Lisa S. Starks
'Batter My [Flaming] Heart': Male Masochism in the Religious Lyrics of Donne and Crashaw
Enculturation, Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 1997
The impetus of my psychoanalytic exploration of male masochism in Donne and Crashaw occurs in Richard Rambuss's "Pleasure and Devotion: The Body of Jesus and Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric," in which he opens up possibilities for reading eroticism (especially homoeroticism) in early modern representations of Christ's body. In this analysis, Rambuss opposes Caroline Walker Bynum who, in response to Leo Steinberg's The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art, claims that depictions of Christ's genitalia (the focus of Steinberg's work) can only be regarded as erotic from a modern standpoint, for such representations in historical context, before the advent of modern sexuality, could not have rendered "sexual" meanings for their audiences but only those signifying reproduction. As Rambuss points out, Bynum's analysis denies the possibility of reading the erotic--especially the homoerotic--in medieval/Renaissance representation (268), for it works on the underlying assumption that such meanings are structured according to the false binary of "sexual/generative." Conversely, In Rambuss's view, "the body [is] at least potentially sexualized, as a truly polysemous surface where various significances and expressions--including a variety of erotic ones--compete and collude with each other in making the body meaningful" (268). --http://enculturation.gmu.edu/1_2/starks.html [May 2004]
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