B. Diane Lipsett
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199754519
- eISBN:
- 9780199827213
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199754519.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Early Christian Studies
Self-restraint or self-mastery may appear to be the opposite of erotic desire. But in three ancient tales of conversion—The Shepherd of Hermas, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, and Joseph and Aseneth—the ...
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Self-restraint or self-mastery may appear to be the opposite of erotic desire. But in three ancient tales of conversion—The Shepherd of Hermas, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, and Joseph and Aseneth—the interplay of desire and self-restraint is complex and dynamic, as careful literary analysis shows. This study treats conversion—the marked change in a protagonist’s piety and identity—as in part an effect of story, a function of narrative textures, coherence, and closure. Readings of the three narratives gain nuance through appeals to varied theorists of desire, self-formation, and narrative, including Foucault, psychoanalytic theorists, and the ancient literary critic Longinus. Well grounded in scholarship on Hermas, Thecla, and Aseneth, the closely paced readings sharpen attention to each story, while also advancing discussions of ancient views of the self; of desire, masculinity, and virginity; of the cultural codes around marriage and continence; and of the textual energetics of conversion tales.Less
Self-restraint or self-mastery may appear to be the opposite of erotic desire. But in three ancient tales of conversion—The Shepherd of Hermas, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, and Joseph and Aseneth—the interplay of desire and self-restraint is complex and dynamic, as careful literary analysis shows. This study treats conversion—the marked change in a protagonist’s piety and identity—as in part an effect of story, a function of narrative textures, coherence, and closure. Readings of the three narratives gain nuance through appeals to varied theorists of desire, self-formation, and narrative, including Foucault, psychoanalytic theorists, and the ancient literary critic Longinus. Well grounded in scholarship on Hermas, Thecla, and Aseneth, the closely paced readings sharpen attention to each story, while also advancing discussions of ancient views of the self; of desire, masculinity, and virginity; of the cultural codes around marriage and continence; and of the textual energetics of conversion tales.
Gillian Knoll
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474428521
- eISBN:
- 9781474481175
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474428521.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare explores the role of the mind in creating erotic experience on the early modern stage. To “conceive” desire is to acknowledge the generative potential of the ...
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Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare explores the role of the mind in creating erotic experience on the early modern stage. To “conceive” desire is to acknowledge the generative potential of the erotic imagination, its capacity to impart form and make meaning out of the most elusive experiences. Drawing from cognitive and philosophical approaches, this book advances a new methodology for analysing how early modern plays dramatize inward erotic experience.
Grounded in cognitive theories about the metaphorical nature of thought, Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare traces the contours of three conceptual metaphors—motion, space, and creativity—that shape erotic desire in plays by John Lyly and William Shakespeare. Although Lyly and Shakespeare wrote for different types of theatres and only partially-overlapping audiences, both dramatists created characters who speak erotic language at considerable length and in extraordinary depth. Their metaphors do more than merely narrate or express eros; they constitute characters’ erotic experiences.
Each of the book’s three sections explores a fundamental conceptual metaphor, first its philosophical underpinnings and then its capacity for dramatizing erotic experience in Lyly’s and Shakespeare’s plays. Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare provides a literary and linguistic analysis of metaphor that credits the role of cognition in the experience of erotic desire, even of pleasure itself.Less
Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare explores the role of the mind in creating erotic experience on the early modern stage. To “conceive” desire is to acknowledge the generative potential of the erotic imagination, its capacity to impart form and make meaning out of the most elusive experiences. Drawing from cognitive and philosophical approaches, this book advances a new methodology for analysing how early modern plays dramatize inward erotic experience.
Grounded in cognitive theories about the metaphorical nature of thought, Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare traces the contours of three conceptual metaphors—motion, space, and creativity—that shape erotic desire in plays by John Lyly and William Shakespeare. Although Lyly and Shakespeare wrote for different types of theatres and only partially-overlapping audiences, both dramatists created characters who speak erotic language at considerable length and in extraordinary depth. Their metaphors do more than merely narrate or express eros; they constitute characters’ erotic experiences.
Each of the book’s three sections explores a fundamental conceptual metaphor, first its philosophical underpinnings and then its capacity for dramatizing erotic experience in Lyly’s and Shakespeare’s plays. Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare provides a literary and linguistic analysis of metaphor that credits the role of cognition in the experience of erotic desire, even of pleasure itself.
Frida Beckman (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748642618
- eISBN:
- 9780748671755
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748642618.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
For Deleuze, sexuality is a force that can capture as well as liberate life. Its flows tend to be repressed and contained in specific forms while at the same time they retain revolutionary potential. ...
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For Deleuze, sexuality is a force that can capture as well as liberate life. Its flows tend to be repressed and contained in specific forms while at the same time they retain revolutionary potential. There is immense power in the thousand sexes of desiring-machines, and sexuality is seen as a source of becoming. This book gathers prominent Deleuze scholars to explore the restricting and liberating forces of sexuality in relation to a spread of central themes in Deleuze's philosophy, including politics, psychoanalysis and friendship as well as specific topics such as the body-machine, disability, feminism and erotics.Less
For Deleuze, sexuality is a force that can capture as well as liberate life. Its flows tend to be repressed and contained in specific forms while at the same time they retain revolutionary potential. There is immense power in the thousand sexes of desiring-machines, and sexuality is seen as a source of becoming. This book gathers prominent Deleuze scholars to explore the restricting and liberating forces of sexuality in relation to a spread of central themes in Deleuze's philosophy, including politics, psychoanalysis and friendship as well as specific topics such as the body-machine, disability, feminism and erotics.
