Can racism and intimacy co-exist? Can love and friendship form and flourish across South Africa’s imposed colour lines?

Who better to engage on the subject of hazardous liaisons than the students with whom Jonathan Jansen served over seven years as Vice Chancellor of the University of the Free State. The context is the University campus in Bloemfontein, the City of Roses, the Mississippi of South Africa. Rural, agricultural, insular, religious and conservative, this is not a place for breaking out. But over the years, Jansen observed shifts in campus life and noticed more and more openly interracial friendships and couples, and he began having conversations with these students with burning questions in mind.

Ten interracial couples tell their stories of love and friendship in their own words, with no social theories imposed on their meanings, but instead a focus on how these students experience the world of interracial relationships, and how flawed, outdated laws and customs set limits on human relationships, and the long shadow they cast on learning, living and loving on university campuses to this day.

A “must-read” (The Washington Post) funny and practical guide to help you find, build, and keep the relationship of your dreams.

Have you ever looked around and wondered, “Why has everyone found love except me?” You’re not the only one. Great relationships don’t just appear in our lives—they’re the culmination of a series of decisions, including whom to date, how to end it with the wrong person, and when to commit to the right one. But our brains often get in the way. We make poor decisions, which thwart us on our quest to find lasting love.

Drawing from years of research, behavioral scientist turned dating coach Logan Ury reveals the hidden forces that cause those mistakes. But awareness on its own doesn’t lead to results. You have to actually change your behavior. Ury shows you how.

This “simple-to-use guide” (Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone) focuses on a different decision in each chapter, incorporating insights from behavioral science, original research, and real-life stories.

You’ll learn:

• What’s holding you back in dating (and how to break the pattern)
• What really matters in a long-term partner (and what really doesn’t)
• How to overcome the perils of online dating (and make the apps work for you)
• How to meet more people in real life (while doing activities you love)
• How to make dates fun again (so they stop feeling like job interviews)
• Why “the spark” is a myth (but you’ll find love anyway)

This “data-driven” (Time), step-by-step guide to relationships, complete with hands-on exercises, is designed to transform your life. How to Not Die Alone will help you find, build, and keep the relationship of your dreams.

What happens when enemies work to advance similar goals? Who wins, who loses, and why? In Frenemies, Nancy Whittier addresses this question through a study of feminist and conservative opposition to pornography, campaigns against child sexual abuse, and engagement on the Violence Against Women Act. Drawing on extensive research, Whittier shows how feminist and conservative activists interacted with each other and with the federal government, how their interaction affected them, and what each side achieved. Whittier re-conceptualizes relationships between social movements, presenting a model of how "frenemies"-groups that are neither allies nor opponents-work toward related goals. She outlines the dynamics and paths of frenemy relationships, describing the unintended consequences for the groups involved and for their respective movements at large. With high levels of political polarization across the U.S., Frenemies provides a crucial look at both the promise and the risk of cooperation across political differences.

Real Sex Films explores one of the most controversial movements in international cinema through an innovative interdisciplinary combination of theories of globalization and embodiment. Risk sociology, feminist film theory and critical feminist mapping theory are brought together with concepts of production, narrative, genre, authorship, stardom, spectatorship and social audience as several lenses of both 'mutual understanding' and 'galvanizing extension' in ways of seeing this object of 'real-sex cinema'. Notions of personal subjectivity and critical distance, disciplinary co-operation and critique, and cinematic perceptions of the utopia and dystopia of love within risk modernity are the tensions exposed reflexively and in parallel, as each chapter focuses different lenses communicating intimacy, desire, risk and transgression. This is a book which substantively, methodologically and theoretically is embracing and engaging in its consideration of the images, ethics, 'double standards' and embodiments of brutal cinema. Written in a style free of jargon, and crossing the boundaries of film studies, media and cultural studies, the ethnographic turn, risk sociology, feminist psychoanalytical and geopolitical studies, this is a book for students, academics as well as general and professional audiences.

