Thomas F. Haddox
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823225217
- eISBN:
- 9780823236947
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823225217.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
This book charts what has been a largely unexplored literary landscape, looking at the work of such diverse writers as the gens de couleur libre poets of antebellum New Orleans, Kate ...
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This book charts what has been a largely unexplored literary landscape, looking at the work of such diverse writers as the gens de couleur libre poets of antebellum New Orleans, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Carson McCullers, Margaret Mitchell, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and John Kennedy Toole. It shows that Catholicism and its Church have always been a presence, albeit in different ways, in the southern cultural tradition. For some, Catholicism has been associated with miscegenation and with the political aspirations of African Americans; for others, it has served as the model for the feudal and patriarchal society that some southern whites sought to establish; for still others, it has presented a gorgeous aesthetic spectacle associated with decadence and homoeroticism; and for still others, it has marked a quotidian, do-it-yourself “lifestyle” attractive for its lack of concern with southern anxieties about honor. By focusing on the shifting and contradictory ways Catholicism has signified within southern literature and culture, this book contributes to a more nuanced understanding of American and southern literary and cultural history.Less
This book charts what has been a largely unexplored literary landscape, looking at the work of such diverse writers as the gens de couleur libre poets of antebellum New Orleans, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Carson McCullers, Margaret Mitchell, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and John Kennedy Toole. It shows that Catholicism and its Church have always been a presence, albeit in different ways, in the southern cultural tradition. For some, Catholicism has been associated with miscegenation and with the political aspirations of African Americans; for others, it has served as the model for the feudal and patriarchal society that some southern whites sought to establish; for still others, it has presented a gorgeous aesthetic spectacle associated with decadence and homoeroticism; and for still others, it has marked a quotidian, do-it-yourself “lifestyle” attractive for its lack of concern with southern anxieties about honor. By focusing on the shifting and contradictory ways Catholicism has signified within southern literature and culture, this book contributes to a more nuanced understanding of American and southern literary and cultural history.
Rebecca Krawiec
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- November 2003
- ISBN:
- 9780195129434
- eISBN:
- 9780199834396
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195129431.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion in the Ancient World
Lays out the narratives and explores the issues of various periods of crisis that prompted Shenoute's letters to the female monks. The issue themselves are wide ranging: Shenoute's exercise of power ...
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Lays out the narratives and explores the issues of various periods of crisis that prompted Shenoute's letters to the female monks. The issue themselves are wide ranging: Shenoute's exercise of power over the female community; his insistence on the gender separation of the male and female monks, including forbidding visits among relatives even as Shenoute himself visited the female community; incidents of female homoeroticism; a debate over what constituted proper monastic duties and proper corporal punishment; gossip; disputes over the quality of clothing the women were producing for male monks, including Shenoute's; and complaints about the excessive nature of Shenoute's leadership. All these topics, even in their diversity and their focus on conflict, provided Shenoute with the opportunity to teach all the monks, male and female, how to lead a salvific life in the monastery.Less
Lays out the narratives and explores the issues of various periods of crisis that prompted Shenoute's letters to the female monks. The issue themselves are wide ranging: Shenoute's exercise of power over the female community; his insistence on the gender separation of the male and female monks, including forbidding visits among relatives even as Shenoute himself visited the female community; incidents of female homoeroticism; a debate over what constituted proper monastic duties and proper corporal punishment; gossip; disputes over the quality of clothing the women were producing for male monks, including Shenoute's; and complaints about the excessive nature of Shenoute's leadership. All these topics, even in their diversity and their focus on conflict, provided Shenoute with the opportunity to teach all the monks, male and female, how to lead a salvific life in the monastery.
Holly Furneaux
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199566099
- eISBN:
- 9780191721915
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199566099.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book offers a radically new reading of Dickens and his major works. It demonstrates that, rather than representing a largely conventional, conservative view of sexuality and gender, he presents ...
