Male Fantasies Research Articles

The Faustian ‘Gretchen’: Overlooked Aspects of a Famous Male Fantasy

This essay takes issue, on the one hand, with the traditional interpretation of Goethe's Margarete as representing the Natural, the Naïve, and the selflessly loving feminine as well as, on the other hand, the feminist interpretation of Margarete as a male fantasy figure who props up the masculine self-perception of the male as a dominant and titanic "striver." Both interpretative tendencies overlook the close analogy with which Margarete's aspirations and behaviour mirror Faust's own regarding a shared readiness to rebel, break all the rules, and dare the ultimate, which gives Margarete her own independent agenda, makes her an individual in her own right. In this light the three key paradigms of femininity – Madonna, whore/witch, and nature – which shape the presentation of this character are investigated, as well as the relation of the "Gretchentragödie" to notions of the classical, the role of sexual fulfilment in Margarete's decision-making, and the significance of this character's two names. The essay concludes that, excepting the area of intellectualised self-consciousness, Margarete must be regarded as a striving individual who engages in autonomous activity, which much previous criticism has made the domain of the self-determined modern male subject.

Masochism and The Mother, Pedagogy and Perversion

Female masochism is a male fantasy. Jacques Lacan, ctd in Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Psychoanalysis 173 Erika's contract: If I beg, tighten my bonds, please. Adjust the belt by at least two o...

THE PERSONIFICATION OF LUST

Introduction Just as the human imagination often creates other supernatural creatures to serve as archetypes personifying visceral human emotions, Chinese of the Qing period frequently attribute male sexual fantasies to manipulation by fox spirits (huli jing ilfflft) engaged in Inner Alchemy practices. From medieval times, the Chinese have dreaded fox spirits,1 which they have believed appear as beautiful women in order to bewitch men and suck away their energy. Traditionally, the Chinese view such amorous encounters as states caused by outside forces that subject the victim to temptations, and often to hallucinations as well.2 Following Western demonological usage, we will term such states obsessions.3 For the Chinese, the vul-

The Return of Women in Howard Barker’s Seven Lears: The Pursuit of the Good

Recent feminist criticism on Shakespeare's King Lear, led by psychoanalytic critics such as Coppelia Kahn and Janet Adelman, has attempted to excavate 'the maternal subtext,' disclosing patriarchal ideology and the hidden mother inscribed in Lear's inner psyche. Concentrating on the complete absence of literal mothers in the play and exploring male anxieties and fantasies about maternal presence, the feminists examine the way in which a repressed femaleness called 'the mother' returns. In a similar vein, Howard Barker's Seven Lears: The Pursuit of the Good, a prequel to King Lear, stems from the observation that maternal characters are completely absent from the Shakespeare play. Tracing the development of Lear from a boy to a tyrant, Barker's bold adaptation puts a central question of why the mother is expunged from memory, and why she is reduced to the object of an 'unjust but necessary hatred' from Lear. Interpreting this absence as a deliberate form of oppression, Barker tries to restore the motivations and histories of the female characters subsumed into a narrative dominated by Lear in King Lear. Focusing on the contradictory relationship between goodness and politics and the issues of ethical responsibility in a patriarchal world, this paper explores how Barker's adaptation deals with the effect of the missing mother from a feminist perspective. Barker subverts the classical tragic (and misogynist) rhythm inscribed in the text through the unsympathetic characterization of Lear, his repressive relations with his daughters and the introduction of the missing queen, Clarissa. First of all, Barker sees Lear as a man veering between social conscience, embodied by the Gaol, a collective of the unjustly imprisoned, and the corrupting influences of Bishop, an authoritative father figure to Young Lear. The process of Lear's gradual absorption into patriarchal ideology is explored through his complicity in inventing his own version of abuse by the 'wicked' daughters. In Barker's adaptation, Lear's incestuous desire towards Cordelia, suggested by Kahn and Adelman, is further developed and expanded through Lear's repressive relationship with Prudentia, his mother-in-law and the very site where his sexual needs are unfold. Above alt, Barker's missing queen, Clarissa, embodies the qualities of moral integrity totally lacking in Lear himself. Establishing her final expulsion as a clear sign of Lear's moral inertia and degradation, Seven Lears moves further than the psychoanalytic insights provided by Kahn, who saw Lear's madness as a product of the rage at being deprived of maternal presence. Barker suggests Clarissa's unflinching honesty and political perception as a constant attempt on Lear's sanity as welt as a real reason for his anxiety.

