Gender Reconstructions

Timely and politically pertinent, this collection of essays links the fields of women’s studies and cultural studies, examining women’s desires and women as objects of desire. Working in diverse disciplines and time periods, the contributors address the common theme of 'perversion' as a cultural, often linguistic, construct. Analysing texts and images from medieval times to the twentieth century, the volume affords the reader modernist and postmodernist perspectives on the connected issues of erotics, pornography, and perversion. Contents: ’When female weakness triumphs’: Torture and perversion in four plays by Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, Martine van Elk; Clothing naked desire in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Cindy L. Carlson; Seductive confession in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, Susan M. Bernardo; Villette and the perversions of female identity, Eleanor Salotto; Abjecting Freud: masculinity, maternity, and perversion, Deborah Caslav Covino; The gaze and its specular perversions: Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés, Ernestine Daubner; Sade’s woman: essential pornogony and virtual embodiment, Robert L. Mazzola; On the Beach of Elsewhere: Angela Carter’s pornography and the culture of gender archetypes, Gregory J. Rubinson; Perverse writing - maternity and monarchy: fictocriticism and exorbitant, plural bodies, Heather B. Kerr; White trash lesbianism: Dorothy Allison’s queer politics, Kelly L. Thomas; The efficacy of shock for feminist politics: Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School and Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, Ann Bomberger; Index.