scholarly journals Visual Histories of Sex

2022 ◽  
Vol 2022 (142) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Heike Bauer ◽  
Melina Pappademos ◽  
Katie Sutton ◽  
Jennifer Tucker

Abstract Increased access to visual archives and the proliferation of digitized images related to sexuality have led a growing number of scholars in recent years to place images and visual practices at the center of critical historical inquiries of sexual desire, subjectivity, and embodiment. At the same time, new critical histories of sexual science serve both to expand the temporal and geographical frames for investigating the historical relationships of sex and visual production, and to generate new lines of inquiry and reshape visual studies more broadly. The contributors to this issue invite us to ask: What new questions and challenges for the study of sex and sexual science are posed by critical studies of the visual? How are new visual methodologies that focus on archives changing the contours of historical knowledge about sex and sexuality? What—and where—are new methodologies still needed? “Visual Archives of Sex” aims to illuminate current research that centers visual media in the history of sexuality and that interrogates contemporary historiographies.

Author(s):  
Carolin Behrmann

This chapter argues that normative orders are not simply represented but made through visualities. Rather than just having a subversive purpose, images, symbols, gestures, and performative actions are able to generate legal meaning; this has been discussed since early Renaissance. The reason for the troubled relationship between law and visuality is connected to the long history of skepticism toward the authenticity of images. This chapter looks into the ties between the law and image history and shows that visual media have to be counted as a crucial part of the legal sphere. Both aesthetic knowledge and aesthetic signification of legal normativity have a long historical record. The chapter argues that since the law deploys visual media in different contexts, critical instruments and theoretical approaches must be able to deal with the epistemological qualities of images.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (152) ◽  
pp. 92-99
Author(s):  
S. M. Geiko ◽  
◽  
O. D. Lauta

The article provides a philosophical analysis of the tropological theory of the history of H. White. The researcher claims that history is a specific kind of literature, and the historical works is the connection of a certain set of research and narrative operations. The first type of operation answers the question of why the event happened this way and not the other. The second operation is the social description, the narrative of events, the intellectual act of organizing the actual material. According to H. White, this is where the set of ideas and preferences of the researcher begin to work, mainly of a literary and historical nature. Explanations are the main mechanism that becomes the common thread of the narrative. The are implemented through using plot (romantic, satire, comic and tragic) and trope systems – the main stylistic forms of text organization (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony). The latter decisively influenced for result of the work historians. Historiographical style follows the tropological model, the selection of which is determined by the historian’s individual language practice. When the choice is made, the imagination is ready to create a narrative. Therefore, the historical understanding, according to H. White, can only be tropological. H. White proposes a new methodology for historical research. During the discourse, adequate speech is created to analyze historical phenomena, which the philosopher defines as prefigurative tropological movement. This is how history is revealed through the art of anthropology. Thus, H. White’s tropical history theory offers modern science f meaningful and metatheoretically significant. The structure of concepts on which the classification of historiographical styles can be based and the predictive function of philosophy regarding historical knowledge can be refined.


Author(s):  
Monica L. Mercado

The history of sexuality is a growing area of interest for scholars of religion and race in the North American context. That which is often regarded as a private matter—sex and sexuality—is in fact shaped by larger cultural, economic, political, and religious forces. To study the intersections of sexuality and race in American religious history, then, is to examine the role of belief, as well as formal religious institutions and their spokespeople, in circulating ideas about bodies, sex, marriage, family, morality, and immorality. If religious variety has been one way that scholars have understood the American experiment from the earliest colonial encounters to the present day, this chapter considers moments when sex and sexuality, and the religious thinking that passes judgments on sexual practices, has served to define or highlight racial difference in American history.


2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 959-985
Author(s):  
Melissa Graboyes ◽  
Zainab Alidina

AbstractFrom nearly any perspective and metric, the effects of malaria on the African continent have been persistent and deep. By focusing on the malady of malaria and the last century of biomedical interventions, Graboyes and Alidina raise critical historical, ethical, and scientific questions related to truth telling, African autonomy, and the obligations of foreign researchers. They provide a condensed history of malaria activities on the continent over the past 120 years, highlighting the overall history of failures to eliminate or control the disease. A case study of the risks of rebound malaria illustrates the practical and moral problems that abound when historical knowledge is ignored. In light of current calls for renewed global eradication efforts, Graboyes and Alidina provide evidence for why historical knowledge must be better integrated into global health epistemic realms.


