Alien sex fiends the metaphoricity of sexuality in postmodernity

Abstract

This article analyses the depiction of sexuality in selected postmodern British novels, short stories and plays (by Martin Amis, Patrick McCabe, Hanif Kureishi, Will Self, Sarah Kane, and Mark Ravenhill) and related British and French films (especially Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy). It reads its fragmentation and destabilisation, which is frequently accompanied by violence and particularly pinpointed in the motif of terrorism, as a response to the insight proposed in theoretical writings such as Judith Butler's, that safe ontologies (like those postulating that sex leads to gender leads to normative heterosexuality) are no longer considered universally valid. However, the experience of loss that is the consequence of abandoning such ontologies is also viewed by these texts as unsettling and terrifying, which explains their paradoxical hovering between often gratuitous violence and a conservative rhetoric.