Hera Cook
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199252183
- eISBN:
- 9780191719240
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199252183.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, Social History
The impact of the gradual introduction of contraception that led to the separation of reproduction and sexuality is illustrated in the style of sex manuals from the 1920s. In Married Love, the most ...
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The impact of the gradual introduction of contraception that led to the separation of reproduction and sexuality is illustrated in the style of sex manuals from the 1920s. In Married Love, the most influential manual of the period, Marie Stopes constructed a biologically mandated active female sexual desire and reaffirmed female emotionality. In order to do this, she argued for the reshaping of male sexuality, which was highly contested by male manual authors. The influence of feminism is evident in the manuals of the 1920s. There was also a modernization of physical sexual activity taking place in response to the demands made by use of withdrawal and other methods of contraception.Less
The impact of the gradual introduction of contraception that led to the separation of reproduction and sexuality is illustrated in the style of sex manuals from the 1920s. In Married Love, the most influential manual of the period, Marie Stopes constructed a biologically mandated active female sexual desire and reaffirmed female emotionality. In order to do this, she argued for the reshaping of male sexuality, which was highly contested by male manual authors. The influence of feminism is evident in the manuals of the 1920s. There was also a modernization of physical sexual activity taking place in response to the demands made by use of withdrawal and other methods of contraception.
Amy M. King
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195161519
- eISBN:
- 9780199787838
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195161519.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Novels written in the 18th and 19th centuries are filled with depictions of girls “blooming” or “in bloom” — from Frances Burney's Evelina, whose blooming complexion attracts libertines and suitors ...
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Novels written in the 18th and 19th centuries are filled with depictions of girls “blooming” or “in bloom” — from Frances Burney's Evelina, whose blooming complexion attracts libertines and suitors alike, to John Cleland's Fanny Hill, whose bloom is explicitly tied to sexual initiation. The prevalence of this figurative language of “bloom” and the ease with which botanical facts are matched with female physiology raises the question: whence does it arise, and what gives it its sustaining power as a method for depicting nascent female sexuality in the marriage plots of the 19th-century novel? This chapter answers this question by looking at the newly sexualized botany of Linnaeus and his mid-18th-century exegetes, where aesthetic practice and scientific classification meet, and where the novel subsequently finds a significant register for discussing and disposing of female destinies.Less
Novels written in the 18th and 19th centuries are filled with depictions of girls “blooming” or “in bloom” — from Frances Burney's Evelina, whose blooming complexion attracts libertines and suitors alike, to John Cleland's Fanny Hill, whose bloom is explicitly tied to sexual initiation. The prevalence of this figurative language of “bloom” and the ease with which botanical facts are matched with female physiology raises the question: whence does it arise, and what gives it its sustaining power as a method for depicting nascent female sexuality in the marriage plots of the 19th-century novel? This chapter answers this question by looking at the newly sexualized botany of Linnaeus and his mid-18th-century exegetes, where aesthetic practice and scientific classification meet, and where the novel subsequently finds a significant register for discussing and disposing of female destinies.
Diana Jeater
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199290673
- eISBN:
- 9780191700569
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199290673.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History
This chapter focuses on one important dimension of women's experience of empire, their encounter with attempts to control and redirect their sexuality. Controlling men's labour, always of paramount ...
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This chapter focuses on one important dimension of women's experience of empire, their encounter with attempts to control and redirect their sexuality. Controlling men's labour, always of paramount importance to the architects of empire in Africa, was matched, if not at times surpassed, by colonial concerns over the sexuality of African women. As the nature of gender relations changed under the architecture of colonial administration, so the experiences of women were altered. Control over women's labour was also vital to the imperial project, and African women experienced major changes in the quantity, nature, and context of their work within the empire.Less
This chapter focuses on one important dimension of women's experience of empire, their encounter with attempts to control and redirect their sexuality. Controlling men's labour, always of paramount importance to the architects of empire in Africa, was matched, if not at times surpassed, by colonial concerns over the sexuality of African women. As the nature of gender relations changed under the architecture of colonial administration, so the experiences of women were altered. Control over women's labour was also vital to the imperial project, and African women experienced major changes in the quantity, nature, and context of their work within the empire.
Elizabeth Boa
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198158196
- eISBN:
- 9780191673283
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198158196.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This study of Kafka centres on gender. The author's insights show how, in an age of reactionary hysteria, Kafka rejected patriarchy yet exploited women as literary raw material. Drawing on Kafka's ...
