Can the orgasm be explained in historical terms? An almost incommunicable individual emotion yet also a cultural reality, the orgasm is part of, but also escapes, collective experience. The history of the orgasm is that of the hidden body, of forbidden desires, of flesh constrained by taboos and morality. Buried deep in archives and libraries, the documents that shed light on this physical, sometimes libertine, life are nevertheless surprisingly plentiful and have a surprisingly evocative charge. Robert Muchembled's book unearths fascinating sources which suggest that we need to look with a fresh eye at the past and realize that the sublimation of the erotic impulse was far more than simple religious asceticism: it was the hidden driving force of the West until the 1960s.

In the sphere of sexual pleasure, England and France have followed parallel paths. The United States remains deeply influenced by this common repressive model, which hedonist Europe has recently abandoned in favour of a malleable sexuality of which woman are the chief beneficiaries. Liberated by the pill from the dangers and anxieties associated with the obligations of reproduction, they can now claim equality with men and uninhibitedly claim pleasure and the orgasm for themselves.

What is incest? Is it universally prohibited? Does this prohibition concern only "biological" kinships or does it extend to various "social" kinships, such as those that are formed today in so-called blended families but which also exist in many other societies? This prohibition plays a fundamental role in the functioning of the multiple kinship systems studied throughout the world. But where does it come from? Can we think, with Claude Lévi-Strauss, that the prohibition of incest alone marks the passage from nature to culture? And how can we understand, then, the persistent tension between the proclaimed, institutionalized prohibition and the incestuous practice which, everywhere, remains? World-renowned anthropologist Maurice Godelier highlights an essential fact, the spontaneously asocial and undifferentiated character of human sexuality and the need for a social regulation of this spontaneity. It thus brings to light the main teachings of anthropology on the question of incest, a major social fact of burning relevance today.

Depictions of rape on television have evolved dramatically, from hard-boiled stories about male detectives to more insightful shows focusing on rape victims. Rape on Prime Time is the first book to examine those changing depictions of rape. Lisa M. Cuklanz reveals that prime-time television programs during the 1970s-usually detective shows-reflected traditional ideas that "real" rape is perpetrated by brutal strangers upon passive victims. Beginning in 1980, depictions of rape began to include attacks by known assailants, and victims began to address their feelings. By 1990, scripts portrayed date and marital rape and paid greater attention to the trial process, reflecting legal reformers' concerns. While previous studies have examined one series or genre, Cuklanz examines programs as dissimilar as Barney Miller, Dallas, The Cosby Show, and Quincy. She outlines the "basic plot" for rape episodes, then traces the historical development of rape themes. In each chapter she includes close analyses of episodes that add depth to findings derived from scripts and taped episodes. Rape on Prime Time provides important insight into the social construction of rape in mainstream mass media since the inception of rape law reform in 1974.

Our lives are full of small tensions, our closest relationships full of struggle: between woman and man, artist and customer, purist and commercialist, professional and client - and between the dominant and the submissive. In "Dominatrix", Danielle J. Lindemann draws on extensive fieldwork and interviews with professional dominatrices in New York City and San Francisco to offer a sophisticated portrait of these unusual specialists, their work, and their clients. Prior research on sex work has focused primarily on prostitutes and most studies of BDSM absorb prodomme/client relationships without exploring the professional aspect that makes them unique. Lindemann satisfies our curiosity about these paid encounters, shining a light on one of the most secretive and least understood of personal relationships and unthreading a heretofore unexamined patch of our social tapestry. Upending the idea that these erotic laborers engage in simple exchanges and revealing the therapeutic and analytic nature of their work, Lindemann makes a major contribution to cultural studies, sociology, and queer studies with her analysis of how gender, power, sexuality, and hierarchy shape all of our social experiences.

Based on questions from women who have attended author David Deida's highly acclaimed relationships seminars, this must-have book puts male behavior under the microscope. Included are chapters on sex, work, relationships and communication. Interspersed throughout are sidebars that shed light on the many faces of men and help women grasp what makes them act the way they do.

Perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union transformed every aspect of life in Russia, and as hope began to give way to pessimism, popular culture came to reflect the anxiety and despair felt by more and more Russians. Free from censorship for the first time in Russia's history, the popular culture industry (publishing, film, and television) began to disseminate works that featured increasingly explicit images and descriptions of sex and violence.

In Overkill, Eliot Borenstein explores this lurid and often-disturbing cultural landscape in close, imaginative readings of such works as You're Just a Slut, My Dear (Ty prosto shliukha, dorogaia ), a novel about sexual slavery and illegal organ harvesting; the Nympho trilogy of books featuring a Chechen-fighting sex addict; and the Mad Dog and Antikiller series of books and films recounting, respectively, the exploits of the Russian Rambo and an assassin killing in the cause of justice. Borenstein argues that the popular cultural products consumed in the post-perestroika era were more than just diversions; they allowed Russians to indulge their despair over economic woes and everyday threats. At the same time, they built a notion of nationalism or heroism that could be maintained even under the most miserable of social conditions, when consumers felt most powerless.

For Borenstein, the myriad depictions of deviance in pornographic and also crime fiction, with their patently excessive and appalling details of social and moral decay, represented the popular culture industry's response to the otherwise unimaginable scale of Russia's national collapse. "The full sense of collapse," he writes, "required a panoptic view that only the media and culture industry were eager to provide, amalgamating national collapse into one master narrative that would then be readily available to most individuals as a framework for understanding their own suffering and their own fears."

Romantic relationship formation and the engagement in sexual behaviors are normative and salient developmental tasks for adolescents and young adults. These developmental tasks are increasingly viewed from an ecological perspective, thus as strongly embedded in different social contexts. This volume brings together seven recent empirical studies that investigated different aspects of adolescents' and young adults' romantic relationships and sexuality, and the linkages with various characteristics of relations with parents, peers, and partners. These studies were conducted in six Western countries, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and the USA. Three studies examined the formation of young people's romantic relationships, and the other four studies focused on youth's developing sexuality. Together, they employed a diverse range of state-of-the-art research methods, including online questionnaires, computer-assisted interviews, daily diary assessments, and observations of dyadic interactions. In the editorial chapter, these recent advances in empirical research are discussed and framed within two important changes in the theoretical perspectives on young people's emerging romantic relationships and sexual activity: from risky behaviors to normative tasks, and from individual to contextualized processes. Throughout this volume, important directions for future research are suggested, specifically focusing on how to better incorporate the interrelational perspective into empirical research on these topics, and how to further bridge the gap between the research fields on romantic relationships and sexuality. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Developmental Psychology.

The past decade has seen dramatic growth in every area of the prison enterprise. Yet knowledge of the inner life of the prison remains limited. This book redresses this research gap by providing insight into various aspects of the daily life of prison staff. The book provides a serious exploration of their work and, in doing so, draws attention to the variety, value, and complexity of work within prisons. Understanding Prison Staff provides information on relevant research studies, key debates, and on operational and procedural matters. It includes reflective material which academic staff can adopt for core or specialist modules which focus on prison management, prison officer training, and the occupational cultures of prison staff.

Attitudes towards divorce have changed considerably over the past two centuries. As society has moved away from a Biblical definition of marriage as an indissoluble union, to that of an individual and personal relationship, secular laws have evolved as well. Using unpublished sources and previously inaccessible private collections, Holmes explores the significant role the Church of England has played in these changes, as well as the impact this has had on ecclesiastical policies. This timely study will be relevant to ongoing debates about the meaning and nature of marriage, including the theological doctrines and ecclesiastical policies underlying current debates on same-sex marriage.

