Covering a wide variety of subjects and points of inquiry on women's sexuality, from genital anxieties about pubic hair to constructions of the body in the therapy room, this book offers a ground-breaking examination of women, sex, and madness, drawing from psychology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies. Breanne Fahs argues that women's sexuality embodies a permanent state of tension between cultural impulses of destruction and selfishness contrasted with the fundamental possibilities of subversiveness and joy. Emphasizing cultural, social, and personal narratives about sexuality, Fahs asks readers to imagine sex, bodies, and madness as intertwined, and to see these narratives as fluid, contested, and changing. With topics as diverse as anarchist visions of sexual freedom, sexualized emotion work, lesbian haunted houses, and the insidious workings of capitalism, Fahs conceptualizes sexuality as a force of regressive moral panics and profound inequalities-deployed in both blatant and more subtle ways onto the body-while also finding hope and resistance in the possibilities of sexuality. By integrating clinical case studies, cultural studies, qualitative interviews, and original essays, Fahs offers a provocative new vision for sexuality that fuses together social anxieties and cultural madness through a critical feminist psychological approach. Fahs provides an original and accessible volume for students and academics in psychology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies.

Body hair, especially on women, provokes, disrupts, and, at times, offends. It is tangled up with culture itself—in art, families, workplaces, relationships, sex, the beauty industry, governments, and capitalism. From Chinese activists challenging the Communist Party, to students in Arizona rejecting their family and workplace ideas about grooming, to high-art feminist photographers boldly featuring hairy women, Fahs deftly explores the volatile and ever-changing landscape of women's body hair politics. She showcases an underground movement of artists, zine-makers, rebels, and activists who have used women's visible body hair as a declaration of freedom from patriarchal norms. Fahs presents body hair not just as a personal grooming choice but as a connection to broader cultural stories about women's reproductive rights, feminist battlegrounds about autonomy, neoliberal intrusions into beauty regimens, and even global tensions around women's place in society. Ultimately, Unshaved shows the collision between the mundane and the extraordinary, the everyday and the revolutionary.

In this landmark collection spanning three centuries and four waves of feminist activism and writing, Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge. The manifesto-raging and wanting, quarreling and provocative-has always been central to feminism, and it's the angry, brash feminism we need now. Collecting over 75 manifestos from around the world, Burn It Down! is a rallying cry and a call to action. Among this quarrelsome sisterhood, you'll find: Breanne Fahs argues that we need manifestos in all their urgent rawness-their insistence that we have to act now, that we must face this, that the bleeding edge of rage and defiance is where new ideas are born.

Covering a wide variety of subjects and points of inquiry on women's sexuality, from genital anxieties about pubic hair to constructions of the body in the therapy room, this book offers a ground-breaking examination of women, sex, and madness, drawing from psychology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies. Breanne Fahs argues that women's sexuality embodies a permanent state of tension between cultural impulses of destruction and selfishness contrasted with the fundamental possibilities of subversiveness and joy. Emphasizing cultural, social, and personal narratives about sexuality, Fahs asks readers to imagine sex, bodies, and madness as intertwined, and to see these narratives as fluid, contested, and changing. With topics as diverse as anarchist visions of sexual freedom, sexualized emotion work, lesbian haunted houses, and the insidious workings of capitalism, Fahs conceptualizes sexuality as a force of regressive moral panics and profound inequalities-deployed in both blatant and more subtle ways onto the body-while also finding hope and resistance in the possibilities of sexuality. By integrating clinical case studies, cultural studies, qualitative interviews, and original essays, Fahs offers a provocative new vision for sexuality that fuses together social anxieties and cultural madness through a critical feminist psychological approach. Fahs provides an original and accessible volume for students and academics in psychology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies.

In this landmark collection spanning three centuries and four waves of feminist activism and writing, Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge. The manifesto-raging and wanting, quarreling and provocative-has always been central to feminism, and it's the angry, brash feminism we need now. Collecting over 75 manifestos from around the world, Burn It Down! is a rallying cry and a call to action. Among this quarrelsome sisterhood, you'll find: Breanne Fahs argues that we need manifestos in all their urgent rawness-their insistence that we have to act now, that we must face this, that the bleeding edge of rage and defiance is where new ideas are born.

