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What Should We Agree on about the Repugnant Conclusion?
- Stéphane Zuber, Nikhil Venkatesh, Torbjörn Tännsjö, Christian Tarsney, H. Orri Stefánsson, Katie Steele, Dean Spears, Jeff Sebo, Marcus Pivato, Toby Ord, Yew-Kwang Ng, Michal Masny, William MacAskill, Nicholas Lawson, Kevin Kuruc, Michelle Hutchinson, Johan E. Gustafsson, Hilary Greaves, Lisa Forsberg, Marc Fleurbaey, Diane Coffey, Susumu Cato, Clinton Castro, Tim Campbell, Mark Budolfson, John Broome, Alexander Berger, Nick Beckstead, Geir B. Asheim
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The Repugnant Conclusion is an implication of some approaches to population ethics. It states, in Derek Parfit's original formulation,
For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better, even though its members have lives that are barely worth living. (Parfit 1984: 388)
Biocompatibility of a novel heat-treated and ceramic-coated magnesium alloy (Mg–1.2Zn–0.5Ca–0.5Mn) for resorbable skeletal fixation devices
- Agnieszka Chmielewska, Taylor MacDonald, Hamdy Ibrahim, Tim McManus, Jan Lammel Lindemann, Patrick Smith, Lihan Rong, Alan Luo, Rigoberto Advincula, Wojciech Swieszkowski, Mohammad Elahinia, David Dean
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- Journal:
- MRS Communications / Volume 10 / Issue 3 / September 2020
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 10 August 2020, pp. 467-474
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- September 2020
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Our recent exploration into the use of biodegradable metals and surface treatments resulting in sufficient strength for skeletal reconstruction applications has led to the need to test these devices’ cytotoxicity. More specifically, our group has developed a resorbable magnesium alloy, Mg–1.2Zn–0.5Ca–0.5Mn, that can be strengthened by heat treatment and coated with a ceramic layer offering time-certain resorption of a medical device. This in vitro study shows that these treatments do not result in cytotoxicity. Both heat-treated (HT) and HT + ceramic-coated (sol–gel) coupons demonstrated more than 70% viability. Thus, these processing steps are likely to be useful in producing biocompatible, resorbable implants that incorporate our Mg–1.2Zn–0.5Ca–0.5Mn alloy.
9 - Foucault and Sex
- from Part III - Reading After Foucault
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- By Tim Dean, University of Illinois
- Edited by Lisa Downing, University of Birmingham
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- After Foucault
- Published online:
- 30 May 2018
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- 07 June 2018, pp 141-154
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Summary
So much depends on what you mean by the term sex.
Elevating sex from a word (whose meaning we all intuitively know) to a term (whose meaning becomes apparent only within a constellation of philosophically specific concepts) suggests that already we have segued into a different world. In this world sex, far from a natural given, is culturally conditioned and historically produced. Certainly we are not being controversial in observing that the experience of sex, as well as its social organization and meaning, changes over time and across different cultures. The work of Michel Foucault is largely responsible for the fact that today such claims hardly seem daring or new. Yet there are elements of Foucault's thinking about sex and sexuality that remain to be fully appreciated in our current critical landscape. When, for example, he contends that ‘sex … is doubtless but an ideal point made necessary by the deployment of sexuality’, this conception of sex seems far from obvious. For reasons that will become apparent, Foucault's readers have had considerably more to say about his account of sexuality than about his conception of sex.
It is striking how frequently the canonical guides to Foucault skirt the problem of sex. Even Foucauldian scholars who bill their books as being about ‘sex’ often end up writing almost exclusively about gender. Given such elisions, I want to make clear from the outset that by the term sex I refer not to who you are (male, female, trans, intersex), but to what you do (or might do) with your body for the purposes of pleasure. In other words, here sex refers to erotic practice, not to sexual difference, sexual identity, or sexual role. We need this distinction because the word ‘sex’ describes both a status and an activity, with the heteronormative assumption being that one determines the other. It is a fallacy of our time – one that Foucault helps demystify – to assume that what you do sexually should give rise to an identity. The very idea of ‘sexual identity’ is a contradiction in terms, yet we continue to believe in it for an array of historically specific reasons.
