleration, the show contributes to moral pieties concerning who and what are the proper objects of desire.7 Gayle Rubin warned, over a quarter of a 5. As an illustration of how emphasizing oddities works as an advertising strategy, BBC America announced that “[t]his compelling range of BBC America Reveals documentaries highlights a wide variety of social and cultural issues — from topics such as body image and addiction to the state of brothels and the history of purebred dogs” (BBC America). 6. The list is long but see for example The Hills; The Osbournes; Keeping Up with the Kardashians; Real Wives of Orange County, New York, Atlanta, and New Jersey; Jersey Shore; Celebrity Rehab. 39
century ago, that the culprits of sex panics extend beyond the formal structures of the State into church congregations, citizens’ councils, medical authorities, vigilant parents, and, of course, popular culture media that stoke sentiments of disgust and fear of sexual diversity. We are encouraged, through Strangeloves, to see OS people as lacking something important: love and sexual relations with humans. And this lack is read frequently as a sign of arrested or traumatized development. 8 It is worth noting that the Objectùm-Sexuality Internationale group has denounced the Strangeloves episode on their website, stating that “[d]espite featuring OSI members Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer and Erika Naisho Eiffel, this film is firmly denounced by the objectùm-sexual community for its exploitative and sensationalized take on OS” (OSI Opening Page). As an example of exploitation, when Amy and Erika travel to the Empire State Building so that Amy may have a moment of intimacy with her lover, the camera fixates on her in order to show what love-making between a woman and a building looks like. When the crew follows along to the amusement park, then off-season and largely abandoned, the camera is 7. Among the episodes included in the Strangeloves series is “My Car is My Lover,” aired the week prior to I Married the Eiffel Tower, in which the crew follows two American men who love particular cars. At a car show in Pomona, California, the men meet and one is shown surreptiously having sex with several of the cars on display; available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvuY1nO27Go. The Eiffel Tower episode features only women subjects, leaving the impression that OS is a condition only experienced by women, whereas the car-loving episode is exclusively about men. The two car lovers incidentally do not appear to be affiliated with OSI. 8. I have chosen not to focus on the vast amount of psychoanalytic literature on object relations in this article, in favor of broadening out to consider the cultural discourses and ideological constructs through which objectùm-sexuality is described and often anxiously appraised by those to whom it seems odd. To the extent that objectùm-sexuality is characterized as a form of arrested psychosexual development, object relations theory may be more or less felicitous in showing how object cathexes are an element of every childhood and, drawing on D.W. Winnicott, need not be wholly abandoned nor pathologized, as he believed that we continue to search for objects we can love throughout our lives, objects we can experience as both within and outside ourselves. And, for Winnicott, the intermediary space between the inside and the outside is a space of creativity and an expressive space, not one that is defined as pathological (Winnicott Playing and Reality; Winnicott “Transitional Objects”). 40
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directed to watch Amy lying beneath 1001 Nacht while she whispers that he smells good and while we see her fingering the grease from one of his mechanical joints that she then rubs on her face. When the TV crew travels with Erika to the Eiffel Tower, where she hopes to consummate her love on the anniversary of their wedding, the narrator notes that the challenge for many objectùm-sexuals is to find the privacy necessary to connect with their lovers, an act of disingenuousness since the camera is right at the keyhole peering in. Moments later we hear the off-camera interviewer ask Erika, who has just commented that she feels the connection with the tower as the coldness of the tower’s steel meets the warmth of Erika’s body, “Is it not unpleasant that she is so cold?” Erika replies: “It’s actually quite pleasant that she is cold because I can feel the exchange of temperature between us which is an exchange of energy and that energy is very spiritual.” During some of this segment, over the moving image of Erika being with her tower, we hear Amy playing the church organ and singing “Amazing Grace,” with its signature line of abjection: “... that saved a wretch like me” (Piotrowska). Following the airing of the show, Erika told a German interviewer that she was glad to have participated in bringing some awareness to objectùmsexuality by participating in the Channel 5 episode but that “my only regret is that my naivety fell into the hands of a director with no regard for moral decency when portraying my love for objects. What one does in front of the camera when urged is very different from real life. I have never been open with my intimacy and that film was a load of crock to portray that I am.” The director staged the sex scenes and asked incessant questions about sex, Erika complained. In contrast, she cited a German documentary for RTL Channel 12 as showing the reality of her objectùm-sexual love, “not that sensationalized paparazzi crap from the U.K” (Eiffel Interview on RTL Punkt 12). The situation of object-sexuals is strikingly familiar to historians of homosexuality and readers of Foucault: the desire to understand themselves and for public toleration impels deviant sexual subjects to offer their accounts to authorities and to be lured by the temptations of what they believe will be enlightened publicity (The History of Sexuality). And the effects of these interactions are by no means mono-directional or intrinsically constraining. How many among us — at least those of us over 35 — took pleasure in reading even the most pathologizing and sensational cases of sex perversion in psychoanalytic texts or in the pulp fiction 41
bastardizations to which such lofty ideas gave rise? So I am not suggesting that the Strangeloves episode is willfully evil or that its effects are predictably mostly oppressive. Those effects may extend to people who recognize a commonality with the subjects of the episode and who engage in a negotiated reading, as Stuart Hall would put it, or a disidentificatory process, as Jose Mun˜oz might put it, with the substance and form of I Married the Eiffel Tower. Given this, I want to turn to some points of convergence between the discourses about and those produced by selfidentified objectùm-sexuals.
