Queer Velocities

Queer Velocities
Author: Jennifer Eun-Jung Row
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2022-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810144727

Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage explores how seventeenth-century French theater represents queer desire. In this book, the first queer theoretical treatment of canonical French theater, Jennifer Eun-Jung Row proposes that these velocities, moments of unseemly haste or strategic delay, sparked new kinds of attachments, intimacies, and erotics. Rather than rely on fixed identities or analog categories, we might turn to these affectively saturated moments of temporal sensation to analyze queerness in the premodern world. The twin innovations of precise, portable timepieces and the development of the theater as a state institution together ignited new types of embodiments, orderly and disorderly pleasures, and normative and wayward rhythms of life. Row leverages a painstakingly formalist and rhetorical analysis of tragedies by Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille to show how the staging of delay or haste can critically interrupt the normative temporalities of marriage, motherhood, mourning, or sovereignty—the quotidian rhythms and paradigms so necessary for the biopolitical management of life. Row’s approach builds on the queer turn to temporality and Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of the chronobiopolitical to wager that queerness can also be fostered by the sensations of disruptive speed and slowness. Ultimately, Row suggests that the theater not only contributed to the glitter of Louis XIV’s absolutist spectacle but also ignited new forms of knowing and feeling time, as well as new modes of loving, living, and being together.

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect
Author: Todd W. Reeser
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 722
Release: 2022-12-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000738329

The study of affect is one of the most exciting and wide-ranging topics to have emerged in the humanities and social sciences in recent years and continues to generate research and debate. It has particularly important implications for the study of gender, as this outstanding handbook amply demonstrates. It is the most comprehensive volume to date, engaging with the intersections between gender and affect studies. A global and interdisciplinary range of contributors articulate the connections (and disconnections) between gender, sexuality, and affect in a range of geographical and historical contexts. Comprising over 40 chapters, the Companion is divided into six parts: Affects of Gender Affective Relations, Relational Affects Affective Practices Representing Affects Geographical and Spatial Affects Affects of History, Histories of Affect Topics examined include intersections between gender and affect over topics including queerness, trans*, feminism, masculinity, race/ethnicity, disability, animality, media, posthumanism, technology, sound, labor, neoliberalism, protest, and temporality. This is an outstanding collection that will be invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines, including gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, literature, media, and sociology.

Sexual Disorientations

Sexual Disorientations
Author: Kent L. Brintnall
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 477
Release: 2017-11-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0823277534

Sexual Disorientations brings some of the most recent and significant works of queer theory into conversation with the overlapping fields of biblical, theological and religious studies to explore the deep theological resonances of questions about the social and cultural construction of time, memory, and futurity. Apocalyptic, eschatological and apophatic languages, frameworks, and orientations pervade both queer theorizing and theologizing about time, affect, history and desire. The volume fosters a more explicit engagement between theories of queer temporality and affectivity and religious texts and discourses.

Bodies on the Verge

Bodies on the Verge
Author: Joseph A. Marchal
Publisher: SBL Press
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2019-05-24
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 088414335X

A collection that resets the terms of interpreting the Pauline letters Interpretation of Paul's letters often proves troubling, since people frequently cite them when debating controversial matters of gender and sexuality. Rather than focusing on the more common defensive responses to those expected prooftexts that supposedly address homosexuality, the essays in this collection reflect the range, rigor, vitality, and creativity of other interpretive options influenced by queer studies. Thus key concepts and practices for understanding these letters in terms of history, theology, empire, gender, race, and ethnicity, among others, are rethought through queer interventions within both ancient settings and more recent history and literature. Features: New options for how to interpret and use Paul's letters, particularly in light of their use in debates about sexuality and gender Developing approaches in queer studies that help with understanding and using Pauline letters and interpretations differently Key reflections on the two "clobber passages" (Rom 1:26-27 and 1 Cor 6:9) that demonstrate the relevance of a far wider range of texts throughout the Pauline corpus

The Oxford Handbook of New Testament, Gender, and Sexuality

The Oxford Handbook of New Testament, Gender, and Sexuality
Author: Benjamin H. Dunning
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 733
Release: 2019-10-10
Genre: Bibles
ISBN: 019021340X

Over several decades, scholarship in New Testament and early Christianity has drawn attention both to the ways in which ancient Mediterranean conceptions of embodiment, sexual difference, and desire were fundamentally different from modern ones and also to important lines of genealogical connection between the past and the present. The result is that the study of "gender" and "sexuality" in early Christianity has become an increasingly complex undertaking. This is a complexity produced not only by the intricacies of conflicting historical data, but also by historicizing approaches that query the very terms of analysis whereby we inquire into these questions in the first place. Yet at the same time, recent work on these topics has produced a rich and nuanced body of scholarly literature that has contributed substantially to our understanding of early Christian history and also proved relevant to ongoing theological and social debates. The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Sexuality in the New Testament provides a roadmap to this lively scholarly landscape, introducing both students and other scholars to the relevant problems, debates, and issues. Leading scholars in the field offer original contributions by way of synthesis, critical interrogation, and proposals for future questions, hypotheses, and research trajectories.