Le sec et l'humide by Jonathan Littell

Le sec et l'humide by Jonathan Littell

Amor nello specchio (1622): Mirroring, Masturbation, and Same-Sex Love

Amor nello specchio (1622):Mirroring, Masturbation, and Same-Sex Love Emily Wilbourne (bio) The literal translation of Amor nello specchio is "love in the mirror," although "love reflected" provides a better sense of the phrase's meaning. The play by that name was first published in Paris by Giovan Battista Andreini in 1622 and has recently come to occupy a remarkable position in the work of scholars and theater practitioners.1 The magnetic pull of this particular text is attributable to the twists and turns of the commedia plot. The main character, Florinda, is initially in love with her own reflection. After some time she transfers her affections to the beautiful Lidia, and by the end of the play she has settled on Lidia's identical twin brother, Eugenio, a self-described hermaphrodite played by a woman in drag. This romp through variously configured sexual relations is fascinating for its frank depictions of female sexuality—Florinda consummates each of her three love affairs—and also for an ending that remains sexually and delightfully ambiguous despite the specter of resolution into compulsory heterosexuality. At the same time, the "real-world" backdrop to the play's performance and publication complicates further the shifting erotic allegiances staged as Amor nello specchio. The playwright, Giovan Battista, was both author and actor, although his character, Lelio, filled a fairly minor role. In this play Lelio is sharply rejected by a self-obsessed Florinda and after a failed attempt at seduction by magical incantation abandons the feminine temptations of romantic love in favor of a career in the military. Not only Lelio but all [End Page 54] the male characters of this play are shunted sideways, with the dramatic interest of Amor nello specchio securely centered on the female characters. The lead, Florinda, was played by Virginia Ramponi Andreini, wife of Giovan Battista and a renowned singer and actress in her own right, while her onstage lovers, Lidia and the (male) hermaphrodite, Eugenio, were both played by her husband's real-life lover, Virginia Rotari.2 In performance, then, the shifting sexual configurations of Amor nello specchio embodied and reconstituted the scandalous ménage à trois of the actors' offstage love lives. Add to this an onstage masturbation scene, some cross-dressing, and the temporal interval of nearly four hundred years that separates the early modern play from our postmodern moment, and it is clear why this text proved and proves so fascinating. Previous scholarship has valued Amor nello specchio for the compelling exegetical unfolding of male fantasies of female sexuality, with Siro Ferrone's Attori mercanti corsari (1993) and Piermario Vescovo's "Narciso, Psiche e Marte 'mestruato.' Una lettura di Amor nello specchio di Giovan Battista Andreini" (2004) the most notable examples.3 Understood thus, Giovan Battista's stylistic maturity is achieved at the expense of his female companions, with the characters of Florinda and Lidia repeatedly understood to ventriloquize the artistic product of a male author. Amor nello specchio is seen as both symptom of and transcendent signifier for Giovan Battista's extramarital affair: literary mastery routed through the penis. This model of reception is present also in the program notes of the two modern stagings the work has received, both directed by Luca Ronconi (1987 and 2002), and in a 1999 Italian film entitled Amor nello specchio, a period drama very loosely based around the play and on the historico-biographical circumstances that preceded its publication. 4 The film was directed by Salvatore Maira, who, with Anna Michela Borracci, published a modern edition of the original play in 1997; the edition includes an introduction by Maira that lightly revises an article first published in 1994.5 The film exists, therefore, in a weird historiographic relationship with the 1622 text and with modern scholarship on the work, functioning as an attempt to imagine and explain the conditions of the play's conception. In contrast with these authors and directors, my interest lies elsewhere. In relation to the improvised practice and formulaic conventions of commedia dell'arte performance, questions of authorship are inherently problematic.6 Stock characters were the norm, and each actor brought a repertoire of gestures, sounds, and phrases to his or her performance...

