Pornotopia

„Playboy”, architektura i biopolityka w czasach zimnej wojny

Paul B. Preciado

11 €

“Playboy” was much more than a mere erotic magazine - it co-created the architectural imaginarium of the second half of the 20th century. “Playboy” is mansions and parties, a tropical grotto and a glass-walled underground playroom where guests can admire bunnies swimming naked in the pool; it’s a round bed where Hefner lumbers around with playmates; it’s a suit, a private jet, a club with secret rooms, a zoo in the garden, it’s a secret castle and an oasis in the big city. In time, ‘Playboy’ became the first pornotopia of the mass media age.

Paul B. Preciado, excerpt from the book

The Cold War was a time of the questioning of the biopolitical regime, the intense activities of feminist movements, the emergence of the contraceptive pill, and the formation of post-industrial mechanisms of production and immaterial labour. Not only the television reality show, which is the invention of Hugh Hefner, but also the home office with a bed hooked up to a multimedia network acting as an office seem prophetic today, to say the least.

Dorota Jędruch, from the introduction to the Polish edition

About the author:

Paul B. Preciado - Spanish writer, philosopher and art curator. He has taught political history of the body, gender theory and performance history at the University of Paris VIII. His interests include issues of identity, gender, architecture, sexuality. He is the author of many texts on these topics and books, of which Testo ćpun has been published in Polish translation. Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Age of Pharmacopornography, a diary documenting the author’s process of taking testosterone during the gender correction process, and at the same time a political history of technologies related to human sexuality. Preciado was director of public programmes at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona from 2012 to 2014, curator of public programmes at documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens in 2017, and curator of the Taiwanese pavilion at the 2019 Venice Art Biennale. He collaborates with the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

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