Contributors
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- By Mitchell Aboulafia, Frederick Adams, Marilyn McCord Adams, Robert M. Adams, Laird Addis, James W. Allard, David Allison, William P. Alston, Karl Ameriks, C. Anthony Anderson, David Leech Anderson, Lanier Anderson, Roger Ariew, David Armstrong, Denis G. Arnold, E. J. Ashworth, Margaret Atherton, Robin Attfield, Bruce Aune, Edward Wilson Averill, Jody Azzouni, Kent Bach, Andrew Bailey, Lynne Rudder Baker, Thomas R. Baldwin, Jon Barwise, George Bealer, William Bechtel, Lawrence C. Becker, Mark A. Bedau, Ernst Behler, José A. Benardete, Ermanno Bencivenga, Jan Berg, Michael Bergmann, Robert L. Bernasconi, Sven Bernecker, Bernard Berofsky, Rod Bertolet, Charles J. Beyer, Christian Beyer, Joseph Bien, Joseph Bien, Peg Birmingham, Ivan Boh, James Bohman, Daniel Bonevac, Laurence BonJour, William J. Bouwsma, Raymond D. Bradley, Myles Brand, Richard B. Brandt, Michael E. Bratman, Stephen E. Braude, Daniel Breazeale, Angela Breitenbach, Jason Bridges, David O. Brink, Gordon G. Brittan, Justin Broackes, Dan W. Brock, Aaron Bronfman, Jeffrey E. Brower, Bartosz Brozek, Anthony Brueckner, Jeffrey Bub, Lara Buchak, Otavio Bueno, Ann E. Bumpus, Robert W. Burch, John Burgess, Arthur W. Burks, Panayot Butchvarov, Robert E. Butts, Marina Bykova, Patrick Byrne, David Carr, Noël Carroll, Edward S. Casey, Victor Caston, Victor Caston, Albert Casullo, Robert L. Causey, Alan K. L. Chan, Ruth Chang, Deen K. Chatterjee, Andrew Chignell, Roderick M. Chisholm, Kelly J. Clark, E. J. Coffman, Robin Collins, Brian P. Copenhaver, John Corcoran, John Cottingham, Roger Crisp, Frederick J. Crosson, Antonio S. Cua, Phillip D. Cummins, Martin Curd, Adam Cureton, Andrew Cutrofello, Stephen Darwall, Paul Sheldon Davies, Wayne A. Davis, Timothy Joseph Day, Claudio de Almeida, Mario De Caro, Mario De Caro, John Deigh, C. F. Delaney, Daniel C. Dennett, Michael R. DePaul, Michael Detlefsen, Daniel Trent Devereux, Philip E. Devine, John M. Dillon, Martin C. Dillon, Robert DiSalle, Mary Domski, Alan Donagan, Paul Draper, Fred Dretske, Mircea Dumitru, Wilhelm Dupré, Gerald Dworkin, John Earman, Ellery Eells, Catherine Z. Elgin, Berent Enç, Ronald P. Endicott, Edward Erwin, John Etchemendy, C. Stephen Evans, Susan L. Feagin, Solomon Feferman, Richard Feldman, Arthur Fine, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, William FitzPatrick, Richard E. Flathman, Gvozden Flego, Richard Foley, Graeme Forbes, Rainer Forst, Malcolm R. Forster, Daniel Fouke, Patrick Francken, Samuel Freeman, Elizabeth Fricker, Miranda Fricker, Michael Friedman, Michael Fuerstein, Richard A. Fumerton, Alan Gabbey, Pieranna Garavaso, Daniel Garber, Jorge L. A. Garcia, Robert K. Garcia, Don Garrett, Philip Gasper, Gerald Gaus, Berys Gaut, Bernard Gert, Roger F. Gibson, Cody Gilmore, Carl Ginet, Alan H. Goldman, Alvin I. Goldman, Alfonso Gömez-Lobo, Lenn E. Goodman, Robert M. Gordon, Stefan Gosepath, Jorge J. E. Gracia, Daniel W. Graham, George A. Graham, Peter J. Graham, Richard