(Dissident Pleasures)
Authors: Maria Elvia Dias Benitez and Carlos Eduardo Figari
ISBN-10 : 857617166X
ISBN-13 : 978-8576171669
Forbidden encounters, obscene narratives, forbidden sexual games, peripheral desires, and homoerotic sociabilities come together in this collection – organized by anthropologist Maria Elvira Diaz-Benitez and sociologist Carlos Figari – which, in 20 articles, offers analyses and reflections on topics such as BDSM (a practice that includes sadomasochism), bareback sex, pedophilia, incest, scatology, homoerotic sociabilities, prostitution, transvestilities, and pornography, among others, beyond the label of perversions. The authors attempt to interpret these practices objectively and to understand how they are organized, how they originated, and how they create sociabilities. The idea is to understand how people legitimize their practices. Here we encounter new configurations whose cultural production takes place across various sectors of the sexual cultural industry, websites, spaces of sociability, and literary narratives.
The presence of diverse themes regarding genders and transgressive sexual practices expresses the effervescence of a field rich in analysis in Latin America and the emergence of critical perspectives on theory and ethnographic practice by new anthropologists.
The book explores how it is possible to produce knowledge about sexual and erotic practices that challenge the political effects of repulsion. It also addresses the ways in which subjectivities and collective identities are constructed through alternative sexual practices, identifying their conditions of production, their transformations, and the discourses agents use to legitimize them.
Click here to read the review by Adriana Piscitelli (Unicamp).