Posing Sex - Toward a Perceptual Ethics for Literary and Visual Art

Posing Sex: Toward a Perceptual Ethics for Literary and Visual Artviews the long and provocative tradition of representing the sexual act in Western art as an occasion for challenging assumptions about personhood.

It is uncontroversial that what Singer dubs the "sex image," the artist''s posing of human figures in the act of coitus, is an enduring compositional armature for artists from antiquity to the present. Singer, however, makes the quite controversial claim that this aesthetic practice, in literature and painting especially, serves as a powerful m-er for exploring how the mind is continuous with the sensuously lively body rather than its rationalistic antagonist. Singer draws upon a rich philosophical tradition-from the Greek Stoics, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hegel to contemporary theorists of perception and aesthetic agency-to show how the stakes of aesthetic experience epitomized in the sex image are essentially ethical. Referencing a broad range of image