Everyone wanted Madonna's 1992 album Erotica to be a scandal. Amidst a culture war, conservatives wanted it to prove the decline of family values. Gay men, hit by the AIDS epidemic, wanted to see it as a celebration of a sexual culture that had quickly disappeared. And Madonna wanted to sell scandal, which is why she released Erotica at the same time as the erotic thriller Body of Evidence and her pornographic book Sex.

However, Erotica is more emotional than pornographic. This ambiguity around sex makes the album crucial both for understanding its era and for navigating cultural shifts a generation later. As queer politics shifted from sexual liberation to political rights, such as same-sex marriage, Madonna sought to combine both. Her songs were foundational for the work of queer theory, which was emerging in academia alongside the album.

Erotica was - and is - central to the expanding awareness of cultural intimacy. In this book, Michael Dango examines Erotica and its legacy, drawing both from the intellectual traditions at the heart of today's hysteria over critical race theory and from his own experiences as a gay man who is too young to know the initial devastation of AIDS and too old to have grown up assuming he could marry. Madonna offered Erotica as a key in the cultural battle of the '90s. Her album speaks with even greater urgency to today's cultural battles.

Pages: 144, Year of Publication: 1102, Dimensions: 12.1x12.1cm