But for the Victorians this sort of cult of mourning developed. That's a very ancient idea, the linkage of sex and death. Salon spoke with Lutz by phone about Victorian gender bending, homoeroticism, and what was up with all that flogging porn. That I found myself Googling "Victorian porn" after finishing Lutz' book is both a statement about how much our world has changed, and how what fundamentally excites us remains much the same. Like the era itself, "Pleasure Bound" is restrained and a bit of a tease. It is an academic read (it wouldn't hurt to brush up on your Victorian art and literature beforehand) with the occasional pulse-quickening passage filled with erotic descriptions of floggings or lines of sensual poetry. These rebels got off, so to speak, on breaking taboos and challenging sexual mores - through their work and, sometimes, their personal exploits. Lutz, a professor of Victorian literature and culture at Long Island University, focuses on a small group of bawdy iconoclasts including explorer Richard Burton, Pre-Raphaelite painters Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Simeon Solomon, poet Christina Rossetti - Dante's sister - and poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. More interesting still, she introduces us to the sexual revolutionaries of the time. In " Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism," Deborah Lutz writes about the seedier side of 19th century London - anonymous sex, flagellation brothels and spanking porn, for starters. We think of it as a time of buttoned-up prudery and repression - and it was - but loosen the corset of 1860s England and out spills the kink. Pornography, S&M, gay "cruising," cross-dressing - these don't sound like relics of the Victorian era.
0 kommentar(er)
