When Camille Melissa emigrated to the UK from Australia via Paris and entered the sex industry in 2005, she always knew that photography would play a crucial role as she navigated the complex structures – both visible and invisible – of this misrepresented community. The rhetoric surrounding sex work is often frustratingly one-dimensional in mainstream media; those who enter the industry are somehow ‘damaged’, labourers of the patriarchy, powerless individuals who need saving from themselves. Sex work activists continue to challenge the victim narrative forced upon them, across politics, film and art. Camille is one such activist. She started her online platform Whoretography as a way of examining the intersection of images, technologies, society and the sex workers’ rights movement. As ‘a visual activist platform and a sex work positive publishing house’, Whoretography seeks to answer two fundamental questions: Is it possible to reclaim the word ‘whore’ through creative practice as research? What role does photography play in contemporary online sexual consumption? “The easy availability of information on the internet has revolutionised the industry’s marketing techniques and its verbal and visual vocabulary,” Camille says, “Digital photographs are now fundamental to the transaction of sex. Photography needs to form a greater part of the sex work discussion; I have learned how negatively impactful photography can be in presenting sex workers as different from and less than other people.” Camille's Twitter handle is @Whoretography and her website with more information about her ebooks is https://thephotographictheoris... and will be online from May Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is not a comprehensive study of every sexual quirk, kink and ritual across all cultures throughout time, as that would entail writing an encyclopaedia. Rather, this is a drop in the ocean, a paddle in the shallow end of sex history, but I hope you will get pleasantly wet nonetheless. The act of sex has not changed since people first worked out what went where, but the ways in which society dictates how sex is culturally understood and performed have varied significantly through the ages. Humans are the only creatures that stigmatise particular sexual practices, and sex remains a deeply divisive issue around the world. Attitudes will change and grow - hopefully for the better - but sex will never be free of stigma or shame unless we acknowledge where it has come from.  Drawing upon extensive research from Dr Kate Lister's Whores of Yore website and written with her distinctive humour and wit, A Curious History of Sex (Unbound, 2020) covers topics ranging from twentieth- century testicle thefts to Victorian doctors massaging the pelvises of their female patients, from smutty bread innuendos dating back to AD 79, to the new and controversial sex doll brothels. It is peppered with surprising and informative historical slang and illustrated by eye-opening, toe- curling and hilarious images. In this fascinating book, Lister deftly debunks myths and stereotypes and gives unusual sexual practices an historical framework, as she provides valuable context for issues facing people today, including gender, sexual shame, beauty and language. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Within queer, transgender, and Latinx and Chicanx cultural politics, brown transgender narratives are frequently silenced and erased. Brown trans subjects are treated as deceptive, unnatural, nonexistent, or impossible, their bodies, lives, and material circumstances represented through tropes and used as metaphors. Restoring personhood and agency to these subjects, Francisco J. Galarte advances “brown trans figuration” as a theoretical framework to describe how transness and brownness coexist within the larger queer, trans, and Latinx historical experiences. Brown Trans Figurations: Rethinking Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies (University of Texas Press, 2021) presents a collection of representations that reveal the repression of brown trans narratives and make that repression visible and palpable. Galarte examines the violent deaths of two transgender Latinas and the corresponding narratives that emerged about their lives, analyzes the invisibility of brown transmasculinity in Chicana feminist works, and explores how issues such as immigration rights activism can be imagined as part of an LGBTQ rights-based political platform. This book considers the contexts in which brown trans narratives appear, how they circulate, and how they are reproduced in politics, sexual cultures, and racialized economies. Francisco J. Galarte is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of New Mexico where he teaches courses in Chicanx, Latinx and transgender studies. John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. Website: Johnmarszalek3.comTwitter: @marsjf3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are joined today by Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa in the writers’ heaven that is Iowa City, Iowa. She also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Gender, Women’s Studies, and Sexuality Studies at Iowa. She is here today to talk to us about her upcoming book: Me Too: The Impact of Rape Culture in the Media (Polity Press, 2021). Professor Durham is the author of the quite famous The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It (Overlook Press, 2008) and Technosex: Precarious Corporealities, Mediated Sexualities, and the Ethics of Embodied Technics (Palgrave 2016) – both of which address modern, mass media explorations of the sexuality and gender. In the wake of the MeToo movement, revelations of sexual assault and harassment continue to disrupt sexual politics across the globe. Reports of recurrent and widespread misconduct - in workplaces from doctors' offices to factory floors - are precipitating firings, legal actions, street protests, and policy punditry. Meenakshi Gigi Durham situates media culture as a place in which these broader social struggles are enacted and reproduced. The media figures whose depravity sparked the #MeToo movement are symbolic markers of the complexities of sexual desire and consent. Pop culture sparks controversies about rape culture; social media users have launched feminist resistance that turned to real-world activism; investigative journalists have broken stories of assault, offering a platform for survivors to speak truth to patriarchal power. Arguing that the media are a linchpin in these events, Durham provides a feminist account of the interrelated contexts of media production, representation, and reception. She situates media as the key site where the establishment of sexuality and social relations takes place and traces the media's powerful role in both reifying and challenging rape culture. