Erotic Ambiguities

Erotic Ambiguities
Author: Helen McDonald
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2001
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780415170994

Art is always ambiguous. When it involves the female body it can also be erotic. Erotic Ambiguities is a study of how contemporary women artists have reconceptualised the figure of the female nude. Helen McDonald shows how, over the past thirty years, artists have employed the idea of ambiguity to dismantle the exclusive, classical ideal enshrined in the figure of the nude, and how they have broadened the scope of the ideal to include differences of race, ethnicity, sexuality and disability as well as gender. McDonald discusses the work of a wide range of women artists, including Barbara Kruger, Judy Chicago, Mary Duffy, Zoe Leonard, Tracey Moffatt, Pat Brassington and Sally Smart. She traces the shift in feminist art practices from the early challenge to partriarchal representations of the female nude to contemporary, 'postfeminist' practices, influenced by theories of performativity, queer theory and postcoloniality. McDonald argues that feminist efforts to develop a more positive representation of the female body need to be reconsidered, in the face of the resistant ambiguities and hybrid complexities of visual art in the late 1990s.

Erotic Ambiguities

Erotic Ambiguities
Author: Helen McDonald
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2002-08-26
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1134696671

Art is always ambiguous. When it involves the female body it can also be erotic. Erotic Ambiguities is a study of how contemporary women artists have reconceptualised the figure of the female nude. Helen McDonald shows how, over the past thirty years, artists have employed the idea of ambiguity to dismantle the exclusive, classical ideal enshrined in the figure of the nude, and how they have broadened the scope of the ideal to include differences of race, ethnicity, sexuality and disability as well as gender. McDonald discusses the work of a wide range of women artists, including Barbara Kruger, Judy Chicago, Mary Duffy, Zoe Leonard, Tracey Moffatt, Pat Brassington and Sally Smart. She traces the shift in feminist art practices from the early challenge to partriarchal representations of the female nude to contemporary, 'postfeminist' practices, influenced by theories of performativity, queer theory and postcoloniality. McDonald argues that feminist efforts to develop a more positive representation of the female body need to be reconsidered, in the face of the resistant ambiguities and hybrid complexities of visual art in the late 1990s.

The last taboo

The last taboo
Author: Karin Lesnik-Oberstein
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2013-07-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1847796753

This is the first academic book ever written on women and body hair, which has been seen until now as too trivial, ridiculous or revolting to write about. Even feminist writers or researchers on the body have found remarkably little to say about body hair, usually ignoring it completely. It would appear that the only texts to elaborate on body hair are guides on how to remove it, medical texts on ‘hirsutism’, or fetishistic pornography on ‘hairy’ women. The last taboo also questions how and why any particular issue can become defined as ‘self-evidently’ too silly or too mad to write about. Using a wide range of thinking from gender theory, queer theory, critical and literary theory, history, art history, anthropology and psychology, the contributors argue that in fact body hair plays a central role in constructing masculinity and femininity and sexual and cultural identities. It is sure to provide many academic researchers with a completely fresh perspective on all of the fields mentioned above.

Ambiguous Pleasures

Ambiguous Pleasures
Author: Rachel Spronk
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2012
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857454781

Among both male and female young urban professionals in Nairobi, sexuality is a key to achieving a 'modern' identity. These young men and women see themselves as the avant garde of a new Africa, while they also express the recurring worry of how to combine an 'African' identity with the new lifestyles with which they are experimenting. By focusing on public debates and their preoccupations with issues of African heritage, gerontocratic power relations and conventional morality on the one hand, and personal sexual relationships, intimacy and self-perceptions on the other, this study works out the complexities of sexuality and culture in the context of modernity in an African society. It moves beyond an investigation of a health or development perspective of sexuality and instead examines desire, pleasure and eroticism, revealing new insights into the methodology and theory of the study of sexuality within the social sciences. Sexuality serves as a prism for analysing how social developments generate new notions of self in postcolonial Kenya and is a crucial component towards understanding the way people recognize and deal with modern changes in their personal lives.

