Stretcher

Cunt-Ups is a hermaphroditic salute to William Burroughs and Kathy Acker. I started the project as cut-ups, in the original Burroughs sense, as delineated in The Job. I used a variety of texts written by myself and others. Per Burroughs’ rather vague instructions, I cut each page of this material into four squares. For each cunt-up I chose two or three squares from my own source text, and one or two from other sources. I taped the new Frankenstein page together, typed it into my computer and then reworked the material. When my own source text was used up my cunt-ups were finished. The body with all organs slithers and lunges through netsex, psychic oozings, alien invasion, and serial murder. In ecstatic peristalsis the lover endlessly re/turns to life.

Is the cut-up a male form? I’ve always considered it so—needing the violence of a pair of scissors in order to reach nonlinearity. Is the pornographic a male realm? I think so. Women are usually stuck in the more wishy-washy “erotic.” These cunt-ups are my version of Take Back the Night. I’m barging in on pornographic language and subverting it to my own ends. Cunt-Ups is also very much about sexual obsession and desire. In American English we have a language for romance and a language for pornography, but the two rarely meet. In Cunt-Ups, which I see as a very romantic text, I’m collapsing romance and porn. Sex can’t be reduced to events that happen to a person. Sex is a trap, a labyrinth, a matrix that engulfs you. Oddly, even though I’ve spent up to four hours on each cunt-up, afterwards I cannot recognize them—just like in sex, intense focus and then sensual amnesia. They enter the free zone of writing; they have cut their own ties to the writer. She no longer remembers these disembodied shreds of desire as her text.

- Dodie Bellamy

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