The bedtrick : tales of sex and masquerade
"The Bedtrick brings together hundreds of stories from all over the world, from the earliest recorded Hindu and Hebrew texts to the latest item in the Weekly World News, to show the hilariously convoluted sexual scrapes that people manage to get themselves into and out of. Here you will find wives who accidentally commit adultery with their own husbands. You will read Lincoln's truly terrible poem about a bedtrick. And you will learn that President Clinton was not the first man to be identified by an idiosyncratic organ."--Jacket
Comparative studies
xxxi, 598 pages ; 24 cm.
9780226156422, 9780226156439, 0226156427, 0226156435
43145698
Preface: Why a book about a bedtrick?
Introduction: Sex, text, and masquerade
How to commit adultery with your own spouse
Approach one: Philosophy, or love/sex = mind/body?
The rope of the false mother
Approach two: Psychology
Waking up in bed with an animal
Approach three: Zoology
The lovely/loathly lady
Approach four: Feminism, or Women are good to think with
The cuckolds of the heart
Approach five: Theology, or When God has lipstick on his collar
Designated hitters
Approach six: Law, or Loopholes in the penal code
Color, class, and clout
Approach seven: Weapons of the weak
Cross-cultural cross-dressing
Approach eight: Queer theory and the theater of deception
Incest
Approach nine: Sexual rhetoric
Real sex and fantastic sex
Approach ten: Structuralism
Conclusion: Carnal ignorance and carnal knowledge
Appendix: Bedtricks in Stith Thompson's Motif-index