Erotic Relations Research Articles

Sexuality as Unity in Life: An Approach from Michel Henry’s Phenomenology of Incarnation

This article aims to promote the integration of knowledge and life based on a phenomenological description of sexuality and erotic relations. To carry out this task, I will follow the approaches of the French philosopher Michel Henry in order to extract the anthropological consequences of a phenomenology of incarnation pertaining to sexuality. Both the peculiar union produced by the sexual act and its perpetually threatened condition through the “event” of nihilation of the flesh will be the object of reflection throughout this work. In my search for the reintegration of the human being through the sexual act, I will show the importance of woman and her spiritual superiority in deepening the intimate meaning of sexuality. Further, I will argue that the intersubjective experience lived in sexual practice demands a consideration of human beings from their ultimate condition of relational possibility (Life), emphasizing their engendered, not merely created, condition. Thus, the salvation of human beings and their involvement in the coming of Life to them is intrinsically related to that carnal disposition which aids to unify them, beyond their diversity, in their self-revelation in Life.

Black Soil

AbstractThis article turns to the minor Black matter of soil to map a provisional theory of Black alchemy. Black alchemy names an erotic and ethical orientation toward the Dead and dead matter. Sifting the metonymic, metaphysical, and material properties between (Black fleshly) matter and (earthly) matters, the article argues for an attention to the erotic relations among Blackness, soil, and Dead (matter). These relations disrupt and refuse the circuits of racial capitalism that establish both Black bodies and soil as sites of resource depletion and commodification. Turning to the syncretic knowledge system of Obeah and tinctures of grave dirt, cachexia africana and histories of dirt eating, and the 2019 performance and installation Dirt Eater by Kiyan Williams, the article asks, What are the practices of those who have collectively lived the end of the world and therefore are already dreaming the messy, dirty end of this one?

Periodicals as proxénètes : Erotic Complicity in Don Juan (1895–1900)

Abstract The illustrated review Don Juan published an eclectic array of literary and artistic works, ranging from the popular to the avant-garde. By exploiting sex appeal, shared humour, and textual structures, the review created forms of erotic complicity between text, collaborator, and reader. This article suggests that Don Juan enacted a form of proxénétisme by encouraging, enabling, and profiting from erotic relations within and beyond its pages. The review’s advertising columns regularly featured products such as sex toys, condoms, and aphrodisiacs, which, in enabling non-procreative and pleasure-centred sexual liaisons, brought obscenity trials against the businesses that sold them. Much like the sex shop Maison A. Claverie, the revue légère crossed moral and legal boundaries by offering sexual pleasure to a diverse clientele. Through its playful manipulation of a wide variety of advertising formats, such as personal ads, book catalogues, and réclame, Don Juan provided space for creative forms of erotic textual production, frequently blurring generic and structural boundaries between advertising and main copy, pecuniary interest and artistic expression.

Trans-oceanic erotics: sexing indentureship

Through creative speculation and intervention, this research project probes the ‘coolie homoerotic’ (Wahab 2019) as a critical reflection on the place of the homoerotic and queerness within the trans-oceanic lifeworld of coolie indentureship. The four artworks presented are informed by a series of questions that might help to build a platform for queering indentureship and trans-oceanic space beyond identity recovery and respectability politics. In this regard, the work in progress is aimed at sexing indenture by (1) focusing on Brown same-sex sexual intimacies and erotic relations on coolie ships, as a way of undoing the historically constructed disconnect between the categories ‘sex’ and ‘indentured labour’, and (2) critically engaging the colonial heteropatriarchal discourse of ‘sex/gender/sexuality’ that continues to condition the unthinkability of same-sex relations in the context of indentureship and its legacies.

