NYU Press Eroticism and Containment: Notes from the Flood Plain: 1 (Genders)

Product Description 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 overflowthe floodthat 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. Review "A major contribution to the ever expanding historical literature of the modern African American freedom struggle. This book brings together outstanding examples of detailed and thoughtful studies of northern as well as southern local movements."-Clayborne Carson, Professor of History and Director, Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, Stanford University "Brilliantly conveys the vibrancy and creativity of community-based movements that transformed America's racial and civic landscape in the decades following World War II."-Patricia Sullivan, author of "Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years" "The essays in "Groundwork" assert individually and collectively that at the root of any national movement for change are local activists working from the bottom up to change their communities first, then the world. This excellent and invigorating collection is crucial reading in an election year."-Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, and author of "America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans" "The thirteen essays in this important collection examine grass-roots struggles for racial justice throughout the United States from 1940-1980...Read together, these essays remind us that activism changes people as much as society."-"Journal of American History",-, 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. Ann Kibbey is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder and founding editor of Genders. She teaches cultural studies and is the author of The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence.