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The primary aim of our study is to challenge the traditional phallocentric conception of the erotic that casts women as passive objects, whose sexuality is defined solely in relation to the phallus. Drawing on the feminist critique of Audre Lorde, who contends that the power of the erotic is an empowering force that is latent in women, we argue that when women take agency over their body and reclaim their sexuality, they emerge as empowered beings in all aspects of their lives. The erotic, thus, turns into a life force or a creative agency to address the multifariousness of sexuality. This paper seeks to establish the trope of erotic as a constructive force and further aims to explicate how women wield sexuality to subvert gendered power dynamics and counter the historical use of sexuality as a tool for female subjugation. By integrating Lorde’s idea of the erotic as an agency along with the theories of sexuality propounded by Herbert Marcuse, Luce Irigaray, and Georges Bataille, we attempt to arrive at an alternative conceptualization of the erotic through a feminist reading of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood (2003) and perceive the sexual encounters in question, as an empowering and reconciling force for both the sexes, rather than perpetuating power dynamics.

This article analyses the representation of the sexual bodies and erotic desire of Jamaican black women in selected poems by Tanya Shirley. It draws on postcolonial feminist theories and Caribbean and diasporic cultural studies, especially Audre Lorde's theory of the erotic as power, as it analyses idiosyncratic sources and strategies of women's erotic empowerment. In her poetry, Shirley is careful to highlight the volatility of eroticism as a force that can both empower and imperil women. She also erotically empowers frequently neglected attributes of female subjectivity such as the fat female body and the stereotypically nurturing characteristic of women. Moreover, Shirley pays homage to Jamaican working-class women who cunningly deploy their erotic power in response to socioeconomic and gender oppression in the problematic and nuanced contexts of Caribbean gender politics. Through these rhetorical and thematic strategies, Shirley illustrates various uses of the erotic as a template for Caribbean women's poetics. This model rejects both pathologised and respectable renditions of Caribbean black women's sexuality as evidenced in historical discourse and earlier works by women writers, insisting, instead, on an assertive and celebratory female eroticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The primary aim of our study is to challenge the traditional phallocentric conception of the erotic that casts women as passive objects, whose sexuality is defined solely in relation to the phallus. Drawing on the feminist critique of Audre Lorde, who contends that the power of the erotic is an empowering force that is latent in women, we argue that when women take agency over their body and reclaim their sexuality, they emerge as empowered beings in all aspects of their lives. The erotic, thus, turns into a life force or a creative agency to address the multifariousness of sexuality. This paper seeks to establish the trope of erotic as a constructive force and further aims to explicate how women wield sexuality to subvert gendered power dynamics and counter the historical use of sexuality as a tool for female subjugation. By integrating Lorde's idea of the erotic as an agency along with the theories of sexuality propounded by Herbert Marcuse, Luce Irigaray, and Georges Bataille, we attempt to arrive at an alternative conceptualization of the erotic through a feminist reading of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood (2003) and perceive the sexual encounters in question, as an empowering and reconciling force for both the sexes, rather than perpetuating power dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: This heuristic study explores the client's experience of seeking to repair early relational deficits through their sexual practices, preferences, desires and relationships. Aims: The aim of this study was to explore the hypothesis that a client's sexual practices, preferences, desires, relationships and needs can offer a direct opportunity to understand their early relational deficits. Methodology: This study uses heuristic enquiry, seeking to capture the essence of participants' experiences. In‐person, semistructured interviews were conducted with four participants, and transcripts were analysed according to Moustakis' heuristic method. Findings: The four research participants did seek repair in ways that aligned with the literature in terms of seeking a lost unity, searching for intimacy, to repair damage and resolve splits through the powerful