1) I was making fun of Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe," which Walter Benjamin critiques in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". It shows the commodification of sexuality and art under Capitalism.
2) I was trying to visibly explain the antisocial argument in queer theory. This argument states that the place of queers is to embody the "death drive. We must reject what Lee Eddleman calls "reproductive futurism". This is the idea that the child, or, the injunction that society must reproduce itself, can serve as the totalitarian image that perpetually denies pleasure in the present and can justify violence and/or disproportionate legal regulation. We need only think of the unconstitutional discrepancies in the age of consent for anal sex. The place of queers is to say no to reproduction. This is why I'm wearing a bondage belt and smoking. Why I find BDSM and smoking philosophically interesting is because their pleasures are in direct opposition to so-called "genital sexuality". Their enjoyment is the antithesis of reproductive biopolitics; for they are not attached to any particular organ. Though Leo Bersani is right to point out the masculinist and totalitarian potential of leather culture, I disagree with his characterization. One of the purposes of bondage is to disable the power of the phallus, or at least regulate it through deliberate performance and negotiation.
3) To that end, I was also interested in critiquing the politics of forced freedom/subjection of the disabled, hence the contractures in my hands. And this is, of course, linked to the Kantian notion of the autonomous moral citizen , upon which we base so much contemporary liberal democratic theory In a sense, I am already bounded by my disability and bounded by the state. Consequently, in taking on this narrative I challenge the social construction of "nature" and relocate disability discrimination in unjust social conditions. This is also a direct challenge to the assumption that persons with disabilities are asexual. And, as well, I wanted to denounce the proposition that states have "a legitimate" monopoly over violence, as Max Weber would have it. We are all under varying amounts of subjection. Because subjection constitutes the subject: we are entities already tied up and tongue-tied by language and power.
4) I intended to highlight the continuing importance of discussing the political politics of death and ACT UP around HIV-AIDS.