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century, (The Ohio State University Press, 2020), Alyson K. Spurgas, Ph.D. examines the “new science of female sexuality” from a critical, sociological perspective, considering how today’s feminist-identified sex researchers study and manage women with low desire. Diagnosing Desire investigates experimental sex research that measures the disconnect between subjective and genital female arousal, contemporary psychiatric diagnoses for low female desire, new models for understanding women’s sexual response, and cutting-edge treatments for low desire in women—including from the realms of mindfulness and alternative healing. Spurgas makes the case that, together, all of these technologies create a “feminized responsive desire framework” for understanding women’s sexuality, and that this, in fact, produces women’s sexuality as a complex problem to be solved. The biggest problem, Spurgas argues, is that gendered and sexualized trauma—including as it is produced within techno-scientific medicine itself—is too often ignored in contemporary renderings. Through incisive textual analysis and in-depth qualitative research based on interviews with women with low desire, Spurgas argues for a more radical and communal form of care for feminized—and traumatized—populations, in opposition to biopolitical mandates to individualize and neo-liberalize forms of self-care. Ultimately, this is a book not just about a specific diagnosis or dysfunction but about the material-discursive regimes that produce and regulate femininity. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent study, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant”, was published in Gender Issues Journal. His interests include the sociology of art and culture, sociology of death and dying, and sociology of sex and gender. More can be found about Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. by going to his website, Google Scholar, following him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or emailing him at johnstonmo at wmpenn dot edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s interview on New Books in History is with Dr. Marta Vicente, Professor of History at the University of Kansas to talk about her 2017 Cambridge University Press release, Debating Sex and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Spain. Eighteenth-century debates continue to set the terms of modern-day discussions on how ‘nature and nurture’ shape sex and gender. Current dialogs – from the tension between ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ bodies, to how nature and society shape sexual difference – date back to the early modern period. Debating Sex and Gender is an innovative study of the creation of a two=sex modern of human sexuality based on different genitalia within Spain, reflecting the enlightened quest to promote social reproduction and stability. Drawing on primary sources such as medical treatises and legal literature, Vicente traces the lives of individuals whose ambiguous sex and gender made them examples for physicians, legislators, and educators for how nature, family upbringing, education, and the social environment shaped an individual’s sex. This book brings together insights form the histories of sexuality, medicine, and the law to shed new light on this timely and important field of study. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020), Dr. Kim Gallon examines how Black newspaper editors and journalists created and fostered Black sexual publics during the 1920s and 1930s. She demonstrates that editors strategically elected to publish stories about marital scandals, divorces, homosexuality, and gender non-conformity, imagining that this coverage was a source of pleasure and debate for Black readers. Gallon argues that this editorial practice actually exposed class, gender, and sexuality divisions between different groups of African Americans. At the same time, this coverage revealed the tenuous position of lesbians, gay men, and female impersonators in a public sphere that sometimes silenced and marginalized their voices. Along with advancing racial solidarity, which Gallon takes as the Black presses’ starting point, the press revealed the diversity of Black people and created a discursive space in which sexual knowledge was produced, debated, and enjoyed.  To learn more about Professor Gallon’s digital scholarship and stay informed about how her work is meeting the demands of our moment, follow @BlackDigitalHum and @COVIDBlk on Twitter. Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020), Roland Betancourt reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval thought and visual culture around matters of sexual and reproductive consent, bullying and slut-shaming, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, trans and nonbinary gender identities, and the depiction of racialized minorities. Betancourt explores these issues in the context of the Byzantine Empire, using sources from late antiquity and early Christianity up to the early modern period. Highlighting nuanced and strikingly modern approaches by medieval writers, philosophers, theologians, and doctors, the book offers a new history of gender, sexuality, and race. Weaving together art, literature, and an impressive array of texts, Betancourt investigates depictions of sexual consent in images of the Virgin Mary, tactics of sexual shaming in the story of Empress Theodora, narratives of transgender monks, portrayals of same-gender desire in images of the Doubting Thomas, and stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in representations of the Ethiopian Eunuch. He also gathers evidence from medical manuals detailing everything from surgical practices for late terminations of pregnancy to a host of procedures used to affirm a person’s gender. Showing how understandings of gender, sexuality, and race have long been enmeshed, Byzantine Intersectionality offers a groundbreaking look at the culture of the medieval world.  Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today, author Mithu Sanyal, describes the topic of rape as a ‘cultural sore spot,’ one that requires yet eludes wide conversation. Her latest book, Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo (Verso, 2019), bravely starts this conversation. It covers the history of rape as well as of our divergent and misguided conceptions for it, and it addresses the topic’s intersection with matters of gender stereotypes and racism. We unpack these topics in our interview, along with the psychological phenomena undergirding conflicts over consent and body sovereignty. This episode will be of interest for anyone interested in the problems of sexual violence and gender bias. Mithu Sanyal is an award-winning broadcaster, academic, and author based in Dusseldorf. Her prior book, Vulva, has been translated into five languages. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah Hines (Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Oklahoma) and James Cane-Carrasco (Associate Professor, Departments of History and International & Area Studies, University of Oklahoma) speak with Lessie Jo Frazier (Professor, Departments of Gender Studies and American Studies, Indiana University-Bloomington) about her new book,  Desired States: Sex, Gender, and Political Culture in Chile (Rutgers UP, 2020). In a powerful refutation to scholars who relegate gendered social order and sexuality to the private sphere, Lessie Jo Frazier contends that desire played a central role in the political culture of the modern Chilean state. In four chapters and an epilogue that span 1913 to 2019, Prof. Frazier documents how public debates over sexuality—including those over working women’s behavior, the vulnerability of male prisoners of war, and socialist masculinities—have long shaped the body politic. Frazier unites ethnographic fieldwork, cultural criticism, and extensive archival research to highlight how states and political movements conjure or condemn people’s desires for institutional purposes. Join us for a conversation about the serendipity that brought her to research in Chile, and the diverse influences that shaped this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tom Rastrelli is a survivor of clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse who then became a priest in the early days of the Catholic Church’s ongoing scandals. Confessions of a Gay Priest: A Memoir of Sex, Love, Abuse, and Scandal in the Catholic Seminary (University of Iowa Press, 2020) divulges the clandes­tine inner workings of the seminary, providing an intimate and unapologetic look into the psychosexual and spiritual dynamics of celibacy and lays bare the “formation” system that perpetuates the cycle of abuse and cover-up that continues today. Under the guidance of a charismatic college campus minister, Rastrelli sought to reconcile his homosexuality and childhood sexual abuse. When he felt called to the priesthood, Rastrelli be­gan the process of “priestly discernment.” Priests welcomed him into a confusing clerical culture where public displays of piety, celibacy, and homophobia masked a closeted underworld in which elder priests preyed upon young recruits. From there he ventured deeper into the seminary system seeking healing, hoping to help others, and striving not to live a double life. Trained to treat sexuality like an addiction, he and his brother seminarians lived in a world of cliques, competition, self-loathing, alcohol, hidden crushes, and closeted sex. Ultimately, the “for­mation” intended to make Rastrelli a compliant priest helped to liberate him. Tom Rastrelli is director of digital communications at Willamette University. He lives in Salem, Oregon. John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. Website: Johnmarszalek3.com. Twitter: @marsjf3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ellen Lamont's new book The Mating Game: How Gender Still Shapes How We Date (University of California Press, 2020) offers an in-depth analysis of how gender shapes dating practices. Despite enormous changes in patterns of dating and courtship in twenty-first-century America, contemporary understandings of romance and intimacy remain firmly rooted in age-old assumptions of gender difference. These tenacious beliefs now vie with cultural messages of gender equality that stress independence, self-development, and egalitarian practices in public and private life. Through interviews with heterosexual and LGBTQ individuals, Ellen Lamont’s The Mating Game explores how people with diverse sexualities and gender identities date, form romantic relationships, and make decisions about future commitments as they negotiate uncertain terrain fraught with competing messages about gender, sexuality, and intimacy. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at [email protected] or [email protected]. