Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1975. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

The increasing importance of pornography since its commercialization at the end of the seventies modified the artistic landscape of sexual representation. What has occurred is a transformation of the horizon of expectations of pornographic images, the definition of eroticism and the relationship between the two notions. In this perspective, the thesis concentrates on the analysis of the appropriation of certain distinct traits of hard core pornography in feminist art. Specifically, it is a qualitative analysis of the interrelations between eroticism and pornography in feminist art during the 1980s. The thesis proceeds to an in-depth analysis of several works by Pipilotti Rist, Annie Sprinkle, and Marlene Dumas as well as adding three earlier works of sexually explicit representation by Carolee Schneemann. The analysis of these works aims to redefine notions of pornography and eroticism, drawing on the work of Linda Williams for the first definition and Georges Bataille for the second. The theoretical context of the thesis, which also turns out to be the historical context of the works, is made up of disciplinary approaches that have most contributed to the debate around eroticism and pornography: art history, philosophy, feminist studies, queer theory, semiology and psychoanalysis. / The thesis makes several conclusions. First, the dynamic between eroticism and pornography does not have to be considered oppositional; the two methods of expression are frequently both represented in the same work. Also, women are no longer uniquely victims of pornography (they are increasingly in the role of pornographic auteure) and the analysis of these works confirms that feminists have appropriated the genre to explore a diversity of female eroticisms and propose a form of feminist, intersubjective pornography. Finally, the use by female artists of syntaxes and features typical of pornography helps to bring about a demand for a more complete and complex female subjectivity which is no longer only political, but also sexual.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 361-377). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 117-123). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

In this essay eroticism will be examined as it appears in some twentieth century representational styles. The decision to concentrate on the representational styles is based on the fact that eroticism is by nature incompatible with the non-representational or non-objective movements in art. This incompatibility is rooted in the knowledge that eroticism is intrinsically and fundamentally a human experience and could therefore find expression only in an art which is concerned with human experience, i.e. experiences which refer to man, his nature and his relation to Nature. It would be oversimplified and grossly inaccurate to equate the nonrepresentational with the abstract, abstraction being an element present in all art to a greater or lesser degree. However, when abstraction has reached the stage where it can define its aims, as, in the words of Kandinsky, "widening the separation between the domain of art and the domain of Nature", (Lake & Maillard: A Dictionary of Modern Painting, p. 1) then it may also approach the realm of the non-representational. When Michel Seupher states, "I call abstract art all art that does not recall or evoke reality", (Lake & Maillard: A Dictionary of Modern Painting, p. 136) abstract and nonrepresentational art becomes fused into an inseparable unity. Erotic expression will then be incompatible with this degree of abstraction. Intro., p. 1.

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Le fonctionnement de la société romaine reposait en partie sur la distinction de genre et de groupe social. Cela était particulièrement prégnant dans le domaine de l’érotisme. Au-dessus de tous les groupes sociaux se situait celui des hommes libres dont le rôle sexuel était celui de dominant-pénétrant. De fait, l’érotisme à la romaine peut être défini comme étant phallocentrique. Par opposition, toutes les autres catégories de personnes formaient le groupe des dominés-pénétrés. Néanmoins, le degré de soumission de chacun était déterminé par sa position sur l’échelle sociale. Les matrones avaient accès à un érotisme restreint qui se voulait procréatif. Les autres femmes, dans une certaine mesure, pouvaient être utilisées par les hommes de qui elles dépendaient comme des instruments de plaisir. Ainsi, la prostitution a toujours eu un rôle important à Rome. Bien qu’infâmes, les prostituées avaient pour mission d’assouvir les besoins charnels des hommes et pratiquaient une sexualité récréative plutôt décomplexée. Toutes les pratiques sexuelles n’étaient cependant pas admises et si, contrairement aux chastes matrones, les prostituées pouvaient s’autoriser des formes de sexualité non fécondantes, les pratiques jugées perverses (scopophilie, exhibitionnisme, agalmatophilie, etc…) étaient, selon la morale, à bannir de tous les lits. / The functioning of the Roman society was based partially on the distinction of genre and social group. It was particularly strong in the eroticism. Over all the social groups was situated that of the free men whose sexual role was the one of dominating - penetrating. Actually, the Roman type eroticism can be defined as being phallocentric. By opposition, all other categories of persons formed the group of dominated penetrated. Nevertheless, the degree of submission of each was determined by its position on the social scale. The stout women had access to an eroticism restricts who was procreative. Other women, to a certain extent, could be used by the men as instruments of pleasure. So, the prostitution always had an important role in Rome. The prostitutes had an important mission. But, all the sexual practices were not allowed and if, contrary of the matronae, the prostitutes could adduce forms of sexuality for not being pregnant, the practices considered perverse (scopophilia, exhibitionism, agalmatophilia, etc.) were banished, according to the morality, of all the beds.

