1st Global Conference
Tuesday 20th March - Thursday 22nd March 2007 |
Session 11: Liminal Intimacies
Chair: Rob Fisher
Disarticulations: Love, Language and Knowledge in contemporary
retellings of the Bluebeard tale
Lucy
Butler
University of Melbourne, Australia
This paper reads Jane Campion’s film In the Cut as
an example of the way in which contemporary female writers and filmmakers
are using the Bluebeard tale to critique the relation of
romantic love to language and knowledge. In these works, Bluebeard’s
central image – a chamber of dismembered female corpses – evokes
not only the repeated failure of the romantic ideal, but a broader
collapse of language and meaning.
Redeploying the
tropes of concealment, violation, and revelation at the “heart” of
the Bluebeard tale, Campion’s
film probes the problematic relation of romantic love to knowledge. A
cultural mythology which encourages the idea of total fulfillment in the experience
of romantic love reduces the loved object to an aspect of the imagined completion
of the self. When one’s identity is staked in one’s idea
of the other, it becomes both imperative and impossible to penetrate the other’s
most private yet sought after self. The fundamental otherness of the
loved object and the slipperiness of language make the romantic ideal of absolute
unity desirable and untenable: the effect is the destabilising of the lover’s
identity, and love thus becomes defined by the anxiety it provokes. Bluebeard,
in its contemporary incarnations, testifies to the self-defeating violence
inherent in the impossible demand for total disclosure which characterizes
the prevailing narrative of romantic love.
Disturbing Intimacies: The Micro-Politics of Interviewing the Embodiment
of Political Evil
Alejandro
Cervantes-Carson
Department of Sociology & Anthropology,
University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, VA, USA
No abstract is presently available
Tell It like It Is: The Importance
of Acknowledging Love as a Component of Abnormal Sexuality
David
White
Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary, Canada
Edward Albee's play, The Goat, presents a portrait of a normal, well-adjusted, successful, happily married man who falls in love with an animal. The play is remarkable because it challenges not just the limits of the characters' and the audience's ability to tolerate the violation of social norms, it challenges our ability to believe that real love knows no bounds. With paraphilias generally the way to understand them is usually described in terms of sexual desire and mental illness. The idea that real love might be just as significantly a part of the story is typically disbelieved and thus dismissed out of hand. Insofar as it ever is considered possible, it is typically thought to be irrelevant to the important questions of how to protect children and animals from sexual abuse and exploitation. But there is a growing body of evidence suggesting – particularly in the case of paedophilia and zoophilia – that acknowledging the feelings of romantic love some people have for children or animals is just as important to understanding these phenomena as the sexual attraction is. There also are strong reasons to believe that unless we develop a better and more sophisticated understanding of the nature of paedophilia and zoophilia – including the importance of feelings of romantic love that form a part of these attractions – our ability to deal with people who have these attractions will remain inadequate and, as a result, more children and animals will remain at a greater risk for sexual abuse. Additionally, the denial of the reality of sincere feelings of love paedophiles can have for children can result in significant harms being inadvertently inflicted on children when providing them with support and treatment after they have been sexually involved with an adult. Taking up Albee's challenge, then, is crucial both to our ability to prevent abuse and to mitigate its harm when it happens