Angela Carter's ‘The Sadeian Woman’ and Female Desire in England 1960–1975

In The Sadeian Woman (1979) Angela Carter suggested that the visions of free female sexuality created by the Marquis de Sade in his violent pornographic novels provided insight into existing female sexualities in her own—British—society. In this article the representation of female sexuality in novels set in contemporary British society, written by women, and published between 1960 and 1975, is examined in relation to Carter's exegesis of the good, virtuous Justine and the meretricious, sexually desirous Juliette, two contrasting characters from Sade's work. The limitations of the three other alternatives present in the novels are described; containment within long-term marriage, good-hearted promiscuity; and the rejection of emotional repression. Then Carter's own solution to women's sexual inequality is placed in the context of feminism in the late 1970s, and the role of the novels in contributing to change is acknowledged.     

sexual freedom and the promise of revolution: Emma Goldman’s passion

This article explores the contributions to a history of sexuality, capitalism and revolution made when we consider the work of anarchist thinker and activist Emma Goldman (1869–1940). I suggest that Goldman's centring of sexual freedom at the heart of revolutionary vision and practice is part of a long tradition of sexual politics, one which struggles to make sense of how productive and reproductive labour come together, and to identify the difference between sexual freedom and capitalist opportunity. Goldman's concern with the significance of kinship in holding together capitalism, militarism and religion, as well as sexual feeling's capacity to disrupt those relationships, echoes across more than a century to resonate with Marxist, feminist and queer scholars' engagements with similar issues. But where contemporary scholars often tend to retain the opposition between culture and society, representation and the real, making it difficult to produce a materialist analysis of sexuality as transformative rather than always already overdetermined, Goldman's energetic insistence on sexual connectivity as freeing provides an important vantage point. Not only does Goldman consistently situate sexuality in a broad political context of the sexual division of labour, the institutions of marriage and the church, consumerism, patriotism and productive (as well as reproductive) labour, she frames sexual freedom as both the basis of new relationships between men and women, and as a model for a new political future.     

Raising Decent Citizens—On Respectability,Parenthood and Drawing Boundaries

This article disputes the sexual freedom in Norway while it makes a case for a rereading of Jens Bjørneboe's Uten en tråd. Though Norway has come a long way in liberating sexuality and achieving sexual equality among the genders, remnants of a puritanical tradition continue to haunt sexuality, as one may glean from contemporary literature, applauded by critics. The liberating power of Uten en tråd is that it laughs in the face of the oppressive puritanical sexual ethic while it joyfully embraces its own new sexual ethic, thus attaining an authentic freedom that has completely let go of the past.     

An AIDS-Era reassessment of Christabel Pankhurst's The great scourge and how to end it

Christabel Pankhurst's The Great Scourge and How to End It analysed how continuing male insistence on the physical imperative of their sexual urges threatened women by creating an excluded subclass of prostitutes, and by establishing within the institution of marriage a social mechanism which favoured the infection of unsuspecting women with sexually transmitted disease. Historians, however, have been harsh in their readings of her text, finding in it a manifesto against sexual freedom, and have used it to ‘illustrate’ what they have considered to be the suffragette movement's fundamentally puritan, retrograde nature, thus discounting the legitimate health risks to Edwardian women     

Working Girls: Femininity and Entrapment in Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls

Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls (1966) and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (1956) are novels that have long exerted a powerful hold on the popular imagination. The bestselling Peyton Place was adapted into a successful film in 1957 before becoming an iconic television series, running from 1964 to 1969. Valley of the Dolls was similarly re-imagined in two films, Valley of the Dolls (1967) and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), which, even today, retain a cult following. These books are typically remembered for their scandalous bringing to light of such ‘taboo’ issues as adultery, abortion, female sexuality and sexual abuse. But this article suggests that Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls are equally preoccupied with a sympathetic examination of the role of women in the post-war workplace. In both of these novels, the process of female self-fashioning is integrally related to a woman's entry into the workforce, and to the making and controlling of her own money. But this entry into the male-dominated workforce is inherently fraught with danger, and Metalious and Susann expose some of the myriad ways in which the so-called ‘American Dream’ is contingent on the entrapment, suppression and regulation of various forms of female desire and agency.     

Dancing across difference: Experience and identity in the classroom

This article uses Liquid Sky to consider the possibilities of feminist reorientations outside of formal and political orthodoxies and suggests that such disengagements from the dominant are alienated from the utopian rather than re-imagined as transgressive modes of utopian resistance. These disengagements are theorized as a postpunk feminist dystopia: that is, a de-emancipatory system of gendered and aesthetic practices that spatio-sonically shapes queer female sexuality as extrinsic to social and sexual ideals. This dystopia specifically frames the lesbian subject as a bodily terrain of self-estrangement, and names the film's network of alienated corporeal, subcultural, and sonic space. Feminist dystopia ultimately describes female empowerment's precarious position in a sexual and sonic landscape of non-normativity and offers a way to visualize oppositional practices that do not readily correspond to liberation.     

