On Sexuality and Power

by Alan Sinfield

Overview

It is widely supposed that the most suitable partner will be someone very much like oneself; gay fiction and cinema are often organized around this assumption. Nonetheless, power differentials are remarkably persistent—as well as sexy. What are the personal and political implications of this insight?

Sinfield argues that hierarchies in interpersonal relations are continuous with the main power differentials of our social and political life (gender, class, age, and race); therefore it is not surprising that they govern our psychic lives. Recent writing enables an exploration of their positive potential, especially in fantasy, as well as their danger.

On Sexuality and Power focuses on the writing of the last thirty years, revisiting also Whitman, Wilde, Mann, Forster, and Genet, and reassessing the very idea of a gay canon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231508667
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	12/22/2004
Series:	Between Men-Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Alan Sinfield teaches in the English Department at Sussex University. He is the author of Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century and The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment, among other books. He lives in Brighton, UK.

Table of Contents

Taxonomies
Fantasy
Power
Gender
Age
Class
Race

What People are Saying About This

Lee Edelman

By means of the very taxonomic categories his new book so deftly deploys, Alan Sinfield succeeds in showing us that taxonomy can never comprehend sexuality. Instead, as this forceful account makes clear, sexualities inhabit the unstable differentials that emerge from and generate the fluxions of power, socially and psychically both. By refusing to retreat from the force of this insight, which it unpacks with great lucidity and intelligence, *On Sexuality and Power* makes a major contribution to the analysis of sexuality and politics.

— Lee Edelman, author of "Homographesis" and "No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive*"

Editorial Reviews

This interdisciplinary book makes a valuable contribution to gay studies...Essential.

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