Conhecimento Comum

Data de nascimento: 1960-04-17
Sexo: male
Nacionalidade: USA
Local de nascimento: Chicago, Illinois, USA
Educação: School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Fatal error: Call to undefined function isLitsy() in /var/www/html/inc_magicDB.php on line 425: Peter Sotos (born 1960?) is a Chicago-born writer who has contributed an unprecedented examination of the peculiar motivations of sadistic sexual criminals. His works are often cited as conveying an uncanny understanding of myriad aspects of pornography. Most of his writings have focused on sexually violent pornography, particularly of that involving children. His writings are also considered by many to be social criticism often commenting on the hypocritical way media handles these issues.

In 1984, while attending The Art Institute of Chicago, Sotos began producing a self-published newsletter or “fanzine” named Pure, notable as the first zine dedicated to serial killer lore. Much of the text and pictures in Pure were photocopied images from major newspapers and other print media. Sotos also used a photocopy from a magazine of child pornography as the cover of issue#2 of Pure. In 1986 this cover led to his arrest and charges of obscenity and possession of child pornography. The charges of obscenity were dropped, but Sotos eventually pled guilty to the possession charge and received a suspended sentence. Sotos was the first person in the United States ever to be charged for owning child pornography.

Sotos’ writings explore sadistic and pedophilic sexual impulses in their many, often hidden, guises. Often using first person narratives, his prose takes on the point of view of the sexual predator. Despite his early legal troubles, and the seemingly fatal stigma of falsely being labeled a pedophile, Sotos continues to garner support for his ideas and literary output.

He was until 2003 a seminal member of the industrial noise band Whitehouse.

http://www.last.fm/music/Peter+Sotos/...

Membros

Críticas

Mine por Peter Sotos

Sotos' use of collage gets more and more subtle, perhaps even more insidious or poignant depending on who you ask. Meaning that the line between weeping mother, dead girl, and Sotos himself blurs or disappears entirely because of how the words are folded. At the same time, the demarcations between the three are made ever more pronounced just because of how Sotos casts or reflects on each. In much of his work, Sotos will scorn the weeping mother and/or himself. SOmetimes he will show deep empathy for the dead and the hurt, sometimes jsut lurid fascination (or what masquerades as such). Here, he does all of these things to a degree, and that doesn't really happen in any of the other books.

The names he lingers on here, in relation to their images and stories, are particularly devastating and/or prurient (again, it's hard to pull apart here). Skyler Kauffmann being raped and buried alive, or the borderline urban legend of Thea Pumbroek. She only exists in a few grizzly details, and Sotos doesn't even give you those. You have to go hunt that context down. And you make it yours by doing so. By imbibing, in a way, these murdered and hurt lives, and Sotos forces us to do that in a way the news or a press release or muttered sympathy doesn't, a piece of that story becomes "ours."

I was talking with Anita Dalton as I read this book and she pointed out that the title of the book reflects this. It at once a descriptor of victim experience, parental clinging, perpetrator possessiveness, and the ownership Sotos creates for himself, whether it is mournful or caring or pornographic or lurid or something in between or wholly other. All the more, that "mine" is in the mouth of the reader now too. You are included. I am included. Maybe even in some more meaningful way than a hungry reporter or a lurid spectator we are mixed into the experience by reading about it and how it is interpreted. The "mine" lies in the mouth of the parent, the victim, the perpetrator, the writer, and at last the reader.… (mais)

