Representation Of Female Sexuality Research Articles

Representations of Female Sexuality in Polish cinema after 1989

REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMALE SEXUALITY IN POLISH CINEMA AFTER 1989: LIBERATION OR COMMODIFICATION? IN CONSIDERING the issue of female sexuality in Polish cinema after 1989 it is necessary to locate it within the broader context of the Polish ideological discourse on femininity and the representation of sexuality in Polish cinema. First, it can be claimed that specific historical circumstances resulted in the domination of national issues over that of gender, and that gender roles were predominantly defined according to the demands of the national ideology of Polishness. The origins of the Polish dominant discourse on femininity can be found in the 19th century, particularly when the myth of the Polish Mother was created. (1) The analysis of representations of this myth in Polish art demonstrates strongly that they were based on the tradition of the representation of the Virgin Mary. Using this representative model inevitably led to a de-sexualization...

George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: feminism, evolutionism, and the reconstruction of gender

analysis of the writings of two major Victorian intellectuals examines the crucial place of gender in the larger Victorian debate about nature, religion, and evolutionary theory. Demonstrating the primacy of Herbert Spencer's influence on George Eliot's thought, Nancy Paxton discloses the continuous dialogue between this profoundly learned novelist and one of the most formidable and influential scientific authorities of her time. Using rarely cited first editions of Spencer's published works, Paxton reveals that Eliot and Spencer initially agreed in supporting several of the goals of early Victorian feminism when they met in 1851. Paxton surveys all of Spencer's writing to show when and why he repudiated his early feminism and demonstrates Eliot's determined resistance to the most conservative tendencies of evolutionary theory in her representation of female sexuality, motherhood, feminist ambition, and desire. In comparing Eliot's and Spencer's evolutionary reconstruction of gender, the book draws on a wide variety of biographical, literary, and critical texts and on interdisciplinary scholarship about the relation between scientific and literary discourse in the nineteenth century. By thus reassessing Eliot's contribution to feminist thought, it presents a revolutionary reading of her novels which is informed by contemporary feminist criticism and the new historicism. This is an important book because of the questions it raises, the issues it covers, and the illumination it brings to Eliot and Spencer and to crucial problems in the nineteenth century: Paxton looks at the ways scientific data get turned into arguments about the nature of women in society, about women andeducation, about women and sexuality. work shows how truly current Eliot's novels are, no matter what their setting.--Barry Qualls, Rutgers University

The Muted Other

Classicizing art has often expressed political values, but its role in the service of gender ideology has rarely been explored. The goal of this essay is to develop a gender-based interpretation of several works of classicizing public art and to show how they communicated ideas about social order through their representation of female sexuality. The themes and styles taken from an ideal Greek or Roman past function in certain public reliefs of the late first century B.C. and history paintings of the late eighteenth century as a prescription for relationships between men and women. Their method, one among a number visible in these two periods, is to mute difference and alterity. Whether the cultural opposition is between male and female, public and private, or culture and nature, the muting of the Other implies power unequally divided, value unequally apportioned. In patriarchal cultures in the West, this means privileging the male insider and his values. Classicizing art can make this cultural model visible in a special way. Its stories and its idealizations may be used to give form to the conflict between oppositions and at the same time attempt to mediate that conflict in two ways: first, by demonstrating the moral and physical superiority of male Self over female Other; second, by convincing the Other that it is possible to become like Self.