Joanne Begiato
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526128577
- eISBN:
- 9781526152046
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526128584
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Manliness in Britain offers a new account of masculinity in the long nineteenth century: more corporeal and material, more emotional, more cross-class, and less heteronormative than other studies. ...
More
Manliness in Britain offers a new account of masculinity in the long nineteenth century: more corporeal and material, more emotional, more cross-class, and less heteronormative than other studies. Using diverse textual, visual, and material culture sources, it shows that masculinities were produced and disseminated through men’s bodies, very often working-class ones, and the emotions and material culture associated with them. It analyses idealised men who stimulated desire and admiration, including virile boxers, soldiers, sailors, and blacksmiths, brave firemen, and noble industrial workers. Also investigated are unmanly men, like drunkards, wife-beaters, and masturbators who elicited disgust and aversion.
The book disrupts the chronology of nineteenth-century masculinities, since it stretches from the ages of feeling, revolution, and reform, to those of militarism, imperialism, representative democracy, and mass media. It also queers these histories, by recognising that male and female desire for idealised male bodies and the gender attributes they embodied was integral to the success of manliness. Imagined working-class men and their materiality was central to broader ideas of manliness and unmanliness. They not only offered didactic lessons for the working classes and made the labouring ranks appear less threatening, they provide insights into the production of middle-class men’s identities.
Overall, it is shown that this melding of bodies, emotions, and material culture created emotionalised bodies and objects, which facilitated the conveying, reproducing, and fixing of manliness in society. As such, the book will be vital for students and academics in the history of bodies, emotions, gender, and material culture. (248 words)Less
Manliness in Britain offers a new account of masculinity in the long nineteenth century: more corporeal and material, more emotional, more cross-class, and less heteronormative than other studies. Using diverse textual, visual, and material culture sources, it shows that masculinities were produced and disseminated through men’s bodies, very often working-class ones, and the emotions and material culture associated with them. It analyses idealised men who stimulated desire and admiration, including virile boxers, soldiers, sailors, and blacksmiths, brave firemen, and noble industrial workers. Also investigated are unmanly men, like drunkards, wife-beaters, and masturbators who elicited disgust and aversion.
The book disrupts the chronology of nineteenth-century masculinities, since it stretches from the ages of feeling, revolution, and reform, to those of militarism, imperialism, representative democracy, and mass media. It also queers these histories, by recognising that male and female desire for idealised male bodies and the gender attributes they embodied was integral to the success of manliness. Imagined working-class men and their materiality was central to broader ideas of manliness and unmanliness. They not only offered didactic lessons for the working classes and made the labouring ranks appear less threatening, they provide insights into the production of middle-class men’s identities.
Overall, it is shown that this melding of bodies, emotions, and material culture created emotionalised bodies and objects, which facilitated the conveying, reproducing, and fixing of manliness in society. As such, the book will be vital for students and academics in the history of bodies, emotions, gender, and material culture. (248 words)
Gul Ozyegin
- Published in print:
- 1937
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814762349
- eISBN:
- 9780814762356
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814762349.003.0003
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
In stark contrast with their fathers, the young men whose narratives make up this chapter long for identities based on self-expansion and personal enrichment. Mirroring Turkish society's pivot away ...
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In stark contrast with their fathers, the young men whose narratives make up this chapter long for identities based on self-expansion and personal enrichment. Mirroring Turkish society's pivot away from state-based paternalism, these young men see themselves as embarking on projects of "entrepreneurship of the self" where old ideals of paternal selflessness are replaced by new ideals of individualism, ambition, and pleasure seeking. As these men reject the traditional modes of masculinity modeled by their fathers, they explicitly seek new types of affective relationships with "selfish" women who break from the traditional models of female selflessness. Yet even as these men seek recognition and support for their own self-making from women who are equally ambitious and independent, they cannot completely repudiate the maternal model, longing at the same time for "positive," "selfless" girls who subordinate their desires to the needs of the relationship. The tension of this paradox is felt most acutely by men from conservative and rural family backgrounds whose new identities as upwardly mobile high-achievers necessitate recognition from equally high-achieving women, but who are unable or unwilling to completely relinquish their need for male dominance and control in order to make such relationships successful.Less
In stark contrast with their fathers, the young men whose narratives make up this chapter long for identities based on self-expansion and personal enrichment. Mirroring Turkish society's pivot away from state-based paternalism, these young men see themselves as embarking on projects of "entrepreneurship of the self" where old ideals of paternal selflessness are replaced by new ideals of individualism, ambition, and pleasure seeking. As these men reject the traditional modes of masculinity modeled by their fathers, they explicitly seek new types of affective relationships with "selfish" women who break from the traditional models of female selflessness. Yet even as these men seek recognition and support for their own self-making from women who are equally ambitious and independent, they cannot completely repudiate the maternal model, longing at the same time for "positive," "selfless" girls who subordinate their desires to the needs of the relationship. The tension of this paradox is felt most acutely by men from conservative and rural family backgrounds whose new identities as upwardly mobile high-achievers necessitate recognition from equally high-achieving women, but who are unable or unwilling to completely relinquish their need for male dominance and control in order to make such relationships successful.
