ABSTRACT

Are bodies sexy? How? In what sorts of ways? Sexy Bodies investigates the production of sexual bodies and sexual practices, of sexualities which are dyke, bi, transracial, and even hetero. It celebrates lesbian and queer sexualities but also explores what runs underneath and within all sexualities, discovering what is fundamentally weird and 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 tribades to tomboys; uncover 'virtual' lesbians in the fiction of Jeanette Winterson; track desire in the music of legendary Blues singers; and investigate the ever-scrutinised and celebrated body of Elizabeth Taylor. The collection includes two important pieces of fiction by Mary Fallon and Nicole Brossard.

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

chapter |18 pages

Queer Belongings

The politics of departure

chapter |23 pages

The ‘Cunning Lingua' of Desire

Bodies-language and perverse performativity

chapter |44 pages

Sextec

Excerpt from Working Hot

chapter |18 pages

Lesbian Bodies

Tribades, tomboys and tarts

chapter |24 pages

Teledildonics

Virtual lesbians in the fiction of Jeanette Winterson

chapter |9 pages

Green Night of Labyrinth Park

La nuit verte du parc Labyrinthe

chapter |18 pages

Acts of Creation

The brainchildren of certain psychoanalytic fictions

chapter |17 pages

‘I Embrace the Difference'

Elizabeth Taylor and the closet

chapter |9 pages

Pariah Bodies

chapter |14 pages

Sexualizing Space

chapter |16 pages

The Jewels in the Crotch

The imperial erotic in The Raj Quartet

chapter |20 pages

Girls on a Wired Screen

Cavani's cinema and lesbian s/m

chapter |35 pages

I used to be your Sweet Mama

Ideology, sexuality and domesticity in the Blues of Gertrude ‘Ma' Rainey and Bessie Smith*

chapter |12 pages

Destruction

Boundary erotics and refigurations of the heterosexual male body

chapter |22 pages

Animal Sex

Libido as desire and death