On the Ground of Nature: Sexuality and Respectability in Die Freundschaft's Wandervogel Stories.

Die Freundschaft [Friendship] was a popular gay magazine during Germany's Weimar Republic. Unlike other gay magazines which preceded it, Friendship's mission was to support a mass movement for homosexual emancipation aimed at respectability and rights. This study examines how the stories about nature - particularly the Wandervogel stories - which were published in Friendship, supported the magazine's efforts at presenting homosexuality in a way that would be acceptable to the Weimar public. It argues that these stories drew from the legacy of the Wandervogel, as well as the conflicting movements of Adolf Brand and Magnus Hirschfeld, to formulate a kind of homosexuality that was connected to nature, steeped in Germany's literary tradition, and deeply commited to values such as duty and commitment to one's fellow man. This study problematizes these efforts by examining how they celebrated a specific kind of "respectable" homosexuality at the expense of other kinds of queerness.

Vaginal Jade Eggs: Ancient Chinese Practice or Modern Marketing Myth?

OBJECTIVE: To identify evidence that vaginal jade eggs were recommended or used in sexual health practices or for pelvic muscle exercises in ancient Chinese culture. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A search of the online databases of 4 major Chinese art and archeology collections in the United States. RESULTS: More than 5000 jade objects were viewable in online databases. No vaginal jade eggs were identified. CONCLUSIONS: No evidence was found to support the claim that vaginal jade eggs were used for any indication in ancient Chinese culture.

Detecting Two-Spirit erotics: The fiction of Carole laFavor.

This article examines the life and novels of Carole laFavor, arguing for her importance to and influence in Two-Spirit studies. Along with being a writer, laFavor was a powerful voice for social justice and Indigenous health sovereignty in Minnesota and the nation. Her two novels, Along the Journey River and Evil Dead Center, which both focus on Anishinaabe lesbian detective protagonist Renee LaRoche, are the first lesbian detective fiction published by a Native author. Renee's embrace of a specifically Two-Spirit erotics anchors her to family and brings her tribal community a powerful healing when she employs her skills to protect her people from instances of racism, abuse, and injustice. This article, then, reads these novels as the first of an emerging genre of texts that claim an overtly Two-Spirit erotic as well as vital precursors to the present embrace of sovereign erotics in Indigenous studies.

Sappho's shifting fortunes from antiquity to the early Renaissance.

Although Sappho was revered as the greatest woman poet of all time by the Greeks, in later antiquity and the Middle Ages, her love of women was considered shameful and overshadowed her excellent reputation. She was also called a prostitute, and fictional accounts of her affairs with men further "tarnished" her reputation. Dual representations of Sappho existed within two centuries of her death. On the one hand, she was a role model for other poets to follow in their quest for fame, on the other she was the quintessential representation of female vice, which, at least by the Roman period, brought her infamy. Late antique and medieval Christian authors inherited this latter view, and vilified Sappho's sexuality, while church authorities, at least according to legend, had her works publicly burned. In the initial stages of the Renaissance, then, the humanist desire to reconnect with the pagan past had to proceed in the context of late medieval Christianity. Sappho's homoeroticism was erased, ultimately, in order that her skill could be lauded to fight misogyny. Hence, the humanists "rehabilitated" Sappho's virtue in a Christian context where same-sex love was considered an "unmentionable" vice. In order to argue that women were smart and capable, the humanists needed Sappho. She was perhaps the most famous, and most skilled, woman who had ever lived, and her example was used in an attempt to improve the lot of women in the early Renaissance.

Vulnerable but aloof versus naughty and nice: contrasting the presentation of male and female nude models in Viva and Playboy.

The current research examined contested meanings of nudity by comparing images of nude men and women that appeared in Viva, a 1970s women's magazine founded with the intention of foregrounding male nudity, to corresponding issues of Playboy. A major difference was obtained between male models and Playboy Playmates regarding direction of gaze and nudity. Although gaze aversion is often interpreted as a sign of submission and direct gaze is seen as a dominance cue, men in Viva displayed a high level of gaze aversion and women in Playboy often gazed directly at the camera, especially when their pubic area was exposed. Additional content analysis examined the personality characteristics attributed to male models in Viva and Playmates in Playboy in their biographical sketches. In Viva, men were presented as possessing "bad boy" traits that may have been intended to compensate for the loss of power associated with male nudity. Playmates could be viewed as being naughty (by virtue of posing nude) and nice in the characterization of their personalities.

Childbirth and women's healthcare in pre-modern societies: an assessment

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Annotations on Artemisia.

To demonstrate the relevance of an artist's biography to the understanding of her creations, no instance is more persuasive than the career of the 17th-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Numerous scholars have attempted to correlate the nature of her subject matter with the more dramatic events of her picaresque private life. A psychoanalytic effort to make such a correlation needs to go beyond discrete incidents, to reconstruct her personality and its development. Artemisia's oeuvre is tightly focused on a fantasy system of sexual irrestibility, probably based on the interactions of this motherless child with a delinquent father. Hypotheses that the artist became a vengeful victim overtook her strength, resilience, and affability.

"The string of this one story": erotica, HIV, and the construction of safe sex in gay male popular memory.

Recalibrating the critical consideration of popular memory, this essay rehabilitates the erotic narrative as an object of critical study and as a political practice via an examination of John Preston's (1985b) print collection, Hot Living: Erotic Stories About Safer Sex. It considers this collection as a use of the erotic genre to produce a popular memory within its reading community to support safer sex practices in the "Age of AIDS." It examines this collection as a communitarian project that articulates a new erotic rhetoric in response to HIV and considers its individual epistemological and epidemiological implications.