The Spinster in the Garden: Joy and Transcendence in Elizabeth von Arnim’s Father and Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

Abstract

This article proposes an original reading of Father (1931) and Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther (1907), two texts by Elizabeth von Arnim that centre on a young single woman. It will examine how female autonomy is spatially imagined in the form of a garden and poses significant challenges to the patriarchal societies presented in the texts. Many scholars have detailed the recurring motif of the garden in Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) and The Solitary Summer (1899). The two texts this article addresses were published later than those that have been discussed in relation to the garden, and signal a move away from the married female towards an examination of the independent or single female. Significantly, they disrupt the traditional ‘marriage plot’ novel by tracing two single women’s movement into the garden as a retreat from the societies in which they live. In both texts, von Arnim presents a distinctively beautiful, transcendent garden experience for her female protagonists that contrasts with the oppressive expectations placed on them by urban society. These texts turn on dichotomies—city/country, built/organic environments, repression/freedom—to expose the central characters’ repression and their attempts to gain some degree of independence. Each central character experiences joy as a result of her interaction with the organic environment and the power the protagonist exercises over this space.     

on the orgasm of the species: female sexuality,science and sexual difference

This essay interrogates the assemblage of female sexuality. Drawing on an analysis of Masters and Johnson's anatomical research and primatological research on monkeys, I argue that the female sexuality was the product of encounters between women, machines and monkeys. Orgasm's extra-species life produced a conception of female sexuality as natural in evolutionary and anatomical terms. The set of assumptions that follow this naturalisation of female sexuality through an emphasis on orgasm allow us to further deconstruct notions of female sexuality, naturalness and the politics of knowledge that produce this assemblage. Ultimately, I argue that this focus on anatomy and female orgasm allows us to see the stakes of an anatomically based sexual difference.     

College Women and Personal Goals: Cognitive Dimensions that Differentiate Risk-Reduction Sexual Decisions

As the twenty-first century begins, a high level of participation in premarital sexual intercourse by college women is well-documented. But, in the research exploring risk-reduction sexual behaviors, the relationship of cognitive abilities to responsible sexual behavior has been under-researched. Anonymous questionnaires were administered to 626 never-married, heterosexual women at a midwestern university to examine personal goal-setting, a cognitive variable postulated to be related to risk-reduction sexual behavior. Women who frequently set goals were more religious, optimistic about life, conservative in sexual attitudes, comfortable with their sexuality, and more psychologically sexually satisfied. Those who less often set goals were more likely to drink alcohol prior to sexual intercourse, become more intoxicated, and less likely to ask if new sex partners had STI(s). The cognitive variable, goal-setting, did differentiate college women who made responsible sexual decisions from those who engaged in risk-taking sexual behaviors.Professor Emerita of Family and Consumer Science, Texas State University-San Marcos. Received her PhD from the University of Texas, Austin in Child Development and Family Relations and is a Certified Marriage and Family Therapist, American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists and licensed in the State of Texas. Her research interests include sexual attitudes and behavior of college students, adoption attitudes of unmarried pregnant teens, and teen pregnancy/parenting programs.University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Received his PhD from the University of Florida in Family Sociology and is a Clinical Fellow, American Academy of Clinical Sexologists and Fellow, National Council on Family Relations. His research interests include sexual attitudes and behavior of college students, adoption attitudes of unmarried pregnant teens, female sexual adjustment, and perceptions of the female physiological sexual response.     

Battle of Femininity: romantic heroines and modern sexuality in the interwar middlebrow women's novel

Focusing on Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets, Rose Macaulay's Dangerous Ages and E. H. Young's William, this article examines the representation of young romantic heroines in the context of emergent discourses on women's sexuality, marriage and motherhood. It is argued that these heroines, ambivalent and tentative in their quest for sexual modernity, represent the middlebrow's moral stance that reflects the paradoxical attitude of the interwar era towards modern women. A juxtaposition of these texts reveals a battle of varying versions of femininity, while a fine balance is mediated between the progressive and conservative ends of the middlebrow spectrum of values.     

Does Body Image Play a Role in Risky Sexual Behavior and Attitudes?

Body image and sexuality, both physically-oriented domains of the self, are likely linked, but few studies have examined their associations. In the present investigation, we studied emerging adult undergraduates (ages 17–19), focusing specifically on risky sexual behaviors and attitudes. Participants (N=434) completed a survey on body image, lifetime sexual behavior, sexual double standard attitudes, and attitudes about condoms. Males who evaluated their appearance more positively and who were more oriented toward their appearance were more likely to report risky sexual behavior, yet females who evaluated their appearance more positively were less likely to report risky sexual behavior. For most sexual attitudes, patterns did not differ by gender. Individuals who were more oriented toward their appearance believed more in the sexual double standard, and those who had more positive evaluations of their appearance perceived fewer barriers to using condoms. Intervention implications are discussed.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2003 Emerging Adulthood Conference, Boston, MA.Doctoral candidate in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include body image, sexuality, and gender in adolescence and emerging adulthood.Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She received her PhD in developmental psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include sexuality, interpersonal relationships, and gender role development during adolescence and emerging adulthood.Doctoral candidate in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include gender, adolescent development, and family relationships     

Trickster Humour in Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home: Negotiating Arab American Muslim Female Sexuality

Randa Jarrar’ s A Map of Home (2008), a major contemporary Arab American woman's novel, utilizes trickster humour as a way to resist the ideological manufacture of the Muslim female body propounded by US orientalism, Islamist orthodoxy and secular Arab patriarchy. Current scholarship on A Map of Home has not examined the relationship between humour and contemporary female sexuality. Focusing mostly on authorial tone, this article reads the novel's narrator-protagonist, Nidali Ammar, as a trickster figure, who resists being perceived as a cultural heroine and in doing so disrupts the sacredness of social conventions. The trickster A Map of Home celebrates, and Nidali enacts, prompts readers to laugh at key cultural norms shaping the Muslim female body in post-9/11 US sculpture. This inquiry examines a range of interconnected sexual themes—most notably, ‘proper’ sexual boundaries, orientations and codes of virginity—to illustrate how trickster humour fosters Arab American women's agency.     

She's old enough to be a beautiful young boy: Sarah Bernhardt,breeches roles and the poetics of aging

This essay argues that Sarah Bernhardt's choice to play young male roles late in her career served as a radically anti-agist feminist response to the limiting and often demeaning professional and social opportunities afforded aging women. While scholarship has attended to Bernhardt's cross-dress roles through the lens of gender, this essay highlights her “breeches” roles, in particular Hamlet and L’Aiglon as cross-age and cross-gender. By examining “aging” as the contextual mode by which gender functioned, we open up new terrain with which to examine and appreciate Bernhardt's significance in the scope of theatre history, women's history and aging studies. In the title roles of Hamlet and L’Aiglon, Berhnardt assumed youth and male-ness on stage, which both highlighted her offstage socially perceived deficits (aged and female) and challenged the designation of those identities as deficient; performance threw into flux what had been assumed static. And the public responded. Far from honoring the assumed cultural hetero-normative contract that aging women acquiesce public visibility, Bernhardt's breeches roles (re)constructed her body as female (from aging/sexless) and demanded audience members’, male and female, desiring gaze.     

Book Review: Work,children and gender equality

The motivating concern behind this article is that women, in the diversity of their ages, life situations, cultural traditions of gender and actual sexual connections to men, are still marginalized by prevailing approaches to HIV and AIDS. Safe sexual practices for women, within social contexts and actual sexual relations with men, are not being approached in ways that engage women's (or their male partners') active involvement. Conventional heterosexual distinctions between women's and men's sexuality disables prevention processes. Categories and perspectives which prevail in ''interpreting'' the HIV/ AIDS epidemic, inhibitions and assumptions framing sexual safety information, and cultural narratives of gendered love/desire/sex, converge into two highly problematic outcomes: a dissociation of heterosexually-defined men who have sex with women from central responsibility for HIV prevention, and marginalization of women who have sex with men from concern about women's sexual safety.     

the ambivalence of colonial desire in Marguerite Duras's <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Lover</Emphasis>

This paper analyses the notions of desire and metissage that circulate in The Lover, Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel about an illicit and scandalous sexual relationship between an adolescent French girl and a wealthy Chinese man set in 1920s French colonial Siagon. Rather than celebrate The Lover as a tale of a young French girl's resistance to colonial sexual mores and regulations, this paper seeks to excavate how that resistance both affirms and challenges the racializing and racist dynamics of colonial society. In particular, I explore the intertwining discourses of colonial sexuality, gender, race, and Orientalism that both produced and constrained the specific forms of desire and subjectivities available to and taken up by European women in French Indochina, and that circumscribe the story that Duras is able to tell about the French girl's love affair in The Lover. I suggest that Duras's portrayal of the French girl as a sexually autonomous female subject – one whose erotic relations are not bound by the dictates of colonial patriarchy – is made possible only by the ambivalent structure of the girl's desire, by her simultaneous attraction to and repulsion of the racialized others of the French colonies.     

