Over the past decade, there has been an increasing emphasis in African scholarship and research on the importance of understanding sexuality and the issues around it, such as identity, sexual rights and sexuality, reproductive health and rights and gender and political democracy. Despite this, Africa has frequently been found by researchers to be predominantly hostile to any discussion of sexual and reproductive rights, conveying dismay at the notion of women's rights to reproductive freedom, disgusted objection to the idea that gay and lesbian people have civic and human rights and opposed to engagement with issues such as FGM (Kenya), virginity testing (South Africa), Shar'ia interpretations of appropriate sexuality (Nigeria and Sudan), and legal relationships to homosexuality and intersexuality (South Africa).

In 2004, the African Gender Institute ran a continental research project, Mapping Sexualities, among the objectives of which was the development of a research methodology suited to carrying out in-depth case studies of the dynamics of gender and contemporary sexual cultures in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda. This book is the result of that research. The chapters cover broad-ranging issues and include questions about what it means to research topics that are unpopular or fraught with the sense of the taboo that underpins much work in sexualities and gender studies.

Overall, the diverse pieces within the collection offer the opportunity to see qualitative research not as the 'poor cousin' of quantitative studies but as a zone which raises intellectual and political challenges.

After the Great War, British men and women grappled with their ignorance about sexuality and desire. Seeking advice and information from doctors, magazines, and each other, they wrote tens of thousands of letters about themselves as sexual subjects. In these letters, they disclosed their uncertainties, their behaviors, and the role of sexuality in their lives. Their fascinating narratives tell how people sought to unleash their imaginations and fashion new identities.

Making Modern Love shows how readers embraced popular mediaOCoself-help books, fetish magazines, and advice columnsOCoas a source of information about sexuality and a means for telling their own stories. From longings for transcendent marital union to fantasies of fetish-wear, cross-dressing, and whipping, men and women revealed a surprising range of desires and behaviors (queer and otherwise) that have been largely disregarded until now.

Lisa Sigel mines these provocative narratives to understand how they contributed to new subjectivities and the development of modern sexualities."

In "Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation," Zrinka Stahuljak explores the connections and fissures between the history of sexuality, nineteenth-century views of the Middle Ages, and the conceptualization of modern France. This cultural history uncovers the determinant role that the sexuality of the Middle Ages played in nineteenth-century French identity.Stahuljak's provocative study of sex, blood, race, and love in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical and historical literature demonstrates how French medicine's obsession with the medieval past helped to define European sexuality, race, public health policy, marriage, family, and the conceptualization of the Middle Ages. Stahuljak reveals the connections between the medieval military order of the Templars and the 1830 colonization of Algeria, between a fifteenth-century French marshal and the development of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's theory of sadism, between courtly love and the 1884 law on divorce. Although the developing discipline of medieval studies eventually rejected the influence of these medical philologists, the convergence of medievalism and medicine shaped modern capitalist French society and established a vision of the Middle Ages that survives today.

Karaoke bars with prostitute hostesses are standard fare in Chinese cities, college students accept jobs as highly paid mistresses, sex stores are as common as corner convenience shops, venereal disease and HIV/AIDS are soaring, and China's social media are buzzing with conversation and debate about sex. The story of sex in China is as improbable as it is intriguing. China hand Richard Burger takes the reader on an exploration of the country's complex transformation from a once sexually open society to one of the most prudish, followed by a stunning turn in recent years towards new sexual freedoms.

This book presents current research focusing on sexual minorities. Topics discussed include gay and lesbian parenthood; asexuality; media representations of trebly marginalised minorities; the effect of imaged contact on heterosexual women's attitudes toward lesbian women; the high-school experiences of sexual and gender minority youth and best practices in the development of interventions designed to attenuate homonegativity. The final entry is a "virtual discussion" in which contributors responded to a set of questions that focused on key issues in the field of sexual minority studies..

Citizenship from Below boldly revises the history of the struggles for freedom by emancipated peoples in post-slavery Jamaica, post-independence Haiti, and the wider Caribbean by focusing on the interplay between the state, the body, race, and sexuality. Mimi Sheller offers a new theory of "citizenship from below" to describe the contest between "proper" spaces of legitimate high politics and the disavowed politics of lived embodiment. While acknowledging the internal contradictions and damaging exclusions of subaltern self-empowerment, Sheller roots out from beneath the historical archive traces of a deeper freedom, one expressed through bodily performances, familial relationships, cultivation of the land, and sacred worship.Attending to the hidden linkages among intimate realms and the public sphere, Sheller explores specific struggles for freedom, including women's political activism in Jamaica; the role of discourses of "manhood" in the making of free subjects, soldiers, and citizens; the fiercely ethnonationalist discourses that excluded South Asian and African indentured workers; the sexual politics of the low-bass beats and "bottoms up" moves in the dancehall; and the struggle for reproductive and LGBT rights and against homophobia in the contemporary Caribbean. Through her creative use of archival sources and emphasis on the connections between intimacy, violence, and citizenship, Sheller enriches critical theories of embodied freedom, sexual citizenship, and erotic agency in all post-slavery societies.