contact of sex. The study demonstrates the irresistible power of the unconscious desire to address unmet needs and the destructive nature of the urgent search for intimacy—and suggests that although a repair through the erotic is sought, it is rarely found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists of sexuality often invoke the theme of pleasure, but it is not always clear what scholars believe the implications and importance of pleasure are. To this end, this paper reviews the existing literature on sexual pleasure, specifically within the field of sociology, to demonstrate what questions about sexual pleasure are (and are not) currently being asked. Through a systematic literature review, I demonstrate that scholars often lack a justification for why pleasure is important. I also connect themes between the kind of questions being asked about pleasure and the justifications attached to these studies, relating to risk mitigation, relationship satisfaction and well‐being, power structures, and moral oversight. Based on this review, I make recommendations for the future of sexual pleasure research with the goal of centering pleasure for pleasure's sake and embracing its liberatory possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to obtain a set of erotic and gory pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) for use in studies across India. Additionally, it compares the ratings of a representative Indian sample with North American norms. Using the Self-assessment Manikin, adult Indian participants rated 72 arousal-matched IAPS pictures on emotional dimensions of arousal, valence and dominance. The ratings of the Indian and North American samples for valence were similar, but arousal and dominance ratings differed significantly. According to the valence–arousal relationship, the Indian sample's emotional reactions to the unpleasant pictures compared to the pleasant ones were stronger. The Indian sample's affective space of valence and arousal had a more curved and deeper boomerang pattern than the North American sample. The divergences in arousal and dominance ratings are attributed to cultural differences in interpreting affective information specific to erotic and gory pictures. Although there are marked similarities between the Indian and North American ratings, careful consideration of country-specific normative ratings is recommended for erotic and gory IAPS pictures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was presented at a psychotherapy conference. The purpose was to look at gender, sexual, erotic, and relationship diversity. Sally presents her own personal and professional history, as a psychosexual therapist, of meeting diversity in the therapy room. She provides definitions of current terms and ways to consider opening up the topic with clients. She challenges the heteronormative positions and delivers an important take home message around keeping curious, open and not making assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of conjuring in African American culture and artistic works in its relation to female identity has been recently addressed from an academic point of view as "Conjuring Feminism": a term that centralizes its role as an intellectual tradition that works as a liberatory epistemology for women of African descent. In the definition of such term, Audre Lorde's concept of the erotic has a central role. This paper analyzes Zora Neale Hurston's works to explore how she engages in this tradition and its erotic nature. Lorde's notion also functions as the paradigm at the base of Conjuring Feminism and provides an analysis of its applicability to address the African-based spiritual phenomenon of magic, one that engages Alejo Carpentier's notion of the marvelous real. In this way, the erotic provides the space and momentum to enact both Conjure Feminism and the marvelous real as female liberatory epistemologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the aurea dicta of Epicurus (DRN 3.12) are placed in conversation with larger discourses related to apian, floral, and honey imagery. Within these literary contexts, bees and honey are often associated with morally suspect appetites, effeminacy, and potentially dangerous erotic entanglements. Lucretius, I argue, seems to allude to these risky literary valences and manipulates them for his own poetic and rhetorical ends. Honey, we discover, is much more than a sugary substance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Erotic Black Diaspora: From Your Hands to Mine" is a theoretical exploration of how the erotic informs Black feminist politics, kinship, love, and spirituality throughout the African diaspora. Through an interdisciplinary approach rooted in literary studies, history, African and African diaspora studies, women's and gender studies, and Black queer studies, as