Holy Witches. Staging Martyrdom and Power in MARK OF THE DEVIL. Mark of the Devil: On a Classic Exploitation Film. International Symposium. Universität Wien, Tamsweg, 2.-4.4.2014.
2008, Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art, www.differentvisions.org, ed. Rachel Dressler (https://differentvisions.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/1356/2020/03/Issue-1-Easton.pdf)
Sebastiano's Martyrdom of Saint Agatha is only one example of an early-sixteenth-century religious image that deliberately evokes erotic desire in the viewer. The figure of Saint Agatha, derived from a broken sculpture of Venus with the features of a beautiful contemporary, was intended to provoke lust in its original owner, a young cardinal pilloried for his homosexual activity. The essential ambivalence of this work and others of the same genre should be seen in the context of Roman attitudes to sexuality: clerics were, in principle, admonished to live chastely, but in practice were likely to be sexually active.
Keynote for Syracuse University Graduate Student Religion conference, The Monstrous, the Marginalized, and Transgressive Forms of Humanity, 2013
2006, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte
2003, Early Medieval Europe
Un atlas pornographique : entre scientia sexualis et ars erotica Alain Ayotte Mémoire présenté au Département Individualized Program comme exigence partielle au grade de maîtrise ès arts (Individualized Program)
2004, Modern Philology
In Bartholomew Fair, Ben Jonson provides a parodic version of the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew. This parody allowed Jonson the recent ex-Catholic to proclaim publicly the right kinds of political and religious loyalties.
The course is focused on re-reading sections of Foucault’s History of Sexuality (esp. Vols. 1 and 2, and additional published materials intended for a fourth volume), as well as some of his late interviews and lectures at the Collège du France and elsewhere (Berkeley and Vermont), in relation to hagiographic romance narratives from the Late Antique, Old English, and Middle English traditions (Eileen Joy) and to medieval and early modern literary texts on love written in French (Anna Klosowska). The central guiding concept for the course is Foucault’s notion of an “improbable manner of being” -- a notion that Foucault sketched, somewhat elliptically, in his late lectures and interviews in relation to his thinking on asceticism and techniques of the “care of the self” that he had explored in classical and early Christian texts, but had no time to more fully develop. This course will explore medieval and early modern texts to imagine what the inclusion of particular representations in these texts of “improbable” modes and techniques of the self would have contributed to Foucault’s history of sexuality and his late thinking on ascesis, with an eye toward the consequences Foucault’s readings of these texts might have had upon his study of sexuality and care of the self in the premodern period.
The effect of pornography on the spectator is a particularly contentious issue. Yet pornography comes in many forms, and sexually explicit media cannot be dismissed as a monolithic medium that offers no value. Indeed, post-porn is dissident pornographic representation that subverts, critiques, and shatters normative codes. Post-porn texts are a contemporary rewriting of traditional pornographic tropes – by drawing on queerfeminist theory and practice, post-porn artists experiment and create their own sexually explicit artistic content. This dissertation argues for an acknowledgement of the sociocultural value of post-porn by analysing the French documentary film Mutantes (Féminisme Porno Punk), which offers an overview of post-porn, and by drawing on Barthes’s framework on plaisir and jouissance as a way of theorising post-porn spectatorship. Through textual analysis of the parodic and aggressive-defensive postporn portrayed in Mutantes, we can see the various ways in which post-porn subverts socio-cultural norms. This multifarious sexually explicit media also disrupts assumptions about what constitutes pornography (and art), and forces the spectator to question their own subjectivity. Indeed, by shattering normative codes, post-porn texts invite a spectatorship of jouissance – they disturb our sensibilities, encourage contradiction, and subvert our assumptions.
![FORREST, Amy E. (unpublished MA dissertation [English translation], 2013) 'Leave no normative code intact': Subverting Socio-cultural Norms in Post-porn](https://0.academia-photos.com/attachment_thumbnails/48491036/mini_magick20180817-24743-husl08.png?1534534374)
Considering the traits of heroism and sanctity in 'Mankind' and 'Beowulf'.
2011, Social and Cultural Geography, 12(5) 493-508.
This paper considers issues of sexual citizenship in light of new UK legislation that prosecutes the viewers of ‘extreme pornography’. Justified as an attempt to uphold public decency, government intervention seeks to prevent people seeing ‘extreme’ images not by limiting access to certain websites, but instead by intervening in the private consumption of these images. In this paper I draw on the discourses of those who have supported such intervention, and suggest that these arguments make a claim to space that defends the rights of some citizens over others. I examine the entwining of rights of expression, rights to identity and rights to safety. In conclusion, I argue that sexual citizenship is not just about the right to occupy actual physical places but also the right to inhabit the virtual. I hence argue that the internet plays a key role in transforming the sexual geographies of public and private.
2009, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies
Page 1. Published by Maney Publishing (c) Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies Vol. 33 No. 1 (2009) 1–16 © 2009 Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman ...
