scholarly journals Pornohealing: Pornography as a healing process for individuals with a history of sexual violence

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (Winter) ◽  
pp. 216-231
Author(s):  
Sonia Patrinou
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Healing Process ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Erotic Film ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Spectator

By taking as a starting point “The Clit List,” a pornographic database that includes porn material addressed to individuals who have experienced sexual harassment(s) and/or assault(s), this essay brings forward the following question: can pornography take the form of a healing process for individuals with a history of sexual violence? In order to provide an answer, alternative uses and aspects of pornography will be explored, with a particular focus on queer, feminist, and ethical porn. Following the contemporary history of pornography, I engage with both Queer Theory by discussing queer feminist approaches to porn, but also Affect Theory by sharing queer feminist approaches to trauma and the potential healing that an (erotic) film can induce in the spectator. More than simply seeking for alternative aspects of porn, this essay accounts for the (re)introduction of pornography as a productive media with a sexual healing possibility.

Telling stories of rape, revenge and redemption in the age of the TED talk

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Crawley ◽  
Olivera Simic
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Entertainment Media ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Informal Justice ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Men’S Involvement

The last few years have witnessed increasing discussion of sexual violence in the mainstream media and public debate in North America and elsewhere, especially with the most recent wave of sexual assault and harassment allegations in entertainment, media and public institutions, called the #MeToo campaign. Despite the view that men must be engaged in this conversation in order to be effective at preventing violence and changing deep-seated patriarchal attitudes, the place of male voices in this ongoing conversation is hotly in question. This article analyzes an unusual and controversial project by Thordis Elva and Tom Stranger, who, 20 years after Stranger raped Elva, produced a TED talk (2016) watched by over 3 million people, and a jointly written book, South of Forgiveness (Elva and Stranger, 2017), detailing their story of forgiveness and redemption. The first part of this article situates this unprecedented victim-rapist enterprise within the history of feminist anti-rape politics and men’s involvement in that politics, arguing that this project both instantiates, and critiques, an appeal to the ‘good man’. The second part analyzes the book South of Forgiveness as a survivor story that is more complex than the highly reductive format of a TED talk allows, and shows how its uneasy fit within the putative frameworks of ‘restorative’ or informal justice (as Elva and others claim it to be) is a function of the unacknowledged dimension to the performance in the form of revenge. The third part of the article turns to Elva’s and Stranger’s public performances that began with the TED talk and book tour, which we attended, to show how this function of revenge played out theatrically and implicates the spectator as bystander and witness. We conclude by reflecting upon the implications of listening to male perpetrators speak against sexual violence against women and our responsibility towards these questions as feminist legal academics.

scholarly journals Sexual Violence in Childhood and Post-Childhood: The Experiences of Young Men Who Have Sex With Men in Beirut

2019 ◽  
pp. 088626051988016
Author(s):  
Cynthia El Khoury ◽  
Matt G. Mutchler ◽  
Carol Abi Ghanem ◽  
Susan M. Kegeles ◽  
Elie Ballan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Psychosocial Functioning ◽  
Sex Abuse ◽  
Young Msm ◽  
Child Sex Abuse ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sex With Men ◽  
And Coping

Sexual violence has been found to have psychosocial and sexual ramifications for men who have sex with men (MSM) but has not been studied in the Middle East. We assessed the prevalence and correlates of experiences of child and post-child sexual violence among young MSM residing in Beirut, Lebanon. In total, 226 MSM, aged 18 to 29, were recruited with long-chain peer referrals and administered a survey that included questions on history of being pressured to have sex, as well as specific forms of sexual harassment and abuse, in addition to measures of psychosocial functioning and sexual behavior. Logistic regression analysis was used to examine correlates of child sex abuse and experiences of sexual violence post-childhood; 17.3% experienced sexual abuse as a child (below age 13), while 63.3% experienced any form of sexual violence post-childhood—furthermore, 48.7% had experienced being forced or pressured to have sex during their lifetime, including 32.3% prior to age 18. Participants who experienced child sex abuse were more likely to experience abusive relationships in adulthood, as well as at least one type of sexual harassment/abuse post-childhood. Experience of any sexual violence post-childhood was correlated with greater recent sexuality-related discrimination and more recent male sex partners. These findings reveal a high prevalence of sexual violence among MSM in Beirut, both in childhood and post-childhood. More research within the Middle East is needed to better understand the drivers of sexual violence in this population, and how to best provide prevention and coping services.

