Unreliability, Psychology, Liberty Well we certainly get our fill of the unreliable narrator in Part 2 of Lolita. First, H.H. can’t remember his and Lolita’s travel itinerary (which contrast suspiciously with his seemingly photographic memory earlier). On their second cross-country trip there is the question of weather or not someone is following H.H. and Lolita, […]
While reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita my first instinct was to identify Foucault’s four strategic unities. A simple task, as it turned out, for this beautifully written text couldn’t have set up the four unities more clearly: the hysterical woman (Charlotte), the masturbating child (Dolly), the Malthusian couple (Humbert & Charlotte), and the perverse adult (Humbert […]
Lolita as a Foucauldian Case Study Reading the introduction to Lolita invoked a strong sense of déjà vu, which I realized came from the uncanny similarities between it and “The Custom House”. Both introductions serve to set up the stories as “true” (or in terms of The Scarlet Letter, based on a true story). More […]
In the 1892 case of Alice Mitchell in Chapter 6 of Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality, the author talks about “urnings”, which are individuals who are only stimulated people of the same sex, i.e. “unnatural sexual practices” (Peiss, 199). There is a parallel between sexual desire of two females and theses “unnatural […]
Vampires, Sexuality, and SciFi (I wrote this on Saturday night, but couldn’t post it due to a lack of internet access) I’m writing this blog post from Rye, New York, home to Lunacon – a science fiction/fantasy convention that I’ve attended almost every year since I was an infant. With Professor Benavides’ talk on Vampires […]
I had a professor in my freshman year who loved the idea of “liminal spaces” – spots that are on both sides of something; they are neither here nor there. She loved to tell us, “It’s OK not knowing.” She loved the parts of life that were not black, that were not white, that were […]
The Never-Ending Confession The Scarlet Letter, a novel so imbued with the themes of sin, guilt, and confession, has an interesting confessional: the scaffold. Hester is taken to the scaffold early in the narrative and a confession is demanded of her, but she refuses that with silence. Her silence is in itself a powerful act, […]
As the sources I scour about sexuality increase, so does my understanding of the broad problems surrounding the history of sex. However, as my increased understanding, or rather, exponentially growing interest and grasps at the general ideas, grows, more questions seem to arise, the answers to them become seemingly more and more out of reach. […]
Identity and Sexuality in the Anglo-American Colonies In this week’s Peiss readings we get some concrete facts and history to support what Foucault had mentioned in The History of Sexuality – the fact that sexual abnormality was often tolerated by villagers/townspeople during the Puritan era, even though legal codes created by the religious and political […]
Here is the compiled slideshow for my amateur photoshoot at the the Museum of Sex. Super-Cultural Constructs The first class discussion on Foucault left me reeling, because I could not understand how I had missed or completely misinterpreted some of his most emphasized points. Granted, reading on a crowded train doesn’t help, but neither does […]
