The ‘secret’ source of ‘female hysteria’: the role that syphilis played in the construction of female sexuality and psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois P Rudnick ◽  
Alison M Heru
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
Women's Development ◽  
Psychosexual Development ◽  
Heterosexual Relationships ◽  
Profound Impact ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Sexual Aversion ◽  
Social Suppression

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the unspoken fear of syphilis played a significant role in the development of beliefs about female sexuality. Many women were afraid of sexual relationships with men because they feared contracting syphilis, which was, at that time, untreatable. Women also feared passing this disease on to their children. Women’s sexual aversion, or repression, became a focus for Freud and his colleagues, whose theory of psychosexual development was based on their treatment of women. This article examines the case of Dora, the memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan and other sources to argue that the fear of syphilis was a significant factor in upper- and middle-class women’s avoidance of heterosexual relationships. The fear of syphilis, in turn, became a significant factor in the psychoanalytic construction of female sexuality. The social suppression of the fear of syphilis has had a profound impact on theories of women’s development. The implication for psychiatry is that our models of psychological development occur within a sociocultural milieu and cannot escape suppressed aspects of our culture.

The Failed Campaign Against Prostitution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. C. Kemeny
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Red Light ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cult Of Domesticity ◽  
The Family ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Reform Organizations

Protestants criticized prostitution because it threatened the family and ultimately civil society, and the Watch and Ward Society devised a campaign to shut down Boston’s red-light districts. These Protestant elites espoused traditional gender roles and Victorian sexual mores and endorsed the “cult of domesticity.” In the late nineteenth century, a number of reform organizations turned their attention to the “social evil,” as it was popularly called. The Watch and Ward Society’s quest to reduce prostitution placed it squarely within the larger international anti-prostitution movement. Moral reformers resisted all forms of policy that officially sanctioned or tacitly tolerated prostitution, instead arguing for its abolition. Their attempt to suppress commercialized sex eventually collapsed because of the lack of public support.

Sufis and the Sufi Lodges in Istanbul in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Socio-Spatial Analysis

2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422110252
Author(s):  
Ahmet Yusuf Yüksek
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spatial Analysis ◽  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
Spatial History ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Social Profiles

This study investigates the socio-spatial history of Sufism in Istanbul during 1880s. Drawing on a unique population registry, it reconstructs the locations of Sufi lodges and the social profiles of Sufis to question how visible Sufism was in the Ottoman capital, and what this visibility demonstrates the historical realities of Sufism. It claims that Sufism was an integral part of the Ottoman life since Sufi lodges were space of religion and spirituality, art, housing, and health. Despite their large presence in Istanbul, Sufi lodges were extensively missing in two main areas: the districts of Unkapanı-Bayezid and Galata-Pera. While the lack of lodgess in the latter area can be explained by the Western encroachment in the Ottoman capital, the explanation for the absence of Sufis in Unkapanı-Bayezid is more complex: natural disasters, two opposing views about Sufi sociability, and the locations of the central lodges.

Fictions of Containment in the Spanish Female Picaresque

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Kuffner
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Conduct Manuals ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
The Social ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Sexuality And Space ◽  
Female Picaresque

This study examines the interdependence of gender, sexuality and space in the early modern period, which saw the inception of architecture as a discipline and gave rise to the first custodial institutions for women, including convents for reformed prostitutes. Meanwhile, conduct manuals established prescriptive mandates for female use of space, concentrating especially on the liminal spaces of the home. This work traces literary prostitution in the Spanish Mediterranean through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the rise of courtesan culture in several key areas through the shift from tolerance of prostitution toward repression. Kuffner’s analysis pairs canonical and noncanonical works of fiction with didactic writing, architectural treatises, and legal mandates, tying the literary practice of prostitution to increasing control over female sexuality during the Counter Reformation. By tracing erotic negotiations in the female picaresque novel from its origins through later manifestations, she demonstrates that even as societal attitudes towards prostitution shifted dramatically, a countervailing tendency to view prostitution as an essential part of the social fabric undergirds many representations of literary prostitutes. Kuffner’s analysis reveals that the semblance of domestic enclosure figures as a primary erotic strategy in female picaresque fiction, allowing readers to assess the variety of strategies used by authors to comment on the relationship between unruly female sexuality and social order.

