Lolita, Lo-lee-ta, Lo. Lee. Ta. I love it—I love this book! Vladamir Nabokov gets into your head and leaves behind Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. What a magnificent novel to read, especially in light of Foucault, and refreshing after the more restrained The Scarlet Letter. And yet, after visiting The Museum of Sex, there is no way […]
After visiting the Museum of Sex in combination with reading Lolita and this weeks documents I have noticed a strong trend in sexuality -the attempt to construct some ideal that arises from an illusion/fantasy. In the museum I was struck by the simulator in the BDSM exhibit on the second floor. This sort of “create […]
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 this past class, in which we discussed Victorian Hawthorne writing about Puritans, I noticed new layers in The Scarlet Letter. In regards to the documents in Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality, the deployment of sexuality, and power-relations, were evident. Hawthorne’s Victorian influence is seen in “Another View of Hester.” He speculates, […]
At the end of our discussion last week, Professor Quinby prompted us to think about how Foucault’s notion of the deployment of sexuality shows up in our readings. I want to focus primarily on this weeks essays as I found them really interesting and a good springboard for discussion about the Scarlet Letter in class. […]
