Book review of The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire

Centring on three of Delany's most influential publications, this article provides an overview of the way her work has both engendered debate and stimulated new research directions. "Undoing Substantial Connection" (1972) argues that the late Middle Ages witnessed the decline of "analogical thought" in literature, science, politics, and philosophy; "Mothers to Think Back Through" (1987) engages the life and work of Christine de Pizan, challenging the prevalent celebratory readings of this late medieval writer in order to pose tough questions regarding the role of the author in society; and "Geographies of Desire" (1992) explores the interrelation of gender and Orientalism in the poetry of Chaucer.

I was stupid . . . New York meant freedom to me. -Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence (1993) IN A KEY MOMENT IN MARTIN SCORSESE'S TAXI DRIVER (1976), the taxi driver, Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro), picks up a new customer, Senator and presidential hopeful Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris). When Travis recognizes Palantine, the latter asks, What is the one thing about this country that bugs you most? After some hesitation, Travis answers: Well, whatever it is, he [the president] should clean up this city here because this city here is like an open sewer, you know. It's full of filth and scum. Sometimes I can hardly take it. Whoever becomes the president should just really clean it up, know what I mean? Sometimes I go out and I smell it. I get headaches it's so bad, you know. It's like . . . they just never go away, you know. It's like the president should clean up this whole mess here. He should just flush it right down the fucking toilet.1 This moment may be the film's most obvious reference to New York City's decay in the mid1970s. Taxi Driver was shot during a strike of the garbage disposal workers, when the city was literally engulfed in trash. More generally, Scorsese has commented thus: When you live in a city, there's a constant sense that the buildings are getting old, things are breaking down, the bridges and the subway need repairing. At the same time society is in a state of decay; the police force are not doing their job in allowing prostitution on the streets, and who knows if they're feeding off it and making money out of it. (Christie and Thompson 60) The decay Scorsese and Taxi Driver are referring to is historically specific, rooted in New York City's postwar decline. While Taxi Driver chronicles Travis's excessive response to the perceived decline of the city, perhaps more fundamentally, the decline of the city seems to engender the decline of the male hero- Travis's inability to function in individual, collective, and heteronormative terms. The contours of New York City's postwar decline- and its more recent redevelopmentare fairly well known. The crisis fully emerged in the 1960s, although it had been a while in the making, and it took multiple forms. It may have started with the crisis of urban planning, more specifically in postwar suburban euphoria, and Robert Moses's notorious plans to build elevated expressways through New York City (including one going east-west across Manhattan) in order to facilitate suburbanization (Burns and Sanders 517). These plans were stopped, not least because of the engagement of Jane Jacobs, who in 1961 published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she argued for neighborhood control, as well as economic and social diversity, shifting the issue from large-scale planning to block power. Nonetheless, it hardly presented a largescale solution, if only because of additional urban transformations and crises, such as the race riots of 1964 and the influx of immigrants from Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and elsewhere that accompanied the deindustrialization of the city, which pushed blue-collar jobs toward the outer boroughs (Beauregard; Glazer and Moyhinan). In 1958, 27 percent of New York State's jobs were still in manufacturing; in 1993, it was a slim 8.6 percent. A disproportionate number of these job losses (three out of five) occurred in the city (Fitch 23). This crisis culminated in 1975- the year Taxi Driver was released- when President refused federal aid to New York, a city on the brink of bankruptcy. On the morning of 30 October 1975, New Yorkers awoke to a newspaper headline occupying the entire front page of the New York Daily News: Ford to City: Drop Dead (Burns and Sanders 550). The early instances of this long-term post-war decline have been examined by Edward Dimendberg, who has persuasively argued that in the 1940s and 50s, film noir articulated complex of nostalgia for older urban forms (7) and anxiety about late modernity and its distinctive spatiality (6). …

