Preliminary Programme

We could agree that the 1970s was the glorious decade to a new generation of filmmakers in Italy, England and Brazil. They were all trying to screen sex situations exploring new gazes on feminine body in bizarre positions. In Brazil, we must add something peculiar regarding the political context of dictatorship and the censorship monitoring arts with special attention to the film Industry.
This paper address a selection of Brazilian, Italian and British film productions during the 1970s, to draw attention to: 1) how some aesthetic dimension of comedy, as a film genre, mixed in plots with sexual content is configured in a transnational way; 2) What cinematic strategies are being elaborated to screen naked women, sex relations, gay and lesbian eroticism, infidelities, normative and subversive sex encounters; 3) How such imagery inflect different forms and categories of difference (p.ex. class, gender, race, nationality); 4) How Visual culture act shaping modes of recognition/misrecognition and identification in terms of gender and sexual performance.
There are many important academic works that help to underline such cinematic and narrative conventions of screening sex and gender. Laura Mulvey and Richard Dyer are names that, in different ways, brought new dimension to feminist and queer film studies. Linda Nicholson, Teresa de Lauretis, B. R. Rich and many others are equally important to this research since they have some of the most quoted references in this field of study. Even though, I also intend to bring to this theoretical debate some contributions from Latin authors, including Brazilian ones. Not just to emphasize their singular research contributions but to feature another set of problems and concepts. One of them is the difficult for Latin America’s Social Science and Historiography to think under a queer perspective.

As a result of this incursion on films and some theoretical and political aspects, I will present an argument that dialogues with Foucault’s History of the Sexuality. Beyond the disciplinary, normative and controlling modes of power to produce sexuality, in the 1970s we also have the seduction. One of the important manifestations of seduction practices is convincing by humour and laugh, having visual culture as a privileged site of (re)production (J.Evans & S. Hall, 1999). The provisory conclusion I could state is: seduction was a very effective practice, operating through a particular use of the balance between humour and eroticism in this soft-porn filmography, bringing a new approach to the history of sexuality.
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In the paper, the swedish reception of and debate on the thinking of Wilhelm Reich (1898-1956) will be discussed. In the 1960´s and 1970´s, there was a renewed interest in the Austrian psychoanalyst Reich in Sweden. As in several other countries, books by Reich were published, as well as books and articles about his life and his ideas.

The interest in Reich can mostly be found among marxist sociologists and psychologists and to some extent among libertarian parts of the new left. Groups and individuals also choose to embrace different parts of Reich´s thinking; many focused on the combination of psychoanalysis and marxism, others the concept of orgastic potency, and some the orgone theory.

Even though Reich had an actuality among leftists and radicals around Europe, a hypothesis is that his theories were of less importance in Sweden compared to for example West Germany. One, but probably not the only, reason for this is the intense sex debate in Sweden that took place in the early 1960´s, before the rise of the new left and before articles and books by Reich were spread. For the swedish sexliberals in the early 1960´s, Reich was not an alternative, it was instead the ideas and perspectives of Alfred Kinsey.

In the paper I will also, as a comparison, shed some light on the impact of Reich in Scandinavia in the 1930´s. Reich lived for a short time as a refugee in Sweden and Denmark and for five years in Norway, in touch with radical psychoanalysts and sex reformers.
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In 1974 a new teacher’s manual introduced the concept of ‘relationship education’ as the official name of the Norwegian sex education. Sexuality, the manual stated, was more than biology, it was also; ‘a foundation for contact and community as two people share experiences, ideas and needs, and provide answers to one another also by physical contact. Sexuality is therefore also relationship’. Christian ideals of marriage and monogamy pervaded the new manual, but it was also influenced by the sexual radicalism of the 1960s. In the paper I will explore how the Norwegian sex education of the 1970s were marked by conflicting forms of sexual knowledge, and how this made the teacher’s manual ambiguous in its approach to youth sexuality.
When sex education had been introduced, under the name of ‘reproduction education’, in Norwegian schools in the 1930s, it had been crucial that sexuality was represented in a rational manner. Anyone should be able to talk about sexuality as it was no longer to be ‘obscured’ by religion or superstition. This ‘naturalistic’ approach to sex education was however soon to be criticized from a Christian opposition, requesting that sexuality should be regarded as an integrated part of family, society and religion. During the 1960s and early 1970s the sex education also became subject to harsh criticism by social scientists who were influenced by both the sexual radicalism or freudomarxism of Marcuse and Reich, and the new sex surveys that followed the seminal Kinsey reports. The moral framework of abstinence and the unwillingness to include contraceptives made the current sex education irrelevant to the youths, these critics claimed.
The voices of sexual radicalism, strengthened by new survey material, wanted the acknowledgement of youth sexuality in the sex education. In contrast to Sweden, where the Christian opposition was weaker, Norwegian sex education did not include information on contraceptives. Thus, the main objective for the sexual radicals was that contraceptives should be included in the sex education. In the new official guidelines of 1974 contraceptives were included; they succeeded in this endeavour. At the same time, contraceptives were described in an ambiguous manner in the teacher’s manual of 1974. Could it be that the focus on contraceptives in the debates on sex education had displaced the more profound ideas of sexual radicalism? Maybe the Christian voices had a larger impact on the overall ideas of human sexuality in the new sex education of the 1970s?
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