Purpose – This thesis investigates why archaeological museums tend to have a separate section for erotic and/or sexual objects. The aim is to understand why these rooms are needed and if they are considered outdated in the year 2020. Three case studies will be discussed in this thesis: Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Altes Museum, and Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. Analysis – The qualitative data collected through interviews will be analyzed and presented in case studies. I apply two theories: power theory according to Michel Foucault and Clive Grey and queer theory. Method – To answer my questions, I interview museum workers responsible for the erotic display from the three case studies. All museums have a separate exhibition regarding erotic objects, so-called "secret museums". Methods that have been in use is qualitative method together with phenomenology. Findings – The findings show that the phenomenon “secret museum” was born in the mid-1700s when Pompeii and Herculaneum were excavated and several objects with erotic motives were found. Today several archaeological museums exhibit these objects in separate rooms, sometimes with restrictions. When these exhibitions were first formed only educated men were allowed to enter. It was considered that the objects would be misunderstood by the lower class and even hurt the relationship between men and women if women were to be exposed to pornography. The results from the three case studies show that people are still sensitive to objects regarding erotica or sexualities and that the separate area is for the visitors to choose if they want to enter or not. The result also shows that there is a respect for the history around this phenomenon and the rooms are in themselves museology history that needs to be preserved.  Paper type – Two years master's thesis in Museum and Cultural Heritage studies.