E. Grandy, I. Grattan-Guinness, John Greco, Philip T. Grier, Nicholas Griffin, Nicholas Griffin, David A. Griffiths, Paul J. Griffiths, Stephen R. Grimm, Charles L. Griswold, Charles B. Guignon, Pete A. Y. Gunter, Dimitri Gutas, Gary Gutting, Paul Guyer, Kwame Gyekye, Oscar A. Haac, Raul Hakli, Raul Hakli, Michael Hallett, Edward C. Halper, Jean Hampton, R. James Hankinson, K. R. Hanley, Russell Hardin, Robert M. Harnish, William Harper, David Harrah, Kevin Hart, Ali Hasan, William Hasker, John Haugeland, Roger Hausheer, William Heald, Peter Heath, Richard Heck, John F. Heil, Vincent F. Hendricks, Stephen Hetherington, Francis Heylighen, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Risto Hilpinen, Harold T. Hodes, Joshua Hoffman, Alan Holland, Robert L. Holmes, Richard Holton, Brad W. Hooker, Terence E. Horgan, Tamara Horowitz, Paul Horwich, Vittorio Hösle, Paul Hoβfeld, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Frances Howard-Snyder, Anne Hudson, Deal W. Hudson, Carl A. Huffman, David L. Hull, Patricia Huntington, Thomas Hurka, Paul Hurley, Rosalind Hursthouse, Guillermo Hurtado, Ronald E. Hustwit, Sarah Hutton, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Harry A. Ide, David Ingram, Philip J. Ivanhoe, Alfred L. Ivry, Frank Jackson, Dale Jacquette, Joseph Jedwab, Richard Jeffrey, David Alan Johnson, Edward Johnson, Mark D. Jordan, Richard Joyce, Hwa Yol Jung, Robert Hillary Kane, Tomis Kapitan, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, James A. Keller, Ralph Kennedy, Sergei Khoruzhii, Jaegwon Kim, Yersu Kim, Nathan L. King, Patricia Kitcher, Peter D. Klein, E. D. Klemke, Virginia Klenk, George L. Kline, Christian Klotz, Simo Knuuttila, Joseph J. Kockelmans, Konstantin Kolenda, Sebastian Tomasz Kołodziejczyk, Isaac Kramnick, Richard Kraut, Fred Kroon, Manfred Kuehn, Steven T. Kuhn, Henry E. Kyburg, John Lachs, Jennifer Lackey, Stephen E. Lahey, Andrea Lavazza, Thomas H. Leahey, Joo Heung Lee, Keith Lehrer, Dorothy Leland, Noah M. Lemos, Ernest LePore, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Isaac Levi, Andrew Levine, Alan E. Lewis, Daniel E. Little, Shu-hsien Liu, Shu-hsien Liu, Alan K. L. Chan, Brian Loar, Lawrence B. Lombard, John Longeway, Dominic McIver Lopes, Michael J. Loux, E. J. Lowe, Steven Luper, Eugene C. Luschei, William G. Lycan, David Lyons, David Macarthur, Danielle Macbeth, Scott MacDonald, Jacob L. Mackey, Louis H. Mackey, Penelope Mackie, Edward H. Madden, Penelope Maddy, G. B. Madison, Bernd Magnus, Pekka Mäkelä, Rudolf A. Makkreel, David Manley, William E. Mann (W.E.M.), Vladimir Marchenkov, Peter Markie, Jean-Pierre Marquis, Ausonio Marras, Mike W. Martin, A. P. Martinich, William L. McBride, David McCabe, Storrs McCall, Hugh J. McCann, Robert N. McCauley, John J. McDermott, Sarah McGrath, Ralph McInerny, Daniel J. McKaughan, Thomas McKay, Michael McKinsey, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ernan McMullin, Anthonie Meijers, Jack W. Meiland, William Jason Melanson, Alfred R. Mele, Joseph R. Mendola, Christopher Menzel, Michael