Indeed, his latest novel, Cleanness, posits sex as central to life. But rarely has one done so as seriously as the novelist Garth Greenwell, who masterfully employs the art of explicit, empathetic description as a way of theorizing sex. This radical theory of sex would harness the power of nuanced attention in order to “identify, describe, explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual oppression.” In the decades since 1984, plenty of queer writers have taken up Rubin’s call. Such a theory would “build rich descriptions” of human sexuality, while acknowledging how certain histories and social norms shape-and sometimes maim-our sex lives. Rubin wanted “a radical theory of sex” that would pursue a nonjudgmental attentiveness to sex in all its forms. “The time has come to think about sex,” wrote Gayle Rubin, a pioneer of queer theory, in 1984.
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