In Russia today, conservative views about gender are often promoted through reference to the past, to show that supposedly ‘traditional’ gender roles are intrinsic to Russian history. Frequently, this idea is upheld in scholarship. My work explores the historicity of commonly held assumptions about gender. This dissertation focusses on gender and sexuality in Russia from the sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries. It shows that ideas about what constituted a virtuous marriage were established by reference to ideas about brotherhood. Brotherhood here refers not to biological siblings, but to a church rite of ‘spiritual brotherhood’ known in Russian as bratotvorenie. This rite has not been studied in any depth before. Based on archival work, this dissertation offers a detailed account of the tradition in Russia until its ban in 1650, when it was prohibited by leading ecclesiastical figures for being too like marriage. One churchman complained: ‘The priest, joining together these two men, unites them in matrimony’. The dissertation shows that bratotvorenie was conceived of in premodern Russia as a form of same-sex union, and that it was through banning this tradition that churchmen came to express in a coherent way which kinds of partnership were legitimate and why. The first chapter challenges the idea that marriage was always a monogamous union between a man and a woman for the creation of children, an idea that is often encountered in academic literature on Russian marriage history. It shows that the church rite of marriage was edited in Russia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when ideas about the sacramental nature of marriage changed. The second chapter builds on these observations, suggesting that marriage and ‘spiritual brotherhood’ were understood as analogous in the premodern period. The final two chapters look at depictions of marriage and brotherhood in hagiography and iconography respectively. They focus on Petr and Fevroniia, the first married couple to be canonised in Russia in 1547. In 2008, their feast day was reworked into a state festival called the ‘Day of Family, Love and Fidelity’, now widely celebrated across Russia. Petr and Fevroniia have been cast as the patron saints of so-called ‘traditional moral-spiritual values’. This view is generally upheld in existent scholarship on the saints. This dissertation responds to the way the saints are being represented today, arguing that they were initially venerated for subverting normative ideas about gender and sexuality—that they were queer. What is more, their veneration paralleled the veneration of holy brothers. Their hagiography seems to have been based on the Life of a monastic brotherhood, and icons depicting Petr and Fevroniia standardly showed them in monastic robes. Focussing on marriage and brotherhood in premodern Russia, each chapter of this dissertation challenges a preconceived idea about the immutability of supposedly ‘traditional’ gender roles in Russian history.

This thesis employs the bodily wound as a metaphor for exploring HIV/AIDS in visual culture. In particular it connects issues of bodily penetration, sexuality and mortality with pre-existing anxieties around the integrity of the male body and identity. The thesis is structured around four case studies, none of which can be said to be ‘about’ HIV/AIDS in any straightforward way, and a theoretical and historical overview in the introduction. In doing so it demonstrates that our understanding of HIV/AIDS is always connected to highly entrenched ways of thinking, particularly around gender and embodiment. The introduction sets out the issues around HIV/AIDS particularly as they relate to visual culture and promotes the work of Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida as philosophical antecedents of queer theory, a body of ideas that emerges alongside HIV/AIDS and is intimately connected with it. Chapter one continues to engage with Bataille through the work of Ron Athey. Athey’s work uses religious and sacrificial imagery, wounding and bodily penetration to explore living in the world as an HIV-positive man. The work of Mary Douglas, who argued that the individual body could stand in for the social body, along with Leo Bersani, who argues that male penetration is tantamount to subjective dissolution are instructive in this regard. The second chapter examines how Bataille’s work has been incorporated into the discourse of art history but subject to strategic exclusions that masked its engagement with sexuality, corporeality and politics at the height of the AIDS crisis in the western world. It argues that the work of David Wojnarowicz addresses similar concerns but in an embodied, activist form. The third chapter looks at a film by François Ozon from 2005 and argues that, through photography and trauma discourse, it returns viewers to a time when HIV infection was invariably terminal and fatal. The film, therefore, is an engagement with mortality on the part of a young man. The final chapter looks at the films of Pedro Almodóvar to argue that his films simultaneously undercut our expectations around gender and sexuality while promoting an understanding of sexual difference as the originary experience of loss in our lives. The work of Judith Butler is instructive in this regard and also draws out its connections and implications to HIV/AIDS. In conclusion the thesis argues that HIV/AIDS, understood as a wound to the idea of an integral, stable and sacrosanct body, has made such an understanding of the body untenable and that this has enabling and productive consequences for our understanding of gender and sexuality.

