Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 1. Introduction | Aesthetic sexuality: a literary history of sadomasochism 2. Universal perversion and the laws of judgment: the Marquis de Sade 3. Brutal beauty: Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads and Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des supplices 4. Tragic self-shattering I: Nietzsche’s aesthetics 5. Tragic self-shattering II: delirious materialism in Bataille’s L’Érotisme and Histoire de l’œil 6. Tragic self-shattering III: mortifying metaphysics in Réage’s Histoire d’O and Berg’s L’image 7. Sadomasochism as anti-aesthetic theatre 8. Conclusion | Fashioning BDSM today Works Cited Index

Promotional Information

Maps the history of aesthetic sexuality and the way in which sexuality is constructed as a form of art and as a means of self-creation.

Promotional Information

Maps the history of aesthetic sexuality and the way in which sexuality is constructed as a form of art and as a means of self-creation.

About the Author

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.

Reviews

Romana Byrne’s 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 Byrne’s 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*