Lisa Downing
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 411972 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Lisa Downing |
| NOMBRES | Lisa |
| APELLIDO | Downing |
| FIRMA | DOWNING L |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Exeter |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9241-7572 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 40 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 72 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 38 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1995 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Revisiting the Abject Phallus in a Post-#metoo/#balancetonporc World
Keith Reader’s The Abject Object (2006) brought together the Lacanian concept of the phallus with the Kristevan notion of abjection to theorize representations of emasculated and failing masculinities across a range of modern French texts. This article brings Reader’s Lacanian-Kristevan model up to date with a discussion of recent developments in online cultures. The past twenty years are marked by the rise of the feminist movement known as #Meto…
On Refusing to Care as a Feminist Ethic
It is long established that care is a feminist issue, even as feminists of different philosophical and political stripes disagree regarding the value of care as a guiding ethic. Into the debate on care comes ‘reactionary feminism’, a recent UK-based movement which argues that the technological advances of the sexual revolution have prioritized liberal freedom and alienated women from caring roles with deleterious effects. The most prominent ‘reac…
Materialism from Hobbes to Locke
In Materialism from Hobbes to Locke, Stewart Duncan provides a lucid and judicious investigation of some central episodes in the history of materialism in seventeenth-century Britain. The book begins with an examination of Thomas Hobbes’s defense of materialism. Duncan then considers three significant critics of Hobbes’s materialism: Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Margaret Cavendish. Last, he turns to a four-chapter treatment of issues surroundi…
Im/mobility
In Baudelaire and Freud (1977), Leo Bersani posits that psychoanalysis offers a way of understanding sexuality as characterized by the mobility of fantasy, rather than by the content of fetishes or sexual identities, and that this mobility offers the "potential for explosive displacements." This short meditation explores how mobility as a concept, understood in Bersani's sense, helps us think beyond some of the paradoxes, redundancies, and aporia…
On Freedom
This is a transcript of a dialogue between Lisa Downing and Maggie Nelson about Nelson's recent book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021). The interlocutors discuss the rise of cultural authoritarianism, the role of care in shaping and delimiting freedom, the ways in which freedom and care signify differently according to the sex of the 'free' subject, and the vexed question of what freedom will mean in an uncertain future foresh…
Author Functions and Freedom
Freedom was a core theme of Michel Foucault's later writings, as well the central tenet of the work of pro-capitalist writer Ayn Rand. This article firstly demonstrates some surprisingly similar arguments made in the oeuvres of these unlikely bedfellows regarding how cultivation of the self/holding the self as one's highest value (in Foucault's and Rand's respective lexicons) can lead to an ethic of freedom. Secondly, the article examines the way…
(S)extremism
The neologism '(s)extremism' indicates a nexus of ideas intrinsic to the way in which contemporary culture imagines the figure of the violent woman. First, it identifies the sexism visible in reactions to such women; secondly, it highlights the fact that these misogynistic responses are often predicated precisely on sex (i.e. on assumptions about woman's biological function), not (only) on gender; thirdly, it highlights the question mark that hov…
After Foucault
The work of Michel Foucault is much read, widely cited, and occasionally misunderstood. In response to this state of affairs, this collection aims to clarify, to contextualize, and to contribute to Foucauldian scholarship in a very specific way. Rather than offering either a conceptual introduction to Foucault's work, or a series of interventions aimed specifically at experts, After Foucault explores his critical afterlives, situates his work in …
After Foucault
The body politic
The post-Brexit, post-Trump climate in the EU has seen a series of challenges from the right wing of politics to the liberal consensus of recent years (e.g. the rise of Gert Wilders in the Netherlands and the increased support for Alternativ für Deutschland in the 2017 German election). This article examines the gendering and embodiment of the new far right in France and the UK. It offers a comparative focus on two recent political challengers fr…
Antisocial Feminism? Shulamith Firestone, Monique Wittig and Proto-Queer Theory
Recent iterations of feminist theory and activism, especially intersectional, 'third-wave' feminism, have cast much second-wave feminism as politically unacceptable in failing to centre the experiences of less privileged subjects than the often white, often middle-class names with which the second wave is usually associated. While bearing those critiques in mind, this article argues that some second-wave writers, exemplified by Shulamith Fireston…
Heteronormativity and Repronormativity in Sexological “Perversion Theory” and the DSM-5’s “Paraphilic Disorder” Diagnoses
De-Centring western sexualities
As editors of the Ashgate ‘Queer Interventions’ volume Queer in Europe (Downing & Gillett, 2011), we were excited to learn of the existence of this book. With its programmatic insistence on ‘Centra
Modernism and perversion