Assinalado

poetontheone | Jul 22, 2016 |

Pure Filth por Peter Sotos

Sotos' printed transcriptions of the films of Jamie Gillis strip away image from word. Since the pornographic is formulated in terms of the visual, the jerk off material is pretty much non-existent here. What is left is the verbal exchange, and that exchange reveals as much about Gillis as it does about the women he's filming performing oral sex on random men in adult bookstores or eating their own puke be it for desperate need of money or for pleasure where pay off is almost secondary. In one of the transcripts, Jamie Gillis says that someone could find the tape in a hundred years and think he was the twentieth century Marquis de Sade, and The Humiliation of Heidi and the scene with Eve certainly make him a contender. On the other hand, the Africa interview wouldn't be out of place in a seminar alongside work by Dworkin and McKinnon, since its practically a case study in power dynamics, trauma, and the messiness of sexual need and desire. Sotos' introduction is among his more candid writing, in consideration of a wider audience, though it is no less provocative or unflinching for it. If you enjoy Jamie Gillis, Sotos, the theory of pornography, or, dare I say, feminist cultural theory, this is a valuable text.… (mais)

Assinalado

poetontheone | Dec 15, 2015 |

Home por Peter Sotos

In this collaboration between Peter Sotos and photographer Michael Salerno, Sotos' text prefaces the photographs, and thus colors them if you go through the book from beginning to end. Text feeds into image and image feeds back into text. Sotos lingers in the particulars of the crimes of Joseph Duncan, picking at them like crusted scab, disrupting them with his own need and concentration. His text uses much less direct collage here, more an exercise of putting words and ideas into "other mouths," A more subtle and infectious juxtaposition without seams. Salerno's photographic collage work of sleeping boys blanketed by the wreckage of hurricanes is not able to be divorced, after reading the words, from Duncan as once a serenely sleeping boy, a long time ago, and how little that matters now, You see a the literal image of a broken home and contextualize that in term's of Shasta's lived experience. These boys are sleeping serenely, and what these images evoke, after everything, is the opposition between the curled serenity of her sleeping smallness and the wreckage in her mind that's not supposed to be there.… (mais)

Assinalado

poetontheone | Sep 27, 2015 |

Show Adult por Peter Sotos

A logical progression after Selfish, Little and Comfort and Critique, which makes Predicate seem even more like a strange stylistic detour, or regression, for having immediately preceded this. Collage is still present, of course, and there is more talk of gloryholes and sad cocksucking here than perhaps in any other Sotos book outside of Index.

Here though, the facts of Sotos' slumming and his deviant queer experience are more closely linked to his obsessions with media portrayals of sex crimes. When talking about lamenting mothers, he says, "[h]ow dare you, cunt, think you're going to tell me what it's like not to understand your loss? You think I've never missed a fucking bus. Known someone with cancer and watched any number of loved ones die of it? Fuck, I've been to more hospital rooms than you, fucking het."

He puts himself, and in general the predator, at some level of human disadvantage, giving them some level of sympathy. The book is a literary Skinner Box experiment, evinced by the cover, which forces the reader to see the evident villains in at least the same light as sad and shudderring monkeys clutching cloth mothers, and maybe seeing Sotos' narrative voice to be a little more empathetic than even that. If he wants it. He gives it out. In Comfort and Critique, he humanizes parents more. In Selfish, Little, Lesley, thus the victim. Here the pigs aren't really dissected, but Sotos himself (at least as persona if not author, poetic speaker if not the man himself wholly) is revealed a little more here than before, and humanized. Through bar conversations, brief meditations on the fear of HIV/AIDS, and biting contrasts like the quote above.

Again, as the years progress, Sotos's becomes more reflective (if not necessarily accessible to a wider audience) and his most recent works are easily found. Sotos' rests beyond the perimeters of marketable "transgressive" literature, and more importantly, hinges at the edge of queer deviance. Without the fantasy of Cooper or the intersectional politics of Delany, Sotos' forces his readers to give thought to darkest edges of human contemplation and the formulation of desire. This book is emblematic of that, and makes interesting formal choices that differentiate it from its predecessors and makes it just as essential reading. Hopefully at some point Sotos' back catalog from this period will be reprinted. This book in particular is so scarce it's almost as if it was never written. It's lack of availability compared to those that are more available from Sotos' ouevre might be purposeful, probably because of its focus on Masha Allen, who was a widely discussed topic in the media at the time of the book's release.… (mais)

Assinalado

poetontheone | Apr 28, 2015 |

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