No room for law in the folds of the soul: entangling and unraveling law and sexuality
Brooks, V. 2014. No room for law in the folds of the soul: entangling and unraveling law and sexuality. Creative Constraints. UCL 03 Nov 2014
Brooks, V. 2014. No room for law in the folds of the soul: entangling and unraveling law and sexuality. Creative Constraints. UCL 03 Nov 2014
| Title | No room for law in the folds of the soul: entangling and unraveling law and sexuality |
|---|---|
| Authors | Brooks, V. |
| Type | Conference paper |
| Abstract | Sex, for law, is the ultimate in entanglement; an entanglement of bodies to oppress and divide, and an entanglement of subjective qualities, such as identity, orientation. Any sexual encounter is messy, a mess of bodily depths and fluids, skins and blood, it is also an amalgam of matter and spaces, laws and judgments as to whether the encounter of lawful/unlawful. Sex is a folded experience, where each individual’s experience of sex is produced through their own subjectivities, through their own fold. The folds in the material of one’s sexuality are most obviously made up of desires and genitals, erogenous zones and orgasms, but the less obvious presence is law. Law can be thought of as that which must be transgressed in order to satiate desire, or in accordance with a philosophy of immanence, it can be that which compels and produces sexuality. Law’s presence is significant, but where within the folds of sexuality can it be located? How does it connect to the body and how does law materialise the body’s depths in order to produce this seemingly fundamental relation to ourselves? The fold is clearly an entanglement of different (material and materialised) elements that work together to produce sexuality’s agonies and ecstasies. With such a mess of ravelling and unravelling, weaving and un-weaving, this paper attempts to find whether the intricate entanglements and infinite folds of the fold can ever be unravelled; that is, is it possible to find law and ascertain how it produces the sexed body? Does law stifle and oppress, or is it essentially erotic, where it excites and produces within the material of the fold? |
| Keywords | Law; Sexuality; Folding; Deleuze |
| Year | 2014 |
| Conference | Creative Constraints |
| Publication dates | |
| Completed | 2014 |