Petula Sik Ying Ho and A. Ka Tat Tsang
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9789888139156
- eISBN:
- 9789882209756
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888139156.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
The anthology provides an exemplary methodological model of community-based research through the authors’ studies on sexual and erotic attitudes and practices of gay men and middle-aged women in Hong ...
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The anthology provides an exemplary methodological model of community-based research through the authors’ studies on sexual and erotic attitudes and practices of gay men and middle-aged women in Hong Kong over the last fifteen years. This collection focuses on issues that have major scholastic contribution to the field, namely, the voices of women on issues of sex and desire, and the investigation of multiple sex relationships among Hong Kong men and women. It also addresses clinical psychological issues and sex education topics that serve to enrich the current state of sexuality studies. The book reveals the social changes, trends, movements, and processes in Hong Kong and across China, thereby highlighting the reality of coloniality and how our experience of desire/sexuality is conditioned by broad, global and socio-political forces.Less
The anthology provides an exemplary methodological model of community-based research through the authors’ studies on sexual and erotic attitudes and practices of gay men and middle-aged women in Hong Kong over the last fifteen years. This collection focuses on issues that have major scholastic contribution to the field, namely, the voices of women on issues of sex and desire, and the investigation of multiple sex relationships among Hong Kong men and women. It also addresses clinical psychological issues and sex education topics that serve to enrich the current state of sexuality studies. The book reveals the social changes, trends, movements, and processes in Hong Kong and across China, thereby highlighting the reality of coloniality and how our experience of desire/sexuality is conditioned by broad, global and socio-political forces.
Deborah Martin
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719090349
- eISBN:
- 9781526109606
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719090349.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Since the release of her debut feature, La ciénaga, in 2001, Argentine director Lucrecia Martel has gained worldwide recognition for her richly allusive, elliptical and sensorial film-making. The ...
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Since the release of her debut feature, La ciénaga, in 2001, Argentine director Lucrecia Martel has gained worldwide recognition for her richly allusive, elliptical and sensorial film-making. The first monograph on her work, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel analyses her three feature films, which also include La niña santa (2004) and La mujer sin cabeza (2008), alongside the unstudied short films Nueva Argirópolis (2010), Pescados (2010) and Muta (2011). It examines the place of Martel’s work within the experimental turn taken by Argentine cinema in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a trend of which Martel is often described as a major player, yet also explores correspondences between her work and other national and global filmmaking trends, including the horror genre, and classic Hollywood. It brings together the rich and diverse critical approaches which have been taken in the analysis of Martel’s work – including feminist and queer approaches, political readings and phenomenology – and proposes new ways of understanding her films, in particular through their figuring of desire as revolutionary, their use of the child’s perspective, and their address to the senses and perception, which it argues serve to renew cinematic language and thought.Less
Since the release of her debut feature, La ciénaga, in 2001, Argentine director Lucrecia Martel has gained worldwide recognition for her richly allusive, elliptical and sensorial film-making. The first monograph on her work, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel analyses her three feature films, which also include La niña santa (2004) and La mujer sin cabeza (2008), alongside the unstudied short films Nueva Argirópolis (2010), Pescados (2010) and Muta (2011). It examines the place of Martel’s work within the experimental turn taken by Argentine cinema in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a trend of which Martel is often described as a major player, yet also explores correspondences between her work and other national and global filmmaking trends, including the horror genre, and classic Hollywood. It brings together the rich and diverse critical approaches which have been taken in the analysis of Martel’s work – including feminist and queer approaches, political readings and phenomenology – and proposes new ways of understanding her films, in particular through their figuring of desire as revolutionary, their use of the child’s perspective, and their address to the senses and perception, which it argues serve to renew cinematic language and thought.
Frida Beckman
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748645923
- eISBN:
- 9780748689170
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748645923.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
Mapping both historical and contemporary configurations of the sexual body along with its functions and sensations, this book identifies disabling conceptions and constructions of pleasure while also ...
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Mapping both historical and contemporary configurations of the sexual body along with its functions and sensations, this book identifies disabling conceptions and constructions of pleasure while also searching for the possibility of claiming sexual pleasure as a constructive and politically enabling notion today. In the face of the way in which Deleuze’s theory of desire builds on a rejection of the usefulness of pleasure, this book works to construct a Deleuzian theory of sexuality that is inclusive of pleasure. Intervening into contemporary fields of research including posthumanist-, disability-, animal-, and feminist studies as well as into current critiques of capitalism and consumerism, Between Desire and Pleasure works to contribute to cultural, conceptual, and political debates about sexuality.Less
Mapping both historical and contemporary configurations of the sexual body along with its functions and sensations, this book identifies disabling conceptions and constructions of pleasure while also searching for the possibility of claiming sexual pleasure as a constructive and politically enabling notion today. In the face of the way in which Deleuze’s theory of desire builds on a rejection of the usefulness of pleasure, this book works to construct a Deleuzian theory of sexuality that is inclusive of pleasure. Intervening into contemporary fields of research including posthumanist-, disability-, animal-, and feminist studies as well as into current critiques of capitalism and consumerism, Between Desire and Pleasure works to contribute to cultural, conceptual, and political debates about sexuality.
