Playing with Things

"Hundreds of dazzlingly beautiful, sexually explicit ceramic sculptures made by indigenous Moche artists in Peru over a thousand years ago constitute a large and important corpus of non-western art about sex. Nevertheless, the Moche sex pots remain largely unknown except to regional specialists, subject to a dual marginalization. In Pre-Columbian studies, sexuality remains marginalized and understudied; in sexuality studies, non-western art is largely absent, and "classical" Greece and Rome appear as modernity's only Other. This study of the Moche sex pots fills these lacunae from a new…