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.

"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

In the last decade, fierce controversy has arisen over the nature of sexual orientation. Scientific research, religious views, increasingly ambiguous gender roles, and the growing visibility of sexual minorities have sparked impassioned arguments about whether our sexual desires are hard-wired in our genes or shaped by the changing forces of society.

In recent years scientific research and popular opinion have favored the idea that sexual orientations are determined at birth, but philosopher and educator Edward Stein argues that much of what we think we know about the origins of sexual desire is probably wrong. Stein provides a comprehensive overview of such research on sexual orientation and shows that it is deeply flawed. Stein argues that this research assumes a picture of sexual desire that reflects unquestioned cultural stereotypes rather than cross-cultural scientific facts, and that it suffers from serious methodological problems. He considers whether sexual orientation is even amenable to empirical study and asks if it is useful for our understanding of human nature to categorize people based on their sexual desires. Perhaps most importantly, Stein examines some of the ethical issues surrounding such research, including gay and lesbian civil rights and the implications of parents trying to select or change the sexual orientation of their children.

The Mismeasure of Desire offers a reasoned, accessible, and incisive examination of contemporary thinking about one of the most hotly debated issues of our time and adds a compelling voice of dissent to prevailing--and largely unexamined--assumptions about human sexuality.

This text provides an account of the changes that have taken place in the social construction of sexuality during the past century. Focusing on Sacramento, California, at the dawn of the 20th century, the author juxtaposes early cinema and vaudeville performances and popular newspapers and magazines with insights from close interpretations of transcripts from Sacramento court cases. She demonstrates how attitudes that emerged in the popular discourse - ideas about gender roles, female desire, prostitution, divorce and homosexuality - often found complex and contradictory expression in the courts. As judges, prosecutors, defence attorneys and juries all weighed in with differing opinions, the courtroom itself became a site of multiple discourses that attempted to make sense of a growing sexual chaos. In tracing the birth of modern sexuality, Ullman chronicles the dynamics of social change during a cultural moment and explains the shifts in the sexual ethos of turn-of-the-century America. Ullman blends social history, textual analysis and film and performance criticism to explain how sexuality became an essential part of social identity in this century.

Whether you've barely recovered from spending lockdown with your other half or desperately heading to the clubs to meet 'the one', SH**GED. MARRIED. ANNOYED. is here to see you through . . . THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER FROM THE STARS OF THE CHART-TOPPING PODCAST NOW FEATURING A BONUS CHAPTER 'An absolute triumph' Daisy May Cooper 'These two are bloody hilarious' Zoe Sugg 'A hilarious look at the highs and lows of relationships' Sun __________ SH**GED. Hitting the bars, necking drinks and necking strangers, stumbling home, one-night-stands, nightmare dates, thinking this one's alright, ghosting, tears, more drinking, living off late-night chips. MARRIED. Meeting 'the one', weekends away, moving in, declaring life-long love, stags and hens, the perfect wedding, the honeymoon period, getting through the hard bits together, starting a family. ANNOYED. Can you close the bathroom door if you're doing that? Sleepless nights, arguing about whose turn it is to change the baby's nappy, toys everywhere, only having two drinks, still being hungover, wondering when it all stopped being easy. Whether you're sh**ged, married, annoyed, or all of the above, Chris and Rosie Ramsey write hilariously and with honesty about the ups and downs of dating, relationships, arguing, parenting and everything in between.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Amphibious Subjects is an ethnographic study of a community of self-identified effeminate men-known in local parlance as sasso-residing in coastal Jamestown, a suburb of Accra, Ghana's capital. Drawing on the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye's notion of "amphibious personhood," Kwame Edwin Otu argues that sasso embody and articulate amphibious subjectivity in their self-making, creating an identity that moves beyond the homogenizing impulses of western categories of gender and sexuality. Such subjectivity simultaneously unsettles claims purported by the Christian heteronationalist state and LGBT+ human rights organizations that Ghana is predominantly heterosexual or homophobic. Weaving together personal interactions with sasso, participant observation, autoethnography, archival sources, essays from African and African-diasporic literature, and critical analyses of documentaries such as the BBC's The World's Worst Place to Be Gay, Amphibious Subjects is an ethnographic meditation on how Africa is configured as the "heart of homophobic darkness" in transnational LGBT+ human rights imaginaries.