1. Introduction 2. Orientalism and the Critical History of the Squire's Tale, Kenneth Bleeth 3. Domesticating the Exotic in the Squire's Tale, John M. Flyer 4. The Historical Basis of Chaucer's Squire's Tale 5. East Meets West in Chauver's Squire's Tale and Franklin's Tales, Katherine Lynch 6. Orientation and Nation in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Suzanne Conklin Akbari 7. Scientific Imagery in Chaucer, Dorothee Metlitzki 8. The Canterbury Tales and the Arabc Frame Tradition, Katherine Slater Gites 9. Criticism, Anti-Semitism and the Prioress's Tale, Louise O. Fradenburg 10. Mappae Mundi and 'The Knights Tale': The Geography of Power, the Technology of Control, Sylvia Tomasch 11. Geographies of Desire: Orientalism in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Sheila Delany 12. Worlds Apart: Orientalism, Antifeminism, and Heresy in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, Susan Schibanoff 13. Chaucer and Englishness, Derek Pearsall.

Taking a long view of mycological history, this essay considers how studies of fungal life have modeled fugitive, cryptic, and queer forms of belonging that open the body and the body politic to modes of collectivity that trouble the equation of ecology with holistic closure. Turning to Arthur Machen'sThe Hill of Dreams, this essay shows how the geographies of desire and belonging created through fungal intimacies make it impossible to speak of either the self-contained individual or ecology in the singular. Open and plural, selves and worlds proliferate, contaminate, and interpenetrate through the infectious touch of fungal relations.

I was stupid … New York meant freedom to me. -Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence (1993)

Current research has suggested that sex, sexual practices and sexual identities are increasingly being folded into people’s leisure and recreational activities. One area that has witnessed growing popularity has been sex clubs that market themselves as places that enable heterosexual casual, anonymous sexual encounters. Traditionally called swingers’ clubs, these are not strip clubs, lap dancing clubs or brothels, we have very little information about sex clubs or the people who visit them. In response, this article defines what sex clubs are, their geographical locations, and their facilities. Alongside this, through the data scraping of 6837 profiles of people who have visited clubs and left online reviews of the clubs that they have visited, this research provides the most extensive dataset available on the gender, age, relationship status and sexual preferences of sex club patrons. The findings from the study suggest that sex clubs are an emerging space for leisure sex that prioritises erotic practices that stand outside heteronormative norms and values. Whilst clubs have been traditionally associated with swinger communities, the findings in this article also suggest that sex clubs appeal to people with diverse sexual preferences. Alongside this, it highlights the potential ways in which sex clubs may be part of a broader spatialization of leisure sex. The article concludes by suggesting that in a post-Covid context, sex clubs will have increasing importance as places of leisure sex.

The Geography of Desire

One. To Be Emplaced: Fuzhounese Migration and the Geography of Desire

Research Article| August 01 2019 Refugee Gothic: Review of Four Graphic Memoirs of the Vietnamese Diaspora Michael G. Vann Michael G. Vann Michael G. Vann is Professor of History at California State University, Sacramento, and is the author of the graphic history The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2019). Vann’s research on historical cartoons includes “(Colonial) Intimacy Issues: Using French Hanoi to Teach the Histories of Sex, Racial Hierarchies, and Geographies of Desire in the New Imperialism” (World History Connected, October 2018) and “Sex and the Colonial City: Mapping Masculinity, Whiteness, and Desire in French Occupied Hanoi” (Journal of World History, Vol. 28, Nos. 3/4, 2017). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Vietnamese Studies (2019) 14 (3): 137–142. https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2019.14.3.137 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michael G. Vann; Refugee Gothic: Review of Four Graphic Memoirs of the Vietnamese Diaspora. Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1 August 2019; 14 (3): 137–142. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/vs.2019.14.3.137 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Vietnamese Studies Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2019 by The Regents of the University of California2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The construction of woman as Other would seem the obvious target in a work so fitly titled for that purpose as the Legend of Good Women (1386). Elsewhere1 I have argued that the socio-literary construction of gender is what Chaucer aims to deconstruct in his Legend, through a variety of rhetorical means and in the service of an ultimate (that is, historically unattainable but nonetheless "true") genderlessness such as that offered by St. Paul in his remonstrance to the Galatians, or by Augustine in his vision of the resurrection:There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Jesus Christ.