Sodom on the Thames looks closely at three episodes involving sex between men in late-nineteenth-century England. Morris Kaplan draws on extensive research into court records, contemporary newspaper accounts, personal correspondence and diaries, even a pornographic novel. He focuses on two notorious scandals and one quieter incident.

In 1871, transvestites "Stella" (Ernest Boulton) and "Fanny" (Frederick Park), who had paraded around London's West End followed by enthusiastic admirers, were tried for conspiracy to commit sodomy. In 1889 1890, the "Cleveland Street affair" revealed that telegraph delivery boys had been moonlighting as prostitutes for prominent gentlemen, one of whom fled abroad. In 1871, Eton schoolmaster William Johnson resigned in disgrace, generating shockwaves among the young men in his circle whose romantic attachments lasted throughout their lives. Kaplan shows how profoundly these scandals influenced the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and contributed to growing anxiety about male friendships.

Sodom on the Thames reconstructs these incidents in rich detail and gives a voice to the diverse people involved. It deepens our understanding of late Victorian attitudes toward urban culture, masculinity, and male homoeroticism. Kaplan also explores the implications of such historical narratives for the contemporary politics of sexuality."

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.

In Lovesick Japan, Mark D. West explores an official vision of love, sex, and marriage in contemporary Japan. A comprehensive body of evidence 2,700 court opinions describes a society characterized by a presupposed absence of physical and emotional intimacy, affection, and personal connections. In compelling, poignant, and sometimes horrifying court cases, West finds that Japanese judges frequently opine on whether a person is in love, what other emotions a person is feeling, and whether those emotions are appropriate for the situation.

Sometimes judges' views about love, sex, and marriage emerge from their presentation of the facts of cases. Among the recurring elements are abortions forced by men, compensated dating, late-life divorces, termination fees to end affairs, sexless couples, Valentine's Day heartbreak, "soapland" bath-brothels, and home-wrecking hostesses.

Sometimes the judges' analysis, decisions, and commentary are as revealing as the facts. Sex in the cases is a choice among private "normal" sex, which is male-dominated, conservative, dispassionate, or nonexistent; commercial sex, which caters to every fetish but is said to lead to rape, murder, and general social depravity; and a hybrid of the two, which commodifies private sexual relationships. Marriage is contractual; judges express the ideal of love in marriage and proclaim its importance, but virtually no one in the court cases achieves it. Love usually appears as a tragic, overwhelming emotion associated with jealousy, suffering, heartache, and death."

In some parts of South Africa, more than one in three people are HIV positive. Love in the Time of AIDS explores transformations in notions of gender and intimacy to try to understand the roots of this virulent epidemic. By living in an informal settlement and collecting love letters, cell phone text messages, oral histories, and archival materials, Mark Hunter details the everyday social inequalities that have resulted in untimely deaths. Hunter shows how first apartheid and then chronic unemployment have become entangled with ideas about femininity, masculinity, love, and sex and have created an economy of exchange that perpetuates the transmission of HIV/AIDS. This sobering ethnography challenges conventional understandings of HIV/AIDS in South Africa.

