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SPEAKING OF BODIES, PLEASURES, AND PARADISE LOST: EROTIC AGENCY AND SITUATIONIST ETHNOGRAPHY

This ethnographic account of a love story of two elite-level bodybuilders addresses the ways in which broad cultural histories are relevant to understanding contemporarily situated problematics of sex and sexual identity. Specifically I argue that strategically placed historical and cross-cultural studies are useful in understanding in this context how: (1) subjects are configured as gendered, sexed, and sexually-oriented; (2) subjects make love; and (3) attempts to remake love outside the episteme of sexuality are confined. The love story, configured as a ‘paradise lost’ narrative, provides evidence suggesting that the occularcentric and muscularcentric practices of bodybuilding within this specific setting combined to offer the featured couple the material grounds upon which to venture temporarily beyond the pleasures circumscribed by the historical shift in subjectivity associated with Modernity. I conclude the piece by looking to the 1960's European revolutionary aesthetic movement of the Situationists to suggest how a ‘situationist ethnography’ might be used to create conditions of possibility for progressive work in the area of sexuality.