Feminine Sexuality Research Articles

“A Wife and a Mother Has No Business to Be So Well Dressed”: Gender, Class, and Dynasty in the Revolutionary Republic

Abstract: This essay takes Angelica Schuyler—whose surname, following her husband’s, became Church in 1784—as a case study in the intersection between class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in the revolutionary American republic. It argues that she and women like her held a distinctively dynastic attitude towards kinship, which shaped the norms of sociability that governed the emerging national state during the first decades of the federal government. Like other wealthy, well-connected, white women in this period, Schuyler Church disavowed the popular ideology of female domesticity and asserted power through the public display of feminine sexuality. The essay builds on studies of the so-called “republican court” in the United States, as well as scholarship on elite women’s role as powerbrokers in British and French society, to draw out the ways that their gendered experience of sexuality and family life interacted with strategies for reproducing and accumulating power. Like all other ruling classes, that of the United States depended upon women. That dependence drove the shifting political salience of gender and sexuality in the early republic.

Gender-Based Double Standards and Inequalities in Online Culture: Objectification of Feminine Sexuality, Self-Expression and Appearance, and Cybershaming

Online communities provide a place that facilitates netizens to share their thoughts and ideas freely and swiftly with the speed of a click; this is relatively free and more convenient compared to traditional methods of socialisation. However, the online world can still reflect the traditional community to some extent. Especially with gender-related topics, women are the most often recipients of cyber shaming. This essay will explore the topic of gender-based double standards both online and offline, focusing on cyber shaming received pertaining to women's outfit choices. The essay argues that the cyber shaming of women's outfit choices is not just a matter of individual taste or preference but is rooted in deeply ingrained gender stereotypes and expectations that constrain women's freedom of expression and limit their opportunities for self-determination. This essay will use qualitative and quantitative research methods to investigate the impact of outfits on criticism directed at women and the implications of gender-based double standards. By shedding light on the gender-based double standards that underpin cyber shaming, the essay aims to raise awareness and promote a more equitable and inclusive online culture that values diversity, respect, and empowerment for all. Moreover, this essay demonstrates that online cyberbullying can cause significant consequences in the offline world; some can even cost lives. There is also a need for progressive changes in criminal and privacy law that promote gender equity and prevent cyber-SV against EYW. The implications of these results for academics and practitioners are discussed, and directions for future research are outlined. Throughout the conducted research on three designed inquiry questions, this study concluded with three key findings: Outfit-based content manifests judgments and criticism in the comment to be harsher for women; the impact of cyberbullying on emerging young women is greater than at other ages; and women to some extent have aggravated the effect of the misogyny complex.

The Enjoyment of Being Had: The Aesthetics of Masquerade in The Confidence-Man

Impostors, confidence artists, and artful deceivers seem to have achieved a strange kind of popularity and even prestige in our contemporary political landscape, for reasons that remain elusive, especially given how harmful and socially unwanted such behaviors ostensibly are. Herman Melville’s 1857 novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, helps us shift our perspective on this seemingly irrational phenomenon because it points out how being susceptible to dupery is linked to the enjoyment of fiction itself. This insight also highlights the importance of epistemological failure in the recent “return to aesthetics” in literary studies, where the positive dimension of unconsciously “willing one’s dupery” directly links aesthetic form to politics. The logic that connects aesthetics to unconscious enjoyment is then elaborated in the work of psychoanalytic thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Helene Deutsch and others to raise particular questions about how and why the enjoyment of being duped has been associated with feminine sexuality. Reading Melville’s novel while considering psychoanalytic concepts such as the “as if” personality, imposture, and interpassivity illuminates how confidence games play upon the ruses of sexuality, which have profound implications for why the public remains in thrall to the workings of known deceivers.

Contours of Sexuality in Roy’s The God of Small Things

This study aims at analyzing the contours of sexuality, obscenity and incest in Arundhati Roy’s debut novel, The God of Small Things to mark how the novelist deconstructs the naturalized and normalized social, ethical, and cultural values in the Indian society. The illicit relationship between the central character of the novel and a divorced woman, Ammu and the servant of her family, Velutha, the incest between Estha and Rahel, an incident where an old man forces Estha to masturbate, and the sensual affair of Baby Kochamma with Father Mulligan are some of the highly charged obscene details in the novel that invite a keen rationale for the research. The research utilizes the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis and radical feminism that deal with sexuality, feminine sexuality, and sibling incest to observe Roy’s motive for emphasizing on pornographic drives. Both Freudian psychoanalysts and radical feminists deal with the sex overtly taking it as the basic human instinct. The research finding is that Roy emphasizes the graphic description of sexual acts among members of family and different castes to cherish beauty found in ‘small things’, to mystify the mundane, to examine the issues of unethical sex in revolutionary South-Asian societies. It is expected that people interested in researching libidinal issues in Roy in particular, and South-Asian literature in general, can take the paper as a reference.