Too drastic, too crazy, too "out there," too early, too late, too damaged, too much--Valerie Solanas has been dismissed but never forgotten. She has become, unwittingly, a figurehead for women's unexpressed rage, and stands at the center of many worlds. She inhabited Andy Warhol's Factory scene, circulated among feminists and the countercultural underground, charged men money for conversation, despised "daddy's girls," and outlined a vision for radical gender dystopia.

Known for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968 and for writing the polemical diatribe "SCUM Manifesto," Solanas is one of the most famous women of her era." SCUM Manifesto"--which predicted ATMs, test-tube babies, the Internet, and artificial insemination long before they existed--has sold more copies, and has been translated into more languages, than nearly all other feminist texts of its time.

Shockingly little work has interrogated Solanas's life. This book is the first biography about Solanas, including original interviews with family, friends (and enemies), and numerous living Warhol associates. It reveals surprising details about her life: the children nearly no one knew she had, her drive for control over her own writing and copyright, and her elusive personal and professional relationships.

"Valerie Solanas" addresses how this era changed the world and depicts an iconic figure whose life is at once tragic and remarkable.

Breanne Fahs is an associate professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University, a practicing clinical psychologist, and the author of "Performing Sex" and "The Moral Panics of Sexuality."

Body hair, especially on women, provokes, disrupts, and, at times, offends. It is tangled up with culture itself-in art, families, workplaces, relationships, sex, the beauty industry, governments, and capitalism. From Chinese activists challenging the Communist Party, to students in Arizona rejecting their family and workplace ideas about grooming, to high-art feminist photographers boldly featuring hairy women, Fahs deftly explores the volatile and ever-changing landscape of women's body hair politics. She showcases an underground movement of artists, zine-makers, rebels, and activists who have used women's visible body hair as a declaration of freedom from patriarchal norms. Fahs presents body hair not just as a personal grooming choice but as a connection to broader cultural stories about women's reproductive rights, feminist battlegrounds about autonomy, neoliberal intrusions into beauty regimens, and even global tensions around women's place in society. Ultimately, Unshaved shows the collision between the mundane and the extraordinary, the everyday and the revolutionary.

This open access handbook, the first of its kind, provides a comprehensive and carefully curated multidisciplinary and genre-spanning view of the state of the field of Critical Menstruation Studies, opening up new directions in research and advocacy. It is animated by the central question: '"what new lines of inquiry are possible when we center our attention on menstrual health and politics across the life course?" The chapters-diverse in content, form and perspective-establish Critical Menstruation Studies as a potent lens that reveals, complicates and unpacks inequalities across biological, social, cultural and historical dimensions. This handbook is an unmatched resource for researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and activists new to and already familiar with the field as it rapidly develops and expands.

Unapologetic, troublemaking, agitating, revolutionary, and hot-headed: radical feminism bravely transformed the history of politics, love, sexuality, and science. In Firebrand Feminism, Breanne Fahs brings together ten years of dialogue with four founders of the radical feminist movement: Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Sarachild, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Dana Densmore. Taking aim at the selfishness of the right and the incremental politics of the liberal left, they defiantly and fiercely created a new kind of feminism in the late 1960s. Firebrand Feminism provides a timely and historically rich account of these audacious women and the lasting impact of their words and work. This unique and provocative book unites second- and third-wave feminism and creates a much-needed intergenerational dialogue about the utility of feminist rage, the importance of refusal, the changing politics of sex and love, trans rights, and tactics to start (and continue) a revolution.

