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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.
[go
to essay]
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.
[go
to essay]
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.
[go to essay]
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.
[go
to essay]
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.
[go
to essay]
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.
[go
to essay]
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.
[go
to essay]
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.
[go
to essay]
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. [go
to essay]
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