Female Desire Research Articles

Online Yaoi Fanfiction and Explorations of Female Desire through Sexually Exploited Male Bodies

This essay will try to trace the phenomena of rape, dub-con (dubious consent), and non-con (non consent) as literary expressions of sexual violence which find their graphic and image-laden expression in anglophoneyaoi (fiction centred upon male homoerotic relationship (s) in the Japanese anime/manga context) fanfictions (fiction written by fans based on an extant work). Through my work, I try to delve into the question of consent and the rationale of such literary acts through fan ethnography. Also there is the fiction-based otherization of the authorial self as fanfiction is written purely for the pleasure (often masturbatory) of the author and the intended and implied audience (the yaoifanbase) who, while harboring and finding pleasure in such fantasies, do not subscribe to such notions in real life nor would they enjoy to be in such situations. The essay also deals with the question of how gay men are represented in such texts and their discomfort in such representations, where their bodies and sexuality are produced and consumed as tools of entertainment for women. These erotic texts exclusively cater to the female psychosexuality, as they are produced by and for women. Since in yaoi texts no involvement of the female body per se hence the pleasure is derived from a mental correlation. The fanbase of such work is also huge, centered around the rotten girls/fujoshi culture.

Ogawa Yōko and the Horrific Femininities of Daily Life

In Ogawa Yōko’s (b. 1962) writing from the late 1980’s and 1990’s, female narrators often revel in the fantastical beauty of youthful masculinities, while they themselves cannot escape the disgusting disorder of feminized domestic spaces. First, I read death and violence in kitchens depicted in the story collection Revenge (1998) to show how Ogawa rewrites this space associated with the housewife and her duties as one of horrific possibilities overturning idealized images of domesticity. Next, building on earlier readings of food, I argue that spectacles of sweetness—cakes, jam, and ice cream desserts—play a particularly crucial role in articulating female desire and violence, such as with the earlier works “Pregnancy Diary” (1991) and Sugar Time (1991). Returning to Revenge, I observe how “sweet” images appear in scenes of violence to outline how female homosocial gazes reflect a constant engagement with femininities seen in other women, particularly those marked by the transgression of anger and murderous desire. I end by considering ways in which Ogawa’s self-reflexive depiction of the woman writer in Revenge playfully problematizes the “mad” fantasies of women who write.

What Does (a Nasty) Woman Want?

In this video essay I have juxtaposed material from three films about female desire – made by women at different historical moments in time, in different countries. These are: The Piano (1993) by Jane Campion, Fuga (2018) by Agnieszka Smoczynska and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) by Celine Sciamma. In the Polish context it is particularly important that these three films about female desire speak to each other, as Poland has been late in acknowledging its links to international feminism. The video essay and the text which accompanies it also evoke the recent Polish Nobel Prize Winner for Literature Olga Tokarczuk and Wislowa Szymborska, the Polish poet who also won the Nobel Prize in 1996. In terms of the films, it is the figure of Alicja, in Agnieszka Smoczynska’s film, who is the most radical of the three, despite Poland being the most conservative of the countries that produced the films.

Riding in Cars with Girls

The open road is popularly imagined as both cinematic and male, a space suited to the scope afforded by the cinema and the breadth demanded by the male psyche. However, while these connotations are ingrained within the aesthetics of driving, its kinaesthetics – the articulations between bodies, movement and space – have more in common with television and with stories of women’s desire. Drawing from Iris Marion Young’s theories of gendered embodiment, this article argues that driving, television and female desire are all marked by the same contradictions between movement and stability, and between public and private. It analyses two recent television programmes concerned with women behind the wheel – Black Mirror’s ‘San Junipero’ (Netflix, 2016) and the first two seasons of Big Little Lies (HBO, 2017–present) – to argue that driving on television affords a space through which to negotiate feminine embodiment, agency and desire.