Annie Proulx's “two-faced landscape” constitutes the geography of Brokeback Mountain on both the physical and emotional levels of Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar's relationship. The bifurcated narrative shifts between the hardscrabble towns of the northern plains and the romanticized, elusive Brokeback Mountain. This division marks Jack and Ennis's relationship, from its unexpected, volatile inception to its tragic, inevitable conclusion since, as Ennis states, “if you can't fix it, you gotta stand it.”

This study explores the growth of bourgeois American society during the mid-nineteenth century. Phenomena such as colonialism, migration, international trade, industrialization, and print culture cut across geographic and political boundaries and were critical to the evolution of bourgeoisie. Complimenting these conditions were traditions of cosmological mythology and enlightenment ideals that produced a transnationalist, if not cosmopolitan, consciousness. Together these contributed to an acute awareness of mobility and spatial difference. Metaphors of travel captured the sense of personal transformation, possibility, and empowerment common within the cultures of bourgeois identity. The romance of travel and encounter became a powerful discursive and psychological devise for the construction and reproduction of bourgeois desires such as status, class cohesion, and social dominance in the fluid, socially ambiguous conditions of the day.This study traces the significance of the romance of travel through a socially and geographically diverse gallery of individuals. It also examines the popular culture and institutions in which they participated. However, the narrative concentrates on the life of Bayard Taylor, a famed traveler, lecturer and writer of the day. Taylor serves as a representative figure. The journey of his rise to prominence, and the central role that a cosmopolitan geography of desire played in his popularity, are illuminating. Taylor's banality makes him useful as a means to investigate how the popular racial, gender, and class ideas surrounding bourgeois selfhood intertwined with a broader consciousness of the world outside the United States. Taylor exemplifies the way the romance of travel was utilized to adapt to and succeed in America.More broadly the study sheds light on the strident attitudes of American exceptionalism that persist despite a long history characterized by cultural dependence, global interconnection, and multiethnic complexity. It emerged out of the tensions surrounding parochial-cosmopolitanism within bourgeois culture: between the realities of the transnationalist context of its birth and the parochial aims of asserting hegemony over local surroundings.

The article explores the ways “uneven geographical development” conditions and is conditioned by local placemaking practices. Guided by David Harvey’s work along with Henri Lefebvre’s three dimensions of spatial production— spatial practices, representations of space, and spaces of representation or the “spatial imaginary”—I look at the ways a diasporic community of Vietnamese teachers, students, and parents negotiate heritage language and culture within an urban public elementary school. I hope to illustrate how spatial production works on individuals in ways that produce both docile and self-determining bodies negotiating tensions between unity and difference. I argue that in confining our understanding of the spatial to static backdrops, we limit our abilities to imagine spaces of difference, geographies of desire, places of radical openness and possibility, and third spaces of political opportunity.

The Geography of Desire

The ninth-century Periphyseon (De Diusione Naturae) by the Hiberno-Latin philosopher John Scottus Eriugena culminates early Irish Sea writings on nature from the standpoint of intellectual history, although the book was banned for centuries by the Western church and, despite renewed interest in recent years, remains little read (there is no easily accessible English-language translation, for example) and less understood given its early medieval experiential approach to philosophy.1 The work’s symbolism of nature—its sea of divinity and clouds of theophany, its cosmic tree uniting Paradise and earth, and its fourfold textualiconography of a cosmic landscape—remains indispensable, however, for understanding larger cultural contexts of the naturally miraculous Otherworld trope, which move it even beyond the Heideggerian sense of region explored in the last chapter into a more elemental realm. The cosmic-landscape symbolism of the Periphyseon more than its philosophy forms the focus of this chapter, which examines how, in effect, Eriugena’s cosmic iconography extends a place-region analogous in qualities to the Irish Sea Otherworld onto a Creation-wide scale. In other words, the text illustrates views of nature implicit in the Otherworld trope, in ways relevant to current environmental philosophy. Written around the same time as the formation of core literary narratives of Tochmarc Etaine, Tain Bu Cuailnge, and key Irish sources for the Welsh Mabinogi, by an Irish author in Francia with an educational background in the archipelagic milieux of those other texts, the Periphyseon challenges modern assumptions that the distinctive early Irish exegetical concern with miracles as natural “was not tied to a wider theoretical outlook,” but does so with its own iconography.