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)
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
Notes on contributors | ||
Introduction | ||
Editors' acknowledgements | ||
1 | Queer Belongings: The Politics of Departure | 1 |
2 | The 'Cunning Lingua' of Desire: Bodies-Language and Perverse Performativity | 19 |
3 | Sextec: Excerpt from Working Hot | 42 |
4 | Lesbian Bodies: Tribades, Tomboys and Tarts | 86 |
5 | Teledildonics: Virtual Lesbians in the Fiction of Jeanette Winterson | 104 |
6 | Green Night of Labyrinth Park: La Nuit Verte Du Parc Labyrinthe | 128 |
7 | Acts of Creation: The Brainchildren of Certain Psychoanalytic Fictions | 137 |
8 | 'I Embrace the Difference': Elizabeth Taylor and the Closet | 155 |
9 | Pariah Bodies | 172 |
10 | Sexualizing Space | 181 |
11 | The Jewels in the Crotch: The Imperial Erotic in the Raj Quartet | 195 |
12 | Girls on a Wired Screen: Cavani's Cinema and Lesbian S/M | 211 |
13 | I Used to be Your Sweet Mama: Ideology, Sexuality and Domesticity in the Blues of Gertrude 'Ma' Rainey and Bessie Smith | 231 |
14 | Destruction: Boundary Erotics and Refigurations of the Heterosexual Male Body | 266 |
15 | Animal Sex: Libido as Desire and Death | 278 |
Index | 300 |