SEXOLOGY OTHERWISE, OR THE LITERARY STYLE OF REASONING
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2025
Abstract
In his essay “The Literariness of Sexuality: Or, How to Do the (Literary) History of (American) Sexuality” (2013), Christopher Looby audaciously sidesteps the usual groundings of sexuality in material conditions and lived experiences to claim that “sexuality is essentially a literary phenomenon.”1 For Looby, the literariness of sexuality has three dimensions:“[S]exuality is itself a fiction,” which aggregates “bodily sensations, gender determinations, forms of sexual conduct, erotic scripts, and so on” into what Michel Foucault calls the “artificial unity” of sexuality. This “‘fictitious unity’” may be seen as a “stylization of the self” analogous (and even more than analogous) to the “stylization of literary language.” The historical co-emergence of sexuality and the literary public sphere suggests that sexuality needed a venue to be “articulated, promulgated, circulated, and encountered” and that the literary public sphere provided just such an arena.2
Publication Source (Journal or Book title)
The Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies
First Page
106
Last Page
113
Recommended Citation
Kahan, B. (2025). SEXOLOGY OTHERWISE, OR THE LITERARY STYLE OF REASONING. The Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies, 106-113. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003010180-11