Search

In the 1920s and 30s, a criminal investigation followed by a trial against a group of allegedly homosexual men was launched in Gothenburg, Sweden. Almost a century later, Swedish artist Conny Karlsson Lundgren engages with these events in a multifaceted two-part installation and performative work that borrows the title from the investigation, The Gothenburg Affair (Göteborgsaffären). In this article, we describe how the investigation was conducted during a time in which the science of criminology expanded to envelop new technologies and methods of identification and categorization. Tools such as new uses of photography, the portrait parlé, and Kretschmerian body types were implemented to identify criminal individuals and behaviors and place them within a particular category of criminality or pathology. In his works, Karlsson Lundgren conspicuously brings out sensual and sexual details of the archival material and inverts the denigrating and stigmatizing ways in which these details were used in the source material. In the article, we describe the strategies though which Karlsson Lundgren's work transforms aspects of the archival material and in this way intervenes in history to continue a resistance found between the lines of the archival material itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soviet cinema magazines covers played a crucial role in shaping the cinematic star system of the Soviet Union, yet their significance has been largely overlooked in academic discussions. This article examines the covers of two periodicals, Ekrano naujienos (News of the Screen) and Kinas (Cinema), published in Soviet Lithuania from 1955 to 1986, focusing specifically on covers featuring a single face. The analysis situates these covers within the broader context of the close-up of the face, which held a prominent position in Soviet cinema culture. Additionally, the article explores the unique context of eroticism associated with the face in Soviet cinema criticism.

South Korea, which has, for a long time, prided itself as a mono-racial nation, is experiencing a significant shift in its demographic from racial homogeneity to multi-raciality. Such change is fueled by the rise in interracial relationships between Korean men and non-Korean women. In this article, I address the question: How are Korean masculinity and national identity reconceptualized through interracial relationships? I build on feminist theories on race and eroticism to critically examine the YouTube videos uploaded by couples comprised of Korean men and white women. These videos garner hundreds of thousands of views and become spaces of lively debate about issues of masculinity, nationalism, and femininity. I argue that the viewer responses to the videos mobilize misogynistic binaries that pit supposedly problematic Korean women against the supposedly ideal white women. I demonstrate how misogyny in Korea is being rearticulated to conform to the nation's demographic shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To explore queer touch in digital spaces, the authors consider three games that sit uneasily within the genre of the first-person shooter (FPS), in which the player mediates gameplay through a first-person perspective, typically in the form of an armed individual. The FPS was fundamental in establishing such technological idiosyncrasies as real-time rendering and physics that still shape digital intimacy today. As these techniques were developed, a normative and often violent regime of touch was established whereby sight equated destructive, obliterating intimacy. Yet, as explored in this article, through techniques such as glitch, mechanical remixing, and code reappropriation, normative touch itself can be broken, giving way to queerer forms of intimacy. The authors center their analysis on Trespasser, Portal, and Polaris. Although disparate in content, production context, and temporality, all three games seek to reinterpret physical intimacy in code and narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the democratisation of Mexico in 2000 and the progressive neoliberalisation of cultural spheres, gay pornography appears as a medium where national identities and the racial/ethnic tensions of the mestizo construction of Mexico have been resituated, challenged, and redefined through a liberatory ethics and aesthetics. Mecos Films' first two films La putiza and La verganza mobilise popular stereotypes such as the luchador wrestler and sexualise national heroes such as mariachis. By narrating the sexual adventures of a lucha libre wrestler heavily mediated with ethnic markers, the films engage with, de-structure, and finally reassemble stereotypes of sexual(ised) citizenship. The sexual(ised) men on screen reformulate a sexual politics where mutual pleasure is the starting point to developing a sexual citizenship liberated from structurally violent gender norms. Comparing the historical arc of Mexican pornographic production from the 1920s (Colección Callado), this article highlights the use of popular subjects (charros, mariachis, chinas poblanas, etc.) as visible representations of queer and non-normative sexual subjects within the space of the nation. The films foreground role-play as a strategic tool to subvert and redefine Mexican masculine sexualities, and ultimately mobilise an aesthetics of pleasure, particularly anal pleasure, that deconstructs and reconstructs liberated Mexican masculinities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This dossier collects four reflections on The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (2019) with responses by its author Tiffany Lethabo King. This dossier is based on an American Studies Association 2021 roundtable organized by Beenash Jafri.

