Chelsea Charms claims that she has the biggest artificial breasts in the world. She is followed by more than 270,000 users on Twitter. Charms gives interviews to the mainstream media. She also runs her own website. Although she has never used her body in hardcore pornography, she is nevertheless a kind of celebrity, very careful about her image, defined, obviously, by her enormous bust. Charms very clearly identifies herself with her breasts. In the media her breasts are presented as the essence of her personality. In a cultural sense, there is no difference between her image and her bust, allowing us to speak of a peculiar branding, with Charms’s breasts serving as a “logo”. In this article I analyse how the media figure of “the woman with the largest (augmented) breasts in the world” comes to life, in relation to Celia Lury and Scott Lash’s theory of the global culture industry and Hartmut Boehme’s take on the cultural role of fetishism in modernity. I attempt to deconstruct the “Chelsea Charms” brand in the context of contemporary image culture, which feeds on augmented bodies like no other. At the same time, I pose a crucial question: Does having an artificial body automatically lead to having an artificial identity or is the relation between the two much more complex, and by reconstructing it, can one can better understand contemporary strategies of identity building, even outside of this particular case? The answer is paradoxical: because of her curious character, Chelsea Charms can be seen as a model exponent of the culture of virtuality, which is based on the myths of individual agency, creative freedom, and plasticity of human existence, including the body. 

The aim of this article is to show how the narcissistic identity of gamers and modes of consumption corresponding with it affect the forms of participation in video games culture. I have analyzed the changing ways in which consumers participate in contemporary popular culture and identified the common image of the gamer which has emerged at the end of the last century. By recalling the key events concerning gamer communities from the last few years, such as the rise of Gamergate movement, I wanted to show the impact of mechanics of exclusion still existing in conservative communities of video game fans. 

Peaches is one of the most controversial popcultural icons of the twenty-first century. Born as Merrill Beth Nisker, Peaches is a Canadian artist who deals in her arts – mostly centered on electro rock music – with the issues of sexual freedom, and the hypocrisy of the contemporary power structures that still govern the relations between people, making the shade of patriarchy present. In her artistic activates – predominantly, but not exclusively, the lyrics to her songs – she performs a number of sexual transgressions that provoke questions about equality, identity, and liberty. She subverts the old, hypocritical system of values employing an explicitly shocking and direct attitude to sexualities that can be called hypersexiness. This article attempts to present Peaches’ uncompromising artistic attitude and is an attempt to read it through the aforementioned category of hypersexiness.  

In the article, the author discusses a new cultural phenomenon known as ASMR, in particular its interest in multi-sensuality, in a posthuman perspective related to the non-hierarchical nature of human senses. The text analyzes selected ASMR videos published on the YouTube website, focusing on ways to show different sensory impressions (connected with images, sounds, haptics, aromas, flavours), putting forward the thesis that ASMR practices promote posthuman type of sensitivity and encourage the production of alternative modes of experiencing the world. 

The year 1989 is a symbolic turning point in the discourse of sexsuality in Poland as well as important moment in history of an erotic as a genre: from the conventionally understood love-themed poem, through vulgar eroticism of the artists associated with ‘bruLion’, to sophisticated usages of convention, which purpose is to exploit critical potential of eroticism and to involve into a socio- olitical discussions. In the article the author presents the ways of eroticism, sexuality and pornography functioning as forms of resistance in polish contemporary poetry on the example of works by three poets: Jerzy Jarniewicz, Andrzej Sosnowski and Joanna Oparek. The author refers e.g. to the Roland Barthes’ category of the pleasure of the text, Marquis de Sade’s pornogrammar and Georges Bataille’s philosophy. The claim of the author is to show how the contemporary poetry transforms the classical conventions of an erotic for  ideological purposes.

Article, which title quotes the one of Michael Ian Black’s commentary published on The New York Timeswebsite (“The Boys Are Not All Right”, February 21, 2018), analyses Netflix’s 2018 reboot of Queer Eyemakeover show in context of toxic masculinity and mass shootings in American high schools. The shooting in Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14 was an 18th one in 2018 according to the Gun Violence Archive statistics. Commentators emphasised the fact that the perpetrators are mainly (white) man (teenage boys in case of school rampages) and connect it with toxic masculinity, a category that has been linked with Roland F. Levant research (published i.a. in his article The New Psychology of Men in 1996). Rather optimistic views on Queer Eye usually concentrate on programme’s promotion of tolerance towards sexual minorities or on – as the Fab 5 themselves state – acceptance. Stressing the genre convention (fixed and repeatable dramaturgy), ideology (homosexual man as a lifestyle expert) and ideological production choices (participants selection) I will analyse partaker’s representation, pointing out the differences between real people and the dominant stereotypes in American culture they were chosen to dismantle, seeing it, if not as a broadening the concept of masculinity, then at least as a subtle cracks on the manhood monolith. 

Australian Great War poets were not able to escape their relationship with the dead, turning nightmares into poetry. Images haunted them, and through their poetry it may be seen that they lived in dread which became a central state of their subconscious. Frederic Manning said that the battle fields were the damned circles where Dante trod, recognising that he was in a hell where the dead became the carrion of rats and crows. Leon Gellert said that he strolled to hell where the world rolls wet with blood and the skinny hand of Death gropes at the beating heart. Their horrific visions help explain the shell-shocked realities of post-war years. Manning saw a boy’s face coming out of a cloud through a mist of blood, haunting him with its trembling lips, convulsing with terror and hate. He says it was the mask of God, broken by the horrors of war. Some saw hope in happy dreams interrupting nightmares, but Manning and Gellert stand as poetic examples of the soldier’s wartime hell. Gellert wrote, ‘the scythe of time runs red, while a Foul Voice screams and Fear runs shrieking by the wall’. Manning saw them all as a raucous choir of frogs. These mad images inform the reader of a mind tormented by sights too hideous to reconcile, and show the poet’s subconscious dread of the terror he must live with. 

This article is a proposed reading of an extract from Olga Tokarczuk’s book in the perspective of a melancholic experience and aims to show the melancholic trait of the selected character of the „Flights”. The author, using interpretation techniques from the field of literary studies, creates a kind of case study: she analyses the literary text and indicates the melancholy trails that appear in the whole artistic creation of the author of „The Books of Jacob”. The character of the Flemish scientist Filip Verheyen is examined in terms of human nature and the body, which ‘responds’ to mental suffering. 

Biegnij, Melosie!

Dazai Osamu

tłumaczenie i wstęp: Wiktoria Krupska, Karolina Mirek

Opowiadanie Hiya („Ona”) zostało napisane w maju 1969 roku. Weszło do zbioru Bajt min lahm („Dom pełen ciał”), który ukazał się dwa lata później (Idris 1982; Idris 1990, 146–154). Tytuł utworu oraz ogólny rys tytułowej postaci zostały zaczerpnięte z powieści Henry’ego Ridera Haggarda (zm.1925) She („Ona”) z 1886 roku oraz jej kontynuacji, Ayesha, the Return of She („Ayesha, powrót Onej”) z 1905 roku.

Jusuf Idris (1927–1991) to jeden z najbardziej uznanych egipskich pisarzy XX wieku, niekwestionowany mistrz krótkich opowiadań, autor mikropowieści obyczajowych i sztuk teatralnych. 

tłumaczenie Bożena Prochwicz-Studnicka