Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Melissa J. Homestead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
New Hampshire ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
History Of

Using Cather and Lewis’s shared gravesite in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, as a touchstone, the introduction describes how biographers have approached the question of Willa Cather’s sexuality, how critics have applied queer theory to readings of her work, and how Lewis’s place in Cather’s life and creative process has been repeatedly ignored or misrepresented. The introduction lays out the terms on which this volume defines Lewis’s relationship with Cather and makes her visible again: it introduces Lewis’s role as Cather’s editor and suggests how models of the history of sexuality have failed to capture the persistence of the so-called Boston marriage into the twentieth century.

THE NEW OTHER VICTORIANS: THE SUCCESS (AND FAILURE) OF QUEER THEORY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH STUDIES

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 755-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Kaye
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Sexuality Studies ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Critical Writing ◽  
History Of

Much of the critical writingon Queer Theory and Sexuality Studies in a Victorian context over the last decade or so has been absorbing, exploring, complicating, and working under the burden of the influence of Michel Foucault's theoretical writings on erotic relations and identity. The first volume of Foucault'sThe History of Sexuality(1978), in fact, had begun with a gauntlet thrown down before Victorian Studies, a chapter-long critique of Steven Marcus'sThe Other Victorians(1966), a work that had offered an entirely new and at the time, quite bold avenue of exploring nineteenth-century culture – namely, through the pornographic imagination that Marcus taxonomized with precise, clinical flair as a “pornotopia” in which “all men . . . are always infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or both. Everyone is always ready for everything” (276). In Foucault's telling, however, Marcus demonstrated a theoretically impoverished faith in Freudian models of “repression” in Marcus's examination of “underground” Victorian sexualities. It was Marcus's reliance on the “repressive fallacy,” his conviction that there existed a demarcated spatial and psychic Victorian counter-world thatThe History of Sexualityhad so forcefully undermined.

Forum: Dagmar Herzog's Sexuality in Europe

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-275
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
University Of Vienna ◽  
History Of ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
East And West ◽  
Twentieth Century Europe

This discussion of Dagmar Herzog's Sexuality in Europe (2011) continues our new series of book fora. Herzog's new overview of changing European sexual mores and behaviour offers a jumping-off point for our panellists to discuss recent trends and future directions in the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Europe, East and West. Jeffrey Weeks (London South Bank University), Franz Eder (University of Vienna), Daniel Healey (University of Reading) and Victoria Harris (University of Birmingham) give their responses, and Herzog replies.

scholarly journals Foucault and Sedgwick: The Repressive Hypothesis Revisited

2012 ◽  
pp. 20-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynne Huffer
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

This essay examines the Foucauldian foundations of queer theory in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The essay argues that Sedgwick’s increasing disappointment with Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis is in part produced by the slippery rhetoric of The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Specifically, Foucault’s use of free indirect discourse in that volume destabilizes both the theory of repression and the critique Foucault mounts against it, thereby rendering ambiguous any political promise his critique might seem to offer. Returning to the fraught relation between Foucault and Sedgwick, the essay concludes by reading Foucault and Sedgwick together through the lens of a reparative ethics in which the felt experience of knowing the world is also an experiment in new ways of living.

scholarly journals THE RECENT HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SEXUALITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMANY

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 763-779 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK FENEMORE
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Advice Literature ◽  
The Third ◽  
Youth Cultures ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
Definition Of

ABSTRACTThis article sets out to explore the extent and to test the limits of the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Germany. It examines the ways in which sexuality can be explored from above and below. Drawing on medical-legal definitions of sexuality, feminist debates about sexuality, the science of sexology, and advice literature, the article sets out the state of debate together with ways that it might develop in the future. Arguing in favour of a milieu-specific history of sexuality, it suggests ways that the study of youth cultures and teenage magazines together with everyday, oral history and biographical approaches might help to arrive at this. It then goes on to chart new approaches, particularly with regard to sexuality in the Third Reich, and suggests ways that these reshape our understanding of sexuality in post-war Germany, East and West. Arguing against a reductive emphasis on a society being either ‘pro-’ or ‘anti-sex’ and calling for a clearer definition of what is meant by ‘sexual liberalization’, the article points to a more multi-layered and contradictory understanding of sexuality, which is still in the process of being written.

Sexuality and German Fascism. Edited by Dagmar Herzog. New York: Berghahn Books. 2005. Pp. 352. $25.00 (paper), $75.00 (cloth). ISBN 1-57181-652-6. Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany. By Dagmar Herzog. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2005. Pp. 361. $29.95. ISBN 0-691-11702-0.

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-333
Author(s):  
Edward Ross Dickinson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Dagmar Herzog opens her introduction to Sexuality and German Fascism with a simple question: “What is the relationship between sexual and other kinds of politics?” The essays printed here offer a thought-provoking and sometimes surprising set of approaches to that question. Like most recent research in the history of sexuality, they focus on “deviant” sexualities—homosexual, commercial, interracial, public—and its policing. They are, however, informed also by an awareness of the productive and positive, as well as the prohibitive and repressive functions of the societal regulation of sex.

Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century. By Alan Sinfield. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000; 407. $29.95 hardcover; Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality. Edited by Calvin Thomas. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000; pp. 290. $49.95 hardback, $18.95 paperback.

2001 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-243
Author(s):  
James Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Tony Kushner ◽  
Complex Relation ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

Playwright Tony Kushner has called the remarkable generation of gay and lesbian playwrights examined in these two books a “weird little golden age” of dramatists, filmmakers, and theorists. Each book deals with aspects of this twentieth-century gay – lesbian renaissance and, for scholars, opens the field of sexuality and gender to an emphasis on theatre history, culture, and literary theory. Of these two works, Alan Sinfield's Out on Stage stands out as an essential critical history of homosexuality in modern drama, while Straight with a Twist, edited by Calvin Thomas, is an interesting collection of a dozen essays on aspects of Queer Theory (embracing variant definitions of the term from Rimbaud to Foucault) viewed through the prism of the heterosexual gaze and its complex relation to the gay – lesbian “other.”

scholarly journals Histories of ‘Sex’, Histories of ‘Sexuality’

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
VICTORIA HARRIS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Cyclical Change ◽  
History Of

For Dagmar Herzog, writing the history of sexuality is an act of rebalancing. Sexuality becomes neither positive nor negative, but ambivalent. Herzog destabilises a dominant ‘narrative of gradual progress’, which misunderstands ‘how profoundly complicated the sexual politics of the twentieth century in Europe actually were’ (p. 2). Instead of a linear chronology, Herzog reveals a twentieth century of cyclical change – revolutionary liberalisations and conservative backlashes occur in quick succession, or even concomitantly. Repression appears even within developments considered liberalising by contemporaries. The ambivalences within ‘progress’ and ‘change’ shape sexuality and its history. A third ambivalence is no less important – happiness. Despite being an act inextricably connected with pleasure, sex does not consistently give rise to happiness.

scholarly journals ARTISTIC HARMONY OF THE POETICS OF HISTORICAL TRUTH

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-273
Author(s):  
Z. Sametova ◽  
◽  
M. Aitimov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Spiritual Values ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Historical Truth

This article States that the classic artistic basis of modern Kazakh prose, which influenced its content and form, were the works of new written realistic literature ( works of Abay, Y. Altynsarina et al.). Images of Kazakh prose created by Shokan, Ibrai, Abai and works written at the subsequent stages of the development of Kazakh literature are national spiritual values. It also examines the literary process of the early twentieth century and the work of individual writers who contributed to the development of the novel genre in Kazakh prose along with examples of world literature. A large number of Kazakh novels created during the period of independence were published in the 90s of the XX century and the beginning of the XXI century. The article examines how the centuries-old history of the Kazakh people, the history of the Kazakh state from ancient times to the present day is depicted in fiction within the framework of the traditional creative process.

scholarly journals Timelessness and Precarity in Orientalist Temporality: Mehdi-Georges Lahlou’s Aesthetics of Disorientation

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Conor Moynihan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
East And West ◽  
Hyphenated Identity

The Hourglasses (2015), by French-Moroccan artist Mehdi-Georges Lahlou, features five large hourglasses displayed artifact-like upon a table. As one would expect of an hourglass, these glass sculptures can be inverted to measure out time. This, though, is where convention ends, as these are filled with couscous, not sand. Unlike sand, couscous cannot measure time consistently and the inversion of any one of these five hourglasses results in a different measurement of time. In effect, they disorient any linear notion of temporality, raising the specter of Orientalism and its fantasy of a timeless East. Mehdi-Georges works in a diverse range of media including performance, sculpture, installation, and self-portraiture. Dealing with race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, identity, and representations of Islam and Catholicism, his work performs the instability in all these categories by critically complicating fantasies of “East” and “West” without relying on a mere binary reversal of meaning. Contextualizing his work within a larger history of Orientalism, my argument begins first with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” composed in 1817, followed by an analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orientalist paintings before leading to a concise discussion of contemporary Orientalism in art and art discourse. My analysis then circles back to the artist’s work to insist that Orientalism’s fantastical invocation of the East remains a disabling presence in the contemporary imaginary. Orientalism’s temporality, as glimpsed obliquely from Mehdi-Georges Lahlou’s hyphenated identity, is likewise rendered unstable in his work. As seen in The Hourglasses, his work produces what I call “an aesthetic of disorientation,” predicated on the artist’s embodied cultural hyphenation, which renders the Orientalist fantasy of the East absurd through its own tropes of representation. By bringing queer theory and disability studies to bear on his work, I show how his practice engages with Orientalism’s temporality to open up new possibilities of perceiving the world.

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