This dissertation examines the way violence in Colombia, in its multiple forms and manifestations, has shaped the representations about eroticism in three contemporary novels: Héctor Abad Faciolince's Fragmentos de amor furtivo, Fernando Molano's Un beso de Dick and Albalucía Ángel's Misiá Señora. This project specially focuses on the different forms in which violence has become a factor in the way these works represent eroticism and its discourse. Drawing from the theoretical framework of authors such as Slavoj Žižek, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, the dissertation proposes the existence of an erotic violent space in which three elements intertwine. The first element, evident in Faciolince's work, is the design of a new form of urban space based on the need to be protected in a dangerous city. This form of cartography restricts mobility for the city's inhabitants, opens up new spaces for segregation based on movement and access to space and restricts erotic manifestations to the boundaries of a ghetto-type city. The second element, from Molano's novel, deals with the establishment of gender roles based on homoerotic desire. The violence in this piece is connected to family and school institutions, and the way they determine the creation of public and hidden forms of identity. Finally, Angel's novel deals with the different ways in which the female body can be used as a symbolic battlefield where patriarchal and religious discourses try to impose limitations, promoting the establishment of alienated women.I propose that eroticism is the intimate space where social, discursive and ideological violence is executed, while simultaneously acts as the sphere of individual life where resistance can be enforced. In a country where so much attention is given to the overt, material consequences of violence, such as the number of deaths, massacres and kidnappings, it is easy to overlook the importance of how violence impacts identity and intimacy.

A fifty page manuscript of poetry and a critical introduction detailing the poet's aesthetics. Using the idea of the double-image and eroticism, the poet places her work in the category of the surreal. She describes the process of writing poetry born of fragmentary elements as a feminist emergence of agency. The manuscript is composed of four sections, each an element in the inevitable breakdown of a love relationship: meeting, love-making, birth of a child, death. Quotes from various authors of anthropological and fictional texts begin each section to reinforce thematic structure in a process of unveiling the agency of the narrator. The poems are organized as a series, beginning and ending with sequence poems.

The poetry of Eduardo Espina and Nestor Perlongher is one of the most transcendental of Hispanic neo-baroque, emerging in the eighties and persisting in the new millennium as one of the most influential literary tendencies in the latest Latin- American generations. This dissertation explores neo-baroque as defined by Omar Calabrese: aesthetics of repetition; aesthetic of monstrosity; the importance of imprecision; predominance of labyrinth within a preference for enigma, occult, or the weight of nonlinearly reading of artistic fragmented texts and eroticism as defined by Georges Bataille in the poetry of Espina and Nestor Perlongher. Both poets emphasize the problematic figure of the transvestite and the homosexual transgressive subject and propose a new perspective of linguistic artifice as an artistic and discursive technique and employ eroticism as a mask that unveils the conventionality of the categories, which govern the patriarchal, masculine-heterosexual Western civilization.

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This dissertation analyzes the (ab)use of politics and eroticism within the framework of the Transition to democracy in Spain, its social and cultural impact—on literature, film, music, and popular media—, and its consequences. After a period of nearly four decades, when the country was subjected to a totalitarian regime, Spanish society underwent a process of democratic restoration. As a result, the two topics considered taboo during almost forty years of repression—i.e., politics and sexuality/eroticism—, gushed out fiercely. Every aspect of culture was influenced by and intrinsically linked to them. However, while we have been offered a more or less global approach to the Transition—the Transition as a whole—, and some studies have focused on diverse areas, no research to date has covered in depth the significance of those issues during that historical moment. Considering the facts stated above, it was imperative to conduct a more detailed analysis of the influence of both eroticism and politics on the cultural production of the Transition from different perspectives. Although the academic intelligentsia has often rejected them as expressions of mass culture, we must consider Pierre Bourdieu’s theories—in line with the tradition of classical sociology, that includes science, law, and religion, together with artistic activities—, Michel Foucault’s ideas on sexuality, and New Historicism, examining texts and their contexts. This work concludes that the (ab)use of both subjects during the Spanish Transition was a reaction to a repressive condition. It led to extremes, to societal transgression and, in most cases, to the objectification of women because of the impositions of a patriarchal society. It was, however, part of a learning and, in a sense, cathartic process that led, eventually, to the reestablishment of the status quo, to a more equitable and multicultural society where men, women, and any political or sexual tendencies are respected—at least, in theory.