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This book offers a radically new reading of Dickens and his major works. It demonstrates that, rather than representing a largely conventional, conservative view of sexuality and gender, he presents a distinctly queer corpus, everywhere fascinated by the diversity of gender roles, the expandability of notions of the family, and the complex multiplicity of sexual desire. The book examines the long overlooked figures of bachelor fathers, maritally resistant men, and male nurses, and explores Dickens's attention to a longing, not to reproduce, but to nurture, his interest in healing touch, and his career‐long commitment to articulating homoerotic desire. This book places Dickens's writing in a wider literary and social context, alongside authors including Bulwer‐Lytton, Tennyson, Braddon, Collins, and Whitman, to make a case for Dickens's central position in queer literary history. Examining novels, poetry, life‐writing, journalism, legal, and political debates, the book proposes that this eminent Victorian can direct us to the ways in which his culture could, and did, comfortably accommodate homoeroticism and families of choice. Further, it argues that Dickens's portrayals of nurturing masculinity and his concern with touch and affect between men challenge what we have been used to thinking about Victorian ideals of maleness. Queer Dickens intervenes into current debates about the Victorians (neither so punitive nor so prudish as we once imagined) and about the methodologies of histories of the family and of sexuality; it makes the case for a more optimistic, nurturing, and life‐affirming trajectory in queer theory.Less
This book offers a radically new reading of Dickens and his major works. It demonstrates that, rather than representing a largely conventional, conservative view of sexuality and gender, he presents a distinctly queer corpus, everywhere fascinated by the diversity of gender roles, the expandability of notions of the family, and the complex multiplicity of sexual desire. The book examines the long overlooked figures of bachelor fathers, maritally resistant men, and male nurses, and explores Dickens's attention to a longing, not to reproduce, but to nurture, his interest in healing touch, and his career‐long commitment to articulating homoerotic desire. This book places Dickens's writing in a wider literary and social context, alongside authors including Bulwer‐Lytton, Tennyson, Braddon, Collins, and Whitman, to make a case for Dickens's central position in queer literary history. Examining novels, poetry, life‐writing, journalism, legal, and political debates, the book proposes that this eminent Victorian can direct us to the ways in which his culture could, and did, comfortably accommodate homoeroticism and families of choice. Further, it argues that Dickens's portrayals of nurturing masculinity and his concern with touch and affect between men challenge what we have been used to thinking about Victorian ideals of maleness. Queer Dickens intervenes into current debates about the Victorians (neither so punitive nor so prudish as we once imagined) and about the methodologies of histories of the family and of sexuality; it makes the case for a more optimistic, nurturing, and life‐affirming trajectory in queer theory.
Huw Griffiths
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199641819
- eISBN:
- 9780191749025
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199641819.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, Shakespeare Studies
Double Falsehood is a story of love, but also of loss. Theobald’s play alters many details from the assumed source of the original, the Cardenio narrative in Cervantes’s Don ...
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Double Falsehood is a story of love, but also of loss. Theobald’s play alters many details from the assumed source of the original, the Cardenio narrative in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, available to Fletcher and Shakespeare in Shelton’s 1612 translation. This chapter argues that some of these changes are the result of altered understandings of the relationships between friendship, sexuality, and class as represented on the public stage, and particularly the loss of passionately physical expressions of male friendship, common in the earlier period. Those differences are traced across all these interrelated texts, and other relevant plays, in the service of illuminating a shifting politico-erotic territory in which substantial changes occurred in the relationships between homosociality, homoeroticism, and the figure of the ‘friend’.Less
Double Falsehood is a story of love, but also of loss. Theobald’s play alters many details from the assumed source of the original, the Cardenio narrative in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, available to Fletcher and Shakespeare in Shelton’s 1612 translation. This chapter argues that some of these changes are the result of altered understandings of the relationships between friendship, sexuality, and class as represented on the public stage, and particularly the loss of passionately physical expressions of male friendship, common in the earlier period. Those differences are traced across all these interrelated texts, and other relevant plays, in the service of illuminating a shifting politico-erotic territory in which substantial changes occurred in the relationships between homosociality, homoeroticism, and the figure of the ‘friend’.
Holly Furneaux
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199566099
- eISBN:
- 9780191721915
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199566099.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This introductory chapter begins with a description of the case of James Pratt and John Smith, who were convicted under a sodomy law only fully repealed in England in 1967. It then outlines main ...
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This introductory chapter begins with a description of the case of James Pratt and John Smith, who were convicted under a sodomy law only fully repealed in England in 1967. It then outlines main objective of the book, which argues that Dickens's early sympathy with Pratt and Smith was to develop into a career long dedication to the positive representation of same-sex desire and other non-heterosexual life choices. The book contributes to the ongoing revision of conceptions about Dickens and his age (neither so prudish or punitive as we once imagined), arguing that this eminent Victorian can direct us to the ways in which his culture could, and did, comfortably accommodate homoeroticism and forms of family founded on neither marriage nor blood. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.Less
This introductory chapter begins with a description of the case of James Pratt and John Smith, who were convicted under a sodomy law only fully repealed in England in 1967. It then outlines main objective of the book, which argues that Dickens's early sympathy with Pratt and Smith was to develop into a career long dedication to the positive representation of same-sex desire and other non-heterosexual life choices. The book contributes to the ongoing revision of conceptions about Dickens and his age (neither so prudish or punitive as we once imagined), arguing that this eminent Victorian can direct us to the ways in which his culture could, and did, comfortably accommodate homoeroticism and forms of family founded on neither marriage nor blood. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.
Tamara Levitz
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199730162
- eISBN:
- 9780199932467
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199730162.003.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
Chapter 1 explores the intersection between sexuality and religious belief as it shaped Gide’s interpretation of the myth of Persephone. Gide’s interest in this myth is related to his feeling of ...