My dissertation asserts that folklore under the Iberian fascist regimes portrayed a distorted mirror of the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula. In this operation, social deviance was a key category for political folklore in order to address wider audiences. Staging Deviant Traditions argues that the Spanish Francoist regime (1936/39-1975) and the Portuguese Estado Novo (1933-1974) utilized folklorists and folk performers who deviated from the social identities privileged by fascism. These folk ensembles reified traditional dance and music while deliberately ignoring the popular communities that produced and circulated vernacular repertoires. This dissertation not only places the Iberian politics of folklore within the broader frame of interwar fascist cultural policies but also follows the evolution of these politics during the Cold War by focusing on three cases: the Coros y Danzas of Sección Femenina, the Bailados Portugueses Verde Gaio, and the Ballet Gallego Rey de Viana. Staging Deviant Traditions begins by studying, in its Introduction, the politics of folklore under the Rome-Berlin Axis. Nazi Germany and fascist Italy massively institutionalized folklore through technology to control the narrative about the essence of the people and used tradition to construct a new fascist art through reactionary modernism. These experiences shaped the folklore of the time and inflected processes of traditional culture appropriation in the Iberian regimes, as explored in the three chapters that follow. In Chapter 1, “Coros y Danzas and the Political-Affective Reinvention of the Folklorist Role,” I study how Sección Femenina, the female elite of the Spanish fascist party, and its work in the Coros y Danzas women’s troupes intervened in the folklore transmission circuit to make themselves indispensable to the fascist government by recreating folklore, notwithstanding a regime that disavowed women’s political agency. Establishing its members as folklore agents who researched and collected autochthonous music and dance, Coros y Danzas managed to appropriate that traditional repertoire according to a gendered vision of women as vessels of vernacular culture. Coros y Danzas transformed folklore into fetishized sentimental spectacle drawing on affects and emotions as social practice so that their reified productions became associated with them affectively and politically. These reified productions, performed outside Spanish borders, used folk music and dance to create a sentimental Spanish community that sought to overcome dissidence and generate acceptance of the dictatorship; this movement enabled the organization to further secure its own position within Francoism. Chapter 2, “Verde Gaio: Queering Folk Dances for the Elite,” centers on the Estado Novo’s use of the Grupo de Bailados Portugueses Verde Gaio (1940-1983) as a cosmopolitan tool to promote a deceptive modernist image of the regime before select audiences. The head of the SPN/SNI (Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional, Secretariado Nacional da Informação), modernist intellectual António Ferro, aimed to create a state-owned ballet company following Ballets Russes’ homoerotic art. He chose queer dancer Francis Graça, trained at the revue, as Verde Gaio’s principal and choreographer. In preceding decades, the Orpheu intellectuals paved the way for queer modernism, and select artists were active in establishing the Verde Gaio. Despite the repression of sexual deviance under the Estado Novo, the Verde Gaio deployed queer aesthetic sensibilities and homoerotic images as a glamorous tool for diplomatic and domestic political affairs. At the same time, the Secretariado obliterated more vulgar sexual references in the vernacular repertoire, from which Verde Gaio took inspiration, while appearing to move with the times of cosmopolitan arts. Finally, in Chapter 3, “Negotiating Subalternity: The Ballet Gallego Rey de Viana against Flamenco,” I trace how the folklore troupe Ballet Gallego Rey de Viana (1949-2006) instrumentalized the Celtic and the Galician matriarchal myths to guarantee Galician privileged position within Francoist cultural diplomacy. However, these topoi, promoted by Spanish centralist circles, contributed to deactivating Galician ambitions of political autonomy and fostering Spanish internal colonialism in Galiza. By inserting Galician vernacular culture within the Celtic community, Rey de Viana pursued securing a more European image of the regime abroad than the exoticized picture provided by flamenco as the Spanish national dance. Through this operation, Rey de Viana aspired to oust flamenco by portraying a desirable gendered image of Spain abroad while cementing the Galician subaltern position within Francoism. Relying on diverse archival sources, such as correspondence, administrative documents, video footage, and newsclippings, Staging Deviant Traditions shows how Iberian fascist regimes depended on deviant social identities performing in folk ensembles so that reified music and dance traditions would become aesthetically and affectively associated with the dictatorships.

At no point in the apocryphal text does Judith, a wise and beautiful Jewish widow, sit on Holofernes, the Assyrian general laying siege to her city. Yet, in 1525, Barthel Beham, a young artist from Nuremberg, created Judith Seated on the Body of Holofernes, an engraving in which a voluptuous nude Judith sits atop Holofernes’s nude torso. Neither the textual nor the visual traditions explain Beham’s choice to perch the chaste woman on top of her slain enemy, so what sources inspired the printmaker? What is the meaning of Judith’s provocative position? The tiny printed image depicts the relationship between a male figure and a female figure. Thus, in order to appreciate the complexity of that relationship, I begin this thesis by reviewing what it meant to be a man and what it meant to be a woman in early sixteenth-century Germany. Because gender roles and the dynamics between the sexes were so complex, I encourage scholars to reevaluate Weibermacht (Power of Women) imagery. The nudity of Beham’s Judith and her intimate proximity to Holofernes suggest that Judith Seated on the Body of Holofernes is a Weibermacht print. In fact, Judith’s pose specifically echoes that of Phyllis riding Aristotle, a popular Weibermacht narrative. The combined eroticism of Judith’s exposed body and her compromising position would have appealed broadly to male viewers, but Beham likely targeted an erudite audience of well-educated, affluent men when he designed the multivalent print. Through close visual analysis and careful consideration of which prints circulated in early sixteenth-century Nuremberg, I argue that Beham’s Judith resembles witches riding backwards on goats, crouching Venuses, and a woman in the “reverse-cowgirl” sex position. Admittedly, it is impossible to know which sources Beham studied in preparation for Judith Seated on the Body of Holofernes, but I am inclined to believe that he wanted each of those jocular references to enrich the meaning of his work, providing a witty commentary on the power of women. But regardless of the artist’s intentionality, I think visually literate viewers would have recognized and enjoyed decoding the layers of meaning in Beham’s odd engraving. / text