No description available.

Sexually themed objects from ancient Greece and Rome have been present in debates about our relationship with the past and with sexuality since they were first brought to modern attention in large numbers in the Enlightenment period. However, modern engagement with this type of material has very often been characterised as problematic. This thesis pushes beyond the story of reactionary censorship of ancient depictions of sex to demonstrate how these images were meaningfully engaged with across intellectual life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and America. It makes a significant and timely contribution to our existing knowledge of a key historical period for the development of the modern understanding of sexuality and cultural representations of it, and the central role that antiquity played in negotiating this fundamental aspect of modernity. Crucially, this work demonstrates how sexual antiquities functioned as symbols of pre-Christian sexual, social and political mores, with which to think through, and to challenge, contemporary cultural constructions around sexuality, religion, gender roles and the development of culture itself. It presents evidence of the widespread and prolific acquisition of sexually themed artefacts throughout private and institutional collecting culture. This deliberate seeking out of ancient images of sex is shown to have been motivated by debates on the universal human connection between sex and religion, as part of wider constructions of notions such as ‘culture’ and ‘primitivism’, with Classical material maintaining a central position in these ideas, despite research into increasingly diverse cultures, past and present. The purposeful engagement with sexual imagery from antiquity is also revealed as having acted as a valuable new source of knowledge about ancient sexual life between men which gave new impetus to the negotiation, defence, celebration and promotion of homoerotic desire in contemporary turn of the twentieth century, Western society.

<p>This dissertation examines the construction of gendered legal subjects in the influential legal works of the eleventh century Ḥanafī jurist, Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Sarakhsī (d. 483 A.H./1090 C.E.). In particular, I explore how gendered subjects are imagined in legal matters pertaining to sexual desire. Through a close reading of several legal cases, I argue that gendered subjects in his legal work al-Mabsūṭ are constructed through an ontological framework that conceptualizes men as active and desiring and women as passive and desirable. This binary construal of gendered nature serves as a hermeneutical given in al-Sarakhsī’s legal argumentation and is produced through a phallocentric epistemology. Al-Sarakhsī’s discussions of desire and sexuality are mediated through the experience of the male body. While the dissertation endeavors to show the centrality of the active/passive binary in al-Sarakhsī’s legal reasoning, it also highlights the dissonances and fissures in the text’s construction of gendered subjects of desire. By tracing the intricacies of al-Sarakhsī’s legal reasoning, I note moments in which the text makes contradictory claims about gender and desire, as well as moments in which al-Sarakhsī must contend with realities that seemingly run up against his ontological framework. These moments in the text draw our attention to al-Sarakhsī’s active attempt at maintaining the coherence of the gendered ontology. I thus argue that the gendered ontology in al-Sarakhsī’s text is a legal fiction that both reflects his assumptions about gendered nature but is also constructed to rationalize legal precedence.</p> / Dissertation

No description available.

