Erotic Life Research Articles

The Banality of Anal: Safer Sexual Erotics in the Gay Men's Health Crisis' Safer Sex Comix and Ex Aequo's Alex et la vie d'après.

Analyzing two harm reduction comics campaigns-one early in the AIDS crisis (the Gay Men's Health Crisis' [GMHC] 1980s Safer Sex Comix) and one more recent (Fabrice Neaud and Thierry Robberecht's 2008 Alex et la vie d'après), I explore tensions between queer safer sexual erotics and national discourses of sexual norms/deviation raised by Cindy Patton and William Haver at the height of AIDS discourse theory in 1996, approximately halfway between the comics. Using these theorists' reflections on the history of AIDS activism/representation as a hinge, I explore the manifestation/transformation a decade later of the ethical, educational, and erotic issues they raise. Both foreground the ways that HIV, safer sex, and/or eroticism pose difficulties for systems of linguistic and visual representation. Combining text and image, comics-a common harm reduction medium-epitomize this representational issue. While the GMHC addresses an immediate need for information about safer sex, Alex attempts to tackle the unrepresentability/unthinkability of safer and/or seropositive sex(uality). Safer Sex Comix, while largely prioritizing directness above formal experimentation, employ strategies of transgressing the borders of the comics panel to emphasize a plethora of lower-risk sexual acts. The most visually inventive moments in Alex represent Alex's feelings of unintelligbility post-diagnosis, but the comic restricts its representation of sex only to anal intercourse, and it proves unable to visualize alternative formulations of the erotic, turning to more normative narratives and images as earlier, visually explicit unsafe sexual encounters are replaced with more a/illusive representations post-conversion, literalizing the unrepresentability of seropositive erotic life.

Book Review: The Erotic Life of Manuscripts: New Testament Textual Criticism and the Biological Sciences

Book Review: The Erotic Life of Manuscripts: New Testament Textual Criticism and the Biological Sciences

COOPER’S QUEER OBJECTS

Queer objects are crucial to the narrative strategies of Dennis Cooper’s George Miles cycle where they support his exhaustive inventory of what it means to have (in all senses) a sexual type. In Frisk (1991), Cooper transforms some objects into media to blur the boundaries between the writing subject and the objects he desires. The snuff photos, seen at too young an age, form the point of reference for Dennis the narrator’s erotic life but they acquire their force in a looping narrative structure that calls into question their status as representation as well as their capacity to communicate. The novel thus elicits a new theorization of the relation between objects and media that discloses the stakes for fiction in a queer subjectivity that takes the self as another object at the same time as it probes the limits of realism. I situate Cooper in a genealogy of autofiction that extends back to Marcel Proust and Jean Genet and forward to J.T. LeRoy, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, and Sheila Heti. The essay concludes by contrasting Cooper’s narrative achievements to the collapse of the writing subject into the autobiographical self in the more recent examples.

Black pussy power: Performing acts of black eroticism in Pam Grier’s Blaxploitation films

This article contends that black feminist conceptions of ‘pussy power’ have prematurely foreclosed an examination of both pussy and its powers, thereby missing the erotic potential inherent in a ‘pussy power’ that is distinctly black – what I term black pussy power. Taking Pam Grier’s Blaxploitation performances in Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) as my primary case studies, I use black pussy power as a conceptual framework through which to read Grier’s performances of black eroticism, which enable her to resist racialised gendered sexual subjection and tap into modes of erotic agency otherwise denied to her. Moving away from delimited understandings of pussy as female genitalia or an objectified entity of female sexuality, I mobilise black queer feminist theorisations of the ‘arbitrary relation between black sex and gender’ to theorise the polymorphous potential of black pussy to signify beyond the narrow gender and sexual grammars currently available to us. 1 At the same time, black pussy’s discursive connection to black feminine sexuality animates the insurgent potential of black pussy power to secure nominal black freedoms in the face of state-sanctioned infringements on black erotic life.

