Transgression And Subversion

Is the pícaro, the roguish hero of early modern Spanish adventure fiction, a 'real man'? What position does he hold in the gender hierarchy of his fictional social context? Why is the pícara so 'non-female'? What effect has her gender constitution on her fictional social context? In terms of a gendered subject, the picaresque figure has hardly been analyzed so far. Although scholars have recognized it as a transgressive and subversive model, the 'queer' effect of the figure is yet to be examined. With regard to the categories of class, generation, topography, and gender, the contributions assembled in this volume explore Spanish, French, English, and German novels narratologically from the perspective of culture and gender theories.

Sex is often regarded as a dangerous business that must be rigorously controlled, regulated, and subjected to rules. Sexual acts that defy acceptable practices may be seen as variously defiling, immoral, and even unnatural. They may challenge and subvert both cultural preconceptions and the social order in a politics of sexual transgression that threatens to transform permissible boundaries and restructure bodily engagements. This collection of essays explores acts of sexual transgression that have the power to reconfigure perceptions of bodily intimacy and the social norms of interaction. Considering issues such as domestic violence, child prostitution, health and sex, teenage sex, and sex with animals across a range of settings from contemporary Oceania, the Pacific, South Africa, and southeast Asia to Euro-America, this book should interest all those who question the "naturalness" of sex, including public health workers, clinical practitioners and students of sex, sexuality, and gender in the humanities and social sciences.

Against and Beyond: Subversion and Transgression in Mass Media, Popular Culture and Performance is a collection of fourteen essays by scholars representing a number of disciplines discussing transgression and subversion in film, television, music, theatre and digital media. Moving across major political and cultural movements of the 20th century, the book addresses a global need for transgression and subversion in our times. Applying theories of Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Foucault, Adorno and Horkheimer, Deleuze and Guattari, and Butler, the volume is an important contribution to understanding the mechanisms and functions of subversion and transgression in contemporary media and popular culture and provides essential reading for all those seeking to go against and beyond.

Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the world's most respected and widely read living writers. His work is marked by technical sophistication and by its alliance with a variety of trends in modern culture. To date little criticism of his work has made use of the important developments in literary theory in the past two decades. This book does that, analyzing Vargas Llosa's place in modern and postmodern criticism.

This book explores the role of the social and natural sciences in supporting the development of indigenous knowledge systems. It looks at how indigenous knowledge systems can impact on the transformation of knowledge generating institutions such as scientific and higher education institutions on the one hand, and the policy domain on the other.

Why is homosexuality socially marginal yet symbolically central? Why, in other words, is it so strangely integral to the very societies which obsessively denounce it, and why is it history - history rather than human nature - which has produced this paradoxical position? These are just some of the questions explored in this wide-ranging study of sexual dissidence which returns to the early modern period in order to focus, question, and develop issues of postmodernity. In the process it brilliantly links writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Gide, Wilde, and Genet, and cultural critics as different as St. Augustine, Freud, Fanon, Foucault, and Monique Wittig. So Freud's theory of perversion is discovered to be more challenging than either his critics or his advocates usually allow, especially when approached via the earlier period's archetypal perverts, the religious heretic and the wayward woman, Satan and Eve. The book further shows how the literature, histories, and sub-cultures of sexual and gender dissidence prove remarkably illuminating for current debates in literary theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural materialism. It includes chapters on transgression and its containment, contemporary theories of sexual difference, homophobia, the gay sensibility, transvestite literature in the culture and theatre of Renaissance England, homosexuality, and race.

Genius and the Spirit of Transgression -- Symbols of the Morally Bad -- Evil and the Sublime -- Wicked Spectators.