Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy's Architecture and Biopolitics

by Paul Preciado

Overview

Published for the first time in 1953, Playboy was not only the first pornographic popular magazine in America; it also came to embody an entirely new lifestyle through the construction of a series of utopian multimedia spaces — from the Playboy Mansion and fictional Playboy’s Penthouse of 1959 to the Playboy Clubs and hotels appearing around the world in the 1960s. Simultaneously, the invention of the contraceptive pill provided access to a biochemical technique that separated (hetero) sexuality and reproduction.

Addressing these concurrent cultural shifts, Paul Preciado investigates the strategic relationships between space, gender, and sexuality in popular sites related to the production and consumption of pornography that have tended to reside at the margins of traditional histories of architecture: bachelor pads, multimedia rotating beds, and design objects, among others.

Combining historical perspectives with contemporary critical theory, gender and queer theory, porn studies, the history of technology, and a range of primary transdisciplinary sources — treatises on sexuality, medical and pharmaceutical handbooks, architecture journals, erotic magazines, building manuals, and novels — Pornotopia explores the use of architecture as a biopolitical technique for governing sexual relations and the production of gender in the postwar United States.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942130260
Publisher:	Zone Books
Publication date:	10/01/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	751,849
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Paul Preciado is Professor of the Political History of the Body, Gender Theory, and the History of Performance at Paris VIII; the director of the Independent Studies Program of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona; and the author of Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era and The Contrasexual Manifesto.

Table of Contents

Preface to the English Edition 9

I Playboy Architecture: Performing Masculinity 15

II Manifesto for an Indoor Man: The Awakening of the Playboy's Domestic Consciousness 29

III Unfolding Domesticity: The Postdomestic Interior and the Invention of the "Girl Next Door" 51

IV Striptease: Undressing Domesticity 67

V The Male Electronic Boudoir: The Urban Bachelor Apartment 83

VI The Playboy Mansion: American Oïkema 107

VII The Invention of the Pharmacopornographic Bed 133

VIII Playboy Spatial Products: The Playboy Club and the Playboy Archipelago as Pornscape 181

Conclusion: The Afterlife of a Pornotopia 215

Postscript: Entering the Playboy Archive 225

Notes 229

Bibliography 257

Index 291

What People are Saying About This

Jack Halberstam

Linking masculinity to domesticity, playboy bunnies to barbies and pornography to new orders of the political, Preciado rewrites the history of sexuality in terms of a radical reorientation of interiority and exteriority. With equal parts daring, nerve and sheer originality, Preciado describes, theorizes and explains the emergence of a new spatialization of sex, a pornotopia no less, that exceeds Hugh Hefner's playboy universe and comes to describe the arrangements of bodies and buildings within modernity. Breathtaking!

Susan Stryker

Better known as a theoretical provocateur in gender and sexuality studies, Beatriz Preciado's architectural training shines in this fascinating book about the built spaces of Playboy magnate Hugh Hefner's bunny empire, and the cultural fantasies they materialize. Pornotopia is a genre-busting work that implodes traditional distinctions between topics and fields in an entertaining and enlightening fashion. Serious scholars of architecture and culture should have it on their bookshelves next to works by Joel Sanders, Beatriz Colomina, Annmarie Adams, Mark Wigley and Bernard Tschumi.

Endorsement

Better known as a theoretical provocateur in gender and sexuality studies, Beatriz Preciado's architectural training shines in this fascinating book about the built spaces of Playboy magnate Hugh Hefner's bunny empire, and the cultural fantasies they materialize. Pornotopia is a genre-busting work that implodes traditional distinctions between topics and fields in an entertaining and enlightening fashion. Serious scholars of architecture and culture should have it on their bookshelves next to works by Joel Sanders, Beatriz Colomina, Annmarie Adams, Mark Wigley and Bernard Tschumi.

—Susan Stryker, Ph.D. Director, Institute for LGBT Studies, University of Arizona

From the Publisher

“Better known as a theoretical provocateur in gender and sexuality studies, Beatriz Preciado reveals her architectural training in this fascinating book about the built spaces of Playboy magnate Hugh Hefner’s bunny empire, and the cultural fantasies they materialize. Pornotopia is a genre-busting work that implodes traditional distinctions between topics and fields in an entertaining and enlightening fashion. Serious scholars of architecture and culture should have it on their bookshelves next to works by Joel Sanders, Beatriz Colomina, Annmarie Adams, Mark Wigley, and Bernard Tschumi.” — Susan Stryker, Director, Institute for LGBT Studies, University of Arizona

“Linking masculinity to domesticity, Playboy Bunnies to Barbies, and pornography to new orders of the political, Preciado rewrites the history of sexuality in terms of a radical reorientation of interiority and exteri­ority. With equal parts daring, nerve, and sheer originality, Preciado describes, theorizes, and explains the emergence of a new spatialization of sex, a pornotopia no less, that exceeds Hugh Hefner’s Playboy universe and comes to describe the arrangements of bodies and buildings within modernity. Breathtaking!” — Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure and Gaga Feminism

Editorial Reviews

"Compellingly written and funny as well as troubling, Pornotopia is certainly one of the architectural highlights of the year."

Times Higher Education

Compellingly written and funny as well as troubling, Pornotopia is certainly one of the architectural highlights of the year.

—Times Higher Education

From the Publisher

Compellingly written and funny as well as troubling, Pornotopia is certainly one of the architectural highlights of the year.

—Times Higher Education

Reviews

10/15/2014
The English-language edition of Pornotopia (originally published in Spanish by Editorial Anagrama in 2010) is a strong addition to the growing body of critical literature on the role of Playboy, the lifestyle magazine founded by Hugh Hefner in 1953, in contemporary American culture. Complimenting such works as Elizabeth Fraterrigo's Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America and Carrie Pitzulo's Bachelors and Bunnies, Preciado (political history, Univ. of Paris 8; Testo Junkie) argues that Playboy and its creator had not only a sexual but also a broader bio-spatial agenda. Drawing on a background in the history of architecture, the author explores how Hefner rebelled against postwar suburban domesticity by creating a counter-domestic image organized around the urban, heterosexual bachelor. She argues that Playboy's imagined and actual spaces constructed a life of biological and technological mastery in which the male protagonist experienced pleasure through manipulating and mediating his environment—and the bodies (including his own) therein. VERDICT Theoretically top-heavy at points, this work is nevertheless a well-written, well-evidenced study of an underexamined aspect of the Playboy empire. Highly recommended for historians of mid-20th-century gender and sexuality, pop and consumer culture, and our built and technological environments.—Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc. Lib., Boston

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