‘Entrancing but Dangerous’: Blackwood and the Erotic

Within the Borders of a Monastery is a story by Georgian feminist writer and activist Ekaterine Gabashvili (1851-1938). The goal of the paper is to explore the representation of female desire in the story. As Georgia was the part of the USSR, the humanities in Georgia were ideologized – the scholars would analyze literary texts from strictly Marxist point of view. Therefore, the process of reviewing Georgian literature from feminist perspective has started only recently. The paper contributes to the process and suggests an innovative reading of Gabashvili’s story. As Gabashvili thematizes hysteria and psychosis from feminist-psychoanalytical perspective and challenges gender roles, the paper uses the methodology of the Feminist Literary Criticism with French Feminist and the Gender Performativity Theories. The paper argues that the story depicts female desire as a destructive, incontrollable force which is pre-oedipal, opposes the Symbolic (i.e. the patriarchy) and manifests itself either through hysteria/psychosis or through the semiotic metaphors (e.g. dance). It transcends the female body and is connected to the feminine: the female and male protagonists (Salo and Tevdore, respectively) who love each other, experience and express their desire identically. The feminine is shown as a performative phenomenon through the androgenous male protagonist Tevdore. The opposition between the Semiotic and the Symbolic is reinforced through the semantics of space. The end of the story (the protagonists committing a suicide) reveals the theme of the story: banishing the female desire and the feminine from the symbolic order.

Reviewed by: Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936–1961 Laura Quinn Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936–1961. By Gary Richards. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Pp. 256. $44.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). This impressive and useful monograph manages to be both ambitious and compact, both careful and lively. Richards, an associate professor of English at New Orleans University, challenges what he sees as an evasion of homosexuality in critical discourse on southern literature in the era designated the "Southern Renaissance." The book is ambitious in its theoretical grounding in contemporary gay/lesbian and/or queer theory and in its corrective, revisionary claims for its historicized geographical subject. Its compactness is enabled by the author's skill at close reading of texts as well as the incisiveness of his encapsulation of critical genealogies. The book is a lively [End Page 330] read because of its quite distinctive lucidity—with respect to both textual exegesis and theoretical deployments—and because the six authors he has chosen for case study and the sometimes lesser-known works he explores are illuminated and enlivened by his analyses. This study's final signature feature—its "carefulness"—manifests itself in several ways. First, in terminological distinctions between, for instance, same-sex desire and homosexuality and again between what he calls gender transitivity/intransitivity, along with his title phrase, sexual otherness, and the fixedness of homosexual identity, which he wants to question. Additionally, he has not "significantly deployed the term queer" because it "risks sacrificing the centrality of desire and same-sex desire in particular" (2). Second, in a cautionary claim that, while the fiction he chooses for study clearly foregrounds homoeroticism, a reader should not only not "presume an absence in an uninterrogated text, one also should not presume a presence" (4–5). Third, in resisting "homophiliac" readings of southern fiction, as "this study works against the erection of a univocal southern gay/lesbian canon," seeking to see instead that "these six writers' representations of same-sex desire are contradictory and disruptive of critical continuities" (6). The six Southern Renaissance writers in Richards's anticanon are Truman Capote, William Goyen, Richard Wright, Lillian Smith, Harper Lee, and Carson McCullers. Richards argues that each exemplifies the centrality of same-sex desire in southern mid-twentieth-century fiction, that these representations of desire get "quarantined" in critical discourse, and yet that each writer does quite distinct and (largely) unprecedented fictional things with this desire. His first chapter, "Freaks with a Voice," tracks the critical foundations of Southern Renaissance literary discourse in order to establish and explain its propensity to quarantine its "freaks." By this compelling account, the Southern Renaissance emerges as a defensive move against charges of cultural aridity in the twentieth-century South, notably exemplified by H. L. Mencken's disparaging 1917 essay, "The Sahara of the Bozart" (8). The archresponders to this charge were the members of the Nashville Agrarian group, composed of "former Fugitives and eventual New Critics," including Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Alan Tate, and other self-nominated gatekeepers of this Renaissance (9). The Agrarian agenda was conservative, family values oriented, and fixed on minimizing "the presence of same-sex desire (and other disruptive elements of otherness and multiplicity) in twentieth-century southern literature" (18). Richards argues that the agenda-laden Agrarian aesthetic was paradoxically compatible with the supposedly apolitical formalism of New Criticism and that this fusion had critical staying power in the last half of the twentieth century. He argues further that, when this paradigm began to shift, it tended to compensate for decades of neglect or reductive treatment of race and racism by "belaboring these issues at the minimization or exclusion of others," effectively "quarantining" sexual otherness yet again (21). That [End Page 331] is, southern critics did this; nonsouthern critics, by contrast, emphasized sexual otherness in southern texts as depravity—most memorably, Leslie Fiedler in his identifications of the gothic in Faulkner and his famous claim that "post–World War II American fiction can be roughly divided into 'the Jewish-heterosexual wing' and 'the Southern homosexual'" (quoted on 27). Richards sees this nonsouthern critical "quarantining...

