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This article analyzes the erotic and sexual awakening as a product of a biological process: the first menstruation in an eleven´s years old little girl. Through the analysis of the short-story “Señorita en la cuadra” (2005) from the honduran writer, Lety Elvir, this study points out some aspects: how the idea of impurity that lays in the menstruation processes is refuted, the apology of sensuality and joy that comes with biological, anatomical and social changes for women, and finally, we discuss about the corporal and individual conscience that comes out in the text. We examine discours, images, and inter-texts mixed up, in order to show a vision of reality in which “young ladies” take their destiny in their own hands. El presente artículo estudia el despertar erótico y sexual detonado por un proceso biológico: la menstruación de una jovencita de once años. A partir del análisis del cuento “Señorita en la cuadra” (2005) de la hondureña Lety Elvir, este artículo aborda distintos aspectos: la refutación de la menstruación como un proceso “impuro” y que vuelve impuras a las mujeres, la apologética de la sensualidad y del gozo del cuerpo relacionados con procesos biológicos, anatómicos y sociales, y finalmente, la conciencia corporal y la noción de individuo que el texto plantea. Se estudian los discursos, las imágenes e intertextos que se entremezclan en un breve cuento hondureño con el fin de mostrar una visión de mundo en la que las “señoritas” toman las riendas de su propio destino.

This essay focuses on the intersections of tourism, war, and erotics in occupied Paris during the Second World War. Too frequently, tourism is considered a only peacetime phenomenon. War, however, can produce its own tourism, as was true of German soldiers in occupied Paris during the Second World War. A specially designated unit of the Wehrmacht arranged tours for thousands of its young soldiers, many of whom had never before left their native towns and villages. Their time in Paris, a city with an already established imaginary of sensuality, opened previously undreamed of possibilities for sexual adventures both imagined and real. Although erotic imaginaries can be difficult for the historian to trace, some idea of them is provided in the diaries of Ernst Jünger, a well-known German officer and writer, who while stationed in Paris toured the city and seems to have had at least a few sexual encounters with local women along the way. The many relationships between German soldiers and Frenchwomen produced tens of thousands of children born during the Occupation. Other soldiers consorted with streetwalkers or visited brothels, carefully regulated by the German authorities. Erotic behavior and imaginaries clearly reflected the power imbalances of the time.With the 1944 liberation of France, Allied soldiers replaced the Germans but the power imbalances remained and the erotic tourism continued. The Liberation also brought accusations against “horizontal collaborators,” or Frenchwomen accused of having had sexual relations with the Germans. Many of those accused were paraded with their heads shaven or worse in French town and cities, reflecting a sense of emasculation in postwar France. In these many ways, erotics was linked to tourism and war. This essay surveys some of the many expressions of erotic feeling in occupied Paris. Addressing the complex intersections of tourism, war, and erotics, it seeks to encourage further research in their linkages.

Après l¿amour, Agnès Vannouvong¿s first novel, gained critical attention when it was published in 2013 as much for its literary qualities as for the erotic nature of its prose. An exploration of female love and doubly so because the novel treats love between women, Après l¿amour is a text haunted by the inter-textual presence of Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig and Violette Leduc and which tells the tale of a young Parisian lesbian on the rebound at the end of a long relationship. Taking as its starting point formulations on the erotic by Marguerite Duras and Audrey Lorde, this article proposes to discuss the relationship between desire, the erotic and artistic creation at work in Vannouvong¿s text. It will consider what it means to write a Don Juan-esque lesbian narrative, set in a capital city (over) synonymous with the romantic, the sensual and even the downright saucy, and this at a time when the very codes of amorous encounters are experiencing a radical transformation, shifting from the physical desire and sexual attraction underpinning nineteenth and twentieth century conceptions of romantic love to the disembodied textual interaction of the Internet. Are the `true feelings¿ of the erotic to be opposed the simulacrum of pornography as Lorde suggests? Or are we now living in a time that is quite literally ¿after love¿, where we are condemned to look back with nostalgia on the age of authentic emotions, just as the narrator in the novel looks back with longing and regret on her past relationship with Paola? Is there not always an element of fiction, of illusion, of fabrication in every amorous relationship? Do true feelings really exist or are they rather a chimera necessary for literary creation?, Artículo revisado por pares

Nelly Kaplan, cinéaste et écrivain qui avait d’étroites affinités avec les surréalistes, organisait son œuvre sur l’entrelacement des genres et des tonalités, de l’humour et de l’érotisme. Ni féministe ni misogyne ni androphobe, elle présente une « création androgyne » : ni masculine ni féminine, à la fois masculine et féminine. Nous verrons qu’on ne peut pas dissocier le corps textuel du corps sexuel et que les genres littéraires doivent toujours se préoccuper de l’inscription du genre (sexué). Ce qui sera ainsi en jeu, ce sera de tenir pleinement compte de l’impact du mot genre dans sa désignation au sein de la langue française : le genre grammatical, le genre biologique et le genre sexuel, le genre littéraire, le genre artistique. Et d’évaluer le travail des formes artistiques que cela entraîne. Les détours par les citations, le roman quantique et l’écriture-panique sont ainsi quelques-unes des formes qui seront examinées dans la production littéraire de Nelly Kaplan et qui élaborent plus qu’une poétique : une érotique. Nelly Kaplan, movie-maker and writer with close affinities with the Surrealists, organizes her work on the interweaving of genres and tonalities, humor and eroticism. Neither a feminist nor a misogynist nor a man-hater, she puts forth an “androgynous creation”: neither masculine nor feminine both masculine and feminine. We shall see that textual body and sexual body cannot be dissociated and that literary genres always have to do with the inscription of gender. What will thus be at stake will be to take full account of the impact of the word genre in its designation in the French language: grammatical genre, biological genre and sexual genre, literary genre, artistic genre. And to assess the work of the art-forms that it entails. Detour through quotations, quantum-novel and panic-writing are thus some of the forms that will be examined in Nelly Kaplan’s literary production, and that elaborate more than a poetics: an erotics.

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.

“Intrusiones mutuas” explora la trayectoria personal de Roger Bartra, un destacado antropólogo mexicano y polémica figura intelectual pública en el México actual. Es un retrato de un colega antropólogo que trabaja disfrutando y diviertiéndose y produciendo cartografías erotizadas de México, el boudoir donde vive, llamado por él “peep show”. En la forma del metálogo batesoniano, la conversación circula por la obra de Bartra como un pasaje a través de paisajes literarios, estéticos y afectivos que problematizan la cultura política y poética del paradigma de Writing Culture. “Mutual Intrusions” explores the personal trajectory of Roger Bartra, leading Mexican anthropologist and polemical public intellectual figure in contemporary Mexico. It is a portrait of a fellow anthropologist playfully working and producing eroticized cartographies of the boudoir he dwells in-Mexico-the “peep show” as he calls it. In the form of a Batesonian metalogue, the conversation meanders through Bartra’s oeuvre as a passage across affective, aesthetic and literary landscapes that troubles the cultural politics and poetics of the Writing Culture paradigm.