ABSTRACT
The fanzine Butt stages a different style of desire that does not reduce sexuality to the mere fulfillment of fantasies, but offers, beyond a psychoanalytical understanding of sexual encounters, new forms of contact. One way to understand this stylistic shift within post-pornography would be to say that in Butt, sexuality is transcended by affects. Through a critical engagement with theories of affect, a concept of affective sexualities emerges as a mixed phenomenon. For a strict distinction between sexuality and affects is not easily tenable. However, in order to counteract the desexualization of a queer analysis in the field of affect theory, the discussion about the critical potential of affects must be tied back to the topic of sexuality. To this end, we can read moments of affect in Foucault, which are addressed through the barely elaborated concept of pleasure, and which, in turn, maintain a proximity to Deleuze's concept of desire. In the context of Butt, however, what is at stake is not the processing and shifting of institutionalized forms of power as in the case of Foucault's example of S/M, but rather a different conception of love, as Lauren Berlant suggests, that can no longer be categorically distinguished from desire.
