The Shapes of Fancy
The Shapes of Fancy

Author: Christine Varnado

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1452961638

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Exploring forms of desire unaccounted for in previous histories of sexuality What can the Renaissance tell us at our present moment about who and what is “queer,” as well as the political consequences of asking? In posing this question, The Shapes of Fancy offers a powerful new method of accounting for ineffable and diffuse forms of desire, mining early modern drama and prose literature to describe new patterns of affective resonance. Starting with the question of how and why readers seek traces of desire in texts from bygone times and places, The Shapes of Fancy demonstrates a practice of critical attunement to the psychic and historical circulations of affect across time within texts, from texts to readers, and among readers. Closely reading for uncharted desires as they recur in early modern drama, witchcraft pamphlets, and early Atlantic voyage narratives and demonstrating how each is structured by qualities of secrecy, impossibility, and excess, Christine Varnado follows four “shapes of fancy”: the desire to be used to others’ ends; indiscriminate, bottomless appetite; paranoid self-fulfilling suspicion; and melancholic longings for impossible transformations and affinities. These affective dynamics go awry in atypical and perverse ways. In other words, argues Varnado, these modes of feeling are recognizable on the page or stage as “queer” because of how, and not by whom, they are expressed. This new theorization of desire expands the notion of queerness in literature, decoupling the literary trace of queerness from the binary logics of same-sex versus opposite-sex and normative versus deviant that have governed early modern sexuality studies. Providing a set of methods for analyzing affect and desire in texts from any period, The Shapes of Fancy stages an impassioned defense of the inherently desirous nature of reading, making a case for readerly investment and identification as vital engines of meaning making and political insight.

The Shape of Desire
The Shape of Desire

Author: Sharon Shinn

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2012-04-03

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1101561629

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ONE OF PUBLISHERS WEEKLY'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR Master storyteller Sharon Shinn has thrilled readers with her national bestselling Twelve Houses series. Now experience her original new novel in which love and loyalty are tested at every turn.... For fifteen years, Maria Devane has been desperately, passionately in love with Dante Romano. But Maria knows that Dante can never give everything of himself back—at least not all of the time. Every month, Dante shifts shape, becoming a wild animal. He can’t choose when he shifts, the transition is often abrupt, and, as he gets older, the time he spends in human form is gradually decreasing. Maria has kept his secret since the beginning, knowing that their love is worth the danger. But when a string of brutal attacks occurs in local parks while Dante is in animal form, Maria is forced to consider whether the lies she’s been telling about her life have turned into lies she’s telling herself...

Dilemmas of Desire
Dilemmas of Desire

Author: Deborah L. TOLMAN

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0674044363

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Be sexy but not sexual. Don't be a prude but don't be a slut. These are the cultural messages that barrage teenage girls. In movies and magazines, in music and advice columns, girls are portrayed as the object or the victim of someone else's desire--but virtually never as someone with acceptable sexual feelings of her own. What teenage girls make of these contradictory messages, and what they make of their awakening sexuality--so distant from and yet so susceptible to cultural stereotypes--emerges for the first time in frank and complex fashion in Deborah Tolman's Dilemmas of Desire. A unique look into the world of adolescent sexuality, this book offers an intimate and often disturbing, sometimes inspiring, picture of how teenage girls experience, understand, and respond to their sexual feelings, and of how society mediates, shapes, and distorts this experience. In extensive interviews, we listen as actual adolescent girls--both urban and suburban--speak candidly of their curiosity and confusion, their pleasure and disappointment, their fears, defiance, or capitulation in the face of a seemingly imperishable double standard that smiles upon burgeoning sexuality in boys yet frowns, even panics, at its equivalent in girls. As a vivid evocation of girls negotiating some of the most vexing issues of adolescence, and as a thoughtful, richly informed examination of the dilemmas these girls face, this readable and revealing book begins the critical work of understanding the sexuality of young women in all its personal, social, and emotional significance.

