Published for the first time in 1953, Playboy was not only the first
pornographic popular magazine in America; it also came to embody an
entirely new lifestyle through the construction of a series of
utopian multimedia spaces -- from the Playboy Mansion and fictional
Playboy's Penthouse of 1959 to the Playboy Clubs and hotels appearing
around the world in the 1960s. Simultaneously, the invention of the
contraceptive pill provided access to a biochemical technique that
separated (hetero) sexuality and reproduction.
Addressing these
concurrent cultural shifts, Paul Preciado investigates the strategic
relationships between space, gender, and sexuality in popular sites
related to the production and consumption of pornography that have
tended to reside at the margins of traditional histories of
architecture: bachelor pads, multimedia rotating beds, and design
objects, among others.
Combining historical
perspectives with contemporary critical theory, gender and queer
theory, porn studies, the history of technology, and a range of
primary transdisciplinary sources -- treatises on sexuality, medical
and pharmaceutical handbooks, architecture journals, erotic
magazines, building manuals, and novels -- Pornotopia explores
the use of architecture as a biopolitical technique for governing
sexual relations and the production of gender in the postwar United
States.