The Trial(s) of Queen Caroline and Hays’s Memoirs of Queens, Illustriousand Celebrated

ABSTRACTSometime before the death of Queen Caroline in August 1821, Mary Hays, Rational Dissenter and feminist radical, published her last work, Memoirs of Queens: Celebrated and Illustrious. Hays claimed her intention in writing the Memoirs was to compile a selection of lives of queens “illustrious for their great qualities, and celebrated for their endowments and fortunes”. Unlike the Victorian collective biographies of women worthies with which Hays’ final text is sometimes lumped, Memoirs of Queens was not, however, written as an aspirational text, but rather as a study of the perils of royal life and the struggle of queens to overcome the conditions engendered by the “sexual distinction”. This article explores Hays Memoirs of Queens in the context of the aftermath of the trial of Queen Caroline, arguing that this text was perhaps Hays most radical. In her study of the life of Queen Caroline, I will suggest that Hays pushed the boundaries of the radical politics she had shared with Wollstonecraft in the 1790s, vigorously rejecting the sexual double standard enshrined by the George IV’s supporters in their relentless crusade to ruin the Queen, while also making a plaintive plea for a woman’s right to an erotic life.

Sharing secrets, revealing thoughts and feelings. Perceptions about disclosure practices and anonymity in a FB University students

The aim of this study was to identify students' perceptions about personal information disclosure and anonymity in a specific Facebook University Community. The explicit goal of this Community is the sharing of secrets and the revelation of students' deepest thoughts and feelings on high sensitive issues as their erotic or sexual life, leading to information disclosures in various ways. An online survey was conducted and spread through Community's Facebook profile in order to record students' perceptions about the Community and to identify disclosure practices as well as perceived benefits and costs deriving from their participation. Anonymity as expected is valued positively while privacy violations seem to bother less since this is a public Community resulting in a stated comfort about secondary disclosure taking place through reference to persons' physical or other characteristics. This study enhances existing literature on Facebook, by enlightening more facets of personal information disclosure on Facebook students' communities.

Black Bread by Peter Bush

more engaged with the Russian spirit than with the country’s quotidian concerns. The novel almost floats; we are engaged from beginning to end, and one couldn’t find a better companion than Rostov. Rita D. Jacobs New York City Emili Teixidor. Black Bread. Trans. Peter Bush. Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2016. 393 pages. There is nothing more profound than the realization of what war does well beyond its official end. Peter Bush has given us a poetic translation of Emili Teixidor’s novel Black Bread, in which each line seems to be given complete attention and where Teixidor has loaded line after line with both wonderful and terrible beauty. From the opening scene to the finale, the narrative of war and chaos and coming-of-age is underpinned with what seems an eternal forest—a natural world that holds secrets and desires and will ultimately outlive all the pettiness that is humanity. Though the narrative of Black Bread is based in Catalonia just after the Spanish Civil War, it is a timeless setting for contemporary humanity. This is a novel that will stick with us because of the continued relevance of divisive social orders in addition to the complexities of religion and politics. Telling a story of war, class divisions , sexuality, religious doctrine, executions , and fascist rule from the point of view of a young boy is, perhaps, one of the best ways to deliver a litany of existential questions without a hint of preachiness . It unfolds flawlessly, through honest characters, scenes, and descriptions of rural Spain. From the start, we are folded into a familiar world—the close relationships that children have as they grow up together; the hard-working family; the grandmother with infinite wisdom. Ultimately, Emili Teixidor’s novel allows us to see aspects of ourselves by situating us in moments of sympathy for the speaker . Teixidor’s linguistic brushstrokes paint everything we need in order to see ourselves just as the speaker finally does himself: that we are, in the end, always somehow at war within ourselves. That we are all doomed to someday grapple with moments so uncomfortable and arresting that we might find ourselves completely changed into something we no longer recognize. Sarah Warren University of North Texas Sachin Kundalkar. Cobalt Blue. Trans. Jerry Pinto. New York. The New Press. 2016. 240 pages. The entrance of an unknown stranger who radically impacts the lives of other characters is a commonly used fictional device. Consider Pasolini’s Teorema, where the entrance of an opaque character called “The Visitor” radically changes the day-to-day existence of five characters. Sachin Kundalkar’s Marathi novel, Cobalt Blue, brilliantly translated by Jerry Pinto, deploys a similar device. The everyday and erotic lives of two characters, a gay man named Tanay and his sister Anuja, are completely altered after a young artist , whose backstory remains shrouded in mystery, rents an upstairs room in their parental home. The novel, divided into two parts (“Tanay” and “Anuja”), depicts the profound impact this stranger has on the two characters after he disappears without explanation. Tanay’s narrative is an imaginary, emotionally intense dialogue between an “I” and a “you.” Anuja’s narrative consists of diary entries where she tries to reconstruct her life after her lover leaves her. What unites these two narratives, which often show us the same events from different perspectives, is the polyvalent use of blue. Blue functions as a marker for the alluring difference of the other, for example when Tanay says: “You had a way of looking at things which seemed sharp, perceptive , cobalt blue.” The color signifies an incorporation of the other within the self when Tanay ruminates on relationships: “If nothing else,” he says, “you adopt some of the other person’s habits.” Almost as an afterthought, he reveals how his beloved is World Literature in Review 80 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 ...

