Download or read book The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy written by Laura Hinton and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1999-09-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suggesting that sentimental novels, films, and TV melodramas are guided by an ambivalent and sadoerotic sympathy, this book shows sympathetic sentiments to be cultural formulations of male desire, and sympathy itself to be the embodiment of a controlling gaze. In a playful but historically persuasive linkage of diverse texts, Laura Hinton shows how sympathetic spectators love their victims and, in the process, maintain authoritarian codes of sexual and racial difference.