Sexual Transgression Research Articles

Mellifluent Sexuality: Female Intimacy in Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest

Pamphlets like Onania (1716), whose rate of reprinting exploded during the eighteenth century, became docents for ironically teaching and demonstrating erotic pleasures to readers, rather than expurgating them, as intended. As a result, the possibilities for pleasure reading were varied and many. I offer Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Romance of the Forest (1791), as an extension of those autoerotic reading pleasures for an eighteenth-century audience. Radcliffe’s novel veils the possibility of a masturbatory narrative with music and instrumentality. The lute, an instrument with diverse and erotic resonances in the eighteenth century, mediates these practices for Radcliffe’s two heroines. In meditating on the lute’s depiction, I trace the early modern history of the lute in literature and art, reflect on its connections to embodiment and erotic performance, and consider the ways musical performance becomes a site of female intimacy and pleasure, which complicates readings of public and private spaces. For Clara and Adeline, the autoerotic lute enables the blossoming of transgressive sexuality, despite the heteronormativity offered by the novel’s ending.

Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2013 ed. by Jay Watson and James G. Thomas, Jr.

Reviewed by: Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2013 ed. by Jay Watson and James G. Thomas, Jr. Lorie Watkins Jay Watson and James G. Thomas, Jr., eds. Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2013. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2016. Each year the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference collects selected papers presented at the conference into a single volume published by the University Press of Mississippi. The recently published 2013 collection features [End Page 74] papers from the fortieth annual conference examining the role of William Faulkner’s work in connection with the literature of the black Americas. In a somewhat unusual move for the series, this volume includes both critical and creative interpretations of the conference theme. Seventeen essays and poetic selections examine issues of Faulkner’s influence on writing in black literatures of the Americas, influences on and reinterpretations of his own work, and the connections between Faulkner’s work and the literature and writers of the region. In his introduction to the volume, Jay Watson quotes a key line from Édouard Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi: “Faulkner’s oeuvre will be made complete when it is revisited and made vital by African Americans.” This goal, Glissant suggests, “will be achieved by a radically ‘other’ reading” (xxi). The artists and critics from the Caribbean and America contributing to the 2013 volume, as Watson notes, “reveal that the revisionary work Glissant describes has been long underway in the Americas. They return us to Faulkner with new insight not only into the magnitude and impact of his achievement but also—just as meaningfully—into its limits” (xxi–xxii). Following the Introduction and “Note on the Conference,” the volume opens with “African American Poetic Responses to Faulkner” by Chiyuma Elliott, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Derrick Harriell, Randall Horton, and Jamaal May. At turns playful and poignant, these poetic interpretations of Faulkner’s life, texts, and characters invite readers to reimagine Faulkner’s life and his apocryphal world in exciting and enlightening ways. The critical essays that follow put Faulkner’s work in conversation with a variety of literary and cultural topics. James Smethurst examines the early African American migration narrative in Faulkner’s fiction, Thadious M. Davis evaluates Faulkner’s use of the black voice, George Hutchinson connects Faulkner’s career with the evolution of black modernism, and Tim A. Ryan outlines connections between Faulkner’s writings and the work of Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton. In the first of several thematic pairings, Joe Fruscione examines Faulkner’s and Ralph Ellison’s reactions to intellectual celebrity and their shared experiences in President Eisenhower’s People-to-People program, while Ben Robbins examines transgressive sexualities in Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms” and James Baldwin’s Another Country. Lisa Hinrichsen examines how African American writers like Randall Kenan have dealt with the gothic nature pervading of much of Faulkner’s work, and Matthew Dischinger explores the importance of the narratives told by the plantation ledgers in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. Doreen Fowler uses Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! to illustrate the power of language with respect to race and the social construction of identity, and Ted Atkinson shows how Natasha Trethewey creatively reimagines Light in August in her powerful poem, “Miscegenation.” The remaining essays largely connect Faulkner’s work to that of other writers. Andrew B. Leiter speaks to Jean Toomer’s influence on Faulkner, John Wharton Lowe examines Faulkner’s influence on Ernest J. Gaines, Dotty Dye reads Faulkner’s A Fable alongside Claude McKay’s Banjo, and T. Austin Graham juxtaposes Faulkner’s The Unvanquished with W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction with an eye toward their depictions of the Civil War. Jenna Sciuto and and Sharron Eve Sarthou read Faulkner comparatively against two writers of the black Caribbean; Sciuto reads Faulkner alongside Haitian writer Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Love, and Sarthou shows how Haitian American Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker critiques Faulkner’s depictions of Haiti in Absalom, Absalom! I had the pleasure of attending the 2013 conference, so I heard many of these works read in...