Sexuality in Women with Fibromyalgia Syndrome: A Metasynthesis of Qualitative Studies.

Metasynthesis of qualitative studies. The search included articles published between 2000 and June 2023 on the PubMed, WOS, CINAHL, SCOPUS, and SCIELO databases. 450 articles were found through the initial search, of which, only nine fulfilled the criteria and were included in the thematic synthesis. From this analysis, three main themes emerged: (1) "I want to, but I can't": FMS causes a shift in feminine sexuality. (2) Resetting sex life and intimacy. (3) Taking charge of a "new sexuality." Women with FMS suffer from limitations of their sexuality that affect their partner. Pain, stiffness and a loss of desire make sexual encounters difficult. Becoming aware of this and striving not to lose their sexuality is key to coping with this problem. Women and their sexual partners can change roles and encourage communication, games, foreplay or touching. The use of lubricants, physical exercise and complementary therapies, along with social, professional and partner support, are key to coping with FMS.

“Cunt is beautiful! […] cunt is knowledge”: Germaine Greer’s illustrated magazine articles as sex education for women

ABSTRACT Public intellectual and subversive media personality, feminist and anarchist Germaine Greer wrote multiple innovative texts on feminine issues in the 1960s and 70s, and particularly on women’s sexuality. Among her less researched texts were those published in counterculture magazines Oz and Suck, both characterized by original and trailblazing verbal and visual contents. In those texts, Greer presented her view of feminine sexuality as a revolutionary force in the struggle for equality, and in the process, provided women with essential, silenced knowledge about their bodies and sexualities. This article discusses Greer’s sexual pedagogy for women based on her texts published in both magazines and on the visual images attached to them. These imagetexts are analyzed within the historical context of the sexual revolution and countercultural press of the 1960-70s in Britain and within the theoretical frameworks of critical sexual literacy and critical visual literacy and analysis.

‘Better the devil you know’: feminine sexuality and patriarchal liberation in The Witch

ABSTRACT At the end of 2015‘s The Witch, isolated and beaten protagonist, Thomasin, ultimately rejects her puritanical upbringing to become a witch, accepting the invitation of the Devil (in the guise of the family’s goat Black Philip). This essay will discuss Thomasin’s sexual deliverance in terms of her turning away from the authoritarian ‘Law of the Father’ towards female liberation that comes in the form of the Witch. Thomasin transitions from girl to woman, but does not want to do so in the restrictive Puritan fashion where patriarchy and oppression rules. She becomes a woman by embracing her sexuality in the figure of the witch and Black Philip as the figure of lust helping her become free. Western folklore posits the goat as a symbol of fertility, independence, and lust; Black Philip is a figure who represents a connection to wild desires. Therefore, Black Philip becomes not only a physical representation of the devil, but also a symbolic representation of Thomasin’s sexual desire. Drawing on theories of the monstrous-feminine (Creed, Kristeva, Arnold), the symbolism of folklore and Freud’s Electra complex, this work argues that, despite its message of feminine empowerment, The Witch cannot fully reject or escape patriarchal discourse.

