Session 4: Sexual Representations I
6th Global Conference
Tuesday 10th November – Thursday 12th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria
Spatial Sexualities: The Private, the Social, and the Distinctively Deadly in Othello on Screen
Eleni Pilla
Northern Arizona University, Arizona, USA
In Shakespeare’s early modern domestic tragedy of Othello the bedroom articulates a complex form of spatial sexuality. Othello kills his wife on their marital bed “else she’ll betray more men” (5.2.6) and then commits suicide when he discovers that he has wrongfully murdered her. With the technological resources at their disposal, modern film directors can present sexuality spatially in innovative ways when adapting Shakespeare’s play for the screen.
Concentrating on the configuration of the bedroom in Oliver Parker’s erotic thriller (1995), this paper explores the complex interweaving of sexuality and space. The paper demonstrates how spatial sexualities are constructed through the interpenetration of a myriad of discourses relating to identity, authority, hegemony, gender, race and sexuality. The analysis highlights how Parker’s erotic thriller constructs a distinctive spatial sexuality relevant to the genre of the film. The paper will end by putting forward how the debates established through the dialogue between sexuality and space are not resolved at the end of this cinematic adaptation of Othello.
Download Draft Conference Paper
Feminine but Macho too. Erotic Reshaping of the Self in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album
Ilaria Ricci
University of Udine, Italy
Hanif Kureishi’s second novel, The Black Album, freely portrays sexual behaviours such as pornography, casual sex under the effect of drugs, abstinence and masturbation highlighting the social as well as private dimension of sexuality. This essay, focusing on the sexual relationship between Shahid Hasan and Deedee Osgood, attempts to demonstrate how Shahid comes to accept the fluid, mongrelized condition of both the self and contemporary society at large through his own erotic reshaping.
The Black Album, set in 1989 and named after a Prince album, draws parallels between Shahid and Prince, Deedee and Madonna. By scrutinising the furore around The Satanic Verses in context of these two icons of pop, Kureishi explores power, censorship and pornography and shows how attitudes to violence and attitudes to sex are not unrelated. While sexual deprivation, represented through the characters of the Muslim Brothers, can lead the repressed to violence, pornography can be seen as a mode of playing with and thus subverting phallic power.
Sexual role reversal is central to Shahid and Deedee’s relationship. Not tied to either sex’s stereotypical role, they accept the eroticism involved in the wrestling for male and female power and lose the didacticism of gender politics. Deedee and Shahid become much more dynamic lovers. Sexual fantasy and political role reversal coexist. The sexual fantasy involves the same sort of gender-bending that Shahid admires in the persona of Prince. Putting women’s makeup on and cross dressing as a woman is a ludic experiment of reinvention of the body, while sex on stage is transposed to the stage of life. London becomes a liminal space for transformative theatrical display where Shahid and Deedee can re-invent their bodies, desires and lust.
It is through the power of a free, uninhibited, creative and fluid sexuality that Shahid finds his own identity and develops his talent as a writer.
Deconstructing sexual identities in Daniel MacIvor ’s A Beautiful View
Michaela Pnacekova
Department of English and American Studies, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
In A Beautiful View the main theme is a relationship between two women through which feminine gender and homosexuality are addressed. This main theme becomes essentially the plot of the play, and as it develops the two protagonists enact various scenes from their relationship from the beginning to the end, e.g. the first encounter, first love-making, first fight etc. It can be said that the two characters – Liz and Mitch ‘perform’ a show about their relationship.
However, the relationship itself becomes gradually a problem; it is sabotaged by the pressure of defining it as well as the pressure of defining one’s own sexual identity, which is constructed via language here. Yet, does the refusal of defining and labeling sexual identity deconstruct the concept itself? The paper will focus on linguistic features in the dramatic text that deal with sexual identities and their labeling as well as on its interaction with heteronormative discourse or ‘heterosexual matrix’ in Butler’s words, which essentially becomes the reason for the characters’ break-up.
The paper looks into the way the characters’ relationship is indexed in their language as well as the (de)construction of their sexual identities by the refusal to label them. Linguistically, labels are a form of deixis – they point to the context. Thus, the context becomes a crucial factor in constructing sexual identity. Here, this context is termed heteronormative discourse. The denial of naming one’s relationship as well as one’s own sexual identity means de-contextualizing it in order to get rid of the original connotative meanings of the heteronormative discourse.
The paper will be focused on the conversational level of the dramatic text (speech acts), and in order to examine the deconstruction of sexual identities, theory of indexicality and language performativity theory will be used.
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