Solitary Pleasures

by Bennett, Paula; Rosario, Vernon A.

• ISBN13: 9780415911733
• ISBN10: 0415911737
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1995-10-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Solitary Pleasuresis the first anthology to address masturbation, exploring both the history and artistic representation of autoeroticism. Masturbation today enjoys a highly equivocal and contradictory status among cultural discourses relating to sexuality. On the one hand, it is the subject of much popular treatment, especially in sexual self-help books, advice columns, and in pop culture--for example, Madonna's "Like a Virgin" performance, a recentRoseanneepisode, and David Russell's movieSpanking the Monkey. On the other hand, masturbation is still a taboo subject for most people in everyday conversation. Perhaps more surprising, it has been largely dismissed by academics as a trivial, humorous topic and the "history of a delusion." It was not until the eighteenth century that "onanism" was portrayed as a morbid act of epidemic proportions that produced pox, hair loss, blindness, insanity, impotence and a horrible. Itsprevention and treatment warranted diverse and often cruel measures: surveillance, diets, drugs, corsets, electrical alarms, urethral cauterization, clitoridectomy, and labial sewing. This literature's apocalyptic warnings about the personal and social morbidity of "pollution-by-the-hand" are largely unknown to most people today, but the ghostly echoes of these admonitions still inform and preserve the present taboo of the subject. Why did this apparently innocuous activity become so overpoweringly stigmatized? Why was the eradication of masturbation one of the most important goals of 19th century public hygiene? Why, even after the "sexual revolution," is masturbation still shrouded in shame? Solitary Pleasuresis the first anthology to take masturbation seriously, as seriously as did those who subjected people to unusual physical and mental torture to curtail the "vicious pleasures of solitude." The volume includes work by scholars in history, literary studies, arthistory and cultural studies analyzing representations of autoeroticism from the 16th century to the present. Essays study the role of masturbation and sexual fantasy in the production and consumption of film, poetry, art and the novel, and suggests links between auto-eroticism, imaginative production, and sexual orientation.Solitary Pleasuresestablishes masturbation and related issues of sexual fantasy and sexual autonomy as subjects of import for cultural history, psychology, women's studies and the history of literature and the arts.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Politics of Solitary Pleasures	p. 1
Autonomy as Deviance: Sixteenth-Century Images of Witches and Prostitutes	p. 19
Playing with Herself: Feminine Sexuality and Aesthetic Indifference	p. 49
Forbidden Pleasures: Enlightenment Literature of Sexual Advice	p. 75
Phantastical Pollutions: The Public Threat of Private Vice in France	p. 101
Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl	p. 133
The Social Evil, the Solitary Vice, and Pouring Tea	p. 155
"The Roots of the Orchis, the Iuli of Chestnuts": The Odor of Male Solitude	p. 163
"Pomegranate-Flowers": The Phantasmic Productions of Late-Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Woman Poets	p. 189
Fragments of a Poetics: Bonnetain and Roth	p. 215
Can Robinson Crusoe Find True Happiness (Alone)?: Beyond the Genitals and History on the Island of Hope	p. 233
Coming in Handy: The J/O Spectacle and the Gay Male Subject in Almodovar	p. 251
Notes on Contributors	p. 277
Index	p. 281
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