Sexual Revolution Research Articles

An Analysis of the Treatment of Love and Sexuality in the Poems of Kamala Das

Kamala Das, a renowned Indian author and poet, has been widely acclaimed for her bold and confessional style of writing. The research article aims to explore the multidimensional portrayal of love and sexuality in her works, juxtaposing them with the social norms and cultural backdrop of postcolonial India. In fact, everything else is secondary and this subject takes center stage. In reference to Kamala Das’ poetry, the term “love” refers to both passions, which her husband and a number of other men were fully and even excessively satisfied, as well as real love, which she never experienced. Her poetry primarily expresses her dissatisfaction with love. The spectrum of her writings is laden with autobiographical elements. In her works, love is depicted not only as an emotion but also as a tool for self-discovery and liberation from the shackles of conventional society. Despite fully meeting her sexual desires, her husband never believed that a woman should expect true love from her spouse, which is why their marriage failed. There were several sexual partners for her, but none of them ever showed her true affection. Kamala Das discusses her unfulfilled love often in her poems, and she repeatedly confesses her longing for love. At this point, Kamala Das admits that love is a strong emotional connection between a man and a woman, and she also thinks that their physical relationship is significant but secondary. The sexuality of a woman is addressed by Kamala Das, who views it as a crucial component of her overall physical and psychological composition. The article further explores how Das’s portrayal of female sexuality acts as a rebellion against the traditional gender roles and societal expectations placed upon Indian women during her time. The intimate and sensual expression in her works is not only a testament to her unique voice but also reflects the underlying themes of self-assertion and search for identity. It brings to light how her exploration of female empowerment through sexual liberation was both groundbreaking and controversial within the context of Indian society. It highlights her as a trailblazer in bringing the discourse on female sexuality into the mainstream and as a proponent of women’s agency in postcolonial Indian literature. The article illuminates the enduring relevance and the multifaceted nature of Das’s writings.

Підліткова сексуальність та проблеми сексуальної освіти в Україні

The article dwells on analysing the main trends characterizing the sexual life of modern teenagers using the example of Ukrainian high school students. The authors present an overview of scientific approaches to the study of sexual life, in particular, sociological studies of the sexual behaviour of young people in the West and modern Ukraine. The paper draws attention to some of the consequences of the “sexual revolution” regarding the impact on sexual health (HIV/AIDS; sexually transmitted diseases; teenage abortions, sexual violence, etc.). The analysis of features inherent in the modern sexual behaviour of adolescents (frequency of sexual contacts; the number of sexual partners; age and gender characteristics of sexual behaviour of respondents) is based on the results of three representative sociological studies among schoolchildren in Kharkiv and Kharkiv region (1999 and 2013) and four regions of Ukraine (2021). Sociologists of V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University and the Sociological Association of Ukraine carried out these studies. Such characteristics of social behaviour as “age of sexual debut” and the dynamics of changes of this indicator were analyzed based on the data of Ukrainian and Western sociologists. Some negative consequences of early sexual life are described (sexual development disorders, mental disorders, sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted teenage pregnancies, teenage prostitution, etc.). Attention is paid to issues of systematic sexual education and sexual enlightenment of adolescents to preserve reproductive and sexual health. The authors analyze the role of parents, the educational process in school, and sexual education programs in the formation of safe sexual behaviour skills and a responsible attitude of adolescents to their health and the health of loved ones.

Introduction

RISE 6.1 is the second of a two-volume themed issue dedicated to the study of sexual liberation and its literatures in Ireland in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that extends the line of scholarly and historical inquiry first begun in RISE 5.1. The essays collected there examined the social and cultural politics that attended the historical rise of the heteropatriarchal state and interrogated the durability of conservative notions of Irishness, especially in terms of the sexual politics of the nation. While mindful of the ways in which this important historical paradigm continues to assert itself in Irish culture and the politics of the nation state, the current volume also seeks to put analytical pressure on the idea of ‘liberation’ central to counter-hegemonic ideas of sexual morality and revolution, and how it can be applied to the work of contemporary writers and social thinkers in Ireland. Adumbrating the ways in which the heteronormative social order asserts itself (the gaze, temporality and sociospatial formations), these essays collectively interrogate the dialectical tension that conjoins conservative and insurgent practices and ideologies in the still unfolding landscape of Ireland’s changing codes around sexual morality and identity.