Intimate outsiders: the harem in Ottoman and Orientalist art and travel literature

Until now, the notion of a cross-cultural dialogue has not figured in the analysis of harem paintings, largely because the Western fantasy of the harem has been seen as the archetype for Western appropriation of the Orient. In Intimate Outsiders , the art historian Mary Roberts brings to light a body of harem imagery that was created through a dynamic process of cultural exchange. Roberts focuses on images produced by nineteenth-century European artists and writers who were granted access to harems in the urban centers of Istanbul and Cairo. As invited guests, these Europeans were “intimate outsiders” within the women’s quarters of elite Ottoman households. At the same time, elite Ottoman women were offered intimate access to European culture through their contact with these foreign travelers. Roberts draws on a range of sources, including paintings, photographs, and travelogues discovered in archives in Britain, Turkey, Egypt, and Denmark. She rethinks the influential harem works of the realist painter John Frederick Lewis, a British artist living in Cairo during the 1840s, whose works were granted an authoritative status by his British public despite the actual limits of his insider knowledge. Unlike Lewis, British women were able to visit Ottoman harems, and from the mid-nineteenth century on they did so in droves. Writing about their experiences in published travelogues, they undermined the idea that harems were the subject only of male fantasies. The elite Ottoman women who orchestrated these visits often challenged their guests’ misapprehensions about harem life, and a number of them exercised power as patrons, commissioning portraits from European artists. Their roles as art patrons defy the Western idea of the harem woman as passive odalisque.

Eyeballs and Icicles, a Swimming Pool and a Dummy: Shakespeare and The Revenger’s Tragedy on Stage in 2008

Playgoing in 2008 yielded some distinctive choices and memorable images. I will concentrate on ten productions that include an award-winning Othello, two versions of King Lear, five comedies, the Doctor Who Hamlet, and a well-staged Revenger's Tragedy. The RSC Merchant of Venice received some savage reviews but provided moments worth putting on the record. Shylock, before departing his house in 2.5, set up the later reference to his turquoise ring (I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor--3.1.121-22) (1) by taking it off his finger and making a long diagonal stage cross to deliver it to Jessica. Perhaps owing to director Tim Carroll's extensive experience at the Globe, this show included more than the usual amount of direct interplay between actors and playgoers. I have seen other productions where Nerissa and Portia in 1.2 singled out members of the audience as the suitors being mocked or Gratiano ventured into the stalls (here he snuggled up with a young lady in the second row), but in the final scene such interactive stage business went a step farther. When Portia delivered to Antonio the news about the safe arrival of three of his argosies, she plucked a paper from a gentleman seated in the first row and added: You shall not know by what strange accident / I chanced on this letter (5.1.278-79). A moment later Nerissa tried the same trick when offering the special deed of gift (292) to Lorenzo and Jessica but elicited only puzzlement from the seated playgoer (who helpfully offered her program)--and the actress then found the sought-for item in her pocket. The most distinctive choice was linked to the three casket scenes, with the desired effect not fully clear (several of my astute play-going friends came away mystified). From where I was seated, I could see no visible distinction in the color of the caskets, nor were they opened so that the choosers could extract the skull, fool's head, and portrait. Rather, the three scenes were staged with Portia, dressed in white, placed in an upstage recess (with an echo chamber effect) surrounded by stalagmites and stalactites, while the choosers pored over large objects from which they had to clear away mist to read the inscriptions. The point (which, I confess, I did not catch during the Morocco segment) was that the caskets were frozen, as, in a sense was Portia, an Ice Maiden or Ice Princess who could only be freed by a Prince Charming with the leaden answer. When Bassanio did choose correctly; all three caskets cracked into small pieces--though when I saw the show only two of them did so (and I was told that a few times none of them fulfilled the effect). The reviews had prepared me for director Conall Morrison's RSC Taming of the Shrew, for, as predicted, it was very funny, especially in the first half, and was geared to a concept wherein Stephen Boxer's drunken Sly tried unsuccessfully to join a stag party outside a bar, was rejected, even head-butted by a woman (Michelle Gomez) who was to reappear as Katherine, and fell asleep to be discovered by a Lady rather than a Lord and subjected to the trick acted out in the second Induction scene. At the end of 1.1 (our first view of Bianca, Kate, Lucentio, et al.) Sly was awakened, led to center stage, and handed a playscript whereupon he began, hesitatingly, to deliver Petruchio's lines, so that the remainder of the play acted out Sly's drunken male fantasy of success and control. At the end of the final scene, the players stripped Petruchio of his costume and departed on their truck (bearing the joke license plate XME K8), leaving Petruchio-Sly alone, bewildered, clad only his boxer shorts--the final image. Although I knew this story line was coming (and had previously seen comparable Sly-Petruchio configurations), I was not prepared for the full effect as staged here. First, the Kate-Petruchio rough wooing scene (2.1) was not played so as to display a growing understanding or attraction, however subtle, between the two. …

