This chapter uses contemporary Haitian fiction by feminist authors to explore the Haitian uses of the erotic. Emmelie Prophète’s Un ailleurs à soi (2018) and Kettly Mars’s Je suis vivant (2015) offer rich examples of how representations of same-sex desire map feminist geographies that foreground the relationship between the body, intimacy, and identity. I begin with a brief discussion of how representations of the erotic have evolved in Haitian literature, then continue with close readings of Prophète and Mars’s women-loving-women protagonists physical and verbal interactions. Guided by Caribbean feminist methodologies, I argue that these authors actively amplify the erotic as a source of freedom that can be powerfully ordinary and quietly mundane which is especially significant in the context of twenty-first-century literature.

Throughout the history of European colonization of the American continent, which continues today, European visitors and settlers have produced records of their encounters with Indigenous Peoples they regarded as nonheteronormative or queer. Native people have decried the ways such documentation lends itself to cultural misrepresentation and appropriation. In 1990, a group of LGBTIQ+ identified Native American and First Nations people coined the autonym Two-Spirit to insist on Indigenous Peoples’ sovereign rights of self-determination, self-definition, and self-naming. Contemporary Native communities use Two-Spirit as an umbrella term that references gender-expansive Indigenous traditions and identities that exceed colonial logics. This chapter focuses on Two-Spirit/queer Native authors who create literature by and for Two-Spirit people, thus representing the past, present, and imagined future of queer Indigeneity. Proposing that decolonization movements to reclaim queer(ed) Indigenous “gender” traditions and revitalize Indigenous languages are interrelated, this essay reads works by Two-Spirit authors who incorporate Indigenous languages into their writing.

This chapter meditates on how Black erotic bodies manifest in a white supremacist world. It contends that said bodies congeal through an amalgamation of fungible gender and material/discursive dispossession. These inheritances afford Black people the opportunity to conjure fugitive freedom practices, such as multiplicity, which enable Black people to harness erotic power in the pursuit of self-determined notions of pleasure and intimacy with themselves and within Black communities. To buttress my argument, I draw on the work of Akwaeke Emezi – namely, their debut novel Freshwater and an essay about their gender transition surgeries – and Audre Lorde’s classic essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” to illustrate how multiplicity is a freedom practiced undergirded by erotic power such that practitioners need not minimize or eliminate contradictory or complex aspects of themselves in order to access pleasure and intimacy along personal and interpersonal registers.

This essay discusses immediate, or “erotic,” aesthetic agency, the first of several stages of the figure of the aesthete in Either/Or. Erotic aesthetic agency consists in an almost naïve, all but nonpurposive pursuit of occasions to exercise the power to overwhelm the wills of others in one’s sheer desire of them, to incorporate them in one’s own terms by operation of simple impulse. The effect of this agency on others is to subject them to desire as such, that is, to desire as a force that binds them to the Don. But the ultimate aim of the agency is its existence: that it be. The conceptual structure of Kierkegaard’s understanding of this starting point in the aesthetic view of the world, as it is presented by a self-professed fictional aesthete, is explored with reference to the figure that organizes much of the portrayal of the erotic aesthete, Don Juan, as he appears in Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera Don Giovanni. Special attention is paid both to details of the opera as Kierkegaard would have experienced it and to the slippage between a reflective aesthete, A, imagining an unreflective aesthete, the Don, as an ideal.

Plato writes narrated (as distinct from dramatic) dialogues in his ‘middle’ period. Some are narrated throughout, others are introduced and sometimes interrupted by a dramatic frame dialogue, highlighting the fictiveness of the conversation being represented. In one group, Socrates himself narrates conversations he had with boys or teenagers or young men: Charmides, Lysis, Euthydemus. Here Plato pursues themes appropriate to the genre of ‘erotic’ dialogue, where narration can exhibit the comedy of interactions between his characters. Sometimes another speaker recounts a conversation in which Socrates participated: Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides (Theaetetus is an abortive further example; Protagoras, narrated by Socrates himself, has many affinities with Symposium). These three dialogues employ distancing mechanisms coupled with ostentatious but self-defeating claims of veracity and reliability, indicating remoteness from what Socrates himself in fact taught. Finally, I take up the suggestion that Plato sticks with the mode of narrated dialogue in Republic because he has by now developed theoretical scruples about the ethical propriety of direct dramatic representation.