This book is devoted to the re-presentation and re-installation of a single artwork, Tobias Kaspar's installation Bodies in the Backdrop, conceived as a site-specific installation. Kaspar worked with material from Peggy Guggenheim's autobiography Confessions of an Art Addict and photographs taken at Guggenheim's palazzo in Venice in 2011. The body of work referred to the self-portrayal of a collector and the entanglement with personal relations in the process of building a collection: love and money. In turn the publication consists of fragmented texts and images used in the exhibition. Focusing on Marie Antoinette's so-called "breast bowl" a second essay by Elisabeth Lebovici opens the narration of the publication.
2013, Mirabilia
Abstract: This article is part of the scholarly revival in Angela of Foligno (c.1248-c. 1308) studies in relation to images. With the exhibition entitled "Dal visibile all’indicibile. Crocifissi ed esperienza mistica in Angela da Foligno" (Foligno, October 6th, 2012 – January 6th, 2013) and the publication of the catalogue, relations between Angela’s visions and her artistic context have been examined in greater depth. However, despite the excellent essays included in the book, there is still lacking a theoretical basis to explain Angela's devotional relationship with some images and, in particular, her reception of them. The main aim of these pages is therefore to develop that theoretical background and to interpret from such a basis the events that occurred in Assisi in front of the so-called “vetrata degli angeli” (the stained glass window of the angels).
vigiliae christianae 68 (2014) 384-408: Jerome’s Epistula prima is a remarkably hybrid text. It contains a miraculous account of the trial and failed execution of a woman from Vercelli, who is falsely accused of adultery and eventually saved from further persecution by Jerome’s patron, Evagrius of Antioch. In our article we discuss the martyrological and novelistic elements of Jerome’s text and analyze how he related a cruel, but trivial trial with anonymous protagonists to contemporary Church politics and gave it an ascetical undertone. Furthermore, we link these elements to the interests of Jerome’s intended readership. Overall, we argue that Jerome wrote the Epistula prima not only as a hyper-rhetorical showcase to advertise himself as a Christian writer or to eulogize Evagrius, but that he included subtle yet meaningful literary and ideological references in his text.
2002, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern …
A review of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Ahmanson Foundation conference "Medieval Sexualities 2009," held in March of that year.
The present thesis discusses Saint Dorothy’s cult in medieval Hungary. How did the cult arrive? Who were the promoters? What were the main features of the cult? The first two chapters provide the historical circumstances of the formation of virgin martyrs’ cult and the emergence of Saint Dorothy’s cult in Europe. Saint Dorothy was a young virgin, who during the reign of Emperor Diocletian suffered martyrdom in Cappadocia in the Late Antiquity. Legends were produced about her life from the early Middle Ages, however, only from the mid-fourteenth century did she become popular in various European regions, including Italy and Germany. She was particularly popular in German-speaking territories. The third chapter presents the arrival of Saint Dorothy’s cult in Hungary and shows that she was unknown in the Árpádian period. It seems that the cult emerged during the Angevin era. Her veneration became widespread only from the 1360s. Probably Dorothy’s cult connected to clerics from Poland, who arrived in the entourage of Queen Elizabeth Piast, wife of Charles I. Other traces suggest German origin, since her cult was mostly popular in the German-speaking territories of Hungary. The two origins do not exclude each other, because the Polish towns were also frequently populated by Germans. Dorothy’s veneration centered in Szepesség in Hungary, where an extensive fresco cycle commemorates her suffering. The fifteenth and sixteenth-century textual and pictorial representations emphasize the importance of Dorothy’s intercessory power. Besides her imago, the most frequent depiction was her rose miracle. On late medieval altarpieces she accompanied Virgin Mary with other virgins, which refers to her status as sponsa Christi and to her intimate relationship with the mother of Christ. Interestingly, hospitals were also dedicated to Saint Dorothy (usually she was a co-patron), which might have derived from the fact that she promised that she would help to rescue people from poverty.
2009, The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness, eds. Elizabeth Pastan, Ellen M. Shortell, Evelyn Staudinger Lane
2012, Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae 38.1:197-215
2011, The Erotic in Context
The dialectical functioning of the erotic manifests itself as something that necessarily exists and draws nourishment antithetically from its state of unfulfillment – either its failing to happen at all, or its always already having happened and passed – i.e. in its moment of the purest presence. Yet what is more remarkable and captivating are the axes of the image-symptom and anachro-image, image-event and image-repertoire that give rise to the Figural, to the interstitial intensities of the image. The Figural offers us a distinct and exceptional key to unbolt the image.
A Marxist critique of pornography and a defense of the eroticism in art
Bibliography on the theme of "Medieval Representation of Sexual Dissidence."