Gender, Sexuality and the Poetics of Identification

If the volume of writing about lesbians is any indication, nineteenth-century France was profoundly interested in female homosexuality, Both non-fiction and creative writers alike diagnosed symptoms, detailed traits, described milieus, devised plots, and imagined couples and couplings of women. The authors who lent their time, their analyses and their imaginations to the contemplation of lesbians came from a broad array of disciplines, including medicine, criminology, journalism, and fiction writing. They were also nearly exclusively men. l During the first half of the century, notable literary works included Diderot (La Religieuse, published 1796), Balzac (La Fille aux yeux d 'or, 1835) and Gautier (Mademoiselle de Maupin, 1835). Following the mid-century and the medicalization of sexual pathology, this literary vogue flourished and attracted authors whose works on female homosexuality ranged across the genres and registers: the popular, pornographic, naturalist, and decadent novel; and poetry high and low. The phenomenon of male interest in female homosexuality, which Naomi Schor, among others, has referred to as male lesbianism,2 was (and, to judge from contemporary pornography, still is) an overwhelmingly voyeuristic obsession motivated by a libidinous curiosity about sexual activity between women. Male fantasies about lesbian sexuality clearly inspired some explicitly erotic texts (Mus set's Gamiani, 1833; Henry Monnier's 'Deux Gougnottes', 1864; among others) and undoubtedly motivated more mainstream portraits as well, from Adolphe Belot's popular novel, Mile Giraud, ma femme (1870) to Catulle Mendes's Mephistophela (1890). Voyeuristic representations oflesbians, however, frequently did doubfe duty: they served to warn readers as well as to excite them. Lesbian sexuality represented excess and menace, dangerous not only to other women (seduction, corruption), but also to men (unrequited fatal attraction, unbridled jealousy). Consequently, literary texts from the period often punished the lesbian characters-whether sympathetic victims or predatory seductresses-

On Rereading Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies

Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies has generated broad interest in the literature of several academic disciplines. His analysis of the symbolic and gender dynamics of the leaders of the German Freikorps (German paramilitary mercenary units of the period 1918-1923) has been widely generalized into a theory of modern masculinity. Two issues inadequately explored in Theweleit's work nonetheless must be read through more recent empirical and theoretical work in history and sociology: (1) the formative role of colonial military experience in the careers of the German Freikorps officers who provide the material for his analysis and (2) the complex historical problem of the facticity of rape in Freikorps activity.

