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

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