The Erotic Life of Manuscripts: New Testament Textual Criticism and the Biological Sciences

The Erotic Life of Manuscripts: New Testament Textual Criticism and the Biological Sciences

Leucate Univers

more engaged with the Russian spirit than with the country’s quotidian concerns. The novel almost floats; we are engaged from beginning to end, and one couldn’t find a better companion than Rostov. Rita D. Jacobs New York City Emili Teixidor. Black Bread. Trans. Peter Bush. Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2016. 393 pages. There is nothing more profound than the realization of what war does well beyond its official end. Peter Bush has given us a poetic translation of Emili Teixidor’s novel Black Bread, in which each line seems to be given complete attention and where Teixidor has loaded line after line with both wonderful and terrible beauty. From the opening scene to the finale, the narrative of war and chaos and coming-of-age is underpinned with what seems an eternal forest—a natural world that holds secrets and desires and will ultimately outlive all the pettiness that is humanity. Though the narrative of Black Bread is based in Catalonia just after the Spanish Civil War, it is a timeless setting for contemporary humanity. This is a novel that will stick with us because of the continued relevance of divisive social orders in addition to the complexities of religion and politics. Telling a story of war, class divisions , sexuality, religious doctrine, executions , and fascist rule from the point of view of a young boy is, perhaps, one of the best ways to deliver a litany of existential questions without a hint of preachiness . It unfolds flawlessly, through honest characters, scenes, and descriptions of rural Spain. From the start, we are folded into a familiar world—the close relationships that children have as they grow up together; the hard-working family; the grandmother with infinite wisdom. Ultimately, Emili Teixidor’s novel allows us to see aspects of ourselves by situating us in moments of sympathy for the speaker . Teixidor’s linguistic brushstrokes paint everything we need in order to see ourselves just as the speaker finally does himself: that we are, in the end, always somehow at war within ourselves. That we are all doomed to someday grapple with moments so uncomfortable and arresting that we might find ourselves completely changed into something we no longer recognize. Sarah Warren University of North Texas Sachin Kundalkar. Cobalt Blue. Trans. Jerry Pinto. New York. The New Press. 2016. 240 pages. The entrance of an unknown stranger who radically impacts the lives of other characters is a commonly used fictional device. Consider Pasolini’s Teorema, where the entrance of an opaque character called “The Visitor” radically changes the day-to-day existence of five characters. Sachin Kundalkar’s Marathi novel, Cobalt Blue, brilliantly translated by Jerry Pinto, deploys a similar device. The everyday and erotic lives of two characters, a gay man named Tanay and his sister Anuja, are completely altered after a young artist , whose backstory remains shrouded in mystery, rents an upstairs room in their parental home. The novel, divided into two parts (“Tanay” and “Anuja”), depicts the profound impact this stranger has on the two characters after he disappears without explanation. Tanay’s narrative is an imaginary, emotionally intense dialogue between an “I” and a “you.” Anuja’s narrative consists of diary entries where she tries to reconstruct her life after her lover leaves her. What unites these two narratives, which often show us the same events from different perspectives, is the polyvalent use of blue. Blue functions as a marker for the alluring difference of the other, for example when Tanay says: “You had a way of looking at things which seemed sharp, perceptive , cobalt blue.” The color signifies an incorporation of the other within the self when Tanay ruminates on relationships: “If nothing else,” he says, “you adopt some of the other person’s habits.” Almost as an afterthought, he reveals how his beloved is World Literature in Review 80 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 woven into his perception of self: “Yesterday , when a cobalt blue smudge of the wall ended up on my hand, I wiped it on my trousers without thinking.” Blue operates as a cipher of loss like the blue paint drying on the floor in Tanay’s “museum of broken things” or the “stream...