The Technological Priestess: The Piano Recital, Photography, and Clara Schumann

Musicologists often consider Clara Schumann to be one of the most influential figures in the establishment of the solo piano recital – a musical experience that encouraged the dominance of the serious music aesthetic. Schumann's connection to this ideal is perhaps most evident in her enshrinement as the priestess, a nineteenth-century title that honoured the interpretive power of her virtuosic performances. While her commitment to canonical values cannot be questioned, Schumann's piano virtuosity was also undeniably popular, incredibly physical and acutely tied to the century's rapidly changing musical and visual technologies. Attention to the analytical and imaginative connections between these transformative technologies actively complicates the divine, dehumanized and mythological stature that has come to centre Schumann's historiography. Her mass-produced photographs, and especially her cartes-de-visite, could both compound her priestessness and stimulate unresolvable fissures within it. Aligned with recent scholarship that expands Schumann's virtuosity into the realms of the popular, photographs and other forms of mass media reveal the inherent flexibility of the priestess ideology and this mythology's (seemingly) easy inclusion of various ambiguous and sometimes contradictory ideals. In effect, photographs of Schumann could instigate a kind of exhilarating, cognitive dissonance in their viewers: seeing was not necessarily believing her as only priestess. Seeing could, in fact, mean imagining and reimagining Clara Schumann in all kinds of fantastical ways: ways that aligned her piano virtuosity with the commodified visual technology in an increasingly mechanized world, or ways that underscored her feminine sexuality and virtuosity as socially destabilizing or democratizing.

Clitoral Therapy Device for Alleviating Sexual Dysfunction After Female Genital Mutilation: Randomized Controlled Trial

Female genital mutilation is considered a crime but is still practiced today in Africa and the Middle East, despite all the laws that make this procedure illegal due to the long-term physical and psychological harm it causes to women. Millions of girls and women living today have undergone genital mutilation, which involves removing the external female genitalia either partially or totally, based on the belief that it restricts feminine sexuality, thereby "saving" a girl for marriage. For girls and women, the surgery offers no health advantages. Girls' right to control critical decisions regarding their sexual and reproductive health is violated because genital mutilation is frequently done against their will and frequently without their consent, leading to lifelong psychic trauma in addition to sexual dysfunction and lack of satisfaction due to distortion of the genitalia that threatens marital stability. To determine the effect of a clitoral therapy device on improving sexual domains in women suffering from sexual dysfunction after female genital mutilation. This study examined 80 married women aged from 20 to 45 years who were referred from the gynecology outpatient clinic of the Faculty of Medicine, Suez University, for sexual dysfunction resulting from female genital mutilation. The women were divided into 2 equal groups: the study group received a clitoral therapy device and traditional psychosexual education and were closely followed for 3 months, while the control group received only traditional psychosexual education for 3 months. The Arabic version of the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI) questionnaire was used to assess sexual outcomes pre- and posttreatment in the 2 groups. Our findings revealed a significant increase in the 6 domains of the FSFI pretreatment in both groups compared to posttreatment (P>.001), except the orgasm domain in the control group, which showed only a nonsignificant increase (P=.16). Clitoral therapy devices may be an effective, safe, noninvasive rehabilitation method for sexual dysfunction following female genital mutilation. ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05039775; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05039775.

The Freedom of Gender Constitution and the Unconscious Determination of Sex –What Separates Them and What Unites Them

This article aims at discussing the origin of female sexual desire, its relationship to bisexuality, the interplay between identifications and the choice of love objects, according to the ideas of Irigaray [1], Kristeva and Butler [2]. We tried to rethink the centrality of melancholy in the constitution of gender, attributed by the authors to the patriarchal and heteronormative gender frame and to resume the ambiguities of the Freudian theory and clinic on feminine sexuality [3], so as to (re)weave the threads of a family plot, which ended up short-circuiting a patient's motherhood and her feminine sexuality experience. The "masquerade" hypothesis, as the effect of a feminine melancholy, associated with the ontology of the phallus as Lacan [4] supposes - a debate that, regarding gender, is retaken by Butler [2] and discussed by Schaffa [5] - is re-evaluated as freedom of gender constitution and a place of passage of libido and mutual enrichment between sexes, as stated by Schneider [6].

How to Be a Perfect Woman: The Evolution of Italian Renaissance Female Portraiture and Decorum

Renaissance portraiture represents more than the sitters. These images portray complex conceptualizations of identities, layered amalgams of the personal and political; dynastic and economic; amorous and pious; and present, future, and eternal. In the late fifteenth century, side profile portraits were the norm, characterized by the superiority of aloofness and nonchalance. Typically commissioned by husbands to celebrate marriages, these portraits memorialize the brides’ domesticity, piety, and above all, chastity. With Leonardo da Vinci’s groundbreaking Mona Lisa of ca. 1503 came the revolutionary change in female portrait composition, widely imitated by masters of the time. Females portrayed after this transition engaged the viewers directly, deviating from the previous detachment. These portraits are focused on harmony, with the prevalence of triangular formations along with scenic backdrops. The early sixteenth century saw another shift in female portrait ideals: artists were no longer constrained by traditional female decorum, but rather focused on exploring feminine sexuality. Belle Donne paintings and various counterparts grant viewers intimate insights into the lives of Renaissance women, whose sexuality was celebrated in the private sphere but remained taboo in public. Eventually, as more female art patrons rose to power in the mid-sixteenth century, the practice of female portraiture ceased to be dominated by male patriarchy, becoming rather a part of the female sphere. In this paper, I explored the evolution of female portraiture in chronological order, tracing the shift in feminine decorum along the way, ending with a survey of the connection between the art world and the literary realm.