Reviewed by: Boys in children's literature and popular culture. Masculinity, abjection, and the fictional child Jochen Weber Annette Wannamaker , Boys in children's literature and popular culture. Masculinity, abjection, and the fictional child. (Series: Children's literature and culture; 46) New York [et al]: Routledge2008XIIIpp + 181pp ISBN 9780415974691US$90.00 United States For some time now, complaints have been raised in the USA and other countries that boys are not only reading less than girls, but in addition prefer books and other media considered mostly inappropriate by adults. In response to these pedagogic concerns, Annette Wannamaker, assistant professor of children's literature in the English Department at Eastern Michigan University, examines English-language children's books, films, TV programs, video games, manga, and anime from the last two decades to investigate what exactly attracts boys to these popular media and to consider which models of masculinity contemporary boy culture offers. In five chapters exploring Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan, Louis Sachar's Holes, the Captain Underpants series, manga, and the Harry Potter series, she documents the affirmative character of the works in close and careful readings of the texts: the male protagonists are generally white, heterosexual, and members of the middle-class. On the one hand, the popular media thus perpetuates conventional conceptions of boy- and manhood, oftentimes blatantly glorifying a hegemonic male "norm" that tolerates no deviation. On the other hand, however, Wannamaker convincingly argues that some male protagonists – especially in the Harry Potter series – escape gender stereotypes and instead display more nuanced and complex forms of masculinity. Indeed, Wannamaker's astutely structured and stimulating study makes a convincing case for not simply dismissing boy culture and reading as inappropriate. On the contrary, she argues that boys rather need encouragement to grow into independent, discerning readers who fully understand that hegemonic models of masculinity are but literary and social constructs. [End Page 59] Copyright © 2009 Bookbird, Inc.

Curial e Güelfa is a Catalan romance often slighted by literary critics as too "affected" or lacking in style. Upon closer reading, this fascinating text undermines the rules of chivalric romance in innovative ways, for example, by subverting gender norms. The kiss functions as a signifier of women's control over the male protagonist and the subversion of the chivalric order. Through the various kisses observed in the text, we can follow the development of the male protagonist, the knight, Curial. Curial assumes the traditional feminine role in the romance, as passive recipient of the kisses bestowed by the woman, Güelfa, rather than the other way around. When the male protagonist finally demonstrates agency by bestowing a kiss of his own volition, he does so in a way that transgresses a pact he has made with his lover, Güelfa, thereby subjecting him to the control of another woman, Laquesis. The origins and inspiration for these literary innovations may find their roots in the Italian humanism present at the court of Alfonso V of Aragon, where the text was likely written.

