Depictions Of Sexuality Research Articles

Conceptual Overview (Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography)

Conceptual Overview (Portrayals of Sexuality in Pornography)

Petr and Fevroniia's Unorthodox Marriage

The married couple Petr and Fevroniia were first canonized in 1547. In Russia today, they are celebrated as an example of supposedly 'traditional' Orthodox family values. Academic studies of the saints' early hagiographies often reinforce this idea, presenting them as idealized love stories or celebrations of Orthodox marriage. By contrast, this article argues that the first, sixteenth-century version of the saints' hagiography depicts a marriage that was unorthodox in its depiction of gender and sexuality. Although unorthodox features would later be removed from the text, there remains a gulf between contemporary and historical understandings of the saints' marriage.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Examining Biology Curricular Resources’ Scientific Depictions of Evolution, Race, Sexuality, and Identity

Examining Biology Curricular Resources’ Scientific Depictions of Evolution, Race, Sexuality, and Identity

Das umgeschriebene Genie. Zum Verhältnis von literarischem Autorschaftsdiskurs und Schriftpraktiken im Theater

Das umgeschriebene Genie<b>. Zum Verhältnis von literarischem Autorschaftsdiskurs und Schriftpraktiken im Theater</b>

The Color of a Good Horse: The “Roan” in Henry IV Part 1 and Henry V

For some time now, scholars have been interested in the way Shakespeare presents the horse, with interpretations ranging from its necessary absence on-stage to its depiction of sexuality.1 However,...

History from the top shelf: the cultural politics of sex in post-war Britain

ABSTRACT The 1970s saw representations of sex become ever more visible in Britain. This special issue is designed to stimulate further research into how shifts in cultural politics, media and society facilitated and responded to cultural depictions of sex and sexuality. To this end, our short introduction surveys some of the literature and offers a glimpse of what might be stacked along History's top shelf.

The Comics of R. Crumb and R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self

The Comics of R. Crumb and R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self

Uploading the Archive, Copy/Pasting the “Classical”

This video essay combines a series of fiction feature films, made between the late-1990s and 2010s, in which futuristic androids and robots trade in digitised classical Hollywood archival film fragments as pedagogical and expressive traces, amassing an amateur archive. I call these fragments “film quotations” to denote the process of selection, citation, and reappropriation in these film-within-a-film moments. In this video essay, Flubber (Mayfield, 1997), S1m0ne (Niccol, 2002), Teknolust (Leeson, 2002), WALL-E (Stanton, 2008), and Prometheus (Scott, 2012) all “quote” classical Hollywood films, in the form of short excerpts of sound and image, projecting (or uploading?) Hollywood’s archival past onto their imagined versions of the future. As this cohort of robots explore and amass personal visual archives, mining Hollywood history for meaning and mimicry, their viewership reveals several interrelated classical Hollywood ideologies and biases: the robot-amassed archives replicate hyper-traditional behaviour, both in conforming to strict copyright rules and in depictions of gender, sexuality, and monogamy. While only Teknolust self-consciously and critically replicates hegemonic, heternormative media logics, this essay seeks to reveal how these robots’ sensorial experience of the archive select and project a misleading selection of history into the future. While touting a paradoxically easy-to-access Hollywood history, these robots cling to a tightly limited, licensed, entirely white and compulsorily cis-het digitised Hollywood archive.

‘Too Uncompromising a Figure to be So Disposed of’: Virginia Woolf and/on Olive Schreiner

In her 1925 review of an edited collection of Olive Schreiner’s letters, Virginia Woolf described Schreiner as ‘too uncompromising a figure to be so disposed of’. Prompted by this intriguing comment, this article brings Woolf’s late-1920s writings into conversation with Schreiner’s novels and letters in order to trace personal and textual connections between the two authors. Comparative analysis of Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928) reveals similarities and confluences in their novelistic structures, experimental temporalities, allegorical representations, use of natural imagery, and in the central and unifying linear motifs that are used to hold together the novel forms. Additional modernist aesthetic and political links are provided by depictions of sex- and gender-crossing characters in Orlando, The Story of an African Farm and Schreiner’s From Man to Man (1926), as well as by the feminist arguments and role of ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ in From Man to Man and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). The article concludes by arguing that ‘Woolf and/on Schreiner’ provides evidence towards a claim for South Africa as a pioneering site of modernist innovation, and thereby contributes to new understandings of the development of global modernisms.

