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The objected and the objecting doin'it for themselves

Richard L. Kramarova

2018-2020

The manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom written by Marquis de Sade during his imprisonment survived the sacking of the Bastille placed inside a hollow wooden dildo hidden within the walls of the prison. As Paul B. Preciado concludes from the Sade episode ‘(...) any dildo can eventually contain a book but also [that] a book can operate like a dildo by becoming a technique for fabricating sexuality. Like a dildo, a book is a sexual body’s assisted cultural technology of modification.’ (Preciado, 2018). Similarly, the account of my research is written in captivity, in tiny tight script in hopes of it being recovered from within a crude prosthesis (literally filled by endless potentiality). A prosthesis born from my body that secretly penetrated that very entity and subsequently a hard prison wall, to serve as a technology of modification for the finder-keeper. As this versatile object and its transformative power is accessible to me and my body, I aim to make it accessible to my reader may she be so inclined as to rummage through the ruins of my prison and take herself what I have passionately taken.

Supervisor: Fenia Kotsopoulou

External Mentor: Tereza Černá

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