Male Love Research Articles

Please (Don't) Want Me

In certain clinical situations, desire and arousal are significant components of the intersubjective field. In these cases, the analyst's wish to bear witness extends to both mind and body. This article will explore the impact of absent, violent, or otherwise unavailable fathers on their heterosexual sons and the resulting longing for male attention, admiration, and love, which often includes a need to be admired physically and romantically in ways their fathers could not provide. When this desire emerges in the treatment, the male analyst who experiences an erotic countertransference response and can manage potential anxiety and shame is in a unique position to provide the patient with these necessary supplies. Two case examples will be considered.

The Orator/O Le Tulafale (review)

Reviewed by: The Orator/O Le Tulafale Sadat Muaiava and Tamasailau Suaalii-Sauni The Orator/O Le Tulafale. Feature film, 110 minutes, color, 2011. Written and directed by Tusi Tamasese; produced by Catherine Fitzgerald; distributed by Transmission Films Ltd (in Australasia) and the New Zealand Film Commission (global). Samoan with English subtitles. Release information available at http://theoratorfilm.co.nz/ Samoan director Tusi Tamasese's debut feature The Orator/O Le Tulafale simultaneously comforts and challenges its Samoan audience—it takes us on a provocative, nonjudgmental excursion into the icons, nuances, and metaphors of Sāmoa's history and society and into Samoan ways of feeling and thinking. As Samoans engaged in the development of Samoan and Pacific studies, we are thrilled by the opportunity that this film offers to explore the nuances of contemporary Samoan life without losing sight of the profound significance of particular cultures for addressing universal human concerns. The Orator appears to be a muse working to awaken and tease Samoan and Pacific imaginations, inspiring us to move beyond banal, superficial, and dogmatic interpretations in order to get "beneath the surface," as Tusi observed in a 2011 interview with Stephen Carnell (http://www.theprimateperspective.com/). As its [End Page 438] nuances and meanings surface, come alive, and dance, enticing viewers to delve deeper, the story encourages Samoans to make sense for themselves of what fa'asāmoa (Samoan culture) might or ought to be and how it resonates with other cultures. As muse, the film titillates our intellectual capacities and awakens those parts of our Samoan or Pacific selves that may have been deadened by the overwhelming impossibilities and tensions of contemporary monoliths—monolingualism, monoculturalism, monotheism, and even monogamy. Its sumptuous smorgasbord of visuals, sounds, and linguistic metaphors provides windows through which to study the rhetoric, practice, vulnerabilities, and strengths of what it might mean to be Samoan, to be "of Sāmoa," or to be of the increasingly global Pacific. The Orator might also be provocateur, subversively seeking our express and complicit acknowledgment (as Samoans) that there is sophisticated beauty in a chiefly culture that promotes simplicity and restraint. Described by the director as his "hero" in one online interview (blog.flicks.co.nz, 4 Oct 2011), the Samoan chief Leopa'ō is someone bestowed with voice and power—raised to speak less and listen more, to speak only when he must and, when he must, to speak in a manner that is loving and aims always for peace. Rhetoric and metaphor are core tools in the oratorical repertoire of Samoan chiefs because of the assumption that their allusive qualities help to avoid confrontation—provided, of course, that those interpreting the allusive speech understand its cultural logic. As provocateur, the film forces us to admit that at times we Samoans can be an inflexibly proud people, overly strict and emotionally undemonstrative. It forces us to recognize that we too grapple with issues of violence—structural and personal, blatant and subtle, and often gendered. In Sāmoa's hierarchical and patriarchal society, there is high potential for the negative exploitation of neighbors and family members, often realized, as the film suggests, in the normalization of domestic violence. The film is saturated with scenes in which the potential for violence seems ever-present, either in speech or by gesture—from the use of words such as 'aikae (eat shit) and pogāua (translated as "pain in the neck") as threats or in jest, to the use of threatening stances while holding a machete or rocks. At the structural level, a masculine chauvinistic violence in particular is implicit, for example, in the retributive treatments imposed on Litia, one of the film's heroines, compared with that imposed on her married male lover. Viewers may also not realize the subtle but significant and gender-specific link in the film between the pe'a as symbol of Samoan male courage and the Samoan saying, "E i ai sou ake?" ("Do you have any balls?). But perhaps the film's most subversively persuasive force is its simple message about alofa. As embraced in The Orator, alofa forgives our transgressions—what Tui Atua, in the 2011 Professor James Ritchie Memorial Lecture Series keynote...

