Territories of Desire in Queer Culture
Title | Territories of Desire in Queer Culture PDF eBook |
Author | David Alderson |
Publisher | Manchester University Press |
Pages | 268 |
Release | 2000 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780719057618 |
This book engages with, and develops, current debates about desire and sexual identification by focusing on a wide selection of contemporary literature, film, and theory. These texts range from the novels of Alan Hollinghurst and Paul Magrs to the work of Pedro Almodovar, RuPaul, Derek Jarman, and Camille Paglia, as well as TV programs like "Ellen" and "Shinjuku Boys, " and individual films such as Collard's "Savage Nights."
Mapping Desire:Geog Sexuality
Title | Mapping Desire:Geog Sexuality PDF eBook |
Author | David Bell |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 369 |
Release | 2003-09-02 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 1134833105 |
This is the first book to explore sexualities from a geographical perspective. The nature of place and notions of space are of increasing centrality to cultural and social theory. Mapping Desire presents the rich and diverse world of contemporary sexuality, exploring how the heterosexual body has been appropriated and resisted on the individual, community and city scales. The geographies presented here range across Europe, America, Australasia, Africa, the Pacific and the imaginary, cutting across city and country and analysing the positions of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and heterosexuals. The contributors ring different interests and approaches to bear on theoretical and empirical material from a wide range of sources. The book is divided into four sections: cartographies/identities; sexualised spaces: global/local; sexualised spaces: local/global; sites of resistance. Each section is separately introduced. Beyond the bibliography, an annotated guide to further reading is also provided to help the reader map their own way through the literature.
Tropics of Desire
Title | Tropics of Desire PDF eBook |
Author | Jose Quiroga |
Publisher | NYU Press |
Pages | 302 |
Release | 2000-11 |
Genre | Health & Fitness |
ISBN | 0814769535 |
From its sweaty beats to the pulsating music on the streets, Latin/o America is perceived in the United States as the land of heat, the toy store for Western sex. It is the territory of magical fantasy and of revolutionary threat, where topography is the travel guide of desire, directing imperial voyeurs to the exhibition of the flesh. Jose Quiroga flips the stereotype upside down: he shows how Latin/o American lesbians and gay men have consistently eschewed notions of sexual identity for a politics of intervention. In Tropics of Desire, Quiroga reads hesitant Mexican poets as sex-positive voices, he questions how outing and identity politics can fall prey to the manipulations of the state, and explores how invisibility has been used as a tactical tool in opposition to the universal imperative to come out. Drawing on diverse cultural examples such as the performance of bolero and salsa, film, literature, and correspondence, and influenced by masters like Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and a rich tradition of Latin American stylists, Quiroga argues for a politics that denies biological determinism and cannibalizes cultural stereotypes for the sake of political action.
Sex, Needs and Queer Culture
Title | Sex, Needs and Queer Culture PDF eBook |
Author | Doctor David Alderson |
Publisher | Zed Books Ltd. |
Pages | 245 |
Release | 2016-04-15 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 1783605154 |
The belief of many in the early sexual liberation movements was that capitalism’s investment in the norms of the heterosexual family meant that any challenge to them was invariably anti-capitalist. In recent years, however, lesbian and gay subcultures have become increasingly mainstream and commercialized — as seen, for example, in corporate backing for pride events — while the initial radicalism of sexual liberation has given way to relatively conservative goals over marriage and adoption rights. Meanwhile, queer theory has critiqued this ‘homonormativity’, or assimilation, as if some act of betrayal had occurred. In Sex, Needs and Queer Culture, David Alderson seeks to account for these shifts in both queer movements and the wider society, and argues powerfully for a distinctive theoretical framework. Through a critical reassessment of the work of Herbert Marcuse, as well as the cultural theorists Raymond Williams and Alan Sinfield, Alderson asks whether capitalism is progressive for queers, evaluates the distinctive radicalism of the counterculture as it has mutated into queer, and distinguishes between avant-garde protest and subcultural development. In doing so, the book offers new directions for thinking about sexuality and its relations to the broader project of human liberation.
On Sexuality and Power
Title | On Sexuality and Power PDF eBook |
Author | Alan Sinfield |
Publisher | Columbia University Press |
Pages | 233 |
Release | 2004-12-22 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0231508662 |
It is widely supposed that the most suitable partner will be someone very much like oneself; gay fiction and cinema are often organized around this assumption. Nonetheless, power differentials are remarkably persistent—as well as sexy. What are the personal and political implications of this insight? Sinfield argues that hierarchies in interpersonal relations are continuous with the main power differentials of our social and political life (gender, class, age, and race); therefore it is not surprising that they govern our psychic lives. Recent writing enables an exploration of their positive potential, especially in fantasy, as well as their danger. On Sexuality and Power focuses on the writing of the last thirty years, revisiting also Whitman, Wilde, Mann, Forster, and Genet, and reassessing the very idea of a gay canon.
Gothic Topographies
Title | Gothic Topographies PDF eBook |
Author | Matti Savolainen |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 258 |
Release | 2016-04-22 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1317126041 |
In demonstrating the global reach of Gothic literatures, this collection takes up the influence of the Gothic mode in literatures that may be geographically remote from one another but still share related issues of minor languages, nation building, place and race. Suggesting that there is a parallel between certain motifs and themes found in the Gothic of the North (Scandinavia, Northern Europe and Canada) and South (Australia, South Africa and the US South), the essays explore the transgressions and confusion of borders and limits, whether they be linguistic, literary, generic, class-based, gendered or sexual. The volume includes essays on a wide diversity of authors and topics: Jan Potocki, Gustav Meyrink, William Godwin, Alan Hollinghurst, Marlene van Niekerk, John Richardson, antislavery discourse and the Gothic imagination, the Australian aboriginal Gothic, vampires of Post-Soviet Gothic society, Danish, Swedish and Finnish fiction and film, and the Canadian female Gothic and the death drive. What distinguishes this book from other collections on the Gothic is the coverage of themes and literatures that are either lacking in the mainstream research on the Gothic or are referred to only briefly in other book-length studies. Experts in the Gothic and those new to the field will appreciate the book's commitment to situating Gothic sensibilities in an international context.
The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature
Title | The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature PDF eBook |
Author | Jodie Medd |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 297 |
Release | 2015-12-10 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1316453561 |
The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature examines literary representations of lesbian sexuality, identities, and communities, from the medieval period to the present. In addition to providing a helpful orientation to key literary-historical periods, critical concepts, theoretical debates and literary genres, this Companion considers the work of such well-known authors as Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Alison Bechdel and Sarah Waters. Written by a host of leading critics and covering subjects as diverse as lesbian desire in the long eighteenth century and same-sex love in a postcolonial context, this Companion delivers insight into the variety of traditions that have shaped the present landscape of lesbian literature.