Venus Figurines

In this article, the working of certain bodily processes is presented as the basis for the apotropaic meaning and function of the genitals of the Upper Palaeolithic Venus Figurines. The working of the sympathetic nervous system is identified as the cause of genital arousal due to anxiety. The simultaneous experience of anxiety and the engorgement of the labia and clitoris led to an apotropaic meaning, in addition to a sexual meaning, being assigned to the genitals during the Palaeolithic Era. The ability to think in symbols, which was developing greatly at this time, led to that which could be experienced in bodies being transferred to Venus Figurines.

Black Queer Freedom

In this book, GerShun Avilez argues that queerness, here meaning same-sex desire and gender nonconformity, introduces the threat of injury and that artists throughout the Black diaspora use queer desire to negotiate spaces of injury. The space of injury does not necessarily pertain to a particular architecture or location; it concerns the perception and engagement of a body. Black queer bodies are perceived as social threats, and this perception results in threats (physical, psychological, socioeconomic) against these bodies. The space of injury describes the potential threat to queer bodies that lingers throughout the social world. Attending to such threats and challenging them constitute defining elements in Black queer artists’ work. In each of the two parts to the book, the author examines how perceptions of the Black queer body in different environments create uncertainty for that body and make it a contested space because of racial and sexual meaning. Part 1 focuses on movement through public space (through streets and across borders) and on how state-backed interruptions seek to inhibit queer bodies. Part 2 explores movement through institutional spaces (prisons and hospitals), which seek to expose the queer body to make it vulnerable to control. Ultimately, the book insists that desire and artistic production function as means to queer freedom when actual policies and legislation fail to ensure civic rights and social mobility.

El acto sexual como agente del (re)nacimiento de Osiris

One of the most important myths of the Ancient Egypt civilization is Osiris’ cyclical myth. Even though not enough attention has been given to it, one of the most important mythemes is the sexual act between the god and Isis. This sexual act establishes two pillars of the monarchy in Ancient Egypt: the conception and the subsequent birth of Horus (the archetype of the earthly Egyptian king) and Osiris’ (re)birth (king of the Underworld and archetype of the dead). Regardless of the great importance of this sexual act, the sources that relate to it are scarce. On a textual level, the intercourse between both divinities has been documented since the Pyramid Texts until the end of the Pharaonic Period. However, it appears narrated on very few occasions with verbs carrying explicit sexual meaning. Only the context allows one to see that the protagonists are having sexual relations. Since Osiris is dead, Isis is the obvious agent of the action, an exception that makes the goddess different from the rest of her peers. Regarding iconography, only three images have been documented in the Dynastic Period: one in the Middle Kingdom and two in the New Kingdom. In all of them the image is the same, the anthropomorphic Osiris, lies in his funerary bed while Isis, in the shape of a bird of prey, copulates with him.

How to Undo the History of Sexuality: Editing Edward Taylor’s Meditations

This essay establishes how the scholarly labors that brought Edward Taylor’s works to light in the 1930s foreclosed any understanding of them as queer. The absence of a queer critical reception history is this essay’s subject, and to trace that absence, it focuses on the material and intellectual terms of Taylor’s initial critical reception and on the political forces and critical assumptions that bear on those terms. Taylor’s devotional Meditations offer an exemplary case for understanding how many of the ordinary labors associated with recovery and publication—the scholarly acts that stand, ultimately, behind nearly any interpretation of any literary text, including genre classification, editorial presentation, and genealogical authentication—have often been versions of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick described in the late 1980s as “the extremely elusive and maddeningly plural ways in which cultures and their various institutions efface and alter sexual meaning.”

Imperial Cryptonomy: Colonial Specters and Portuguese Exceptionalism in Isabela Figueiredo’s Caderno de Memórias Coloniais

In opposing mainstream metropolitan narratives of the imperial past, Figueiredo’s memoir retells many of her traumatic experiences growing up in the colony, beginning with her formation as a gendered and racialized subject and the teaching of desire by her social and familial circles of colonists. She, in other words, utilizes her own placement into Empire’s discursive field in order to contest the metropolis’s dominant post-imperial narrative regarding its colonial past. Of the different characters that emerge from her memoir, her father is undoubtedly the most prevalent. For instance, Figueiredo notably equates her father with colonialism, as the embodiment and voicing of race, gender, and class-based power. The ubiquity of the father in her narrating of the past urges us to think of him as a specter, one that repeatedly destabilizes the present, both hers and that of the former metropolis. This chapter thus utilizes Jacques Derrida’s concept of spectrality in dialogue with his engagement with Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham’s notion of cryptonomy. The goal of this particular inquiry is to understand the ideological relationship between the field of racial, socio-economic and sexual meaning experienced by Figueiredo as a colonist and the official political narrative of Portuguese pluri-continentality and amicable colonialism promoted during and after the final three decades of Portuguese imperialism.

Genesis 49:4 in Light of Arabic and Modern South Arabian

The rare word pahaz 'wily, devious' in Genesis 49:4 may have been chosen to describe Reuben in order to allow a play on words. Modern South Arabian and Arabic cognates to this root carry a sexual meaning, and such a meaning fits the context of this biblical passage.

Male sexuality in Vietnam: the case of male-to-male sex

Background: To implement effective behaviour change interventions for men who have sex with men, qualitative information was collected about the contexts and meanings of sex and relationships between men in Ho Chi Minh City. Methods: Individual interviews and focus groups were conducted with 74 men aged 18 years or older who had had sex with another man in the previous 12 months. Results: Findings reveal that sex between men exists and is associated with two common descriptors in Vietnam: bong lo for those who are feminised in public and bong kin for those who are not, and are often married. In sexual relationships, for both groups of men, there is a trade off between sexual pleasure and risk. Condoms may not be used, particularly when having sex with a partner who was considered to be good looking or perceived as ‘clean’. Conclusions: The study highlights the need for HIV prevention programs which address issues of sexual meaning in male-to-male sexual relationships.