Mel Gordon: Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin (2000–)

This sourcebook of rare visual documents and study of pre-Nazi, Cabaret-period “Babylon on the Spree” has the distinction of being praised both by scholars and avatars of contemporary culture.

Publisher Feral House, Los Angeles, 2000
Expanded edition, 2006
ISBN 1932595112
303 pages

Review: Lemons (Salon, 2000).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (64 MB, updated on 2018-5-8)

See also Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935, 1997.

Beatriz Preciado: Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2008–) [ES, EN, BR-PT]

“What constitutes a ‘real’ man or woman in the twenty-first century? Since birth control pills, erectile dysfunction remedies, and factory-made testosterone and estrogen were developed, biology is definitely no longer destiny.

In this analysis of gender, Beatriz Preciado shows the ways in which the synthesis of hormones since the 1950s has fundamentally changed how gender and sexual identity formulated, and how the pharmaceutical and pornography industries are in the business of creating desire. This riveting continuation of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality also includes Preciado’s diaristic account of her own use of testosterone every day for one year, and it’s impact on her body as well as her imagination.”

Spanish edition
Publisher Espasa Calpe, Madrid, 2008
ISBN 8467026936, 9788467026931
324 pages

English edition
Translated from the French by Bruce Benderson
Publisher The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013
ISBN 1558618376, 9781558618374
427 pages

Reviews: Marcie Bianco (Lambda, 2013), Johanna Fateman (BookForum, 2013), Deborah Harris-Moore (Make, 2014), Karmele Mendoza Pérez (Nordic Journal of STS, 2015).
Commentary: McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar, 2013).
Interview (Ricky Tucker, The Paris Review, 2013).
Wikipedia-FR

Publisher (ES)
Publisher (EN)
WorldCat (ES), (EN)

Testo Yonqui (Spanish, 2008, 3 MB, updated on 2019-6-6)
Testo Junkie (English, trans. Bruce Benderson, 2013, updated on 2019-6-6)
Testo Junkie (BR-Portuguese, trans. Maria Paula Gurgel Ribeiro with Verônica Daminelli Fernandes, 2018, added on 2019-6-6)

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun: Control And Freedom: Power And Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006)

“How has the Internet, a medium that thrives on control, been accepted as a medium of freedom? Why is freedom increasingly indistinguishable from paranoid control? In Control and Freedom, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explores the current political and technological coupling of freedom with control by tracing the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium. The parallel (and paranoid) myths of the Internet as total freedom/total control, she says, stem from our reduction of political problems into technological ones.

Drawing on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault and analyzing such phenomena as Webcams and face-recognition technology, Chun argues that the relationship between control and freedom in networked contact is experienced and negotiated through sexuality and race. She traces the desire for cyberspace to cyberpunk fiction and maps the transformation of public/private into open/closed. Analyzing “pornocracy,” she contends that it was through cyberporn and the government’s attempts to regulate it that the Internet became a marketplace of ideas and commodities. Chun describes the way Internet promoters conflated technological empowerment with racial empowerment and, through close examinations of William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell, she analyzes the management of interactivity in narratives of cyberspace.

The Internet’s potential for democracy stems not from illusory promises of individual empowerment, Chun argues, but rather from the ways in which it exposes us to others (and to other machines) in ways we cannot control. Using fiber optic networks—light coursing through glass tubes—as metaphor and reality, Control and Freedom engages the rich philosophical tradition of light as a figure for knowledge, clarification, surveillance, and discipline, in order to argue that fiber-optic networks physically instantiate, and thus shatter, enlightenment.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2006
ISBN 0262033321, 9780262033329
352 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2019-10-10)