This original book brings a fascinating and accessible new account of the tumultuous history of sexuality in Europe from the waning of Victorianism to the collapse of Communism and the rise of European Islam. Although the twentieth century is often called the century of sex and seen as an era of increasing liberalization, Dagmar Herzog instead emphasizes the complexities and contradictions in sexual desires and behaviours, the ambivalences surrounding sexual freedom, and the difficulties encountered in securing sexual rights. Incorporating the most recent scholarship on a broad range of conceptual problems and national contexts, the book investigates the shifting fortunes of marriage and prostitution, contraception and abortion, queer and straight existence. It analyzes sexual violence in war and peace, the promotion of sexual satisfaction in fascist and democratic societies, the role of eugenics and disability, the politicization and commercialization of sex, and processes of secularization and religious renewal.

How is sexuality studied methodologically? How are we innovating, methodologically, in the study of sexuality? What impact, if any, has the increase in mixed methodologies had on the study of sexuality? Sexualities Research brings together original contributions by emerging and world-leading scholars of sexuality. Through this volume the authors seek to address how theoretical and methodological choices enable wider dissemination and social impact of sexualities research. Indeed, covering a diverse range of theoretical perspectives and methodologies to provide important new insights into human sexuality, the chapters cover an array of topics from the experience of researching sexuality, to using theories in new and innovative ways. With an international scope, Sexualities Research also builds on the re-emergence of the European Sociological Association Sexuality Research Network and asks important questions about the study of sexuality in contemporary societies against the background of political upheaval and economic troubles. Certainly, this collection shows the importance and vitality of sociological understandings of human sexuality in the twenty-first century. An enlightening volume consisting of a variety of case studies and theoretical research, Sexualities Research will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers who are interested in fields such as Sociology, LGBT/Queer Studies and Gender Studies.

What did sex mean for ordinary people before the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, who were often pitied by later generations as repressed, unfulfilled and full of moral anxiety? This book provides the first rounded, first-hand account of sexuality in marriage in the early and mid-twentieth century. These award-winning authors look beyond conventions of silence among the respectable majority to challenge stereotypes of ignorance and inhibition. Based on vivid, compelling and frank testimonies from a socially and geographically diverse range of individuals, the book explores a spectrum of sexual experiences, from learning about sex and sexual practices in courtship, to attitudes to the body, marital ideals and birth control. It demonstrates that while the era's emphasis on silence and strict moral codes could for some be a source of inhibition and dissatisfaction, for many the culture of privacy and innocence was central to fulfilling and pleasurable intimate lives.

Sex, Power and Consent: Youth Culture and the Unwritten Rules draws on the real world stories and experiences of young women and young men - as told in their own words - regarding love, sex, relationships and negotiating consent. Judicious reference to feminist and sociological theory underpins explicit connections between young people's lived experience and current international debates. Issues surrounding youth sex within popular culture, sexuality education and sexual violence prevention are thoroughly explored. In a clear, incisive and eminently readable manner, Anastasia Powell develops a compelling framework for understanding the 'unwritten rules' and the gendered power relations in which sexual negotiations take place. Ultimately Sex, Power and Consent provides practical strategies for young people, and those working with them, toward the prevention of sexual violence.

When the French invaded Italy in 1494, they were shocked by the frank sexuality expressed in Italian cities. By 1600, the French were widely considered to be the most highly sexualized nation in Christendom. What caused this transformation? This book examines how, as Renaissance textual practices and new forms of knowledge rippled outward from Italy, the sexual landscape and French notions of masculinity, sexual agency, and procreation were fundamentally changed. Exploring the use of astrology, the infusion of Neoplatonism, the critique of Petrarchan love poetry, and the monarchy's sexual reputation, the book reveals that the French encountered conflicting ideas from abroad and from antiquity about the meanings and implications of sexual behavior. Intensely interested in cultural self-definition, humanists, poets, and political figures all contributed to the rapid alteration of sexual ideas to suit French cultural needs. The result was the vibrant sexual reputation that marks French culture to this day.

#1 New Release in Human Sexuality Transform the Way Conflict Affects Your Love LifeWant to bring more peace into your relationship and also get back that "spark" that's been missing? From bad breath to infidelity, find resolution for issues that cause division. If left unresolved, sources of disconnect can lead to major rifts in a relationship. Authors CrisMarie Campbell and Susan Clarke bring over twenty years of experience in family and marriage counseling and relationship coaching to this book. They cater their advice to romantic relationships and provide resolution strategies for women and men. Bring back the "spark" that's been missing. Passion is essential to relationships, and equally important across the spectrums of love, sex, and dating. Whether it's our first love or last love, in order for our bond with our partner to thrive, there needs to be a sense of excitement present. By transforming the way conflict affects us, we create a space for the intimate relationship or passionate marriage we long for to take root and grow. Conflict doesn't have to be a deal breaker. While arguments with our partner can get tiring, looking at those disagreements as opportunities to strengthen our bond rather than weaken it can have a significant impact on their effect. With conflict comes the chance to communicate and solve problems together. This can restore a sense of intimacy and connection with our partner, both emotionally and physically. In The Beauty of Conflict for Couples, you will find: Relatable stories that shed light on the common struggles of romantic relationships Practical tools that offer guidance for addressing conflict A source of hope for relationships that appear to be fated for failure If you and your significant other have looked for guidance in books such as Mating in Captivity, The 5 Love Languages, Hold Me Tight, or Campbell and Clarke's first book, The Beauty of Conflict, then you'll find a further source of resolution in The Beauty of Conflict for Couples.

