Delirium 2023 Calendar
Sex is exhilarating, at least sometimes. Sex can be painful. Sex connects and it can destroy. It can be churning, agitating, or sometimes it might calm your nervous system.
It can be full of love, or completely free from it. It can confront you with your limits and it can show you that you want to cross them. It can feel normal, average or awfully weird. Funny or deadly romantic. Exciting, boring, violent. You might want it, or not. You can have it although you do not want it, you can not have it although you want it. You can regret it or still replay the memory of it years later. It can be pure ecstasy and unfortunately, it can be a brutal monster as well. Sex sells, it’s capital, it exploits. Sex empowers. Mostly the wrong people, in the wrong way.
Delirium experiments with how it is, being the boss in your own sex-universe. Turns out it can be fun. You can place a glass of martini in front of your vulva if you feel like it. Or imagine making out in a ghost costume. There are aliens around in this calendar as well. Or sometimes you’re just sad and shed some tears together with your pussy, that’s fine too.
It all started with the modest question of how to overthrow patriarchy. Doesn’t seem to be that easy, somehow. „There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.“* - no feminist thoughts without Judith Butler entering the stage. That’s the way it is, we ourselves are the expressions of a culturally shaped gender-matrix. So does the classic pin-up-look still feel sexy to perform, even if we know it has been born out of a patriarchal, capitalist world? Confusingly, it does. Because we are part of this world. It’s difficult to get out of here. We are shaped by its ideals and categories, that we reproduce everyday. Good news is: if we shape them, we can also reshape them. This is where the „subversive potential“ is.
Can it feel uncomfortable to move away from the paths and patterns we know, questioning the familiar? It surely does. And do we feel unsexy if we move too far away from what is known as sexy? Probably. But we should at least try and extend the borders, bit by bit. So here is our interpretation of taking the way an inch further.
*Butler, Judith: 1990, 1999. Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge (p. 25.).