View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.In this dynamic legal context the publication of Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini''s Love the Sin offers a smart, but controversial, intervention. -- Journal of the American Academy of ReligionImportant... a fresh way to argue for gay rights and sexual freedom.--Boston PhoenixLove the Sin is a progressive contribution to discussions about sexual and religious freedom in a country where we find less of both than most politicians, religious thinkers, media moralists, and average Americans want to admit.--Gay TodayA brilliant book, one that can move public conversations about sexual, racial, and religious difference beyond present assumptions and impasses. Love the Sin suggests that religion can become the ground for sexual freedom rather than the justification for sexual repression.--Margaret R. Miles, author of Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the MoviesThis impressive book provides analytical and strategic insights on the central obstacle to gay and lesbian freedom today: sexuality''s treatment by religion. The authors'' accessible voice, wide-ranging and original synthesis, and deep knowledge make the experience of reading this book a pleasure.--Urvashi Vaid, former director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy InstituteJakobsen and Pellegrini argue convincingly that movements for ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual justice would be well served by using the paradigm of religious freedom instead of biological determinism to make the case for social change. Love the Sin is required reading for all the sinners to whom the title euphemistically refers, and for everyone who dreams of a more just society.--RabbiRebecca Alpert, author of Like Bread on the Seder PlateGives us vital language to escape both the trap of toleration and the seduction of assimilation. Not afraid to challenge the certainties of the secular left on religion, nor willing to settle for a narrow version of gay and lesbian rights, Love the Sin presents a new vision of American sexual and religious freedom.--Laura Levitt, Director of Jewish Studies, Temple UniversityAs ambitious, feisty, and exciting as any new passion, Love the Sin takes its readers on a compelling ride across the volatile landscape of religion and sex in American public life. The authors not only provoke and stimulate, guide and elucidate, but they redefine freedom and democracy as values for our sex lives as well as our sexual politics.--Lisa Duggan, coauthor of Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political CultureJakobsen and Pellegrini do a nice job of showing how the love-the-sinner/hate-the- sin tradition falls dramatically short of the higher aspiration to tolerance.--Stephen Pomper, Washington MonthlyThe authors of this short but succinct study explore the connection between the traditions of Christianity and the political and social regulation of sexuality in America.-- Library JournalLike any trumpet call to pull down the walls, this book serves its purpose by giving the GLBT community a new focus and even a renewed idealism.--The Gay & Lesbian ReviewWe cannot afford to lose the battle for nonpartisan sex education in the schools, sexual freedom for all citizens or a host of other endangered human rights. Love the Sin is essential reading for anyone who cares about these issues.--Women''s Review of BooksLove the Sin is a book that is relevant for anyoneinterested in sexology, religion, and politics. It has the potential to provoke and important dialogue amoung religious institutions, politicians at every level of government, community leader, and families about what it means to live up to the American ideal. -- Journal of History of SexualitySex. Religion. There is no denying that these two subjects are among the most provocative in American public life. Even the constitutional principle of church-state separation seems to give way when it comes to sex: the Supreme Court draws on theology as readily as it draws on cas

Performance Anxieties looks at the on-going debates over the value of psychoanalysis for feminist theory and politics--specifically concerning the social and psychical meanings of racialization. Beginning with an historicized return to Freud and the meaning of Jewishness in Freud's day, Ann Pellegrini indicates how "race" and racialization are not incidental features of psychoanalysis or of modern subjectivity, but are among the generative conditions of both.
Performance Anxieties stages a series of playful encounters between elite and popular performance texts--Freud meets Sarah Bernhardt meets Sandra Bernhard; Joan Riviere's masquerading women are refigured in relation to the hard female bodies in the film Pumping Iron II: The Women; and the Terminator and Alien films. In re-reading psychoanalysis alongside other performance texts, Pellegrini unsettles relations between popular and elite, performance and performative.

