Prior to the Spanish conquest, the Nahua indigenous peoples of central Mexico did not have a notion of "sex" or "sexuality" equivalent to the sexual categories developed by colonial society or those promoted by modern Western peoples. In this innovative ethnohistory, Pete Sigal seeks to shed new light on Nahua concepts of the sexual without relying on the modern Western concept of sexuality. Along with clerical documents and other Spanish sources, he interprets the many texts produced by the Nahua. While colonial clerics worked to impose Catholic beliefs--particularly those equating sexuality and sin--on the indigenous people they encountered, the process of cultural assimilation was slower and less consistent than scholars have assumed. Sigal argues that modern researchers of sexuality have exaggerated the power of the Catholic sacrament of confession to change the ways that individuals understood themselves and their behaviors. At least until the mid-seventeenth century, when increased contact with the Spanish began to significantly change Nahua culture and society, indigenous peoples, particularly commoners, related their sexual lives and imaginations not just to concepts of sin and redemption but also to pleasure, seduction, and rituals of fertility and warfare.

First published in 2008, Donna Freitas's Sex and the Soul achieved national acclaim, illuminating the as-yet-unexplored struggles of college students navigating the lines of faith and sexuality. Conducting face-to-face interviews at a wide range of colleges and universities-from public to private, Catholic to evangelical-Freitas discovers what students really think about these highly personal subjects. Their stories will not only engage readers, but, in many cases, move them with the painful struggles these candid young women and men face. Indeed, the book uncovers aspects of college life that may unsettle some readers, especially parents. Many campuses, for instance, are dominated by a pervasive hook-up culture. Moreover, many students see little connection between sex and religion, even as they seek one between sex and spirituality. Indeed, these observations hold true even at Catholic schools. Only at evangelical colleges is religion an important factor when deciding whether or not to engage in sex. But Freitas's research also reveals that, even at secular schools, students are not comfortable with a culture of casual sex, and that they do want spirituality to speak about what they should do and who they should try to be-not just what they should avoid doing. This updated edition includes a new Afterword in which Freitas reflects on the hundreds of conversations she has had with college students since the book was first published, and offers further practical advice for dealing with hookup culture.

In "Nightwork," Anne Allison opens a window onto Japanese corporate culture and gender identities. Allison performed the ritualized tasks of a hostess in one of Tokyo's many "hostess clubs": pouring drinks, lighting cigarettes, and making flattering or titillating conversation with the businessmen who came there on company expense accounts. Her book critically examines how such establishments create bonds among white-collar men and forge a masculine identity that suits the needs of their corporations.
Allison describes in detail a typical company outing to such a club--what the men do, how they interact with the hostesses, the role the hostess is expected to play, and the extent to which all of this involves "play" rather than "work." Unlike previous books on Japanese nightlife, Allison's ethnography of one specific hostess club (here referred to as Bijo) views the general phenomenon from the eyes of a woman, hostess, and feminist anthropologist.
Observing that clubs like Bijo further a kind of masculinity dependent on the gestures and labors of women, Allison seeks to uncover connections between such behavior and other social, economic, sexual, and gendered relations. She argues that Japanese corporate nightlife enables and institutionalizes a particular form of ritualized male dominance: in paying for this entertainment, Japanese corporations not only give their male workers a self-image as phallic man, but also develop relationships to work that are unconditional and unbreakable. This is a book that will appeal to anyone interested in gender roles or in contemporary Japanese society.

Freewheeling sexuality and gender experimentation defined the social and moral landscape of 1890s San Francisco. Middle class whites crafting titillating narratives on topics such as high divorce rates, mannish women, and extramarital sex centered Chinese and Japanese immigrants in particular. Amy Sueyoshi draws on everything from newspapers to felony case files to oral histories in order to examine how whites' pursuit of gender and sexual fulfillment gave rise to racial caricatures. As she reveals, white reporters, writers, artists, and others conflated Chinese and Japanese, previously seen as two races, into one. There emerged the Oriental-a single pan-Asian American stereotype weighted with sexual and gender meaning. Sueyoshi bridges feminist, queer, and ethnic studies to show how the white quest to forge new frontiers in gender and sexual freedom reinforced-and spawned-racial inequality through the ever evolving Oriental. Informed and fascinating, Discriminating Sex reconsiders the origins and expression of racial stereotyping in an American city.