For the past several years, child advocates, parents, and educators have expressed concern over the sexualization of girls. Has the cultural sexual objectification of girls and women increased? Are younger and younger girls sold a "sexed-up" version of femininity, and are adult women sold a girlish sexuality?
The Sexualization of Girls and Girlhood: Causes, Consequences, and Resistance includes the best empirical research, theory, and practice stemming from the report of the American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. Contributors discuss evidence for this phenomenon from media and marketing, to interpersonal interaction, to girls' own efforts to fashion themselves after sexualized role models around them. A variety of consequences of the sexualization of girls and girlhood--for girls themselves, for others, and for society at large--are presented. Individual chapters cover topics such as athletics as a solution and problem for the sexualization of girls, sexual harassment by peers, gendered violence, body image, adolescent girls' sexual development, and healthy sexuality for girls and young women. Importantly, positive alternatives and suggestions are included so that those who care for girls can address this troubling cultural trend and help counter the significant risk to girls' wellbeing that it represents. This volume is a valuable resource for child advocates, parents, and educators and useful for undergraduate and graduate courses that address gender across disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, education, communication, media studies, and women's, and sexuality studies.

Sex is bad. Unprotected sex is a problem. Having a baby would be a disaster. Abortion is a sin. Teenagers in the United States hear conflicting messages about sex from everyone around them. How do teens understand these messages? In Mixed Messages, Stefanie Mollborn examines how social norms and social control work through in-depth interviews with college students and teen mothers and fathers, revealing the tough conversations teeangers just can't have with adults. Delving into teenagers' complicated social worlds Mollborn argues that by creating informal social sanctions like gossip and exclusion and formal communication such as sex education, families, peers, schools, and communities strategize to gain control over teens' behaviors. However, while teens strategize to keep control, they resist the constraints of the norms, revealing the variety of outcomes that occur beyond compliance or deviance. By proving that the norms existing today around teen sex are ineffective, failing to regulate sexual behavior, and instead punishing teens that violate them, Mollborn calls for a more thoughtful and consistent dialogue between teens and adults, emphasizing messages that will lead to more positive health outcomes.

As a field of study, sexology emerged in the nineteenth century bringing together academics, non-medical professionals, and reformers in Europe and North America who sought to systematically study human sexuality and sexual behavior. The field reached its peak in the postwar United States in projects like the Kinsey Reports before gradually being discredited and fading from public consciousness. The contributors to this special issue engage with the contemporary material and aesthetic detritus of the sexological project and ask how the remnants of its history persist to the present. Using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, they critique the way sexology embedded bodily difference in public policy and infrastructure. The contributors show how Blackness disrupts visual representations of female pleasure, articulate an aesthetics of trans-madness, and reflect on the broader implications of sex segregation in public toilets. Contributors. Lucas Crawford, Jina B. Kim, Joan Lubin, Amber Musser, Susan Stryker, Jeanne Vaccaro

Sexy Like Us: Disability, Humor, and Sexuality takes a humorous, intimate approach to disability through the stories, jokes, performances, and other creative expressions of people with disabilities. Author Teresa Milbrodt explores why individuals can laugh at their leglessness, find stoma bags sexual, discover intimacy in scars, and flaunt their fragility in ways both hilarious and serious. Their creative and comic acts crash, collide, and collaborate with perceptions of disability in literature and dominant culture, allowing people with disabilities to shape political disability identity and disability pride, call attention to social inequalities, and poke back at ableist cultural norms. This book also discusses how the ambivalent nature of comedy has led to debates within disability communities about when it is acceptable to joke, who has permission to joke, and which jokes should be used inside and outside a community's inner circle. Joking may be difficult when considering aspects of disability that involve physical or emotional pain and struggles to adapt to new forms of embodiment. At the same time, people with disabilities can use humor to expand the definitions of disability and sexuality. They can help others with disabilities assert themselves as sexy and sexual. And they can question social norms and stigmas around bodies in ways that open up journeys of being, not just for individuals who consider themselves disabled, but for all people.