well as archival research, a close reading of letters sent to Black feminist, writer, and poet Audre Lorde reveals how the erotic functions within Black feminist spaces, particularly in the late 1970s-mid 1980s. In using Audre Lorde's definition of the erotic, as she defines it in "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," this paper argues that the Erotic Black Diaspora is a way of reading Black feminist love, language, and action. Recognizing the diversity within Afro-diasporic experiences, the Erotic Black Diaspora privileges the erotic (platonic and/or romantic) feelings and expressions across continents cultivated between same-sex-loving and queer individuals throughout the African diaspora. Positioning Black feminist archives, in particular correspondence sent between Black feminist foremothers, as a counter-archive to institutions of oppression informs one's understanding of the ethics of Black feminist politics, love, spirituality, and community building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we rite/write, as an act of shamanic enfleshment, into knowing-being a decolonizing and feminist political subjectivity that centres the divine feminine and feminist spirituality of the abuelas. We journey across the territories of Colombia and so-called Australia and with the archetypes of Bachué, la Mujer Salvaje, la Mujer Amante-Hechicera, and Baubo, ella quien habla por la entrepierna. We rite/write to bring to presence the role that the erotic, the cyclical, and enfleshed can bring to our politics so that it weaves a sacred erotic political sociality, other registers of kinship/homecoming and (political) subjectivity, and a politics (m)otherwise in which no one is left behind and the racialized and feminized body is returned to its rightful place in our visions and onto epistemological practices of healing liberations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study looks at three performances of "Vaghe Stelle" from Cavalli's L'erismena to explore different ways of configuring questions of love and virtue. The focus is on three types of relationship: one couched in the language of the pastoral and the idyllic, suppressing the erotic impulse; the second, where that impulse is carefully controlled in the manner of what has been called "courtly love," and a third, where the erotic impulse has been given free reign. The question of what an "ideal" relationship between love and virtue might be is left unanswered by the composer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the cannon of Shakespeare's criticism, Othello's Desdemona is often depicted as an icon of modesty, wifeliness, and Christian virtue; however, many psychoanalytic critics tout a more venal and meretricious interpretation of her character. The subtle process of gradually goading teen Desdemona into the trap of a prostituted, soft-porn practitioner by the male agency is orchestrated through extolling her to an exquisitely beautiful, feminine icon while dropping seemingly innocuous innuendoes of the need to offer such beauty and charm, whether platonically or carnally, to men. Her culpable passivity and disinclination to unequivocally reject attempts to prostitute her render her in collusion to her moral descent. Taking her amorous history, erotic propensity, and resolute decision-making, Desdemona strikes us as a sexual experimenter who marries Othello for her own gratification, having turned away many European princes. Shakespeare projects an image of her as an exquisitely beautiful celebrity who takes pride in flaunting her charms, seducing men, and leaving a trail of broken hearts. In the psychologically intense slap scene, without verbally agreeing to the behests of her spouse-turned-pimp, she nonetheless undertakes his every utterable and non-utterable whim. Desdemona's sudden, inexplicable reticence to spurn Othello's prompting in this scene while surrounded by her Venetian compatriots who are oxymoronically transformed to function as depraved, ferocious voyeurs reinforce her image as purposely feeble and unerringly eroticized, rendering her a complicit performer rather than a helpless victim. Whether willing or compelled, Desdemona's conflicting, character-trope served Shakespeare's performative histrionics, business acumen, and rendered Othello a popular, considerably successful classic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines trans feminine community-building and care in the context of desire and the erotic as forms of political praxis. The theoretical core of the text builds on Audre Lorde's broad, poetic use of the erotic as well as José Muñoz's aesthetic and utopian notion of queer future. I argue that Lorde and Muñoz provide important tools for theorizing the erotic as a politically subversive and utopian form of care in the contemporary political setting of rising