Byron and Ottoman love: Orientalism, Europeanization and same-sex sexualities in the early nineteenth-century Levant

Byron has been seen as central to a Romantic vision of the Levant, the struggle for Greek independence and an idealization of Greek male love. Yet not much sustained attention has been given to Byron’s same-sex experience with Muslims or to the Ottoman culture of his beloved Greek boys. Byron grasped opportunities for same-sex erotic experience that the Ottoman Empire offered; yet by helping to establish a homogeneous Greek Christian state, he helped magnify the power of the Orthodox clergy that still acts in Greece as a brake on homoeroticism. In helping to Europeanize the Greeks, he helped destroy aspects of the Islamic world that deeply appealed to him. Byron’s Orientalism made him a bridge-builder between East and West; today we should recognize both the patriarchal despotism and the sexual and cultural wealth of the Levant he celebrated and helped destroy.

The Recovery of Friendship: Male Love and Developmental Narrative in Tennyson’s In Memoriam

The Recovery of Friendship: Male Love and Developmental Narrative in Tennyson’s In Memoriam Sarah Rose Cole (bio) In July 1844, the barrister and journalist George Venables found a mysterious volume in the Temple chambers that he shared with his lifelong friend Henry Lushington. As leading members of the Cambridge Apostles, the secret society whose “brethren” kept up their bonds long after their days of college debating, Venables and Lushington allowed their chambers to be used as an unofficial meeting ground for Cambridge men passing through London.1 Thus, Venables may not have been much surprised to discover that his bookshelf contained an apparently abandoned manuscript by his fellow Apostle, Alfred Tennyson. Stuck behind the other books, the strange volume resembled a butcher’s account book in a very shabby condition; it contained the drafts of Tennyson’s untitled “elegies,” the brief poems that he had been periodically writing since the sudden death of his closest Cambridge friend Arthur Hallam in 1833. In response to Venables’s inquiry, Tennyson wrote: You had better keep the MSS which you mention till I see you. I suppose I must myself have slipt it behind your books to keep it out of people’s way, for I scarcely liked everyone who came in to overhaul those poems & moreover the volume itself was not fit to be seen, foul with the rust dust and mildew of innumerable moons.2 When Tennyson finally decided, in 1849, that it was time to make his private elegies “fit to be seen” by a wider public, he discovered that he had once again mislaid the manuscript in the Temple, where Venables and Lushington had often offered the poet a resting place in his life of “genteel vagrancy.”3 This time, Tennyson decided that the manuscript must be retrieved at once, and assigned the task to his young disciple Coventry Patmore.4 While Patmore gleefully showed off the notebook to assorted friends as “the greatest literary [End Page 43] treasure in England—the manuscript of Tennyson’s next poem,” his wife copied out the verses at Tennyson’s request (qtd. Shatto and Shaw, p. 19). The still untitled book, printed from Emily Patmore’s fair copy, then went back to the Temple, where the proofs were corrected by the experienced journalist George Venables. While the story of In Memoriam’s journey to publication may be familiar to Tennyson scholars, the collaboration between Tennyson’s friends carries a symbolic resonance that has not yet been noticed. When Tennyson asked for the help of George Venables and Emily Patmore, he brought together the real-life models for Thackeray’s George Warrington (the charismatic “woman-hater” of Pendennis) and Coventry Patmore’s Honoria, better known as the “Angel in the House.”5 Although the equation of literary characters with their supposed models tends to obscure rather than illuminate literary texts, the image of the iconic Victorian bachelor Warrington and the “Angel in the House” laboring together over In Memoriam is too fitting to pass up. No other Victorian text has had quite the dual life of In Memoriam, a poem that came to be read—and continues to be read in modern criticism—as both a ritual text of Victorian household piety and the most extended English poem on male same-sex love. In the extensive critical debate over the relation between marital domesticity and same-sex bonds in In Memoriam, scholars have shared one over-riding assumption: that the most salient form of male-male attachment in Tennyson’s work is what we would now call “homosexuality.” While earlier readings often take a defensive stance, seeking to explain how the marital imagery of In Memoriam does not point to a homosexual attachment between Tennyson and Hallam, more recent studies generally argue that the poem either expresses or attempts to neutralize homosexual desire.6 In both strands of criticism, male-male love appears as a subversive force (either feared or validated for its divergence from sexual norms), while domestic relationships stand for Victorian normalcy. I suggest, however, that this dichotomy between normalcy and subversion has obscured the connections between same-sex love and the dominant forms of Victorian gender and class identity...

