"Erotics in Culture is both timely and at odds with these times. In an age of cancel cultures that continually repress the force of the erotic, this is a brave, and intellectually acute, intervention. It engages, cohesively and combatively, a basket of disciplines: sexuality studies, literature, cinema and other arts, feminist and queer studies, animal studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy, religion. And, compellingly, it seeks no settled answers. Deploying the erotic as subject, object and method—throwing up multiple connections and cross-connections—it seeks, rather, to unsettle. What better work can the erotic do?"

—Brinda Bose Professor, Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University

"The lush and luxurious anthology shows that the current complexities of imaginative eroticism go right into the bottomless depths of creaturely risk-taking, opening up the psychosomatic nature of relational transformations and the bawdy, humorous, perverse and abject ways of living and sharing free, unsettling and uninhabited lives. May this volume be a trumpet call for the revival of serious playfulness and shining freedom in our lives and deaths, standing up resolutely against the moral parasites of the world."

—Prasanta Chakravarty Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi & Editor, humanitiesunderground.org

What might the erotic reveal about the cultures that give it expression, negotiate its pleasures, and delimit its possibilities? Erotics of Culture explores the intricate relations between sexuality, embodiment, representation, and cultural authority across literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, cinema, performance, and digital media. Attentive to the interplay of bodily experience, fantasy, and cultural practices, the volume considers how erotic subjectivities and intimacies take shape, and what its tensions and ambiguities reveal about the historically contingent ways in which bodies and desires are understood, represented, and regulated.

Rishiraj Pal is Assistant Professor of English at the Centre for Distance and Online Education, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata.

Sarmila Paul is Assistant Professor of English at Rani Birla Girls’ College, affiliated to the University of Calcutta.