"A thought-provoking piece of scholarship that sheds light on the complex history of slave breeding in America. Smithers's book will be hotly debated in the profession."--Michael L. Ondaatje, University of Newcastle, Australia "As engaging as it is compelling, bold, and captivating, Smithers's Slave Breeding pulls the reader through its pages with heart-wrenching exposition of the dark and ugly chapter of what could rightly be characterized as the sexual zeitgeist of American national history."--Tunde Adeleke, Iowa State University For over two centuries, the topic of slave breeding has occupied a controversial place in the master narrative of American history. From nineteenth-century abolitionists to twentieth-century filmmakers and artists, Americans have debated whether slave owners deliberately and coercively manipulated the sexual practices and marital status of enslaved African Americans to reproduce new generations of slaves for profit. In this bold and provocative book, historian Gregory Smithers investigates how African Americans have narrated, remembered, and represented slave-breeding practices. He argues that while social and economic historians have downplayed the significance of slave breeding, African Americans have refused to forget the violence and sexual coercion associated with the plantation South. By placing African American histories and memories of slave breeding within the larger context of America's history of racial and gender discrimination, Smithers sheds much-needed light on African American collective memory, racialized perceptions of fragile black families, and the long history of racially motivated violence against men, women, and children of color. Gregory D. Smithers teaches American history at the Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of "Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780s-1890s" and coauthor of "The Preacher and the Politician: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama and Race in America."

'The Sexual History of the Global South' explores the gap between sexuality studies and postcolonial, cultural critique. Featuring twelve original case studies, based on original historical and ethnographic research from countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the book examines the sexual investments underlying the colonial project and the construction of modern nation-states. Covering issues of heteronormativity, postcolonial amnesia regarding non-normative sexualities, women's sexual agency, the policing of the boundaries between the public and the private realm, sexual citizenship, the connections between LGBTQ activism and processes of state formation, and the emergence of sexuality studies in the Global South, this collection is of great geographical, historical and topical significance.

After the Great War, British men and women, grappled with their ignorance about sexuality and desire. This book shows how readers embraced popular media - self-help books, fetish magazines, and advice columns - as a source of information about sexuality and a means for telling their own stories.

In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very serious condemnations of the Church and relying on a courtly culture that was already preoccupied with honor and secrecy, European poets, romance writers, and lovers devised a vision of love as something quite different from desire. Romantic love was thus born as a movement of covert resistance. In "The Making of Romantic Love", William M. Reddy illuminates the birth of a cultural movement that managed to regulate selfish desire and render it innocent - or innocent enough. Reddy strikes out from this historical moment on an international exploration of love, contrasting the medieval development of romantic love in Europe with contemporaneous eastern traditions in Bengal and Orissa, and in Heian Japan from 900 to 1200 CE, where one finds no trace of an opposition between love and desire. In this comparative framework, Reddy tells an appealing tale about the rise and fall of various practices of longing, underscoring the uniqueness of the European concept of sexual desire.

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.

Representations of consensual sadomasochism range from the dark, seedy undergrounds of crime thrillers to the fetishized pornographic images of sitcoms and erotica. In this pathbreaking book, ethnographer Staci Newmahr delves into the social space of a public, pansexual SM community to understand sadomasochism from the inside out. Based on four years of in-depth and immersive participant observation, she juxtaposes her experiences in the field with the life stories of community members, providing a richly detailed portrait of SM as a social space in which experiences of "violence" intersect with experiences of the erotic. She shows that SM is a recreational and deeply gendered risk-taking endeavor, through which participants negotiate boundaries between chaos and order. Playing on the Edge challenges our assumptions about sadomasochism, sexuality, eroticism, and emotional experience, exploring what we mean by intimacy, and how, exactly, we achieve it.

Sexuality education is defined as a life-long process of acquiring information about individual's private life, sexual identity and relationships and a process of changing behaviour. The most essential purpose of sexuality education is developing positive sexual behaviour, which include self-confidence, requires respectful approach to both oneself and anybody, free of sexual coercion and violence and safe sexual experiences, planning to be parents. The other purpose of sexuality education is decreasing negative outcomes which include unintended pregnancy, sexual coercion, sexually transmitted diseases and sexual dysfunctions. It is aimed that to provide developing positive sexual attitudes during individual's growing period by gaining sexual knowledge and skills to protect their sexual health at present and in the future. In this way, it is possible to prevent adolescent pregnancy, abortions and sexually transmitted diseases. Thus, sexuality education must be viewed within the framework in biological, socio-cultural, psychological and religious dimensions. This book examines the most recent research done in the field.

