0000000000328559
AUTHOR
Rainer Emig
showing 2 related works from this author
Terrorist Masculinities: Political Masculinity between Fiction, Facts, and Their Mediation
2018
This essay proposes that terrorism manifests itself in a relation that encompasses masculinity as well as the media. The origin of this relationship is the joint performativity of gender and acts of terror. This makes terrorism an instrument of social and political change. But in order to legitimize themselves, terrorism as well as masculinity require authorization by a phantasmagorical power. Drawing on the dominance of males among terrorists, this essay will look at an early depiction of terrorism in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a contemporary representation in Sahota’s novel Ours Are the Streets and terrorism’s real manifestation in the Paris carnage of November 2015. It will show that in…
Comparative Decadence? Male Queerness in Late Nineteenth- and Late Twentieth-Century Fiction
2018
Emig’s chapter compares Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library. After outlining the different historical contexts of queer masculinity in the novels, it points out parallels, such as its legal repression in late Victorianism and at the time of the AIDS crisis under Thatcher. Wilde’s novel provokes with homoerotic longing, Hollinghurst’s with pornographic depictions of gay sex. Both texts are decadent fantasies, yet also criticise double standards of hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity. Hollinghurst’s novel further exposes its Wildean subtext as class-ridden and colonial. In addition, the scandalous male as narcissistic consumer of …