“Laugh! I Thought I Should’ve Died”: British Music Hall Humour and the Subversion of Childhood on The Muppet Show

Through the abundant use of the bawdy, humorous songs of British music hall, The Muppet Show delivered a potent critique of constructed notions of a protectionist childhood. Paradoxically perhaps, the music hall songs, carnivalesque comedy, and frequent depictions of sex, sexuality, and violence also did much to construct The Muppet Show’s intended “family” audience while simultaneously providing a direct challenge to its normative sanguinuptial (blood and marriage) construction. This intergenerational family audience is crucial to the child’s interpretation of The Muppet Show’s complex and contentious content, subject matter that is rarely included in media made for a solely child audience. While the musical sketches open up an interpretive space for the child to encounter, resist, and subvert the range of fluid identities hinted at onscreen, the process is simultaneously constricted by the musical-visual texts themselves and by The Muppet Show’s family-reception context. As such, this case study reveals the inherent tensions of targeting a family audience through music and television.

Kein Land für Kinder? Westeros aus der Kinderperspektive

With its complexity and frequent depiction of violence and sexuality, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire book series is evidently aimed at an adult readership. Considering its setting in a feudalistic society, it is all the more surprising that many of the point of view characters are children or teenagers who are a priori in a position of powerlessness. This position is even exacerbated for the youngest children of House Stark once the game for the Iron Throne begins. Although they experience violence and have to face dangerous situations, the loss of their home and family is also reminiscent of the step out of the social order which marks the beginning of countless adventure stories and hero’s journeys in literary history. The article shows how Bran, Sansa and Arya Stark are initially subjected to the power and whims of others in a world marked by war, violence and arbitrariness, and how they eventually develop strategies to realise their inherent potential for empowerment in the course of their respective journeys.

Transcripts of Gender, Intimacy, and Islam in Southeast Asia: The “Outrageous” Texts of Raja Ali Haji and Khatijah Terung

It is generally perceived that Malays—who are predominantly Muslims—are comparable with the notion of politeness, aligned with moral axioms, and behave in ways copiously guided by religion. Casual sex and other forms of sexual “deviance” are typically attributed to foreign influences, most popularly, Westernisation. New social trends among this community, such as the emphasis on male dominance, changing prescriptions about the functions and expectations of sex, receptiveness towards the body and emotion, exposure to sex education, and openness to sexual discourse are often attributed to the “immoral” West. Yet, forms of sexual behaviours depicted in the writings of notable Malay religious and literary personages reveal surprising insights into the Malay-Muslim milieu of 19th-century Riau. A variety of sexual practices and relations are expressed through these writings. This article adopts a historical-sociological framework to examine the “artisan tools” of textual materials as in the Kitab Pengetahuan Bahasa (Book of Linguistic Knowledge) by Raja Ali Haji and Perhimpunan Gunawan bagi Laki-Laki dan Perempuan (A Compendium of Charms for Men and Women) by Khatijah Terung. The “outrageous” sexual depictions in these texts are discussed and analysed, in part to debunk the idea of a “sexual revolution” or “sexual licentiousness” as emanating from an external culture.

Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France: A Documentary History ed. by Jeffrey Merrick

