Suchergebnisse

Amid the national shame and subjugation following World War I in France, cultural critics there-journalists, novelists, doctors, and legislators, among others-worked to rehabilitate what was perceived as an unhealthy social body. Carolyn J. Dean shows how these critics attempted to reconstruct the "bodily integrity" of the nation by pointing to the dangers of homosexuality and pornography. Dean's provocative work demonstrates the importance of this concept of bodily integrity in France and shows how it was ultimately used to define first-class citizenship. Dean presents fresh historical material-including novels and medical treatises-to show how fantasies about the body-violating qualities of homosexuality and pornography informed social perceptions and political action. Although she focuses on the period from 1890 to 1945, Dean also establishes the relevance of these ideas to current preoccupations with pornography and sexuality in the United States

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ILLUSTRATIONS -- INTRODUCTION -- 1. THE RIGHTEOUS AVENGERS. The Tehlirian and Schwarzbard Trials, 1921 and 1927 -- 2. THE CAMP SURVIVOR. The Libel Cases of Victor Kravchenko and David Rousset, 1949 and 1950–51 -- 3. THE HOLOCAUST WITNESS. The Eichmann Trial and Its Aftermath -- 4. THE GLOBAL VICTIM AND THE COUNTERWITNESS -- CONCLUSION -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INDEX

This essay explores assumptions that underpin discourses on atrocity photographs, including the idea that images objectify photographed subjects or traumatize viewers. The essay analyzes the unexamined ideas that construct these assumptions, in particular the affective investment in the concept of human dignity as an image of invulnerability. Arguments about atrocity photographs pit important if recent concepts of photography's ostensibly transformative if vexed political function to "bear witness" against an aversion to the display of violated human dignity whose sources are psychic and cultural.

There has been a lot of ink spilled lately regarding the various symptoms generated in French intellectual, cultural, and political life by a malady diagnosed as the triumph of neoliberalism and American consumerism at the end of the Cold War. In recent years, some French scholars afflicted with the disease have revisited and revised well-worn political models, and others returned defensively to the tradition of French secular republicanism as an antidote to "multiculturalism" and "communitarianism" (what Americans would call identity politics), which French authors often envision as American imports. This defensiveness on both the French left and right responds to the apparent exhaustion of nationalism, of revolutionary ideals, and of French identity. Joan Scott's recent book onThe Fantasy of Feminist Historydoes a particularly incisive job of revealing the various investments in secular republicanism as themselves forms of sexism and racism or nostalgia, especially on the right. She cites a discussion in which Mona Ozouf, Phillipe Raynaud, and others argue that the particularly "French" form of "seduction" and heterosexual coupling encourages men to exercise dominance through gallantry if they want to win over women. Gallantry civilizes society by using sexual difference as armor against an imagined leveling and sameness represented by those who cannot understand seduction as a means metaphorically of reconciling the differences that inevitably arise in democracies—feminists, "militant homosexuals," and Muslims who refuse to play by French rules. Here the play of difference relies on a rigid gender difference—and the subordination of women—that sells itself as natural and quintessentially French.

carolyn j. dean is Professor of History at Brown University. She is currently working on a study tentatively entitled "Empathy,Suffering, and Indifference after the Holocaust."