Homosexual Desire Research Articles

Developing Homosexuality: Fritz Morgenthaler, Junction Points and Psychoanalytic Theory

The Swiss psychoanalyst Fritz Morgenthaler (1919–84) is well known in German-speaking psychoanalysis as an early exponent of Heinz Kohut's self psychology, as an ethnopsychoanalytic researcher and as an original thinker on the topics of dreams, psychoanalytic technique and especially on sexuality (perversions, heterosexuality, homosexuality). In 1980, he presented the first psychoanalytic conception of homosexuality in the German-speaking world that did not view homosexuality in terms of deviance or pathology. His theory of ‘junction points’ ( Weichenstellungen) postulates three decisive moments in the development of homosexuality: a prioritized cathexis of autoeroticism in narcissistic development, a Janus-facedness of homosexual desire as an outcome of the Oedipal complex and the coming out in puberty. According to Morgenthaler, this development can result in non-neurotic or neurotic homosexuality. Less known than the theory of junction points and to some degree even concealed by himself (his earlier texts appeared later on in corrected versions) are Morgenthaler's pre-1980 accounts of homosexuality which deserve to be called homophobic. Starting with a discussion of this early work, the article outlines Morgenthaler's theoretical development with special focus on his theory of junction points and how this theory was taken up in psychoanalytic theory.

Articulating Sexuality, Desire, and Identity: A Keyword Analysis of Heteronormativity in Taiwanese Gay and Lesbian Dating Websites

This paper discusses how the so-called social construct, i.e., the frame of heteronormativity, can be maintained, reproduced and enacted by language within same-sex dating communities in the twenty-first century. That is, we examine heteronormativity in discourse collected from two popular same-sex dating websites in Taiwan in order to analyze how heteronormative ideologies influence the linguistic construction of homosexual desires, dating preferences, and queer relationships. By scrutinizing the keywords in the corpora through the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics, we argue that there are still power relationships among Taiwanese gay men and lesbian women seeking romantic love online that are informed by heteronormative ideologies around gender within the scope of homosexuality. On the one hand, the keywords contain many binary roles providing conventional interactional modes for Taiwanese homosexual couples that show great similarity to those in heterosexual relationships. On the other hand, the analysis indicates that heteronormative constructions of masculinity and femininity are related to anxieties over mainstream preferences for dating on the two target websites.

Movimento e estagnação em Controle, de Natalia Borges Polesso

Resumo Este artigo tem o objetivo de analisar as relações entre movimento e estagnação nas construções dos espaços e da homossexualidade feminina no romance Controle, de Natalia Borges Polesso (2019a). Argumenta-se que a narrativa traça um paralelo entre a repressão da sexualidade não normativa da protagonista e sua condição médica marcada pela epilepsia e pela depressão, levando a personagem à reclusão na esfera doméstica. Embora esse paralelo possa incutir o risco de calcar a homossexualidade como patologia, a complexidade do enredo de Polesso mostra que a insegurança e o isolamento social da protagonista são superados pelo desejo homossexual, que é retratado como uma força que impulsiona o movimento da personagem. Por último, nota-se que o romance de Polesso retrabalha certos estereótipos presentes na literatura lésbica, como a exclusão social, o mito do amor trágico e o deslocamento como premissa para concretizar o encontro erótico, conforme apontam os estudos de Virgínia Maria Vasconcelos Leal.

Manifestation of Chinese and American Values in The Wedding Banquet

This paper mainly focuses on various cultural values and conflicts represented in the film The Wedding Banquet. In contrast with the civil marriage ceremony of American style performed in a Registry Office, the Chinese wedding is much more luxurious, filled with lots of over-elaborated formalities that are necessary in Chinese culture. The ceremony itself is considered more important than the notarization. Taking the subject of sexual orientation as a metaphor for larger cultural issues, the film is examined as identity confusion and inevitably, the pursuit of identity reconstruction. Through Wei-Tung’s psychological struggles between Chinese traditional values and his homosexual desires, the film explores the possibility of a re-considered perception of identity for an Asian diasporic gay. Given the historical baggage brings with them, the process of the construction of identity for the immigrant is continuously dynamic and ongoing. After the implicit negotiations between ethnicity, sexuality, and patriarchy, the film story moves to reconciliation. This suggests that in such an era of multiculturalism, people had better come to realize their individual identities of diversity and complexity.

