Pornotopie digitali per maschilità ai margini: <i>The Sluts</i> di Dennis Cooper

Anna Chiara Corradino

doi:10.54103/2282-0035/29352

Authors

Anna Chiara Corradino Scuola Normale Superiore

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54103/2282-0035/29352

Keywords:

Dennis Cooper, The Sluts, pornotopia, necrophilia, masculinities at the margins

Abstract

This essay aims to analyze Dennis Cooper’s masterpiece The Sluts (2004) as an anticipatory representation of masculinity dynamics in contemporary digital communities. The novel, structured as an online forum where anonymous users share sexual reviews about Brad, a young escort with an uncertain identity, is here situated within the theoretical debate on marginal masculinity developed by Kaja Silverman and Raewyn Connell in the 1990s. The text also proposes to read The Sluts, through the analysis of the Nick Carter (from the Backstreet Boys) subplot, as a “digital necrophilic pornotopia,” following Paul B. Preciado’s theoretical framework, revealing how virtual spaces function as devices for producing sexual subjectivity. Cooper demonstrates how textual necrophilia becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of authentic relationships in the digital age, transforming collective writing into a form of social masturbation that exposes the paradoxes of contemporary online communication.

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Author Biography

Anna Chiara Corradino, Scuola Normale Superiore

Anna Chiara Corradino currently is research fellow (assegnista di ricerca) at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa and adjunct fellow (cultrice della materia) in Hermeneutics and Rhetoric at the University of Pisa. Previously, she held the position of DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow at the Historical Institute of the University of Potsdam. She holds PhDs in Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures from the Universities of Bologna and L'Aquila, as well as in Kulturwissenschaft from Humboldt Universität Berlin. She obtained a double degree in Philology and History of Antiquity and Italian Studies from the University of Pisa. Her academic interests encompass the history of ideas, the reception of classics in the modern and contemporary contexts, and studies in cultural and gender studies. She has authored works on topics such as female necrophilia (Whatever 2020 and 2021), adaptation in the ancient world (in the volume Beyond Adaptation?, published by Il Mulino in 2021), and the reception of ancient myths (in de genere 2023, Between 2024, ECHO 2024). Her doctoral research has been published by Bloomsbury – IMAGINES (2025).

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