III. Desiring Etiology In the case of objectùm-sexuality, as in so many diagnoses of “strange loves” that proliferate through what Foucault called the ubiquitous “implantation of perversions” characteristic of modern societies, medical and psychological notions are tied into the media representations of this mode of sexuality (The History of Sexuality). Simply put, the Strangeloves episode on OS pathologizes it. According to the episode, the two main speculative etiological factors for explaining the presence of objectùmsexuality are a) Asperger’s Syndrome and b) childhood emotional and sexual abuse. These two situations are cited not only by experts examining objectùm-sexuality but also by some, though not all, of the people who identify as objectùm-sexuals. Amy, who has an abiding love of the Twin Trade towers, was diagnosed in her teenage years with Asperger’s Syndrome by a psychologist to whom she was sent for treatment out of concern for her difficulty in forming social relationships with other people and for her apparent signs of self-injury. The psychologist’s report, from which Amy reads during the episode, cited her fixation on objects as a symptom of an underlying psychosexual problem. Amy herself recalls how distant her father was and how hard life became once her parents became ill, lost their jobs, were divorced, and the family lost its home. Objects, she comments, provide her the comfort and security that people cannot. Asperger’s Syndrome, considered to be on the mild side of a spectrum of autism disorders, is said to manifest in difficulty in relating socially to other humans and to an exaggerated attachment to objects, and even to a sense on the part of the sufferer of this disorder of the object having a soul or a 42
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spirit.9 People with Asperger’s Disorder often express a loyalty to objects whom they wish to defend against injustice and destruction. Furthermore, Asperger’s Syndrome is more commonly diagnosed in boys and men, thus making girls and women who are diagnosed with it seem more aberrant, with the suggestion that they lack a fundamental ability to establish social connections, a quality assumed to be of the essence of femininity.10 The
19. Australian psychologist Tony Attwood provides an accessible explanation of patients’ attachments to objects (Attwood 175-77). According to the 4th edition of the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the diagnostic criteria for Asperger’s Syndrome defines it as a “qualitative impairment in social interaction” that may manifest in “persistent preoccupation with parts of objects.” However, “there is no clinically significant general delay in language (e.g., single words used by age 2 years, communicative phrases used by age 3 years) ... [nor any] ... clinically significant delay in cognitive development or in the development of ageappropriate self-help skills, adaptive behavior (other than in social interaction), and curiosity about the environment in childhood.” (American Psychiatric Association 2000). The proposed changes to the DSM’s 5th edition, to go into effect in 2013, fold Asperger’s Syndrome, first discerned officially in 1994, into the category of Autism Spectrum Disorder (previously “Autism Disorder”) based on the determination that “Asperger’s Syndrome” is a term that doctors use loosely and lack sufficient agreement on what it means. Therefore, advocates of the diagnostic revision note that the criteria used for determining Asperger’s Syndrome do not work well in clinical assessment and treatment of patients. They argue that the spectrum model affords the means for more effective treatment, placing autism on a scale of mild to severe (American Psychiatric Association 2010). The proposal was met with opposition by some who have been diagnosed with Asperger’s and who argue that the reclassification carries a stigma, specifically that their social difficulties will be linked to the assumption that they have stunted mental development, a characteristic of those with severe autism (Tanner). 10. According to one authority on Asperger’s Syndrome and gender, girls may be under-diagnosed for AS because their “social deficits” are not as conspicuous. She writes, Although there are 4 boys for every girl diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS), high-functioning girls with autistic spectrum disorders may not be as easy to recognize due to a number of differences in their social interactions and behavior. This results from the fact that girls are more inclined to adopt effective strategies to hide their differences in social situations. ... Overall, girls are raised to be sociable, and as such, girls with AS tend to devote more effort to learning the required social cues and scripts. Girls will turn their 43
diagnosis, however, does not seem to offend Amy but instead provides a comforting framework within which to understand herself, though she negotiates the diagnosis by filtering out the suggestion that her attachment to objects must be overcome, with the end goal being the achievement of love and sexual intimacy with the proper object: an adult human, preferably of the “opposite sex.” The diagnosis of Asperger’s Sydrome also affords Amy a rational framework supporting her sense that she “was born this way,” since the diagnosis is frequently tied to genetic or congenital factors in the medical literature and in popular understandings of autism spectrum disorders. Erika Eiffel functions in the Strangeloves episode as an exemplary case of how childhood trauma and sexual abuse may have a strong bearing on the outcome of objectùm-sexuality. She describes being born into a family where neither parent loved her. She was shuttled around from one foster home to another and was sexually molested by a half-brother for two of her childhood years. She turned to objects for safety, security, and comfort. Her sword and her archery bow were not fetish objects; they did not function, as she points out, as vehicles to achieve sexual satisfaction but were themselves the objects of deep erotic connection. Likewise the Berlin Wall. When asked by the interviewer why she loves the Wall, Erika replies that it is because they have much in common. Realizing that many believe the fall of the Wall in 1989 was a triumph of freedom over oppression, she has a slightly different reading of what this “old ragged wall” means, at least to her. “The Berlin Wall,” she explains, was built, made, and then rejected by the people who made him and I feel that way about my own life. How can you bring someone into the world, like a child or an object, and then not love them? This old ragged wall has taught me many things and one of the most important things is to stand up. Who cares what people think about you? Stand up and be yourself. I am standing up and being me. I am the Berlin Wall. Hate me, try to break me apart, try to tear me down considerable intellectual skills to the task of analysing social interactions and conventions. Additionally, they are less inclined to develop the conduct disorders that attract notice among boys with autism spectrum disorders” (Copley). 44
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but I will still be here standing. (Piotrowska)
As it appears in the Strangeloves episode, Erika’s is a survivor’s discourse, one familiar to anyone who has studied post-traumatic stress disorder or feminist family violence discourses. The trauma requires an apparatus for making it meaningful and for overcoming its debilitating effects; it must be re-membered but in new terms. While there is cultural value attached to this process of confronting traumatic incidents, there is still stigma attached and this stigma is reflective of a larger discourse of proper objects that would say that if only Erika had not had such an awful childhood, she could have grown up to have love and sexual fulfillment the right way, not this sad, unfulfilling, and strange mode of desire in which she is now trapped. From her own written account, not edited by the Strangeloves producers, she only briefly references her “tumultuous life” as something she has survived thanks to her love of objects. She complains mainly of the pressure from a very early age to hide this love or face ridicule. Who is invested in portraying her as a victim of trauma and why are they so invested? What prurient pleasure might be experienced from viewing her as an abjected subject, whether she is portrayed as socially disabled, sexually perverse, or mentally deranged? In what ways does Erika become entangled in discourses of causality? How does she defend herself? She is aware of how contempt can masquerade as pity and counters that “[m]y life has been very rich and I have achieved many personal goals empowered by the loving connection I have with what are otherwise known as inanimate objects. ... If the worst things I do are love Bridges and an old concrete memorial in Berlin, or fancy the elegance of wood Fences I guess I am doing OK” (Eiffel, “ ‘Married’”). This statement and her account of coming out as an OS person, with OS being “all I have ever known,” suggests that objectùm-sexuality, rather than a radically new sexual orientation, has much in common with other modern minoritized sexual formations in which the narrative structure starts with the early recognition of an original desire that then must be hidden out of fear of reprisals and that later can be liberated through a process of identification usually referred to as “coming out of the closet” and finally expressing the truth about oneself and consolidating desire around a legible sexual practice or sexual object choice.
