Countersexual Manifesto
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