Chasing Papi

Abstract In the wake of COVID-19, virtual platforms of contact have reimagined trans-of-color knowledge and intimacy despite social distance. The “digital,” whether cybernetic or handcrafted, has long pervaded trans and queer-of-color artistic innovation and even informed their critical responses to the AIDS crisis. None have a better grasp of the virtuosity of virtual interfaces than mixed-media artist Olivero Rodriguez. Drawing on his literary and image-based art piece entitled The Papi Project (2010–18), this essay articulates how he works in tandem with speculation and archiving. The result is a life support system reviving dormant erotic networks and complex familial relations central to his reclusive late father, Peter. By chasing Papi, Rodriguez empowers an archival art strategy to visually reconcile a trans-of-color childhood and patrilineal relations with a virus. Furthermore, by contesting the way AIDS narratives eclipse children's perspectives on disease, Rodriguez's intervention has consequence for trans-of-color historical critique, breathing new life into an “epidemic child, not birthed but raised by AIDS.”

Entre Exu e Ogum: políticas do sagrado no teatro de Abdias do Nascimento

Resumo Estudo crítico das determinantes míticas na caracterização das personagens e na composição da ação em Sortilégio II, drama de Abdias do Nascimento. O teatro de Abdias obedece a paradigmas de composição da cena que não se baseiam mais na organicidade sintagmática da fábula, mas, apresentando os complexos e paixões de Emanuel, busca uma organização descontínua e paradigmática, para dar conta da vida de uma única e dominante subjetividade em cena. Em Sortilégio II, essa configuração teatral pós-catástrofe é ideal para tecer os processos rememorativos de Emanuel, na tentativa de projetar no presente da cena o passado traumático do personagem, marcado pela violência social, pelos complexos raciais e pelas contraditórias relações eróticas com Ifigênia e Margarida. Na peça, além das definições estruturais da ação, o sagrado afro-brasileiro e a mitologia dos Orixás são importantes modulações culturais que interferem nas relações de poder entre os agentes e nos processos de subjetivação que acometem Emanuel. Uma rede social e simbólica que, sob a tutela de Exu e Ogum, concorre para a libertação e deificação do personagem. Por meio do reconhecimento da cultura negra, do pertencimento étnico-racial e do sacrifício mítico, Emanuel deixa o mundo racista dos homens para habitar o Orún, o plano divino dos Orixás.

Teen Moms: Violence, Consent, and Embodied Subjectivity in Middle English Pregnancy Laments

Abstract This article examines power and coercion in five Middle English and Middle Scots lyrics voiced by pregnant, abandoned singlewomen. It focuses on the language of consent and embodiment in these pregnancy laments, arguing that they both protest and normalize masculine violence in heterosexual erotic relations, highlight the various factors that undermine young singlewomen’s consent, articulate acute dissatisfaction with gendered power inequalities, and demonstrate the devastating consequences of sexual ignorance. It explores the different ways that we can read these lyrics when considering issues of voice, audience, performance, and manuscript context. The essay closes by linking the popularity of medieval unplanned pregnancy narratives to modern-day reality television programming, arguing that the trans-historical popularity of these stories merits further exploration.

Mythological Indifference in Schelling and Nerval

Mythological Indifference in Schelling and Nerval

Eros as Educator in the Era of Advanced Monetary Economy: Simmel’s Social Metaphysics of the Erotic Being

In the era of advanced monetary economy, the nexus of love, money, and good education is at the origin of the “good society”. If marriage was invented for reasons of administration of goods and money, then the fact that individual love came upon marriage in the specific historical and geographical context of the Western European metropolitan life cannot be a coincidence. The platonicladder of love, that leads to eternity through the erotic elevation of the soul to the sight of the Ideas, is transformed in Modern era through the new perception of Money as a “secular god”. For Plato, the goal of the lover is actually “education” (paideia) as he is supposed to give to the soul of the beloved wings in order to elevate itself to the contemplation of the Ideas. Plato’s heritance regarding love, says Simmel, is the belief that beyond the affect something of a bigger order is hiding in the phenomenon of love. As long as serial monogamy is the dominant model of erotic relations in our days, it is clear that its spiritual background is linked to Platonic Eros, not as an initiation to the science of the general, but, bended by the modern understanding of the individual, as an art of the individual. What is explored in this article is the educational role of Eros and its cultural potential.Eros can actually be considered as educator, as the initiator of the individual to a higher collective and spiritual order.