Hitchcock as Philosopher of the Erotic

Hitchcock as Philosopher of the Erotic
Author: Richard Gilmore
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2024-06-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1040041353

This book reads Alfred Hitchcock as a philosopher of what constitutes the erotic. The author argues that Hitchcock is doing a post-Nietzschean, postmodern kind of philosophy in which he is exploring and creating possibilities of what the erotic can feel like and how the erotic can be expressed. The erotic is a pervasive phenomenon in Hitchcock’s films. It involves irony, play, and sophistication, and there can be erotic failures as well as erotic successes. The erotic is most complexly explored by Hitchcock in his two masterpieces from the 1950s: Vertigo (1958), a story of the failure of the erotic, and North by Northwest (1959), in which the erotic is consummated in marriage. The author argues that Hitchcock has a philosophical theory about what makes the difference. It is a version of existential philosophy that understands what a person is to be based on what they make of themselves through their choices. The author argues that the erotic for Hitchcock is a process of mutual, reciprocal creation of the personality of the other person. This process is complicated by the fact that as one attempts to create the person one desires, one is simultaneously being created by that other person, and so what one desires is also in a process of being recreated in the mutual reciprocal dance of the erotic entanglement. There is a moral dimension to this because erotic failure is, in a way, a failure of the human, not in the sense of a human essence, but in the sense of realizing human possibilities that can make our lives more satisfying, complete, and full. Hitchcock as Philosopher of the Erotic will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on philosophy of film, film studies, and philosophy of love and sex.

Willa Cather's Sexual Aesthetics and the Male Homosexual Literary Tradition

Willa Cather's Sexual Aesthetics and the Male Homosexual Literary Tradition
Author: John P. Anders
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 1999-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780803259409

In this first full-length study of male homosexuality in Cather's short stories and novels, John P. Anders examines patterns of male friendship ranging on a continuum from the social to the sexual. He reveals how Cather's work assumes an unexpected depth and complexity by drawing on both the familiar tradition of friendship literature inspired by classical and Christian texts and a homosexual legacy that is part of, yet distinct from, established literary traditions. ø Anders argues that Cather's artistic achievement is distinguished by her sexual aesthetics, an elusive literary style inextricably associated with homosexuality. His analysis demonstrates how a homosexual ethos and eros helped Cather develop a sensitivity to human variation and a style to accommodate it and thus became the objective correlative of her art, dramatizing the diversity of human nature as it deepens the mystery of her work.

Pornographic Sensibilities

Pornographic Sensibilities
Author: Nicholas R. Jones
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2020-11-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000264106

Pornographic Sensibilities stages a conversation between two fields—Medieval/Early Modern Hispanic Studies and Porn Studies—that traditionally have had little to say to each other. The collection offers innovative new approaches to the study of gendered and sexualized bodies in medieval and early modern textual production, including literary and historical documents. The volume’s embrace of the interpretative tools of Porn Studies also inscribes a critical provocation: in what ways can contemporary modes of reading the past serve to freshly illuminate not only the contours of that same past but also the very critical assumptions of the present upon which fields like medieval and early modern Hispanic Studies are built? In this way, Pornographic Sensibilities encourages at once both rigorous historicizations of pre- and early-modern culture, and playful engagement with "presentism," considered here as a critical tool to undress the hidden assumptions of both past and present. This move substantively challenges long-held critical orthodoxies among scholars of pre-Enlightenment periods, for whom the very category of "pornography" itself has often problematically been framed as an anachronism when applied to their work.

Sentimental Materialism

Sentimental Materialism
Author: Lori Merish
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2000
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780822325161

Examines the constructions of feminine consumption in the nineteenth century in relation to capitalism and domesticity.

Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Epyllion and Its Reception

Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Epyllion and Its Reception
Author: Manuel Baumbach
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 666
Release: 2015-03-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004233059

In classical scholarship of the past two centuries, the term “epyllion” was used to label short hexametric texts mainly ascribable to the Hellenistic period (Greek) or the Neoterics (Latin). Apart from their brevity, characteristics such as a predilection for episodic narration or female characters were regarded as typically “epyllic” features. However, in Antiquity itself, the texts we call “epyllia” were not considered a coherent genre, which seems to be an innovation of the late 18th century. The contributions in this book not only re-examine some important (and some lesser known) Greek and Latin primary texts, but also critically reconsider the theoretical discourses attached to it, and also sketch their literary and scholarly reception in the Byzantine and Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Modern Age.