Suchergebnisse

This article compares the 1950s and 1960s short story writing of two influential yet underexamined women writers, Mannu Bhandari (1931–) and R. Chudamani (1931–2010), who are considered key representatives of the Hindi and Tamil literary canons, respectively. Mani demonstrates that from within their specific geographic and historical contexts, Bhandari's and Chudamani's writing provides insight into literary discourses of gender equality circulating in the immediate postindependence moment. In particular, she argues that these women writers broadened the scope of feminist thought and literary expression existing at the time through their rhetorical use of a language of entitlement that universalizes feminine desire in humanist terms. They did so through the portrayal of female characters who express the desire to possess sexual freedom, economic independence, and human equality on the same terms as the male characters. Feminist scholarship has characterized the 1950s and 1960s as a moment of paucity in women's writing and decline in feminist politics. Yet Bhandari's and Chudamani's distinct uses of a language of entitlement offer a deeper understanding of the role of the literary in shaping feminist thought. Their work thus provides alternative genealogies of the categories of feminism and women's writing in India.

The formal theory of rational choice as grounded in desire-satisfaction cannot account for the problem of such deformed desires as women's slavish desires. Traditional "informed desire" tests impose conditions of rationality, such as full information and absence of psychoses, but do not exclude deformed desires. I offer a Kantian-inspired addendum to these tests, according to which the very features of deformed desires render them irrational to adopt for an agent who appreciates her equal worth.

AbstractIn 1961, the Mexican government launched the Programa Nacional Fronterizo (Pronaf) in partnership with the country's economic elites, a precursor to the state's more widely known border industrialization project. Pronaf was ostensibly an urban beautification program targeting nine cities at the Mexico-US border, led by former Ciudad Juárez mayor Antonio Bermúdez and with architecture supervised by Mexico City–based modernist Mario Pani. However, as this article argues, Pronaf sought to better integrate the borderlands to the national market and political structure at a moment of crisis. The state's capitalist modernization plan of import substitution industrialization, which produced the so-called Mexican Miracle in the 1940s, was showing signs of strain. Greater consumption of products made in Mexico, based on a more patriotic identification by citizens at the border, would buttress the "Miracle," which had initially ignored these very citizens based on metropolitan perceptions of their lack of allegiance to Mexico and affinity for the US. Understanding spectacular architecture to have not only a didactic but an affective function, Pronaf deployed a network of soaring, Jet Age–inspired built environments. These parabolic hyperboloid environments, accompanied by a hyperbolic rhetoric from Bermúdez, sought to convince border residents of the "beauty" and "desirability" of national culture and the fluidity of the national market just as their socioeconomic mobility came under greater government scrutiny. Pronaf piloted an affective infrastructure that desired to channel border residents' citizenship and consumption toward the reproduction of the political and economic status quo, eventually setting the stage for neoliberal transition.

Abstract
This paper explores the epistemology and methodology for describing sexual/erotic desire in women. Culture provides a variety of discourses which create possibilities for individual agents to think, experience and act. This paper outlines the dominant discourses of sexuality. The main focus is on the emerging psychodynamic understanding of erotic desire as a cultivated way of experiencing and expressing intersubjective embodied desire. The story of a female research participant has been selected to illustrate the journey from undifferentiated physical and mental experiences of desire to the peculiar integration of both aspects in her lived experience. A combination of interpretive methods is employed.

Abstract
This article addresses multiple paths of desire in Egypt. To date, research has mainly focused on the family as the realm of intimacy. To understand desire, it is important to take into account other contexts that contribute to shaping experience. Conversations about sex among men in coffee shops are contrasted with family discourses as a symbolic locus for alternative modes shaping intimacy in homosocial circles. The hierarchy of truth whereby confessions are supposed to give insight into subjects' core feelings are reassessed, allowing the sketching of a geography of competing intimacies that outline the coordinates of masculine desire.

