We think of the city as a place where anything goes. Take the sensational fantasies and lurid antics of single women on "Sex in the City" or young men on "Queer as Folk," and you might imagine the city as some kind of sexual playground--a place where you can have any kind of sex you want, with whomever you like, anytime or anywhere you choose.
But in "The Sexual Organization of the City," Edward Laumann and company argue that this idea is a myth. Drawing on extensive surveys and interviews with Chicago adults, they show that the city is--to the contrary--a place where sexual choices and options are constrained. From Wicker Park and Boys Town to the South Side and Pilsen, they observe that sexual behavior and partnering are significantly limited by such factors as which neighborhood you live in, your ethnicity, what your sexual preference might be, or the circle of friends to which you belong. In other words, the social and institutional "networks" that city dwellers occupy potentially limit their sexual options by making different types of sexual activities, relationships, or meeting places less accessible.
To explain this idea of sex in the city, the editors of this work develop a theory of sexual marketplaces--the places where people look for sexual partners. They then use this theory to consider a variety of questions about sexuality: Why do sexual partnerships rarely cross racial and ethnic lines, even in neighborhoods where relatively few same-ethnicity partners are available? Why do gay men and lesbians have few public meeting spots in some neighborhoods, but a wide variety in others? Why are African Americans less likely to marry than whites? Does having a lot of friendsmake you less likely to get a sexually transmitted disease? And why do public health campaigns promoting safe sex seem to change the behaviors of some, but not others?
Considering vital questions such as these, and shedding new light on the city of Chicago, this work will profoundly recast our ideas about human sexual behavior.

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"

"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

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.

Throughout the United States, groups of individuals have been confronting the issues surrounding sexually explicit materials. Many have concurred in their perceptions of what is pornographic, have assessed pornography to be a problem our society must deal with, and have made organized efforts within their communities to stop or restrict the commercial availability of such materials. Citizens for Decency is an examination of two antipornography crusades, one in the Midwest and the other in the Southwest. It examines the evolution and impact of such crusades, the satisfaction derived from participating, and the relevant characteristics of the participants and their opponents. It is the first systematic, comprehensive, and theory-oriented study of antipornography crusades and one of the few studies that analyze movements to resist change. The book begins with the assumption that the term pornography is a value judgment and that the labeling of sexually explicit materials as "pornographic" can be adequately understood only in the wider context of sociological and psychological structures and processes. In approaching the antipornography crusades, Louis A. Zurcher and R. George Kirkpatrick gathered data by observation and document search and by interviews with persons well informed about and central to the crusades. Their examination of the organizations that directed the two movements is particularly extensive, and their comparative analysis of the two organizations allows them to determine which features are the most important, how these characteristics interact, and what their relationship is to the symbolic crusade. Among their important findings, the authors show that antipornography crusaders are people discontent with their status who have mobilized to protect the dominance and prestige of their traditional life styles. The participants in the crusades are shown to differ from their opponents in a number of significant ways. In the final chapters, the authors analyze their findings with reference to social movement theory and offer predictions concerning future symbolic crusades.

At what age do girls gain the maturity to make sexual choices? This question provokes especially vexed debates in India, where early marriage is a widespread practice. India has served as a focal problem site in NGO campaigns and intergovernmental conferences setting age standards for sexual maturity. Over the last century, the country shifted the legal age of marriage from twelve, among the lowest in the world, to eighteen, at the high end of the global spectrum. Ashwini Tambe illuminates the ideas that shaped such shifts: how the concept of adolescence as a sheltered phase led to delaying both marriage and legal adulthood; how the imperative of population control influenced laws on marriage age; and how imperial moral hierarchies between nations provoked defensive postures within India. Tambe's transnational feminist approach to legal history shows how intergovernmental debates influenced Indian laws and how expert discourses in India changed UN terminology about girls. Ultimately, the well-meaning focus on child marriage became tethered less to the well-being of girls themselves and more to parents' interests, population control targets, and the preservation of national reputation.

Making Surveillance States: Transnational Histories opens up new and exciting perspectives on how systems of state surveillance developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taking a transnational approach, the book challenges us to rethink the presumed novelty of contemporary surveillance practices, while developing critical analyses of the ways in which state surveillance has profoundly shaped the emergence of contemporary societies. Contributors engage with a range of surveillance practices, including medical and disease surveillance, systems of documentation and identification, and policing and security. These approaches enable us to understand how surveillance has underpinned the emergence of modern states, sustained systems of state security, enabled practices of colonial rule, perpetuated racist and gendered forms of identification and classification, regulated and policed migration, shaped the eugenically inflected medicalization of disability and sexuality, and contained dissent. While surveillance is thus bound up with complex relations of power, it is also contested. Emerging from the book is a sense of how state actors understood and legitimized their own surveillance practices, as well as how these practices have been implemented in different times and places. At the same time, contributors explore the myriad ways in which these systems of surveillance have been resisted, challenged, and subverted.

