The Erotic: 2005 Conference Session 1

Session 1: Erotic and Politics
Chair: Jones Irwin

The Erotic and the Nation State
Anna McHugh
University College, Oxford, United Kingdom

This paper will propose that the recent resurgence of academic interest in the Erotic is paralleled by the emergence of a new type of political conservatism. Popularly dubbed “neo-conservatives”, many members of the new Right advocate censorship of pornography and obscenity. Such censorship is part of their evocation of classical models of democracy, where the virtue of self-government is integral to the moral worth and personal discipline of the people to be governed. Several prominent neo-conservatives have suggested that censorship of the pornographic and the obscene is not incompatible with a democracy because they degrade the humanity of those involved, reducing them to an infantile state. People in a democracy, they argue, must ensure that they are not governed by the infantile and irrational parts of themselves.
Conversely, neoconservative literature is aware of the difference between the pornographic, which degrades humanity and makes people unfit to be citizens, and the Erotic. With its “carefree sensuality”, the Erotic celebrates the capacity to make and maintain mature relationships, thus elevating the individual and making them worthy to participate in a mature, democratic state. Censorship of the pornographic and affirmation of the erotic are two faces of the neo-conservatives’ perspective on democracy, and its role as the estate of mature, responsible citizens alone. Treatment of the erotic is a benchmark of a state’s particular model of democracy and its understanding of the humanity of its citizens. Questions connected to this topic include: the possibility of erotic life in a conservative ethos; definitions of the erotic and neo-conservative heuristic models; the erotic life of the private and public citizen; and the vexed question of censorship – is the promise that self-government limits governmental intrusion for real, or a Machiavellian manoeuvre by the new Right?

The Erotic Imagination: Visual Technologies and Social Change in Egypt and India
Sumita Chakravarty
New School University , New York , USA

This paper explores the concept of the erotic as a way to understand and chart a history of the non-West's relationship to visual technologies. Drawing on evidence of the reception of photography and cinema in nineteenth-century and early twentieth century India and Egypt , my aim is to develop an analytical framework whereby the erotic is linked to perceptions of self and society in the throes of change. The displacement of older forms of artistic and discursive representation by the modern visual media found expression through a mixture of hope and fear, dread and desire in which women and their sexuality were often, though not exclusively, made to bear the burden of the "disfigurements" of modernity. Paradoxically, Western industrial and media technologies were appropriated and used as tools to critique society itself. The erotic takes on a deeper significance as it links the techniques of vision to political structures and historical forces.
The broader theoretical aim of the essay (and of the project of which it is a part) is to clarify the relationship between the erotic, the sensuous and the visual. Some underlying questions are: What happens when one "regime of perception" is overlaid by another? How do forms of representation change and with what social effects? These questions have recently become crucial with the rapid dissemination of new media technologies and their differential global impact. Yet too much emphasis has been placed on the economic and organizational aspects of new media in "traditional" societies. There are no studies at all that place these media in a historical continuum and in a cultural context, not to speak of comparative frameworks of analysis. In my research I have found the erotic to be a powerful lens with which to begin to understand the ways in which technological forces are grasped and articulated.

Visions of Sadomasochism as a Fascist Erotic
Alison M. Moore
Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland, Australia

Contemporary sadomasochists in the Western world have received both open and implied criticism for their use of an erotic deemed reminiscent of Nazism. Such accusations have been made by American radical feminist critics and anti-pornography campaigners, by right-wing literature scholars, by historians of Nazi sexuality and, most famously, by the contemporary cultural critic Susan Sontag in her analysis of American gay SM/leather culture as an extension of the aesthetic allure of the cinema of Leni Riefenstahl, asking: ‘How could a regime that persecuted gay men become a gay turn on?’ But this paper will argue that the myth of SM as Fascist is frequently based upon historically inaccurate assumptions about National Socialist sexual politics, assuming the Nazis to have been predominantly bisexual or homosexual, perverse and sadomasochistic, or drawing upon ill-informed stereotypes of sadomasochistic desire as a repetition of real-life violence and abuse. Aside from those who directly criticise sadomasochistic practices as fascistic, there is also the broader level at which connections have been drawn between the two across a variety of cultural media, in Holocaust historiography, in Hollywood and in Italian neo-realist cinema, and in pulp pornography of the nineteen-seventies. There are important implications of this for sadomasochist eroticism: The Fascism slur constitutes a new form of pathologisation that links sadomasochism to the Nazi past, hence promoting societal confusion about the consensuality of SM play. But also, in associating SM with the ultimate non-consensual evil, the Nazi-perversion mythos may be productive to sadomasochistic fantasies that rely on a parody of non-consent and on a celebration of thanatotic and/or hyper-masculinist excess.