J. Meyer, Christian B. Miller, David W. Miller, Peter Millican, Robert N. Minor, Phillip Mitsis, James A. Montmarquet, Michael S. Moore, Tim Moore, Benjamin Morison, Donald R. Morrison, Stephen J. Morse, Paul K. Moser, Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, Ian Mueller, James Bernard Murphy, Mark C. Murphy, Steven Nadler, Jan Narveson, Alan Nelson, Jerome Neu, Samuel Newlands, Kai Nielsen, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Carlos G. Noreña, Calvin G. Normore, David Fate Norton, Nikolaj Nottelmann, Donald Nute, David S. Oderberg, Steve Odin, Michael O’Rourke, Willard G. Oxtoby, Heinz Paetzold, George S. Pappas, Anthony J. Parel, Lydia Patton, R. P. Peerenboom, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Adriaan T. Peperzak, Derk Pereboom, Jaroslav Peregrin, Glen Pettigrove, Philip Pettit, Edmund L. Pincoffs, Andrew Pinsent, Robert B. Pippin, Alvin Plantinga, Louis P. Pojman, Richard H. Popkin, John F. Post, Carl J. Posy, William J. Prior, Richard Purtill, Michael Quante, Philip L. Quinn, Philip L. Quinn, Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, Diana Raffman, Gerard Raulet, Stephen L. Read, Andrews Reath, Andrew Reisner, Nicholas Rescher, Henry S. Richardson, Robert C. Richardson, Thomas Ricketts, Wayne D. Riggs, Mark Roberts, Robert C. Roberts, Luke Robinson, Alexander Rosenberg, Gary Rosenkranz, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Adina L. Roskies, William L. Rowe, T. M. Rudavsky, Michael Ruse, Bruce Russell, Lilly-Marlene Russow, Dan Ryder, R. M. Sainsbury, Joseph Salerno, Nathan Salmon, Wesley C. Salmon, Constantine Sandis, David H. Sanford, Marco Santambrogio, David Sapire, Ruth A. Saunders, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Charles Sayward, James P. Scanlan, Richard Schacht, Tamar Schapiro, Frederick F. Schmitt, Jerome B. Schneewind, Calvin O. Schrag, Alan D. Schrift, George F. Schumm, Jean-Loup Seban, David N. Sedley, Kenneth Seeskin, Krister Segerberg, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Dennis M. Senchuk, James F. Sennett, William Lad Sessions, Stewart Shapiro, Tommie Shelby, Donald W. Sherburne, Christopher Shields, Roger A. Shiner, Sydney Shoemaker, Robert K. Shope, Kwong-loi Shun, Wilfried Sieg, A. John Simmons, Robert L. Simon, Marcus G. Singer, Georgette Sinkler, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Matti T. Sintonen, Lawrence Sklar, Brian Skyrms, Robert C. Sleigh, Michael Anthony Slote, Hans Sluga, Barry Smith, Michael Smith, Robin Smith, Robert Sokolowski, Robert C. Solomon, Marta Soniewicka, Philip Soper, Ernest Sosa, Nicholas Southwood, Paul Vincent Spade, T. L. S. Sprigge, Eric O. Springsted, George J. Stack, Rebecca Stangl, Jason Stanley, Florian Steinberger, Sören Stenlund, Christopher Stephens, James P. Sterba, Josef Stern, Matthias Steup, M. A. Stewart, Leopold Stubenberg, Edith Dudley Sulla, Frederick Suppe, Jere Paul Surber, David George Sussman, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, Zeno G. Swijtink, Richard Swinburne, Charles