Sexualities

In the USA today, the election of gay bishops threatens to bring about a schism in the Episcopalian Church. This article asks questions about the extraordinary importance attached to matters sexual, both historically and in the present. Laqueur's anthropological answer to this broad question is that it is connected with a long and divergent tradition of thinking about the origins of culture. Sex and death, he says, organize the work of making culture. The thematic occasion for the history presented here is the notion of 'orgasm', and Laqueur offers four or five dates which can be regarded as turning points in the long history of 'allegories of orgasm'.

In Solitary Sex, Thomas Laqueur adopts a position that might be called constructivist but not discursivist. He does not speak, as historians with an allegiance to Foucault's work often do, of 'invention', but argues that masturbation was 'something that had been perfectly well understood since Antiquity, even if it was variously classified and named'. The thing was there already: the word, and any change in words, came later. This article asks some questions about what it might mean for the history of sexuality to talk about unnamed things, missing words, or absent expressions. The examples are taken from the history of frigidity, as an attempt to trace the problematic absence of a name, and the name of a problematic absence.

This article provides an analysis of the role played by competing conceptions of pleasure in European cultural politics during the 18th century. Beginning with the `onanism' panic, which gripped western Europe in 1712, and with the apparent paradox that new concern about masturbation developed at a time when the pursuit of pleasure was increasingly legitimized in intellectual discourse, this article suggests that the panic can be understood as part of a wider process. This was a process in which a legitimization of pleasure was accompanied by a series of battles to define the concept in more socially useful ways. These battles can be traced across a range of literary fields from theology and aesthetics to physiology and political and moral theory.

When Lallemand coined the term spermatorrhée in the first volume of Des pertes séminales involontaires (1838), an earlier discourse on 'seminal weakness' was transformed into something new: a recognizable and treatable medical disorder, with its own specific aetiology and nosology. To the symptoms of seminal weakness — blushing, crying, breathlessness, melancholy, lack of confidence and extreme sensitivity — were added symptoms such as spermatozoa in the urine detectable only with the use of new, microscopic medical technologies. While the spermatorrhoea epidemic thus reflects an increased anxiety about male fluidity at this time, it also produced a profound change in the practice and organization of medicine. The flourishing of 'quack' doctors in this area forced licensed physicians to incorporate treatment of sexual disorders and diseases within general practice, while new legislation regulated the medical profession itself.

How important is a new word for the development of newly imagined sexual pathology? In the case of the neologism 'sadism' at the fin de siècle, this invention was strangely both pivotal and incidental. Tracking sexual concepts, as Laqueur does for masturbation, requires that the neologisms invented at precise historic moments be both recontextualized in relation to earlier discourses, and problematized as stable constructs in their ongoing development. This article is a genealogical sketch of this kind in relation to 'sadism', as part of a larger inquiry into how this sexual construct became available to the Frankfurt School philosophers and as an explanation for Nazi genocidal cruelty.

In recent years there has been a cultural-scientific shift in the ways in which ageing and sexuality are represented. This has been most notable in the popular media where the predominant portrayal of asexual old age is increasingly accompanied by newer images of the 'sexy oldie'. While this shift counters conventional stereotypes of the asexual and disengaged elderly, the implications for seniors of such a change have not yet been adequately researched. Do senior viewers read images of sexy oldies as a challenge to traditional framings of older people as not sexually desirable, desirous, or capable? Do such portrayals disrupt the 'unwatchability' of elderly bodies and sexuality? This article draws on material from a reception study of seniors' readings of the film The Mother (2003) and focuses on the tensions and contradictions within and between the responses of focus groups of men and women (aged 49—85). In particular, I explore the ways in which some female participants' affective responses of 'disgust' to a filmic image of a naked, sexually active woman in her 60s, work to reconstitute it as 'unwatchable'.

This article considers the theme of the Channel 4 show 'Playing It Straight' (2005), a variation on the 'dating show' genre in which a female contestant must select the man of her dreams from 10 suitors. However, the twist in the show's format is that not all of the men are heterosexually identified. The article contends that the show's narrative is not homophobic but effeminophobic. Second, the article analyses how the show positions all the male contestants, both gay and straight, within the matrix of New Lad style homosocial bonding. Finally, the article considers how the show mobilises one of the dominant cultural themes in contemporary popular culture: the 'safe eroticism' or 'queer' friendship that can develop between a straight woman and a gay identified man.