Posts Tagged: perversion

Tony Kushner’s two-part play Angels in America is heavy on sexuality, disease, politics, professional discrimination, religion, race, and gender.  The two themes that stick out most to me are sexuality and gender.  The portrayal of the Jewish identity as ethnicity versus religion is very realistic for the modern day, and it is not a treatment […]

The range of psychoses related in Lolita is relentless.  The entire text could be a document in Peiss’s textbook, and wading through these murky waters becomes an exercise in suspicion.  Humbert’s mixture of paranoia and recklessness makes me root for his success in keeping his and Lo’s anonymiy despite my increasing disgust and fury with […]

Dirty Old Men Before I get into my reaction to Part I of Lolita, I must say that I really love the author’s writing.  That said, I am thoroughly disturbed and disgusted by Humbert Humbert.  I’ll cut here for spoilers.

Victorian Discourse in Volumes In the Puritan world, the hand of God or the temptation of the devil were to be found anywhere and everywhere.  For the Victorians, the readings for this week seem to point less to an obsession with sin than to an obsession with words and language. 

Public and Private, In Writing Walt Whitman’s romantic poems are most usually written to romanticize nature and the heavenly practices of growing grass.  This excerpt from “Calamus” however is a an escape into nature for some much needed sensual privacy.  Whitman comes here not to reflect on the seclusion of nature, but on the necessarily […]

Various thoughts on love and sex in the 19th century Perhaps aptly, “Alice Mitchell as a ‘Case of Sexual Perversion’” was published by a Comstock: T. Griswold Comstock.  His analysis was appalling, in my opinion.  There was indeed something wrong with Alice Mitchell – some sort of mental disorder that caused her to murder another […]

As the sources I scour about sexuality increase, so does my understanding of the broad problems surrounding the history of sex. However, as my increased understanding, or rather, exponentially growing interest and grasps at the general ideas, grows, more questions seem to arise, the answers to them become seemingly more and more out of reach. […]

Power and Problematic Sexualities Foucault finally started to make sense to me with The Deployment of Sexuality.  Maybe it’s because Part 4 is much more linear, but I am just relieved to feel a little less lost. In his “Method” section, Foucault effectively dispels the rest of the ideas I had about power in relation […]

Manga, Media, Social Construction v. Essentialism? For me, our visit to the Museum of Sex drove home some of the ideas that Weeks’ touched upon in his discussion of the social construction of sexuality.  Weeks states that sexuality is shaped and given meaning by society and that it in turn shapes each of us.  Each […]