The Soldier and the Aesthete: Homosexuality and Popular Culture in Gilded Age America

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary W. Blanchard
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Collective State ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Renaissance Art ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Aesthetic Movement ◽  
Change Perceptions ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Military

The aftermath of civil strife, note some historians, can change perceptions of gender. Particularly for males, the effect of exhaustive internal wars and the ensuing collapse of the warrior ideal relegates the soldier/hero to a marginal iconological status. Linda L. Carroll has persuasively argued, for instance, that, following the Italian wars, one finds the “damaged” images of males in Renaissance art: bowed heads, display of stomach, presentation of buttocks. In fact, male weakness and “effeminacy” can, notes Linda Dowling, follow on the military collapse of any collective state. Arthur N. Gilbert argues, in contrast, that historically in wartime, male weakness in the form of “sodomites” was rigorously persecuted. From 1749 until 1792, for instance, there was only one execution for sodomy in France, while, during the Napoleonic Wars, the period of 1803–14, seven men were executed. Such analysis suggests that, in the aftermath of civil wars, cultural attitudes toward effeminate or homosexual men shifted from suppression or persecution during martial crisis to one of latitude and perhaps tolerance in periods following the breakdown of the military collective.The aftermath of America's Civil War, the decades of the 1870s and 1880s, provides a testing ground to examine attitudes toward the soldier/hero and toward the effeminate male in a time of social and cultural disarray. At this time, an art “craze,” the Aesthetic Movement, captured popular culture. Aestheticism, seen in the eighteenth century as a “sensibility,” had, by the nineteenth century, an institutional base and a social reform ideology.

JAPANESE AESTHETICS IN AMERICAN SILVER MASTERPIECES

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-88
Author(s):  
I. A. Peremislov ◽  
◽  
L. G. Peremislov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Decorative Arts ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Aesthetic Movement ◽  
Xixth Century ◽  
Man And Nature ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Unique Style ◽  
Jewelry Industry

Japanese culture with its unique monuments of architecture, sculpture, painting, small forms, decorative and applied arts, occupies a special place in the development of world art. Influenced by China, Japanese masters created their own unique style based on the aesthetics of contemplation and spiritual harmony of man and nature. In the context of "Japan's inspiration" the work refers to the influence of the art of the Land of the Rising Sun on American decorative arts and, in particular, on the silver jewelry industry in trends of a new aesthetic direction of the last third of the XIXth century, the "Aesthetic movement". The article provides a brief overview of the history of the emergence and development of decorative silver art in the United States. The important centers of silversmithing in the USA and the most important American manufacturers of the XIXth century are described in more detail. The article also touches on the influence of Japanese aesthetic ideas on European creative groups and on the formation of innovative ideas in European decorative arts. At the same time, an attempt is made to trace the origin, development trends, evolution and variations of "Japanesque" style in American decorative and applied art, in particular, in the works of Edward Moore and Charles Osborne (Tiffany & Co jewelry multinational company).

In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Second World War ◽  
New Order ◽  
Japanese Empire ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Military ◽  
Second World

The destruction of Japan’s empire in August 1945 under the military onslaught of the Allied Powers produced a powerful rupture in the histories of modern East Asia. Everywhere imperial ruins from Manchuria to Taiwan bore memoires of a great run of upheavals and wars which in turn produced revolutionary uprisings and civil wars from China to Korea. The end of global Second World War did not bring peace and stability to East Asia. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. Rather the disintegration of Japan’s imperium inaugurated a era of unprecedented bloodletting, state destruction, state creation, and reinvention of international order. In the ruins of Japan’s New Order, legal anarchy, personal revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments were the crucible for decades of violence. As the circuits of empire went into meltdown in 1945, questions over the continuity of state and law, ideologies and the troubled inheritance of the Japanese empire could no longer be suppressed. In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire takes a transnational lens to this period, concluding that we need to write the violence of empire’s end – and empire itself - back into the global history of East Asia’s Cold War.