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This study of Kafka centres on gender. The author's insights show how, in an age of reactionary hysteria, Kafka rejected patriarchy yet exploited women as literary raw material. Drawing on Kafka's letters to his fiancée and to the Czech journalist Milena Jesenská, the author illuminates the transformation of details of everyday life into the strange yet uncannily familiar signs which are Kafka's stylistic hallmark. The book argues that gender cannot be isolated from other dimensions of identity, and relates Kafka's alienating images of the male body and fascinated disgust of female sexuality to the body-culture of the early twentieth century, and to interfusing militaristic, racist, gender, and class ideologies. This is the context also for the stereotypes of the New Woman, the massive Matriarch, the lower-class seductress, and the assimilating Jew. The book explores Kafka's exploitation yet subversion of such stereotypes through the brilliant literary devices which assure his place in the modernist canon.Less
This study of Kafka centres on gender. The author's insights show how, in an age of reactionary hysteria, Kafka rejected patriarchy yet exploited women as literary raw material. Drawing on Kafka's letters to his fiancée and to the Czech journalist Milena Jesenská, the author illuminates the transformation of details of everyday life into the strange yet uncannily familiar signs which are Kafka's stylistic hallmark. The book argues that gender cannot be isolated from other dimensions of identity, and relates Kafka's alienating images of the male body and fascinated disgust of female sexuality to the body-culture of the early twentieth century, and to interfusing militaristic, racist, gender, and class ideologies. This is the context also for the stereotypes of the New Woman, the massive Matriarch, the lower-class seductress, and the assimilating Jew. The book explores Kafka's exploitation yet subversion of such stereotypes through the brilliant literary devices which assure his place in the modernist canon.
Lisa M. Diamond
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199765218
- eISBN:
- 9780199979585
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199765218.003.0001
- Subject:
- Psychology, Developmental Psychology
This chapter assesses the distinctive features of female same-sex sexuality and considers their implications for modeling the nature and development of female sexual orientation. After reviewing the ...
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This chapter assesses the distinctive features of female same-sex sexuality and considers their implications for modeling the nature and development of female sexual orientation. After reviewing the state of current research on these directions, it outlines some of the most provocative and promising directions for future research. Of all of the preconceptions about sexual orientation that have been questioned and revised over the years, one of the most important is the presumption that female and male sexual orientation are parallel phenomena, with the same origins and outcomes. To the contrary, women’s greater propensity for nonexclusive, fluid patterns of attraction suggests the possibility that the underlying determinants of female same-sex sexuality may be quite different from those for men, requiring different explanatory models.Less
This chapter assesses the distinctive features of female same-sex sexuality and considers their implications for modeling the nature and development of female sexual orientation. After reviewing the state of current research on these directions, it outlines some of the most provocative and promising directions for future research. Of all of the preconceptions about sexual orientation that have been questioned and revised over the years, one of the most important is the presumption that female and male sexual orientation are parallel phenomena, with the same origins and outcomes. To the contrary, women’s greater propensity for nonexclusive, fluid patterns of attraction suggests the possibility that the underlying determinants of female same-sex sexuality may be quite different from those for men, requiring different explanatory models.
Amy M. King
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195161519
- eISBN:
- 9780199787838
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195161519.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter focuses on the set of meanings about botany and botanical practices that were forming in the 18th century to understand the botanical vernacular in its emergent stages. It argues that ...
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This chapter focuses on the set of meanings about botany and botanical practices that were forming in the 18th century to understand the botanical vernacular in its emergent stages. It argues that the bloom narrative emerged from the Linnaean context and then developed as a literary narrative; bloom does not shift in accordance with the botanical changes of the 1830s and beyond but rather with the literary tides out of which that narrative grew. Maria Edgeworth's Belinda, and the poems of Charlotte Smith and Erasmus Darwin are analyzed.Less
This chapter focuses on the set of meanings about botany and botanical practices that were forming in the 18th century to understand the botanical vernacular in its emergent stages. It argues that the bloom narrative emerged from the Linnaean context and then developed as a literary narrative; bloom does not shift in accordance with the botanical changes of the 1830s and beyond but rather with the literary tides out of which that narrative grew. Maria Edgeworth's Belinda, and the poems of Charlotte Smith and Erasmus Darwin are analyzed.