This accessible and engaging book explores the ways that "space, place, and sex" are inextricably linked from the micro to the macro level, from the individual body to the globe. Drawing on queer, feminist, gender, social, and cultural studies, Lynda Johnston and Robyn Longhurst highlight the complex nature of sex and sexuality and how they are connected to both virtual and physical spaces and places. Their aim is to enrich our understanding of sexual identities and practices whether they be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, asexual, queer, or heterosexual. They show that bodies are defined and connected through media such as television, movies, ads, and the Internet, as well as through "real" places such as homes, churches, sports arenas, city streets, beaches, and wilderness. Drawing on a diverse array of historical and contemporary examples, the authors argue convincingly that sexual politics permeate all places and spaces at every level of geographical scale. Thus, they illustrate, sexuality affects the way people live in and interact with space and place, as space and place in turn affect people's sexuality."

In this hard-hitting anthology, journalist Shannon T. Boodram collects the compelling and personal firsthand accounts of young people dealing with sex in today's world. Laid covers a range of important topics, from teens' first times to STIs, abstinence to unplanned pregnancies. Boodram, an up-and-coming voice for her generation, engages teens and twentysomethings in honest dialogue and explores how they see and experience sex, how and why it shapes their beliefs, and what they have learned about themselves and their sexuality through their actions. Laid is a great conversation-starter, and doesn't shy away from the personal topics. A great resource for young people, Laid invites teens and young adults to take a close-up look at sex and sexuality. Boodram's chapters offer more than 40 personal narratives, from both female and male voices, with in-depth analyses, facts, and Q&As to further the discourse. Responsible and thought-provoking, Laid offers a range of honest perspectives on young adult sexuality in today's easy access culture

The collective consciousness of World War II revolved around the virtues of bravery, sacrifice, and commitment. Members of the "Greatest Generation" toed political and social lines in hopes of winning the war. They fell into lockstep, not asking many questions and breaking few social and sexual mores. Or did they?In fact, World War II, like all wars, was an era of sexual experimentation and a general loosening of morals. During this time of conflicting emotions and messages, of great sacrifice, and of discovery, some groups, especially women, experienced a relaxing of bonds that had kept them in check. "Thanks for the Memories: Love, Sex, and World War II" is the true story of how that generation responded to the fervor of war and how those passions changed their lives-and the relationships between the sexes-forever.But this book is more than that. As Jane Mersky Leder writes, ""Thanks for the Memories" opens the hearts and memories of a generation that is dying, by one estimate, at the rate of more than 1,000 a day." It not only exposes the Greatest Generation's sexual and romantic escapades, it underscores how those four war years revolutionized relationships (including those between gays) and helped set the stage for the second wave of the women's liberation movement. "Many who never thought their stories mattered," Leder writes, "now feel the pull of limited time, and the importance of leaving an accurate account for their children and grandchildren of what it was like to be a young man or young woman during World War II. This is their collective story."

Reforming the Moral Subject explores a movement known as "ethics reform" that flourished in Central Europe between 1890 and 1930. Tracie Matysik examines the works of German-speaking intellectuals and activists-moral philosophers, sociologists, legal theorists, pedagogy specialists, psychoanalysts, sexual liberationists, and others-who discovered in the language of ethics a means to revitalize the public sphere. Ethics reformers used the academic field of moral philosophy to contest public- and state-sponsored rhetoric that they thought equated "morality" with national loyalty, religious tradition, and repressive sexual mores. They founded organizations and periodicals, circulated brochures, and hosted lectures and conferences, all aimed at rethinking ethics for a secular modernity. Arising in a context sharply influenced by materialism, Darwinism, and the advent of sexology, ethics debates gradually focused not surprisingly on the role of sexuality in definitions of ethics and of the moral subject. Intellectuals and activists came to agree that sexuality was central to the formation of the moral subject. Some viewed the moral subject as that individual who had learned to suppress sexual drives, while others saw sexual drives and sexual autonomy as the source of moral energy and sentiment. The association of sexuality with a wide and variegated discussion of ethics made the sexualized moral subject an open concept that could not be fully regulated, confined, or conflated with national identities. Matysik's compelling intellectual and cultural history of ethics and moral subjectivity reframes the nature of German liberalism and intellectual activism from the end of the nineteenth century until the interwar period.

Perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union transformed every aspect of life in Russia, and as hope began to give way to pessimism, popular culture came to reflect the anxiety and despair felt by more and more Russians. Free from censorship for the first time in Russia's history, the popular culture industry (publishing, film, and television) began to disseminate works that featured increasingly explicit images and descriptions of sex and violence.

In Overkill, Eliot Borenstein explores this lurid and often-disturbing cultural landscape in close, imaginative readings of such works as You're Just a Slut, My Dear (Ty prosto shliukha, dorogaia ), a novel about sexual slavery and illegal organ harvesting; the Nympho trilogy of books featuring a Chechen-fighting sex addict; and the Mad Dog and Antikiller series of books and films recounting, respectively, the exploits of the Russian Rambo and an assassin killing in the cause of justice. Borenstein argues that the popular cultural products consumed in the post-perestroika era were more than just diversions; they allowed Russians to indulge their despair over economic woes and everyday threats. At the same time, they built a notion of nationalism or heroism that could be maintained even under the most miserable of social conditions, when consumers felt most powerless.

For Borenstein, the myriad depictions of deviance in pornographic and also crime fiction, with their patently excessive and appalling details of social and moral decay, represented the popular culture industry's response to the otherwise unimaginable scale of Russia's national collapse. "The full sense of collapse," he writes, "required a panoptic view that only the media and culture industry were eager to provide, amalgamating national collapse into one master narrative that would then be readily available to most individuals as a framework for understanding their own suffering and their own fears."

Perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union transformed every aspect of life in Russia, and as hope began to give way to pessimism, popular culture came to reflect the anxiety and despair felt by more and more Russians. Free from censorship for the first time in Russia's history, the popular culture industry (publishing, film, and television) began to disseminate works that featured increasingly explicit images and descriptions of sex and violence.

In Overkill, Eliot Borenstein explores this lurid and often-disturbing cultural landscape in close, imaginative readings of such works as You're Just a Slut, My Dear (Ty prosto shliukha, dorogaia ), a novel about sexual slavery and illegal organ harvesting; the Nympho trilogy of books featuring a Chechen-fighting sex addict; and the Mad Dog and Antikiller series of books and films recounting, respectively, the exploits of the Russian Rambo and an assassin killing in the cause of justice. Borenstein argues that the popular cultural products consumed in the post-perestroika era were more than just diversions; they allowed Russians to indulge their despair over economic woes and everyday threats. At the same time, they built a notion of nationalism or heroism that could be maintained even under the most miserable of social conditions, when consumers felt most powerless.

For Borenstein, the myriad depictions of deviance in pornographic and also crime fiction, with their patently excessive and appalling details of social and moral decay, represented the popular culture industry's response to the otherwise unimaginable scale of Russia's national collapse. "The full sense of collapse," he writes, "required a panoptic view that only the media and culture industry were eager to provide, amalgamating national collapse into one master narrative that would then be readily available to most individuals as a framework for understanding their own suffering and their own fears."

The Dictatorship of Sex explores the attempts to define and control sexual behavior in the years following the Russian Revolution. It is the first book to examine Soviet "sexual enlightenment," a program of popular health and lifestyle advice intended to establish a model of sexual conduct for the men and women who would build socialism. Leftist social theorists and political activists had long envisioned an egalitarian utopia, and after 1917, the medical profession took the leading role in solving the sex question (while at the same time carving out a niche for itself among postrevolutionary social institutions). Frances Bernstein reveals the tension between the doctors' advocacy for relatively liberal social policy and the generally proscriptive nature of their advice, as well as their lack of interest in questions of personal pleasure, fulfillment, and sexual expression. While supporting the goals of the Soviet state, the enlighteners appealed to "irrefutable" biological truths that ultimately supported a very traditional gender regime. The Dictatorship of Sex offers a unique lens through which to contemplate a central conundrum of Russian history: the relationship between the supposedly "liberated" 1920s and "repressive" 1930s. Although most of the proponents of sexual enlightenment in the 1920s would suffer greatly during Stalin's purges, their writings facilitated the Stalinist approach to sexuality and the family. Bernstein's book will interest historians of Russia, gender, sexuality, and medicine, as well as anyone curious about social and ideological experiments in a revolutionary culture.