Nature, Caged Birds, and Constrained Women: An Ecocritical Feminist Reading of Angela Carter’s Story The Erl-King

In their feminist and postmodern readings of Angela Carter’s fiction, critics have often eclipsed the presence of nature in her writings and the significance of non-human forms of life. This article addresses this critical gap, focusing on Carter’s employment of birds and the greenwood in her story The Erl-King as a metaphor for gender roles and power relations. Hence, the alliance between her ecopoetics and feminist vision forms a case of “ecofeminism.” In her defense of “minor” and oppressed forms of life, Carter makes her caged birds emblems of women imprisoned by patriarchy. Their liberation by the female narrator at the end of the story is not only a sign of resistance but also an indication of the essential harmony and mutual strength of women and nature. Surprisingly though, and before this unexpected end in which the narrator strangles the Erl-King with his own hair, nature is made complicit in the oppression of women rather than simply liberating. This can be explained through Carter’s ambivalent brand of postmodern feminist poetics that rejects fixities and conventional binaries, unsettling the patriarchal myth that women are merely close to nature. Thus, Carter subverts feminist logic by exposing how women and nature are not only closely allied or opposed to patriarchy but also complicit in their own oppression. Moreover, she subverts the woman/nature dichotomy by making the Erl-King the epitome of a harmonious life in nature rather than plainly defending women as expected in feminist texts. Carter deconstructs established myths and conventional gender roles, accounting for subtle female desire in the process of articulating feminist poetics via nature.

Come‐hither looks: the Hollywood vamp and the function of cinema

Come‐hither looks: the Hollywood vamp and the function of cinema

Magic Realism in Flowers: Karnad’s Post-Modern World of Folkloric Fantasy

“Magic realism” is a recent literary technique that contains a latent amalgamation of fantastic or mythical elements into an otherwise realistically narrated fiction. The theme and subject of such a literary work are often imaginary, somewhat outlandish and fantastic and always reflect into a dream-like reverie. It further marks the miscellaneous use of myths, legends and fairy tales, and an expressionistic description of an arcane situation leading to the element of surprise or abrupt shock. In literary discourses, the term is primarily associated with the post-modern novel of the Americas. Girish Karnad’s dramatic monologue, Flowers, however, bears all the elements of this literary phenomenon. This short play could also be labeled as a dramatized novel and is a simple tale of a priest caught in an agonized conflict between his devotion to God and his love for a courtesan. However, Karnad’s creative genius turns this conflict into a scintillating portrayal of the sexual urge of a priest interspersed with his feelings of religious devotion and familial duties through the technique of magic realism and, in the process, questions god’s authority in the postmodern world. The play is an attempt by Karnad for the first time in his playwriting career “to focus on male than a female desire.” It presents an interesting picture of the bizarre human world full of magic and its realistic social impressions. The present article attempts to shed some light on this aspect of Karnad through the thematic exploration of the flowers.

\u2018Terrible monsters Sin-bred\u2019: Blakean monstrosity in Alan Moore\u2019s graphic novels

William Blake’s illuminated books are full of depictions of the monstrous, like Orc’s or Urizen’s metamorphoses, bestial figures such as the Leviathan in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–1793), and the masses of blood and flesh appearing in The Book of Urizen (1794). In contrast to eighteenth-century discourses in which moral virtue and monstrosity were polar opposites, Blake’s universe is more complex and presents an ambivalent attitude towards revolution and social transgression embodied in the monstrous. The meanings of the monstrous in Blake are associated with evil in his works, where it can be understood as released or repressed energies, two types which correspond, respectively, to liberation or alienation. Via countercultural influence, Blakean antinomianism filtered down to Alan Moore, for whom the notion of evil depends on perspectives; thus, in Moore, the socially unacceptable can appear as monstrous, but monstrosity is also a mode through which to make visible the oppressive order that defines transgression as such. This article will discuss Blake and Moore’s use of visual and verbal aesthetics to identify as monstrous characters like Satan, Urizen and Orc in Blake and William Gull, Asmodeus and Cthulhu in Moore to pinpoint the meanings that underlie them and how the direct or indirect Blakean influence operates in Moore’s works. This will contribute to trace changes in their meanings as they pass from signifying energy to tyranny, from unfallenness to fallenness, or from conventional to visionary perception. This exploration will also show the changes in their mode of representation, contributing to understand the peculiarities of the Gothic side of Moore’s construction of Blakean vision. To do this, a series of parallels found in several examples from Alan Moore’s graphic novels will be analysed, especially Swamp Thing (1984–1987), where the hero is a vegetable–human hybrid; From Hell (1989–1998), where the villain acts as both mad scientist and monster in his perverse endeavour to violently reshape female desire to his will; Promethea (1999–2005), where a divine emanation is perceived as a threatening devil by opposing fundamentalists; and finally the horrible entities in Neonomicon (2010–2011) and Providence (2015–2017).

