Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons^™

Writing Desire On The Lesbian Body: Baudelaire’S Fantasies And Vivien’S Realities, Emily Wieder

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

In The Flowers of Evil [Les Fleurs du Mal (1857)], French poet Charles Baudelaire paints three female bodies: the mistress, the prostitute, and the lesbian. The latter appears in three of one-hundred poems but so captivated Baudelaire that he almost titled the collection The Lesbians. Censors nevertheless condemned the anthology and suppressed two of the lesbian poems. The remaining lesbian poem compares the “damned women” to “thoughtful cattle.” A rare representation of lesbian bodies, this metaphor problematically depicts them as savage.

Yet this “Other” exemplifies the baudelairean poetic ideal. By crafting Beauty, the Poet immortalizes his corpus. As the …

Rethinking The Monstrous: Gender, Otherness, And Space In The Cinematic Storytelling Of Arrival And The Shape Of Water, Edward Chamberlain

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Through comparing the Hollywood films Arrival and The Shape of Water, this article explicates the films’ similar portrayals of gender, social collaboration, and monstrosity. Although the mainstream media in the United States has linked the idea of the monstrous to larger global forces, the two films suggest that “the monster” exists much closer to home. Hence, this article makes the case that monstrosity occurs in a variety of formulations such as the actions of national authorities like governmental officials that oppress and endanger a myriad of American citizens as well as newcomers. Further, this article makes the case that …

Jarrod Hayes. Queer Roots For The Diaspora: Ghosts In The Family Tree. Ann Arbor: U Of Michigan P, 2016., Annie De Saussure

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Jarrod Hayes. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the family tree. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 325 pp.

The Representation Of Instinctive Homosexuality And Immoral Narcissism In Gide’S The Immoralist (1902) And Mann’S Death In Venice (1912), Louise Willis

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Representation of Instinctive Homosexuality and Immoral Narcissism in Gide’s The Immoralist (1902) and Mann’s Death in Venice (1912)" Louise Willis examines two early literary representations of homosexuality in André Gide's The Immoralist (1902) and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1912). She reads them with fin-de-siècle sexological theory, mainly Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). Willis argues that the texts reflect the reconception of homosexuality as a latent instinct with pathological expression, rather than a sinful act of free will. The article explains that visual imagery conveys homoerotic desire, by incorporating Nietzsche's concept of …

Shifting Understandings Of Lesbianism In Imperial And Weimar Germany, Meghan C. Paradis

Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal at Clark (SURJ)

This paper seeks to understand how, and why, understandings of lesbianism shifted in Germany over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through close readings of both popular cultural productions and medical and psychological texts produced within the context of Imperial and Weimar Germany, this paper explores the changing nature of understandings of homosexuality in women, arguing that over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dominant conceptualization of lesbianism transformed from an understanding of lesbians that was rooted in biology and viewed lesbians as physically masculine “gender inverts”, to one that was …

Claiming The Feminine: Assimilationism And Militantism In Three Lesbian Texts, Travis Ferrell

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.