Sexual Myths of Modernity

Sexual Myths of Modernity PDF Author: Alison M. Moore
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498530737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The notion of sexual sadism emerged from nineteenth-century alienist attempts to imagine the pleasure of the torturer or mass killer. This was a time in which sexuality was mapped to social progress, so that perversions were always related either to degeneration or decadence. These ideas were internalized in later Freudian views of the drives within the self, and of their repression under the demands of modern European civilization. Sadism was always presented as the barbarous past that lurked within each of us, ready to burst forth into murderous violence, crime, anti-Semitism, and finally genocide. This idea maintained its currency in European thought after the Second World War as Freudian-influenced accounts of the history of philosophy configured the Marquis de Sade as a kind of Kantian “superego” in a framework that viewed the Western Enlightenment as unraveled by its own inner demons. In this way, a straight line was imagined from the late eighteenth century to the Holocaust. These ideas have had an ongoing legacy in debates about sexual perversion, feminism, genocide representation, and historical memory of Nazism. However, recent genocide research has massively debunked assumptions that perpetrators of mass violence are especially sexually motivated in their cruelty. This book considers how the late twentieth-century imagination eroticized Nazism for its own ends, but also how it has been informed by nineteenth-century formulations of the idea of mass violence as a sexual problem.

Sexual Myths of Modernity

Sexual Myths of Modernity PDF Author: Alison M. Moore
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498530737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
The notion of sexual sadism emerged from nineteenth-century alienist attempts to imagine the pleasure of the torturer or mass killer. This was a time in which sexuality was mapped to social progress, so that perversions were always related either to degeneration or decadence. These ideas were internalized in later Freudian views of the drives within the self, and of their repression under the demands of modern European civilization. Sadism was always presented as the barbarous past that lurked within each of us, ready to burst forth into murderous violence, crime, anti-Semitism, and finally genocide. This idea maintained its currency in European thought after the Second World War as Freudian-influenced accounts of the history of philosophy configured the Marquis de Sade as a kind of Kantian “superego” in a framework that viewed the Western Enlightenment as unraveled by its own inner demons. In this way, a straight line was imagined from the late eighteenth century to the Holocaust. These ideas have had an ongoing legacy in debates about sexual perversion, feminism, genocide representation, and historical memory of Nazism. However, recent genocide research has massively debunked assumptions that perpetrators of mass violence are especially sexually motivated in their cruelty. This book considers how the late twentieth-century imagination eroticized Nazism for its own ends, but also how it has been informed by nineteenth-century formulations of the idea of mass violence as a sexual problem.

The Sexuality of History

The Sexuality of History PDF Author: Susan S. Lanser
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022618787X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
The period of reform, revolution, and reaction that characterized seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe also witnessed an intensified interest in lesbians. In scientific treatises and orientalist travelogues, in French court gossip and Dutch court records, in passionate verse, in the rising novel, and in cross-dressed flirtations on the English and Spanish stage, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and physicians were placing sapphic relations before the public eye. In The Sexuality of History, Susan S. Lanser shows how intimacies between women became harbingers of the modern, bringing the sapphic into the mainstream of some of the most significant events in Western Europe. Ideas about female same-sex relations became a focal point for intellectual and cultural contests between authority and liberty, power and difference, desire and duty, mobility and change, order and governance. Lanser explores the ways in which a historically specific interest in lesbians intersected with, and stimulated, systemic concerns that would seem to have little to do with sexuality. Departing from the prevailing trend of queer reading whereby scholars ferret out hidden content in “closeted” texts, Lanser situates overtly erotic representations within wider spheres of interest. The Sexuality of History shows that just as we can understand sexuality by studying the past, so too can we understand the past by studying sexuality.

Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity

Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity PDF Author: R. Egan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230106005
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This ground-breaking work provides the first history of ideas about the sexual child in modernity. Beginning with twenty-first century panics about sexualization, the authors address why the sexual child excites such powerful emotions in the Anglophone west.

Bad Girls

Bad Girls PDF Author: Amanda H. Littauer
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146962379X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
In this innovative and revealing study of midcentury American sex and culture, Amanda Littauer traces the origins of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. She argues that sexual liberation was much more than a reaction to 1950s repression because it largely involved the mainstreaming of a counterculture already on the rise among girls and young women decades earlier. From World War II–era "victory girls" to teen lesbians in the 1940s and 1950s, these nonconforming women and girls navigated and resisted intense social and interpersonal pressures to fit existing mores, using the upheavals of the era to pursue new sexual freedoms. Building on a new generation of research on postwar society, Littauer tells the history of diverse young women who stood at the center of major cultural change and helped transform a society bound by conservative sexual morality into one more open to individualism, plurality, and pleasure in modern sexual life.

