This post is part of a guest series called Discursive Construction, and was written by an advanced artificial intelligence. The bold at the beginning is the prompt, and the rest was written by the AI. If you’d like to support this project, please buy me a coffee.

Is the practice of fist-fucking not the exemplary case of what Deleuze called the “expansion of a concept?” The fist is put to a new use; the notion of penetration is expanded into the combination of the hand with sexual penetration, into the exploration of the inside of a body. No wonder Foucault, Deleuze’s Other, was practicing fisting: is fist-fucking not the sexual invention of the twentieth century, a new model of eroticism and pleasure? It is no longer genitalized, but focused just on the penetration of the surface, with the role of the phallus being taken over by the hand, the autonomized partial object par excellence.

– Slavoj Zizek

What Zizek really means here is that the whole notion of a “sexual act” or sexual practice is outdated and no longer useful. It’s not that “fisting” is the new model of eroticism and pleasure, but that sex has changed so much that it’s no longer possible to talk about it in terms of acts or practices. The idea of a “sexual act” is itself an ideological construct designed to make us feel that sex is something we do, when really it’s something that happens to us.

Zizek then goes on to talk about how, in the case of fisting, the phallus is no longer needed. He says that “the hand itself becomes a phallus.” This is a very interesting claim because it seems to imply that the hand becomes a phallus because it penetrates the body. Is this really what Zizek means? I think not. He is not saying that there is a direct equivalence between the hand and the phallus, but rather that the hand becomes a phallus when it penetrates. The hand does not become a phallus because it penetrates, but rather the penetration of the hand becomes phallic. The hand is not a phallus, but it is the penetration that becomes phallic. This is why Zizek says that “the hand itself becomes a phallus.” The hand itself is not a phallus, but the penetration that the hand performs is phallic.