Popular Sexual Knowledges and Women's Agency in 1920s England: Marie Stopes's Married Love and E.M. Hull's The Sheik

This article examines popular discourses of women's sexuality in 1920s England and argues that sex manuals like Marie Stopes's Married Life and sex novels like E.M. Hull's The Sheik, despite their adherence to status quo values, were liberating for women through their affirmation of women's sexual subjectivity. Stopes's enormously popular book contributed strongly to a new understanding of women's sexual drives as natural and autonomous. The changing attitudes were reflected in the numbers of postwar women who actively participated in the creation and consumption of popular sex-novels and films, exercising both economic and sexual freedoms at once. This article focusses on the film version of The Sheik, which experienced great success as part of this growing leisure market catering specifically to women's desire, and in particular on the figure of Rudolph Valentino as a “woman-made” man. The film's “crossed” representations of sexuality (the emancipated “flapper” and the effeminate yet virile “sheik”) challenged traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, and in doing so, were liberating for women consumers at the same time that they threatened the sexual identities of men.     

living a body myth,performing a body reality: reclaiming the corporeality and sexuality of the Indian female dancer

This paper investigates the dilemma that has been projected upon Indian female dancers' bodies by contemporary Indian audiences when female desire occupies the centrality of a performance and projects the female body as sexual, articulate and independent of the discipline and propriety of classicism. Locating this dilemma in the nationalist construction of Indian womanhood and femininity as ‘chaste’, this paper adopts Victor Turner's notions of liminal and liminoid phenomenon and Brechtian defamiliarization technique as a feminist strategy to construct a framework within which the contemporary Indian dancer can reclaim her sexuality in performance. To investigate the complex nationalist trope of chaste Indian womanhood, and to analyse the subversion of this trope by placing agency on the female body as sexual, I locate my argument in the discussion of The Silk Route: Memory of a Journey by Kinaetma Theatre, UK, which was performed in Kolkata in August 2004.     

Results of a misspent youth: Joan Jett's performance of female masculinity

The article maps Joan Jett's performances from her days with the Runaways in the mid-1970s through her successful solo career in the 1980s to her recent affiliations with the riot grrrls in the 1990s. Unlike some critics, who, while acknowledging Jett's influence on generations of female rock performers, dismiss Jett as an inferior copy of male rock musicians, the author argues that Jett's various performances of female masculinity challenged conventional understandings of masculinity and femininity. The article explores how Jett's interest in punk enabled her to carve a space for herself in a male-dominated genre. It is further contended that as more spaces opened for women in the early 1990s, Jett's performances took a more aggressive stance on traditionally feminist issues and enabled her to use her sexuality as an offensive weapon.     

Parenting,Communication about Sexuality,and the Development of Adolescent Womens’ Sexual Agency: A Longitudinal Assessment

Sexual agency (i.e., the ability to make decisions and assertions related to one’s own sexuality) is associated with sexual health enhancing outcomes. Given that young women are expected to act passively, rather than with agency when it comes to sexual encounters, the present study aimed to explore whether parental support, knowledge, and communication about sexuality during late adolescence contribute to an enhancement of sexual agency in a sample of young women in the long-term. Using a longitudinal design (panel study), 320 female participants who participated in three data collection waves (T1, T2, and T5) were included in the analyses (M_age?=?16.2 years, SD?=?0.50 at baseline). Mediated by the frequency of parents’ communication about sexuality with their daughters, both dimensions of parental support (emotional engagement and support of autonomy) positively predicted adolescent women’s sexual agency two years later. In contrast, parental knowledge of their children’s whereabouts was unrelated to communication and female sexual agency. Specific dimensions of parenting seem to play a crucial role in empowering adolescent girls to act agentic through communicating, emotional support, and encouraging autonomy, which in turn may contribute to healthy sexual behavior in young adulthood.     

Hearts and Minds: War Neurosis and the Politics of Madness in Anna Kavan's I Am Lazarus

Abstract

Anna Kavan's fictional portrayals of psychiatric breakdown and its treatment provide a unique perspective on the patient's experience of early to mid twentieth-century psychiatry. This article looks in detail at Kavan's time working with soldiers suffering from effort syndrome during the Second World War, observing how the solider-psychiatric patient becomes a figurehead for her radical politics in her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944), and a prominent protagonist in her stories. Through close reading of her correspondence, her journalism and her wartime stories collected in I Am Lazarus (1945), it examines how the intersection of psychological trauma and physiological symptoms characteristic of effort syndrome surfaces in Kavan's writing of this period and in her own psychic responses to the war. It observes the importance of figurative language to her portrayal of war trauma and psychological breakdown, as her characters embody metaphor in their psychosomatic symptoms, and explores a twisted reconception of mind–body dualism prevalent throughout her writing of this period. It goes on to examine how the peculiar interaction of the physical and the psychological extends to the relationship between Kavan's characters and their external environment in her Blitz stories. Against the backdrop of the war-torn city, mind and body engage in ongoing conflict, affect and emotion bleed into her physical landscapes, and everyday objects become animated and hostile towards her protagonists.