Contemporary culture provides conflicting and confusing messages about the meaning and purpose of human sexuality, and often sex education that is offered often does not promote a mature, integrated understanding of sexuality. Human Sexuality in the Catholic Tradition meets the great need for pastoral guidance in addressing moral issues of sexuality in both the Church and broader culture today. Kieran Scott and Harold Horell explore with other leading scholars how to draw from the best Christian faith traditions to renew our understanding of sexuality, explore the integration of our sexuality and our spirituality, and develop life-affirming and life-sustaining ways of approaching contemporary sexual issues. This book explores sexuality from spiritual, psychological, moral and ministerial perspectives, and addresses specific issues such as sex and marriage, celibacy, homosexuality, and cohabitation.

In this pioneering, nonobjective study, a distinguished Black sexologist tackles one of the most controversial aspects of American race relations. The subject of Black sexuality has been widely discussed in every possible popular format for the past four hundred years, yet serious scholarship in the area is lacking. While Black sexuality has been a pervasive force in American life, it has been too sensitive a topic for Black or white authors to write about in a serious, non-polemical format. Robert Staples explores same-sex attitudes and behavior, interracial sexual relations, rape, prostitution, pornography, and the stereotypes of Black sexual superiority in this scholarly yet accessible collection. Staples shows how vaunted and feared sexual differences were the 'raison d'etre' of Southern school segregation, race-based laws, white flight from the inner cities, the double sexual standard, lynchings, and race riots. This groundbreaking study concludes with a speculation on the future of Black sexuality in the 21st century based on our knowledge of current demographic and economic forces.

In a personal, nontechnical, and informal style, eminent researcher Ira L. Reiss discusses the many situations he has encountered during the past fifty years while researching sexuality and developing useful and innovative explanations of its different aspects. Most of the problems that were present during those years are still confronting those who work on human sexuality. Reiss discusses his experiences in sexual science in areas such as premarital sex, the sexual revolution, Masters and Johnson's therapy, feminism and sexuality, crises in sexual organizations, responses to HIV/AIDS, child and adolescent sexuality, radical social constructionism, biology versus sexual science, international trends, and the movement toward a Ph.D. in sexual science. The insights and solutions Reiss proposes are of great importance to all those who are interested in the sexual issues that affect people today.

Be sexy but not sexual. Don't be a prude but don't be a slut. These are the cultural messages that barrage teenage girls. In movies and magazines, in music and advice columns, girls are portrayed as the object or the victim of someone else's desire--but virtually never as someone with acceptable sexual feelings of her own. What teenage girls make of these contradictory messages, and what they make of their awakening sexuality--so distant from and yet so susceptible to cultural stereotypes--emerges for the first time in frank and complex fashion in Deborah Tolman's "Dilemmas of Desire."

A unique look into the world of adolescent sexuality, this book offers an intimate and often disturbing, sometimes inspiring, picture of how teenage girls experience, understand, and respond to their sexual feelings, and of how society mediates, shapes, and distorts this experience. In extensive interviews, we listen as actual adolescent girls--both urban and suburban--speak candidly of their curiosity and confusion, their pleasure and disappointment, their fears, defiance, or capitulation in the face of a seemingly imperishable double standard that smiles upon burgeoning sexuality in boys yet frowns, even panics, at its equivalent in girls.

As a vivid evocation of girls negotiating some of the most vexing issues of adolescence, and as a thoughtful, richly informed examination of the dilemmas these girls face, this readable and revealing book begins the critical work of understanding the sexuality of young women in all its personal, social, and emotional significance.

With a well-earned reputation for tolerance of both prostitution and miscegenation, New Orleans became known as the Great Southern Babylon in antebellum times. Following the Civil War, a profound alteration in social and economic conditions gradually reshaped the city's sexual culture and erotic commerce. Historian Alecia P. Long traces sex in the Crescent City over fifty years, drawing from Louisiana Supreme Court case testimony to relate intriguing tales of people both obscure and famous whose relationships and actions exemplify the era. Long uncovers a connection between the geographical segregation of prostitution and the rising tide of racial segregation. She offers a compelling explanation of how New Orleans's lucrative sex trade drew tourists from the Bible Belt and beyond even as a nationwide trend toward the commercialization of sex emerged. And she dispels the romanticized smoke and perfume surrounding Storyville to reveal in the reasons for its rise and fall a fascinating corner of southern history. The Great Southern Babylon portrays the complex mosaic of race, gender, sexuality, social class, and commerce in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans.