J. Robert G. Williams
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- February 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198850205
- eISBN:
- 9780191884672
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198850205.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
What is representation? How do the more primitive aspects of our world come together to generate it? How do different kinds of representation relate to one another? This book identifies the ...
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What is representation? How do the more primitive aspects of our world come together to generate it? How do different kinds of representation relate to one another? This book identifies the metaphysical foundations for representational facts. The story told is in three parts. The most primitive layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of sensation/perception and intention/action, which are the two most basic modes in which an individual and the world interact. It is argued that we can understand how this kind of representation can exist in a fundamentally physical world so long as we have an independent, illuminating grip on functions and causation. The second layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of (degrees of) belief and desire, whose representational content goes far beyond the immediate perceptable and manipulable environment. It is argued that the correct belief/desire interpretation of an agent is the one which makes their action-guiding states, given their perceptual evidence, most rational. The final layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of words and sentences, human artefacts with representational content. It is argued that one can give an illuminating account of the conditions under which a compositional interpretation of a public language like English is correct by appeal to patterns emerging from the attitudes conventionally expressed by sentences. The three-layer metaphysics of representation resolves long-standing underdetermination puzzles, predicts and explains patterns in the way that concepts denote, and articulates a delicate interactive relationship between the foundations of language and thought.Less
What is representation? How do the more primitive aspects of our world come together to generate it? How do different kinds of representation relate to one another? This book identifies the metaphysical foundations for representational facts. The story told is in three parts. The most primitive layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of sensation/perception and intention/action, which are the two most basic modes in which an individual and the world interact. It is argued that we can understand how this kind of representation can exist in a fundamentally physical world so long as we have an independent, illuminating grip on functions and causation. The second layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of (degrees of) belief and desire, whose representational content goes far beyond the immediate perceptable and manipulable environment. It is argued that the correct belief/desire interpretation of an agent is the one which makes their action-guiding states, given their perceptual evidence, most rational. The final layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of words and sentences, human artefacts with representational content. It is argued that one can give an illuminating account of the conditions under which a compositional interpretation of a public language like English is correct by appeal to patterns emerging from the attitudes conventionally expressed by sentences. The three-layer metaphysics of representation resolves long-standing underdetermination puzzles, predicts and explains patterns in the way that concepts denote, and articulates a delicate interactive relationship between the foundations of language and thought.
Aaron Schuster
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262528597
- eISBN:
- 9780262334150
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262528597.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is ...
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Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is one of the crucial issues dividing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, two formidable figures of post-war French thought. Though the encounter with psychoanalysis deeply marked Deleuze’s work, we are yet to have a critical account of the very different postures he adopted toward psychoanalysis, and especially Lacanian theory, throughout his career. In this book Schuster tackles this tangled relationship head on. The result is neither a Lacanian reading of Deleuze nor a Deleuzian reading of Lacan but rather a systematic and comparative analysis that identifies concerns common to both thinkers and their ultimately incompatible ways of addressing them. Schuster focuses on drive and desire—the strange, convoluted relationship of human beings to the forces that move them from within—“the trouble with pleasure.” Along the way, Schuster offers his own conceptual analyses and examples. In the “Critique of Pure Complaint” he provides a philosophy of complaining, ranging from Freud’s theory of neurosis to Spinoza’s intellectual complaint of God and the Deleuzian great complaint. Schuster goes on to elaborate a theory of love as “mutually compatible symptoms”; an original philosophical history of pleasure, including a hypothetical Heideggerian treatise and a Platonic theory of true pleasure; and an exploration of the 1920s “literature of the death drive,” including Thomas Mann, Italo Svevo, and Blaise Cendrars.Less
Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is one of the crucial issues dividing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, two formidable figures of post-war French thought. Though the encounter with psychoanalysis deeply marked Deleuze’s work, we are yet to have a critical account of the very different postures he adopted toward psychoanalysis, and especially Lacanian theory, throughout his career. In this book Schuster tackles this tangled relationship head on. The result is neither a Lacanian reading of Deleuze nor a Deleuzian reading of Lacan but rather a systematic and comparative analysis that identifies concerns common to both thinkers and their ultimately incompatible ways of addressing them. Schuster focuses on drive and desire—the strange, convoluted relationship of human beings to the forces that move them from within—“the trouble with pleasure.” Along the way, Schuster offers his own conceptual analyses and examples. In the “Critique of Pure Complaint” he provides a philosophy of complaining, ranging from Freud’s theory of neurosis to Spinoza’s intellectual complaint of God and the Deleuzian great complaint. Schuster goes on to elaborate a theory of love as “mutually compatible symptoms”; an original philosophical history of pleasure, including a hypothetical Heideggerian treatise and a Platonic theory of true pleasure; and an exploration of the 1920s “literature of the death drive,” including Thomas Mann, Italo Svevo, and Blaise Cendrars.
