Davey Crockett as Trickster

Individuals, experiencing themselves as powerless in the face of massive and unremitting social transformation, respond by attempting to capture and encapsulate such change within a new and ordered symbolic universe. They seek through imagery and myth to mitigate their feelings of helplessness by deflecting and partially distorting change and thus bringing it within the control of the imagination. Especially when the social fabric is rent in fundamental ways, bodily and familial imagery will assume ascendancy. At such times individuals will revert to their most primitive experience of human interaction and social ordering. On an even more instinctive level, when all the world spins out of control, the last intuitive resource of any individual is her or his own body, and especially its sexual impulses. That, at least, one can control and manipulate. Thus sexuality and the family, because of their primitive psychic and social functions, serve as reservoirs of physical imagery through which individuals seek to express and rationalize their experience of social change.2 Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the western world experienced a sexual explosion not of acts, licit or illicit, but of words, images, fantasies, fears. Thus far we have viewed the growing sexual obsessions of this era as an effort by unnamed persons to control the behaviour, sexual and otherwise, of unnamed others, to expand the power of the state, to reach into the minds and hearts of millions.3 Possibly, but also too simply. To understand the full complexity of this politico-sexual phenomenon, we must begin our analysis at a far earlier state of the process before the manipula

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Feeling · Human sexuality · Instinct · Liminality · Phenomenon · Pornography · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Social Psychology

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  Mary Douglas•Man•1968

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