The Erotic Life of Manuscripts. By Yii-Jan Lin

<i>The Erotic Life of Manuscripts.</i> By Yii-Jan Lin

Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture ed. by Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall (review)

Reviewed by: Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture ed. by Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall Caroline Gonda Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall, eds., Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014). Pp. 219. £60.00. “Remember: As far as anyone knows we’re a nice normal family.” Doubtless hilarious to some, the bumper stickers and wall plaques on eBay are not so funny to the queer children excluded, silenced, or sacrificed in order to preserve the so-called normal family’s image of itself. It’s in the nature of ideology that those processes of exclusion, silencing, and sacrifice are so often themselves invisible or denied. The appearance of obviousness, naturalness, this-is-just-how-things-are, is what gives particular forms of being their power to control—or, at their most extreme, to destroy—the lives of others. In a world where, as the Scottish lesbian novelist Iona Macgregor says, “the dominant class never sees its own boundaries,” the work of a collection such as Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture is an important intervention, making critically visible both “the heteronormative legacy of the eighteenth century as a historical period” and the continuing presence of heteronormativity in eighteenth-century studies. As the editors note, the chapters in this volume “set out to reconfigure our sense of how gender and sexuality have become mapped onto space; how public and private have been carved up, and gendered and sexual bodies socially sanctioned; and how narrative conventions have been put in the service of affirming or subverting cultural orthodoxies about sex, gender, and sexuality. They also spotlight the literary traditions, scholarly criticisms, and pedagogical practices that buttress or subvert heteronormativity both in the past and in the present” (15). Whether or not one subscribes to Karma Lochrie’s argument in Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (2005)—that only the emergence of statistics as a science in the late eighteenth century makes it possible to speak meaningfully about norms and the normal (including in sexuality)—this collection makes the case for the eighteenth century as a crucial period in the formation of heteronormativity. By the end of the century, the editors argue, heteronormativity “congeals into a fully fomented hegemony,” although “alternate sex/gender configurations” continue to materialize (14–15). The chapters here explore heteronormativity across a wide range of areas and subjects: for example, the history of shopping and its impact on the sexual geography of the city (O’Driscoll); changes in French wedding-night customs (Roulston); the use of heteroerotic pornography as an element in male homosocial bonding (Kavanagh); moral panic, sexual assault, and protective masculinity in late eighteenth-century London (Braunschneider); Gothic fiction’s resistance to heteronormative closure (Haggerty); and the racial and sexual politics of colonialism (de Freitas Boe). In addition to Coykendall’s chapter on the critical and historical reception of Gray and Walpole, the two chapters that frame the volume address themselves to eighteenth-century studies, examining the workings of heteronormativity in scholarly research (Lanser) and the pedagogic practices and new readings of texts that result from attending to transgender issues in the classroom (Saxton, Mance, and Edwards). As powerful and pervasive a force as heteronormativity becomes, it is not monolithic, but is enmeshed with other structures of power. Ana de Freitas Boe’s [End Page 427] chapter on John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1790) makes this particularly clear: “Stedman’s depiction of the erotic life of the colony forces us to reconsider how concerns about race and miscegenation shaped emergent heteronormative conceptions of sexuality in the eighteenth century. The monogamous couple—and monogamy as a concept—looks different from the vantage point of the colonial periphery” (165). Questions of class as well as of race are important in this volume, as seen particularly in Sally O’Driscoll’s chapter “Conjugal Capitalism,” which focuses on the figure of the domestic woman as “mulier mercans,” defined no longer by her sexual desires but by the fetishistic transfer of those desires onto material goods and purchasable commodities. The city in which she wanders is transformed, gentrified by the...

