Showing papers on "Lust published in 2011"

Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories

Abstract: Introduction: A Passion for Plot: Story as Feeling One. Before Stories: Emotional Time and Anna Karenina Two. Stories and Works: From Ancient Egypt to Post-Modernism Three. Universal Narrative Prototypes: Sacrifice, Heroism, and Romantic Love Four. Cross-Cultural Minor Genres: Attachment, Lust, Revenge, and Criminal Justice Afterword: On the Future of Feeling: Stories and the Training of Sensibility

God, Sex, and Gender: An Introduction

Abstract: Introduction Part 1: Sex, Gender and Theology. 1. Sex. Sexuality, the Sexes, Having Sex. 1.1 Sexuality. 1.2 How Many Sexes are There? 1.3 Having Sex. 2. Gender. Language, Power and History. 2.1 Gender. 2.2 Gender, Language and Power. 2.3 Gender in the Time of Jesus. 3. Theology.Sources and Applications. 3.1 Explaining the Sources: Scripture, Tradition, Reason. 3.2 Applying the Sources. 3.3 Using the Sources Well. Part 2: Being Theological About Sex. 4. Desiring. 4.1 Learning from Lust. 4.2 Desiring 4.3 Desiring God? 4.4 God Desiring Us? 5.Framing Sex: Must the Framework be Marriage? 5.1 Traditional Framework: Celibacy or Marriage? 5.2 The Case Against Marriage. 5.3 Alternative Frameworks: Justice and Friendship? 5.4 A New Case for Marriage? 6. Covenants and Covenant-Makers. 6.1 Beginning with God. 6.2 God the Father Maker of Covenants 6.3 Christ - the Bridegroom, Maker of a New Covenant. 6.4 The Eucharist Sharing in the New Covenant. Part 3: Being Theological about Gender. 7. God - Beyond Male and Female. 7.1 Does God Have [a] Sex? 7. 2 Is God the Son a Man? 7.3 Mary Mother of all the Living. 7.4 Womankind in God s Likeness? 8. In Christ there is Neither Male nor Female . 8.1 Sex in the Body of Christ. 8.2 Gender in the Body of Christ. 8.3 Masculinity in the Body of Christ. 8.4 Neither Male nor Female ? Part 4: Being Theological about Same-Sex Love. 9. The Bible and Same-Sex Love. 9.1 What the Churches Teach. 9.2 Same-Sex Relations in the Hebrew Bible. 9.3 Same-Sex Relations in the New Testament. 9.4 What Else Does the Bible Say about Same-Sex Relations? 9.5 Finding What We Want to Find? Evaluating Official Teaching. 10. Tradition, Reason and Same-Sex Love. 10.1 Tradition and Same-Sex Love. 10.2 Reason, Natural Law, and Same-Sex Love. 10.3 Complementarity and Same-Sex Love. 10.4 Experience and Same-Sex Love. Part 5: Learning to Love. 11. Virginity, Celibacy, Chastity. 11.1 Valuing Virginity? 11.2 Virginity for the Sake of the Kingdom . 11.3 In Praise of Restraint. 11.4 Commending Chastity. 12. Condilemmas : Sex and Contraception in the Time of HIV/AIDS. 12.1 Contraception, Still a Theological Issue. 12.2 Lambeth Against Rome. 12.3 Contraception and Natural Law. 12.4 Sex and Love: An Unbreakable Connection ? 12.5 Moral Deficit Arguments. 12.6 Condoms in the Time of HIV/AIDS. 13. Marriage and the States of Life. 13.1 Betrothal in the Bible. 13.2 Betrothal and Tradition. 13.3 Spousals, Nuptials and States of Life. 14. Inclusive Theology and Sexual Minorities. 14.1 Sex. 14.2 Gender. References.