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Chapter 1 explores the intersection between sexuality and religious belief as it shaped Gide’s interpretation of the myth of Persephone. Gide’s interest in this myth is related to his feeling of being torn between his Calvinist heritage and the mysticism he associated with homoerotic experience. In his Prosperine drafts from 1909 and 1913, Gide sublimated sexual temptation into the classical forms of the melodrama, while simultaneously celebrating his desire through the suggestion of ideal music. In the years that followed he came out as a pédéraste, emerged as an anticolonialist activist, and became the object of bitter public battles over the relationship between faith and sexuality. In Perséphone, he responded to these events by adopting a resistant aesthetics of ambiguity that led him to create a bricolage of prose and poetry styles. His politically motivated “anxiousness” undermined the basis of faith presumed in neoclassicism.Less
Chapter 1 explores the intersection between sexuality and religious belief as it shaped Gide’s interpretation of the myth of Persephone. Gide’s interest in this myth is related to his feeling of being torn between his Calvinist heritage and the mysticism he associated with homoerotic experience. In his Prosperine drafts from 1909 and 1913, Gide sublimated sexual temptation into the classical forms of the melodrama, while simultaneously celebrating his desire through the suggestion of ideal music. In the years that followed he came out as a pédéraste, emerged as an anticolonialist activist, and became the object of bitter public battles over the relationship between faith and sexuality. In Perséphone, he responded to these events by adopting a resistant aesthetics of ambiguity that led him to create a bricolage of prose and poetry styles. His politically motivated “anxiousness” undermined the basis of faith presumed in neoclassicism.
Alastair J. Minnis
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198187547
- eISBN:
- 9780191718977
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187547.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
The Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun was a major bestseller, largely due to its robust treatment of ‘natural’ sexuality. This book concentrates on the ways in which de Meun, in imitation of Ovid, ...
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The Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun was a major bestseller, largely due to its robust treatment of ‘natural’ sexuality. This book concentrates on the ways in which de Meun, in imitation of Ovid, assumed the mock-magisterium (or mastership) of love. From Latin texts and literary theory, de Meun derived many hermeneutic rationales and generic categorisations, without allowing any one to dominate. The book considers allegorical versus literalistic expression in the poem, its competing discourses of allegorical covering and satiric stripping, de Meun's provocative use of plain and sometimes obscene language in a widely accessible French work, the challenge of its homosocial and perhaps even homoerotic constructions, the subversive effects of coital comedy within a text characterised by intermittent aspirations to moral and scientific truth, and — placing the poem's reception within the European history of vernacular hermeneutics — the problematic translation of literary authority from Latin into the vulgar tongue.Less
The Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun was a major bestseller, largely due to its robust treatment of ‘natural’ sexuality. This book concentrates on the ways in which de Meun, in imitation of Ovid, assumed the mock-magisterium (or mastership) of love. From Latin texts and literary theory, de Meun derived many hermeneutic rationales and generic categorisations, without allowing any one to dominate. The book considers allegorical versus literalistic expression in the poem, its competing discourses of allegorical covering and satiric stripping, de Meun's provocative use of plain and sometimes obscene language in a widely accessible French work, the challenge of its homosocial and perhaps even homoerotic constructions, the subversive effects of coital comedy within a text characterised by intermittent aspirations to moral and scientific truth, and — placing the poem's reception within the European history of vernacular hermeneutics — the problematic translation of literary authority from Latin into the vulgar tongue.
Vincent Woodard
Justin A. Joyce and Dwight McBride (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814794616
- eISBN:
- 9781479815807
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814794616.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Scholars of U.S. and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. This book takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption ...
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Scholars of U.S. and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. This book takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the literal starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of the slaveholder, and further draws attention to the ways in which Blacks experienced their consumption as a fundamentally homoerotic occurrence. This book explores these connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and U.S. slave culture. Utilizing many staples of African American literature and culture, such as the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass, as well as other less circulated materials like James L. Smith's slave narrative, runaway slave advertisements, and numerous articles from Black newspapers published in the nineteenth century, the book traces the racial assumptions, political aspirations, gender codes, and philosophical frameworks that dictated both European and white American arousal towards Black males and hunger for Black male flesh. The book uses these texts to unpick how slaves struggled not only against social consumption, but also against endemic mechanisms of starvation and hunger designed to break them. It concludes with an examination of the controversial chain gang oral sex scene in Toni Morrison's Beloved, suggesting that even at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, we are still at a loss for language with which to describe Black male hunger within a plantation culture of consumption.Less
Scholars of U.S. and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. This book takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the literal starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of the slaveholder, and further draws attention to the ways in which Blacks experienced their consumption as a fundamentally homoerotic occurrence. This book explores these connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and U.S. slave culture. Utilizing many staples of African American literature and culture, such as the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass, as well as other less circulated materials like James L. Smith's slave narrative, runaway slave advertisements, and numerous articles from Black newspapers published in the nineteenth century, the book traces the racial assumptions, political aspirations, gender codes, and philosophical frameworks that dictated both European and white American arousal towards Black males and hunger for Black male flesh. The book uses these texts to unpick how slaves struggled not only against social consumption, but also against endemic mechanisms of starvation and hunger designed to break them. It concludes with an examination of the controversial chain gang oral sex scene in Toni Morrison's Beloved, suggesting that even at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, we are still at a loss for language with which to describe Black male hunger within a plantation culture of consumption.