Disability and sex work: developing affinities through decriminalization

This article argues that strong policy frameworks are required to support the health and well-being of sex workers, disabled people, and disabled sex workers. Through an examination of the context of sex work in Canada, we articulate the flaws of sex work criminalization and the persistent barriers that criminalization creates. Our analysis of the intersection of disabled sexuality and access to sexual services identifies how the sex industry can aid in the flourishing of the erotic lives of disabled people. The article culminates in a discussion of the benefits of sex work decriminalization for sex workers, disabled people, and disabled sex workers.

Loneliness and its opposite: sex, disability, and the ethics of engagement

Few people these days would oppose making the public realm of space, social services and jobs accessible to women and men with disabilities. But what about access to the private realm of desire and sexuality? How can one also facilitate access to that, in ways that respect the integrity of disabled adults, and also of those people who work with and care for them? Loneliness and Its Opposite documents how two countries generally imagined to be progressive engage with these questions in very different ways. Denmark and Sweden are both liberal welfare states, but they diverge dramatically when it comes to sexuality and disability. In Denmark, the erotic lives of people with disabilities are acknowledged and facilitated. In Sweden, they are denied and blocked. Why do these differences exist, and how do both facilitation and hindrance play out in practice? Loneliness and Its Opposite charts complex boundaries between private and public, love and sex, work and intimacy, and affection and abuse. It shows how providing disabled adults with access to sexual lives is not just crucial for a life with dignity. It is an issue of fundamental social justice with far reaching consequences for everyone.

Reclaiming Lost Loves: Transcending Unrequited Desires. Discussion of Davies’ “Oedipal Complexity”

In this discussion I address the multidimensionality embedded within the oedipal phase of development and contend that the elaboration and working through of unrequited oedipal longing within the transference–countertransference matrix is one of the most profound gifts of an analysis. The child’s confrontation with thwarted desire (generationally) for either parent is central to the development of the mind, the personality, and one’s erotic life. I also argue that the experience of oedipal exclusion becomes not solely a response to a generational boundary but to a gender boundary discouraging same-sex love. I speak for retaining a conceptualization of an oedipal complex without losing any of the complexity of individual experience. In describing our oedipal lineages for erotic life as resting upon an interwoven layering of maternal and paternal oedipal desires, my aim is to continue a project to rehabilitate the oedipal concept from heteronormative presumptions and from being (mis)understood in a reductive manner that alienates rather than engages.