anti-genderism, moral conservativism and neo-fascism. The essay begins though a brief, historical examination of the ways in which transgender sexuality, desire and the erotic have come to be a neglected and contested topic in both academic and clinical research, despite what Michel Foucault defines as a 'discursive explosion' on the truth about sex and sexuality in modernity. I will then point out historical counter examples of transfeminine, transvestite and cross-dresser community-building in which care is intimately linked to the erotic in Lorde's sense of the term. Finally, I argue that trans desire and the erotic should be understood as radically political in Muñoz's sense of utopian imagining of a future yet to be made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the erotic power of the dancer in relation to the performance of arkestra girls in the Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. From the discursive lens of body, agency and identity, I move to the visceral presence of a dancer who foregrounds the labour of the erotic and the bodies of sensory in a live performance. I argue that the existing binary between dance and sex work not only conceals the labour question but also hides the power of the erotic. I see dance and sex as co-producing forces in the formation of the phenomenal body on stage. I call the 'transformative' force the erotic power of the dancer – the power of the erotic to transform the body and give it an exceptional 'new' dimension. The liveness of such performance rests on the sensory circulation of the body and its polyphonic vibes. Against the theories of affect that heavily rely on the individual body of a performer, I situate the erotic body as an exchange, as a commodity but also as having a potential for radical intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Our reticence [to discuss sex in public] is therefore understandable, but not acceptable when it seeps into our literature" (v) declares Sibbyl Akwaugo Whyte in her introduction to the 2018 electronic collection Erotic Africa: The Sex Anthology. Back in 2014-2015, Léonora Miano rejected the muzzling effects of racialization that until recently has led Francophone sub-Saharan and Afrodiasporic writers to suppress their sexuality. Miano's rebellion against that repressed form of self-alienation and her striving toward poetic sexual freedom resulted in her commissioning and editing two anthologies, Première nuit: une anthologie du désir (2014) by male writers and Volcaniques: une anthologie du plaisir (2015) by female writers. Investment in correcting the silence around sex(ual) pleasure is echoed and amplified in a growing number of anthologies, mostly digital. What is the conceptual repertoire the editors, curators, and writers deploy in expressing their vision of sexual pleasure and poetic freedom? Are there discernible forms of freedom in their articulations? What kind of freedom is possible in writing and publishing erotic and/or pornographic texts in a digital space? Drawing on the collections' editorial notes, secondary materials on the founders of the collectives and hubs, Phyllis Taoua's reflections on freedom, and a close reading of Tuelo Gabonewe's short story "The Oink in Doinker," I argue that this genre and its current success is all about freedom in its instrumental and substantive guises. Specifically, I show how in combating sexual moralists through the distribution of their literary output via the Internet, these writers engage online platforms as instrumental freedoms. Using those instrumental freedoms, they practice and aspire to substantive freedoms by presenting a radical vision of sexual permissiveness, and thus remedying a stale literary scene through experimentation with content and style, which equally affords their readers a certain degree of substantive freedom. In their practices and aspiration exists the insuppressible creative resolve toward sexual self-determination that however reveals the tenuous relationship between the two kinds of freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about erotical riddles found in Javanese and Indonesian. By using data collected and formulated through an introspective method, it is found that the addressers commonly construct erotic riddles in odd interrogative sentence types intended to deceive and mislead the addressees. The riddled topics are mostly about human genital and everything related to it, woman's breasts, and sexual activity. The humorous riddle discourses are created by various riddling techniques, such as analogy and metaphor, homonymy, sound change, word and syllabic permutation, and metonymy. Javanese and Indonesian erotic riddle discourses often contain code-mixing of the two codes mastered almost equally well by the bilingual interlocutors living in bilingual and diglossic speech communities.

