University of Buenos Aires Puts on Live Sex Show in Name of Feminism
An experimental performance piece that bills itself as “post porn” has scandalized an audience of students and onlookers at the state University of Buenos Aires.
As reported by the PanAm Post, a host of Argentine students along with professors and researchers of the School of Social Sciences organized the outre performance as part of an ongoing series called “Wednesdays of Pleasure.”
The performance, which was acted out by a Spanish group called PostOp, was a semiotic erotic social critique, which displayed acts of sexual intercourse, along with elements of bondage and sadomasochism.
The audience for the event was definity forewarned as the flier promoting the performance reads: “Post-porn comes to the School of Social Sciences, passing through the halls and sexualizing everything around it. A proposal to expand the pornographic imagination and experience other sexualized ways of living in the university environment.”
A student named Martín who witnessed the performance described the shock of the show, saying, “There were roughly 50 people watching in silence, astonished at what was going on. Many of them were recording it with their phones.”
“They were watching it surprised; it’s not a common situation at the university,” said the student.
As an an artistic movement “Post-porn” combines elements of pornography with feminist and post-structuralist ideas.
Although many might have known enough about pornography and feminism to think they knew what they were in store for, the post-structuralist part might have been confusing.
Post-structuralism -- a late 1960s early 1970s critical theory movement that was typified by a deep skepticism of the soft sciences -- would see the integration as the erotic and critical as fair game
One of the leading post-structuralists, the late Michel Foucault (who, by the way, got a big kick out of going to S&M clubs) identified both prostitution and psychiatry as obvious outlets for sexual confession.
Argentina is a land perhaps very used to the marriage of ideals and the tropes of eroticism. As reported in Financial Times, Maria Laura Avignolo, of the Argentine opposition newspaper Clarin, has described Argentine president Cristina Fernández as an amalgam of artifice and authority, saying, “Cristina uses her femininity, defends the feminist cause, but her politics are male. She concentrates power and is extremely narcissistic and authoritarian.”
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