Peter Tupper

The Oriental and the Gothic in the Antebellum South

Featured Articles, Gothic, Orientalism, Slavery No Responses »

Sep 092008

Gossett, Thomas F. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture Southern Methodist University Press, 1985

Roberts, Diane. The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region Routledge, 1994

Schick, Irvin C. The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse Verso, 1999

First, I want to reiterate my position that consensual Master-slave roleplaying relationships as practiced by Munby and Cullwick and afterwards have only a tenuous connection to the actual institution of Atlantic slavery. It’s more about the fictionalized version of slavery as seen by people who had no direct experience with it.

Second, getting off on a scenario does not necessarily mean the fantasizer agrees with the politics or ideas behind it. In fact, a masochist might get a stronger charge off a scenario if the suffering is not just.

Orientalism in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut

Celluloid Dungeon No Responses »

Aug 222008

Whether you consider Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut to be a flawed, misunderstood masterpiece or a pretentious, leaden exploration of… something, it does reveal a lot of sexual history.

The centrepiece of the film is a sequence in which the lead disguises himself and crashes an exclusive orgy for the ultra-wealthy. He wanders around the mansion, witnessing what is probably the most boring and unerotic orgy ever committed to film.

The Rosetta stone of BDSM history

Featured Articles, Slavery No Responses »

Jul 272008

Colligan, Colette. “Anti-Abolition Writes Obscenity: The English Vice, Transatlantic Slavery, and England’s Obscene Print Culture” International Exposure: perspectives on modern European pornography, 1800-2000, edited by Lisa Z. Sigel. Rutgers, 2005. Link

While I’ve known for a while that Atlantic slavery was the inspiration for the Master-slave motif of BDSM, exactly how this happened is a bit of a mystery, and I’ve been forced to do a bit of hand-waving when I give presentations. We know that books like Robinson Crusoe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin were inspirations for sexual fantasies, as documented by Krafft-Ebing and Freud. But what happened after that?

Colette Colligan has the answer. The Rosetta stone of BDSM history is two texts: First, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861 in the USA, available in the UK in 1862) written by Harriet Jacobs under the pen name “Linda Brent”, and its sexualized parody The Secret Life of Linda Brent, a Curious History of Slave Life (1882) written by George Lazenby and published in The Cremorne.

Vintage fetish magazines

Uncategorized No Responses »

Jul 012008

The Rubber Betty blog frequently runs complete scans of vintage fetish magazines like AtomAge, along with other classic stuff.

Thanks Betty, for keeping our history alive!

Jean Genet’s “The Balcony”

Uncategorized No Responses »

Jun 302008

BalconyExecutioner-793488

The 20th century’s answer to Sade is probably Jean Genet, a novelist and playwright who developed a strange kind of ascent through descent, finding a kind of apotheosis. If heroism is impossible, one distinguishes oneself through cultivating betrayal and abuse.

One of his plays was The Balcony (1956), a surreal exploration of fantasy and fetish.

Most of the scenes occur in the Balcony, a “house of illusions” or a brothel, depending on the mood of Irma, the house’s madam. Irma presides over the constantly shifting boundaries of fantasy and reality, dealing with clients who want to be Bishops and Generals, and may in reality be those things, a pimp who is actually a cowardly crossdresser and a whore who wants to be a saint. The Judge insists on hearing “true confessions” from a whore dressed as a criminal, who technically is a criminal, but the Judge shrinks from the thought that the woman actually committed any crimes.

Sex is hotter in dystopia: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Uncategorized No Responses »

Jun 272008

I can’t imagine that George Orwell, had he lived to see this edition of his best known novel, would have been terribly pleased by this pulpy, sexed-up cover for 1984. Quite the bedroom eyes for a member of the anti-sex league. It reminds me of a gag in The Seven Year Itch, in which the protagonist makes a living putting tarted-up covers on innocuous titles like Little Women so they will sell on dime store racks.

The back cover continues in this vein:

This makes an interesting echo to the ancillary images with sexy flagellation and the like to Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other abolitionist media, which could be seen as a kind of dystopian literature (warning about what is rather than what could be). As Nalo Hopkinson observed: “Dystopias happen.” And if you’re kinky, dystopia offers far more fantasy inspiration than utopia. As a previous commenter on this blog mentioned, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was a major turn-on for her, even though it was totally against her politics.

I have to confess that I haven’t read 1984 or Brave New World, though I know that sex figures prominently in the two books. More to the point, sex is compulsorily regulated by authority in those dystopias.

Liliana Cavini’s The Night Porter

Celluloid Dungeon, Featured Articles No Responses »

Jun 232008

The Night Porter, 1974, dir. Liliana Cavini IMDB, Wikipedia

If there’s an image that epitomizes 1970s kink, it’s Charlotte Rampling in the Nazi-exploitation classic The Night Porter: topless, wearing an SS officer’s cap, trousers, boots and suspenders, singing something in German to soldiers. It’s an iconic image, perhaps echoing Marlene Dietrich’s equally memorable turns in male and military drag. It’s also rather disturbing, suggesting a kind of fascist chic that no doubt had people making crude theories about the link between deviant sexuality (i.e. fetishism) and deviant politics (i.e. fascism).