Opening Materials

Review of Irish Studies (RISE) 6.1 Irish Sexual Liberation and Its Literatures, Part 2: A Long Time Coming

The Reticent Revolution of Sexual Daydreams

Daydreaming is a spoken word poem that captures the intimate moment in which a woman fantasizes about having sex with her ‘crush’. Although romantic and tender at times, this piece is not a snapshot of ‘everlasting love’ between two people, but of the reticent revolution of self-love, self-indulgence, and self-surrender that invokes sexual daydreams. brown’s (2019) ‘Pleasure Activism’ observes the sensual imagination as a private and safe place where we develop fantasies of what we desire – what we want to do to others, or what we want done to us by others or what we want to witness, while acknowledging that these fantasies are heavily influenced by cultural social norms and intersecting systems of hierarchy that can perpetuate the disempowerment of ourselves and others. This leads brown to recognize sexual fantasies as sites for radical healing and liberation – as a quiet space where we get to intentionally work on developing new fantasies and generate power in and/or out of the bedroom. Inspired by brown’s work, Daydreaming challenges androcentric and suppressive cultures of sexual exploitation and repression by (re)imagining and (re)claiming sex as something full of reciprocity, rapture, and vocality, thus disrupting the long-standing history of silencing survivors of sexual trauma and the patriarchal view that sexual pleasure is primarily for white straight cis men. As such, the poem embodies counter-hegemony, not only offering us an opportunity to see, feel, sense, and imagine differently, but to also (re)shape “our real-life desires and practices”, as brown (2019) puts it (p. 222). By creating space to envision new imaginary landscapes of sexual healing, sexual empowerment, and sexual liberation, Daydreaming reminds us of the power and potential of the radical sexual imagination to liberate a part of our (sexual) selves from within. It seeks to celebrate the political and liberating process of shamelessly luxuriating in our own erotic imaginations to activate our inner sexual worlds, and thus to produce social change.

Loose Attitudes: Politics of Self-Knowledge in Our Bodies, Ourselves and The House of God.

Readers of Samuel Shem's medical satire The House of God (1978) have long worried about the bad attitude of his main characters: young male internal medicine trainees. This article examines the interns' atrocious affections, using the feminist classic Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973) as a counterweight to the masculinist perspective of House of God. These radically different critiques of United States medicine derive from a shared sociopolitical context and represent a historically specific response to the personal politics of sexual liberation and self-actualization in the 1970s. I show that Shem and the Boston Women's Health Book Collective share a rhetorical strategy of "loose expertise" grounded in embodied knowledge, which connects both texts to the radical social movements of the late 1960s. Loose expertise enables institutional critique by shifting the domain of knowledge away from traditional structures of authority, but inhibits intersectional critique by essentializing the individual subject position of the author. The article concludes by examining the relationship of both texts to the medical humanities.

“Don Giovanni,” Sex’n’Roll, and Echoes of the Counterculture: A Brief History of Desire Read Backwards

This article is an attempt to read the history of courtly love backwards, thus setting a perspective that enables the interpretation of the contemporary sexual revolution by revealing its historical and archetypal patterns. It presents the hybrid relationships linking operatic “archaicness” with film, philosophy, and music in their contemporary artistic forms. The central argument is that the widespread phenomenon of aestheticization of life is based on the illusion that one is able to achieve absolute fulfillment in a transient world. The myth of Don Juan embodies this very dimension of modernity, which gives the aesthetic (sensual) the rank of the absolute, while numerous artistic actualizations of this myth confirm that the Western European imaginarium has its affective substrate in the form of desire, which is impossible to satisfy.

