Portrayal Of Sexuality Research Articles

Transgressive Textualities: Translating References to Gender, Sexuality and Corporeality in Nelly Arcan’s Putain and Paradis, clef en main

In this paper I examine how transgressive references to gender, sexuality and the body are translated in two texts by the Québécoise writer Nelly Arcan, her debut autofictional narrative Putain (2001) and her final (retroactively auto)fictional title Paradis, clef en main (2009). Throughout her oeuvre, Arcan seeks to liberate women from stereotypical frameworks of reference by asserting women’s gendered, sexual and corporeal subjectivities in previously taboo discourses on prostitution, incest, sexuality, anorexia, matrophobia and suicide. Through her candid and explicit writing style, Arcan elaborates her own specific écriture au féminin which incorporates a linguistic, thematic and physical visualization of women within her texts.These two novels have been translated into English as Whore (2005) by Bruce Benderson and Exit (2011) by David Scott Hamilton respectively. However, analysis of the target texts suggests that neither translator adopts a gender-conscious approach which compromises the specificity of Arcan's idiolect in the Anglophone context. Through a comparative analysis of examples from the source texts and translations under the categories of gender, sexuality and the body, I discuss how the translation practices work counterproductively to obfuscate Arcan’s textual visualisations of women. In terms of references to gendered identity, by removing or neutralising Arcan's grammatically feminised language in Putain, the translator obfuscates Arcan's idea of the importance gender plays in shaping maternal relationships. Similarly, in Exit, Arcan's subversive feminist wordplay is distorted resulting in women being reinserted into patriarchal frameworks of reference. My analysis on Arcan's portrayal of sexuality underlines how sexual euphemisms in the translation downplay the narrator's potential for sexual agency in Whore, while misleading translation choices for feminist neologisms relating to women's sexuality in Exit eschew Arcan's efforts to verbalise women's lived sexual realities. Lastly, inconsistency in the translation of female corporeal vocabulary distorts the neutral tone Arcan employs in Putain to ensure women's bodies are not eroticised and the translator's decision to condense references to the female body in Exit undermines the significance Arcan places on corporeal connections between women. Thereafter, I move on to consider the wider implications of the translative process such as how paratextual elements also have an impact upon Arcan's reception in the target culture. I argue that in both Whore and Exit, the paratranslators intentionally sensationalise the autofictional elements of Arcan's texts. In short, my analysis contends that through a non-gender conscious translation practice, the celebrity of Arcan is promoted in the Anglophone context but to the detriment of Arcan’s écriture au féminin.

Becoming Reinaldo Arenas: family, sexuality, and the Cuban Revolution

Becoming Reinaldo Arenas explores the life and work of the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990), who emerged on the Latin American cultural scene in the 1960s and quickly achieved literary fame. Yet as a political dissident and an openly gay man, Arenas also experienced discrimination and persecution; he produced much of his work amid political controversy and precarious living conditions. In 1980, having survived ostracism and incarceration in Cuba, he arrived in the United States during the Mariel boatlift. Ten years later, after struggling with poverty and AIDS in New York, Arenas committed suicide. Through insightful close readings of a selection of Arenas's works, including unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, Olivares examines the writer's personal, political, and artistic trajectory, focusing on his portrayals of family, sexuality, exile, and nostalgia. He documents Arenas's critical engagement with cultural and political developments in revolutionary Cuba and investigates the ways in which Arenas challenged literary and national norms. Olivares's analysis shows how Arenas drew on his life experiences to offer revealing perspectives on the Cuban Revolution, the struggles of Cuban exiles, and the politics of sexuality.

"There's nothing people won't do to one another, if the circumstances are right": Male Rape and the Politics of Representation in John Harvey's Police Procedural <i>Easy Meat</i>

The article discusses portrayals of male rape in John Harvey's police procedural novel Easy Meat (1996), exploring how the novel interrogates the representation of sexual crime, male rape, and masculinity in crime fiction. By examining Harvey's portrayal of masculinity and sexuality in Easy Meat, the author explores the ways in which crime fiction problematizes the politics of representing sexual crime.

