New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work
364 episodes - English - Latest episode: 9 days ago - ★★★★★ - 3 ratingsInterviews with researchers on sex-related issues.
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Episodes
Elyse Ambrose, "A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive" (T&T Clark, 2024)
April 11, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutesIn A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive (T&T Clark, 2024), Elyse Ambrose looks to an archive of blackqueerness as an authoritative source for religious ethical reflection. This approach counters the disintegrative norms of anti-black and anti-body traditionalism in Christian sexual ethics, even those that strive to be liberative. It builds upon a tradition of black queer and LGBTQ+-centered critique at the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and religi...
Erin L. Durban, "The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourEvangelical Christians and members of the global LGBTQI human rights movement have vied for influence in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. Each side accuses the other of serving foreign interests. Yet each proposes future foreign interventions on behalf of their respective causes despite the country’s traumatic past with European colonialism and American imperialism. In The Sexual Politics of the Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti (University of Illinois Press, 2023), author Erin L. Dur...
Laura Menin, "Quest for Love in Central Morocco: Young Women and the Dynamics of Intimate Lives" (Syracuse UP, 2024)
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 33 minutesFollowing the 2011 wave of revolutions and protests in North Africa and the Middle East, new discussions of individual freedoms emerged in the Moroccan public sphere and human rights discourse. A segment of the public rallied around the removal of an article in the penal code that punished sexual relationships outside of marriage. As debates about personal and sexual freedom gain momentum, love and intimacy remain complex issues. Moving between public, clandestine, and online interactions, Q...
Jennifer Evans, "Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
March 02, 2024 09:00 - 48 minutesHow did men cope with sexual health issues in early modern England? In Men's Sexual Health in Early Modern England (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), Dr. Jennifer Evans presents a vivid history that investigates how sexual, reproductive, and genitourinary conditions were understood between 1580 and 1740. Drawing on medical sources and personal testimonies, it reveals how men responded to bouts of ill health and their relationships with the medical practitioners tasked with curing them. In do...
William R. Jankowiak, "Illicit Monogamy: Inside a Fundamentalist Mormon Community" (Columbia UP, 2023)
January 29, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourAngel Park is a Mormon fundamentalist polygamous community where plural marriages between one man and multiple women are common. Based on many years of in-depth ethnographic research, in Illicit Monogamy: Inside a Fundamentalist Mormon Community (Columbia UP, 2023), William Jankowiak considers the plural family from the points of view of husbands, wives, and children, giving a balanced account of its complications and conflicts. Through an extensive case study, the book not only gives the rea...
Chelsea Schields, "Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean" (U California Press, 2023)
January 21, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesChelsea Schields's book Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean (U California Press, 2023) reveals how the contested management of sex and race transformed the Caribbean into a crucial site in the global oil economy. By the mid-twentieth century, the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba housed the world's largest oil refineries. To bolster this massive industrial experiment, oil corporations and political authorities offshored intimacy, circumventing laws regulating sex, reprodu...
Sujin Lee, "Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan" (Stanford UP, 2023)
January 17, 2024 09:00 - 58 minutesIn 2007, Japan’s health minister referred to women ages 15-50 as “birthing machines.” The context was a speech about Japan’s declining birthrate and projected population shrinkage. As Sujin Lee shows in Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan (Stanford UP, 2023), neither population anxieties nor the idea of women as childbearing devices whose wombs were the property of the state are new. However, when the “population problem” became a public preoccupation for po...
Women and the Body in Buddhism
January 07, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourDr Pierce Salguero sits down with Amy Langenberg, a scholar of South Asian Buddhism, gender, sexuality, and the body. We focus on Amy’s work on misogyny in Buddhist texts, her book on Buddhist embryology, and her current project on sexual abuse in contemporary Buddhist communities. Along the way we discuss miscarriage, menstruation, and the importance of feminist scholarship . . . and also, what does the Buddha have in common with Michael Phelps? Enjoy the conversation! And remember that not ...
