Re: Middlesex 1/ 2 “… since the 18th century the family has become an obligatory locus of affects, feelings, love; that sexuality has it privileged point of deployment in the family; that for this reason sexuality is “incestuous” from the start.” – Michel Foucault The bigger half of part one is dedicated to the history […]
Joe the Mormon is as uncertain about his decision to move to Washington as he is about coming out of the closet. Perhaps these two things are linked, and if Joe to moves to Washington, leaving his wife in the process, it would mean coming out of the closet—the closet called marriage let’s say. He […]
Re: Jumping the Broomstick; Brief commentary on Sula Power relations festered inside the slave’s realm of sexual relations. Slave women resisted sexual advances by men of both colors, fostering the idea that “principle” was the only thing they had. They sought to preserve their bodies, usually in forlorn efforts, and, on the contrary, they, many […]
The adventures of Humbert the pedophile and Lolita the hobbledehoy continue on the road with souvenirs, countless inns, a brief intermission at Beardsley, and a doppelganger identified as Trapp. And how appropriate is it that an Aztec red convertible haunts H.H.? It parallels his incandescent lust; moreover, it seems that red—commonly used to represent anything […]
Jean- Jacques Humbert—in Nabokov’s Foucauldian universe—cannot relinquish his desire for his dear Annabel; obsessed over the image of his first love, Humbert falls out of an unsuccessful marriage and ultimately lands in 342 Lawn street, Ramsdale. Here, he resurrects the image of his lost love through Dolores Haze—daughter of a single mother, twelve years of […]
“Women, who had little status or power in the larger world of male concerns, possessed status and power in the lives and worlds of other women.” – Carroll Smith-Rosenberg It—“it” being the festering of a homosexual nomenclature—began during the late 19th century. The institution of science—psychology, to be precise—became the authority of all things sexual; […]
The ideology of female purity—the expression of passionlessness or maybe, the absence of Nymphomania—seems like, by the standards of theocratic doctrine and by the events that filled the beginning of the 19th century, an opportunity for a woman to obtain a sense of residual power; however, progress in sexual liberation, and women’s liberation for that […]
“I regard it as an impious and detestable maxim that in matters of government the majority of a people has the right to do everything, and nevertheless I place the origin of all powers in the will of the majority.” – Alexis De Tocqueville An apparition of Tocqueville appeared in front of me last Thursday, […]
Re: Weeks, Norton, Sex Museum, R.L.G.B., Thunder Cats, Foucault, Mad Men and more fun items Just a little bit more on Essentialism and Constructionist Theory Questions to be answered: Is indentifying one’s sexual orientation considered knowledge? Or is it a matter of the senses? Example: Can you know that you like women or men, before […]
Re: Sex Museum Surrounded by archaic condoms, syphilis-infested genitals, animated porn, myriad sex toys, mini LCD screens projecting various fetishes, safe sex posters and HIV/ Aids prevention ads, and some other fun things, I had the following thoughts: 1) This museum is the perfect place to bring naïve adolescents. 2) It certainly feels different when […]