Diane Railton and Paul Watson
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748633227
- eISBN:
- 9780748671021
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748633227.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter discusses the ways in which long-standing tropes of blackness and whiteness are used to develop different femininities for black and white women. It also deals with the relationship ...
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This chapter discusses the ways in which long-standing tropes of blackness and whiteness are used to develop different femininities for black and white women. It also deals with the relationship between music video and cultural identity. It then describes the videos by two contemporary pop stars, Beyoncé Knowles' ‘Baby Boy’ and Kylie Minogue's ‘can't Get You Out of My Head’. These videos stage specific performances of Knowles' and Minogue's personae which mobilise images of and ideas about the performers that pre-date the videos themselves. The representation of black female sexuality implies an essential sexuality that is already in and of the world while the presentation of white female sexuality always offers the potential for reinvention. While the videos presented are all still clearly concerned with the construction of black female sexuality, it is a sexuality of the present, cognisant of modernity and a subject of its own enunciation.Less
This chapter discusses the ways in which long-standing tropes of blackness and whiteness are used to develop different femininities for black and white women. It also deals with the relationship between music video and cultural identity. It then describes the videos by two contemporary pop stars, Beyoncé Knowles' ‘Baby Boy’ and Kylie Minogue's ‘can't Get You Out of My Head’. These videos stage specific performances of Knowles' and Minogue's personae which mobilise images of and ideas about the performers that pre-date the videos themselves. The representation of black female sexuality implies an essential sexuality that is already in and of the world while the presentation of white female sexuality always offers the potential for reinvention. While the videos presented are all still clearly concerned with the construction of black female sexuality, it is a sexuality of the present, cognisant of modernity and a subject of its own enunciation.
Hera Cook
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199252183
- eISBN:
- 9780191719240
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199252183.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, Social History
This introductory chapter outlines the discussions presented in the book, namely the extent and ways in which male and female sexuality in England has been transformed from the late 1700s to the ...
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This introductory chapter outlines the discussions presented in the book, namely the extent and ways in which male and female sexuality in England has been transformed from the late 1700s to the latter quarter of the last century. The chapter also describes the author's motivation for writing the book.Less
This introductory chapter outlines the discussions presented in the book, namely the extent and ways in which male and female sexuality in England has been transformed from the late 1700s to the latter quarter of the last century. The chapter also describes the author's motivation for writing the book.
NEIL KENNY
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199271368
- eISBN:
- 9780191709531
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199271368.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter investigates the curiosity attributed to women in the early modern period, especially in France. In contrast with what emerged in Chapter 4 regarding male curiosity, women's own ...
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This chapter investigates the curiosity attributed to women in the early modern period, especially in France. In contrast with what emerged in Chapter 4 regarding male curiosity, women's own curiosity was often described as residing in their lack of chastity, rather than in anxiety about male chastity. Male writers were much more interested in reining in female sexuality and knowledge than they were in voicing female anxiety about men. However, these generalizations are — like all those offered in the present book — nuanced by the example of particular case-studies. Even female curiosity was occasionally permitted, though this was often for purposes that suited male writers.Less
This chapter investigates the curiosity attributed to women in the early modern period, especially in France. In contrast with what emerged in Chapter 4 regarding male curiosity, women's own curiosity was often described as residing in their lack of chastity, rather than in anxiety about male chastity. Male writers were much more interested in reining in female sexuality and knowledge than they were in voicing female anxiety about men. However, these generalizations are — like all those offered in the present book — nuanced by the example of particular case-studies. Even female curiosity was occasionally permitted, though this was often for purposes that suited male writers.
Durba Mitra
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691196350
- eISBN:
- 9780691197029
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691196350.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, Indian History
This introductory chapter traces the history of the concept of the sexually deviant female in colonial India. It first takes a look at how the figure of the prostitute appears across different ...
