Description
Book SynopsisRepresenting Kink raises awareness about non-normative texts and non-normative erotic practices and desires. It defines kink broadly, encompassing a range of inappropriate texts and understanding it in frequent reference to non-normative erotic fantasies and experiences. Kink is treated as both a set of practices as well as a category of texts at the nexus of subject and form. In addition to canonical texts that take up erotic and marginalized themes, the collection also studies forms that are themselves fringe and feature kink: taboo literature, self-published erotica, SM narratives, fan fiction, role-playing games, and other disavowed texts. The purpose of this study is to focus attention on the margins of an already marginalized subject, in order to highlight the extent to which non-normative textuality and eroticism both shape and are shaped by culture and context. It sheds light on a category of subjects that is at once mainstream in the form of texts such as Fifty Shades of Grey
Trade ReviewThe chapters in this collection articulate some exceptionally important and profound ideas. The way the authors embrace their subjects as ‘kinked’ often leads to profound moments of recognition and realization, particularly when they focus on the most troubling sexually explicit material ... The wide scope of the volume overall is to be applauded, and demonstrates that kink studies must be open and inclusive, not merely restricted to tiresome analysis of heteronormative-tinged BDSM.
-- Jason D. Scott, Arizona State University
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Entering the Fringe
Sara K. Howe and Susan E. Cook
1. Playing Rough: Consent, Captivity, and Rape Role Play in Taboo Erotic Romances
Sara K. Howe
2. Violating the Vampire: Twihard Fan Fiction as Rape Fantasy
Jane M. Kubiesa
3. A Kink of One’s Own: Subversion, Disorientation, and the Feminine Voice in Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School
Fe Lorraine Reyes
4. Queer Beginnings: From Fanzines to Rule 34
Brian Watson and Bobby Derie
5. It’s a (Bound and Gagged) Living: Sweet Gwendoline and the “Danger Girl” Archetype
Sean Shannon
6. Kinking the Canon: Pornography and Prose in Fingersmith and The Handmaiden
Susan E. Cook
7. “To Test the Limits and Break Through”: How Femslash Rejects Straight-Coding of Queer Experiences in Disney’s Frozen
Whitney S. May
8. Breaking the Scales: Refusal, Excess, and the Fat Male Body in Supernatural and Harry Potter Fan Fiction
Jonathan A. Rose
9. “Roll for Seduction”: Sex as Forbidden Play in Critical Role and The Adventure Zone Fan Fiction
Josh Zimmerman and Antonnet Johnson
About the Editors
About the Contributors
Index
