Sex Objects: Art And The Dialectics Of Desire

Description

The declaration that a work of art is "about sex" is often announced to the public as a scandal after which there is nothing else to say about the work or the artist-controversy concludes a conversation when instead it should begin a new one. Moving beyond debates about pornography and censorship, Jennifer Doyle shows us that sex in art is as diverse as sex in everyday life: exciting, ordinary, emotional, traumatic, embarrassing, funny, even profoundly boring. Sex Objects examines the reception and frequent misunderstanding of highly sexualized images, words, and performances.

Jennifer Doyle is associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is coeditor, with Jonathan Flatley and Jose Esteban Munoz, of Pop Out: Queer Warhol.

"Like a brassy fag hag crashing a gay sex party, Jennifer Doyle mixes it up here with a queer lot. Whether she's just watching or actively participating, whether turned on or bored, thinking or crying, or most likely all of these at once, Doyle shows how crucial a queer feminist perspective is to understanding the erotics of art." - Douglas Crimp, University of Rochester, author of Melancholia and Moralism"