"Your body, my choice"

Abstract

Are we sure we have to go all the way back to the Middle Ages to find violent forms of male domination? Unfortunately, the contemporary world offers a sad spectacle of this, where the sex of power is proudly displayed. So it's hard to adopt the lesson of the Greeks, who laughed at Priape's chattering impotence. This first lesson, in the form of a general introduction, looks to structural anthropology and the new feminist epistemologies of contemporary political philosophy for the theoretical foundations for an investigation into the power relations between sex, gender and sexuality, while adopting Foucauldian mistrust of sex as king and all-politics. By analyzing two objects from the 14^th century (an ivory box preserved in the Musée de Cluny and the aquamanile featured on the lecture poster) in the light of Aristotle's Lai, we attempt to define what we expect from the Middle Ages in this inquiry: a closer attention to ambivalence, which is tantamount to the power of reversal.

Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power: on a fake quote from House of Cards
Brutality in politics, yesterday and today
How to laugh at the fascinus (Pascal Quignard, Le Sexe et l'Effroi, Paris, 1994)
Un petit dieu sans forme, et mal taillé (Maurice Olender, Priape, le phallocrate impotent, Paris, 2025)
Priapic government: a chattering, obscene impotence
Critiques of sex as king and all-politics
Michel Foucault'sHistoire de la sexualité , or the "science of sharing"
Sex says nothing about the naked truth of power
Against "this austere monarchy of sex" (La Volonté de savoir, Paris, 1976)
"Le sexe désigne donc trois choses..." (Elsa Dorlin, Sexe, genre et sexualités, Paris, 2008)
"A fantasy endowed with destructive power" (Judith Butler, Qui a peur du genre?, Paris, 2025)
From gender as "primary way of signifying power relations" (Joan W. Scott, "Genre: une catégorie utile d'analyse historique", Les Cahiers du GRIF, 1988) to "rapports sociaux de sexe" (Nicole-Claude Mathieu, L'Anatomie politique. Categorisations et idéologies du sexe, Paris, 1991)
The "valence différentielle des sexes" as "butoir ultime de la pensée" (Françoise Héritier, Masculin/Féminin, Paris, 1996-2012
"Thought of difference" for "dissolving hierarchy": a militant structuralism
Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals: sperm as pneuma
Women, milk and blood
Medieval doctrines of the embryo (Maaike Van Der Lugt, Le Ver, le démon et la vierge. Les théories médiévales de la génération extraordinaire, Paris, 2004)
A reminder of the politics of love: a system of power cannot be safely ordered by linking the arts of governing to the arts of loving
To greet Christine Klapisch-Zuber: back to the delivery tray
The composite case known as "L'assaut du château d'Amour" from the Musée de Cluny
Love, war and madness: literary models
Solomon's wisdom and Aristotle's madness
The philosopher, between omniscience and blindness
Phyllis riding Aristotle: an aquamanile and his Wasserhahn
Taming the lion of philosophers (Figures du fou, Paris, 2024)
Roman d'Alexandre and Lai d'Alexandre: mocking the master'smaiestas
"Sa tresce grosse, longue et blonde:/Na pas deservi c'on la tonde" (André Corbellari, "Lascive Phyllis", in Chantal Connochie-Bourgne dir., La Chevelure dans la littérature et l'art du Moyen Âge, Arles, 2004)
Equus eroticus: active role, passive role
Chrétien de Troyes and Quentin Tarantino
I'ma get medieval on your ass: the anal stage of male domination?
A sword-sharpening stone in the shape of a phallus
Your body, my choice, a masculinist slogan: four words and everything is destroyed
From "Politiques de l'amour" to "Sexe du pouvoir": once again, the break-in of the present
"I won't be complete. I'd just like, once again, to understand, and make people understand" (Lucien Febvre, Autour de l'Héptaméron, amour sacré, amour profane, Paris, 1944).