Carol Siegel

Cultural historian Carol Siegel provides a fascinating look at Goth, a subculture among Western youth. While the fortunes of Goth culture form a portion of this book's story, Siegel is more interested in pursuing Goth as a means of resisting regimes of sexual normalcy, especially in its celebration of sadomasochism. For Siegel, Goth appears as a mode of being sexually undead--and loving it. The author tracks down Goth, reveals the source of its darkness, and shows that Goth as a response to the modern world has not disappeared but only escaped underground.

Goth's Dark Empire

Siegel explores the literary tradition of representing male love as service and ordeal and looks at how modernist and postmodernist writers and filmmakers have responded to this tradition and how psychoanalytic theorists have depicted the behaviors they labeled masochistic. Among the novels and films she discusses are Mary Webb's Gone to Earth, James Joyce's Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head, Kathy Acker's Great Expectations, Jonathan Demme's Something Wild, Stephen Frears's Dangerous Liaisons, and Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter.

Modern Revisions of the Story of Love

Male Masochism

New Millennial Sexstyles questions the twin feminist orthodoxies that the 1960s sexual revolution failed women and that the sexual attitudes most prominent in current youth cultures are deplorably regressive. Comparing the American sexscape she inhabits to the vision of contemporary culture produced by feminist theorists, Carol Siegel considers whether the sexual revolution may have succeeded, but in ways not recognized by current academic studies of gender and sexuality. In discouraging undomesticated heterosexuality, academic feminism ignores the connection between mainstream opposition to all unrestrained sexual expression and the growth of new forms of homophobia in our times. At the same time, the youth subcultures' challenges to these views of sexuality and gender have been dismissed as insignificant, or misunderstood as sexist. In this book, they receive more respectful attention. Siegel draws on her own experience as a college student to create a personal history of academic feminism's early sympathy with bourgeois values. She looks at the development of American sex advice literature and at the reception of such "transgressive" popular films as Basic Instinct, Thelma and Louise, and Natural Born Killers to demonstrate that the most profoundly capitalist feminist theories have always been the most culturally authoritative. A more encouraging vision emerges in the book's second half, where a record of conversations about sex and gender with young people, and of their responses to products designed for their consumption, takes the reader through some of today's most radical youth cultures and suggests new directions for gender studies.

New Millennial Sexstyles

Thomas Foster

Ellen E. Berry

This book examines the process of disciplinary formation as it affects lesbian and gay studies in the academy, contrasting older academic disciplines with newer, identity-based areas of study. It also demonstrates the extent to which contemporary queer studies involves practices of interdisciplinary reading and analysis.

Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formations in Queer Studies

The Gay '90s

Ann M. Kibbey

Forming and Reforming Identity exposes the historical sites of identity formation and seeks to define the mechanisms of modern-day gender ideologies. Illuminating the power of the family and state in shaping gender identities, the book also examines the constitution of these identities. Each chapter reveals the complexities and contradictions that inevitably accompany the formation of any new category of identity, whether they are deliberately restrictive or intended as a reformation of the old. The volume moves, as gender construction does, across a field of different media: novels, plays, teleplays, films, official documents, political theory, and advertisements. Four sections—REMOLDING WOMAN; REBELLING MAN; HOMEMADE IDENTITIES; and FEMINISMS THAT MAKE (A) DIFFERENCE—address such subjects as the representation of American women in the 1950s; nationalism and respectable sexuality in India; women, Hollywood cinema, and World War II; compulsory heterophobia; and the televising of AIDS. [ go to the Genders website ]

