Peter Tupper

Flagellation in the Muslim holy day of Ashura

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Jan 092009
 

From Slate: Self-flagellation is a major part of the Muslim holiday, the Day of Ashura.

A subset of male Shiites injure themselves on Ashura to represent their grief over the martyrdom of Hussein, grandson of the prophet, at the hands of the Ummayad army in 680. These people engage in violent rituals such as pounding their chests with their fists, lacerating their scalps with a knife or machete, or self-flagellation with a zanjeer—five blades connected to a wooden handle by steel chain. But none of these forms of expression is sanctioned by mainstream religious authorities; most prominent Shiite clerics object to all forms of self-mutilation, since it has no basis in early religious history and appears barbaric to outsiders.

The parallels between self-inflicted ordeals in Islam and in Christianity are striking, as the practice persists in spite of what leaders say and the lack of any scriptural support. Prominent Muslim clerics have issues fatwas condemning the practices, that they reflect badly on the faith and harm the body.

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Niklaus Largier’s In Praise of the Whip

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Dec 212008
 

Largier, Niklaus. In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal. Zone Books, 2007 Link

I finally got through Niklaus Largier’s In Praise of the Whip. It’s long and pretty heavy going at times, and being translated from German probably didn’t help. There’s also some Foucauldian theory in it, though not a huge amount. If I ever do this book, it will be a lot more accessible than this book.

Largier starts off by saying that flagellation is not only a tactile experience, but a visual and even performative one. “The voyeur, then, is already on the scene, even when he or she never openly appears.” (pg.23) This jibes with Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten” and Anita Phillips’ assertion that the masochist always suffers for somebody.

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England’s finest pornographers: The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley, by Colette Colligan

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Nov 122008
 

Colligan, Colette. The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley Palgrave Macmillan, 2006 Link

Alan Moore wrote, in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1, “The British Empire has always encountered difficulty in distinguishing between its heroes and its monsters.” That applies to more than just fictional characters. Why else would two of England’s heroes also be known as notorious pornographers?

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The atypical pornographer: Karen Fletcher

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Oct 222008
 

While reading about the Paul “Max Hardcore” Little and Extreme Associates trials, I came across other evidence of just how out of control American prosecution of obscenity is these days.

Strategically, going after Little is a brilliant way to rack up a victory. He’s male, he’s scary, he works in a visual medium (more arresting than print), he specializes in humiliation and other edgy issues, he performs in his own films, and even free speech and sex-positive advocates have a hard time defending him. He’s the stereotypical pornographer, a pre-packaged bogeyman ready to be ritually scapegoated in a purification drama.

Compare Little to Karen Fletcher. She is a 58-year-old agoraphobic woman who lives alone on disability. She was indicted on six charges of distributing obscene materials over the Internet. These were prose stories (no video or images) of children under 10 being molested and killed on a members-only web site. Fletcher plea bargained and got five years of probation and forfeiture of her computer.

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Hiram Powers’ The Greek Slave: Virtue in Distress

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Oct 172008
 

Hiram Powers' The Greek Slave

One of the most popular works of sculpture of the 19th century was Hiram Powers’ The Greek Slave, circa 1843.

To forestall any shock and dismay over the statue’s nudity, Powers helpfully included a pamphlet explaining how his work was to be interpreted, a short narrative sketch of virtue-in-distress.

Powers astutely explained, in the pamphlet that accompained his statue on its American tour in 1847, that his slave’s nudity was not her fault: she had been divested of her clothes by the lustful and impious Turks who put her on the auction block; thus her unwilling nakedness signified the purest form of the Ideal, the triumph of Christian virtue over sin. This sales pitch, aimed point-blank at Puritan sensibilities, worked so well that American Clergymen urged their congregations to go and see The Greek Slave.”

The humor magazine Punch has always been in touch with the British middle class psyche, and and it made a perhaps unwittingly clever satire of the sculpture when it ran a cartoon entitled, The Virginian Slave. Remember, the original statue and its replicas and miniatures were created when slavery was in full bloom in the American South, and people who demonstrated their sensitivity by clucking over The Greek Slave’s virtue-in-distress couldn’t care too much about the actual slaves across the Atlantic.

The Virginian Slave

Now, was this an example of “unconscious pornography”, that the Victorian American and British viewers needed a pious gloss to gaze upon a naked woman in chains without guilt? Or did they really look it in a different way than us cynical moderns? Or can the image be viewed in multiple ways?

I’m a little influenced by Harold Bloom’s idea of strong and weak misreading, or misprision. It could be that BDSM pornography is a misreading of earlier genres like the novel of sensibility and the Gothic.