The Bible and Feminism

The Bible and Feminism
Author: Yvonne Sherwood
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 750
Release: 2017-11-24
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0191034193

This groundbreaking book breaks with established canons and resists some of the stereotypes of feminist biblical studies. It features a wide range of contributors who showcase new methodological and theoretical movements such as feminist materialisms, intersectionality, postidentitarian 'nomadic' politics, gender archaeology, and lived religion, and theories of the human and the posthuman. The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field engages a range of social and political issues, including migration and xenophobia, divorce and family law, abortion, 'pinkwashing', the neoliberal university, the second amendment, AIDS and sexual trafficking, and the politics of 'the veil'. Foundational figures in feminist biblical studies work alongside new voices and contributors from a multitude of disciplines in conversations with the Bible that go well beyond the expected canon-within-the-canon assumed to be of interest to feminist biblical scholars. Moving beyond the limits of a text-orientated model of reading, this collection looks at how biblical texts were actualized in the lives of religious revolutionaries, such as Joanna Southcott or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. It charts the politics of the Pauline veil in the self-understanding of Europe and reads the 'genealogical halls' in the book of Chronicles alongside acts of commemoration and forgetting in 9/11 and Tiananmen Square.

Appalling Bodies

Appalling Bodies
Author: Joseph A. Marchal
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2019-11-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190060336

The letters of Paul are among the most commonly cited biblical texts in ongoing cultural and religious disputes about gender, sexuality, and embodiment. Appalling Bodies reframes these uses of the letters by reaching past Paul toward other, far more fascinating figures that appear before, after, and within the letters. The letters repeat ancient stereotypes about women, eunuchs, slaves, and barbarians--in their Roman imperial setting, each of these overlapping groups were cast as debased, dangerous, and complicated. Joseph Marchal presents new ways for us to think about these dangers and complications with the help of queer theory. Appalling Bodies juxtaposes these ancient figures against recent figures of gender and sexual variation, in order to defamiliarize and reorient what can be known about both. The connections between the marginalization and stigmatization of these figures troubles the history, ethics, and politics of biblical interpretation. Ultimately, Marchal assembles and reintroduces us to Appalling Bodies from then and now, and the study of Paul's letters may never be the same.

Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature

Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature
Author: Ari Friedlander
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2023-01-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192677950

The "rogue," a term that described criminals, prostitutes, vagrants, beggars, and the unemployed, dominated the pages of early modern popular crime literature. Rogue Sexuality resituates the rogue by focusing on how their menace—and their seductive appeal—emerged not only from their social marginality, but also from their supposedly excessive sexuality and prodigious sexual reproduction. Through discussions of both familiar and little-studied early modern works by William Shakespeare, John Milton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Robert Greene, Thomas Harman, and the inventor of modern demography John Graunt, this volume posits the sexualized rogue as the avatar of a new category of "socio-sexual identity" and traces a surprising social transposition, in which socio-political elites are portrayed as appropriating the rogue's sexual vitality and performative charisma to navigate moments of crisis. By tracking the movement of rogue sexuality from a criminal to a normative discursive register, this book challenges the distinctions that literary critics and historians tend to draw between orderly and disorderly sexuality. With its focus on reproduction, rogue sexuality also provides a new framework for what Michel Foucault called "biopolitics," the state's focus on exercising power over life. In legal, administrative, and scientific documents, this book shows that early modern writers grappled with popular pamphlets' rendering of the alleged threat of rogue reproduction. Rogue Sexuality thus offers a new approach to the political history of early modern England as a population—as a people whose aggregate sexual life and reproduction were a key part of its political imagination.

Cervantine Blackness

Cervantine Blackness
Author: Nicholas R. Jones
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2024-10-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0271099089

There is no shortage of Black characters in Miguel de Cervantes’s works, yet there has been a profound silence about the Spanish author’s compelling literary construction and cultural codification of Black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa. In Cervantine Blackness, Nicholas R. Jones reconsiders in what sense Black subjects possess an inherent value within Cervantes’s cultural purview and literary corpus. In this unflinching critique, Jones charts important new methodological and theoretical terrain, problematizing the ways emphasis on agency has stifled and truncated the study of Black Africans and their descendants in early modern Spanish cultural and literary production. Through the lens of what he calls “Cervantine Blackness,” Jones challenges the reader to think about the blind faith that has been lent to the idea of agency—and its analogues “presence” and “resistance”—as a primary motivation for examining the lives of Black people during this period. Offering a well-crafted and sharp critique, through a systematic deconstruction of deeply rooted prejudices, Jones establishes a solid foundation for the development of a new genre of literary and cultural criticism. A searing work of literary criticism and political debate, Cervantine Blackness speaks to specialists and nonspecialists alike—anyone with a serious interest in Cervantes’s work who takes seriously a critical reckoning with the cultural, historical, and literary legacies of agency, antiblackness, and refusal within the Iberian Peninsula and the global reaches of its empire.