3x3x6 – 9 Sq.m. and 6 Surveillance Cameras

The title of Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6 which represented Taiwan at Venice Biennale 2019 derives from the 21st century high-security prison cell measured in 9 square meter and equipped with 6 surveillance cameras. As an immersive installation, 3x3x6 is comprised of multiple interfaces to reflect on the construction of sexual subjectivity by technologies of confinement and control, from physical incarceration to the omnipresent surveillance systems of contemporary society, from Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon conceptualized in 1791 to China’s Sharp Eyes that boasts 200 million surveillance cameras with facial recognition capacity for its 1.4 billion population. By employing strategic and technical interventions, 3x3x6 investigates 10 criminal cases in which the prisoners across time and space are incarcerated for sexual provocation and gender affirmation. The exhibition constructs collective counter-accounts of sexuality where trans punk fiction, queer, and anti-colonial imaginations hacks the operating system of the history of sexual subjection. This Image and Text piece intersperses images from the exhibition with handout texts written by curator Paul B. Preciado (against a grey background), as well as an interview between special section co-editor Paula Gardner and the artist that brings the extraordinary exhibition into further conversation with feminist technoscience scholarship. The project website is available at https://3x3x6-v2.webflow.io/.

Marriage, aging, and women’s pursuit of commercial sex in Japan

A number of scholarly works have observed Western and Japanese women travelers who seek romance and adventure with local “beach boys” in the Global South. Despite the important criticism of geopolitical inequality contained in these works, what is missing is how those involved in such commodified sexual relationships make sense of what they do. This essay focuses on how well-heeled Japanese married women, who are concerned with the meaning and effects of aging, pursue a commodified form of sexual intimacy as a means to rediscover their sense of sexual subjectivity. How do they perceive their own involvement in sexual commerce? What kinds of sexual power dynamics do these women and their younger, precarious male partners shape at the intersection of gender, age, and class? How do these women make sense of the apparently masculine act of paying for sex, which requires them to transgress cultural norms of feminine passivity in sexual matters? By posing these questions, this article provides a fine-grained portrayal of a particular kind of feminist agency.

Pink Porn Economy: Genealogies of Transnational LGBTQ Organising

Studying pre-2000s pink porn magazines reveals the importance of politics in-between in the development of LGBTQ transnational organising in the twentieth century. The usual historical narratives of LGBTQ politics in the North are based on medical or legislative documents or on self-identified queers’ descriptions of their own interactions with these discourses. However, these discourses and data only capture parts of how twentieth-century queers developed sexual subjectivity, became nationally and transnationally organised, and conducted sexual politics. This chapter uses Claire Colebrook’s (Understanding Deleuze. Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2002) feminist engagement in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept device to discuss transnational political networks that rhizomatically connected the makers, disseminators and subscribers of male same-sex porn magazines produced in Denmark and Sweden between 1960 and 1980. The concepts enable an analysis of the messy entanglement of desire, subjectivity processes, consumption, organising and activism, and of the shaping of certain queer communities of belonging while also excluding others. The application of gender analysis to the entanglement of pink porn economies in queer transnational networks sheds a genealogical light on the historical division between the emergence of vis-à-vis lesbian and gay networks and politics—and on the tensions between them regarding so-called positive or negative sexual rights in the decades to come.