The Psychology of Desire
The Psychology of Desire

Author: Wilhelm Hofmann

Publisher: Guilford Publications

Published: 2016-06-29

Total Pages: 489

ISBN-13: 146252768X

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Providing a comprehensive perspective on human desire, this volume brings together leading experts from multiple psychological subdisciplines. It addresses such key questions as how desires of different kinds emerge, how they influence judgment and decision making, and how problematic desires can be effectively controlled. Current research on underlying brain mechanisms and regulatory processes is reviewed. Cutting-edge measurement tools are described, including practical recommendations for their use. The book also examines pathological forms of desire and the complex relationship between desire and happiness. The concluding section analyzes specific applied domains--eating, sex, aggression, substance use, shopping, and social media.

Objects of Desire
Objects of Desire

Author: Clare Sestanovich

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2021-06-29

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0593318102

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“A debut story collection of the rarest kind ... you wish that every single entry could be an entire novel." —Entertainment Weekly Fresh, intimate stories of women’s lives from an extraordinary new literary voice, laying bare the unexpected beauty and irony in contemporary life A college freshman, traveling home, strikesup an odd, ephemeral friendship with the couple next to her on the plane. A mother prepares for her son’s wedding, her own life unraveling as his comes together. A long-lost stepbrother’s visit to New York prompts a family’s reckoning with its old taboos. A wife considers the secrets her marriage once contained. An office worker, exhausted by the ambitions of the men around her, emerges into a gridlocked city one afternoon to make a decision. In these eleven powerful stories, thrilling desire and melancholic yearning animate women’s lives, from the brink of adulthood to the labyrinthine path between twenty and thirty, to middle age, when certain possibilities quietly elapse. Tender, lucid, and piercingly funny, Objects of Desire is a collection pulsing with subtle drama, rich with unforgettable scenes, and alive with moments of recognition each more startling than the last—a spellbinding debut that announces a major talent.

Forms of Desire
Forms of Desire

Author: Doris Kloster

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2014-09-02

Total Pages: 107

ISBN-13: 1466879998

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In the trend of S/M and fetishism in art that Doris Kloster helped popularize with her first self-titled book, Kloster remains the only prominent female photographer to do significant work. Now, with her new book Forms of Desire, Kloster transcends that genre and utilizes her unique position to examine a broader range of erotic expression, pointedly exploring female sexuality in all of its various guises. With this collection of nudes and portraits, all shot on location, Kloster invites the viewer to experience the rich and varied sexuality of a multi-racial group of strong, adventurous women. The result is nothing less than a compendium of female sexual expression, exploring different facets of women's sexual natures - from fetishism and role-playing to the use of toys and gender-bending. As co-founder and editorial director of FAD magazine, Kloster has been walking the cultural edge for over ten years, photographing sex radicals and capturing women's sexual power with her lens. Forms of Desire is her most accomplished work to date; her strongest statement on sexuality, power, and gender.

Regulating Desire
Regulating Desire

Author: J. Shoshanna Ehrlich

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2014-09-30

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 143845306X

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Starting with the mid-nineteenth-century campaign by the American Female Moral Reform Society to criminalize seduction and moving forward to the late twentieth-century conservative effort to codify a national abstinence-only education policy, Regulating Desire explores the legal regulation of young women's sexuality in the United States. The book covers five distinct time periods in which changing social conditions generated considerable public anxiety about youthful female sexuality and examines how successive generations of reformers sought to revise the law in an effort to manage unruly desires and restore a gendered social order. J. Shoshanna Ehrlich draws upon a rich array of primary source materials, including reform periodicals, court cases, legislative hearing records, and abstinence curricula to create an interdisciplinary narrative of socially embedded legal change. Capturing the complex and dynamic nature of the relationship between the state and the sexualized youthful female body, she highlights how the law both embodies and shapes gendered understandings of normative desire as mediated by considerations of race and class.