Rethinking the Erotic: Eroticism in Literature, Film, Art and Society

Rethinking the Erotic: Eroticism in Literature, Film, Art and Society PDF Author: Katarzyna Popak-Bernat
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1848883501
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. The erotic is a complex and highly problematic phenomenon that scholars have agonised over for centuries. Generally speaking, the erotic refers to sex and sexuality. However, it is a multifaceted term that holds multiple, meanings for different people. The erotic, on the one hand, is personal – a collection of thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and sensations shared with one’s self or other people. On the other hand, it is explicitly public – subject to censorship, scientific study, penalisation, political debate, and reproduction in art. It is also the basis of this volume, which includes chapters from 14 different authors who presented their ideas on eroticism at the 7th Global Conference: The Erotic (Exploring Critical Issues) at Mansfield College, Oxford in September 2012. This volume offers a broad perspective on issues of the erotic with the authors representing not only a wide variety of academic and non-academic disciplines but also a range of countries from across the globe.

Rethinking the Erotic: Eroticism in Literature, Film, Art and Society

Rethinking the Erotic: Eroticism in Literature, Film, Art and Society PDF Author: Katarzyna Popak-Bernat
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1848883501
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. The erotic is a complex and highly problematic phenomenon that scholars have agonised over for centuries. Generally speaking, the erotic refers to sex and sexuality. However, it is a multifaceted term that holds multiple, meanings for different people. The erotic, on the one hand, is personal – a collection of thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and sensations shared with one’s self or other people. On the other hand, it is explicitly public – subject to censorship, scientific study, penalisation, political debate, and reproduction in art. It is also the basis of this volume, which includes chapters from 14 different authors who presented their ideas on eroticism at the 7th Global Conference: The Erotic (Exploring Critical Issues) at Mansfield College, Oxford in September 2012. This volume offers a broad perspective on issues of the erotic with the authors representing not only a wide variety of academic and non-academic disciplines but also a range of countries from across the globe.

William Blake’s Divine Love

William Blake’s Divine Love PDF Author: Joshua Schouten de Jel
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040003656
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Despite the fact that William Blake summarises the plot of Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) in just eight lines in the prefatory ‘Argument,’ there are several contentious moments in the poem which continue to cause debate. Critics read Oothoon’s call to Theotormon’s eagles and her offer to catch girls of silver and gold as either evidence of her rape-damaged psyche or confirmation of her selfless love which transcends her socio-sexual state. How do we reconcile the attack of Theotormon’s eagles and the wanton play of the girls with Oothoon’s articulate and highly sophisticated expressions of spiritual truth and free love? In William Blake’s Divine Love: Visions of Oothoon, Joshua Schouten de Jel explores the hermeneutical possibilities of Oothoon’s self-annihilation and the epistemological potential of her visual copulation by establishing an artistic and hagiographical heritage which informs the pictorial representation and poetic pronunciation of Oothoon’s enlightened entelechy. Working with Michelangelo’s The Punishment of Tityus (1532) and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–51), Oothoon’s ecstatic figuration reflects two iconographic traditions which, framed by the linguistic tropes of divine love expressed within a female-centred mystagogy, reveal the soteriological significance of Oothoon’s willing self-sacrifice.

Time Binds

Time Binds PDF Author: Elizabeth Freeman
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822348047
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
By foregrounding bodily pleasure in the experience of time and its representation in queer literature, film, video, and art, Elizabeth Freeman challenges queer theorys recent emphasis on loss and trauma.

The Transformation of Intimacy

The Transformation of Intimacy PDF Author: Anthony Giddens
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745666507
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
The sexual revolution: an evocative term, but what meaning can be given to it today? How does 'sexuality' come into being and what connections does it have with the changes that have affected personal life on a more general plane? In answering these questions, Anthony Giddens disputes many of the dominant interpretations of the role of sexuality in modern culture. The emergence of what the author calls plastic sexuality - sexuality freed from its intrinsic relation to reproduction - is analysed in terms of the long-term development of the modern social order and social influences of the last few decades. Giddens argues that the transformation of intimacy, in which women have played the major part, holds out the possibility of a radical democratization of the personal sphere. This book will appeal to a large general audience as well as being essential reading for students and professionals.

Laura Mulvey 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' 1975

Laura Mulvey 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' 1975 PDF Author: Laura Mulvey
Publisher: Koenig Books
ISBN: 9783863359652
Category : Feminism and motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
Since it first appeared in Screen in 1975, Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" has been an enduring point of reference for artists, filmmakers, writers and theorists. Mulvey's compelling polemical analysis of visual pleasure has provoked and encouraged others to take positions, challenge preconceived ideas and produce new works that owe their possibility to the generative qualities of this key essay. In this book, the celebrated New York-based video artist Rachel Rose (born 1986) has produced an innovative work that extends and adds to the essay's frame of reference. Drawing on 18th- and 19th-century fairy tales, and observing how their flat narratives matched the flatness of their depictions, Rose created collages that connect these pre-cinematic illustrations to what Mulvey describes in her essay--cinema flattening sexuality into visuality.