In this article I present the constitution of essay-letters as a narrative possibility for research, analyzing knowledge production from our places of knowledge. To this end, I write an essay that has as its guiding thread the defense of the production of an intimacy and erotic policy for research. To do this, I use the dialogue I weave with intellectuals such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa, a conversation in composition to inquire how to carry out relationship research concerned with how we meet and respect differences and how we welcome multiple forms of existence in our processes of thinking and writing research. To feed the proposed discussion, the essay-letters arise as an invitation to dialogues, spoken writing and the deconstruction of a hegemonic way of writing the research processes that, in most cases, capture existences and languages. This research has showed that we need to invest in an enlargement of methodological possibilities that we propose to ourselves just like the decolonization of knowledge is supposed to happen in a practical form, in actions of our doing. The essay-letters, in this way, operated as a producing machine of opening of encounters, dialogues among the participants of this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who is Lucrezia, the mysterious woman at the center of Machiavelli's comic play Mandragola ? And why is she deemed "fit to govern a kingdom"? This article revisits these questions with attention to Mandragola 's sophisticated, and often irreverent, allusions to Roman source materials. While scholars have long recognized that Mandragola draws on Roman history and drama, its sustained engagement with Lucretian and Ovidian poetry has gone largely unnoticed. In what follows, I trace these allusions and show how Machiavelli uses them to bring into view the fertility of erotic desire. Mandragola is replete with Lucretian phrases and imagery, but a close examination of these references indicates they are made playfully, and even satirically, in the style of Ovid's Ars amatoria, a didactic elegy on the art of seduction that develops a mixed assessment of Epicurean teachings. Like Ovid, Machiavelli embraces the hedonism that motivates Epicureanism—but without accepting that happiness requires distancing ourselves from illusion. This departure allows both Ovid and Machiavelli to reassess the status of erotic desire. For Lucretius, erotic desire must be handled with extreme caution lest it entangle the mind in ruinous false beliefs and destroy the possibility of theoretical wisdom. Machiavelli, following Ovid, recommends a different course, in which happiness is achieved through the deliberate manipulation of erotic fantasy. For Machiavelli, staging erotic fantasies is an essential part of statecraft. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amadis of Gaul is a medieval romance written in the early 14th century and edited by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo for its publication two centuries later. Montalvo, apart from emending the first three books, was the author of the fourth one. This neo-Arthurian1 work, as Tierney described it (1999, 1221) very much like many other works of its genre, fed itself upon romantic, classical Roman and Greek stories whose central axis stood on the journey of the hero for spiritual quest2 (Savary 1984, 108). It also became an important source of inspiration for the well-known masterpiece Don Quijote de la Mancha, whose countless references to the hero of Gaul officially confirmed Amadis as the quintessence of chivalry novels in the history of literature. The focus of this analysis is going to be drawn to some extracts taken from Amadis of Gaul, more specifically, the desperate letter that princess Oriana writes to Amadis, along with special mention to some other extracts in which certain aspects of their relationship will be dissected in this essay. The main purpose of this research is to reveal the underlying meaning to the traditionally conceived role of women in this type of literary genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present investigation, contrasting Plato's Socrates with Socrates' character that emerges from the texts and doxography from the Socratics, I present two hypotheses about who Socrates' erotic teacher was. On the one hand, there is the general doxographic hypothesis of the Socratics who point to Aspasia as his erotic teacher, since Aeschines and Xenophon, disciples of Socrates, as well as other philosophers and doxographers after the classical period (Alciphron, Athenaeus, Cicero, Philostratus, Lucian, Maximus of Tyre, Plutarch, Synesius, Victorinus), portray Aspasia as Socrates' teacher in the erotic arts. On the other hand, there is the Platonic innovation that presents Diotima as the true erotic guide of Socrates. I seek to demonstrate the importance of the priestess of Mantineia in the Banquet, since Diotima is directly associated with the platonic novelty of philosophical éros. Next, I indicate the possible reasons for this displacement (replacing Aspasia with Diotima as the central figure of philosophical éros and Socrates' erotic guide) carried out by Plato, focusing on how these reasons are linked to essential aspects of the erotic novelties proposed by Plato. Finally, I question whether this Platonic strategy, which limits the wisdom of Aspasia to just one of the subjects for which it was known (rhetoric), would not it be another one of the camouflages that philosophy made with the sophistic