It's not about the tool, it's about the ideology

While it is often argued that technology could act as a change agent and transform educational practices, individuals, communities, government and society holding their own ideological beliefs limit such a liberalisation of the educational system. To show that the use of educational technology is part of a dialectical struggle this article explores the: current use of technology in the classroom; development of standards and approaches to learning technology; and the use of computer and video games. The design, development, integration and use of technology in the classroom is driven by individual and institutional ideologies that support current hegemonic constructions maintained through observation and control systems. The development of standards for learning management systems (for example the Sharable Content Object Reference Model and the associated Learning Object Metadata Standard) underpin the concept of Reusable Learning Objects (RLO). The conceptualization, development, deployment and use of RLOs is ideologically driven and has little to do with contemporary ideas of learning and everything to do with fundamental and totalitarian ideologies of instruction. The blended approach to learning, where technology is introduced into existing courses where appropriate, sees technological objects (such as digital information, discussion boards, and chat sessions) as an additional component to existing courses. The use of technology in such a way does not allow for the re-conceptualisation of existing ideological practices and therefore limits educational transformation. Computer game technology could be used as a powerful tool to support learning. However, many supporters of the use of games in education argue for the use of simulations that are either ideologically suspect (for example the use of game software used to train military personal as a useful educational device) or based on model-using rather that model-building. An analysis of successful computer games shows that players are presented with either realistic environments that include complex multifaceted characters involved in richly textured narratives or are designed to support male fantasies (both erotic and authoritarian), inculcate self-discipline (especially through reflex), include control-and-monitoring (preparing workers for a global economy) and are gender exclusive. This article argues that technology can only be used within specific idiosyncratic, homological and inclusive ideologies that in most cases reproduce the past into the future, which is making real a neo-liberal dream. South African Journal of Higher Education Vol. 21 (6) 2008: pp. 655-671

文学の危機と の召喚 : 女性の執筆行為と太宰治・川端康成の少女幻想の間( 日本文学協会第62回大会二日目文学研究の部 の黄泉がえり)

文学の危機と の召喚 : 女性の執筆行為と太宰治・川端康成の少女幻想の間( 日本文学協会第62回大会二日目文学研究の部 の黄泉がえり)

Textual Fidelity

Textual Fidelity Laurence Raw Jennifer M. Jeffers Britain Colonized: Hollywood’s Appropriation of British Literature. Palgrave, 2006. 282 pages; $69.00. Britain Colonized makes uncomfortable reading for anyone interested in contemporary British culture and its representation in recent Hollywood movies. Jeffers argues that, when faced with the task of bringing a British literary text (or British icon) to the screen, directors inevitably resort to accepted Hollywood formulae and American cultural standards. The reasons for this are mostly commercial: in the pursuit of maximum profit, no one cares about textual fidelity. Consequently, filmmakers reshape texts according to “American middle-class expectation” (112). Jeffers concludes that “capitalist Hollywood is now the only global model” for adaptation (206)—which has expedited the destruction of British culture by Americanization (221). Jeffers included several case studies of individual adaptations to prove her point. In Merchant-Ivory’s Remains of the Day (1993), the focus is on Christopher Reeve’s Lewis, who is seen alone in Dartington Hall in the concluding scenes of the film. The sequence demonstrates how “America has arrived and England is receding” (75). Neil Labute rewrites A.S.Byatt’s Possession (2002) as a western with three standard characters—the hero, the society, and the villain. As in Remains, the central character, Roland Mitchell (Aaron Eckhart), is an American who eventually forges a new order in English society, this time in academic and literary circles by marrying Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow) and thereby combining, in Jeffers’s view, “the line of the great [English] poets with Roland’s heroic American bloodline” (92). Sharon Maguire’s version of Bridget Jones Diary (2001) transforms the eponymous heroine (Renee Zellweger) into a Lucille Ball figure, whose “Emersonian self-reliance renders her a winner as a career woman and heterosexual” (171). Stephen Frears’ version of High Fidelity (2000) goes even further and eliminates the British content altogether, transforming Nick Hornby’s portrayal of a 90s “lad” into “an American male fantasy.” At one point Bruce Springsteen is brought in to give the central character, Rob ( John Cusack), advice about his love life; this cultural transplanting proves that “we are in an all-male, all-American fantasy world (202). Jeffers concludes her study with an analysis of John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (1999), wherein the immortal Bard has been re-territorialized into “a hip, sexy, but, at heart, all-around average film guy” (226). Madden invests British history with an American spin by showing how an upwardly mobile Shakespeare learned to scheme his way into bettering his situation. These strategies are nothing new; since the earliest days of cinema, British literary texts have continually been reshaped to suit changing tastes. Shakespeare’s plays were transformed into one- and two-reelers in the early part of last century, while the western formula has been successfully introduced into adaptations as diverse as The Four Feathers (1936), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) and How Green Was My [End Page 83] Valley (1942). What is perhaps more interesting is to ascertain whether the process of adapting texts has changed over time. Jeffers herself is in no doubt that recent adapters have responded to seismic shifts within the education system as teachers place less and less emphasis on textual study, preferring to show the film versions instead in the belief that this medium seems more suitable for tele-literate learners. In turn, this approach has created an even greater demand for Americanized adaptations incorporating familiar characters, plots, and situations. While Jeffers’s claim has its merits, it does not necessarily represent a cause for concern. Any response to a cinematic text is inevitably shaped by the socio-economic conditions in which the act of viewing takes place. Just as those conditions are limitless, so too are the possibilities for new constructions of “British” or “American” culture or for a combination of both. The original text will, in this sense, never be reproduced. Jeffers’s use of collective terms such as “the American audience” might suit her overall argument, but it underestimates this eternal variation—by each society, each studio, each individual—on the original text. The task of evaluating audience responses to a particular genre—the heritage film, for instance—is...

