Sexual Dissidence

Abstract

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, 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 links writers as diverse as William Shakespeare, André Gide, Oscar Wilde, and Jean Genet, and cultural critics as different as St. Augustine, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Monique Wittig. 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.

Violence, Cultural Display and the Suspension of Sexual Prejudice

“…Like sexual desire itself, this is fluid and situationally variable and this is exemplified by the popularity of some gay and lesbian events, even among many heterosexual people with ambivalent views about such occasions. It is ironic that the actual success of these events signals the same tense 'proximity' between heterosexual and homosexual identities that underlies much anti-homosexual sentiment and violence (Dollimore 1991). The fluid nature of human sexuality is even reflected in serious incidents of violence intended to shore up unstable sexual and gender boundaries with an enactment of traditional prejudice (Tomsen 2006), as well as occasions of liminality where those same boundaries are momentarily disavowed.…”

The Politics of Forgiveness: A Theological Exploration of King Lear

“…Many commentators in recent years, recognising the horrific ugliness and immorality of the neo-pagan account of bestial human nature, nevertheless believe it to be irrefutable in its "awful truth". 52 For them Lear has no politics or ethics whatsoever. It is rather a painfully accurate description of the utter nihilism of the human condition, a world where people do prey upon one another and from which there is no escape.…”

Reflections on a coy field: Methodology, criticism and careerism

“…Doty's methodological problems arise from his practice of trying to work within a poststructuralist critique of representation., signification and of gender while grounding his argumentative strategies in classical or modernist tactics of representation and signification (see Preziosi 1989: 30fl). He multiplies instances of 'queemess' as 'difference' (in exclusive opposition to 'straightness') in his attempts to substantiate mass cultural queer codings., themes and subject matter, subjectivities and audience reception practices., but his efforts fall short of their goal; first, because they rely despite repudiation on the same heterocentrist binary that critical queernessindeed 3 that critical gender studies (Butler 1990;Dollimore 1991)-demolishes, and secondly 3 because his examples and classifications attenuate queer specificity and history with the hypers tret ching of 'difference'. The extracts I have quoted show this debilitating critical process at work despite the impression that his critical practice would be a study in escaping either the gender binarism denounced 3 or one getting around any alleged reductiveness associated with the labels 'lesbian' or 'gay' (but not with a newly minted universalist 'queer').…”