inheritances, in particular, of the Aspasian rhetorical-erotic sorceries that profoundly influenced Socratism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This photo essay curates two interrelated bodies of creative work, Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy (2013-ongoing) and The Brown Photo Album: An Archive of Feminist Futurities (2020), to explore the queer afterlives of indentureship in South Africa through the aesthetic realm. Queering the Archive and The Brown Photo Album are influenced by the photo archive of an Afro-Indian family from rural Kwa Zulu Natal. The curation of these two interrelated projects as this photo essay, Brown Femininities and the Queer Erotics of Indentureship, positions the maternal-feminine as central to the making of Afro-Indianness and to my own understanding of sexuality, beauty, pleasure and the erotic as informed by the home-space of the Afro-Indian family. This project maps my mother's desire to create a visual archive of the Afro-Indian woman in the immediate afterlife of indentureship onto my own desire to create a visual archive of the Afro-Indian queer experience in contemporary South Africa. The images translate the violence associate with the sugarcane plantations and indentureship into an aesthetic of pleasure where the past, present, and future as well as Black, Brown, and white bodies rub against and touch each other as an ongoing practice dedicated to re-imagining Afro-Indian intimacies and South African Blackness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attachment to the bad object has remained a durable, undertheorized clinical problem. With an extended clinical example, the experience of limit, in both patient and analyst, is examined as part of a dense undercurrent in the relationship, including transference, that gives rise to shifts in understanding the attachment to an unsatisfying internal object. Importantly, the patient's and the analyst's experiences of limit are "in play" during the process of changes in the patient's attachment to the bad object. The relation of patient and analyst to the patient's internal objects, including bad and unsatisfying objects, is where play itself begins. Limit itself is constitutive of play. The analyst's attempt to analyze his own thoughts and experience regarding limits in maintaining an empathic connection to the patient's psychic reality influences the patient's capacity to take in a new part of his or her experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages a Winnicottian formulation of the analytic field to highlight the often unspoken, implicit erotic dimensions of analytic work. Material from an analysis with a very inhibited, emotionally constricted man shows both patient and analyst encountering difficulty in "locating" each other within the analytic field. Paradoxically, a felt sense of connection was also palpable, and possibly/impossibly erotic. Movement in the treatment required the development of what the analyst came to think of as an "erotic sonar"-a "sounding" in the erotic body of each participant that could indicate the place of creative connection. A sensing in the body for the "feel" of the analytic dyad became a kinetic reading of emotional closeness or distance, as well as indicating the subtle, and shifting, tones of the relationship. Emphasis is placed on bodily experience in a subjective registering of the erotic, both as sexuality and as a more general experience of passion, vitality, and creativity.

This paper addresses responses to Drawing Down the Moon by Shannon Grimes, James Davila, Gregory Shaw, and Naomi Janowitz, using the cues of extraordinary efficacy, performance, social location, and ends to determine whether something is labeled magic and by whom. In each of the papers, the cue of social location appears as the most significant, even though the others each play a role as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is so little written about the female analyst's sexual desire? Presenting a case where an older, cisgendered, heterosexual female analyst is unmoored by erotic stirrings toward her younger, cisgendered, heterosexual male patient, de Peyer challenges cultural and gender prohibitions against the acknowledgment of female analytic erotic arousal. Can the female analyst be both maternal and sexual? Engaging the complexities of an intersubjective collision between the analyst's desire and the patient's apparent absence of desire, this paper explores the emergence of dissociative transference-countertransference dynamics, along with culturally embedded associations to gender, power, the incest taboo, and the potential for ethical boundary violation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers collected in this issue address a variety of aspects of the concept of conatus ranging from the explorations of its roots in early ancient Greek thought to its application on modern theories of democratic education. The conatus is a special relation between the parts of a monad and their subparts and the subparts of the subparts to infinity, which ensures that each part and subpart is a part of this monad and not of any other. As a fundamental trait of monadic existence, the conatus is manifested in a multiplicity of facets that sustain the persistence of any real existence. It is thus obvious that there is still a vast field of such manifestations of conatus that awaits philosophical exploration, especially in the realms of Social Ontology and of the Philosophy of Nature.

