In our second edition of the colloquium, we continue to look for the erotic possibilities of supposedly repulsive substances. This year we turn to fecal matter in order to discover something about the body— its subterfuges, its capaciousness, its limit(lessness)—that could never be produced from a prim and proper approach to desire. What can the various modalities of scatological enjoyment, excretory practices, sphincter politics and coprophagic imaginaries (from shitposting to shitkissing) tell us about sex and sexuality? What kinds of knowledge, and sensations, might the breaking of a fundamental taboo yield? We hope to find out by staging a collision of poetry and shit.

Program

My Inverted Rectum Giving

Ilja Schamle (Dutch Art Institute)

(…) as if I'd never known I had an anus, let alone one gurgling with analytical potential. Only when collapsed intestine walls sent me reeling from toilet to floor, my guts heaving inside me, did that blurred rectal threshold become unavoidable. From there, I turn to the sick rectum, all leaking substances and uncontainments, as the site where pain, shame, and pleasure become difficult to separate. Emerging from gut intimacies, anality, and chronic inflammatory illness, I lean on psychoanalysis and queer theory to understand the role of erotics in evading the logic of health capitalism through closeness to mucus and shit. This bodily excess as inversion strikes as a refusal. Situated between art and academia, crip aesthetics, as in always already sick, wields to let this shit and poetics collide, language cracking open its own splits and spits without collapsing into health categories. The broken rectum surfaces not as pathology, my new anus a drive in desire's cracks and my sick sexuality metabolizing through (…)

Practice Makes Pervert: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Scat Sex

Diego Semerene (University of Amsterdam)

This talk proposes scat as a sexual strategy between bodies deemed male at birth for conjuring a/the phallus. For in the scene of sex the phallus is, ironically, nowhere to be found. This is particularly complicated when such a scene is traversed by the suspicion that the penis of “the other with a penis” may be as fraudulent as the subject knows their own penis to be. Shit makes a certain kind of queer sex viable at last. Shit briefly resolves the problem of sexual difference, or sameness, haunting the queer sexual situation. It does so by relieving the responsibility of having the phallus from the lovers, whose task is inevitably botched by the queerness of the encounter itself, and outsourcing it to opaque organic matter, whose phallicity does not rely on performance but substance. The talk is structured around vignettes of sexual encounters involving excrement. 

Digital Excrement in a Gift-of-Shit Economy: Shitposting as Babified Labor

Xichen Liu (University of Amsterdam)

This talk revisits the tendency to understand the Internet either as a gift economy or as a form of commodity exchange. Building on Marxist feminist analyses that have productively foregrounded the role of the housewife in reproduction of capitalist social relations, it argues that the role of the Child (Edelman 2004) in sustaining a future-oriented reproductive unit also constitutes an often neglected “outside” of capitalism. Introducing the figure of the queer baby, this talk examines the production and circulation of digital excrement across contemporary platforms. It argues that much of what circulates online operates as un/savory excrement: content that is neither fully valuable nor entirely discardable. Through examples such as daily lore and shitposting, it shows how repetitive, low-threshold forms of digital participation operate as excretory practices. Approached as “babified labor”, these practices sustain platform circulation while simultaneously slipping from the demands of reproducing the future of digital capitalism.

The Politics of the Sphincter

Misha Kavka (University of Amsterdam)

In Seminar VI Lacan declares that “there is but one truly serious mammal, which is the ‘potamus” – serious, apparently, because the hippopotamus marks out his grazing territory with his own shit, which Lacan refers to as “a specifically excremental symbolism” (2019, 106). This rudimentary symbolic activity begs to be differentiated from another shit-marking moment, namely Trump sharing an AI-generated video of himself as a fighter pilot dropping ‘bombs’ of squishy excrement on No Kings protesters in October 2025. The question to be asked is whether the shit-dump in this instance refers to the content of the video or to its release by Trump on social media. I will use the distinction between these two levels of bowel-release to argue that there is a difference between the excremental symbolism of the sociable hippopotamus and what I’ll call Trump’s politics of the sphincter, wherein egoic sustenance resides precisely in the power to dump shit on others, without concern for shame or consequences. Taken as the opposite of anal retention, and hence socialisation, the politics of the sphincter articulates the narcissistic logic of our political moment.

From deviant to abject ecologies: queer copropolitics in the wasteocene 

Cy Lecerf Maulpoix (EHESS Paris)

This presentation revisits a critical research trajectory that began in 2016 with queer ecologies and gradually expanded into a broader investigation of hygienism, body politics, and their relationship to the history of environmentalism. Its central figures include an eco-queer activist seeking kinship within climate justice movements, British and French eco-socialists concerned with digestion and waste, sexual liberation militants reclaiming shit against the capitalist privatization of anality, and the intertwined sexual and ecological panics surrounding wastewater.

RMA students seeking 1EC must register by emailing d.semerene@uva.nl before May 22 (hard deadline) to receive preparatory readings. Include: full name, program/affiliation and institutional email address.