Media Genealogy of the Contagion: Syphilis — AIDS — COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-112
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationships ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Control Society ◽  
Object Based ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Form ◽  
Society Of Control

The article is devoted to a genealogy of the attitude toward viruses in social and political practice in light of the new coronavirus pandemic. The disciplinary society and the society of control have taken on a completely new configuration since the HIV crisis in the 1980s. AIDS and now COVID-19 as phenomena of social crisis have had a great impact on (sexual) relationships and have also caused a significant change in the social and political order. Epidemics and pandemics mobilize political structures and constitute power relations, thus changing the way bodies are controlled, establishing new differentiations and redefining what disease is. The authors trace the development of discourses about syphilis, AIDS and COVID-19 to describe how knowledge about the disease is being generated today; it has origins in myth and would be unthinkable without aesthetic visualization and mass media technologies. Syphilis was an exact fit for the paradigm of the disciplinary society, which stigmatized bodily pleasure and abstracted pathology by activating projection mechanisms as a sign of the Other. However, AIDS already differed significantly from that paradigm because other medical technologies are used to define HIV, and that has affected the epistemology of the disease and epidemic. The article considers HIV/AIDS as a transitional model that forms a bridge between the epidemics of the past (leprosy, plague, smallpox, syphilis) and the COVID-19 pandemic. Above all there is a change in the biopolitical regime so that bodies are no longer controlled and regulated through sexuality. COVID-19 is a new form of sociality which is not based on the exclusion of “pathological” forms of sexuality or on “deviant” or “perverted” bodies, but involves the object-based, microlevel of relations between viruses, the immune system, and the human genome, which are then mapped with distortions and substitutions onto social relationships and practices. The authors use the term “delegated control” in a new context and introduce the original term “omniopticum” to describe the new regime of biopolitics and the “control society” in the post-COVID era.

Political Obedience

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glenn Burgess
Keyword(s):  
Political Order ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Profound Impact ◽  
Development Of Resistance ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Resistance Theory ◽  
The Way

The Reformation had a profound impact on European thinking about political obedience. This chapter explores the way in which the Reformation “mood” embraced theories of absolute authority, but also led to a questioning of authority. It explores the development of resistance theory and ideas of popular sovereignty, and of toleration, all of which cast significant limits on the authority of secular rulers. Reformation impulses also inspired some to genuinely revolutionary attempts to transform the social and political order, and these revolutionary ideas are explored too. The approach taken is to avoid narrative, and to explore particular moments at which the implication of Reformation ideas becomes apparent.

Female Onanism: Condemned Pleasures, Medical Probes, and Late-Victorian Pornography

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-164
Author(s):  
Stefano Rossi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Self ◽  
Erotic Literature ◽  
Medical Discourses ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The more Victorian physicians deepened their research into female sexuality, the more a culture of lust infected the hypocritical façade of a nation strictly attached to social norms of order, formality, and bigotry. Lascivious sexual desire and carnal appetite – here embodied in female masturbation – were taboos that had to be forcibly silenced. Yet, late-Victorian pornography mocked medical discourses on female onanism, as well as fears related to female sexuality, and revealed ‘unspeakable’ secret domestic settings marred by ‘dangerous’ practices, scandalous carnality and deviant desires. Furthermore, contemptuous of literary censorship and strict morality, the plenteous erotic literature, represented here by William Lazenby's pornographic magazine The Pearl, not only dared to taunt physicians’ concerns about female ‘self-pollution’ circulating at that time, but also found a great inspiration in the huge domestic success of some innovative medical tools – specifically patented to assuage women's nerves – being produced in those years: electric vibrators. Those ‘engines’ rapidly invaded pornographic literature of the late nineteenth century and became central to a great number of erotic stories, titillating fables and poems, as clearly demonstrated by the contents of The Pearl.

What is Popular about the Khānqāh?

2015 ◽  
pp. 90-102
Author(s):  
Nathan Hofer
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Profound Impact ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

After Saladin opened the Saʿīd al-Su ʿadāʾ Cairo was infused with many hundreds of juridical Sufis from the East. This immigration had a profound impact on the social and religious fabric of the city. Upon their arrival these individuals lived and worked in the very heart of urban Cairo, the bayn al-qa‚ rayn district. While the Sufis were obliged to spend portions of their day engaged in devotions within the walls of the khānqāh, they were not required to sequester themselves. They performed public rituals every evening, they paraded through the streets of Cairo every Friday, and they frequented the city’s many madrasas, mosques and teaching circles. Locals also came to the khānqāh to study with them on site. All these practices contributed to the popularisation of Sufism on a large scale in Cairo. But what exactly where these Sufis popularising?

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