H. G. Cocks
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226438665
- eISBN:
- 9780226438832
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226438832.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History
The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed in a storm of fire and brimstone sent from heaven, as recorded in Genesis. The biblical story provided perhaps the most important reference point in ...
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The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed in a storm of fire and brimstone sent from heaven, as recorded in Genesis. The biblical story provided perhaps the most important reference point in early modern England for those wanting to explore the nature of sexual excess and especially homoerotic desire. Visions of Sodom examines the different ways in which the story of the wicked cities was interpreted and read from the early modern period to the nineteenth century, and how it shaped understanding of homoerotic desire. During that period, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah provided a myth describing the origin of “fornication,” but also contained other important elements. Sodom was not only a marker of sexual sins, but also the epitome of false religion, the archetype of a city, an example of hell’s fire and what would happen at the end of the world, the symbol of a sinner’s permanent torment, and a mysterious physical site – a real place that could be searched for and visited. Sodom had a fourfold unity as an iniquitous city, a symbol of eternal punishment, an actual place, and a complex of often unnameable and terrible sins. Visions of Sodom describes how these various readings were used to make homoerotic desire visible and explicable in Protestant Britain.Less
The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed in a storm of fire and brimstone sent from heaven, as recorded in Genesis. The biblical story provided perhaps the most important reference point in early modern England for those wanting to explore the nature of sexual excess and especially homoerotic desire. Visions of Sodom examines the different ways in which the story of the wicked cities was interpreted and read from the early modern period to the nineteenth century, and how it shaped understanding of homoerotic desire. During that period, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah provided a myth describing the origin of “fornication,” but also contained other important elements. Sodom was not only a marker of sexual sins, but also the epitome of false religion, the archetype of a city, an example of hell’s fire and what would happen at the end of the world, the symbol of a sinner’s permanent torment, and a mysterious physical site – a real place that could be searched for and visited. Sodom had a fourfold unity as an iniquitous city, a symbol of eternal punishment, an actual place, and a complex of often unnameable and terrible sins. Visions of Sodom describes how these various readings were used to make homoerotic desire visible and explicable in Protestant Britain.
ALASTAIR MINNIS
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198187547
- eISBN:
- 9780191718977
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198187547.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter examines the semantic cross-currents which complicate the ending of the poem Roman de la Rose, rendering closure impossible and consequently undermining the text's occasional aspirations ...
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This chapter examines the semantic cross-currents which complicate the ending of the poem Roman de la Rose, rendering closure impossible and consequently undermining the text's occasional aspirations towards historical, moral, or metaphysical truth. Ovidian comedy conflicts with the moral affirmation of ‘natural’ sexuality which Jean de Meun inherited from Alan's De planctu naturae, as de Meun has his lover-figure put on a richly problematic performance of normative masculinity. This is not to deny, however, that the earlier narrative offers hints of homoeroticism. This chapter considers the laughter which surrounds Amant's sexual consummation at the end of the poem and discusses genre and gender by exploring the causes of the text's terminal disruption of its moral impulses.Less
This chapter examines the semantic cross-currents which complicate the ending of the poem Roman de la Rose, rendering closure impossible and consequently undermining the text's occasional aspirations towards historical, moral, or metaphysical truth. Ovidian comedy conflicts with the moral affirmation of ‘natural’ sexuality which Jean de Meun inherited from Alan's De planctu naturae, as de Meun has his lover-figure put on a richly problematic performance of normative masculinity. This is not to deny, however, that the earlier narrative offers hints of homoeroticism. This chapter considers the laughter which surrounds Amant's sexual consummation at the end of the poem and discusses genre and gender by exploring the causes of the text's terminal disruption of its moral impulses.
Sylvia Huot
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199252121
- eISBN:
- 9780191719110
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199252121.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
This chapter examines literary treatments of madness in connection with love and sexual desire, with a focus on the male heterosexual subject. Analyses trace the tension between erotic desire and ...