Rethinking Rufus is the first book-length study of sexual violence against enslaved men. Scholars have extensively documented the widespread sexual exploitation and abuse suffered by enslaved women, with comparatively little attention paid to the stories of men. However, a careful reading of extant sources reveals that sexual assault of enslaved men also occurred systematically and in a wide variety of forms, including physical assault, sexual coercion, and other intimate violations. To tell the story of men such as Rufus?who was coerced into a sexual union with an enslaved woman, Rose, whose resistance of this union is widely celebrated?historian Thomas A. Foster interrogates a range of sources on slavery: early American newspapers, court records, enslavers' journals, abolitionist literature, the testimony of formerly enslaved people collected in autobiographies and in interviews, and various forms of artistic representation. Foster's sustained examination of how black men were sexually violated by both white men and white women makes an important contribution to our understanding of masculinity, sexuality, the lived experience of enslaved men, and the general power dynamics fostered by the institution of slavery. Rethinking Rufus illuminates how the conditions of slavery gave rise to a variety of forms of sexual assault and exploitation that affected all members of the community.

Freewheeling sexuality and gender experimentation defined the social and moral landscape of 1890s San Francisco. Middle class whites crafting titillating narratives on topics such as high divorce rates, mannish women, and extramarital sex centered Chinese and Japanese immigrants in particular. Amy Sueyoshi draws on everything from newspapers to felony case files to oral histories in order to examine how whites' pursuit of gender and sexual fulfillment gave rise to racial caricatures. As she reveals, white reporters, writers, artists, and others conflated Chinese and Japanese, previously seen as two races, into one. There emerged the Oriental-a single pan-Asian American stereotype weighted with sexual and gender meaning. Sueyoshi bridges feminist, queer, and ethnic studies to show how the white quest to forge new frontiers in gender and sexual freedom reinforced-and spawned-racial inequality through the ever evolving Oriental. Informed and fascinating, Discriminating Sex reconsiders the origins and expression of racial stereotyping in an American city.

One of the twentieth century's most controversial sexologists--or "fuckologists," to use his own memorable term--John Money was considered a trailblazing scientist and sexual libertarian by some, but damned by others as a fraud and a pervert. Money invented the concept of gender in the 1950s, yet fought its uptake by feminists. He backed surgical treatments for transsexuality, but argued that gender roles were set by reproductive capacity. He shaped the treatment of intersex, advocating experimental sex changes for children with ambiguous genitalia. He pioneered drug therapy for sex offenders, yet took an ambivalent stance towards pedophilia. In his most publicized case study, Money oversaw the reassignment of David Reimer as female following a circumcision accident in infancy. Heralded by many as proof that gender is pliable, the case was later discredited when Reimer revealed that he had lived as a male since his early teens.
In "Fuckology," the authors contextualize and interrogate Money's writings and practices. The book focuses on his three key diagnostic concepts, "hermaphroditism," "transsexualism," and "paraphilia," but also addresses his lesser-known work on topics ranging from animal behavior to the philosophy of science. The result is a comprehensive collection of new insights for researchers and students within healthcare, the humanities, and the social sciences, as well as for practitioners and activists in sexology, psychology, and patient rights.

Metro Vancouver is a diverse city where half the residents identify as people of colour, but only one percent of the population is racialized as Black. In this context, African-Canadians are both hyper-visible as Black, and invisible as distinct communities. Informed by feminist and critical race theories, and based on interviews with women and men who grew up in Vancouver, "Where Are You From?" recounts the unique experience of growing up in a place where the second generation seldom sees other people who look like them, and yet are inundated with popular representations of Blackness from the United States. This study explores how the second generation in Vancouver redefine their African identities to distinguish themselves from African-Americans, while continuing to experience considerable everyday racism that challenges belonging as Canadians. As a result, some members of the second generation reject, and others strongly assert, a Canadian identity.

