Display Of Sexuality Research Articles

“A Wife and a Mother Has No Business to Be So Well Dressed”: Gender, Class, and Dynasty in the Revolutionary Republic

Abstract: This essay takes Angelica Schuyler—whose surname, following her husband’s, became Church in 1784—as a case study in the intersection between class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in the revolutionary American republic. It argues that she and women like her held a distinctively dynastic attitude towards kinship, which shaped the norms of sociability that governed the emerging national state during the first decades of the federal government. Like other wealthy, well-connected, white women in this period, Schuyler Church disavowed the popular ideology of female domesticity and asserted power through the public display of feminine sexuality. The essay builds on studies of the so-called “republican court” in the United States, as well as scholarship on elite women’s role as powerbrokers in British and French society, to draw out the ways that their gendered experience of sexuality and family life interacted with strategies for reproducing and accumulating power. Like all other ruling classes, that of the United States depended upon women. That dependence drove the shifting political salience of gender and sexuality in the early republic.

Streaming Black girlhood: biculturality, nostalgia and hypervisibility in Cuties

ABSTRACT The era of streaming services and online distribution of independent films have offered more varied representations of the African Diaspora than were previously available through traditional media. Within this context, Maïmouna Doucouré’s acclaimed 2020 film, Cuties, presents a poignant and nuanced, yet controversial representation of Black immigrant biculturality, girlhood, and puberty. In this essay, we engage with Cuties through the lens of nostalgia as an escape from uncomfortable realities. Set in France, the film centres the immigrant experience. The protagonist Aminata (Amy), a French-Senegalese preteen, witnesses her mother’s sadness at her husband’s impending wedding. Amy embarks on a journey of body agency and rage that demonstrates her navigation between cultures. We critically engage with how Amy disrupts her mother’s and community’s immigrant nostalgia: a longing and idealizing for the culture of their homeland in opposition to the dominant culture of their adopted country. We also examine how the U.S. release of Cuties on Netflix got caught, perhaps unintentionally, in the crosshairs of a U.S. culture war. The marketing for Cuties presented a sexualized, feel-good depiction of the girls in the film which distracted from Doucouré’s true aim of depicting the rage of girlhood and the negative influences of sexualized popular culture, hypervisibility, and imagery on adolescent girls. We consider this backlash from the perspective of nostalgia as well: We unpack how this controversy reflects some Black viewers’ desire for a ‘return’ to polite and tame filmic representations of Black girls. Despite Doucouré’s efforts to explain herself and sympathetic critics’ campaign to defend the film, there was some preoccupation with the young girls’ display of sexuality. We perceive Doucouré as challenging audiences to stay present in the challenges facing young Black girls, particularly as they are increasingly exposed to online models of sexuality and femininity.

The Gaiety Girl and the Matinee Idol: Constructing Celebrity, Glamour and Sexuality in the West End of London, 1890–1914

AbstractThis study examines the role that musical comedy on stage played in shaping popular culture in the long Edwardian period (1890–1914). It is based around two iconic theatrical types of the period: the Gaiety Girl and the matinee idol. Historians have underestimated their importance and what they represented. These two are decoded as a way of understanding the development of a culture based upon glamour, celebrity, fashion, display and public forms of sexuality which started to break with Victorianism. It looks in particular at the musical comedies produced by the West End impresario George Edwardes and explores their links to the developing fashion and beauty industries of the period.

Global hip-hop culture and the scopophilic spectacle of women in South African hip-hop music videos

In many hip-hop music videos, women’s value is reduced to sensuous display of sexuality. Asa result visual pleasure is created through the representation of women as eager and willingsexual objects. This article assesses the techniques and ways women are sexualised in SouthAfrican hip-hop music videos, and how their representation attempts to create visual pleasurefor those that consume these videos. Four critical elements are adopted from Laura Mulvey’sseminal theoretical discourse about the positioning of women in narrative cinema, to study thegender representation and sexual presentation of women in two popular South African hip-hopmusic videos. The analysis reveals that appealing to the male gaze, processes of objectification,gender division of labour and camera techniques are ways of presenting a sexualised spectacleof women for the visual pleasure of male characters and audiences of the videos.