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IV. A Spectrum of Object-Love What if we situated objectùm-sexuality in relation to the framework that Gayle Rubin sketched in that memorable graphic figure she included in her “Thinking Sex” essay, “The Sex Hierarchy: the Charmed Circle vs. the Outer Limits”? (281) I am suggesting that we problematize the divisions that divide the outer limits where objectùm-sexuality is generally placed and the charmed circle of more proper objects.11 Let’s start by considering, as one humorous commenter remarked following a posting about the Strangeloves episode on a blog site called boingboing: “I know a lady who goes to bed with an inanimate object every night ... My girlfriend!” (Burton) Erika had her sword and her bow. Recruits to the U.S. Marine Corps are encouraged to love and sleep with their rifles. Military aviators are trained to feel the intimate connection to the fighter jets they fly. Then there’s the familiar car love and companionship: think of the KITT car that co-stars on the now re-made television drama, Knight Rider (originally starring that 11. David Levy, an expert in the field of artificial intelligence, argues that it will soon be common for people to fall in love with robots and seek companionship, friendship, sexual relations, and marriage with them. In his 2007 book, Love and Sex with Robots, Levy isolates ten factors that he claims scientists have identified about why humans fall in love with other humans. They include a sense of mystery, reciprocal affection, and readiness to enter a relationship. Levy further claims that all of these factors can be applied to robots if they are properly programmed. He predicts that by 2025 (but probably well before then), “artificial-emotion technologies” will allow robots to be more emotionally available than the typical American human male. As for sexual relations, Levy isolates the factors he believes are the reasons people have sex with other people. These include “for pure pleasure,” “to express emotional closeness,” “because your partner wants to.” He reasons, again, that these qualities can be embodied in robots and other sex toys, and claims that they already are. He concludes with the prediction that the future of human/robot sex promises to be better than most sex between humans. (Levy) As one pithy critic points out, “Levy spends so much time laying out his logical arguments about how and why we will fall in love with robots that he gives short shrift to the bigger questions of whether we really want to. I’d have like a little less geewhiz, and a little more examination about whether a sexbot in every home, a Kama Sutra on legs that never tires, never says no, and never has needs of its own is what we really want.” (Henig) In other words, a Stepford wife (Levin). 46
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object, David Hasselhoff, whose KITT car was voiced by various male actors). The Real Doll Corporation, headquartered in San Marcos, California, is doing a thriving business selling a variety of silicone life-sized dolls to those who can afford to buy them, ranging from around $6,500 to $50,000 each.12 Comments on various blog sites discussing objectùmsexuality, most of them following stories on the Strangeloves episode, indicate the love of all manner of objects among those who reluctantly confess that the television show got them to think about their own attachments. Among the cherished objects is everything from kitchen spatulas to iPods, cell phones, appliances, vibrators, jets, boats, computers. What is a proper object in the context of hyper commodity-fetishism in a 12. For details about the Real Doll Company see http://www.realdoll.com/cgibin/snav.rd. For an interesting article about a sculptor and painter living in Davis, California, who has learned how to repair real dolls, damaged due to abuse or neglect, and who expresses sympathy for them, see Gordinier. 47
society whose economy was about 73% dependent upon consumerism (at least until the bubble-bursting recession that ensued at the end of the George W. Bush administration)? Where do normative heterosexual yuppies13 belong on the spectrum of object-love — those whose attraction to one another is propelled by a desire for the car the other drives, the cologne or perfume the other wears, the clothing the other fashions, or the kitchen appliances and flat-screen televisions the other owns? How does Amy’s love for the Twin Trade Towers compare to that of the iconographic fire-fighters, police, civic leaders, surviving widows and all others associated with the post-911 nationalist project of “homeland security” in the United States, whose reverence for the Towers is quite obviously marked by a cathexis that binds the nation to the spirit of a building? Though it may be too great a liberty to take, what do we make of the nationalist display on inauguration day in January of 2009, when all the major television networks in the U.S. directed their cameras to capture the grandeur of the Washington monument in America’s capital city as it anchors the capitol mall on one end with the mighty domed structure of the Capitol Building on the other? When is a building or a monument or a Cathedral properly loved? When is the love of a building a sign of pathology or profanity? Objectùm-sexuals are careful to distinguish their passions from fetishism, and they do so by emphasizing a compassionate, empathic, spiritual, and sensual attachment that is reciprocated with the object of their desire. They insist that, unlike fetishism, which they view as instrumental and exploitative of objects, theirs’ is true love and desire signaled through reciprocity. For objectùm-sexuals, objects are not substitutions or stand-ins for parts of human bodies or, in turn, for types of unprocessed infantile desires. As Joachim A. writes, “For some people, their car becomes a fetish which they use to put themselves in the limelight. For the objectùm-sexual, on the other hand, the car itself — and nothing else — is the desire sexual partner, and all sexual fantasies and emotions are focused on it” (quoted in Thadeusz). Indeed, Freud’s definition of fetishism doesn’t seem to apply to how OS people practice love. In his writings on the subject, Freud’s thinking 13. Yuppie derives from the acronym, emerging in the 1980s, standing for Young Urban Professional People. 48
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changed, but he never abandoned the general claim that fetishism was part of a disavowal process in which the afflicted acknowledges and yet disavows the recognition that his mother has been castrated. Developing a fetish is to develop a substitution that allows for this apparent splitting or contradiction in the young boy and later the man he becomes. It is his dread of castration that propels the boy to divert his eyes away from the specter of lack and to invest his libidinal energies in a fetish that will stand for the phallus but also for its castration in women. Freud thus assumed fetishists were men and found no cases of fetishism among women (“Fetishism”). If one’s exposure to objectùm-sexuality was solely through the Strangeloves episode, then one would be led to believe that women make up a majority of the small subculture of objectùm-sexuals, which is doubtful. Although there are many men who identify as objectùm-sexuals, the Strangeloves episode’s focus on women reiterates ideological assumptions about the proper expression of women’s desire: she is to be an object, not to be acknowledged as an active subject who desires one. So we should ask how it is that gender becomes a dividing line in the ways OS has been depicted by the Strangeloves episode and much of the popular commentary that it provoked. I am suggesting that gender may be an axis across which we are able to see what non-human object choices are part of a “charmed circle” (e.g. men loving guns, jets, cars, computers, etc.) and which non-human object choices might dwell in the “outer limits” of it (e.g. women loving buildings, amusement park rides, walls, fences, etc.). What does it mean that subjects of I Married the Eiffel Tower, all women, seem to occupy this outer limit? The fact that they dare to declare matrimonial relations with seemingly silent objects runs counter to the conventional heteronormative framework where women are to wait more or less passively for a man to propose marriage. And the insinuation that these women are having sex in public — thus placing them in a longer history of women of “ill-repute” — adds to how they are portrayed negatively in the television episode. Are they desperately delusional women and/or nymphomaniacs? Though perhaps in their efforts to distance themselves from fetishists some OS people contribute to the common stigmatization of fetishists, they make a very interesting point about how fetishism is quintessentially a human-centered sexuality, unlike objectùm-sexuality. A.L. writes, for example, “[M]y physical attraction for my lover [a building] is not defined by human sexuality and therefore I see zero relevance to an object appearing 49
phallic. I love this building with all my heart foremost and there should be no need to justify our love in the confines of human sexuality” (A. L.). And it is the difference of objects from humanity that makes them appealing, as Joachim A, writes, “you can reveal yourself to an object partner in an intimate way, in a way that you would never reveal yourself to any other person” (quoted in Thadeusz). D, an OS person from Berlin, writes, “I love my darling for exactly what he is, for all his features, his soul and his character which is so different from a human’s. There is something so special and sublime about him, which a human could never have. A human could never replace him” (D). Objectùm-sexual people are frequently asked to explain their sexual practices by curious interviewers and those encountering the phenomenon for the first time. “How do you do it?” is, of course, a question very familiar to non-normative sexual people. For example, lesbians are frequently beseeched to explain what exactly their sexual encounters look like since, it is presumed, there is no sex without a penis or a plausible facsimile of one. What is interesting about the ways that OS people respond to questions about their sexual practices is that they frequently turn the questions back on the askers, and they do so by reimagining sexual embodiment. For example, A.L. writes, They tell me I should love a person. They tell me it is wrong to love a building because the pieces don’t fit. And what pieces are they referring to? Clearly, not the ones in my heart that feel so right with my object of love. Well, it is not possible to have sex with a building, they demand. Ok, that may be the case if you are going off the prolific definition between humans but why does sex have to the defining factor whether love is right or wrong for an individual? There are people incapable of having sex or chose not to for a variety of reasons. Is this to say that they can never know love? And there are those like me with a different characterization of sex. (A. L.)