Male–Female Reactions to Variations in Sexual Explicitness in Pornography: An Empirical Test of Predictions of Intra- and Inter-gender Differences

Previous research has established that men and women respond differently to distinctive characteristics of mediated sexual portrayals. The current study experimentally tests a series of predictions derived from both sperm competition, and minimal parental investment perspectives about between- and within-gender responses to content manipulations of sexually explicit videos. Results indicate that men experienced greater post-exposure arousal and less negative affect after viewing sexually explicit videos than did women. Further, men who viewed more explicit sexual depictions tended to report greater post-exposure arousal than those who saw less explicit depictions. No within-gender differences were found for women in terms of content explicitness. Also, regardless of degree of explicitness, women reported lower levels of post-exposure arousal in response to content depicting male ejaculation than content that does not. Men, though expressing greater post-exposure arousal to less explicit content depicting male sexual climax than that which does not, showed no difference in arousal response when they saw more intensely explicit depictions, whether or not male ejaculation was shown. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for future application of evolutionary theory in studies of mediated sexual content.

New Jews?: race and American Jewish identity in 21st-century film

Preface 1 Introduction 2 American Jewish Racial Identity Politics Off- and Onscreen 3 Family Dynamics and the Stereotype of the Meddling Matriarch 4 Cinematic Portrayals of American Jewish Romance and Sexuality 5 The Myth of Pampered Princess Material Consumption 6 American Jewish Political Economy at the Movies 7 Race, Film, and 21st-Century American Jewish Identity Appendix Works Cited Index About the Author

Neural response to visual sexual cues in dopamine treatment-linked hypersexuality in Parkinson’s disease

Hypersexuality with compulsive sexual behaviour is a significant source of morbidity for patients with Parkinson's disease receiving dopamine replacement therapies. We know relatively little about the pathophysiology of hypersexuality in Parkinson's disease, and it is unknown how visual sexual stimuli, similar to the portrayals of sexuality in the mainstream mass media may affect the brain and behaviour in such susceptible individuals. Here, we have studied a group of 12 patients with Parkinson's disease with hypersexuality using a functional magnetic resonance imaging block design exposing participants to both sexual, other reward-related and neutral visual cues. We hypothesized that exposure to visual sexual cues would trigger increased sexual desire in patients with Parkinson's disease with hypersexuality that would correspond to changes in brain activity in regions linked to dopaminergically stimulated sexual motivation. Patients with Parkinson's disease with hypersexuality were scanned ON and OFF dopamine drugs, and their results were compared with a group of 12 Parkinson's disease control patients without hypersexuality or other impulse control disorders. Exposure to sexual cues significantly increased sexual desire and hedonic responses in the Parkinson's disease hypersexuality group compared with the Parkinson's disease control patients. These behavioural changes corresponded to significant blood oxygen level-dependent signal changes in regions within limbic, paralimbic, temporal, occipital, somatosensory and prefrontal cortices that correspond to emotional, cognitive, autonomic, visual and motivational processes. The functional imaging data showed that the hypersexuality patients' increased sexual desire correlated with enhanced activations in the ventral striatum, and cingulate and orbitofrontal cortices. When the patients with Parkinson's disease with hypersexuality were OFF medication, the functional imaging data showed decreases in activation during the presentation of sexual cues relative to rest. These deactivations were not observed when the patients were ON medication, suggesting that dopamine drugs may release inhibition within local neuronal circuits in the cerebral cortex that may contribute to compulsive sexual behaviour. The findings of this study have implications with respect to the potential influence of cue exposure via exposure to mass media in enhancing libido, which in this group of vulnerable patients can lead to devastating social consequences and occasionally, custodial sentences. Stimulation through exposure to sexual visual cues in patients with Parkinson's disease with hypersexuality provides a motivational impetus for seeking this reward behaviour through activations and deactivations of cerebral cortex.

Reinscribing Sexuality: Manga Versions of Romeo and Juliet

Abstract Designed to familiarize the younger audience with the Bard’s work, while at the same time catering to their tastes and interests, not only have Shakespearean adaptations moved the original plots to unusual milieus and exotic cultures, but have also ‘translated’ them to new media. This paper analyzes the portrayal of sexuality in two transmediations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The paper compares and contrasts two manga versions of the play (a British and a Japanese one), aiming to highlight the ways in which the “star crossed lovers’” relationship has been adapted and appropriated by the two cultures in the twentyfirst century.