Through creative speculation and intervention, this research project probes the 'coolie homoerotic' (Wahab 2019) as a critical reflection on the place of the homoerotic and queerness within the transoceanic lifeworld of coolie indentureship. The four artworks presented are informed by a series of questions that might help to build a platform for queering indentureship and trans-oceanic space beyond identity recovery and respectability politics. In this regard, the work in progress is aimed at sexing indenture by (1) focusing on Brown same-sex sexual intimacies and erotic relations on coolie ships, as a way of undoing the historically constructed disconnect between the categories 'sex' and 'indentured labour', and (2) critically engaging the colonial heteropatriarchal discourse of 'sex/gender/sexuality' that continues to condition the unthinkability of same-sex relations in the context of indentureship and its legacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The symposion, a male social gathering that began in ancient Greece, was a social institution by and for men, hence a type of men’s society as we might understand it in modern parlance. Its manifestation on the Indian subcontinent has to date not been fully explored. In its original form, the symposion consisted of three main elements: alcohol, sex, and intellectual pursuits in the form of literature and philosophy, commonly understood by the popular phrase “wine, women, and song”. These sympotic elements find their equivalents in a wide range of Sanskrit litera­ture, which include medicine (Āyurveda), eroticism (Kāmaśāstra), polity (Arthaśāstra), epics, and rhetoric (Alaṃkāraśāstra), as expressed in the Carakasaṃhitā, the Kāmasūtra, the Arthaśāstra, the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, and the Kāvyamīmāṃsā. The literary evidence indicates that the three sympotic elements came to full blossom in urban Indian men’s social gatherings or goṣṭhīs dating to a few centuries before the Common Era. The paper combines this literary evidence with archaeological sources to show how a foreign social custom contributed to an indigenous institution of men’s society in ancient India by a process of adaptation. It would appear that as the institution moved into different parts of the Indian subcontinent, it increasingly came under Brahmanic influence, which led to an important ideological change that stressed literary and intel­lectual pursuits over alcohol and sex. Under royal patronage, the goṣṭhī finally became a means for the development of Sanskrit and Indian literature and drama.