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This introductory chapter traces the history of the concept of the sexually deviant female in colonial India. It first takes a look at how the figure of the prostitute appears across different archives from colonial India and within analyses of Indian social life. The chapter then shows how colonial studies on the nature of Indian society were to become the empirical basis for universalist theories of comparative societies. Indeed, the colonial state in India was, at its inception, an experiment in new forms of scientific and social scientific practices that were to influence state practices and the formation of disciplinary knowledge in the colony and metropole. At the heart of these sciences of society was a concern about structuring, tracing, and mapping the social world of colonial India through the assessment of women's sexuality. These histories reveal the way key debates about gender, caste, communal difference, and social hierarchy in India became objects of social scientific analysis through the description and evaluation of female sexuality. And, as the chapter shows, this social scientific imaginary had extraordinary reach.Less
This introductory chapter traces the history of the concept of the sexually deviant female in colonial India. It first takes a look at how the figure of the prostitute appears across different archives from colonial India and within analyses of Indian social life. The chapter then shows how colonial studies on the nature of Indian society were to become the empirical basis for universalist theories of comparative societies. Indeed, the colonial state in India was, at its inception, an experiment in new forms of scientific and social scientific practices that were to influence state practices and the formation of disciplinary knowledge in the colony and metropole. At the heart of these sciences of society was a concern about structuring, tracing, and mapping the social world of colonial India through the assessment of women's sexuality. These histories reveal the way key debates about gender, caste, communal difference, and social hierarchy in India became objects of social scientific analysis through the description and evaluation of female sexuality. And, as the chapter shows, this social scientific imaginary had extraordinary reach.
Ariane Cruz
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781479809288
- eISBN:
- 9781479899425
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479809288.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Chapter 4 interrogates the simultaneity of the “technologies” of sexuality, race, gender, pleasure, and visuality. Focusing my analysis on one popular contemporary U.S. hard-core BDSM pornography ...
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Chapter 4 interrogates the simultaneity of the “technologies” of sexuality, race, gender, pleasure, and visuality. Focusing my analysis on one popular contemporary U.S. hard-core BDSM pornography website, kink.com, and its use of fucking machines, I analyze performances of racialized sexuality staged through multimodal intimate points of encounter—between human and machine; black and white; “man,” “woman,” and cyborg; self and other. I examine the collaborative laboring of technologies—sexuality, race, gender, pleasure, and visuality—as they delineate the material and symbolic ontological boundaries of the black female body and black women’s erotic subjectivity. While the machines most explicitly labor as technologies of pleasure, they also operate as technologies of race that reveal race as a technology. I read the fucking-machine performances as imbricated technologies of racialization, sexualization, gendering, visuality, and pleasure in the context of theories of race and/as technology and “new media” discourses of race in cyberspace. Fuckingmachines.com exhibits complex technologies of racialization performed at multiple, overlapping sites: machines, performers, and spectators. Illuminating the racialized and gendered corporealization of sex and sexual pleasure, these fucking machines and their sexual performances reveal the interlocking systems of race, gender, and sexuality as not only mechanized but also as mechanisms of power.Less
Chapter 4 interrogates the simultaneity of the “technologies” of sexuality, race, gender, pleasure, and visuality. Focusing my analysis on one popular contemporary U.S. hard-core BDSM pornography website, kink.com, and its use of fucking machines, I analyze performances of racialized sexuality staged through multimodal intimate points of encounter—between human and machine; black and white; “man,” “woman,” and cyborg; self and other. I examine the collaborative laboring of technologies—sexuality, race, gender, pleasure, and visuality—as they delineate the material and symbolic ontological boundaries of the black female body and black women’s erotic subjectivity. While the machines most explicitly labor as technologies of pleasure, they also operate as technologies of race that reveal race as a technology. I read the fucking-machine performances as imbricated technologies of racialization, sexualization, gendering, visuality, and pleasure in the context of theories of race and/as technology and “new media” discourses of race in cyberspace. Fuckingmachines.com exhibits complex technologies of racialization performed at multiple, overlapping sites: machines, performers, and spectators. Illuminating the racialized and gendered corporealization of sex and sexual pleasure, these fucking machines and their sexual performances reveal the interlocking systems of race, gender, and sexuality as not only mechanized but also as mechanisms of power.
Durba Mitra
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691196350
- eISBN:
- 9780691197029
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691196350.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, Indian History
This chapter accounts for the foundational place of deviant female sexuality in social evolutionary thought over the period between the 1860s and the 1950s. It begins by analyzing concepts of ...
