Erotic Representations Research Articles

The Greeks, Eroticism and Ourselves

One of the principle connections between the lived experience and the representation of sexuality occurs at the level of erotic meaning. In any given culture erotic meanings found in representation may reflect or structure experience in a variety of ways. For example, many feminists have argued that pornography has helped to structure our modern experience of gender and sexuality in ways they consider oppressive. It is certainly important to consider the relation of eroticism to wider aspects of social life. Yet because of the ‘taken for grantedness’ of our erotic constructions this task is difficult to accomplish and rarely attempted. Therefore, rather than tackling modern eroticism head on, in this article I re-examine what we know (or think we know) about the relation between erotic representation and social experience in the context of ancient Greece. Moreover, we find that this point of historical comparison throws into relief aspects of our own use of eroticism, which are revealed, for instance, in our tendency to misinterpret the past in ways that are all too characteristic of ourselves.

Joffo: 'Un sac de billes' and Other Writings by Tony Simons (review)

MLRy 99.3, 2004 793 of fictional images of relations between women. This political stance dictates Cairns's primary attention to realist writing. Grounding her work in investigative research with readers of Lesbia magazine, and other French lesbians, Cairns argues for the importance of realist fiction to women's lives, their affectiveand erotic identifications, their social and political affiliations. While she debates the theorization of lesbian identity per se, through reference to Wittig, Kristeva, Irigaray, and others, Cairns remains largely pragmatic in her approach to writing and sexual identity. This vo? lume certainly makes an important critical intervention in the field, but it is, as Cairns suggests, firstand foremost intended as a reference book, an encyclopaedic tool. The main body of the book is made up of three chapters with discussions of fictional texts arranged in chronological order. The first of these chapters studies works written by women who are themselves not known to identify as lesbians. The second two, focusing on 'the insider' s take', look respectively at works by such authors as Mireille Best, Jocelyne Francois, and Helene de Monferrand who focus on lesbian relations extensively in their writing, and at works by other more marginal lesbianidentified writers, in whose works lesbianism has been a less dominant concern. This arrangement makes for an interesting trajectory for the reader. It is disheartening at firstto find how far writing of the 1960s and 1970s has perpetuated stereotypes of narcissism and psychosis, power play and betrayal in lesbian relations. The later chapters, and later volumes discussed, give way to more politically sensitive, romantic, and erotic representations of women's attention to one another. For a reader who has followed French lesbian writing of the period, there is nostalgia and pleasure in revisiting these novels, some more literary,some more popular; in her resourceful and judicious comments on the texts, Cairns makes a good reading companion. In many cases, too, she provides the firstengaged critical discussions of the texts in question, setting them in the context of their author's biography and more broadly within the history of France post-1968. Occasionally too tart?in her response to Ursula Tidd's fine work on the subject, for instance?Cairns emerges primarily as an authoritative critic with a deep commitment to mapping, and transforming, this field of study. Corpus Christi College, Cambridge Emma Wilson Joffo: 'Un sac de billes' and Other Writings. By Tony Simons. (Glasgow Introduc? tory Guides to French Literature, 46) London: University of Glasgow French and German Publications. 2002. iv + 84pp. ?4. ISBN 0-85261-696-1. Tony Simons's introductory study focuses on two of Joseph Joffo'sautobiographical novels, Un sac de billes (1973) and Baby foot (1977). As with other studies in this student-friendly series, the aim is both to analyse the novels in relation to the social, historical, and political issues raised by their writing and reception and to provide a close reading ofthe novels as narrative constructs. In the case ofJoffo,Simons chooses mainly to explore the Occupation context of Un sac de billes and the Jewish identity of the autobiographical protagonist and its textual effects.The competing individual and group identities ofthe young Jewish protagonist are well analysed as Joand his brother Maurice are forced to traverse a country where their Jewishness must be masked and hidden. Reflections on the representation of closed spaces and the main protagonists' movement between such spaces provide stimulating readings of Un sac de billes as a politicized novel of rites ofpassage. In addition, Simons focuses on storytelling struc? tures in the novel and the relevance of key intertexts, such as the Odyssey and biblical narratives ofthe Jews and theirjourney from enslavement to liberation. Less success? ful is the study's joint reading of Un sac de billes and Baby foot. In comparison with Un sac de billes, Babyfoot emerges as a less accomplished text, trailing in the wake of its 794 Reviews well-known predecessor. Indeed, the paired reading of the texts functions mainly to illustrate the development ofthe autobiographical protagonist rather than to advance arguments over narrative form or social and political context. A corollary of this joint perspective is that less space is available to explore...