This book is a comprehensive study of the ways in which the diagnostic category of ‘perversion’ came about via a ‘conceptual transfer between literature, medicine and psychology, between imaginary
Safewording! Kinkphobia and gender normativity in Fifty Shades of Grey
This article considers the recent publishing phenomenon, E.L. James's Fifty Shades trilogy, from what may be termed a ‘sex-critical’ perspective. That is, it evaluates, without endorsing, the differing responses to the trilogy issuing from both sex-positive and radical feminist perspectives. Further, it subjects to equal scrutiny the ways in which the trilogy and discourses about it represent both BDSM practices and the rituals of ‘vanilla’ heter…
Notes on a proto-queer Rachilde
This article explores new ways in which the French female Decadent writer Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery Vallette, 1860–1953) may be profitably viewed as a ‘proto-queer’ writer. While previous published works argue for Rachilde as ‘proto-queer’ primarily by analysing her games with gendered language and gender inversion, this article contends that Rachilde's deployment of discourses of sexual perversion against the ideological grain places her writi…
Gendered Constructions of the Nightmare in French Nineteenth-Century Medical Writing and Fantastic Fiction
This article considers the history of the nightmare and argues that the nineteenth century in France sees a particular efflorescence of discursive attempts, across medical and literary fields, to explain, classify, and describe experientially this phenomenological concept. The article begins with a brief pan-European prehistory of the modern notion of the 'cauchemar' that explores its demonological and medical origins and the sexual connotations …
Interdisciplinarity, Cultural Studies, Queer
This article offers a comparative examination of the status of 'interdisciplinarity', 'cultural studies' and 'queer' in the discipline of French studies in the Anglophone world and in France. It is argued that, while the intellectual origins of both interdisciplinarity and queer theory are French, a series of disavowals and appropriations has de-gallicized them. On the one hand, the cultural hegemony of English studies in the USA and the UK has l…
Georges Bataille at the Avant-garde of Queer Theory?
Viewing critical psychology through the lens of queer
This article constitutes an intervention by two arts and humanities scholars with an expertise in queer studies and an outsider's interest in the discipline of critical psychology. First, it proposes a critical comparative history of the homosexual rights movements that predates ‘queer’ and the development of the discipline of psychology. Second, it examines some of the most recent currents in queer theory and tests their applicability to psychol…
Reading Bitchy Jones's Diary
The four articles in this section are united by their analyses of the links between three phenomena: female-authored web blogging; questions of sexual identity and community construction; and debat
Newton as Philosopher
Book Review| January 01 2011 Newton as Philosopher Andrew Janiak, Newton as Philosopher. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xii +196 pp. Lisa Downing Lisa Downing Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2011) 120 (1): 124–129. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2010-020 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Lisa Downing; Newton as Philosopher. The Philosophical…
John Money's ‘Normophilia’
This article considers the treatment of the concept of paraphilia in the work of sexologist John Money (1921–2006). It argues that Money's writing on paraphilia in the 1980s and 1990s, while both prolific and influential for clinical practice, has been ignored by historians and critics who have instead paid attention to his controversial pioneering work on gender identity and sex reassignment. First, the article reveals and analyses Money's indeb…
The natural and the normal in the history of sexuality
The Secret Vice
Journal Article The Secret Vice: Masturbation in Victorian Fiction and Medical Culture Get access Diane Mason, The Secret Vice: Masturbation in Victorian Fiction and Medical Culture, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008. Pp. 184. £50. ISBN 978 0 7190 7714 2. Lisa Downing Lisa Downing University of Exeter [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of…
Safewording! Kinkphobia and gender normativity in Fifty Shades of Grey
This article considers the recent publishing phenomenon, E.L. James's Fifty Shades trilogy, from what may be termed a ‘sex-critical’ perspective. That is, it evaluates, without endorsing, the differing responses to the trilogy issuing from both sex-positive and radical feminist perspectives. Further, it subjects to equal scrutiny the ways in which the trilogy and discourses about it represent both BDSM practices and the rituals of ‘vanilla’ heter…
On the limits of sexual ethics
The body politic
The post-Brexit, post-Trump climate in the EU has seen a series of challenges from the right wing of politics to the liberal consensus of recent years (e.g. the rise of Gert Wilders in the Netherlands and the increased support for Alternativ für Deutschland in the 2017 German election). This article examines the gendering and embodiment of the new far right in France and the UK. It offers a comparative focus on two recent political challengers fr…
De-Centring western sexualities
As editors of the Ashgate ‘Queer Interventions’ volume Queer in Europe (Downing & Gillett, 2011), we were excited to learn of the existence of this book. With its programmatic insistence on ‘Centra
French Cinema’s New ‘Sexual Revolution’