Valorizing the Barbarians: Enemy Speeches in Roman Historiography

Abstract: Acknowledgments Author's Note Introduction Part I: Mithridates and the East 1. "A Deep-Seated Lust for Empire and Riches": Sallust's Epistula Mithridatis 2. "Their Whole Population Has the Spirit of Wolves": Pompeius Trogus' Speech of Mithridates Part II: Hannibal and Carthage 3. "He Considered It to Be in No Way Worthy to Contemplate the Hope of Living Defeated": Polybius' Speeches of Hannibal 4. "Nothing at All Has Been Left to Us, Except That Which We Defend with Arms": Livy's Hannibal Part III: Boudica and Britain 5. "Men Might Live and Be Slaves": Tacitus' Speech of Boudica 6. "Slaves to a Bad Lyre-Player": Cassius Dio's Speech of Boudica 7. Conclusions Appendix: Texts and Translations of the Speeches Examined at Length Notes Works Cited Index

Re-reading Rape in The Changeling

Abstract: In Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1622), Beatrice-Joanna's father insists that she marry Alonzo di Piracquo. Her servant De Flores demands her virginity in payment for eliminating Piracquo so that she may instead marry Alsemero, predicting, loathsomely but correctly, that "Thou'lt love anon / What thou so fears't and faint'st to venture on" (3.4.173-74).1 Alsemero, despite his apparent lack of sexual experience, travels prepared with a test to ensure that his wife, should he happen to acquire one on his journey, is a virgin. When Beatrice-Joanna is discovered to have had sex with De Flores and to have colluded in Piracquo's murder, her father, husband, and lover all turn on her. Alsemero even locks her into a closet with De Flores, commanding a repeat performance of her adultery: "I'll be your pander now; rehearse again / Your scene of lust, that you may be perfect" (5.3.114-15).In response to this trafficking in Beatrice-Joanna, The Changeling has sometimes been read as a play about rape. In a provocative and influential essay challenging a long tradition of demonizing Beatrice-Joanna, Deborah Burks argues that the play not only presents De Flores's "defloration" of Beatrice-Joanna as a rape but also, in accord with obsolete but not superceded statute definitions of rape, as a "crime targeted at propertied men, through a piece of their property, women. The violation of the woman in this play is shown clearly and horribly to be an assault on a man," by whom she means first Piracquo but then Beatrice- Joanna's husband, Alsemero, and her father, Vermandero (762-63). (As this string of possible stakeholders suggests, one of the interesting things about the play is that it is hard to determine in 3.4 precisely who owns Beatrice-Joanna and is thus the victim of this theft.)2 Christina Malcolmson calls what happens between Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores "a form of rape" (156); Molly Smith describes their "relationship" as "rooted in rape" (112, 90). Building on the assumption that what happens between De Flores and Beatrice-Joanna is a rape, Judith Haber reads the play as insisting "on the coincidence of fear and desire, of virgin and whore, of marriage and rape" (80). Although Kim Solga points out that Beatrice-Joanna's "status as a victim of sexual violence (indeed, of any violence at all) is wholly uncertain" (146), and therefore up to the audience to determine, she also consistently assumes that De Flores rapes Beatrice-Joanna, who might best be described, therefore, as a victim. Finally, Karen Bamford labels The Changeling a "late Jacobean rape play" (151).This essay argues that The Changeling depicts coercion and consent in socially and morally complex ways that describing it as a "rape play" flattens. I am particularly interested in the ways in which Beatrice-Joanna is herself sometimes coercive or at least strategic in her schemes to have her will. Yet I also want to challenge a division in criticism of The Changeling between those critics who argue that the play depicts a rape and those who simply ignore the possibility and the criticism that posits it. Although questioning the usefulness of rape as a verdict is a riskier strategy than ignoring it, keeping the possibility of rape active allows us to scrutinize the interplay of coercion and consent, of victimization and strategy, not only in the play but also more broadly in theoretical and historical discussions of rape. I propose to re-read the play in light of both Janet Halley's critique of "carrying a brief for" the feminine, or in this case, a female character, and recent work on the available ways of describing and assessing sexual coercion in seventeenth-century England. Is it possible to re-read the negotiations between Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores in The Changeling as something other than rape, as statutes defined it, while still suggesting that the play participates in a history of debating rape's meaning? Is it possible to take a break from either defending or prosecuting Beatrice-Joanna? …

