UC Riverside

“Reading for a Queer Sexual Ethics” examines how reading and writing queer erotic texts might help us construct a sexual politics capable of preventing harm and accommodating desire without succumbing to the white masculine fantasy of individualized, agential subjectivity. I pair nineteenth-century texts with contemporary queer erotic fanfiction, focusing on a specific sexual act or erotic dynamic within the paired texts. I examine anal fingering via Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and ipoiledi’s Captain America fanfiction, erotic submission via Victorian Spiritualist articles and memoirs and emungere’s BDSM-themed Hannibal fanfiction, and edging via greywash’s unfinished BBC Sherlock fanfiction. Each chapter considers a set of complications around sexuality and analyzes how written depictions of each sexual practice offer a structure through which one might grapple with how to ethically navigate these difficulties without falling back on oversimplified, undertheorized solutions.

Ultimately, “Reading for a Queer Sexual Ethics” argues that the process of preventing harm and accommodating desire within sexual intimacy requires continuing evaluations and reevaluations of specific situations and relationships: to strive for a robust, equitable sexual ethics, we must keep reading and writing our way through the difficulties presented by real-life situations. We must follow multiple trains of thought, succumb to digressions and diversions, retread old ground, and acknowledge that the urgent need for a queerer, more feminist, more antiracist, less ableist sexual politics will never be satisfied by reducing sex and power to simple and stable things. One way “Reading for a Queer Sexual Ethics” carries out its own argument is by playing a part in a larger project around sexual politics, which consists of a mystery novel about campus sexual politics and works of fanfiction that thematize consent, desire, and agency.