Hypersext: Hypertext, cyborgs, and postpornographic poetry

Hypersext is an interactive essay written by Sayaka Araniva-Yanez and Madioula Kébé-Kamara. This work is part of a series of collaborations undertaken by these two authors, both students at the Université du Québec à Montréal and co-founders of the feminist and intersectional publishing house Diverses Syllabes. In a similar way as their text “Mises en scène littéraires“, published in the Québécois creative and literary magazine Mœbius, Hypersext explodes and hybridizes the forms of the essay and the poem in order to expose “performative mechanisms that dress up our language[]“ and stands up against the disempowerment of women, especially those minoritized and fetishized by the academic, editorial, and pornographic institutions. Created on the Twine platform, which facilitates the construction of non-linear narratives as well as the democratization of artistic and digital productions, Araniva-Yanez and Kébé-Kamara’s essay reflects on cyberfeminism and postpornography.

The title, Hypersext, encapsulates two main elements in the construction of the essay: hypertext and sex. Gérard Genette uses the term “hypertextuality“ to describe any relationship uniting a text B (the hypertext) to an earlier text A (the hypotext) “on which it is grafted in a way that is not that of the commentary[]“. He proposes a

general notion of text in the second degree […] or text derived from another pre-existing text. This derivation can be either of the order, descriptive or intellectual, where a metatext (say such a page of Aristotle’s Poetics) “speaks“ of a text (Oedipus King). It can be of another order, such that B does not speak of A at all, but could not exist as it is without A, from which it results at the end of an operation that I will qualify, provisionally still, as a transformation, and that consequently it more or less obviously evokes, without necessarily speaking of it and quoting it.[]

The hypertext, in this sense, is a notion that allows us to identify and inscribe an object in an artistic and critical lineage. Following the example of the postpornographic movement, Hypersext incorporates an aesthetic “made of a traffic of signs and cultural artifacts, of critical resignificance of normative codes considered by traditional feminism as unfit for femininity[]“. Araniva-Yanez and Kébé-Kamara invite us to contemplate the place of digital technology in sexual life, to reconsider the machines that we use to search, view, and to even participate in coitus, fictional or real. “Does your computer turn you on or do you turn on your computer?[]“ the authors ask us on the cover of the essay. In this review, we will explore how Hypsersext traffics cultural signs and artifacts, analyzing the reflexive components that constitute the interactive essay and that deploy a new vision of pornography and feminism.

Araniva-Yanez and Kébé-Kamara participate in feminist, queer, and intersectional lines of thought that question the forms and functions of pornography through technology. Specifically, their goal is to “make us ponder the role of technology in the materialization of the female body[]“, to interrogate the characteristics of a computer-based erotic literature, and to address what happens to women “when they are saved, filed, indexed, and exported to private [digital] libraries[]“. Hypersext is visually inspired by pornographic websites such as Pornhub and asserts itself as a meditation on the pornographic genre and its role in sexual life, especially that of women. The interactive essay positions its readers as “consumers of pornography[]“ and asks if one dares to “take a look at the comments[]“. The “Yes, why not?“ titled hyperlink leads to a page displaying and mimicking the interface of a porn website, asking:

How many comments in order to overconsume the overconsumption of your pairs? Literary pornography; cybernetic prose; digitization of a materialized and vulgarized clitoris; how many, but how many comments in order to grasp her sex by many?

You read 5. Scroll; scroll; caress the curves, slide the index finger, push it in a little, just enough; glossy eyes, jaw in love with a slip; crimson jowls.[]

Like the artists of the postpornographic movement, Hypersext reproduces the image of the porn website in order to reverse the relationship between the consumer and the images consumed. Linda Williams demonstrates, in her essay Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,“ an evolution of pornography as a discourse, a _Scientia sexualis, that is intended as a confession of the female body, a visual documentation of sexual motions and desires. She explains:

Just as westerns for so long offered myths and fantasies of America’s agrarian past as told exclusively from the viewpoint of the white male settlers who exploited and overpowered the native American inhabitants, so has pornography long been a myth of sexual pleasure told from the point of view of men with the power to exploit and objectify the sexuality of women.[]