Vision and Gender in Malory's Morte Darthur (review)

Reviewed by: Vision and Gender in Malory's Morte Darthur Benedick Turner Molly Martin . Vision and Gender in Malory's Morte Darthur. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010. 201p. In Vision and Gender in Malory's Morte Darthur, Molly Martin argues that the Morte is mainly concerned with "defining and valorizing the male community of knights and its specific version of romance masculinity" (1). According to Martin, Malory's "masculinist project" depends upon vision, in particular how masculinity is produced in images of masculine bodies and behaviors. Right at the start, therefore, Martin makes it clear how her work is supplying something that is lacking from the existing body of Malory scholarship: a book-length study of the relationship between vision and gender in the Morte. Martin rightly notes that this lack is especially surprising given our age's critical interest in vision, thereby encouraging her readers to believe that her book is an innovative contribution to a popular direction of scholarly inquiry. Martin's introduction explains how later-medieval ideas about seeing and being seen are more complicated than the theories of vision most commonly [End Page 95] embraced today: instead of being located primarily in the male gaze, visual power is apportioned between both the image and its viewer. Martin argues that the production of masculinity in the Morte depends in large part upon knights becoming "spectacle[s] of masculinity" that are viewed by a multilayered audience consisting of other characters, the narrator, and the readers: the reactions of these various audiences are essential to the text's valuation of masculinity. But Martin also describes how one of the most influential medieval theories of vision—the one asserted in the idea of courtly love as defined by Andreas Capellanus—manifests in the Morte to present the male lover as incapacitated by the sight of his beloved lady. While the knight's masculinity depends upon the images of his person and his masculine behavior being viewed by others, it is also endangered when he gazes upon his lady and is rendered passive by the suffering of desire. Martin's first chapter following her introduction focuses on "The Tale of Sir Gareth." It might seem imprudent for Martin to devote an entire chapter to just one episode; after all, her subject—the Morte in its entirety—is very long while her book is not (180 pages, quite a few of them dominated by notes, albeit ones justified by the breadth of Martin's research). However, "Sir Gareth" provides the clearest and most basic examples of the phenomena described in the introduction. Furthermore, the thorough examination of this story is especially welcome considering the one shortcoming of the introduction, which is that Martin is so busy explaining theories about vision and courtly love that she has to postpone presenting passages from the Morte. Admittedly, introductions are often light on evidence, but quotations from Andreas, Lacan, and Barthes show up before passages from Malory; a chapter that lingers on one part of the Morte and examines several substantial passages up close thus comes as a relief. Martin's ensuing chapters deftly expand the breadth of her focus without sacrificing depth of analysis, and in most cases it is immediately clear how each chapter will add a new layer to Martin's argument. Chapter Two examines the linked cases of Launcelot and Trystram, two men whose visibility is especially important to their status as champion knights and thus as ideals of masculinity: they must be seen fighting in battles and tournaments, and they must be seen as objects of female desire. But at the same time, the fact that their sexual desires are adulterous requires that they maintain a certain degree of invisibility. The third chapter might seem the least involving. It explores the cases of four more knights, including Gawayne, who either fail at creating masculine spectacles of themselves or choose not to do so. Martin's conclusion is that in every case, the knight who is not seen performing masculine action is marginalized by Arthurian society. Thus there are no exceptions to the rule Martin described in earlier [End Page 96] chapters, or rather the exceptions are punished so severely that...

"Nothing Feels as Real"