Forming and Reforming Identity

Genders 21

Thomas C. Foster

What do narratives by British suffragettes of being forcibly fed have in common with the representation of indigenous women in Canadian police archives? How are literary representations of domestic violence related to the use of silence as a strategy of resistance in African American women's writing? How are modernist fictions of gay male desire connected with ambiguous sexual performances in rock music or with images of Vietnam veterans in American horror movies? What does a narrative of women's participation in Bengali national resistance movements share with an ethnographic study of prostitution in Papua New Guinea? These are the some of the specific questions raised by the essays in this volume, which examines a wide variety of historical and cultural locations where differently sexed, gendered, and racialized bodies have been constructed. More generally, this volume addresses theoretical debates over whether embodiment is best understood through representations or performances. Are bodies written or enacted? The different answers to these questions have important consequences for how we understand the inscription of bodies with systems of power and the possibilities that exist for resisting those systems. [ go to the Genders website ]

Bodies of Writing, Bodies in Performance

Genders 23

Sexual confessions on television talk shows. Gender and medical discourse in colonial India. River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho. White women in a German colony. Henry James' thwarted love. What do these seemingly diverse subjects have in common? All address, in different ways, social and cultural attempts to contain eroticism by delineating the perimeters of genders. They scrutinize the political investments in the construction of gender in such disparate locations as contemporary Hollywood, Renaissance England, colonial India and Africa, and in modern and contemporary homosexual discourse communities and in Freud's sessions with Dora. But whether the gendering of the subject follows the dictates of conservative politics or the radical agenda of a marginalized interest, the essays reveal the erotic overflow—the flood—that cannot be contained within any one gender identity. In examining how the erotic escapes containment, this work discloses problems inherent in the intersections of gender and desire. [ go to the Genders website ]

Notes from the Flood Plain

Eroticism and Containment

Carol Siegel challenges the standard representation of Lawrence in feminist criticism and places his work in the context of women's literary traditions.

Wavering Boundaries in Women's Literary Traditions

Lawrence Among the Women

In Goth's Dark Empire cultural historian Carol Siegel provides a fascinating look at Goth, a subculture among Western youth. It came to prominence with punk performers such as Marilyn Manson and was made infamous when it was linked (erroneously) to the Columbine High School murders. While the fortunes of Goth culture form a portion of this book's story, Carol Siegel is more interested in pursuing Goth as a means of resisting regimes of sexual normalcy, especially in its celebration of sadomasochism (S/M). The world of Goth can appear wide-ranging: from films such as Edward Scissorhands and The Crow to popular fiction such as Anne Rice's "vampire" novels to rock bands such as Nine Inch Nails. But for Siegel, Goth appears as a mode of being sexually undead -- and loving it. What was Goth and what happened to it? In this book, Siegel tracks Goth down, reveals the sources of its darkness, and shows that Goth as a response to the modern world has not disappeared but only escaped underground.

Professor of English and Cultural Studies Carol Siegel

New Millennial Sexstyles questions the twin feminist orthodoxies that the 1960s sexual revolution failed women and that the sexual attitudes most prominent in current youth cultures are deplorably regressive. Comparing the American sexscape she inhabits to the vision of contemporary culture produced by feminist theorists, Carol Siegel considers whether the sexual revolution may have succeeded, but in ways not recognized by current academic studies of gender and sexuality. In discouraging undomesticated heterosexuality, academic feminism ignores the connection between mainstream opposition to all unrestrained sexual expression and the growth of new forms of homophobia in our times. At the same time, the youth subcultures' challenges to these views of sexuality and gender have been dismissed as insignificant, or misunderstood as sexist. In this book, they receive more respectful attention. Siegel draws on her own experience as a college student to create a personal history of academic feminism's early sympathy with bourgeois values. She looks at the development of American sex advice literature and at the reception of such ""transgressive"" popular films as Basic Instinct, Thelma and Louise, and Natural Born Killers to demonstrate that the most profoundly capitalist feminist theories have always been the most culturally authoritative. A more encouraging vision emerges in the book's second half, where a record of conversations about sex and gender with young people, and of their responses to products designed for their consumption, takes the reader through some of today's most radical youth cultures and suggests new directions for gender studies.

Carol Siegel

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