From time to time we all tend to wonder what sort of "story" our life might comprise: what it means, where it is going, and whether it hangs together as a whole. In The Stories We Are, William Lowell Randall explores the links between literature and life and speculates on the range of storytelling styles through which people compose their lives. In doing so, he draws on a variety of fields, including psychology, psychotherapy, theology, philosophy, feminist theory, and literary theory. Using categories like plot, character, point of view, and style, Randall plays with the possibility that we each make sense of the events of our lives to the extent that we weave them into our own unfolding novel, as simultaneously its author, narrator, main character, and reader. In the process, he offers us a unique perspective on features of our day-to-day world such as secrecy, self-deception, gossip, prejudice, intimacy, maturity, and the proverbial "art of living." First published in 1995, this second edition of The Stories We Are includes a new preface and afterword by the author that offer insight into his argument and evolution as a scholar, as well as an illuminating foreword by Ruthellen Josselson.

In 1998, Sweden passed ground-breaking legislation criminalising the purchase of sexual services which sought to curb demand and support women exiting the sex industry. Grounded in the reality of the violence and abuse inherent in prostitution -- and reeling from the death of a friend to prostitution in Spain -- Kajsa Ekis Ekman exposes the many lies in the sex work scenario. Trade unions arent trade unions. Groups for prostituted women are simultaneously groups for brothel owners. And prostitution is always presented from a womans point of view. The men who buy sex are left out. Drawing on Marxist and feminist analyses, Ekis Ekman argues that the Self must be split from the body to make it possible to sell your body without selling yourself. The body becomes sex. Sex becomes a service. The story of the sex worker says: the Split Self is not only possible, it is the ideal. Turning to the practice of surrogate motherhood, Kajsa Ekis Ekman identifies the same components: that the woman is neither connected to her own body nor to the child she grows in her body and gives birth to. Surrogacy becomes an extended form of prostitution. In this capitalist creation story, the parent is the one who pays. The product sold is not sex but a baby. Ekis Ekman asks: why should this not be called child trafficking? This brilliant expose is written with a razor-sharp intellect and disarming wit and will make us look at prostitution and surrogacy and the parallels between them in a new way.

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.

The mainstreaming of pornographic imagery into fashion and popular culture at the turn of the millennium in Britain and the US signalled a dramatic cultural shift in construction of both femininity and masculinity. For men and women, raunch became the new cool. This engaging book draws from a diverse range of examples including film, popular tabloids, campus culture, mass media marketing campaigns, facebook profiles, and art exhibits to explore expressions and meanings of porn chic. Bringing a cultural and feminist lens to the material, this book challenges the reader to question the sexual agency of the 12-year-old girl dressed to seduce in fashions inspired by Katie Price, the college co-ed flashing her breasts for a film maker during Spring break, and the waitress making her customer happy with chicken wings and a nice set of Hooters. Further it explores the raunchy bad boys being paid handsomely to tell the world about their sexual exploits, online, on film, and in popular press bestsellers. The book also contains thought-provoking artwork by Nicola Bockelmann which focuses on the permeable border between pornography and mainstream culture and urges viewers to question everyday explicitness. Balancing a popular culture approach and a strong analytic lens, Porn Chic will engage a wide audience of readers interested in popular culture, fashion, and gender studies.

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.

The title of this collection of essays, Sex and Disability, unites two terms that the popular imagination often regards as incongruous. The major texts in sexuality studies, including queer theory, rarely mention disability, and foundational texts in disability studies do not discuss sex in much detail. What if "sex" and "disability" were understood as intimately related concepts? And what if disabled people were seen as both subjects and objects of a range of erotic desires and practices? These are among the questions that this collection's contributors engage. From multiple perspectives-including literary analysis, ethnography, and autobiography-they consider how sex and disability come together and how disabled people negotiate sex and sexual identities in ableist and heteronormative culture. Queering disability studies, while also expanding the purview of queer and sexuality studies, these essays shake up notions about who and what is sexy and sexualizable, what counts as sex, and what desire is. At the same time, they challenge conceptions of disability in the dominant culture, queer studies, and disability studies. Contributors. Chris Bell, Michael Davidson, Lennard J. Davis, Michel Desjardins, Lezlie Frye, Rachael Groner, Kristen Harmon, Michelle Jarman, Alison Kafer, Riva Lehrer, Nicole Markotic, Robert McRuer, Anna Mollow, Rachel O'Connell, Russell Shuttleworth, David Serlin, Tobin Siebers, Abby L. Wilkerson

"Policing Sexuality" explores the regulation of sexual behavior and identity by nation states, and will question how and why states have sought to influence and control the sexuality of their citizens. This unique book simultaneously introduces the topic and argues for interpretation of state policing of sexuality. The author presents both theoretical and ethnographic literature, distilling common themes and causes and presenting factors that contribute towards a state's desire to control both the sexual behavior and sexual identity of its citizens, such as the influence of colonialism, class, religion, and national identity. This book features five crucial case studies from India, Britain, the USA, Malaysia, and Turkey. "Policing Sexuality" illuminates this fascinating study with comparative accounts.