Tales of Female Sexuality and Scandal: Lauren Beukes’s “Princess” and Archived Asylum Texts

In the short story “Princess” (Slipping: Stories, Essays and Other Writing. San Francisco: Tachyon, 2016), Lauren Beukes presents a tale of a princess who discovers her clitoris. Subsequent to this discovery, the princess's sexuality rapidly develops to encompass the pleasures derived from autoeroticism, as well as the sexual acts performed by her handmaid. Yet, the princess's sexual pleasure is only one part of the story. The other part is how society recoils in shock and engages in vehement scolding of the princess's expression of female sexual pleasure. Beukes's tale sparked my curiosity to explore narratives of female sexuality in archived texts. Such an undertaking is motivated by the dearth of historical studies of female sexuality in South Africa. One case in point is the study of female sexuality in the Victorian period, where the primary focus of academic scholarship is on rape and sexual violence. In this article, I seek to broaden the South African narratives of female sexuality in the late nineteenth century to include aspects pertaining to pleasure, as well as to enumerate how female sexual desire was often tied to scandals, public shock, and transgressions of femininity. To achieve this goal, I offer a micro-study of female sexuality at the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum.

Claude Jutra’s Surfacing (1981) through visual spectacles: Framing female body, voyeurism and paranoia

This article examines Claude Jutra’s 1981 film adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing in terms of its focus on female body, voyeurism and paranoia. The psychoanalytic perspective of the feminist film theory, with its emphasis on visual pleasure, narcissism, the male gaze, scopophilia, fetishization of the female, the oedipal nature of the narrative and female subjectivity, provides a pragmatic groundwork for the theoretical underpinning of this study. In the same way, the film apparatus, such as editing and camera work, provides a semiotic impetus to the spectator to identify with the perfect male, and not with the distorted female. With its focus on various scenes, generic codes and aspects of the film, the paper furthermore sees how Jutra’s production validates the prejudices of the classical film narrative in the context of the female image, sexual difference, female desire and stereotyped female paranoia. Despite its narrative focus on the quest of a female protagonist, Jutra’s film conforms to the traditional model of the classical cinema wherein the woman is no more than a signifier – an entity that signifies things in relation to men only.

Female “Lone Wolves”: The Anti‐Social Heroine in Recent Television Series

Female “Lone Wolves”: The Anti‐Social Heroine in Recent Television Series

Validação da escala curta de avaliação funcional do desejo sexual feminino

INTRODUÇÃO: a disfunção do desejo sexual feminino é prevalente e impacta negativamente sobre a função sexual e a qualidade de vida, mas não existem escalas funcionais que levem em conta função e disfunção. OBJETIVO: construir e validar uma escala curta para avaliação funcional do desejo sexual feminino. MÉTODO: Correlação dos resultados de função do desejo sexual avaliado pelo Índice de Função Sexual Feminina (FSFI) e a nova escala funcional, em uma amostra via internet da população feminina brasileira em geral por meio do teste T de Student e o coeficiente de Spearman. Curva ROC fomentou a análise de corroboração entre os dados do domínio disfunção do desejo do FSFI com a nova escala de avaliação funcional. RESULTADOS: Metade das mulheres da amostra apresentou disfunção sexual pelo FSFI, sendo que um terço apresentou disfunção do desejo sexual. Houve boa correlação entre os resultados da nova escala e do domínio desejo sexual do FSFI, bem como boa sensibilidade e especificidade do modelo pela curva ROC. CONCLUSÃO: a nova escala curta de avaliação funcional do desejo sexual feminino com base na Classificação Internacional de Funcionalidade, Incapacidade e Saúde pode ser uma ferramenta útil na avaliação da função do desejo sexual feminino.

Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England by David K. Coley

Reviewed by: Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England by David K. Coley Katherine H. Terrell david k. coley, Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2019. Pp. xi, 220. isbn: 978–0–8142–1390–2. $99.95. In Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England, David K. Coley asks why the trauma of the Black Death, which by some estimates killed 60% of England’s population in the fourteenth century, seems to have left such scanty traces in the period’s vernacular literature—particularly compared to the more extensive contemporary responses from mainland Europe. Not only did the plague test the faith of the English people, but the decimated population also had to contend with new economic and social realities, including the dissolution of communities, a lengthy labor shortage, and changes in gender relations. Taking the poems of British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x as a test case, Coley sets out ‘to investigate how the history of the medieval plague experience might be simultaneously forgotten and remembered in late medieval English literature’ (p. 5). He argues that the poems of the Pearl-poet ‘are both suffused with the plague and offer a distinguishable literary response to it’ (p. 22). The book is divided into four chapters, one on each of the anonymous Pearl-poet’s works: Cleanness, Pearl, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, plus an introduction that sets out the book’s conceptual and historical framework, and a conclusion that interrogates why the flowering of vernacular literature in England’s fourteenth century seems to have so little to say about the Black Death. Coley suggests that the ‘forgotten history’ of the plague surfaces in different ways throughout the four poems: at times as an unconscious manifestation of trauma, at others as a direct and conscious evocation of plague rhetoric and a commentary on the social changes that resulted from widespread calamity. As none of the poems he discusses ever directly reference the Black Death, his reasoning ‘necessarily relies on patterns of suggestion and implication, on semantic and narrative parallel, even on informed conjecture’ (p. 7). This provocative strategy is largely successful. Though readers may take issue with specific readings, the larger patterns that Coley establishes build up to a convincing account of the plague’s presence in these four works, and a compelling reason to reevaluate the traces of the Black Death throughout fourteenth-century English literature. In the first chapter, Coley argues that the biblical calamities of Cleanness poignantly manifest the unspeakable trauma of the plague, standing witness to both loss and recovery. Chapter Two draws a parallel between the language of Pearl and that of contemporary medical writings about the Black Death, convincingly suggesting not [End Page 139] only that we should understand the poem’s lost child as a plague victim, but also that the poem can then ‘be recognized as a meditation on the personal, soteriological, and even eschatological shocks that the pestilence inflicted’ (p. 89). In the third chapter, on Patience, Coley contextualizes the flight of the reluctant prophet Jonah in the light of fraught responses to approaching contagion, reading Jonah as ‘a flawed but sympathetic figure through whom the poet explores the moral, theological, ethical, and even medical dimensions of resisting God’s pestilential wrath’ (p. 95). In a particularly rich reading, the fourth chapter demonstrates how bringing an awareness of the social and economic changes wrought by the plague to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight opens up the poem’s treatment of gender hierarchies and ‘its ambivalence over female desire and sexual agency’ (p. 128). The conclusion challenges us to ask not, ‘Why didn’t English poets write about the plague?’ but ‘Why did English poets write about the plague in the ways that they did?’ and to venture beyond the poems of MS Cotton Nero A.x to answer the question. Katherine H. Terrell Hamilton College Copyright © 2020 Arthuriana

Resource demands reduce partner discrimination in Himba women.

Where autonomy for partner choice is high, partner preferences may be shaped by both social and ecological conditions. In particular, women's access to resources can influence both the type and number of partnerships she engages in. However, most existing data linking resources and partner choice rely on either priming effects or large demographic databases, rather than preferences for specific individuals. Here we leverage a combination of demographic data, food insecurity scores and trait and partner preference ratings to determine whether resource security modulates partner preferences among Himba pastoralists. We find that while food insecurity alone has a weak effect on women's openness to new partners, the interaction of food insecurity and number of dependent children strongly predicts women's openness to potential partners. Further, we show that women who have more dependants have stronger preferences for wealthy and influential men. An alternative hypothesis derived from mating-market dynamics, that female desirability affects female preferences, had no effect. Our data show that women who face greater resource constraints are less discriminating in the number of partners they are open to, and have stronger preferences for resource-related traits. These findings highlight the importance of ecological signals in explaining the plasticity of mate preferences.

