Editing Eroticism (section)

==Definitions==
Because the nature of what is erotic is fluid,<ref>Evans, David T., Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities, (New York: Routledge, 1993)</ref> early definitions of the term attempted to conceive eroticism as some form of sensual or romantic love or as the human sex drive ([[libido]]); for example, the ''Encyclopédie'' of 1755 states that the erotic "is an epithet which is applied to everything with a connection to the love of the sexes; one employs it particularly to characterize...a dissoluteness, an excess".<ref>''Encyclopédie'' (1755), quoted in Lynn Hunt ed., ''Eroticism and the Body Politic'' (London 1991) p. 90</ref> Libertine literature such as those by [[John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester]] evoked eroticism to the readers.{{How|date=November 2024}}<ref name="Mudge 2017 p. 8">{{cite book | last=Mudge | first=B.K. | title=The Cambridge Companion to Erotic Literature | publisher=Cambridge University Press | series=Cambridge Companions to Literature | year=2017 | isbn=978-1-107-18407-7 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=GB4xDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA8 | access-date=2023-05-11 | page=8}}</ref>

Because eroticism is wholly dependent on the viewer's culture and personal tastes pertaining to what, exactly, defines the erotic,<ref>Foster. Jeannette H., Sex Variant Women in Literature: A Historical and Quantitative Survey 2nd ed., (New York: Vantage Press, 1956) (repr. Baltimore: Diana Press, 1975)</ref><ref>Weinberg, M., & A. Bell, Homosexuality: An Annotated Bibliography, (New York: 1972)</ref> critics have often{{how often|date=June 2018}} confused eroticism with [[pornography]], with [[anti-pornography]] activist [[Andrea Dworkin]] saying, "Erotica is simply high-class pornography; better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer."<ref>{{cite book |title=Pornography: Men Possessing Women |last=Dworkin |first=Andrea |year=1981 |isbn=978-0-399-12619-2 |pages=39|publisher=Putnam }}</ref> This confusion, as [[Lynn Hunt]] writes, "demonstrate[s] the difficulty of drawing... a clear generic demarcation between the erotic and the pornographic": "the history of the separation of pornography from eroticism... remains to be written".<ref>Hunt, "Introduction", in Hunt ed., ''Eroticism'' p. 4</ref>

[[Audre Lorde]] recognises eroticism and pornography as “two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual”, defining the erotic as “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Lorde |first=Audre |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1006460992 |title=Your silence will not protect you |date=2017 |publisher=Silver Press |isbn=978-0-9957162-2-3 |location=UK |pages=22–25 |oclc=1006460992}}</ref> In her 1978 essay, ''Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power'', Lorde identifies the erotic as a source of creative power that is deeply rooted in a spiritual plane of unrecognised or unexpressed feeling and sensation.