‘Hij zou onder diens ogen een vent zijn’

Abstract ‘He would be a man in his eyes. ’ Male homosocial desire in novels by Menno Ter Braak Menno ter Braak is one of the most prominent writers of Dutch high ­modernism. In his two novels, Hampton Court and Dr. Dumay verliest…, the double bind of homosocial desire is fully operative. Building on the critical work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, this paper questions the role of the ‘­epistemology of the closet’ in Ter Braaks literary oeuvre, which is pepper­ed with scenes of closeted homosexual desire. Moreover, and in addition to Sedgwick, I pay special attention to the representation of emancipated women in Ter Braaks novels. As I aim to show, the male characters seem to have accepted (or even internalised) feminist notions. Yet, the relative closeness to, and sometimes even identification with, emancipated women, reinforces the conservative reflexes build within male homosocial bonds. So in the end, the conservative fear on which the homosocial bond feeds, trumps the desire for change and a loosening up of the erotic spectrum.

Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi by Healey Dan (review)

REVIEWS 577 Mills writes incisively on the influence of English and Italian subculture and hooliganism on Yugoslav football in 1980s; it would be useful in light of the Tito-Stalin split of 1948 to consider how the post-war development of the game in Yugoslavia differed from that in countries of the Eastern Bloc. However, this highly original study undeniably makes a valuable and scholarly contribution to our understanding of Yugoslav history, and a thoughtful and convincing case for the continued examination of the overt and covert means by which sport is politicized. Durham University Guy Woodward Healey, Dan. Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2018. xxii + 286 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Selected further reading. Index. £21.99 (paperback). Seventeen years have passed since the publication of Dan Healey’s groundbreaking book, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia. It remains one of the most masterfully researched investigations of queer subcultures and attitudes towards homosexuality in the first half of the twentieth century. Healey’s latest book focuses more directly on homophobia in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russian Federation. Its ‘niche’ focus should fool no one: this book is a valuable tool for any modern historian. The book’s universal value is in its sophisticated methodology. Healey must not only contend with stereotypes about Russia by outsiders, but with presentday attempts to control the historical narrative by internal forces hostile to queers. He dissects and analyses archival material with the theoretical and empirical knowledge at his disposal, despite obstructive elements within archival institutions, deliberate destruction or redaction of sources and false or hostile interpretations of restricted-access material by homophobes within the historical profession. He does this while reflecting critically on what meanings can be drawn from different types of sources — memoirs, official reports, Gulag records, ‘confessions’ given to police, or the pre-digital gay magazines of the 1990s — depending on the circumstances and context of their production and preservation. The disputed biographies of three samesex attracted cultural figures — the poet Nikolai Kliuev (1884–1937), poet and diarist Mikhail Kuzmin (1872–1936) and the Soviet singer Vadim Kozin (1905–94) — serve as examples of aggressive historical instrumentalization or erasure, and the tenacity of queer life stories. The book is organized into three parts — Homophobia in Russia after 1945, Queer Visibility and ‘Traditional Sexual Relations’, and Writing and SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 578 Remembering Russia’s Queer Pasts — each of which Healey uses to address a set of thematic or methodological questions. Temporally the book covers three periods, from Stalin’s assumption of power to the Second World War (mid1920s to late 1930s), the post-war Soviet period (1945 to 1991) and the post-Soviet period (1991 to the present). Healey identifies three ‘sexual revolutions’ over this time, not all of which were part of a liberalizing trend. 1968, for example, was not a progressive moment in Soviet history: there was no Stonewall, feminism was shunned and police persecution intensified in the 1970s and 1980s. This idea of a sexual revolution that conservatizes, rather than liberalizes, is compelling. Healey links the history of homophobia not only to moral discourses but material and systemic trends and circumstances, and to the social organization of gender and reproduction. This allows him to grapple with seemingly contradictory empirical evidence. Within the Gulag system which operated from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s as a cornerstone of the Soviet economy, heterosexuality posed an unequally high risk compared with homosexuality. Despite its ostensible function to uphold the law and the moral code, the Gulag ‘was mainly destructive of “normal” family ties; many [heterosexuals] found it psychologically and practically impossible to restore lost relationships’ once sentences were served (p. 50). When the Gulag was dismantled after 1953, three quarters of the 25 million former prisoners were men, precipitating a crisis of heterosexuality. Contemporary policy-makers saw the Gulag not only as a place into which homosexuality was brought, but as ‘homogenic’ (p. 36), that is, generative of homosexuality. Yet homosexuality could also be a stabilizing factor that guaranteed a higher rate of labour productivity and, in the case of women, reduced maternity costs (p. 38). Healey offers several gems of...