The colonizing imagery is not anodyne: hardcore pornography, from its origin, sets a male gaze on the female body, attempts to name, exhibit, and control female pleasure so that it serves the needs of the phallic master, that it seeks to produce the famous money shot, the male ejaculation. Moreover, this genre continues to perpetuate negative clichés that contribute to the exoticization, stereotyping, objectification or even stigmatization of racialized and queer women. Audre Lorde points out, in her essay “Uses of the Erotic“, the ways in which this masculinist genre oppresses and erases the knowledge-pleasure of female sexuality:

As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values the depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves. Therefore, women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.[]

Lorde calls on feminists to access the knowledge-power of their eroticism, to regain the strength of their pleasure and sexuality in order to counter male, heterosexist, and white domination. As a counter-discourse to hardcore and misogynistic pornography, the reclamation of Pornhub’s comments allows for the exposure and critique of the misogyny that pornography maintains. Following the link “Yes, I’m a voyeur; I want the erotic mechanics[]“, we see a series of poem-comments that model and poetize real Pornhub comments.

The first poem-comment, from thatguy88779, illustrates the violence of the male pornographic gaze: “Cut the head, I just need the body; Porn is the reason why God made female.[]“ This comment highlights the violent dematerialization of women by pornography, the enslavement of the female body to male pleasure maintained by the industry. Like an echo of Laurent Joffrin’s review of the film Baise-moi, which “wants to cut Despentes’ head off“, it highlights a masculinist vision of the world, which believes that “women are only asses that can be stuffed with his cock[]“. This staging of comments imitates the form of the pornographic web page but turns it into a mirror that reflects the violence of the male gaze, the objectification of women and their bodies, as if they were sex toys to be manipulated and dismembered.If the essay reclaims the form of the pornographic web page, it is not to renounce the genre: instead it seeks to display the power relations that pornography produces and maintains, to take up this interface to explore its form and function. Julie Lavigne notes that:

It is true that pornography in feminist art is not a very common theme, but there is a promising practice. Despite the contradiction that there may be at first sight between the objectives of artistic production or feminism and those of pornography, contemporary feminist art incorporates characteristics specific to hard core pornography since its beginnings, and subsequently in a more or less marginal form throughout its short history.[]

Other poem-comments exhibit these erotic mechanics by calling out the bodies of consumers. Like gorgebush420’s, which states “Rubbed so hard; I think I just fell in love,“ or Missylx’s, who writes “best fuck in my life and i’m not even in the video,[]“ these poem-comments transcribe the bodily participation of pornography consumers. Still others, like King10Load, write “This was an exorcism; my favorite. I’m going to live vicariously thru this video; fucking wow. This was so powerful; you look so sweet in bed; I am having trouble breathing; I just want someone to love.[]“ If digital pornography dematerializes the clitoris (and by extension the female body), Hypersext materializes the corporality of the viewers and reverses the male gaze that pornography favors. The physical contact involved in searching, browsing, and selecting images and videos, as well as the sensory reactions to the videos staged through the poems, transforms porn viewing into a matter for consumption. These comments, as well as their authors, become objects to be copied, cut, pasted, and critiqued. Scrolling through the poem-comments, we caress the curves, we slide the index finger, as if they were pornographic images. Now it is the consumers of porn who are put forward, their comments captured, reworked, and poeticized on the website “xxxpornopoetics.com“.