College students hook up and have sex. That is what many students expect to happen during their time at university-it is part of growing up and navigating the relationship scene on most American campuses today. But what do you do when you're a student at an evangelical university? Students at these schools must negotiate a barrage of religiously imbued undercurrents that impact how they think about relationships, in addition to how they experience and evaluate them. As they work to form successful unions, students at evangelical colleges balance sacred ideologies of purity, holiness, and godliness, while also dealing with more mainstream notions of popularity, the online world, and the appeal of sexual intimacy. In From Single to Serious, Dana M. Malone shines a light on friendship, dating, and, sexuality, in both the ideals and the practical experiences of heterosexual students at U. S. evangelical colleges. She examines the struggles they have in balancing their gendered and religious presentations of self, the expectations of their campus community, and their desire to find meaningful romantic relationships.

'No brief survey can do justice to the richness, complexity and detail of Foucault's discussion' New York Review of Books The second volume of Michel Foucault's pioneering analysis of the changing nature of desire explores how sexuality was perceived in classical Greek culture. From the stranger byways of Greek medicine (with its advice on the healthiest season for sex, as well as exercise and diet) to the role of women, The Use of Pleasure is full of extraordinary insights into the differences - and the continuities - between the Ancient, Christian and Modern worlds, showing how sex became a moral issue in the west. 'Required reading for those who cling to stereotyped ideas about our difference from the Greeks in terms of pagan license versus Christian austerity' Los Angeles Times Book Review

Transnational films that represent intimacy and inequality produce new experiences that result in the displacement of the universal spectator, in a redefinition of the power of cinema for today's global audiences. The Proximity of Other Skins examines transnational films that achieve global prominence in presenting a different cinematic language of love and sex. Author Celine Parrenas Shimizu traverses independent films by Gina Kim and Ramona Diaz to the global cinema of Laurent Cantet, Park Chan-wook and Cannes award-winning director Brilliante Mendoza and their representations of transnational intimacies. In doing so, she addresses unexpected encounters in the global movement of people and goods within their geopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts. In these celebrated films that move across continents, she finds ways to expand our definition of intimacy, including explicit sex and relations that go beyond sex, enabling us the opportunity to theorize how people now live together in many spheres of contemporary life. Readers can then better understand how intimacy can affirm and express love, but also alienate and oppress, revealing the loneliness, pain, and suffering within transnational, national, and personal relations of power and hierarchy. In studying representations of intimacy, the book calls to expand our vocabulary of moving images and its role in redefining care work and affective relations between people across difference and inequality. The book addresses cinematic intimacies between husbands/wives/lovers, understanding between sex workers and clients, close familiarity between rich and poor, and new affinities between citizen and refugee and laborer and capitalist.

Is it time to take a break from feminism? In this pathbreaking book, Janet Halley reassesses the place of feminism in the law and politics of sexuality. She argues that sexuality involves deeply contested and clashing realities and interests, and that feminism helps us understand only some of them. To see crucial dimensions of sexuality that feminism does not reveal--the interests of gays and lesbians to be sure, but also those of men, and of constituencies and values beyond the realm of sex and gender--we might need to take a break from feminism.

Halley also invites feminism to abandon its uncritical relationship to its own power. Feminists are, in many areas of social and political life, partners in governance. To govern responsibly, even on behalf of women, Halley urges, feminists should try taking a break from their own presuppositions.

Halley offers a genealogy of various feminisms and of gay, queer, and trans theories as they split from each other in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. All these incommensurate theories, she argues, enrich thinking on the left not despite their break from each other but because of it. She concludes by examining legal cases to show how taking a break from feminism can change your very perceptions of what's at stake in a decision and liberate you to decide it anew.