For many decades, the LGBTQ+ community has been plagued by strife and human rights violations. Members of the LGBTQ+ community were often denied a right to marriage, healthcare, and in some parts of the world, a right to life. While these struggles are steadily improving in recent years, disparities and discrimination still remain from the workplace to the healthcare that this community receives. There is still much that needs to be done globally to achieve inclusivity and equity for the LGBTQ+ community. The Research Anthology on Inclusivity and Equity for the LGBTQ+ Community is a comprehensive compendium that analyzes the struggles and accomplishments of the LGBTQ+ community with a focus on the current climate around the world and the continued impact to these individuals. Multiple settings are discussed within this dynamic anthology such as education, healthcare, online communities, and more. Covering topics such as gender, homophobia, and queer theory, this text is essential for scholars of gender theory, faculty of both K-12 and higher education, professors, pre-service teachers, students, human rights activists, community leaders, policymakers, researchers, and academicians.

Policing Sex in the Sunflower State: The Story of the Kansas State Industrial Farm for Women is the history of how, over a span of two decades, the state of Kansas detained over 5,000 women for no other crime than having a venereal disease. In 1917, the Kansas legislature passed Chapter 205, a law that gave the state Board of Health broad powers to quarantine people for disease. State authorities quickly began enforcing Chapter 205 to control the spread of venereal disease among soldiers preparing to fight in World War I. Though Chapter 205 was officially gender-neutral, it was primarily enforced against women; this gendered enforcement became even more dramatic as Chapter 205 transitioned from a wartime emergency measure to a peacetime public health strategy. Women were quarantined alongside regular female prisoners at the Kansas State Industrial Farm for Women (the Farm). Women detained under Chapter 205 constituted 71 percent of the total inmate population between 1918 and 1942. Their confinement at the Farm was indefinite, with doctors and superintendents deciding when they were physically and morally cured enough to reenter society; in practice, women detained under Chapter 205 spent an average of four months at the Farm. While at the Farm, inmates received treatment for their diseases and were subjected to a plan of moral reform that focused on the value of hard work and the inculcation of middle-class norms for proper feminine behavior. Nicole Perry's research reveals fresh insights into histories of women, sexuality, and programs of public health and social control. Underlying each of these are the prevailing ideas and practices of respectability, in some cases culturally encoded, in others legislated, enforced, and institutionalized. Perry recovers the voices of the different groups of women involved with the Farm: the activist women who lobbied to create the Farm, the professional women who worked there, and the incarcerated women whose bodies came under the control of the state. Policing Sex in the Sunflower State offers an incisive and timely critique of a failed public health policy that was based on perceptions of gender, race, class, and respectability rather than a reasoned response to the social problem at hand.

Technology is rapidly advancing, and each innovation provides opportunities for such technology to mesh with the human enactment of physical intimacy or to be used in the quest for information about sexuality. However, the availability of this technology has complicated sexual decision making for young adults as they continually navigate their sexual identity, orientation, behavior, and community. Young Adult Sexuality in the Digital Age is a pivotal reference source that improves the understanding of the combination of technology and sexual decision making for young adults, examining the role of technology in sexual identity formation, sexual communication, relationship formation and dissolution, and sexual learning and online sexual communities and activism. While highlighting topics such as privacy management, cyber intimacy, and digital communications, this book is ideally designed for therapists, social workers, sociologists, psychologists, counselors, healthcare professionals, scholars, researchers, and students.

Beholding Beauty: Sa'di of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry explores the relationship between sexuality, politics, and spirituality in the lyrics of Sa'di Shirazi (d. 1292 CE), one of the most revered masters of classical Persian literature. Relying on a variety of sources, including unstudied manuscripts, Domenico Ingenito presents the so-called "inimitable smoothness" of Sa'di's lyric style as a serene yet multifaceted window into the uncanny beauty of the world, the human body, and the realm of the unseen. The book constitutes the first attempt to study Sa'di's lyric meditations on beauty in the context of the major artistic, scientific and intellectual trends of his time. By charting unexplored connections between Islamic philosophy and mysticism, obscene verses and courtly ideals of love, Ingenito approaches Sa'di's literary genius from the perspective of sacred homoeroticism and the psychology of performative lyricism in their historical context.

