#sex and death are connected in cohesion with the human spirit; the coordination of potentialities

[dearorpheus]

Do you have any writings abt sex and death, and how they're connected? Thanks if you decide to answer!

hiiiii yes♡ 

first and foremost is Bataille’s Erotism: Death and Sensuality which is expressly about this. everywhere you turn while researching this subject, Bataille will be mentioned. inclusive of this is a foray into religious eroticism/divine love/mysticism and elements of dissolution/continuity, violation and violence, aberration, so on... "There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image." (pdf)

also v central are Freud’s theories surrounding our competing Eros/Thanatos drives, in which (as a very reductive summation) “the death instinct pervades sexual activity”; Freud also touches on dissolution, displacement and 'higher order/form'—you can see here one of the many ways Freud influenced Bataille's theories/writings. ultimately we might agree that the drives, rather than competing, are irreparably intertwined. "Life is displaced death, and death is displaced life." -> I like this article about them, but the source material is his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (pdf) +if you're interested in this, you could further research in sexology, sexual ethics and phenomenology as regarding sexualities linked to death, namely necrophilia, lust murder/sexual homicide, asphyxiophilia (sexual arousal by oxygen deprivation/erotic asphyxiation) and autassassinophilia (sexual arousal from the idea/risk of legitimately—imperatively, not in a fantasy-sense—being killed)

speaking of necrophilia (from Howard Barker’s afterword for Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance):

the last two sentences accordant with the modern usage of la petite mort in which the sensation of orgasm is likened to death. literature which comes to mind: M.G. Lewis’ The Monk*, Gabrielle Wittkop’s Le Necrophile, Angela Carter’s “The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love” as published in The Bloody Chamber, Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse, some of Baudelaire’s poetry...

then getting into more periphery stuff, there’s a lot of theory on the corpse and its sexuality (touched on above) + fetishisation. some theories have to do with executions, others with the sexual aspects of ritual sacrifice, as below in Death Comes To The Maiden: Sex and Execution 1431-1933 by Camille Naish:

more on the former in Julia Kristeva’s The Severed Head: Capital Visions and Nicole Loraux’s Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman

also the eroticisation of the medical venus—for this i heartily recommend Joanna Ebenstein’s The Anatomical Venus which is an absolutely fucking stunning artwork of a book to caress and coo over and cradle as you would a baby and which has a chapter dedicated to ‘Ecstasy, Fetishism and Doll Worship’ that delves into this (and religious eroticism, ne'er shall these subjects be pried apart for individual study it seems, not that i’m complaining)

+supplementary readings into our corpse-like beauty standards, with the heroin chic of the 90s (which has perhaps insidiously returned?) but esp in terms of the consumptive beauty ideals of the fin de siècle x, x etc etc. pervasive and perverted when beauty—an engine of evolution/a vehicle for sexual selection—becomes dictated by icons of illness

other haphazard things which come to mind: Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae (tw for terf rhetoric); Angela Carter’s Sadeian Woman; cause-and-effect death by sex horror trope/generic imperative of post Halloween/‘78 slasher film; death and the maiden trope ofc which is often highly sexualised

*there is a v good essay on this called “Between Life and Death: Representing Necrophilia, Medicine, and the Figure of the Intercessor in M.G. Lewis's The Monk” by Laura Miller