Kit Heintzman

Kit Heintzman has just completed hir MA from Queen’s University’s School of Kinesiology and Health Studies. Hir MA thesis focused upon the invention of sadism, masochism, algolagnia, and sadomasochism as nosological categories and Germany’s contemporaneous imperialist expansion into East Africa and Southwest Africa; this work sought to interrogate late nineteenth-century German national identity and the relationship between creating racialized and economic master-slave relationships abroad while trying to regulate eroticized master-slave relationships within the German metropole.

Hir interests outside of history of psychiatry, sexology, and national identity include prison abolition, visual culture, postcoloniality, historic memory, revenge fantasies, biopolitics, queer theory, and feminist pornography. Ze has spent the past six years as a sex educator operating from an anti-oppressive mandate teaching in universities, colleges, high schools, half ways homes, and to anyone requesting access to the information.

Hermeneutics of labile bodies has three central elements. The first is an epistemological investigation into queer theory’s emphasis on linguistic and optic significations. Here I will be paying particular attention to how the expansion of queer theory to incorporate issues of trans* theory, critical race theory, and crip theory under its purview have effected methological approaches from literary criticism to visual cultural studies.

The second part of the project takes queer feminist pornography as a case study of how pornographers are integrating, critiquing, and reproducing queer and feminist debates of (anti-)identity politics, paying particular attention to struggles of theoretically informed feminist sexual praxis. The last part of the project starts from Otto Fenichel’s theory scopophilia (to look at is to devour), to ask what is being devoured through visual media when a pornographic text plays with the presentation of identity through fractious, bricolage, and postmodern metaphors of the self. Here I am interested in the project of having a reified anti-identity consumed via optic/linguistic media.