Expanding and Restricting the Erotic: A Critique of Current and Past Norms

The current erotic landscape is contradictory: While the West sees greater sexual and erotic freedom than ever, there is also a movement to restrict the behaviour of various sexual minorities. Expanding and Restricting the Erotic addresses the way in which the erotic has been constrained and freed, both historically and at present. Topics range from the troubling way in which the mainstream media represents the erotic, to the concept of friends with benefits. Other chapters explore female eroticism, from contemporary female hip hop artists to Latin American women seeking to express their eroticism in the midst of sexual repression. Medieval and Early Modern medical conceptions of the female body are explored, as are ancient Greek erotic practices. Finally, the controversial area of teenage girls’ erotic representation is analysed.

Besides pursuing a career in architecture, Lawrence Buttigieg (PhD, Loughborough University, UK) is also an artist and freelance researcher. His practice-led research, which takes the form of mixed-media, body-themed, box-assemblages, examines concepts of representation, alterity and selfhood. Buttigieg’s work may be viewed at www.aboutlawrence.eu.

Sophia Kanaouti (Ph.D., University of Wales, Cardiff) teaches for the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has published on social and political inequality and on media and politics in relation to political theorists such as Arendt and Castoriadis. A recent publication of hers by Brill is Psychologising Evil in the Media, in the collection Perspectives on Evil (2019).

Lily Martinez Evangelista (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) teaches translation at the Universidade de Brasília. She recently published a paper titled Hyper-Eroticism as a Source of Spiritual and Material Agency in Trilogía sucia de La Habana (2018).

Robert Scott Stewart (Ph.D., University of Waterloo, Canada) is a Professor of Philosophy at Cape Breton University (Canada). He has published widely and is a contributing editor of two books, Food For Thought (2012), and Talk About Sex (2013). He is also the co-author of Philosophizing About Sex (2015).