Siblings and Sex: A New Approach to the Fiction of Lee Smith

The article calls for a feminist reappraisal of the fiction of contemporary Appalachian writer Lee Smith, one that acknowledges the pattern of female disempowerment and sexual abuse that permeates so much of her work, alongside its more positive portrayals of female creativity, sexuality, and strength. In particular, the article focuses on a specific motif within the broader pattern of sexual exploitation in Smith's writing: that of the vulnerable young girl seduced (or raped) by a slightly older brother or brother figure. It draws from two little-known texts from early in Smith's career to establish the existence of the motif and then traces its reemergence as an undercurrent in her mature fiction of the 1980s and 1990s. In this body of work, Smith explores with increasing subtlety the consequences of sibling incest for adolescent girls and the adult women they become, and, while her later novels hold out more possibilities for survivorship and survivor discourse than do the earliest works, the fiction as a whole hardly charts a clear and straightforward path from silence to speech or exploitation to empowerment.

The Role of Media Literacy in Shaping Adolescents' Understanding of and Responses to Sexual Portrayals in Mass Media

This study was a theory-based, pretest–posttest quasi-experiment conducted in the field (N = 922) to determine whether and how a media literacy curriculum addressing sexual portrayals in the media would influence adolescents' decision-making processes regarding sex. Results of the evaluation, based on the Message Interpretation Process Model, indicated that participants who received media literacy training better understood that media influence teens' decision making about sex and were more likely to report that sexual depictions in the media are inaccurate and glamorized. In addition, participants who received media literacy lessons were more likely than were control group participants to believe that other teens practice abstinence and reported a greater ability to resist peer pressure. An interaction effect existed between gender and condition on attitudes toward abstinence, suggesting that the lessons helped girls and boys in somewhat different ways. Overall, the results indicated that media literacy strengthened key aspects of participants' logic-oriented decision-making process.

Sex and Sexism in Australian Alcohol Advertising: (Why) Are Women More Offended than Men?

Alcohol advertisements often attract criticism for portraying women in an overtly sexual and demeaning fashion, with past research finding that women are more critical than men. The first study reported here found that neither feminism nor gender role identity added substantial explanatory power beyond that of gender. Females reported more negative attitudes toward ads that used demeaning sexual appeals and more positive attitudes toward empowering appeals. The second study provided quantitative evidence in support of the assumption that it is offensive sexual portrayals, rather than other aspects of sexist advertisements, that are disliked. Keywords: Advertising, Australia, Alcohol, Sexism, Consumer Attitudes

Understanding the Dynamics Behind the Relationship Between Exposure to Negative Consequences of Risky Sex on Entertainment Television and Emerging Adults' Safe-Sex Attitudes and Intentions

Social cognitive theory (SCT; Bandura, 1986) has established that people often are inhibited from engaging in a behavior when they observe models experience negative consequences for their actions. Thus, in the realm of sexual portrayals on television, a program that depicts consequences of risky intercourse should reduce the likelihood that a viewer would respond positively. In addition, SCT suggests that a consequence's intensity and type play a role in viewer outcomes and that it is difficult to inhibit behaviors that one has personal experience with. These assumptions were tested in this study. Results showed that emerging adults with high sexual risk experience were not influenced by television portrayals of negative consequences to risky sex. Effects of exposure were identified only among participants who did not have a high amount of sexual risk experience, such that they reported safer-sex outcomes. Outcomes differed based on the type of consequence participants were exposed to.

Breaking the Culture of Mute Sensation: Female Expression of Power in Sexual Contest with Men in Yoruba Newspapers

The study examines the problem of the deviation from the Yoruba cultural norm which frowns at open discussion of sexuality, especially among women folk. It examines the extent and the manner by which women give expression to their sexual feelings and dexterity in the Yoruba newspapers. This is considered against the backdrop of sexuality as a subject of human cultural expression, and mediated sex as a display of gender contest and an expression of gender power. Specifically, the study found out that the Yoruba newspapers generously portray sexuality and that women are portrayed as having sexual hegemony, which of course deviates from the traditional image of women in the Yoruba culture. The Yoruba newspapers' portrayal of women as the dominant force in the sexual contest tends to depict the current reality of women coming up in positions of authority in the society. The position of the paper is that the portrayal of sexuality in the newspapers is an expression of gender power.