Similarly, Erika Eiffel writes, Yes, of course, we enjoy physical relations with our partners. Easy? Not exactly, but the connection happens even if the pieces do not fit. We each have our own means of physical union ... or mental union
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... it could be a simple caress to much more. Beauty is in the eye ... just as sexual pleasure is ... For me, I indeed feel a very spiritual connection with my lover when we make union with each other. This connection has powered me in my career. I have loved objects in the past that have brought me to the World Class level in athletics, driven purely by the spiritual connection with the equipment. (Eiffel FAQs)
V. Public Displays of Affection To what kinds of objects do objectùm-sexuals become passionately attached? Interestingly, many though certainly not all of the objects of OS love are built structures or homemade models of them. 14 Unlike the proliferating world of highly advertised commodities so commonly found in bourgeois dating scenes, these objects of love are not products available for purchase and consumption as one consumes a car, or a perfume, or a piece of fashionable clothing. This is an interesting phenomenon, especially in our highly commodified social world. Why turn to public or quasi-public built structures for love? Is the fact that these objects cannot be purchased relevant to the ways that OS people imagine love and reciprocity? Since these objects cannot be purchased or exclusively possessed, does that render them more suitable for love and a relationship of communion and reciprocity? For OS people who love buildings, is a commodity by definition also, like the fetish, an object that is exploited or that is relegated to a status of substituting for intimacy because it is purchased (i.e. possessed)? We could take the inquiry further by asking why, for example, certain structures become the objects of romantic desire? Remember the attachments to the Eiffel Tower, the Berlin Wall, the Empire State Building, 14. I have encountered a few cases of OS people who are in love with their iBook computers or their toasters, and yet the commodity status of these items is also less emphasized among their OS lovers. I am not suggesting that commodification is absent in these scenes, but that it is, like fetishism, associated with domination and exploitation, rather than exchange and reciprocity among those who identify as objectùm-sexuals. 51
the World Trade Center in New York, and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Each has a monumental significance and is commonly aligned with modern western nationalism, binding the spirit of capitalism with the nation-state form and signifying security of one sort or another: political, commercial, territorial, etc. Each also stands as a cherished public treasure to be revered, not merely relegated to its use value. Citizens of modern nation-states in the West are solicited to express their reverence in visits to these monuments and especially to do this visiting with young children for whom beholding the significance of each revered monument is part of a process of belonging to the nation. This is the normative case. So it is interesting to consider how the passionate attachments to these structures, expressed by the object-sexual people I’ve discussed so far, might evince a kind of alterity to the normative solicitations of the nation-state — and therein is one of the ways that these people disrupt orders of security, both literally and figuratively. Consider how, in the normative case, the State’s apparatus, along with non-State apparati that support the security powers of the State (for example, commercial banking and trade institutions), urge that the devotion for the State be enacted through the child, and that the sex to be had with the State should take a detour through the body of one’s wife or husband, and that the progeny of such a union should be an offering to the polity or what we could call the nation. Thus nationalist belonging is enacted through the racially and sexually idealized family form with the proper pairing of heterosexual parents giving birth and nationalist education to the offspring. We could call this heteronormative nationalism. Think of it this way: monuments are pedagogical tools for cultivating in the child a sense of national belonging or, if her particular family form is outside the “charmed circle,” the child learns that she does not belong, that she is an alien. Monuments are what parents take their children on vacation to see, what parents encourage their children to love, and by loving the monuments they gain a sense of belonging. They become national subjects through a cathexis to national objects. But objectùm-sexuality cuts out the symbolic displacement that would bind the nation via heteronormative reproduction and instead takes the OS subject directly to the monument to which she adheres. Marrying a monument can thus be seen as a resistant practice that rises in intimate relation to the operations of power that are at work in the devotional attachments solicited by the State.15 52
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We might consider specifying a subset of sexuality called monument sexuality and define it as a particular form of public sex, one that expresses itself either in licit/legitimate ways (the devotional detour to nationalist heterosexual reproduction) or in illicit/illegitimate ways (the matrimonial attachments to objects of national reverence). Women who love monuments and who seek matrimony with these monuments break the rules of public sex and, in turn, of security. They lay claim to objects that are to be revered but not fondled, they do it in the presence of others whose sexuality in relation to these monuments has been detoured long ago on a childhood family vacation to Paris, New York, Washington, DC, or San Francisco. I would rather not see these practices as a mutually exclusive binary opposition to heteronormative nationalism; instead both are expressions of monument sexuality. To reiterate, we are all encouraged to develop a libidinal reverence in the presence of these mighty architectural wonders; standing in awe of them is the normative condition. We are asked to attach ourselves to them. However, to marry them or to admit to one’s sexual desire to be on them, under them, or near them are affronts to the licit mode of having sex in public because this form of monument sex goes too far, overshooting the devotional detour but perhaps no less nationalist. Perhaps we could call Erika’s marriage an expression of perverse nationalism.16 Continuing with navigational metaphors, she has taken a different path by passing up the normative devotional detour that winds up in the form of a human heterosexual couple and the properly productive outcome of giving birth to children but shares with all of us the marks of nationalist reverence. We could say that Erika’s monument sexuality, for example, appropriates 15. I am grateful to Emma Heaney, who in our conversations, helped me to formulate this analysis. See also Sturken. 16. A common dictionary definition of perverse, an adjective, is to purposely deviate from what is accepted as good, proper, or reasonable. Freud urged readers to reach beyond the moralistic judgments attached to the word, by noting that perversion is a kind of swerving away from the normative course of development, stressing that there is no pre-given natural or determined course, but that psychological development entailed negotiating the complexities of sexual subjectivity (Three Essays). I draw on this line of analysis to suggest that Erika is navigating a non-normative path to nationalism and to sexual subjectivity, not that she belongs to a sub-species of humans who dwell outside of these formative structures. 53
some aspects of security without incorporating the whole apparatus of security. It is, though, interesting to note that by her own account, her love of the Eiffel Tower and of the Berlin Wall are “non-political connections,” providing no further explanation for why she regards them as such (Eiffel, ‘Married’). Declaring abiding love for the Berlin Wall or, in Amy’s case, for the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, may allow the women to fold their personal trauma into national or historical trauma. This operation belies the common accusation among those inclined to pathologize objectùm-sexuality that objectùm-sexuals lack a connection to other people. Extolling love for highly publicized architectural objects, especially those marking histories of violence, war, and destruction, objectùm-sexuals engage the past in ways that tie History, a collective social sense of past ruptures, to their individual histories of trauma. In Erika’s words, “I relate to the Berliner-Mauer as a kindred spirit of abuse and survival thereof. In many ways ... I am the Berlin Wall” (Ibid.). Through such a gesture, Erika is both a subject and object of History. Would a Mexican nationalist perhaps regard the Alamo in a similar way? Might some Koreans, living in North or South Korea, regard the DMZ in a similar fashion? While the monumental structures of note here can be read as signifiers of nationalism in their respective national contexts, they are also, importantly, legible within a modern globalizing context and thus attachments to them signify connections between particular national and global historical developments, notably Western European colonialism and American empire building, both carried out through capitalist expansion. The Eiffel Tower, for example, was constructed from 1887-1889 as the entrance arch for the Exposition Universelle, a World’s Fair marking the centennial celebration of the French Revolution and it remained the world’s tallest tower until the Chrysler Building was completed in New York in 1930. The Empire State Building, completed in 1931, superceded the Chrysler Building in height, employing thousands of construction workers, many who were immigrants from Europe, and hundreds of Mohawk Indian iron workers. Its official opening was marked by President Herbert Hoover turning on the lights from a remote switch in Washington, D.C. Opening during the Great Depression, its many office spaces remained vacant in the early years. It remained the tallest building in New York until the World Trade Center was completed in 1973. Technically speaking, these latter 54