Seeing ecology: pollination and the resistance to Adam Smith’s Theory of political economy in William Blake’s Book of Thel (1789)

I love that something so beautiful could make you uncomfortable or, if you are the type of person who isn’t made uncomfortable about the frank display of sexuality by flowers, well, that says somet...

Sex sells? The role of female agency in sexualized advertisements

Advertising with sexualized female models is a commonly used technique in the advertisement industry. While “sex sells” is often successful in eliciting positive responses from male consumers, it often elicits negative responses from female consumers. On the one hand, female consumers might perceive sexualization as lacking in value (i.e., as a cheap display of sexuality lacking any kind of commitment). On the other hand, they might perceive sexualization as lacking in agency (i.e., as the model being displayed as an object rather than a subject). In two studies we investigate whether it is the lack of value or the lack of agency in sexualization that leads to more negative evaluations by young female perceivers. We manipulated the slogan in a sexualized advertisement so that it either adds value to sex (but does not add agency to the model) or so that it adds agency to the model (but does not add value to sex). Furthermore, we investigate the role of relatedness between the consumer and model with two advanced methodological approaches manipulating the facial characteristics of the model in the advertisement. In Study 1, we manipulated relatedness via perceived familiarity of the model’s face, whereas in Study 2, we manipulated relatedness via actual similarity between the perceivers’ and the model’s face in the advertisement. Results indicate that the lack of agency rather than the lack of value leads to negative evaluations by female consumers. This effect was pronounced if the advertisement model was relatable to the consumers.

Gender and Song in Early Modern England ed. by Leslie C. Dunn, and Katherine R. Larson

Reviewed by: Gender and Song in Early Modern England ed. by Leslie C. Dunn, and Katherine R. Larson Julie Robarts Dunn, Leslie C., and Katherine R. Larson, eds, Gender and Song in Early Modern England (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World), Farnham, Ashgate, 2014; hardback; pp. 236; 7 b/w illustrations and 1 music example; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781472443410. The edited collection Gender and Song in Early Modern England addresses the intersection of gender with song as text, musical genre, and embodied performance in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English acoustic and social environments. The introduction reviews recent developments in sound studies and musicology in the broader western European tradition and early modern studies. The review essay focuses particularly on studies that have explored gender and sexuality in relation to representations of musicians, musical performance, and soundscapes. The eleven essays in the collection grew out of a seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in 2011. Several essays consider poetic and musical genres that ventriloquize female personae, or that women and men performed, including the ayre, broadside ballad, and song within households. These chapters explore the ways in which the gender and social status of the performer, relative to the gender and decorum of the lyric voice, shape reception and transmission of song. Performance of song in public and domestic environments could strengthen or subvert the messages about masculinity and femininity inherent in lyric and popular genres. Of particular note is Linda Phyllis Austern's essay demonstrating the ways in which the male householder's control over male-only and mixed-gender musical performance in domestic environments was a key site of the performance of masculinity. By managing music-making, men regulated a source of communal pleasure and mastered the perceived threats of music as both irrational and effeminate. They also exercised control over the display of female sexuality—understood as an unavoidable element of female musical performance. Most of the essays in the collection examine the use of song and music in theatrical texts and performance. Jennifer L. Wood shows how the representation of the New World 'Indian', in dramatic texts, travel narratives, and prints, parallels representations of European witches through the association of chant, dance, and harsh sounding instruments. Two chapters explore the ways in which confessional positions informed competing understandings of music, in the performance of masks by schoolgirls, and a public play. Music, especially polyphony, and dance could be praised as Neoplatonic harmony or condemned as sensual; however, the gender and rank of performers or characters modulated the polemic around this conflict. Angela Heetderks applies the insights of early modern disability studies to show the ways in which song marks characters in Shakespeare's corpus as 'hypermarginalised' through the connection with madness or jesting. [End Page 255] Julie Robarts University of Melbourne Copyright © 2019 Julie Robarts

