Erotic Power Research Articles

Sensuality and Consciousness III: To Dance with Nature's Forces

In remote regions of the eastern Andaman, into the 1990s, a remarkable rapport with nature's forces was occurring.1 Most strikingly expressed during adolescence, it emerged spontaneously from a local type of consciousness. Both the capability and the underlying consciousness were conceived within a pervasive milieu of lushly sensual infant nurture.2 So dependable was the pattern of affection, it spawned a tactile language long before onset of speech. Speech, learning and sociality then followed in the eros‐driven paradigm already set. So did a rare rapport with nature's forces.With nothing in the culture to discourage it, eros was not walled‐off as children grew. It remained firmly at the root of consciousness on through teens. To be a child out in those seas was to move spontaneously and digressively out into life pursuing sundry passion pulses. When erotic power escalated during adolescence, rapport with natural forces dramatically increased. Spectacular gambolings with nature began bursting forth—sometimes astonishingly complex rhythmic ones. No clouds of moody adolescent angst discouraged spontaneity; no flattening of affect suppressed adolescent verve; no emotional dissimulation confounded purpose. Adolescence was a time for a blossoming of affect, for melding deeply and dynamically with habitat. It was a time to profoundly dance with nature's forces.Possessing a protean character, love lies more fluidly within the human frame than language. Following its own inner protocols, love seems able to evade the stable kinds of labeling required for logical inquiry. In exotic cultures it is hard to see at all. In the eastern Andaman, its workings were initially invisible to Western eyes. It was necessary to firm up subliminal awarenesses before the workings out of eros could even be detected there. Though difficult to deal with scientifically, love plays such a profound role in the affairs of humankind that it begs experimental types of scrutiny.A fracturing of love into Bacchanalian and Sublime occurred during the early Greek foundations of Western culture. Out of that schism Western ethos grew. The ethos molded the Western type of consciousness. In the eastern Andaman, eros was not cleaved at all. It shaped a type of psyche not countenanced by the West since its prehistory.

L'autoportrait de la narratrice dans La Religieuse : les ruses du regard

Corinna Gepner : The Self -portrait of the Narrator in La Religieuse. This study of the conflict between attempts to seduce and to move the reader in La Religieuse analyses the physical and moral representation the narrator gives of herself in this work, which is intended to touch us with its account of the misfortunes she suffers. Can there be emotion without seduction? We show that the self-portrait is achieved by indirect means : the female narrator adopts the point of view of others to describe her charms, thus refusing to assume her power of seduction directly. The only exception to the technique of indirect portraiture is the exhibition of Suzanne's suffering, which is exposed shamelessly to the gaze of the person for whom the work is entended. Does suffering exorcise any impure desire to please ? One cannot ignore its erotic power. Seduction is thus at the heart of the work ; this seduction concerns the intended recipient but also the reader, who is reminded by a profoundly ironical author of the gratuitous nature of his own desire.

Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power

Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power. By Rita Nakashima Brock. The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1988. 130 pages. $16.95 Mary Zeiss Strange Mary Zeiss Strange Skidmore College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume LX, Issue 2, Summer 1992, Pages 328–331, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/LX.2.328 Published: 01 July 1992

The Virgin's Gaze: Spectacle and Transgression in Middle English Lyrics of the Passion

Depictions of the Virgin in Middle English lyrics of the Passion are one of the most common medieval sources for accounts of a woman's gaze. Her gaze in these laments, however, runs counter to cultural proscriptions of female gazing, as illustrated in Dante, Chaucer, Alan of Lille, and Bernard of Clairvaux and as theorized in recent feminist film theory. The Marian poems complicate the gaze by repeatedly enjoining the reader to view Christ's suffering and mutilated body through an intricately mediated visual enterprise: the reader looks not only at the figure on the cross but also at the Virgin gazing, a sight that is further mediated by the poet, often in the persona of someone watching at the scene. Spectatorship in the laments sets up a complex tension between the Virgin as spectacle and the Virgin as a transgressive subject of maternal and erotic power.

Pat Parker: A Tribute

Pat Parker died on 4 June 1989, but it took more than two months for news of her death to find its way across the Atlantic and into the alternative press. Pat Parker published her first volume of radical poetry, Child of Myself, in 1972, but it took almost two decades for a small handful of her poems to find their way into a British anthology (McEwen, 1988). So who was Pat Parker and what might this failure of respect and reticence to honour mean? A survivor of tin-roofed 'Texas hell', 'soul-searing poverty' and 'small town mentality' (Parker, 1978:141, 'Womanslaughter'), Pat Parker was one of the first working-class poets to wave two strong womanly fingers at the literary elite and their 'academic wanderings' (Parker, 1987:61). Judy Grahn, a 'class-mate' and friend for many years, describes her as 'an outrageous poet, the kind who says things first, and means them' (Grahn, 1978: 13). Audre Lorde, who spent many a long hour talking with Pat Parker before finally bringing her own erotic power and sexual identity to her poetry, feared for her (Grahn, 1984: 13; Lorde, 1978:9). For this loud and rich-mouthed poet, who planted her feet firmly on platforms all over America and demanded that her audiences, whoever they may be, pay attention, was not only working class, she was Black and lesbian: the very first to refuse to compromise and speak openly from all her undiluted experience. 'Goat Child', the autobiographical story poem that Judy Grahn recalls listening to with amazement in 1970, because it 'was nearly unheard of' that 'a woman's entire life [could] be the storyline of a poem, a modern epic', is without doubt a courageous, sinewy work and a fine example of Pat Parker's skill. Naming the knots on the tightly-stretched string of her first twenty-two years, Pat Parker also begins, with 'Goat Child', the relentless search for a definition of self that would allow her to formulate her own vision, her own 'simple dream' (Parker, 1978: 13). To this end, there is nothing she would not remember and learn

Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power by Rita Nakashima Brock. New York, Crossroad, 1988. 130 pp. $16.95

Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power <i>by Rita Nakashima Brock</i>. New York, Crossroad, 1988. 130 pp. $16.95

Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power. By Rita Nakashima Brock. New York: Crossroad, 1988. xvii + 130 pages. $16.95.

Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power. By Rita Nakashima Brock. New York: Crossroad, 1988. xvii + 130 pages. $16.95.