USB Journals (Univ. Köln)
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Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the editorial:
Alyssa Milano\u27s #MeToo twitter appeal (October 15, 2017) to women, to publicly speak out about experiences of sexual harassment and assault, powerfully foregrounded the persistence of patriarchal structures, particularly in the workplace, and its misogynist implications on a global scale. Initially connected to the entertainment industry, the movement spread to disclose harassment and assault in religious and educational institutions, as well as in the financial industry and in politics, exposing the pervasive impact/use of sexualized violence; misuse of positions of power in all social sectors against those in (financial) dependency (in work situations) and against all those who threaten to disturb the heteronormative order, including women, men, and LGBTQ*
“This book is dedicated to my tattooist”: Corporeal Inscriptions as Écriture féminine in Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless
No full textThis article reads Kathy Acker’s 1988 novel Empire of the Senseless in relation to écriture féminine as a specific form of text production. Acker puts French feminist Hélène Cixous’s theory to practice, thus offering a strategy of writing that challenges binarisms and the normative imperatives of a patriarchal order. Writing becomes a productive form of resistance and reinvention, not only on an abstract intertextual meta level, but as a very physical activity: the liberating potential that Cixous and Acker locate in the process of women’s writing is played out in Kathy Acker’s écriture in the motif of tattooing. Writing the body is enacted by writing on the body as a way of negotiating women’s ‘imprisonment’ in a phallocratic culture working to erase its spiritual, corporeal, and political boundaries
Queer Youth Literature Within the Context of the Evolving Recognition of Human Rights
No full textWhile law and literature written for adults is a long-established field, there is a paucity of research focusing on texts written for young people. Even more so, however, is a dearth in research on texts with queer characters and how those texts connect with the latter. My work aims to understand the relationship between law and youth literature’s representations of queer identities. This article provides a literature review of these emerging areas, connecting them with debates surrounding Section 28 legislation in the UK, a law that was spurred by queer children’s literature and which effectively silenced queer identities in schools and libraries across the UK. Finally, this article offers possible pathways forward
Same-sex Families and New Parental Models: Redefining Motherhood and Fatherhood Through Children’s Picture Books
No full textFamily is one of the most common and influential topics in children’s literature. However, depictions of families with non-traditional gender dynamics are still not common in picturebooks addressed to young audiences. In particular, fathers and mothers rarely counteract their gender roles; they usually fulfil socially constructed expectations linked to masculinity and femininity. Parental models are particularly influential in children’s construction of gender identity. For this reason, it is fundamental to promote inclusive children’s literature. This paper explores a selection of children’s picturebooks from different countries in which where new parental gender dynamics are presented. The depiction of gender standards will be related to family structures: children’s literature on same-sex families seems to be particularly effective in counteracting gender stereotypes linked to fatherhood and motherhood challenging traditional family structures and parental gender norms
Reviewing Pornography: Asserting Sexual Agency on Girls on Porn
No full textCan pornography ever be an ethical expression of sexuality? Laura and Rachel, hosts of the podcast Girls on Porn (2019-), participate in this ongoing discourse by reviewing professional and amateur pornographic videos on their podcast. Their aim is to help their listenership find ethical pornography and, in the course of reviewing a selection of pornographic content each episode, to explicitly subvert expectations about mainstream pornography by primarily focussing on the performance of women’s sexual pleasure. The podcast makes use of the popular format of the “chumcast” shows—podcasts that thrive on the casual conversation and easy banter of their hosts (cf. McHugh). The popularity of this format may be explained by the unique affordances of the podcast medium, heightening feelings of intimacy, authenticity and embodiment (Llinares, Berry and Meserko). This article explores how the podcast medium’s aural form impacts the hosts’ assertion of their sexual agency in their commentary of the pornographic videos they watch as well as in the negotiation of their personal erotic experiences. The affordances of the podcast allow the hosts and their diverse guests to affirm their sexual agency and express their erotic fantasies in a safe space by providing an intimate atmosphere that prompts a paradoxical sense of anonymity as well as a parasocial connection to their listenership. Importantly, it also enables the hosts to mediate the pornography they watch through an aural-only medium which allows a distance to the visuality of pornographic videos which overwhelmingly relies on the objectification of female bodies
Basic Instinct with a Twist: How the Femmes Fatales of Killing Eve Queer the Gendered Politics of Crime Television
No full textThe femme fatale, one of the most common and renowned female, cinematic tropes across different crime genres, undergoes a queering in the 2018 UK series Killing Eve, in which the female investigator Eve Polastri and the female killer Villanelle engage in a dangerous cat-and-mouse game driven by mutual, queer desires. Killing Eve serves as a critical revisitation of the 1992 US-American classic Basic Instinct, in which one of the most notorious, flamboyant and influential femmes fatales to this day, Catherine Tramell, seduces and threatens a male investigator. By conducting a close, comparative reading of Killing Eve’s Villanelle and Basic Instinct’s Catherine, the relationship between investigator and female murderer in both media respectively, and by reading Killing Eve’s character Eve as an investigator who herself emerges as a femme fatale, this paper demonstrates how Killing Eve subverts the trope of the femme fatale, escalates its queer monstrosity and extends Catherine’s ability to violently disrupt the heteronormative, gendered politics of pop-cultural imagination
Review: Sara K. Howe; Susan E. Cook (ed.), Representing Kink. Fringe Sexuality and Textuality in Literature, Digital Narrative, and Popular Culture.
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
By its title alone Representing Kink questions the notion that kink is in and of itself the representation of BDSM, leather, and latex by which it prominently is sold. Kink is always already a deviation from what is considered the norm, which lead to the normative representation we have of it today. Hence this collection of articles unravels the lens through which kink is viewed in two major ways, firstly, by engaging with a wider range of kinks not represented in BDSM and leather communities and, secondly, by analyzing fan-fictions of popular movies and TV-series, which subvert popular characters and images from the bottom-up. Instead of engaging with a top-down representation of kink, the majority of the nine articles collected in this book engage with the bottom-up expression of desire. These expressions are found in digital narratives unfiltered and uncensored by publishing houses and institutions that provide alternate readings of popular fictions. Kink, in this sense, can therein also be viewed as something already latent within popular culture