Tourism, Imperialism, and Hybridity in the Reconstruction South: Constance Fenimore Woolson's Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches

Now that the little monkey has gone, I may be able at last to and likeness of her. --Kitty, (1876) At their core, issues of imperialism coalesce around such concepts as center and margin, dominance and subjugation, self and other--binaries at the heart of the ten stories collected in Constance Fenimore Woolson's Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880). I am interested not only in excavating these binaries in Woolson's southern fiction, but also in examining what happens to the tensions between them. Ultimately, these tensions are not neatly resolved, as they often were in popular postwar reunion romances. As many postcolonial theorists have noted, sooner or later the encounter between cultures and peoples results not only in clashes but also in mingling that creates forms of doubleness or hybridity, term often used today to connote the mixture of cultures, but which has its origins in nineteenth-century conceptions of racial difference. A reading of Woolson's fiction in this context suggests her discomfort with the effects of imperialism, particularly form of hybridity predicated on an inequality that blurs cultural and racial distinctions. In the process of registering this discomfort, Woolson, northern writer, also manages to decenter her texts in ways that challenge her northern readers' presumed cultural superiority in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction. first published in 1876 and later collected in Rodman the Keeper, is one of Woolson's most frequently anthologized southern stories and can be read in multiple contexts for its complex portrayal of race, ethnicity, and sexuality. (1) I will begin with brief analysis of to suggest the possibilities for reading Woolson's southern stories in poscolonial/anti-imperlialist context. The story's narrator, white, northern artist who struggles to catch and fix the image of Spanish-speaking Minorcan girl (203), epitomizes the eyes of the colonizer, to borrow Mary Pratt's phrase, not least in her use of an animalistic metaphor--little monkey--often employed in racist portrayals of darkskinned peoples) The girl, Felipa, whose gender identity is blurred by the boy's clothing she wears, is a small, dark-skinned, yellow-eyed child, the offspring of the ocean and the heats, tawny, lithe and wild, shy yet fearless--not unlike one of the little brown deer (197). Like many colonized natives, she is described as product of the landscape around her, even as type of the region's fauna; thus she is the typical exotic other. Felipa is also product of Florida's colonial past: her father was Spanish sailor, and she is now being raised by her Minorcan grandparents, members of an ethnic group brought as indentured servants from the isle of Minorca off the coast of Spain to the British colony of Florida in 1768. (3) Almost nothing is revealed about the artist and narrator, Kitty, who is convalescing as well as vacationing in Florida with two other friends: Christine, Pre-Raphaelite beauty (202), and Christine's persistent suitor, Edward. In fact, so little is revealed about Kitty and her friends that they become ciphers of the imperial presence of northern tourists in the South after the Civil War, unwanted guests imposing themselves on native population that contains no other whites. Of Felipa, Kitty explains, did not come to us--we came to her; we loomed into her life like genii from another world (197). The magical effect they have on her, however, is anything but benign. Felipa becomes obsessed with Christine, who is so different from any woman she has ever seen, and aspires to attain her beauty. She is thus educated in the standards of western beauty and art but ultimately realizes her inability to measure up. When Felipa learns of Christine and Edward's engagement and impending departure, she attempts to kill herself with the very tools of western art (poisonous paints) to which Kitty has introduced her, and then she stabs Edward in the arm. …

Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (review)