The Routledge Companion to Media, Sex and Sexuality is a vibrant and authoritative exploration of the ways in which sex and sexualities are mediated in modern media and everyday life. The 40 chapters in this volume offer a snapshot of the remarkable diversification of approaches and research within the field, bringing together a wide range of scholars and researchers from around the world and from different disciplinary backgrounds including cultural studies, education, history, media studies, sexuality studies and sociology. The volume presents a broad array of global and transnational issues and intersectional perspectives, as authors address a series of important questions that have consequences for current and future thinking in the field. Topics explored include post-feminism, masculinities, media industries, queer identities, video games, media activism, music videos, sexualisation, celebrities, sport, sex-advice books, pornography and erotica, and social and mobile media. The Routledge Companion to Media, Sex and Sexuality is an essential guide to the central ideas, concepts and debates currently shaping research in mediated sexualities and the connections between conceptions of sexual identity, bodies and media technologies.

Being Gorgeous explores the ways in which extravagance, flamboyance and dressing up can open up possibilities for women to play around anarchically with familiar stereotypical tropes of femininity. This is protest through play - a pleasurable misbehaviour that reflects a feminism for the twenty first century. Willson discusses how, whether through pastiche, parody, or pure pleasure, artists, artistes and indeed the spectators themselves can operate in excess of the restrictive images which saturate our visual culture. By referring to a wide spectrum of examples, including Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, Matthew Barney, Dr Sketchy's, Audacity Chutzpah, Burly Q and Carnesky's Ghost Train, Being Gorgeous demonstrates how contemporary female performers embody, critique and thoroughly relish their own representation by inappropriately re-appropriating femininity.

In Renaissance and early modern Europe, various constellations of phenomena-ranging from sex scandals to legal debates to flurries of satirical prints-collectively demonstrate, at different times and places, an increased concern with cuckoldry, impotence and adultery. This concern emerges in unusual events (such as scatological rituals of house-scorning), appears in neglected sources (such as drawings by Swiss mercenary soldier-artists), and engages innovative areas of inquiry (such as the intersection between medical theory and Renaissance comedy). Interdisciplinary analytical tools are here deployed to scrutinize court scandals and decipher archival documents. Household recipes, popular literary works and a variety of visual media are examined in the light of contemporary sexual culture and contextualized with reference to current social and political issues. The essays in this volume reveal the central importance of sexuality and sexual metaphor for our understanding of European history, politics and culture, and emphasize the extent to which erotic presuppositions underpinned the early modern world.

'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.

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

From cyber porn to striptease culture, this trailblaising book uncovers the shockingly fascinating new ways that western society is being sexualized. We don't realise how far the 'pornogrification' of culture has reached - this book does and discusses it graphically but responsibly. Media interest in this subject is huge."Mainstreaming Sex" uncovers the significant impact, hitherto only half glimpsed, that striptease culture is having on our media, relationships, educational and working lives. It is a welcome and much needed book.Western culture is exhibiting its fascination with sex in new, often surprising ways. Pole dancing is a form of keep fit, porn stars find work as agony aunts, pornography itself is just 'a mouse click away', and phone sex, email affairs and cybersex are now part of our everyday lives. This sexualization of modern culture is the subject widely discussed here.In original chapters, the contributors confront the reality that in all aspects of social and cultural life, sex is being 'mainstreamed'. They explore film, print and online pornographies; representations of masturbation in film and television, supersexualized advertising, and problem page sex. They also examine young people's views of sex in mainstream media; women's use of sexual media in the home; and, pole dancing as exercise and performance and third wave feminism and the sexualization debate.