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This chapter examines literary treatments of madness in connection with love and sexual desire, with a focus on the male heterosexual subject. Analyses trace the tension between erotic desire and misogynistic revulsion, as well as that between heterosexual desire and homosocial bonding, in a series of texts. The spectre of homoerotic desire that haunts many medieval romances is also examined. Negotiating these conflicting demands and emotions can result in both feigned and genuine madness for many heroes of chivalric romance. Examples include Amadas et Ydoine, Ipomedon, the prose Tristan — focusing on the interplay between Tristan, Mark, Palamedes, and Kahedin —, Marie de France’s Lanval, and the episode of the sodomitic king Agriano in the romance Bérinus.Less
This chapter examines literary treatments of madness in connection with love and sexual desire, with a focus on the male heterosexual subject. Analyses trace the tension between erotic desire and misogynistic revulsion, as well as that between heterosexual desire and homosocial bonding, in a series of texts. The spectre of homoerotic desire that haunts many medieval romances is also examined. Negotiating these conflicting demands and emotions can result in both feigned and genuine madness for many heroes of chivalric romance. Examples include Amadas et Ydoine, Ipomedon, the prose Tristan — focusing on the interplay between Tristan, Mark, Palamedes, and Kahedin —, Marie de France’s Lanval, and the episode of the sodomitic king Agriano in the romance Bérinus.
Joseph Campana
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823239108
- eISBN:
- 9780823239146
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823239108.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
“The Legend of Chastity” and witness the culmination of Spenser's project of epic disarmament and of the reformation of heroic masculinity. In chapter five, I argue that the action of the Legend of ...
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“The Legend of Chastity” and witness the culmination of Spenser's project of epic disarmament and of the reformation of heroic masculinity. In chapter five, I argue that the action of the Legend of Chastity responds to a crisis of masculinity dramatized through the erotic scenarios central to the conventions of romance narrative and Petrarchan lyric. Whereas romance positions women as the objects of violent, masculine desire, Petrarchan sonnets elevate the beloved to a position of violent supremacy and power, leaving the man to suffer abjectly the woman's wrath and disdain. The interlocking nature of these discourses produces a seemingly inescapable dialectic of violence and victimization that devolves painfully on the bodies of women. While many identify Spenser with the vicious sadomasochism in early modern erotic discourse. I argue that have critics failed to understand that Spenser's solution to the crisis of masculinity in the 1590 Faerie Queene comes as sympathetic identification that occurs through the masochistic theatricality of the Petrarchan lyric. Spenser positions the male poet as the tortured Amoret who can only be rescued by the female knight Britomart. Amoret and Britomart come to represent the reformation of masculinity through sympathetic identification across gender and the articulation of sympathetic sociality as an ideal.Less
“The Legend of Chastity” and witness the culmination of Spenser's project of epic disarmament and of the reformation of heroic masculinity. In chapter five, I argue that the action of the Legend of Chastity responds to a crisis of masculinity dramatized through the erotic scenarios central to the conventions of romance narrative and Petrarchan lyric. Whereas romance positions women as the objects of violent, masculine desire, Petrarchan sonnets elevate the beloved to a position of violent supremacy and power, leaving the man to suffer abjectly the woman's wrath and disdain. The interlocking nature of these discourses produces a seemingly inescapable dialectic of violence and victimization that devolves painfully on the bodies of women. While many identify Spenser with the vicious sadomasochism in early modern erotic discourse. I argue that have critics failed to understand that Spenser's solution to the crisis of masculinity in the 1590 Faerie Queene comes as sympathetic identification that occurs through the masochistic theatricality of the Petrarchan lyric. Spenser positions the male poet as the tortured Amoret who can only be rescued by the female knight Britomart. Amoret and Britomart come to represent the reformation of masculinity through sympathetic identification across gender and the articulation of sympathetic sociality as an ideal.
David Cohen
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748613199
- eISBN:
- 9780748651016
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748613199.003.0007
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, European History: BCE to 500CE
Recent scholarship has succeeded in greatly advancing our understanding of ‘Greek homosexuality’. Kenneth Dover and Michel Foucault have argued that the modern dichotomisation of sexuality as ...
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Recent scholarship has succeeded in greatly advancing our understanding of ‘Greek homosexuality’. Kenneth Dover and Michel Foucault have argued that the modern dichotomisation of sexuality as heterosexuality/homosexuality does not apply to the ancient world, and they have shown how distinctions between active and passive roles in male sexuality defined the contours of the permissible and impermissible in pederastic courtship and other forms of homoerotic behaviour. Among the Greeks, active homosexuality was regarded as perfectly natural (sexual desire was not distinguished according to its object). There was, however, a prohibition against males of any age adopting a submissive role that was unworthy of a free citizen. This chapter explores law, society and homosexuality in classical Athens, and argues that Athenian homoeroticism must be understood in the context of a theory of social practice that emphasises the centrality of cultural contradiction and ambivalence.Less
Recent scholarship has succeeded in greatly advancing our understanding of ‘Greek homosexuality’. Kenneth Dover and Michel Foucault have argued that the modern dichotomisation of sexuality as heterosexuality/homosexuality does not apply to the ancient world, and they have shown how distinctions between active and passive roles in male sexuality defined the contours of the permissible and impermissible in pederastic courtship and other forms of homoerotic behaviour. Among the Greeks, active homosexuality was regarded as perfectly natural (sexual desire was not distinguished according to its object). There was, however, a prohibition against males of any age adopting a submissive role that was unworthy of a free citizen. This chapter explores law, society and homosexuality in classical Athens, and argues that Athenian homoeroticism must be understood in the context of a theory of social practice that emphasises the centrality of cultural contradiction and ambivalence.
