Erotic Viewing

Our discussion at the end of class about the (homo)erotics in Duraeus Solito's Busong reminded me of a kind of erotic viewing practice as proposed by film theorist Laura Marks. She explains:

What is erotic? The ability to oscillate between near and far is erotic. In sex, what is erotic is the ability to move between control and relinquishing, between being giver and receiver. It’s the ability to have your sense of self, your self-control, taken away and restored—and to do the same for another person. Elaine Scarry writes that torture deprives a person of language and reduces him or her to nothing but a body. Language, she argues, is what makes us subjects; it allows us to take a distance from our bodies. A lover’s promise is to take the beloved to that point where he or she has no distance from the body—and then to let the beloved come back, into possession of language and personhood.
In the sliding relationship between haptic and optical, distant vision gives way to touch, and touch reconceives the object to be seen from a distance. Optical visuality requires distance and a center, the viewer acting like a pinhole camera. In a haptic relationship our self rushes up to the surface to interact with another surface. When this happens there is a concomitant loss of depth—we become amoebalike, lacking a center, changing as the surface to which we cling changes. We cannot help but be changed in the process of interacting. 
(2002, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, xvi)

Continuing in the vein of considering the erotic as more-than-human, perhaps viewing erotically can help us decentre our humaness as we continue in our weeks of watching film. By embracing the potential erotic effect (/affect?) the films may have on us -- rather than bracketing it during our collective viewings as bourgeois prudism has so swiftly engrained -- this haptic mode of viewing can help us touch the film as more embodied than linguistic.