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This chapter accounts for the foundational place of deviant female sexuality in social evolutionary thought over the period between the 1860s and the 1950s. It begins by analyzing concepts of sexuality and patriarchal monogamy in European and American ethnology. The chapter then explores the widespread impact of the field of ethnology on the ideas of a set of social analysts in eastern India who produced original theories of Indian social development in the first decades of the twentieth century. Their theories united the science of female sexuality with philology, biology, ethnology, psychology, and sociology to create original models for the evolution of Indian society. The unification of diverse sexual practices through classifications of deviant female sex constituted the social as a discrete domain of inquiry. These publications in critical social theory emerged in India at a moment when social scientific disciplines had not yet undergone disciplinary differentiation. A distinguishing feature of these publications was a claim to expertise about female sexuality through the blending of different fields of knowledge. To conclude, the chapter briefly touches on how these multidisciplinary understandings of primitivity and evolutionary development continue to shape social thought in postcolonial India.Less
This chapter accounts for the foundational place of deviant female sexuality in social evolutionary thought over the period between the 1860s and the 1950s. It begins by analyzing concepts of sexuality and patriarchal monogamy in European and American ethnology. The chapter then explores the widespread impact of the field of ethnology on the ideas of a set of social analysts in eastern India who produced original theories of Indian social development in the first decades of the twentieth century. Their theories united the science of female sexuality with philology, biology, ethnology, psychology, and sociology to create original models for the evolution of Indian society. The unification of diverse sexual practices through classifications of deviant female sex constituted the social as a discrete domain of inquiry. These publications in critical social theory emerged in India at a moment when social scientific disciplines had not yet undergone disciplinary differentiation. A distinguishing feature of these publications was a claim to expertise about female sexuality through the blending of different fields of knowledge. To conclude, the chapter briefly touches on how these multidisciplinary understandings of primitivity and evolutionary development continue to shape social thought in postcolonial India.
Carolyn Herbst Lewis
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807834251
- eISBN:
- 9781469606385
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807899540_lewis.6
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This chapter argues that healthy female sexual response is the foundation of successful heterosexual performance for both men and women. The basis for the definition of healthy female sexual response ...
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This chapter argues that healthy female sexual response is the foundation of successful heterosexual performance for both men and women. The basis for the definition of healthy female sexual response was Edmund Bergler's collaborative work with Eduard Hitschmann, Frigidity in Women: Its Characteristics and Treatment. The book's description of female sexual desire and response, with its direct connection to Freudian psychosexual theories, became the dominant narrative on “normal” female sexuality in the 1950s.Less
This chapter argues that healthy female sexual response is the foundation of successful heterosexual performance for both men and women. The basis for the definition of healthy female sexual response was Edmund Bergler's collaborative work with Eduard Hitschmann, Frigidity in Women: Its Characteristics and Treatment. The book's description of female sexual desire and response, with its direct connection to Freudian psychosexual theories, became the dominant narrative on “normal” female sexuality in the 1950s.
Caroline Franklin
- Published in print:
- 1992
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112303
- eISBN:
- 9780191670763
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112303.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Traditionally seen as an archetypal masculine poet, better known for his relationships with women than for the sympathetic study of them, Lord Byron has not lent himself easily to a feminist critique ...
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Traditionally seen as an archetypal masculine poet, better known for his relationships with women than for the sympathetic study of them, Lord Byron has not lent himself easily to a feminist critique hitherto. This book examines Byron within the setting of the contemporary debate on the nature, role, and rights of women in society. The heroines of Byron's narrative and dramatic verse are considered, not from a biographical perspective, but by relating these representations to the ideologies of sexual difference of the poet's day. Viewed in their literary-historical context, these Byronic heroines are compared with other female protagonists of the age, thereby revealing the poet to be honest and bold in his portrayal of female sexuality and its relation to political issues. Drawing upon original research materials, this book presents the poet in context as well as making a contribution to the debate regarding the representation of women in early 19th-century society.Less
Traditionally seen as an archetypal masculine poet, better known for his relationships with women than for the sympathetic study of them, Lord Byron has not lent himself easily to a feminist critique hitherto. This book examines Byron within the setting of the contemporary debate on the nature, role, and rights of women in society. The heroines of Byron's narrative and dramatic verse are considered, not from a biographical perspective, but by relating these representations to the ideologies of sexual difference of the poet's day. Viewed in their literary-historical context, these Byronic heroines are compared with other female protagonists of the age, thereby revealing the poet to be honest and bold in his portrayal of female sexuality and its relation to political issues. Drawing upon original research materials, this book presents the poet in context as well as making a contribution to the debate regarding the representation of women in early 19th-century society.