True Lover/False Lover, <i>franquise</i>/<i>dete</i>:

This paper discusses a comparison between Kim Man-jung’s 『The Cloud Dream of the Nine』 and Hermann Hesse’s 『Narcissus and Goldmund』. The two works can be compared because they are similar in characters, ideological background, story structure, and content development method. In particular, both works require attention in that they deal with the issue of desire against the backdrop of medieval ruling ideology. Kim Man-jung’s 『The Cloud Dream of the Nine』 deals with the is sue of human desire against the background of Buddhism and Confucianism, while Herman Hesse’s 『Narcissus and Goldmund』 explores human desire against the background of Christianity. In addition, these two works grasp the meaning of de sire according to the way the narrative operates through the two male protagonists who show different and conflicting attitudes toward life, and raise the importance of the perception it implies. In 『The Cloud Dream of the Nine』 and 『Narcissus and Goldmund』, desire serves as a catalyst for the protagonists to question their existing lives, fostering their will to discover themselves or prompting them to decide to escape from their current situations. In addition, desires that have been concealed or suppressed by existing dominant and mainstream ideas, especially sexual desires, are justified in the narra tives or revealed as essential experiences for art. This dismantles the dichotomous thinking that has long been entrenched in history by dominant ideologies. The dominant ideologies that govern society set a dichotomy between abstinence and desire, distinguishes everything in the world, and dichotomizes all values, such as sanctity and profanity, father and mother, good and evil, right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, etc. It has been used to discipline people in society, and the two nar ratives criticize this traditional way of thinking. They discuss the unique value of desire as a natural human quality, the power of the desire impulse to move from ‘here’ to ‘there’, and the creation of a new world. They reveal the positive aspects of fostering a new civilization.

In her provocative study of feminine desire, What does a woman Reading and Sexual Difference, Shoshana Felman responds to Freuds infamous question what does a woman want? by exposing the elusiveness of feminine desire in literary works by Freud and Balzac. Juxtaposing analyses of Balzac's Adieu and La fille aux yeux d'or with Freud's discussion of his dream about his patient Irma, Felman argues that, although these works attempt to master, control, and understand the desire of their female protagonists, at the same time they enact a form of resistance to such efforts. Her own readings, then, consist in tracing within each of her chosen texts inadvertent textual transgression of its male assumptions and prescriptions. (1) She attends to details that signal the woman's refusal to adhere to patriarchal codifications of desire, and shows how the works disrupt the male urge to cure, to make sense of, female madness, sexuality, or, in the case of Irma, pain. The fetishization of women's desire and the silencing of female characters ultimately serve to reveal a male anxiety towards feminine desire, and a parallel desire to possess the feminine by normalizing and then fulfilling the woman's needs. This essay will explore a similar urge to master inscrutable feminine desire, and a potentially comparable form of textual resistance, in Nedjma, a novel written in French by the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine. Published in 1956, the text revolves around the enigmatic central character of Nedjma, a putative symbol for Algeria and a fictionalized version of Kateb's own cousin with whom he fell passionately but hopelessly in love, and narrates her (fruitless) pursuit by four male protagonists (Mourad, Lakhdar, Rachid, and Mustapha). First, Nedjma can be seen, like Irma, as at once silenced and constrained, and at the same time the object of male fantasy. Secondly, however, this article will suggest that Nedjma's own desire on closer inspection may be not merely inscrutable, exotically mysterious, and ultimately an object of male fantasy, but a powerful, active, potentially violent force. This reading of Nedjma's agency will take the figure of Antigone as a potentially comparable signifier of active desire that cannot be read according to social and political expectation. Yet again, however, the danger with this portrait is perhaps that it too still remains the product of a fantasy produced by a male author, and the waywardness of her desire could itself be seen as a subject of fascination for the male gaze. Finally, the desire to master Nedjma can be understood also as bound up with the search for an independent Algeria, as critics have more than once read her precisely as a symbol for a new nation born out of the union of France and Algeria. Nevertheless, close reading of the work actually unsettles any straightforward association between Nedjma and Algeria, and she turns out also not to fulfill the characters', or the author's, putative dream of a hybridized but liberated new community. She remains, however, a site for a complex interweaving of a nexus of frustrated sexual and cultural desires. Nedjma is the axis around which Kateb's novel revolves, yet, like Irma, she herself rarely speaks, and never participates in dialogue with the other protagonists. She is figured as the object of desire of the male protagonists, but her own voice is largely excluded from the narrative, and in this sense, she could be seen to comply with Lacanian conceptions of femininity as lack, as excluded from the symbolic order. As critic Charles Bonn writes, est dite, elle ne dit pas. Elle peut etre lue des lors au centre du roman comme une sorte de noyau vide. (2) She is also constrained, married off to Kamel against her will, and in many of the male narrators' evocations of her she lacks agency. The early images of her at the villa reinforce this atmosphere of claustration, and the reader's first glimpse of Nedjma herself also conveys this sense of constraint: Etoffe et chair fraichement lavees, Nedjma est nue dans sa robe; elle secoue son ecrasante chevelure fauve, ouvre et referme la fenetre; on dirait quelle cherche, inlassablement, a chasser l'atmosphere, ou tout au moins a la faire circuler par ses mouvements. …