Joanne Begiato
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526128577
- eISBN:
- 9781526152046
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526128584.00007
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This chapter reveals how manliness was conveyed through beautiful, virile, male bodies. Such appealing male figures and faces were associated with positive emotions that were coded as both manly and ...
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This chapter reveals how manliness was conveyed through beautiful, virile, male bodies. Such appealing male figures and faces were associated with positive emotions that were coded as both manly and moral. This chapter explores their changing forms over time, shaped by modernity, sport, anthropometry and physiognomy, but also addresses the role of male beauty in disseminating ideals of manliness. It takes a queer history approach which deliberately makes strange the conjunction between physical beauty and masculine values. It rejects assumptions about normative masculinities and how they were created and circulated and instead adopts the techniques of scholarship that queers sexual constructions. Overall, it proposes that beautiful male forms and appearances were intended to arouse desire for the gender that these bodies bore. This nuances our understanding of the gaze. It shows that the idealised manly body was active, since it was an agent of prized gender values. Yet, it was also passive, as the erotic object of a female and male desirous gaze, and subordinate, for although some of the descriptions of idealised male bodies in this chapter were elite, many manly and unmanly bodies were those of white working-class men. (191 words)Less
This chapter reveals how manliness was conveyed through beautiful, virile, male bodies. Such appealing male figures and faces were associated with positive emotions that were coded as both manly and moral. This chapter explores their changing forms over time, shaped by modernity, sport, anthropometry and physiognomy, but also addresses the role of male beauty in disseminating ideals of manliness. It takes a queer history approach which deliberately makes strange the conjunction between physical beauty and masculine values. It rejects assumptions about normative masculinities and how they were created and circulated and instead adopts the techniques of scholarship that queers sexual constructions. Overall, it proposes that beautiful male forms and appearances were intended to arouse desire for the gender that these bodies bore. This nuances our understanding of the gaze. It shows that the idealised manly body was active, since it was an agent of prized gender values. Yet, it was also passive, as the erotic object of a female and male desirous gaze, and subordinate, for although some of the descriptions of idealised male bodies in this chapter were elite, many manly and unmanly bodies were those of white working-class men. (191 words)
Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry, and Joanne Begatio (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526135629
- eISBN:
- 9781526150349
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526135636
- Subject:
- History, Military History
Manliness in Britain offers a new account of masculinity in the long nineteenth century: more corporeal and material, more emotional, more cross-class, and less heteronormative than other studies. ...
More
Manliness in Britain offers a new account of masculinity in the long nineteenth century: more corporeal and material, more emotional, more cross-class, and less heteronormative than other studies. Using diverse textual, visual, and material culture sources, it shows that masculinities were produced and disseminated through men’s bodies, very often working-class ones, and the emotions and material culture associated with them. It analyses idealised men who stimulated desire and admiration, including virile boxers, soldiers, sailors, and blacksmiths, brave firemen, and noble industrial workers. Also investigated are unmanly men, like drunkards, wife-beaters, and masturbators who elicited disgust and aversion.
The book disrupts the chronology of nineteenth-century masculinities, since it stretches from the ages of feeling, revolution, and reform, to those of militarism, imperialism, representative democracy, and mass media. It also queers these histories, by recognising that male and female desire for idealised male bodies and the gender attributes they embodied was integral to the success of manliness. Imagined working-class men and their materiality was central to broader ideas of manliness and unmanliness. They not only offered didactic lessons for the working classes and made the labouring ranks appear less threatening, they provide insights into the production of middle-class men’s identities.
Overall, it is shown that this melding of bodies, emotions, and material culture created emotionalised bodies and objects, which facilitated the conveying, reproducing, and fixing of manliness in society. As such, the book will be vital for students and academics in the history of bodies, emotions, gender, and material culture. (248 words)Less
Manliness in Britain offers a new account of masculinity in the long nineteenth century: more corporeal and material, more emotional, more cross-class, and less heteronormative than other studies. Using diverse textual, visual, and material culture sources, it shows that masculinities were produced and disseminated through men’s bodies, very often working-class ones, and the emotions and material culture associated with them. It analyses idealised men who stimulated desire and admiration, including virile boxers, soldiers, sailors, and blacksmiths, brave firemen, and noble industrial workers. Also investigated are unmanly men, like drunkards, wife-beaters, and masturbators who elicited disgust and aversion.
The book disrupts the chronology of nineteenth-century masculinities, since it stretches from the ages of feeling, revolution, and reform, to those of militarism, imperialism, representative democracy, and mass media. It also queers these histories, by recognising that male and female desire for idealised male bodies and the gender attributes they embodied was integral to the success of manliness. Imagined working-class men and their materiality was central to broader ideas of manliness and unmanliness. They not only offered didactic lessons for the working classes and made the labouring ranks appear less threatening, they provide insights into the production of middle-class men’s identities.
