Posthuman Has Zoom Sex
In the twilight of their bedroom, Posthuman turns on the camera. Their body is already a cybernetic system–what remains but the upload? The viral response? Naked, Posthuman adjusts the lighting, assumes a provocative pose, filters personhood into pornography. A predictable shift between states. A (bio)logical response to modernity. Do not judge Posthuman, when they breathe, when they slip a hand between their legs. Only watch. Only be a being with eyes. Only see collarbone, thigh, the shudder of a stomach. The recipient is unimportant–you, not-you, whoever. What matters is the tremble, the softness, the sound–rather, the audio, the clarity of image. The connectivity, and what it carries. The desire to be animal distilled into pixels. Posthuman gasps, feels things unspeakable. The sentient screen simplifies, decodes, projects ghostly ecstasy through space. And that dead red eye of the camera, watching everything. Waiting on climax, or collapse. Where does the camera go when the computer is closed? Nowhere, of course. The sexiest part is the waiting. The desire to witness what happens in the dark.
Posthuman Dabbles in Doublespeak
In the depths of a coffee-fueled internet goose chase, Posthuman reads that 2016’s Word of the Year was post-truth. The prefix makes them feel validated in their own baptismal afterness. It’s always been an insecurity, to be defined by what came before, an embarrassment Posthuman hides under swagger and electric charm and vast projected quantities of not giving a single fuck. Posthuman wanders into the kitchen and eats a banana, sliding a finger along its spotted peel. The fruit is adorned with a round red badge declaring Mexican origin, a white arc of text reading AS FRESH AS IT GETS. If the sticker can rewrite the senses, unmake the rot already inside, what can’t words do? Posthuman chews slowly and considers rebranding. They compose a coming-out. I’M GOING BY POST, they post, and let the comments come stampeding in. They are thinking about bananas, who have no concept of truth, or words, for that matter, and how perhaps the two are the same thing. As in, I say my name and who I am and then it is so. I call myself a scholar or a slut or a human and then it is so. The banana calls itself nothing and simply is. It grows in some jungle, no, more likely some Central American plantation where of course the word plantation itself is banned, because to call it by that heaviness would be to invoke a nastier reality–better to submerge that faraway monocrop in friendly terminology which encourages capitalist collaboration rather than making consumers feel like participants in violation of human rights. Posthuman peels the banana slowly, swallows it in mealy segments, calls it sustenance and makes it so, collects energy from its sugars so they can move their limbs so they can rot on the couch and scroll through their phone. I’m so proud, Post, say the commenters, declarations of support studded with emojis and awe. You’re finally becoming the thing you already are.
Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey is a California transplant living in Munich, Germany, where they are a Visiting Scholar at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. A 2026 Anthony Veasna So Scholar through the Adroit Journal and a Monarch Queer Literary Award winner, their work appears in publications such as Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, and the Cincinnati Review. Their writing explores human-nature relation and deconstructs binaries casting humankind in opposition to the natural world.