Elizabeth Eva Leach, "Medieval Sex Lives: The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders" (Cornell UP, 2023)
January 06, 2024 09:00 - 38 minutesHow was music important to medieval society? In Medieval Sex Lives:The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders (Cornell UP, 2023), Prof Elizabeth Eva Leach, a Professor of Music at the University of Oxford explores the history and content of the Douce 308 manuscript to tell the story of the cultural and sexual scripts that framed courtly life in the Medieval era. The book tells the long history of the idea of courtly love, as well as using contemporary theories and cultural prac...
Stephen M. Engel and Timothy S. Lyle, "Disrupting Dignity: Rethinking Power and Progress in LGBTQ Lives" (NYU Press, 2021)
January 02, 2024 09:00 - 58 minutesScholars Stephen Engel and Timothy Lyle have a new book that dives into the thinking around power, political and cultural progress, and the LGBTQ+ communities in the United States. This book is fascinating and important in examining not only policy developments around rights and full citizenship for members of the LGBTQ+ communities, but also how these discussions and dialogues shape thinking about access to rights and dimensions of full citizenship. The overarching title of the book, Disrupt...
Matthew Gutmann, "Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short" (Basic Books, 2019)
January 02, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short (Basic Books, 2019), Matthew Gutmann examines how cultural expectations viewing men as violent and sex driven becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Dubious interpretations of the scientific study of the effects of testosterone, comparisons to the animal kingdom and the persistence of sex segregation reinforces ideas about what is natural. The idea that masculinity is the result of biology allows the “boys will be boys” excuse and reinfo...
John Christopoulos, "Abortion in Early Modern Italy" (Harvard UP, 2021)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesToday we have John Christopoulos, Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, to talk about his new book, Abortion in Early Modern Italy (Harvard University Press, 2021) In this authoritative history, John Christopoulos provides a provocative and far-reaching account of abortion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. His poignant portraits of women who terminated or were forced to terminate pregnancies offer a corrective to longstanding views: he finds that Ita...
Timothy McCall, "Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
December 25, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourLooking beyond the marble elegance of Michelangelo's David, the pugnacious, passionate, and--crucially--important story of Renaissance manhood. Timothy McCall's book Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy (Reaktion, 2023) explores the images, objects, and experiences that fashioned men and masculinity in the courts of fifteenth-century Italy. Across the peninsula, Italian princes fought each other in fierce battles and spectacular jousts, seduced mistresse...
Nobuko Ishitate-Okunomiya Yamasaki, "Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire" (Routledge, 2023)
December 25, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourAnalysing materials from literature and film, this book considers the fates of women who did not or could not buy into the Japanese imperial ideology of "good wives, wise mothers" in support of male empire-building. Although many feminist critics have articulated women's active roles as dutiful collaborators for the Japanese empire, male-dominated narratives of empire-building have been largely supported and rectified. In contrast, the roles of marginalized women, such as sex workers, women e...
Jafari S. Allen, "There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life" (Duke UP, 2022)
December 25, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life (Duke UP, 2022), Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls “Black gay habits of mind.” In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London...
Anne E. Linton, "Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
December 22, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourA compelling study of medical and literary imaginations, Anne Linton's Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines the complex relationship between modes of seeing, thinking, and writing intersex bodies and lives. In this project, Linton brings a rich archive of medical cases from 1800 to 1902 into dialogue with canonical nineteenth-century authors (Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, and Emile Zola), as well as an impressive ran...
Emily Horowitz, "From Rage to Reason: Why We Need Sex Crime Laws Based on Facts, Not Fear" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
December 20, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn her book From Rage to Reason: Why We Need Sex Crime Laws Based on Facts, Not Fear (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), Emily Horowitz shows how current sex-offense policies in the United States create new forms of harm and prevent those who have caused harm from the process of constructive repentance or contributing to society after punishment. Horowitz also illustrates the failure of criminal justice responses to social problems. Sharing detailed narratives from the experiences of those on regist...
