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The past fifty years are conventionally understood to have witnessed an uninterrupted expansion of sexual rights and liberties in the United States. This state-of-the-art collection tells a different story: while progress has been made in marriage equality, reproductive rights, access to birth control, and other areas, government and civil society are waging a war on stigmatized sex by means of law, surveillance, and social control. The contributors document the history and operation of sex offender registries and the criminalization of HIV, as well as highly punitive measures against sex work that do more to harm women than to combat human trafficking. They reveal that sex crimes are punish...
From the very beginning of the epidemic, AIDS was linked to punishment. Calls to punish people living with HIV—mostly stigmatized minorities—began before doctors had even settled on a name for the disease. Punitive attitudes toward AIDS prompted lawmakers around the country to introduce legislation aimed at criminalizing the behaviors of people living with HIV. Punishing Disease explains how this happened—and its consequences. With the door to criminalizing sickness now open, what other ailments will follow? As lawmakers move to tack on additional diseases such as hepatitis and meningitis to existing law, the question is more than academic.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth are disproportionately represented in the U.S. youth homelessness population. In Coming Out to the Streets, Brandon Andrew Robinson examines their lives. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in central Texas, Coming Out to the Streets looks into the LGBTQ youth's lives before they experience homelessness—within their families, schools, and other institutions—and later when they navigate the streets, deal with police, and access shelters and other services. Through this documentation, Brandon Andrew Robinson shows how poverty and racial inequality shape the ways that the LGBTQ youth negotiate their gender and sexuality before and while they are experiencing homelessness. To address LGBTQ youth homelessness, Robinson contends that solutions must move beyond blaming families for rejecting their child. In highlighting the voices of the LGBTQ youth, Robinson calls for queer and trans liberation through systemic change.
Hatred of Sex links Jacques Rancière's political philosophy of the constitutive disorder of democracy with Jean Laplanche's identification of a fundamental perturbation at the heart of human sexuality. Sex is hated as well as desired, Oliver Davis and Tim Dean contend, because sexual intensity impedes coherent selfhood and undermines identity, rendering us all a little more deplorable than we might wish. Davis and Dean explore the consequences of this conflicted dynamic across a range of fields and institutions, including queer studies, attachment theory, the #MeToo movement, and "traumatology," demonstrating how hatred of sex has been optimized and exploited by neoliberalism. Advancing strong claims about sex, pleasure, power, intersectionality, therapy, and governance, Davis and Dean shed new light on enduring questions of equality at a historical moment when democracy appears ever more precarious.
Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people’s lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined for us, the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs down our spine at the mere thought of him or her. Yet, a culture that has so much to say about love is virtually silent on the no less mysterious moments when we avoid falling in love, where we fall out of love, when the one who kept us awake at night now leaves us indifferent, or when we hurry away from those who excited us a few months or even a few hours before. In The End of Love, Eva Illouz documents the multifarious ways in which relationships e...
Celebrities in the United States have drawn significant attention and resources to the complex issue of human trafficking--a subject of feminist concern--and they are often criticized for promoting sensationalized and simplistic understandings of the issue. In this comprehensive analysis of celebrities' anti-trafficking activism, however, Samantha Majic finds that this phenomenon is more nuanced: even as some celebrities promote regressive issue narratives and carceral solutions, others use their platforms to elevate more diverse representations of human trafficking and feminist analyses of gender inequality. Lights, Camera, Feminism? thus argues that we should understand celebrities as multilevel political actors whose activism is shaped and mediated by a range of personal and contextual factors, with implications for feminist and democratic politics more broadly.
This provocative collection showcases the work of emerging and established sociologists in the fields of sexuality and gender studies as they reflect on what it means to develop, practice, and teach queer methods. Located within the critical conversation about the possibilities and challenges of utilizing insights from humanistic queer epistemologies in social scientific research, Other, Please Specify presents to a new generation of researchers an array of experiences, insights, and approaches, revealing the power of investigations of the social world. With contributions from sociologists who have helped define queer studies and who use a range of interpretative and statistical methods, this volume offers methodological advice and practical strategies in research design and execution, all with the intent of getting queer research off the ground and building a collaborative community within this emerging subfield.
In the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration, The Feminist and the Sex Offender makes a powerful feminist case for accountability without punishment and sexual safety and pleasure without injustice. With analytical clarity and narrative force, The Feminist and the Sex Offender contends with two problems that are typically siloed in the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration: sexual and gender violence, on the one hand, and the state’s unjust, ineffective, and soul-destroying response to it on the other. Is it possible to confront the culture of abuse? Is it possible to hold harm-doers accountable without recourse to a criminal justice system that redoubles injuries, fails survivors, and retrenches the conditions that made such abuse possible? Drawing on interviews, extensive research, reportage, and history, The Feminist and the Sex Offender develops an intersectional feminist approach to ending sexual violence. It maps with considerable detail the unjust sex offender regime while highlighting the alternatives we urgently need.
Revisits the sex wars of the 1970s and ’80s and examines their influence on how we think about sexual harm in the #MeToo era #MeToo’s stunning explosion on social media in October 2017 radically changed—and amplified—conversations about sexual violence as it revealed how widespread the issue is and toppled prominent celebrities and politicians. But, as the movement spread, a conflict emerged among feminist supporters and detractors about how punishment should be doled out and how justice should be served. The New Sex Wars reveals that these clashes are nothing new. Delving into the contentious debates from the ’70s and ‘80s, Brenda Cossman traces the striking echoes in the femini...
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people have established gathering spaces to find acceptance, form social networks, and unify to resist oppression. Framing the emergence of queer enclaves in reference to place, this volume explores the physical and symbolic spaces of LGBTQ Americans. Authors provide an overview of the concept of “place” and its role in informing identity formation and community building. The book also includes interactive project prompts, providing opportunities to practically apply topics and theories discussed in the chapters.