My Corpse Inside
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.
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 abstruse 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.
Praise
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 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
“My Corpse Inside is an incredibly smart take on homosexuality, representation, literary theory..., the body, and the film Kairo. At its best, these themes swirl and inform each other in incisive ways but perhaps the sheer number of themes is what gives our readers pause..”