Ervin Malakaj, "Anders als Die Andern" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 37 minutesReleased in 1919, "Anders als die Andern" (Different from the Others) stunned audiences with its straightforward depiction of queer love. Supporters celebrated the film’s moving storyline, while conservative detractors succeeded in prohibiting public screenings. Banned and partially destroyed after the rise of Nazism, the film was lost until the 1970s and only about one-third of its original footage is preserved today. Directed by Richard Oswald and co-written by Oswald and the renowned sexol...
Simon Joyce, "LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives" (Oxford UP, 2022)
December 05, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIt has been decades since Michel Foucault urged us to rethink "the repressive hypothesis" and see new forms of sexual discourse as coming into being in the nineteenth century, yet the term "Victorian" still has largely negative connotations. LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives (Oxford UP, 2022) argues for re-visiting the period's thinking about gender and sexual identity at a time when our queer alliances are fraying. We think of those whose primary self-d...
Fae Garland and Mitchell Travis, "Intersex Embodiment: Legal Frameworks Beyond Identity and Patienthood" (Bristol UP, 2022)
November 26, 2023 09:00 - 56 minutesWhat is intersex and why does it matter? What is the power of law to disrupt dominant narratives? I had a fascinating conversation with authors Dr Fae Garland and Dr Mitchell Travis about their book, Intersex Embodiment: Legal Frameworks Beyond Identity and Disorder (Bristol UP, 2023). We got into detail about these groundbreaking human rights issues. We spoke about the very real challenges faced in conducting legal research that has meaningful impact for social change. In research spanning m...
Terah J. Stewart, "Sex Work on Campus" (Routledge, 2022)
November 17, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourTerah J. Stewart's book Sex Work on Campus (Routledge, 2022) examines the experiences of college students engaged in sex work and sparks dialogue about the ways educators might develop a deeper appreciation for-and praxis of-equity and justice on campus. Analyzing a study conducted with seven college student sex workers, the book focuses on sex work histories, student motivations, and how power (or lack thereof) associated with social identity shape experiences of student sex work. It examine...
Heather Smith-Cannoy et al., "Sex Trafficking and Human Rights: The Status of Women and State Responses" (Georgetown UP, 2022)
November 16, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesHuman trafficking for the sex trade is a form of modern-day slavery that ensnares thousands of victims each year, disproportionately affecting women and girls. While the international community has developed an impressive edifice of human rights law, these laws are not equally recognized or enforced by all countries. Sex Trafficking and Human Rights demonstrates that state responsiveness to human trafficking is shaped by the political, social, cultural, and economic rights afforded to women i...
Barry Reay and Nina Attwood, "Dirty Books: Erotic Fiction and the Avant-garde in Mid-century Paris and New York" (Manchester UP, 2023)
November 10, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesFrom the 1930s to the 1970s, in New York and in Paris, daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature. The books were written by young, impecunious writers, poets, and artists, many anonymously. Most of these pornographers wrote to survive, but some also relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided - men writing as women, and women writing as men - and some (Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller) went on to become influential figures in modernist literature. Barry...
I Kick and I Fly
November 09, 2023 09:00 - 52 minutesProfessor Ruchira Gupta joins us to share her young adult novel I Kick and I Fly (Scholastic, 2023), which was inspired by her experience making the Emmy-award winning documentary The Selling of Innocents. I Kick and I Fly is set on the outskirts of the Red Light District in Bihar, India, where fourteen year old Heera is living on borrowed time until her father sells her into the sex trade to help feed their family and repay his loans. It is, she’s been told, the fate of the women in her comm...