Virginity is of concern here, that is its utter messiness. At once valuable and detrimental, normative and deviant, undesirable and enviable. Virginity and its loss hold tremendous cultural significance. For many, female virginity is still a universally accepted condition, something that is somehow bound to the hymen, whereas male virginity is almost as elusive as the G-spot: we know it's there, it's just we have a harder time finding it. Of course boys are virgins, queers are virgins, some people reclaim their virginities, and others reject virginity from the get go. So what if we agree to forget the hymen all together? Might we start to see the instability of terms like untouched, pure, or innocent? Might we question the act of sex, the very notion of relational sexuality? After all, for many people it is the sexual acts they don't do, or don't want to do, that carry the most abundant emotional clout. Virgin Envy is a collection of essays that look past the vestal virgins and beyond Joan of Arc. From medieval to present-day literature, the output of HBO, Bollywood, and the films of Abdellah Taia or Derek Jarman to the virginity testing of politically active women in Tahrir Square, the writers here explore the concept of virginity in today's world to show that ultimately virginity is a site around which our most basic beliefs about sexuality are confronted, and from which we can come to understand some of our most basic anxieties, paranoias, fears, and desires.

For many Americans, the emergence of a "porno chic" culture provided an opportunity to embrace the sexual revolution by attending a film like Deep Throat (1972) or leafing through an erotic magazine like Penthouse. By the 1980s, this pornographic moment was beaten back by the rise of Reagan-era political conservatism and feminist anti-pornography sentiment. This volume places pornography at the heart of the 1970s American experience, exploring lesser-known forms of pornography from the decade, such as a new, vibrant gay porn genre; transsexual/female impersonator magazines; and pornography for new users, including women and conservative Christians. The collection also explores the rise of a culture of porn film auteurs and stars as well as the transition from film to video. As the corpus of adult ephemera of the 1970s disintegrates, much of it never to be professionally restored and archived, these essays seek to document what pornography meant to its producers and consumers at a pivotal moment. In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Peter Alilunas, Gillian Frank, Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Lucas Hilderbrand, Nancy Semin Lingo, Laura Helen Marks, Nicholas Matte, Jennifer Christine Nash, Joe Rubin, Alex Warner, Leigh Ann Wheeler, and Greg Youmans.

Swedish cinema became recognized for daring representations of sexuality with such films as One Summer of Happiness (1951), The Silence (1963), I am Curious (Yellow) (1967) and a wave of sex films in the late 1960s and 1970s. The association between Swedish film and sexuality shows up frequently in popular culture-from Taxi Driver to Mad Men, references to dirty Swedish movies abound. Yet the connection has attracted little critical attention. In this collection of new essays, Swedish and American scholars go beyond popular misconceptions to explore the origins, influences and reception of sexuality in Swedish cinema during the "sexual revolution" on both sides of the Atlantic. A broad range of topics are covered, from analyses of key films, to a behind-the-scenes study of the Swedish Film Institute, which played a significant role in opposing Swedish film censorship.

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.

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.

This book expands the notion of sexual fantasies from the field of psychology into the realms of cultural studies, anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. So far, much research on sexual fantasies has dealt with issues of gender differences, the effect of sexual fantasies on people's sex lives, or how problematic fantasies can be treated in therapy. In this volume contributors from different academic disciplines explore sexual fantasies at the convergence of the cultural and the individual, taking into account that fantasies are paradoxical: highly individualised and private, and at the same time dependent on a world that supplies structures, images, symbols, and narratives.

Radical Love is a study about the phenomenon of love. Radical love allows for both passionate and egalitarian relationships and, in Gomez's words, "a revolution for the twenty-first century."

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.

How Sex Became a Civil Liberty is the first book to show how and why we have come to see sexual expression, sexual practice, and sexual privacy as fundamental rights. Using rich archival sources and oral interviews, historian Leigh Ann Wheeler shows how the private lives of women and men in the American Civil Liberties Union shaped their understanding of sexual rights as they built the constitutional foundation for the twentieth-century's sexual revolutions.
Wheeler introduces readers to a number of fascinating figures, including ACLU founders Crystal Eastman and Roger Baldwin; nudists, victims of involuntary sterilization, and others who appealed to the organization for help; as well as attorneys like Dorothy Kenyon, Harriet Pilpel, and Melvin Wulf, who pushed the ACLU to tackle such controversial issues as abortion and homosexuality. It demonstrates how their work with the American Birth Control League, Planned Parenthood Federation, Kinsey Institute, Playboy magazine, and other organizations influenced the ACLU's agenda.
Wheeler explores the ACLU's prominent role in nearly every major court decision related to sexuality while examining how the ACLU also promoted its agenda through grassroots activism, political action, and public education. She shows how the ACLU helped to collapse distinctions between public and private in ways that privileged access to sexual expression over protection from it. Thanks largely to the organization's work, abortion and birth control are legal, coerced sterilization is rare, sexually explicit material is readily available, and gay rights are becoming a reality. But this book does not simply applaud the creation of a sex-saturated culture and the arming of citizens with sexual rights; it shows how hard-won rights for some often impinged upon freedoms held dear by others.

'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.

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.