Celibacies: American Modernism And Sexual Life [Paperback]

In this innovative study, Benjamin Kahan traces the elusive history of modern celibacy. Arguing that celibacy is a distinct sexuality with its own practices and pleasures, Kahan shows it to be much more than the renunciation of sex or a cover for homosexuality.Celibaciesfocuses on a diverse group of authors, social activists, and artists, spanning from the suffragettes to Henry James, and from the Harlem Renaissance's Father Divine to Andy Warhol. This array of figures reveals the many varieties of celibacy that have until now escaped scholars of literary modernism and sexuality. Ultimately, this book wrests the discussion of celibacy and sexual restraint away from social and religious conservatism, resituating celibacy within a history of political protest and artistic experimentation.Celibaciesoffers an entirely new perspective on this little-understood sexual identity and initiates a profound reconsideration of the nature and constitution of sexuality.

Arguing that celibacy is a distinct sexuality with its own practices and pleasures, Benjamin Kahan shows it to be much more than the renunciation of sex or a cover for homosexuality.

"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 U.S. 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, erotilÃ/