Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Special Relationship and the British Hypothesis: The Black Laurel, The Third Man, Cold War Vienna and Berlin
- 2 Cold War on the 1930s and Sacrificial Naming: John Dos Passos and Josephine Herbst
- 3 DEW Line, Uranium and the Arctic Cold War: Ginsberg's Kaddish and Nabokov's Lolita
- 4 Cold War Sex War, Or the Other Being Inside: Burroughs, Paley, Plath, Hughes
- 5 The Sacrificial Logic of the Asian Cold War: Greene's The Quiet American and McCarthy's The Seventeenth Degree
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Cold War Sex War, Or the Other Being Inside: Burroughs, Paley, Plath, Hughes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Special Relationship and the British Hypothesis: The Black Laurel, The Third Man, Cold War Vienna and Berlin
- 2 Cold War on the 1930s and Sacrificial Naming: John Dos Passos and Josephine Herbst
- 3 DEW Line, Uranium and the Arctic Cold War: Ginsberg's Kaddish and Nabokov's Lolita
- 4 Cold War Sex War, Or the Other Being Inside: Burroughs, Paley, Plath, Hughes
- 5 The Sacrificial Logic of the Asian Cold War: Greene's The Quiet American and McCarthy's The Seventeenth Degree
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In a 1979 interview, Grace Paley outlined the relations she saw between ‘the politics of the ordinary life of women and men, and the organizational or activist politics’ of the nuclear disarmament movement, ‘which brings together our own personal flesh, our bodies, as women’:
For a long time I thought about ourselves as women, and what places like Three Mile Island or Love Canal meant to us and to the children we bore and to our own flesh. Then I saw that this also involves men in a way I hadn't thought about before, not just in terms of their being affected but also in a sexual way. This unseeable, unsmellable radiation attacks particularly the foetus, the small growing child, and particularly the egg. […] if [men] would think what was happening to them was the violent if invisible entrance into their sexual bodies, and the attack upon the innocent sperm, if you want to call it that, as well as the pure egg, [then] men would begin to understand what rape was all about.
The Cold War nuclear programme drew minds into its strange, subatomic world at dimensions the body's senses could not record, a world of radiating particles lethal to the innocence of the body's own cells, beamed in waves as if from some evil communications system, insidious, electron-microscopic, a man-made viral epidemic.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Literary Cold War 1945 to Vietnam , pp. 106 - 151Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009