Expectations of Modernity

Expectations of Modernity PDF Author: James Ferguson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 052092228X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Once lauded as the wave of the African future, Zambia's economic boom in the 1960s and early 1970s was fueled by the export of copper and other primary materials. Since the mid-1970s, however, the urban economy has rapidly deteriorated, leaving workers scrambling to get by. Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural responses to this prolonged period of sharp economic decline. Focusing on the experiences of mineworkers in the Copperbelt region, James Ferguson traces the failure of standard narratives of urbanization and social change to make sense of the Copperbelt's recent history. He instead develops alternative analytic tools appropriate for an "ethnography of decline." Ferguson shows how the Zambian copper workers understand their own experience of social, cultural, and economic "advance" and "decline." Ferguson's ethnographic study transports us into their lives—the dynamics of their relations with family and friends, as well as copper companies and government agencies. Theoretically sophisticated and vividly written, Expectations of Modernity will appeal not only to those interested in Africa today, but to anyone contemplating the illusory successes of today's globalizing economy.

Queer Rebellion in the Novels of Michelle Cliff

Queer Rebellion in the Novels of Michelle Cliff PDF Author: Kaisa Ilmonen
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443893439
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book explores Jamaican-American author Michelle Cliff’s (1946–2016) literary rebellion against the colonial, gendered and racist norms of Western Modernity. It studies the sexualized circuits of the Atlantic world, drawing on the fields of literary criticism, feminist theories, queer studies and Caribbean studies. In order to do this, the book develops the theoretical paradigm of intersectionality. It also addresses the disturbing questions concerning the sexual politics of transatlantic modernity as represented in Cliff’s novels. Cliff’s rebellious poetics envisions the colonial Caribbean past in new ways. Her novels tell stories about Caribbean queer characters setting the queer as a site of postcolonial agency and as a perspective out of which colonial history can be re-written. This book considers myths, rites, and cultural memory as sites of healing in the midst of colonial bodily politics. Transnational histories, identity and ethics emerge as intertwined in Cliff’s feminist novels.

The Transformation of Modernity

The Transformation of Modernity PDF Author: Michael Hviid Jacobsen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351787551
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
This title was first published in 2001: For over 30 years it has been argued that contemporary society is undergoing a fundamental transformation. The portrait of the modern society or modernity offered by philosophers and social scientists from Hobbes to Parsons is no longer understood as a description of the final and highest stage in the social evolution of mankind. Modern society is not the end of history but simply another more or less contingent social and cultural formation on planet earth. This new perspective on modernity and its transformation, which has emerged from the modernist-postmodernist debate, is the subject matter of this book. It is addressed in a multidisciplinary and international way, both theoretically and empirically, and is explored not only in general and historical terms, but also through specific topics such as sexuality, identity, democracy, globalization, knowledge and leadership. Offering an important collaborative contribution to contemporary discourse in sociology, social psychology, politics and philosophy, this book represents a unique effort to come to grips with our obscure and elusive social position at the start of the 21st century.

From Shame to Sin

From Shame to Sin PDF Author: Kyle Harper
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674074564
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
The transformation of the Roman world from polytheistic to Christian is one of the most sweeping ideological changes of premodern history. At the center was sex. Kyle Harper examines how Christianity changed the ethics of sexual behavior from shame to sin, and shows how the roots of modern sexuality are grounded in an ancient religious revolution.

Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present

Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present PDF Author: Kate Fisher
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230354122
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
An examination of how bodies and sexualities have been constructed, categorised, represented, diagnosed, experienced and subverted from the fifteenth to the early twenty-first century. It draws attention to continuities in thinking about bodies and sex: concept may have changed, but hey nevertheless draw on older ideas and language.

Frigidity

Frigidity PDF Author: P. Cryle
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230337031
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This first major study of a curiously neglected term in the history of sexuality will intrigue students, scholars and enthusiasts alike. The authors take us through a journey across four centuries, showing how notions of sexual coldness and frigidity have been thought about by legal, medical, psychiatric, psychoanalytic and literary writers.