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Back in the Spotlight: The Cinematic Regime of Representation of Kathoeys and Gay Men in Thailand

Serhat Ünaldi

in Queer Bangkok: 21st Century Markets, Media, and Rights

This chapter examines queer representation in Thai cinema and the possibilities for the emergence of a movie scene that better reflects the diversity of queer life in Thailand. It examines movies ... More

This chapter examines queer representation in Thai cinema and the possibilities for the emergence of a movie scene that better reflects the diversity of queer life in Thailand. It examines movies with representations of male-to-female transgender kathoeys and male homosexuals, although tom-dee lesbians also appear in a number of the films. The movies considered are divided, first into a group of mainstream films produced by Thailand's major studios—Iron Ladies 1 and Iron Ladies 2 (2000 and 2003), Saving Private Tootsie (2002), Beautiful Boxer (2003), The Last Song (2006), Metrosexual (2006), Me . . . Myself (2007)—and second, into the category of independent films including Tropical Malady (2004), Rainbow Boys (2005), and Silom Soi (2006).Less

Wellness as an Ecological Enterprise

G. Kelly James

in Becoming Ecological: An Expedition Into Community Psychology

The Wellness topic has significance for the analysis of risk and protective factors—currently of interest to prevention research investigators. The longstanding tradition of emphasizing ... More

The Wellness topic has significance for the analysis of risk and protective factors—currently of interest to prevention research investigators. The longstanding tradition of emphasizing epidemiological research for risk factors such as abuse of substances, limited educational achievement, and the pernicious influences of various forms of social and racial discrimination has established connections between the above factors and the expression of psychological maladies. Devoting time and energy to the study of wellness is not simply a scrutiny of the absence of illness. Since the study of illness has been such a priority and so commanding of our attention for so long, it will take some doing to begin anew. This chapter describes five ideas to assist this shift in point of view. These ideas reconceptualize how inquiries can be conceived and carried out. New criteria and new premises are employed; a different epistemology is invoked.Less

Nefeeseh

Jason Thompson

in Edward William Lane 1801–1876: The Life of the Pioneering Egyptologist and Orientalist

Lane spent three more months in Cairo, after returning from Nubia at the end of 1827. Illness was certainly a factor for his gastrointestinal infection and other maladies stubbornly persisted, but ... More

Lane spent three more months in Cairo, after returning from Nubia at the end of 1827. Illness was certainly a factor for his gastrointestinal infection and other maladies stubbornly persisted, but one of the most important of the “other circumstances” was the acquisition of a young female slave named Nefeeseh. If memory served her correctly later, her name had originally been Anastasia, but she became Nefeeseh. Nefeeseh was a Greek girl. There was no question of Nefeeseh being Lane's slave; she became his mascot, younger sister, daughter, or pleasant child companion. Lane was not the only one of his colleagues to acquire a slave, but none of the others acted out of compassion except Hay, and even he may not have done so at first. Buying a female Greek slave and placing her with a friend were entirely in character for Hay.Less

Ghost Towns

Dudley Andrew

in Cinema at the City's Edge

This chapter focuses on the growing number of horror films across East Asia. It highlights Ringu (1998), a film which incorporates local and aesthetic preferences in a manner that thrilled audiences ... More

This chapter focuses on the growing number of horror films across East Asia. It highlights Ringu (1998), a film which incorporates local and aesthetic preferences in a manner that thrilled audiences throughout East Asia and is considered as the origin of a powerful Asian cycle of ghost films. The chapter also examines box office films in the ghost genre, such as Double Vision (2002), Sorum (2001), A Single Spark (1995), 3-Iron (2004), and Tropical Malady (2004).Less

Black Bile and the Intractable Jinn: Threshold of the Inorganic

Stefania Pandolfo

in Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam

This chapter analyzes the metaphysical sites of the maladies and medicines of the soul, as well as questions of natural medicine and its relation to therapy.

The Biloxi Fever: Leisure and Laziness in the Tourist Landscape

Rebecca Cawood McIntyre

in Souvenirs of the Old South: Northern Tourism and Southern Mythology

In 1895, Julian Ralph, New York travel writer and southern booster, penned an article in Harper's New Monthly Magazine recounting his adventures in Biloxi, Mississippi. Describing the “peculiar ... More

In 1895, Julian Ralph, New York travel writer and southern booster, penned an article in Harper's New Monthly Magazine recounting his adventures in Biloxi, Mississippi. Describing the “peculiar charms” of this picturesque village, Ralph warned his northern readers of a malady the locals called “Biloxi fever”, an illness that sooner or later afflicted anyone who came to the town. The symptoms of Biloxi fever, assured Ralph, were easy to detect. While obviously tongue-in-cheek, Ralph's emphasis on leisure in Biloxi, nonetheless, typified how northern promoters pitched the lazy pleasures of a southern vacation to their middle-class readers in the North in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century. Tourism in the United States, though, did not invent a leisurely South as variations of the myth had existed since the colonial era.Less

