"subversive quotation of the penis"

"The Very End of Clacton Pier" 

"[...] the artificial prosthesis of the dildo not only has the potential to blur the boundaries between different sexual and gender identities, but also those between human beings and technologies. Through the concept of Preciado’s dildo, post-porn is already located within the scope of a feminist posthumanism. With reference to Foucault, the term technology is used to describe not only the inorganic and artificially created object but also its forms of application, i.e. discourses and practices that surround the tool or machine and activate it culturally in the first place (Preciado 115-117).
     In a feminist-posthumanist perspective, the inorganic and technological on the one hand and the organic and supposedly natural on the other hand are never located in an exterior relation to each other. This inseparable interconnection is analogous to the one between sexuality and power. Every mode of medical-technological interference with the human body – for instance the contraceptive pill – transgresses the boundaries of the organism and thereby renders such borders fragile and permeable (Preciado 109-127).
     So does a tool called dildo. When someone masturbates with a dildo in queer post-porn and the streams of lust circulate between the dildo and the organism, the attempt to establish the skin as a distinct barrier between the human being and technology becomes impossible and pointless (Joy 21:30-21:55). The diverse and rapidly increasing forms of interconnection between the organic and the technological produce new bodies over and over. As early as 1985, the feminist biologist and science historian Donna Haraway termed these hybrids cyborgs (Haraway 149-181). According to her, every human body is always already a cyborg as every body constantly is technologically connected. Hence, the body cannot be conceptualized without referring to technologies since it is produced by them in the first place."
— Stefan Offermann, Gender Forum
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"It is what Derrida has called the dangerous supplement that destroys what it completes."

"In this theoretical context Beatrice Preciado has analysed the paradoxical production of the female orgasm. The 17th century saw the beginning of a number of medical campaigns against masturbation, then considered a dangerous and abnormal exposure. These campaigns reached a peak in the 19th century when a vast number of instruments were invented to prevent the spread of the masturbation disease. These instruments, ranging from chastity belts, cock rings and bondage systems to electroshock apparatuses, marked the body with regions of pleasure and pain, isolating them in order to medically determine where sex is located.Through a play of repression and permission, these anti-masturbation devices show that sex lies in the genitals and that the orgasm is the corresponding bodily reaction. At the same time, medicine developed a method for treating female hysteria using genital massages to stimulate orgasm both as a symptom of and a cure for a hysterical fit. For Preciado the female orgasm was produced at the intersection of these two reverse strategies of repression and production.This is why she suggests that the dildo is the truth of heterosexuality that will betray its logic – because it is the bad copy of the penis that denaturalises the sexual field and its dual distribution of positions.

Coco De Mer (from: InRumor.com)

     In its most strategic sense, the dildo disrupts the distinction between living subjects and dead things: The dildo is detachable and therefore resists the force with which the body reappropriates pleasure, as if pleasure were something that emerged from the body. The pleasure produced by the body belongs to it only to the extent that it is reappropriation.(…) The enjoying dildo knows that pleasure is never given or taken, that it is never there, that it is never real but always embodiment and reappropriation. For Preciado the dildo, as subversive quotation of the penis, reveals the inconsistency of the heterosexual regime.
     By a mere act of multiplication, it exceeds the sovereignty of the single signifier and rejects the separations that the latter has instituted. It is what Derrida has called the dangerous supplement that destroys what it completes. Replacing the one with the multiple, this instrument demonstrates that the pleasure produced by sex can neither be attributed to a bodily region nor declared as subjective property: The dildo shows that the signifier that generates sexual difference falls outside of its own game. The logic that it establishes isthe logic that will betray it.“
— Katja Diefenbach, Fizzle Out in White: Postporn politics and the deconstruction of fetishism
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