What is the secret to making love last? Hot sex has a lot to do with it But if you want your relationship to last, you've got to make all of your love life work now. Boot Camp has over 69 ways on how to discover new ways to relate to each other. Now you can take a closer look at everyday situations that cause stress in relationships and see how easy it is to do something about it. When you make positive changes, you renew intimacy, revive love and create the long term relationship you dream of. Thirty-six years of living and loving have gone into creating this survival course for relationships. Boot Camp for Lovers, by Smith & Jones has more than 69 ways you can recycle love, renew intimacy and revive your emotional relationship together. Spend time doing a little R&R. Read and Repair your relationships All the chapters add up to making love...last forever. Eye-catching typography and magazine style layout makes a welcome change from heavily typeset pages of psychology books. Each chapter is designed as a "reading room" without distraction of the previous chapters. Finally you can understand the everyday language of long term love. About Alias Smith & Jones For this first book, it was a decision to publish this book under pen name alias Smith & Jones. This keeps the anonymity and privacy of this couples personal relationship a secret and invites unbiased readership because readers are not placing an authors faces to the text. As happens on so many relationship books...and readers will not look at the couple on the dust-jacket.. because there is no photo...yet cover to cover, Boot Camp an "unmirrored" book, it holds new insights and delivers such "knowing" of how to make love last forever. Exactly what couples who have ever wondered what the secret to making a relationship last...are looking for. This creative couple are not the couple next door by any stretch. They are arguably a dynamic team who have a depth of understanding that they believe goes beyond psychotherapy books because the authors have the rare accolade of being in a long term relationship, living together for 36 years, and by default have become self professed experts in the field of long term relationships. From experience and research they have become experts in understanding what goes into creating a long term relationship. This dynamic creative team worked together advertising agencies internationally. They problem solved major accounts, producing award winning advertising for television, radio and media. Their co-joint creative backgrounds means that they are able to work together to research and produce a definitive book about relationships. Smith & Jones are running a series of workshops based on the principles of the Boot Camp For Lovers' Survival Course.

Barebacking--when gay men deliberately abandon condoms and embrace unprotected sex--has incited a great deal of shock, outrage, anger, and even disgust, but very little contemplation. Purposely flying in the face of decades of safe-sex campaigning and HIV/AIDS awareness initiatives, barebacking is unquestionably radical behavior, behavior that most people would rather condemn than understand. Thus the time is ripe for "Unlimited Intimacy," Tim Dean's riveting investigation into barebacking and the distinctive subculture that has grown around it.

Audacious and undeniably provocative, Dean's profoundly reflective account is neither a manifesto nor an apology; instead, it is a searching analysis that tests the very limits of the study of sex in the twenty-first century. Dean's extensive research into the subculture provides a tour of the scene's bars, sex clubs, and Web sites; offers an explicit but sophisticated analysis of its pornography; and documents his own personal experiences in the culture. But ultimately, it is HIV that animates the controversy around barebacking, and "Unlimited Intimacy" explores how barebackers think about transmitting the virus--especially the idea that deliberately sharing it establishes a new network of kinship among the infected. According to Dean, intimacy makes us vulnerable, exposes us to emotional risk, and forces us to drop our psychological barriers. As a committed experiment in intimacy without limits--one that makes those metaphors of intimacy quite literal--barebacking thus says a great deal about how intimacy works.

Written with a fierce intelligence and uncompromising nerve, "Unlimited Intimacy" will prove to be a milestone in our understanding of sexual behavior.

In A Wild Constraint: The Case for Chastity, Taylor addresses the provocative subject of celibacy. Too often considered an exclusively religious option, celibacy has been reclaimed by some feminists and sociologists over the last 20 years as a radical alternative in secular society to the liberal sexual lifestyle. What, after all, is sexual liberation when so often the outcome is pain and social chaos? In the context of promiscuity, sexual abuse and confusion, celibacy can herald a different sexual freedom. Jenny Taylor draws on personal experience and interviews with men and women of all ages to demonstrate the impact of the sexual revolution and to make a case for celibacy. She argues that celibacy is a viable alternative that deserves to be taken seriously and challenges the church to speak out for sexual abstinence with confidence and certainty.

You May Be Commitment-Phobic If: You have a mile-long list of requirements for your ideal mate You go from one short-lived relationship to the next You have a habit of dating "unavailable" men You think many of your married friends have settled for less You are constantly blowing "hot" and "cold" in your relationships For years, it was the men who had the monopoly on commitment-phobia. Today, single women are the fastest-growing segment of the population, with over forty-seven million single women in this country and twenty-two million of them between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four. Whatever the reasons -- fear of divorce, increased financial independence, delayed motherhood -- more women than ever no longer feel the urgency, or the ability, to settle down. Lucky for this growing group of women, author and former commitment-phobe Elina Furman has written Kiss and Run, the first-ever book about female commitment anxiety. Filled with fun quizzes, first-person testimonials, and step-by-step action plans, Kiss and Run includes the top-five panic buttons, advice for curbing overanalysis, and tips for fixing negative commitment scripts. You'll also find the seven types of commitment-phobes, including the Nitpicker, the Serial Dater, and the Long-Distance Runner. Based on the stories of more than one hundred women, this straight-talking guide helps single women conquer commitment anxiety and say yes to love.