The last comment, by DanBenSaid09, is a quote from the philosopher Daniel Bensaïd: “Capital is also the census of bodies, the putting to work, the submission of bodies to discipline both to the machine and to the principle of efficiency. Force of work, the body becomes a merchandise among others and the bodies become merchandise in power; the discordance of the times.[]“ In this reconstruction of pornography, every body is a commodity: whether it is the dematerialized body of the woman that is an object to be saved, classified, catalogued and exported to private libraries, or that of the consumers, who generate revenue for pornographic websites through their subscriptions, through ads, and through traffic from visits, these bodies are subject to the process of commodification and are objects of production in the capitalist machine. It is about criticizing the pornographic institution, inviting the porn “(over)consumers“ to consider their place within this machine, their complicity in violence against women and to rethink the form and function of pornography. If the female authors of Hypersext stage the mechanics of pornography, it is with the aim of deconstructing its component parts, questioning the misogynistic practices they engender and demanding a more inclusive reformulation of hardcore. Through this interrogation of the place of machines (computers, cell phones) in sexuality, the digitization of sexual relations, and the reversal of consumer/consumed roles, this essay re-establishes the corporality of gender. The hypertext refers to the earlier text, that of photographed and filmed bodies, and brings it out between the lines of the poems in order to rethink the relationship between corporality, pornography, and technology and to claim women’s agency in managing their bodies.

Hypertext allows us to produce a network of hypotexts, to inscribe a text in a lineage of previous literary and artistic productions. Following the model of Shelley Jackson’s interactive story Patchwork Girl, Hypersext uses hyperlinking as a way to navigate the text in a non-linear fashion. Jackson’s interactive narrative, first published in 1995 and later republished in 2016, tells the story of Mary Shelley and her creation, a monster inspired by Dr. Frankenstein’s monster that becomes emotionally connected to the one who gave birth to it. By exploring the multiple hypertexts, the reader discovers a series of first-person narratives that represent Mary Shelley, the monster, but also an auto-fictional narrative by Jackson herself. Hypersext echoes Shelley Jackson’s style by multiplying the hypertext through hyperlinks. “Do you love the female body so much that you sacralize it, desacralize it, poeticize it?[]“ the essay’s authors ask, offering three hyperlinks to continue reading: sacralize, desacralize, and poeticize. Following the “sacralize“ hyperlink, we find a page that offers a screenshot of a nude woman with the lines “Look how beautiful she is. / Look how perfect she is. / Again, that male gaze shaping her.“ Clicking on the “male gaze“ titled hyperlink leads to the following quote:

The woman is positioned in the patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male, bound by a symbolic order in which the man can give free rein to his fantasies and obsessions through language, imposing them on the silent image of the woman still and always locked in her role as bearer of meaning and not creator of meaning.[]

It is no longer a question of sacralizing the woman, this violence that Laura Mulvey studies in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema“. It is a question of confronting pornography, of taking back the elements which constitute it and reworking them so that the woman expresses herself, so that she is no longer an object, but a subject in the production of her pleasure. Following the hyperlink “desacralize“, we read the following lines: “Meet these plural women. / Here nothing common, the woman is subject. / The object of desire is no longer in control. / Look at them carefully.[]“

In order to resist this image of the fantasized woman, Hypersext calls on the voices of women, these plural voices that claim agency, that want to get rid of the male gaze in favor of a freedom of sexual expression. Borrowing the voice, for example, of “your favorite porn actress […] a virtual object that dwells in cyberspace,[]“ the essay confronts readers and asks, “Will the king or queen of porn and disturbing commentary ever love this cyborg body enough to respect it?[]“ Through this voice, Hypersext produces a cyborg woman, a hybrid between pornographic actress and machine who reveals herself and speaks out against the consumers who do not comply with her. She leaves “enough to make [them] meditate“ and stages “raving comments.[]“ The essay dissolves the boundaries between physical and digital bodies, makes women’s subjectivity in digital pornography speak for itself, and insists on the sexual relationship maintained between spectator and machine. Thus, the cursor “[engages] [the] nudity“, “roams and draws the languid and carnal look[]“. The use of hypertexts allows for a plural voice, encapsulating not only those of the authors, but also the voices of the consumers through the poem-comments, and the voice of the porn actress. As we read, these hypertexts add new narrative layers to the essay, diversify the modes of expression that constitute the vision of pornography, and accentuate the voices of women.

