OWO day

alec ramsdell a_ramsdell at hotmail.com
Sat Aug 8 14:56:39 PDT 1998



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>From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>Subject: OWO day
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>> OWO
>> One World Orgasm
>> (International Orgasm Day)

What a great day I am having! :-)

Sadly I'm spending the day alone. :-( . . . :-)

...monosexually, bisexually, homosexually,
>> heterosexually

Actually, I'm observing OWO by processing my fetish for Eve Sedgwick's book _Tendencies_. In an essay in this book she makes the distinction between sexual identity and sexuality. Such a distinction may lead to insights into commodity fetishism, and commodification of self insofar as self-identity is produced to an extent by pleasure, and pleasure is mediated by commodities and spectacles.

As one who finds pleasure in both "same"-sex and "opposite"-sex acts, yet who does not identify himself as any particular sexuality (gay, or bi), the distinction between sexuality and sexual identity interests me. It seems to me that sexual identity formation, *while absolutely crucial in the fight for lives and rights*, might tend in another way towards a kind of rigidity of thinking about sexuality in black and white terms. Of course we've got a long way to go in dismantling prejudices, so I may be getting a little stary eyed utopic here. But thinking in terms of sexuality can have a political trajectory (the Sedgwick essay I have in mind, whose title I can't recall just now, deals with nationalities and sexuality).

I'm probably not as up on the literature about this as others. Any ideas?

-Alec

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