First printed in 1918, Ralph Werther's ""Autobiography of an Androgyne"" charts his emerging self-understanding as a member of the ""third sex"" and documents his explorations of queer underworlds in turn-of-the-century New York City. Werther presents a sensational life narrative that begins with a privileged upper-class birth and a youthful realization of his difference from other boys. He concludes with a decision to undergo castration. Along the way, he recounts intimate stories of adolescent sexual encounters with adult men and women, escapades as a reckless ""fairie"" who trolled Brooklyn and the Bowery in search of working-class Irish and Italian immigrants, and an immersion into the subculture of male ""inverts.""This new edition also includes a critical introduction by Scott Herring that situates the text within the scientific, historical, literary, and social contexts of urban American life in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Tracing how this pioneering autobiography engages with conversations on immigration, gender, economics, metropolitan working-class culture, and the invention of homosexuality across class lines, this edition is ideal for courses on topics ranging from Victorian literature to modern American sexuality.

Bringing sex and philosophy together on a blind date, Anne Dufourmantelle\u2019s provocative study uses this analogy to uncover and examine philosophy\u2019s blind spot. Delightful and startling comparisons spring from the date: both sex and philosophy are dangerous, both are socially subversive, and both are obsessions. Although sex and philosophy have much in common, however, they have scarcely known one another until now. Socrates and Diogenes had little to say about sex, and although it was notoriously explored by the Marquis de Sade, this study explains why philosophy has never been fully sexualized nor sex really philosophized. Blind Date highlights the marked deletion of sexual topics and themes from philosophical works, while also opening doors for their union. Inviting readers to remember that thought does not require repressed desire, Dufourmantelle argues that sex is everywhere, and it affects all kinds of thinking.

In the early years of the British empire, cohabitation between Indian women and British men was commonplace and to some degree tolerated. However, as Durba Ghosh argues in a challenge to the existing historiography, anxieties about social status, appropriate sexuality, and the question of who could be counted as 'British' or 'Indian' were constant concerns of the colonial government even at this time. By following the stories of a number of mixed-race families, at all levels of the social scale, from high-ranking officials and noblewomen to rank-and-file soldiers and camp followers, and also the activities of indigenous female concubines, mistresses and wives, the author offers a fascinating account of how gender, class and race affected the cultural, social and even political mores of the period. The book makes an original and signal contribution to scholarship on colonialism, gender and sexuality.

High unemployment rates, humiliating relief policy, and the spectre of eviction characterized the experiences of many Ontario families in the Great Depression. Respectable Citizens is an examination of the material difficulties and survival strategies of families facing poverty and unemployment, and an analysis of how collective action and protest redefined the meanings of welfare and citizenship in the 1930s.

Lara Campbell draws on diverse sources including newspapers, family and juvenile court records, premiers' papers, memoirs, and oral histories to uncover the ways in which the material workings of the family and the discursive category of 'respectable' citizenship were invested with gendered obligations and Anglo-British identity. Respectable Citizens demonstrates how women and men represented themselves as entitled to make specific claims on the state, shedding new light on the cooperative and conflicting relationships between men and women, parents and children, and citizen and state in 1930s Canada.

Sexuality in modern western culture is central to identity but the tendency to define by sexuality does not apply to the premodern past. Before the 'invention' of sexuality, erotic acts and desires were comprehended as species of sin, expressions of idealised love, courtship, and marriage, or components of intimacies between men or women, not as outworkings of an innermost self. With a focus on c. 1100 c. 1800, this book explores the shifting meanings, languages, and practices of western sex. It is the first study to combine the medieval and early modern to rethink this time of sex before sexuality, where same-sex and opposite-sex desire and eroticism bore but faint traces of what moderns came to call heterosexuality, homosexuality, lesbianism, and pornography. This volume aims to contribute to contemporary historical theory through paying attention to the particularity of premodern sexual cultures. Phillips and Reay argue that students of premodern sex will be blocked in their understanding if they use terms and concepts applicable to sexuality since the late nineteenth century, and modern commentators will never know their subject without a deeper comprehension of sex's history.

