Brian Duff publishes article in the journal Sexualities

Brian Duff, associate professor in the Political Science Department, has published an article in the current issue of the international peer-reviewed journal Sexualities.  The article, "Confession, sexuality and pornography as sacred language," explores the connection between religious and sexual sources of personal meaning. It revisits the analyses of modern sexuality offered by the French theorist Michel Foucault and and the American feminist Catharine MacKinnon to argue that an understanding of the role of sexuality in religious confessional discourse sheds new light on the role of pornography in contemporary culture. Pornography can be understood as a popular discourse with effects analogous to the elite discourse, rooted in confession, examined by Foucault. This analysis reveals ways that Foucault’s attention to religious texts might shed more direct light on lived sexualities, and the relationship between sexuality, spirituality and notions of the sacred in contemporary culture.

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