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9780822355540

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When did celibacy become unfashionable? Why has queer studies colluded with its denigration? And what do the histories of celibacy, homosexuality, queerness, friendship, and the contemporary Asexuality Movement share? Benjamin Kahan's compassionate genealogy of an alternative modernism provides judicious answers to these questions, while theorizing celibacy's tenacious existence along the edge of the intelligible. Countering queer studies' infatuation with sex-as-visible-transgression and its willingness to cede abstinence's reformist energies to the political Right, Celibacies offers savvy inspiration for thinking sexuality without sex. --Valerie Traub, author of The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England

This original and long-needed book on modern celibacy as a distinctive kind of sexuality--as opposed to the lack or negation of sexuality, or symptom of the repression of sexuality--holds true to its promise to show us just how richly varied celibacy can be, and how vital it in fact was to United States and British modernism. As Benjamin Kahan shows through insightful readings of texts by Henry James, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Father Divine, and Andy Warhol, among others, modernist celibacies were secular as well as religious, collectivizing as well as individualizing, sensuous as well as ascetic; celibacies were also capable of being feminist, erotic, strategic, and episodic. Attentive to celibacy as both practice and identity, Celibacies will be indispensible reading for queer theory and modernist studies. --Sianne Ngai, author of Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting

Author Information

Benjamin Kahan is Assistant Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University.

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