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structures in New York are not national monuments and are instead privately owned and rented mainly to commercial entities. That they enjoy the status of national landmarks, if not official monuments, speaks to the deeply intertwined histories of U.S. national identity and the massive expansion of capitalism into volatile transnational networks of exchange. The Berlin Wall, built in 1961, demarcated the physical border between East and West Germany during the heart of the Cold War between the global super powers of the U.S.S.R. (aligned with communism) and the United States (aligned with capitalism). Its dismantling in 1990, prompted by the mass defections and street protests by disaffected East Germans, brought an end to this synecdoche of what Winston Churchill called the “Iron Curtain” aimed at containing communism. The Golden Gate Bridge, completed in 1937 despite the objections of local ferry companies and the economic setbacks of the Great Depression, linked the peninsula of San Francisco to the regions north of it. Its design as the second largest suspension bridge in the United States, after the Verenzano Narrows bridge in New York, earned it great acclaim among engineers and a popular iconic status as a welcoming gateway into what is now the most expensive real estate market on the West Coast. Passionate attachments to these structures are shared and varied, across the generations of modern humans who have designed, built, and revered them; they signify a cosmopolitan consciousness that develops along with the social stratifications wrought by the political-economy of industrial capitalism. These structures are bound up with concerns for security and distinction, whether they reach upward, across, or between meaningful spaces. In a rather banal way, objectùm-sexuals are seen to pose a threat to security, as evidenced by the admonition by the security guard who ordered Amy to step away from the Empire State Building at the very moment when she was becoming physically intimate with this object of her love. Her actions are seen as intrusions upon private property and, in the post-911 context, as threats to security of a building that is frequently evacuated by its occupants due to bomb threats. It is one thing to have sex in public with another human; it is another to have sex with a building that is seen as both mighty and vulnerable to attack. Perhaps there is a connection between the vulnerability objectùm-sexuals feel about expressing their passions in public and their identification with the endangered object. Something must account for the common practice among objectùm-sexuals, including many 55
women, of building miniature versions of their loved ones, which they keep close to them and hold in their arms in the privacy of their own homes. Speaking of property relations, what do we make of Erika’s and EijaRiitta’s investments not just in the discourses of romance and desire but also of marriage as a way to signify their attachments? Though no state sanctions their marriages, these unions connote a depth of shared history and commitment between the partners. As with sanctioned marriages, they are a way of materializing the relationship through public rituals and declared promises. On an Easter Sunday, Erika was joined by a small group of close friends in her marriage ceremony with the Eiffel Tower. “When I ‘married’ the monumental structure,” she writes, it was simply to honor my love for Bridges as La Tour Eiffel was dubbed the ‘Sheppardess of the Bridges’ and engineered by one of the world’s greatest Bridge engineers, Gustave Eiffel. Changing my surname was a measure to illustrate my love for Bridges and a commitment to what I am; an objectùm-sexual. ... I am well aware it is not legally recognized, nor do I seek privilege. It was for me and my Bridges only. (Eiffel, “‘Married’”)
Erika’s deep affection for bridges stems from early memories of being in awe of them as wonders of structural engineering, and their beauty lay in their capacity to connect and endure. Marriages, like bridges, are connections. In some clearly recognizable ways, Erika Eiffel and Eija-Riitta BerlinerMauer appear to be playing to a normative feminine type — that is, they are laboring in love, they admire grand and distant figures, and they are drawn both to protect but also be protected by these objects. Their devotion, tenacity, commitment, sacrifice, patience, faith, and long-suffering dedication seem to come right out of the highly gendered romantic playbook. How really non-normative are Erika and Eija-Riitta? Usually, labors of love performed by wives involve those not only undertaken in the service of husbands but of the children who, as mothers, they are to nurture. The lament of many a laboring-in-love female character in literature and in life is that her labor is needed for love to carry on. She must show others daily and in minute and magnificent ways that she loves them. The way they express (or don’t express) their love for her should not be a 56
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condition of whether she shows her love for them, as the playbook goes. How really reciprocal is this normative arrangement? It is a question to consider in light of the common denunciation by critics of objectùmsexuals that theirs is a fictive love because objects, it is assumed, cannot love them in return. In Erika and Eija-Riitta, we find complex negotiations of femininity, which draw upon but also in some ways subvert, hegemonic forms of feminine desire. Further, in some significant ways, the marriages claimed by Erika and Eija-Riitta redefine the institution in radical ways. For one thing, Erika and Eija-Riitta’s marriages are non-procreative and they necessarily entail physical distance and limits to privacy. They also involve sharing objects of love: Eija-Riitta’s marriage to the Berlin Wall does not preclude Erika’s loving attachment to it; the two women have become friends not only because they share objects of love but because they share an identification with the formation of objectùm-sexuality. Furthermore, Erika’s marriage to the Eiffel Tower does not require a monogamous commitment, as we have seen. It endures even as Erika proclaims, “I am in love with the Golden Gate Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge is in love with me” (Piotrowska). The bridge, “one of her boys,” does not undermine her marriage to the Eiffel Tower, a marriage between two feminine spirits. But lest we liken her marriage to the “Sheppardess of the Bridges” to a lesbian partnership, as the Strangeloves producers took the liberty to suggest, what we have in Erika is what might be aptly called synecdochal matrimony, wherein each bridge is a part of the whole of Bridges: “I felt connected to the world’s Bridges,” she reflects, “as if they were one entity but showing themselves in different ways. Everywhere I went, they were there, with me always ... aesthetically beautiful to the world but radiating endurance under extreme forces to me” (Eiffel, “‘Married’”, emphasis added). In marrying one bridge she marries them all, a synecdochal matrimony whose human-to-human parallel is not easy to imagine.17 She resists calling 17. The closest I can get is to think of the clichéd phrase “I just love a man in a uniform,” wherein the man is not the substitution or stand-in for the uniformed force (army, navy, police, etc.), but is perhaps a synecdoche of the force; he is one of the “hands on deck” and in connecting with him, she of the quote is marrying the army, navy, etc. What is held in awe is the army, navy, etc., like the Bridges for Erika. But maybe it’s just the cloth of the uniform that turns her on, not the force for which it stands. 57
her relationships polyamorous perhaps because such a term implies that they are frivolous; and she is not leading a double-life or two-timing. To the contrary, the term polyamorous is technically inaccurate according to her thoughtful articulation of the way her love works: what she falls in love with are the embodiments of wondrous engineering that are One but made manifest in many objects throughout the world, whether they be archery bows, towers, bridges, or walls. This is not polygamy nor is it monogamy nor is it promiscuity. It is not possessive of the object of desire. Do we modern humans have a name for this? If we don’t, then we don’t recognize — or are symptomatically resistant to recognizing — the practice of it. In a moment, we’ll have a chance to think about how consent and reciprocity are articles of commitment in normative models of modern matrimony, and to observe how objectùm-sexuals conceptualize these articles differently in their love affairs with things.