Understanding Homophobia in Our Forefathers: Rethinking How Kohut Actually Worked

Jule Miller’s (1985) article entitled “How Kohut Actually Worked,” remains a valuable window into Kohut’s clinical perspective toward the end of his life. However, one disturbing element to the article is Kohut and Miller’s homophobic and heterosexist approach to the homosexual material as described by the patient in the patient’s experience of self. Understanding Kohut’s perspective on homosexuality is a complex undertaking, complicated by the intersection of the context of the times in which he lived, his experience of homosexuality in his personal life, and his theoretical positions. The purpose of this article is threefold: (a) to highlight the clinical principles that exemplified Kohut’s way of thinking toward the end of his life, as communicated by Jule Miller, and to apply these same principles in a way that broadens exploration of the clinical material; (b) to maintain the relevance of Miller’s article in the self psychology canon by offering a corrective for the damaging nature of the homophobic and heterosexist aspects of the article; and (c) to combat psychoanalysis’s historic antipathy toward gay people in an effort to make psychoanalysis accessible and appealing to people of diverse sexual identity. The author suggests three intricately entwined factors contributed to Kohut and Miller’s perspectives on the patient’s homosexual fantasy and desire: the period in which the supervision occurred, a conjunction in the supervision, and Kohut and Miller’s personal reactions to the patient’s homosexual desires and behavior.

Thomas Gray’s Sensibility and the Sublimity of Reserve

Gray écrivit peu et publia encore moins, si bien qu’on prit l’habitude, à partir du XIX e siècle, de le considérer comme un poète inhibé ; les tendances récentes de la critique n’y ont pas changé grand-chose, qui expliquent la minceur de son œuvre par l’influence tétanisante de Milton, par la conjoncture hostile que représentait la commercialisation du marché littéraire, ou encore par l’homophobie dominante de son temps. Pourtant le prestige de Gray, à la fin du XVIII e siècle, était énorme, et il n’a jamais été complètement négligé depuis. Le présent article s’efforce de rendre compte de cette situation paradoxale dans l’histoire littéraire, à travers trois aspects de son œuvre : d’abord, l’exacerbation d’une certaine exigence classique chez Gray, qui lui fit rechercher le rare ou le neuf en même temps que le bon goût ; ensuite, l’impact de l’épistémologie empiriste développée par Locke, qui se traduit par le relief accru de la sensation, dans son ambiguïté et son intensité ; enfin, un soupçon de subversion politique qui tenait moins à des prises de position explicites qu’à certaines procédures lyriques, et qui pourrait expliquer pour une bonne part l’aura dont put jouir Gray aux yeux des réformistes et des radicaux des années 1780 et 90.

‘I don’t know what gender is, but I do, and I can, and we all do’: An interview with Clare Hemmings