Women’s Contributions to Middle English Arthurian Scholarship

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-119
Author(s):  
Usha Vishnuvajjala
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Adaptation Studies ◽  
Arthurian Literature ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
New Methodologies

Abstract This article examines the history of scholarship of both Middle English Arthurian literature and its afterlives to argue that the marginalisation of such literature has slowly diminished – often through the work of women. The increasing numbers of women in academia coincided with the advent of new methodologies in literary studies in the late-twentieth century to produce a wide range of scholarship on English Arthurian literature, including on texts that had long been considered beneath serious study. This work continues now, with recent studies considering English Arthuriana through postcolonial theory, queer theory, affect theory, adaptation studies and many other methods.

scholarly journals Trzy kroki w stronę obrazów. Pierre Bonnard i percepcyjne opóźnienie.

2018 ◽  
pp. 67-92
Author(s):  
Łukasz Kiepuszewski
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Art History ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Specific Composition ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Late Works ◽  
Analytical Practice

The essay is an analysis of three interpretations of Pierre Bonnard’s paintings offered by Jean Clair, John Elderfield, and Yves-Alain Bois. Their approaches are crucial in the context of the revaluation Bonnard’s works and his place in the history of modern painting, which has been continuing since the 1980s. Today’s scholars have been interested mostly in his late works from 1920-1947. At that time the artist created a multidimensional pictorial synthesis which addressed the most advanced dilemmas which appeared in the first half of the 20th century. The critical opinions analyzed in the essay, referring to physiology and the psychology of perception, the cognitive conditions of visual perception, and specific philosophical traditions, stem from individual visual experience and demonstrate significant tensions. Taking the painting as a starting point triggers differences in interpretation not just at the level of theoretical discourse, but in respect to visualization itself. Bonnard’s works significantly program the process of visual perception – grasping the changing rhythm of relation between the center and periphery and moving toward fixations scattered in the visual field. The specific composition of paintings makes the spectator deconcentrate; it can be grasped in an act of perception which extends in time. Such  “delay” of perception means that Bonnard’s paintings are a challenge to the gestalt psychology which prevails in the analytical practice of art history. The unique quality of Bonnard’s works, based on the coexistence of the rhythms of organization and disorder,shows no superior coherence of the gestalt. They establish an “inconclusive” relation between the part and the whole, which results in continuing deference and delay of the integration of motifs and elements of the pictorial field. The discussed episode in Bonnard’s art’s reception confirms a belief that “he is not a painter for those in a hurry. The phenomenon of the perceptive delay seems to be significantly connected with the delay in discovering such qualities by art historians.

On The Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia

1961 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. W. Small
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

It is generally accepted that history is an element of culture and the historian a member of society, thus, in Croce's aphorism, that the only true history is contemporary history. It follows from this that when there occur great changes in the contemporary scene, there must also be great changes in historiography, that the vision not merely of the present but also of the past must change.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

How the Bible Feels

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 27-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorina Miller Parmenter
Keyword(s):  
Affect Theory ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Bodily Harm ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Christian Leaders ◽  
Christian History

Despite Christian leaders’ insistence that what is important about the Bible are the messages of the text, throughout Christian history the Bible as a material object, engaged by the senses, frequently has been perceived to be an effective object able to protect its users from bodily harm. This paper explores several examples where Christians view their Bibles as protective shields, and will situate those interpretations within the history of the material uses of the Bible. It will also explore how recent studies in affect theory might add to the understanding of what is communicated through sensory engagement with the Bible.

The Guatemalan Genocide Through Indigenous Mayan Literature Twenty Years After the Peace Accords: Rigoberta Menchú, Humberto Ak´Abal and Victor Montejo

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
David Caballero Mariscal
Keyword(s):  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Dark Period ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Rigoberta Menchu ◽  
Testimonial Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Peace Accords ◽  
Historical Truth

Guatemala experienced a cruel genocide in the early eighties, in the context of a repressive Conflict. Due to the different governments´ repressive policies, this terrible social situation was little known abroad, and even in the own country. Just after the Peace Accords, several organisms worked to uncover the historical truth. In any case, we cannot forget that testimonial literature is a privileged mean to know this dark period of the contemporary history of Guatemala. This genre is particularly relevant, because the main writers are originally Mayans, and have directly suffered both repression and social exclusion due to ethnic reasons. Rigoberta Menchú, Unmberto Ak´abal and Víctor Montejo represent a new and original point of view in the measure in which they describe feelings and situations from the perspective of those who experience them personally. Testimonial literature or the Testimonio becomes an ethnographic document that allows us to know not just a period but a people who have suffered from repression and exclusion for centuries.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document