Filming female desire: queering the gaze of pop music videos

ABSTRACT This paper examines the queer gaze within pop music videos. It contends that the contemporary US musician Hayley Kiyoko can be seen as a queer music video auteur who has transformed what the ‘gaze’ can mean in mainstream pop music through directing her own videos. The paper asserts that through her performance within and, arguably even more significantly, via her direction of videos, Kiyoko has produced a new and complex portrayal of how female sexual desire is represented even when, on the surface, it may not necessarily appear to disrupt normativity. Reaction videos made by Kiyoko’s fans have also queered the gaze whereby the ‘watcher’ becomes the ‘watched’. The paper concludes that online spaces and digital technologies are radically reshaping understandings of queer sexuality in music videos.

Sexuality in male partners of women with fibromyalgia syndrome: A qualitative study.

The aim of our study was to understand how male partners of women diagnosed with fibromyalgia syndrome perceive sexuality. Gadamerian hermeneutic phenomenology and the Roy Adaptation Model provided the overall framework for this research study. Eighteen participants were recruited through convenience and purposive sampling. Data collection was conducted between February and July of 2017 and included a focus group and twelve in-depth interviews. Two main themes were extracted: "facing a new sex life" and "resisting the loss of the couple’s sexuality". Fibromyalgia syndrome compromises the couple’s sex life. Enhancing intimacy, skin-to-skin contact (during acute FMS outbreaks), finding new positions, non-coital sex and use of sex toys can increase female desire and help coping.

“Let me hear Thy voice”: Michèle Roberts’s Refiguring of Mary Magdalene in the Light of The Song of Songs

The article engages with the protagonist of The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Michèle Roberts, first published in 1984 as The Wild Girl. Filipczak discusses scholarly publications that analyze the role of Mary Magdalene, and redeem her from the sexist bias which reduced her to a repentant whore despite the lack of evidence for this in the Gospels. The very same analyses demonstrate that the role of Mary Magdalene as Christ’s first apostle silenced by patriarchal tradition was unique. While Roberts draws on the composite character of Mary Magdalene embedded in the traditional association between women, sexuality and sin, she also moves far beyond this, by reclaiming the female imaginary as an important part of human connection to the divine. At the same time, Roberts recovers the conjunction between sexuality and spirituality by framing the relationship of Christ and Mary Magdalene with The Song of Songs, which provides the abject saint from Catholic tradition with an entirely different legacy of autonomy and expression of female desire, be it sexual, maternal or spiritual. The intertext connected with The Song of Songs runs consistently through The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene. This, in turn, sensitizes the readers to the traces of the Song in the Gospels, which never quote from it, but they rely heavily on the association between Christ and the Bridegroom, while John 20 shows the encounter between the risen Christ and Mary Magdalene in the garden whose imagery is strongly suggestive of the nuptial meeting in The Song of Songs.

INHIBIN B AS MARKER OF ANDROGEN INSUFFICIENCY IN WOMEN OF REPRODUCTIVE AGE WITH SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION

According to the Princeton Consensus, female sexual dysfunction can be a sign of androgen deficiency (AD) in women of reproductive age, which necessitates the inclusion of appropriate therapy in fertility rehabilitation protocols for patients with biochemically confirmed AD. Most often, AD is associated with ovarian dysfunction. With ovarian hypofunction of autoimmune origin, an increase in inhibin B production occurs, in contrast to ovarian insufficiency of another etiology, which is due to selective damage to theca interna cells, while granulosa cells synthesizing inhibin B remain intact. Aim of the research. The study of the value of inhibin B as a prognostic marker of fertility recovery in women with androgen deficiency and sexual dysfunction. Materials and methods. The study design included 77 women of reproductive age of the main group with sexual dysfunction and androgen deficiency: 45 women with sexual dysfunction and the presence of thyroperoxidase Ak (I-a group), I-b group of 32 women with sexual dysfunction without antibodies to any organism tissues. Control group – 31 healthy women of reproductive age. Diagnostic laparoscopy was performed on anOLYMPUS device using a standard technique. Hormone testing was performed using a Johnson & Johnson Vitros automated system. Blood samples for the study were taken in the morning (8–11) on an empty stomach with venipuncture of the ulnar vein in the 1st phase of the menstrual cycle. Ultrasound test was performed on an Aloka Hitachi apparatus (Japan) with a sensor frequency of 7 MHz. Sexual dysfunction was determined by the Skindex-16V questionnaire. The diagnosis of the examined “Violation of female sexual desire / arousal” was done according to the classification DSM-5. Clinical manifestation of sexual dysfunction was >6 months. Results. The average age of the examined main group was 32.3±1.7 years, in the control group – 33.9±1.6 years. The average age of menarche for women of both groups was 13–14 years (in the main 13.3±0.34, in the control – 13.0±0.23 (p>0.05). The study of the hormonal background showed a pronounced, statistically significant in compare with healthy women, a decrease in the concentrations of not only estradiol, but also androgens, total testosterone, free testosterone, as well as dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate. Concentrations of sex steroids directly and statistically significantly correlated with the I-a group with concentrations of gonadotropins (luteinizing hormone (LH) and estradiol r=0.67; follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) and estradiol r=0.64; LH and total testosterone r=0.47; FSH and total testosterone r=0.42; for all p <0.001). LH and DHEA-S p=0 <33 (p=0 <02), FSH and DHEA-S p=0<27 (p=0 <03). In group I-b, LH correlation and total testosterone r=0.58 p<0.001 were noted. Diagnostic laparoscopy with ovarian biopsy was performed in 12 women of group I-a and group 23 of group I-b. At the same time, the presence of lymphoid infiltration, autoantibodies and complement on growing follicles was established, with primordial and primary follicles intact. Tissue fibrosis, the presence of activated B and T lymphocytes: CD8+, CD4+, natural killer cells (NK), polyclonal plasmocytes, macrophages of primordial and primary follicles were characteristic for group I-b. Conclusions. The level of inhibin B can serve as an early marker of autoimmune ovarian damage in women of reproductive age with female sexual dysfunction. Therapy of androgen deficiency should be carried out taking into account the pathogenesis of the disease.

Evolutionary Perspectives on Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder in Women

This review attempts to explain female hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) from a functional evolutionary perspective. Can theory and data regarding the evolved functions of female sexual motivation help explain cases of low sexual desire in women? If so, might some such cases be the product of brain mechanisms operating in ways that promoted reproductive success during human evolution, rather than low desire resulting from pathology? A functional theory of women’s sexual motivation is first summarized, which posits that sexual desire is modulated by both conception probability and social variables related to the initiation and maintenance of pair bonds. Recent evidence consistent with this theory is reviewed, followed by review of evidence showing that variables predicting sexual desire in most women may also explain cases of HSDD. Women’s sexual desire varies in functionally patterned ways. Discovering the evolved design of brain mechanisms that generate those patterns is crucial for understanding HSDD.

Defying modesty: sexuality, female desire and stardom, Chandidas (1932)

ABSTRACTSexuality and sexual display in Indian films, especially the more contemporary Indian cinema has often been labelled as regressive on account of it objectification of the female body and the splitting of the woman down to her bodily presence. This article however makes the case that female sexual displays, especially in songs (and dance sequences) have accounted for the making of stars, more so when such displays have stood out against the mainstream society’s codes of feminine modesty and reticence. In essence the article argues that what has often been criticised as a disservice to women has frequently been precisely the opposite, for its projecting of autonomous and potent feminine selves. That is not to take away from the truth of this cinema’s sexualisation and objectification of women, or the aspect of sexual exploitation in the workplace as epitomised by the infamous casting couch wherein women have had to dispense sexual favours in order to secure work. However when we consider stardom and the making of some female stars of Indian cinema, what stands out is a sexual openness in their portrayals, which made these exceptional for the agency that they ascribed to the female protagonist. As such, the article makes the case that women in films, even when figured as objects of the male gaze, occasionally actually stood forth as models for the debunking of social codes, and for giving a primacy to women that was not a given either within the diegetic space of the films themselves, or society at large.