This encyclopedic book details the sexual practices and perversions of peoples and cultures throughout the world. Topics include: love and love charms, rental marriages, the bridal night of a princess, the sexual lexicon, chastity and the feeling of shame, onanism and artificial instruments, public prostitution and the sex act.

This is an encyclopaedic overview of royal scandals, covering nearly 1000 years, from the passionate Plantagenets to Henry VIII's alarming head count of wives and mistresses, to the sapphic crushes of Mary and Anne Stuart right on up to the scandal-blighted coupling of Prince Charles and Lady Diana.

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.

Taking the long view, the Christian religion for two thousand years maintained a disapproving attitude toward human sexuality ("sex is dirty"). As David Carr of Union Theological Seminary observes, "From the outset, Christianity has depicted sex as a dangerous, chaotic, anti-spiritual force." Such a negative attitude raises the question: Why has the church over the centuries exhibited a hostile attitude toward sex? Sullivan attempts to answer that question in Part One of this book. He contends that early Christian theologians failed to understand the mythic character of the Adam and Eve story and read into it ideas which are not there. In addition, early theology preached that "the soul and the body - which is inferior to the soul - are constantly at war with one another." Since human sexuality involves the body (which is inherently bad), early theologians concluded sex must be bad. In Part Two of "Rescuing Sex from the Christians", Sullivan examines the controversial subjects of masturbation, homosexuality, adultery, and prostitution and demonstrates how the Christian idea of sexuality has vilified these practices, not always for the good.

An examination of why so few people suffering from environmental hazards and pollution choose to participate in environmental justice movements. In the coal-mining region of Central Appalachia, mountaintop-removal mining and coal-industry-related flooding, water contamination, and illness have led to the emergence of a grassroots, women-driven environmental justice movement. But the number of local activists is small relative to the affected population, and recruiting movement participants from within the region is an ongoing challenge. In Fighting King Coal, Shannon Elizabeth Bell examines an understudied puzzle within social movement theory: why so few of the many people who suffer from industry-produced environmental hazards and pollution rise up to participate in social movements aimed at bringing about social justice and industry accountability. Using the coal-mining region of Central Appalachia as a case study, Bell investigates the challenges of micromobilization through in-depth interviews, participant observation, content analysis, geospatial viewshed analysis, and an eight-month "Photovoice" project-an innovative means of studying, in real time, the social dynamics affecting activist involvement in the region. Although the Photovoice participants took striking photographs and wrote movingly about the environmental destruction caused by coal production, only a few became activists. Bell reveals the importance of local identities to the success or failure of local recruitment efforts in social movement struggles, ultimately arguing that, if the local identities of environmental justice movements are lost, the movements may also lose their power.

Sara Moslener sheds light on the contemporary purity movement by examining how earlier movements established the rhetorical and moral frameworks utilized by two of today's leading purity organizations, True Loves Waits and Silver Ring Thing. Her investigation reveals that purity work over the last two centuries has developed in concert with widespread fears of changing traditional gender roles and sexual norms, national decline, and global apocalypse. In Virgin Nation Moslener highlights various points in U.S. history when evangelical beliefs and values have seemed to provide viable explanations for and solutions to widespread cultural crises, resulting in the growth of their cultural and political influence. By asserting a causal relationship between sexual immorality, national decline, and apocalyptic anticipation, leaders have shaped a purity rhetoric that positions Protestant evangelicalism as the salvation of American civilization. Nineteenth-century purity reformers, Moslener shows, utilized a nationalist discourse that drew upon racialized and sexualized fears of national decline and pointed to sexual immorality as the cause of Anglo-Saxon decline, and national decay. In the early to mid-twentieth century, fundamentalist leaders such as Billy Graham and Carl F.H. Henry sought to establish an intellectually sound millennialist theology that linked sexual immorality, national vulnerability, and the expectation of imminent nuclear apocalypse. Then with the resurgence of Christian fundamentalism in the 1970s, formerly apolitical social conservatives found themselves swayed by the nationalist and prophetic ideologies of the Moral Majority, which also linked sexual immorality to national decline and pending apocalypse. However, millennialist theologies, relevant at the height of the cold war, had mostly disappeared from political discourse by the 1970s when the Red Scare began to fade from popular consciousness. For contemporary purity advocates, says Moslener, the main obstacle to moral and national restoration is sexual immorality, a cultural blight traceable to the excesses of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Today the movement positions the adolescents who embody sexual purity as an embattled sexual minority poised to save America from the repercussions of its own moral turpitude, with or without government assistance.

