Sexual Encounters : Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities

Lee Wallace

ISBN 10: 080148832X / ISBN 13: 9780801488320

Edité par Cornell University Press Mai 2003, 2003

A propos de cet article

Neuware - The subject of 'Sexual Encounters' is sexual fantasy, particularly male homoerotic fantasy found in the literature and art of South Sea exploration, colonization, and settlement. Working at the boundaries of a number of disciplines such as queer theory, anthropology, postcolonial studies, and history, Wallace engages in subversive readings of 18th- and 19th-century Pacific voyage journals (Cook in Hawaii and a Russian expedition to the Marquesas), an argument concerning Gauguin's treatment of female figures, and a discussion of homosexuality and Samoan male-to-female transgenderism. These phenomena, Wallace asserts, demonstrate the continuity and dissonance between Western and Pacific sexual categories. She reconstructs Pacific history through the inevitable entanglement of metropolitan and indigenous sexual regimes and ultimately argues for the importance of the Pacific in defining modern sexual categories.

N° de réf. du vendeur 9780801488320

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Sexual Encounters : Pacific Texts, Modern Sexualities
• Éditeur: Cornell University Press Mai 2003
• Date de parution: 2003
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 080148832X
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780801488320
• Reliure: Taschenbuch
• État de l'article: Neu
• Dimensions: 228 L x 152 H x 17 P (en millimètres) 228 millimètres de largeur par 152 millimètres de hauteur par 17 millimètres de profondeur
• Poids: 276 grammes

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

European literary, artistic, and anthropological representation has long viewed the Pacific as the site of heterosexual pleasures. The received wisdom of these accounts is based on the idea of female bodies unrestrained by civilization. In a revisionist history of the Pacific zone and some of its preeminent Western imaginists, Lee Wallace suggests that the fantasy of the male body, rather than of the free-loving female, provides the underlying libidinal structure for many of the classic "encounter" narratives from Cook to Melville. The subject of Sexual Encounters is sexual fantasy, particularly male homoerotic fantasy found in the literature and art of South Sea exploration, colonization, and settlement. Working at the boundaries of a number of disciplines such as queer theory, anthropology, postcolonial studies, and history, Wallace engages in subversive readings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Pacific voyage journals (Cook in Hawaii and a Russian expedition to the Marquesas), an argument concerning Gauguin's treatment of female figures, and a discussion of homosexuality and Samoan male-to-female transgenderism. These phenomena, Wallace asserts, demonstrate the continuity and dissonance between Western and Pacific sexual categories. She reconstructs Pacific history through the inevitable entanglement of metropolitan and indigenous sexual regimes and ultimately argues for the importance of the Pacific in defining modern sexual categories.

À propos de l?auteur

Lee Wallace is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Auckland.