Shuqin Cui
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824840037
- eISBN:
- 9780824868390
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824840037.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Asian Studies
This chapter discusses the transformation of female sexuality from the sexed-other into the pleasurable-self. Hu Ming's army series reveals the female body and sexuality concealed beneath military ...
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This chapter discusses the transformation of female sexuality from the sexed-other into the pleasurable-self. Hu Ming's army series reveals the female body and sexuality concealed beneath military uniforms, thereby shedding the cover of socialist gender hierarchies and art canons. Shen Ling's Pink Bed and Man-Woman series share sexual pleasure with viewers and challenge notions of eroticism and pornography. In contrast to Hu Ming's and Shen Ling's positive portraiture of female bodies and sexuality, Xiang Jing's sculptures radically challenge conventional spectatorship with oversized naked bodies, simultaneously inviting and deflecting a voyeuristic-scopophilic gaze. The exposed genitals, distorted body shapes, and hairless heads work to refuse pleasure in looking and frustrate interpretive reading, yet the sculpture subjects remain in the realm of self-expression of female experience. Finally, the thesis of female sexuality is further explored through the dialectical relationship between gender and space. Cui Xiuwen's hidden camera shows sex workers inside the ladies' room of an affluent nightclub in Beijing. The video exposure reveals how prostitution, ostensibly eliminated, is reemerging in public space. The chapter concludes that in a state-managed market society where female sexuality faces either sanctions or commodification, it is difficult to speak about women's pleasure.Less
This chapter discusses the transformation of female sexuality from the sexed-other into the pleasurable-self. Hu Ming's army series reveals the female body and sexuality concealed beneath military uniforms, thereby shedding the cover of socialist gender hierarchies and art canons. Shen Ling's Pink Bed and Man-Woman series share sexual pleasure with viewers and challenge notions of eroticism and pornography. In contrast to Hu Ming's and Shen Ling's positive portraiture of female bodies and sexuality, Xiang Jing's sculptures radically challenge conventional spectatorship with oversized naked bodies, simultaneously inviting and deflecting a voyeuristic-scopophilic gaze. The exposed genitals, distorted body shapes, and hairless heads work to refuse pleasure in looking and frustrate interpretive reading, yet the sculpture subjects remain in the realm of self-expression of female experience. Finally, the thesis of female sexuality is further explored through the dialectical relationship between gender and space. Cui Xiuwen's hidden camera shows sex workers inside the ladies' room of an affluent nightclub in Beijing. The video exposure reveals how prostitution, ostensibly eliminated, is reemerging in public space. The chapter concludes that in a state-managed market society where female sexuality faces either sanctions or commodification, it is difficult to speak about women's pleasure.
Jessica L. Martucci
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226288031
- eISBN:
- 9780226288178
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226288178.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This chapter explores the culture of motherhood surrounding breastfeeding in the postwar era, focusing primarily on the ways women encountered information about breastfeeding and the ideology of ...
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This chapter explores the culture of motherhood surrounding breastfeeding in the postwar era, focusing primarily on the ways women encountered information about breastfeeding and the ideology of natural motherhood. It argues that even while breastfeeding declined in practice, a natural motherhood ideology that stressed breastfeeding as a way to maintain value in motherhood reached far beyond the living rooms of La Leche League meetings.. Though many more mothers turned to bottle-feeding as the postwar era ticked along, there continued to be a place for discussion about breastfeeding, one that increasingly reflected its connection to the era's nascent natural motherhood ideology. In attempting to carry breastfeeding into a new era, these mothers helped create an alternative path for postwar womanhood, one based on maternity and a biology of sentiment and meaning rather than one of cool scientific rationality. In doing so they confronted a daunting hospital system built around efficiency, not sentiment, and butted up against ideals of marriage and family life that often stressed women's heterosexual desirability and housekeeping abilities above motherhood.Less
This chapter explores the culture of motherhood surrounding breastfeeding in the postwar era, focusing primarily on the ways women encountered information about breastfeeding and the ideology of natural motherhood. It argues that even while breastfeeding declined in practice, a natural motherhood ideology that stressed breastfeeding as a way to maintain value in motherhood reached far beyond the living rooms of La Leche League meetings.. Though many more mothers turned to bottle-feeding as the postwar era ticked along, there continued to be a place for discussion about breastfeeding, one that increasingly reflected its connection to the era's nascent natural motherhood ideology. In attempting to carry breastfeeding into a new era, these mothers helped create an alternative path for postwar womanhood, one based on maternity and a biology of sentiment and meaning rather than one of cool scientific rationality. In doing so they confronted a daunting hospital system built around efficiency, not sentiment, and butted up against ideals of marriage and family life that often stressed women's heterosexual desirability and housekeeping abilities above motherhood.