At a time when secularism is put forward as the answer to religious fundamentalism and violence, Secularisms offers a powerful, multivoiced critique of the narrative equating secularism with modernity, reason, freedom, peace, and progress. Bringing together essays by scholars based in religious studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, science studies, anthropology, and political science, this volume challenges the binary conception of "conservative" religion versus "progressive" secularism. With essays addressing secularism in India, Iran, Turkey, Great Britain, China, and the United States, this collection crucially complicates the dominant narrative by showing that secularism is multifaceted. How secularism is lived and experienced varies with its national, regional, and religious context. The essays explore local secularisms in relation to religious traditions ranging from Islam to Judaism, Hinduism to Christianity. Several contributors explicitly take up the way feminism has been implicated in the dominant secularization story. Ultimately, by dislodging secularism's connection to the single (and singular) progress narrative, this volume seeks to open spaces for other possible narratives about both secularism and religion-as well as for other possible ways of inhabiting the contemporary world. Contributors: Robert J. Baird, Andrew Davison, Tracy Fessenden, Janet R. Jakobsen, Laura Levitt, Molly McGarry, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Taha Parla, Geeta Patel, Ann Pellegrini, Tyler Roberts, Ranu Samantrai, Banu Subramaniam, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Angela Zito

2014 Lambda Literary Award Finalist: LGBT Nonfiction
Breaks down the most commonly held misconceptions about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their lives
In ""You Can Tell Just by Looking"" three scholars and activists come together to unpack enduring, popular, and deeply held myths about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, culture, and life in America. Myths, such as "All Religions Condemn Homosexuality" and "Transgender People Are Mentally Ill," have been used to justify discrimination and oppression of LGBT people. Others, such as "Homosexuals Are Born That Way," have been embraced by LGBT communities and their allies. In discussing and dispelling these myths--including gay-positive ones--the authors challenge readers to question their own beliefs and to grapple with the complexities of what it means to be queer in the broadest social, political, and cultural sense.

A 10th anniversary edition of this field defining work-an intellectual inspiration for a generation of LGBTQ scholars Cruising Utopia arrived in 2009 to insist that queerness must be reimagined as a futurity-bound phenomenon, an insistence on the potentiality of another world that would crack open the pragmatic present. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Jose Esteban Munoz argued that the here and now were not enough and issued an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination. On the anniversary of its original publication, this edition includes two essays that extend and expand the project of Cruising Utopia, as well as a new foreword by the current editors of Sexual Cultures, the book series he co-founded with Ann Pellegrini 20 years ago. This 10th anniversary edition celebrates the lasting impact that Cruising Utopia has had on the decade of queer of color critique that followed and introduces a new generation of readers to a future not yet here.

In this powerful and timely book, Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini make a solid case for loving the sinner and the sin. Rejecting both religious conservatives' arguments for sexual regulation and liberal views that advocate tolerance, the authors argue for and realistically envision true sexual and religious freedom in this country. With a new preface addressing recent events, "Love the Sin" provides activists and others with a strong tool to use in their fight for freedom.

The essays in this volume boldly map the historically resonant intersections between Jewishness and queerness, between homophobia and anti-Semitism, and between queer theory and theorizations of Jewishness. With important essays by such well-known figures in queer and gender studies as Judith Butler, Daniel Boyarin, Marjorie Garber, Michael Moon, and Eve Sedgwick, this book is not so much interested in revealing -- outing -- "queer Jews" as it is in exploring the complex social arrangements and processes through which modern Jewish and homosexual identities emerged as traces of each other during the last two hundred years.

A 10th anniversary edition of this field defining work—an intellectual inspiration for a generation of LGBTQ scholars Cruising Utopia arrived in 2009 to insist that queerness must be reimagined as a futurity-bound phenomenon, an insistence on the potentiality of another world that would crack open the pragmatic present. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, José Esteban Muñoz argued that the here and now were not enough and issued an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination. On the anniversary of its original publication, this edition includes two essays that extend and expand the project of Cruising Utopia, as well as a new foreword by the current editors of Sexual Cultures, the book series he co-founded with Ann Pellegrini 20 years ago. This 10th anniversary edition celebrates the lasting impact that Cruising Utopia has had on the decade of queer of color critique that followed and introduces a new generation of readers to a future not yet here.

The essays in this volume boldly map the historically resonant intersections between Jewishness and queerness, between homophobia and anti-Semitism, and between queer theory and theorizations of Jewishness. With important essays by such well-known figures in queer and gender studies as Judith Butler, Daniel Boyarin, Marjorie Garber, Michael Moon, and Eve Sedgwick, this book is not so much interested in revealing -- outing -- "queer Jews" as it is in exploring the complex social arrangements and processes through which modern Jewish and homosexual identities emerged as traces of each other during the last two hundred years.