2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (162) ◽  
pp. 244-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leanne Calvert

AbstractThe history of sex and sexuality is underdeveloped in Irish historical studies, particularly for the period before the late-nineteenth century. While much has been written on rates of illegitimacy in Ireland, and its regional diversity, little research has been conducted on how ordinary women and men viewed sex and sexuality. Moreover, we still know little about the roles that sex played in the rituals of courtship and marriage. Drawing on a sample of Presbyterian church records, this article offers some new insights into these areas. It argues that sexual intercourse and other forms of sexual activity formed part of the normal courtship rituals for many young Presbyterian couples in Ulster. Courting couples participated in non-penetrative sexual practices, such as petting, groping and bundling. Furthermore, while sexual intercourse did not have a place in the formal route to marriage, many couples engaged in it regardless.


Author(s):  
Francesca Orestano

By dwelling first on the ‘faults’, then on the ‘excellencies’ remarked by reviewers and critics of Little Dorrit, this chapter also traces the history of that novel’s critical reception as it evolved from a close focus on contemporary politics and economics toward a study of the writer’s Hogarthian skill at building a visual satire. Subsequently the characters’ psychology as well as Dickens’s became the object of critical enquiry. When visual studies brought to the fore the import of perception and its narrative function, another area of investigation opened, in this chapter specifically connected with, and culturally encoded in, the technique of the stereoscope and the scientific notion of the binocularity of vision. Implemented by Dickens in the construction of Little Dorrit, this notion allows for a further critical reading of the novel as lieu de mémoire where real and imagined imprisonments, inscribed in history, also conjure the scene where cultural memory rewrites individual and collective identity in the present.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-89
Author(s):  
Martine Jayne Barons ◽  
Rachel L Wilkerson

Causal questions drive scientific enquiry. From Hume to Granger, and Rubin to Pearl the history of science is full of examples of scientists testing new theories in an effort to uncover causal mechanisms. The difficulty of drawing causal conclusions from observational data has prompted developments in new methodologies, most notably in the area of graphical models. We explore the relationship between existing theories about causal mechanisms in a social science domain, new mathematical and statistical modelling methods, the role of mathematical proof and the importance of accounting for uncertainty. We show that, while the mathematical sciences rely on their modelling assumptions, dialogue with the social sciences calls for continual extension of these models. We show how changing model assumptions lead to innovative causal structures and more nuanced casual explanations. We review differing techniques for determining cause in different disciplines using causal theories from psychology, medicine, and economics.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 416
Author(s):  
Elsa Maria Gabriel Morgado ◽  
Levi Leonido Fernandes da Silva ◽  
Maria Beatriz Licursi Conceição ◽  
Mário Aníbal Gonçalves Rego Cardoso ◽  
João Bartolomeu Rodrigues

This article focuses mainly on the Portuguese legal framework, which somehow also results from the significant changes and recommendations of the various (international) guidelines on Special Education and the Inclusion. It also intends to carry out a review of the literature on the historical and conceptual evolution of the Special Education and all the corresponding concepts and themes. The combination of these two approaches clearly contribute, in our view, for a consolidation and coordination between the historical knowledge and the conceptual knowledge, together with the legal framework inherent in the practice and intervention in different contexts in which Special Education is of particular focus and interest. The present research is a qualitative research using the method of documentary research based on the conceptual and methodological framework of Gil (2010) and Bardin (1979) which aims to present some facts that we consider relevant to the history of Education Special, sensitizing the readers to the inescapable need of their social and civic participation, in order to ground a collective voice that wants to be strong and mobilizing in a central theme for the life of all. As a result of the present investigation, the latent need to carry out a significant reformulation and normative updating is evident in the light of the civilizational and conceptual advances that come from the specific needs and particularities of inclusion and special education in particular.


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