Contre une conception essentialiste du point de vue du genre, et irénique, de la galanterie, cette étude appréhende cette dernière en termes d’histoire de la sexualité pour mettre en évidence la mise en place d’une micropolitique galante dès le premier XVIIe siècle. Elle se concentre sur les premières comédies de Corneille, dont le succès fait fond sur l’essor d’une nouvelle culture amoureuse, la galanterie. La première partie problématise le succès du discours galant, qui, produit par la sphère des belles lettres, peut toujours tourner à la simple politesse, mais ne s’en impose pas moins dans le contexte de la mixité d’ancien régime. La comédie cornélienne constitue ainsi une technologie galante où s’élabore, et d’où se diffuse, le discours galant qui, en régulant le commerce amoureux, légitime le mariage d’amour. La deuxième partie appréhende le conflit dramatique autour duquel s’organise l’intrigue galante en termes de constructionnisme social pour définir les contours de l’érotique galante. Dispositif « hétérotopique », la galanterie commande des processus de subjectivation tels que l’amour hétérosexuel cède désormais le pas à l’amitié homosociale, naturalisant du même coup le lien entre sexe et investissement affectif – ce complexe bientôt appelé « sexualité ». La galanterie s’inscrit ainsi dans la généalogie de la matrice hétérosexuelle. La troisième partie aborde la dramaturgie tragique de Corneille et montre comment la tragédie classique, en réponse à la tendance du discours galant à fonctionner à titre d’art de plaire autant qu’à titre d’art d’aimer, a inventé un discours amoureux adapté à l’individualisme moderne : non plus l’amour comme « passion de l’âme », mais, tout simplement, « la passion ». / As opposed to an irenic conception of gallantry that also relies on an essentialist definition of gender, this study addresses gallantry in terms of the history of sexuality, so as to emphasize the deployment of a gallant micropolitics the early 17th century France. It focuses on the success of Pierre Corneille’s comedies in the context of the blooming of a new amorous culture, soon to be called gallantry. The first part problematizes the discourse of gallantry produced by the sphere of the belle-Letters, which can always turn to mere courtesy, but nevertheless becomes pervasive to regulate men/women interactions in the Ancien Régime France. The Cornelian comedy functions as a gallant technology that produces and diffuses the discourse of gallantry, which organizes amorous relationships so as to legitimize love marriage. The second part addresses the conflict around which turns the whole plot of Corneille’s gallant comedies in terms of social constructionism, so as to account for the erotic subjectivities construed by gallantry. As an “heterotopic” apparatus, gallantry implies processes of subjectivation such that heterosexual love now prevails over homosocial friendship, thereby naturalizing the link between sex and emotional investment – a complex soon to be called “sexuality”. Thus, gallantry is part of the genealogy of the heterosexual matrix. The third part focuses on Pierre Corneille’s poetics of tragedy, and shows that the genre of the 17th century French tragedy replied to the tendency for the discourse of gallantry to function as a form of politeness rather than an authentic form of love by inventing an amorous discourse more suitable to modern individualism, and which no longer depicts love as a “passion of the soul” but simply as, in French, la passion.

This thesis analyses the development towards a mass market pornographic press. Sweden (in addition to Denmark) is often described as a forerunner in this development when the so-called “porn wave” hit most of the Western world in the late 1960s. The “porn wave” was the starting point of the contemporary pornographic press, which put sexually explicit pictures on the international market. Denmark was the first country in the world to decriminalize pornographic pictures in 1969 and Sweden followed in 1971. While previous research in Sweden often blames decriminalisation for the growth of the pornographic market, this thesis shows that the “porn wave” preceded the alteration of the Freedom of the press act and thus calls for a more multifaceted analysis of the development. Very few studies have been made about the development from an underground exclusive market of explicit pornography to a legal mass market. This thesis, however, makes a survey of all the Swedish publishers of pornographic magazines, their length on the market, and the market conditions. By analysing the regulation of pornography prior to 1971 and the legal cases leading to prosecutions of the publishers, the strategies used to challenge the regulation are traced. Special attention is also paid to how the monopoly on distribution held by Pressbyrån, a company owned by the Swedish press, affected the pornographic press. By cooperating and starting their own distribution channels, the pornography publishers managed to challenge Pressbyrån’s regulations. Great emphasis is laid on the discursive construction of pornography in mass media and in the parliamentary debates. This thesis argues that the antagonisms between the pornographic press and its critics are central in understanding how pornography was perceived and that these debates have decisively impacted the market conditions. Sensation-seeking articles in the evening papers, and the politicians’ liberal attitudes towards the pornographic press, made the market seem more open and lucrative. The resistance towards the establishment of a mass market and explicit pornographic press was strong during the whole period – but these critics used quite varying arguments. By analysing these arguments, this thesis shows how the pornographic press touched on sensitive cultural norms regarding marriage, young people’s sexuality, homosexuality, gender and love. The second half of the 1960s was a turning point in the development of the pornographic press, the discursive construction of pornography and in the political strategies used to combat pornography. In just a few years, the pornographic press grew substantially and started to publish explicit pictures of intercourse. In that same period, the construction of pornography went from a conservatively Christian understanding to a sexually liberal – and later to a feminist understanding of its problems. The government introduced a “porn raid” against the magazines, prosecuted many of them, and then paradoxically decriminalized pornography in 1971. Theoretically, the conclusion is made that pornography has to be seen in its historical context and in relation to its special market conditions. Since pornography continually has been a contested commodity, its controversial status has resulted in special regulations, marketing difficulties and lack of income from advertisements.

