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‘The Gothic Aesthetics of Eminem’ examines key videos, lyrics, and performances of the white hip-hop celebrity, noting the reoccurrence of such Gothic tropes and narrational strategies as self-replication, the spectacle of monstrous proliferation, the spread of fakery and the counterfeit, as well as the abjection of women. The authors compare Stoker‘s Dracula to Eminem, whose cultural menace similarly functions to proselytise white young men into clones, refracting the racial and sexual anxieties of Stoker‘s novel. The article moves from a consideration of the rapper‘s songs and videos ‘My Name Is’, ‘The Real Slim Shady,’ and ‘Stan’ to the film, 8 Mile.
The stereotype of the forward, sexually precocious female botanist made its first appearance in literature in the turbulent revolutionary climate of the 1790s. The emergence of this figure illustrates both the contemporary appeal, particularly to women, of the Linnaean Sexual System of botanical classification, and the anxieties surrounding female modesty that it provoked. This book explores the cultivation of the female mind and the feminised discourse of botanical literature in eighteenth-century Britain. In particular, it discusses British women's engagement with the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, and his unsettling discovery of plant sexuality. The book also explores nationality and sexuality debates in relation to botany and charts the appearance of a new literary stereotype, the sexually precocious female botanist. It investigates the cultivation of the female mind and its implications for the theories of the feminised discourse of botanical literature. The book also investigates a process of feminisation of botany in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's and Priscilla Wakefield's letters on botany; these were literary and educational texts addressed specifically to women. Linnaean classification exemplified order, making botany an ideal discipline for young British women in the eighteenth century. Erasmus Darwin's explicit discussion of sexuality related to the aura of illicit sexuality that had surrounded Sir Joseph Banks. Richard Polwhele appropriates Collinsonia's image of the promiscuous female to allude to Mary Wollstonecraft's sexuality, drawing on forward plants in Darwin and Thomas Mathias. The book finally looks at early nineteenth-century debates and demonstrates how scientific botany came into conflict with the craft of floristry.
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century clinical and popular medical advice works. As to the intended market for these popular anti-masturbation texts, I am using Lesley A. Hall’s model of the ‘normal male’ – ‘a man who would define himself as heterosexual, [who] wants to marry and lead a conventional conjugal life, and [who] has no “deviations of object” in his sex-life’. 11 In her 1991 book, Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality 1900–1950 , Lesley A. Hall’s assertion that ‘“Normality” [in the male] does not exclude sexual anxiety’, and her
At a time when monolingualist claims for the importance of ‘speaking English’ to the national order continue louder than ever, even as language diversity is increasingly part of contemporary British life, literature becomes a space to consider the terms of linguistic belonging. Bad English examines writers including Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Suhayl Saadi, Raman Mundair, Daljit Nagra, Xiaolu Guo, Leila Aboulela, Brian Chikwava, and Caroline Bergvall, who engage multilingually, experimentally, playfully, and ambivalently with English’s power. Considering their invented vernaculars and mixed idioms, their dramatised scenes of languaging – languages learned or lost, acts of translation, scenes of speaking, the exposure and racialised visibility of accent – it argues for a growing field of contemporary literature in Britain pre-eminently concerned with language’s power dynamics, its aesthetic potentialities, and its prosthetic strangeness. Drawing on insights from applied linguistics and translation studies as well as literary scholarship, Bad English explores contemporary arguments about language in Britain – in debates about citizenship or education, in the media or on Twitter, in Home Office policy and asylum legislation – as well as the ways they are taken up in literature. It uncovers both an antagonistic and a productive interplay between language politics and literary form, tracing writers’ articulation of linguistic alienation and ambivalence, as well as the productivity and making-new of radical language practices. Doing so, it refutes the view that language difference and language politics are somehow irrelevant to contemporary Britain and instead argues for their constitutive centrality to the work of novelists and poets whose inside/outside relationship to English in its institutionalised forms is the generative force of their writing.
In May 1958, and four years into the Algerian War of Independence, a revolt again appropriated the revolutionary and republican symbolism of the French Revolution by seizing power through a Committee of Public Safety. This book explores why a repressive colonial system that had for over a century maintained the material and intellectual backwardness of Algerian women now turned to an extensive programme of 'emancipation'. After a brief background sketch of the situation of Algerian women during the post-war decade, it discusses the various factors contributed to the emergence of the first significant women's organisations in the main urban centres. It was only after the outbreak of the rebellion in 1954 and the arrival of many hundreds of wives of army officers that the model of female interventionism became dramatically activated. The French military intervention in Algeria during 1954-1962 derived its force from the Orientalist current in European colonialism and also seemed to foreshadow the revival of global Islamophobia after 1979 and the eventual moves to 'liberate' Muslim societies by US-led neo-imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the women of Bordj Okhriss, as throughout Algeria, the French army represented a dangerous and powerful force associated with mass destruction, brutality and rape. The central contradiction facing the mobile socio-medical teams teams was how to gain the trust of Algerian women and to bring them social progress and emancipation when they themselves were part of an army that had destroyed their villages and driven them into refugee camps.
partly in colonial scandals surrounding European men engaging in sexual relationships and, in some cases, cohabiting with African women. The latter was most common in the early decades of colonial rule and declined from the interwar period when increasing numbers of European women accompanied their husbands to African colonies. 14 These sexual anxieties centring on African women continued to shape European
laugh at, apparently, old-fashioned sexual anxieties. But such hilarity could well operate to mask a deeper, perhaps tacitly unacknowledged, persistent unease about the subject. Medically, masturbation is now accepted to be a largely harmless practice. Nevertheless, beyond being the butt of jokes, serious discussion of the topic in a wider public arena than that of the sex manual still appears to be problematic. This is reinforced in the much-reported 1994 case of Jocelyn Elders, then US Surgeon-General in the Clinton administration. Elder’s speech at a World AIDS Day
hostilities is explained by contrasting patterns of state formation in the South Africa and the South. Sexual anxieties in the South were inextricable from the violence that arose to first destroy Radical Reconstruction and then impose segregation. Fears of rape formed a perennial rationale for the thousands of lynches that took place from the 1890s until the Second World War. Even when demonstratively baseless, allegations of sexual assaults proved to be a bloodboiling ululation. White males, many of whom openly exploited the joys of the double standard, could be quickly
’s irrational and overwhelming sexual anxiety; the murky violation of Giacomo’s voyeurism; Innogen’s psychological and physical suffering at the hands of her husband, father and stepmother. These sinister emotions are not entirely forgotten, nor is the existence of sorrow and failure denied, but a miraculous contrast is provided to these dark undercurrents, offering hope that the
noire. ‘Qui dit viol dit nègre’ (‘Whoever says rape says Negro’) (Peau noire: 134; Black Skin: 166), ‘Un nègre me viole’ (‘A Negro is raping me’) (Peau noire: 144; Black Skin: 178) are Fanon’s privileged examples of phobia in Peau noire: Negrophobia as symptom of sexualized anxiety, as sign of the hallucinatory sexual presence of black men in a phobic imaginary. ‘Au fond, cette peur du viol n’appellet-elle pas, justement, le viol?’ (‘Basically, does this fear of rape not itself cry out for rape?’) he wonders, in one of the most provocative moments of the book, ‘ne