Haptic Poetics

Haptic Poetics David Fredrick Sigma is an unattractive, disagreeable letter, very offensive when used to excess. A hiss seems a sound more suited to a brute beast than to a rational being. Dionysius of Halicarnassus1 Catullus 4 is a poem about a retired boat. It does not employ erotic, grotesque, or invective imagery: no Lesbia, no Gellius, no dread Mother Goddess, no befouled orifices, no stolen napkins, and not even any food. It is similarly apolitical—no Cicero, Mamurra, or Caesar. As content in Catullus goes, the yacht's story is less than titillating. At the same time, the poem displays an extraordinarily dense acoustic texture, which makes it seem truly a nuga, an illustration of what the poet can do technically to embellish uninteresting, or at least benign, subject matter. Consequently, poem 4 appears irrelevant to the central issues in Catullus like love, politics, gender, and power, especially compared to the Lesbia cycle, the Attis poem, or pedicabo et irrumabo, "I will fuck you anally and orally . . ." But even in this apparently marginal poem, Catullus' use of sound is important programmatically, as is the theme of reminiscence itself. The long poems, the Lesbia poems, and the obscene poems all display in various ways a preoccupation with corporeal integrity and violation, and the voice is the place where poetry, through its acoustic qualities, intersects materially the reader's own body. [End Page 49] Reading aloud, one takes into one's mouth the language of the poems. If the content is obscene, then the os impurum becomes at least temporarily one's own.2 At the same time, themes of violation and abandonment can be generalized beyond poems with specifically erotic or obscene content to include a "Callimachean" poem like 4. I will argue that the retirement of the phaselus is a metaphor for poetics in the face of cultural transformation and, in this capacity, it resonates with other lost figures in Catullus such as Ariadne, Attis, Catullus' brother, and the Catullan ego. An examination of acoustic technique in Catullus 4 suggests fundamental links, in content and aural aesthetics, between it and poems 63 and 64, major poems that any interpretation of Catullus must consider. Finally, the issues of erotic representation and acoustic pleasure in Catullus must be situated in the physical context of Roman poetic performance. The intricate sound-patterns of Catullan verse, throughout the corpus, shape the voice as if it were a physical medium like stone or paint, rather than an optional addition to the reader's eyes and the words on the page. But the voice, as a form of "cultural plastic," is inseparable from, and internal to, the body.3 This raises the question of oral versus written performance for Catullus and subsequent Latin poets. On the one hand, Catullus' text demands visual study. Close, repeated reading is required to trace both intratextual patterns shared between poems and equally complex intertextual strategies of allusion to prior texts and poetic models. Catullus' self-conscious association of his own poetry with Callimachus certainly suggests that the techniques of writing are much more important than the requirements of oral performance.4 On the other hand, if Catullus' lyric consciousness demands a collected, written text, there is no denying the performance qualities of his work, qualities it obviously shares with much of Latin literature. As Starr has put it (1991.338): Roman literature, then, might more accurately be described as "aural" rather than as "oral." Literature was [End Page 50] appreciated primarily through the ears rather than the eyes. When Pliny compliments the voce suavissima of Piso . . . or Juvenal complains about the epic poet Cordus, whom he calls raucus, a word Ovid applies to the sounds of frogs and asses . . . the voice and the poetry are not easily separable: the experience of the poem was also the experience of the reader's voice. It is worth asking, then, not only how lyric consciousness is written and experienced as text in late Republican and Augustan Rome, but where it is performed and what it sounds like. Catullus' manipulations of the voice cannot be subordinated, in a simple way, to meaning, like ornaments to be congratulated when they help the sense...

The Pleasure Threshold: Looking at Lesbian Pornography on Film

Porn can be both progressive and reactionary, oppressive and liberating and it is naive simply to welcome or denounce its representations. Debates in Britain have tended to pivot on the oppressive nature of power without often recognizing the possibility of women's pleasure. Heterosexual analyses of porn have rarely applied their theories, often rooted in a binary male-female, subject-object discourse, to same-sex erotic representations. Socialist-feminist men have seen other men's need to watch porn as a social lack: 'A narcissistic substitute for really effective and socially interactive power-sharing' (Bloom, in Day and Bloom, 1988: 21). Many radical feminists have strived to protect us from its corrupting force: 'It is perhaps the greatest tragedy of our oppression that it can be from images and fantasies of that very oppression that we draw what we have been encouraged to see as empowering and liberating, i.e., sexual pleasure' (Jeffreys in Chester and Dickey, 1988: 139). Just as it has been taboo for women to express an interest in sex and sexual satisfaction, so feminism has prescribed further taboos declaring 'politically correct' ways of having sex and seeking arousal. To watch, never mind admit to enjoying porn, is equal to treacherous collusion with the most sinister component of hetero-patriarchy. As porn is visible and explicit it could be seen as an easier target to focus the fight against sexism and male violence. However, antiporn campaigners have often conflated sexually explicit images with violence against women, rather than see porn as a socially constructed part of a much