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6 The condom, gender and sexual difference The previous chapter showed how theories of porn have inadvertently naturalised the male body and heterosexuality as primary and authentic. This chapter shows how in the context of AIDS sociologists and social theorists have similarly produced a naturalisation of the male body and male heterosexuality in their interpretation of the condom in the context of AIDS. Since the early 1990s a major concern in empirical studies and analyses of heterosex has been and continues to be why heterosexual men do not wear condoms. In
Although Europa 51 (1952) was the most commercially successful of the films Roberto Rossellini made with the Hollywood star, Ingrid Bergman, the reception by the Italian press was largely negative. Many critics focussed on what they saw to be the ‘unreal’ or abstract quality of the films portrayal of the postwar urban milieu and on the Bergman character‘s isolation from the social world. This article looks at how certain structures of seeing that are associated in the classical style with the woman as star or spectacle - e.g., the repetitious return to her fixed image, the resistance to pulling back from the figure of the woman in order to situate her within a determinate location and set of relationships between characters and objects - are no longer restricted to her image but in fact bleed into or “contaminate” the depiction of the world she inhabits. In other words, whereas the compulsive return to the fixed image of the woman tends to be contained or neutralised by the narrative economy and editing patterns (ordered by sexual difference) of the classical style, in Rossellini‘s work this ‘insistent’ even aberrant framing in relation to the woman becomes a part of the (female) characters and the cameras vision of the ‘pathology’ of the urban landscape in the aftermath of the war.
This book on Geoffrey Chaucer explores the relationship between Chaucer's poetry and the change and conflict characteristic of his day and the sorts of literary and non-literary conventions that were at his disposal for making sense of the society around him. Critics who consider the social meaning of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales fall into two main schools: those who present his social thought as an expression of the dominant spirit or ideology of his day and those who see Chaucer as possessing a more heterodox voice. Many of the present generation of Chaucer critics have been trained either as 'Robertsonians' or as 'Donaldsonians'. For D. W. Robertson, even those medieval poems which do not explicitly address religious issues were frequently intended to promote the Augustinian doctrine of charity beneath a pleasing surface; for E. Talbot Donaldson, there are 'no such poems in Middle English'. The book sets out the basics of the Augustinian doctrine of charity and of medieval allegorical theory and examines 'patristic' interpretations of Chaucer's work, particularly of the 'Nun's Priest Tale'. It looks at the humanist alternative to the patristic method and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the patristic approach. The book also outlines some of the major medieval discourses about sexual difference which inform Chaucer's depiction of women, in particular, the tendency of medieval writers to polarise their views of women, condemning them to the pit or elevating them to the pedestal.
’ work have long taken up her concern with sexual difference, for in some sense this has been the favoured interpretative position particularly in North American scholarship, few have recognised the intimate relationship between these concerns and her tendency to work through them via a lexicon of religious signification. Although her recent writing seems to indicate that her religious imaginary has extended to include Eastern religions, Buddhism being the most obvious example, most of her religious allusions continue to derive either from the mythic traditions of
modality of differentiation, negativity is not eradicated but reformulated by Irigaray, so that recognition is understood as a positive affirmation of an other, rather than an appropriation. Then, according to Irigaray, women, as no longer abstract and disembodied ciphers in a system not of their own devising, can become both initiators and partners in a revised model of relationship that incorporates a positive mode of sexual difference. This affirmation does not come at the cost of negating the other. Women attain the universal in their own right, but not in a dominant
before the public by art historians and museums, we demand more than token acquisitions and belated, partial integrations. Feminist, postcolonial and queer readings enrich the histories of art, and we learn to see ourselves and art’s histories in complexity and diversity. This book analyses questions of painting and sexual difference, knowingly threading theory into reading artworks. I make the case for feminist theory so that that the richness of art’s histories can be saved from bland banality, hero-worship and
CHAPTER 7 Conclusion: a world of difference In this concluding chapter of the book, my intention is to evaluate the impact of the principal elements of Irigaray’s work that are concerned with women and religion. Before I do this, however, I will undertake a survey of the way that Irigaray has influenced certain women philosophers, both religious and secular, and their responses to her work. Irigaray’s work, particularly those explorations concerned with sexual difference, has been the subject of diverse reactions – both complimentary and unsympathetic. Her
male is not accurate. Mulvey posed her investigation into cinema through psychoanalysis, in which the terms masculine and feminine define psycho-social-linguistic positions, relative and asymmetrical, and always failing – hence the compulsive iteration of the phallic model of sexual difference across an entire, brilliant and entrancing industry. Some feminists have been misled into imagining that we can posit a female gaze, a gaze of women. Thus Helen Frankenthaler, a woman, paints a Nude that suggests a female body
appropriate to recognize differences among women – an issue to which we will return – and to urge those of us who are sufficiently privileged to be able to work for responsibility for our own language and subject positions to work also for justice and empowerment for others. In other words, the question ‘Who are you?’ must be confronted not only in relation to sexual difference but also in relation to social and material differences and their causes. We will come back to this. The question of difference among Irigaray’s possible addressees is closely related to her choice
. And Levinas offers an extremely suggestive elaboration of obligation for the Other in terms of sensibility, but fails to radicalize this analysis in terms of eroticism and sexual difference. 5302P Democracy MUP-PT/lb.qxd 23/10/09 16:09 Page 263 DISSENSUS, ETHICS AND THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRACY 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 10111 11 12 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 1 42111 To address these limitations of the contemporary debates on ethics and democracy, I would like to develop further my theory of an ethics of dissensus and