A geneaology of Caribbean feminism is a geneaology of tanty feminisms. Occupying numerous articulations throughout the history of the Caribbean region and its diasporas, the figure of the 'tanty', or 'aunty' as they are known in non-Caribbean contexts, and the consequential amital social relations they produce have been indispensable to contemporary discourses and practices of Caribbean feminist thought and praxis. The tanty cannot be read as indebted to a singular person, figure or monolithic legacy but operates as a fluid and transnational force of Caribbean feminist knowing that instructs us through non-normative embodied transgressions, and pedagogies of free up. Yet, despite their presence of vital integrity to Caribbean popular culture, community organizing, history, politics and literature, discussions of the politics and pedagogies of tantyhood remain underrepresented in scholarly Caribbean feminist literatures. In this article, I reflect upon my creative practice as a drag artist and self-proclaimed tanty in an annual digital photography series I have produced over the last three years entitled 'Coolieween'. In this work, I reference Indo-/Caribbean folklore and mythologies, and stories of horror, the grotesque and the paranormal as entangled with queer affects, embodiments and aesthetics. Drag artistry, which, like tantyhood, agitates the invisible boundaries of neo-colonial gender, racial and sexual binaries, provides a critical feminist terrain to metaphorize the institutional crossings of pain and pleasure held within historical and contemporary ontologies of Indo-Caribbeanness. Investigating the pedagogy of this crossing is central to understanding, as well as critiquing, long-standing attachments of pain, injury, pathologization and trauma that have been commonly scripted to Indo-Caribbean subjectivities, often in reference to genealogies of kala pani poetics and other diaspora narratives that have sutured ideas of Indo-Caribbeanness as always-already broken, fragmented and dislocated. In this article, I instead centre paradigms of erotics and pleasure as a transformative medium to turn our optics towards transformative reconfigurations of Indo-Caribbean feminist selfhoods. As I argue here, by thinking with and through tanty feminisms, we are provided with intergenerational and transnational languages of unsettling logic that continually instruct us through everyday modalities of Indo-Caribbean feminist living and being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Zina Saro-Wiwa's documentary project and video installation Eaten by the Heart, which explores intimacy, heartbreak, and love performances among Africans, both on the continent and in the diaspora. Considering the role of the erotic in how diasporic subjects conceptualize and negotiate their attachments to their homeland and host country, Akinbola argues that Saro-Wiwa marks the Black diasporic body as a site of erotic agency. In doing so, Saro-Wiwa simultaneously acknowledges and resists the burden of respectability and cultural norms that hide and dismiss the importance of emotional expression, intimacy, and vulnerability in the lives of African and African diasporic people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early twentieth-century Futurist and Fascist sense of 'speed' as an aesthetic ideal and object of desire continues to be a pervasive and powerful influence in contemporary culture. The paper explores aspects of cultural imaginaries and discourses of the body, their relationships to the motor vehicle, and how these imaginaries play out in the health education space, specifically in a schools-based road safety programme, Fit to Drive (F2D), where the erotics and aesthetics of the human-car-machine-assemblage are made absent. In imagining the limits and possibilities of human embodiment in road safety/health education, we present encounters with the fascist psyche, with Graham – a grotesque (baroque) creature at the heart of a collaborative art project/installation, with the folds of our bodies, and the competing possibilities of the baroque. Our intent is to invite a different engagement with the human-car-machine-assemblage, and to trouble what we include in, exclude from, school-based health education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I explore the sensuous dimensions of intimacies and erotics in ethnographic field research conducted among the Dagara in northwestern Ghana. I argue that sensuous perception reveals aspects of ethnographic research that are frequently rendered inaudible, especially performative modes of expression. I theorize a conception of the erotic that moves beyond sexual activity, desire, and identity. This expansion of the erotic continuum opens up space to explore intimacy as produced through embodied knowledges. Through three sonic portraits, I demonstrate that sensuous perception is vital to understanding women's shared intimacies and relationships. The indigenous materiality, ritual, and performative modes expressed in the portraits illuminate the myriad configurations of erotics as a source of power between women, even across identity categories. These everyday moments, the sonic intimacies that develop over time and in non-linear ways, they gesture to the performative, embodied, sensorial dimensions of ethnographic knowing, and they clarify gendered intimacies. These portraits suggest that the erotic is a manifestation of creative energy embedded in shared knowledge, history, and embodied expression such as dance, ritual, labor, and intimate gestures. By witnessing everyday sonic productions as transformative, we conceptually expand feminist praxis to be grounded in indigenous expressions, idioms, and ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares the views of psychoanalyst Fritz Morgenthaler and philosopher Michel Foucault on the issue of human sexuality. Topics mentioned include the identification of freedom in sexual experience and action, the need of mutual relation between individuality and sociality, and the theoretical concepts of psychoanalysis.