"In this innovative look at the sex lives of Mexican immigrants, Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez reveals that what goes on between the sheets is not private and isolated, but rather intimately articulated to inequalities of gender, generation and economy. Gonzalez-Lopez gives us a candid view of the dangerous and the pleasurable, showing how mind-numbing employment regimes lead to the taylorization of sex, but also to possibilities for women's enhanced sexual power and pleasure. She also shows how the existence of internalized sexism, valorization of female virginity, homo-erotic desire, male prostitution, and children's sex education respond to changes in the social organization of pre-migration and post-migration life. This is work of tremendous originality, sensitivity and courage. Read this book and shatter your stereotypes."--Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of "Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence"
""Erotic Journeys" will be a revelation to anyone who wants to understand the way sexuality is constructed, constrained, and evolving in an increasingly diverse and conflicted country. Gonzalez-Lopez unveils an important culture that has heretofore been known only to those who have lived within it. It may well be a model for further studies about diversity and sexuality."--Pepper Schwartz, Professor of Sociology, University of Washington, author of "Gender and Sexuality"
"What a splendid book! "Erotic Journeys" demolishes every binary opposition, ethnic stereotype, and assumption about the sexual experiences of Mexican immigrants. Analytically thoughtful and ethnographically sensitive, Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez reveals the processes of sexualities asthey are created--and recreated. "--Michael Kimmel, author of "The Gendered Society"

In this volume, noted scholars Elaine Hatfield and Richard Rapson focus on the cross-cultural research concerning the passionate beginnings of relationships: how people meet, fall in love, make love, and fall out of love, usually only to risk it all over again. Through in-depth analysis and astute assessment, they compare the way cultures try to set rules for these incendiary matters. Two main questions addressed are: 'What seems to be biological and universal?' and 'What seems to be socially constructed and transient?' Taking a historical perspective, the authors ask where different societies, and the world itself, are headed?

The Age of Beloveds offers a rich introduction to early modern Ottoman culture through a study of its beautiful lyric love poetry. At the same time, it suggests provocative cross-cultural parallels in the sociology and spirituality of love in Europe-from Istanbul to London-during the long sixteenth century. Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli provide a generous sampling of translations of Ottoman poems, many of which have never appeared in English, along with informative and inspired close readings. The authors explain that the flourishing of Ottoman power and culture during the "Turkish Renaissance" manifested itself, to some degree, as an "age of beloveds," in which young men became the focal points for the desire and attention of powerful officeholders and artists as well as the inspiration for a rich literature of love.The authors show that the "age of beloveds" was not just an Ottoman, eastern European, or Islamic phenomenon. It extended into western Europe as well, pervading the cultures of Venice, Florence, Rome, and London during the same period. Andrews and Kalpakli contend that in an age dominated by absolute rulers and troubled by war, cultural change, and religious upheaval, the attachments of dependent courtiers and the longings of anxious commoners aroused an intense interest in love and the beloved. The Age of Beloveds reveals new commonalities in the cultural history of two worlds long seen as radically different.

Answers to real-life, nitty-gritty private questions Christians are asking about sex Louis and Melissa McBurney offer frank, humorous, sensitive, and biblically grounded answers to the thousands of sex questions readers have sent to the editors of Marriage Partnership, a publication of Christianity Today International. The authors deal with sensitive issues that need to be talked about, but within a solid spiritual, psychological, and therapeutic context. This book is perfect for newlyweds, newlyweds of 25 years, or for parents to give their engaged son or daughter who is soon to be married. The McBurney s give frank, honest answers to real, honest questions that many Christians have always wanted to ask, but were too embarrassed or afraid. The author s authentic, unblushing, yet thoroughly Christian perspective is presented in a two-column format. Their humor, husband-wife dialogue, and to-the-point answers provide an ideal reference for all the stages of married sex."

"Irregular Connections" traces the anthropological study of sex from the eighteenth century to the present, focusing primarily on social and cultural anthropology and the work done by researchers in North America and Great Britain. Andrew P. and Harriet D. Lyons argue that the sexuality of those whom anthropologists studied has been conscripted into Western discourses about sex, including debates about prostitution, homosexuality, divorce, premarital relations, and hierarchies of gender, class, and race. Because sex is the most private of activities and often carries a high emotional charge, it is peculiarly difficult to investigate. At times, such as the late 1920s and the last decade of the twentieth century, sexuality has been a central concern of anthropologists and focal in their theoretical formulations. At other times the study of sexuality has been marginalized. The anthropology of sex has sometimes been one of the main faces that anthropology presented to the public, often causing resentment within the discipline."" "Irregular Connections" discusses several individuals who have played a significant role in the anthropological study of sexuality, including Sir Richard Burton, Havelock Ellis, Edward Westermarck, Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, George Devereux, Robert Levy, Gilbert Herdt, Stephen O. Murray, and Esther Newton. Synthesizing a wealth of information from different anthropological traditions, the authors offer a seamless history of the anthropology of sex as it has been practiced and conceptualized in North America and Great Britain.