‘Listen to your fear’: how fear discourse (re)produces gendered sexual subjectivities

This article explores the interrelations between gender and fear, based on the hypothesis of sexual fear being produced as a feminised emotion in discourse. Empirical analyses of historically contingent constructions of sexual fears from 1961–2021 in the advice pages of the popular German youth magazine Bravo show how fear has been produced as a central technique governing feminine sexuality, by far surmounting the importance of either feminine love or desire. The results point to historically specific constructions of feminised sexual dangers, developing from premarital pregnancy in the 1960s, emotional suffering because of premature coitus in the 1980s and 1990s, to digitalised sexual practices in the 21st century. Feminised constructions of sexual risks and fears render feminine subjects as passive, vulnerable and in need of protection while simultaneously producing masculine subjects as actively sex seeking and potentially dangerous. The results also indicate that discursive delegitimisation of feminine sexual fear may equally contribute to re-establishing sexual inequality by pressuring girls to be sexually available. I argue, therefore, that it is not sufficient to analyse constructions of gendered subjects as being either fearful or fearless. Instead, the reconstruction of discursive model practices governing subjects to manage sexual fears is key to disentangling the complex nexus of gender and fear. The investigation of historical transformations of sexual fear discourses contributes to tracing both dynamics and continuities in gendered power relations, thereby illustrating the central role of fear in classic sociological research themes of inequality and power relations.

From Abuse to Apotheosis- Decoding The Trajectory of A Feminist Quest in Girish Karnad's Naga-mandala


 
 
 
 This paper attempts to explore the idea of womanhood and feminine sexuality as it appears in Girish Karnad's remarkable play Naga-Mandala and discuss how the central protagonist of the play Rani manages to achieve a state of social respectability but at the cost of her individuality as a woman. We will also try to trace her journey from a state of patriarchal neglect and abuse to her final apotheosis and try to interrogate how to be a woman in India is to straddle two different imprisonments- the image of a Goddess and the image of a slut. This paper will highlight how Rani too gets absorbed in the pantheistic iconography of a deified mortal and thus manages to cut across the confinements of patriarchy which for many women is still an elusive dream. But what remains our chief contention is how such an ideological and contrived politics of feminine appropriation as a figure of divinity tends to reinforce the idea of a woman as a benign entity heralding notions of virtue and purity that others are ideally expected to conform to. The trajectory of Rani's life and struggles against the conventions of patriarchy thus bring forth quintessential questions about feminine desires and sensuality which needs greater attention within the mainstream discourse of feminism.
 
 
 

Feminine sexuality, religiousness and psychotic distress: Tracing a pattern

This paper describes a pattern regarding the relationship between feminine sexuality, religiousness and psychotic distress that was discerned in two independent multiple case studies in Greece. One study utilized grounded theory to develop a model of therapeutic change through recording the development of voice hearers’ understanding and coping with their voices during a therapeutic intervention. The other study applied biographical and thematic analysis to interviews with persons with psychosis and their families, in order to explore family narratives regarding life with a family member with psychosis. A common pattern was detected for all the female participants, whereby following a religious upbringing in childhood and pursuing independence from the family together with social and sexual exploration in early adulthood, the onset of psychosis marked a return to the family home and a religious frame of reference. The psychotic experiences seemed to resemble engrained experiences of shaming regarding sexual and gender norms. Moreover, they had the effect of re-signifying female identity and sexuality, bringing them into line with conservative religious principles. This pattern suggests that psychotic experiences may not only express culturally prescribed female gender norms but also may serve to regulate women’s sexuality in conservative religious cultural environments.