This article examines the emergence of in the 1980s, a genre of adolescent fiction that fused illness and romance narrative to reinforce the interdependent norms of able- bodiedness, heteronormativity, emotional management, and maturity among American youth. Spotlighting popular American young adult fiction, including Lurlene McDaniel's Dawn Rochelle series (1985-93) and Jean Ferris's Invincible Summer (1987), the article critiques teen sick-lit's ableist and sexist visions of disability and sexuality and attends to the ways in which these novels suggest transgressive crip possibilities for desiring disabled bodies and resisting ableist norms of gender, sexuality, and beauty. Finally, drawing novel links between disability studies and emergent affect theory, the article analyzes teen sick-lit as one understudied response to post-1968 liberal social movements and post-Fordist economic shifts toward service industries that commodified emotion. Everyone loves a good cry, and no one delivers heartwrenching (sic) stories better than Lurlene reads the opening line of the Random House Publishers website's biography for McDaniel. Adoring fans describe her fiction as cryin' and dyin', while her personal webpage offers a series of printable bookmarks bearing slogans such as Nothing feels as real as a Lurlene McDan- iel book. 1 McDaniel has penned over fifty young adult (YA) novels, which almost exclusively link an illness plotline, in which a white teen girl protagonist exhibits unexplained symptoms and receives a diagnosis and treatments for a chronic illness, with a romance plotline, in which her pursuit of a nondisa- bled and healthy male love interest parallels and positively affects her process of getting well. McDaniel's melancholy titles—Let Him Live (1993), Don't Die, My Love (1995), Sixteen and Dying (1992)—produce the expectation of sadness for readers. As the bookmark's slogan suggests, McDaniel's books, and others like them, conjure a relationship between realness and emotional intensity in which sadness connotes authenticity. McDaniel's novels represent a genre of YA literature that I am calling sick-lit, which emerged alongside the YA problem novel as a new literary form and market for teenagers. Often identified as 10-hankie-novels or t earjerkers, 1. An Amazon customer review by got2Breading describes McDaniel's My Secret Boyfriend as a deviation from McDaniel's typical 'cryin' and dyin'' stuff.

‘Affection in Education’: Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds and the politics of Greek love

The paper examines Edward Carpenter’s 1899 essay on education that defended the value of powerful same-sex attachments, either between older and younger boys or between teachers and pupils, in the context of Victorian ideologies of same-sex affection. Linda Dowling has described how ‘a homosexual counterdiscourse able to justify male love in ideal or transcendental terms’ was fashioned out of the discourse of Greek studies in 19th-century Oxford by Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and the Uranian poets. We argue that Carpenter’s position in both ‘Affection in Education’ and his pamphlet on Homogenic love is best interpreted not in terms of this particular counterdiscourse so much as in light of John Addington Symonds’ sharp political reaction against it, a reaction that was grounded in recent historical scholarship on the ancient Greeks and which rejected the idealisation of intellectualised, aristocratic boy-love in favour of a vision of egalitarian sexual relationships between men, and which was, in Carpenter’s own case, very closely associated with his own ideals of social and political progress.

The Beauty of the Beast: Fairy Tales as Mystical Texts in Simone Weil and Cristina Campo

a deformazione professionale (the English “professional bias” does not begin to convey the image of a mind irremediably deformed by one’s work), claiming there was nothing to be done about it. Now, after over two decades spent analyzing texts for a living, I too have my own deformazione professionale: it is difficult for those of us trained in literary criticism to read something and not interpret it—and, occasionally, over-interpret it. In the immensely popular tetralogy of vampire romances by Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, for example, I saw so much of my own familiar mystics: the nubile female protagonist is distraught with her love for a flawlessly beautiful, immortal male lover, whose perfection highlights her own insignificance. To me, the love affair between Edward the vampire and Bella the high-school senior is imaged, in some small ways, as the love between God and the human soul—the bridegroom and bride of Christian mysticism: like God, Edward is superhuman, perfect, male, and compellingly if a bit dangerously attractive; like the human soul, Bella risks much in close proximity with his fearsome intensity—if you would forgive the comparison, think of how shattered, how undone Teresa of Avila is during her ecstatic encounters. In terms of interpretive single-mindedness, I have found in Simone Weil’s and Cristina Campo’s readings of fairy tales kindred spirits—if you would once again forgive the comparison: their discovery of mystical love in fairy tales is not unlike mine in the Twilight series (Meyer’s books have indeed been likened to Campo’s favorite fairy tale, “Beauty and the Beast,” “La Belle et la Bete”: Bella Swan, the motherless female protagonist, is in love with a charming yet deadly monster). To different extents, popular narratives such as Twilight and fairy tales—not unlike spiritual texts such as mystical accounts and scriptural parables—abound in metaphors and extended similes pointing to another order of reality beyond the physical world. As Weil and Campo insist, proper attention to the deceptively simple surface of folktales and fairy tales leads the

Between the Back and the Front: Male Love in Humorous Tales of the Edo Period

Abstract The present article explores representations of male-male sexuality and eroticism in humorous tales of the Edo period. The point of departure for the discussion is the metaphor of ‘back’ and ‘front’, which delineated the sexual options available to a grown-up man, namely anal sex with males and vaginal sex with female partners. A brief preliminary overview of the custom of male love (nanshoku), which forms the unifying theme of the tales under discussion, is provided. After an introduction to the genre of Edo-period humorous tales (shōwa or kobanashi), the article centres on the depiction of male-male intercourse and eroticism in this type of literature, and argues that certain discrepancies, relevant from a gender perspective, become discernible in the respective representations of the two partners of a nanshoku relationship. It is shown how the metaphor of ‘back’ and ‘front’ is grounded in sexual practice, how it functioned and how it is employed for the achievement of a comic effect in the tales. The article then goes on to address the question of the extent to which male sexuality can be said to move ‘between the back and the front’, and some thoughts on gender and desire in the Edo period are offered.