2018, Theology & Sexuality
Since the 1970s, some religious practitioners of the contemporary Pagan movement (a.k.a. Neo-Paganism) have embraced spiritual BDSM, or “sacred kink,” as a spiritual discipline relating to their tradition. The “sex wars,” debates around pornography, prostitution, and sadomasochism, have appeared in the history of Wicca and contemporary Paganism. Pagan feminists have brought theological questions to the same debates. They have focused on the Wiccan Rede (“harm none”) and the affirmation of pleasure in Doreen Valiente’s Charge of the Goddess that states that, “All acts of pleasure are [the Goddess’s] rituals.” While support for BDSM has become the dominant public perspective in twenty-first century Paganism, the movement’s late twentieth-century history includes instances of anguish as individuals wrestled with their personal sexual desire and their feminist principles.
2005, AAA. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik
This paper focuses on erotic corporeality in lesbian-feminist pornography. Pornography itself is fundamentally paradoxical, assuming as it does that the body is both exquisitely fantastic and real in the most basic sense. As a specific subgenre, lesbian-feminist pornography, reduplicates this paradox, which is precisely what makes it so central to any analysis of how the flesh is discursivized to produce the body in a specific culture. Lesbian-feminist pornography is an interloper in several zones of cultural conflict at once—the body, gender, sexuality, race and class—and reveals some of the central erotic underpinnings of American feminism. In particular, three discourses that intersect in lesbian-feminist pornography give it a central position for an exploration of the human body in American culture: the discourses around the (1) lesbian body, (2) social power difference and (3) feminism. Insistently calling upon “the truth” about sexuality, American lesbian pornography both celebrates and dismisses experiential knowledge about corporeality, essentially disassembling its own point of departure, the female body, only to make it whole again as the original flesh in the end. Yet the desirous lesbian gaze in the pornographic text also subverts this harmonious conclusion. In the pornographic act, the performance ultimately eclipses the real and slips away from the self’s desire, the center of the truth that justifies its existence. This moment of eclipse becomes tangible in the short stories of Pat Califia, which together inaugurate and delimit American lesbian pornography as an independent genre.
This contribution offers a short introduction to the (in)famous (and anonymous) erotic novel 'Josephine Mutzenbacher' (1906), discussing the questions of "sexual anarchy" (E. Showalter) and child pornography. The novel which is a closet key text of fin-de-siècle Vienna is read as an example for the crypto-pedophile discourse i that emerged together with the discovery of infantile sexuality by Freud and has been largely ignored in cultural historiography.
Anthropological study of the Internet pornography can refer to the cultural communication between the creators of the contents and authors of pornographic sites, as well as between the authors of sites and users, the latter being more relevant to this work as it assumes supracultural activities on the Internet and comprises the pornography users as a distinct population. The aim of this study is to determine, through the categorization of porn clips in the Internet, cognitive schemes and cultural models which explain the principles of such classification and provide the information on the cultural thought that lies behind the interpretation of the Internet pornography during the organization of that particular part of virtual reality by the pornographic sites’ authors and their users. Following methodological means have been applied: ethno-taxonomic analysis and D’Andrade’s folk model of the mind. Categories which appear on web sites are not organized in hierarchies, which means their interrelations had to be inferred. Results showed that categories do not carry sufficient meaning by themselves. Rather, related categories are used to describe concepts, and those concepts frequently derive their meaning from their relation with other concepts. Users also perform the partition of this space by using similar larger segments, whereas the categories themselves are merely preferences within the segment which is currently in focus. One of the observed user behaviours which affects their approach to categorization is their perception of the realistic-spectacular relationship. The users perceive most clips as a staged fiction whose actors take part in it for reasons of self-interest. On one hand, this implies a higher competence of users population; on the other, this relates to the need to define, justify and place the perception of one’s own sexuality within the framework of what is socially acceptable supporting it with the assertion that “no animal was harmed during the making of this movie”, which to a certain extent corresponds to the context outside the pornography in which any behaviour on the Internet is believed to be legitimate just because it is virtual, making the evaluation parameters appear to come down to the esthetic element and the physical safety, while everything has its price. The Internet pornography represents a consistent continuation of the history of pornography because the behaviour exhibited during its use also represents a side effect of a cultural environment of the group using it.
2006, European Journal of Cultural Studies
2010, Maastricht Journal of European & Comparative Law
The article inquires into a delicate and often prudish legal problem of erotic art in the paradigmatic dynamics of national law on obscenity and an ever-growing body of international law of cultural heritage. Pornography is a popular legal construction in distinguishing ‘high art’ from cultural practices, allegedly deprived of artistic value. Yet since when do we know what is the obscene or the pornographic and why do we outlaw certain narratives and visualizations from the realm of freedom of expression? This question remains ultimately vague in national law (predominantly embraced under the heading of boni mores, or ‘public morality’) and even more scattered in contemporary international law. The latter seems to silence somewhat uncomfortable and outdated developments on pornography of the early 20th century. Consequently, this piece is an attempt to trace the genesis and evolution of the legal interpretation of art in the dichotomy of freedom of expression and pornography.
2013, Murders and Acquisitions: Representations of the Serial Killer in Popular Culture
