Exploring Erotic Encounters: The Inescapable Entanglement of Tradition, Transcendence and Transgression (At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries, 93)

Erotic encounters have assumed a myriad of shapes and forms throughout the histories of the world and, at many stages of those histories, have been understood as possessing the potential to take us closer to some ultimate mode of being that the everyday, in all of its artless modesty, seems unable to do. In this volume, discussions of the erotic as an extraordinary part of the human condition, manifest in examples such as: exoticised voyages to faraway lands; the thrills of ancient combat; the escape and enchantment of eroticized performance; transgressive notions of the female jouissance; the delights of the sexual pursuits in the virtual domain; the political possibilities of stigmatized, queer pleasure; and perceptions of ‘fetishes’ which include relationships with inanimate beings. It would appear that what is required for these out-of-the-ordinary quests, are pointed actions – movements away from the monotony of life’s rhythms and outside the shelter of an otherwise predictable materiality. Contributors are Jon Braddy, John Dayton, Rita Dirks, John T. Grider, Billy Huff, Maciej Musiał, Naomi Stekelenburg, Dionne van Reenen and Tianyang Zhou.

John T. Grider, Ph.D. (2006), University of Colorado, Boulder, is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. He is also a Research Associate at the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State. Dionne van Reenen, MA (2013), DipMus AISTD (1992) University of Cape Town and University of the Free State, is a researcher and PhD candidate at the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State.