This chapter critiques a tendency by masculine critics and writers in the 1980s toward binary framing that led to a misassignment of responsibility and misreading of Black women’s literary production.The framework reduces our capacity to read Black literature of this era through its intelligence about gender, to appreciate that Black literature in the 1980s might be read for its attention to and expansion of gender as a category for racial analysis. This chapter animates the gender-thinking in Black male writers’ representations of masculinity by collating the work of Essex Hemphill with that of Ernest J. Gaines. By pairing these two writers, the chapter exemplifies a gender study that refuses the simplistic rejection of Black women’s writing, and instead amplifies the legacy of Black feminist intersectional thought. This comparative reading moves away from pitting Black men against Black women, since to do so is to marginalize writers and their work. Furthermore, it rectifies the general exclusion of queer writers from the category “Black male writers,” akin to the canonical categorization of Black women’s writing that often includes queer women and scenes of queerness.

While the first two-thirds of the book focus on the immiserating aspects of bondage, this fourth part recognises its pleasures. Looking back to the trope of the slave or soldier of love in Roman elegy as a rejection of the values of Roman imperialism, this chapter shows how relations of domination, bondage and resistance have infused amorous lyric for two millennia. It examines another lacuna – the missing foot in elegiac distich – in relation to castration, and the effeminisation of the lyric speaker. In Ovid’s elegies the female beloved is momentarily the triumphator who drives her captive lover before her like a slave, before the domination of the female beloved by the male speaker is reasserted through sadistic violence. An examination of Marlowe’s prosody shows how he re-queers this speaker, intermingling militarism and eroticism, masculine heroism and effeminate otium, paradoxically challenging the authority of Augustan and Tudor sexual norms through failure.

This paper examines three different receptions of Plato’s Charmides – Oscar Wilde’s Charmides, Cavafy’s In a Town of Osroene, and Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades. It focuses on their responses to the erotic and philosophical element in the Charmides. Wilde provides an example of minimal textual engagement: the name Charmides is invoked solely for its connotations of young, male beauty. In Cavafy explicit allusion to ‘the Platonic Charmides’ recasts the poem an expression of homoerotic desire, and endows its group of young men with the prestige of a Platonic gathering and Platonic love. In contrast, Plutarch’s engagement with the Charmides is implicit, and depends entirely on the reader’s ability to recognise a series of detailed verbal echoes. Plutarch denies that Socrates’ motivation was sexual, and integrates allusion to the Charmides into a broader network of allusions to other passages in which Plato describes Socrates’ encounters with beautiful young men, or the ideal relationship of a mature man with a younger beloved, in which the sexual element is entirely absent. In so doing, Plutarch “corrects” Plato with Plato, and removes what had become an embarrassment in his period.

Cicero, Lucretius, and Catullus employ the comic adulescens to examine love as a physical and mental disorder. According to David Konstan, the traditional Roman line held that “amor was tolerated in a young man, but that it was but a transient seizure which would not corrupt the responsibility of a Roman citizen (i.e., of an aristocrat) toward his republic, his family and his dignity.” Cicero and Lucretius both toe this line, using the comic adulescens to drive wayward Roman youths back into the fold to perform according to the conservative norms of their respective communities. Catullus, by contrast, explores the character from the perspective not of one trying to cure another but of a person going through the experience of the lover and trying to make sense of his complex and contradictory thoughts. In trying to think not with the comic adulescens but as him, Catullus displays something altogether new for a member of the Roman elite: a sustained interest in the potential interiority of individuals from Roman comedy and how their staged experiences might be used to reflect on personal struggles.

The introduction situates the book in relation to academic and activist developments concerning same-sex cultures and intimacies in Africa at the turn of the century. Prominent among the key terms concepts it introduces, is the African feminist critique of the “ethnopornographic” colonial gaze on Black women’s sexual bodies and the queer destabilization of categories of sexual identity and its attending LGBT identity politics. The epistemological challenge of researching female same-sex desires from a queer postcolonial perspective, is illustrated through a discussion of the conflicting African and queer feminist representations of “women marriages,” a historical institution found in a variety of African societies. Considering the few anthropological references to female same-sex practices and to the historical practice of “friendship marriage” in colonial Ghana, it highlights the conceptual potential of friendship and kinship, as opposed to and alongside sexuality for an intersectional feminist analysis women’s erotic desires and intimacies.

Chapter 4 studies what have come to be known as Duras’s “erotic texts:” L’Homme assis dans le couloir (1980) and La Maladie de la mort (1982). In these brief but provocative works, Duras combines the lurid sensationalism of the tabloids with the transgressive philosophy and literature of writers such as Sade or Bataille. After a close reading of the intricate interplay between gender, violence, and erotics, this chapter argues that Duras takes advantage of these audacious texts as springboards to expose her own personal sexual scandals in the media and to make provocative public remarks about sexuality more broadly. She even goes so far as to deride homosexuality as a diminished form of desire as she attacks Roland Barthes, among others, in a series of unsettling homophobic remarks in the media.