What follows is an interview with Clare Hemmings, Professor of Feminist Theory and Head of the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics. A leading figure in UK feminist theory, her research insists that we acknowledge matters of ambivalence and uncertainty in our history-making, storytelling and theorising. As such, it contributes to and has productively intervened in many fields, including feminist epistemology, affect theory, historiography and sexuality studies. Beginning with her first book, Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender (2002), continuing in Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (2011), and most overtly in Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive (2018), Hemmings interrogates and challenges dominant modes and expressions of gender and sexuality from a feminist positionality that is itself under-theorised and rarely articulated: that of a feminine bisexual woman. As Hemmings notes, bisexual positionality encompasses the affective capacity for a ‘combination of heterosexual and homosexual desire’ (Hemmings, 2002a; 2002b: 17) and thus generates ‘radical reconfigurations’ (Hemmings, 2002b: 197) of our understanding of the relations between gender, sex and desire. Yet bisexuality has been repeatedly reproduced, within both feminist and queer theory, ‘as an abstract and curiously lifeless middle. As a lesbian and feminist who has occupied that supposedly ‘lifeless middle ground’, albeit differently (I have had two long-term relationships, one with a man, one with a woman), I was interested in speaking with Clare about these issues, and was compelled to do so after I attended an event that she co-organised at the London School of Economics, a screening of Sylvie Tissot’s film about the French feminist Christine Delphy that included Delphy herself. As soon as Delphy entered the theatre and began walking down the stairs to the podium, the audience burst spontaneously into a standing ovation and long applause: '[T]his moment involved both a shared jouissance and the returning of haunting conflicts within feminism – conflicts that we wish had been resolved long ago –because it entailed both exhilarating and dissonant affects, it became a sort of feminist moment par excellence, a moment where solidarity is never exempted from the (re)emergence of disagreements, and where the fantasy of a collective fusion becomes the condition for those conflicts to emerge' (Eloit in Delphy et al., 2016: 151). Delphy’s presence, and the film about her, reminded me that (1) feminist thinkers from the 1970s and 1980s were extraordinarily sophisticated in their understanding of how gender constitutes us as men and women; (2) this analysis is still mostly absent from public conversations; and (3) we still long for such conversations. My interview with Clare Hemmings is thus a continuation of this moment of shared jouissance and haunting. It was conducted informally, in 2017, in Clare’s office, in what was then the Gender Institute, in Columbia House at the LSE. For over 90 minutes during a grey afternoon in London, we spoke on a range of topics, from Clare’s intellectual history to her (then) forthcoming book on Emma Goldman. We discussed her background as a poststructuralist theorist who also carries out empirical research and the challenge of studying sexuality in the archive. In the portion of the interview that appears below, we talk in detail about Clare’s early work on bisexuality and how her thinking contributes to theorising gender in the present.

Introduction: Queerer than Fiction

In last paragraphs of Freud's essay on paranoid Dr. Schreber, there is discussion of what Freud considers a striking between Schreber's persecutory delusion and Freud's own theory. Freud was indeed later to generalize, famously, that the delusions of paranoiacs have an unpalatable external similarity and internal kinship to systems of our philosophers--among whom he included himself.(1) For all his characteristic slyness, it may be true that putative congruence between paranoia and theory was unpalatable to Freud. In hands of subsequent thinkers, however, it has by now become less an embarrassment than a prescriptive article of faith: for literary and cultural critics, prevailing theoretical challenge has been to find ever more subtle and searching ways of implementing a hermeneutic of suspicion. In a world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression, to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naive or complaisant. Even aside from prestige that now attaches to a hermeneutic of suspicion in critical theory as a whole, queer studies in particular has had a distinctive history of intimacy with paranoid imperative. Freud, of course, traced every instance of paranoia to repression of same-sex desire, whether in women or in men. A chain of powerful, against-the-grain responses to Freud's argument, beginning with Guy Hocquenghem's Homosexual Desire, has established paranoid stance as a uniquely privileged one for understanding not--as in Freudian tradition--homosexuality itself, but rather precisely mechanisms of homophobic and heterosexist enforcement against it.(2) Subversive and demystifying parody, suspicious archaeologies of present, detection of hidden patterns of violence and their exposure: these infinitely doable and teachable protocols of unveiling have become common currency of cultural and historicist studies, and signs in turn of special status that queer and antihomophobic inquiry seems to hold within that movement. If there is any obvious danger in triumphalism of a hermeneutic of suspicion. it is that broad consensual sweep of such methodological assumptions, current near-profession-wide agreement about what constitutes narrative or explanation or adequate historicization, may, if it persists unquestioned, unintentionally impoverish gene-pool of literary-critical perspectives and skills. The trouble with a narrow gene-pool, of course, is its diminished ability to respond to environmental (for instance, political) change. Another danger of present paranoid consensus, however, is that it may require disarticulation, disavowal, and misrecognition of other ways of reading--ways less oriented around suspicion--that are actually being practiced. One premise of present collection is that a closer, more respectful attention to past and present queer reading practices--the kind of attention these essays, in their different ways, all embody--will show how reservoir of practices already in use crucially exceeds theorizations of a consensual hermeneutic of suspicion. Many of these essays are, rightly, incisive and unerring in their methodical suspicion; but what more unites them is a very different impulse and history, which would be badly misrecognized under currently available rubrics. Perhaps instead of battening on Freudian understanding of paranoia, for all its useful definitional linkage to homoerotic issues, it would be more descriptive here to use Melanie Klein's less differentiated, arguably less elegant concept of paranoid position. The interest of Klein's concept lies, it seems to me, in her seeing paranoid position always in oscillatory context of a very different possible one, depressive/reparative position.(3) For Klein's infant or adult, paranoid position--understandably marked by hatred, envy, and anxiety--is a position of terrible alertness to dangers posed by hateful and envious part-objects that one cannot help but ingest from world around one. …