Batman Returns

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-215
Author(s):  
Martijn Oosterbaan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Entertainment Industry ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Politics Of Aesthetics ◽  
Contemporary Work ◽  
Academic Discussion ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Anthropological Literature

This article explores the aesthetic elements of sovereignty. Building on the anthropological literature on sovereignty and on contemporary work on the politics of aesthetics, the article analyzes contemporary appearances of Batman symbols and figures in Rio de Janeiro. Despite political debate and academic discussion about the Batmen appearing in mafia-like militias and popular street protests in Rio, the question of what these appearances tell us about the relations between popular imagery and political contestation has remained untouched. This article supports the work of writers who argue that superhero comics and movies present fierce figures that operate in the zone of indistinction, at the crossroads of lawful order and its exception. However, it adds to this literature an analysis that shows in what kind of sociopolitical contexts these figures operate and how that plays itself out. To understand the contemporary appearances and force of figures of the entertainment industry better, this article proposes the concept “popular culture of sovereignty.”

Vertical video: rupturing the aesthetic paradigm

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen M Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Orientation Model ◽  
Video Shot ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic

Popular culture has critiqued ‘vertical video syndrome’, or video shot on smartphones in the portrait rather than landscape orientation, as something aesthetically unpleasing which should be avoided. But the design of smartphones seems to encourage shooting vertical video. This article examines the aesthetic desirability of vertical videos through applied media aesthetics. It traces the history of horizontal film and television orientations, as well as the image-centric orientation model found in still photography. It argues that vertical video, rather than a syndrome to be avoided, instead takes advantage of the technological innovations and embodied pleasures offered by the smartphone to rupture the visual paradigms and create a new visual aesthetic for phone-based moving images.

scholarly journals Facebook for Facebook's Sake

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-38
Author(s):  
Kevin Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Digital City ◽  
Aesthetic Movement ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Take Back ◽  
Facebook Usage ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Art For Art's Sake ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Central Claim

The affective labour debate has become mainstream in communications studies. In this paper, I The affective labour debate has become mainstream in communications studies. In this paper, I suggest the Aesthetic Movement of the late 19th century as inspiration for how users can use Facebook with the knowledge that their data is being used for profit. I present Facebook usage as art, creating an analog with aesthete Oscar Wilde’s essay, “the critic as artist” (1891/2010), where he presents critics as artists. Other theorists, especially Walter Benjamin provide grounding for making the argument that Facebook usage is an artistic expression. I then turn to my inversion of Walter Pater’s “art for art’s sake”, the seminal idea of Aestheticism and propose Facebook for Facebook’s sake as a method for Facebook use. While more advanced remuneration concepts have yet to arrive with such force that they could provide the proper payment to users, Facebook for its own sake is a way to appreciate Facebook’s beauty in the meantime. Baudelaire and Debord’s psychogeographic theories provide methods for navigating cities that I apply to examine Facebook as a digital city. The central claim of this paper is the following: By using Facebook for Facebook’s sake, users take back some of the dignity taken away from them in the exploitation of free labour. Finally, I turn to critiques of Aestheticism and how contemporary software might provide insight into using Facebook in an ethical manner. Users will have to consider each action differently; how would liking something affect users’ artistic expression of themselves? In this way, while the affective labour debate continues, users can use Facebook for its own sake.

scholarly journals Spectres of M.I.A

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeyapriya Foster
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Independent State ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Missing In Action ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Military