In this special issue, contributors trace how sexual scientific thought circulated throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and how that thought continues to shape sexuality. The authors situate the science of sex within a broader context of sexuality studies, which examines the social, psychological, and political aspects of desires, acts, identities, and sexology. Articles-addressing topics such as early gender clinics and transsexual etiology, the taxonomy of queer identities, and blackness and sexology-examine the current and historical ways in which racial science and colonial knowledge constitute sexual science as an amorphous object, one with a problematically vast reach that buttresses racial hierarchy and undergirds colonial infrastructures. The authors urge readers to explore how the taxonomies of sexual science structure identitarian frameworks of gender and sexuality. Contributors: Kadji Amin, Howard Chiang, Stephanie D. Clare, Emmett Harsin Drager, Patrick R. Grzanka, Benjamin Kahan, Greta LaFleur, Rovel Sequeira, Aaron J. Stone, Zohar Weiman-Kelman, Joanna Wuest

This special issue of GLQ celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Gayle Rubin's groundbreaking essay, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality." Credited with inaugurating the contemporary field of sexuality studies, Rubin's essay calls for an "autonomous theory and politics specific to sexuality." Looking at the intellectual and political gains of sexual freedom movements over the past two decades, Rethinking Sex explores the critical and activist afterlife of the controversial 1982 Barnard College Conference on Sexuality, where Rubin originally presented the essay. In her contribution to this special issue, Rubin reflects on her earlier essay and examines developments in "pro-sex" feminism since the publication of "Thinking Sex." Other noted scholars assess the significance of Rubin's work for histories of sexuality and for new areas in queer studies, such as transgender studies, disability studies, and transnational studies. In honouring Rubin's scholarship, the contributors address the history of sexual theory and politics and the forms that they might take in the twenty-first century. Contributors: Lisa Duggan; Stephen Epstein; Lisa Henderson; Neville Hoad; Sharon Holland; Regina Kunzel; Robert McRuer; Joanne Meyerowitz; Gayle Rubin; Susan Stryker; Carole Vance; Contributors; Jeff Chang; Vivien Goldman; Jennifer Kabat; Mark Katz; Josh Kun; Barbara London; Mac McCaughan; Carlo McCormick; Charlie McGovern; Mark Anthony Neal; Piotr Orlov; Luc Sante; Trevor Schoonmaker; Dave Tompkins

Despite decades of efforts to combat homelessness, many people continue to experience it in Canada's major cities. There are a number of barriers that prevent effective responses to homelessness, including a lack of agreement on the fundamental question: what is homelessness? In Multiple Barriers, Alison Smith explores the forces that shape intergovernmental and multilevel governance dynamics to help better understand why, despite the best efforts of community and advocacy groups, homelessness remains as persistent as ever. Drawing on nearly 100 interviews with key actors in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal, as well as extensive participant observation, Smith argues that institutional differences across cities interact with ideas regarding homelessness to contribute to very different models of governance. Multiple Barriers shows that the genuine involvement of locally based service providers, with the development of policy, are necessary for an effective, equitable, and enduring solution to the homelessness crisis in Canada.

The word sex has many implications when it is used in connection with video games. As game studies scholars have argued, games are player-driven experiences. Players must participate in processes of play to move the game forward. The addition of content that incorporates sex and/or sexuality adds complexity that other media do not share. Rated M for Mature further develops our understanding of the practices and activities of video games, specifically focusing on the intersection of games with sexual content. From the supposed scandal of "Hot Coffee" to the emergence of same-sex romance options in RPGs, the collection explores the concepts of sex and sexuality in the area of video games.

Western culture has long regarded black female sexuality with a strange mix of fascination and condemnation, associating it with everything from desirability, hypersexuality, and liberation to vulgarity, recklessness, and disease. Yet even as their bodies and sexualities have been the subject of countless public discourses, black women's voices have been largely marginalized in these discussions. In this groundbreaking collection, feminist scholars from across the academy come together to correct this omission--illuminating black female sexual desires marked by agency and empowerment, as well as pleasure and pain, to reveal the ways black women regulate their sexual lives.
The twelve original essays in "Black Female Sexualities" reveal the diverse ways black women perceive, experience, and represent sexuality. The contributors highlight the range of tactics that black women use to express their sexual desires and identities. Yet they do not shy away from exploring the complex ways in which black women negotiate the more traumatic aspects of sexuality and grapple with the legacy of negative stereotypes.
"Black Female Sexualities" takes not only an interdisciplinary approach--drawing from critical race theory, sociology, and performance studies--but also an intergenerational one, in conversation with the foremothers of black feminist studies. In addition, it explores a diverse archive of representations, covering everything from blues to hip-hop, from "Crash "to "Precious," from Sister Souljah to Edwidge Danticat. Revealing that black female sexuality is anything but a black-and-white issue, this collection demonstrates how to appreciate a whole spectrum of subjectivities, experiences, and desires.

