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Articles 1 - 13 of 13
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
“For The Moment, I Am Not F*Cking,” I Am Tweeting: Platforms Of / As Sexuality, Jacob Johanssen
“For The Moment, I Am Not F*Cking,” I Am Tweeting: Platforms Of / As Sexuality, Jacob Johanssen
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article develops the argument that digital platforms are significantly infused with originary (and unconscious) residues of the sexual. Drawing on Laplancheian conceptualizations of sexuality, I argue that the digital has always been sexual(ised) in itself – a process that precedes and exceeds the erotic or pornographic. For Laplanche, sexuality is constitutive of the human subject as such. Infantile sexuality is shaped and transformed in an enigmatic relation with the caregiver. Drawing on this model as an analogy, I claim that users are drawn to platforms because they (unconsciously) desire to return to infantile sexuality and a holding environment but …
Queer Love In Woolf's Orlando And Chu's Notes Of A Desolate Man, Pei-Wen Clio Kao
Queer Love In Woolf's Orlando And Chu's Notes Of A Desolate Man, Pei-Wen Clio Kao
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Queer Love in Woolf's Orlando and Chu's Notes of a Desolate Man" Pei-Wen Clio Kao analyses Virginia Woolf and T'ien-Wen Chu's novels in the context of gender studies. Kao's reading of Orlando and Notes of a Desolate Man is an elaboration on homosexual sensibilities of both men and women based on the concept of écriture féminine in the context of patriarchy and the former's power of subversion and change. Kao's analysis results in the finding that while Woolf's Orlando is more attuned to the feminist discourse based on an extended Western project in its period and …
Us-American New Women In Italy 1853-1870, Sirpa A. Salenius
Us-American New Women In Italy 1853-1870, Sirpa A. Salenius
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "US-American New Women in Italy 1853-1870" Sirpa A. Salenius discusses the Italian experience of sculptors such as Harriet Hosmer and Edmonia Lewis, who were independent, career-oriented women studying and working in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century. They were among the most representative New Woman figures who started to challenge US-American society's male-dominant norm and gender-imposed limitations, while reinventing an identity for themselves. Other progressive women, who observed them in Italy, were impressed and influenced by the example of their lives and work. For instance, the influence of Frances Willard's visit to Italy became visible after her return …
Homosexual Identity, Translation, And Prime-Stevenson's Imre And The Intersexes, Margaret S. Breen
Homosexual Identity, Translation, And Prime-Stevenson's Imre And The Intersexes, Margaret S. Breen
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Homosexual Identity, Translation, and Prime-Stevenson's Imre and The Intersexes" Margaret S. Breen examines the role of translation in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies. Breen's focus is Edward Prime-Stevenson, who, under the penname Xavier Mayne, wrote two works: a short novel, Imre: A Memorandum (1906), and a general history of homosexuality, The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem of Social Life (1908). Breen argues that Prime-Stevenson's texts are relevant to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of (homo)sexuality because they point to the importance of translation in writings concerning sexual and gender identities and …
Gender Performance In The Literature Of The Female Beats, Gillian Thomson
Gender Performance In The Literature Of The Female Beats, Gillian Thomson
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats" Gillian Thomson examines the re-negotiation of gender boundaries within Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters and Hettie Jones's Drive poems; secondary to this is how the male Beats demonstrate a more concrete, dichotomous version of such gender categories. Thomson intend to demonstrate how the women often write themselves into Beat history and how their revised performance of gender modifies the normative tropes regarding females within the Beat enclave. The theoretical backdrop focuses on how language not only records or expresses reality, but also shapes it. This is a decidedly poststructuralist …
Erotic Mourning And Post-Traumatic Sexual Desire, Gila G. Ashtor
Erotic Mourning And Post-Traumatic Sexual Desire, Gila G. Ashtor
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "Erotic Mourning and Post-traumatic Sexual Desire" Gila Ashtor investigates the ways Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 2000 memoir contains an alternative logic of affectivity that locates possibilities for mourning in the ambivalent directionalities of post-traumatic sexual desire. Ashtor links dominant conceptualizations of post-traumatic working-through and regimes of heteronormative sexual reproductivity in order to argue that Eggers's self-exhibitionistic spectacle of failed post-traumatic healing, precisely as a drama of undoing that replaces the cumulative acquisition of psychic cohesion with survival incoherent gestures, produces a version of what this paper will call "radical mourning." To particularize the …
Sapphic Consciousness In H.D. And De Noailles, Catherine O. Clark
Sapphic Consciousness In H.D. And De Noailles, Catherine O. Clark