"A brilliant, wide-ranging, masterful critique of the cultural impact of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology on popular as well as scholarly understandings of gender, sexuality and political economy. There are no cheap, trendy shots at science here, nor grandstand gestures to the prejudices of cultural relativists. Lancaster displays the skills of a science journalist while producing a major cultural studies opus."--Judith Stacey, author of "In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age

"For several years now, the unsupported, illogical, and often wacky claims of evolutionary psychology and other offspring of sociobiology have creepingly--and creepily--achieved the status of legitimate science in this culture. Finally, in "The Trouble with Nature, we have a book that brilliantly exposes the speciousness of recent--and widely accepted--arguments that gender differences, parental roles, beauty ideals, male violence, and homosexuality are genetically 'hard wired.' But Lancaster's book is not just a refutation of this 'genomania.' It's also a cultural exploration of its emergence and appeal at a time when sexuality, gender, and the family, far from exhibiting some invariant, stable form, are actually in radical flux. And it's also a wonderful read, which draws on popular culture, anthropology, philosophy, history, and scientific studies with equal ease and authority to demonstrate, not that biology plays little or no role in human life, but that cultural plasticity--not uniformity--is the real law of our evolution."--Susan Bordo, author of "Unbearable Weight and "The Male Body

"'What is a woman, man, homosexual or heterosexual?'--asks Roger Lancaster inthis lively, engaging new book. And well may he ask as, once again, academic pop stars hawk their biodetermined creations. Eschewing simplistic caricatures, he offers vivid examples of the ambiguities, contradictions, and complexities that characterize real people, while showing how the biomyths serve to revivify constricting ideologies about sex and family. An original and fascinating book."--Ruth Hubbard, author of "Exploding the Gene Myth and "The Politics of Women's Biology

"A major advance for the science of human behavior and for thoughtful scholarship generally. Lancaster provides a comprehensive analysis of essentialized ideas about sexuality, gender, and sexual preference that are out there in American popular culture, and--alas!--reinforced by crappy science. He provides an immensely valuable counterpoint to the evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics that everyone knows about, but that few are competent to consider critically. What a fun book!"--Jonathan Marks, author of "What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee

"Provocative, witty, illuminating and politically pointed, "The Trouble with Nature shows us how the flat-footed fixities of biological reductionism limit and constrain us, and why we need an expansive progressive political imagination to free us."--Lisa Duggan, co-author of "Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture

"A funny, ironic, and learned account of a deeply serious topic: how the media and popular culture appropriate facts--real ones and fake ones--about biology in order to make claims about how human societies ought to be organized and understood. One might have hoped that David Hume back in the eighteenth century would have put a stop to suchfoolishness, but apparently not. Anyone needing an antidote to the current crop of popular socio-biology books flooding the market, anyone who needs convincing of the power of culture, should read this wonderful book."--Thomas Laqueur, author of "Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud

"Sex, lies and videotape. Culture wars, science wars, and it's the economy, stupid. With interdisciplinary brilliance and biting wit, Lancaster makes sad sense of sociobiology's contemporary renaissance while dissecting its popular and scholarly practitioners. But Lancaster's decidedly queer perspective connects science to shifting sexuality, family, and economic inequality in the cultural stew of the present. E.M. Forster famously adjured us to 'only connect.' What do Will and Grace have to do with post-Fordist economies? Journalists' 'just-so' stories about ducks and sex with the 9/11 terror? The Trouble with Nature connects us all, in surprisingly new ways."--Micaela di Leonardo, author of Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity

""The Trouble with Nature will be a valuable addition to my library. It is a book I will want to share with colleagues and students. A pleasure to read, it is full of insights about the place of sexuality in popular consciousness. Lancaster has written a personal and a political study, while avoiding many of the cliches too common in contemporary cultural criticism."--Lawrence Grossberg, Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill