Lisabeth During, "The Chastity Plot" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Lisabeth During, "The Chastity Plot" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

In The Chastity Plot (U Chicago Press, 2021), Lisabeth During tells the story of the rise, fall, and transformation of the ideal of chastity. From its role in the practice of asceticism to its associations with sovereignty, violence, and the purity of nature, it has been loved, honored, and despised. Obsession with chastity has played a powerful and disturbing role in our moral imagination. It has enforced patriarchy’s double standards, complicated sexual relations, and imbedded in Western culture a myth of gender that has been long contested by feminists. Still not yet fully understood, the chastity plot remains with us, and the metaphysics of purity continue to haunt literature, religion, and philosophy. Idealized and unattainable, sexual renunciation has shaped social institutions, political power, ethical norms, and clerical abuses. It has led to destruction and passion, to seductive fantasies that inspired saints and provoked libertines. As During shows, it should not be underestimated. Examining literature, religion, psychoanalysis, and cultural history from antiquity through the middle ages and into modernity, During provides a sweeping history of chastity and insight into its subversive potential. Instead of simply asking what chastity is, During considers what chastity can do, why we should care, and how it might provide a productive disruption, generating new ways of thinking about sex, integrity, and freedom. Keep your eyes out for Lisabeth's next book, She Did It In Her Sleep, which focuses on the horrifying phenomenon that is comatose rape. Frances Sacks is a graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episoder(494)

Sexual Imperialism and English Language Teaching

Sexual Imperialism and English Language Teaching

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Hanna Torsh speaks with Dr Vaughan Rapatahana about sexual predation in the English language teaching industry. The conversation addresses his ...

2 Sep 202531min

Patrice D. Douglass, "Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Patrice D. Douglass, "Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence" (Stanford UP, 2025)

In Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence (Stanford UP, 2025) Patrice D. Douglass interrogates the relationship between sexual violence and modern racial slavery and finds ...

29 Aug 20251h 19min

Marla Segol, "Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2022)

Marla Segol, "Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2022)

In Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy (Penn State University Press, 2021) a provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology underlying Western sex ...

17 Aug 202556min

Marla Segol, "Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2022)

Marla Segol, "Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2022)

In Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy (Penn State University Press, 2021) a provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology underlying Western sex ...

17 Aug 202556min

Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018)

Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018)

From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each o...

8 Aug 20251h 12min

Hannah Charnock, "Teenage intimacies: Young Women, Sex and Social Life in England, 1950-80" (Manchester UP, 2025)

Hannah Charnock, "Teenage intimacies: Young Women, Sex and Social Life in England, 1950-80" (Manchester UP, 2025)

Teenage Intimacies offers a new account of the ‘sexual revolution’ in mid-twentieth century England. Rather than focusing on ‘Swinging London’, the book reveals the transformations in social life that...

2 Aug 202541min

Chris Washington, "Nonbinary Jane Austen" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Chris Washington, "Nonbinary Jane Austen" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

In Nonbinary Jane Austen, Chris Washington theorizes how Jane Austen envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that we can supposedly see solidifying in the eighteenth c...

2 Aug 20251h 9min

Marion Bower, "The Life and Work of Joan Riviere: Freud, Klein and Female Sexuality" (Routledge, 2018)

Marion Bower, "The Life and Work of Joan Riviere: Freud, Klein and Female Sexuality" (Routledge, 2018)

Joan Riviere (1883-1962) is best known for her role in promoting the ideas of others. She came to prominence in the world of psychoanalysis as Freud’s favorite translator and Melanie Klein’s earliest ...

27 Jul 202558min

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