Soma rhei, or the New Vision of Porn

Abstract

During the 1990s “fluidity” became a postmodern catchword. For Zygmunt Bauman, for instance, the state of permanent liquidity defines the late, consumerist stage of modernity (Bauman passim). For numerous feminist, gender and queer authors, on the other hand, the (arguably liberating) concept of fluidity opened up new spaces for theorizing the end of fixed and stable bodies, genders, sexualities and identities. Related aspects of corporeality – such as Bakhtin’s incomplete and grotesque bodies, Kristeva’s “abject” – have been elaborated on quite extensively. Is it still possible to talk about fluidity without either repeating the hackneyed clichés or else dismissing the “postmodern follies” from, say, a sober Marxist position? [...]