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Aesthetic Seexuality
A Literary History of Sadomasochism
E-Book: 201 English Pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury
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To understand why the concept of aesthetic seexuality is important, we must consider the influence of the first volume of Foucault’s seminal The History of Seexuality. Arguing against Foucault’s assertions that only scientia seexualis has operated in modern Western culture while ars erotica belongs to Eastern and ancient societies, Byrne suggests that modern Western culture has indeed witnessed a form of ars erotica, encompassed in what she calls ‘aesthetic seexuality’.
To argue for the existence of aesthetic seexuality, Byrne examines mainly works of literature to show how, within these texts, seexual practice and pleasure are constructed as having aesthetic value, a quality that marks these experiences as forms of art. In aesthetic seexuality, value and meaning are located within seexual practice and pleasure rather than in their underlying cause; seexuality’s raison d’être is tied to its aesthetic value, at surface level rather than beneath it. Aesthetic seexuality, Byrne shows, is a product of choice, a deliberate strategy of self-creation as well as a mode of social communication.
Review
Romana Byrne’s philosophical, historical, and literary reflections on ‘aesthetic seexuality’, 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 seexual subjectivity in exhilarating ways.
Romana Byrne’s “Aesthetic Seexuality” provocatively reveals sadomasochism as a scandalous art of seexuality embedded within Western culture. Tracking the connections between sadomasochism and aesthetic philosophy, from Kant to Baudrillard, Byrne deftly negotiates the pleasures and paradoxes of seexuality on the surface – seex as a matter of practices, games, and fleeting intensities. The result subtly subverts the demand we speak our seexuality as truth, and offers the pleasure of seexuality as aesthetic self-creation.
“Aesthetic Seexuality” reads against the grain of standard readings of the “scientia seexualis” versus “ars erotica” distinction Foucault made famous in his” History of Seexuality.” From Sade to Nietzsche to contemporary fetish fashion, Byrne brilliantly uses the aesthetics of sadomasochism to reconceptualize seexuality itself. A tour de force!