“A sick man’s dream”: Jephthah, Judges, and Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion

Even a cursory reading of the eleventh chapter of Judges suggests obvious parallels between the Jephthah story and Blake’sVisions of the Daughters of Albion; however, Blake’s six illustrations of Judges (including two of Jephthah and his daughter) irrefutably document his appropriation of the story. No critic has connected the Jephthah story of virgin sacrifice to Oothoon’s fate, nor have Blake’s illustrations of the Judges narrative received much attention. My argument is that Blake’s contrary reading of the book of Judges should inform our critical reading ofVisions.This intertextual analysis emphasizes the poem’s representation of the female body as a site of sacrifice and how both Blake’s illustrations and the poem position readers for this spectacle of virginity and violence. Reading Blake’s illustrations of the Jephthah narrative—visual revelations of issues of sexual power—amplifies the poem’s cultural power, its iconic representation of a patriarchal obsession with virginity, demonstrable in late eighteenth-century British culture but with ties to biblical, Hebraic representations of virginity and violence. Blake’s culturally-targeted revision of Jephthah’s daughter defies eighteenth-century British cultural strictures about female purity and marital customs by transforming the daughter virgin’s lament atnotbeing able to marry into Oothoon’s redefinition of sexual purity. Further, my reading refutes the widespread critical opinion that in the ending of the poem, the heroine Oothoon offers free love that is, in Mellor’s words, a “male fantasy,” serving the interests of the “male libertine, ”and underscores the poem’s critique of mandated female virginity and culturally-endorsed violence. Finally, Finally, the illustrations and the poem document Blake’s engagement with this biblical book where Israel’s destiny unfolds through accounts of judges who again and again misjudge, who enact sexual violence and fail to see its connection with their own violent ends. Blake’sVisionsbegins and ends with a chorus of daughters—in between it chronicles the horrors of exploitation, rape, slavery, cultural imperialism and links those to individual sexual repression, like Theotormon’s troubled image of Oothoon, like Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter, truly a “sick man’s dream.”