This is a major new survey of the social and cultural history of sexuality in early modern Europe. Within a frame that includes the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment, it weaves together statistical findings, discussions of changing sexual ideology, and evidence of belief structures regarding family, religion, science, crime, and deviance. While broad in overall scope and coverage, the transformations are framed to highlight the narrative of change over time within each domain. By emphasizing the interrelationship between practices and ideological change - in family form, religious organization, medical logic, legal structures, and notions of deviancy - Katherine Crawford's accessible survey reveals how these changes produced the conditions in which our modern notions of sexuality were developed. This book will be essential reading for students of early modern European history and the history of sexuality.

This collection of essays asks contributors to take the capaciousness of the word "queer" to heart in order to think about what medieval queers would have looked like and how they may have existed on the margins and borders of dominant, normative sexuality and desire. The contributors work with recent trends in queer medieval studies, blending together modern concepts of sexuality and desire with the queer configurations of eroticism, desire, and materiality as they might have existed for medieval audiences.

Beginning with the spectacle of hysteria, moving through the perversions of fetishism, masochism, and sadism, and ending with paranoia and psychosis, this book explores the ways that conflicts with the Oedipal law erupt on the body and in language in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, for Chaucer's tales are rife with issues of mastery and control that emerge as conflicts not only between authority and experience but also between power and knowledge, word and flesh, rule books and reason, man and woman, same and other - conflicts that erupt in a macabre sprawl of broken bones, dismembered bodies, cut throats, and decapitations. Like the macabre sprawl of conflict in the Canterbury Tales, this book brings together a number of conflicting modes of thinking and writing through the surprising and perhaps disconcerting use of "shadow" chapters that speak to or against the four "central" chapters, creating both dialogue and interruption.

Virgin Envy sets out to re-conceive the ways that we describe and relate to virginity as a cultural construct. Who is a virgin? How do we lose our virginities? What if we regret our "first time"? Contributors to Virgin Envy everything from medieval romance to Bollywood films to Twilight and True Blood, to destabilize the many assumptions about sexual purity. In particular, the hymen is called into question. How is virginity determined for those without a hymen? How do we account for the ways in which the "geography of the hymen" has changed over the course of history? And what about male and queer virginity? Issues of commodification, postcoloniality, and religious diversity are also addressed. "An ambitious, wide-ranging, and eclectic collection." Corrinne Harol, Enlightened Virginity in Eighteenth-Century Literature

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.

The last twenty years have seen a growth in multi-disciplinary work in the area of sexuality, culture and health. What was once a set of specialist concerns has been steadily mainstreamed. Alongside this, a broader interest has developed in 'social' and 'cultural' factors relating to sexuality and sexual health, from family planning and STI management to gender and intimate partner violence and the technologisation of sex. This book offers a research-based overview of key topics relevant to social and cultural perspectives on sexuality and sexual health. Beginning with an extended introduction and divided into six sections, it looks at culture, sex and gender, sexual diversity, sex work, migration and sexual violence. Each section opens with an editorial discussion which places the theme, and the chapters that follow, in a contemporary context. Six additional substantive chapters can be accessed online at www.routledge.com/cw/aggleton. Including cutting-edge conceptual and empirical material from around the world, this is a key resource for students in, and across, a variety of academic disciplines in the social and health sciences. It is especially suitable for readers from sexuality studies, gender studies, development studies, anthropology and sociology as well as those with public health and social work backgrounds.

This SpringerBrief provides readers with a comprehensive snapshot of contemporary research about autistics and their experiences and insights of sexual behaviours and interests. The authors use a scoping review approach to canvass the diverse literature on this topic. This approach shows many gaps in scholarly understanding about autistics and their experiences and insights of sexual interests and behaviours. Some of the gaps relate to sex education, gender dysphoria and gender reassignment surgery, pregnancy and childbirth, and domestic violence experiences of autistics. The book addresses these gaps and provides explanations and recommendations for further research.

Despite increased awareness of sexual diversity, older people's accounts of sex and intimacy remain marginalised. This edited volume addresses diversity in sexual and intimate experience later in life (50+) and captures international research and analysis relating to intersectional identities. Contributors explore how being older intersects with differences of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class. Offering a critical focus and original contribution to an emerging, although still relatively neglected field, this collection extends knowledge concerning intimacies, practices and pleasures for those thought to represent normative, non-normative and 'new normative' forms of sexual identification and expression.

