The documentaries we watched, (A)Sexuality and Married to the Eiffel Tower, has definitely been different and an eye-opening experience overall. Although not widely spoken about, asexuality is something that is more heard of and is acknowledged as being a part of the queer spectrum. Object sexuals, on the other hand, is something that I have never encountered before as a term. There are occasions where articles on the internet would feature something like that as click bait, or the TV show “My Strange Addiction’s” famous episode of the man who has a sexual relationship with his car depicted him as having some sort of mental disorder. However, Married to the Eiffel Tower is an attempt to showcase the humanistic elements of relationship and mental processes of these women. Not to say that it has succeeded in normalizing object sexuals in the grander scheme of things, but it has taken the first step in trying to put the conversation out there. I think this documentary really pushes how we think of queerness and why society likes to impose their own ideals of a normative relationship on others. It reminds me of Spivak’s piece, Can the Subaltern Speak, where she discusses how the oppressed are not given a chance to speak for themselves. Even though society is slowly accepting other forms of sexuality, it is still very much still binary (gays and lesbians). The difficulty arises when progress is slow and that this specific identity is so far from binary. The documentary is a form of letting the subaltern speak, but the interviews are still directed in a way that separates “us” and “them”. I think the next step would be to let the marginalized speak for themselves, but there will still be an obvious challenge to find acceptance in society.
Spivak & Married to the Eiffel Tower