This article proposes and examines a selection of interpretative strategies for viewing the type of sexually explicit art film made by French directors Catherine Breillat, Patrice Chéreau, Gaspar Noé and the team Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, over the past five years. To contextualise the relevant debates, political work on pornography, produced mainly by feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, is placed in dialogue with recent deconstructi…
Viewing critical psychology through the lens of queer
This article constitutes an intervention by two arts and humanities scholars with an expertise in queer studies and an outsider's interest in the discipline of critical psychology. First, it proposes a critical comparative history of the homosexual rights movements that predates ‘queer’ and the development of the discipline of psychology. Second, it examines some of the most recent currents in queer theory and tests their applicability to psychol…
The Status of Mechanism in Locke's Essay
The prominent place of corpuscularian mechanism in Locke's Essay is nowadays universally acknowledged.' Certainly, Locke's discussions of the primary/secondary quality distinction and of real essences cannot be understood without reference to the corpuscuLarian science of his day, which held that all macroscopic bodily phenomena should be explained in terms of the motions and impacts of submicroscopic particles, or corpuscles, each of which can b…
Heteronormativity and Repronormativity in Sexological “Perversion Theory” and the DSM-5’s “Paraphilic Disorder” Diagnoses
Antisocial Feminism? Shulamith Firestone, Monique Wittig and Proto-Queer Theory
Recent iterations of feminist theory and activism, especially intersectional, 'third-wave' feminism, have cast much second-wave feminism as politically unacceptable in failing to centre the experiences of less privileged subjects than the often white, often middle-class names with which the second wave is usually associated. While bearing those critiques in mind, this article argues that some second-wave writers, exemplified by Shulamith Fireston…
The Secret Vice
Journal Article The Secret Vice: Masturbation in Victorian Fiction and Medical Culture Get access Diane Mason, The Secret Vice: Masturbation in Victorian Fiction and Medical Culture, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008. Pp. 184. £50. ISBN 978 0 7190 7714 2. Lisa Downing Lisa Downing University of Exeter [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of…
Interdisciplinarity, Cultural Studies, Queer
This article offers a comparative examination of the status of 'interdisciplinarity', 'cultural studies' and 'queer' in the discipline of French studies in the Anglophone world and in France. It is argued that, while the intellectual origins of both interdisciplinarity and queer theory are French, a series of disavowals and appropriations has de-gallicized them. On the one hand, the cultural hegemony of English studies in the USA and the UK has l…
Reading Bitchy Jones's Diary
The four articles in this section are united by their analyses of the links between three phenomena: female-authored web blogging; questions of sexual identity and community construction; and debat
Newton as Philosopher
Book Review| January 01 2011 Newton as Philosopher Andrew Janiak, Newton as Philosopher. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xii +196 pp. Lisa Downing Lisa Downing Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2011) 120 (1): 124–129. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2010-020 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Lisa Downing; Newton as Philosopher. The Philosophical…
John Money's ‘Normophilia’
This article considers the treatment of the concept of paraphilia in the work of sexologist John Money (1921–2006). It argues that Money's writing on paraphilia in the 1980s and 1990s, while both prolific and influential for clinical practice, has been ignored by historians and critics who have instead paid attention to his controversial pioneering work on gender identity and sex reassignment. First, the article reveals and analyses Money's indeb…
The natural and the normal in the history of sexuality
Encounters With Levinas
Journal Article Encounters With Levinas Get access Lisa Downing Lisa Downing Queen Mary, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume LX, Issue 1, January 2006, Pages 147–149, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/kni351 Published: 01 January 2006
The Iconography of Asphyxiophilia
This is a post print version of the article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below
Malebranche and Ideas
The Cambridge Companion to Locke
Introduction 1. Locke's life and times J. R. Milton 2. Locke's theory of ideas Vere Chappell 3. Locke's philosophy of body Edwin McCann 4. Locke's philosophy of mind Jonathan Bennett 5. Locke's philosophy of language Paul Guyer 6. Locke's theory of knowledge Roger Woolhouse 7. Locke's philosophy of religion Nicholas Wolterstorff 8. Locke's moral philosophy J. B. Schneewind 9. Locke's political philosophy Richard Ashcraft 10. Locke's influence Han…
The Status of Mechanism in Locke's Essay
The prominent place of corpuscularian mechanism in Locke's Essay is nowadays universally acknowledged.' Certainly, Locke's discussions of the primary/secondary quality distinction and of real essences cannot be understood without reference to the corpuscuLarian science of his day, which held that all macroscopic bodily phenomena should be explained in terms of the motions and impacts of submicroscopic particles, or corpuscles, each of which can b…
The Uses of Mechanism
Death and the Maidens
On the limits of sexual ethics
French Cinema’s New ‘Sexual Revolution’
This article proposes and examines a selection of interpretative strategies for viewing the type of sexually explicit art film made by French directors Catherine Breillat, Patrice Chéreau, Gaspar Noé and the team Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, over the past five years. To contextualise the relevant debates, political work on pornography, produced mainly by feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, is placed in dialogue with recent deconstructi…