This Will Change Your Perspective on James Bond
November 07, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe Bond movies have influenced portrayals of masculinity and femininity for decades, but the Daniel Craig-era saw a revolution in depictions of sex, gender, and inclusivity. The UConn PopCast discusses with Professor Susan Burgess, author of LGBT Inclusion in American Life: Pop Culture, Political Imagination, and Civil Rights (NYU Press, 2023) The UConn PopCast is proud to be sponsored by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Learn about our MA Program. Learn more about your a...
B Camminga, "Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa: Bodies Over Borders and Borders Over Bodies" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018)
November 06, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesTransgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa: Bodies Over Borders and Borders Over Bodies (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018) tracks the conceptual journeying of the term ‘transgender’ from the Global North—where it originated—along with the physical embodied journeying of transgender asylum seekers from countries within Africa to South Africa and considers the interrelationships between the two. The term 'transgender' transforms as it travels, taking on meaning in relation to bodies, national h...
Gitte Marianne Hansen and Fabio Gygi, "The Work of Gender: Service, Performance and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan" (NIAS, 2022)
November 04, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesThe Work of Gender: Service, Performance and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan (NIAS Press, 2022) is an edited volume of ethnographic research organized around a cluster of key themes such as affective labor and the commodified performance of gender in contemporary Japan. Refreshingly, the chapters consist exclusively of the work of early-career scholars, tied together with an introductory chapter and epilogue by the book’s editors, Gitte Marianne Hansen and Fabio Gygi. The authors are attentive ...
Akiko Takeyama, "Involuntary Consent: The Illusion of Choice in Japan’s Adult Video Industry" (Stanford UP, 2023)
November 02, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesIn a world dominated by the notion of autonomy, free choice, and consent, Akiko Takeyama takes us on a thought-provoking journey into the heart of Japan's adult video industry in her groundbreaking book, Involuntary Consent The Illusion of Choice in Japan’s Adult Video Industry. With an ethereal blend of ethnography and critical analysis, Takeyama challenges the pervasive idea that participation in the adult entertainment industry is always a matter of free will. Instead, she introduces us to...
Margaret K. Nelson, "Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s" (NYU Press, 2022)
October 24, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesAll families have secrets but the facts requiring secrecy change with time. Nowadays A lesbian partnership, a “bastard” son, an aunt who is a prostitute, or a criminal grandfather might be of little or no consequence but could have unravelled a family at an earlier moment in history. In Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s (NYU Press, 2023), Dr. Margaret K. Nelson is interested in how families keep secrets from each other and from outsiders when to do otherwise ...
Livia Arndal Woods, "Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel" (Ohio State UP, 2023)
October 18, 2023 08:00 - 39 minutesIn Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel (Ohio State University Press, 2023), Livia Arndal Woods traces the connections between literary treatments of pregnancy and the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth occurring over the nineteenth century. In the first book-length study of the topic, Woods uses the problem of pregnancy in the Victorian novel (in which pregnancy is treated modestly as a rule and only rarely as an embodied experience) to advocate for "somatic reading," a practice attuned ...
Stephanie R. Larson, "What It Feels Like: Visceral Rhetoric and the Politics of Rape Culture" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2021)
October 08, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesWhat it feels like: Visceral Rhetoric and the Politics of Rape Culture (Penn State Press, 2021) by Dr. Stephanie Larson interrogates an underexamined reason for our failure to abolish rape in the United States: the way we communicate about it. Using affective and feminist materialist approaches to rhetorical criticism, Dr. Larson examines how discourses about rape and sexual assault rely on strategies of containment, denying the felt experiences of victims and ultimately stalling broader clai...
Karen Weingarten, "Pregnancy Test" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
September 27, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesIn the 1970s, the invention of the home pregnancy test changed what it means to be pregnant. For the first time, women could use a technology in the privacy of their own homes that gave them a yes or no answer. That answer had the power to change the course of their reproductive lives, and it chipped away at a paternalistic culture that gave gynecologists-the majority of whom were men-control over information about women's bodies. However, while science so often promises clear-cut answers, th...
