Hard times and rough rides: the legal and ethical impossibilities of researching 'shock' pornographies

This article explores the various ethical and legal limitations faced by researchers studying extreme or ‘ shock’ pornographies, beginning with generic and disciplinary contexts, and focusing specifically upon the assumption that textual analysis unproblematically justifies certain pornographies, while legal contexts utilize a prohibitive gaze. Are our academic freedoms of speech endangered by legislations that restrict our access to non-mainstream images, forcing them further into taboo locales? If so, is the ideological normalization of sexuality inextricable from our research methodologies? Simultaneously, can we justify researchers being allowed access to materials that are not deemed suitable for general consumption, which may further bolster normalized hierarchies of class-privilege and cultural capital

Fear of the Queer Child

This article is about the fear of the queer child — the fear that exposing children to homosexuality and gender variance makes them more likely to develop homosexual desires, engage in homosexual acts, deviate from traditional gender norms, or identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. This fear is thousands of years old, but it has undergone a remarkable transformation in the last half-century, in response to the rise of the LGBT movement. For centuries, the fear had been articulated specifically in sexual terms, as a belief that children would be seduced into queerness by adults. Since the 1970s, it has been reformulated in the more palatable and plausible terms of indoctrination, role modeling, and public approval. Since the earliest days of the LGBT movement, advocates have responded to this fear by insisting that it is empirically false — that sodomy laws have “nothing to do” with children, that marriage laws have “nothing to do” with schools, that children raised by lesbian and gay parents are “no different” than children raised by heterosexual parents — and above all, that children’s sexual orientation and gender identity are fixed early in life and cannot be learned or taught, chosen or changed. In recent years, this empirical strategy has begun to falter, as advocates run up against the inherent vagueness, incompleteness, and unpredictability of empirical data. To break through this strategic impasse, this article highlights a growing vanguard of scholars, lawyers, and judges who are developing a normative challenge to the fear of the queer child. It argues that the state has no legitimate interest in encouraging children to be straight or discouraging them from being queer, because it may not presume that queerness is immoral, harmful, or inferior — in children or in anyone else. The state must adopt a neutral stance toward children’s straightness or queerness, without attempting to promote one set of desires, behaviors, or identities over the other

"Nada levarei quando morrer, aqueles que mim deve cobrarei no inferno" ("Nothing I will take when I die those who owe me mony I will charge in hell"), a film by Miguel Rio Branco

"Nada levarei quando morrer, aqueles que mim deve cobrarei no inferno" ("Nothing I will take when I die those who owe me mony I will charge in hell"), produced by Miguel Rio Branco in 1981 and captured in 16mm film in 1979 is a raid on the Community of Maciel, prostitution district in the neighborhood of Pelourinho in Salvador, Bahia. The street, the brothels, the architecture in ruins and, in particular, women and their scars make up a human landscape of social and erotic tension. The film is the document of a lived experience of brazilian reality and an exercise on the picture, the body and the pose. The moving image converses with still images, noises and music building a space of approximation and confrontation with the place in which the dynamic between photo and cinema is the poetry of the artist and his experience in the Decade of 1980

Women\u27s Studies Center Annual Report 2010-2011

https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cwgs-annualreports/1008/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, March 24, 1976

Volume 66, Issue 32https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/6063/thumbnail.jp

Novelistic Intimacies: Reading And Writing In The Late Age Of Print

In Novelistic Intimacies, I consider the political and aesthetic structure of intimacy in a diverse set of narrative forms produced in the so-called digital age, or the late age of print—from encyclopedic and metafictional novels to graphic storytelling and Afrofuturist fantasy. As an organizing principle, intimacy forces us to consider, at once, how novelists have attempted to restore language and narrative with personal meaning after postmodernism—often termed New Sincerity or post-irony. At the same time, intimacy allows us to see how novelists have experimented on the materiality of the book and the eroticism of language to invent new, impersonal modes of storytelling in the present. In this way, I think about reading and writing in contemporary fiction affectively, as acting on both the body and the mind. This requires that I consider these novels as material objects in the world. How do they circulate? How and why do readers engage with and activate them in the present? I argue that, in the late age of print, readers have particular bodily, physical, and sensual orientations towards books themselves. In different ways, each of the novels chosen manipulates the reader’s orientation towards the book as an object as a fundamental component of their aesthetic practice. And, I argue that part of the reason these manipulations are effective is because of a broader history of the book and the ways in which deep-seated habits and memories coalesce around and inform how readers engage with books. In doing so, I examine the contemporary novel in the context of a longer history of the book as an erotic threat and/or tool, looking backwards to literary figures like Samuel Richardson, Walt Whitman, and W.E.B. Du Bois to illuminate the aesthetic techniques of these contemporary storytellers. Beginning with an interrogation of the unacknowledged homosocial intimacy between men staged by one of the popular originators of New Sincerity, David Foster Wallace, I develop an alternative account of literary production in the late age of print. Through close readings of the works of Wallace, his contemporary A.M. Homes, the graphic auteur Chris Ware, and #BlackLivesMatter activist Kiese Laymon, I analyze the ways in which intimacy—filtered through the categories of race, gender, and sexuality—undergird and determine the relationships between the reader, narrative, and the book

Psychoanalyzing colonialism, colonizing psychoanalysis : re-reading aboriginality

This study argues for the necessity of a psychoanalytic perspective in the study of colonization, while recognizing the complicity of psychoanalysis in the colonial project. My first chapter situates the Oedipal subject as a historic effect and attempts to trace some of the conditions of its emergence. In this way, I seek to call into question the universal status that Freud attributed to the Oedipal subject. From this historicized perspective, I then read Freud's Totem and Taboo, and its construction of the `savage', as an effect of displacement, and in so doing, suggest a relation between the Oedipalized subject and the colonizing subject. The following three chapters are comprised of detailed readings of specific events and texts in Australian cultural history. All of these chapters focus on Aboriginal writers, and argue that the texts they have produced can be read as challenging, in a variety of ways, the naturalized construction of the patriarchal nuclear family in the colonial context, and the Oedipalized subject that supports it. The first of these contextualizes the life and work of David Ilnaipon, and argues for a more positive reassessmenot f his work that takes into consideration modes of Oedipalized subjectification operative in the colonial domain. The following chapter focuses on Sally Morgan's My Place, Australia's best-selling, Aboriginal autobiography, and suggests that its overwhelming popularity masks profound anxieties about the intimate and sexualized nature of colonial exploitation as manifest in the settler family home. The final chapter considers recent allegations that Mudrooroo, Australia's most wellknown and prolific Aboriginal writer, is actually an African American. This chapter suggests that a re-reading of his novels, Master of the Ghost Dreaming and Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World, provide possible ways of rethinking simplistic notions of identity and theirgrounding in Oedipalized identifications. All three textual events act as imperatives to remember the legacy of colonialism that continues to pervade contemporary Australian culture