C. Taliaferro, Robert B. Talisse, John Tasioulas, Paul Teller, Larry S. Temkin, Mark Textor, H. S. Thayer, Peter Thielke, Alan Thomas, Amie L. Thomasson, Katherine Thomson-Jones, Joshua C. Thurow, Vzalerie Tiberius, Terrence N. Tice, Paul Tidman, Mark C. Timmons, William Tolhurst, James E. Tomberlin, Rosemarie Tong, Lawrence Torcello, Kelly Trogdon, J. D. Trout, Robert E. Tully, Raimo Tuomela, John Turri, Martin M. Tweedale, Thomas Uebel, Jennifer Uleman, James Van Cleve, Harry van der Linden, Peter van Inwagen, Bryan W. Van Norden, René van Woudenberg, Donald Phillip Verene, Samantha Vice, Thomas Vinci, Donald Wayne Viney, Barbara Von Eckardt, Peter B. M. Vranas, Steven J. Wagner, William J. Wainwright, Paul E. Walker, Robert E. Wall, Craig Walton, Douglas Walton, Eric Watkins, Richard A. Watson, Michael V. Wedin, Rudolph H. Weingartner, Paul Weirich, Paul J. Weithman, Carl Wellman, Howard Wettstein, Samuel C. Wheeler, Stephen A. White, Jennifer Whiting, Edward R. Wierenga, Michael Williams, Fred Wilson, W. Kent Wilson, Kenneth P. Winkler, John F. Wippel, Jan Woleński, Allan B. Wolter, Nicholas P. Wolterstorff, Rega Wood, W. Jay Wood, Paul Woodruff, Alison Wylie, Gideon Yaffe, Takashi Yagisawa, Yutaka Yamamoto, Keith E. Yandell, Xiaomei Yang, Dean Zimmerman, Günter Zoller, Catherine Zuckert, Michael Zuckert, Jack A. Zupko (J.A.Z.)
- Edited by Robert Audi, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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- The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
- Published online:
- 05 August 2015
- Print publication:
- 27 April 2015, pp ix-xxx
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39 - AIDS Literatures
- from Part VI - Genres of the Present
- Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
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- The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
- Published online:
- 18 December 2014
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- 17 November 2014, pp 712-732
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Summary
Queer characters became increasingly visible in literary fiction, taking starring roles in novels by a range of writers, including Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Angus Wilson, James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, Jane Rule, and Maureen Duffy. From the 1950s, a range of fiction and nonfiction books on queer subjects were available as cheap paperbacks. After 1970, gay and lesbian fiction has been constituted as a genre. Queer fiction since Stonewall, in its heterogeneity, has reflected the heterogeneity of queer identities, culture, and politics. The most challenging of 1970s lesbian novels, Bertha Harris's Lover, assembles a fantastical cast of magical women. Over the next two decades American gay male fiction transformed itself from a field of isolated figures to a crowded scene. Queer identities are accommodated in a world more tolerant than that portrayed in radical fiction of the post-Stonewall period.
