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.
About the Author :
WES JAMISON is an assistant professor of English at Defiance College. They were awarded the 2021 Quill Prose Award for their essay collection, Carrion, and their essay and Melancholia was selected as a winner of Essay Press's Chapbook Contest. Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and selected as Notables in Best American Essays. Their work also appears in DIAGRAM, The Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly, After the Art, and elsewhere. Jamison currently lives in the Midwest with their partner and cat.
Review :
My Corpse Inside reads like a two-hundred-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.
Jamison has woven a fascinating, troubling, utterly revealing text of our contemporary landscape of screens, erotics, power, and violence.
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.
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 nonfiction: gasping and ball-gagged, shocking, consensual.