Spirits and Clocks
Book Review| July 01 2004 Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes Dennis Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii, 181. Lisa Downing Lisa Downing Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2004) 113 (3): 417–420. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-113-3-417 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio S…
Beyond Reasonable Doubt
This article explores the concept of murder as an art form, discussed by the English writer Thomas De Quincey in the 1820s and reappearing later in a group of texts not previously analysed from this perspective: French Decadent fiction. Close readings of texts by Octave Mirbeau and Rachilde delineate the structures and thematic characteristics of this conceit. Drawing insights from ethical and psychoanalytic criticism (Levinas, Jessica Benjamin, …
The Iconography of Asphyxiophilia
This is a post print version of the article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below
Beyond Sexuality
Le Monstre, le singe et le fœtus
By Evanghélina Stead. Geneva, Droz, 2004. 602 pp. Stead's compendious volume sets out to address the historical lacuna she identifies and describes in the opening pages: ‘l'absence de discours théorique de la fin du XIXe siècle sur elle-même’ (p. 1). Drawing on a vast selection of fin-de-siècle iconography and texts from various Western European cultures, she attempts to show that rather than articulating a discourse about its own ideology, Decad…
Encounters With Levinas
Journal Article Encounters With Levinas Get access Lisa Downing Lisa Downing Queen Mary, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume LX, Issue 1, January 2006, Pages 147–149, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/kni351 Published: 01 January 2006
The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault
French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault is essential reading for students in departments of literature, history, sociology and cultural studies. His work on the institutions of mental health and medicine, the history of systems of knowledge, literature and literary theory, criminality and the prison system, and sexuality, has had a profound and enduring impact across the humanities and social sciences. This introductory book, written for…
The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault
The Secret Vice
Journal Article The Secret Vice: Masturbation in Victorian Fiction and Medical Culture Get access Diane Mason, The Secret Vice: Masturbation in Victorian Fiction and Medical Culture, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008. Pp. 184. £50. ISBN 978 0 7190 7714 2. Lisa Downing Lisa Downing University of Exeter [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of…
John Money's ‘Normophilia’
This article considers the treatment of the concept of paraphilia in the work of sexologist John Money (1921–2006). It argues that Money's writing on paraphilia in the 1980s and 1990s, while both prolific and influential for clinical practice, has been ignored by historians and critics who have instead paid attention to his controversial pioneering work on gender identity and sex reassignment. First, the article reveals and analyses Money's indeb…
The natural and the normal in the history of sexuality
Georges Bataille at the Avant-garde of Queer Theory?
Viewing critical psychology through the lens of queer
This article constitutes an intervention by two arts and humanities scholars with an expertise in queer studies and an outsider's interest in the discipline of critical psychology. First, it proposes a critical comparative history of the homosexual rights movements that predates ‘queer’ and the development of the discipline of psychology. Second, it examines some of the most recent currents in queer theory and tests their applicability to psychol…
Reading Bitchy Jones's Diary
The four articles in this section are united by their analyses of the links between three phenomena: female-authored web blogging; questions of sexual identity and community construction; and debat
Newton as Philosopher
Book Review| January 01 2011 Newton as Philosopher Andrew Janiak, Newton as Philosopher. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xii +196 pp. Lisa Downing Lisa Downing Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2011) 120 (1): 124–129. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2010-020 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Lisa Downing; Newton as Philosopher. The Philosophical…
De-Centring western sexualities
As editors of the Ashgate ‘Queer Interventions’ volume Queer in Europe (Downing & Gillett, 2011), we were excited to learn of the existence of this book. With its programmatic insistence on ‘Centra
Modernism and perversion
This book is a comprehensive study of the ways in which the diagnostic category of ‘perversion’ came about via a ‘conceptual transfer between literature, medicine and psychology, between imaginary
Safewording! Kinkphobia and gender normativity in Fifty Shades of Grey
This article considers the recent publishing phenomenon, E.L. James's Fifty Shades trilogy, from what may be termed a ‘sex-critical’ perspective. That is, it evaluates, without endorsing, the differing responses to the trilogy issuing from both sex-positive and radical feminist perspectives. Further, it subjects to equal scrutiny the ways in which the trilogy and discourses about it represent both BDSM practices and the rituals of ‘vanilla’ heter…
Sociology (24 obras) · Art (20 obras) · Philosophy (19 obras) · Psychology (19 obras) · Gender Studies (18 obras) · Psychoanalysis (18 obras) · Literature (14 obras) · Epistemology (13 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Politics (13 obras)