Queering German Culture by Leanne Dawson

 Reviews Queering German Culture. Ed. by L D. (Edinburgh German Yearbook, ) Rochester, NY: Camden House. .  pp. £. ISBN ––– –. Although Queer Studies and German Studies have historically shadowed each other, it is surprisingly rare that they are in direct conversation. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out, the English word queer shares a root with a German one, quer (Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), p. xii). More, as Leanne Dawson shows in the Introduction to this volume, both contemporary transnational queer theory and contemporary queer culture are indebted to German contributions, from early sexologists such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld, who first researched and theorized homosexuality, to cultural icons such as Marlene Dietrich, omas Mann, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, which remain generative for contemporary queer cultural production. ese traces and affiliations remain underexplored, both within German Studies and within transnational Queer Studies—which has oen taken Anglo-American culture as its objects and anglophone or francophone theorists as its guides. Dawson rightly argues that, as LGBT rights discourses take centre stage in German politics, it is more than timely to probe the cultures and histories that underpin and are oen in tension with these discourses. is volume offers eight eclectic essays that take queer approaches to various aspects of German culture from the early twentieth century on. While the title ‘Queering German Culture’ suggests a systematic approach to German culture as a whole, the editor states that the structure of the volume is intended to resist linear structures that might imply a narrative of progress. Dawson’s Introduction provides a compressed overview of queer German history and theory from the mid nineteenth century on, a useful if necessarily simplified point of orientation for the following chapters. Dawson’s first chapter offers a compelling transnational comparison between the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn and Spinnboden in Berlin, arguing that such community-led archives queer the concept of ‘home’ by creating an alternative intergenerational community of knowledge and values. Cyd Sturgess’s fascinating and theoretically rich ‘“Die zarte Haut einer schönen Frau”: Fashioning Femininities in Weimar Germany’s Lesbian Periodicals’ explores the different ideological underpinnings of the rival publications Frauenliebe and Die Freundin. Sturgess suggests that Frauenliebe’s association with Magnus Hirschfeld led to a more liberal and more commercial approach to gender and sexuality, whereas Die Freundin advocated bourgeois moral standards and a culture of assimilation. At the same time, Sturgess demonstrates how the regular trans supplements published by each paper undermine any simple opposition between the two queer approaches. Kyle Frackman’s essay examines the  documentary Unter Männern — Schwul in der DDR, arguing that this ‘throws into relief the contradictory and occasionally grotesque duality of East German gender and sexual discourse’ (p. ) while its queer stylistic effects emphasize the artificial nature of the documentary medium. In the second section, ‘Queering the Other’, John Plew’s diagnosis of a homopho- MLR, .,   bic double bind in omas Mann’s aesthetics works within the established queer German canon, unlike Nicholas Courtman’s discussion of queer politics and homophobia in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, Ging, Gegangen () and Terézia Mora’s Alle Tage (). Courtman’s essay argues that, while Mora’s text opens up space for a queer migrant heterotopia, Erpenbeck’s celebrated novel is imbricated in a heteronormative temporality which erases queer migrants. Sarra Kassem’s essay also discusses the transnational queer via the oen erased figure of the lesbian political refugee in Fatih Akin’s Auf der anderen Seite (). e final two essays, by Lauren Pilcher and Gary Schmidt, survey how performative femininity undermines the patriarchal logic of cinematic looking in Fassbinder’s cinema, and analyse the ways in which three novels—by Jonathan Franzen, Phillip Roth, and omas Brüssig—renegotiate the boundary between homosocial and homosexual desire. It would be highly un-queer to demand that a volume entitled Queering German Culture adhere to a hegemonic idea of totality or consistency, either of methodology or in reference to a normative, bounded idea of ‘German culture’. e heterogeneity of the at times furtive, unexpected, and aslant readings in this volume is in itself queer. At the same time, the...