In the mid-nineteenth century, anatomical illustration in England underwent a crisis of representation. Moral authorities were growing increasingly concerned with the proliferation of images of the naked body and the effects they might have on public “decency.” The anatomical profession was sensitive to this hostile climate to nude representations. In the years immediately preceding the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 that defined the category of “pornography,” anatomical illustration was being purged of sexual connotations as part of an attempt to consolidate medicine as a respectable “profession.” In the eyes of this new professional body, there was no space for sexual associations in anatomical texts. Artistic medical anatomy’s rejection was driven by its links to problematic erotic traditions. Specifically, anatomy’s proximity to pseudo-medical pornography, the same-sex eroticism of the Hellenic tradition, and the problem of the male and female nude in “high art” were at issue. In representing the naked body artistically, anatomists brought their illustrations into dangerous proximity with these traditions. By systematically putting the work of one Victorian anatomist, Joseph Maclise, into dialogue with these erotic traditions, it becomes clear that medicine was not isolated from the broader sexual culture. This study demonstrates that viewing publics and viewing practices are historically specific and are brought into being by the interaction of visual phenomena by emphasizing the fluidity between representational fields of art, medicine and sexuality. The effort to excise the sexual meanings contained in anatomy ultimately led to the emergence of a new diagrammatic style of anatomical drawing that became the orthodox style of medical illustration, and that persists to this day.

No description available.

In the mid-nineteenth century, anatomical illustration in England underwent a crisis of representation. Moral authorities were growing increasingly concerned with the proliferation of images of the naked body and the effects they might have on public “decency.” The anatomical profession was sensitive to this hostile climate to nude representations. In the years immediately preceding the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 that defined the category of “pornography,” anatomical illustration was being purged of sexual connotations as part of an attempt to consolidate medicine as a respectable “profession.” In the eyes of this new professional body, there was no space for sexual associations in anatomical texts. Artistic medical anatomy’s rejection was driven by its links to problematic erotic traditions. Specifically, anatomy’s proximity to pseudo-medical pornography, the same-sex eroticism of the Hellenic tradition, and the problem of the male and female nude in “high art” were at issue. In representing the naked body artistically, anatomists brought their illustrations into dangerous proximity with these traditions. By systematically putting the work of one Victorian anatomist, Joseph Maclise, into dialogue with these erotic traditions, it becomes clear that medicine was not isolated from the broader sexual culture. This study demonstrates that viewing publics and viewing practices are historically specific and are brought into being by the interaction of visual phenomena by emphasizing the fluidity between representational fields of art, medicine and sexuality. The effort to excise the sexual meanings contained in anatomy ultimately led to the emergence of a new diagrammatic style of anatomical drawing that became the orthodox style of medical illustration, and that persists to this day.

In the mid-nineteenth century, anatomical illustration in England underwent a crisis of representation. Moral authorities were growing increasingly concerned with the proliferation of images of the naked body and the effects they might have on public “decency.” The anatomical profession was sensitive to this hostile climate to nude representations. In the years immediately preceding the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 that defined the category of “pornography,” anatomical illustration was being purged of sexual connotations as part of an attempt to consolidate medicine as a respectable “profession.” In the eyes of this new professional body, there was no space for sexual associations in anatomical texts. Artistic medical anatomy’s rejection was driven by its links to problematic erotic traditions. Specifically, anatomy’s proximity to pseudo-medical pornography, the same-sex eroticism of the Hellenic tradition, and the problem of the male and female nude in “high art” were at issue. In representing the naked body artistically, anatomists brought their illustrations into dangerous proximity with these traditions. By systematically putting the work of one Victorian anatomist, Joseph Maclise, into dialogue with these erotic traditions, it becomes clear that medicine was not isolated from the broader sexual culture. This study demonstrates that viewing publics and viewing practices are historically specific and are brought into being by the interaction of visual phenomena by emphasizing the fluidity between representational fields of art, medicine and sexuality. The effort to excise the sexual meanings contained in anatomy ultimately led to the emergence of a new diagrammatic style of anatomical drawing that became the orthodox style of medical illustration, and that persists to this day. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate