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Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism »

Book cover image of Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism by E. Grosz

Authors: E. Grosz, Elizabeth Grosz (Editor), Elspeth Probyn
ISBN-13: 9780415098021, ISBN-10: 0415098025
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Routledge
Date Published: August 1995
Edition: (Non-applicable)

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Author Biography: E. Grosz

Book Synopsis

Are bodies sexy? How, and in what sorts of ways? Sexy Bodies investigates the production of sexual bodies and sexual practices, sexualities of all kinds--dyke, bisexual, transracial, even heterosexual. While celebrating lesbian and queer sexualities, Sexy Bodies also explores what runs underneath and within all sexualities, discovering what is fundamentally strange about all bodies, all carnalities.

Looking at a pleasurable variety of cultural forms and texts, the contributors consider the particular charms of girls and horses, from National Velvet to Marnie; discuss figures of the lesbian body, from vampires to tomboys; uncover "virtual" lesbians in the fiction of Jeanette Winterson; track desire in the music of legendary Blues singers; and investigate the ever-scrutinized and celebrated body of Elizabeth Taylor. The collection also includes two important pieces of fiction by Mary Fallon and Nicole Brossard.

Sexy Bodies makes new connections between and among bodies, cruising the borders of the obscene, the pleasurable, the desirable, and the unspoken, rethinking sexuality anew, as deeply and stangely sexy.

Contributors: Sue Best, Nicole Brossard, Dianne Chisholm, Barbara Creed, Angela Davis, Mary Fallon, Anna Gibbs, Sue Golding, Elizabeth Grosz, Melissa Jane Hardie, Lisa Moore, Chantal Nadeau, Elspeth Probyn, Sabina Sawhney, Catherine Waldby

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors
Introduction
Editors' acknowledgements
1Queer Belongings: The Politics of Departure1
2The 'Cunning Lingua' of Desire: Bodies-Language and Perverse Performativity19
3Sextec: Excerpt from Working Hot42
4Lesbian Bodies: Tribades, Tomboys and Tarts86
5Teledildonics: Virtual Lesbians in the Fiction of Jeanette Winterson104
6Green Night of Labyrinth Park: La Nuit Verte Du Parc Labyrinthe128
7Acts of Creation: The Brainchildren of Certain Psychoanalytic Fictions137
8'I Embrace the Difference': Elizabeth Taylor and the Closet155
9Pariah Bodies172
10Sexualizing Space181
11The Jewels in the Crotch: The Imperial Erotic in the Raj Quartet195
12Girls on a Wired Screen: Cavani's Cinema and Lesbian S/M211
13I Used to be Your Sweet Mama: Ideology, Sexuality and Domesticity in the Blues of Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey and Bessie Smith231
14Destruction: Boundary Erotics and Refigurations of the Heterosexual Male Body266
15Animal Sex: Libido as Desire and Death278
Index300

Subjects