VI. The Limits of Toleration The commentary inspired by the Strangeloves episode, gleaned from various blogging sites, offers a range of public attitudes towards objectùmsexuality. On boingboing, a site that seems to be of interest to men, one can find a fair amount of well-intentioned humor, often of the self-deprecating sort. Aloisius, for example, writes, “I love the earth. It does so many great things for me. Keeps me breathing, feeds me, and entertains me to no end. Unfortunately our size difference makes a physical relationship comical at best” (Aloisius). Noen writes, “[object love] is what we all do. We all construct a fantasy of our beloved and then make love to that. No one, or very few, makes love to the sweating, shitting, digesting, gurgling corporeal reality that is their loved one. We construct a virtual and more sanitized version and we love that. For the OS they have merely detached that from people and placed it onto things” (Noen). Antinous, responding to another commenter’s objection that “you can’t be in love with an object in the sense that without reciprocity, there is no relationship in the traditional sense,” remarks “Reciprocity as a prerequisite in love relationships is only about a thousand years old. The idea of lover and object is far more traditional” (Antinous). On Jezebel, a blog site devoted to celebrity, sex, fashion for women, we 58
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find a range of attitudes among the voluminous commentary, some more accepting of OS than others. There is a common thread of pity, however, and lay diagnoses are commonly offered that assume OS women suffer from a tragic lack of trust and loneliness. A fair amount of such commentary assumes not only that OS women are alone and without intimacy but that single women are, in general, fundamentally unfortunate. Some comments are squeamish about knowing too much about such a disturbing topic. Several worry about the health of OS women featured in Strangeloves, assuming that the surfaces of buildings and walls are more unsanitary than touching the skin of another human, an assumption that another commenter refutes by reminding readers that “hands are gross and I’d much rather lay my lady lips on steel or concrete than to be touched by an unwashed hand” (Scout). Others confess of their love of objects in light of what they learned watching Strangeloves, and there are a few choice humorous comments, including the comment of Ink-StainedWretch, who identifies as “a tad aspy,” having a compassion for objects but never having the sexual feelings for objects “unless you count my idiot ex, who doesn’t even deserve to rise to the level of object” (Ink-StainedWretch). PoliticalPartyGirl observes that the Eiffel Tower is “pretty damn phallic to be female ... unless you’re standing under it,” (PoliticalPartyGirl) to which Hazel replies “[t]here’s actually 800 more feet of tower inside the tower, and it’s way more sensitive than, say, the Washington monument” (Hazel). On popular sex columnist Dan Savage’s blogsite, readers took exception to his dismissal of objectùm-sexuality when he wrote “I’m not buying it” (Savage). While a number of readers urged him to reconsider his view in light of how it echoed with moralistic judgments about sex, several opined that the women in I Married the Eiffel Tower were lesbians “who couldn’t deal with it.” One commenter damned with faint praise as he remarked, “way to go, freaks. I mean really. I wouldn’t want these people raising kids or for that matter having even the possibility of getting knocked up [but] the fact that they are content is cool as well. How many hetero or gay couples are unhappy?” (General Jack Ripper) Another reader granted OS people the “right to be as nutty as my Aunt Laura’s Christmas fruitcake, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking this isn’t anything but an extreme behavior, and one perhaps indicative of some other, more serious underlying psychological issues.” He makes what in his mind seems to be an important distinction: “At least the guys hooking up with ‘real dolls’ are fetishizing 59
over an object that’s been highly anthropomorphized; these people appear to be incapable of even managing that modicum of human interaction” (Comte). Apparently, the line for determining the proper object choice here is whether the object can be imagined to be a human, in this case, whether it has the structural form of a human body. Regardless of the fact that, for example, the Real DollTM‚ is inert and silent, she is seen as a better object choice than a wall or a fence or a tower. But at a time when multi-user online simulated worlds are growing dramatically, it seems antiquated to insist that a proper object be one that resembles a human. In Second Life, for example, players create avatars of many shapes and sizes through which they encounter avatars created by other players. The avatars are not identical to their human creators either in form or substance but they are developed and performed by humans to interact in a computer-programmed simulated environment. They are in this sense alive and imagined not as inert life-like models but forms of simulated vitality; their creators do not necessarily expect or wish to every encounter one another as humans outside the simulated environment (Boellstorff). At the Warwick Pride online forum, hosted through the University of Warwick’s LGBTUA18 organization, the discussion involved questions concerning whether objects can consent and, by extension, whether they can be said to have the right to marry. An interest in the matter of reciprocity and intimacy was the subject of one conversation thread. Some commentators regarded OS people to be “dehumanizing themselves” by seeking love from objects, while others seemed to advocate for the right of “inanimate” objects to be free from abuse by the humans who desire them. One participant responded, “I didn’t get consent from my vibrator, but that doesn’t mean that I’m raping it every time I use it. You can’t/don’t need to get consent from inanimate objects” (Vickih86). (I would add, as an aside, that a vibrator is animate or it wouldn’t be of much value; when a vibrator is inanimate, it is quite literally turned off.) Given that the forum is linked to an LGBT organization, it is perhaps not surprising to find various participants arguing for greater inclusion, 18. The acronym stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Undefined, and Asexual. The online forum’s participants reflect on the politics and history of this naming, especially when arguing over the value of an ever-evolving formation of sexually diverse movement (Warwick). 60
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citing the history of moralistic exclusions that hobbled the emergence of a movement for LGBT liberation through pronouncements about the pathology of homosexuality. To counter this perspective, one unregistered participant warned that the movement must draw the line on paraphilias: just because OS is a sexual deviation doesn’t mean it is acceptable, making reference to the boogeyman figure of pedophilia as a limit case on toleration. (Unregistered) In response, strawberryutopia remarked “If the community thought that ‘protecting our own kind,’ for lack of a better expression, was more important than accepting ‘outsiders’ into the movement then we’d have never evolved past ‘Gay Liberation.’” In response to another reader who suggested that OS people are “de-humanizing” themselves, strawberryutopia wrote that to say “that people have dehumanized themselves is just an excuse used to justify punishment and prejudice against people/actions/orientations we don’t agree with by implying that they are ‘unnatural’ and ‘less than human.’ Surely unduly harsh” (strawberryutopia).
VII. The Thing About It Is ... The emergence of objectùm-sexuality as a legible cultural formation and much of the popular commentary about it raises interesting questions about the being and status of objects, and about the anxieties that object love arouses. How are ideas about intimacy, object agency, and the relationship between subject and object illuminated in the presence of this new cultural formation? I have suggested, throughout this article, that objectùm-sexuality is not as strange or foreign as may might, on first contact, assume. And I have attempted to suggest that this sense of strangeness affords us an opportunity to step back and interrogate our assumptions about human subjectivity and sexuality. Placing objectùm-sexuality on a continuum of sexualities, including heteronormative sexuality, allows us to recognize how object relations are at play across the continuum but also how regulatory mechanisms are deployed to disallow or to disavow certain human attachments to objects, and to promote others. Now I turn to consider, in this concluding section, how fields adjacent to Sexuality Studies may help us to appreciate how objectùm-sexuality makes sense in our world today. Lauren Berlant, speaking of intimacy, urges us to historicize the meaning 61
of this term and asks “how can we think about the way attachments make people public, producing transpersonal identities and subjectivities, when those attachments come from within spaces as varied as those of domestic intimacy, state policy, and mass-mediated experiences of intensely disruptive crises?” (Berlant 2) She reminds us that intimacy is regarded as a necessary requirement in Western modernity so that to have a life is to have an intimate life, and we are trained to do that and to perform it publicly. Hence the seemingly oxymoronic public intimacy is now a primary mode of intimacy’s expression in normative expectations that regulate it. Consider the phenomena of talk-show confessionals, proliferating tales of “coming out,” and the sanctioned public displays of affection carried out in dating rituals, marriage ceremonies, and family vacations. Objectùm-sexuals may initially seem to disturb norms of intimacy when they marry public buildings or play a church organ as a sexual practice, but, following Berlant, we can begin to consider how the practice of intimacy generally “reveals itself to be a relation associated with tacit fantasies, tacit rules, and tacit obligations to remain unproblematic” (7, emphasis added). The practice of intimacy makes things — it makes relations among things, including people, who, I’ll assert, are things. Bill Brown’s outline of Thing Theory will help me here. Brown is interested in theorizing what we mean when we speak of things. He does so by noting a distinction between objects and things: “the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation” (4). Things, for Brown, have a force as a “sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence.” Thingness, therefore, is what “exceeds the mere materialization of objects or their mere utilization as objects” (5). Complementing this idea is Arjun Appadurai’s notion of “things-inmotion,” a way of thinking about the social lives of objects and their capacity to influence the contexts through which they move and in which they establish relationships. The thing is not inert, nor independent of other participants in social networks; it has, as Appadurai observes, agency “of a sort that derives from ... [human] encodation of dynamic objects” (5). Brown and Appadurai contribute to a post-human understanding of lively things — they work against the grain of human-centric notions that name objects as either the mere creations of humans and/or discrete entities discovered by humans and therefore at the disposal of humans. But humans and their avatars, also known as subjects, endure in symptomatic ways in these theoretical formulations according to which an object’s relevance 62
