Creampied to death: Ejaculative kinship in the age of normative data flows

This article reframes the kinship between all liquids (from the mother’s milk to a lover’s sperm) as a source of queer dissidence that becomes particularly relevant in times of normative data-flows, the necro-politicization of the ocean, and social media’s injunction of permanent availability. Following Gaston Bachelard’s general theory of material imagination, liquidness appears as the only matter antithetical to digitality, hardware’s most threatening substance, and a reparative metaphor for contemporary anxieties. Through a queer psychoanalytic understanding of matter that harks back to the subject’s earliest experiences, the argument ultimately anchors itself in the figure of the creampie, the ejaculate excess that oozes out of a subject’s orifices after coitus, providing liquid evidence of a fantasy of fulfillment that is otherwise perpetually deferred by the digital economy.