Catherine Gallagher
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182436
- eISBN:
- 9780191673801
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182436.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This book is an exploration of the careers of five influential women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The ‘nobodies’ of the title are not ignored, silenced, ...
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This book is an exploration of the careers of five influential women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The ‘nobodies’ of the title are not ignored, silenced, erased, or anonymous women. Instead, they are literal nobodies: the abstractions of authorial personae, printed books, scandalous allegories, intellectual property rights, literary reputation, debts and obligations, and fictional characters. These are the exchangeable tokens of modern authorship that lent new cultural power to the increasing number of women writers during the eighteenth century. The book shows that women writers invented and popularized numerous ingenious similarities between their gender and their occupation. Far from creating only minor variations on an essentially masculine figure, they delineated crucial features of ‘the author’ for the period in general by emphasizing their trials and triumphs in the marketplace. Aphra Behn (1640–89) and Delarivier Manley (1663–1724) became popular and notorious by likening their authorship to the perceived ‘nothingness’ of female sexuality and deceptions of scandalous rumour-mongering. The book argues that the preoccupation with absence and misrepresentation was imported into the novel, the new genre that encouraged identification with ‘nobodies’ – with fictional characters understood to have no individual embodied referents in the world. In studies of the economic relations, authorial personae, and fictional techniques of Charlotte Lennox (1729–1804), Frances Burney (1752–1840), and Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849), it details the evolving connection between the development of the novel and the growing prestige of the female author.Less
This book is an exploration of the careers of five influential women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The ‘nobodies’ of the title are not ignored, silenced, erased, or anonymous women. Instead, they are literal nobodies: the abstractions of authorial personae, printed books, scandalous allegories, intellectual property rights, literary reputation, debts and obligations, and fictional characters. These are the exchangeable tokens of modern authorship that lent new cultural power to the increasing number of women writers during the eighteenth century. The book shows that women writers invented and popularized numerous ingenious similarities between their gender and their occupation. Far from creating only minor variations on an essentially masculine figure, they delineated crucial features of ‘the author’ for the period in general by emphasizing their trials and triumphs in the marketplace. Aphra Behn (1640–89) and Delarivier Manley (1663–1724) became popular and notorious by likening their authorship to the perceived ‘nothingness’ of female sexuality and deceptions of scandalous rumour-mongering. The book argues that the preoccupation with absence and misrepresentation was imported into the novel, the new genre that encouraged identification with ‘nobodies’ – with fictional characters understood to have no individual embodied referents in the world. In studies of the economic relations, authorial personae, and fictional techniques of Charlotte Lennox (1729–1804), Frances Burney (1752–1840), and Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849), it details the evolving connection between the development of the novel and the growing prestige of the female author.
Birgit Schippers
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748640898
- eISBN:
- 9780748671830
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748640898.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
Kristeva's writings on crisis and revolt are the focus of this chapter. These topics, which underpin Kristeva's wider philosophical considerations, receive a distinctive attention in her work ...
