Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research, two hundred fifty interviews, and over three hundred youth love letters, author Shanti Parikh uses lively vignettes to provide a rare window into young people's heterosexual desires and practices in Uganda. In chapters entitled ""Unbreak my heart,"" ""I miss you like a desert missing rain,"" and ""You're just playing with my head,"" she invites readers into the world of secret longings, disappointments, and anxieties of young Ugandans as they grapple with everyday difficulties while creatively imagining romantic futures and possibilities. Parikh also examines the unintended consequences of Uganda's aggressive HIV campaigns that thrust sexuality and anxieties about it into the public sphere. In a context of economic precarity and generational tension that constantly complicates young people's notions of consumption-based romance, communities experience the dilemmas of protecting and policing young people from reputational and health dangers of sexual activity. ""They arrested me for loving a school girl"" is the title of a chapter on controlling delinquent daughters and punishing defiant boyfriends for attempting to undermine patriarchal authority by asserting their adolescent romantic agency. Sex education programs struggle between risk and pleasure amidst morally charged debates among international donors and community elders, transforming the youthful female body into a platform for public critique and concern. The many sides of this research constitute an eloquently executed critical anthropology of intervention.

Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research, two hundred fifty interviews, and over three hundred youth love letters, author Shanti Parikh uses lively vignettes to provide a rare window into young people's heterosexual desires and practices in Uganda. In chapters entitled ""Unbreak my heart,"" ""I miss you like a desert missing rain,"" and ""You're just playing with my head,"" she invites readers into the world of secret longings, disappointments, and anxieties of young Ugandans as they grapple with everyday difficulties while creatively imagining romantic futures and possibilities. Parikh also examines the unintended consequences of Uganda's aggressive HIV campaigns that thrust sexuality and anxieties about it into the public sphere. In a context of economic precarity and generational tension that constantly complicates young people's notions of consumption-based romance, communities experience the dilemmas of protecting and policing young people from reputational and health dangers of sexual activity. ""They arrested me for loving a school girl"" is the title of a chapter on controlling delinquent daughters and punishing defiant boyfriends for attempting to undermine patriarchal authority by asserting their adolescent romantic agency. Sex education programs struggle between risk and pleasure amidst morally charged debates among international donors and community elders, transforming the youthful female body into a platform for public critique and concern. The many sides of this research constitute an eloquently executed critical anthropology of intervention.

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

In the Caribbean, sexuality is omnipresent; that is, it is seen but not heard. The Caribbean region can be characterised as a dualistic society. On the one side, sexuality is embraced and highly visible, manifesting itself in the culture of the music, dance, and the popular Carnival. The other side presents a society that is conservative and inhibiting, one that is heavily influenced by religion. There is a lack of communication regarding sexuality, both within schools and homes, making it very challenging for parents to be open with their children on the subject matter. Let's face it, many parents do not feel comfortable talking to their children about sexuality for a variety of reasons. In this respect, sexual education offered in schools helps open the discussion. However, it is not a panacea. Parents should not leave this important topic to the schools. Rather, parents should work together with the schools and the information that is disseminated to ensure the values and beliefs of the family, community and society are integrated. In this book, we present recent research on sexuality, alcohol, drugs and violence from the Caribbean region.

It is generally recognized that antebellum interracial relationships were "notorious" at the neighborhood level, but we have yet to fully uncover the complexities of such relationships, especially from freedwomen's and children's points of view. Likewise, the frequency with which southern white men freed enslaved women and their children is now generally known to those familiar with American history, but less is known about the financial and emotional investments in them made by these men. Sharony Green presents three case studies with evidence from surviving letters that indicate a kind of "love" existing between the ex-slave mistress and her former master. She follows the journey of these women and children from the south to Cincinnati, which had the largest per capita population of mixed race people outside the South during the antebellum period.

Women experience considerable changes in their bodies, lives, and identity between the ages of twenty and seventy, including marriage, motherhood, the dissolution of relationships, and menopause, all of which often impact sexuality. In "Deserving Desire," Beth Montemurro takes a wide-ranging look at the evolution of women's sexuality over time, with a specific focus on the development of sexual subjectivity--that is sexual confidence, agency, and a sense of entitlement to sexual desire.
Detailed stories of the ninety-five women in this study explore how they become more comfortable with their bodies, when most begin to enjoy sex, feel confident and positive about engaging in it, and how they become sexual subjects in control of their bodies. "Deserving Desire" explores the complex multi-stage process in which sexual subjectivity evolves over a woman's lifetime. As girls, they learn about sex and how those around them--parents, peers, religion and media--regard sex. Physical and emotional transitions such as having a baby or ending a relationship further affect women's sexual confidence and desire. Montemurro emphasizes that sexual subjectivity is about feeling in control of sexual decision making and acting purposefully and confidently.
Though adolescent sexuality has been a major focus of sociological research, few studies have examined, as Montemurro does here, the development of sexuality through women's lives and the events that change the way women feel about themselves, their bodies, and their relationships.

