The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects — born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the life-force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.
Audre Lorde
Sexuality has often been confused with pornography. It has been trivialised as something that is a denigration and denial of true feeling by sensationalising genuine expressivism.
To quote from Lorde again:
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It
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What art succeeds in doing is transmute the sexual expression into an acceptable form - by turning it into a thing of beauty and approximating it into a haze of sublimity. In the post- modern climate of media, eros as sexuality reels dangerously on the brink of pornography. Yet what is also important is to realize that it is an important lens to view our social, political and cultural identities. At the beginning of the twentieth century, sexuality rode on the tide of social progressivism and became a vehicle for artistic expression in the novel. Also, when eros as sexuality serves as a principal theme in serious or popular literature, it is often used as a means of remarking upon the dynamics in a society. This is the point that is scrutinised and analysed in this paper where the sexuality of women is seen as an important definition and perspective in Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973).The novel explores the lives and friendship of Sula Peace and Nel Wright in the black neighbourhood dubiously named ‘The Bottom’ in the city of Medallion . The novel also investigates lives of its various female characters in this community who add to our understanding of the life of African American women. Morrison is one of the most remarkable African-American authors of the twentieth century and her novels remind readers that the position of African-Americans in the white-dominant society of the United States of …show more content…
Lorde’s 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” explores this very inter-sectionality (-the description of way multiple oppressions are experienced) of sexuality, gender, class and race. In this essay, Lorde argues against a restricted use of the erotic; an example of this usage is pornography where the female body isobjectified, thereby never affording the female an opportunity to express and/or recognize
Bentley, Greg W. Sammy's Erotic Experience: Subjectivity and Sexual Difference in John Updikes "A&P". N.p.: n.p., 2004. N. pag.
...ses of the erotic: the erotic as power” she speaks of fighting the enemy, and how women need power in order to fight the power comes from erotic. She explains how the erotic has been mistaken for the opposite of power. When Lorde speaks of erotic she means knowing how you feel and living on those feeling now being in the dark with those feelings.
In her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey discusses the subject of how female characters, through various methods, are subjected to erotic objectification, by both the characters on screen as well as the spectators within the auditorium. While Mulvey makes an excellent point in acknowledging female’s exposure in cinema, she fails to realize that male characters are just as likely to be subjected to the same kind of objectification, depending on what type of audience the motion picture is directed at. Mulveys claim depends on a generalization of a homogenous audience and characters that only consists of heterosexual men. When transferring Mulveys claim onto homosexual male characters starring in a production that is in first-hand directed towards a gay audience, the erotic objectification of male characters share several similarities with those Mulvey describe women to be exposed to in her essay. Consequently, erotic objectification is governed by different circumstances, in which the audience plays a large role.
The Erotic is one thing that is always on all living human minds just like eating is when one is hungry or sleeping when one is tired. There are beliefs that some people agree with and some that don’t for example; men and women may not have the same opinion on how the erotic affects both of their genders. Many men believe that it makes them sit in a more powerful position, a position where women need them to fill this erotic feeling. Although, women needing men for such a thing is an argument worth fighting because, women are just as capable of taking care of themselves just as men do. Individualism is a trait that women all over the world have started to increasingly embrace, thriving with the amazing feeling that it allows them to feel. “Uses of the Erotic” encourages individualism.
As Todd May focuses on the intensity involved with the idea of romantic love, over the idea of sex and love, he insists that the most intimate relationships were the more intense due to the constant engagement you have with an individual ( ****) - the two of you that the relationship consists of create a private world
Dover, K. J., and Elizabeth M. Craik. "Plato's Philosophy of Sex." Owls to Athens. 1st
...ing: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion." Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." 121-156.New York: Routledge, 1993.
... But the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her”
by analyzing the case of Sarah Baartman as the quintessential Black female erotic body. The viewing of black women’s bodies as animalistic explorative and subsequent centuries of colonialism but also connects all hegemonic movements to surveillance and defining/redefining of the black female body.
“Women are not only associated with and defined by the ‘inferior’ realm of flesh (while men represent ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’) but they also are told they must rise above their carnal appetites,” ...
Eroticizing men occurs throughthe visual display of aadults when the female remains fully clothed and the man accompanies her fully naked, it sees a contradiction of gender sterotypes, in which the gaze is switched from male to female. However, the question must be asked, how much are we empowring ourselves by oppressing the other? Women are fighting the cause by inflicting the situation on men, therefore objectification occurs not only in women but also in men. As a result of this it is liekly that future generations of boy and girls alike will continue to place emphasis on sexuality as opposed to personal attributes. Soceity will also continue to percieve both sexes based on their attractiveness and sexual assets, in which does not promote the end to objectification in women but rather seems to have spread the mentality of sexual degrading to btoh men and women.
In today’s heterosexual and patriarchal society sex and sexual desires revolve around men, and Hoagland sets out seven patterns showing how this is the case. Sex is thought of as a “powerful and uncontrollable urge” and male sexuality therefore is a basic component to male health, sexual acts show male conquest and domination, sexual freedom gives men total access to and over women, rape is, by this logic, natural and women who resist a man’s advances are “‘frigid’”, sex involves losing control and sexual desire, when described as erotic, “involves a death wish (eros)”. The bottom line is that in today’s heterosexual and patriarchal society sex is all about men having a natural power over women; sex involves a total loss of control which creates a split between reason and emotion since being in control is a matter of reason controlling emotions, “we tend to believe that to be safe we must be rational and in control but to...
There has been a long and on going discourse on the battle of the sexes, and Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex reconfigures the social relation that defines man and women, and how far women has evolved from the second position given to them. In order for us to define what a woman is, we first need to clarify what a man is, for this is said to be the point of derivation (De Beauvoir). And this notion presents to us the concept of duality, which states that women will always be treated as the second sex, the dominated and lacking one. Woman as the sexed being that differs from men, in which they are simply placed in the others category. As men treat their bodies as a concrete connection to the world that they inhabit; women are simply treated as bodies to be objectified and used for pleasure, pleasure that arise from the beauty that the bodies behold. This draws us to form the statement that beauty is a powerful means of objectification that every woman aims to attain in order to consequently attain acceptance and approval from the patriarchal society. The society that set up the vague standard of beauty based on satisfaction of sexual drives. Here, women constantly seek to be the center of attention and inevitably the medium of erection.
Sexuality gained a connection to the truth. This results into the idea that sexuality is a part of identity and a key aspect in understating who we are individual. And all of this is only possible due to the discourse of sexuality, which is determined by social culture and time. However, the idea that sexuality objectively defines who you are is false, because the idea where this is based on, the “repressive hypothesis” also is
To conclude, the use of body for Feminist and Performance artists in the 1960s-1970s was significant in confronting the way women were viewed as artists in a male dominated art world. It was a vital element in raising consciousness and showing action towards the ideas of feminism. (Holt.J, 2009) Feminine nudity was a controversial problem, which female artists wanted to provoke in order to gain equality. The body became a form of expression to transform social stereotypes, and used as a primary medium, which reasserted aspects of a women’s figure that had been traditionally ignored or repressed by the male majority. (Holt.J, 2009) The body had just become one platform used by feminism and performance artists such as, Cindy Sherman, Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilke to rebel and promote their ideas, in order to gain equal rights.