Plato in Folsom Prison

Of the many structures which constitute the intellectual architecture of Black Power, where do “canonical” sources of political theory stand? How are they incorporated, reworked, and critiqued by the movement’s leading, innovative thinkers? Eldridge Cleaver, author of Soul on Ice and Minister of Information in the Black Panther Party, is certainly such a thinker. Subsequently scorned or ignored, he sought to advance the African American struggle for liberty and equality by exposing gendered and sexualized structures of racial oppression. Cleaver chooses distinctive theoretical tools, a kind of queer classicism, engaging with Plato’s Symposium and Republic as he develops new models for understanding the interdiction of black–white erotic relations, the policing of black masculinity, and the subordination of black persons within a racialized political order. Analyzing Cleaver’s engagement with Plato equips us to recognize intersections of classical political theory and modern radical thought and activism, the limits of such engagements, and the challenges for political theory when the complex interstices of race, gender, sexuality, and classicism are interrogated.

Social Atmospheres: The Cultural Psychology of the “Šatrija” and “Trečias frontas” Societies

Analyses of many controversial episodes in twentieth century Lithuanian literary history increasingly call not only for debates about political and social processes, and about ideological contexts, but for examination of the cultural psychology of that era. Drawing on psychohistorical and emotional history approaches opens up the path to a more integrated understanding of historical situations and motivations. The author of this article undertakes to reconstruct and compare two literary societies – the neo-Catholic “Šatrija” and the leftist “Trečias frontas” (“Third Front”) – and the atmosphere around them during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Following Walter Benjamin, the concept of atmosphere takes into account the quality of sociocultural situations and relates objective historical contexts to subjective psychological states. The interplay between sociocultural environment and individual feelings is also stressed in foundational works of cultural psychology: correlations between them reveal common societal codes (c.f. Richard Schweder, Jerome Bruner, Michael Cole, Vytautas Kavolis). The article draws on a number of key elements in cultural psychology – relationship to authority and institutions, spaces and practices integrating the collective, private platonic and erotic relations – to analyze the wealth of memoir material left by members of the groups and individuals close to them. The study makes it possible to more clearly identify the liberal-salon and revolutionary-bohemian atmospheres that were operating among the young Lithuanian intellectuals in the late 1920s and early 1930s and to grasp that members of both groups faced various mechanisms of political and psychological repression. Their relationships with these mechanisms marked the beginning of a period of identity crisis for the members of “Šatrija” and “Trečias frontas” and led some of them to make radical ideological choices during the 1940s.

The conceptual images of erotic relations in Spanish. Analysis of some linguistic aspects of The Turkish passion by Antonio Gala

The conceptual images of erotic relations in Spanish. Analysis of some linguistic aspects of The Turkish passion by Antonio GalaIn this paper we try to systematize the contemporary Spanish expressions related to the erotic relations. The corpus is based on the novel by Antonio Gala The Turkish Passion (orig. La pasión turca) which, thanks to its plot with higly erotic content, constitutes an important source of linguistic material for our investigation. The analysis we propose reflects the methodology developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their studies concerning the cognitive theory of metaphor. According to them, every concept consists of a source and a target domain and while expressing one idea we refer to another. Our analysis focuses on the reconstruction of the conceptual domains by means of which the Spanish writer describes the erotic relations. Although the book does not include all the erotic vocabulary and expressions which exist in contemporary Spanish, it enables us to observe some regularities in the use of metaphors in Spanish and reveal some sociocultural phenomena encoded in the linguistic material.