Susan Potter
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252042461
- eISBN:
- 9780252051302
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042461.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book is a counter-history of the emergence of lesbian sexuality in early cinema. Drawing on the critical insights of queer theory and the history of sexuality, it challenges approaches to ...
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This book is a counter-history of the emergence of lesbian sexuality in early cinema. Drawing on the critical insights of queer theory and the history of sexuality, it challenges approaches to lesbian representation, initially by reframing the emergence of lesbian figures in cinema in the late 1920s and early 1930s as only the most visible and belated signs of an array of strategies of sexuality. The emergence of lesbian representation and spectatorship in early cinema is not a linear progression and consolidation but rather arises across multiple sites in dispersed forms that are modern and backward-looking, recursive and anachronistic. In this tumultuous period, new but not always coherent sexual knowledges and categories emerge, even as older modalities of homoeroticism persist. The book articulates some of the discursive and institutional processes by which women’s same-sex desires and identities have been reorganized as impossible, marginal or—perhaps not so surprisingly—central to new forms of cinematic representation and spectatorship. Complicating the critical consensus of feminist film theory and history, the book foregrounds the centrality of women’s same-sex desire to historically distinct cinematic discourses of both homo- and heterosexuality. It articulates across its chapters the emergence of lesbian sexuality—and that of its intimate “other,” heterosexuality—as the effect of diverse discursive operations of early cinema, considered as a complex assemblage of film texts, exhibition practices, modes of female spectatorship, and reception.Less
This book is a counter-history of the emergence of lesbian sexuality in early cinema. Drawing on the critical insights of queer theory and the history of sexuality, it challenges approaches to lesbian representation, initially by reframing the emergence of lesbian figures in cinema in the late 1920s and early 1930s as only the most visible and belated signs of an array of strategies of sexuality. The emergence of lesbian representation and spectatorship in early cinema is not a linear progression and consolidation but rather arises across multiple sites in dispersed forms that are modern and backward-looking, recursive and anachronistic. In this tumultuous period, new but not always coherent sexual knowledges and categories emerge, even as older modalities of homoeroticism persist. The book articulates some of the discursive and institutional processes by which women’s same-sex desires and identities have been reorganized as impossible, marginal or—perhaps not so surprisingly—central to new forms of cinematic representation and spectatorship. Complicating the critical consensus of feminist film theory and history, the book foregrounds the centrality of women’s same-sex desire to historically distinct cinematic discourses of both homo- and heterosexuality. It articulates across its chapters the emergence of lesbian sexuality—and that of its intimate “other,” heterosexuality—as the effect of diverse discursive operations of early cinema, considered as a complex assemblage of film texts, exhibition practices, modes of female spectatorship, and reception.
Adam Parkes
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195383812
- eISBN:
- 9780199896950
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195383812.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Chapter 2 extends the previous chapter’s inquiry into the relation between impressionist aesthetics and public discourse by considering problems of literary influence and homoeroticism in the ...
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Chapter 2 extends the previous chapter’s inquiry into the relation between impressionist aesthetics and public discourse by considering problems of literary influence and homoeroticism in the writings of the Oxford art critic Walter Pater and three male disciples: George Moore, Arthur Symons, and Oscar Wilde. Writing in the wake of scandalized Victorian responses to Pater’s The Renaissance, Moore and Wilde imparted subtle homoerotic meanings to the language of impressions they had inherited from their master. Arthur Symons, by contrast, tried to mute these meanings, but he too became implicated in the same sexual discourse. The chapter ends by showing how Joseph Conrad, a later heir to Pater’s legacy, reactivates questions of homoerotic impressions and influence in the more explicitly political context of Heart of Darkness.Less
Chapter 2 extends the previous chapter’s inquiry into the relation between impressionist aesthetics and public discourse by considering problems of literary influence and homoeroticism in the writings of the Oxford art critic Walter Pater and three male disciples: George Moore, Arthur Symons, and Oscar Wilde. Writing in the wake of scandalized Victorian responses to Pater’s The Renaissance, Moore and Wilde imparted subtle homoerotic meanings to the language of impressions they had inherited from their master. Arthur Symons, by contrast, tried to mute these meanings, but he too became implicated in the same sexual discourse. The chapter ends by showing how Joseph Conrad, a later heir to Pater’s legacy, reactivates questions of homoerotic impressions and influence in the more explicitly political context of Heart of Darkness.
