Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Gentleman Death In Silk And Lace: Death And The Maiden In Vampire Literature And Film, Emily Wilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis contains an examination in the psychosocial significance of Hans Baldung Grien’s “Death and the Maiden” art motif, created during the Renaissance period following the Black Death, and its resurgence in the vampire fiction genre of both literature and film. I investigate the motif in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) as well as their film adaptations by Francis Ford Coppola (1992) and Neil Jordan (1994), respectively. By examining the presence of the motif in art, literature, and film, I found that the common threads across all investigated works were the dominant social …

Kink In Flux: Bdsm Theory And Sexual Praxis, Celeste Pietrusza

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The opening decades of the 21^st century have seen a veritable explosion of representations of bondage, discipline and sadomasochism (BDSM) and kink practices in mainstream media and American culture. Along with this, empirical researchers working in sexuality studies continue to show, contrary to the history of stigmatizing accounts in the history of clinical psychology, no evidence of increased pathology and, in some studies, better outcomes on measures of mental health.

Given the legacy of psychoanalysis in foregrounding considerations of sadomasochism and sexuality for the human psyche, it seems particularly well positioned to approach the complexities of dynamic fantasies involved …

The Logic Of Sexuation In Deleuze And Lacan, Matthew Lovett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In The Logic of Sexuation in Deleuze and Lacan, I argue for an account of sexual difference that responds to a tension in feminist philosophy, namely, the problem of the ontological status of the sexed body. In so doing, I turn to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan. I argue that, rather than being antithetical, the two can be productively read together, in particular with regard to this very question. Ultimately basing my reading in the Deleuzian passive syntheses and dynamic geneses of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense as well as in Lacan’s twentieth …