The notion of sexual sadism emerged from nineteenth-century alienist attempts to imagine the pleasure of the torturer or mass killer. This was a time in which sexuality was mapped to social progress, so that perversions were always related either to degeneration or decadence. These ideas were internalized in later Freudian views of the drives within the self, and of their repression under the demands of modern European civilization. Sadism was always presented as the barbarous past that lurked within each of us, ready to burst forth into murderous violence, crime, anti-Semitism, and finally genocide. This idea maintained its currency in European thought after the Second World War as Freudian-influenced accounts of the history of philosophy configured the Marquis de Sade as a kind of Kantian “superego” in a framework that viewed the Western Enlightenment as unraveled by its own inner demons. In this way, a straight line was imagined from the late eighteenth century to the Holocaust. These ideas have had an ongoing legacy in debates about sexual perversion, feminism, genocide representation, and historical memory of Nazism. However, recent genocide research has massively debunked assumptions that perpetrators of mass violence are especially sexually motivated in their cruelty. This book considers how the late twentieth-century imagination eroticized Nazism for its own ends, but also how it has been informed by nineteenth-century formulations of the idea of mass violence as a sexual problem.

Myth and Sexuality is a fascinating study of the ways in which our ideas about sex and gender have been shaped by our cultural myths--ranging from the Ancient Greeks to contemporary America.

The period of reform, revolution, and reaction that characterized seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe also witnessed an intensified interest in lesbians. In scientific treatises and orientalist travelogues, in French court gossip and Dutch court records, in passionate verse, in the rising novel, and in cross-dressed flirtations on the English and Spanish stage, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and physicians were placing sapphic relations before the public eye. In The Sexuality of History, Susan S. Lanser shows how intimacies between women became harbingers of the modern, bringing the sapphic into the mainstream of some of the most significant events in Western Europe. Ideas about female same-sex relations became a focal point for intellectual and cultural contests between authority and liberty, power and difference, desire and duty, mobility and change, order and governance. Lanser explores the ways in which a historically specific interest in lesbians intersected with, and stimulated, systemic concerns that would seem to have little to do with sexuality. Departing from the prevailing trend of queer reading whereby scholars ferret out hidden content in “closeted” texts, Lanser situates overtly erotic representations within wider spheres of interest. The Sexuality of History shows that just as we can understand sexuality by studying the past, so too can we understand the past by studying sexuality.

Riane Eisler shows us how history has consistently promoted the link between sex and violence—and how we can sever this link and move to a politics of partnership rather than domination in all our relations.

Non Aboriginal material.

Love is a Cunning Weaver: Myths, Sexuality, and the Modern World explores the relationship between the modern and ancient worlds by analyzing the depiction of queer and female characters in Greco-Roman mythology. That relationship is illuminated and defined by the modern individual's tendency to apply contemporaneous narratives to myths of the ancient world in order to understand them. The aforementioned queer and female characters are introduced in their original contexts based on the most popular written traditions of the myths in which they appear. They are then broken down through a series of interviews with current (or recently graduated) college students. Finally, the narrative established in the introduction of each chapter is subverted through a creative piece.

This book explores Jamaican-American author Michelle Cliff’s (1946–2016) literary rebellion against the colonial, gendered and racist norms of Western Modernity. It studies the sexualized circuits of the Atlantic world, drawing on the fields of literary criticism, feminist theories, queer studies and Caribbean studies. In order to do this, the book develops the theoretical paradigm of intersectionality. It also addresses the disturbing questions concerning the sexual politics of transatlantic modernity as represented in Cliff’s novels. Cliff’s rebellious poetics envisions the colonial Caribbean past in new ways. Her novels tell stories about Caribbean queer characters setting the queer as a site of postcolonial agency and as a perspective out of which colonial history can be re-written. This book considers myths, rites, and cultural memory as sites of healing in the midst of colonial bodily politics. Transnational histories, identity and ethics emerge as intertwined in Cliff’s feminist novels.