Marked women: prostitutes and prostitution in the cinema

Julia Roberts played a prostitute, famously, in Pretty Woman. So did Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, Jane Fonda in Klute, Karina in Vivre sa vie, Greta Garbo in Anna Christie, and Charlize Theron, who won an Academy Award for Monster. This engaging and generously illustrated study explores the depiction of female prostitute characters and prostitution in world cinema, from the silent era to the present-day industry. From the woman with control over her own destiny to the woman who cannot get away from her pimp, Russell Campbell shows the diverse representations of prostitutes in film. Marked Women classifies fifteen recurrent character types and three common narratives, many of them with their roots in male fantasy. The Happy Hooker, for example, is the liberated woman whose only goal is to give as much pleasure as she receives, while the Avenger, a nightmare of the male imagination, represents the threat of women taking retribution for all the oppression they have suffered at the hands of men. The Love Story, a common narrative, represents the prostitute as both heroine and anti-heroine, while Condemned to Death allows men to manifest, in imagination only, their hostility toward women by killing off the troubled prostitute in an act of cathartic violence. The figure of the woman whose body is available at a price has fascinated and intrigued filmmakers and filmgoers since the very beginning of cinema, but the manner of representation has also been highly conflicted and fiercely contested. Campbell explores the cinematic prostitute as a figure shaped by both reactionary thought and feminist challenges to the norm, demonstrating how the film industry itself is split by fascinating contradictions.

Cárceles de amor: ‘Gender trouble’ and male fantasies in fifteenth-century Castile

The specimens of the fifteenth-century sentimental romance are strange texts. This also holds true for Diego de San Pedro's Carcel de amor which the inventor of the novela sentimental, Marcelino Me...

Transforming Feminine Categories: Genealogies of Virginity and Sainthood

The categories of virginity and sainthood, often used as norms of femininity, are historically and contextually constructed. Genealogies of these categories reveal definitions of female subjectivity in accordance with male desires. Traditional conceptions of virginity have implications for theories of female development and sexuality, conceptions of the psychoanalytic process, and theories of social symbolism. Notions of virginity as an unblemished state, the first penetration by a penis as an irrevocable transformation to womanhood, and defloration as a developmental milestone in female sexuality derive from male fantasies of female purity that translate into justifications for social structures of control and ownership. While fantasies of sainthood played significant roles in the work of both Sigmund and Anna Freud, their images of saints, which they did not analyze, were unconsciously shaped by a Victorian sensibility. Because the psychoanalytic legacy is androcentrically informed, analysts may be hampered in their efforts to treat the pathologies of perfection that continue to plague women. Contesting and unsettling conventional epistemological assumptions open up the categories of virginity and sainthood to images and representations of female autonomy and integrity. The critical analyses offered here contribute to theories of the plasticity of gender and the social construction of femininity.

Male fantasies about lesbian desire: A review of Spike Lee’s film She hate me

Male fantasies about lesbian desire: A review of Spike Lee’s film She hate me

Spectacles of Pain: War, Masculinity and the Masochistic Fantasy in Amos Gitai's Kippur

Israeli war films of the 1950s and 60s focused on the typically male fantasy in which a soldier is prepared to sacrifice his body to torture and harm—and sometimes even to death—in order to serve national ideals. Masochistic enjoyment is a substantial component in the construction of the fighting male body as a war machine, but in the 50s war films this component was absent. The materiality of bodily pain appeared as a representation of an abstract national idea. What was omitted in these films becomes a spectacle of pain in Amos Gitai's film, Kippur (2000). The film constructs a masochistic fantasy whereby the fighting male body is stripped of its metaphoric national meaning, turning now to its bodily corporality, to flesh, blood, and bone. Gitai's film exposes the violence and suffering that are denied by Israel's culture of war, and which are required for the very construction of nationalism.

Edward Said and Assia Djebar: A Contrapuntal Reading

In Orientalism, Edward Said defines the relationship between the Occident and the Orient as one of power and domination, positing Orientalism as an exclusively male phenomenon, and the Oriental woman a projection of European male fantasy. It is fitting, therefore, to examine Algerian women's writings as expressions of resistance to Empire. This article proposes to read Djebar and Said's personal trajectories contrapuntally and then apply his theoretical concepts, particularly the notion of contrapuntal reading, to the Algerian novelist's writings. I am responding to the concern that Said largely marginalized most women and noncanonical writers and their works by suggesting that Djebar, who shares Said's preoccupations with cultural imperialism, extends and develops his analyses of Orientalism and imperialism in her work.