COVID-19 has magnified intersecting inequalities that are central to the functioning of capitalism. At the height of the crisis, the value of an economy based on the exchange of goods and services faded away to expose the importance of care across the public and private spheres. Undervalued and underpaid labour suddenly became critical to the survival of many. Drawing on Abolition Feminism, we argue for the need to seize this revaluation of labour to centre nurture and pleasure within our post-pandemic recovery. We apply an Abolition Feminist framework that conceptualises the prison as part of a network of violence that deflects attention from the root causes of harm. We reflect on the development of our Abolition Feminist web platform, Read and Resist!, a space where theory meets reflection on praxis. We consider how activist strategies within Abolition Feminism may support us in reimagining our relationships with law and justice post-COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pictures with affective content have been widely used in the scientific study of emotions, from two main perspectives: on the one hand, dimensional theories claiming that affective experiences can be described according to a few fundamental dimensions such as valence and arousal, and on the other hand, discrete-category theories proposing the presence of a number of basic and universal emotions. Although it has been demonstrated that these two approaches are not mutually exclusive, the existing standardized affective picture databases have been created from the dimensional perspective, which has led to important gaps for research focused on discrete emotions. The present work introduces MATTER, a new database comprising 540 pictures depicting disgusting, fearful, neutral, erotic, mirthful and incongruent content, which provides normative values (total N = 368, mean = 120.47 ratings/picture) in valence and arousal dimensions, as well as in discrete affective (disgust, fear, erotica and mirth) and cognitive (incongruence and interest) features. A tentative classification into discrete categories is presented, and the physical properties of each picture are reported. Our findings suggest that MATTER constitutes a modern and suitable set of affective images including, for the first time, both mirth- and incongruence-related pictures. Additionally, it will enable the examination of affective and cognitive processes in fear/disgust and humor/incongruence fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the romanticism period, the two most explored motifs of poetry, besides others, were those of war and love. Many authors will deal with the first motif, but there will be no author at all in Albanian Romantic Literature that won’t involve in his creations love poetry. The erotic motif will lie somewhere more and somewhere less into the creativity of each representative of this period. Zef Sersembe is a Romantic Italian-Arbëresh writer, whom devoted his life to poetry. Most of his poems are dedicated to love and it can be said that these creations can be considered as the most prosperous ones of this poet. He brought in Albanian and Italian literature not only a beautiful poetry, but also a creative individuality characterized by a distinctive and representative style. It will be exactly erotic poetry and some of its features which will be subject of our survey. Will be analyzed some of the elements that emerge in these creations, elements that relate not only to the use of motives, but also to the particular ways in which this author's erotic poetry is constructed through the connotation of language. The chosen creations that are object of our work are written in variants; therefore the main focus will be the way language is used to create different meanings, from almost the same corpus of signs between these variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1950s, films set in the Brazilian Northeast have variously represented the region as the site of romanticised national origin, spectacularised poverty and violence, and popular anticolonial revolt, in each case defined by its opposition to metropolitan, urban centers. Gabriel Mascaro's 2015 film Boi Neon breaks with these narratives, portraying a community of itinerant vaqueiros ("cowboys") in the contemporary Northeast whose barren landscape is shot through with neon to mark its absorption into the globalised market as the textile industry and agribusiness encroach on the arid, traditionally cattle-raising region. Combining a Deleuzian approach to the body and desire with haptic and aural film theory, this article argues that, through careful attention to the affective ways in which humans interact with others and with a particular focus on the erotic, Boi Neon dispels conventional narratives of the region, drawing attention instead to the desires and tensions of bodies in their everyday activities. As time-space compression and reduction of humans, animals, and land to their exchange value make the dualisms that oppose nature to culture, rural to urban, premodern to modern, and mythical to historical increasingly difficult to sustain, I argue, Mascaro uses the contemporary Northeast as a setting to explore lines of flight from late capitalist agro-industry's extractivist and heteropatriarchal order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyze the eroticism and the representation of femininity in pornochanchada, the most popular genre in the history of national cinema. During the conservative military dictatorship, erotization dominated the screens of the whole world, arriving at Brazil in the form of pornochanchada. Those films overcame censorship and presented sexual discourses highly indecent to the moral values of the time, but, because they did not present explicit criticisms to the policy of the military dictatorship, the genre was considered alienating and futile, showing the disregard of the critics for the cinema of the masses and for sexual discourses. It's clear that the eroticization displayed on the screen was conservative, as female stereotypes perpetuated gender roles in order to please the desires of the male audience.