“Personal Preference” as the New Racism

In this article, I examine how race impacts online interactions on one of the most popular online gay personal websites in the United States. Based on 15 in-depth interviews and an analysis of 100 profiles, I show that the filtering system on this website allows users to cleanse particular racial bodies from their viewing practices. I use Patricia Hill Collins’s concept of the “new racism” and Sharon Holland’s ideas on everyday practices of racism within one’s erotic life to explain how these social exclusionary practices toward gay men of color in cyberspace are considered not to be racist acts. Specifically, I show how the neoliberal discourse of “personal preference” effaces the larger cultural assumptions that are influencing people’s interpersonal and psychic racial desires, furthering an erotic new racism in this digital age. By also turning to a queer of color analysis, I posit that the practices that gay users engage in lead to the remarginalization of all nonheterosexual individuals, though in qualitatively different ways.

Performing sex: the making and unmaking of women's erotic lives Breanne Fahs

Performing sex: the making and unmaking of women's erotic lives <i>Breanne Fahs</i>

Searching for Climax

AbstractIn August 2013, the newly launched YouTube channel, All Def Digital, posted a video entitled “The Harriet Tubman Sextape.” Reactions to the tape were swift and overwhelmingly negative. Decrying the desecration of the iconic Tubman and the positing of sexual transactions as a liberatory tool for enslaved black women, responses to the digital short shed light upon uncomfortable and complicated interpretations of the role of sex, sexuality, sexual economies, and sexual violence played in black lives during chattel slavery. Situating Tubman at the center of these dialogues offers an opportunity to pose new questions about the erotic life of slavery.This essay is a call to explore and a foundational excavation of the sexual lives of black women during slavery, and more specifically, historical narratives of pleasure. Grappling with the erotic lives of black women during slavery offers a new lens with which to comprehend the lived experience of chattel slavery. Uncovering sensation, intimate interiority, and erotic experiences challenges a historiographical approach rooted in a twentieth century black liberation ethos and demands that we take seriously the erotic subjectivities of black women during slavery as part of an emancipatory politics. Using “The Tubman Sextape” as a point of entry, this essay examines how to create erotic maps of Tubman, and black women during slavery more broadly by engaging the historiography of slavery, popular representations of bondage, and emergent theories and conceptualizations of erotics.

James M. Bromley Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of ShakespeareIntimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare. James M. Bromley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. viii+210.

<i>James M. Bromley</i> Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare<i>Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare</i>. James M. Bromley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. viii+210.

Our Peculiar Institution

Read through the lens of Sharon Patricia Holland's work on the "erotic life of racism," Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave offers ways of thinking the intertwining of religion and race in the United States from the antebellum era up to today.

6 * Queer Theory

Are we happy yet? Are queer people, whoever they are, feeling brighter about the changing prospects for strange sexualities in world contexts? Or is happiness (still) a dirty word? And should we remind ourselves, we who read what is called ‘queer theory’, that the common linking of ‘queer’ to ‘sex’ is a sinking ship? Is the sex-vessel for carrying queerness really just one among many vessels now? Speaking of now, what time is it? Queer theory still wants to trouble your answer. It might be time for failure. Or becomings. Or maybe time for coming—surely there must be time for that—and thus for ‘sex’ to come up again. Orgasm, singleness, and even the erotic life of racism are on tap right now. As are objects of various kinds: new bad objects (think of ‘chick lit’) and object lessons (about and around identity knowledges). Finally, there are animated states of being that are not conventionally living or alive. ‘Animacies’, they are being called. All this is part of the lay of the land, as the following chapter details in books published in 2011–12, including some books from adjacent years. The chapter is divided into five sections: 1. Happiness is Unqueer? 2. Listening Queerly to a Kind of Dying, Seeing Queerly towards a Kind of Doing; 3. Getting Back to ‘Sex’? 4. What Time Is It Now? 5. Bad Objects, Object Lessons, and Animated (?) Objects (?). (Authors engaged include, among others, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Elizabeth Povinelli, Chandan Reddy, Ann Cvetkovich, Judith (Jack) Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Michael Cobb, Sharon Patricia Holland, Carolyn Dinshaw, Stephanie Harzewski, Robyn Wiegman and Mel Y. Chen.)