«Las plumas son para las gallinas»: masculinidad, plumofobia y discreción entre hombres

Este trabajo parte de la premisa de que se ha producido una masculinización de los hombres identificados como homosexuales a partir de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Esto ha conllevado una transformación del modelo de deseo homosexual masculino y un rechazo de la pluma, es decir, de las actitudes o formas de actuar consideradas como afeminadas. Después de tres años de experiencia etnográfica en diferentes ciudades españolas, en chats y aplicaciones de contactos para hombres, bares nocturnos y centros deportivos, utilizo mi participación en la aplicación Wapo para mostrar cómo ciertos ideales relacionados con la masculinidad y la discreción, así como los discursos contra la pluma, hegemonizan la interacción en este tipo de espacios. También muestro que las diferencias observadas respecto a estas normatividades dependen de la cercanía geográfica a lo que he llamado epicentros de lo gay. Asimismo, analizo diferentes formas en que los hombres a los que he entrevistado experimentan estas normatividades. Finalmente, argumento que la plumofobia es una forma de control de género entre hombres que sirve para recuperar el capital simbólico asociado a la masculinidad y conservar así los privilegios sociales asociados a la hombría.

Per scientiam ad iustitiam? Werk und Wirkung von Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935)

Abstract Magnus Hirschfeld was the trailblazer of modern sexology and he defined homosexuality as a variation in western sexual life - and no longer as a perversion or vice. Moreover, he campaigned for sexual liberation with petitions to the parliament, leaflets and even movies. He popularized terms that are still in use, such as »transsexualism« or »homosexuality«. But he also became an admirer of sexual eugenics. Lastly, he never achieved the decriminalization of homosexual desire and he also died without any successors. Throughout his life he saw himself as a German citizen. His Jewish background was more relevant to his enemies than to himself.

Dial P for psychiatry: two short essays about Alfred Hitchcock

Dial P for psychiatry: two short essays about Alfred Hitchcock

Męsko-męski seks heteryków, czyli społeczno-kulturowy przewodnik po tym, jak go uprawiać i nie zostać gejem

Reachable knowledge, which is a collection of socially negotiated constructs and narratives, imposes limits on possible ways of understanding the world around us. A dominant discourse becomes a boundary of cognition. The contemporary discourse on male sexual identity cements and limits it to a homosexual or heterosexual version. The socio-cultural rules producing hetero- and homosexuality can be particularly well viewed in the example of men who identify as heterosexuals yet have sex with other men. This article provides a recipe for the effective union of heterosexuality with homosexual desire, free of the danger of social stigma. At the same time, the article attempts to disclose how the development of male sexuality is restricted by modern modes of knowledge production in regard to male sexuality and by forcing men to practice their sexuality in a pre-specified manner. The article also gives voice to alternative ways of understanding male sexuality, especially through the lens of fluidity, changeability, and vagueness.

Between the Labor Camp and the Clinic:Temaor the Shared Forms of Late Soviet Homosexual Subjectivities

Based on interviews with twenty-one women and fifteen men who expressed homosexual desires during the late Soviet period, this article seeks to shed light upon Soviet homosexual subjectivities in the Russian SFSR. As a result of the drive to “close off the entire topic of gay subjectivity to respectable inquiry, so as to prevent gayness from ever again being understood as a sickness,” queer studies has for a long time been “silent” on this topic (David Halperin). My objective here is to take into account both the effects produced by Soviet medical and penal discourse on the subjectification of individuals who experience homosexual desire and the room to maneuver open to individuals for constructing the subject of their sexuality from their experience. I suggest that men and women were able to construct homosexual subjectivities that cannot be reduced to binary stigmatization as either sickness or criminality. In reality, men and women rendered themselves the subjects of their homosexuality in confrontation simultaneously and non-exclusively with both the pathologizing and criminalizing definitions of homosexuality.