For most of western history, all sex outside marriage was illegal, with the church and state punishing any dissent. Between 1600 and 1800, this entire world-view was shattered by revolutionary new ideas - that consenting adults have the freedom to do what they like with their own bodies, and morality cannot be imposed by force. This groundbreaking book shows that the creation of this modern culture of sex - broadcasted and debated in a rapidly expanding universe of public media - was a central part of the Enlightenment, and helped create a new model of western civilization whose principles of equality, privacy and individual freedom last to this day.

'Here is an oasis in the desert of the Anglican debate . . .This book is rightly aimed at those who are unresolved on questions about homosexuality. Its contention that these questions are important but should not be church-dividing will ring true with many.' Professor David Ford, Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge. '... an extremely useful and sympathetic guide for the ordinary lay or clerical reader who wants to learn more about the issue which seems to be pulling the Anglican Communion apart ...' David Jones, former Deputy Director of Oxfam and a member of General Synod. ""An Acceptable Sacrifice?" The answer is simple: No. It is not acceptable for us to discriminate against our brothers and sisters on the basis of sexual orientation just as it was not acceptable for discrimination to exist on the basis of skin colour under Apartheid." Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu

Premarital sex, consensual relations, bigamy, polygamy, births out of wedlock, and clandestine affairs between clergy and laity were common components of everyday society in colonial Latin America. "Private Passions and Public Sins" focuses on the frequency and significance of illegitimacy and extramarital relationships in Lima, Peru, during the seventeenth century. Lima was Maria Mannarelli's selection for this study because it was the administrative, commercial, and religious center of the Viceroyalty of Peru and was home to numerous ethnic and social groups.

Chapter one deals with the Iberian family and extramarital relations in fifteenth-century Spain. Chapter two reconstructs the unequal numbers of men and women in Lima's population throughout the century. Chapter three shows the reactions of civil and church authorities and ordinary citizens to extramarital relationships. Chapter four explores adultery and chapter five follows with illegitimacy and its significance in Lima's society.

The relationship between illegitimacy and women is the focus of chapter six, with a view of colonial women and the emphasis on control of sexuality. The problem of child abandonment resulting from extramarital relationships is discussed in chapter seven.

In the first half of the twentieth century, white elites who dominated Virginia politics sought to increase state control over African Americans and lower-class whites, whom they saw as oversexed and lacking sexual self-restraint. In order to reaffirm the existing political and social order, white politicians legalized eugenic sterilization, increased state efforts to control venereal disease and prostitution, cracked down on interracial marriage, and enacted state-wide movie censorship. Providing a detailed picture of the interaction of sexuality, politics, and public policy, Pippa Holloway explores how these measures were passed and enforced. The white elites who sought to expand government's role in regulating sexual behavior had, like most southerners, a tradition of favoring small government, so to justify these new policies, they couched their argument in economic terms: a modern, progressive government could provide optimum conditions for business growth by maintaining a stable social order and a healthy, docile workforce. Holloway's analysis demonstrates that the cultural context that characterized certain populations as sexually dangerous worked in tandem with the political context that denied them the right to vote. This perspective on sexual regulation and the state in Virginia offers further insight into why white elite rule mattered in the development of southern governments.

In this revised classic text, Segal's overview of theories of masculinity considers continuities and change in hegemonic notions of masculinity and focuses on competing male identities, exemplified in black, ethnic, gay and anti-sexist groups. The contrast in power and privilege across these groups has led many to speak of 'masculinity in crisis'.