Tracy Rutler, "Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French Literature" (Oxford UP/Liverpool UP, 2021)
September 23, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesTracy Rutler's Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French Literature (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, Liverpool UP, 2021) explores the imaginaries of novels and plays from the "liminal" period that followed the end of Louis the XIV's reign in France. Examining a range of French works from the 1730s and 1740s, including writing by Antoine François Prévost, Claude Crébillion, Pierre de Marivaux, and Françoise de Graffigny, Rutler traces a set of ...
Dana Berkowitz et al. ed., "Male Femininities" (NYU Press, 2023)
September 20, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesInnovative essays that explore how men perform femininity and what femininity looks like without women What counts as “male femininity”? Is it simply men behaving in effeminate ways or is it the absence of masculinity? Male Femininities (NYU Press, 2023) presents a nuanced, critical collection of essays that highlight the extent to which male femininities are neither an imitation of femaleness nor an emptying of masculinity. These innovative essays focus on both gay and straight men, and tran...
Hongwei Bao, "Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance" (Routledge, 2022)
September 18, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesIn Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance (Routledge, 2022), Hongwei Bao analyses queer theatre and performance in contemporary China. Boa documents various forms of queer performance - including music, film, theatre, and political activism - in the first two decades of the twenty first century. In doing so, Bao argues for the importance of performance for queer identity and community formation. This trailblazing work uses queer performance as an analytical lens to challenge heteronormative m...
Beverley Chalmers, "Child Sex Abuse: Power, Profit, Perversion" (Grosvenor House, 2022)
September 16, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesChildren of all ages are abused in every country in the world, by members of every society, culture, religion, and socio-economic class. About 120 million children under twenty, or one child in ten, report sexual abuse. We often blame children for their own abuse instead of holding the perpetrators responsible for their crimes. When perpetrators are prosecuted, punishments are rarely severe. Remarkably, we sometimes justify child sex abuse, or even facilitate it, allowing it to continue, not ...
Jacob Bloomfield, "Drag: A British History" (U California Press, 2023)
September 13, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesDrag: A British History (University of California Press, 2023) is a groundbreaking study of the sustained popularity and changing forms of male drag performance in modern Britain. With this book, Jacob Bloomfield provides fresh perspectives on drag and recovers previously neglected episodes in the history of the art form. Despite its transgressive associations, drag has persisted as an intrinsic, and common, part of British popular culture--drag artists have consistently asserted themselves a...
A Better Way to Buy Books
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesBookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...
Tingting Hu, "Victims, Perpetrators and Professionals: The Representation of Women in Chinese Crime Films" (Liverpool UP, 2021)
September 09, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesHow are women represented in Chinese crime films? In what ways do the representation reflect traditional Chinese values and contemporary Chinese social-cultural norms? How did boys’ love culture emerge in China? What is the role of the Chinese state in queer media production and queer culture in China? In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden, and an affiliated PhD student at NIAS, Tingting Hu talked about her book Victims, Perpetrators and Professional...
Alexander Stille, "The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune" (FSG, 2023)
September 04, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesIn the middle of the Ozzie and Harriet 1950s, the birth control pill was introduced and a maverick psychoanalytic institute, the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, opened its doors in New York City. Its founders, Saul Newton and Jane Pearce, wanted to start a revolution, one grounded in ideals of creative expression, sexual liberation, and freedom from the expectations of society, and the revolution, they felt, needed to begin at home. Dismantling the nuclear family—and monoga...
Donna J. Drucker, "Fertility Technology" (MIT Press, 2023)
August 29, 2023 08:00 - 30 minutesA concise overview of fertility technology—its history, practical applications, and ethical and social implications around the world. In the late 1850s, a physician in New York City used a syringe and glass tube to inject half a drop of sperm into a woman’s uterus, marking the first recorded instance of artificial insemination. From that day forward, doctors and scientists have turned to technology in ever more innovative ways to facilitate conception. Fertility Technology (MIT Press, 2023) s...
