Music Physiology, Erotic Encounters, and Queer Reading Practices in Teleny

While music often appears as a “code” for sexual desire in Victorian literature, this article explores music's presence in a text for which no veiled language was needed: the anonymously published pornographic novella Teleny (1893). The authors of Teleny invoke emerging scientific discourses about music physiology to draw explicit parallels between musical and sexual encounters—as when the protagonist Camille orgasms in response to the vibrations of his lover's piano music. In such moments, Teleny offers an insistent defense of queer desire as a natural process rooted in the organic and often involuntary actions of the muscles and nerves—a particularly powerful intervention at a time when sexual “inversion” was most often denigrated as unnatural. In its use of biological science in the service of sexual representation—science that many twenty-first-century queer theorists might deem “essentialist”—Teleny presents a compelling challenge to scholars grappling with conversations about normativity, resistance, utopian desires, and idealized cultural objects.

Play! A Special Issue

Sexuality, as it relates to video games in particular, has received increasing attention over the past decade in studies of games and play, even as the notion of play remains relatively underexplored within sexuality studies. This special issue asks what shift is effected when sexual representation, networked forms of connecting and relating, and the experimentation with sexual likes are approached through the notion of play. Bringing together the notions of sex and play, it both foregrounds the role of experimentation and improvisation in sexual pleasure practices and inquires after the rules and norms that these are embedded in. Contributors to this special issue combine the study of sexuality with diverse theoretical conceptions of play in order to explore the entanglements of affect, cognition, and the somatic in sexual lives, broadening current understandings of how these are lived through repetitive routines and improvisational sprees alike. In so doing, they focus on the specific sites and scenes where sexual play unfolds (from constantly morphing online pornographic archives to on- and offline party spaces, dungeons, and saunas), while also attending to the props and objects of play (from sex toys and orgasmic vocalizations to sensation-enhancing chemicals and pornographic imageries), as well as the social and technological settings where these activities occur. This introduction offers a brief overview of the rationale of thinking sex in and as play, before presenting the articles that make up this special issue.

Curating Trans Erotic Imaginaries

This article considers the archival, political, and ethical questions raised by curating a public exhibit of archival trans erotic material through a case study of the author's 2019 exhibit Trans Porn Imaginaries: A Half-Century of Transvestite Lawmen and Gendertrash from Hell, which presented materials from the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies' Sexual Representation Collection and the ArQuives: Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives at the University of Toronto's iSchool. The exhibit explored intersections between trans erotic representation and BDSM, gay liberation, Playboy's vision of straight male sexual cosmopolitanism, the feminist porn movement, and sex worker politics. In this article, the exhibit's curator discusses the importance of pornography to trans cultural production, the limits of the archive (especially when researching pornography), and the ethics and politics of putting trans sexual representations on display. Ultimately, the author argues that exhibits such as this one can demonstrate the breadth, diversity, and longevity of transness in popular erotic imaginaries and the creativity of earlier generations of trans cultural producers, as well as create the opportunity for some people to see themselves and their desires represented.

Development of an Iranian Sexual Satisfaction Model: A Qualitative Research

Background: Sexual satisfaction is one of the factors affecting the continuity of marital relationship and satisfaction with this relationship. Regarding this, the present research was conducted to develop a model of Iranian sexual satisfaction in terms of marital adjustment, marital quality, and marital conflict. Materials and Methods: This applied exploratory study was conducted during 2018-2019 using a qualitative method and data-based approach. The data were collected using in-depth interviews. After the interview, the obtained data were subjected to inductive analysis. In other words, there was no previous conceptual framework for coding and categorization, rather the analysis was performed freely and according to the coding technique of data theory. To assess the validity of the content of the subject matter, the table of contents was submitted to six faculty members of psychology who were familiar with qualitative research and sexuality issues, who confirmed the content validity of the identified themes. Results: Based on the results, the final model of the research consisted of eleven different themes, including seven stimulants, namely preparation, sexual preferences, sexual representation, cognition, attitude, sexual behaviors, and sexual consequences, and four preventive factors, namely cognitive impediments, emotional barriers, barriers to behavior, and environmental barriers. Conclusion: Recommendations for couples to obtain sexual satisfaction must be based on both stimuli and barriers as identified in this research.

Coda

This coda draws attention not only to the opacity of sexuality but its complex ordering across multiple, dynamic registers. It instigates a close reading of a digital fragment from the archive of early cinema in order to denaturalize processes of sexual representation and their interpretation, and to consider their imbrications in sexuality itself. It argues that the simultaneous sexual transparency and opacity of such digital fragments in the present foregrounds the ongoing value of an interdisciplinary film history while also sharpening the need to make explicit our perspectives, disciplinary frameworks, and approaches to film historiography.