Since the 1990s China has seen a dramatic increase in the number of men seeking treatment for impotence. Everett Yuehong Zhang argues in The Impotence Epidemic that this trend represents changing public attitudes about sexuality in an increasingly globalized China. In this ethnography he shifts discussions of impotence as a purely neurovascular phenomenon to a social one. Zhang contextualizes impotence within the social changes brought by recent economic reform and through the production of various desires in post-Maoist China. Based on interviews with 350 men and their partners from Beijing and Chengdu, and concerned with de-mystifying and de-stigmatizing impotence, Zhang suggests that the impotence epidemic represents not just trauma and suffering, but also a contagion of individualized desire and an affirmation for living a full life. For Zhang, studying male impotence in China is one way to comprehend the unique experience of Chinese modernity.

More than Just Sex: A Committed Couples' Guide to Keeping Relationships Lively, Intimate, and Gratifying addresses the psychological concepts and beliefs that foster sexual pleasure, and those that inhibit it. The book is an antidote to today's graphic, readily available sexual imagery which lacks the necessary context for teaching what it means to be sexually involved with another human being. Rather, it emphasizes that human sexuality involves more than just sex-it involves true sexual intimacy. The book is based on the premise that while we may be educated about the biology of sex, few are taught how to maintain a long-term, fulfilling sexual relationship. More than Just Sex teaches that sexual intimacy is not necessarily natural or instinctive, but learned. Topics include: All the psychological and sociological influences that shaped an individual's sexual behavior and attitudes today. A psychological look at human sexual anatomy and physiology from the point of view on how to experience greater sexual pleasure. Who is responsible for what happens sexually between a couple? How being sexually goal oriented turns an experience that is supposed to be fun and pleasurable into an exhausting task or job. An examination of the specific psychological traps that interfere with our experience of sexual pleasure. A discussion of the psychological issues related to the subject of sexual initiation within a committed relationship. More than Just Sex is written in a style that students will be able to relate to on a personal and practical level. More than Just Sex doesn't address the same old ""birds and bees"" discussion of sexual reproduction that students have heard in high school and from their parents. This book covers the material that they didn't teach, how to have greater sexual pleasure and all the aspects that inhibit the experience. More than Just Sex can be used in courses on human sexuality. It can also be used in sociology classes examining women's issues, and marriage and sex, as well as in psychology and health science classes.

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.

This book examines life trajectories among three categories of women living beyond the bounds of heteronormativity in Jakarta and Delhi, two major cities with substantively different religious and social values: women who have lost their husbands, either through divorce or death; sex workers; and young, urban lesbians. Delhi has a large Hindu majority and a sizeable Muslim minority, amongst other religious and cultural pluralities. The Indian state is constitutionally committed to secularism and equal respect to all regions despite right-wing Hindu fundamentalism. Jakarta is the capital of a sprawling archipelago with a large variety of ethnic cultures, Indonesia having the largest Muslim population of the world, as well as sizeable ethnic and religious minorities comprising Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and others. The Indonesian state is constitutionally secular, but religion plays a large role in public life and is embedded in regulations that strongly impact people's private lives. Recently, there have been strong political currents to impose stricter Islamic codes. The public arena of sexual politics, in which the media play an important role, is explored in both cities. Hot sex is a major media selling point, particularly in Indonesia. Heteronormativity entails a system of symbolic violence in the sense that it punishes those that it excludes and polices those that it includes; the ways its powers are subverted are likewise symbolic. Passionate aesthetics refers to the dynamics, motivations, codes of behavior and presentation, subjectivities and identities that together make up the complex workings of erotic attraction, sexual relations and partnerships patterns. By charting the lives of women who live beyond the boundaries of the heteronormative, commonalities are revealed; boundaries and regulatory mechanisms in the context of symbolic violence are delineated; and the issue of the struggle for sexual rights for marginalised groups, and their open rebellion, brought to the fore. At the heart of the book lies elaboration of the ways Asian families are constructed -- their social, economic, sexual and religious agency, and how these engage with state-led values.

In the 1920s, cultural and political reactions to the Red Scare in America contributed to a marked shift in the way Americans thought about sexuality, womanhood, manhood, and family life. The Russian Revolution prompted anxious Americans sensing a threat to social order to position heterosexuality, monogamy, and the family as a bulwark against radicalism.
In her probing and engaging book, "Red War on the Family, " Erica Ryan traces the roots of sexual modernism and the history of antiradicalism and antifeminism. She illuminates how Americans responded to foreign and domestic threats and expressed nationalism by strengthening traditional gender and family roles-especially by imposing them on immigrant groups, workers, women, and young people.
Ryan argues that the environment of political conformity in the 1920s was maintained in part through the quest for cultural and social conformity, exemplified by white, middle-class family life. "Red War on the Family "charts the ways Americanism both reinforced and was reinforced by these sexual and gender norms in the decades after World War I.

