In Defense of Sex
Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire
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Examines the need to recenter the category of sex–theorizing sex itself as nonbinary–in contemporary studies of gender and sexuality
Gender has largely replaced sex as a category in critical theory, in progressive cultural circles, and in everyday bureaucratic language. Much of this development has been salutary. Gender has become a crucial site for theorizing trans identifications and embodiments. Yet, without a concomitant theory of sex, gender’s contemporary uses also intersect with late neoliberalism’s emphasis on micro-identities, flexibility, avatar culture, and human capital. Contemporary culture has also grown more ambivalent about sexual desire and its expression. Sex is seen as both ubiquitous and ubiquitously a problem.
In Defense of Sex theorizes sex as both a nonbinary form of embodiment (one that can complement recent trans conceptions of gender as multiple and nonbinary) and a crucial form of social desire. Drawing on intersex and trans theory as well as Marxist theory, feminist new materialism, psychoanalysis, and accounts of the flesh in Black studies, author Christopher Breu argues for a materialist understanding of embodiment and the workings of desire as they structure contemporary culture. Moving from critique to theorizing embodiment, desire, and forms of bioaccumulation, In Defense of Sex concludes by proposing the unabashedly utopian project of building a sexual and embodied commons.
In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire is available from Knowledge Unlatched on an open-access basis.
In Defense of Sex offers a novel, rigorous, creative, and timely intervention. By grounding his theoretical contribution in lived experience and connecting it to those of other multiply marginalized subjects and communities, Breu advances and intertwines scholarly and activist dialogues in vital new ways.—David A. Rubin, author of Intersex Matters: Biomedical Embodiment, Gender Regulation, and Transnational Activism
As gender categories fabulously expand and multiply, what does, what can, sex mean now? Departing from both sex negativity and the relative lack of attention to the category of sex, Breu articulates a new understanding of sex for the 21st century. Ambitiously intermingling several theoretical terrains, Breu forges a position that is nonbinary but also materialist, as he calls for relational collectivities, desire, flourishing, ecological “transspecies being,” and the creation of a transindividual, sexual, bodily commons. This is a bold, inventive, and theoretically capacious vision that grapples with emerging problematics of sex, gender, embodiment, justice, scale, transformation, wild visions, and more.—Stacy Alaimo, author of Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times
Preface: “This ain’t by design, girl” | xi
Introduction: Sex for the Twenty-First Century | 1
1 The Ascent of Gender and Decline of Sex | 39
2 Sex as Extimacy | 67
3 Bioaccumulation and the Dialectics of Embodiment | 101
4 The Sexual and Bodily Commons | 134
Epilogue: Following in the Steps of the Hermaphrodite | 173
Acknowledgments | 177
Notes | 181
Index | 205
