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‘The Spontaneous Feeling of Shame’: Masturbation and Freud 1930–1940

Hera Cook

in The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800-1975

The anxiety regarding masturbation peaked in the early interwar period at which time shame was regarded as a natural result of the practice of masturbation even by sexual reformers. In this period, ... More

The anxiety regarding masturbation peaked in the early interwar period at which time shame was regarded as a natural result of the practice of masturbation even by sexual reformers. In this period, any manual contact with the genital of the self or a sexual partner was defined as masturbation in the sex manuals. Male sexual dominance was the norm and Freudian concepts of the shift from clitoral to vaginal sexual responsiveness in women were deployed to reconstruct a new account of women's sexuality as active but still oriented toward sexual intercourse. A contemporary response to D. H. Lawrence is considered.Less

Sexual Desires: Repression and Sublimation in Black Narcissus (1947), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), and Sea Wife (1957)

Maureen Sabine

in Veiled Desires: Intimate Portrayals of Nuns in Postwar Anglo-American Film

Chapter 2 analyzes the representation of Anglican missionary nuns in Black Narcissus, and argues that while these sisters have been critiqued as agents of British and Christian imperialism in India, ... More

Chapter 2 analyzes the representation of Anglican missionary nuns in Black Narcissus, and argues that while these sisters have been critiqued as agents of British and Christian imperialism in India, they have not been studied as women contending with the psychosexual pressures of the celibate religious life. The visually stunning flashbacks in this Powell and Pressburger film reveal the turbulent desires hidden beneath the veil; demonstrate the dangers of the emotional repression of sexuality; trace an emergent counter dynamics of sublimation; and elevate erotic memories into flashes of spiritual illumination. This chapter goes on to suggest how Deborah Kerr's fire-and-ice screen image embodies the tensions of sexual repression, attraction, and sublimation that are examined not only in Black Narcissus, but less successfully, in two later 1957 films, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison and Sea Wife.Less

The Thrill of the Fight: Charlotte Brontë and Elia Kazan

in Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films, and the Benefits of Censorship

This chapter examines two intensely psychological stories of women whose lives appear to be damaged and even destroyed by the forces of sexual repression: Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) and Eliza ... More

This chapter examines two intensely psychological stories of women whose lives appear to be damaged and even destroyed by the forces of sexual repression: Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) and Eliza Kazan's film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). It argues that Brontë's and Kazan's interactions with their respective moral censors were marked less by victimization and oppression than by stimulation and inspiration. Both artists were, in the end, paradoxically motivated by the moral complaints lodged against them to communicate their ideas in subtler, richer, and more powerful ways.Less

Why Sex?

Leo Bersani

in Receptive Bodies

This chapter focuses on Michel Foucault's superficially counter-intuitive attack on what he calls the “repressive hypothesis” concerning sex. The accepted idea, which Foucault sets out to reverse, is ... More

This chapter focuses on Michel Foucault's superficially counter-intuitive attack on what he calls the “repressive hypothesis” concerning sex. The accepted idea, which Foucault sets out to reverse, is that humans have been living, for at least three centuries, in a regime of sexual repression, one in which sex, subjected to general rules of prohibition, censorship, and denial, has been reduced to invisibility and silence. For Foucault, the stakes in the exercise of power are much higher than sexual freedom or sexual repression. He is interested in considerably more than drawing people's attention to the paradoxical relation between the control of our sexuality and the apparent freedom with which we are encouraged to talk about sex.Less

Voluptuary Architecture: Organizing, Policing, and Producing Pleasure

James A. Steintrager

in The Autonomy of Pleasure: "Libertines, License, and Sexual Revolution"

Examines how libertines transformed institutions that were subject to enlightened critique such as convents, monasteries, and harems, and turned them into idealized spaces for the organization of ... More

Examines how libertines transformed institutions that were subject to enlightened critique such as convents, monasteries, and harems, and turned them into idealized spaces for the organization of pleasure. Subsequently looks at how libertines rejected projects for the organization and control of prostitution as restrictions on the autonomy of pleasure.Less

Going to Tara via Vienna: Joyce and the Freudian Bildungsroman

Michael G. Cronin

in Impure Thoughts: Sexuality, Catholicism and Literature in Twentieth-Century Ireland

This chapter discusses the emergence of psychoanalytic thought in the twentieth century and the historical development of the notion of sexuality. It examines the Freudian libidinal theory model, ... More

This chapter discusses the emergence of psychoanalytic thought in the twentieth century and the historical development of the notion of sexuality. It examines the Freudian libidinal theory model, which re-conceptualised desire and stated that human subjectivity is produced by a struggle between opposing forces of sexual desire and sexual repression.Less

Love & Death

Susan G. Davis

in Dirty Jokes and Bawdy Songs: The Uncensored Life of Gershon Legman

After his break with Kinsey, Legman aimed to make a place for himself among New York City intellectuals as a full-time writer and editor on topics of sex. Between 1946 and 1948, he was at work ... More

After his break with Kinsey, Legman aimed to make a place for himself among New York City intellectuals as a full-time writer and editor on topics of sex. Between 1946 and 1948, he was at work drafting Love & Death, a series of essays on the effects of censorship and repression on American culture. Love & Death was an early foray into the criticism of mass culture and an early content analysis of comic books, detective fiction, and stereotypes of women in mass culture. In it Legman argued that the repression of sex in mass culture inevitably led to a sick and violent society. This chapter shows Legman developing and circulating his essays among New York’s writers and editors, unpacks his negative critique of mass culture, and presents the responses of some of his prominent readers. Although the book was rejected by several dozen publishers, Legman got attention for his views. Through Fredric Wertham, one of the principal psychiatrists in New York City, Legman gave a public lecture on psychoanalytic approaches to comic books. Also discussed is Legman’s marriage to his first wife, Beverley Keith, and the salons they held at their tiny house in the Bronx.Less

Queer Relay

Lisa Henderson

in Love and Money: Queers, Class, and Cultural Production

This chapter continues social exploration through fieldwork to examine actually existing market conditions of queer cultural production at the crossroads of industrial and queer independent sectors. ... More

This chapter continues social exploration through fieldwork to examine actually existing market conditions of queer cultural production at the crossroads of industrial and queer independent sectors. It narrates a field study designed to work against a “commercial repressive hypothesis,” the idea that the history of commerce in queer cultural production is a history of repression. The chapter mainly draws from Michel Foucault's writing on the sexual repressive hypothesis (SRH), the notion that contends that the history of sexuality in the West is a history of sexual repression with cumulative nods toward liberation, as liberationists have undone, first, the religious, then the carceral, and finally the medical ties that bind in the modern period. The chapter also looks at Foucault's The History of Sexuality (1986), where he argues, contrary to the SRH, that modern Western sexuality is in fact a history of the proliferation of sexual discourses, including liberationist ones.Less