Overall, it is shown that this melding of bodies, emotions, and material culture created emotionalised bodies and objects, which facilitated the conveying, reproducing, and fixing of manliness in society. As such, the book will be vital for students and academics in the history of bodies, emotions, gender, and material culture. (248 words)
Terence Irwin
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195086454
- eISBN:
- 9780199833306
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195086457.003.0020
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy
The last chapter analyses how Plato’s ethical views are developed in the later dialogues (the Philebus, the Statesman, and the Laws). In the last dialogue Plato tries to harmonise the different ...
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The last chapter analyses how Plato’s ethical views are developed in the later dialogues (the Philebus, the Statesman, and the Laws). In the last dialogue Plato tries to harmonise the different virtues. The relations between pleasure, happiness, and desire are analysed. Finally, the role played by the cardinal virtues in the later dialogues is examined, in particular, a certain attention toward the condition of wisdom and how it is related to the other virtues.Less
The last chapter analyses how Plato’s ethical views are developed in the later dialogues (the Philebus, the Statesman, and the Laws). In the last dialogue Plato tries to harmonise the different virtues. The relations between pleasure, happiness, and desire are analysed. Finally, the role played by the cardinal virtues in the later dialogues is examined, in particular, a certain attention toward the condition of wisdom and how it is related to the other virtues.
Eugenio Barba
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9789622099944
- eISBN:
- 9789882207394
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789622099944.003.0009
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
This chapter discusses the first experiment combining jingju and a Western work. It notes that in 1986, seven years after Kuo Hsiao-chuang and her Elegant Voice first assailed jingju circles, Wu ...
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This chapter discusses the first experiment combining jingju and a Western work. It notes that in 1986, seven years after Kuo Hsiao-chuang and her Elegant Voice first assailed jingju circles, Wu Hsing-kuo and his newly established Contemporary Legend Theatre (CLT) gave Taiwanese audiences another shock. It further notes that The Kingdom of Desire, an adaptation of Macbeth that was to meet with international acclaim for decades, began the CLT's maiden voyage into contemporary experimental theatre on the island. It observes that it was the first time that Shakespeare, the representative of the Western canon, and the “national drama” (guoju), symbol of the Chinese traditional culture, had met on Taiwan's stage. It notes that the struggle between the two cultural fields resulted in an unusual hybrid style that startled the auditorium.Less
This chapter discusses the first experiment combining jingju and a Western work. It notes that in 1986, seven years after Kuo Hsiao-chuang and her Elegant Voice first assailed jingju circles, Wu Hsing-kuo and his newly established Contemporary Legend Theatre (CLT) gave Taiwanese audiences another shock. It further notes that The Kingdom of Desire, an adaptation of Macbeth that was to meet with international acclaim for decades, began the CLT's maiden voyage into contemporary experimental theatre on the island. It observes that it was the first time that Shakespeare, the representative of the Western canon, and the “national drama” (guoju), symbol of the Chinese traditional culture, had met on Taiwan's stage. It notes that the struggle between the two cultural fields resulted in an unusual hybrid style that startled the auditorium.
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816674749
- eISBN:
- 9781452947341
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816674749.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
The book traces the interactions of American allopathic medicine, industrial capitalism, and the human desire for sleep from the late 18th century through the turn of the 21st century. The foundation ...
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The book traces the interactions of American allopathic medicine, industrial capitalism, and the human desire for sleep from the late 18th century through the turn of the 21st century. The foundation of contemporary American sleep is laid in the 19th century, when industrial workday demands the coordination and consolidation of sleeping and waking patterns. What was lost in this transition was unconsolidated sleep – instead of two nightly periods of rest, or daily naps supplemented with nightly sleep, one eight hour period of sleep was substituted as a new norm. This norm laid the basis for the emerging field of sleep medicine, which took as its primary concern the eradication of napping and insomnia, and substituting eight regular and consolidated hours of sleep. This invention of consolidated sleep led to the eventual pathologization of many forms of sleep, and provided the basis for contemporary sleep medicine. The present interest in sleep, exemplified by advertising campaigns for “Z drugs” – a new chemical that promotes and consolidates sleep – is not so much new as an intensification of a two hundred year old interest in making “normal” American sleep. In the present, I focus on the lives of physicians, scientists, patients and their families as they deal with the social frictions that sleep disorders are accepted as causing. I argue in the conclusion that by recognizing the human limits of sleep, we can apprehend sleep’s variations as non-pathological, and that with more flexible social institutions and expectations, the medicalization of sleep might be subverted.Less
The book traces the interactions of American allopathic medicine, industrial capitalism, and the human desire for sleep from the late 18th century through the turn of the 21st century. The foundation of contemporary American sleep is laid in the 19th century, when industrial workday demands the coordination and consolidation of sleeping and waking patterns. What was lost in this transition was unconsolidated sleep – instead of two nightly periods of rest, or daily naps supplemented with nightly sleep, one eight hour period of sleep was substituted as a new norm. This norm laid the basis for the emerging field of sleep medicine, which took as its primary concern the eradication of napping and insomnia, and substituting eight regular and consolidated hours of sleep. This invention of consolidated sleep led to the eventual pathologization of many forms of sleep, and provided the basis for contemporary sleep medicine. The present interest in sleep, exemplified by advertising campaigns for “Z drugs” – a new chemical that promotes and consolidates sleep – is not so much new as an intensification of a two hundred year old interest in making “normal” American sleep. In the present, I focus on the lives of physicians, scientists, patients and their families as they deal with the social frictions that sleep disorders are accepted as causing. I argue in the conclusion that by recognizing the human limits of sleep, we can apprehend sleep’s variations as non-pathological, and that with more flexible social institutions and expectations, the medicalization of sleep might be subverted.
