Transformation Art: online metamorphosis as posthuman sexual practice

Abstract

A loose community online creates and shares transformation (TF) art: a genre of images and stories in which humans turn into nonhuman animals. Erotic, transgressive images of hybrid bodies, mostly coded female, circulate between artists and enthusiasts. As an insider to the community, I asked twenty-one TF creators a standard set of questions about desire, affect, and nonhuman animal representation in their online activity. Their responses are here woven with critical concepts from posthuman, (post-)pornographic, and trans* studies. TF creators affirm that it is the fetish of transformation, rather than sexualized representations of nonhuman beings, that excites and arouses. They insist that partial forms, where human features are tangled up with actual tails, muzzles, whiskers, manes, ears, udders, flanks, fins, and wings, can be sexy. Yet, they also make a clear distinction between online and offline attachments to nonhuman animals, as well as erotic relations with human partners. The TF genre’s traffic in the nonhuman in its pursuit of personal pleasure has enabled an online experiment that multiplies human desires while calling on a menagerie of playful forms. In its own licentious and chimeric way, and not without its problems, TF art draws attention to possibilities of a posthuman sexual practice.