Reprise

C. Daniel Batson

in What's Wrong With Morality?: A Social-Psychological Perspective

The brief Reprise returns to the moral maladies with which the book began. Psychological processes that might account for various examples of moral failure are suggested, drawing on the standard ... More

The brief Reprise returns to the moral maladies with which the book began. Psychological processes that might account for various examples of moral failure are suggested, drawing on the standard diagnoses of our moral ills-personal deficiency and situational pressure-as well as on the value→emotion→motivation→behavior framework introduced in Chapter 1 and developed in Chapters 4–6. The scope of our maladies is most apparent when we face moral decisions in the absence of strong situational pressure. Provided with a little wiggle room, our moral character shows its true face.Less

Sexing the X

Sarah S. Richardson

in Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome

Focusing on “X mosaicism” theories of female biology, health, and behavior, this chapter examines the longstanding and infrequently questioned association of the X with femaleness. Drawing strongly ... More

Focusing on “X mosaicism” theories of female biology, health, and behavior, this chapter examines the longstanding and infrequently questioned association of the X with femaleness. Drawing strongly on resonances between traditional ideas of femininity and the concepts of chimerism, mixedness, and two-ness, human X mosaicism theories seek the origins of mysterious “female maladies” and female behavior in their doubled Xs. Analyzing X mosaicism theories of female biology and behavior and X-chromosomal theories of the higher incidence of autoimmunity in women, this chapter shows how gendered assumptions operate to sustain and cohere hypotheses of dubious empirical merit in high-priority areas of women’s health research. Sourcing notions of the X as female, and chimerism as feminine, X mosaicism theories of female biology and behavior present a poignant case of gendered conceptions of biological objects of analysis influencing scientific reasoning.Less

: Naked Image

John Paul Ricco

in The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes

This chapter looks at Marguerite Duras’ short story The Malady of Death and Catherine Breillat's book Pornocracy, and film Anatomy of Hell—the latter two of which are redactions of the Duras story. ... More

This chapter looks at Marguerite Duras’ short story The Malady of Death and Catherine Breillat's book Pornocracy, and film Anatomy of Hell—the latter two of which are redactions of the Duras story. All three works are discussed in terms of their presentation of the scene of naked sharing of bodies and the inappropriable finitude that is impossibly shared between them, right up to death. The bed scenes in the Duras and Breillat are in turn compared with Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson as analysed by Sarah Kofman, and to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ photographic image of an unmade bed. By providing visual evidence of two bodies having been in the bed but that are no longer present, Gonzalez-Torres's image is an emblematic image for the entire book and its study of the retreat of bodies as retracing the scene of the decision between us as already-unmade and as erotic and funereal, at once.Less

Forging a Head

Elaine P. Miller

in Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times

This concluding chapter summarizes the book's main themes. The text has conducted an in-depth exploration of one philosopher/psychoanalyst's engagement with depression and other social maladies not ... More

This concluding chapter summarizes the book's main themes. The text has conducted an in-depth exploration of one philosopher/psychoanalyst's engagement with depression and other social maladies not only at the level of the individual but also at the level of the culture. Julia Kristeva's contribution to psychoanalytic accounts of coming to subjectivity considers the role of the image in its potential to give rise to aesthetic ideas—in painting, sculpture, photography, and film—in constituting a healthy psyche in the age of the spectacle. Also, art puts forward a new, singular kind of image: one that might be thought of as melancholic, negative or iconoclastic, uncanny or foreign, sublimating without de-eroticizing, and forgiving, pardoning.Less

Stigmatizing Powerlessness

Georges Vigarello

in The Metamorphoses of Fat: A History of Obesity

This chapter discusses the increased attention to degrees of bigness and more acute stigmatization of “excesses” during the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century culture had a different vision of the ... More

This chapter discusses the increased attention to degrees of bigness and more acute stigmatization of “excesses” during the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century culture had a different vision of the body that was focused less on liquid humors and more on solid fibers, less on vapors and more on the tone and vibrancy of nerves. It wondered more about the origins of life force and had an unprecedented interest in muscle and nerve tensions and in the causes that might lead to softening or relaxation of fibers. A concern for lines and their interlacing displaced the earlier concern for liquids and sacks. In addition to the traditional focus on the compression of blood vessels by fat, there was now a similar alertness to the possible compression of the nerves. This is evident in Samuel Tissot’s study of nervous maladies from 1770. “Excess fat, despite being soft, will produce a compression strong enough to bother the nerves and produce regular swelling.” And conversely, a softening of fibers is said to favor the buildup of fat in tissues. There is one failing that weakens enormous bodies, namely, loss of “vibrancy,” an absence of “tonic force,” a major deficit of reactivity. Powerlessness, in the end, is the fate of the weighted down anatomy. This explains the focus at this time on what is most feared, namely, loss of reproductive faculties and loss of the faculty of reaction.Less