A Dance with Many Secrets: The Experience of Emotional Harm from the Perspective of Past Professional Female Ballet Dancers in Canada

ABSTRACTOriginating in the Italian and French courts, ballet is an age-old art that fuses aesthetics and athleticism (Wulff, 2008). Despite changing times, ballet masters and mistresses tenaciously hold on to a sense of deep traditionalism. However, some scholars suggest that unwavering devotion to the art may conceal troubled embodied relations and oppressive practices (Gvion, 2008). In this study, we drew on the phenomenological research tradition in an effort to further examine the power relations that play out on the body in the world of Canadian professional ballet (Papaefstathiou, Rhind, & Brakenridge, 2013). Twenty past professional female ballet dancers from across Canada participated in this study. Our dedicated dancers were relentless. They sacrificed body and mind in the pursuit of excellence in a broader cultural context that expected nothing less. The dancers normalized harmful emotional experiences, inappropriate sexual transgressions, and chronic injury (Gvion, 2008). They also described experiences of neglect—and feeling replaceable—after the onset of injury. We have attempted to theorize our findings within the context of embodiment literature and the work of gender theorists. Emboldened by our dancers’ voices, we have shed light—and broken secrets—regarding some of the harmful practices that still characterize professional ballet in Canada. We hope that our work might further continue efforts to democratize power imbalances in professional ballet and ultimately enhance holistic dancer development and health.

Strata of the Soul: The Queer Archaeologies of Vernon Lee and Oscar Wilde

This essay explores Vernon Lee's ‘Amour Dure’ and ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’, as well as Oscar Wilde's ‘The Sphinx’, ‘The Truth of Masks’, and ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ to uncover how writers at the turn of the twentieth century represented encounters with material artefacts of the past to facilitate the expression of queer identity and experience. While Lee's stories address derelict material remains to expose neglected individual histories, illustrating unconventional relationships through temporal collision, Wilde's ‘The Sphinx’ adopts the exoticism of ancient Egypt to more explicitly discuss sexual transgression. Furthermore, through ‘The Truth of Masks’ and ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, Wilde can be seen to employ archaeological experience to envision queer desire. In their appropriation of the mysteries of the buried past to suggest non-normative desires buried within the self, these late-Victorian works constitute a precursor to major concepts generally associated with the twentieth century, including Freud's analogy between archaeology and psychoanalysis, and the rise of queer archaeology in the late 1980s.

‘Celibacy is certainly not for me!’: Transgressive Sexualities in Male Children in Moses Isegawa's Abyssinian Chronicles

ABSTRACTMoses Isegawa's representation of young male sexuality in Abyssinian Chronicles draws our attention to sexuality as a mobile process of relation, a provisional, contextually-informed construct which challenges more naturalised assumptions of sexuality as a monolithic biological given. Even though there may be attempts by various state and ideological apparatuses to police sexualities and bodies, whether via explicit control or the more subtle inculcation of ideas and behaviours, this coercive facet of identity is not easily fixed into conformity. People create spaces – rhetorical, experiential, imaginative – in which to live difference, in the form of resistance, perhaps, or simply as modes of being and imagining that escape the material and discursive governance of normative categories. This paper examines the intertwining concepts of religion and culture and their role in the production of assumed sexual truths. I consider how these are variously realised through institutions such as schools, church and family, and yet how male child characters in Isegawa's novel also embody and transgress the socio-cultural norms that these institutions espouse.

"I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life."

Holden Caulfield is a noticeable narrator. As the protagonist in J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, he displays a multitude of narrative idiosyncrasies: he contradicts himself, exaggerates his recount of events, and often leaves the reader half-informed on his motivations and emotional life. Much of his narrative style hints at him as a potentially unreliable narrator, although it is widely impossible to determine when his narrative account is unreliable and when it is not. This creates interpretative problems as the reader can never know for sure whether they are supposed to take Holden’s account literally or to look for a veiled meaning beyond his statements.
 This essay explores the consequences of potentially unreliable narration in a specific episode of the novel: Holden’s night-time encounter with his former teacher Mr Antolini. When Holden sleeps on Mr Antolini’s sofa after spending exhausting days in Manhattan, he awakes to find Mr Antolini petting his head. Holden interprets this behaviour as a “flitty pass,” as a sexual transgression on his former teacher’s part, stating that “[t]hat kind of stuff’s happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid.” But what exactly is Holden referring to, and can the reader trust this statement, considering that Holden’s narration regularly borders unreliability?
 Considering the fact that the text rarely reveals the truth behind Holden’s account, I argue that multiple interpretations of this chapter are not only possible but are at the stylistic heart of the novel. On the one hand, this reading of the novel offers an interpretation of a key episode, by considering a history of sexual abuse in Holden’s biography. On the other hand, it indicates that Holden’s account mirrors the mode of narration that would be expected from a troubled and disoriented adolescent – a factor that despite the potentially unreliable mode of narration adds to the sense of authenticity in the novel.

