Returning to the early modern period, this study questions and develops issues of post-modernity. It shows how literature histories and sub-cultures of sexual and gender dissidence may be relevant to current debates and discusses topics ranging from homophobia to transgression and its containment.

Recent critical and historical work on the late-Victorian period has furnished a vocabulary for discussing gender and sexuality. These popular terms include categories such as homo/hetero, patriarchal/feminist, and masculine/effeminate. This collection exploits this framework—while refining and resisting it in places—to show how certain Victorians imagined difference in ways that continue to challenge us today. One essay, for example, traces the remarkable feminist appropriation of male-identified fields of study, such as Classical philology. Others address the validation of male bodies as objects of desire in writing, painting, and emergent modernist choreography. The writings shed light on the diverse interests served by a range of cultural practitioners and on the complex ways in which the late Victorians invented themselves as modern subjects. This volume will be essential reading for students of British literary and cultural history as well as for those interested in feminist, gay, and lesbian studies. Contributors are: Oliver Buckton, Richard Dellamora, Dennis Denisoff, Regenia Gagnier, Eric Haralson, Andrew Hewitt, Christopher Lane, Thaïs Morgan, Yopie Prins, Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Julia Saville, Robert Sulcer, Jr., Martha Vicinus.

Why is homosexuality socially marginal yet symbolically central? Why, in other words, is it so strangely integral to the very societies which obsessively denounce it, and why is it history - history rather than human nature - which has produced this paradoxical position? These are just some of the questions explored in this wide-ranging study of sexual dissidence which returns to the early modern period in order to focus, question, and develop issues of postmodernity. In the process it brilliantly links writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Gide, Wilde, and Genet, and cultural critics as different as St. Augustine, Freud, Fanon, Foucault, and Monique Wittig. So Freud's theory of perversion is discovered to be more challenging than either his critics or his advocates usually allow, especially when approached via the earlier period's archetypal perverts, the religious heretic and the wayward woman, Satan and Eve. The book further shows how the literature, histories, and sub-cultures of sexual and gender dissidence prove remarkably illuminating for current debates in literary theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural materialism. It includes chapters on transgression and its containment, contemporary theories of sexual difference, homophobia, the gay sensibility, transvestite literature in the culture and theatre of Renaissance England, homosexuality, and race.

Taking as a starting point an interpretation of the television medium as an Ideological State Apparatus, this book examines how gender roles and non-heteronormative sexualities are constructed in Spanish and Catalan television series. In the first part, which focuses on the construction of gender roles in Catalan soap operas, it applies the analytical paradigms founded by Anglo-Saxon feminist scholars for the content of soap operas to a corpus of material which has rarely been analysed through this perspective. In the second part, which focuses on the construction of non-heteronormative sexualities in Spanish and Catalan television series, the book challenges the rhetoric of “normalisation” and the “essentialist” paradigms which have so far dominated the examination of the construction of sexuality in television series. As such, this book addresses the role performed by television in the construction of meanings which surround gender issues and non-heteronormative sexualities. This is a timely exercise because gender studies and studies of sexual dissidence are fairly recent fields in Spanish and Catalan academia and television has been largely disregarded, especially as far as the analysis of characters and storylines is concerned. As a result, this book represents a major contribution to these fields in the Spanish and Catalan contexts.

Shame, a powerful emotion, leads individuals to feel vulnerable, victimized, rejected. In Shameless, noted scholar and writer Arlene Stein explores American culture's attitudes toward shame and sexuality. Some say that we live in a world without shame. But American culture is a curious mix of the shameless and the shamers, a seemingly endless parade of Pamela Andersons and Jerry Falwells strutting their stuff and wagging their fingers. With thoughtful analysis and wit, Shameless analyzes these clashing visions of sexual morality. While conservatives have brought back sexual shame—by pushing for abstinence-only sex education, limitations on abortion, and prohibitions of gay/lesbian civil rights—progressives hold out for sexual liberalization and a society beyond “the closet.” As these two Americas compete with one another, the future of family life, the right to privacy, and the very meaning of morality hang in the balance.

This book analyses the critical reception of Pai Hsien-yung'sCrystal Boys, one of Taiwan's first recognized gay novels and one which has played an important role in redefining sexual modernity and linking this to ongoing cultural dialogues on state-building. It examines the deployment of sexuality over the past five decades in Taiwan by paying particular attention to male homosexuality and prostitution. In addition to literary and film material, the study engages a number of relevant legal cases and media reports. Through Hans Huang's primary research and historical investigations, the book not only illuminates the construction of gendered sexual identities in Taiwanese culture but also, in a reflexive fashion, critiques the culture that produces them. Hans Tao-Ming Huangis assistant professor in the English Department, National Central University, Taiwan.

Guynn offers an innovative new approach to the ethical, cultural, and ideological analysis of medieval allegory. Working between poststructuralism and historical materialism, he considers both the playfulness of allegory and its disciplinary force.