There is something deceptively binary about Leïla Marouane's novel, The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris: her male protagonist is a forty-year old virgin who wishes to “conquer” Western female bodies for whom procreation, marriage and commitment are (he hopes) irrelevant. At the same time, he does not seem able to break free from supposedly traditional Muslim values. And he is obsessed by an overpowering mother does not stop pressuring him into marrying a young Muslim virgin and having children as soon as possible. One of the possible interpretations of The Sexual Life of as Islamist in Paris is the protagonist slowly becomes mad because he is torn between two worlds and two cultures. The narrator has supposedly inherited a very precise cartography of bodies and gender that separates the world into penetrable and penetrating bodies. The trouble with that interpretation however is that it presupposes that Marouane accepts that Maghrebi sexual discourse is monolithic, opposable to a just as monolithic Western norm. Upon close reading, it becomes apparent that The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris is just as provocative as its title seems to promise but for reasons that have nothing to do with the reiteration or inversion of clichés. Rather than presenting a simple reversal of stereotypes (Mohamed is the male virgin and the Arab women he meets are sexually liberated), the novel complicates the construction of virginity and penetration and presents the narrative voice as an inextricable web of male and female threads. Presented as a double of the author herself, it turns the novel into a space where the construction of masculinity and femininity escapes the opposition between “the Maghreb” and “France,” a space where critique has find its own parameters through practices of constant disaligning and disidentification from gender and ethnic or religious norms.

This thesis addresses the varying ways in which sexual desire is portrayed in a range of fictional works by Mishima Yukio. It presents a fresh examination of the central role that desire plays in Mishima's work, in the light of contemporary literary theory, particularly cultural materialism and queer theory. The works discussed include a number of Mishima's popular entertainment novels. The representations of aspects of desire, including same-sex desire, sadomasochism and heterosexual relationships outside marriage, are compared to contemporary writing on these in Japanese non-literary discourse, as well as earlier literary representations of, in particular, same-sex desire. The influence of sexology and psychoanalysis is examined, specifically in the forms in which these accounts of desire were communicated to the Japanese reading public in journalism of the period. The relation of Mishima's fiction to popular journalism in general is discussed, with reference to the kasutori magazines of the Occupation period and women's magazines of the high-growth era. Mishima's strategies for representing sexual desire for men are discussed, including his use of literary allusion and his portrayal of women as desiring subjects. Aspects of his narrative technique are identified as camp, in that they use borrowed cultural authority to express desire from a non-dominant subject position. The use of allusion in Forbidden Colours is examined to show how Mishima used allusion to elaborate paradigms for same-sex desire other than those available in contemporary discourse.

This article, by closely examining the trajectory of the upcoming Bollywood star Ayushmann Khurrana, tries to unravel the constitutive fantasies that provide a significant degree of coherence to his star-image. Through a close textual reading, the article aligns these fantasies with the diurnal realities of neoliberal India. In these fantasies, the male protagonist is found to be (a) the privileged embodiment of a surplus/lack that comes to signify the ‘thing’ called the modern, but (b) the man and his sociality is not prepared yet to accept this ‘thing’, thus triggering comedy; it is only in romantic conjugation with (c) a working woman can this excess charge of the modern be resolved within the narratives. Using psychoanalytic insights, the article unpacks these fantasies as ones involving both a crisis and an ultimately infantile reaction to it.

