Beneath the Rising Sun: “Frenchness” and the Archaeology of Desire

This article takes the case of “rouge pot” fragments found in an archaeological context in New Orleans’ French Quarter associated with the circa 1822 Rising Sun Hotel and investigates the discourses and desires that shape our interpretations of artifacts. We argue that archaeological, historiographic, and public desires overlap and inform one another in a complex web of relations. In New Orleans, the particular web into which the archaeology of cosmetic jars and hotel sites can fall is spun by the ways in which the former French colonial capital is sexualized in both textbooks and folk songs.     

Property,boundary, exclusion: Making sense of hetero-violence in safer spaces

This paper focuses on research conducted over a period of thirty months as part of a wider ESRC-funded initiative on violence. It focuses on the sustainability of safer gay space. This paper shows how the generation of the fear of the 'heterosexual other' functions to enable certain claims to be made on the space from a proprietorial aspect which includes recourse to purity, danger and respectability. This shows how property relations become articulated as a property of the person, demonstrating how entitlement to space is formed. It also explores how boundaries are being constructed and maintained in different (and often novel) ways and shows how different intelligibilities are constructed for understanding one's place through concepts of property and propriety that relate to forms of investment and movement through space. It thus challenges traditional ideas on boundary formation and maintenance. Ultimately it foregrounds how these understandings of bodies in space influence current articulations of citizenship and poltical participation. Cet article analyse des recherches effectuées au cours d'une période de trente mois dans le cadre d'une étude plus large sur la violence, subventionnée par ESRC. Le thème principal est celui de la viabilité des espaces sans risque. Nous démontrons comment le maintien d'une peur de 'l'autre hétérosexuel' sert à fonder certains droits envers ces espaces, droits qui sont reliés à un sens de la propriété faisant appel à des notions de pureté, danger et respectabilité. Notre analyse indique comment ces relations de propriété sont exprimées en fonction de la personne, démontrant ainsi comment se formule l'accès à l'espace. Elle démontre aussi les divers modes de construction et maintien des frontières, et comment ceux-ci élaborent des cadres de perception permettant de comprendre la place de l'individu au sein des concepts de 'rectitude' et 'propriété' qui sont liés à des formes d'interaction avec l'espace. Finalement, notre étude questionne les idées traditionnelles quant à la formation et au maintien des frontières, signalant ainsi comment l'analyse des corps dans l'espace ouvre de nouvelles voies d'étude ayant trait à la citoyennetéet àl'exercise de droits politiques. El enfoque de este papel es una investigación elaborada durante un período de 30 meses como parte de una iniciativa más amplia sobre la violencia fundada por ESRC. El enfoque es sobre la sotenibilidad de sitios más seguros para gays. Este papel demuestra como la generación de miedo del 'Otro heterosexual' facilita ciertas reclamaciones sobre un espacio. Estas reclamaciones incluyen nociones de pureza, peligro y respetabildad y demuestran la manera en que las relaciones propietarias llegan a ser articuladas como propiedad de la persona y de ahí, cómo es formado el derecho a un espacio. También examina como límites están siendo construidos y mantenidos de diferentes maneras (muchas veces nuevas) y indica como uno construye diferentes inteligibilidades para mejor entender su lugar a través de conceptos de propiedad y tenencia vinculados a formas de inversión y movimiento en un espacio. Así desafía las ideas tradicionales de la formación y mantenimiento de límites. Por último destaca la manera en que este entendimiento de 'cuerpos en un espacio' influye en las ideas actuales de ciudadanía y participación política.     

Sexing the Self: Geographies of engagement and encounter

Geographic research on the construction of sexual identity takes inspiration from two main sources. The first is the post-structural literature that suggests sexual subjects are sutured to identities created in the realms of discourse. The second is a psychoanalytical tradition concerned with the desires and disgusts experienced by sexual subjects as they seek to reconcile their inner selves with the outside world. In this paper an attempt is made to combine these contrasting perspectives by exploring the way sexualities are negotiated by individuals as they encounter a world that is both real and imagined. The utility of this approach is illustrated with reference to the author's research on sex work, which demonstrates that the making of sexual identities involves a dynamic relation between Self and Other--a relation that is subsequently encoded in representations of space. The paper concludes that the making of sexual identities can only be understood by examining the ways that representation and experience entwine in specific places to create sexual identities that are fractured, contested and always becoming.     

Making room for rubbers: Gender,technology, and birth control before the pill

Before the Food and Drug Administration approved in 1960 the distribution of oral contraceptives, the most popular form of birth control in the United States was the condom. Scholars have often downplayed men's involvement in the history of birth control, relegating knowledge and use of contraceptive technology to a separate "female domain." This article explores the role of condoms in the evolution of the American birth control business, attitudes toward public health, and everyday sexual behavior, and suggests why the full complexities of the history of birth control are best captured by an approach that is attentive to broad gender dynamics as well as to the diversity of technological change.     