THE NEW OTHER VICTORIANS: THE SUCCESS (AND FAILURE) OF QUEER THEORY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH STUDIES

Much of the critical writingon Queer Theory and Sexuality Studies in a Victorian context over the last decade or so has been absorbing, exploring, complicating, and working under the burden of the influence of Michel Foucault's theoretical writings on erotic relations and identity. The first volume of Foucault'sThe History of Sexuality(1978), in fact, had begun with a gauntlet thrown down before Victorian Studies, a chapter-long critique of Steven Marcus'sThe Other Victorians(1966), a work that had offered an entirely new and at the time, quite bold avenue of exploring nineteenth-century culture – namely, through the pornographic imagination that Marcus taxonomized with precise, clinical flair as a “pornotopia” in which “all men . . . are always infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or both. Everyone is always ready for everything” (276). In Foucault's telling, however, Marcus demonstrated a theoretically impoverished faith in Freudian models of “repression” in Marcus's examination of “underground” Victorian sexualities. It was Marcus's reliance on the “repressive fallacy,” his conviction that there existed a demarcated spatial and psychic Victorian counter-world thatThe History of Sexualityhad so forcefully undermined.

Swallow This: A Pelike within Late Archaic Song and Visual Culture

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED] On a well-known pelike in Saint Petersburg associated with the Pioneer Group of vase painters and dated to c. 510-505 BCE, (1) three figures point upwards to a (Fig. 1). Coming from the mouth of the youth seated on the left are the words, Look, a swallow [IDO XELIDON], The older bearded man responds, Yes, by Heracles [NE TON HERAKLEA], while the boy to his side adds, There it is [HAUTE!] In between the last two figures the phrase It's already spring (EAR EDE) appears. In recent decades, scholars have offered rich treatments of this pelike, citing it in discussions of the interface between oral and literate cultures, and in treatments of the nuanced relations between words and images on painted pottery. In Francois Lissarrague's account, the 'speaking' figures offer an instance of a mimesis that is at once visual and verbal, (2) while Richard Neer notes that the vase confronts viewers with three different modes of signification: the painted image, the word, and the oionos, a term that means simultaneously a bird/bird of prey, a bird of omen, and an omen drawn from a bird. (3) In Neer's subtle analysis, the vase also demonstrates how artists of the late sixth and early fifth centuries--the painters of the Pioneer Group in particular--liked to engage in visual ambiguity, creating riddling scenes that oscillate between different meanings, an effect that Neer styles poikilia, (4) According to his reading, the pelike's artist suggests the potential gap between the sign (the bird) and its referent (the advent of spring); for, as Neer nicely observes, while the does, in a widely-attested belief from Homer and Hesiod on, herald the new season, a familiar Attic proverb warns, One does not a springtime ([[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). If a solitary bird is not an indicator of spring, then at least one statement on the vase fails to correspond to the phenomenon to which it refers. Most recently, Henry Immerwahr has offered an innovatory discussion of the pelike, reading it as an illustration of a piece of love magic first attested in a fragment of Hipponax; following his focus on erotic relations, Immerwahr further calls attention to the cohesion between the scene and the two wrestlers depicted on the vase's other side (Fig. 2). (5) The analysis of the pelike that I offer here develops the suggestions that mimesis, sign making, poikilia, and ambiguity are very much the painter's concerns--and this in ways that Lissarrague's and Neer's rich discussions have left still to be explored--while also accommodating these within the pederastic frame common to my and Immerwahr's analyses. My larger aim, however, distinguishes this reading from existing accounts. So as more thoroughly to reconstruct a late sixth-century viewer's response to its images, I contextualize the vase in two respects. First, I place its scenes and words within the larger, culturally determined systems of meaning surrounding them; both the gestures that these painted figures perform and the messages on the vase act much like formulae in epic song, as repositories of a significance that goes beyond their denotative meaning on this particular occasion and that encompasses both existing traditions informing acts of bird (and specifically swallow) identification and decipherment and the social practices typically associated with the individuals included in the scene. (6) And second, I reinsert the object into its sympotic milieu, showing how it was designed both to play an active part in the types of intra-elite verbal, social, and sexual competitions typical of the sympotic space, and to engage its audience by making them participate, as viewers, talkers, and singers, in its several representations. [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] More narrowly, I make four principal points. First, the artist has chosen this precise scene because it confronts viewers with the type of griphos or 'riddle' so prevalent at the symposium, whose decipherment depends on recognizing the semantic uncertainty and doubleness of the terms that the puzzle includes. …