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depends upon humans recognizing it. Thus acts of recognition in a sense give the object life, even as the object may fail in performing its expected activity. But what if we really de-centered the human? What if we really took seriously the idea that the subject has no meaning without objects? In different ways that has been said by Hegel, Freud, Lacan, and many others. How about this: what if we said that it’s best to think of object enchantments that are not at the behest of humans? And could those object enchantments involve things formerly known as humans? Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT), developed to study the material and social complexities of laboratory science, may also help us to think about intimacies among things. ANT’s method reveals how objects are part of a broader network of actors and may themselves be best thought of as actors (rather than inert, static, or inanimate entities) if and when they act or are granted activity by others. Thus, for example, the actors in a network can be scientists, their funders, and the audiences receiving their findings but Latour finds this traditional way of studying the sociology of science too limiting. For Latour, actors may also be the instruments of measurement and observation used in an experiment, such as a microscope, telescope, thermometer, or barometer. They act upon others and are acted upon. A virus, a cell, a protein, a planet, an atom, substances, heat, bodily organs, electricity, yeast, sunlight, tides — these may also be among the actors in a network. So might the building or university or city in which an experiment takes place. ANT, Latour writes, “does not limit itself to human individual actors but extends the word actor ... to non-human, nonindividual entities” (2). He continues, [a]n ‘actor’ in ANT is a semiotic definition — an actant —, that is, something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general. An actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of an action. ... [A]ctors are not conceived as fixed entities but as flows, as circulating objects, undergoing trials, and their stability, continuity, isotopies has to be obtained by other actions and other trials.( 5- 6, emphasis added)
Any given network consists of connections and associations and ANT aims at tracking (or recording) the action that makes up the network. Any 63
given network is saturated with mediations and potential misalignments between what is expected and what occurs. Each actor in the network may fail to meet the expectations of the experiment. When an actor fails to meet the expectations set out for it or when it gives rise to a new problem to account for, these are among the signs of its agency. In Latour’s words, ANT “is a method to describe the deployment of associations like semiotics is a method to describe the generative path of any narration” (7, emphasis added). It dispenses with the cherished distinction between things and representations and between nature and culture. In Latour’s way of putting it, it is irreductionist; that is, ANT does not seek foundations or ultimate accounts but observes, from within the network, the contingencies, the unexpected developments, the accidents, the momentary fulfillments, the swerves, the collisions, and the obstacles within experiments. Actor-network theory also offers a compelling critique of the Cartesian model of the human according to which matter and spirit are seen as fundamentally distinct and the human subject is endowed with a mind that observes and is capable of rationally analyzing the world “out there” — that is the world of things. The Cartesian model assumes an observer that is detached from the object of observation and therefore capable of achieving objectivity, transcending particularity, and having dominion over how things act. ANT will have none of this. As Latour states it, If a criticism can be leveled at ANT it is ... its complete indifference for providing a model of human competence. There is no model of (human) actor in ANT nor any basic list of competencies that have to be set at the beginning because the human, the self and the social actor of traditional society theory is not on its agenda. So what is on its agenda? The attribution of human, unhuman, nonhuman, inhuman characteristics; the distribution of properties among these entities; the connections established between them; the circulation entailed by these attributions, distributions and connections; the transformation of those attributions, distributions and connections, of the many elements that circulate and of the few ways through which they are seen. (5-6)
The observer — referred to by Latour intentionally as “it” — is within, not outside, of the network. “It has to work and pay the price like any other 64
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actor. In order to explain, to account, to observe, to prove, to argue, to dominate and to see, it has to move around and work” (10). Therefore, reflexivity inheres in the network; it is not an afterthought or a consideration requiring a momentary break from the network. If we link Latour’s ideas here to those of Berlant on intimacy, we may begin to see intimacy’s relationality in terms of contingent connections and distribution of properties among intimate and animate things (“actors”); for example, Erika and the Eiffel Tower. Latour’s method would allow us to see Erika and the tower as nodes in the larger network that makes their connection possible — the historical elements that affords their meeting, the significance of structural form in Erika’s sense of self, etc. We would thus be able to conceptualize Erika’s love as operating in a network of actions, one in which the human is not the only actor and one in which the agency of objects is conditioned upon circumstances of the existence of the network. The network, of course, consists of many nodes, including some aimed at interceding in connections between things, obstacles, resistances. Thus, actor-network theory may be useful for rethinking intimacy and for tracing when, how, and why something like objectùm-sexuality emerges. Latour practically never cites any of it, but among the most lively and interesting writings on objects and the matter of object relationality are feminist technoscience thinkers who draw our attention to the politics and ethics of post-human formations. Donna Haraway, who has been in playful and sometimes contentious dialogue with Latour for a long time, has been urging progressive beings to make sense of the conditions that have given rise to new relations between humans and machines, humans and animals, and humans and all manner of situated knowledge networks of what she calls subject-objects. She urges us to see the animations of these relationships and to participate in political and epistemological debates over the status of the human, especially since this category of being has been deployed historically in order to exclude Others, along the lines of a hierarchical Great Chain of Being manifesting in modern systems of gender, race, class, species, and sexual hierarchies. In her essay on Situated Knowledges, originally published in 1987, Haraway offers an intervention in standard scientific accounts of objectivity by sketching out the idea of a feminist doctrine of objectivity, noting that scientific practice is far more constructivist than most scientists let on. Much of the essay focuses on critically engaging metaphors of vision that 65
allow her to elaborate upon what she refers to as the privilege of partial perspective. Haraway stresses that all vision is embodied, whether it emanates from the ostensibly omniscient scientist or from the marked bodies of those who have been “imprisoned” as objects of the scientific gaze. Vision is anything but passive and detached, she argues, and visualizing technologies bring this point to the fore; they are mediation devices as is vision itself. As she puts it, they are active perceptual systems that build on specific ways of seeing which are based on ways of life. She calls for a doctrine of embodied objectivity whereby putatively omniscient scientists do not escape representation and formerly conquered objects (that is, marked subjects) may be appreciated for their situated knowledges and partial perspectives. This doctrine insists on the particularity and embodiment of all vision, thus noting its specificity, locale, partiality, and finitude. “... [O]nly partial perspective promises objective vision” (“Situated Knowledges” 190). Haraway cautions against romanticizing or appropriating the vision of subjugated positions for there are no ‘innocent’ positions. But what is good about subjugated positions is how they allow the possibility of marking the previously unmarked omniscient subject’s position that depended upon (but disavowed) repressions, elisions, and disappearing acts which claimed “ways of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively” (ibid. 191). Feminist objectivity is about critical positioning, she writes, and this positioning produces knowledge, including science, while it privileges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, and transformations of systems of knowing and ways of seeing. Because perspective is embodied and therefore situational, it can also be mobile, within certain but mutable limits. As she puts it, “[f ]eminist embodiment, then, is not about fixed location in a reified body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in fields, inflections and orientations, and responsibility for difference in materialsemiotic fields of meaning” (ibid. 195, emphasis added).19 19. Haraway calls for the cultivation of a “passionate detachment,” following feminist film theorist Annette Kuhn, as a positioning that requires more than self-critical partiality; “we are also bound to seek perspective from those points of view, which can never be known in advance, that promise something quite extraordinary, that is, knowledge potent for constructing worlds less organized by axes of domination” (“Situated Knowledges 192). One can see how 66
