LAUSR

This book’s peculiar strategy reminded me of a weekend trip to Paris with my then-girlfriend. She wanted to free-flow and sit under the bridges talking to the homeless clochards. To me that made a lot of sense only if her interest was in French dialects, but she told me she was hoping for life lessons. I thought that the Comédie Francaise, the Paris Opera and the Louvre museum were more likely venues to find beauty and wisdom. In Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures, L.H. Stallings relies largely on novels about sex workers, especially in BDSM, lesbian pornography, or – more directly – on written autobiography and other writings by transgender prostitutes and strippers. Stallings defends her approach by claiming that