The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800 (review)

Reviewed by: The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800 Rachel Carnell (bio) Katherine Binhammer. The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. viii+246pp. US $90. ISBN 978-0-521-11134-8. In 1783, in a tract on the loss of female chastity, Charles Horne identified three separate elements in the act of seduction: seduction of the heart, seduction of the person, and seduction of the mind. Although previous interpretations of the period might have led us to believe that the physical loss of virtue would have been his main concern, in fact Horne was most preoccupied with the seduction of a woman’s heart. Traditional feminist readings of the seduction narratives that proliferated in the second half of the eighteenth century point to their construction of women as helpless victims of male sexual aggression. Such interpretations, however, depend on the facts of the plot rather than on the structure of the narratives; these interpretations also depend on reading mainly canonical texts in an overly narrow historical context. Through a richly historicized analysis of the narrative structure and cultural contexts of the seduction tale, Katherine Binhammer demonstrates that such stories helped create much more than an ideology of victimhood: they also helped to define the operations of the female heart, and hence the female self. More significantly, the proliferation of seduction narratives during the second half of the eighteenth century indicated [End Page 388] not a repetition of a hegemonic dogma about women’s nature or virtue but an ongoing discussion and exchange about the female heart and female selfhood since “no one meaning about seduction yet dominated cultural representations” (2). As Binhammer points out, “seduction narratives in the second half of the eighteenth century serve as the epistemic testing ground for imagining how women can know their hearts” (3). It is possible to understand Clarissa as a simple morality tale teaching us, as Richardson himself suggests, that counter to received opinion, a reformed rake does not make a good husband. This is in fact the message offered in a popular eighteenth-century abridgement of the novel, in which the several thousands pages are reduced to several hundred. The very length of Richardson’s novel, as well as the spacing of the publication in separate volumes, and the heroine’s syntactical emphasis on other possible ways her tale could have unfolded, however, allowed readers to take seriously Clarissa’s own suggestion that she herself does not fully know her own heart and that her story did not have to become the clichéd narrative of seduction that Lovelace is so determined to play out. For Binhammer, while the novel’s ending “fixes meaning in terms of a restrictive bourgeois femininity,” the narrative itself suggests other possible endings “that reflect the heterogeneous terrain for knowing love in the mid-eighteenth century” (39). The richness of Binhammer’s narrative analysis is matched by the depth of the historical context she brings to her study. Her chapter on prostitutes’ tales, both real and fictional, helps us understand the complex cultural response to Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753, which by formally codifying marriage allowed men to ignore the earlier cultural understanding that a promise of marriage followed by seduction already constituted a legal marriage. Thus prostitutes’ narratives (some published to generate sympathy for the Magdalen Hospital for penitent prostitutes), which tended to “prop up the new affective discourse that defines a valid marriage as based on love not money,” confronted the “failure of social institutions” and laws such as the Hardwicke Act, “established in support of companionate marriage, to sanction love properly” (50). In her chapter on novels that follow the couple into married life, Binhammer points to the importance of the embedded seduction narratives often found in such texts. This narrative embedding emphasizes “the way affective agency links wives and seduced women” by offering the tales of seduced women as “test cases for women’s knowledge of their hearts”; such examples show “how that knowledge translates into legitimate erotic relations” (75). Binhammer’s chapter on ballads and street literature delineates the cultural construction of the heart in different strata of social rank. While some ballads depicted seduced...

Disfiguring Gender: Masculine Desire in the Old French Fabliau

Old French fabliaux frequently invoke a traditional gender binary associating masculinity with reason and femininity with desire, but even the most conservative examples of the genre unsettle this normative distribution. By taking comic advantage of men's inability to regulate women's desires, fabliaux challenge gender's ability to order bodies according to conventional structures. As the contests of these stories attest, desire founded upon lack produces competitive, alienated, and oppositional sexual relations. Other fabliaux undermine this model of sexuality altogether, primarily by including masculinity within the domain of erotic plentitude. In focusing on the polymorphous possibilities of desire, these tales imagine erotic relations that move beyond gender's differential fixities. Rather than condemning men for failing to curb desire, these fabliaux take advantage of prescriptive regulations, disfiguring gender as a front for sexual abandon. Across the genre, the Old French fabliau uncovers desire's ability to create expansive bodily pleasures, using gender's delimiting boundaries to produce corporeal intensities that outstrip the prescriptive controls of masculinity and femininity alike.

Thiefing sugar: eroticism between women in Caribbean literature

In Thiefing Sugar , Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley explores the poetry and prose of Caribbean women writers, revealing in their imagery a rich tradition of erotic relations between women. She takes the book’s title from Dionne Brand’s novel In Another Place, Not Here , where eroticism between women is likened to the sweet and subversive act of cane cutters stealing sugar. The natural world is repeatedly reclaimed and reinterpreted to express love between women in the poetry and prose that Tinsley analyzes. She not only recuperates stories of Caribbean women loving women, stories that have been ignored or passed over by postcolonial and queer scholarship until now, she also shows how those erotic relations and their literary evocations form a poetics and politics of decolonization. Tinsley’s interpretations of twentieth-century literature by Dutch-, English-, and French-speaking women from the Caribbean take into account colonialism, migration, labor history, violence, and revolutionary politics. Throughout Thiefing Sugar , Tinsley connects her readings to contemporary matters such as neoimperialism and international LGBT and human-rights discourses. She explains too how the texts that she examines intervene in black feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies, particularly when she highlights the cultural limitations of the metaphors that dominate queer theory in North America and Europe, including those of the closet and “coming out.”

Pigs and Desire in Lillian Ng´s "Swallowing Clouds"

Pigs and Desire in Lillian Ng´s "Swallowing Clouds"

Navigating International Rights and Local Politics: Sexuality Governance in Post-Colonial Settings

With the global rise of homophobia, this paper considers how the non-Western world negotiates the separation of: 1- the need to avoid importing Western models of sexual identity, from 2- a local public sphere for those with non-heteronormative sexualities and genders to deliberate over what it “means” to claim rights based on a sexual identity, such as LGBT. Focusing on Lebanon, the paper considers the difficulties of “applying” such categories as gay or lesbian in the Arab/Muslim world and the concomitant rise of homophobic discourse. The search for reliable answers to these questions has been hindered by a lack of local deliberation over the meanings of sexuality.Yet, resisting both Western hegemony and heteronormativity has tremendous implications for the global politics of sexuality and identity-based human rights advocacy. Assuming that sexuality is fluid regardless of culture, I argue against both 1) a “special” human rights agenda tailored to the Arab/Muslim world, as well as 2) a globalized, “Western” form of identity-based human rights advocacy that is as quick to label as the local “homophobic” societies. I demonstrate the extent to which a public sphere can allow political deliberation over what it “means” to have same-sex erotic relations or defy gendered binaries where homophobia has assumed a populist dimension. I show, first, the ways in which the local public sphere in Lebanon can allow deliberation over what it “means” to have non-normative erotic relations, including self-definition. Second, I explore from a sexuality governance perspective the degree to which the purported existence of such a public sphere allows the translation of discourse into progressive reform.

Women’s Same-sex Relations in Indonesian Pesantren

This article describes women’s lives in Indonesian pesantren1 (boarding schools), particularly in relation to issues of gender and sexuality. The curriculum and teaching methods adopted from Arabic culture are very traditional and deeply impact the ways of thinking of all santri (pesantren students) and kyai (pesantren leaders). Pesantren culture is still very patriarchal, for example, women students are subject to strict rules and women are regarded as sinful beings. Most pesantren regulate not only women’s bodies but also their sexual desires. In addition, women students are prepared to become pious wives for men, not leaders. However, despite these strict regulations in the pesantren, same-sex erotic relations have been noted in the pesantren. Given Islamic views on women’s sexuality and patriarchal power as propagated in the pesantren, same-sex relations among pesantren women in East Java may be interpreted as acts of resistance.