“Address to Public Council”: The Additions to Marston’sThe Malcontent, the King’s Men’s Repertory, and Early Modern Theatrical Economics

“Address to Public Council”: The Additions to Marston’s<i>The Malcontent</i>, the King’s Men’s Repertory, and Early Modern Theatrical Economics

Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and RepresentationCritical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational IdentityWomen’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels

Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and RepresentationCritical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational IdentityWomen’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels

Are infidelity tolerance and rape myth acceptance related constructs? An association moderated by psychopathy and narcissism

Infidelity and rape are sexual transgressions that embody self-centeredness and disregard for others. The attitudinal frameworks related to each of these sexual malfeasances—infidelity tolerance and rape myth acceptance (RMA), respectively—may both result from sexual scripts that lack empathy. We proposed that infidelity tolerance and RMA are associated constructs and that their relationship is moderated by psychopathy and narcissism, both of which are characterized by a lack of empathy. In our cross-sectional study of 262 undergraduates, the relationship between infidelity tolerance and RMA was significantly moderated by both psychopathy (β=0.125, p=0.029) and narcissism (β=0.133, p=0.025). Specifically, the positive relationship between infidelity tolerance and RMA was strengthened as psychopathic or narcissistic traits increased. Further, in an exploratory set of analyses, we found that the self-centered impulsivity factor of psychopathy and the exhibitionism/entitlement factor of narcissism were driving their respective interactions with RMA. Infidelity tolerance and RMA are associated, especially in people that are more likely to lack empathy. The sexual scripts of people with psychopathic and narcissistic traits should be further examined. Other sexual scripts (e.g., hostile masculinity) may also result in a positive relationship between infidelity tolerance and RMA.

The Re-turning of the Screw: The Question of Intent and the Risk of Ideality—A Response to Saketopoulou’s Essay “To Suffer Pleasure”

ABSTRACTIn her paper “To Suffer Pleasure: The Shattering of the Ego as Psychic Labor of Perverse Sexuality,” published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Volume 15, Number 4, Saketopoulou proposes an alternative interpretation of perversion that allows the analyst to recognize perversity’s “productive potential” (Saketopoulou, 2014, p. 255). In this paper I offer a close reading of Saketapoulou’s essay to address 3 contentious issues in her arguments: (a) the author’s proposed definition of perversion and its relationship with the concept of polymorphous perversity, (b) the potential of transgressive sexuality to “shatter” the ego, and (c) the status of the analytic dyad in the case itself and beyond. As I attempt to demonstrate, Saketopoulou’s legitimate and necessary call to move away from dogmatic, pathologizing, and dismissive approaches to perversity requires an even more radical reinterpretation of both the concept of perversion and of what it means to listen analytically to “perverse sexual scripts” (Saketopoulou, p. 257).

Sexual Violation in Islamic Law: Substance, Evidence, and Procedure

Sexual Violation in Islamic Law: Substance, Evidence, and Procedure

MORMONS, GENDER, AND THE NEW COMMERCIAL ENTERTAINMENTS, 1890–1920

In the early twentieth century, new forms of commercial entertainment—dance halls, movie theaters, amusement halls and parks, saloons and the like—emerged in urban areas, providing new ways for young Americans to amuse themselves. This essay explores the distinctive Mormon response to these new forms of amusement. Mormon leaders took up other progressive reformers’ concerns about early twentieth-century amusements, but refracted them through a distinctively Mormon lens that was at once gendered and uniquely religious. Mormons rejected the progressive double standard that sought to constrain women's, more than men's, participation in these new entertainments, focusing on restraining both genders equally. While many progressives held women more responsible for the sexual transgressions they worried resulted from these new forms of entertainment, Mormons held men and women equally accountable. Moreover, while other progressives sought (and largely failed) to provide alternative, more wholesome, entertainment for American youth, Mormons successfully provided family and Church amusements that kept their youth safely ensconced within the Church community. By the end of the 1910s, Church leaders had officially institutionalized the provision of amusement for its members and the Church formally became a social as well as religious organization.