Intimate Consumption and New Sexual Subjects Among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea

This article examines the transformation of sexual meanings, attitudes, norms, and practices surrounding depletion and pollution across decades (1974–2010) among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea. In the premodern village, all sexual intercourse, whether with boy‐initiates or women, was ritualized and ultimately controlled by the men's secret society. Intimate consumption refers traditionally to a symbolic complex of beliefs, concepts, emotions, and ritual experiences involving sexuality, bodily health, social relationships, and gendered politics. But it also covers sexual anxieties corresponding to the transfer and loss of bodily fluids via the perceived depletion and pollution of self and body. For adult men, the sense of intimate consumption requires repeated substance replenishment and purification. Intimate consumption made oral and vaginal sex highly rule‐bound, taboo laden, and intensely regulated in terms of the meaning, scope, duration, and intended goals of sexual exchange. Pacification, colonization, out‐migration, Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) Christianity, and primary schooling in the Sambia Valley over a period of decades instigated social transformations that challenged and wore down this system of sexual regulation. Thus, the transition from ritual to non‐ritual practices, i.e., more individualistic sexual relationships, highlight narratives of change in the Sambia sexuality. With the demise of ritual initiation in the 1980s and 1990s, and the appearance of HIV and SikAids in the Sambia Valley, explicit ritual sexual techniques were no longer socialized. Modernity (in the sense of a set of policies, attitudes, and rules introduced through institutions such as the government community school) and SDA church sociality influenced both the pace and form of this sexual transformation. Among the greatest changes was the expansion of female agency and sexual autonomy, and personal decision‐making vis‐à‐vis especially marriage and also romance, courtship, and sex. Notably, oral sex, once universal and mandatory, largely disappeared from Sambia intimate relations. Today, spousal intimacy reveals a different set of more ‘modern’ meanings and behaviors compared to two generations ago, e.g., more mutualistic and companionate. Intimate consumption remains a worry for certain Sambia young men and women today however, influenced in part by the rise of the HIV pandemic, mobility, and the absence of normative narratives of sexuality in villages and town settlements. This creates public spaces wherein new sexual subjects have emerged in the villages and urban settlements within the Sambia Valley and in settlements throughout PNG.     

Translation as techné: female sexuality and the science of social progress in colonial India

Abstract

In this article, I analyze processes of translation that shaped the science of sex in eastern India between the 1880s and the 1930s. I trace the impact of translation – the rendering of words between the language of English and Bengali as well as the travel and transformation of concepts – through close textual analysis of influential Bengali-language medical and scientific textbooks on nymphomania, female sexual excesses, and the evolution of Indian society. The translation of sexual categories was a techné by which Bengali intellectuals produced categories of social behavior and identity as equivalent and homogenous. Through claims of equivalence in translation, Bengali scientists argued for the commensurability of Indian social practices with universalist schemes of social evolution and civilizational progress. This process of exchange pivoted on the figure of the sexually deviant woman, who became a key site of translation and categorical equivalence. In thinking translation through techné, I foreground how a semiotics of female sexuality produced ‘the social’ as an object of inquiry in colonial India.     

ODE to a geography teacher: Sexuality and the classroom

Abstract

This paper explores some of the ways that sexuality is an issue in the course of teaching. It includes discussions of crushes between students and staff, consensual personal relationships between staff and students, sexual harassment and how to create an atmosphere in the classroom/institution that enables lesbian, gay and bisexual students and staff to ‘come out’.     

What’s radical about reality TV? An unexpected tale from Shanghai of a Chinese lesbian antihero

This article advances a Marxist approach to the contradictory relationship of minority sexuality to capitalist political economy. I use the work of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci and critical theorist Nancy Fraser to tell a story of an extraordinary momentary opening for a distinct lesbian subculture in Shanghai. This moment was born from a Chinese reality TV show called Super Girl. A radical space for lesbian self-development is shown to have emerged through a relative uncoupling of the social relations of capitalism from political authority. This article warns against an Althusserian tendency within gay political economy and intersectionality analyses which slips into a notion of hegemonic market containment. Instead, a Marxism that is alert to subversive outlets by and for human agency is applied.     

Kings and favourites: politics and sexuality in late medieval Europe

This article examines the use of ‘discursive sodomy’ in political critique against five late medieval monarchs and their favourites. Sources from Castile, England and Sweden reveal common themes that recur. Contemporary sources frequently stated that the king’s love for his favourite was excessive and beyond measure; that the favourite was always by the king’s side and thereby hindered others from approaching him. Critics further claimed that the king showed no moderation in his generosity toward the favourite and that the difference in rank between the two men made their relationship suspicious. This paper argues that all four themes included allusions to same-sex desire with the purpose of implying that the natural order and hierarchies were put in jeopardy. The main issue at hand was that the king had been seduced or even bewitched and therefore was no longer in control. He had let another man dominate him.