Eroticism and Containment: Notes from the Flood Plain

Sexual confessions on television talk shows. Gender and medical discourse in colonial India. River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho. White women in a German colony. Henry James' thwarted love. What do these seemingly diverse subjects have in common?

All address, in different ways, social and cultural attempts to contain eroticism by delineating the perimeters of genders. They scrutinize the political investments in the construction of gender in such disparate locations as contemporary Hollywood, Renaissance England, colonial India and Africa, and in modern and contemporary homosexual discourse communities and in Freud's sessions with Dora.

But whether the gendering of the subject follows the dictates of conservative politics or the radical agenda of a marginalized interest, the essays reveal the erotic overflow--the flood--that cannot be contained within any one gender identity. In examining how the erotic escapes containment, this work discloses problems inherent in the intersections of gender and desire.

[ go to the Genders website ]

Author: Carol Siegel
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 12/01/1994
Pages: 344
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.99h x 5.89w x 0.88d
ISBN: 9780814779996

About the Author

Carol Siegel is Associate Professor of English at Washington State University, Vancouver and author of Lawrence Among the Women: Wavering Boundaries in Women's Literary Traditions and Male Masochism: Modern Revisions of the Story of Love.