This essay offers an original tool, eroto‐philology, in order to explore the crucial role that linguistic particularities play in the study of sexuality, and the role sexuality plays in the study of language, focusing on the unique case of modern Yiddish. In the case of Yiddish, the sexual and the linguistic, the erotic and the philological, shared a similar positioning: where Jewish sexuality was considered deviant, so too the language itself was considered abnormal and deviant. This article will begin a larger project of reversing the dominant perspective, by exploring how Jews formulated their own notions of their language and bodies, writing philology and sexology in their own tongue. The focus of this article will be the role of sexuality in Yiddish linguistic projects spanning 1913–1990, and each of these projects will be treated as an incomplete archive, first because Yiddish was emerging and later because of its imminent decline. Taking into account the shifting historical realities of Yiddish and its speakers, eroto‐philology will serve as a methodological mediation between body and text, activating the materiality of reading each, and both, together.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the heteronormative construction, older people are positioned as asexual, post-sexual or predatory on young bodies. Ageist assumptions deny their sexual desires exist at all or, if they are acknowledged, frame them within pathological medical, sexological and cultural discourses that characterize older sexual agency as grotesque, ugly, unattractive and sexually undesirable. These normative constructions have a negative impact on older sexual subjectivities. This article begins to develop a constructive representational form – or erotics - of aging sex and sexuality. Queer, as a deconstructionist, anti-foundational and anti-essential perspective, would seem the most prominent means by which to challenge pathologies of the ageing body and ageing sexuality. However, this discussion will suggest that there is both scope and limitations with regards to the ability of Queer critiques to undermine ageist erotophobia. Whilst queer proposes that we are free to construct and reconstruct our sexuality in multiple ways, our changing subjectivities are not just experienced emotionally and intra-psychically but are also bounded by our physicality. Our ageing corporeality prevents a constant and continuous reinvention of the sexual self. This does not preclude an erotics of age that -moves away from genito-centric and heteronormative/ homonormative constructions of sexuality and open up the potential for an erotic aged sex and sexual intimacy.

The German-born Surrealist artist and writer Hans Bellmer is currently most famous for the two dolls he created in Berlin during the 1930s, alongside accompanying photographs and texts. Controversial for the challenging and oftentimes sexually graphic character of his work, Bellmer has often been criticized by feminist thinkers. Beginning with the recently hosted Double Sexus exhibition in Berlin, where his work was presented alongside that of Louise Bourgeois, and then examining his doll photographs and other works, I argue that—far from reifying gender norms—Bellmer deconstructs the stability of the male ego.

By attending to the inherent flux of sexual fantasy, Miranda July’s first novel The First Bad Man reveals a mobile and mutable erotics capable of generating an enlarged range of self-identification and relational intimacy, far from any essentialist assumptions of stable or coherent sexual identity. July focuses specifically upon role-play as the means to unpack the normative categories of hetero/homosexuality, masculinity and femininity, celebrating rather than pathologising qualities like superficiality and inconsistency. The novel touches upon many polarising issues (for example, sexual violence, sadomasochism and assisted reproductive technology), deftly avoiding the conventional language which colours perception. Both erotic and humorous, The First Bad Man helps to redefine the often highly charged discourse around sex and sexuality.

This dossier collects four reflections on The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (2019) with responses by its author Tiffany Lethabo King. This dossier is based on an American Studies Association 2021 roundtable organized by Beenash Jafri. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heterosexual eroticising situations and relationships in the context of missions. This article contains some of the results of empirical research done on heterosexual eroticising relationships in which missionary women engage. This research was done for a DTh thesis submitted at the University of South Africa in 2014. Eroticising always precedes actions and influences the later relationships of male and female missionaries who are still alive and working. In an initial study it was found that many missionary organisations had addressed and listed sexuality as a theme. However, the eroticising of heterosexual relationships has up till now not been systematically researched and reflected upon. During interviews with missionary women, it was found that they not only had been involved in erotic relationships beforehand, but that they also experienced eroticising in the mission field, establishing eroticising as part of the internal system of missionary work.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: Consequently, a Missiology of being authentically human was developed for this study in which eroticising was addressed. With this, it should be possible to deal theologically and practically with eroticising, temptation and sexual needs.

In this short essay, I will endeavour to show that Frantz Fanon’s well-known conception of struggles for national liberation is intimately linked to an erotics of liberation. This one takes its roots in a shift, or better a reversal, of theories of racism. As Etienne Balibar argues, “racism,” as a category, appears at mid 19th century, especially under the aegis of the UNESCO, as a break with the conceptions of “race,” considered to be a pure “myth” or “prejudice.” A better example of such an epistemological rupture is probably Sartre’s Antisemite and Jew and its motto: “the Jew is a man whom other men consider a Jew…it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew.” In other words, race is nothing but the product of racism. The biological arguments that underlie the theories of race are “false” arguments inasmuch as they depend on ideological and/or psychological premises.

