Playing Dirty is full of dirty jokes. Arguing that the early modern excremental body is in many ways an erotic body, Will Stockton--with humor and dry wit--reads psychoanalytic theory through early modern comedies, claiming that it is helpful, rather than inimical, to the project of historicizing the body.
Noting that psychoanalysis has traditionally operated in a paranoid framework that relentlessly produces evidence of the same "truths,"...