In the latest issue of The Erotic Review, Lucy Roeber’s opening article ‘Sex, not Seggs’ introduces us to a new current within contemporary erotic writing, art, and imagination. Though it remains difficult for practitioners working in the ‘erotic’, or ‘adult’ space to survive online amid digital censorship from tech and social media giants, we are seeing an emergence of new directions in erotic writing that move beyond the heteronormative, centring the voices and perspectives of women, queer people, and all of those under- and often mis-represented in this space.
Room is being made for work that is more ambitious in its scope. Artists like Sissel Tolaas, covered in Extra Extra, explore sensory experiences of desire, namely, olfaction and the language of scent. Issue 26, like its predecessors, provides a wealth of perspectives, including writing on the relationship between the erotic and the grotesque with Olivia Laing, and filmmaking on female friendship, by Payal Kapadia.
Extra Extra is also a platform for erotic writing. Continuing on the magazine’s theme of “urban erotic encounters”, 106 Erotic Short Stories collects 106 short-form works from Dutch language writers translated into English. The stories use the erotic as a narrative technique that speaks to the way we live in cities, as “desire and imagination meet in stairwells, apartments, bars and glances that linger”. In this way, the erotic can move beyond the false binary of exploitation and censorship to situate our bodies and take up space. What really excites about the erotic is that it can be used to ask questions about the nature of desire itself. As Roeber emphasises, this is a moment for underrepresented voices to come to the fore and transform what it means to be sexual, to use the body, and to interact with others.
It is not only new work that is forming this shift. Publishers are also looking to historical works (recent and long past) to rethink their role in erotic expression. Winter Editions have newly released translations of Monique Wittig’s landmark work The Lesbian Body, featuring an introductory essay by Paul B Preciado, author of Dysphoria Mundi and Testo Junkie, to praise from Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam.
The Lesbian Body is an avant-garde work of theory-fiction dedicated to the construction of a new body. Wittig writes from the perspective of a negative ‘I’, throwing the notion of a coherent self into disarray. Meanwhile, descriptions of secretions and erotic violence shake the foundations of the body itself. It is a dizzying read that has been re-activated, no doubt ready to dismantle the institution of the heterosexual body as we know it today.
We are also excited to revisit the work of Marina Abramovic, with the release of On the Erotic, in which Abramovic theorises the force of the erotic as it has existed in her practice up to now. The erotic is presented as a creative essence that moves between the image, the symbol, pain, and performance.
At the same time, we can look back at the playful and the absurd side of erotic art. GrimRoar & S:.S.:C:. Books' Satan's Library collects and recontextualises scans of clandestine erotic paperbacks produced during the height of the 20th Century 'satanic panic'.
The 'erotic' is not limited to one single meaning. Yet, its categorisation means that works like Satan's Library share space with more pared-down and sensual approaches such as FORMA Editions' Impressions of Men, by Richard Kilroy... This is to say that the works presented here are radically different from each other, but broadly share a relationship to sexuality, categorisation, and moderation or censorship.
In this context, resisting censorship and the stable definition of the erotic does not mean permitting anything and everything. What it can mean, however, is making space for alternative perspectives and a critical exploration of desire, and what it means to us today.