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.

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.

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.

High unemployment rates, humiliating relief policy, and the spectre of eviction characterized the experiences of many Ontario families in the Great Depression. Respectable Citizens is an examination of the material difficulties and survival strategies of families facing poverty and unemployment, and an analysis of how collective action and protest redefined the meanings of welfare and citizenship in the 1930s.

Lara Campbell draws on diverse sources including newspapers, family and juvenile court records, premiers' papers, memoirs, and oral histories to uncover the ways in which the material workings of the family and the discursive category of 'respectable' citizenship were invested with gendered obligations and Anglo-British identity. Respectable Citizens demonstrates how women and men represented themselves as entitled to make specific claims on the state, shedding new light on the cooperative and conflicting relationships between men and women, parents and children, and citizen and state in 1930s Canada.

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."

From social silence to social science: same-sex sexuality, HIV & AIDS and gender in South Africa presents a unique and innovative effort to examine what we know about homosexual transmission of HIV and AIDS in South Africa. It reverses the trend whereby categories of same sex sexual practice are almost always excluded from research of HIV and AIDS, as well as from care and intervention programmes. The varied contributors (academics, activists and programme planners) draw attention to the risk behaviours and treatment needs of people who engage in homosexual sex, and explain why same-sex sexuality has to be seen as key within South African efforts to study, test and prevent HIV infection. Relevant to scholarly debates about HIV and AIDS, it is also essential reading for anyone involved in research, policymaking, advocacy and community development.

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.

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a revolution in contraceptive behaviour as the large Victorian family disappeared. This book offers a new perspective on the gender relations, sexual attitudes, and contraceptive practices that accompanied the emergence of the smaller family in modern Britain. Kate Fisher draws on a range of first-hand evidence, including over 190 oral history interviews, in which individuals born between 1900 and 1930 described their marriages and sexual relationships. By using individual testimony she challenges many of the key conditions that have long been envisaged by demographic and historical scholars as necessary for any significant reduction in average family size to take place.
Dr Fisher demonstrates that a massive expansion in birth control took place in a society in which sexual ignorance was widespread; that effective family limitation was achieved without the mass adoption of new contraceptive technologies; that traditional methods, such as withdrawal, absitinence, and abortion were often seen as preferable to modern appliances, such as condoms and caps; that communication between spouses was not key to the systematic adoption of contraception; and, above all, that women were not necessarily the driving force behind the attempt to avoid pregnancy. Women frequently avoided involvement in family planning decisions and practices, whereas the vast majority of men in Britain from the interwar period onward viewed the regular use of birth control as a masculine duty and obligation. By allowing this generation to speak for themselves, Kate Fisher produces a richer understanding of the often startling social atttitudes and complex conjugaldynamics that lay behind the vast changes in contraceptive behavior and family size in the twentieth century.

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.

The vast majority of non-biomedical research on HIV/AIDS has been behavioural research, usually by survey methods, counting people's sex acts, partners, preferences, places, times and reasons for sex, and assessing levels of risk for HIV infection, revealing the dominance of seeing sex largely as behaviours. However, the notion of behaviours denudes sex of all meaning and pleasure. It neglects, as a result, how meaning and pleasure rely on context, how context exemplifies culture, and how culture is structured by history and discourse. When we drive our understanding of the epidemic by behaviours alone, we fail to comprehend that many of the social determinants of behaviour lie beyond the conscious apprehension of immediate acts and volitions, i.e. sexual behaviours are socially embedded practices. If we fail to understand the determinants of HIV risk and vulnerability as profoundly social- and by social is meant relational, contextual, cultural, political, economic, historical, symbolic and discursive- we fail to understand best how to intervene. Also, in such behavioural surveys, we are often concerned more with the sex of the sexual partner than the meaning of sex without a condom or an understanding of which circumstances within a sexual economy structure risk as, say, pleasure or intimacy, or social membership or an act of self-actualisation. Research undertaken in the mid-1990s among young people in seven developing countries revealed the importance of changing sexual meanings, sexual cultures and sexual identities in the patterns of sexual activity, forms of partnering, and meanings of sexual safety for young people within rapidly changing cultures.

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.

"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"

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.

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.

"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.