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article "Sapphic Consciousness in H.D. and de Noailles" Catherine Clark discusses how female modernists, like their male counterparts, re-evaluated their artistic position in relation to the Greeks and Romans as they explored experimental modes of aesthetic and literary expression. However, many women writers at the turn of the century developed a unique palimpsest with their predecessors, specifically Sappho, that deconstructed and destructed conventional approaches to classical legacy and myth. Clark analyzes selected poems by modernists H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Anna de Noailles in which they evoke a Hellenistic past and that collapses the artificial constructions of a largely …
Gender In Winterson's Sexing The Cherry, Paul Kintzele
Gender In Winterson's Sexing The Cherry, Paul Kintzele
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Gender in Winterson's Sexing the Cherry" Paul Kintzele examines the ways in which Jeanette Winterson's 1989 novel explores and critiques aspects of gender and sexuality. While acknowledging the importance of the performance theory of gender that derives from the work of Judith Butler, Kintzele contends that such an approach must be complemented with a psychoanalytic approach that insists on a particular distinction between sex and gender. Although some scholars map the sex/gender distinction onto the perennial nature/nurture binary and thus reduce sex to biology or anatomy, scholars of psychoanalysis such as Joan Copjec and Charles Shepherdson, read …
Bassani's The Garden Of The Finzi-Continis And Italian "Queers", John Champagne
Bassani's The Garden Of The Finzi-Continis And Italian "Queers", John Champagne
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article "Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Italian 'Queers'" John Champagne argues for a reading of the novel as not gay, but queer. Champagne argues that such a reading strategy emphasizes the ways in which the novel deconstructs normative gender, sexual, and even religious identities in an attempt both to resist the tyranny of the normal and to cope with the trauma of the Italian Shoah. A psycho-analytically inflected queer theory in this instance gives us access to the complexity of the novel's portrayal of Italian Jewish identity in fascist Italy and opens up onto a reflection …
Gender Identities In The Contemporary Slovene Novel, Alojzija Zupan Sosic
Gender Identities In The Contemporary Slovene Novel, Alojzija Zupan Sosic
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, "Gender Identities in the Contemporary Slovene Novel," Alojzija Zupan Sosic argues that perspectives of sexual identity have become prominent topics. Based on her library and publication research, Zupan Sosic proposes that in the period of 1990–2005 the Slovene novel is illuminated by a development of the personal or intimate story. In this development, changes of sexual identity evolve through the binary system of the heterosexual matrix whereby issues of sexual minorities remain. Important innovation in the Slovene novel include aspects connected to an identity formation determined by sexual identity where perhaps the most significant innovation is found …
Queer Theory And Discourses Of Desire, Louise O. Vasvári
Queer Theory And Discourses Of Desire, Louise O. Vasvári
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her paper "Queer Theory and Discourses of Desire," Louise O. Vasvári proposes that the multiplicity of ways that language constructs -- or silences -- the socially constructed expression of erotic desire is a necessary complement to the study of gendered and of sexual identity. Vasvári contributes to queer theory and its subfield, queer linguistics, with the term "queer" understood as more inclusive and less male-oriented than "gay" where queer theory seeks to read between and outside the lines of the dominant heteronormative discourses that studies how mainstream reproductive heterosexuality comes to be (re)produced through cultural narratives as self-evident, obligatory, …
Dorian Gray, Tom Ripley, And The Queer Closet, Jonathan Alexander, Deborah Meem
Dorian Gray, Tom Ripley, And The Queer Closet, Jonathan Alexander, Deborah Meem
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In their paper, "Dorian Gray, Tom Ripley, and the Queer Closet," Jonathan Alexander and Deborah Meem present and portray an imaginary conversation among an impossible but intriguing group of writers, critics, and fictional characters. These individuals speak in their own (published) voices, which are moderated by the author-facilitators and shaped into an extended rumination on art, the Doppelgänger, queerness, and literary influence. Through their dialogue, the actors reveal a tradition of the queer novel, running in this case from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray to Patricia Highsmith's five Tom Ripley books, whereby the closet functions simultaneously as refuge …
Gender And Modernity In The Work Of Hesse And Kazantzakis, Evi Petropoulou
Gender And Modernity In The Work Of Hesse And Kazantzakis, Evi Petropoulou
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Evi Petropoulou discusses in her article, "Gender and Modernity in the Work of Hesse and Kazantzakis," selected basic tendencies of the modern European novel, in this case pertaining to gender identity and she exemplifies her postulates with an analysis of texts by Hermann Hesse and Nikos Kazantzakis. She examines the mainly male dominated literary discourse in the work of these authors in light of their theoretical indebtedness to the thought of Nietzsche and Hegel. The study offers new insight into literary representations of gender relations in modernity and how Hesse and Kazantzakis define identity, the self, and otherness.