Fuck Journal

Since his on-screen “death” by erogenous torture device in Nine Inch Nails’ notorious “Happiness in Slavery” music video, writer and artist Bob Flanagan has been a looming legend in domains of art, pain and sex. First published by Hanuman Books in 1987, Fuck Journal chronicles Flanagan’s liaisons with his beloved romantic and artistic partner Sheree Rose over the course of a year. Composed at Rose’s prompting and anticipating Flanagan’s extraordinary Pain Journal, the volume is so direct in its account of the couple’s conjugal life that the Indian authorities tossed its original print run into the ocean before the books could ship from Chennai to New York. By luck, 300 copies which had traveled with the editors to the US remained in circulation: an origin story that chimes with Flanagan’s aura of irreverence. Fuck Journal is characterized by a transfixing rhythm of total divulsion, a document of union amid, and through, pain with resonances in current discourses around sadomasochistic desire, crip experience, gender politics and beyond.