LOVE KILLS: SIMULATIONS IN PENNA AGEING MODEL

The standard Penna ageing model with sexual reproduction is enlarged by adding additional bit-strings for love: Marriage happens only if the male love strings are sufficiently different from the female ones. We simulate at what level of required difference the population dies out.

Decision Making: Singin' in the Brain

Which neurons in the brain "decide" to initiate particular behaviors in response to sensory information? In this issue of Neuron, two papers (Kohatsu etal. and von Philipsborn etal.) identify candidates in the courtship circuitry of Drosophila. The activity of these neurons is both regulated by sex pheromones and necessary and sufficient to trigger male love song.

Jean-Luc Godard: The Cinema in Doubt

Jean-Luc Godard: The Cinema in Doubt

Notes on <i>Daddy</i>, 1973

These notes were written in June 1973. They are published here for the first time. The Daddy received its world premiere at the New York Film Festival in April 1973. I had made the in total collaboration with the French sculptress Niki de St. Phalle, and the general subject of the appeared to most people to be about Niki, her work and much more importantly her sexual fantasies: most of which seem to be about a total overthrow of patriarchy as we know it. The ninety minutes of the were divided into three parts. In the first part, Niki is played as a little girl by the eight year old daughter of one of Niki's former lovers, Clarice Rivers.1 In part two, Niki appeared as herself, I'm a big girl now, enacting a series of sexual rites and fantasies in front of the dead father, tied to a wheelchair, to whom Niki reveals the ecstasies she enjoys while seducing her girlfriends, the somewhat dubious experiences she puts up with while being seduced by her long suffering male lovers and numerous fantasies of revenge against men. In part three she indirectly reveals, and admits, that she is still trapped by her need to be in love with Daddy, or the memory of him and she accepts he will be [with her] forever, despite herself. The had started as a light- hearted exploration of Niki's sculpture and paintings. But gradually, by filming she came to understand the meaning of many of the symbols in her work ... huge, voluptuous sexy dancing Nanas as she called them, winsome little girls and birds, crosses and altars and other paraphernalia of Catholicism ... And the dragged us both into a harrowing ritual of mutual psychoanalysis, as further and further we plunged together in a journey through her unconscious (murky in the extreme) and my unconscious (even murkier) until the became much more a confession about our catastrophic sado- masochistic love affair, our mutual fantasies about power and castration, and our living out her primal scene of seduction, or imagined seduction by her father. As I was the camera and the rational, the director and the editor of the film, I was already cast as the seeing eye of Daddy anyway, morbidly peering into the most secret parts of her soul and sexuality. I had met Niki a week before she married the sculptor Jean Tinguely, with whom she had lived for the previous ten years.2 A month after the marriage she left Jean and came to live with me, outwardly for us to make a together, inwardly ... for us to see (perhaps) just how far we would take each other into that ecstatic madness we sensed we had to explore together. After a week or so, Jean- who was fascinated by all my falcons, which ended up perched on blocks in the back garden of Niki's house- and I became the best of friends and he was probably quite relieved I would be taking Niki off his hands for a couple of years, as she had made his life as difficult, at times, as she would make mine. Eigh teen months later, the child of our psychic, alchemical marriage, Daddy, was revealed to the world at the New York Film Festival, the premiere being held in the cinema attached to the Museum of Modern Art. Considering the nakedness of the film, the amateurish acting by all the non- professionals who played the various parts in the film, the raw anguish and bitterness that Niki revealed in the towards men at large, (or otherwise), and the complexity of the symbols and images derived from her work, the was well received and reviewed. The audience that night were mostly there to see an art film anyway, in [the] Art Museum, and the avant- garde ambience in the style and form of the was a language recognised and accepted. We probably never received such a sympathetic audience again; even though the was shown widely in Germany, Scandinavia, Switzerland and France. In November of the same year, the was shown at the London Film Festival with disastrous results- several critics refused to review any further festival entries after seeing it. …

