Cinesexuality book completion/Flesh Fold Infinity article completion for New Formations: Deleuzian Politics

The first project for completion is the book 'Cinesexuality'. 'Cinesexuality' is the first dedicated volume to deal with continental philosophy and film in configuring a new mode of desire unique to the film spectatorship. Cinesexuality is part of the new series of Queer Interventions edited by Noreen Giffney and Michael O'Rourke for Ashgate Press. The series addresses a variety of new directions in queer theory. Cinesexuality explores the queerness of cinema spectatorship, making it both a text on queer theory and film theory. Cinesexuality will intervene into film theory, feminist studies, sexuality and perversion theory. I was invited to propose this book based on recent publications in which I invoke but do not elaborate these issues.

Cinesexuality represents a new example of a variety of ways in which queer theory and transgressive sexuality can alter relations between spectator and cinema. The central premise of the book is that cinema spectatorship represents a unique encounter of desire, pleasure and perversion beyond binary dialectics of subject/object and image/meaning. This unique relationship is what I have termed cinesexuality. Cinesexuality is a desiring matrix that encompasses all cinema spectatorships, frequently beyond gender, hetero- or homosexuality, encouraging all spectators to challenge traditional notions of what elicits pleasure. In this sense all cinematic spectatorship is a queer form of desire. Images are not gendered forms or reflective of possible objects of desire, yet all spectators take pleasure from film, thus sexual matrices are neither determined nor dialectic. All spectators are thus queer and queered. Additionally film seduces through images and ideas which we may find perverse or non-pleasurable outside of cinema, so concepts of what constitutes desire and pleasure are similarly queered. Extending the purpose of the book as a challenge to broader paradigms of sexuality and subjectivity, the encounter with the screen and images incites the spectator to reconfigure their own subjectivity, through desire encountering the mobile self outside of self but within the world. For this reason the challenge to hermeneutic subjectivity represents a feminist and queer ethics that can be extended to larger social interactive situations. Through a variety of cinematic examples, including abstract film, extreme films and films which offer examples of perverse sexuality and corporeal reconfiguration, Cinesexuality will encourage a radical shift to spectatorship as itself inherently queer beyond what is watched and who watches. Based on anonymous readers' and editors' reports the project is both accessible and highly theoretically rigorous.

The second project is the completion of 'Flesh, Fold, Infinity', a journal article for the internationally prestigious refereed journal 'New Formations'. The special issue on Deleuzian Politics comes from the conference on the same topic. 7 participants were invited to submit a 7000 word article. 'Flesh, Fold and Infinity' uses the strategic model of female genitalia, after feminist philosopher Irigaray's model of the 'two lips', which challenge the dominance of culture as phallic. The paper extends the idea of symbolic models of gender to thought as itself enfleshed, where ideology, philosophy and paradigms of thinking otherwise are capable of effectuating material change. The article breaks down barriers which binarise male/female, body/mind and materiality/philosophy. The underlying ethics of the paper demand all subjects - male, female, queer, heterosexual - to address different modes of thinking which fold them within and between other subjects rather than positioning them in opposition to. Using Irigaray with Deleuze and his work on Leibniz and 'the fold' this article creates connections between an ethics of queer, corporeal philosophy and attempts to reconcile the traditionally perceived antagonism between Irigaray and Deleuze.