Dirty Works: Obscenity on Trial in America's First Sexual Revolution

Dirty Works: Obscenity on Trial in America's First Sexual Revolution

Art, artifice, and eroticized infantilization: Imagining Japanese femininities in the Weimar Republic in Fritz Lang's Harakiri (1919) and Kapitän Mertens's “Kio, die lasterhafte Kirschblüte” (1924)

AbstractThis article focuses on the ways in which a Japan‐specific Orientalism regarding Japanese femininities establishes itself in Weimar Germany's popular culture. In this period of German democratization in which we observe Weimar women's social, sexual, and political liberation, I propose that popular culture texts such as Fritz Lang's film Harakiri (1919) and Kapitän Mertens's magazine publication “Kio, die lasterhafte Kirschblüte” (1924) created an alternative fantasy engaging with contemporary anxieties and dreams. I read the depiction of Japanese femininities as a mediation of predominantly heterosexual male fears about the liberation movement of modern Weimar women as circulated in mass media. In developing this reading, I observe a simultaneity of three different imagined Japanese femininities: aestheticized artificialization/reification, eroticization, and infantilization. I argue that the narrative construction of such ultimately subservient exotic, doll‐like figures is diametrically opposed to the widely studied New Woman of Weimar and thus warrants further inquiry.

“Why Don't They Display Male Nudes?”

Abstract In the West, the 1970s were the decade of rapid sexual liberalization. Similarly, in state-socialist Poland new approaches toward sex and nudity also gained momentum. Female nudes started being printed in the popular press and displayed in gallery rooms. Simultaneously, early feminist artists such as Natalia LL, Teresa Murak, and Ewa Partum experimented with nudity to question gendered discourses and social norms. This article compares popular nude photography exhibitions with the works of women artists to analyze two approaches toward female nudity that developed in 1970s Poland. Thus, it showcases the ambiguities surrounding the project of socialist sexual modernity and highlights conflicting visions of femininity and liberation.

European movements for confluent love: Revealing romantic delusions with the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough and Comedy Italian Style

Differences in Northern and Southern European gender relations have historical roots that can be investigated in the regions’ literature and cinema. The mating morality of romantic love facilitated the West’s First Sexual Revolution of the mid-eighteenth century. The Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough, a late-nineteenth-century literary movement, used Darwinian perspectives to reveal romantic delusions and double standards. The movement’s insights undergirded twentieth-century Nordic gender equality and social democratic governance. Coinciding with the Second Sexual Revolution, the film movement Comedy Italian Style (c. 1958–1979) used psychoanalytical perspectives to promote a similar cultural effect nearly a century later. Both movements contributed to the transition to our present era’s demythologised morality of confluent love, which sacralises gender equality, but the Scandinavians’ head start, evolutionary approach and genre choices partially explain why today’s Nordic women are more empowered than their Italian counterparts. Comparing these movements offers insight into how fiction helps populations transition to new mating moralities.

Study of Female Consciousness in Female Gothic Literature

The female characters in Gothic novels are usually the representatives of fear or even the persecuted, while Female Gothic literature aims to establish the standard of female own value. The heroines achieve self-salvation through their own wisdom and calm attitude, and finally awaken their self-consciousness to form female subjectivity. This is a challenge to the gender hierarchy and the culture of male control.The style of Female Gothic runs through Angela Carter’s life of writing. She pays attention to the sufferings of female, delving into areas where other female writers have not or dare not explore, boldly and frankly addressing topics such as incest, sexual abuse, and pornography. From her point of view, female’s body and desire are subjects that cannot be bypassed in feminist writing and research. Through analyzing Carter’s work, The Company of Wolves, this paper focuses on the power of female as subversive to the established value system and the guiding role they play as constructors of a new order and has a deep thinking of female in deconstructing patriarchal centralism to construct harmonious relations between male and female.In The Company of Wolves, the author also creates a new Little Red Riding Hood with a rebellious spirit, but here, the little girl is more about exploiting the fighting potential contained in the female “sexual energy”. The seduction of Little Red Riding Hood by a Wolf disguised as a hunter can also be directly interpreted as a sexual seduction. Carter’s rewriting is to release the repressed potential desire of the female subject in the traditional fairy tale, so as to break the traditional pattern of gender relations. For a long time, female have grown up under the discipline of male power, in a position of oppression and constraint, being taught to restrain their desires, learn to protect themselves and be a good girl, and being instilled with the idea that “it is their natural duty to bear and raise children and do a good job at home”. Female are bound by the “feminine virtues” of self-sacrifice, obedience and docility, while their individual needs and desires are denied and hidden. Carter’s new Red Riding Hood is not bound by moral norms, but boldly follows her own desires, using “sex” as a tool to gain a new life, so that sexual liberation is achieved and sexual reconciliation with men is completed. Female’s self-consciousness and subjectivity are realized in this process.

