New Books for 2023
Announcing two new books for 2023 – Queering Occultures and Acts of Magical Resistance.
Archive for the category ‘Gender’
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On the “third-nature” – IV
Thus far in this series, I have been examining early Indian textual sources for glimpses of how persons of non-normative sexualities or gender presentations were represented. For this post – as I promised at the end of the previous installment – dealing with ‘changes of sex’ – I will examine a text from a much later period, a 16th-century Tamil version of the Brahmottara-Khaṇḍa, featuring the famous Queen Sīmantinī. The Brahmottara-Khaṇḍa is a section of the Skanda Purāṇa, that has been dated to between 700 -1150 C.E.
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On the “third-nature” – III
Continuing this series on non-normative sexuality and gender presentation in early Indian sources. This time, I will examine a couple of examples from medical (Āyurvedic) literature. Early Āyurvedic texts have much to say about how persons exhibiting non-normative sexual behaviors and presentations come about.
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On the “third-nature” – II
In the previous post in this series, I examined the representation of non-normative sexualities and gender presentations in the Code of Manu and the Kamasutra. This time, it is the turn of ‘queer’ Buddhist anxieties. Again, this is an expansion of a Twitter thread earlier in the year.
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On the “third-nature” – I
Over on Twitter, I’ve been doing a series of threads examining early Indian texts of various kinds and how they present matters relating to non-normative sexualities and gender presentation, as a preamble to getting around to the tricky concept of “third-nature” (tṛtīyāprakṛti) in classical sources. In this series of posts, I will expand on my necessarily brief Twitter comments. It is complex stuff at times, but I shall strive for conciseness.
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On the ‘Queering’ of Ganesha
You create this world. You maintain this world. All this world is seen in you. You are Earth, water, Fire, Air, Aethyr. You are beyond the four measures of speech. You are beyond the Three Gunas. You are beyond the three bodies. You are beyond the three times. You are always situated in the Muladhara. You are the being of the three Shaktis. You are always meditated upon by Yogins. You are Brahma, you are Vishnu, you are Rudra, You are Agni, You are Vayu, You are the Moon, You are the Sun, You are Brahma, Bhur-Bhuvah-Svar.
Ganesa UpanisadWhat makes a god ‘queer’? How – and perhaps more importantly – who makes that identification, and when does it become canonical?
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Book Review: Essays on Women in Western Esotericism – II
Continuing with my review of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism from March (part 1).
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As editor Amy Hale points out in her introduction, the women profiled in this collection (for the most part British, living between the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries) lived at a time when women’s involvement in the esoteric was becoming more visible, as was women’s involvement with other social movements. These women saw esotericism – in varying degrees, as a route for both personal and social transformation. -
Book Review: Essays on Women in Western Esotericism – I
The scholarly focus on women in Western Esotericism has, as editor Amy Hale points out in her introduction to Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021), often been framed as marginal or secondary to studies of male occultists. This new book then is a welcome and much-needed corrective to that lacuna. Divided into four sections, the contributions cover women both well-known – Dion Fortune, Pamela Colman Smith, Florence Farr, and Doreen Valiente, to the more obscure (at least to me), such as Eleanor Kirk and Colette Aboulker-Muscat.
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Book Review: Asexual Erotics
The perception of Asexuality as an orientation has largely become more prominent since the late 1990s with the launching of AVEN (the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network in 2001) and the rapid increase of awareness and activism that it spawned in questioning assumptions regarding compulsory sexuality. While landmark researchers such as Kinsey had previously identified (with an “X”) those people for whom sexual desire was either very low or absent, bloggers and activists were at the vanguard of identifying Asexuality as a discreet orientation that was typified as “a person who does not experience sexual attraction.” Continue reading »
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A Phallic Knight – II
As I hope the treatise may be forgotten I shall not name the author, but observe, that all the ordure and filfth, all the antique pictures, and all the representations of the generative organs, in their most odious and degrading profusion, have been raked together, and copulated (for no other idea seems to be in the mind of the author) and copulated, I say, with a new species of blasphemy. Such are, what we would call, the records of the stews and bordellos of Grecian and Roman antiquity, exhibited for the recreation of antiquaries, and the obscene revellings of Greek Scholars in their private studies. Surely this is to dwell mentally in lust and darkness in the loathsome and polluted chamber at Capreae.”
Thomas James MathiasGiven that I’m going to give a lecture on Richard Payne Knight for the London Fortean Society in October, I thought I’d better get on with the series of posts on Knight I started last June. Continue reading »