Sexing up Uncle Tom’s Cabin

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Sep 272008
 

I found an extensive archive of essays and images related to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a key abolitionist text.

One thing that surprised me is that, after reading Robin Wood’s account of the sexualized images used in abolitionist writing, the hundreds of images in the archive, from 1852 to 1930, most of them were not at all sexual. There are many depictions of key scenes in the novel (e.g. Tom rescuing Eva from drowing, Eva and Tom together, Eliza’s dramatic flight across the ice floes) but very little in the way of beatings. I don’t know if this is a preference of those who edit the archive, or a representative sampling of the period.

However, there was a notable exception.

Uncle Tom\'s Cabin Cruikshank 1852 utilljso02

George Cruikshank was one of the most famous book illustrators in Victorian England. The twelve “original illustrations” in this turn-of-the-century edition were originally drawn in 1852, for one of the many pirated British editions of Stowe’s novel. At that time they were even more influential than the pictures Billings drew for Jewett’s editions in shaping the way readers around the world “saw” the novel’s characters and events.

As you can see, this scene (which I think is meant to represent the fatal beating of Prue) is the most graphic depiction of punishment in the archive, far more so than any depiction of Tom’s fatal beating at the end of the novel. The woman is young, shapely, lighter in skin color than the man beating her, and positioned just so that one of her breasts is visible. She’s probably supposed to be a mulatto, and could be read as “white”.

I guess this means that the pornographic interpretations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are in the minority, one of many re-interpretations of the work.

Erotic Dreams of Sarah Palin

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Sep 132008
 

While this is hardly a scientific survey, Slate magazine’s compilation of alleged dreams about Alaska governor and Republic vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin reveals some interesting themes.

The most common representations of Palin have her associated with death, destruction and deprivation, as when she orders the dreamer to stop nursing her baby and go to jail. Not surprisingly, she appears as a “bad mother,” punishing and killing and violating family bonds and bodily integrity, to both men and women. She appears in a classic castration fantasy, with the male dreamer reduced to a helpless, submissive animal by a huntress/dominatrix:

“Sarah Palin’s standing over me (I’m naked, she’s not) and shouting, podium style, through a pair of great, floating glasses, ‘And you know what? I’m going to cut it off. I’m gonna CUT IT OFF.’ I hear cheers. Are we onstage? I don’t see it, but I feel the presence of TV camera everywhere. She continues, ‘And you know why? Because, well why shouldn’t I? If you’re good, I know God will put it back.’ I look down and realize I have the biggest pot plant ever growing up between my legs. I mean, the thing is beautiful. I think something happens next, but I can’t remember what. All I know is we are in a field, and Sarah Palin is kneeling over me decked out in hunter gear. She cradles her rifle pragmatically and smiles pathetically as if to say, ‘You silly bear,’ and ruffles my stomach. The plant is gone, but I am now covered in fur. And blood. And bits of grass. And as much as I want to bite her face off, I can’t be angry at her. Or rather, I can’t argue it. I’ve got nothing. And she knows it too. Her triumphalism is effortless.”—Joshua Mensch

Yet, there are also dreams of reconciliation and compromise. One dreamer uses the animals killed by Palin to feed the homeless. Another dreams of marrying Palin:

“I dreamt her hubby was killed in an strange accident, and we somehow met in Germany. My wife was also gone, not sure how. McCain became ill, and Sarah and I were married. My son and I moved into the White House, and I gave a speech about Americans not using common sense, etc. Of course there are some romantic portions of the dream I will not go into detail about. She is very attractive—as you know. My speech was powerful, as Sarah and I both scolded the media for not holding the right folks accountable for certain accounting scandals, etc. I also tried very hard to give America a wakeup call on issues like common sense parenting, buying more house and car than we need, being very wasteful, etc. The dream was a bit foggy, but in the end, I wrote several books, and Mrs. Palin-Kaiser ran the country for a year, doing a very good job. I also see her shaking her finger at the media over and over in the dream. But she always gave me a kiss afterward, so I only got on her case a little about the finger-wagging. Much of the dream is foggy, as I did not even know she existed until six weeks ago. Now I think about her a lot.”—Michael A. Kaiser

Marriage (after her husband conveniently dies) makes Palin into at a centrist instead of a religious conservative.

This immediately reminded me of a passage in Laura Frost’s Sex Drives about the relationship of fascism and sexual fantasy. A woman fantasizes about being Adolf Hitler’s lover and gently talking him out of the Holocaust, as if they were having a lover’s quarrel. It’s a strange relationship between sex and politics, the idea that love really could affect the state.

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