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 overflow—the flood—that 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. [ go to the Genders website ]

A number of features characterize late Ming vernacular fiction as part of the general cultural expansion of that period. These features centrally include the exposition of sexual transgression and the function of containment, by which is meant the ideology of the control of desires. The late Ming writers are studiously devoted to illustrating minute, obscene, or erotic details that belief the decorum of the orthodox surface. However, this subversiveness of detail decreases in intensity from the late Ming to the early Qing, when values of containment are reinvoked. Related topics are: the theme of causality and its role in the story's mapping of the logic of adultery; adultery as an emblem of the woman's escape from containment and the use of the narrative topos of the gap in the wall as a locus of sexual transgression.

This book addresses “containment” as it relates to interlocking discourses around the “War on Terror” as a global effort and its link to race and sexuality within the United States. The project emerged from the recognition that the events of 11 September 2001, prompted new efforts at containment with both domestic and international implications.

Perversion - its ubiquity in infantile life and its persistence in the psychical and sexual lives of some adults - was a central element of Freud's lifelong work. The problem of perversion has since been revisited by many psychoanalytic schools with the result that Freud's original view of perversion has been replaced by numerous - often contradictory - perspectives on its aetiology, development and treatment. The concept of perversion has also been significant for the disciplines of cultural studies and gender and queer theory, which have explored the creative and dissident powers of perversion, while expressing a suspicion of its operation as a pathological category. This bi-partite collection offers a series of perspectives on perversion by a range of psychoanalytic practitioners and theorists (edited by Dany Nobus), and a selection of papers by scholars who work with, or critique, psychoanalytic theories of perversion (edited by Lisa Downing). It stages a serious dialogue between psychoanalysis and its commentators on the controversial issue of non-normative sexuality.

Hawthorne wrote much of his major fiction in the decade that the theories of Charles Marie François Fourier crossed the Atlantic and contributed to a wave of communitarian experimentation in the American North. Famously, Hawthorne briefly lived and worked at Brook Farm, a Transcendentalist commune that formally converted to Fourierism when he had left and was embroiled in litigation to recover money he had invested in the community. In his fiction, Hawthorne responded directly to Fourierism and its critique of capitalism. He used his experiences at Brook Farm as the inspiration for The Blithedale Romance, and in The House of the Seven Gables cast one of the principal characters as a recovering Fourierist. In The Scarlet Letter he engaged with Fourierist debates on marriage and the regulation of desire. Somewhat on the Community-System examines these interventions, and argues that Hawthorne's fiction both seeks to contain Fourierism and responds to its allure. Moreover, in formulating alternative, morally acceptable utopias (ones that are predicated on middle-class marriage), Hawthorne's fiction appropriates key aspects of Fourierist theory

In the 1950s, the term "containment" referred to the foreign policy-driven containment of Communism and atomic proliferation. Yet in Homeward Bound May demonstrates that there was also a domestic version of containment where the "sphere of influence" was the home. Within its walls, potentially dangerous social forces might be tamed, securing the fulfilling life to which postwar women and men aspired. Homeward Bound tells the story of domestic containment - how it emerged, how it affected the lives of those who tried to conform to it, and how it unraveled in the wake of the Vietnam era's assault on Cold War culture, when unwed mothers, feminists, and "secular humanists" became the new "enemy." This revised and updated edition includes the latest information on race, the culture wars, and current cultural and political controversies of the post-Cold War era.

Although theories of exploitation and subversion have radically changed our understanding of gender in Renaissance literature, to favour only those theories is to risk ignoring productive exchanges between 'masculine' and 'feminine' in Renaissance culture. 'Appropriation' is too simple a term to describe these exchanges - as when Petrarchan lovers flirt dangerously with potentially destructive femininity. Spenser revises this Petrarchan phenomenon, constructing flirtations whose participants are figures of speech, readers or narrative voices. His plots allow such exchanges to occur only through conditional speech, but this very conditionality powerfully shapes his work. Seventeenth-century works - including a comedy by Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, and Upon Appleton House by Andrew Marvell - suggest that the civil war and the upsurge of female writers necessitated a reformulation of conditional erotics.

Kornegay's brilliant and insightful use of James Baldwin's literary genius offers a way forward that promises to overcome the divide between religion and sexuality that is of crucial importance not only for black church and theology but for socio-political-religious and theological discourse generally.