Eroticism

That quality may be found in any form of artwork, including painting, sculpture, photography, drama, film, music, or literature.

[2][3][4] Because the nature of what is erotic is fluid,[5] 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".

"[10] 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".

[17] This theme of intrusion or transgression was taken up in the twentieth century by the French philosopher Georges Bataille, who argued that eroticism performs a function of dissolving boundaries between human subjectivity and humanity, a transgression that dissolves the rational world but is always temporary,[18] as well as that, "Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo.

[31] Audre Lorde, a lesbian Caribbean-American writer and outspoken feminist, called the erotic a source of power specifically identified with the female, often corrupted or distorted by oppression, since it poses the challenge of change.