Reviewed by: Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze Kenneth Borris Vin Nardizzi, Stephen Guy-Bray, and Will Stockton, eds. Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. xvi + 247 pp. $115.93. Drawing on Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon’s theory of queer unhistoricism, this rewarding collection of scholarly essays seeks to reinterpret the representations and cultural roles of homoeroticism in the English Renaissance. The title in various ways signals the volume’s project of departing from standard historicist practices. The now ubiquitous designation “early modern” seems pointedly refused (queer unhistoricism rejects the teleological implications of that terminology); likewise the term “history” itself, for it assumes a degree of certain difference from the present that unhistoricism deems inappropriate. “Backward Gaze” playfully mingles the project of discerning the past with the pleasures of “cruising” its departing backside: the unhistorical project seeks to unsettle whatever may be perceptually taken for granted. Readers should find that the volume as a whole stimulates and refreshes their thinking about our cultural past and its portrayals of sex, erotic desire, and human relations. Some will find its value in blazing trails they wish to follow, others in clarifying how, where, and why they wish to diverge. The volume is perspicuously written and structured, with essays primarily addressing historiographical methods and approaches framing a substantial core of studies that mainly present readings of English texts circa 1520 to 1670. That framing apparatus includes a short preface from the series editors Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke, “Renaissance Sextualities” (ix–xi); a brief general introductory chapter co-authored by [End Page 209] the volume’s editors, using the volume’s title (1–11); Will Fisher’s “A Hundred Years of Queering the Renaissance” (13–40); and Madhavi Menon’s short afterword, “Period Cramps” (229–35). Aside from Fisher’s contribution, this material seeks to situate the volume theoretically. Fisher instead shows us how the nineteenth-century writers John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater, and Havelock Ellis had already queered the Renaissance by associating artistic genius in that time with the sexual category of homosexuality emerging in their own, in order to legitimate and even valorize male same-sex desire. Hence, Fisher declares, “the Renaissance was ‘queered’ from its very inception” (31): by which he means in its Victorian historiography. The queering of the Renaissance could be dated much earlier, as such formerly well-known texts as Marsilio Ficino’s De amore (1469) indicate. Among the ensuing essays, some are more theoretically oriented than others, such as the first, Goran Stanivuković’s “Beyond Sodomy: What is Still Queer About Early Modern Queer Studies.” Seeking to expand the queer Renaissance archive, Stanivuković advocates shifting our attention to conjecturally queer non-somatic contacts and specifically to literary manifestations of intertextual queerness, as instanced, he claims, in some specific Shakespearean texts. James M. Bromley explores non-penetrative, non-consummated body contact in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander to question the privileging of penetration in sexual and narrative outcomes and to investigate the former possibilities of non-monogamous queer intimacy. Jennifer Drouin and Julie Crawford’s essays attend respectively to the lesbian signification of Elizabethan literary depictions of Diana’s band of nymphs and to portrayals of domestic and secretarial intimacies between women in four Shakesperean plays and in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania. The forms of female intimacy, they both argue, constitute loci of political dissent. Exploring homosociality in an elite Tudor household, Laurie Shannon examines George Cavendish’s mid-sixteenth century account of Cardinal Wolsey’s splendid male entourage and devotion to the king’s pleasures. Vin Nardizzi finds literary plant-grafting tropes a rich reservoir of Elizabethan sexual comment as in Shakespeare’s Henriad, where Hal’s relations to Falstaff and the princess Catherine, Nardizzi argues, both thus appear to be sodomitical mixtures. Turning to some lyrics by Marvell, illuminated by Slavoj Žižek’s concept of the parallax, Stephen Guy-Bray identifies interplay between sexual difference and sameness that indicates queer historiography should define how “different kinds of difference” may affect sexuality’s past and present expressions. In the final two chapters, the poet Katherine Philips’s feminine homoeroticism re-evaluates “the terms and [End Page 210] logics of...

Sex and the Spectacle of Music Videos: An Examination of the Portrayal of Race and Sexuality in Music Videos

This content analysis used two studies to examine sexual behaviors and sex role portrayals in music videos televised in the United States. The first study included 120 videos recorded from MTV, MTV2, VH-1, BET, and CMT and revealed African American videos were significantly more likely to portray sexual content and female characters in provocative clothing than White videos. The second study analyzed 20 videos from BET’s late-night program, Un:Cut. Results revealed Un:Cut videos depicted seven times as many sexual acts and featured significantly more discouraged sexual behaviors than videos from the five major music video channels. Findings from these studies clarify that race is an important factor when gender roles and sexual content are examined in music videos.