Ibn Sahula's Meshal ha-Qadmoni as restorative polemic

Abstract: This essay explores the ways in which Isaac ibn Sahula (1244–c. 1284) drew upon philosophy, medical theory, astrology, and animal lore, both to polemicize against Christians and Muslims and to goad his Jewish readers to correct spiritual behavior in his Meshal ha-Qadmoni. Christians, Muslims, and “bad” Jews are portrayed as having degraded their intellect by following fleshly lusts or false wisdom. In losing their intellect, they have lost the quality that made them superior to animals. His use of animals to portray the “inhumanity” of most humans adds a level of irony to his work, but also becomes a part of his arsenal of symbolism, which he deftly uses to criticize the religious claims and behavior of non-Jews. In some instances loss of intellect feminizes his opponents. However, Ibn Sahula's use of gender symbolism does not fall along neat dichotomies of male-spiritual, female-material. Rather, non-Jews are often characterized by hyper-masculinity, violence, and excessive lust, whereas Ibn Sahula portr...

Effeminacy in the Shadow of Empire: The Politics of Transgressive Gender in Josephus's Bellum Judaicum

Abstract: As has long been recognized, Judaean tyranny, especially that associated with the revolutionary faction led by John of Gischala, plays a central role in Bellum Judaicum, functioning as an infectious disease that ultimately bears responsibility for the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. Among the litany of damnable vices associated with John and his band of followers, Josephus paints a particularly lurid picture of violent debauchery in B.J. 4.560–563, recounting a blood-drenched sexual rampage that includes a pointed accusation of cross-dressing and sexual passivity. In this article I argue that Josephus' portrayal of the Judaean rebels as effeminate objects of sexual penetration draws on a widespread tendency in Greco-Roman discourse to link perceived gender anomalies with an excessive and uncontrollable lust for power, deploying gender deviancy as a symbolic framework through which to define and disparage tyrants. This image of effeminate tyranny in B.J., although dubious as a source of reliable information for the Gischalan's exploits in Galilee and Judaea, taps into a resurgent moralizing impulse in Flavian Rome, offering an important glimpse into Josephus' own attempt to navigate the cultural and political anxieties of the capital city shortly after the tumultuous transition from the Julio-Claudian to Flavian regime.

The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England after the Reformation

Abstract: Romances were among the most popular books in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries among both Protestant and Catholic readers. Modeled after Catholic narratives, particularly the lives of saints, these works emphasized the supernatural and the marvelous, themes commonly associated with Catholicism. In this book, Tiffany Jo Werth investigates how post-Reformation English authors sought to discipline romance, appropriating its popularity while distilling its alleged Catholic taint. Charged with bewitching readers, especially women, into lust and heresy, romances sold briskly even as preachers and educators denounced them as papist. Protestant reformers, as part of their broader indictment of Catholicism, sought to redirect certain elements of the Christian tradition, including this notorious literary genre. Werth argues that through the writing and circulation of romances, Protestants repurposed their supernatural and otherworldly motifs in order to "fashion," as Edmund Spenser writes, godly "vertuous" readers. Through careful examinations of the period's most renowned romances-Sir Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, Spenser's The Faerie Queen, William Shakespeare's Pericles, and Lady Mary Wroth's Urania-Werth illustrates how post-Reformation writers struggled to transform the literary genre. As a result, the romance, long regarded as an archetypal form closely allied with generalized Christian motifs, emerged as a central tenet of the religious controversies that divided Renaissance England.

Socialist Psychology: Values and Motivations

Abstract: The thesis of this paper is that the values and motivations underlying socialism are very different, and depend upon the types of socialism under consideration. With regard to what I shall label coercive socialism, e.g., socialism in the sense of which the word is currently used, 1 the antecedents are envy, greed, power lust, ignorance, resentment, and lack of knowledge of even the most elementary aspects of economics. As concerns voluntary socialism, the phrase I have chosen to connote such cooperative organizations as the kibbutz, the / monastery, the family, this is essentially animated by benevo­ lence, altruism and empathy for our fellow human creatures. Since the most remarkable or provocative aspect of this thesis is that there are actually not one but rather two varieties of socialism, section I is devoted to an explication, elaboration and defense of this claim. Section II explores the basis of voluntary socialism and III does so for the coercive counterpart to this philosophy.

