Eroticisms: Love, Sex, and Perversion explores the elusiveness of human sensuality. In an era of conflicting moral relativism, political correctness, validation of lifestyle choices, liberation, hedonism, and postmodern pansexualism, versus resurgent puritanism, conservatism, fundamentalism, and theological anti-sexualism, this fifth volume of Psychological Undercurrents of History penetrates current debates and delves into the past to grasp the viscous ambiguities of sexuality, and reassess the question of whether the erotic can be perverse.
This volume explores the impact of sexological and early psychoanalytic conceptions of sexual perversion on the representation of the erotic in the work of a range of major European modernists (including Joyce, Kafka, Lawrence, Mann, Proust and Rilke) as well as in that of some less-well-known figures of the period such as Dujardin and Jahnn.
Focusing on non-human actors, Grażyna Gajewska expands the discussion of eroticism in contemporary culture by bringing in material culture, object studies, and “the anthropology of things.” She sets out from the assumption that things (such as, for instance, attire, underwear, shoes, or jewelry) play an important role in arousing erotic imagination—they are genuine participants in the process, not mere signifiers of eroticism. Their use does not denote only undeniable facts of everyday life associated with functionality, the pragmatic or aesthetic aspect, but also contribute to the shaping of human emotions, fantasies and phantasms. In her study, Gajewska brings eroticism in contemporary culture to light through applying gender studies to new contexts—animals, robots, virtual worlds—even as she explores a new methodology, the anthropology of things.
Drawing on methods and approaches from anthropology, media studies, film theory, and cultural studies, the contributors to Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia examine how mediated eroticism and sexuality circulating across Asia and Asian diasporas both reflect and shape the social practices of their producers and consumers. The essays in this volume cover a wide geographic and thematic range, and combine rigorous textual analysis with empirical research into the production, circulation, and consumption of various forms of media. Judith Farquhar examines how health magazines serve as sources of both medical information and erotic titillation to readers in urban China. Tom Boellstorff analyzes how queer zines produced in Indonesia construct the relationship between same-sex desire and citizenship. Purnima Mankekar examines the rearticulation of commodity affect, erotics, and nation on Indian television. Louisa Schein describes how portrayals of Hmong women in videos shot in Laos create desires for the homeland among viewers in the diaspora. Taken together, the essays offer fresh insights into research on gender, erotics, media, and Asia transnationally conceived. Contributors. Anne Allison, Tom Boellstorff, Nicole Constable, Heather Dell, Judith Farquhar, Sarah L. Friedman, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Purnima Mankekar, Louisa Schein, Everett Yuehong Zhang
Berlin, once perceived of as a puritan city, became in the 1920’s the capital of lust and the decadence of morals. It is in this capricious town that an exceptional museum entirely dedicated to eroticism opened its doors. Abandoning all aspects of voyeurism, the Erotic Museum in Berlin is a magical place where the imagination of man and the most refined works of art interact. This remarkable book is comprised of more than 350 rare illustrations, and accompanied by a major study written by the history professor, Hans-Jürgen Döpp. It covers different aspects of erotica throughout time and continents.
"Bisexuality is about three centuries overdue . . . nevertheless, here it is: a learned, witty study of how our curious culture has managed to get everything wrong about sex." -Gore Vidal
Identifying the stage as a primary site for erotic display, these essays take eroticism in Renaissance culture as a paradigm for issues of sexuality and identity in early modern culture. Contributors examine how the Renaissance stage functioned as a decoder for erotic experience, both reinforcing and subverting expected sexual behaviour. They argue that the dynamics of theatrical eroticism served to deconstruct gender definitions, leaving conventional categories of sexuality blurred, confused - or absent. In seeking to reposition the conventions and subversions of gender and desire in terms of one another, these essays open up an attractive and distinctive perspective in cultural debate.
This major collection explores the contested nature of love and eroticism, examining the ways in which erotic bodily pleasures have become central to contemporary consumer culture. It investigates the spatial dimension of erotic life through considerations of Bohemian love, the gay city and the ways in which the urban landscape and everyday life have become sexualized - issues which have become central to the emergence of `queer′ as a new form of gender politics and more general questions of sexual citizenship. Drawing on the work of feminists, sociologists and cultural theorists, this book contains a wide-ranging and accessible set of contributions to contemporary debates on sexuality, love and eroticism. Love & Eroticism is simultaneously published as volume 15, issue 3-4 of Theory, Culture & Society.
One of the church's favorite photographers, Johnson (1857-1926) spent the 1890s and early 1900s taking pictures of Mormonism's most revered figures and sacred sites. At the same time, he did a brisk business in mail-order erotica, creating and selling stereoviews that he referred to as his "spicy pictures of girls." Situating these images within the religious, artistic, and legal culture of turn-of-the-century America, Campbell reveals the unexpected ways in which they worked to bring the Saints into the nation's mainstream after the scandal of polygamy. --Publisher description.
Using queer theory to untangle all types of nonnormative sexual identities, Tison Pugh uses Chaucer’s work to expose the ongoing tension in the Middle Ages between an erotic culture that glorified love as an ennobling passion and an anti-erotic religious and philosophical tradition that denigrated love and (perhaps especially) its enactments. Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages considers the many ways in which anti-eroticisms complicate the conventional image of Chaucer. With chapters addressing such topics as mutual masochism, homosocial brotherhood, necrotic erotics, queer families, and the eroticisms of Chaucer’s God, Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms will forever change the way readers see the Canterbury Tales and Chaucer’s other masterpieces. For Chaucer, erotic pursuits establish the thrust and tenor of many of his narratives, as they also expose the frustrations inherent in pursuing desires frowned upon by the religious foundations of Western medieval culture. One cannot love freely within an ideological framework that polices sexuality and privileges the anti-erotic Christian ideals of virginity and chastity, yet loving queerly creates escapes from social structures inimical to amour and its expressions in the medieval period. Thus Chaucer is not just England’s foundational love poet, he is also England’s foundational queer poet.