"There are more than twenty-five contributors to the Reader. The sheer pleasure that the contributors provide in the way they bring together brilliantly diverse perspectives to enlarge the limits of one's understanding is not easy to describe. Particularly stimulating among the collection are the pieces by Jeffrey Weeks and Patrick Johnson. The intellectual satisfaction derived from the study of the erotic self and the human struggle and search for meaning and means of communicating meaning is quare indeed A book to read and return from time to time." -The Book Review "This groundbreaking reader will spark the development of new courses in communication and sexuality. Students and teachers wanting to fully understand the constitutive and performative nature of communication will find few other books that meet their needs better than this one." -R. Jeffrey Ringer, St. Cloud University "Sexualities and Communication in Everyday Life provides readers with a useful typology for comprehending the various shifts in thinking about sexual identities and communication that have occurred across time while it also provides a deft synthesis of the major issues and themes. The text puts an excellent breadth of essays--some newly acquired for this book, some previously published and germinal-easily into students' and teachers' hands." -Lesa Lockford, Bowling Green State University Sexualities and Communication in Everyday Life: A Reader is a groundbreaking anthology on the role of communication in the construction and performance of sexualities in interpersonal contexts and in public discourses. Editors Karen E. Lovaas and Mercilee M. Jenkins bring together an interdisciplinary collection which include excerpts from foundational works, recent journal articles, and original pieces written specifically for this text. Key Features: This collection (1) assists students in understanding the intersections of sexuality with other identity constructions; (2) introduces the concepts and implications of queer theory; (3) challenges students to move beyond stereotypical, dichotomous views of homosexual and heterosexual identities and communication styles; and, (4) facilitates students' awareness of and ability to recognize heteronormativity. While most of the readings are written by communication researchers, there are many by scholars from various disciplines including sociology, English, psychology, gender studies, and anthropology. These works also exemplify a variety of research methods, with an emphasis on qualitative research including critical, ethnographic, and performance. An introductory chapter providing a thorough review of literature to date on communication and sexualities is followed by sections on interpersonal contexts and public discourses. There is a logical flow from the foundational materials, to the examinations of sexuality in one's everyday vocabulary, interactions, and relationships, to wider social discourses, to interventions, praxis, and future visions. In addition, discussion questions follow each reading to spark personal reflection and application.

In exploring an array of intimacies between strangers, this book reveals how human relationships, dignity, and collaborations are experienced among global migrants. Nayan Shah takes a novel approach by examining both the legal histories of hundreds of interracial marriages involving South Asians and the countless court cases documenting illicit sexual contact between South Asian men and white, Chinese, and Native American men. Shah illuminates a stunning, transient world of heterogeneous social relations. At the same time, he demonstrates how the United States and Canada, in collusion with each other, actively sought to exclude and dispossess nonwhite "races." "Stranger Intimacy" reveals the intersections between capitalism, the state's treatment of immigrants, sexual citizenship, and racism in the first half of the twentieth century.

Placing sexual culture at the center of power relations in Revolutionary-era Philadelphia, Clare A. Lyons uncovers a world where runaway wives challenged their husbands' patriarchal rights and where serial and casual sexual relationships were commonplace. By reading popular representations of sex against actual behavior, Lyons reveals the clash of meanings given to sex and illuminates struggles to recast sexuality in order to eliminate its subversive potential. Sexuality became the vehicle for exploring currents of liberty, freedom, and individualism in the politics of everyday life among groups of early Americans typically excluded from formal systems of governance - women, African Americans, and poor classes of whites. Lyons shows that men and women created a vibrant urban pleasure culture, including the eroticization of print culture, as eighteenth-century readers became fascinated with stories of bastardy, prostitution, seduction, and adultery. In the post-Revolutionary reaction, white middle-class men asserted their authority, Lyons argues, by creating a gender system that simultaneously allowed them the liberty of their passions, constrained middle-class women with virtue, and projected licentiousness onto lower-class whites and African Americans. Lyons's analysis shows how class and racial divisions fostered new constructions of sexuality that served as a foundation for gender. This gendering of sexuality in the new nation was integral to reconstituting social hierarchies and subordinating women and African Americans in the wake of the Revolution.

A leading expert in human sexuality and the author of Sexational Secrets combines unconventional advice and illuminating anecdotes to explain how to transform one's sex life, discussing such topics as fantasy fulfillment, foreplay, and how to put passion into one's life. Original.

Sodom on the Thames looks closely at three episodes involving sex between men in late-nineteenth-century England. Morris Kaplan draws on extensive research into court records, contemporary newspaper accounts, personal correspondence and diaries, even a pornographic novel. He focuses on two notorious scandals and one quieter incident.

In 1871, transvestites "Stella" (Ernest Boulton) and "Fanny" (Frederick Park), who had paraded around London's West End followed by enthusiastic admirers, were tried for conspiracy to commit sodomy. In 1889 1890, the "Cleveland Street affair" revealed that telegraph delivery boys had been moonlighting as prostitutes for prominent gentlemen, one of whom fled abroad. In 1871, Eton schoolmaster William Johnson resigned in disgrace, generating shockwaves among the young men in his circle whose romantic attachments lasted throughout their lives. Kaplan shows how profoundly these scandals influenced the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and contributed to growing anxiety about male friendships.

Sodom on the Thames reconstructs these incidents in rich detail and gives a voice to the diverse people involved. It deepens our understanding of late Victorian attitudes toward urban culture, masculinity, and male homoeroticism. Kaplan also explores the implications of such historical narratives for the contemporary politics of sexuality."