Verqu(e)erungen des Blicks: queere Ästhetik und Intimität im Werk von ringl+pit

The contribution analyzes the multi-layered interrelations between the two photographers Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach to highlight an underexposed dimension of their artistic collaboration under the name of ringl+pit. Focusing on Stern and Auerbach’s time living together in Berlin (1929–1933) until their flight caused by the Nazi seizure of power, this article will examine how ringl+pit’s work corresponded with contemporary emancipatory movements (such as the sexual liberation movement and the Jewish emancipation movement). Furthermore, it will draw on notions of intimacy and queerness and their correspondences with artistic movements of the 1920s and 1930s to demonstrate how they became stylistically and aesthetically influential dimensions for the work of ringl+pit.

A Political Sexual Revolution: Sexual Autonomy in the British Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the 1970s and 1980s, women across Britain-particularly those in the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM)-took part in a distinct sexual revolution fuelled by a very specific question-who gets to determine the ways in which I am sexual? The active engagement by women with this question of sexual selfhood belies a historiography of sexual revolution-real or imagined-in which women were the passive beneficiaries (or victims) of technological, cultural, religious, social and/or, economic shifts. Drawing on the writing of women in the feminist press, mainstream media, books, and pamphlets, this article describes the specific contribution of the WLM to shaping new possibilities for a sexuality defined, and controlled, by women. I argue that the WLM combined a powerful political framework with an influential social network to significantly contribute to a far-reaching process of deconstructing and recasting female sexuality and sexual relations.

1960s Bombay stars and fashion cultures: The queens in our hearts

This article looks at the influence of Hollywood stardom on Bombay films in the 1960s that gave birth to Indian female star figures: the influence of Audrey Hepburn and the political events in India had major roles to play. Stars, such as Sadhana Shivdasani, Sharmila Tagore and Mumtaz, occupy an important role in the advent of economic and sexual liberalization that became central to feminist (re)presentations. They also played a key role in creating the image of the ‘ideal’ Indian woman. Despite its many patriarchal-centred narrations, Bombay cinema occupied a prominent place in feminist engagement as it created more opportunities for dialogues and awareness for women than were generally available at the time in Indian culture.

Carl R. Trueman. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution.

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글로벌 시대의 서발턴: 제3세계 여성난민들

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid and How I Became a North Korean by Krys Lee are refugee novels set in different regions and cultures; however, they both expose the subaltern status of refugee women from the Third World. The protagonists of both works are two refugee women, Nadia and Jangmi, who, as women, are hopeful for sexual liberation and the liberation of the First World. However, while they are only viewed as vulnerable subjects and victims of local patriarchy, their other identity as refugees from the Third World lacks agency and suffers from alienation when they are subjected to prejudices against refugees. In other words, the new society is an ambivalent space for them that, on the one hand, affords them as women to enjoy greater sexual liberation and freedom than the society they came from. On the other hand, as refugees from Third World countries, however, they are expected to remain mute in the face of discrimination, prejudiced language, and hostile looks. To avoid experiencing worst-case scenarios such as deportation, their best option is to express inexhaustible gratitude for what they have been given and strive to be flawlessly assimilated subjects, while ignoring their refugee identity, which suffers from injustice. Being exposed to the dilemma of having to live with their divided selves and being unable to speak about their problems, Nadia and Jangmi share the question Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak raised about the Third World woman: Can the subaltern speak? This paper endeavors to contextualize the refugee experiences of Nadia and Jangmi in relation to Spivak’s question about the Third World woman. The paper will then contend that refugee women from the Third World are invisible subalterns as the symbol of the world’s inequality which still exists in the so-called more equally globalized world.