Images and stories about African sexuality abound in today's globalized media. Frequently old stereotypes and popular opinion inform these stories, and sex in the media is predominately approached as a problem in need of solutions and intervention. The authors gathered here refuse an easy characterization of African sexuality and instead seek to understand the various erotic realities, sexual practices, and gendered changes taking place across the continent. They present a nuanced and comprehensive overview of the field of sex and sexuality in Africa to serve as a guide though the quickly expanding literature. This collection offers a set of texts that use sexuality as a prism for studying how communities coalesce against the canvas of larger political and economic contexts and how personal lives evolve therein. Scholars working in Africa, the U.S., and Europe reflect on issues of representation, health and bio-politics, same-sex relationships and identity, transactional economies of sex, religion and tradition, and the importance of pleasure and agency. This multidimensional reader provides a comprehensive view of sexuality from an African perspective.

This book—Sex, Sexuality and Sexual Health in Southern Africa—is structured around four major themes: gender and sexuality diversity; love, pleasure and respect; gender, sexual violence and health; and sexuality, gender and sexual justice. Chapters in this book analyse sexuality in relation to recent developments in the Southern African region and what this might mean for contemporary theory, policy and practice.

Sex, sexuality and sexual health are often viewed through a narrow biomedical lens, ignoring the fact that they are profoundly social and historical in character. The contributors in this book bring to light the entanglements of sexuality with respect, recognition, rights and mutual respectful pleasure. Authors draw attention to partnerships, allyships and feminist, queer and trans coalitions in the pursuit of sexual health and justice in the region.

The book will be of interest to final-year undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers and activists as well as those working in Women and Gender Studies, Critical Sexuality Studies, Sexual and Reproductive Health, Development Studies, Public Health, Psychology, Education, Sociology and Anthropology.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Sex, sexuality and sexual health in Southern Africa

Deevia Bhana, Mary Crewe and Peter Aggleton

Part I: Gender and sexuality diversity

Chapter 2. Border crossings: Trans allyship in Southern Africa

Christi Kruger and Pierre Brouard

Chapter 3. Beyond borders: Reproducing and challenging homophobic norms in Zimbabwe

Nelson Muparamoto

Chapter 4. Civil society organisations responding to homophobia and transphobia in Namibian schools

Anthony Brown

Part II: Love, pleasure and respect

Chapter 5. Young women’s experiences of intimate partner violence, respect and agency in South African informal settlements

Samantha Willan, Nwabisa Shai, Nolwazi Ntini, Andrew Gibbs and Rachel Jewkes

Chapter 6. The free sex (talk) boys and men might want

Kopano Ratele

Chapter 7. More to be desired: the need to engage men and couples around communication, sexual pleasure and consent in Southern African safer sex interventions

Laura Pascoe

Part III: Gender, sexual violence and health

Chapter 8. Men’s emotions, violence and change

Andrew Gibbs, Laura Washington, Smanga Mkhwanazi, Sivuyile Khaula, Zama Khoza, Mziwethu Gcuma and Yandisa Sikweyiya

Chapter 9. Power, visibility and sexual and reproductive health in southern Africa

Blessings N. Kaunda-Khangamwa, Alexander Kagaha, Nirvana Pillay and Lenore Manderson

Chapter 10. Examining the gendered experiences of migrant and refugee women in Southern Africa

Tamaryn L. Crankshaw, Jane Freedman and Victoria M. Mutambara

Part IV: Sexuality, gender and sexual justice

Chapter 11. Refining youth sexualities empowerment programmes: the development of the Masizixhobise toolkit based on a critical sexual and reproductive citizenship framework

Catriona Ida Macleod and Sarah Moore

Chapter 12. Thinking with creativity, affect and embodiment in sexual justice scholarship

Tamara Shefer

Chapter 13. Gender and sexuality diversity in Southern Africa

Tiffany Jones

Afterword

Marc Epprecht and Aminata Cécile Mbaye

Infidelity raises questions: Why do women stay with a cheater? Why do women cheat? Why do women become "the other woman"? How does the experience of infidelity impact future relationships? What effect does infidelity have on children? How do women deal with children born from a spouse's affair? Drawing on interviews with U.S. women of various ages, racial backgrounds, educational attainments and sexual orientations, this insightful study examines their personal experiences of cheating and being cheated on. Equal parts engaging, uplifting and dispiriting, their narratives range from all-too-familiar stories to unconventional perspectives on love, life and interpersonal communication.