Alternative Histories of the Self investigates how people re-imagined the idea of the unique self in the period from 1762 to 1917. Some used the notion of the unique self to justify their gender and sexual transgression, but others rejected the notion of the unique self and instead demanded the sacrifice of the self for the good of society. The substantial introductory chapter places these themes in the cultural context of the long nineteenth century, but the book as a whole represents an alternative method for studying the self. Instead of focusing on the thoughts of great thinkers, this book explores how five unusual individuals twisted conventional ideas of the self as they interpreted their own lives. These subjects include: * The Chevalier/e d'Eon, a renegade diplomat who was outed as a woman * Anne Lister, who wrote coded diaries about her attraction to women * Richard Johnson, who secretly criticized the empire that he served * James Hinton, a Victorian doctor who publicly advocated philanthropy and privately supported polygamy * Edith Ellis, a socialist lesbian who celebrated the 'abnormal' These five case studies are skilfully used to explore how the notion of the unique individual was used to make sense of sexual or gender non-conformity. Yet this queer reading will go beyond same-sex desire to analyse the issue of secrets and privacy; for instance, what stigma did men who practiced or advocated unconventional relationships with women incur? Finally, Clark ties these unusual lives to the wider questions of ethics and social justice: did those who questioned sexual conventions challenge political traditions as well? This is a highly innovative study that will be of interest to intellectual historians of modern Britain and Europe, as well as historians of gender and sexuality.

Sex in the Middle East and North Africa examines the sexual practices, politics, and complexities of the modern Arab world. Short chapters feature a variety of experts in anthropology, sociology, health science, and cultural studies. Many of the chapters are based on original ethnographic and interview work with subjects involved in these practices and include their voices. The book is organized into three sections: Single and Dating, Engaged and Married, and It's Complicated. The allusion to categories of relationship status on social media is at once a nod to the compulsion to categorize, recognition of the many ways that categorization is rarely straightforward, and acknowledgment that much of the intimate lives described by the contributors is mediated by online technologies.

Explores how straight Americans make sense of their sexual and gendered selves Since the Stonewall Riots in 1969, the politics of sexual identity in America have drastically transformed. It's almost old news that recent generations of Americans have grown up in a culture more accepting of out lesbians and gay men, seen the proliferation of LGBTQ media representation, and witnessed the attainment of a range of legal rights for same-sex couples. But the changes wrought by a so-called "post-closeted culture" have not just affected the queer community-heterosexuals are also in the midst of a sea change in how their sexuality plays out in everyday life. In Straights, James Joseph Dean argues that heterosexuals can neither assume the invisibility of gays and lesbians, nor count on the assumption that their own heterosexuality will go unchallenged. The presumption that we are all heterosexual, or that there is such a thing as 'compulsory heterosexuality,' he claims, has vanished. Based on 60 in-depth interviews with a diverse group of straight men and women, Straights explores how straight Americans make sense of their sexual and gendered selves in this new landscape, particularly with an understanding of how race does and does not play a role in these conceptions. Dean provides a historical understanding of heterosexuality and how it was first established, then moves on to examine the changing nature of masculinity and femininity and, most importantly, the emergence of a new kind of heterosexuality-notably, for men, the metrosexual, and for women, the emergence of a more fluid sexuality. The book also documents the way heterosexuals interact and form relationships with their LGBTQ family members, friends, acquaintances, and coworkers. Although homophobia persists among straight individuals, Dean shows that being gay-friendly or against homophobic expressions is also increasingly common among straight Americans. A fascinating study, Straights provides an in-depth look at the changing nature of sexual expression in America.