Anxieties of Seeing: The Sensational World of Cinema, Digital Media and Politics

This article analyses the super-hit Malayalam film Drishyam (Sight) in relation to the modalities of protest in the Chumbanasamaram (Kiss of Love [KoL] campaign) in 2014 in Kerala in which the kiss was deployed as a form of public protest. It brings together a popular thriller and a political protest that made waves in the entire nation in order to explore how shifting media technologies choreograph performative modes of doing politics. Drishyam stages the convergence of different media forms and legitimises the conventions of older forms such as cinema that hinges on the spectacle of women’s bodies and sexual acts on screen. At the same time, digital technology and the modes of circulation and reception it facilitates function as a node of heightened anxiety. Although Drishyam precedes the KoL campaign, this film can be seen as a response to precisely the (hyper) visibility of bodies and sexuality in the public domain through the workings of new media technologies. The film is driven by an overwhelming concern about the public performance of intimacy—contiguous with the secret filming and the threat of circulation of the naked woman’s body that is the cause of crisis in the film. Thus, I argue that the energies that drive Drishyam and finds a resonance with a national audience, in fact, anticipates KoL-type display of sexuality which is at once unauthorised and out of place but also mediated by unruly technologies.

Wellington 2013 – Tastefulness: Fashion, Food, Lust and Domesticity in Matilde Serao’s "La virtù di Checchina" (1884)

Throughout Western culture the relationship between women and food has often been seen as a metaphor for something else. From the biblical episode of Eve and the apple to postmodern society, women’s eating habits have been perceived not only as natural acts of self-nourishment but also as a display of affection, sexuality and tendency to sin. Similarly, women’s clothing style has been read as an instrument of self-expression and a key marker of gender identity over the centuries. At the time of the Unification of Italy, neurology, psychiatry and gynecology supported by patriarchal ideology, explicitly identified women as naturally unbalanced beings. As a result, a rigorous diet was recommended to control their voracious feminine behaviour. Preparing meals for the family was synonymous with women’s traditional disposition to take care of others; however, eating some dishes or abstaining from them was also seen as contributing to regulate female disorderly conducts. The corset, an important fashion statement of the time, has been seen as one of the means to control – physically and morally – women’s unstable behaviour, their eating habits and sexuality, thus connecting the complex discourse on food to that on clothing. The short story "La virtù di Checchina" (1884) by Matilde Serao (1856-1927) presents several narrative instances where food preparation for the family and the protagonist’s obsession for fashion take centre stage; these passages are often coupled with the portrayal of the frustration Checchina experiences towards women’s pre-established social role. With a humorous tone, Serao depicts the social constrictions and the cultural contradictions bourgeois women were facing at the time. By analysing Checchina’s daily routine between the kitchen and the closet, I shall demonstrate that for the protagonist, the activities which involve food and clothing are synonymous with something else: a way to express her deepest feelings, communicate her emotional state and reject the repressive social role she must play in a complex socio-cultural context that promotes a fragile and asexual ideal of femininity.

The Female Body as Soul in Queen Anna's Masques

In masques in which Queen Anna and her ladies performed, such as Samuel Daniel's "Tethys Festival" and "The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses," the dancing female body comes to represent the soul visually and thematically. This bodily representation of the soul constitutes a political statement about women's exclusion from affairs of government. It transgresses assumptions about gender roles without hinging on an aggressive display of sexuality, a topic that past feminist masque criticism has foregrounded. To support this argument, I draw on seventeenth-century concepts of the soul-body divide and early modern theories of dance.