Family Conceptions at the Intersection of Feminism, Public Health, and Nationalism in Czechoslovakia (1918–1939)

Even the seemingly liberal Czechoslovak political elites were anxious about the notion of depopulation, and feared the death of the nation, which led them to disregard the societal need for modernizing family planning. At the same time, Czechoslovak women experts were significantly involved in debates on conceptions of the family. They fueled debates on the sexual liberation of women in Czechoslovakia not as a matter of ideology or morality, but as a matter of public health, social justice, and reproductive rights. This paper aims to look at these women experts and their active role in academic debates on Czechoslovak policies on family and reproduction. Looking at the case of Czechoslovakia, as a non-Western country, this article then discusses the issues of the marginalization of women's activism and feminism in the East. The article suggests that, by applying a decolonial lens, a broader inclusion of the history of feminism of non-Western women can be achieved.

‘The Chronicle Must Tell How It Once Was’: Commercial Sex and Pimping in the Chronicle of Hamburg’s Postwar Vice Police

Abstract To ‘pass on a bit of recent history’, members of Hamburg’s vice police, or Sitte, gradually assembled a six-volume chronicle covering the period 1945 to 1982. The authors documented promotions, retirements, joint trips and work parties, but they also recorded the work of the department, illustrated through case notes and commentary on pimping, prostitution, pornography, drug use, paedophilia and incest. This article examines the treatment and depiction of commercial sex and pimping from the 1950s into the early 1980s. Central here is an investigation of the portrayals of ‘pimp’ violence towards women who sold sex, viewed alongside allusions to and evidence of police violence. A further focus is the presentation of and relationship with women who sold sex in Hamburg, with particular reference to police commentary regarding their race, sexuality and gender identity. The article also explores descriptions in the chronicle of so-called ‘transvestite’ prostitution. The authors of the chronicle repeatedly allude to sexual liberalization in West German society at large. Their entries are crafted with a reader in mind as they relate the actions of officers and subjects to changing views on sexuality. This article thus also analyses police engagement with processes of sexual liberalization and the implications for the role of the vice police in West Germany.

T. S. Eliot and Eastern Spirituality

Eliot's lifestyle exemplifies his religion. The community that the book provides enables not just Eliot to gratify his own aspirations but also enables others to arrive at similar realizations and locate their place. The work is the culmination of Eliot's lengthy quest for structure and wonder in literature. In spite of Eliot's assertion that the letter in question is neither a manifesto nor a plea to society, its contents suggest otherwise. This work is a reflection of his quest to comprehend the inexplicable as well as his transition from Eastern philosophy, which he explored in The Waste Land and Four Quartets, to Western Christianity, which he adhered to until the very end of his life. The world we live in today is ethically bankrupt, and as a result, the physical takes precedence over the spiritual. The end outcome is a psychological imbalance, a crisis, and decadence. The contemporary surroundings of the waste landers and their unthinking dedication to want, which they believe will fill the gap in their psyches, are the root causes of the spiritual conflict that they face. The poet is looking for psychological coherence. The progression from "The Burial of the Dead" to "What the Thunder Said" alludes to the idea of an individual's eventual salvation from within. The ending of "The Waste Land" ushers in a new way of being in the world. Religion helps the contemporary man find transcendence, inner quiet, and coherence in a time when science, atheism, and sexual liberation are the prevailing worldviews. Religion has the power to ease the suffering of the person and unite his fragmented self into a unified and harmonious whole. Eliot looks to several religious practices for comfort. The idea of travel plays a significant role throughout Eliot's poem. When seen through the lens of an individual's pursuit of psychological and spiritual wholeness, the poem demonstrates forward movement.