Next Wednesday: Hear Bonnie Talk about Kafka and Cybersex

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about my presentations, but this next one will be right here at Berkeley, and all are welcome! Next Wednesday, 11/14, from 3:30 to 5:00, three of us New Media DE grad students will be presenting from our work. The event will take place in 340 Moffitt, the Berkeley Center for New Media commons — also known as that classroom right near the entrance to Free Speech Movement Cafe. Any supportive, curious, or generally nerdy/pervy faces would be a welcome sight!

The talk I’ll be giving will generally lay out my research (on perversion and media). As a case study though, I’ll also be comparing love letters written by Franz Kafka to transcripts from text-based cybersex. Here’s the official description:

“Writing the Virtual Body: Kafka’s Love Letters and Text-Based Cybersex”

Online sex has many forms, some more literary than others. Text-based cybersex, the internet’s longest-lived form of erotic exchange, takes place through simple chat. Two or more partners write their bodies into virtual intercourse, leaving behind a transcript of their encounter: collaborative erotica generated in real time. However, such transcripts rarely find their way under the microscope of literary scholars. These high-tech texts go overlooked because they emerge from a confusing (yet crucial) new realm of authorship and expression, one in which language, media, and corporality blur.

Cybersex might not be such a strange new technology, though. Even the literary purists can agree on the value of close reading Kafka — and Kafka sent extensive love letters over the years to his partners Felice and Milena. At a time when the high efficiency of the postal system was itself a booming technology, the melancholy lover from Prague wrote missives that, similar to cybersex transcripts, also conjure up the virtual body through text. Indeed, we find this same intersection of technology, writing, sex, and the body in Kafka’s, “In the Penal Colony,” in which a high-tech execution machine sensually and painfully inscribes the sentence of each condemned man onto his flesh.

By reading Kafka’s letters and fiction alongside a sample transcript, we can begin to fashion a literary approach to analyzing chat-based cybersex, allowing us to consider questions like: How is language forming the virtual body? How does text transform into action, words into touch? What does it mean to write a fictional self for the sake of real-life pleasure? How is presence constructed in these media of separation?

I can’t promise sexy Powerpoint pictures of Kafka, but I can promise steamy cybersex transcripts projected on the big screen. I can’t promise Kafka slash fiction, but I can promise wanting to write some…