Female Body, Discipline, and Emerging Male Spectatorship in Yoruba Video Film

This essay examines the increasing display of female sexuality in Yoruba video film. The investigation focuses on this development especially because these sexualized female images have now become an integral part of a video film tradition that emphasizes moral discipline alongside entertainment. The images and motif of discipline tend to constitute two seemingly parallel discourses and it is this apparent contradiction, in relation to spectatorship, that this essay explores. As a result of the liberal deployment of female sexuality in Yoruba video film, almost all the genres are suitable for this investigation. However, Omotara Johnson I, II, III, Eye E , and Iwajowa have been selected for analysis not only for presenting the female body, but also for interrogating the filmic process. These video films are examined within the contexts of objectification and gender theories, including the Yoruba notion of “good character.” Crucial observations that emerge from the research include the discovery that eroticized female body functions as a component of the film’s didactic motif, obliterating possible contradictions between the images and instructional goals of the narratives. In other words, female objectification becomes justified through its centrality to the development of the film’s instructional machinery. The implication of eliminating the opposition between female objectification and didacticism is the creation of a unique spectatorship, which is male and heterosexual. This spectatorship supplants the previous undifferentiated one, because until about ten years ago, Yoruba video film was more preoccupied by dialogue and narrative than capturing the female body. Objectification of the female form and the emergence of specifically male and heterosexual audience are recent phenomena in the development of Yoruba video film.

Sexuality and Everyday Mistreatment at Work: The Role of Gendered Organizations

In recent years, organizational scholars have begun to examine the benefits and costs of women engaging in sexual behavior at work. Our paper contributes to this effort by investigating the extent to which gendered organizations determine when women will display their sexuality at work and the outcomes that will result. In a sample of female lawyers, we showed that the displays of sexuality lead to subtle but persistent forms of mistreatment from co-workers. Further, and more interestingly, we demonstrated that while masculine organizations encourage the display of sexuality, the relationship between women’s use of sexuality and mistreatment is reduced to the extent that the organization is feminine. Implications and future research is discussed.

'War, Women and Song': The Case of Hanka Ordonówna

This article analyses the performances of the Polish cabaret singer-cum-movie star, Hanka Ordonówna/Ordonka, during the Second World War, and subsequent representations of her through physical monuments and biographical treatments in print and on film. It locates Ordonka in the context of female performers entertaining the troops, the lone woman on the front socially approved for her tasteful display of a morale-boosting sexuality before an audience of largely male combatants. ‘War, Women and Song’ argues for Ordonka’s exceptional case due to her popular pre-war celebrity and her own war time experience, when she shared or witnessed her compatriots’ tragic fate of occupation, deportation, mass death and, in many cases, permanent exile. In her war work, Ordonka doubly incarnated for her audiences a lost pre-war culture of urbane sophistication and eroticised charm and a war time victim turned conventional national heroine when she spearheaded a rescue mission of five hundred Polish children orphaned by Soviet atrocities. Ordonka came to represent to her nation both an irresistible lover and an exemplary surrogate parent with the qualities of a self- sacrificing matka polka (Polish mother).

RE:FORM: Becoming Visible

RE:FORM: Becoming Visible explores the tensions between gay visibility, representation and embodied subjectivity, challenging the assumption that visibility equals liberation and functions transparently.
 The overall purpose of this piece is to explore how the invisibility of gay sexuality becomes visible and manifests through the body. In order to do this, I draw from the mythic figure of the monster - a figure that embodies difference and otherness.
 In the video, the monstrous body erupts from a green coloured field and constitutes a visual pattern while at the same time the visual pattern constitutes the body. This relationship symbolizes the paradox of visibility, as the visual structure exists only through the display of bodies. In culture, the representation of identities exists through the visibility of identities, yet identities are limited by concrete representations that replicate dominant ideologies.
 The visual pattern is intended as a metaphor for structures inherent in representation that attempt to reproduce dominant ideologies. By subjecting the representation of the monster to the visual pattern, I explore the tensions between dominant ideologies and subjects. The growth and collapse of the monstrous body denotes the possibility of resistance to structures in representation.
 RE:FORM: Becoming Visible resists the efforts to limit identities and explores the possibilities of open, incomplete subjectivity. New forms are created through resistance. The result is a display of growth, collapse, beauty, desire, sexuality and embodiment.
 Joseph Medaglia is a scholar, artist, designer and educator. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Art and a Master of Arts in Communication and Culture. His research examines the relationship between representation, identity and the body, in particular as it relates to gay subjects. His creative work employs methods of experimental video, costume, interactive design and more recently, robotics and physical computing. For more information visit www.jmedaglia.ca

