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72 books match the query 'Sex in literature' and 4 start with m

cover of Male Fantasies: Volume 1: Women Floods Bodies History

Male Fantasies

Volume 1: Women Floods Bodies History

Klaus Theweleit

University of Minnesota Press, 1987

This first volume of Male Fantasies centers on the fantasies that preoccupied a group of men who played a crucial role in the rise of Nazism. These men were officers in the Freikorps--private, volunteer armies that roamed Germany, serving the cause of domestic repression in the aftermath of World War I. Klaus Theweleit draws upon the novels, letters, and autobiographies of these proto-fascists and their contemporaries, as well as cartoons, advertisements, engravings, and posters. He explores these sources, not to discover what their creators thought about fighting or the fatherland, but to seek out and reconstruct their images of women. He shows that the Freikorps male identity was shaped by the dread and revulsion that characterized their relations with women (real or imagined) and that this dread was, in turn, linked to the aggressive racism and anticommunism at the heart of most fascist movements.

Theweleit’s second volume, Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, carries Male Fantasies from the female image to the self-image of manhood and its ritualized forms of mass behavior, culminating in warfare. It also is available from the University of Minnesota Press.

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cover of Male Fantasies: Volume 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror

Male Fantasies

Volume 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror

Klaus Theweleit

University of Minnesota Press, 1989

Theweleit’s project in Male Fantasies is to discover the emotional core of fascism as it was revealed in the novels and memoirs of the Freikorps, mercenary bands that fought Germany’s border disputes and put down worker revolts in the aftermath of World War I. His excavation of Freikorps literary remains (and the writings of some of their protofascist contemporaries) enabled Theweleit to reconstruct the mythical content of the fascist imagination. An integral part of Male Fantasies is Theweleit’s choice of illustrations--cartoons, advertisements, engravings, posters--that serve as an ironic commentary on the text and extend its meaning in time and space.

In this second volume of the two-volume work Theweleit discovers how the repudiation of one’s own body--and of femininity--became a psychic compulsion associating masculinity with hardness, self-denial, and destruction. We are shown how the body becomes a mechanism for eluding the dreaded liquid--the “Red Flood,” lava, mud--and the “feminine” emotions associated with it. Armored, organized by mental and physical procedures like the military drill, the male body is transformed into a “man of steel.” As Theweleit shows, only in war does this body find redemption from constraint.

The first volume of Male Fantasies, also available from the University of Minnesota Press, deals primarily with the image of women in the collective unconscious of the fascist warrior that threatens to engulf the male ego.

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cover of Male Sexuality under Surveillance: Office In American Literature

Male Sexuality under Surveillance

Office In American Literature

Graham Thompson

University of Iowa Press, 2003

Male Sexuality under Surveillance is a lively, intelligent, and expertly argued analysis of the construction of male sexuality in the business office. Graham Thompson interweaves three main threads: a historicized cultural analysis of the development of the modern business office from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to the present day, a Foucauldian discussion of the office as the site of various disciplinary practices, and a queer-theoretical discussion of the textualization of the gay male body as a device for producing a taxonomy of male-male relations. The combination of these themes produces a study that is fresh, insightful, and provocative.
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cover of Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction

Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists

Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction

Keith McMahon

Duke University Press, 1995

Having multiple wives was one of the mainstays of male privilege during the Ming and Qing dynasties of late imperial China. Based on a comprehensive reading of eighteenth-century Chinese novels and a theoretical approach grounded in poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist criticism, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists examines how such privilege functions in these novels and provides the first full account of literary representations of sexuality and gender in pre-modern China.
In many examples of rare erotic fiction, and in other works as well-known as Dream of the Red Chamber, Keith McMahon identifies a sexual economy defined by the figures of the "miser" and the "shrew"—caricatures of the retentive, self-containing man and the overflowing, male-enervating woman. Among these and other characters, the author explores the issues surrounding the practice of polygamy, the logic of its overvaluation of masculinity, and the nature of sexuality generally in Chinese society. How does the man with many wives manage and justify his sexual authority? Why and how might he escape or limit this presumed authority, sometimes to the point of portraying himself as abject before the shrewish woman? How do women accommodate or coddle the man, or else oppose, undermine, or remold him? And in what sense does the man place himself lower than the spiritually and morally superior woman?
The most extensive English-language study of Chinese literature from the eighteenth century, this examination of polygamy will interest not only students of Chinese history, culture, and literature but also all those concerned with histories of gender and sexuality.
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