'2021's most important book about sex.' Stylist 'You need to read this.' Mashable A bad sexual experience. A grey area. Not rape but... A violation - these are the terms we use to describe the experiences we don't have words for. The way we talk about topics such as sex, consent, assault aren't fit for purpose. Rough is a revolutionary non-fiction work exploring the narratives of sexual violence that we don't talk about. Through powerful testimony from 50 women and non-binary people, this book shines a light on the sexual violence that takes place in our bedrooms and beyond, sometimes at the hands of people we know, trust, or even love. Rough investigates violations such as 'stealthing,' non-consensual choking, and non-consensual rough sex acts that our culture is only starting to recognise as sexual violence. The book explores the ways in which systems of oppression manifest in our sexual culture - from racist microaggressions, to fatphobic acts of aggression, and ableist dehumanising behaviour. An intersectional, sex-positive, kink-positive work, the book also examines how white supremacy, transphobia, biphobia, homophobia, and misogyny are driving forces behind sexual violence. Rough is an urgent, timely call for change to the systems that oppress us all. It's time for a societal shift. As individuals with agency within our sexual culture we have the power to remodel our behaviour and this book shows us how. Praise for Rough 'An incredible investigation into a frighteningly common part of our sexual experience; determined to give ownership back to those who have had their agency stolen from them.' Dr Fern Riddell 'Unflinching. Important, thought-provoking read.' Nataliya Deleva 'Rough speaks to how many women often feel after sexual encounters - violated but unsure of exactly why, and whether our feelings are valid. This book is excellent and demonstrating just how valid those feelings are, and how the cultures of violence within sex that have been normalised intersect with wider systems of patriarchy, racism and misogyny.' Adele Walton, founder of Humanitarian Hotgirl

His first book, "The Great Immigration Scandal" (2004), blew the whistle on abuses within the Home Office and led to the resignation of the immigration minister, Beverley Hughes. Although attacked at the time by the government and the 'liberal' media for alarmism, Moxon's analysis has now been adopted by most of the major political parties. Indeed his views on the dangers of multiculturalism were even echoed by the Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, leading the Evening Standard to claim 'Moxon appears not so much a racist as a visionary'. But immigration was never his primary interest, in fact he joined the Home Office in order to study its HR policy, as part of a decade-long investigation of men-women. This book is the result. Notwithstanding its provocative title, "The Woman Racket" is a serious scientific investigation into one of the key myths of our age - that women are oppressed by the 'patriarchal' traditions of Western societies. Drawing on the latest developments in evolutionary psychology, Moxon finds that the opposite is true - men, or at least the majority of low-status males - have always been the victims of deep-rooted prejudice. As the prejudice is biologically derived, it is unconscious and can only be uncovered with the tools of scientific psychology. The book reveals this prejudice in fields as diverse as healthcare, employment, family policy and politics: compared to the long and bloody struggle for universal male suffrage, women were given the vote 'in an historical blink of the eye'.

This book aims to reflect on how to translate "queer" in the context of Latin America. Queer theory is becoming consolidated on an international scale as an effort to understand dissident bodies and their inventions. But how can we utilize such a rich body of literature and proposals without merely applying in the Global South what has been formulated in the Global North?Through meetings between dissident bodies in the Global South, the book suggests that the theoretical-poetic inventions formulated in this part of the world cannot be forgotten and proposes a discussion on how to approach queer theory from a decolonial point of view. There is still only a scant body of literature that systematizes and approaches these questions from a Latin American point of view; or, to use the term that gives this book its name, the "tropics." The book points out the necessity of staying aware of the connections between western modernity and colonial practices. The book therefore invites us to pass through borders, to question limits, and to allow ourselves to be affected by Others, a fundamental exercise in the context of social inequality as drastic as that in which the majority of the population live in Latin America and in the Global South in general. Theories, like bodies, travel; in being translated, they transform themselves. The movements and the bending of bodies and theories are disturbing and subversive. Queer in the Tropics arises from these translations, from this bending, and from these subversions.

