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Richard C.
Sha, "The Use and Abuse of Alterity: David Halperin and
Percy Shelley on Ancient Greek Sexuality"
Through a comparison of Percy Shelley's
understanding of the alterity of Ancient Greek Sex with
David Halperin's, Sha argues that alterity functions on the
one hand to insist upon the otherness of Greek sex, and, on
the other hand, to declare one's self-consciousness about
that otherness. Because self-consciousness and otherness
are necessarily at odds, alterity has become a post-modern
form of objectivity. Once one declares one's allegiances,
one is free to make the other other.
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Jonathan Loesberg, "Foucault and the
Hedgerow History of Sexuality"
This article argues that what it calls
hedgerow envy, a generalized sense of having a
non-historical stake in the meaning of a historical
narrative—which is part of its inauthenticity and its
theory—is also a central part of how Foucault's
history works, as well as the debates his history has
incited and played a part in over the historical meaning of
sexuality and homosexuality.
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Elizabeth
Fay, "Framing Romantic Dress: Mary Robinson, Princess
Caroline and the Sex/Text"
Two Romantic Period women who were
accustomed to public appearances used the semiotic play
provided by deliberate dress choices to create public
interpretations of their legible bodies: Mary Robinson and
Princess Caroline. While Robinson carefully crafted her
public image, she also varied it with fashionable rapidity
so that she was always in the public eye due to her literal
mobility among public spaces and her identity mobility.
This flexible form of role playing allowed Robinson to
adjust her public image as necessary. When the less adept
Caroline of Brunswick attempted to create similar identity
play for herself, the outcome was successful or disastrous
in public opinion depending on her political backers.
Caroline's body was pre-read through political screens, and
unlike Robinson's careful identity managing, Caroline's
costuming was directed at fighting or abetting such
screens.
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Jillian
Heydt-Stevenson, "Pleasure is now, and ought to be,
your business": Stealing Sexuality in Jane Austen's
Juvenilia
Austen's Juvenilia has generally been seen
as the youthful expression of a nascent talent, a gathering
of short and often fragmentary pieces that are typically
nonsensical or bizarre, but infused throughout with her
comic genius. This essay argues that this body of work,
taken as a whole, has an intellectual unity and is informed
by a consistent thread of appetitive excess that functions
as a powerful critique of the kinds of constraints late
18th-century society imposed on young women. The heroines
of the Juvenilia, in their often shocking or even illegal
pursuit of love, food, drink, and material objects, not
only display the power of a range of female desire, they
also expose just what Austen's society was afraid of and
sought to silence. Historical sources as well as
psychoanalytic and feminist theory help us understand how
Austen's counter-narratives expose the pervasiveness of
repression and how powerful the female resistance to that
denial could be, turning the kinds of violence society
intends against women back out against the world. The
mature Austen continues to explore these themes, even if in
a less manic and more measured way.
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Susan
S. Lanser, "Put to the Blush: Romantic Irregularities
and Sapphic Tropes"
Without arguing for direct influence, this
essay reads a group of English poems as an implicit
Romantic conversation that advances different models of
sapphic sublimity in a troplogical contest about the nature
and place of female affinities. The essay begins by
revisiting the exclusion of "Christabel" from the
Lyrical Ballads, and goes on to discuss the implicit
dialogue enacted through William Wordsworth's sonnet to the
"Ladies of Llangollen" and Dorothy Wordsworth's poem
"Irregular Verses." The essay concludes with a look at the
metrical practices of these poems and of Shelley's
"Rosalind and Helen," as a way to explore the ambivalences
and ambiguities in Romantic configurations of female
same-sex desire.
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Bradford
K. Mudge, "How to Do the History of Pornography:
Romantic Sexuality and its Field of Vision"
This essay takes as its subject both the
sexual body as represented in British romantic fiction and
the imagination (is it "literary" or "pornographic"?) that
was required to envision that body as a narrative event.
Situated after the high watermark of "libertine literature"
in the 1740s and 50s, but before the emergence of
"pornography" proper in the 1830s and 40s, romantic fiction
inherited the eighteenth century's conflicted attitudes
about novelistic pleasure but was itself produced in a
cultural marketplace that had not yet fixed and formulated
the discursive opposition between "literature" and
"pornography." The essay discusses these issues in dialogue
with the historical and sexological discourse of Michel
Foucault in The History of Sexuality.
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Daniel
O'Quinn, "The State of Things: Olaudah Equiano and the
Volatile Politics of Heterocosmic Desire"
The essay explores the notion of masochist
nationalism through a reading of a brief passage in
Equiano's Interesting Narrative in which Equiano
engages with a young Musquito man named George. Equiano's
attempt to convert George is tied to a mutual reading of
Fox's Book of Martyrs which posits a community of
aggrieved souls who will enact vengeance on the slave
holders and on those who sanction slavery. The argument
pays particular attention to how Equiano figures George in
a complex economy of humiliation and revenge. This revenge
becomes highly sexualized when Equiano shifts his allusions
from Fox's Book of Martyrs to The Book of
Judges. From this point onward Equiano's text is
thoroughly involved in a series of rape fantasies which
have important nationalist implications. Ultimately, the
essay suggests that Equiano's most radical gesture in this
scene is to stage politics from the ground of the object,
but it also demonstrates how such a politics is susceptible
to unforeseen consequences.
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David M. Halperin, "'That Obscure Object
of Historical Desire'"
In his essay, Halperin responds to the
essays collected in this issue, many of which respond to
his book How to Do the History of Homosexuality,
touching upon the history of sexuality, homosexuality,
subjectivity, and desire, especially as reflected in the
sexual discourse of Michel Foucault.
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Andrew Elfenbein, "Romantic Loves: A
Response to Historicizing Romantic Sexuality"
Elfenbein's essay responds to the essays in
Historicizing Romantic Sexuality by considering
their usefulness in response to the work of Michel
Foucault. He examines how each essay continues or
complicates Foucault's ideas in The History of
Sexuality. He examines Bradford Mudge's essay in terms
of the agency of the novel, and the essays by Susan Lanser
and Daniel O'Quinn in terms of coding. He discusses female
agency in the essays by Elizabeth Fay and Jillian
Heydt-Stevenson. For the essays by Richard Sha and Jonathan
Loesberg, he examines how they treat identity and
difference in relation to sexuality. He concludes by
discussing the concept of love in Romanticism.
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