Like Mary Shelley’s monster, a patchwork of human shreds, Hypersext produces a cyborg woman who amalgamates a multiplicity of different women and “leads to the highlighting of the hybrid identity and intersectionality that comes from depicting a different and rejected femininity.[]“ Following the “poetize“ hyperlink, there are four possible paths: jessica.jpg, sabrina.jpg, bethany.jpg, and ismene .jpg. Three of the four links cannot be opened, forcing us to follow Bethany’s. Except that “The file bethany.jpg is too large […] To continue the experiment and return to your files,[]“ you must either delete Bethany or not delete it. But the file cannot be deleted, because it is encrypted. Bethany addresses the reader, says she doesn’t want to be deleted, pleads that we stop deleting her, but the only way to pursue our reading is to “Delete“ her. Like the character Monika from _Doki Doki Literature Club, who is aware of her existence as a character, Bethany’s file recognizes her existence as a file, and resists being expunged. This character reminds us that pornographic photos and videos are not just files, they represent people with names, lives, and desires, and that these people deserve their bodily and sexual autonomy just as much as those who view them. Araniva-Yanez and Kébé-Kamara quote Audre Lorde, who writes, “The word sisterhood covers up a false pretense of homogeneity of experience among all women, but in reality, sisterhood does not exist. By refusing to acknowledge these class differences, women deny themselves the energy and creativity of each other.[]“ Indeed, Hypersext is neither about renouncing pornography, nor is it about “whoring out“ those who participate in pornographic creation. Rather, it is about highlighting these women and their experiences and rethinking pornography to produce a feminist and intersectional freedom of sexual expression. The cyborg woman represents hybridity, amalgamates body and machine, consumers and consumed, and demands the right to female pleasure.

Through poetry, Hypersext rethinks the form and function of digital pornography. If Steven Marcus states that porn “ideally moves away from language […] it tries to go beneath and behind language; it tries to reach what language cannot directly express but can only point toward,[]“ Araniva-Yanez and Kébé-Kamara manipulate language in order to elaborate a new physicality. As in the poem of Jessica, which discusses “sucking your hard drive“, “dying at a distance“, and “up dating / in the waiting / scarlet jowls, encoded to your steel limb[]“, Hypersext rethinks cybersex through the hybridization of bodies and machines. The language of digital code writes the woman’s body, facilitates online sexual exchanges and becomes, through this gesture, a sexual act. To quote Craig Dworkin:

What would […] non expressive [sex/poetry] look like? [Sex/poetry] of intellect rather than emotion? One in which the substitutions at the heart of [pleasure/metaphor] and [body/image] were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with « spontaneous overflow » supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process? In which the self-regard of the [poet’s/partner’s] ego was turned back onto the self-reflexive language of the [poem/act] itself? So that the test of [poetry/sex] were no longer whether it could have been done better […], but whether it could conceivably be done otherwise.[]

Like the aesthetic reference to porn websites and the poem-comments, Hypersext assumes a reflexive posture, reclaiming and reworking the language and codes of pornography in order to propose a new vision of the relationship between body, sexuality, and machine in the digital age. The production of a cyborg body, a hybrid of body/machine, but also of consumer/consumed, affirms the intersectional approach that seeks to undo the hold of the male gaze in favor of a democratization of pleasures, a multiplication of confessions of sexuality, and more particularly those of women. The body-cyborg, according to Donna Haraway, “is the simultaneity of breakdowns that cracks the matrices of domination and opens geometric possibilities[]“. It is about demonstrating and demolishing the violence and shame inflicted on women who express their desire, about engendering a body-machine that goes against the cis-heterosexist and white domination of pornography in order to liberate feminine speech and sexuality. We can read, for example, in the poem-file of Sabrina: “cursed orifice / your lips in my slit / smooth; without marks, without limits[]“. These verses underline on one hand the lack of references in the construction of a female pornographic expression, and on the other hand the unlimited potential of female sexuality.