Gendered Bodies

Gendered Bodies PDF Author: Shuqin Cui
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824857429
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Gendered Bodies introduces readers to women's visual art in contemporary China by examining how the visual process of gendering reshapes understandings of historiography, sexuality, pain, and space. When artists take the body as the subject of female experience and the medium of aesthetic experiment, they reveal a wealth of noncanonical approaches to art. The insertion of women's narratives into Chinese art history rewrites a historiography that has denied legitimacy to the woman artist. The gendering of sexuality reveals that the female body incites pleasure in women themselves, reversing the dynamic from woman as desired object to woman as desiring subject. The gendering of pain demonstrates that for those haunted by the sociopolitical past, the body can articulate traumatic memories and psychological torment. The gendering of space transforms the female body into an emblem of landscape devastation, remaps ruin aesthetics, and extends the politics of gender identity into cyberspace and virtual reality. The work presents a critical review of women's art in contemporary China in relation to art traditions, classical and contemporary. Inscribing the female body into art generates not only visual experimentation, but also interaction between local art/cultural production and global perception. While artists may seek inspiration and exhibition space abroad, they often reject the (Western) label "feminist artist." An extensive analysis of artworks and artists—both well- and little-known—provides readers with discursively persuasive and visually provocative evidence. Gendered Bodies follows an interdisciplinary approach that general readers as well as scholars will find inspired and inspiring.

The Decision Between Us

The Decision Between Us PDF Author: John Paul Ricco
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022611337X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
The Decision Between Us combines an inventive reading of Jean-Luc Nancy with queer theoretical concerns to argue that while scenes of intimacy are spaces of sharing, they are also spaces of separation. John Paul Ricco shows that this tension informs our efforts to coexist ethically and politically, an experience of sharing and separation that informs any decision. Using this incongruous relation of intimate separation, Ricco goes on to propose that “decision” is as much an aesthetic as it is an ethical construct, and one that is always defined in terms of our relations to loss, absence, departure, and death. Laying out this theory of “unbecoming community” in modern and contemporary art, literature, and philosophy, and calling our attention to such things as blank sheets of paper, images of unmade beds, and the spaces around bodies, The Decision Between Us opens in 1953, when Robert Rauschenberg famously erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning, and Roland Barthes published Writing Degree Zero, then moves to 1980 and the “neutral mourning” of Barthes’ Camera Lucida, and ends in the early 1990s with installations by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Offering surprising new considerations of these and other seminal works of art and theory by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and Catherine Breillat, The Decision Between Us is a highly original and unusually imaginative exploration of the spaces between us, arousing and evoking an infinite and profound sense of sharing in scenes of passionate, erotic pleasure as well as deep loss and mourning.

The Fifth Sacred Thing

The Fifth Sacred Thing PDF Author: Starhawk
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0307477657
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
An epic tale of freedom and slavery, love and war, and the potential futures of humankind tells of a twenty-first century California clan caught between two clashing worlds, one based on tolerance, the other on repression. Declaration of the Four Sacred Things The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth. Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them. To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves became the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. no one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy. All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity. To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible. To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives. Praise for The Fifth Sacred Thing “This is wisdom wrapped in drama.”—Tom Hayden, California state senator “Starhawk makes the jump to fiction quite smoothly with this memorable first novel.”—Locus “Totally captivating . . . a vision of the paradigm shift that is essential for our very survival as a species on this planet.”—Elinor Gadon, author of The Once and Future Goddess “This strong debut fits well against feminist futuristic, utopic, and dystopic works by the likes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ursula LeGuin, and Margaret Atwood.”—Library Journal

Culture, Society and Sexuality

Culture, Society and Sexuality PDF Author: Richard Guy Parker
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9781857288117
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
This work offers an introduction to the central debates in sexuality research. Among the issues examined are the social and cultural dimensions of sex, human sexuality and sex research.

Pornographic Sensibilities

Pornographic Sensibilities PDF Author: Nicholas R. Jones
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000264165
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Pornographic Sensibilities stages a conversation between two fields—Medieval/Early Modern Hispanic Studies and Porn Studies—that traditionally have had little to say to each other. The collection offers innovative new approaches to the study of gendered and sexualized bodies in medieval and early modern textual production, including literary and historical documents. The volume’s embrace of the interpretative tools of Porn Studies also inscribes a critical provocation: in what ways can contemporary modes of reading the past serve to freshly illuminate not only the contours of that same past but also the very critical assumptions of the present upon which fields like medieval and early modern Hispanic Studies are built? In this way, Pornographic Sensibilities encourages at once both rigorous historicizations of pre- and early-modern culture, and playful engagement with "presentism," considered here as a critical tool to undress the hidden assumptions of both past and present. This move substantively challenges long-held critical orthodoxies among scholars of pre-Enlightenment periods, for whom the very category of "pornography" itself has often problematically been framed as an anachronism when applied to their work.