Suchergebnisse

This ambitious and wide-ranging study of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture and thought transverses texts of evolutionary biology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, political propaganda, fiction, historiography of Nazism, and scholarship on comparative genocide to analyze the notion that mass violence is sexually motivated.

Intro -- Sexing Political Culture in the History of France -- Copyright -- 1. Historicizing Sexual Symbols -- 2. Sexual Crimes in the Early Modern Witch Hunts -- 3. The Renaissance Androgyne and Sexual Ideology -- 4. Le Pantalon -- 5. Strong French Heroine or Pious Maiden? -- 6. The Colonial Feminine Mystique -- 7. The Erotic Republic -- 8. Utopian Bodies -- 9. The Female Flier -- 10. Prodigal Sons of the Nation -- 11. Gender, Sexuality, and Crowd Psychology -- 12. Postwar Reconstruction -- 13. Cinema, Gender, and Power -- 14. Foulard or cocarde? -- Bibliography -- Contributors.

Joseph Pujol, the 'Pétomane' performed to packed audiences at the Moulin Rouge in the early 1890s. By 1906 one of his contemporaries would remark that 'this artist's specialty was no longer in fashion'. When legal battles occurred between Pujol and the Moulin Rouge, newspaper commentaries were filled with hilarity that a man whose anus was the source of his income was now trying to gain a fortune from it. What might the spectacular anus of Pujol, and its pecuniary trials and tribulations, tell us about bodily imagination in late nineteenth-century France? Pujol's idiosyncratic career has rarely been considered as an historical object; and when it has, the gaze has been light-hearted and filled with puns, much like those that surrounded him in his lifetime. But if the temptation to giggle is resisted for a moment, the Pétomane can teach us much about symbolic meanings that were ascribed to the anus in late nineteenth-century Paris.

Debates about Holocaust representation have long been haunted by the idea that the enormity and intensity of human suffering in the events of World War Two are 'unspeakable'. In many such statements the capacity for cognition and the ethical dimension of aestheticisation are blurred – the Holocaust is 'unspeakable' both in the sense of being impossible to imagine in its full horror, but also morally inappropriate as the subject of artistic production. But do all forms of cultural representation of the Holocaust fail in the same way as words or to the same degree, in the eyes of those who would judge their merits according the tenet of unspeakability? This paper considers one particularly renowned work Henryk Górecki's symphony no. 3 (Symfonia pieśni żałosnych) of 1976, discussing how it mediated both the global politics of Holocaust representation and the recuperation of victimhood in postcommunist Poland. Górecki claimed a subjectivity of failure in response to the challenge of representing the events of World War Two and has insisted that the symphony is not about war but about sorrow. The vocal lyrics are nonetheless profoundly thematised around war suffering, and the Second World War in particular - events he approached with a musical language of epic, pathos and redemption. In framing the subject of his work, he emphasised a Polish national suffering that both eschewed mention of specifically targeted groups of victims, and beckoned to Polish folk and catholic traditions. This article presents a new hypothesis about the success of Górecki's work by considering it in relation to the ethical debates about Holocaust empathic response that have occurred in relation to historiographic, literary and filmic representation.

Debates about Holocaust representation have long been haunted by the idea that the enormity and intensity of human suffering in the events of World War Two are 'unspeakable'. In many such statements the capacity for cognition and the ethical dimension of aestheticisation are blurred – the Holocaust is 'unspeakable' both in the sense of being impossible to imagine in its full horror, but also morally inappropriate as the subject of artistic production. But do all forms of cultural representation of the Holocaust fail in the same way as words or to the same degree, in the eyes of those who would judge their merits according the tenet of unspeakability? This paper considers one particularly renowned work Henryk Górecki's symphony no. 3 (Symfonia pieśni żałosnych) of 1976, discussing how it mediated both the global politics of Holocaust representation and the recuperation of victimhood in postcommunist Poland. Górecki claimed a subjectivity of failure in response to the challenge of representing the events of World War Two and has insisted that the symphony is not about war but about sorrow. The vocal lyrics are nonetheless profoundly thematised around war suffering, and the Second World War in particular - events he approached with a musical language of epic, pathos and redemption. In framing the subject of his work, he emphasised a Polish national suffering that both eschewed mention of specifically targeted groups of victims, and beckoned to Polish folk and catholic traditions. This article presents a new hypothesis about the success of Górecki's work by considering it in relation to the ethical debates about Holocaust empathic response that have occurred in relation to historiographic, literary and filmic representation.

This article considers the broad politics of the creation and maintenance of two large erotica collections in European national libraries across their histories and in relation to definitions of censorship and obscenity. It also examines the popular and intellectual discourses that have surrounded the Collection de l'Enfer and the Private Case of the British Library, and imbued them with a particular cultural mystique as repositories of secret, hidden and privileged erotic knowledge. Censorship and repression of sexuality cannot account for the policies of these libraries which have policed public morals through their restricted access conditions, even as the works they deemed obscene were published without any legal sanction. By classing their contents into a discreet category, these collections have helped to frame erotic signification as a separate body of meaning. In France the notion of the Enfer's place within national patrimony has particularly abetted the discourses of mystique and allure around it. In Britain, the bibliographers who have discussed the Private Case have done so through assumptions of masculine heterosexual privilege and normativity.

This paper interrogates the commonplace view of frigidity as a notion always founded upon the misogynist failure to understand female sexual specificity. As an historical explanation, this view fails to take into account the contextual parameters of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about female desire within which the notion of la femme frigide emerged and developed. This paper discusses the work of a range of French medical and psychoanalytic thinkers across the turn of the twentieth century and through the interwar period, showing how 'frigidity' was developed at this time by those who saw themselves precisely as contesting prevailing notions of normative feminine desire, or as defending the rights of women to maximum pleasure. But the inventors of frigidity were no feminist avengers either. Their demands for female pleasure assumed a delicate axis between the avoidance of excess, on the one hand, and the dangers of perversion that would result from any attempt to deny sexuality generally, on the other. Viewed within the context of early twentieth-century French gender anxieties, thinkers like Fauconney and Marie Bonaparte are ambivalent exemplars of the 'management' of sexuality referred to by Michel Foucault.