Exquisite Corpse – serie

Uncut explores the significance of the foreskin in contemporary cultureUncut: A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the foreskin and its position in contemporary Anglo-American culture. From language to art, from religion to medicine and public health, Uncut is a provocative book that asks us to ask ourselves what we know and don’t know about this seemingly small piece of skin.The “uncut” penis is viewed by some as attractive or erotic, and by others as ugly or undesirable. Secular parents of male infants worry about whether or not the foreskin should be removed so their little boy can grow up to “look like dad” or to avoid imagined bullying in the locker room. Medical experts and public health organizations argue back and forth about whether circumcision is medically necessary, while “intactivists” advocate that removing an infant’s foreskin without their consent is mutilation.Drawing on all these threads, Jonathan A. Allan leads us through the history and cultural construction of the foreskin—from Michelangelo’s David to parenting manuals, from nineteenth-century panic over masturbation to foreskin restoration—to ultimately ask: what is the future of the foreskin?

Revealing how sex and contagion have become uneasy yet inseparable bedfellows.  In an era defined by pandemics, our perceptions of sexuality are deeply intertwined with fears and fantasies of disease, transmission, and safety. Little Deaths navigates the shifting terrain of sex and sexuality in these perilous times, examining the political and psychological life of the body.

Revealing how sex and contagion have become uneasy yet inseparable bedfellows.  In an era defined by pandemics, our perceptions of sexuality are deeply intertwined with fears and fantasies of disease, transmission, and safety. Little Deaths navigates the shifting terrain of sex and sexuality in these perilous times, examining the political and psychological life of the body.

Holes command attention. They make us giggle, squirm, and wonder. But what do they really mean to us and why are they so often surrounded by surprising discourses of power and control? For millennia, the figure of the hole stood as the cornerstone for idioms and expressions that denote emptiness, lack, absences, and voids. Approaching a hole makes one wary of imbalance or depravation. A hole demands to be filled. This Book Is Full of Holes challenges these hollow associations, offering instead a range of unexpected (and provocative) religious, sociosexual, philosophical, and scientific discourses.Through an analysis of a wide range of literary and cultural objects, yasser elhariry brings disparate discursive spheres into conversation. He nimbly juxtaposes the holey relationships between ancient Hebrew riddles and Hollywood space movies, ’90s grunge and Black astrophysics, Swiss cheese and philosophy, sacred ritual and postcolonial feminism.Satirical, dead serious, and deeply personal, elhariry’s treatise on this seemingly dead-end object—holes—illuminates the paradox that they nonetheless maintain a persistent hold on the imagination. His stylish analysis reveals their overlooked racialized, gendered, homophobic, and corporeal histories. Holes have been weaponized. This Book Is Full of Holes disarms.

Holes command attention. They make us giggle, squirm, and wonder. But what do they really mean to us and why are they so often surrounded by surprising discourses of power and control? For millennia, the figure of the hole stood as the cornerstone for idioms and expressions that denote emptiness, lack, absences, and voids. Approaching a hole makes one wary of imbalance or depravation. A hole demands to be filled. This Book Is Full of Holes challenges these hollow associations, offering instead a range of unexpected (and provocative) religious, sociosexual, philosophical, and scientific discourses.Through an analysis of a wide range of literary and cultural objects, yasser elhariry brings disparate discursive spheres into conversation. He nimbly juxtaposes the holey relationships between ancient Hebrew riddles and Hollywood space movies, ’90s grunge and Black astrophysics, Swiss cheese and philosophy, sacred ritual and postcolonial feminism.Satirical, dead serious, and deeply personal, elhariry’s treatise on this seemingly dead-end object—holes—illuminates the paradox that they nonetheless maintain a persistent hold on the imagination. His stylish analysis reveals their overlooked racialized, gendered, homophobic, and corporeal histories. Holes have been weaponized. This Book Is Full of Holes disarms.

'A serious work of theory.'The Guardian‘Jonathan Allan has come up with a whole theory of the arsehole.’Dazed and ConfusedIn a resolute deviation from the governing totality of the phallus, Reading from Behind offers a radical reorientation of the anus and its role in the collective imaginary.It exposes what is deeply hidden in our cultural production, and challenges the authority of paranoid, critical thought.A beautiful work that invites us beyond the rejection of phallocentricism, to a new way of being and thinking about sex, culture and identity.

Virginity is of concern here, that is its utter messiness. At once valuable and detrimental, normative and deviant, undesirable and enviable. Virginity and its loss hold tremendous cultural significance. For many, female virginity is still a universally accepted condition, something that is somehow bound to the hymen, whereas male virginity is almost as elusive as the G-spot: we know it's there, it’s just we have a harder time finding it.Of course boys are virgins, queers are virgins, some people reclaim their virginities, and others reject virginity from the get go. So what if we agree to forget the hymen all together? Might we start to see the instability of terms like untouched, pure, or innocent? Might we question the act of sex, the very notion of relational sexuality? After all, for many people it is the sexual acts they don’t do, or don’t want to do, that carry the most abundant emotional clout.Virgin Envy is a collection of essays that look past the vestal virgins and beyond Joan of Arc. From medieval to present-day literature, the output of HBO, Bollywood, and the films of Abdellah Taïa or Derek Jarman to the virginity testing of politically active women in Tahrir Square, the writers here explore the concept of virginity in today’s world to show that ultimately virginity is a site around which our most basic beliefs about sexuality are confronted, and from which we can come to understand some of our most basic anxieties, paranoias, fears, and desires.