<p><b>M.I.A, born Mathangi Arulpragasam, is a British Sri Lankan Tamil artist-activist whose acronymised stage persona refers to the military term Missing in Action. Set against hegemonic readings which privilege postcolonial, feminist, or transnational categories of analyses, my original contribution to knowledge is to locate M.I.A’s work in the political contexts in which they are produced. I thereby foreground the hidden Tamil erasures of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009) that traverse the artist’s productions. The historicisation of M.I.A’s politics of haunting is not only a research gap, but central in understanding the artist’s texts. Using hauntology as a framework and close textual analysis as a method, this thesis constitutes a Tamil-centric reading of M.I.A’s work as well as a nuanced contribution to hauntology studies. </b></p><p>My study identifies the Tamil cemeteries evoked in four songs—“Galang” (2003), “Bucky Done Gun” (2004), “Born Free” (2010), and “Borders” (2015)—inquiring into their visual translations, functions, objectives, and larger political significance. I particularly focus on their visual language that emerge from the collective absence-presences of the war, shared by the Tamil diaspora, of which the artist and I are part. My analyses also extend to probing salient aspects of the lyrics, performance, sound- and sartorial politics. </p><p>My textual analyses render the following findings: M.I.A’s productions recirculate histories of Tamil erasure as sites of death. They replicate and extend the funerary work of the cemeteries of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)—a Sri Lankan Tamil nationalist, separatist, and militant organisation that fought for an independent state in the north and north east of Sri Lanka. The artist recartographises Tamil cemeteries into ubiquitous popcultural expressions, in which the aesthetic techniques—animated stencils, flags, murals, photo montages, and performative bodies—visibilise and physicalise the materiality of violence enacted upon Tamils. M.I.A’s topographies of death rematerialise the architecture of cemeteries as inconspicuous yet omnipresent sites of absence, marking a simultaneous obscuration and ubiquitisation of cemeterial landscapes. These memory locales tend to Tamil graves, expose Tamil truth claims, and let the dead speak with and through the depiction of their brutalised bodies. Urging a responsibility for the (living) dead, they challenge the state’s control over ontology and visibility that renders Tamil lives unlivable and absent.</p>

scholarly journals Coup-Proofing and Civil War

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun Koga Sudduth
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
The Other ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
Rebel Groups ◽  
The Future ◽  
Face Threats ◽  
Military Relations ◽  
The Military

Political leaders face threats to their power from within and outside the regime. Leaders can be removed via a coup d’état undertaken by militaries that are part of the state apparatus. At the same time, leaders can lose power when they confront excluded opposition groups in civil wars. The difficulty for leaders, though, is that efforts to address one threat might leave them vulnerable to the other threat due to the role of the military as an institution of violence capable of exercising coercive power. On one hand, leaders need to protect their regimes from rebels by maintaining strong militaries. Yet, militaries that are strong enough to prevail against rebel forces are also strong enough to execute a coup successfully. On the other hand, leaders who cope with coup threats by weakening their militaries’ capabilities to organize a coup also diminish the very capabilities that they need to defeat their rebel challengers. This unfortunate trade-off between protection by the military and protection from the military has been the long-standing theme in studies of civil-military relations and coup-proofing. Though most research on this subject has focused primarily on rulers’ maneuvers to balance the threats posed by the military and the threats coming from foreign adversaries, more recent scholarship has begun to explore how leaders’ efforts to cope with coup threats will influence the regime’s abilities to address the domestic threats coming from rebel groups, and vice versa. This new wave of research focuses on two related vectors. First, scholars address whether leaders who pursue coup-proofing strategies that weaken their militaries’ capabilities also increase the regime’s vulnerability to rebel threats and the future probability of civil war. Second, scholars examine how the magnitude of threats posed by rebel groups will determine leaders’ strategies toward the militaries, and how these strategies affect both the militaries’ influence over government policy and the future probability of coup onsets. These lines of research contribute to the conflict literature by examining the causal mechanisms through which civil conflict influences coup propensity and vice versa. The literatures on civil war and coups have developed independently without much consideration of each other, and systematic analyses of the linkage between them have only just began.

scholarly journals Die Rolle der Habsburgermonarchie in den ersten drei Koalitionskriegen (1792–1809). Eine Fallstudie zur Darstellung der Überwindung von militärischen und politischen Krisen in der Neuzeit

2018 ◽  
pp. 401
Author(s):  
Patrick Plaschg
Keyword(s):  
Peace Treaty ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Political Role ◽  
The Military

The aim of this work is to present the military and political role of the Habsburg monarchy in the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars between 1792 and 1809. Within this belligerent period, the peace treaty of Pressburg, the central event in a series of several peace resolutions, is considered as Napoleon's greatest triumph. Therefore, the path of the Habsburg monarchy to this treaty and the overcoming of the crises of those years represent the central events, which are analyzed in this work.

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