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Situated knowledges have to do with communities and affinities, not with isolated individuals. They require that “the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor or agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource ....” (ibid. 198). Then, in her closing section, Haraway introduces the idea of the apparatus of bodily production and the figure of the material-semiotic actor. The latter replaces facticity and a fictive organic “real,” particularly in biological sciences but also in other sciences that claim detachment as the best way of knowing. Instead the object of knowledge is posited as “an active, meaning-generating part of the apparatus of bodily production” without implying the immediate (or un-mediated) presence of such objects (ibid. 200). In other words, bodies are not immanently primary, a priori, but are “material-semiotic generative nodes; their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Objects, whether they be bodies or any other objects of knowledge/desire, are boundary projects, and their boundaries materialize in social interaction” (ibid. 201). During the earlier stage of feminist technoscientific theorizing in which Haraway wrote “Situated Knowledges,” a preoccupation with vision and forms of re-presenting knowledge is evident but Haraway began to move the discussion beyond metaphors of vision toward metaphors of embodied performance. The earlier feminist focus on visuality and perspective was necessary to counter the modern Western masculinist (hu)man centricity of claims to detached objectivity according to which the object was perceived as initially distant and mysterious, with the goal of science being the penetration and domination of the object’s essence by the knower and his tools. The relation of subject to object in the framework of detached objectivity is one of power over the object, as objects were variously described as seductresses, dark or evasive characters, or mysterious forces to be tamed. A preoccupation with vision and representation has given way in more recent years to a critical engagement, bridged by Haraway’s insights concerning situated knowledges, with embodied practice and performativity, which highlights the play between now hyphenated subjects-objects. For example, feminist philosopher of physics, Karen Barad, works with the idea of agential realism “in which agency is described as ‘intra-acting’: it is “an enactment, not objectùm-sexuals present us with something quite extraordinary in their insistence upon the liveliness of things and upon intimate relations that are not about dominating the object of desire. 67
something that someone or something has” (178, emphasis added). Agency is, in other words, located in the enacted relationship between human and object and the boundaries demarking human and object are indecipherable —hence theirs is an intra- rather than inter-action. Sherry Turkle, professor of the Social Studies of Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a slightly different way, traces various passionate attachments with objects in her compilation of short essays from generations of scientists who each take an object that meant a lot to them in childhood and describe how it opened up the world of science to them. Turkle situates the book in the context of waning aptitudes in science among American high school and college students, arguing that to examine how we think with objects will revive young people’s interest in science. She attributes this decline, in part, to the tendency in standard science education to disavow passionate attachments in favor of detached objectivity. Her research led her to advise parents and teachers to encourage these passionate engagements rather than pathologize them as anti-social obsessions. Encounters with objects, Turkle argues, are shaped by different kinds of personalities and proclivities, and passions may express themselves in many different ways. But for each scientist in the book, from the young to the emeritus practitioner, embodied intimacy with the object is notable and it begins early in life. “Objects,” she writes, “provide encounters with transparent systems and manipulable microworlds. They provide opportunities to develop intimacy with objects and to develop a personal thinking style” (12). Object intimacy may take the form of the “tinkerer’s style” or the experimental bricolage of disassembling and reassembling an object such as a radio or phonograph. In these intimacies, “children make their minds through actual building” (15).20 20. Turkle relies upon D.W. Winnicott’s object relations theory of childhood development and his focus on the transitional object (“Transitional Objects” 89-97), “those objects that the child experiences as part of his or her body and as part of the external world. As the child learns to separate self from its surroundings, the original transitional objects are abandoned; one gives up the prized blanket, the teddy bear, the bit of silk pillow in the nursery. What remains is a special way of experiencing objects that recalls this early experience of deep connection. Later in life, moments of creativity during which one feels at one with the universe will draw their power from the experience of the transitional object” (20). 68
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Turkle’s authors provide fascinating accounts of their early engagements. One woman geologist remembers how learning to make chocolate meringue taught her the elements of her future field: “basic ingredients, heated, separated, and cooled equals a planet” (Cull). A young girl enamored of building miniature worlds who would later become a neuroscientist describes her attachment to magnifying glasses which she always carried and used to inspect the minute structures of door latches, irons, a toaster and a watch; her doll house and miniature train set were worlds closer to her size, while the adult world around her seemed overwhelming. Her essay focuses on the wonders of the microscope (Hockfield). A boy plays with marbles to learn the laws of physics through his fingers (Lee). Another, enamored of prisms, shrinks himself down to a scale where he can imagine his body to be at one with the structure that inspired him: “visualizing waves of light bounding off nuclei, slithering through electron clouds, and singing across the vacuum between the stars became an obsession,” he remembers (Hermitt). As a young girl, designer Sarah Kuhn used a set of wooden blocks given to her in childhood to build a fortress in her bedroom. The objects of her microworld in her bedroom took on a special physical intimacy where, as a small person, she could work at a scale with them that was better than the larger world of adulthood. She refers to her blocks as powerful teachers — they teach her how things fit together and how structures work. Her bedroom became her safe haven, with her bed at the center imagined as a life raft and the blue carpet below as the sea that was inhabited by many potentially threatening forces. She holds those forces at bay by building with her blocks, constructing a world to address the anxieties of childhood. She grew up a few miles from Alcatraz Island and heard tales of would-be escapees meeting awful demises when they tried to escape and were drowned by the powerful forces of the sea. In her world of blocks, she created security, safety, and self-sufficiency to counter the uncertainty and complexity her parents, as adults, had to deal with. Her blocks offer a “just-right” emotional fit, giving her a sense that things can fit together and be secure. “As I extend my construction, I extend my world of safety” (“What We Play,” 243). Turkle compares Kuhn’s childhood building to the game play of a new generation of people who inhabit and manipulate the world of digital play to get a sense of that “right fit” that mattered so much to Kuhn in childhood (17). Through these autobiographical vignettes of passionate engagements, we 69
can see how objectùm-sexuals may not be as “out there” as, upon first contact, they might have seemed. If the famous scientist of computational pedagogy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Seymour Papert, can exclaim that, as a child, “I fell in love with gears,” and that this love has inspired a brilliant and passionate career, what authorizes a condemnation of objectùm-sexuality? (Papert) How far is Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer’s passion for building models of the objects she loves from the esteemed scientist’s love of gears? I suggested from the outset of this article that we take up Gayle Rubin’s affirmative claim for building rich descriptions of sexuality, as it exists in society and history and that we do so by looking at the case of objectùmsexuality — how it is lived, how it is imagined, and how it is judged. What objects matter? How are proper objects being sorted from improper objects in the context of societies where commodification, possessive property relations, public policing, and technoscientific creativity are bound up with investments in security? What logics govern the discourses and prohibitions about objectùm-sexuality? Against what and who must “Society Be Defended,” to invoke Foucault’s immense project on liberal origins of security societies gathered under this banner? And what might the discourses, experiences, and connections of objectùm-sexuals tell us about the politics of living in a post-human world, a world in which things — we among them —make and remake the world.
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Turkle, Sherry. Ed. Falling for Science: Objects in Mind. Boston: MIT Press, 2008. Vickih86. Comment posted 1 June 2008 at Warwick Pride, Online Forum on Object Sexuality. http://warwickpride.org/forum/archive/index. php?t-846.html, viewed on July 29, 2009. Warwick Pride. Online Forum on Object Sexuality. http://warwickpride.org/ forum/archive/index.php?t-846.html, viewed on July 29, 2009. Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. New York: Basic Books, 1971. ___. “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-Me Possession.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34.2 (1953): 89-97.
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