Gerhard’s Reviews > Radical Sex Between Men: Assembling Desiring-Machines > Status Update

For Deleuze and Guattari, however, the issue is not whether there is a path to freedom, for there is no freedom; there is no state of being, there are only becomings.

If there is an ethic to be found in Deleuze and Guattari, it might be summed up by the following injunction: “Only retain … what augments the number of connections.”

BDSM is a remapping of the body’s erogenous sites, and a deterritorialization of traditional sexuality, which is focused on the genitals, to reterritorialize other bodily sites, surfaces, and depths, through bondage, fist-fucking, cock and ball torture, piercing, domination and submission, humiliation and veneration.

You can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs, right? So it’s the same with anal play … start with something smaller and work your way up. And it’s going to involve some stretching, and that will hurt a bit because, you know, there will be micro tears and things like that.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, the body is a political surface marked by three types of “lines”: molar (rigid), molecular (soft), and lines of flight (resistance).

Degenitalizing the sexual is especially prominent with the practice of fisting because, as participants explained, the sensations they receive from fisting are even more pleasurable than reaching orgasm.

Deleuze and Guattari suggest that social norms attempt to exercise their power by marking (mapping) and shaping the body. In this schema, the body is not a collection of organs, but an inscriptive body.

...the performance of bareback sex by MSM not only challenges expectations about gender relations, but is also helping to build new discourses on health through bodily agency.

...we also need to take stock of the degree to which rawness is mediated by biopolitical relations, particularly those of pharmacopower. From a Foucauldian perspective the category of “undetectable” could not be more ironic, since it relies on surveillance at the biomolecular level by an entire apparatus of medical power. Nothing could be less raw.

Since the presence of condoms in a box on set would be insufficient to prove they were being used, “enforcement” conjures the prospect of members of the LAPD inspecting porn star penises at the moment of insertion. (Nice work if you can get it.)