“This book was one of the best books I have read in a long time. It had the things I like in a romance, a dashing knight, a beautiful princess, and of course the bad guy. This book is for all those who love it when the hero has to fight for his lady.” – […]
It is a testament to the crude fascination of scientia sexualis that with such a novel case of gender identity, everyone was busy trying to collect and examine the physical details of Christine Jorgensen’s life. This is epitomized in Document 3’s text from a Time’s article:“The New York Post put the facts on the […]
Middlesex hinges on questions about sexual identity, but the narrator’s cultural background informs this as well as most aspects of the novel. The juxtaposition between Greek and American culture comes with a juxtaposition of sexual histories and sexual views. The events leading up to Cal’s conception are essentially like the two “colliding” (a word […]
In Act 2 Scene 9, Roy Cohn makes an interesting observation about the power of labels. When his doctor tries to get him to openly admit to being homosexual he refuses adamantly and responds, “Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the […]
Something about the way African American women write about sexuality is unparalleled. There is a kind of an easy and beautiful continuum between pain and passion, that is expressed in a raw and unashamed way, that speaks to a culture that developed from very different roots in this country. Maybe it stems from what Brenda […]
In this crazy ‘50s age of scientia sexualis, where the dichotomy of the “abnormal” and “normal” sex was being both solidified and challenged (and where fear of the “abnormal” was overwhelming the mainstream), it was important for psychiatrists to advance new theories. Some of them were quack-ish in their alarmist nature, like Ch. 11’s doc […]
I wish I knew more about where this poster was distributed, or who paid for it. But regardless the message is pretty clear. Who knows, it was probably built into Sue Lyon’s contract that these posters had to be distributed!
Defining the sexuality of children has long been a part of civilized society. Foucault’s idea of the strategy “pedagogization of children’s sexuality” is that it is founded on the belief that children are highly sexually beings, that need to be constantly monitored an controlled or they will explore and use their bodies in unacceptable ways. […]
I appreciated the frankness of everything. It was interesting, and kind of fun, to look at pornographic images in a public space, with people all around contemplating, giggling, and saying funny things. I’d like to stand next to those rubber bodies that you’re allowed to touch for an entire day and watch how each visitor […]
I was also intrigued by Comstock, whose interpretation of “obscene” lead to bans on things like books – and the obscenity scale ranged from pornographic language and pictures to anything judged to be influential towards immorality (another term with a lot of scope), however indirect.