In order to fill this gap, Hypersext sets itself up as a force of poetic language and allows itself to dig into pornographic codes, to reflect on the role of cyberspace in the constitution of sexual identities and practices. Writing in the first person singular, the authors produce a narrative voice simultaneously personal and polyphonic, which conveys a variety of subjectivities and transcends the binary frames that separate body/machine, pornography/eroticism, and even poetry/knowledge. Following the link “ergonomic bitch,“ we read:

i have forgotten the space between / urgency and lust. now i contemplate my needs.

however, it is / a disfigured portrait and a sinister composition; idealized. i look at myself while i belong to nothing. i can only assume that this is a consequence of a false patience; of a missed / forgotten opportunity in transcendence.

i know now-, that i have been afraid of the absence of epiphany or the bestial apprehension of my own perception. my relationship to creative writing or writing itself, can only be described by a complex care.

i hate harmony / chaos and uncertainty are intertwined with my engine. i will beg for deliverance and weld agony to my pieces.[]

Thus, the essay proposes, through poetic writing, to tap into one’s needs and desires to inform creation. The writing springs from the connections between body and machine, allowing the narrators of the poems to imagine a new poetic pornography that favors the agency of women. As Audre Lorde writes:

We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundation for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been done before.[]

In this sense, the poetry serves to focalize the confession of the feminine pleasure in order to recreate pornography. Poetry is not a luxury, but an urgency, because it conveys the intimate and gives it form. In this way, it favors the sharing of pleasures and the exploration of oneself, produces visions of the world that destabilize the masculinist hegemony in favor of feminine pleasure. Through the lines of the essay, the cyborg woman takes the floor and claims her freedom of expression, asserts her agency and refuses the objectification of the male gaze.

Hypersext writes the cyborg body and produces a cybererotic language. In a process of hybridization (of poetic and essayistic forms, of voices, of bodies and machines), the authors develop a writing that incorporates the complexity of a feminist pornography. Like the hyperlinks that produce “a computer network of documents linked together by activatable links[]“, this text produces a network of voices and pleasures that criticizes the misogyny of the pornographic milieu, but also tries to imagine it differently, to value the knowledge-pleasure of women in the determination of sexual representations. One can read, for example, in the poem-file of Ismene:

navigate with hatred or love

all your hits; click; double-click

private tab del3te me

to haunt you

ghostly data @ your name

click; d0uble-click; harder for longer

waiting 4 your ejection

the mem0ry of my banging head

my mouth still in your vi0lent ardor

while I touch myself “plug & play“

with other enraged chim3ras;

witches of electronic c0itus

y0ur contempt, artificial aphrodisiac

naked machin3,

disconnected from reality

used and aggravated, pushed in

listed by u hybrid 4 u

in your list of names control + v

to no forget,[]

*Hypersext’*s poetry establishes a cyborg sisterhood, composed of enraged chimeras and witches of electronic coitus who refuse to be suppressed, who threaten to haunt those who wish to objectify and suppress them. To return to the text of Audre Lorde: “The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.[]“ Poetry is a driver of change, allows authors to imagine an erotic language and at the same time a new vision of pornography. As Audre Lorde points out, it is through the poem that a new language can be imagined, outside the frameworks of colonizing and masculinist thinking, that values women’s knowledge and pleasure. Through female eroticism and subjectivity, this poetry takes the codes of porn and recasts them as a vehicle for change, generating a mode of sexual expression that resists female subjugation and demands agency.

In short, the interactive essay Hypersext by Sayaka Araniva-Yanez and Madioula Kébé-Kamara rethinks digital pornography and cybersex. Through a resolutely post-pornographic creative process, the authors produce a hypertext that seizes the codes of pornography and reworks them in such a way as to subvert the male gaze. Like the interactive story Patchwork Girl, or the video game _Doki Doki Literature Club, Araniva-Yanez and Kébé-Kamara develop a cyborg body, a hybrid woman/machine that resists objectification and conveys a polyphony of female subjectivities. With fine writing, these authors develop an immersive and moving experience, which invites us to reflect on the creation and consumption of pornography, to question our relationship with machines. Poetry reverses the male gaze, transforms consumers into objects to be consumed and their contempt into an aphrodisiac as the cursor becomes an erogenous zone where clicks and double-clicks bring pleasure to the undressed machine. Does your computer turn you on or do you turn on your computer?

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