Nasty pleasures: xenovisuality and schizo eroticism in trans-species pornography

Abstract

[EN] The present research aims to study phenomenologically the irruption and rise of (xeno)pornographic search categories such as “Furry”, “Pet play” and “Anthro”, in 3 differentiated fields of pornographic production: in mainstream pornography through the Pornhub platform, in the underground pornography of the Deep web and in the postporn movement. The aim is to carry out an analysis of pornographic xenovisuality in three spaces with different audiences and social reception in dialogue with the level of repression and/or cultural acceptance.The research is organised along three thematic axes that interrelate and interrogate each other: posthumanism, sexuality and xenovisuality. The posthuman question emerges from the inevitable hybridisation and questioning of the material and symbolic limits of the human present in the trans-species erotic relationship. Understanding the trans-species as any practice, identity or relationship that exceeds the - socio-historically understood as - human, a trans-species eroticism or sexuality would include those erotic relationships that include machinic, fictitious and/or animal elements.The relationship between sexuality and humanity appears as a fundamental object of study with the intention of clarifying and reviewing how historically both categories have mutually determined each other. To be read as a desiring subject functions as the gateway to a regime of humanity founded on the capacity to exercise domination in the erotic-symbolic relation. Offering the non-human the possibility of being, firstly, object and, secondly, subject of desire, radically reconfigures our conception of the human, its relations, its identity and its sexuality. The relocation of these elements opens the door to destabilising - as the xeno and queer movements do - deeply binary, colonial and speciesist human behaviours and structures.Xenovisuality, on the other hand, refers to new queer ways of looking and being looked at. Understanding the image as a privileged social code of high pulsional charge in what we know today as scopic capitalism, the audiovisual analysis of the xeno is presented as an innovative technique appropriate to the digital context. Finally, interrelating these three categories allows us to formulate the research question: how is the xenovisuality of trans-species pornography reconfiguring the regime of humanity and its socio-political implications?Queer and crip theories become complicit in exposing and revealing the transformative potential of the abject, the monstrous, the unrecognisable and uncodifiable. Haraway's cyborg, Foucault's self-transforming and mutating impulse, or Preciado's biohacking, join forces to configure an epistemology of disgust that takes erotic relations out of the wardrobe of human heteronormative binarism. Therefore, the starting point is to situate the cyborg as a non-place, as a mixture, a crossbreeding between categories and bodies whose frontiers are diluted and linked in symbiogenesis