2nd Global Conference Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers
Session 1: Erotic and Politics Chair: Jones Irwin The Erotic and the Nation State Anna McHugh University College, Oxford, United Kingdom This paper will propose that the recent resurgence of academic interest in the Erotic is paralleled by the emergence of a new type of political conservatism. Popularly dubbed “neo-conservatives”, many members of the new Right advocate censorship of pornography and obscenity. Such censorship is part of their evocation of classical models of democracy, where the virtue of self-government is integral to the moral worth and personal discipline of the people to be governed. Several prominent neo-conservatives have suggested that censorship of the pornographic and the obscene is not incompatible with a democracy because they degrade the humanity of those involved, reducing them to an infantile state. People in a democracy, they argue, must ensure that they are not governed by the infantile and irrational parts of themselves. Conversely, neoconservative literature is aware of the difference between the pornographic, which degrades humanity and makes people unfit to be citizens, and the Erotic. With its “carefree sensuality”, the Erotic celebrates the capacity to make and maintain mature relationships, thus elevating the individual and making them worthy to participate in a mature, democratic state. Censorship of the pornographic and affirmation of the erotic are two faces of the neo-conservatives’ perspective on democracy, and its role as the estate of mature, responsible citizens alone. Treatment of the erotic is a benchmark of a state’s particular model of democracy and its understanding of the humanity of its citizens. Questions connected to this topic include: the possibility of erotic life in a conservative ethos; definitions of the erotic and neo-conservative heuristic models; the erotic life of the private and public citizen; and the vexed question of censorship – is the promise that self-government limits governmental intrusion for real, or a Machiavellian manoeuvre by the new Right? The Erotic Imagination: Visual Technologies and Social Change in Egypt and India Sumita Chakravarty New School University , New York , USA This paper explores the concept of the erotic as a way to understand and chart a history of the non-West's relationship to visual technologies. Drawing on evidence of the reception of photography and cinema in nineteenth-century and early twentieth century India and Egypt , my aim is to develop an analytical framework whereby the erotic is linked to perceptions of self and society in the throes of change. The displacement of older forms of artistic and discursive representation by the modern visual media found expression through a mixture of hope and fear, dread and desire in which women and their sexuality were often, though not exclusively, made to bear the burden of the "disfigurements" of modernity. Paradoxically, Western industrial and media technologies were appropriated and used as tools to critique society itself. The erotic takes on a deeper significance as it links the techniques of vision to political structures and historical forces. The broader theoretical aim of the essay (and of the project of which it is a part) is to clarify the relationship between the erotic, the sensuous and the visual. Some underlying questions are: What happens when one "regime of perception" is overlaid by another? How do forms of representation change and with what social effects? These questions have recently become crucial with the rapid dissemination of new media technologies and their differential global impact. Yet too much emphasis has been placed on the economic and organizational aspects of new media in "traditional" societies. There are no studies at all that place these media in a historical continuum and in a cultural context, not to speak of comparative frameworks of analysis. In my research I have found the erotic to be a powerful lens with which to begin to understand the ways in which technological forces are grasped and articulated. Visions of Sadomasochism as a Fascist Erotic Alison M. Moore Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland, Australia Contemporary sadomasochists in the Western world have received both open and implied criticism for their use of an erotic deemed reminiscent of Nazism. Such accusations have been made by American radical feminist critics and anti-pornography campaigners, by right-wing literature scholars, by historians of Nazi sexuality and, most famously, by the contemporary cultural critic Susan Sontag in her analysis of American gay SM/leather culture as an extension of the aesthetic allure of the cinema of Leni Riefenstahl, asking: ‘How could a regime that persecuted gay men become a gay turn on?’ But this paper will argue that the myth of SM as Fascist is frequently based upon historically inaccurate assumptions about National Socialist sexual politics, assuming the Nazis to have been predominantly bisexual or homosexual, perverse and sadomasochistic, or drawing upon ill-informed stereotypes of sadomasochistic desire as a repetition of real-life violence and abuse. Aside from those who directly criticise sadomasochistic practices as fascistic, there is also the broader level at which connections have been drawn between the two across a variety of cultural media, in Holocaust historiography, in Hollywood and in Italian neo-realist cinema, and in pulp pornography of the nineteen-seventies. There are important implications of this for sadomasochist eroticism: The Fascism slur constitutes a new form of pathologisation that links sadomasochism to the Nazi past, hence promoting societal confusion about the consensuality of SM play. But also, in associating SM with the ultimate non-consensual evil, the Nazi-perversion mythos may be productive to sadomasochistic fantasies that rely on a parody of non-consent and on a celebration of thanatotic and/or hyper-masculinist excess.