Acknowledgements 1. Introduction | Aesthetic sexuality: a literary history of sadomasochism 2. Universal perversion and the laws of judgment: the Marquis de Sade 3. Brutal beauty: Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads and Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des supplices 4. Tragic self-shattering I: Nietzsche’s aesthetics 5. Tragic self-shattering II: delirious materialism in Bataille’s L’Érotisme and Histoire de l’œil 6. Tragic self-shattering III: mortifying metaphysics in Réage’s Histoire d’O and Berg’s L’image 7. Sadomasochism as anti-aesthetic theatre 8. Conclusion | Fashioning BDSM today Works Cited Index
Maps the history of aesthetic sexuality and the way in which sexuality is constructed as a form of art and as a means of self-creation.
Maps the history of aesthetic sexuality and the way in which sexuality is constructed as a form of art and as a means of self-creation.
Romana Byrne is an independent scholar based in France. Formerly, she was a Research Fellow at The University of Melbourne, Australia, where she lectured in the history of queer theory, pornography and aesthetics, and sadomasochism in cinema. She has published in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts and Papers on Language & Literature.
Romana Byrne’s philosophical, historical, and literary reflections
on 'aesthetic sexuality', or pleasure as a form of self- and
other-creation, provides us with a radical alternative approach to
sadomasochism as it has existed since the eighteenth century. It
illuminates the history and culture of sexual subjectivity in
exhilarating ways.
*Joanna Bourke, Professor of History, Birkbeck, University of
London, UK*
Romana Byrne’s Aesthetic Sexuality provocatively reveals
sadomasochism as a scandalous art of sexuality embedded within
Western culture. Tracking the connections between sadomasochism and
aesthetic philosophy, from Kant to Baudrillard, Byrne deftly
negotiates the pleasures and paradoxes of sexuality on the surface
– sex as a matter of practices, games, and fleeting intensities.
The result subtly subverts the demand we speak our sexuality as
truth, and offers the pleasure of sexuality as aesthetic
self-creation.
*Benjamin Noys, Reader in English, University of Chichester, UK and
author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction*
Aesthetic Sexuality reads against the grain of standard readings of
the scientia sexualis versus ars erotica distinction Foucault made
famous in his History of Sexuality. From Sade to Nietzsche to
contemporary fetish fashion, Byrne brilliantly uses the aesthetics
of sadomasochism to reconceptualize sexuality itself. A tour de
force!
*Lynne Huffer, Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies,
Emory University, USA*
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