This open access handbook, the first of its kind, provides a comprehensive and carefully curated multidisciplinary and genre-spanning view of the state of the field of Critical Menstruation Studies, opening up new directions in research and advocacy. It is animated by the central question: '"what new lines of inquiry are possible when we center our attention on menstrual health and politics across the life course?" The chapters-diverse in content, form and perspective-establish Critical Menstruation Studies as a potent lens that reveals, complicates and unpacks inequalities across biological, social, cultural and historical dimensions. This handbook is an unmatched resource for researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and activists new to and already familiar with the field as it rapidly develops and expands.

Unapologetic, troublemaking, agitating, revolutionary, and hot-headed: radical feminism bravely transformed the history of politics, love, sexuality, and science. In Firebrand Feminism, Breanne Fahs brings together ten years of dialogue with four founders of the radical feminist movement: Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Sarachild, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Dana Densmore. Taking aim at the selfishness of the right and the incremental politics of the liberal left, they defiantly and fiercely created a new kind of feminism in the late 1960s. Firebrand Feminism provides a timely and historically rich account of these audacious women and the lasting impact of their words and work. This unique and provocative book unites second- and third-wave feminism and creates a much-needed intergenerational dialogue about the utility of feminist rage, the importance of refusal, the changing politics of sex and love, trans rights, and tactics to start (and continue) a revolution.

Moving from viruses, vaccines, and copycat murder to gay panics, xenophobia, and psychopaths, Transforming Contagion energetically fuses critical humanities and social science perspectives into a boundary-smashing interdisciplinary collection on contagion. The contributors provocatively suggest contagion to be as full of possibilities for revolution and resistance as it is for the descent into madness, malice, and extensive state control. The infectious practices rooted in politics, film, psychological exchanges, social movements, the classroom, and the circulation of a literary text or meme on social media compellingly reveal patterns that emerge in those attempts to re-route, quarantine, define, or even exacerbate various contagions.

Although conventional wisdom holds that women in the United States today are more sexually liberated than ever before, a number of startling statistics call into question this perceived victory: over half of all women report having faked orgasms; 45 percent of women find rape fantasies erotic; a growing number of women perform same-sex eroticism for the viewing benefit of men; and recent clinical studies label 40 percent of women as sexually dysfunctional. Caught between postsexual revolution celebrations of progress and alarmingly regressive new modes of disempowerment, the forty women interviewed in Performing Sex offer a candid and provocative portrait of liberated sex in America. Through this nuanced and complex study, Breanne Fahs demonstrates that despite the constant cooptation of the terms of sexual freedom, women s sexual subjectivities and the ways they continually grapple with shifting definitions of liberation represent provocative spaces for critical inquiry and personal discovery, ultimately generating novel ways of imagining and reimagining power, pleasure, and resistance."

Moving from viruses, vaccines, and copycat murder to gay panics, xenophobia, and psychopaths, Transforming Contagion energetically fuses critical humanities and social science perspectives into a boundary-smashing interdisciplinary collection on contagion. The contributors provocatively suggest contagion to be as full of possibilities for revolution and resistance as it is for the descent into madness, malice, and extensive state control. The infectious practices rooted in politics, film, psychological exchanges, social movements, the classroom, and the circulation of a literary text or meme on social media compellingly reveal patterns that emerge in those attempts to re-route, quarantine, define, or even exacerbate various contagions.

Although conventional wisdom holds that women in the United States today are more sexually liberated than ever before, a number of startling statistics call into question this perceived victory: over half of all women report having faked orgasms; 45 percent of women find rape fantasies erotic; a growing number of women perform same-sex eroticism for the viewing benefit of men; and recent clinical studies label 40 percent of women as sexually dysfunctional. Caught between postsexual revolution celebrations of progress and alarmingly regressive new modes of disempowerment, the forty women interviewed in Performing Sex offer a candid and provocative portrait of liberated sex in America. Through this nuanced and complex study, Breanne Fahs demonstrates that despite the constant cooptation of the terms of sexual freedom, women s sexual subjectivities and the ways they continually grapple with shifting definitions of liberation represent provocative spaces for critical inquiry and personal discovery, ultimately generating novel ways of imagining and reimagining power, pleasure, and resistance."