In both feminist theory and Shakespearean criticism, questions of sexuality have consistently been conflated with questions of gender. This book, refusing to adopt this approach, instead details the intersections and contradictions between sexuality and gender in the early modern period. It argues that desire and anxiety constitute the erotic in Shakespearean drama - circulating throughout the dramatic texts, traversing "masculine" and "feminine" sites, eliciting and expressing heterosexual and homoerotic fantasies, embodiments and fears. Taking heterosexuality and homoeroticism equally seriously, the book presents a non-normalizing account of the unconscious and institutional prerogatives that comprise the erotics of Shakespearean drama. Employing feminist, psychoanalytic and new historical methods, using each to interrogate the other, the book implements a synthesis of the psychic and the social, the individual and the institutional. This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics in the field of Shakespearean studies, Renaissance literature and cultural, gender studies.
Intended primarily for mental health professionals, "Demystifying Love" deals plainly with topics rarely written about for clinicians. The book discusses in a small package highly readable and useful topics, such as love (as both noun and verb), psychological intimacy, sexual desire, as well as infidelity, both in background concepts and clinical guidelines. As the book shows, love is the logical point of departure for a clinical understanding of sexuality and its problems. It is the most conventional framework for understanding sexual behaviors, the one that is broadly endorsed across many cultures, often as the ideal context for sexual expression.
Medieval Sexuality: A Casebook is a fascinating collection featuring both new and established experts in the field. The volume includes 11 original essays by Ross Balzaretti, Philip Crispin, Dominic Janes, Hugh Kennedy, A. Lynn Martin, Kim M. Phillips, Samantha J. E. Riches, Joyce E. Salisbury, David Santiuste, and the volume editors, April Harper and Caroline Proctor. The authors explore a variety of sources, contributing work on a diverse range of topics including: sources for sexuality in Late Lombard Italy; the problematic reception of early medieval penitentials by modern readers...
This book surveys the ways sex and sexuality have been made the subjects of history. It critically analyses some of the key histories of the last forty years; from the early efforts of historians like Steven Marcus to work out a model for sexual history, through to the extraordinary impact of French philosopher Michel Foucault. It explores the vigorous debates about essentialism and social constructionism in the 1980s and early 1990s and the emergence of contemporary debates about historicism, queer theory, embodiment, gender and cultural history shaping the now vast and diverse historical scholarship on sex and sexuality. Histories of Sexuality also focuses on a number of key debates about the history of sex and sexuality in Britain, Europe and America.