Cats and Cows Know That It Is: Textual and Historical Deconstruction of the Ur Version

Steven Heine

in Like Cats and Dogs: Contesting the Mu Koan in Zen Buddhism

This chapter undertakes a deconstruction of the Ur Version and consequent reorientation of the significance of the Mu Kōan from four interlocking hermeneutic angles. These angles include (1) textual ... More

This chapter undertakes a deconstruction of the Ur Version and consequent reorientation of the significance of the Mu Kōan from four interlocking hermeneutic angles. These angles include (1) textual hermeneutics, or rethinking questions about the provenance and diversity of versions of the source dialogue, including questionable or alternative renditions of the exchange; (2) theoretical hermeneutics, by looking critically at the doctrinal background of several related kōan records dealing with the universality of Buddha-nature seen in relation to sentient beings; (3) intellectual historical hermeneutics, through examining issues in the spiritual biography of Zhaozhou, especially in terms of his ironic views regarding the doctrinal content of the Nirvana Sutra, as well as a generally noncommittal style of responding to Zen encounters; and (4) linguistic hermeneutics, or assessing the syntax and grammar of the Ur Version's rhetorical structure in light of different renderings in modern Chinese and Japanese in addition to English that are often misleading.Less

Psychic Life in the Eternal City: Julia Kristeva and the Narcissism of Rome

Richard Fletcher

in Roman Error: Classical Reception and the Problem of Rome's Flaws

Freud’s analogy of the city of Rome as the human psyche in Civilization and its Discontents and Kristeva’s reading of Ovid’s Narcissus as a response to Freudian narcissism in Tales of Love have been ... More

Freud’s analogy of the city of Rome as the human psyche in Civilization and its Discontents and Kristeva’s reading of Ovid’s Narcissus as a response to Freudian narcissism in Tales of Love have been treated as separate aspects of the reception of ancient Rome in psychoanalysis. In New Maladies of the Soul, however, Kristeva makes a direct connection between the two, building on Freud’s doubts about the usefulness of his analogy and offering a corrective image of her own. Kristeva, this chapter argues, thus locates the movement from Freud’s Rome to her specular city in what she calls a “mini-revolution in psychic life” that can be understood through the changes to the figure of Narcissus from Ovid to Plotinus. Psychoanalysis, in being both addressed to and partly founded on an erroneous narcissism, offers a valuable model for classical reception studies through its self-critical approach to narcissism’s ambivalent pleasures and dangers.Less

The Evil of Suffering

Ronald M. Green

in Suffering and Bioethics

This chapter argues that there is a prima facie moral obligation to prevent and relieve suffering. Because pain and suffering are states that all rational people ordinarily want to avoid, this ... More

This chapter argues that there is a prima facie moral obligation to prevent and relieve suffering. Because pain and suffering are states that all rational people ordinarily want to avoid, this obligation does not derive from a specific view of life’s goods and evils. There are limits to the relief of suffering, but they are based on this same duty. Arguments against active euthanasia that point to euthanasia’s adverse long-term impacts on patients and society are examples. On the basis of this understanding, this chapter critiques religious views that appear to valorize suffering. It concludes with an examination of arguments that would limit medical interventions in the name of preventing the medicalization of suffering. Drawing on the concept of “malady” and its conceptually tight relation to suffering, the chapter argues that there are often good reasons for limiting the scope of medical professionalism to the prevention and treatment of diseases (maladies). The prevention and relief of suffering, however, sometimes counsel allowing physicians to assist patients seeking treatments for other, nondisease conditions.Less

Women in the Lunatic Asylums of Bengal

Debjani Das

in Houses of Madness: Insanity and Asylums of Bengal in Nineteenth-century India

This chapter focuses on women in both the ‘native’ and European asylums of Bengal. In doing so, it attempts to classify the different causes and symptoms of insanity among both women and men. It also ... More

This chapter focuses on women in both the ‘native’ and European asylums of Bengal. In doing so, it attempts to classify the different causes and symptoms of insanity among both women and men. It also questions whether insanity could necessarily be termed as a ‘female malady’ and how female insanity was undersood as being different from male insanity.Less