This volume marks the first sustained study to interrogate how and why issues of sexuality, desire, and economic processes intersect in the literature and culture of the Victorian fin de siecle. At the end of the nineteenth-century, the move towards new models of economic thought marked the transition from a marketplace centred around the fulfilment of 'needs' to one ministering to anything that might, potentially, be desired. This collection considers how the literature of the period meditates on the interaction between economy and desire, doing so with particular reference to the themes of fetishism, homoeroticism, the literary marketplace, social hierarchy, and consumer culture. Drawing on theoretical and conceptual approaches including queer theory, feminist theory, and gift theory, contributors offer original analyses of work by canonical and lesser-known writers, including Oscar Wilde, A.E. Housman, Baron Corvo, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, and Lucas Malet. The collection builds on recent critical developments in fin-de-siecle literature (including major interventions in the areas of Decadence, sexuality, and gender studies) and asks, for instance, how did late nineteenth-century writing schematise the libidinal and somatic dimensions of economic exchange? How might we define the relationship between eroticism and the formal economies of literary production/performance? And what relation exists between advertising/consumer culture and (dissident) sexuality in fin-de-siecle literary discourses? This book marks an important contribution to 19th-Century and Victorian literary studies, and enhances the field of fin-de-siecle studies more generally.

Gender, Sex, and Politics: In the Streets and Between the Sheets in the 21st Century includes twenty-seven chapters organized into five sections: Gender, Sexuality and Social Control; Pornography; Sex and Social Media; Dating, Desire, and the Politics of Hooking Up; and Issues in Sexual Pleasure and Safety. This anthology presents these topics using a point-counterpoint-different point framework. Its arguments and perspectives do not pit writers against each other in a binary pro/con debate format. Instead, a variety of views are juxtaposed to encourage critical thinking and robust conversation. This framework enables readers to assess the strengths and shortcomings of conflicting ideas. The chapters are organized in a way that will challenge cherished beliefs and hone both academic and personal insight. Gender, Sex, and Politics is ideal for sparking debates in intro to women's and gender studies, sexuality, and gender courses.

Winner, Ruth Benedict Prize, Association for Queer Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, 2020 Gloria E. Anzaldua Book Prize, National Women's Studies Association, 2020 Honorable Mention, Sara A. Whaley Book Prize, 2020 Sex, drugs, religion, and love are potent combinations in la zona, a regulated prostitution zone in the city of Reynosa, across the border from Hidalgo, Texas. During the years 2008 and 2009, a time of intense drug violence, Sarah Luna met and built relationships with two kinds of migrants, women who moved from rural Mexico to Reynosa to become sex workers and American missionaries who moved from the United States to forge a fellowship with those workers. Luna examines the entanglements, both intimate and financial, that define their lives. Using the concept of obligar, she delves into the connections that tie sex workers to their families, their clients, their pimps, the missionaries, and the drug dealers-and to the guilt, power, and comfort of faith. Love in the Drug War scrutinizes not only la zona and the people who work to survive there, but also Reynosa itself-including the influences of the United States-adding nuance and new understanding to the current Mexico-US border crisis.

'One of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation' OLIVIA LAING What can freedom really mean? In this invigorating, essential book, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience or talk about the concept in ways that are responsive to our divided world. Drawing on pop culture, theory and the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, she follows freedom - with all its complexities - through four realms: art, sex, drugs and climate. On Freedom offers a bold new perspective on the challenging times in which we live. 'Tremendously energising' Guardian 'This provocative meditation...shows Nelson at her most original and brilliant' New York Times 'Nelson is such a friend to her reader, such brilliant company... Exhilarating' Literary Review * A New York Times Notable Book * * A Guardian and TLS 'Books of 2021' Pick *

