MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

My presentation titled “Wet Works: Excremental Posthumanism at the Boundaries of the Body” analyzes three instances in which bodily boundaries are transgressed through the dissemination, scattering, and spreading of bodily fluids. I first analyze the phenomenon of the cum box, a Reddit thread in which a masturbatory object quickly racked up 2.7 million views and was memorialized in Reddit’s Museum of Filth. (According to KnowYourMeme, the Imgur album containing images of the cumbox has since racked up almost 7 million views.) I argue that the cum box presents the problem of intimacy, contamination, bodily filth, and the abject—its power to fascinate, repel, yet unify netizens.

Why did this repellent object so capture the internet’s imagination?

My presentation will analyze Natural Harvest, a semen-based cookbook by Paul Photenhauer, and Wetlands, a novel by Charlotte Roche, to respond to the questions and imperatives presented by the cum box. In Roche’s novel, a young feminine protagonist leaves smears of filth that she knows strangers will touch to achieve unknown intimacy with strangers. Rather than trope these leavings as her failure to meaningfully connect with people, my presentation will suggest that they underscore the secretive intimacies that permeate everyday living, as we all touch surfaces that we share with others. In its recipes, Natural Harvest explores these notions in an explosive, revelatory fashion, as the author explores the connections between sensuality, sexuality, food, and filth, but emphasizes how his recipes are intended to be shared with others. All three use bodily fluids and tropes of contamination to create connections between people—some unwanted, others unanticipated, all potent. Through all three of these works, my presentation will trace a thread of unsought intimacy, redrawn boundaries of the body, and renegotiations of shame to develop a theory of an excremental posthumanism grounded in bodily filth.