The Forgotten Waltz

Abstract: In Terenure, a pleasant suburb of Dublin, it has snowed. Gina Moynihan, girl about town, recalls the trail of lust and happenstance that brought her to fall for "the love of her life," Sean Vallely. As the city outside comes to a halt, Gina remembers their affair: long afternoons made blank by bliss and denial. Now, as the silent streets and falling snow make the day luminous and full of possibility, Gina awaits the arrival of Sean's fragile, twelve-year-old daughter, Evie-the complication, and gravity, of this second life. In this extraordinary novel, Anne Enright speaks directly to the readers she won with The Gathering. Here again is the momentous drama of everyday life; the volatile connections between people; the wry, accurate take on families, marriage, and brittle middle age. With The Forgotten Waltz Enright turns her attention to love, following another unforgettable heroine on a journey of the heart. Writing at the height of her powers, this is Enright's tour de force, a novel of intelligence, passion, and distinction.

Love, Lust, and Lies under Communism: Family Values and Adulterous Liaisons in Early East Germany

Abstract: According to a joke that made the rounds in the former Soviet Union, women from different countries held on to their husbands in different ways: the German by her skills as a housewife, the Spaniard by her passionate lovemaking, the Frenchwoman by her refined elegance—and the Russian by the party committee. This sexist quip was a not so oblique reference to the ways in which the communist party intervened in the private domestic affairs of its members. But—even leaving aside the obviously offensive—it was not entirely accurate, for the practice was just as common in other communist countries as well. This included the eastern half of postwar Germany, where, as in the Soviet Union, the wives of adulterous members of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) sometimes appealed to local functionaries for assistance with their straying husbands.

Beyond language: the postmodern poetics of Ang Lee's adaptation of Lust/Caution

Abstract: Based on Robert Stam's notion of filmic adaptation as a cultural critique and through a detailed analysis of the postmodernist styles of intertextuality, dissolving the history, parodic representation, and the body narrative in the filmic text, this article argues that Ang Lee's film Lust/Caution (2007) adapted from Eileen Chang's fiction Lust, caution is a re-creation embedded with subtle and significant cultural politics. It can be seen as an intellectual endeavour to problematise the ideological assumptions of Self and the Other, history, identity and nationalism, to deconstruct the multiple forms of power that have enslaved human beings, women in particular, and to demonstrate his hope for equality, tolerance and coexistence in human society. In a word, Ang Lee's cinematic adaptation, going far beyond Eileen Chang's representation of private experiences, is an intellectual process of cultural poetics that subverts the mythic language of nationalism and national identity.

