Playing with Things

"Hundreds of dazzlingly beautiful, sexually explicit ceramic sculptures made by indigenous Moche artists in Peru over a thousand years ago constitute a large and important corpus of non-western art about sex. Nevertheless, the Moche sex pots remain largely unknown except to regional specialists, subject to a dual marginalization. In Pre-Columbian studies, sexuality remains marginalized and understudied; in sexuality studies, non-western art is largely absent, and "classical" Greece and Rome appear as modernity's only Other. This study of the Moche sex pots fills these lacunae from a new materialist perspective. Breaking with the iconographic tradition that has long dominated Pre-Columbian studies, this book does not consider the sex pots as representations of human and nonhuman bodies, but as actual ceramic bodies that interact with fleshly bodies, now and in the ancient past"--