This edited book engages with the rapidly emerging field of the geographies of digital sexualities, that is, the interlinkages between sexual lives, material and virtual geographies and digital practices. Modern life is increasingly characterised by our integrated engagement in digital/material landscapes activities and our intimate life online can no longer be conceptualised as discrete from 'real life.' Our digital lives are experienced as a material embeddedness in the spaces of everyday life marking the complex integration of real and digital geographies. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the ways that our social and sexual practices such as dating or casual sex are bound up online and online geographies and in many cases constitute specific sexuality-based communities crossing the digital/material divide. The aim of this collection is to explore the complexities of these newly constituted and interwoven sexual and gender landscapes through empirical, theoretical and conceptual engagements through wide-ranging, innovative and original research in a new and quickly moving field.

This book explores the place of sexuality in a Hungarian vocational school. Building upon ethnographic research using a post-structuralist and intersectional theoretical framework, the author highlights the voices of teachers and students in their everyday environment and gives them the opportunity to speak about themselves and their experiences: in doing so, addressing a significant gap in the market. The author critically discusses key issues concerning schooling and sexuality, addressing such themes as LGBTQ+ youth and teachers, institutional hierarchy, and the role of sexuality in the re/production of social inequalities through education. Through these topics, she sensitively questions what should be expected of schools in preparing their students for the wider world. The intersectional approach employed by the author will appeal to scholars in a wide variety of disciplines, from gender and sexuality studies to the sociology of education and race and ethnicity studies.

This book examines and critiques the fact that Chile's claims to economic exceptionalism have been embodied, often quite aggressively, in a heterosexual, and primarily male, ideal. Despite the many shifts Chilean economics and politics have undergone over the past fifty years, the country's view of itself as a "model" in contrast to other Latin American countries has remained constant. By deploying an artistic, literary, and cinematic archive of queer figures from this period, this book draws parallels among the exceptionalisms of Chile's economic discourse, the subjects deemed most (and least) apt to embody it, and the maneuvers of its cultural production between local and global ideas of gender and politics to delineate its place in the world. Queering the Chilean Way thus sheds light on the sexual, economic, and aesthetic dimensions of exceptionalism-at its heart, a discourse of exclusion that often comprises a major element of nationalism-in Chile and throughout the Americas.

'Incest' refers to illegal sexual relations between family members. Its precise contours, however, are culturally specific. Hence, an illegal incestuous union in one social context may be a legal close-kin union in another. First-degree sexual unions, between a parent and child, or between siblings, are most widely prohibited and abhorred. This book discusses all overt and covert first-degree incest relations in the Hebrew Bible and also probes the significance of gaps and what these imply about projected sexual and social values. As the dominant opinion on the origin of first-degree incest continues to be shaped, new voices such as those of queer and post-feminist criticism have joined the conversation. It navigates not only the incest laws of Leviticus and the narratives of Lot and his daughters and of Amnon and Tamar but pursues subtler intimations of first-degree sexual unions, such as between Adam and his (absent but arguably implied) mother, Haran and Terah's wife, Ham and Noah. In pursuing the psycho-social values that may be drawn from the Hebrew Bible regarding first-degree incest, this book will provide a thorough review of incest studies from the early 20th century onward and explain and assess the contribution of very recent critical approaches from queer and post-feminist perspectives.

At what age do girls gain the maturity to make sexual choices? This question provokes especially vexed debates in India, where early marriage is a widespread practice. India has served as a focal problem site in NGO campaigns and intergovernmental conferences setting age standards for sexual maturity. Over the last century, the country shifted the legal age of marriage from twelve, among the lowest in the world, to eighteen, at the high end of the global spectrum. Ashwini Tambe illuminates the ideas that shaped such shifts: how the concept of adolescence as a sheltered phase led to delaying both marriage and legal adulthood; how the imperative of population control influenced laws on marriage age; and how imperial moral hierarchies between nations provoked defensive postures within India. Tambe's transnational feminist approach to legal history shows how intergovernmental debates influenced Indian laws and how expert discourses in India changed UN terminology about girls. Ultimately, the well-meaning focus on child marriage became tethered less to the well-being of girls themselves and more to parents' interests, population control targets, and the preservation of national reputation.

This book considers a burgeoning social phenomenon, compensated dating in Hong Kong, that facilitates direct commercial sex exchange between consenting females from their mid-teens through the late 20s and males from their early 20s to mid-adulthood. Informed by the transformation of intimacy, the breakdown of institutional constraints, the emergence of a new female sexual autonomy and the advancement of information technology, this book moves beyond stereotypes of sex work to look at the complexities of compensated dating. The phenomenon of compensated dating is distinctive from most other sex trades in that it involves intense emotional interactions and often extends beyond the commercial boundary. Given the dynamic, flexible and ambiguous nature of compensated dating, it has become more of a space for sexual explorations and less of a rigid model of commercial sex, at least in the eye of the participants. This book walks through how men become involved in compensated dating and also sheds lights on how gender relations are negotiated, with important implications on what it means to be a man and a woman in contemporary Hong Kong society. It also speaks to the broader transformations of some of the key social structures and elements, particularly gender and sexualities, in the era of late modernity.