Homophobias: Lust and Loathing across Time and Space

Abstract: David B. Murray (ed.), Homophobias: Lust and Loathing across Time and Space, Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, 240 pages.In 1993, in her groundbreaking article mapping out the emergent field of lesbian-gay studies in anthropology, Kath Weston announced, "homophobia has become a topic for anthropological investigation" (1993:359). Citing five references written by three anthropologists, Weston would seem to have envisaged a body of research on the rise. However, as David Murray indicates, a sustained interrogation of homophobia has not materialized in the discipline. Yet at the same time, the term homophobia has become common parlance, and certainly a plethora of social relations that constitute sexualitybased discrimination, hate, aversion, intolerance and violence continue unabated. A decade and a half later, this volume offers a timely, provocative and politically far-reaching set of papers that, together, open up absolutely vital space for thinking through the ways in which discrimination and hatred based on (non-normative) sexuality continues to be legitimized, organized and expressed in very different places in today's globalizing world. I agree with Murray's evaluation of the current situation: while the anthropology of sexuality has produced a wealth of knowledge about cultural particularities of non-normative sexualities (as well as sexualities of all kinds in the nonWest), the discipline has, for various reasons, been remiss to look at how discriminations against non-normative sexualities are perpetuated, that is, at "understanding the causes, dynamics, forces, structures, and 'logics' which work to create, oppress, marginalize, and/or silence sexual alterity" (p. 2).Such an agenda presents a quagmire of difficulties insofar as anthropologists have shied away from studying societal anxieties around sexual diversity more generally and also normative heterosexuality both of which remain "touchy" subjects. Moreover, the onset of fieldwork on this subject has undoubtedly been slow in coming because anthropologists tend to avoid studying with research populations with whom we feel antagonism. Despite these and other hurdles, the contributors have written a set of papers that, as a whole, make a persuasive case for a new direction in anthropology.Based on richly detailed ethnographic research, the book aims to achieve three main goals: to analyze the assumptions underpinning homophobic discourses; to examine homophobia as socially produced discrimination; and, to generate an analytical framework for advancing more accurate and nuanced understandings of homophobia than currently exist. Each of these are satisfactorily achieved, although the first two more so than the third, in my view. Murray's introduction outlines the book's aims for "rethinking homophobia" and offers four key over-arching questions that guide an anthropological investigation of sexual discrimination and structures of dominance: Is homophobia a universal prejudice? Is homophobia produced through nationalism or globalization or both? Is homophobia a gendered discourse? How do we eliminate homophobia? These are provocative questions, for which each author does provide provisional answers; but given that the book's strengths lie in the ethnographic and theoretical foci, the last question is left for readers to contemplate.The volume proceeds with Part 1, organized around the theme, "Displacing Homophobia," while Part 2 addresses "Transnational Homophobias." A chapter titled "Can There Be an Anthropology of Homophobia?" by Don Kulick, an anthropologist on the forefront of ethnographies of non-normative sexualities, starts off Part 1. Reminiscent of a treatise 20 years ago on feminist ethnography in which Lila AbuLughod (1990) sketched out the dilemma of applying (partial, subjective) feminist approaches to ethnography (purported to be objective), Kulick frames this book's subject matter, also a political project, as a seemingly paradoxical task: how is it possible to interrogate a phenomenon glossed as "homophobia" while simultaneously deconstructing and reframing it? …

The Other Edward: Twilight’s Queer Construction of the Vampire as an Idealized Teenage Boyfriend

Abstract: Guided by these fundamental principles, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight2 saga stands at the forefront of a popular resurgence in the genre of vampire literature since its debut in 2005. These three tenets, culled from the thoughts of Isabella Swan, Meyer’s adolescent protagonist, function as more than mere obiter dicta to both Bella and an audience built primarily of young adult women. These rules lay the foundation for a rather unusual reconceptualization of the vampire mythos, where passion still remains tied up in blood, but the desire for blood is not tied up in sex—at least for the vampire in question above. In a conventional sense, this idea seems somewhat paradoxical: the penetration of the victim’s skin inflicted by traditional vampires has long been associated with the penetration of sexual intercourse; sating the vampiric yearning for blood reads as parallel to gratifying sexual lust. Thus, Edward’s behavior is just plain queer.