In this thesis I address the following questions: (1) How do dykes take up space in public in contemporary cities? (2) How does the ‘marching dyke’ emerge as a subject and what kind of subject is it? (3) How, in turn, do marching dykes affect space? In order to examine these questions I focus on the Toronto Dyke March to ask how it emerged in this particular time and place. The answer to each of these questions is paradoxical. I argue that the Dyke March is a complex, complicated and contradictory site of politics, protest and identity. Investigating ‘marching dykes’ reveals how the subject of the Dyke March is imagined in multiple and conflicting ways. The Toronto Dyke March is an event which brings together thousands of queer women annually who march together in the streets of Toronto on the Saturday afternoon of Pride weekend. My research examines how the March emerged out of a history of activism and organizing and considers how the March has been made meaningful for queer women’s communities, identities, histories and spaces. My analysis draws together queer and feminist poststructuralism, cultural geography literature on sexuality and space, and the history of sexuality in Canada. I combine a Foucaultian genealogy with visual ethnography, interviews and archival research. I argue that the Dyke March is an event which is intentionally meaningful in its claims to particular spaces and subjectivities. This research draws connections across various bodies of scholarship and offers an interdisciplinary contribution to the literature, contributing to discussions of queer women’s visibility and representation. Although my analysis is focused on Toronto as a particular site, it offers insight into broader queer women’s activist organizing efforts and queer activism in Canada.

In this thesis I address the following questions: (1) How do dykes take up space in public in contemporary cities? (2) How does the ‘marching dyke’ emerge as a subject and what kind of subject is it? (3) How, in turn, do marching dykes affect space? In order to examine these questions I focus on the Toronto Dyke March to ask how it emerged in this particular time and place. The answer to each of these questions is paradoxical. I argue that the Dyke March is a complex, complicated and contradictory site of politics, protest and identity. Investigating ‘marching dykes’ reveals how the subject of the Dyke March is imagined in multiple and conflicting ways. The Toronto Dyke March is an event which brings together thousands of queer women annually who march together in the streets of Toronto on the Saturday afternoon of Pride weekend. My research examines how the March emerged out of a history of activism and organizing and considers how the March has been made meaningful for queer women’s communities, identities, histories and spaces. My analysis draws together queer and feminist poststructuralism, cultural geography literature on sexuality and space, and the history of sexuality in Canada. I combine a Foucaultian genealogy with visual ethnography, interviews and archival research. I argue that the Dyke March is an event which is intentionally meaningful in its claims to particular spaces and subjectivities. This research draws connections across various bodies of scholarship and offers an interdisciplinary contribution to the literature, contributing to discussions of queer women’s visibility and representation. Although my analysis is focused on Toronto as a particular site, it offers insight into broader queer women’s activist organizing efforts and queer activism in Canada.