Heather Martel
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780813066189
- eISBN:
- 9780813058399
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813066189.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century
In the early Atlantic Protestant gendered hierarchy of beauty and power, political, social, spiritual, and imperial relationships were eroticized, and desire signaled effeminacy defined by ...
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In the early Atlantic Protestant gendered hierarchy of beauty and power, political, social, spiritual, and imperial relationships were eroticized, and desire signaled effeminacy defined by recognition of power, influence, and the more virtuous, masculine body. The French Calvinists had hoped the Indigenous kings Saturiwa, Outina, and Houstaqua would recognize their beauty, fall in love, and so willingly subordinate themselves, coming to emulate Protestantism and French culture in a normative form of homoeroticism. Instead, critics of the French at Fort Caroline implied that the slippages of some Christian travelers (who lost control to their desires, became dependent on Indigenous hospitality, and sometimes assimilated into Indigenous societies) became idolatrous, which was akin to committing sodomy and amounting to sexual slavery.Less
In the early Atlantic Protestant gendered hierarchy of beauty and power, political, social, spiritual, and imperial relationships were eroticized, and desire signaled effeminacy defined by recognition of power, influence, and the more virtuous, masculine body. The French Calvinists had hoped the Indigenous kings Saturiwa, Outina, and Houstaqua would recognize their beauty, fall in love, and so willingly subordinate themselves, coming to emulate Protestantism and French culture in a normative form of homoeroticism. Instead, critics of the French at Fort Caroline implied that the slippages of some Christian travelers (who lost control to their desires, became dependent on Indigenous hospitality, and sometimes assimilated into Indigenous societies) became idolatrous, which was akin to committing sodomy and amounting to sexual slavery.
Madhavi Menon
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816695904
- eISBN:
- 9781452953656
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816695904.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Indifference to Difference organises itself around Alain Badiou’s suggestion that in the face of increasing claims of identitarian specificity, one might consider the politics and ethics of being ...
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Indifference to Difference organises itself around Alain Badiou’s suggestion that in the face of increasing claims of identitarian specificity, one might consider the politics and ethics of being “indifferent to difference.” Following up on the ideas of sameness and difference that have animated queer theory, I think about what it might mean, methodologically, to be indifferent to differences of chronology, culture, and sexuality. Rather than giving us an identifiable “queerness,” or queerness as an identity, a universalism premised on indifference would be queer in its resistance to ontology. This queer universalism would be neither additive nor predicative; instead, it would resist the regime of difference in which embodiment is considered the basis of authentic identity. Indifference to Difference resuscitates the philosophical debates around universalism by joining them to the concerns of queer theory. Asking, along with Alain Badiou, what it would mean to be indifferent to someone else’s difference from us, Indifference, or Queer Universalism suggests that being locked into a world of differences should not translate into reifying difference as the basis of identity. Rather, by being indifferent to the many differences within which we live, we acknowledge the reality in which we are always moving and ever mobile. This continual movement is the movement of desire. Desire resides in us, but with scant regard for who we are. If we take seriously the universal inability of desire to settle, then we lose the ontological specificity of difference. Queer universalism can only ever be indifferent to difference.Less
Indifference to Difference organises itself around Alain Badiou’s suggestion that in the face of increasing claims of identitarian specificity, one might consider the politics and ethics of being “indifferent to difference.” Following up on the ideas of sameness and difference that have animated queer theory, I think about what it might mean, methodologically, to be indifferent to differences of chronology, culture, and sexuality. Rather than giving us an identifiable “queerness,” or queerness as an identity, a universalism premised on indifference would be queer in its resistance to ontology. This queer universalism would be neither additive nor predicative; instead, it would resist the regime of difference in which embodiment is considered the basis of authentic identity. Indifference to Difference resuscitates the philosophical debates around universalism by joining them to the concerns of queer theory. Asking, along with Alain Badiou, what it would mean to be indifferent to someone else’s difference from us, Indifference, or Queer Universalism suggests that being locked into a world of differences should not translate into reifying difference as the basis of identity. Rather, by being indifferent to the many differences within which we live, we acknowledge the reality in which we are always moving and ever mobile. This continual movement is the movement of desire. Desire resides in us, but with scant regard for who we are. If we take seriously the universal inability of desire to settle, then we lose the ontological specificity of difference. Queer universalism can only ever be indifferent to difference.
Peter Goodrich
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474426565
- eISBN:
- 9781474453714
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474426565.003.0005
- Subject:
- Law, Legal History
Schreber’s theory of law is here put into the context of its contemporaries. The Judge had worked on the German Civil Code and his immediate jurisprudential adversary was the neo-kantian school of ...
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Schreber’s theory of law is here put into the context of its contemporaries. The Judge had worked on the German Civil Code and his immediate jurisprudential adversary was the neo-kantian school of legal philosophy that generated the Pure Theory of Law. Scrheber advocates, by way of antithesis, an Impure Theory, a law of the body, a synaesthetic corpus iuris, replete with smells and sounds, touch and vision, fear and desire. His was a radically humanistic theory of legality, and in comparison to the theocratic Christian doctrine of the Duke of Argyll’s Reign of Law, or the mystical completeness of the Pure Theory, the Memoirs offers an invigorating corrective of a tellurian justice gauged to the needs of the human.Less
Schreber’s theory of law is here put into the context of its contemporaries. The Judge had worked on the German Civil Code and his immediate jurisprudential adversary was the neo-kantian school of legal philosophy that generated the Pure Theory of Law. Scrheber advocates, by way of antithesis, an Impure Theory, a law of the body, a synaesthetic corpus iuris, replete with smells and sounds, touch and vision, fear and desire. His was a radically humanistic theory of legality, and in comparison to the theocratic Christian doctrine of the Duke of Argyll’s Reign of Law, or the mystical completeness of the Pure Theory, the Memoirs offers an invigorating corrective of a tellurian justice gauged to the needs of the human.
Julieanna Preston and Jen Archer-Martin
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474420570
- eISBN:
- 9781474453905
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420570.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
Julieanna Preston and Jen Archer-Martin attempt to reveal the agential voices of the assemblages of human and nonhuman agents. Such are the human embodiment in the form of performance as yet another ...
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Julieanna Preston and Jen Archer-Martin attempt to reveal the agential voices of the assemblages of human and nonhuman agents. Such are the human embodiment in the form of performance as yet another self-organising pile, an assemblage of events operating across scales of temporality, materiality and affectivity and bitumen, a vital and vibrant surface of our living. A language shift away from clichés and stereotypes resets a new ecology of human and nonhuman materiality at work. Impressively vivid, live instances, captured in words, describe the malleability of all agents entangled in the same ecology. Bitumen is introduced through a coagulated dialogue between a poetic and philosophical voice. The labourer is replaced with that of a caretaker, informed by an ethic of care. This call for care is woven as a secondary thread into the context as both a disruptive and a reparative act, much as the roadworker’s high-visibility tribal garbs both screams ‘Take care!’ and reassures ‘I’ll take care of it’.Less
Julieanna Preston and Jen Archer-Martin attempt to reveal the agential voices of the assemblages of human and nonhuman agents. Such are the human embodiment in the form of performance as yet another self-organising pile, an assemblage of events operating across scales of temporality, materiality and affectivity and bitumen, a vital and vibrant surface of our living. A language shift away from clichés and stereotypes resets a new ecology of human and nonhuman materiality at work. Impressively vivid, live instances, captured in words, describe the malleability of all agents entangled in the same ecology. Bitumen is introduced through a coagulated dialogue between a poetic and philosophical voice. The labourer is replaced with that of a caretaker, informed by an ethic of care. This call for care is woven as a secondary thread into the context as both a disruptive and a reparative act, much as the roadworker’s high-visibility tribal garbs both screams ‘Take care!’ and reassures ‘I’ll take care of it’.
Chris Rossdale
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781474443036
- eISBN:
- 9781474465335
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474443036.003.0007
- Subject:
- Political Science, Conflict Politics and Policy
This chapter considers how anti-militarists challenge militarised forms of contestation by prefiguring alternatives. The chapter opens by introducing again the concept of prefiguration, which holds ...
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This chapter considers how anti-militarists challenge militarised forms of contestation by prefiguring alternatives. The chapter opens by introducing again the concept of prefiguration, which holds that the means used to achieve political change will shape or become the ends that result. It then considers three distinct anti-militarist practices – peace camps, die-ins, and the use of humour – showing how each of these is guided by a desire to generate subjectivities and relationalities which do not reproduce militarism. In contrast, the last part of the chapter considers how anti-militarism is shaped not simply by opposition to militarism, but also by desire for it. Drawing on auto-ethnographic reflections, the discussion outlines how acknowledging the role of desire in social movements deepens the radical promise of prefiguration.Less
This chapter considers how anti-militarists challenge militarised forms of contestation by prefiguring alternatives. The chapter opens by introducing again the concept of prefiguration, which holds that the means used to achieve political change will shape or become the ends that result. It then considers three distinct anti-militarist practices – peace camps, die-ins, and the use of humour – showing how each of these is guided by a desire to generate subjectivities and relationalities which do not reproduce militarism. In contrast, the last part of the chapter considers how anti-militarism is shaped not simply by opposition to militarism, but also by desire for it. Drawing on auto-ethnographic reflections, the discussion outlines how acknowledging the role of desire in social movements deepens the radical promise of prefiguration.