Reviewed by: Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France: A Documentary History ed. by Jeffrey Merrick Benjamin Bernard Jeffrey Merrick, ed., Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France: A Documentary History (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 272; 1 map. $34.95 paper. The lack of accessible edited primary sources about early modern European sexuality has been so keenly felt that scholars regularly crowd-source suggestions on Twitter.2 Building on decades of archival research, numerous articles, and several edited volumes, Jeffrey Merrick (Professor Emeritus of History, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee) has furnished an indispensable resource that responds to this need. With careful curation and scrupulous English translations, Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France: A Documentary History is a crucial collection for researchers, teachers, and students of early modern same-sex desire. Because there is, in Merrick's view, "more information about sex between men (but, alas, not between women as well) in Paris than in any other major city in the eighteenth century,"3 this volume also enables Anglophone scholars interested in cross-cultural comparison and thus will benefit sexuality studies in the early modern world more broadly. The volume's rich prefatory commentaries in each subsection and its abundant endnotes provide readers with a patient orientation to each source base, distilling years of expert reflection by the subject's leading historian. This collection brings together documents of two kinds: police files and printed representations. The first corpus, "Surveillance of the Parisian Subculture," assembles English translations of 48 documents generated by the early modern Parisian police according to four institutional and chronological groupings: the lieutenancy general of police's morals bureau primarily in the 1720s, reports of the watch around the 1770s, reports of the Swiss Guard of the Champs-Élysées in the early 1780s, and reports of commissioners, or commissaires, in the 1780s. These sources, in Merrick's deft hands, shine particular light on the texture of everyday life. The first of these policing institutions, the morals bureau of the lieutenancy general of police in Paris, undertook surveillance, arrests, interrogations, and detentions of men for the crime of sodomy, as Merrick has shown in numerous articles [End Page 109] (helpfully listed in the book's "Recommended Reading" section).4 The lieutenancy general's bureaucratic apparatus generated paperwork including reports of undercover spies (or "decoys") dictated to police clerks, denunciations of arrested men, and case summary sheets. (Merrick previously published some documents selected from the moral police's sodomy files in his first primary source collection, co-edited with Bryant Ragan, which inspired me as an undergraduate.5) In this section, readers meet a representative line-up of sodomites: the "incorrigible" recidivist Marquis de Brécey and his lackey Jacques Bernard (no relation), and the lace merchant Emery Eraux who cruised the Seine riverbank by the Collège Mazarin. Merrick has carefully selected cases from thousands of manuscript pages to demonstrate the "variety and complexity" of homosexuality in early modern Paris: patterns of behavior that include the prevalence of age-differentiated relationships, the role of labor patterns in structuring affective relations, and even the at times surprising limits of tolerance. Readers can consider whether transformations between these 1720s sources and the later documents reflect changes in the practices of policing, in the mores of the population under surveillance, or in both. In Part II, "Representations of Same-Sex Relations," Merrick collects thirty-one depictions of male-male and female-female sexuality in print. The first subsection, "Gossip and Slander," includes scandalmongering pamphlets known as nouvelles and libelles that narrate social episodes. This subsection also juxtaposes those newssheets with archival evidence: in addition to translating a newssheet relating the story of a botched pickup at the opera in 1780 by the unfortunate actor Jean-François Bithemer, Merrick appends a legal petition Bithemer's mother filed against a calumnious actress at the comic opera who publicly denounced her son's "improper relations with men" (141–42). The next subsection, "Tradition," includes excerpts of humanist and legal encyclopedias that contrast with the moral dynamism of the third subsection, "Enlightenment." The latter comprises texts generated by self-described philosophes and some that interdisciplinary scholars...

"Laugh! I Thought I Should've Died": British Music Hall Humour and the Subversion of Childhood on The Muppet Show

Through the abundant use of the bawdy, humorous songs of British music hall, The Muppet Show delivered a potent critique of constructed notions of a protectionist childhood. Paradoxically perhaps, the music hall songs, carnivalesque comedy, and frequent depictions of sex, sexuality, and violence also did much to construct The Muppet Show's intended "family" audience while simultaneously providing a direct challenge to its normative sanguinuptial (blood and marriage) construction. This intergenerational family audience is crucial to the child's interpretation of The Muppet Show's complex and contentious content, subject matter that is rarely included in media made for a solely child audience. While the musical sketches open up an interpretive space for the child to encounter, resist, and subvert the range of fluid identities hinted at onscreen, the process is simultaneously constricted by the musical-visual texts themselves and by The Muppet Show's family-reception context. As such, this case study reveals the inherent tensions of targeting a family audience through music and television.