Pleasures and Perils follows a group of young girls living on Nevis, an island society in the Eastern Caribbean. In this provocative ethnography, Debra Curtis examines their sexuality in gripping detail: why do Nevisian girls engage in sexual activity at such young ages? Where is the line between coercion and consent? How does a desire for wealth affect a girl's sexual practices?

Curtis shows that girls are often caught between conflicting discourses of Christian teachings about chastity, public health cautions about safe sex, and media enticements about consumer delights. Sexuality's contradictions are exposed: power and powerlessness, self-determination and cultural control, violence and pleasure. Pleasures and Perils illuminates the methodological and ethical issues anthropologists face when they conduct research on sex, especially among girls. The sexually explicit narratives conveyed in this book challenge not only the reader's own thoughts on sexuality but also the broader limits and possibilities of ethnography.

A passionate and consoling study of sexual love by one of Britain's finest philosophers. "A dazzling treatise, as erudite and eloquent as Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" and considerably more sound in its conclusion." - "TLS". "He is an eloquent and practised writer" - "The Independent". When John desires Mary or Mary desires John, what does either of them want? What is meant by innocence, passion, love and arousal, desire, perversion and shame? These are just a few of the questions Roger Scruton addresses in this thought-provoking intellectual adventure. Beginning from purely philosophical premises, and ranging over human life, art and institutions, he surveys the entire field of sexuality. Equally dissatisfied with puritanism and permissiveness, he argues for a radical break with recent theories. Upholding traditional morality - though in terms that may shock many of its practitioners - his argument gravitates to that which is candid, serene and consoling in the experience of sexual love.

#1 New Release in Human Sexuality Transform the Way Conflict Affects Your Love LifeWant to bring more peace into your relationship and also get back that "spark" that's been missing? From bad breath to infidelity, find resolution for issues that cause division. If left unresolved, sources of disconnect can lead to major rifts in a relationship. Authors CrisMarie Campbell and Susan Clarke bring over twenty years of experience in family and marriage counseling and relationship coaching to this book. They cater their advice to romantic relationships and provide resolution strategies for women and men. Bring back the "spark" that's been missing. Passion is essential to relationships, and equally important across the spectrums of love, sex, and dating. Whether it's our first love or last love, in order for our bond with our partner to thrive, there needs to be a sense of excitement present. By transforming the way conflict affects us, we create a space for the intimate relationship or passionate marriage we long for to take root and grow. Conflict doesn't have to be a deal breaker. While arguments with our partner can get tiring, looking at those disagreements as opportunities to strengthen our bond rather than weaken it can have a significant impact on their effect. With conflict comes the chance to communicate and solve problems together. This can restore a sense of intimacy and connection with our partner, both emotionally and physically. In The Beauty of Conflict for Couples, you will find: Relatable stories that shed light on the common struggles of romantic relationships Practical tools that offer guidance for addressing conflict A source of hope for relationships that appear to be fated for failure If you and your significant other have looked for guidance in books such as Mating in Captivity, The 5 Love Languages, Hold Me Tight, or Campbell and Clarke's first book, The Beauty of Conflict, then you'll find a further source of resolution in The Beauty of Conflict for Couples.