Playing with Things: Engaging the Moche Sex Pots

Mary Weismantel's book Playing with Things explores the enigmatic Moche "sex pots" created by Indigenous Moche artists in Peru over a thousand years ago. She argues that these artifacts are not just inert objects from a long-dead past but vibrant Indigenous things that interact with fleshly bodies. Using a decolonial approach and breaking with long-dominant iconographic traditions, the book explores how the pots play jokes, make babies, give power, and hold water, considering them as actual ceramic bodies that interact with fleshly bodies.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 17 August 2021
Publisher: University of Texas Press

More than a thousand years ago, on the northern coast of Peru, Indigenous Moche artists created a vast and significant corpus of sexually explicit ceramic works of art. They depicted a wide range of sex organs and sex acts, as well as a variety of solitary and interconnected human and nonhuman bodies. To the modern eye, these Moche "sex pots," as Mary Weismantel refers to them, are lively and provocative, but also enigmatic creations whose significance to their original owners remains difficult to comprehend. In Playing with Things, Weismantel demonstrates that there is much to be learned from these ancient artifacts, not merely as inert objects from a long-dead past, but as vibrant Indigenous things, alive in their own inhuman temporality. From a new materialist perspective, she fills the gaps left by other analyses of the sex pots in pre-Columbian studies, where sexuality remains marginalized, and in sexuality studies, where non-Western art is largely absent. Taking a decolonial approach to an archaeology of sexuality and breaking with long-dominant iconographic traditions, this book explores how the pots play jokes, make babies, give power, and hold water, considering the sex pots as actual ceramic bodies that interact with fleshy bodies, both now and in the ancient past. A beautifully written study that will be welcomed by students as well as specialists, Playing with Things is a model for archaeological and art historical engagement with the liberating power of queer theory and Indigenous studies.

Weight: 456g
Dimension: 153 x 229 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781477323212