bio
Katie Connell is a writer, graduate student and teaching assistant at OCADU where she is writing her thesis “Thing Drag” on the meeting points between queer theory and object- oriented ontologies. Her work on the topic has recently appeared in The St. John’s Humanities Review.
title
"Flat Ontological Erotics and Object-Oriented Sex Spaces"
abstract
Taking up the focal examples of Primal Hardware’s Ovipositor dildo and those who have been marginalized for identifying as objectum sexual, this paper proposes a theory of an object-oriented approach to temporal and physical spaces in which erotic sex and desire occur. I argue that an object-oriented sex space is truly queer in that arousal is produced by a recognition of all involved bodies as alien and ontologically multiple. As correlationism reifies cisgendered and heteronormative structures of desire, object- oriented erotics are envisioned within the fluctuating structures of Graham Harman’s allure and Levi Bryant’s flat ontology to identify that human and non-human actants alike genuinely produce and respond to desire. Empowering this truly queer sex space involves discarding heterosexist treatments of objects such as Freudian fetishism for a zone in which all bodies shift and flicker, moving outside the boundaries of their normatively codified positions and blurring the binary between human and non-human.