Derek Krueger
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823226351
- eISBN:
- 9780823236718
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823226351.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), arguably the most important Byzantine religious thinker between John of Damascus in the eighth century and Gregory Palamas in the ...
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Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), arguably the most important Byzantine religious thinker between John of Damascus in the eighth century and Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth, often presents salvation as a heavenly marriage. Scholars have long noted Symeon's frequent use of erotic and nuptial imagery to explore the relationship between the monk and God. What scholars have generally failed to notice or account for is that much of this imagery reflects homoeroticism. This chapter uncovers in the writings of Symeon the New Theologian evidence of a startlingly rich homoerotic imaginary that foregrounds the male monastic body as the site of erotic transformation or deification. The chapter detects possible echoes in Symeon's work of the teasingly cloaked erotic exchange between Alcibiades and Socrates with which Plato's Symposium concludes. While Symeon often invokes divine eros in his understanding of the process of deification, it is debatable whether this parable and its interpretation are “consistent with the New Theologian's use of nuptial imagery elsewhere”.Less
Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), arguably the most important Byzantine religious thinker between John of Damascus in the eighth century and Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth, often presents salvation as a heavenly marriage. Scholars have long noted Symeon's frequent use of erotic and nuptial imagery to explore the relationship between the monk and God. What scholars have generally failed to notice or account for is that much of this imagery reflects homoeroticism. This chapter uncovers in the writings of Symeon the New Theologian evidence of a startlingly rich homoerotic imaginary that foregrounds the male monastic body as the site of erotic transformation or deification. The chapter detects possible echoes in Symeon's work of the teasingly cloaked erotic exchange between Alcibiades and Socrates with which Plato's Symposium concludes. While Symeon often invokes divine eros in his understanding of the process of deification, it is debatable whether this parable and its interpretation are “consistent with the New Theologian's use of nuptial imagery elsewhere”.
Amy Hollywood
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823226351
- eISBN:
- 9780823236718
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823226351.003.0006
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
A number of literary and cultural scholars have recently turned to texts by or about women to uncover possible homoeroticism within the metaphoric structures of women's ...
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A number of literary and cultural scholars have recently turned to texts by or about women to uncover possible homoeroticism within the metaphoric structures of women's own writings or in the practices ascribed to women or female characters within male- and female-authored literary and religious documents. Karma Lochrie, for example, looks to a number of medieval devotional texts and images in which Christ's bloody side wound becomes a locus of desire. Lochrie argues that the complex interplay of gender and sexuality in medieval texts and images effectively queers simple identifications of sex, gender, and/or sexuality. Caroline Walker Bynum insists on the feminization of Christ, providing a locus for female identification with the divine as well as protecting the divine-human relationship from even metaphorical sexualization. This chapter explores the fascinatingly fluid, culturally transgressive erotic subjectivities emerging in the recorded visions of female medieval mystics Mechthild of Magdeburg, Hadewijch, and Marguerite Porete, who represent themselves, respectively, as a bride of Christ, a knight errant in love, and a female Soul seeking erotic union with a feminized divinity.Less
A number of literary and cultural scholars have recently turned to texts by or about women to uncover possible homoeroticism within the metaphoric structures of women's own writings or in the practices ascribed to women or female characters within male- and female-authored literary and religious documents. Karma Lochrie, for example, looks to a number of medieval devotional texts and images in which Christ's bloody side wound becomes a locus of desire. Lochrie argues that the complex interplay of gender and sexuality in medieval texts and images effectively queers simple identifications of sex, gender, and/or sexuality. Caroline Walker Bynum insists on the feminization of Christ, providing a locus for female identification with the divine as well as protecting the divine-human relationship from even metaphorical sexualization. This chapter explores the fascinatingly fluid, culturally transgressive erotic subjectivities emerging in the recorded visions of female medieval mystics Mechthild of Magdeburg, Hadewijch, and Marguerite Porete, who represent themselves, respectively, as a bride of Christ, a knight errant in love, and a female Soul seeking erotic union with a feminized divinity.
Carrie J. Preston
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780231166508
- eISBN:
- 9780231541541
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231166508.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Preston discusses her experience taking noh lessons from a professional actor in Tokyo and recounts how noh pedagogy challenged her notions of “good” teaching and learning. Western pedagogies are ...
