Present or absent shirts: creation of a lexicon of erotic intimacy and masculine mourning
Harper, Catherine (2018) Present or absent shirts: creation of a lexicon of erotic intimacy and masculine mourning. In: The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles. Bloomsbury, pp. 97-107.
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This chapter argues that it is cloth’s relationship with a body that renders it erotic: it is the touch of textile on skin (or its noted absence) that alerts, awakens, enervates and stimulates both the imagination and the physical entity. And by the same token, it is how bodies (again present or absent) stain, enliven or render static the fabric – of shirts, swaddling, sheets, shrouds, and the like – that creates the simultaneous mesmeric and repulsed erotic charge that this essay seeks. Using a range of cultural and historical references, the essay conjures a narrative that links cloth to the sensational and the internalized, to memory and mourning, the sacred and the sublime, and ultimately to the ritualized moments and mythologies of desire and death. Just as pins mend and protect, they pierce, prick and punish: so too, the erotic cloth is both ecstatic and agonized, abject and engorged, traumatized and tumescent.
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