<i>Gendered Dynamics in Latin Love Poetry</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Gendered Dynamics in Latin Love Poetry Aven McMaster Gendered Dynamics in Latin Love Poetry. Edited by Ronnie Ancona and Ellen Greene . Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Pp. 372. $55.00 (cloth). The study of gender in the Roman world and in Latin literature is a growing and vibrant field, and this volume makes an impressive and thought-provoking contribution to the subject. It is a collection of thirteen essays, most published here for the first time, about the complexities of gender in Latin amatory poetry. It is designed to contribute to the developing discussion of gender and sexuality in classics in general and particularly to the increasing interest in the importance of Latin love poetry as a site for the construction of and anxiety about male and female identity in Rome. Catullus, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid are the poets examined here, with the majority of essays concentrating on either Propertius or Ovid. While the collection is aimed mainly at classics scholars and students, there is much here that should be of interest to those working in other areas of gender studies, and some of the essays take the needs of nonspecialists into consideration. Some of the essays give very full background information in the footnotes, with dates of works and explanations of technical terms, but others have mainly bibliographical notes, and some references may be unclear for those without specific background in Latin poetry. All the passages from Latin and Greek texts are given both in the original language and translated, but generally the entire poem or poems under discussion are not given in the book, however, so the reader will have to find the texts elsewhere. There is also no index locorum, which would have been a valuable addition, since there are many passages cited and many close readings of individual texts. Included are essays of particular value for scholars who are not specialists in Latin poetry or even classics. The first essay, Trevor Fear's "Propertian Closure: The Elegiac Inscription of the Liminal Male and Ideological [End Page 615] Contestation in Augustan Rome," outlines the relationship between the elegiac male lover (young, elite, and deliberately resisting maturation into a productive adult) and the rejection, promotion, or accommodation of the normative ideals of Augustan Rome. Fear uses the example of the closural motifs of Propertius's third book to demonstrate the complexities of the elegiac construction of masculinity within the changing social and political world of post-Actium Rome. This essay will give a nonspecialist reader a good outline of the world in which most of the poetry under discussion is set and is particularly valuable for the nuanced approach Fear takes. Too often Roman poetry is seen either as embracing and justifying or as rejecting or subverting Augustus's political and moral programs. Fear resists this simplistic approach, and his argument is compelling. In "Impossible Lesbians in Ovid's Metamorphoses," Kirk Ormand examines Ovid's portrayal of love between two women (Iphis and Ianthe) in terms of Roman sexual and gender categories to see if it can or should be read as depicting "homosexuality," "homophobia" (an attack on female homoeroticism), or something else. This essay should be useful for classicists and nonclassicists alike, because he gives an intelligent summary of recent scholarly discussion of gender categories and sexuality at Rome and provides clear definitions of his use of the terms. He focuses on what can be reconstructed about female sexuality and gender and makes the important point that the ancient conception of sex requires an active role and a passive role; there can be no equal sexual act: "Ancient Rome perceived sex as essentially predicated on an asymmetry of power" (85). He concludes that the story of Iphis and Ianthe is about the impossibility of love between equals, in which there is no hierarchy of dominance, rather than an attack on female homoeroticism per se. One minor criticism is that Ormand needs to state more clearly that he is reconstructing Roman male thought about women's sexuality, not its realities. Nonetheless, this is a valuable contribution to an important topic. Hérica Valladares, in "The Lover as a Model Viewer: Gendered Dynamics in Propertius...

Priscilla Pena Ovalle, <em>Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom</em>