In his "Problemata," Aristotle provided medieval thinkers with the occasion to inquire into the natural causes of the sexual desires of men to act upon or be acted upon by other men, thus bringing human sexuality into the purview of natural philosophers, whose aim it was to explain the causes of objects and events in nature. With this philosophical justification, some late medieval intellectuals asked whether such dispositions might arise from anatomy or from the psychological processes of habit formation. As the fourteenth-century philosopher Walter Burley observed, "Nothing natural is shameful." The authors, scribes, and readers willing to "contemplate base things" never argued that they were not vile, but most did share the conviction that they could be explained.From the evidence that has survived in manuscripts of and related to the "Problemata," two narratives emerge: a chronicle of the earnest attempts of medieval medical theorists and natural philosophers to understand the cause of homosexual desires and pleasures in terms of natural processes, and an ongoing debate as to whether the sciences were equipped or permitted to deal with such subjects at all. Mining hundreds of texts and deciphering commentaries, indices, abbreviations, and marginalia, Joan Cadden shows how European scholars deployed a standard set of philosophical tools and a variety of rhetorical strategies to produce scientific approaches to sodomy.

Sexual Politics explores the complex relationship between sexuality and socialist politics in Britain between the 1880s and the present day. Looking at birth control, abortion law reform, and gay rights, this is a timely examination of the relationship between the personal and the political over the last century and a half. Stephen Brooke tells the stories of individuals such as Edward Carpenter, Dora Russell, Sheila Rowbotham, Ken Livingstone, Peter Tatchell, and Tony Blair, and organizations like the Workers' Birth Control Group, the Abortion Law Reform Association, the National Abortion Campaign, and the Labour Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Sexual radicalism, first and second wave feminism, and gay liberation all feature in the book's portrait of the progress of sexual politics from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Sexual Politics also offers an analysis of the Labour Party's long and sometimes ambiguous link to issues of sexuality, ending with the considerable contribution made to sex reform by the New Labour governments of 1997 to 2010. Sexual issues were always under the surface of Labour politics in the twentieth century, emerging forcefully in the 1970s and 1980s in a way that brought both division and unity to the party. Brooke stresses the importance of class and gender identity to the fate of sexual issues in British politics, the dynamic nature of British socialism, and the impact of sexual radicalism, feminism, and gay liberation upon socialist and working-class politics. Sexual Politics argues that the shifting relationship between the personal and the political is a central element of twentieth-century British history, a relationship that helped define the character of political modernity.

'GORGEOUS, VIVIDLY ALIVE' NEW YORK TIMES 'BOLD, HONEST AND SUPERBLY WELL-WRITTEN' ANDRE ACIMAN, AUTHOR OF CALL ME BY YOUR NAME 'GRACEFUL AND SOUL-BARING' MELANIE REID, THE TIMES 'WHAT A GIFT . . . HAS THE RIGOR AND PRECISION OF JOAN DIDION AND MAGGIE NELSON AND A FORTHRIGHT HUMOR AND NAKED TRUTH ALL OF ITS OWN.' SARAH RUHL, AUTHOR OF SMILE I am in a bar in Brooklyn listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether or not my life was worth living. So begins Chloe Cooper Jones's bold account of moving through the world in a body that looks different than most. Born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis, she must contend not only with her own physical pain, but the emotional discomfort of others. It is only when she unexpectedly becomes a mother that she confronts the demand to live life fully, propelling her on a journey across the globe, reclaiming the spaces she'd been denied, and denied herself. From Roman sculptures to a Beyonce concert, from a tennis tournament to the Cambodian Killing Fields, Jones interrogates the myths of beauty with spiky intelligence, aesthetic philosophy, love and humor, inviting us to find a new way of seeing.

