ABSTRACT
Within the context of Ukrainian postindependence erotomaniac production, the Introduction focuses on the eruption and incorporation of sexually explicit iconography into diverse popular cultural forms. These have become the venue for bringing sexual scenarios into the public sphere. They include public and parliamentary “morality” debates, the aggressive sexualization of print and Internet media, representations of sexed bodies in film and visual art, and the interface between Internet pornography and socialist realism, the artistic method inherited from the USSR. Contextualizing contemporary erotomaniac fictions within the oeuvre of the Ukrainian “Executed Renaissance” of the 1920s, the Introduction charts the ways in which the book explores a new economy and politics of desire forged by multifaceted regimes of explicit sexual representations, whose authors range, according to critical assessments of their work, from “high-caliber” to “popular” literature.