[Erotica in the arts and brain]. / Erotika a muvészetben és az agyban.

Erotic arts express the relation of a person to his or her sexual orientation. Scrutinizing works of arts of that kind could explore unanswered questions about 'normal' and 'perverse' sexuality. Beyond the possibilities of forensic psychiatry the ethical, legal, and social consequences should be more intensely studied. At the same time the employment of modern functional brain imaging techniques is also warranted in the research of eroticism.

Mirror rubbing: a critical genealogy of pre-modern Chinese female same-sex eroticism.

This article offers a critical genealogy of pre-modern Chinese female same-sex relationships. Through the analysis of the primary source materials in history, fiction, and drama, the author shows that female homosexuality is silenced and suppressed. To Confucianism, female same-sex relationships threaten to exclude men from accessing female sex and keep women away from participating in extending the family line. Even the Daoist theory of sex can be used to discriminate against female homosexuality by denying women the ability to initiate and maintain the cycle of yin-yang interaction in sexual intercourse. There are 2 recurring themes in the male writers' imaginings of female same-sex eroticism. First, heterosexuality is the preferred sexual order, and female same-sex desire arises due to the lack of sexual access to men. Second, heterosexual relationships and intercourse are the norm that female homosexuality aspires to imitate.

Beyond the static image: Tee Corinne's roles as a pioneering lesbian artist and art historian.

While Tee Corinne has been widely recognized as a preeminent lesbian and feminist artist of the last forty years, little has been written about her as an artist or art historian in any substantial way. This article attempts to shed light on Corinne's investment in creating explicitly sexual lesbian visual art and art historical writings that put pressure on the categories of artist and art historian between the 1970s and early 2000s. Corinne's work manages to fulfill feminist ideals while also working outside of the norms set up in both the lesbian and mainstream realms of art and art history.

Sexual portraits: Edward Melcarth and homoeroticism in modern American art.

Although one will not find Edward Melcarth (1914-73) in the best recent histories of male homosexuality and American art, he was not always so spectral. Named in Life magazine in 1950 as one of the best young American artists, he exhibited as a painter, draftsman and sculptor and also practised as an illustrator, photographer and designer. His work survives in the Forbes Collection, in the Smithsonian Institution and in the art archives at the Kinsey Institute. We argue that Melcarth's vision of the erotic was far broader than the traditional categories of sexuality that are perpetuated in art histories of homoeroticism in modern America ­ and that such a revisioning enables a reinterpretation of some of the better known images of homosexual art.

Pornography, religion, and the happiness gap: does pornography impact the actively religious differently?

Club good models developed by economists suggest that the club provides a benefit to members by fostering the provision of semi-public goods. In the case of religion, churches create enforcement mechanisms to reduce free riding. Consequently, the psychic costs of deviant activity should be higher for individuals who belong to religious groups with strong social norms. Data from the General Social Survey are used to examine whether the cost of using pornography is greater for the more religiously involved. We measure the cost of using pornography as the happiness gap or the gap between the average happiness reported by individuals who do and individuals who do not report using pornography. The happiness gap is larger for individuals who regularly attend church and who belong to religious groups with strong attitudes against pornography.

Transforming sexuality: the medical sources of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-95) and the origins of the theory of bisexuality.

This article explores the medical references in the writings of the German jurist and activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs as a means of breaking new ground in diverse fields (including history of medicine, history of sexuality, and gender history). It demonstrates that the theory of bisexuality has a much deeper and more textured genealogy than has been hitherto appreciated and that dual-gendered bodies and minds must be better recognized as important through the nineteenth century. Specifically, it demonstrates that classifications and rhetoric of hermaphroditism, and other dual-gendered categories (e.g., sexual dualism and anatomical bisexuality), were deployed in diverse contexts through the period, often with little or no reference to the occurrence of genital ambiguities. Important discourses in embryology, utilized by Ulrichs, suggested that all individuals, in the earliest stages of fetal development, were hermaphroditic. In making an analogy among the ontogeny of sex anatomy, hermaphroditism, and the development of erotic preferences, Ulrichs sought to naturalize homoeroticism, rendering social and legal prohibitions untenable. His advocacy, however, was counterbalanced by the Prussian forensic expert Johann Ludwig Casper who had made some conceptual maneuvers similar to Ulrichs only couched in the rhetoric of pathology. Ulrichs was equivocal in his use of forensic works such as Casper's, condemning their authors but recognizing similarities with his own gender schema.

Scientia sexualis versus ars erotica: Foucault, van Gulik, Needham.

This paper begins with a discussion of the scientia sexualis/ars erotica distinction, which Foucault first advances in History of Sexuality Vol. 1, and which has been employed by many scholars to do a variety of analytical work. Though Foucault has expressed his doubts regarding his conceptualization of the differences between Western and Eastern discourses of desire, he never entirely disowns the distinction. In fact, Foucault remains convinced that China must have an ars erotica. I will explore Foucault's sources of authority. To this end, I introduce the work of famous Dutch sinologist Robert Hans van Gulik, who published the tremendously influential Sexual Life in Ancient China in 1961, and also explore Joseph Needham's view on Chinese sex. I argue that, Foucault, in his fierce polemic against the "Repressive Hypothesis", himself imagined a utopian Other where pleasure and desire were organised differently. I end on a discuss on Orientalism and the project of "Sinography" of comparative literature scholars Haun Saussy, Eric Hayot and others.