Pornography is central to the regulation of all forms of sexual representation on television because it is their distinction from pornography, as it has been historically defined, that legitimizes the circulation and consumption of erotic texts in the mainstream media. In this way pornography acts as a boundary marker arising from its cultural status as […]
Месяц: Сентябрь 2015
Psychoanalytic theory and postfeminism: the work of Luce Irigaray
Irigaray studied linguistics and philosophy before becoming a psychoanalyst. She taught in Lacan’s Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Vincennes; however, after she published her book Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a), she was dismissed from her position by Lacan. Irigaray is one of the French feminists most interested in the concept of difference: […]
Forget-me-not? — The legacy of posttraumatk stress disorder
1 got killed in Vietnam. 1 just didn’t know it at the time. Paul Reutersban, Agent Orange victim55 ITEM More Vietnam veterans have committed suicide since the war ended than were killed in the Vietnam War itself.54 ITEM It is conservatively estimated that 20 percent of all Vietnam veterans, and 60 percent of combat veterans, […]
Thinking the unthinkable
More notable still was the gradual extension of sexual liberty to homosexual acts. This was a development that would have been inconceivable to most early advocates of sexual licence, whose intention was often precisely to prevent sodomy,1 and it remained anathema to mainstream opinion throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and for most of the […]
THE POUTICS OF MAKING MEN DISPOSABLE
ITEM Parode magazine announces that 40 million Soviet men were killed between 1914 and I94S.52 The magazne’s headline reads “Short End of the Stick." Because men died? No. The women were seen as getting the short end of the stick because they were stuck with factory and street-cleaner positions the men weren’t around to do. […]
WAYS OF BOWING FROM THE HEART
Both straight and improvisational exchanges presuppose a number of ways to pay psychological dues. For example, we may simply feign the owed feeling, sometimes without intending to succeed; or we may offer the greater gift of trying to amplify a real feeling that we already have; or we may try to reframe an event and […]
GENDER AND SEXUAL SCIENCE
No one knows precisely when and where gender was initially used to refer to the social and cultural aspects of sexual difference, but it is clear that the term was already current in sexology by the early 1960s. For example, gender does not figure in Alex Comfort’s post-war overview of Sexual Behaviour in Society (1950) […]
Liberty BOUNDED AND EXTENDED
To survey the rise of sexual liberty up to 1800 is to contemplate a momentous ideological upheaval. The conventional justification for sexual discipline had been that immoral actions, even immoral beliefs, were dangerous. They corrupted individuals and undermined the wellbeing of societies; it was therefore legitimate, indeed imperative, to punish them. By the end of […]
The Facts, the Stories leah bradshaw
I am fifty-three years old. I have three children: Emma (twenty-two), Jacob (seventeen), and Lucy (thirteen). I have had two academic husbands, one with whom I had my two oldest children, and one with whom I had my youngest at the age of forty. I no longer have the husbands. They have moved on to […]
PRIVATE VICES, PUBLIC BENEFITS
The gradual separation of personal morality and public affairs around the dawn of the eighteenth century also paved the way for a still more radical challenge. This was the idea that allowing sex outside marriage could actually benefit the public good. Some sexual licence was therefore to be tolerated, even encouraged. This notion directly contradicted […]