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Preston discusses her experience taking noh lessons from a professional actor in Tokyo and recounts how noh pedagogy challenged her notions of “good” teaching and learning. Western pedagogies are typically obsessed with success or performance outcomes, innovation, and creating the illusion of a non-hierarchical classroom, but tradition and mimicry are central to noh pedagogy.Less
Preston discusses her experience taking noh lessons from a professional actor in Tokyo and recounts how noh pedagogy challenged her notions of “good” teaching and learning. Western pedagogies are typically obsessed with success or performance outcomes, innovation, and creating the illusion of a non-hierarchical classroom, but tradition and mimicry are central to noh pedagogy.
Barbara Hartley
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781628461190
- eISBN:
- 9781626740662
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628461190.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
This chapter discusses the prehistory of Boys Love (BL) by analyzing the works of Taisho period (1912–1925) artist, Takabatake Kashō. The period saw significant economic and technological growth that ...
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This chapter discusses the prehistory of Boys Love (BL) by analyzing the works of Taisho period (1912–1925) artist, Takabatake Kashō. The period saw significant economic and technological growth that resulted in major advances in education. A vibrant literary culture developed, especially around popular monthly magazines aimed at differing readerships such as housewives, businessmen, and boys and girls. Kashō, one of Japan's best-known illustrators, presented boys as young, beautiful, and sometimes effeminate-looking male figures that project an air of homoeroticism due to also having made illustrations of older men. These male figures attracted interest among female readers. Noting that such images were featured in girls' magazines, such as Shōjo no tomo (Girls' friend), the chapter suggests that it was precisely the absence of women in the frame of these pictures—and hence their homoerotic charge—that attracted girl readers.Less
This chapter discusses the prehistory of Boys Love (BL) by analyzing the works of Taisho period (1912–1925) artist, Takabatake Kashō. The period saw significant economic and technological growth that resulted in major advances in education. A vibrant literary culture developed, especially around popular monthly magazines aimed at differing readerships such as housewives, businessmen, and boys and girls. Kashō, one of Japan's best-known illustrators, presented boys as young, beautiful, and sometimes effeminate-looking male figures that project an air of homoeroticism due to also having made illustrations of older men. These male figures attracted interest among female readers. Noting that such images were featured in girls' magazines, such as Shōjo no tomo (Girls' friend), the chapter suggests that it was precisely the absence of women in the frame of these pictures—and hence their homoerotic charge—that attracted girl readers.
Bernard de Zogheb
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823251766
- eISBN:
- 9780823252992
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823251766.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
The chapter addresses the comic operettas written by a virtually unknown Alexandrian Syro-Lebanese author, Bernard de Zogheb, between the 1940s and 1990s, against the backdrop of the dissolution of ...
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The chapter addresses the comic operettas written by a virtually unknown Alexandrian Syro-Lebanese author, Bernard de Zogheb, between the 1940s and 1990s, against the backdrop of the dissolution of empire in the eastern and southern Mediterranean and the postindependence period. The libretti—only one of which was published, thanks to the patronage of James Merrill—are written in a lingua franca-like pidgin Italian and set to popular tunes. The argument is made that the operettas instantiate a parodic camp reclamation of verbal mongrelization and gilded mores, undertaking a dual process of self-actualization, of homoeroticism and an upper-crust Alexandrian Levantine cosmopolitanism. In dialogue with Western redactions of Levantinism, the libretti also engage canonical writers of the city, such as Cavafy and Forster, as well as writers whose work engaged the literary triumvirate, such as Robert Liddell and Christian Ayoub Sinano. But a reading of four of the libretti reveals the limitations of this project which falls short of wholly embracing other ethnicities and less privileged classes, ultimately betraying an undertow of interpellation that prevents it from fully coming to terms with the survival of colonial tropes of Levantinism in a Mediterranean reinscribed in terms of the North and the South.Less
The chapter addresses the comic operettas written by a virtually unknown Alexandrian Syro-Lebanese author, Bernard de Zogheb, between the 1940s and 1990s, against the backdrop of the dissolution of empire in the eastern and southern Mediterranean and the postindependence period. The libretti—only one of which was published, thanks to the patronage of James Merrill—are written in a lingua franca-like pidgin Italian and set to popular tunes. The argument is made that the operettas instantiate a parodic camp reclamation of verbal mongrelization and gilded mores, undertaking a dual process of self-actualization, of homoeroticism and an upper-crust Alexandrian Levantine cosmopolitanism. In dialogue with Western redactions of Levantinism, the libretti also engage canonical writers of the city, such as Cavafy and Forster, as well as writers whose work engaged the literary triumvirate, such as Robert Liddell and Christian Ayoub Sinano. But a reading of four of the libretti reveals the limitations of this project which falls short of wholly embracing other ethnicities and less privileged classes, ultimately betraying an undertow of interpellation that prevents it from fully coming to terms with the survival of colonial tropes of Levantinism in a Mediterranean reinscribed in terms of the North and the South.