Inefficient Intimacies II: Yearning, Power, and Pity in Sexual Transgression

Inefficient Intimacies II: Yearning, Power, and Pity in Sexual Transgression

Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls: The Matter of Obscenity in Nineteenth-Century Germany. By Sarah L. Leonard. Material Texts. Edited by Roger Chartier et al.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. viii+258. $55.00 (cloth); $55.00 (e-book).

<i>Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls: The Matter of Obscenity in Nineteenth-Century Germany</i>. By Sarah L. Leonard. Material Texts. Edited by Roger Chartier et al.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. viii+258. $55.00 (cloth); $55.00 (e-book).

Queer Livity in the Caribbean: Rosamond S. King's Island Bodies

This essay responds to Rosamond S. King's Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (2014) by noting the convergence of progressive legislation and violence that renders notions of transgression and freedom contradictory and fraught in our contemporary moment, thus helping to frame the book's relevance. Island Bodies draws attention to the sexed subject's embeddedness in notions of authenticity (within the Caribbean as well as in relation to first-world narratives of emancipation) and to the dominance of biological men in discussions of Caribbean sexualities, among other issues. King's insistence on analyzing fiction alongside nonfictional contexts, such as court cases and queer organizing, provides a rich texture for the consideration of transgressive sexualities, while also raising questions about archives, presence, and the production of knowledge.

Indigenous Sexualities: Rosamond S. King's Island Bodies and the Radical Politics of Scholarship

This essay offers a critical engagement with Rosamond S. King's Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (2014), arguing that King enacts a ground-shifting interdisciplinary and translinguistic approach to the study of Caribbean sexualities and gender explorations. King's work is notable for its bridging of the divide between scholarship, literature, and activism, producing new understandings of transgression and agency that challenge both those who see the Caribbean as homophobic and those who see gender-nonconformity and sexual freedom of expression as global North–influenced corruptions. The essay explores the implications for King's conception of the “Caribglobal” and for her expansive and nuanced explications of the ways Caribbean peoples engage with gender, sexuality, visibility, and community belonging.

One Sustained Moment: The Constant Re-creation of Caribbean Sexualities

King responds to essays by noted scholars Faith Smith and Lisa Outar critiquing her 2014 book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination. In particular, she addresses the choice to examine interracial relationships between Caribbean men of color and foreign white woman rather than between Caribbean people of African and Indian descent. King also addresses recent portrayals of Caribbean trans people and of Caribbean women who desire other women, in particular Shani Mootoo's Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab. Several recent court cases related to Caribbean sexuality and nonbinary gender are addressed. King ends by introducing her current research project, which uses existing and imagined archives to examine Afro-Trinidadian women's protest and performance in the late nineteenth century.

Postelection surrealism and nostalgic racism in the hands of Donald Trump

This article builds on interlocutor comments to “The Hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, Gesture, Spectacle” (Hall, Goldstein, and Ingram 2016), a study published before the 2016 presidential election that analyzes Trump’s use of derisive humor in the Republican Party primaries. We move this earlier analysis forward by examining the ways that Trump’s semiotic displays on the campaign trail now inform the material policies of the Trump administration. Our response reflects upon two currents that characterize this postelection moment: first, the surreal mix of gendered and racialized nostalgia embedded in Trump’s iconography and message, and second, the intensification of white racism as Trump’s rhetoric of patriotic nationalism becomes government. Bringing the responses of our esteemed interlocutors into conversation with the philosophical work of Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, and Susan Sontag and the historical work of Carol Anderson, we suggest that Trump’s spectacle of governing embraces sexual transgression, civil lawlessness, and excessive opulence, all of which encourage a pro-white semiotics and a return to racisms past.

Erotic Labor and the Black Ecstatic “Beyond”

