Pornotopia - 9781935408482

Published for the first time in 1953, Playboy became not only thefirst pornographic popular magazine in America, but also came to embody an entirely new lifestylethat took place in a series of utopian multimedia spaces, from the fictional Playboy's Penthouse of1956 to the Playboy Mansion of 1959 and the Playboy Clubs of the 1960s. At the same time, theinvention of the contraceptive pill offered access to a biochemical technique able to separate(hetero)sexuality and reproduction, troubling the traditional relationships between gender,sexuality, power, and space.

In Pornotopia, Beatriz Preciadoexamines popular culture and pornographic spaces as sites of architectural production. Combininghistorical perspectives with insights from critical theory, gender studies, queer theory, pornstudies, and the history of technology, and drawing from a range of primary transdisciplinarysourcestreatises on sexuality, medical and pharmaceutical handbooks, architecture journals, eroticmagazines, building manuals, and novels -- Preciado traces the strategic relationships amongarchitecture, gender, and sexuality through popular sites related to the production and consumptionof pornography: design objects, bachelor pads, and multimedia rotating beds. Largely relegated tothe margins of traditional histories of architecture, these sites are not mere spaces but a seriesof overlapping systems of representation. They are understood here not as inherently or naturallysexual, nor as perverted or queer, but rather as biopolitical techniques for governing sexualreproduction and the production of gender in modernity.