Body of Resistance: Blackness and the Politics of (In)visibility on YouTube

In this article, I will examine how Kuduro and YouTube provide a space for depictions of intersectional identities, and the ways they challenge stereotypes of racial, gendered and sexual depictions. This article asserts that cyberspace has become an important means of providing visibility for silenced bodies. To support this assertion, it explores the performances of Titica, a Black Angolan transsexual, on YouTube and elsewhere, asking how she has managed to subvert hegemonic dynamics and perpetuate queer identities. The result of this investigation is to reveal the neglected cultural dynamics of Black queer people.

‘How Can We Alter the Crest and the Spur of the Fighting Cock?’: Julian Huxley, Popular Biology, and the Feminist Pacifism of Virginia Woolf

This paper takes as its starting point a letter written by Virginia Woolf in 1940 which speculates about the possibility of ending war. ‘Can we change sex characteristics?’ Woolf asks. ‘How can we alter the crest and the spur of the fighting cock?’ In writing this letter, Woolf recalls a passage she read in 1932 from the biological textbook The Science of Life, co-written by Julian Huxley: a passage which, in Woolf’s terms, describes a ‘hen that became a cock or vice versa’. The paper demonstrates that Woolf’s writing of this period, particularly Three Guineas and Between the Acts, responds to Huxley’s works of popular biology, specifically their discussion of secondary sex characteristics, hormones, and the mutability of biological sex, in order to envision a way out of the repeating cycle of violent domination that she traces in contemporary society, and to conceive of a future society not built upon a binary model of sex or gender. It proposes a non-linear conception of feminist history in which Woolf’s texts—with their depiction of sex as plural and alterable through human agency—display a sympathy with our current understanding of sex: an aspect of her writing that has been overlooked by intermediate commentators.

The bitches of Boys Love comics: the pornographic response of Japan’s rotten women

ABSTRACT Boys Love (BL) manga in Japan have a 50-year history that highlights women’s fantasies of male–male romances that at times feature sexual scenes. In recent years, however, sexual depictions in BL manga have become increasingly vulgar and graphic as fans use the term ero (alluding to its ‘eroticism’) to describe BL works that feature stories with visual and narrative similarities to mainstream pornographic comics called eromanga. The popularization of these ‘ero BL’ titles indicates fans’ growing appreciation and knowledge of mainstream pornography literacies as these are worked on and transformed in this non-heteronormative media. Using approaches in New Literacy Studies, this article examines the works of ero BL artists and the discussions surrounding these titles to understand the development of fans’ affective learning and transformative engagement with pornographic literacies in BL manga that challenge normative notions of pornography in Japan.

LGBTQ Imagery in Advertising

ABSTRACT Gender is many things to many people. It is at once uniting and divisive. Gender in advertising presents a range of opportunities for marketers but is linked inextricably to concepts of masculinity–femininity and sexuality and has the potential to create strong positive or negative responses from different audiences. Using an experimental methodology, this study examines how depictions of gender and sexuality combine to influence consumer attitudes. The findings demonstrate how individuals9 political ideology determines their emotional response to such advertisements and that the resulting emotional response and attitude to the advertisement act as causal mechanisms responsible for product-related attitudes.

Chekhov and Zola's Naturalism

It is a critical commonplace that the young Chekhov owed a substantial debt to the French author Emile Zola, who was famous throughout European letters, many would say notorious, for his forthright, oftentimes graphic depictions of sexuality and the human body. However, this commonplace is a shallow one: most parallels between Chekhov and Zola in contemporary criticism are made in passing and a full‐length study on the two authors has yet to be undertaken. In this connection, my article explores how those very features found in Zola that so infuriated critics of his day, including his graphic sexuality, his love of raw detail, and his oftentimes haphazard blend of in vogue scientific theories and imaginative literature, shaped Chekhov’s own work. More specifically, I focus on Chekhov’s relationship to one of Zola’s most intriguing scandals, the publication of his novel Therese Raquin. In his scandalous introduction to this work, Zola laid out his Naturalist method of writing imaginative literature. In his view, an author must be a “surgeon” who performs analysis on his characters, in particular his female characters, in the same way a doctor does an autopsy on a corpse. My article examines the implications such an artistic orientation had for the young Anton Chekhov, who as both a professional physician and a professional artist, responded particularly to Zola’s dual self‐posturing and its resulting implications for describing complex female characters in Russian literature.