“Paradox lust”: the fortunate fall according to Joyce in finnegans wake

Abstract: A half century ago Atherton started cataloguing the plethora of books in the Wake, and fifteen years ago Hogan concentrated on Milton’s work among those furnishing more potent, complex, and extended allusions. Not since Rabelais’s, Cervantes’s, Sterne’s, and Goethe’s fictions, which demonstrated how to journey through vast realms of culture and paradigmatic literature, has any author acted with such sovereign freedom as Joyce to align a convergence of all books and language over the ages with his own search for wisdom. The fact that Joyce achieved a very personal synthesis out of the referential immensity adduced in the Wake should not deter us from recognizing certain deep patterns which qualify Joyce as a renewer of important tradition. The patterns of concern here as encountered in Joyce finally carry us over into experiencing a kind of “modern mysticism” that is not exclusively apophatic but also simultaneously directly affirmative, although not explainable in any routine discursive fashion. Joyce’s idea of a divine creative principle that appears to “fall” in the course of bringing forth its own purpose in a “creation” has an honorable place in theological, cosmogonic, and mystical thought in the European tradition. A number of Renaissance savants and poets believed that various paradigms embodied in ancient myth, including the biblical story of Adam and Eve, reflected this proposition. Several streams feeding from the Renaissance over Romanticism into Modernism and interesting to Joyce (e.g., early anthropological myth analysis, cabala, theosophy, etc.) kept alive the poetic vocabulary by which to express an encounter with the baffling puzzle of Being as a drama played out by the human race, an evolutionary drama with both historical and psychological dimensions. Joyce’s contemporary, Thomas Mann, while quite different in many respects, shares Joyce’s perception that a parallelism exists between the “fall” of Being or Spirit, the “agon” of human development, and the problem of a seemingly absurd mind/body division. Although keen interest in poets like Blake, the heroic power of the imagination, and the Luciferic theme is prominent in Ulysses, a movement occurs in the Wake away from the Bildungsroman structure toward a more encompassing visionary sense of rebirth. In the Wake Joyce “revises” the Miltonic version of the fall (as well as the Dantesque and others) in a way consonant with Goethe’s revision of the meaning of the recorded three millennia of human striving in Faust II; the Goethean coda anticipates Joyce in “fulfilling” the inner tendency which surfaces from the biblical account of the family romance onward and appears instantiated repeatedly in the world theater/history. Joyce’s version abandons the apocalyptic model of a once-only creation and privileges the alternate model of an eternal or permanent universe, but according to Joyce the repeatable story of the “fortunate fall” eventuates in a requisite salvational insight suited to the Viconian “eternal return”: in the words of the mother, “first we feel, then we fall”. Joyce reinvents the basic sacraments poetically to reflect the ultimate union of creator and creation, and the Wake’s famous coda confirms the sacred mission and destiny of love’s “body” (which is also by analogy the text’s body or embodiment).

"Passion is Catching": Emotional Contagion and Affective Action in Select Works by Shakespeare

Abstract: Title of Document: “PASSION IS CATCHING”: EMOTIONAL CONTAGION AND AFFECTIVE ACTION IN SELECT WORKS BY SHAKESPEARE Angelique Marie Wheelock, PhD, 2011 Directed By: Dr. Kent Cartwright, Department of English Growing out of recent scholarship on humoral theory and emotions in early modern literary texts, this dissertation explores the idea that Shakespearean emotions are contagious. Tears, rage, compassion, fear, affection, horror, and laughter travel invisible pathways from character to character in his texts, reinforcing an implicit scheme of emotional transmission harkening back to Plato and Aristotle. Whether generated internally or imposed from the outside, these passions have the ability to wreak havoc on individuals, communities, and even countries, because passions can, and often do, lead to action. This work examines three of Shakespeare’s tragic works, the poem Rape of Lucrece and two plays: Othello and Julius Caesar. In the chapter on Rape of Lucrece, beauty is the root of the violent, contagious action driving the tale. Tarquin himself is ravished by Lucrece’s beauty. Overwhelmed by a “rage of lust,” the prince must exorcise his excess humors through rape to regain equilibrium. Lucrece is infected with his “load of lust” during the rape and then kills herself, passing on Tarquin’s beauty-inspired violence to Collatine and the nobles in a mutated form—the lust for vengeance. Through her act of self-violence, Lucrece transforms the original contagion into a force which purges Rome of the Tarquins’ rule. For Julius Caesar, I trace Shakespeare’s descriptions of environmental events in Julian Rome and how these correspond to the emotional complexion of the agents in the play. I identify fear as the main emotional vector in this play and illustrate how the imagination takes on a crucial role in the misregulation of the humors, a situation that, in turn, creates the ideal environment for violent action. The chapter dedicated to Othello examines the false transmission of emotion perpetrated by Iago to destroy Othello. Iago develops false emotional paradigms, reframing his hatred for the general with trappings of love; successfully communicating the degree of his passion without the content, Iago is able to fool Othello into believing Desdemona is false. Despite his demand for “ocular proof,” the Moor becomes overwhelmed by the force of Iago’s emotions and becomes an instrument of “honest” Iago’s virulent hate. “PASSION IS CATCHING”: EMOTIONAL CONTAGION AND AFFECTIVE ACTION IN SELECT WORKS BY SHAKESPEARE

"It's Queer, It's like Fate": Tracking Queer in O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra

Abstract: It's Queer, It's like Fate" (1): Tracking Queer in O'Neill's mourning becomes Electra Set in New England just after the American Civil War, Mourning Becomes Electra (henceforth MBE) rewrites the Oresteia while strongly recalling the Oedipus Rex at the same time. In 1930, in a diary he kept during the writing process and one year before the premiere, Eugene O'Neill called the trilogy "a 'psychological drama of lust" and wondered whether it would be possible to achieve "a 'modern psychological approximation of [the] Greek sense of fate" when writing for an audience that had little belief in divine punishment for wrong-doers (Bogard 1972, 335-6 [cf. Alexander 1992, 149-50]). This questioning stance was certainly rhetorical as O'Neill already had something in mind: desire, both obvious and occluded, is a strong representative of fate in the trilogy. It is desire that leads inexorably to two murders, two suicides, and permanent self-imposed isolation from society for a fifth character. (2) Indeed, and this is where the connection to the Oedipus Rex is abundantly in evidence, one might say that the trilogy evokes and stages in its plot the sexualized stages of maturation that Freud identifies through the spectacularized and heteronormative failures O'Neill puts on stage; the subjectivity of Orin (and, to a lesser extent, that of Lavinia) has failed to develop according to the popularized (and often misunderstood) notions of Freud (3) and Jung. (4) And it is not for lack of trying: both Orin (the Orestes figure) and Lavinia (the Electra figure) have 'proper' sexual attitudes toward their parents which they fail to give up as they should. The Oedipal rages against his father Ezra and love for his mother Christine on the part of Orin, and Lavinia's hatred of her mother and love for her father, concretize the Oedipus and Electra complexes most handily. O'Neill certainly saw the drama in psychological terms and even though it is set in the previous century, the words themselves and the concepts that will make the dramatic action meaningful were to be those of the present day: [T]he dialogue is colloquial of today. The house, the period costumes, the Civil War surface stuff, these are masks for what is really a modern psychological drama with no true connection with that period at all. (O'Neill in a letter to the Theatre Guild [7 April 1931], in Bogard 1972, 343 [cf. Pfister 1995, 93]) In O'Neill's hands, the ever pliable story of the house of Atreus embodies on this occasion an externalization of the travails of early modern persons as they grope (unsuccessfully in this case) to come to terms with the demands of civilized personhood. The trilogy breathes the air pervaded by Freud's recent theorizations and converses in Freud's language metaphorically (i.e., through the plot itself) and, of course, with less sophistication. But such presentation and mirroring of intellectual ideas of the day have been the staple of the Western stage since its very beginnings. O'Neill stands squarely in this tradition of serious drama with this trilogy. (5) Within this oppressively heteronormative milieu, it is intriguing--and this is the subject of this paper--that the word 'queer' occurs 31 times. It is odd that amid so much dreary misdirected and tragically stagey heterosexuality this word plays a prominent role. It is my belief that given O'Neill's emphasis on up-to-date language this frequency allows us to consider anything these characters utter as potentially meaningful in the American context of the 1920s and 1930s--what queer might be doing in the trilogy especially should attract our attention, for it was rapidly acquiring a sexualized aura at this time. And even if O'Neill was not alert to all the valences that queer had acquired, they would have been known to at least some of his cosmopolitan Eastern seaboard audience (to say nothing of later audiences down to the present day). …

Wander Lust: Genre, Sexuality and Identity in Ana Kokkinos's 'Head On'

Abstract: While the road movie has long held a privileged place in Australian cinema, less prevalent, though increasingly present, has been the street movie, which—like its road movie cousin—poses important questions about identity in tracing the trajectory of its wanderer protagonists. The most remarkable recent example of an Australian street movie is Ana Kokkinos’s 1997 feature Head On . The film recounts a day in the life of a late adolescent Greek-Australian male who wanders the streets participating in sexual encounters with mainly, though not exclusively, other men. Whereas reviews and articles have generally read the film as a coming out narrative, this article—with reference to Ross Chambers’ theories on digressive narratives in his book Loiterature —will argue that Head On rejects the simplistic teleology of the coming out story in favour of a much more complex understanding of adolescent male sexuality.