Contributors
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- By Harriette Andreadis, Abdulhamit Arvas, GerShun Avilez, Brian James Baer, Thomas Bauer, David Bergman, Brinda Bose, Michael Bronski, Steven Bruhm, Christopher Castiglia, Merrill Cole, Peter Coviello, Sara Danius, Tim Dean, Philippe C. Dubois, Chris Dunton, Elisa Glick, Jonathan Goldberg, Helena Gurfinkel, Neville Hoad, Thomas K. Hubbard, AnaLouise Keating, Eric Keenaghan, David DeCosta Leitao, Karma Lochrie, E. L. McCallum, Lisa O’Connell, David L. Orvis, Gema Pérez-Sánchez, Jay Reed, Robert Reid-Pharr, Steven Ruszczycky, Darieck Scott, Patricia Sieber, Hugh Stevens, Lisa Tatonetti, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Robert Tobin, Eric L. Tribunella, Mikko Tuhkanen, Sherry Velasco, Giovanni Vitiello, Sara Warner
- Edited by E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University, Mikko Tuhkanen, Texas A & M University
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- The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature
- Published online:
- 18 December 2014
- Print publication:
- 17 November 2014, pp xi-xii
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Contributors
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- By Gregory A. Aarons, Nick Axford, Frances Wallace Bailey, Judith Bennett, Karen A. Blase, James Boyle, Tracey Bywater, Linda L. Caldwell, Jeanne Century, Anne Michelle Daniels, Thomas J. Dishion, Celene E. Domitrovich, Morgaen Donaldson, Glen Dunlap, Carl J. Dunst, Melissa Van Dyke, Dean L. Fixsen, Tamsin Ford, Lise Fox, Cassie Freeman, Robyn M. Gillies, Amy E. Green, Mark T. Greenberg, Violet H. Harada, Tim Hobbs, Cindy Huang, Robert J. Illback, Barbara Kelly, Kathryn Margolis, Elizabeth Miller, Dana T. Mitra, Jeremy J. Monsen, Julia E. Moore, Louise Morpeth, Barbara Neufeld, Colleen K. Reutebuch, Mollie Rudnick, Robert Savage, Robert E. Slavin, Elizabeth A. Stormshack, Phillip Strain, Keith J. Topping, Carol M. Trivette, Sharon Vaughn, Janet A. Welsh, Lisa Marks Woolfson, Joyce Yukawa
- Edited by Barbara Kelly, University of Strathclyde, Daniel F. Perkins, Pennsylvania State University
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- Handbook of Implementation Science for Psychology in Education
- Published online:
- 05 November 2012
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- 20 August 2012, pp xi-xiv
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4 - The erotics of transgression
- from Part I - Repression and Legitimation
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- By Tim Dean
- Edited by Hugh Stevens, University College London
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- The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing
- Published online:
- 28 January 2011
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- 25 November 2010, pp 65-80
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Summary
“O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog, / Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached / By time and the elements; but there is a line / You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it / Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses / Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast. / The bottom of the sea is cruel. ” / A vivid warning about transgression, these lines by the modern American poet Hart Crane conclude the initial poem of 'Voyages', a lyric sequence inspired by his maritime lover Emil Opffer. The penalty for crossing the line here is death, figured as an ineluctable embrace by the sea, whose 'caresses' represent a fatal union. Yet the poemdoes exactly what it warns against, with its strongly enjambed syntax luring readers across the line before we're aware of the transgression ('but there is a line / You must not cross'). As the heavy caesurae of the stanza's opening lines give way to the enjambment of those that follow, so the innocent, earth-bound identities are overtaken by the dark dissolution of the sea. The boundary that is crossed not only separates one line of poetry from another but also divides shore from sea, innocence from experience, childhood from adulthood and this world from the next. The 'line / You must not cross' thus suggests an ontological limit as well as a formal division.
Sex and the Aesthetics of Existence
- Tim Dean
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- Journal:
- PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America / Volume 125 / Issue 2 / March 2010
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 23 October 2020, pp. 387-392
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- March 2010
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Leo Bersani's contributions to Queer Theory have been essentially traumatic. Ever since “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” with its startling opening sentence (“There is a big secret about sex: most people don't like it” [197]), Bersani's writing on sexuality has disrupted the conceptual coordinates of queer theory, a field that officially welcomes the disruptive. What has made Bersani hard to assimilate is less his psychoanalytic emphasis on the ineluctable masochism of sexuality (a principal reason for the aversion to sex) than his insistent conceptualization of sexuality in aesthetic terms. Although his work has never shied from the rebarbative aspects of erotic life, it is, in fact, Bersani's speculations about relationality as irreducibly aesthetic that have proved tougher for the field of queer theory to countenance. (Queer theorists take sexual variance in stride; we have a harder time dealing with art.) It is not merely that Bersani draws examples from literature, painting, sculpture, and cinema when discussing erotic relationality. More fundamentally, his earlier work claimed that art has effects on the human subject akin to those of sexuality, while his later writing proposes a specifically aesthetic subjectivity—rather than the sexual kind—as the preferred basis for relating to the world beyond the self.