Subject and Space in Catherine Millet's "La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M."

This article departs from the prevailing focus in critical interpretations of "La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M." on the textual display of female sexuality, and seeks to explore instead the neglected subject of space in Millet's text. The analysis of the elaborate play with spatial concepts, images, metaphors, and language is linked with a rereading of the construction of subjectivity and the self, leading to the conclusion that while "La Vie sexuelle" might seem to celebrate a postmodern shifting, fractured subject, it ultimately reveals a stronger pull towards characteristics associated with the Cartesian/Enlightenment model.

Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture

In the early 1960s, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was a small, multi-racial company of dancers that performed the works of its founding choreographer and other emerging artists. By the late 1960s, the company had become a well-known African American artistic group closely tied to the Civil Rights struggle. In Dancing Revelations, Thomas DeFrantz chronicles the troupe's journey from a small modern dance company to one of the premier institutions of African American culture. He not only charts this rise to national and international renown, but also contextualizes this progress within the civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights struggles of the late 20th century. DeFrantz examines the most celebrated Ailey dances, including Revelations, drawing on video recordings of Ailey's dances, published interviews, oral histories, and his own interviews with former Ailey company dancers. Through vivid descriptions and beautiful illustrations, DeFrantz reveals the relationship between Ailey's works and African American culture as a whole. He illuminates the dual achievement of Ailey as an artist and as an arts activist committed to developing an African American presence in dance. He also addresses concerns about how dance performance is documented, including issues around spectatorship and the display of sexuality, the relationship of Ailey's dances to civil rights activism, and the establishment and maintenance of a successful, large-scale Black Arts institution. Throughout Dancing Revelations, DeFrantz illustrates how Ailey combined elements of African dance with motifs adapted from blues, jazz, and Broadway to choreograph his dances. By re-interpreting these tropes of black culture in his original and well-received dances, DeFrantz argues that Ailey played a significant role in defining the African American cultural canon in the twentieth century. As the first book to examine the cultural sources and cultural impact of Ailey's work, Dancing Revelations is an important contribution to modern dance history and criticism as well as African-American studies.

Good Sports and Right Sorts: Guns, Gender, and Imperialism in British India

In the early 1920s, a young British woman visiting India met the man she would subsequently marry. As the woman's daughter later revealed, she and her companions “were just sitting down to dinner when he came in through the door and one of the bearers came forward to take his gun and clean it, but my father would have none of that. He always cleaned his own gun before he did anything else. This impressed my mother.” If the narrative halted here, the contemporary reader might construe the story as yet another example of traditional gender dynamics. The love-struck young woman admiringly observes the male imperialist's competent, professional handling of his firearm, symbol both of his mastery over the colonized Indian landscape and its people and of his masculine sexual prowess. In this instance, however, the young woman was no passively adoring female quivering before this symbolic display of male power and sexuality. She herself, as her daughter revealed, had been “brought up with guns” and was a “crack shot.” Her admiration for the man who would become her husband stemmed not from feelings of awe or feminine inadequacy but rather from her cool assessment that here was someone who was her equal—and could be her partner—in hunting, shooting, and handling of firearms. Indeed as their daughter recalled, the successful marriage between these two gun aficionados was based in part on the wife's participation in her husband's hunting duties as an officer in the Indian Forest Service.