Side dishes: Latina American women, sex, and cultural production

Moving beyond the 'main dishes' of traditional literary works, Side Dishes offers a provocative and delicious new understanding of Latin American women's authorship and activism. The book illuminates a wealth of creative and intellectual work by Latin American women - editors, directors, cartoonists, academics, performance artists, and comedians - and explores them in light of their treatment of women's sexuality. Side Dishes considers feminist pornography and literary representations of masturbation, bisexuality, lesbianism, and sexual fantasies; the treatment of lust in stand-up comedy and science fiction; critical issues in leading feminist journals; and portrayals of sexuality in four contemporary Latin American films. Melissa A. Fitch concludes with a look at the rise of women's and gender studies programs in Latin America.

Images of sexuality and aging in gerontological literature

Discursive portrayals of aging and sexuality have important implications for the creation and reproduction of inequalities. This article delineates some of the images of older adults' sexualities using an interpretive content analysis of gerontology articles dealing with issues of sexuality in 21 gerontological journals over a 20-year span (1988-2007). The 3 main findings of this analysis were (a) that aging sexualities are asserted, (b) that the sexual identities of older adults vary, and (c) that older adults' sexualities are regulated through a variety of mechanisms. Furthermore, these representations inform research and policy at the intersections of sexuality and aging.

Sex detectives: "Law & Order: SVU"'s fans, critics, and characters investigate lesbian desire

I address the contested question of whether sex crimes detective Olivia Benson (a character on TV's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit played by Mariska Hargitay) is a lesbian, and the ways in which both fans and TV scholars approach this mystery. That is, I investigate not what we "know" about lesbians on/and television, but how we frame the very processes of this knowing. In both critical and fan discourse, debates about where to locate the queerness of television oscillate irresolvably between three sites: the text itself, audience interpretations, and the surrounding metatexts and contexts. With a primary theoretical framework drawn from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet, I analyze the cultural and televisual traditions that shape SVU's portrayal of deviant sexuality, and I assess how these resonate with fan interpretations in today's context of media convergence.

Milton's Forsaken Proserpine

AbstractReaders of Paradise Lost have long found patterns of allusion to the rape of Proserpina, a myth about the brutal encroachment of mortality onto human consciousness. Yet the Proserpina myth haunts the whole corpus of Milton's English and Latin poetry. Manuscript deletions and other evidence show that Milton returned compulsively to the scene of the goddess's rape, even as he tried to suppress the evidence of its hold on his imagination. Milton's ongoing fascination with Proserpina's ravishment by the king of the underworld reflects a lifelong habit of linking erotic desire to the death of the body, a habit that persisted even after Milton left behind the dualist Neoplatonism of his early poems. Tracing patterns of engagement with the figure of Proserpina across Milton's poetry—with a focus on neglected allusions to Claudian's fourth‐century De Raptu Proserpinae—this essay explores Milton's troubled portrayal of sexuality and the mortal body, and shows how both are bound together in his writings wit...

It's better on TV: does television set teenagers up for regret following sexual initiation?

Two-thirds of sexually experienced teenagers in the United States say they wish they had waited longer to have intercourse for the first time. Little is known about why such a large proportion of teenagers express disappointment about the timing of their initial experience with sex. Data on television viewing, on regret about the timing of first intercourse and on potentially relevant covariates were obtained from a national, three-year (2001-2004) longitudinal survey of adolescents aged 12-17 at baseline. Logistic regression and path analysis were used to examine the association between exposure to sex on television and the likelihood of regret following sexual initiation, the extent to which shifts in expectations about the positive consequences of sex mediate this association and whether these relationships differ by gender. Sixty-one percent of females and 39% of males who had sex for the first time during the study period reported that they wished they had waited to have sex. Exposure to sexual content on television was positively associated with the likelihood of regret following sexual initiation among males (coefficient, 0.34) but not females. The association among males was partly explained by a downward shift in males' sex-related outcome expectancies following sexual initiation. Interventions that limit teenagers' exposure to televised sexual content, that provide a more accurate portrayal of sexuality than typically depicted on television or that help adolescents think critically about televised sexual content may help teenagers make more carefully considered decisions about sexual debut.