Erotic Subjects

Treating sixteenth- and seventeenth-century erotic literature as part of English political history, Erotic Subjects traces some surprising implications of two early modern commonplaces: first, that love is the basis of political consent and obedience, and second, that suffering is an intrinsic part of love. Rather than dismiss such assumptions as mere conventions, Melissa Sanchez uncovers the political import of early modern literature's fascination with eroticized violence. Focusing on representations of masochism, sexual assault, and cross-gendered identification, Sanchez re-examines the work of politically active writers from Philip Sidney to John Milton. She argues that political allegiance and consent appear far less conscious and deliberate than traditional historical narratives allow when Sidney depicts abjection as a source of both moral authority and sexual arousal; when Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare make it hard to distinguish between rape and seduction; when Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish depict women who adore treacherous or abusive lovers; when court masques stress the pleasures of enslavement; or when Milton insists that even Edenic marriage is hopelessly pervaded by aggression and self-loathing. Sanchez shows that this literature constitutes an alternate tradition of political theory that acknowledges the irrational and perverse components of power and thereby disrupts more conventional accounts of politics as driven by self-interest, false consciousness, or brute force. Erotic Subjects will be of interest to students and scholars of early modern literary and political history, as well as those interested in the histories of gender, sexuality, and affect more generally.

This book examines how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers used scenarios of masochism and cross-gender identification to explore the origins and limits of political allegiance. It offers a new understanding of the relationship between histories of gender, sexuality, politics, and literature.

Erotic Transference and Countertransference brings together, for the first time, contemporary views on how psychotherapists and analysts work with and think about the erotic in therapeutic practice. Representing a broad spectrum of psychoanalytic perspectives, including object relations, Kleinian, Jungian and Lacanian thought, the contributors highlight similarities and differences in their approaches to the erotic in transference and countertransference, ranging from love and sexual desire to perverse and psychotic manifestations. Erotic Transference and Countertransference offers ways of understanding the erotic which should prove both useful and thought-provoking.

Erotic Geographies in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture addresses the following question: how does a place "get a reputation?" The Athenians associated sexual behaviors with particular places and their inhabitants, and this book decodes the meaning of the sexualization of place and traces the repercussions of these projections. Focusing on Corinth, Sparta, and Lesbos, each section starts from the fact that there were comic joke words that made a verb out of a place name to communicate a sexual slur. Corinth was thought of as a hotbed of prostitution; Sparta was perceived as a hyper-masculine culture that made femininity a problem; Lesbos had varying historically determined connotations, but was always associated with uninhibited and adventurous sexuality. The cultural beliefs encoded in these sexualized stereotypes are unpacked. These findings are then applied to close readings, ultimately demonstrating how sensitivity to the erotics of place enables new interpretations of well-known texts. In the process of moving from individual word to culture to text, Erotic Geographies recovers a complex mode of identity construction illuminating the workings of the Athenian imaginary as well as the role of discourse in shaping subjectivity. Gilhuly brings together a deep engagement with the robust scholarly literature on sex and gender in Classics with the growing interest in cultural geography in a way that has never been done before.

What is the role of sex in the age of democratic beginnings? Despite the sober republican ideals of the Enlightenment, the literature of America’s early years speaks of unruly, carnal longings. Elizabeth Dill argues that the era’s proliferation of texts about extramarital erotic intimacy manifests not an anxiety about the dangers of unfettered feeling but an endorsement of it. Uncovering the more prurient aspects of nation-building, Erotic Citizens establishes the narrative of sexual ruin as a genre whose sustained rejection of marriage acted as a critique of that which traditionally defines a democracy: the social contract and the sovereign individual. Through an examination of philosophical tracts, political cartoons, frontispiece illustrations, portraiture, and the novel from the antebellum period, this study reconsiders how the terms of embodiment and selfhood function to define national belonging. From an enslaved woman’s story of survival in North Carolina to a philosophical treatise penned by an English earl, the readings employ the trope of sexual ruin to tell their tales. Such narratives advanced the political possibilities of the sympathetic body, looking beyond the marriage contract as the model for democratic citizenship. Against the cult of the individual that once seemed to define the era, Erotic Citizens argues that the most radical aspect of the Revolution was not the invention of a self-governing body but the recognition of a self whose body is ungovernable.

The essays in Erotic Justice address the ways in which law has been implicated in contemporary debates dealing with sexuality, culture and `different' subjects - including women, sexual minorities, Muslims and the transnational migrant. Law is analyzed as a discursive terrain, where these different subjects are excluded or included in the postcolonial present on terms that are reminiscent of the colonial encounter and its treatment of difference. Bringing a postcolonial feminist legal analysis to her discussion, Kapur is relentless in her critiques on how colonial discourses, cultural essentialism, and victim rhetoric are reproduced in universal, liberal projects such as human rights and international law, as well as in the legal regulation of sexuality and culture in a postcolonial context. Drawing her examples from postcolonial India, Ratna Kapur demonstrates the theoretical and disruptive possibilities that the postcolonial subject brings to international law, human rights, and domestic law. In the process, challenges are offered to the political and theoretical constructions of the nation, sexuality, cultural authenticity, and women's subjectivity.