Reviewed by: Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex and Stardom Jennifer Zale (bio) Priscilla Pena Ovalle, Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex and Stardom. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Reviewed by A fair number of film stars trained to become professional dancers before beginning their careers in cinema. Audrey Hepburn, one of the more famous examples, planned to become a classical ballerina and trained with the legendary Marie Rambert before having her dream shattered by trauma suffered during World War II. Although Hepburn’s dancing is showcased in certain films like Funny Face with Fred Astaire, her name is by no means synonymous with dance. In Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom, Priscilla Pena Ovalle explores the careers of five Hollywood stars who could arguably be considered dancers before actresses. In any case the careers of Dolores Del Rio, Carmen Miranda, Rita Hayworth, Rita Moreno, and Jennifer Lopez cannot be divorced from the medium of dance that was crucial to their rise to stardom. Unlike Hepburn, all of these women are Latinas and therefore needed to use dance to create an “in-betweeness” (to borrow Ovalle’s term) to negotiate between the white and nonwhite worlds of Hollywood that were often not ready to accept a nonwhite actress in a lead role of a mainstream film (p. 4). In Dance and the Hollywood Latina, Ovalle discuss dance as a technique very generally because she is not a trained dance scholar (which she readily admits at the beginning of her book). This is a common problem occurring with film scholars who write about dance (from the silent era all the way to the present) and reminds us of the necessity for both dance and film scholars to work together on such projects in order to obtain the most accurate results. However, while this book may have been enriched by a deeper knowledge of dance technique and history, Ovalle’s lack of knowledge on this topic did not spoil her overall goal of explaining how these actresses used dance in order to become mainstream stars and appeal to Latino and possibly other marginalized audiences such as blacks. She does a particularly detailed job of describing costume, cosmetics, and hairstyle and relating these elements to [End Page 168] dance in a way that is often neglected by dance scholars. When considering a particular performance these elements can be equally as much a part of the dance as the actual steps themselves. For the Latina actresses discussed in this book, costume and physical appearance were fashioned by Hollywood and determined their public image just as much if not more than the actual dance steps they performed. Ovalle’s chapter on Delores Del Rio is especially intriguing since her films date back to the silent era and she is lesser known than the other actresses discussed in this book. The transition from silent to sound film was obviously extremely difficult for all actors not working in their native country as the language/accent barrier posed a new problem. Since so many actors were forced to stop working during this period, it is interesting, as Ovalle notes, that Del Rio herself continued to make films even if her roles were increasingly limited to those of visibly foreign characters. As Ovalle further points out, it is also interesting that film frequently made the association between “dancer,” “prostitute,” and “unconventional morals” (p. 25). Film periodicals that date back to the silent era mention numerous films starring actresses playing provocative—if not evil—Spanish or Latin vamps. These women are almost always dancers and there are often allusions to the subject of prostitution. The tango is a common theme in these films and the plot often involves the dark, mysterious woman outsmarting and sometimes murdering the white male love interest. One example would be roles played by Russian actresses Vera Karalli and Vera Kholodnya during the silent era. Both of these actresses were classically trained in ballet (Karalli was actually a prima ballerina at the Bolshoi Theatre) and both European with dark hair and features that would allow them to pass for Latin or Spanish. Indeed, dark haired actresses were popular during this...

Um currículo de masculinidades nos estádios de futebol

O artigo procura analisar diferentes masculinidades nos estádios de futebol e ver de que forma elas se hierarquizam, mostrando como as ações dos torcedores, seus cânticos, suas vestimentas e faixas estão envolvidos nas construções das masculinidades desses sujeitos. Os estádios exercem uma pedagogia: aprende-se quando gritar, quando calar, o que gritar, o que calar, o que e como sentir... Argumentase que o conceito de currículo construído nos estádios de futebol pode ser pensado como práticas que os sujeitos são reiteradamente convidados a fazer. Essas práticas são sistematizadas no artigo em quatro eixos: raça, garra e luta; violência e socialização; um amor de macho; masculinidades subalternas.

The making of an elder culture: reflections on the future of America's most audacious generation

Maturity Rules Boomers: Act Two You Say You Want a Revolution Elder Insurgency Entitlements for Everyone Utopia Revisited -- An Exercise in Cultural Archaeology The Doors of Perception Aging & the Alpha Male Love, Loyalty & the End of Sex Ecology & Longevity Welcome to Eldertown Something Eternal Index.

Polygamy and sublime passion: sexuality in China on the verge of modernity

For centuries of Chinese history, polygamy and prostitution were closely linked practices that legitimized the 'polygynous male', the man with multiple sexual partners. Despite their strict hierarchies, these practices also addressed fundamental antagonisms in sexual relations in serious and constructive ways. Qing fiction abounds in stories of female resistance and superiority. Women - main wives, concubines, and prostitutes - were adept at exerting control and gaining status for themselves, while men indulged in elaborate fantasies about female power. Keith McMahon introduces a new concept, 'passive polygamy', to explain the unusual number of Qing stories in which women take charge of a man's desires, turning him into an instrument of female will. To this he adds a story that haunted the institutions of polygamy and prostitution: the tale of 'sublime passion', in which the main characters are a 'remarkable' woman and her male lover. Throughout McMahon examines how polygamy, prostitution, and the story of sublime passion encountered the first stages of paradigmatic change in the nineteenth century, decades before the legal abolition of polygamy. By the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911, love stories were celebrating the exploits of street-smart prostitutes who fleeced gullible patrons in the bustling city of Shanghai. What do these characters have in common with their early counterparts as men and women became inhabitants of a new city in an era flooded with ideas from radically foreign sources - all of this taking place in a time of economic and cultural dislocation? McMahon reads late Qing love stories in a historically symbolic way, taking them as part of a larger fantasy of Chinese civilization undergoing a fundamental crisis. The polygamous marriage and the affairs of the brothel became metaphorical staging grounds for portraying the destiny of China on the verge of modernity. Finally, McMahon speculates on the changes polygamous sexuality underwent after the Qing dynasty ended and whether it exerted a residual influence in later times.

