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

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

Historically, the Bible has been used to drive a wedge between the spirit and the body. In this provocative book, David Carr argues that it can-and should-do just the opposite. Sexuality and spirituality, Carr contends, are intricately interwoven: when one is improverished, the other is warped. As a result, the journey toward God and the life-long engagement with our own sexual embodiment are inseparable. Humans, the Bible tells us, both male and female, were created in God's image, and eros-a fundamental longing for connection that finds abstract good in the pleasure we derive from the stimulation of the senses-is a central component of that image. The Bible, particularly the Hebrew Bible, affirms erotic passion, both eros between humans and eros between God and humans. In a sweeping examination of the sexual rules of the Bible, Carr asserts that Biblical "family values" are a far cry from anything promoted as such in contemporary politics. He concludes that passionate love-our preoccupaton therewith and pursuit thereof-is the primary human vocation, that eros is in fact the flavoring of life.

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Based on extensive research on gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and heterosexuals, Dual Attraction provides the first major study of bisexuality.

The Classics were core to the curriculum and ethos of the intensely homosocial Victorian and Edwardian public schools, yet ancient homosexuality and erotic pedagogy were problematic to the educational establishment, which expurgated classical texts with sexual content. This volume analyses the intimate and uncomfortable nexus between the Classics, sex, and education primarily through the figure of the schoolmaster Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge (1890-1918), whose clandestine writings not only explore homoerotic desires but also offer insightful comments on Classical education. Now a marginalized figure, Bainbrigge's surviving works - a verse drama entitled Achilles in Scyros featuring a cross-dressing Achilles and a Chorus of lesbian schoolgirls, and a Latin dialogue between schoolboys - vividly demonstrate the queer potential of Classics and are marked by a celebration of the pleasures of sex and a refusal to apologize for homoerotic desire. Reprinted here in their entirety, they are accompanied by chapters setting them in their social and literary context, including their parallels with the writings of Bainbrigge's contemporaries and near contemporaries, such as John Addington Symonds, E. M. Forster, and A. E. Housman. What emerges is a provocative new perspective on the history of sexuality and the place of the Classics within that history, which demonstrates that a highly queer version of Classics was possible in private contexts.

In this highly original text-a collaboration between a college professor, a playwright, and an artist-graphic storytelling offers an emotionally resonant way for readers to understand and engage with feminism and resistance. Issues of gender roles, intersectionality, and privilege are explored in seven beautifully illustrated graphic vignettes. Each vignette highlights unique moments and challenges in the struggle for feminist social justice. Brief background information provides context for the uninitiated, and further readings are suggested for those who would like to learn more. Finally, carefully crafted discussion questions help readers probe the key points in each narrative while connecting specific stories to more general concepts in gender studies and feminist theory.

This study illuminates the 2,500-year social history of sexual relations in Iran. Marriage, temporary marriage, prostitution, and homosexuality are all discussed, as well as the often unintended result of these relations-sexually transmitted diseases. A Social History of Sexual Relations in Iran uses travelers' accounts, Iranian and international archival sources, as well as government data, to bring together, in detail, and within the context of Iranian culture and religion, the nature, variety, and problems of sexual relations in Iran over the ages. Finally, Willem Floor summarizes the issues that Iranian society faces today which are not dissimilar to that of many other industrial nations the challenge to the male claim to dominance over women; change in the age of marriage; premarital sex; rising divorce rates; rising promiscuity; prostitution; sexually transmitted diseases; homosexuality; and street children. Willem Floor studied development economics and non-western sociology, as well as Persian, Arabic and Islamology from 1963-67 at the University of Utrecht (the Netherlands). He received his doctoral degree from the University of Leiden in 1971 and went on to work for the World Bank as an energy specialist. Throughout this time, he published extensively on the socio-economic history of Iran. Since his retirement from the World Bank in 2002 he has published numerous scholarly history books and translations, including: Public Health in Qajar Iran, Agriculture in Qajar Iran, The History of Theater in Iran, The Persian Gulf: A Politcal and Economic History of Five Port Cities, The Persian Gulf: The Rise of the Gulf Arabs, and Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin's Travels Through Northern Persia 1770-1774. --

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.

Sex in the Middle East and North Africa examines the sexual practices, politics, and complexities of the modern Arab world. Short chapters feature a variety of experts in anthropology, sociology, health science, and cultural studies. Many of the chapters are based on original ethnographic and interview work with subjects involved in these practices and include their voices. The book is organized into three sections: Single and Dating, Engaged and Married, and It's Complicated. The allusion to categories of relationship status on social media is at once a nod to the compulsion to categorize, recognition of the many ways that categorization is rarely straightforward, and acknowledgment that much of the intimate lives described by the contributors is mediated by online technologies.

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.

Groundbreaking historical scholarship on the complex attitudes toward gender and sexual roles in Native American culture, with a new preface and supplemental bibliographyPrior to the arrival of Europeans in the New World, Native Americans across the continent had developed richly complex attitudes and forms of expression concerning gender and sexual roles. The role of the "berdache," a man living as a woman or a woman living as a man in native societies, has received recent scholarly attention but represents just one of many such occurrences of alternative gender identification in these cultures. Editors Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough have brought together scholars who explore the historical implications of these variations in the meanings of gender, sexuality, and marriage among indigenous communities in North America. Essays that span from the colonial period through the nineteenth century illustrate how these aspects of Native American life were altered through interactions with Europeans. Organized chronologically, Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400-1850 probes gender identification, labor roles, and political authority within Native American societies. The essays are linked by overarching examinations of how Europeans manipulated native ideas about gender for their own ends and how indigenous people responded to European attempts to impose gendered cultural practices at odds with established traditions. Many of the essays also address how indigenous people made meaning of gender and how these meanings developed over time within their own communities. Several contributors also consider sexual practice as a mode of cultural articulation, as well as a vehicle for the expression of gender roles. Representing groundbreaking scholarship in the field of Native American studies, these insightful discussions of gender, sexuality, and identity advance our understanding of cultural traditions and clashes that continue to resonate in native communities today as well as in the larger societies those communities exist within.