This is the only book that systematically examines transgender sex work in the United States and globally. Bringing together perspectives from a rich range of disciplines and experiences, it is an invaluable resource on issues related to commercial sex in the transgender community and in the lives of trans sex workers, including mental health, substance use, relationship dynamics, encounters with the criminal justice system, and opportunities and challenges in the realm of public health. The volume covers trans sex workers' interactions with health, social service, and mental-health agencies, featuring more than forty contributors from across the globe. Synthesizing introductions by the editor help organize and put into context a vast and scattered research and empirical literature. The book is essential for researchers, health practitioners, and policy analysts in the areas of sex-work research, HIV/AIDS, and LGBTQ/gender studies.

How does Shakespeare's treatment of human sexuality relate to the sexual conventions and language of his times? Pre-eminent Shakespearean critic Stanley Wells draws on historical and anecdotal sources to present an illuminating account of sexual behaviour in Shakespeare's time, particularly in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. He demonstrates what we know or can deduce of the sex lives of Shakespeare and members of his family. He also provides a fascinating account of depictions of sexuality in the poetry of the period and suggests that at the time Shakespeare was writing most of his non-dramatic verse a group of poets catered especially for readers with homoerotic tastes. The second part of Shakespeare, Sex, and Love focuses on the variety of ways in which Shakespeare treats sexuality in his plays and at how he relates sexuality to love. Wells shows that Shakespeare's attitude to sex developed over the course of his writing career, and devotes whole chapters to 'The Fun of Sex' - to how he raises laughter out of the matter of sex in both the language and the plotting of some of his comedies; portrayals of sexual desire; to Romeo and Juliet as the play in which Shakespeare focuses most centrally on issues relating to sex, love, and the relationship between them; to sexual jealousy, traced through four major plays; 'Sexual Experience'; and 'Whores and Saints'. A final chapter, 'Just Good Friends' examines Shakespeare's rendering of same-gender relationships.

Published by Sinauer Associates, an imprint of Oxford University Press. In this textbook, Simon LeVay and Janice Baldwin aim to help students understand the diversity of human sexual expression as well as the diversity of perspectives from which sexuality can be studied. Well known for its high-quality presentation of biological aspects of sexuality, Human Sexuality, Fourth Edition, devotes rich coverage to the insights gained from cognitive science, social psychology, sociology, feminism, and cross-cultural studies, along with both moral and political discourse on sexual themes. The fourth edition provides up-to-date coverage of all topics, ranging from gay marriage in New York to the latest developments in contraceptive technology and exciting findings on pre-exposure prophylaxis against HIV. Still the leader in terms of its biological coverage, the fourth edition also has expanded coverage of many other issues, ranging from sex-therapy exercises to learning theories of gender and paraphilias.

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.

Gloria Wekker analyzes the phenomenon of "mati" work, an old practice among Afro-Surinamese working-class women in which marriage is rejected in favor of male and female sexual partners. Wekker vividly describes the lives of these women, who prefer to create alternative families of kin, lovers, and children, and gives a fascinating account of women's sexuality that is not limited to either heterosexuality or same-sex sexuality. She offers new perspectives on the lives of Caribbean women, transnational gay and lesbian movements, and an Afro-Surinamese tradition that challenges conventional Western notions of marriage, gender, identity, and desire. Bringing these women's voices to the forefront, she offers an extensive and groundbreaking analysis of the unique historical, religious, psychological, economic, linguistic, cultural, and political forces that have shaped their lives.

