a note on dorm space.

the suites in harvard’s dorms publicize private experiences. an entrance leads into kaitlin and kathryn’s room; another door leads into juani’s room; juani’s room opens into wendy’s room; a door in wendy’s room leads outside while another leads to the bathroom; and the bathroom leads into the next suite. the doors without locks include the one between juani’s room and wendy’s room; wendy’s room and the bathroom; and the bathroom and the next suite. routines must coordinate the experiences of public dorm life and intimate activities.

the walls are also incredibly thin. noise easily passes from one room to another. in the absence of stronger inhibitions to the traveling of sound, sonorous publics emerge across the material partitions demarcating ‘private’ spaces. life becomes intimate even as it is separated.

action! sex and the moving-image.

the second floor of the museum of sex is hosting an exhibit entitled ‘action! sex and the moving-image’ which traces the development of sex in film. spanning over a hundred years, sex in the moving-image underwent a variety of transformations mediated by regulatory codes and laws at different points in history.

the room of ‘action!’ was illuminated with a dark blue. tiny television screens adorned a wall in the room’s center and the surface of raised blocks functioned as screens for other video clips. the visibility and audibility of films with adult content and porn queered this curatorial space by rendering indistinguishable the public and private. brianne and i navigated this perverse space by viewing close-ups of blowjobs, anal sex, and the like with complete strangers. we strangely felt discomfort and allure at the same time and as the same sensation, in the time and space we shared with others. this queer intimacy in which not a word circulated amongst strangers while erotic sensations did brought together normally and normatively private matters into public spaces while leaving each experience irreducibly singular. a heterotopia to the dominant society of sexual control, ‘action!’ thus enacts a politics of sexual aesthetics reconfiguring the proper place of sex and the curatorial to queer the traffic of bodies walking through and stopping still in a proximity too close for comfort yet too far for commonality.