The past fifty years are conventionally understood to have witnessed an uninterrupted expansion of sexual rights and liberties in the United States. This state-of-the-art collection tells a different story: while progress has been made in marriage equality, reproductive rights, access to birth control, and other areas, government and civil society are waging a war on stigmatized sex by means of law, surveillance, and social control. The contributors document the history and operation of sex offender registries and the criminalization of HIV, as well as highly punitive measures against sex work that do more to harm women than to combat human trafficking. They reveal that sex crimes are punished more harshly than other crimes, while new legal and administrative regulations drastically restrict who is permitted to have sex. By examining how the ever-intensifying war on sex affects both privileged and marginalized communities, the essays collected here show why sexual liberation is indispensable to social justice and human rights. Contributors. Alexis Agathocleous, Elizabeth Bernstein, J. Wallace Borchert, Mary Anne Case, Owen Daniel-McCarter, Scott De Orio, David M. Halperin, Amber Hollibaugh, Trevor Hoppe, Hans Tao-Ming Huang, Regina Kunzel, Roger N. Lancaster, Judith Levine, Laura Mansnerus, Erica R. Meiners, R. Noll, Melissa Petro, Carol Queen, Penelope Saunders, Sean Strub, Maurice Tomlinson, Gregory Tomso

The History of Sexuality in Europe: A Sourcebook and Reader is a dynamic introduction to the latest debates in the history of Sexuality in Europe. It begins with an introduction, "The Magnetic Poetry Kit of Sex," that surveys the field of sexuality and introduces the new concept of sexual grammar. The Reader focuses on the modern age, but has three chapters on the ancient and medieval world to demonstrate their very different cultures of sexuality. Each section of the Reader pairs the latest chapters and articles by experts with primary sources, addressing questions such as: Why did ancient Greek philosophers and medieval Islamic poets celebrate men's desire for each other? Was Jesus a queer eunuch? Were Victorians sexually repressed? How did nonwestern cultures change some Europeans' ideas about sex? Does regulating prostitution protect or punish women who sell sex? How did sexologists learn from feminists, and men and women who desired those of the same sex? Were 60s feminists pro or anti sex? An essential collection for all students of the history of sexuality.

Why is it so hard to talk about sex and sexuality? In this crisp and compelling book, Amin Ghaziani provides a pithy introduction to the field of sexuality studies through a distinctively cultural lens. Rather than focusing on sex acts, which make us feel flustered and blind us to a bigger picture, Ghaziani crafts a conversation about sex cultures that zooms in on the diverse contexts that give meaning to our sexual pursuits and practices. Unlike sex, which is a biological expression, the word sexuality highlights how the materiality of the body acquires cultural meaning as it encounters other bodies, institutions, regulations, symbols, societal norms, values, and worldviews. Think of it this way: sex + culture = sexuality. Sex Cultures offers an introduction to sexuality unlike any other. Its case-study and debate-driven approach, animated by examples from across the globe and across disciplines, upends stubborn assumptions that pit sex against society. The elegance of the arguments makes this book a pleasurable read for beginners and experts alike.

Money, sex, and love: Are they merely

Rediscover Love and Desire after Sexual AssaultReaders of The Body Keeps the Score, The Deepest Well and Trauma Stewardship should read Want: Recovering Desire after Sexual Assault. Have the courage to heal. We know, increasingly, how common and devastating sexual violence is for women, but we don't always talk about how survivors can recover from the trauma and return to desire, sexuality, trust, and pleasure. Want is the story of how Julie Peters did just that-and how you can, too. Move past the fog of trauma. In the years after the assault, Julie was in what she calls the fog of trauma: the colorless, tasteless experience of barely getting through the day. No one-not counsellors, support groups, or other survivors-could give her any advice about how to find the desire that could bring her back to joy, intimacy, and connection. She had to make it up on her own. In Want, Julie tells the story of getting from the devastation of trauma to living a full life in eight sometimes challenging, often bumbling, and occasionally delightful steps. Experience hope, healing and recovery. We have plenty of stories about the helplessness, frustration, and vengeful feelings that can follow trauma. Culturally, we have started a conversation about these experiences, and we're all confused about what this all means for our relationships with each other. We need stories of hope, healing, and recovery. Survivors of assault, if you've been thinking to yourself, "I thought it was just me," Julie is here to show you that you are not alone. Your loved ones may not know how to support you, but they can learn more about your experiences and how to walk alongside you through this book, just as you can learn how to recover from the trauma you've experienced. Want offers a window into one person's experience of recovery-plus the happy ending we all need to know is possible after trauma.