The recent and highly visible rise of Islamic consumer culture in contemporary urban Indonesia is a source of both pleasure and anxiety for many Indonesians, figuring in debates about the appeal of a new piety there in the past decade. At the center of these debates is the image of the piously dressed woman. Simultaneously a consumer and a sign of piety, modest yet attractive, she seems to blur assumptions about the boundaries between image and substance, and in so doing generates anxiety. A booming Islamic fashion industry and Islamic fashion media traffic in this space, turning virtue into value and vice versa by deploying the image of the pious feminine to incite consumer desire while denying accusations that this is simply capitalism with a religious face. Based on research and interviews with the editorial staff of one Islamic fashion magazine, NooR, this article traces how Indonesia's rising Islamic fashion industry and lifestyle media have placed women at the center of broader cultural debates about the relationship between devotion and consumption.

This essay examines the legacy of gay playwright and activist Robert Chesley through an in-depth look at his most controversial play, Jerker, or The Helping Hand (1986), uncovering a unique strand of safe-sex advocacy that emphasized sound—and the voice specifically—to manifest queer desire. Phone sex, or dial-a-porn, as it was first called, rose to popularity in the 1980s amid the AIDS crisis. Chesley's depiction of it onstage reimagined the pornographic address, unleashing it from the visual primacy of video porn of the time to foreground elegiac, pedagogic, and ethical dimensions. The broadcast of Jerker on radio station KPFK-FM, however, spurred a legal redefinition of indecency in 1987 and further imperiled safe-sex advocacy that refused to skirt eroticism. In an era when "Silence = Death," Chesley's Jerker revealed the complexities of the mediated voice as a tool for survival, remembrance, and unbounded pleasure.

This article considers how the concept of desire can be theorized in light of recent work on emotion and affect. In so doing, it questions what desire does and how desire can be theorized, particularly within cinema. Instead of arguing that we must move away from a psychoanalytic interpretation of desire, I ask how this approach can be revitalized and reconsidered through work on affect. This article also highlights the way in which Lacanian and Deleuzian models of desire are constantly set in opposition to each other; in so doing, it seeks to move beyond this impasse and gesture towards alternative ways of theorizing desire. One of the central issues foregrounded within psychoanalytic theory is the process of remembering and forgetting: the method through which the subject can 'let go' and move forward. This relationship is figured primarily in terms of the discourse between self and other. Marguerite Duras' work questions this process of 'letting go' and offers an alternative conceptualization of desire through her use of melancholia. Beyond an intrinsic interest in her work, because Duras has been admired by psychoanalytic, feminist and Deleuzian scholars, her films present an opportunity to rethink a theorization of desire in light of competing interpretations. In discussing melancholia in terms of Duras' work, this paper also considers the extent to which her use of Hiroshima as a backdrop to the affair presented in the film colonizes desire and its transformative potential.

Abstract
Susan Wolf defines a meaningful life as one that is somewhat successfully engaged in promoting positive value. I grant this claim; however, I disagree with Wolf's theory about why we desire meaningfulness, so understood. She suggests that the human desire for meaningfulness is derived from an awareness of ourselves as equally insignificant in the universe and a resulting anti-solipsistic concern for promoting goodness outside the boundaries of our own lives. I accept that this may succeed in explaining why people want to engage in projects that happen to be meaningful. Nevertheless, I argue that Wolf fails to explain why people have a desire for meaningfulness itself. In other words, she has told us one reason we may be motivated to promote positive value, but not why we personally want to be the people who promote it—why we think it is a good thing that meaningful acts be done, but not why we want them to be our meaningful acts. In detailing my response, I follow Wolf in relating our desire for meaningfulness to a kind of love-based motivation. However, I argue that it has more in common with a selfish form of love than the altruistic kind of love proposed by Wolf. Finally, I suggest an alternative explanation which I believe can more fully account for our desire for meaningfulness: the prospect of disappearing from the universe without a trace makes us anxious, so we pursue meaningful achievements in an attempt to make our own physical deaths less final.