Sex Scene suggests that what we have come to understand as the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s was actually a media revolution. In lively essays, the contributors examine a range of mass media-film and television, recorded sound, and publishing-that provide evidence of the circulation of sex in the public sphere, from the mainstream to the fringe. They discuss art films such as I am Curious (Yellow), mainstream movies including Midnight Cowboy, sexploitation films such as Mantis in Lace, the emergence of erotic film festivals and of gay pornography, the use of multimedia in sex education, and the sexual innuendo of The Love Boat. Scholars of cultural studies, history, and media studies, the contributors bring shared concerns to their diverse topics. They highlight the increasingly fluid divide between public and private, the rise of consumer and therapeutic cultures, and the relationship between identity politics and individual rights. The provocative surveys and case studies in this nuanced cultural history reframe the "sexual revolution" as the mass sexualization of our mediated world. Contributors. Joseph Lam Duong, Jeffrey Escoffier, Kevin M. Flanagan, Elena Gorfinkel, Raymond J. Haberski Jr., Joan Hawkins, Kevin Heffernan, Eithne Johnson, Arthur Knight, Elana Levine, Christie Milliken, Eric Schaefer, Jeffrey Sconce, Jacob Smith, Leigh Ann Wheeler, Linda Williams

Recently, with the number of students from higher education and K-12 settings committing suicide, it is apparent that homophobia and homophobic bullying are tremendous problems in our schools and universities. However, educators are unclear about an appropriate process for addressing these challenges. In this book, Jones postulates that we must begin exploring the culture of educational environments as they relate to sexual difference, in order to begin conceptualizing ways in which we may begin to address homophobia and heteronormativity. To that end, this book addresses how educators (at all levels) must begin examining how their concepts about different sexual identities are "normalized" through socializing processes and schooling. In doing so, this book examines how individuals construct meanings about homophobia and hate language through "contextual oppositions, " how educational environments maintain a ''false tolerance" when claiming to be tolerant of different sexual identities, how a hierarchy of hate language exists in educational environments, among other issues related to creating safe places for all students. In essence, the book attempts to "un"normalize society's constructions of sexual identity by deconstructing the social norms.

In Reclaiming Afrikan authors, activists and artists from Nigeria, Uganda, Zambia, Kenya and South Africa offer fresh perspectives on queer life; how gender and sexuality can be understood in Africa as ways of reclaiming identities in the continent. Africa is known to be harsh towards people with non-conforming genders and sexual identities. It is within this framework that Reclaiming Afrikan exists to respond to such violations and to offer alternative ways of thinking and being in the continent. The book appropriates “Afrika” and “queer” to affirm sexual identities that are ordinarily shamed and violated by prejudice and hatred. The use of “k” in Afrika signals an appropriation of an identity and belonging that is always detached from a “queer” person. “Queer” in this book is understood as an inquiry into the present, as a critical space that pushes the boundaries of what is embraced as normative. The artists and authors included in this text are “queer” themselves and occupy spaces that speak back to hegemony. For many, this position challenges various norms on gender, sexuality, and existence and offers a subversive way of being.

Human sexuality involves sexual attraction to another person, which for the most part is to the opposite sex (heterosexuality), some to the same sex (homosexuality) or some having both (bisexuality) or not being attracted to anyone in a sexual manner (asexuality). Human sexuality is determined by many factors, like cultural, political, legal and philosophical aspects of life, but also morality, ethics, theology, spirituality and religion. Sexuality is as old as mankind and interest in sexual activity is very much related to the onset of puberty and the period of schooling. In this book, we have gathered papers from around the world in order to discuss issues of sexuality from an international perspective.

Treating sixteenth- and seventeenth-century erotic literature as part of English political history, Erotic Subjects traces some surprising implications of two early modern commonplaces: first, that love is the basis of political consent and obedience, and second, that suffering is an intrinsic part of love. Rather than dismiss such assumptions as mere conventions, Melissa Sanchez uncovers the political import of early modern literature's fascination with eroticized violence. Focusing on representations of masochism, sexual assault, and cross-gendered identification, Sanchez re-examines the work of politically active writers from Philip Sidney to John Milton. She argues that political allegiance and consent appear far less conscious and deliberate than traditional historical narratives allow when Sidney depicts abjection as a source of both moral authority and sexual arousal; when Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare make it hard to distinguish between rape and seduction; when Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish depict women who adore treacherous or abusive lovers; when court masques stress the pleasures of enslavement; or when Milton insists that even Edenic marriage is hopelessly pervaded by aggression and self-loathing. Sanchez shows that this literature constitutes an alternate tradition of political theory that acknowledges the irrational and perverse components of power and thereby disrupts more conventional accounts of politics as driven by self-interest, false consciousness, or brute force. Erotic Subjects will be of interest to students and scholars of early modern literary and political history, as well as those interested in the histories of gender, sexuality, and affect more generally.