Feminist sex-positive art on Instagram: reorienting the sexualizing gaze

ABSTRACT Instagram has been identified as potentially offering opportunities for feminist activism and resistance against limiting normative ideals surrounding femininity and the body. Extending this work, this article examines a corpus of illustrations shared to Instagram by feminist sex-positive artists. Locating these representations within the constraints of a platform where gendered norms and hierarchies are predominant, we ask how and to what extent these visual and discursive digital representations may be representative of more transgressive constructions of feminine sexuality. To address these questions, we employed a qualitative feminist methodology, combining content analysis with critical discourse analysis of Instagram posts (n = 200) from a small sample of influential feminist artists (n = 10). Four key discursive strategies were identified: making the female body visible/refusing censorship, desexualizing the naked female body, diversifying feminine and sexual desirability norms and centering female pleasure and enjoyment. Our findings demonstrate how a current sex-positive movement on Instagram aims to re-orient the gaze through illustrations, to subjectify rather than objectify women.

Gods, Games, and Globalization: New Perspectives on Religion and Sport

Gods, Games, and Globalization: New Perspectives on Religion and Sport

Gender Constitution and Reversible Potentiality: The Making of the Masculine Subject in Longus’sDaphnis and Chloe

This study places Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe in dialogue with Foucault and Freud, arguing that within the liminality of adolescence, the formation of gendered subjectivity is a condition of “reversible potentiality” in which any given act of the subject represents the radical potential for the subject to be acted upon. Seeking to disrupt the presumptive equivalence between masculine subjectivity and knowledge/power, the author turns to Lycaeneion’s education of Daphnis as a case study in male subject formation. Here, knowledge functions as a force of immobilization rather than empowerment. If Daphnis’s psychosomatic identification with feminine sexuality is understood as a symptom of male sexual development in pederastic culture, then the Freudian female Oedipus complex can be reimagined as descriptive of the boy’s progression out of sexual objectification and into the role of active sexual pursuer, a stage through which boys in pederastic culture must pass on their way to adult male subjectivity.

Veil as Religious Expression: A Sociological Study of University Students in Bangladesh

Currently, within feminist discourse, two major debates surrounding veiling or "purdah" take precedence, with one sect of feminist scholars identifying veils as oppressive and the other heralding veils as a source of agency as well as a freedom of choice. However, this dichotomy is not relevant to the Bangladeshi context and has given rise to a discrepancy between theoretical knowledge and real practice, urging further critical analysis of the changing role of veiling in the Global South generally and Bangladesh specifically, particularly among the youth and adolescent populations. Thus, this essay is based on the experience of teaching sociology in classes and interviewing university students who wear a veil at a Bangladeshi university. Increasing numbers of women, especially young women, can be seen wearing veils in Bangladesh, a drastic shift away from the decades following the nation's independence in 1971. Therefore, this essay will aim both to explore and to discuss reasons that incentivize young women, especially those who are studying, and to critique societal structures and phenomena (including religious behavior and gendered norms) regarding a different form of social attire. Thus, the research conducted was qualitative in nature, and the sample consisted of a select group of university students (using purposive sampling). Thirty-one in-depth interviews, case studies, and two focus group discussions were conducted. I note the ways in which patriarchy, capitalism, and globalization converge in the urban metropolitan setting of Dhaka, to encourage women across age and class divides to embrace religion as their dominant social identity over ethnic and national identities. Veiling in the context of Bangladesh is a complex multidimensional phenomenon; it is both an expression of religious piety and is deeply intertwined with issues of globalization, patriarchy, class, and feminine sexuality.

Feminine Sexuality and the Work of the Negative.

The present paper discusses the intricate development of feminine sexuality by drawing on the ideas of André Green. The paper's main argument is that feminine sexuality is unique in being dependent on the creation of a representation of an internal empty space (as an ontological entity). This takes place through "the work of the negative" and involves an instinctual movement of "double reversal," by which the drive directed at the object helps the subject establish their own body as a source of pleasure. The author will argue that the combination of these two processes, defined in this paper as "the work of the feminine," is a prerequisite of the subject's capacity to structure themselves as having a sense of internal abundance, vitality, and power that is grounded in a receptive sexual position that is relevant to both sexes. The paper will conclude by presenting clinical material demonstrating how "the work of the feminine" manifests in the way the vagina is represented in feminine sexuality. As an afterthought, the paper will describe Green's unique contribution in relation to Winnicott's contribution and to the different ways in which these two authors address the manner in which the subject comes to dwell in their body.

An Intertextual Reading of William Faulkner’s “Victory”

An Intertextual Reading of William Faulkner’s “Victory”