Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault

Couverture
Clarendon Press, 1991 - 388 pages
Why is homosexuality socially marginal yet symbolically central? Why is it so strangely integral to the very societies which obsessively denounce it, and why is it history--rather than human nature--that has produced this paradoxical position? These are just some of the questions explored in Sexual Dissidence.
Written by a leading critic in gender studies, this wide-ranging study returns to the early modern period in order to focus, question, and develop issues of postmodernity, and in the process brilliantly link writers as diverse as Shakespeare, André Gide, Oscar Wilde, and Jean Genet, and cultural critics as different as St. Augustine, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault. In so doing, Dollimore discovers that Freud's theory of perversion is more challenging than either his critics or his advocates usually allow, especially when approached via the earlier period's archetypal perverts, the religious heretic and the wayward woman, Satan and Eve.
A path-breaking book in a rapidly expanding field of literary and cultural study, Sexual Dissidence shows how the literature, histories, and subcultures of sexual and gender dissidence prove remarkably illuminating for current debates in literary theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural materialism. It includes chapters on transgression and its containment, contemporary theories of sexual difference, homophobia, the gay sensibility, transvestite literature in the culture and theatre of Renaissance England, homosexuality, and race.

À l'intérieur du livre

Table des matières

Wilde and Gide in Algiers
3
Becoming Authentic
57
Wildes Transgressive Aesthetic and Contemporary
64
Reencounters
74
The Politics of Containment
81
Tragedy and Containment
97
Towards the Paradoxical Perverse and the Perverse
103
Perversion and Privation
131
From the Polymorphous Perverse to the Perverse Dynamic
205
Perversion Power and Social Control
219
Thinking the Perverse Dynamic
228
Theories of Sexual Difference
249
Subjectivity and Transgression
279
On the Gay Sensibility or the Perverts
307
Desire and Difference
329
Afterword
357

Sexual Difference and Internal Deviation
148
Freuds Theory of Sexual Perversion
169
Deconstructing Freud
191

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À propos de l'auteur (1991)

Jonathan Dollimore is at University of Sussex.

Informations bibliographiques