This article examines the life and novels of Carole laFavor, arguing for her importance to and influence in Two-Spirit studies. Along with being a writer, laFavor was a powerful voice for social justice and Indigenous health sovereignty in Minnesota and the nation. Her two novels,Along the Journey RiverandEvil Dead Center, which both focus on Anishinaabe lesbian detective protagonist Renee LaRoche, are the first lesbian detective fiction published by a Native author. Renee's embrace of a specifically Two-Spirit erotics anchors her to family and brings her tribal community a powerful healing when she employs her skills to protect her people from instances of racism, abuse, and injustice. This article, then, reads these novels as the first of an emerging genre of texts that claim an overtly Two-Spirit erotic as well as vital precursors to the present embrace of sovereign erotics in Indigenous studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we describe a participatory workshop we facilitated on the diversity of Hmong sexualities and sexual norms - including our preparation leading up to the workshop and a summary of what we learned - at the 2015 Hmong National Development conference, which marked the 40th year that Hmong have been in the U.S. We also describe our positionalities and stakes in the matter as they helped to frame discussion. Topics discussed during the workshop included the "repressive" construction of "Hmong culture," gender inequalities, desirability, sexual mores, LGBTQ identities and homoeroticism, virginity, sex acts and pornography. Participants engaged in lively conversation about issues of marriage, reproduction, hookups, sexual play, age and generation, sex education, and exclusion versus tolerance, amply underscoring the multiplicity of viewpoints that are represented among Hmong Americans. Finally, we raise the need for more community dialogues and more in-depth academic inquiry into Hmong sexualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to three articles in a symposium dedicated to my research in somaesthetics, this paper explores a variety of themes connecting my theories with classical Chinese philosophy. The symposium topics discussed here range from the ontology of body-mind and world to the ethics of somaesthetic self-cultivation, and then to the somaesthetic meanings of our practices of erotics and of eating. The paper shows how the pragmatist orientation of somaesthetics reconciles values of unity with those of difference and how key ideas of somaesthetics intersect, in different ways, with both Confucian and Daoist thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This performative text engages with a writing of haptics by offering 10 theses on touch. This writing exercise that seeks to philosophize the feel, to paraphrase Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, comes to understand itself as a performance of touching rather than a text about touching. Each of the 10 separate theses/touches can be read independently and in any order while also creating a whole through their proximity. The passages presented touch upon each other in order to create a performative instantiation of Jacques Rancière's notion of a “distribution of the sensible.” This distribution of the sensible and the gaps therein emerge from different times, spaces, political and aesthetic practices that include yet are not limited to the tear gas sweating streets of Athens touching Caribbean dance practices touching Audre Lorde's erotics touching Max's Kansas City touching queer commons touching anarchist love letters. To trace these practices, temporalities, resistances is to touch the constant trembling oscillation of subject and object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time and space interconnect in the short story "Añejo cinco siglos" from the collection Apenas murmullos (2004). María Elena Llana (1936), the Cuban journalist and writer, using a chronotropic juxtaposition brings together two female characters from different epochs. One is the Galician Doña Isabel de Bobadilla (from the past time) and the other is the Mulata Chabela (from the present time). Both female characters have a dialogue that interconnects two different times and space. They create geographical, political and personal intersections, specifically because their men have left La Habana under different circumstances but with the same goal to settle in Florida. Don Hernando de Soto continues the Spanish Expedition to America leaving Isabel heartbroken while Lazarito has left in a balsa promising Chabela that he would come back. Thus, the purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that the everyday personal interconnections are chronotopes to reconfigure the conditions of crossing geographical and historical frontiers. Nonetheless, in these personal circumstances both women reconfigure narratives about political power and erotic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we explore ethical concerns, the function of promiscuity and the fuel of desire in one-to-one performance work. Looking at examples by ORLAN, Jess Dobkin and Owen G. Parry, we work to map out tentative yet tenacious versions of our experiences of this form. Employing Levinasian ethics to consider the encounter from the perspective of an audience member, Zerihan examines erotics and ethics in relation to the economies of one-to-one performance. Kartsaki's focus is on 'The Promiscuous Spectator', through which she considers the insatiability of desire in performance. Reflecting on examples of performance work, Kartsaki highlights the relationship between desire, repetition and the potential efficacy in the ongoing hunt for fulfilment. Together, the authors' contributions reflect a short critical study, offering two distinct, yet overlapping perspectives on one-to-one performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asserts the need to recognize the complexity of the theoretical work of more lesbian Native American writers, focusing specifically Beth Brant (Bay of Quinte Mohawk) and Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo). Their poetry and short stories provide a theoretically nuanced analysis of how heteronormativity is intertwined in and dependent on colonialism, and thus a methodology for Queer Theory that requires an understanding of it in relation to colonialism. They reject heteronormative Pocahontas fantasies about Native women, offering a lesbian-based tactic for decolonization through the expression of erotic desire. This article demonstrates the endless possibilities for fierce queer resistance, revolutionary change, and healing from the trauma of genocide and the accompanying colonialist heteropatriarchal disciplining of Native women's bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on literature works which deals with children as legal subjects. The author discusses the story "The Turn of the Screw," by Henry James which primarily deals with the issue of child sexuality and discusses the possible legal ways that can be used by children for preserving their individualities. It highlights the legal changes required for pervading cultural and legal narrative of child witnesses.

