The Christina Jorgensen case is a tragic example of how the media could either make or break you. It also reiterates the notion that when it comes to touchy subjects in America, there’s no such thing as an acceptable gray area (Abortion, for or against; Politics, red or blue and sometimes green). As for the […]
My notion of the Victorian lifestyle has been shattered. Gone are the images of couples cold to one another in bed, and a society as tight as the petticoats the women wore. Replace it with sexually charged men and women who were not abashed to share their feelings with one another, and radical thinkers espousing […]
After reading all the historical documents and essays, what struck me the most was that I never learned about or heard of the Postal Act/Comstock Act or Anthony Comstock in any American history class let alone anything about the Free Lovers and other prominent figures and ideologies in this particular historical moment. A quick skim […]
After finishing The Scarlet Letter and this week’s selection of readings, like Colby, I noticed the similarity between Hester Prynne’s situation and the argument Nancy F. Cott makes in “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology 1790-1850.” Plus, from last class, the fact that The Scarlet Letter is a story about Puritans through a Victorian […]
In the time periods explored by Foucault in Parts 1-3 of The History of Sexuality, what was constituted as socially acceptable sexual discourse was anything that would hit close to the bullseye, but not directly on it. It had become an art of verbal communication, and maybe even a gender competition about who could tickle the […]
In the third part of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault introduces the concepts of scientia sexualis, or “telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power,” and its counterpart, ars erotica, or telling the truth of sex from “pleasure itself” (57-58). Foucault argues that Western civilization has adopted the scientia […]
