|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
taste. Literary figures such as the Marquis de Sade, Oscar Wilde, and Radclyffe Hall and works of literature including James Joyce’s Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems have provided important points of focus for discussions around shifting sexual norms. Sex in literature has sometimes become associated with LGBTQ visibility or with a sex-positive approach, while the popular forms of chick lit, sexblogs, and erotic memoirs have made sex central to debates about sexuality, feminism, and postfeminism.
More recently the burden of representing the illicit has moved from written to visual depictions, and “extreme” images and computer generated or drawn figures have become the focus of what has been described as a growing juridification of the imagination. Yet sex writing has continued to be important, too, burgeoning online alongside image-based porn in erotica archives and elsewhere, as well as in more conventional print forms, all of these becoming potent spaces for sexual exploration.
But sex and sexuality make difficult subjects. Despite its highly politicized and often sensational public visibility, sex is often associated with the most private and secret parts of individuals and with shame and danger. The sometimes awkward relations of sexual and gender politics have led to repeated crises and “wars” around sex and particularly sexual representations. And despite the fact that in late modern societies scholars are constantly “incited” to speak about and represent sex, not all forms of speech are equally encouraged. Although sex and sexuality have become the focus of examination in a range of disciplines, talking critically about them remains a difficult business, and scholars who make them their subject may face embarrassed or hostile responses from others. This kind of work requires curiosity and courage, not to mention a determined attempt to slip off commonsensical ways of thinking and speaking.
Fictions of all kinds make space for articulating things that are hard to speak about in other contexts. They set the scene for imaginative