A provocative and meticulously structured exploration of identity, language, and the body, My Corpse Inside exposes the thin and increasingly blurry line between the physical and the digital, between the living and the dead. Wes Jamison contends with the complex and disturbing relationship of sexuality and violence through a torrent of virtual horrors-shock sites, hookup apps, beheading videos, and creepshots-as well as through Jamison's own experiences of being surveilled and exploited online. Inspired by Kiyoshi Kurosawa's master horror film Kairo, which portrays ghosts overflowing into our reality through the internet, this fragmented book-length essay clarifies Julia Kristeva's infamously esoteric theory of abjection and subjectivity and updates it for today's constant virtuality. My Corpse Inside is a disquieting work that asks readers to confront the violence, fetish, horror, and loneliness inherent in our eternal connectivity.

An inquiry into the effects of being perpetually virtually connected on identity, language, and the body

About the Author

WES JAMISON is an assistant professor of English at Del Mar College. They are the author of Carrion, which received the 2021 Quill Prose Award, and the chapbook and Melancholia, a winner of Essay Press's Chapbook Contest. Their essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and mentioned as Notables in the Best American series. Their work also appears in DIAGRAM, The Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly, After the Art, and elsewhere. Born and raised in the Midwest, Jamison currently lives in Corpus Christi, Texas, with their partner and two cats.

Reviews

My Corpse Inside reads like a 200-page slingshot, whipping from Kristeva to Angelspit, 2 Girls 1 Cup to Althusser, Michael Brown to Japanese Technohorror, all the while nakedly processing the author's own abuse. Ultimately, Jamison explores the body, the disembodied, the other-bodied, and our delicate agency that laces them. This book is more dexterous than anything I've read in years. How queer, indeed.

-- Miah Jeffra * author of The Violence Almanac *

Jamison has woven a fascinating, troubling, utterly revealing text of our contemporary landscape of screens, erotics, power, and violence.

-- Marco Wilkinson * author of Madder: A Memoir in Weeds *

Sharply intelligent and deeply compassionate, My Corpse Inside compels us to look at what we often turn away from: the complexities of the body and language, sex and violence, death and belonging. Here is a mind that's wide open, an intellect that pulls us in, a gaze that won't be put off but keeps searching - relentlessly, brilliantly, acutely - for answers.

-- Randon Billings Noble * author of A Harp in the Stars and Be with Me Always *

My Corpse Inside lifts the visceral skin of desire, and beneath it-right under the dermis of our insecurity, the sticky film of sex and erotics-shines a new non-fiction: gasping and ball-gagged, shocking, consensual.

-- Lily Hoang * author of A Bestiary and Changing *



Book Information
ISBN 9780820374949
Author Wes Jamison
Format Paperback
Page Count 186
Imprint University of Georgia Press
Publisher University of Georgia Press