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Kristeva's writings on crisis and revolt are the focus of this chapter. These topics, which underpin Kristeva's wider philosophical considerations, receive a distinctive attention in her work published since the 1990s. While one of the aims of this chapter consists of a careful unpacking and interpretation of these writings, its particular interest revolves around two related themes that emerge from Kristeva's texts; these are the etymological link between crisis and critique and its potential for feminism, and her notion of intimate revolt, described by some commentators as a 'displacement of politics', and its consequence for female revolt. This chapter suggests that Kristeva's notion of the feminine, together with the importance she accords to a critical ethos, holds out the promise of establishing feminism as a critical project. A feminist scrutiny of these writings is therefore crucial, because it brings to the fore Kristeva's attention to issues of key concern to feminism, including the micro-political aspects of subjectivity and politics, the mutually constitutive realms of embodiment, psychic and social-political life, and the theorisation of female sexuality.Less
Kristeva's writings on crisis and revolt are the focus of this chapter. These topics, which underpin Kristeva's wider philosophical considerations, receive a distinctive attention in her work published since the 1990s. While one of the aims of this chapter consists of a careful unpacking and interpretation of these writings, its particular interest revolves around two related themes that emerge from Kristeva's texts; these are the etymological link between crisis and critique and its potential for feminism, and her notion of intimate revolt, described by some commentators as a 'displacement of politics', and its consequence for female revolt. This chapter suggests that Kristeva's notion of the feminine, together with the importance she accords to a critical ethos, holds out the promise of establishing feminism as a critical project. A feminist scrutiny of these writings is therefore crucial, because it brings to the fore Kristeva's attention to issues of key concern to feminism, including the micro-political aspects of subjectivity and politics, the mutually constitutive realms of embodiment, psychic and social-political life, and the theorisation of female sexuality.
Elaine Showalter
- Published in print:
- 1991
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198123835
- eISBN:
- 9780191671616
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198123835.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
The ‘real ancestor’ of the American Dark Lady was Margaret Fuller. In her major feminist treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she wrote about her own experience as the Dark Lady under a literary ...
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The ‘real ancestor’ of the American Dark Lady was Margaret Fuller. In her major feminist treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she wrote about her own experience as the Dark Lady under a literary persona borrowed from another Shakespearean character. She proudly painted herself as Miranda. Fuller's Miranda is an American feminist intellectual, ‘a woman, who, if any in the world could, might speak without heat and bitterness of the position of her sex’. The reasons why Fuller called herself ‘Miranda’, and the relevance of The Tempest in understanding the cultural tradition of American women writers are discussed. American women writers from Fuller to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Katherine Anne Porter, Sylvia Plath, and Gloria Naylor have revised the figure of Miranda in thinking about their relationship to patriarchal power, language, female sexuality, and creativity. The revision of Miranda and The Tempest could be seen as a strategy of legitimation which looks to Shakespeare's sister in order to validate the work of Margaret Fuller and other non-canonical American women writers.Less
The ‘real ancestor’ of the American Dark Lady was Margaret Fuller. In her major feminist treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she wrote about her own experience as the Dark Lady under a literary persona borrowed from another Shakespearean character. She proudly painted herself as Miranda. Fuller's Miranda is an American feminist intellectual, ‘a woman, who, if any in the world could, might speak without heat and bitterness of the position of her sex’. The reasons why Fuller called herself ‘Miranda’, and the relevance of The Tempest in understanding the cultural tradition of American women writers are discussed. American women writers from Fuller to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Katherine Anne Porter, Sylvia Plath, and Gloria Naylor have revised the figure of Miranda in thinking about their relationship to patriarchal power, language, female sexuality, and creativity. The revision of Miranda and The Tempest could be seen as a strategy of legitimation which looks to Shakespeare's sister in order to validate the work of Margaret Fuller and other non-canonical American women writers.
Alan F. Dixson
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199544646
- eISBN:
- 9780191810022
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199544646.003.0005
- Subject:
- Biology, Animal Biology, Evolutionary Biology / Genetics
This chapter discusses the difference between male sexuality and female sexuality among primates. It explores patterns of pre-copulatory and copulatory behaviour that brings both sexes into proximity ...
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This chapter discusses the difference between male sexuality and female sexuality among primates. It explores patterns of pre-copulatory and copulatory behaviour that brings both sexes into proximity regarding their postures, movements, and sexual responses. It gives an overview of the evolution of copulatory postures and the evolution of intromission and ejaculatory patterns. Autoerotic behaviour is also explained, as well as abnormal forms of sexual activity. It also addresses some conceptual issues in human sexuality, particularly gender identity and gender role.Less
This chapter discusses the difference between male sexuality and female sexuality among primates. It explores patterns of pre-copulatory and copulatory behaviour that brings both sexes into proximity regarding their postures, movements, and sexual responses. It gives an overview of the evolution of copulatory postures and the evolution of intromission and ejaculatory patterns. Autoerotic behaviour is also explained, as well as abnormal forms of sexual activity. It also addresses some conceptual issues in human sexuality, particularly gender identity and gender role.
