Finalist, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Offers a way
to undo the inextricable American knot of sex, politics, religion,
and power American politics are obsessed with sex. Before the first
televised presidential debate, John F. Kennedy trailed Richard
Nixon in the polls. As Americans tuned in, however, they found
Kennedy a younger, more vivacious, and more attractive choice than
Nixon. Sexier. The political significance of Kennedy's telegenic
sex appeal is now widely accepted - but taking sexual politics
seriously is not. Janet R. Jakobsen examines how, for the last
several decades, gender and sexuality have reappeared time and
again at the center of political life, marked by a series of widely
recognized issues and movements - women's liberation and gay
liberation in the 1960s and '70s, the AIDS crisis and ACT UP in the
'80s and '90s, welfare and immigration "reform" in the '90s, wars
claiming to "save women" in the 2000s, and battles over health care
in the 2010s, to recent demands for reproductive justice, trans
liberation, and the explosive exposures of #MeToo. Religion has
been wound up in these political struggles, and blamed for not a
little of the resistance to meaningful change in America political
life. Jakobsen acknowledges that religion is a force to be reckoned
with, but decisively breaks with the common sense that religion and
sex are the fixed binary of American political life. She instead
follows the kaleidoscopic ways in which sexual politics are
embedded in social relations of all kinds - not only the intimate
relations of love and family with which gender and sex are
routinely associated, but also secularism, freedom, race,
disability, capitalism, nation and state, housing and the
environment. In the midst of these obsessions, Jakobsen's
promiscuous ethical imagination guides us forward. Drawing on
examples from collaborative projects among activists, academics and
artists, Jakobsen shows that sexual politics can contribute to
building justice from the ground up. Gender and sexual relations
are practices through which values emerge and communities are made.
Sex and desire, gender and embodiment emerge as bases of ethical
possibility, breaking political stalemate and opening new
possibility.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!