Like the Green Revolution of the 1960s, a "Blue Revolution" has taken place in global aquaculture. Geared towards quenching the appetite of privileged consumers in the global North, it has come at a high price for the South: ecological devastation, displacement of rural subsistence farmers, and labour exploitation. The uncomfortable truth is that food security for affluent consumers depends on a foundation of social and ecological devastation in the producing countries. In Confronting the Blue Revolution, Md Saidul Islam uses the shrimp farming industry in Bangladesh and across the global South to show the social and environmental impact of industrialized aquaculture. The book pushes us to reconsider our attitudes to consumption patterns in the developed world, neoliberal environmental governance, and the question of sustainability.

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.

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.

This study of sexuality in seventeenth-century Latin America takes the reader beneath the surface of daily life in a colonial city. Cartagena was an important Spanish port and the site of an Inquisition high court, a slave market, a leper colony, a military base, and a prison colony--colonial institutions that imposed order by enforcing Catholicism, cultural and religious boundaries, and prevailing race and gender hierarchies. The city was also simmering with illegal activity, from contraband trade to prostitution to heretical religious practices. Nicole von Germeten's research uncovers scandalous stories drawn from archival research in Inquisition cases, criminal records, wills, and other legal documents. The stories focus largely on sexual agency and honor: an insult directed at a married woman causes a deadly street battle; a young dona uses sex to manipulate a lustful, corrupt inquisitor. Scandals like these illustrate the central thesis of this book: women in colonial Cartagena de Indias took control of their own sex lives and used sex and rhetoric connected to sexuality to plead their cases when they had to negotiate with colonial bureaucrats.

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.

Drawing on methods and approaches from anthropology, media studies, film theory, and cultural studies, the contributors to Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia examine how mediated eroticism and sexuality circulating across Asia and Asian diasporas both reflect and shape the social practices of their producers and consumers. The essays in this volume cover a wide geographic and thematic range, and combine rigorous textual analysis with empirical research into the production, circulation, and consumption of various forms of media.Judith Farquhar examines how health magazines serve as sources of both medical information and erotic titillation to readers in urban China. Tom Boellstorff analyzes how queer zines produced in Indonesia construct the relationship between same-sex desire and citizenship. Purnima Mankekar examines the rearticulation of commodity affect, erotics, and nation on Indian television. Louisa Schein describes how portrayals of Hmong women in videos shot in Laos create desires for the homeland among viewers in the diaspora. Taken together, the essays offer fresh insights into research on gender, erotics, media, and Asia transnationally conceived. Contributors. Anne Allison, Tom Boellstorff, Nicole Constable, Heather Dell, Judith Farquhar, Sarah L. Friedman, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Purnima Mankekar, Louisa Schein, Everett Yuehong Zhang

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.

The sexualization of girls has captured the attention of the media, advocacy groups and politicians in recent years. This prolific discourse sets alarm bells ringing: sexualization is said to lead to depression, promiscuity and compassion deficit disorder, and rob young girls of their childhood. However, measuring such claims against a wide range of data sources reveals a far more complicated picture.

"Becoming Sexual" begins with a simple question: why does this discourse feel so natural? Analyzing potent cultural and historical assumptions, and subjecting them to measured investigation, R. Danielle Egan illuminates the implications of dominant thinking on sexualization. The sexualized girl functions as a metaphor for cultural decay and as a common enemy through which adult rage, discontent and anxiety regarding class, gender, sexuality, race and the future can be expressed. Egan argues that, ultimately, the popular literature on sexualization is more reflective of adult disquiet than it is about the lives and practices of girls.

"Becoming Sexual" will be a welcome intervention into these fraught polemics for anyone interested in engaging with a high-profile contemporary debate, and will be particularly useful for students of sociology, cultural studies, childhood studies, gender studies and media studies.

In this book, the authors explore the psychological implications, social expectations and role of sexuality in marriage today. Topics presented from across the globe include the nature of the sexual relationship in marriage and during transition to parenthood; gender attitudes in marriage and the division of unpaid family work; health concerns of transnational marriage of immigrant women in Taiwan; couple generativity in relation to familial and social bonds; the marriage and health association; and the social structures that influence marriage and divorce.