Erotic Dissertation

This is a living archive of my PhD dissertation project. This is the silent dialogue with myself (and others) of the process of my research. What do I want to find? What will I find? Erotic Literature as a whole is too much, too broad, to little. How can one find erotism within literature? and without?

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it IS bigger on the inside...

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VICE pal Petra Collins caused an entertaining storm of controversy this week when she designed a t-shirt for American Apparel with a simplistic line drawing depicting a masturbating, menstruating woma…

Why are female physiological situations deemed as "gross"? Are female bodily functions another form of 'control' over female sexuality?

Why is it that female masturbation is not as easily depicted and accepted, visually, as male masturbation?

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Everything You Thought You Knew About The Clitoris Is Probably Wrong

New York artist Sophia Wallace wants you -- and everyone you know -- to be cliterate.

What would Luce Irigaray say about this?

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pleasure and desire

according to the Ancient Greeks Desire is a pause, it makes your knees tremble and it is uncontrollable.

You need pleasure to subside desire. pleasure is narcotic it is sleep, it is oblivion.

An active partner can have enough pleasure to quench desire because their semen (which comes from an area in the anus) emerges completely. A passive partner (like a woman) never has her desire quenched and that is why she is always paused... 

the humour of desire has to be expelled in order for the bodies to 'dry out'. women never do....

really? 

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greek passion

men are affected in their bodies

women are affected 'inside'. (which is why men can't understand that women are 'affected' when they sleep around... because it is a physical thing...)

this inside, outside thing... so Irigaray, isn't it?

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my eros is myself - Medea

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Sensuality is desire to be desired

Sex and sensuality in the ancient world

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sex, sexuality, gender

sex - the act; biological difference

gender - social shaping, cultural distinction

sexuality- aspects of personal and social life which have erotic significance. - fluid.

so, then, one's own sexuality IS a mirror, but of oneself. One does not necessarily need an Other to be able to see. It can be without sex and/ or gender. It can be without an act. It is an inherent part that is constantly flowing, a part of the character and personality of the said individual. 

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social norms

Sandra Lee Bartky writes: “the disciplinary project of femininity is a “set-up”: it requires such radical and extensive measures of bodily transformation that virtually every woman who gives herself to it is destined in some degree to fail. Thus, a measure of shame is added to a woman’s sense that the body she inhabits is deficient: she ought to take better care of herself; she might after all have jogged that last mile. “ (139)

  We know a lot of our self image is produced by outside sources, by society norms... is sexuality the same? sensuality? If that is so, then who chooses for us?

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Your body must be heard

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The Women Behind Erotic Fiction

Warning: The captions of this post are excerpts from the featured writers' erotic literature and contain sexually explicit language.  Who are the people behind erotic fiction, those accounts of racy affairs and clandestine romances so often stashed away in secret, read in the privacy of ones home?

does this give other faces to sexuality? to the representation of sexuality? 

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What is woman?

Beauvoir asks.

Is it the female body?

Historically women HAVE BEEN determined by their bodies.

What happens from the moment we can change them? Haven’t we always been able to change them? from piercings to tattoos to birth-control and abortions. 

Nowadays there is much more “control” over our bodies. We can diet and exercise or go fat and plump. We can plastic 'surgerice' ourselves galore!

but, aren’t we still very determined by our bodies? the way the outside world perceives us, the way we perceive ourselves!

(how is that perception related to sexuality and the way it is lived?)

This reminds me of the Dove Commercial (next post)

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Apulleius (1)

Re-reading "The Golden Ass"...

yes, curiosity is a main theme, but so are words. What can be said and what cannot. 

The relationship between what is said and the desire that those words produce...

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Is menstruation a means to expression? 

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La pornolectora

Seducción, sexo y libros. Un menage à trois que la industrial editorial provoca y fomenta para conseguir beneficios, mercantilizando la literatura y a sus lectoras hasta lo obsceno. O, como prefier...

is this the only type of readers women can strive to be? or others think men women can only strive to this? 

how does reading define/ confine one?

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Question...

If, as Donne wrote, no man is an island, is erotism (as an expression of humanity) within the impossibilities to be an island too? do we share erotism on a global network? How individual can it be? How individual is it? (Thinking, also, of erotism as the mirror of one's humanity as an individual). Is individualism gone then? Did it ever exist? How can erotism be uniform if each sexuality is so diverse?

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Today is mother's day in Mexico. Browsing thru social network posts And jumping from google search to the next I found this piece originally published in 1924. Sanger gives excellent reasons to not hurry motherhood and to treat the female body as something beyond a baby-spitting-machine. Only if you separate motherhood from the female body is there space for sexuality. Is erotism "available" without choice of consequences? Criticism: Sanger thought masturbation was terrible and disgusting. Really? Oh shame... Probably she did not know how to use her own hands, and nobody was kind enough to gift her a magic wand...