Countersexual Manifesto

by Paul B. Preciado, Kevin Gerry Dunn (Translator), Jack Halberstam (Foreword by)

Overview

Countersexual Manifesto is an outrageous yet rigorous work of trans theory, a performative literary text, and an insistent call to action. Seeking to overthrow all constraints on what can be done with and to the body, Paul B. Preciado offers a provocative challenge to even the most radical claims about gender, sexuality, and desire.

Preciado lays out mock constitutional principles for a countersexual revolution that will recognize genitalia as technological objects and offers step-by-step illustrated instructions for dismantling the heterocentric social contract. He calls theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and Haraway to task for not going nearly far enough in their attempts to deconstruct the naturalization of normative identities and behaviors. Preciado’s claim that the dildo precedes the penis—that artifice, not nature, comes first in the history of sexuality—forms the basis of his demand for new practices of sexual emancipation. He calls for a world of sexual plasticity and fabrication, of bio-printers and “dildonics,” and he invokes countersexuality’s roots in the history of sex toys, pornography, and drag in order to rupture the supposedly biological foundations of the heterocentric regime. His claims are extreme, but supported through meticulous readings of philosophy and theory, as well as popular culture. The Manifesto is now available in English translation for its twentieth anniversary, with a new introduction by Preciado. Countersexual Manifesto will disrupt feminism and queer theory and scandalize us all with its hyperbolic but deadly serious defiance of everything we’ve been told about sex.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231175630
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	12/18/2018
Series:	Critical Life Studies
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	380,991
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Paul B. Preciado is a philosopher, curator, and transgender activist. He is curator of public programs for the largest international European art and culture exhibition, documenta 14 (Athens and Kassel). Preciado’s books in English include Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2013) and Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics (2014). He lives between Paris, Barcelona, and Athens.

Kevin Gerry Dunn is a translator of Spanish-language fiction and academic writing on gender, art, and immigration. His recent translations include works by Josefina Fernández, Ramón Arturo Gutiérrez, and Cristian Perfumo.

Jack Halberstam is visiting professor of gender studies and English at Columbia University and is the author of a number of books, including most recently, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (2018).

Table of Contents

Foreword Jack Halberstam ix

Introduction 1

1 Countersexual Society 19

Principles of Countersexual Society 32

(Sample) Countersexual Contract 40

2 Countersexual Reversal Practices 41

Dildotectonics 41

Practice I: Ron Athey's Solar Anus 44

Practice II: Masturbating an Arm 48

Practice III: How to Pleasure a Dildo-Head 52

3 Theories 57

Derrida's Scissors: The Logic of the Dildo 57

Butler's Vibrator: A Brief Genealogy of Sex Toys and Sexual Prostheses 74

Money Makes Sex: The Industrialization of the Sexes 100

Haraway's Prosthesis: Sex Technologies 120

4 Countersexual Reading Exercises 141

On Philosophy as a Better Way of Doin' It in the Ass-Deleuze and "Molecular Homosexuality" 141

Dildo 161

Prosthesis, Mon Amour 164

Author's Note 173

Acknowledgments 175

Notes 177

Bibliography 191

Index 201

Editorial Reviews

Preciado offers a refreshingly radical take on recognizing and renegotiating supposedly biological scripts to support inclusivity, diversity, and equity...the work is rewarding in its refreshing take on the queer history of sexual technologies and gender development. The positionality and layout of the book suggest that it is truly centered on organizing, bringing to life many of the core tenets of queer theory in accessible and tangible ways.

RGWS

Paul Preciado’s work has been immensely important to me, as well as to countless others. It’s so fantastic, then, that we finally have his first book on offer. Like so much that he has offered since, Countersexual Manifesto is freewheeling and learned, rabble-rousing and meticulous, spirited and essential. Whether you want to argue with it, mine it, or become a convert to its call, you should definitively read it, keep it by your side.

Maggie Nelson

Rather than calling for a revolution, Preciado’s Manifesto argues the revolution has already begun.

Advocate

Countersexual Manifesto is a utopian cry to manifest revolutionary change in the face of necropolitical practices and planetary destruction.

Los Angeles Review of Books - RL Goldberg

Rather than calling for a revolution, Preciado’s Manifesto argues the revolution has already begun.

Advocate

Countersexual Manifesto is a utopian cry to manifest revolutionary change in the face of necropolitical practices and planetary destruction.

Los Angeles Review of Books

10/22/2018
Published for the first time in English, this manifesto from Spanish philosopher Preciado (Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era) intends to “draw a door in the wall of sexual and gender oppression and escape through it.” Arguing that sexual identities, sexual practices, and even sex organs are not “natural” or inherent but in fact culturally designated, Preciado advocates an alternate system whose participants would renounce the privileges and constraints that arise from “the heterocentric social contract... that legitimizes the subjection of some bodies to others.” He draws insightful connections between, on the one hand, prohibitions on masturbation and diagnoses of female hysteria and, on the other, the physical and psychological abuse perpetrated against intersex people. The text, which frequently aims to shock and transgress, is enhanced by amusing drawings. Despite satirical elements, it is not always apparent when Preciado is joking; is the reader to take at face value, for example, prescriptions like “everyone will have then at least two names, one traditionally female and another traditionally male... such as Robert Catherine”? Preciado’s is a noble pursuit, and his points are well-argued, but readers not well-versed in deconstructionist theory may have difficulty following along. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

Countersexual Manifesto is a well-lubricated double dong: phantasmagorical poetry on one end, penetrating theory on the other, and a thorough examination of body politics being the shaft. Each sentence delivers a thrust, deep inside, that elicits a yes, yes, yes! Bend over, insert this book, and enjoy the ride.

Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens