Examining Aspects of Sexuality and the Self PDF
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Examining Aspects of Sexualities and the Self Critical Issues SeriesEditors DrRobertFisher DrNancyBillias AdvisoryBoard DrAlejandroCervantes-Carson DrPeterMarioKreuter ProfessorMargaretChatterjee MartinMcGoldrick DrWayneCristaudo RevdStephenMorris MiraCrouch ProfessorJohnParry DrPhilFitzsimmons PaulReynolds ProfessorAsaKasher ProfessorPeterTwohig OwenKelly ProfessorSRamVemuri RevdDrKennethWilson,O.B.E ACriticalIssuesresearchandpublicationsproject. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ TheTransformationsHub ‘Sexualities:Bodies,Desires,Practices’ Examining Aspects of Sexualities and the Self Editedby Gemma Clarke, Fiona McQueen, Michaela Pnacekova, Sabrina Sahli Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford,UnitedKingdom ©Inter-DisciplinaryPress2010 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/ The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative,andwhichprovidesanexemplarforinter-disciplinaryandmulti- disciplinarypublishing. Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthispublicationmaybereproduced,storedina retrievalsystem,ortransmittedinanyformorbyanymeanswithouttheprior permissionofInter-DisciplinaryPress. Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire.OX298HR,UnitedKingdom. +44(0)1993882087 British LibraryCataloguing inPublication Data. A catalogue record for this bookisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary. ISBN:978-1-84888-020-7 First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2009. First Edition. TableofContents Preface vii GemmaClarke,FionaMcQueen,Michaela Pnacekova&SabrinaSahli PARTI ExaminingAspectsofHomosexuality SpecificsoftheContemporaryCzechHomosexual Community:History,EvolutionandAmbivalences 3 Zdeněk Sloboda RecognitionandRegulationofSame-sexCouples intheUnitedKingdom:AnExploratoryStudyof CivilPartnerships 21 MikeThomas FormsofResistancetotheOrganisation’sSymbolic HeteronormativeOrder 31 BeatriceGusmano DeconstructingSexualIdentitiesinDanielMacIvor’s ABeautifulView 45 Michaela Pňačeková PARTII ExaminingAspectsofHeterosexuality WhatDrivestheHumanSexDrive?Peeringintothe PortalsofVirtualSex 59 DerrellCoxII UncomfortableTerritory?TheRelationshipBetween Gender,IntoxicationandRape 69 GemmaClarke SexinTransition:Anti-SexualityandtheChurchin Post-CommunistPoland 87 AlicjaA.Gescinska TheEmbodimentofFemaleSexualPleasure: BodyasObjectandBodyasInstrument 95 FionaMcQueen PARTIII NarrativeDiscourses SpatialSexualities:ThePrivate,theSocial,and theDistinctivelyDeadlyinOthelloonScreen 111 EleniPilla FemininebutMacho:EroticReshapingofthe SelfinHanifKureishi’sTheBlackAlbum 119 IllariaRicci ISimplyamNotThere:Sadismand(theLackOf) SubjectivityinBretEastonEllis’AmericanPsycho 129 SabrinaSahli Sade’sDoctrineofCreativeDestruction 141 CalebHeldt Memory,Excess&theFictionalSelf 153 AndrewMarkham Preface Gemma Clarke, Fiona McQueen, Michaela Pnacekova & Sabrina Sahli ***** In PART I: Examining Aspects of Homosexuality, the four chapters examine constructions and deconstructions of homosexuality and its meanings in various settings as well as from various points of view. There are historical, sociological, and linguistic approaches applied on media discourses, narrative discourses and art discourses. What they all have in common is the post-modern approach to discursive and societal constructions of sexuality; whether it is the post-modern model of community that is being deconstructed as a whole, or whether it is looking at sexual identities as discursive processes as well as discursive products. Foucault and Butler become crucial starting points for these authors, who not only apply these theories to very different fields but who also defy these theories in order to shed new light on homosexual identities and their constructions, contestations and deconstructions. In his chapter ‘Specifics of the Contemporary Czech Homosexual Community: History, Evolution and Ambivalences’, Zdeněk Sloboda focuses on the specifics of the Czech homosexual community that he sees as a post- communist, transitional type. Sloboda describes the history of the gay community in the Czech Republic in the last 20 years, its formations and representations in society and the media. He questions the actual characteristics of the Czech homosexual community applying binary and contrastive concepts to this ‘community’, such as visibility/invisibility, tolerance/homophobia and activism/inactivism. Sloboda therefore poses an important question and that is whether the Czech gay community is really a community and in what ways it differs from ‘western’ gay communities. Mike Thomas’s chapter entitled ‘Recognition and Regulation of Same-sex Couples in the United Kingdom: An Exploratory Study of Civil Partnership’ discusses his exploratory analysis of civil partnership in the United Kingdom. Through examining attitudes held towards civil partnership Thomas considers issues such as control, discipline and the promotion of normative behaviours to analyse civil partnership from a Foucauldian perspective. Narrative analysis of interviews with gay couples highlights the multiple ways in which understandings of civil partnership are created and mediated both within couples and in their relationship to the wider social world. This article provides valuable insight into the awareness couples have of the potentially normalising role of civil partnership, raising new issues viii Preface ______________________________________________________________ around the political role of civil partnership and what this can mean for those gay couples deciding whether to make a legal commitment or not. Beatrice Gusmano’s chapter entitled ‘Forms of Resistance to the Organization’s Symbolic Heteronormative Order’ discusses the ways sexual minorities are constructed at work and their challenges to institutional heteronormative settings. Gusmano presents five forms of resistance to the institutional heteronormative order based on rich data collected from interviews she conducted with Italian employees in various organisations. Through their narratives the employees express their attitudes towards sexuality policy in their job environments as well as their own attitudes towards being out at work. Gusmano says that coming out is a process that should involve not only workers who perform it but every subject in the institutional setting. Thus, she reads sexual identity and coming out at work as performance through which heteronormative discursive power relations are subverted. In the last chapter of this chapter ‘Deconstructing Sexual Identities in Daniel MacIvor’s A Beautiful View’ Michaela Pnacekova takes a rather different stance with regard to explorations of the homosexual self, sexuality and identity, focusing on the discourse of the lesbian protagonists in MacIvor’s play. By means of discourse analysis, Pnacekova investigates how - by refusing to label their homosexual relationship - the two protagonists actually not only deconstruct their sexual identities, but even their sexualities. This chapter thus represents a thorough and conclusive discussion of dynamics of homosexual identities in MacIvor’s play, but it also offers valuable insight into the relationship of communication and (homo-) sexual identity in general. The chapters selected for PART II: ‘Examining Aspects of Heterosexuality’ represent the exciting diversity and depth of current scholarship on heterosexual desire and practice. The authors explore their varied topics across global multi-media representations and within national discourses and material realities. Their analyses reveal both the pleasures and the pains, and the conflicts and celebrations of contemporary heterosexuality. In ‘What Drives the Human Sex Drive? Peering into the Portals of Virtual Sex’, Derrell Cox II presents the findings from an empirical examination of internet-based sexually explicit materials (iSEMs). His survey of online sexual materials provides a valuable insight into this under- researched area. In contrast to previous studies, Cox II’s significant results reveal that most of the content of iSEMs involves the heterosexual pairing of two partners. This crucial finding sheds new light on evolutionary and sperm competition theories of human sexuality. Gemma Clarke’s chapter entitled ‘Uncomfortable Territory: The Relationship between Gender, Intoxication and Rape’ presents empirical data Gemma Clarke, et. al. ix ______________________________________________________________ collected from reported rape cases in the London Metropolitan Police Service between September 2006 and August 2008 to investigate the relationship between gender, intoxication and rape. Through examining and comparing reports of both female and male rape Clarke highlights gendered differences in the reporting and interpreting of rape cases and proposes explanations for these differences. By examining this rich data, Clarke has been extremely successful in highlighting stark gendered differences in attitudes to intoxication and how these affect both patterns of victimisation and reporting behaviour. Alicja Gescinska’s chapter named ‘Sex in Transition: Antisexuality and the Church in Post-Communist Poland’ presents antisexual discourses that hinder free sexuality discourses in Poland as a post-communist and transitioning EU country. She looks at these discourses through the concepts of sexual literacy and positive liberty as social liberalising processes. In the second part of her chapter, Gescinska examines the role