Sensational Pleasures in Cinema, Literature and Visual Culture : The Phallic Eye

This international collection focuses on the phallic character of classic and contemporary literary and visual cultures and their invasive nature. It focuses on thrillers, horror cinema, sexual art and photography, erotic literature, female and male body politics, queer pleasures, gender/cross-gender/transgenderism, CCTV and phallic ethnicities. This international collection focuses on the phallic character of classic and contemporary literary and visual cultures and their invasive nature. The phallic eye is analyzed as a spectacle of the obscene, the scene and the sin, a visualization of guilty pleasures and outrageous lusts that evoke anxiety, guilt, satisfaction, intimacy and intimidation. The phallic eye is a powerful and useful metaphor for a radical investigation of the interrelations between spectatorship, authorship, dominance, Mulvey's theorization of voyeurism/exhibitionism/Looked-at-ness, and surveillance of human desires and visual pleasures. This volume suggests a broad perspective on the phallus as passionate, dynamic and energetic force, which is more than the consuming, predatory eye of the beholder who yearns for sensational spectacles. The chapters focus on thrillers, horror cinema, pornography, sexual art and photography, erotic literature, female and male body politics, queer pleasures, gender/cross-gender/transgenderism, CCTV and phallic ethnicities Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Introduction The Phallic: “An Object of Terror and Delight”....Pages 1-18 Front Matter....Pages 19-19 The Unpardoned Gaze: Forbidden Erotic Vision in Greek Mythology....Pages 21-34 The Haptic Eye: On Nan Goldin’s Scopophilia....Pages 35-49 The Peepshow and the Voyeuse: Colette’s Challenge to the Male Gaze....Pages 50-61 The Monstrous Non-heteronormative Formed by the Male Gaze....Pages 62-73 Bearing Witness to the Unbearable: Ethics and the Phallic Gaze in Irréversible....Pages 74-87 Front Matter....Pages 89-89 Transcendental Gazes: Pornographic Images of Transmasculinity....Pages 91-103 “Look Closer”: Sam Mendes’s Visions of White Men....Pages 104-114 Between the Joy of the Woman Castrator and the Silence of the Woman Victim: Following the Exhibition The Uncanny XX....Pages 115-126 Zack Snyder’s Impossible Gaze: The Fantasy of “Looked-at-ness” Manifested in Sucker Punch (2011)....Pages 127-139 In-Between Complicity and Subversion: D. M. Thomas’s Charlotte or A Reflection of/on “Pornographic” Literature and Society....Pages 140-154 Front Matter....Pages 155-155 ‘There’s No Losing It”: Disability and Voyeurism in Rear Window and Vertigo....Pages 157-168 The Vaginal Apocalypse: Phallic Trauma and the End of the World in Romeo is Bleeding....Pages 169-179 Ambiguous Exposures: Gender-Bending Muscles of the 1930s Physique Photographs of Tony Sansone and Sports Photographs of Babe Didrikson....Pages 180-194 Reframing Gender and Visual Pleasure: New Signifying Practices in Contemporary Cinema....Pages 195-212 Front Matter....Pages 213-213 Voyeurism and Surveillance: A Cinematic and Visual Affair....Pages 215-230 Thrust and Probe: The Phallic Blade, The Physician and the Voyeuristic Pleasures of Violent Penetration....Pages 231-242 Front Matter....Pages 243-243 Seeing Red: The Female Body and the Body of the Text in Hitchcock’s Marnie....Pages 245-257 Pictura in Arcana: The Traumatic Real as In/visible Crack....Pages 258-276 The Female Body in Frederick Sandys’s Paintings, or The Sublimation of Desire....Pages 277-288 Back Matter....Pages 289-308