Michel de Certeau’s 1970 monograph The Possession at Loudun recounts a series of alleged demonic possessions at the Ursuline convent in Loudun, France, in the 1630s. These events led to the arrest of a local priest, Urbain Grandier, who was charged as a sorcerer and executed for his supposed crimes. Rather than seeking to verify the truth of the possessions, this paper analyses them through a feminist lens, suggesting that the state of ‘possession’ gave the afflicted nuns an agency which (...) was otherwise unavailable to them. Under the leadership of their clever prioress Jeanne des Anges, the possessed women used their new agency to target and eliminate Grandier, who can be seen as a representative or scapegoat for the patriarchy as whole. (shrink)

The Viennese obsession with sex at the fin-de-siècle was vividly expressed in the artworks of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Their depictions of women demonstrated their fascination with and fear of female sexual pleasure and desire, reflecting a wider societal anxiety and erotic fixation. This paper will analyse selected paintings and drawings by both Klimt and Schiele to explore this dynamic of 'erotic neurasthenia.'.

Income inequality has been empirically linked to interpersonal competition and risk-taking behaviors, but a separate line of findings consistently shows that individuals have inaccurate perceptions of the actual levels of income inequality in society. How can inequality be both consistently misperceived and yet a reliable predictor of behavior? The present study extends both these lines of research by evaluating if the scope of input used to assess income inequality (i.e., at the national, state, county, or postal code level) can account (...) for perception discrepancies and if actual/perceived inequality is associated with female intrasexual competition. Female participants recruited online from the general US population (_n_ = 691) provided demographic information, measures of perceived income inequality, and measures of intrasexual competition attitudes and behavior. Actual and perceived income inequality (at any level) did not predict negative attitudes toward other women or female weighting of physical appearance as a desirable trait. Perceived income inequality and actual county-level inequality was, however, predictive of female competition in the form of self-sexualization clothing choice. Further analyses found that age and importance placed on physical attractiveness also predicted women’s clothing choices. Perceptions of income inequality were predicted not by actual Gini indices, but by beliefs about the levels of poverty and income gaps. These results highlight the importance of better understanding the proximate cues by which people perceive environmental features such as inequality, and how those cues are used to adjust interpersonal behaviors. (shrink)