French Kissing the Icon: Erotic Iconoclash and Political Subversion in Deborah Castillo’s The Emancipatory Kiss (2013)

Abstract

This article explores the obscene’s potential to become politically subversive through the analysis of the performance video The Emancipatory Kiss (2013) by Venezuelan artist Deborah Castillo. Drawing from a theoretical corpus that brings together pornography studies and media studies, memory, and materiality, and that engages with iconoclasm as defined by Bruno Latour and Michael Taussig, I discuss the operations that enable Castillo’s piece to perform an act of what I call “erotic iconoclash”, which, I propose, makes visible and palpable the fragility of the power attributed to hypermasculine military figures of authority. I argue that Castillo’s act of erotic iconoclash generates a residue—an intolerable secretion—in the image that resists being absorbed into symbol or narrative, that arouses and moves the audience, and that is not concerned with making sense of the world, but rather with un-making the world as we know it. In doing so, it opens up a way for us to rethink the relationship we establish with the dead and their many and varied afterlives outside the suffocating circularity created by acts of destruction and reconstruction.