Feminine but Macho: Erotic Reshaping of the Self in Hanif Kureishiâs The Black Album

Ilaria Ricci

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Feminine but Macho: Erotic Reshaping of the Self in Hanif Kureishiâs The Black Album

In: Examining Aspects of Sexuality and the Self

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Ilaria Ricci

Ilaria Ricci
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 119â127

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848880207_011

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Hanif Kureishiâs second novel, The Black Album, freely portrays sexual behaviours such as pornographic affairs, casual sex under the effect of drugs, abstinence and masturbation highlighting the social as well as the private dimension of sexuality. This essay, focusing on the sexual relationship between Shahid Hasan and Deedee Osgood, attempts to demonstrate how Shahid comes to accept the fluid, mongrelised condition of both the self and the contemporary society he lives in through his own erotic reshaping. The Black Album, set in 1989 and named after a Prince album, draws parallels between Shahid and Prince, Deedee and Madonna. By scrutinising the furore around The Satanic Verses in the cultural context relating to these two icons of pop, Kureishi explores power, censorship and pornography and shows how attitudes to violence and to sex are not unrelated. While sexual deprivation, represented through the characters of the Muslim Brothers, can lead most repressed individuals to violence, pornography can be seen as a mode of playing with and thus subverting phallic power. Sexual role reversal is central to Shahid and Deedeeâs relationship. Untied to any sexual stereotypical role, they accept the eroticism involved in the wrestling for male and female power and lose the didacticism of gender politics. Deedee and Shahid become much more dynamic lovers. Sexual fantasy and political role reversal coexist. The sexual fantasy involves the same sort of gender-bending that Shahid admires in the persona of Prince. Putting women's makeup on and cross dressing as a woman are ludic experiments of reinvention of oneâs body, while sex on stage is transposed to the stage of life. London becomes a liminal space for transformative theatrical display where Shahid and Deedee can re-invent their bodies, their desires and their lust. It is through the power of a free, uninhibited, creative and fluid sexuality that Shahid finds his own identity and develops his talent as a writer.

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Examining Aspects of Sexuality and the Self

E-Book ISBN:: 9781848880207

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 29 Apr 2010

Subjects
- Social Sciences
  - Cultural Studies
  - Gender Studies

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Feminine but Macho: Erotic Reshaping of the Self in Hanif Kureishiâs The Black Album

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Examining Aspects of Sexuality and the Self

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Feminine but Macho: Erotic Reshaping of the Self in Hanif Kureishiâs The Black Album