Here is a lively look at how Shakespeare's treatment of human sexuality in his plays and poems relates to the sexual conventions, sexual mores, and actual sexual behaviors of his day.
Pre-eminent Shakespeare critic Stanley Wells draws on historical and anecdotal sources to present an illuminating account of sexual behavior--and its consequences--in Shakespeare's time, particularly in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. Shakespeare's Stratford was a hotbed of small-town gossip; the town's records reveal many cases of slander involving accusations of cuckoldry and whoredom, as well as many prosecutions for fornication, sexual "incontinence," and adultery. Wells thoroughly explores this milieu, demonstrating what we know or can deduce of the sex lives of Shakespeare and members of his family and providing a fascinating account of depictions of sexuality in the poetry of the period. Wells even points to specific recorded events that find their way into lines and subplots in the plays.
In the second half of the book, Wells goes on to explore the variety of ways in which Shakespeare treats sexuality in his plays and how he relates sexuality to love. Chapters cover everything from the fun that Shakespeare gets out of sex in his comedies; to the ways he relates sexual desire to both lust and love; to sexual jealousy in four major plays; and to Romeo and Juliet as the play in which Shakespeare focuses most centrally on issues relating to sex, love, and the relationship between them. "Whores and Saints" looks at his portrayals of the extremes of womanhood, and a final chapter, "Just Good Friends," investigates his depiction of same-gender relationships.
Whether as a source of comedy, drama, debate, or passion, sex in Shakespeare's plays and poems is always intriguing, and there is no better guide to this subject than Stanley Wells.

In 2003, Lebanese writer Rashid al-Daif spent several weeks in Germany as part of the "West-East Divan" program, a cultural exchange effort meant to improve mutual awareness of German and Middle Eastern cultures. He was paired with German author Joachim Helfer, who then returned the visit to al-Daif in Lebanon. Following their time together, al-Daif published in Arabic a literary reportage of his encounter with Helfer in which he focuses on the German writer's homosexuality. His frank observations have been variously read as trenchant, naive, or offensive. In response, Helfer provided an equally frank point-by-point riposte to al-Daif's text. Together these writers offer a rare exploration of attitudes toward sex, love, and gender across cultural lines. By stretching the limits of both fiction and essay, they highlight the importance of literary sensitivity in understanding the Other.

Rashid al-Daif's "novelized biography" and Joachim Helfer's commentary appear for the first time in English translation in What Makes a Man? Sex Talk in Beirut and Berlin. Also included in this volume are essays by specialists in Arabic and German literature that shed light on the discourse around sex between these two authors from different cultural contexts.

Sex is cheap. Coupled sexual activity has become more widely available than ever. Cheap sex has been made possible by two technologies that have little to do with each other-the wide uptake of the Pill and high-quality pornography-and its distribution made more efficient by a third, the uptake of online dating. Together, they drive down the cost of real sex, have created a massive slow-down in the development of significant relationships, put women's fertility at risk, and have even taken a toll on men's marriageability. What the West has witnessed of late is not the social construction of sexuality or marriage or family forms toward different possibilities as a product of political will, but technology-driven social change. This revolution in sexual autonomy also ushered in an era of plastic sexuality and prompted the flourishing on non-heterosexual identities. This book takes readers on a tour inside the American mating market, and highlights key patterns that characterize young adults' experience today, including the early timing of first sex in relationships, overlapping partners, the hazards of online dating, frustrating returns on their relational investments, and a failure to link future goals like marriage with how they are conducting their current relationships. Drawing upon several large nationally-representative surveys, in-person interviews with 100 men and women, and the assertions of scholars ranging from evolutionary psychologists to gender theorists, what emerges is a story about social change, technological breakthroughs, and the unintended consequences of women's economic success. Sex and its satisfactions are becoming increasingly important in contemporary life. No longer playing a supporting role in enduring relationships, sex has emerged as a central priority in relationship development and continuation. But unravel the layers, and it is obvious that the emergence of "industrial sex" is far more a reflection of men's interests than women's.

