“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, July 25, 2015

Queer Green Sex Toys: Another Dark Ecology Snip

...that's the title of an essay I'm writing for a religion journal, haha--but it's also part of my argument in Dark Ecology:

“In a sense, all toys are sex toys to the extent that they enable links between beings and between a being. The threatening corniness of James Cameron’s Avatar reaches a peak in the living devices that connect the Navi to the biospheric Internet, as when they plug their tails into the skulls of flying lizards. Is it anything other than needless to point out the eroticism? The erotic wiring together of beings suggests the wiring between a being: the ultimate gnosis in Avatar would be to plug the tail into oneself . . . In The Joy there is an excess of links between a being over links between different beings. Is it too ungrammatical to say between the same being? Between the being that is oneself, even between thinking and itself. Although cloning is chronologically prior to sex, perhaps sex is logically prior to cloning. We consider here certainly not a heteronormative sex, but sex for its own sake whose prototype is denigrated as narcissistic. Buddhist Tantra provides a template: ultimate reality is seen as emptiness (the radical inaccessibility of things) in sexual union with appearance (their shimmering givenness), different but the same.”

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