Erotic Labor and the Black Ecstatic “Beyond” Mecca Jamilah Sullivan (bio) The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography. By Jennifer Christine Nash. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 219pages. $84.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paper). Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures. By L. H. Stallings. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 270pages. $95.00 (cloth). $26.00 (paper). A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography. By Mireille Miller-Young. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 368pages. $99.95 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). When American pop culture uberstar Beyoncé released her visual album, Lemonade, in April 2016, the black feminist digisphere lit up with response. Critics discussed the album’s historical, diasporic, and transcultural resonances, its interventions into black cultural discourse, and its cross-genre scope. Some of the most astute think pieces examined the album’s use of erotic experience as political metaphor and its riffing on black diasporic spiritual cosmologies to center black women’s love and sexuality.1 Even bell hooks weighed in.2 Yet one of the most important—if surprising—responses came from Karrine Steffans-Short, the video-dancer-turned-author whose 2005 erotic memoir, Confessions of a Video Vixen, chronicled her sexual encounters with various rappers and pop celebrities in explicit, detailed prose. “Over 15 years ago, I had Beyoncé’s husband,” Steffans-Short declares in her essay “I Am Becky with the Good Hair (and I Am Also Beyoncé),” published on the popular feminist blog xoJane. The essay’s title plays on a line from Lemonade in which Beyoncé’s speaker laments her husband’s sexual affair with another woman, whom she calls “Becky with the good hair.” The essay’s title, coupled with a byline nearly synonymous with hypervisible black female sexual irreverence and eroticism, suggests the piece will be another titillating [End Page 131] exposé, inviting readers to take pleasure in the sexual excesses of the lascivious mistress’s exploits while honoring the pain of the respectable wife, reinforcing the comfortable binary opposition of the two. Quickly, however, Steffans-Short upsets this narrative: “I am Becky. I am Beyoncé . . . We are all Becky.” In the essay, which has been shared over fourteen thousand times on social media, Steffans-Short describes in evocative detail a sexual encounter with Beyoncé’s soon-to-be husband, the rapper Jay-Z, before the couple was married: “Jay and I feasted on our attraction to one another—rabidly and quickly. After just a few minutes, I lifted my head from his lap, wiped my lips, and knew we’d made a mistake.” She then turns immediately to describe her experiences as the wife of a cheating husband and the shame she has felt in both roles: “There is a stigma attached to the other woman, the side piece . . . but, honestly, I don’t see the difference. . . . A woman is all things.” In mobilizing simultaneously the identities of the wronged wife, the libidinous mistress, the “video vixen” (a euphemism for “video ho”), and the popular memoirist and author, Steffans-Short highlights the need for reading strategies that move beyond the stubborn hold that classist respectability politics tend to have on discussions of black women’s bodies and sexualities. In her refusal to accept unsanctioned eroticism as a site of sexual shame, and her casual insistence on narrating her sexual transgression in detail while claiming the position of the faithful wife, she insists on a complex black female sexuality in which respectability and ratchetness, sexual pleasure and sexual shame, can coexist in both public and private spaces. She exposes the porous skin between black sexual cultures, black popular cultures, and black literary cultures, and demands that black sexuality studies expand its archive of viable texts to include those produced by the “video hoes,” porn stars, nonmonogamists, “side pieces,” and freaks who often shape the contours of both public performance and sexual life. Together, The Black Body in Ecstasy, L. H. Stalling’s Funk the Erotic, and Mireille Miller-Young’s Taste for Brown Sugar demonstrate the urgency and the political possibility of this emergent archive, marking a welcome turn toward the development of what Jennifer Christine Nash calls “a black feminist theoretical archive...

Die umstrittene Heldenfigur des ukrainischen Kosakenhetmans Ivan Mazepa: Dämonisierung und Heroisierung der Erinnerung

The figure of Hetman Ivan Mazepa cannot be put in the same line with the leaders of Cossack uprisings. Mazepa was no rebel like Stepan Razin or Kondratii Bulavin. Moreover, the Cossack uprisings of Petro Ivanenko, Semen Palej and Kondratii Bulavin were crushed cruelly with his help. His early career began with his election as Hetman and he succeeded in reuniting the two parts of Chmel’nyts’kyi’s territory under his hetmanate. When Ivan Mazepa went over to Swedish King Karl XII some years later, during the great northern war, he was denounced as a traitor and the Russian Orthodox Church imposed on him an anathema. The personality of the Hetman still polarizes today: In Russian historiography, Mazepa is considered as the prototype of a traitor, in the national Ukrainian narrative he is honored as a heroic figure. The question of who the Ukrainian Hetman Ivan Mazepa actually was is not so easy to answer, because historical facts and the heroic appearance diverge. It is a fact that the figure of the Hetman was undergoing numerous political, cultural, linguistic, literary, and sexual transgressions in its development and certain notions and stereotypes established themselves in the collective memory. Until today they determine the image of the Hetman. The present article questions the origin of certain stereotypes, portrays the role of propaganda actions and the media in demonizing the image of Mazepa and highlights the importance the works of Voltaire, Byron, Hugo and Julius Słowacki had for the idolization of Mazepa. Finally, the question is investigated in how far this hero figure is a constituent part of modern Ukrainian nation-building.