This article explores conceptions of same-sex sexual behavior and desires by American gay males who grew up in Pacific Island or Asian societies. In the absence of systematic survey data, representations, which are not assumed to be autobiographical, by two South Asian émigrés to Canada (Badruddin Khan and Shyam Selvadurai), two second generation Filipino-Americans (Joël Tan and Ricardo Ramos), a second generation Chinese-Hawaiian (Norman Wong) and three men of Chinese descent born and raised in Southeast Asia (Lawrence Chua, Justin Chin, and T. C. Huo) are examined. The unsatisfying script of sexual submission of Asians to whites is particularly central, except for the South Asians. These books provide recurrent evidence of role distance, of switching roles (often without rewriting a dominance-submission conception of insertion-reception) and of some degree of reconceiving the (sexual) self.

This chapter explores the relations between gendered sexual violence and the evolution of the idea of “equality” in relation to the emergent modern ethnos and capitalist class system, as imagined in colonial Korean literature produced between the late 1910s and the mid-1930s. I argue that the nexus among the rape of women, status or class, and ethnos, as illustrated in these literary works, reveals the ways in which empirical sexual violence against women is transformed by literary representations—that is, narrative violence—into an ideological violence that helped to produce a modern ethnonational (socioeconomic) order as an androcentric one. These foundational literary works further illustrate that the androcentric ethnos is even more specifically developed into a masculinist imagining of abstract equality through the naturalization of male sexual desire and rivalry. The first section analyzes the ways in which male protagonists (and male authors by extension) perform the liberation and inclusion of lowborn women in the premodern aristocratic patriarchy by condemning and resignifying their rape, endowing them with legal rapability and educability as potential compatriots and human resources. The second section develops how the narrative deployment of the rape of women reforms the status-based patriarchy of the premodern era into a modern, ethnonationalist, that is, an intraethnic universalist, patriarchy by remasculinizing patriarchy vis-à-vis the other explicit and implicit foreign patriarchies. The last section further delves into literary representations of masculinist equality in which abstract equality is proposed through the narrative-ideological equation between lowborn men’s sexual awakening and their political awakening.

The male-male romance web series The Untamed reached a height of media interest in the summer of 2019 in China. Numerous Chinese young women were obsessed with the drama centred on the relationship between the two male protagonists, and many fan followers identified themselves as ‘ The Untamed Girls’. Through online observation of young female fans of the male-male romance web series, this study articulates how they were self-organised as a counterpublic and utilised strategic ways to negotiate with the party-state censorship. Drawing upon the conceptualisation of ‘ambivalence’, the study analyses a dual ambivalence in their collective actions. It is argued that The Untamed Girls’ participation as a popular feminist project is, however constantly intertwined with an assumption of heteronormativity and an internalised misogyny, where these seemingly empowered women are simultaneously reaffirming a heterosexual regulation of sexual desires and devaluing women when they celebrate the male-male romance embodied in such a drama series.

This article establishes the means by which Lester Burnham, the white, male protagonist in American Beauty, is able to indulge in trangressive and damaging behavior while remaining a sympathetic figure. Through an initial comparison with Falling Down, the victim politics at play in American Beauty are shown to be covert, non confrontational, and contained by the film’s domestic setting. However, close reading exposes the filmic strategies that shape Lester’s claim to victim hood and disguise the oppressive nature of his journey to reempowerment. Ultimately, Lester emerges as the victimizer rather than the victim, and the liberal pretensions of American Beauty are recast in terms of a conservative agenda.

Despite the fact that over two decades and the coming of independence lie between the publication of Charles Mungoshi’s Ndiko Kupindana Kwamazuva [ How Time Passes ] (1975) and Ignatius Mabasa’s Mapenzi [ Fools ] (1999), the city—a key setting in both novels—is described in similar, often congruent, images by the two male protagonists, Rex and Hamundigone. Salisbury, later Harare, is likened to an undefeatable seductress who traps and ruins men by introducing them to her twin pleasures of cheap beer and fast women. Thus, on the surface, the city appears to be responsible for social corruption and moral decay. A close reading of the imagery in both novels, however, reveals that both authors refrain from regurgitating the program-matic and rather simplistic “old society versus modern lifestyle” trope that has permeated the discourse of urbanization in Shona literature. Instead, they intimate that larger sociopolitical forces are the root causes of social malaise in colonial Rhodesia and, subsequently, independent Zimbabwe.