Sexuality and Contemporary Literature By Joel Gwynne and Angeli ...

the door is thrown open unwontedly, or the walls turn out to be too thin [then] all the fine dress of piety and pride will be found tangled around one’s ankles” (2). Gayle Rubin has identified the association of sex with shame as one of the many inscriptions of “sex negativity” (278) that can be found in all aspects of cultural production and social relationships. Sexuality is shameful because sexuality is dangerous, and the dangers it potentially precipitates—rape, incest, exploitation, cruelty, and humiliation—often outweigh its pleasures. In their respective fields but also often moving beyond them, scholars such as Gayle Rubin, Sherry Ortner, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Jeffrey Weeks, Stevi Jackson, and Michael Warner have helped resituate sexuality as a historical and social category, showing how ideas about sexuality are linked to forms of power and other hegemonic categories of identity and subjectivity such as class, race, gender, and nationality. A crucial foundational question that may be articulated, then, is what the construction of something one calls sexuality enables, in ontoepistemological terms, in the way the self and notions of the private are understood, especially in terms of sociopolitical, cultural, and economic arrangements.

A review of recent scholarship investigating the cultural representation of sexuality, work that pays specific attention to the imaginary and the expressive, reveals that much critical attention has tended to focus on film, theatre, and the visual arts rather than literature. This is not surprising given the dominance of visual culture in today’s media-saturated societies around the world. But as long as there are literate populations, literature and written discourse will continue to play a central role in determining how one understands and defines his or her (sexual) self. This collection seeks to close a gap in current critical scholarship by attending precisely to the nexus between sexuality and literature of the contemporary moment. It contends that reading, not just viewing, also informs how people think of themselves as sexual beings, and that literature and the written realm of the imagination remain important outlets for the expression and exploration of sexual desire, sexual acts, sexual being, sexual identity and sexual interaction.