of the Catholic Church and its representatives, such as Ksawery Knotz, a theologist and monk, who wrote a ‘so-called’ liberalising book about sexuality for young Catholic Polish couples. Gescinska however argues that these Catholic discourses only strengthen the homophobic and antisexual attitudes in Poland. In ‘The Embodiment of Female Sexual Pleasure: Body as Object and Body as Instrument’, Fiona McQueen considers how models of embodiment contribute to understandings of women’s experiences of sexual pleasure. Drawing on rich data gathered using in-depth interviews with women in the UK, McQueen deftly reconstructs categorisations of the female body. By re-formulating the body as object and instrument, she highlights the difficulties of experiencing female sexual desire and pleasure within a culture of sexual propriety and objectification. While the first two parts of this book focus on various aspects of homosexual or heterosexual relationships and identities respectively, part three does so on a fictional level. These chapters investigate how both homosexual and heterosexual identities and practices can be negotiated on a fictional level. The authors explore topics such as gendered identities, violent love and sexualities or sadism in novels, plays or film, hereby covering disciplines that range from philosophy over English studies to performative writing. In her article ‘Spatial Sexualities: The Private, the Social and the Distinctively Deadly in Othello on Screen’, Eleni Pilla proposes a reading of Oliver Parker’s screen adaptation of William Shakespeare’s seminal work on jealousy Othello. The main focus of this chapter lies in the connection between space and the inner turmoil of the film’s main protagonist Othello and how the film represents this. Centring on the bedroom as the site of Othello’s anxieties, Pilla demonstrates how Parker’s film ‘constructs a x Preface ______________________________________________________________ distinctive spatial sexuality’. With its stress on the cinematic adaption, Pilla’s chapter represents an important contribution to Shakespeare Studies, as well as to film studies. Moving from the domain of film into that of the novel, Ilaria Ricci’s ‘Feminine but Macho: Erotic Reshaping of the Self in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album’ analyses the ‘erotic education’ of the black protagonist Shahid. Focusing on aspects such as power, gender identities or the consequences of sexual repression, Ricci suggests that it is the protaginist’s relation to his white female university teacher Deedee that encourages him to accept both the fluidity of his own identity as well as that of society. With her sensitive article Ricci contributes to both the field of gender issues and to that of the relation of sexuality (ies) and identity (ies). Sabrina Sahli’s chapter entitled ‘I simply am not there’: Sadism and the Lack of Subjectivity in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho’ reflects upon the nature of the perverse subject and its relationships to ‘the Other’ in the classic novel American Psycho written by Easton Ellis. By examining the ways in which the main character Patrick Bateman fails to undergo a complete process of subjectification, Sahli considers how Lacanian psychoanalysis can shed light on understanding how the social and sexual space interlink. This interesting chapter discusses the nature of sadism in this novel, the benefits of using Lacanian psychoanalysis to interpret this sadism, and the importance of the central relationship between the main characters sense of self and the Other’s position. While Sahli’s chapter focuses on sadism from a literary perspective, Caleb Heldt’s ‘Sade’s Doctrine of Creative Destruction’ takes a philosophical stance and hereby investigates Sade’s writings as the fictional manifestations of his own philosophy of destruction. Challenging the commonly held opinion that Sade’s denial of the Other’s subjectivity equals freedom of the subject, Heldt suggests that this reduction of the Other to a mere object represents ‘the ability to create in its most purified form’. This chapter not only sheds new light on traditional modes of reading Sade as a novelist; it also proposes a way of reading Sade as a philosopher of libertinage. Andrew Markham’s chapter ‘Memory, Excess & the Fictional Self’ represents a creative departure from the other chapters of the conference. Using an innovative blend of narrative, fiction and theory, Markham highlights the fluid nature of sexuality and desire in a memorable and engaging way. Acts of remembrance form the basis of his research document, which he uses to explore constructions and experiences of a person’s sense of their queer sexual Self.
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