After a carnal encounter with garbage, some space emerged for Danielle LaFrance to air her dildos. In #postdildo (Talonbooks 2022) they think and write through the limitlessness and limitations of sexuality, communication, and desire. Focusing on the dildo as sexual object and social relation, LaFrance asks, “How shall You fuck without causing harm?” What came before #postdildo if not internet porn, the confession booth, colonial capitalism, settler sexuality, patriarchy, and feminism, all providing a blueprint for how inadequately to be touched and fucked? What comes after delights? #postdildo is a mass of contradictions that more often than not finds a lot of dis/pleasure in a lot of refusal.
“Danielle’s work talks to you, at you, unapologetically, apologetically. Says I have an idea for something new, something post-pleasure (in the way that we now pleasure now), says lets go post-Dildo. It expands and contracts and explodes outward, fervently. Asks, how should you fuck without causing harm—how can you fuck with so much internalized scum. How all this internalization leads to our collective conflict with desire, the unconscious investment in ideology oiled by the logic of capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, and white supremacy. How we (yes, us, the collective, loose, but existing) are in a feedback loop. How lives are often contradictions—and how in writing, thinking, a new script can be produced—a productive chosen and cooperative—asking around how to undue capitalism as it tries to kill us. Danielle’s writing says implode, gives permission to implode, says that in recognizing our own self-miscommunication, misremembrance, there is a way to redraw lines. I love work like this, work that allows for the dialectic to exist without fault—how in work like Danielle’s I can love femineity and everything it offers, and too, hate femineity and everything it has to offer. Hate that I love it and hate how it protects me. How you can want to be dressed in a leather catsuit straddling a motorcycle just as much as you want to be invisible. It’s okay to re-negotiate yourself, post-Dildo says, Post-Dildo says “me too,” says I see you in the re-negotiation.”