The Antisocial Homosexual
- Tim Dean
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- Journal:
- PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America / Volume 121 / Issue 3 / May 2006
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 23 October 2020, pp. 826-828
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- May 2006
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Chapter 2 - T. S. Eliot, famous clairvoyante
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- By Tim Dean, Teaches in the English department and the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture University of Buffalo (SUNY)
- Edited by Cassandra Laity, Drew University, New Jersey, Nancy K. Gish, University of Southern Maine
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- Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot
- Published online:
- 22 September 2009
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- 28 October 2004, pp 43-65
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Eliot, the smoothy whose whole career was an inside job, demands to be unmasked: his Englishness should be torn aside, his courtesy revealed as cowardice, and, above all, the coolness and distance of his verse reread as a front for emotional torment and the hiss of racial spite. Anyone who announces, as Eliot did, that poetry is an escape from personality can expect, now more than ever, to have his personality ripped open like a fox.
Does modernist aesthetic theory amount to more than a set of masks that criticism must tear away? Certainly it isn't hard to see how the doctrine of impersonality bolsters claims for aesthetic disinterestedness – claims that have been thoroughly demystified to reveal the self-interest and special pleading that lie underneath. The modernist ideal of art's autonomy has been regarded skeptically for several decades now, following the suspicion that it rationalizes various forms of dissimulation. The critic's job is to discover what, in any given case, this aesthetic ideology is being employed to disguise. Since T. S. Eliot had so much to hide – a disastrous marriage, his near-phobic hatred of women, the faint but unmistakable hint of sexual deviancy, along with the expatriate's standard insecurities about fitting in, not to mention his anti-Semitism and racialist bigotries – recent critics have found plenty to expose.
14 - Lacan and queer theory
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- By Tim Dean
- Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Lacan
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2003, pp 238-252
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Lacan died before queer theory came into existence, though he surely would have engaged this new discourse - as he engaged so many others - had he lived to know about it. His psychoanalytic critique of ego psychology and of adaptation to social norms shares much in common with queer theory's political critique of social processes of normalization. Indeed, while queer theory traces its intellectual genealogy to Michel Foucault, it can be argued that queer theory actually begins with Freud, specifically, with his theories of polymorphous perversity, infantile sexuality, and the unconscious. Lacan's “return to Freud” involves rediscovering all that is most strange and refractory - all that remains foreign to our normal, commonsensical ways of thinking - about human subjectivity. Thus from an Anglo-American perspective, Lacan makes psychoanalysis look rather queer. By virtue of its flouting norms of all kinds (including norms of intelligibility), Lacanian psychoanalysis may provide handy ammunition for queer theory's critique of what has come to be known as heteronormativity.
The term “heteronormativity” designates all those ways in which the world makes sense from a heterosexual point of view. It assumes that a complementary relation between the sexes is both a natural arrangement (the way things are) and a cultural ideal (the way things should be). Queer theory analyses how heteronormativity structures the meaningfulness of the social world, thereby enforcing a hierarchy between the normal and the deviant or queer. In its understanding of how the categories of normal and pathological emerge in a mutually constitutive relation, queer theory draws on Foucault’s revisionary account of modern power and, more specifically, on Georges Canguilhem’s critical histories of nosology.
The Decrease in Submissions to PMLA
- Tim Dean
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- Journal:
- PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America / Volume 116 / Issue 3 / May 2001
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 23 October 2020, pp. 651-652
- Print publication:
- May 2001
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