Treating television as a semiotic system, this article charts the various pleasure/meaning/identity configurations that are possible when audiences engage televisual texts. Reflecting on the uniquely postmodern character of television as a communication medium, it is argued that traditional hermeneutic and interpretive approaches to television such as artistic or ideological criticism should be accompanied by alternative approaches rooted in erotics. Developing the simile "television as lover," the article theorizes a transgressive pleasure of television viewing that undermines hegemonic ideology by transforming viewers from patrons into producers. The concluding section explores how such a practice necessitates fundamentally shifting the aim of criticism from critical explication to critical pedagogy. A follow-up article models this approach to television by undertaking a sustained auto(erotic)ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I review what kinds of emotions might be felt by women who are teaching managers. I counterpoise arguments that women's bodies are over-determined as motherly or lacking in masculinity, and therefore lack embodied authority, so leading to feelings of inadequacy, fear, and anxiety with the view that there are spaces, modes and moments when women can exceed, or interrupt these interpolations to Produce most pleasurable relations. As a way into the debates, I examine ideas drawn from women's studies on the emotions associated with pleasure-pleasure specifically based on women's embodied erotics. Arguing that pleasure is not necessarily political resistance, or indeed, unproblematic, I argue that these ideas on pleasure and erotics can be applied to our understanding of women teaching in the management classroom. I conclude that an acknowledgement of some of these pleasures may provide us with a better platform for conceptualizing teaching than simply notions of nurturance, learner-centredness or disembodied rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neil BadmingtonFrom Critical Practice to cultural criticism: an interview with Catherine BelseyIn this interview, Catherine Belsey discusses the development of her work in English literature, critical and cultural theory, and cultural criticism over the last twenty-five years. She discusses the emergence and subsequent institutionalisation of ‘theory’ in the English-speaking world; her first encounter with poststructuralism, in the form of Barthes's S/Z; the importance of Lacanian psychoanalysis to her work; and the challenge posed by the new discipline of cultural criticism to both English literature and cultural studies in their traditional forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games , Christopher B. Patterson critically analyzes video games through the methodological framework of erotics. In doing so, he provides astute insights into the ways in which video games can work to challenge essentialized narratives and constructions of race while also fostering greater awareness and understanding of one's own place within the larger geopolitical systems of capitalism and empire. Through understanding video gamers as not simply passive receptors of ideology, but rather as active participants in the gameplay experience, he contends that video games create pleasure and other forms of affective engagement through erotic play. Through this erotic play, Patterson argues that "games enact playful protests against the power, identity, and order of information technology" (7). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]