The Bonds of Men

Godbeer, Richard. 2009. The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. $35.00 he. 254 pp.Baker, Brian. 2006. Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres, 1945-2000. New York: Continuum. $110.00 hc./$49.95 sc. 173 pp.Masculinity studies has reached a new level of sophistication and maturity I since its inception in the 1970s as an offshoot of feminism. As the study of masculinity has developed, masculinity in its American context has also seen some remarkable changes. In terms of social constructions of masculinity in the past two decades, key shifts have occurred as a result of the extraordinary new visibility of queer sexuality from the early 1990s to the present day, chief amongst them the transformation of hegemonic straight white male masculinity. White straight masculinity, which for some time had been framed as the privileged wielder of the desiring gaze in much of feminist theory in several disciplines, has itself become the object of multiple gazes, and with that decentering has come a new self-consciousness, a new awareness that males can be the object of desire as well as those who take the active role in desiring. As masculinity has elicited a new scrutiny, masculinity studies has traced out new histories of its development. Especially interesting is the current movement towards the study of masculinity in an Anglo-American context. Though situated in quite distinct eras, these two new books discuss masculinities in a shifting, cross-fertilizing transatlantic context that illuminates the shared histories of gender construction within both Britain and the United States. Both works also explore the significance of samesex desire- incipient, suggested, contained, repudiated - to the discourses of masculine subjectivity.The reader of Richard Godbeer's enveloping, consistently revelatory new book comes away from it feeling both and frustrated: because Godbeer is a deft presenter of an almost dizzying array of texts that give evidence of a now-vanished world of male-male emotionalism, frustrated because Godbeer has not properly accounted for its loss. Most of this review will be written in the entranced mode, for this is a splendid work of scholarship and a deeply valuable cultural intervention. The frustrations of Godbeer's work, however, are also complexly revealing, and I will turn to them in the conclusion.Studying the surprisingly ample surviving record of correspondences between eighteenth-century American men in the period just preceding the Revolutionary War up to its immediate aftermath, Godbeer writes that they reveal a striking emotional intensity that demands scrutiny. What did loving friendship mean to these men as part of their personal and social identities? Finding plausible answers involves setting aside assumptions about love between members of the same sex (2009, 9). Immediately, an obstacle to understanding the period's rhetoric of male love emerges: our paradigm of sexual orientation, i.e., Freudian theories and the latenineteenth-century emergence of such new taxonomical sexual categories such as heterosexual and homosexual. Godbeer presents a world of love between men that is historically and culturally prior to these more recent, and apparently calcifying, ways of thinking about sexuality: the modern assumption that most people are attracted - sexually and romantically - to either men or women would have surprised early Americans. Their attitudes toward love, sexual desire, and the relationship between the two differed from ours in significant ways, and presenting these differences makes all the difference in terms of developing a proper understanding of eighteenth-century male relations (3).Unlike in London, no subculture related to males who desired sexual intimacy with other men developed in British America; indeed, Americans regarded sodomy as an alien vice, tied to images of a degenerate Old World-Europe. …

What Is Love without Mourning? Male Intimacies and Cultures of Loss

In this article, the author considers loss and mourning in relation to male homosexual love. He uses mourning as a framework through which to raise questions about the social and cultural status of gay male love in contemporary societies. He argues that loving within heteronormative cultures of intimacy creates forms of vulnerability for gay men and that this is often compounded at times of personal loss. He uses a psychoanalytic framework to consider the important role of culture in the mourning process and reflects on the ways that cultural forms, practices and representations provide the context through which mourning can be both facilitated and disabled. Recent examples from popular culture are used to consider the important role, and often significant absence, of symbolic frameworks through which gay men can enter into dialogues of mourning. In conclusion, the author argues that the social valuing of loss is intimately bound up with the social valuing of love.