In this innovative study, Benjamin Kahan traces the elusive history of modern celibacy. Arguing that celibacy is a distinct sexuality with its own practices and pleasures, Kahan shows it to be much more than the renunciation of sex or a cover for homosexuality. Celibacies focuses on a diverse group of authors, social activists, and artists, spanning from the suffragettes to Henry James, and from the Harlem Renaissance's Father Divine to Andy Warhol. This array of figures reveals the many varieties of celibacy that have until now escaped scholars of literary modernism and sexuality. Ultimately, this book wrests the discussion of celibacy and sexual restraint away from social and religious conservatism, resituating celibacy within a history of political protest and artistic experimentation. Celibacies offers an entirely new perspective on this little-understood sexual identity and initiates a profound reconsideration of the nature and constitution of sexuality.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Amphibious Subjects is an ethnographic study of a community of self-identified effeminate men-known in local parlance as sasso-residing in coastal Jamestown, a suburb of Accra, Ghana's capital. Drawing on the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye's notion of "amphibious personhood," Kwame Edwin Otu argues that sasso embody and articulate amphibious subjectivity in their self-making, creating an identity that moves beyond the homogenizing impulses of western categories of gender and sexuality. Such subjectivity simultaneously unsettles claims purported by the Christian heteronationalist state and LGBT+ human rights organizations that Ghana is predominantly heterosexual or homophobic. Weaving together personal interactions with sasso, participant observation, autoethnography, archival sources, essays from African and African-diasporic literature, and critical analyses of documentaries such as the BBC's The World's Worst Place to Be Gay, Amphibious Subjects is an ethnographic meditation on how Africa is configured as the "heart of homophobic darkness" in transnational LGBT+ human rights imaginaries.

"Anna Clark has pioneered research on sex, scandal, and democracy. Here she shows why scandal is not just engaging, nay fascinating, but how sexual politics is important to power, to political discourse, and the constitution, how it disturbs the fiction of public and private, and how it connects with the contradictions of everyday life-the life that we all live."--Beatrix Campbell, writer and broadcaster, author of "Diana, Princess of Wales: How Sexual Politics Shook the Monarchy"

"In this original and engaging work, we are shown a series of detailed, gripping scandals and how they were instrumental in shaping the world of Georgian politics and in laying the ground for Britain's move toward a modern democracy. The stories are vividly told-the actors move across the stage in all their flawed humanity. Clark's insights into the reforming of acceptable masculine and feminine behavior and the role of sexual innuendo in struggles for power are particularly original. With the publication of "Scandal," all types of political scandal, including those based on or attributed to what current opinion defines as sexual misdemeanors, will have to be taken with the seriousness they deserve, no longer written off as the quaint by-ways of history."--Leonore Davidoff, coauthor of "Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850"

"In her fresh and exciting study, Anna Clark reframes a set of well-known episodes in British political history during the reign of George III and the Regency period. Combining political, cultural, and gender history, she demonstrates in superb fashion the importance of scandal, particularly sexual scandal, to understanding the politics of the age.Clark has written a work of originality that deserves a wide readership."--James Epstein, author of "In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain"

First published in 1988, Peter Brown's "The Body and Society" was a groundbreaking study of the marriage and sexual practices of early Christians in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Brown focuses on the practice of permanent sexual renunciation-continence, celibacy, and lifelong virginity-in Christian circles from the first to the fifth centuries A.D. and traces early Christians' preoccupations with sexuality and the body in the work of the period's great writers.

"The Body and Society" questions how theological views on sexuality and the human body both mirrored and shaped relationships between men and women, Roman aristocracy and slaves, and the married and the celibate. Brown discusses Tertullian, Valentinus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Constantine, the Desert Fathers, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine, among others, and considers asceticism and society in the Eastern Empire, martyrdom and prophecy, gnostic spiritual guidance, promiscuity among the men and women of the church, monks and marriage in Egypt, the ascetic life of women in fourth-century Jerusalem, and the body and society in the early Middle Ages. In his new introduction, Brown reflects on his work's reception in the scholarly community.

How British authorities and Indian intellectuals developed ideas about deviant female sexuality to control and organize modern society in India During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals-philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics-deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. In Indian Sex Life, Durba Mitra shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. Bringing together vast archival materials from diverse disciplines, Mitra reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. Mitra demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, Indian Sex Life overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.