Aesthetic Sexuality: A Literary History of Sadomasochism

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To understand why the concept of aesthetic sexuality is important, we must consider the influence of the first volume of Foucault's seminal The History of Sexuality. Arguing against Foucault's assertions that only scientia sexualis 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 sexuality'. To argue for the existence of aesthetic sexuality, Byrne examines mainly works of literature to show how, within these texts, sexual practice and pleasure are constructed as having aesthetic value, a quality that marks these experiences as forms of art. In aesthetic sexuality, value and meaning are located within sexual practice and pleasure rather than in their underlying cause; sexuality's raison d'tre is tied to its aesthetic value, at surface level rather than beneath it. Aesthetic sexuality, Byrne shows, is a product of choice, a deliberate strategy of self-creation as well as a mode of social communication.

Reviews

Romana Byrnes 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 Byrnes 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

Author Bio

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.