A View from the Bridge: The Absurdity of Tragedy

Abstract This article examines how director Ivo van Hove's groundbreaking production of A View from the Bridge reimagines Miller's realistic play. Van Hove transforms the tragedy into raw symbolic theater that employs many elements of the Theatre of the Absurd. This staging remakes the role of the narrator, Alfieri, who questions the meaning of Eddie Carbone's tragic ending and consequently may shed light on Eddie's possible homosexual desires.

Censorship and the Construction of Homosexual Desire in Mario Camus’s Muere una mujer (1965)

AbstractThe representation of homosexuality and homosexual desire in cinema was strictly banned under Franco’s dictatorship. However, a limited number of filmmakers managed to portray homosexual characters in their films. The popular melodramas of the 1960s were a good chance for these novel representations, and filmmakers of younger generations explored new cinematic discourses on sexuality. This article studies Mario Camus’s Muere una mujer (1965), an important work in the construction of the film discourses on sexual minorities that would flourish during the transition to democracy. This film can therefore be considered a valuable source for understanding future homosexual narratives. Despite the strict demands of the ‘Junta Nacional de Censura’ – the Board of Censors – Camus managed to include homosexual characters who, very exceptionally, expressed their desires. The study of the censorship files, which can be found in the Archivo de Alcalá (Madrid), contribute to the analysis of the complex processes of narration and deletion of homosexual desire.ResumenLa representación de la homosexualidad y del deseo homosexual en el cine estaba estrictamente prohibida durante el Franquismo. Sin embargo, un pequeño grupo de cineastas se las ingeniaron para mostrar personajes homosexuales en sus películas. Los melodramas populares de los años sesenta suponían una buena oportunidad para este tipo de representaciones, y cineastas de generaciones más jóvenes exploraron estos nuevos discursos en el cine. Este artículo estudia Muere una mujer (1965), de Mario Camus. Se trata de un trabajo importante en la construcción de discursos cinematográficos en torno a las minorías sexuales, que proliferarían en la transición a la democracia. Esta película se puede considerar, por lo tanto, una fuente muy valiosa para el estudio de las futuras narrativas homosexuales. A pesar de las estrictas exigencias de la censura, Camus consiguió incluir personajes homosexuales que, excepcionalmente, expresaron sus deseos. El estudio de los expedientes de censura, que se encuentran en el Archivo de Alcalá (Madrid) contribuye al análisis de los complejos procesos de narración y eliminación del deseo homosexual.

Ancient homophobia

The following paper discusses the problem of the alleged prejudices of the Athenian masses against homosexuality in the second half of the fifth century BC. It has been suggested that the unsympathetic perception of pederasty might have been as a result of the generally unfriendly attitudes of the so-called common people towards behaviours associated with the social elite. In what follows, I argue that there is no reason to think that homosexual desires and behaviours were limited to the upper classes; prejudices against homosexuality can hardly be taken, therefore, as a result of populist sentiments. Moreover, it seems that few or no phenomena recorded in our sources relevant to classical Athens can really be associated with homophobia as such.

Sometimes Sex Is Just a Pain in the Ass; Or, the Paradox of Sexual Politics

In the wake of the US Supreme Court decision in Obergefell et al. v. Hodges, US citizens can now claim a right to marriage without regard to their genital anatomy. No doubt this genital indiscrimination has much to recommend it. Yet we might wonder why this achievement represents the culmination of almost fifty years of sexual politics. To answer this question, the essay returns Guy Hocquenghem’s seminal 1972 text Homosexual Desire to consider the latent friction between sexual and politics that Hocquenghem identifies and that continues to characterize our contemporary moment. It then situates Hocquenghem’s text in relation to Michel Foucault’s reflections about origins of politics in ancient Greek in his first lecture course at the Collège de France, which took place the year before Hocquenghem’s book appeared, to suggest that the relation between the sexual and the political may inevitably entail paradox.