Looking for Pei Lim's penis

Melancholia, mimicry, pedagogy

Datos Bibliográficos

ID13086147
AutoresDavid K Seitz (0000-0002-0098-9037, Harvey Mudd College, autor de correspondencia)
Año2019
Volumen6
Número1
Páginas48-58
Fecha de publicación2019-01-02
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaPorn Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2326-8743 • E-ISSN: 2326-8751
EditorialTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/23268743.2018.1559081
OpenAlexW2929236419
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas20

This article considers the salience of Freud’s account of melancholia – one that points to the constitutive role of loss in subject formation – for understanding the racialization of queer sexuality and its mediation in pornography. Scholars have long and insightfully demonstrated the value of melancholia as an interpretive lens for making sense of the dynamics of racialization in the context of the contradictions of liberalism in the Global North. Taking cues from such work, I seek here to trace how pornography might stage returns to inaugural scenes of repudiated desire, and how it might proffer insight into the specificities of racial melancholia for queers. To illuminate the potential of constitutive loss for thinking about race in queer porn, I turn to the figure of Lim Pei-Hsien, an artist, activist, and porn star with a storied but rarely acknowledged history in Canadian LGBTQ, AIDS, and anti-racist circles. I argue that sustained engagement with Lim’s work positions him as a profoundly and perhaps instructively melancholic figure, one who might productively inform thinking on race, queerness, and pornography, particularly when read through a psychoanalytic lens

Art · Biology · Melancholia · Mimicry · Penis · Psychoanalysis · Zoology · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Japanese History and Culture · Medicine · Psychology · Social Psychology · Anatomy