Criminality, Sexuality and Subculture
Panel Chair: Alan Sinfield, University of Sussex
Richard Hornsey (Sussex)
"The Lavender Hill Mob: The Criminality of Male Same-Sex Desire in Abstract Space."
This paper is a reading of the 1951 Ealing comedy The Lavender Hill Mob. It argues that the central narrative can be read as a displaced articulation of the machinations of male same-sex desire, as played out within the urban space of capitalist modernity. Identifying the theft of gold bullion with the squandering of potentially reproductive semen provides a way into thinking of how spatial practices and experience, and their relation to illegality and social taboo helped structure queer male discourse and identioty in the postwar era.
Ingrid Sharp (Leeds)
Dangerous Women: Female Criminality in the Weimar Republic
This paper looks at attempts to control and domesticate women in the postwar society of twenties Germany, in this instance through depictions of criminality and punishment. I will be showing slides of paintings depicting 'Lustmord' (Sexual Murder) and trying to explain the prevalence and popularity of these images and relate them to dominant theories of female criminality.
John Mercer (Buckinghamshire Chilterns U. C.)
"DEEP IN THE BRIG: The Myth of the Prison in American Gay Pornographic Video."
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the significance of the prison scenario and its various mutations in the texts of American commercial pornographic video. The paper will identify the prison as a highly eroticised all male environment, an arena where the active/passive dichotomy of gay pornography is staged and restaged. The significances of the prison are multiple. The prison draws on a gay mythology of homosexual desire that has its origins in sources as diverse as the literature of the Marquis De Sade and Jean Genet and latterly the erotic illustration of the graphic artists Tom of Finland, Rex and Ettienne. Prison scenarios take many shapes in gay pornography from the American penitentiary and the military brig to the fantasised dungeon of the Leatherman. I see these scenarios as performing an important role within gay porn by offering idealised spaces for the functions of pornography: voyeurism, narcissistic display and active/passive role play. The prison space is equally of crucial importance in terms of situating the generic iconographic constructions that occupy the gay pornographic video that I identify as prototypic constructions: idealised hypermasculine types that recur in American gay pornography that act as machines of desire for the gay consumer.