a dildo but for your soul

Abstract

Denim jackets look and feel better over time as they mould to your body. If you’re into the kind of fashion where you pin button badges onto a denim jacket, your badges might cover a range of topics from politics, to dumb humour, to pop culture and even if they seem unconnected at first, there’ll usually be some aesthetic or political connection while also being connected by you/your gross body. The first artwork I made for this project was a series of badges featuring hand drawn, eclectic, joke-work text I’d originally posted online and the practice of transforming text-jokes that cover diverse subject matter into art objects was the primary technique I employed for this project. Since I’ve tried to be funny (sorry) my written dissertation is an extension of the joke-work/art-texts in my creative work that follows the themes of smut and gross bodies (chapter one), common unhappiness (chapter two), reflexive impotence (chapter three), and self-exposure/desiring-machines (chapter four). Overarching is a lightly fictionalised version of myself partly because my miserable love life was a spectre hanging over my creative work but also in line with Cixous’s belief that a dominant feature in women’s writing is a tendency to insert the personal into the historical, with speech that ‘even when “theoretical” or political, is never simple or linear or “objectified,” generalised'. (Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa', 881.) Like Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life and Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, my paper emphasises the interaction between the personal and the academic and I’ve attempted to punctuate a study of my emotions with theoretical dropped pins. I wish I could have used comic sans as the font, but I guess I’ll have to save that for my manifesto.