Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700-1820

Sex and the Floating World offers an entirely new assessment of the genre of Japanese paintings and prints known as shunga. Recent changes in Japanese law have at last enabled erotic images to be published without fear of prosecution, and many picture-books have since appeared in Japan. There has, however, been very little attempt to situate shunga imagery within the contexts of sexuality, gender, or the politics of power. Questions of aesthetics, and of whether shunga deserves a place in the canon of Japanese art history, have dominated, and the issue of how such images were used has been avoided. Timon Screech seeks to re-establish shunga in its proper historical contexts of culture and creativity. Shunga prints are unusual in that they are overtly about sex. Once we begin to examine them first and foremost as sexual aids, we must be prepared for some shocks. In Sex and the Floating World, the author takes us into the strange world of sexual fantasy in Edo-period Japan, investigating the tensions in class and gender experienced by those who made - and made use of - shunga.