SOURCE: Jackson, Earl, Jr. “Death Drives across Pornotopia: Dennis Cooper on the Extremities of Being.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 2 (1994): 143-61.

In the following essay, Jackson studies the interrelationship of sex and death in Cooper's fiction and the author's explorations of the limits of self-knowledge and metaphysical longing, as depicted in scenes of ritualized sexual violence and physical degradation and mirrored in the simulacra of voyeurism and pornographic images.

You go not till I set you up a glass Where you may see the inmost part of you. 

Hamlet 3. 5. 19-20

Perhaps our true sexual act consists in this: in verifying to the point of giddiness the useless objectivity of things.

Jean Baudrillard

Like Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs before him, Dennis Cooper writes consistently within predominantly male homosexual contexts, but his subject is rarely “homosexuality” per se. Moreover, the sexual practices thematized in...