Whisper Networks: A Discussion with Carrie Ann Johnson
August 17, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesWhat is a Whisper Network? What can you gain from being in one, and what is expected of the network members? Not everybody is invited is into a Whisper Network—which is part of how they keep members safe. But it’s also how many of the vulnerable are further left out. Today, Dr. Carrie Ann Johnson joins us to share her research on Whisper Networks, and their role in bridging the safety gap for vulnerable people. This episode explores: Why formal reporting systems fail. How whisper networks c...
Sophie Bjork-James, "The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
August 12, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesThe Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family (Rutgers University Press, 2021) provides an account of how a theology of the family came to dominate a white evangelical tradition in the post-civil rights movement United States, providing a theological corollary to Religious Right politics. This tradition inherently enforces racial inequality in that it draws moral, religious, and political attention away from problems of racial and economic structural oppression, explai...
Kris Marsh, "The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
August 12, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDrawing from stratification economics, intersectionality, and respectability politics, Kris Marsh's The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class (Cambridge UP, 2023) centers on the voices and lifestyles of members of the Black middle class who are single and living alone (SALA). While much has been written about both the Black middle class and the rise of singlehood, this book represents a first foray into bridging these two concepts. In studying these intersection...
Charlotte Karem Albrecht, "Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling" (U California Press, 2023)
August 11, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourMany of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Men were able to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage practices while they were traveling, while Syrian women accessed more economic autonomy though their participation in peddling networks. In Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling (U California Press, 2023), Charlotte Karem Albrecht explores this peddling economy of the late nineteenth and ea...
Petra Bueskens, "Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract" (Routledge, 2018)
July 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhy do women in contemporary western societies experience contradiction between their autonomous and maternal selves? What are the origins of this contradiction and the associated ‘double shift’ that result in widespread calls to either ‘lean in’ or ‘opt out’? How are some mothers subverting these contradictions and finding meaningful ways of reconciling their autonomous and maternal selves? In Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract (Routledge, 2018), Pet...
Rahil Roodsaz, "Sexual Self-Fashioning: Iranian Dutch Narratives of Sexuality and Belonging" (Berghahn Books, 2022)
July 26, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesSexuality and gender have come to serve as measures for cultural belonging in discussions of the position of Muslim immigrants in multicultural Western societies. While the acceptance of assumed local norms such as sexual liberty and gender equality is seen as successful integration, rejecting them is regarded as a sign of failed citizenship. Focusing on premarital sex, homosexuality, and cohabitation outside marriage, Sexual Self-Fashioning: Iranian Dutch Narratives of Sexuality and Belongin...
Kathleen Lubey, "What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest Since the Eighteenth Century" (Stanford UP, 2022)
July 24, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourKathleen Lubey,'s book What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest Since the Eighteenth Century (Stanford UP, 2022) offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining s...
Michele Meek, "Consent Culture and Teen Films: Adolescent Sexuality in US Movies" (Indiana UP, 2023)
July 17, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesTeen films of the 1980s were notorious for treating consent as irrelevant, with scenes of boys spying in girls' locker rooms and tricking girls into sex. While contemporary movies now routinely prioritize consent, ensure date rape is no longer a joke, and celebrate girls' desires, sexual consent remains a problematic and often elusive ideal in teen films. In Consent Culture and Teen Films: Adolescent Sexuality in US Movies (Indiana UP, 2023), Michele Meek traces the history of adolescent sexu...
Sara Moslener, "Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence" (Oxford UP, 2015)
July 15, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesFirst taking hold of the American cultural imagination in the 1990s, the sexual purity movement of contemporary evangelicalism has since received considerable attention from a wide range of media outlets, religious leaders, and feminist critics. Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence (Oxford UP, 2015) offers a history of this movement that goes beyond the Religious Right, demonstrating a link between sexual purity rhetoric and fears of national decline that has shaped American ...