Man Ray Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism

Abstract: Bringing together unique and rarely seen photographs, paintings, sculpture and drawings, this exquisite book tells the story of the tumultuous relationship between the artists Man Ray (1890 - 1976) and Lee Miller (1907 - 1977). From 1929 to 1932, the two lived together in Paris, first as teacher and student, and later as lovers. Historically, Miller has been described as Man Ray's muse, but Partners in Surrealism reveals how their brief, mercurial love affair was a key source of mutual and sustained inspiration, resulting in some of the most powerful work of each artist's career. Featuring a candid and poignant contribution from Antony Penrose, the son of Miller and the English painter Roland Penrose, on the relationship between Man Ray and his parents in later years, this is an extraordinary exploration of the love, lust and desire that drove the art of the Surrealists.

No More Horsing Around: Sex, Love, and Motherhood in Tolstoi’s Kholstomer

Abstract: By giving us a horse's perspective on human life, Lev Tolstoi's Kholstomer (1886) has usually been recognized in the west as a stellar example of the author's use of “defamiliarization.” Most of the critical attention the story has received in Russia, by contrast, consists of Soviet-era studies diat examine the creative history of the text and/or remark on its satiric elements. In this article, Ronald D. LeBlanc examines instead the treatment of the themes of sex, love, and motherhood in Tolstoi's story about a castrated horse. In particular, he explores the significance that castration— with its accompanying cessation of sexual desire—appears to have in this story about a selfless gelding, a tale that may be read as the expression of a desire on the author's part to be unburdened of the affliction of sexual lust and thus to be freed to pursue a more spiritual, less carnal existence on earth.

The lust of the eye and the thrill of the flesh

Abstract: This article sketches recent scholarship on the relationship between pornographic film and modernity. Specifically, it shows how that relationship has since 1979 brought research into pornographic film out of its past status as special pleading or titillation and permitted the creation of a legitimate field of rigorous research. It concludes with an argument that pornographic film is central, not peripheral, to an understanding of the emergence and sexualization of modern consumer society.

Analysis of Jane Campion's ＜The Piano＞ by the Double Concept, the Ruling Reason vs. the Caring Reason

Abstract: In Jane Campion`s Stewart, Ada`s husband, as like modern people, manifests the infinite lust of conquest. But Banes has a humanistic relation with the New Zealand`s tribe and doesn`t have a deep attachment of his own land. Stewart represents the ruling reason in that he disregards his wife`s desire and acts only for his desire to possess and conquest. In contrast with him, in order to satisfy her desire of the piano and hold her own inner world in common, Banes proposes the extraordinary deal, that is to say, to exchange her piano and his land and to learn playing the piano from her. Like this Banes represents the caring reason in that he regards Ada`s desire and cares her in according to her purpose and himself.

Music, lust and modernity: Jazz in the films of Ingmar Bergman

Abstract: This article explores the recurrent use of jazz music in some of the early films of the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman: Kris/Crisis (1946), Till gladje/ To Joy (1949), Sommaren med Monika/Summer with Monika (1953), En lektion i karlek/A Lesson in Love (1954), Kvinnodrom/Dreams (1955) and Tystnaden/The Silence (1963). In these films jazz is presented as derived from the corporeal body, as powerfully erotic and as culturally alien; it is also directly connected to a potentially destructive form of ‘modern’ female sexuality that is socially damaging. In each of the films this leads to social embarrassment, personal failure or even tragedy for the characters involved. The article considers the relationship between Bergman’s use of jazz to express distaste for modernity in relation to the cultural and social transformation of Sweden during the post-war period, and argues that the director’s attitude to the genre reflected a broader, often racist, approach to American popular culture generally and to African American music specifically within Swedish intellectual life. (Less)

Entropy of Developmentalism

Abstract: “The whole history teaches that oligarchy conceals the lust for tyranny; every oligarchy constantly trembles with the tension each member feels in maintaining control over this lust,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche (Kaufman, 1989:136). The history of human society is a perpetual search for meanings and interpretations that explain the dynamics of this lust.