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: dating, sex and single students on evangelical campuses, and a discussion of the book From Single to Serious. Our guest is: Dr. Dana M. Malone. She a higher ed scholar and practitioner energized by facilitating meaningful learning experiences for students and educators alike. Currently an Independent Scholar, she writes, teaches, and works with institutions on a contract basis. Her specialty areas include student cultures, the intersection of gender, intimate relationships, and religious identities as well as student success, assessment planning, and program evaluation. She’s the co-host of The Academic Life channel on New Books Network. She supports her work-life balance by making delicious healthy foods, spending time at the Jersey Shore, and doing yoga. Your host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. She met Dana Malone when she interviewed her for the NBN Gender Channel about her new book From Single to Serious. They stayed in touch after the interview, and over the following weeks worked together to develop and launch The Academic Life channel for NBN. They have been friends and TAL co-hosts ever since. Christina supports her work-life balance with long daily walks, and her love of photography, which you can find on Getty Images/iStock, and in galleries, and here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Judith G. Coffin discovered a virtually unexplored treasure trove of letters to Simone de Beauvoir from Beauvoir's international readers, it inspired Coffin to explore the intimate bond between the famed author and her reading public. This correspondence, at the heart of Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir (Cornell UP, 2020), immerses us in the tumultuous decades from the late 1940s to the 1970s—from the painful aftermath of World War II to the horror and shame of French colonial brutality in Algeria and through the dilemmas and exhilarations of the early gay liberation and feminist movements. The letters also provide a glimpse into the power of reading and the power of readers to seduce their favorite authors. Sex, Love, and Letters lays bare the private lives and political emotions of the letter writers and of Beauvoir herself. Her readers did not simply pen fan letters but, as Coffin shows, engaged in a dialogue that revealed intellectual and literary life to be a joint and collaborative production. "This must happen to you often, doesn't it?" wrote one. "That people write to you and tell you about their lives?" Judith G. Coffin is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches modern European history, including courses on the French Revolution, World Wars 1 and 2, Postwar Europe as well as courses on gender and sexuality. She has written The Politics of Women’s Work: The Paris Garment Trades (Princeton UP, 1996), the modern half of W.W. Norton’s Western Civilizations (New York, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2011) and a series of articles from her book. “Historicizing The Second Sex,” French Politics, Culture & Society 25, 3 (Winter 2007); “Beauvoir, Kinsey, and Mid-Century Sex,” French Politics, Culture, and Society 28, 2 (summer, 2010); “Opinion and Desire: Polling Women in Postwar France” in Kerstin Bruckweh, ed. The Voice of the Citizen Consumer (Oxford University Press, 2011); and "Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir," American Historical Review October, 2010. She is also writing about the histories of psychoanalysis and radio (“The Adventure of the Interior: Menie Grégoire’s Radio Broadcasts.”), and has taught graduate classes in the history of radio, publicity, and privacy. She lived three years in Paris, got her PhD at Yale, taught at Harvard and UC Riverside; she's been a fellow at NYU and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; her husband is Professor and Dean for Research at the UT School of Law; her children are in their twenties, and she is happiest in the winter in Austin and when visiting the Hill Country. Julia Gossard is Assistant Professor of History at Utah State University and learned quite a bit about gender, psychoanalysis, and feminist studies from Judy as a student at UT-Austin   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sex, drugs, religion, and love are potent combinations in la zona, a regulated prostitution zone in the city of Reynosa, across the border from Hidalgo, Texas. During the years 2008 and 2009, a time of intense drug violence, Sarah Luna met and built relationships with two kinds of migrants, women who moved from rural Mexico to Reynosa to become sex workers and American missionaries who moved from the United States to forge a fellowship with those workers. Luna examines the entanglements, both intimate and financial, that define their lives. Using the concept of obligar, she delves into the connections that tie sex workers to their families, their clients, their pimps, the missionaries, and the drug dealers—and to the guilt, power, and comfort of faith. Love in the Drug War: Selling Sex and Finding Jesus on the Mexico-US Border (University of Texas Press, 2020) scrutinizes not only la zona and the people who work to survive there, but also Reynosa itself—including the influences of the United States—adding nuance and new understanding to the current Mexico-US border crisis. The book has been recently awarded the 2020 Ruth Benedict Prize by the Association for Queer Anthropology for its “vibrant ethnographic detail and deft work across conceptual fields.” This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.” Sarah Luna is the Kathryn A. McCarthy Assistant Professor in Women's Studies in the Department of Anthropology and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Tufts University, with a focus on issues of sexual labor, migration, race, borderlands, and queer studies. Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured on City & Society, entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography, and Anthropology News.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why are Americans, and American politicians more specifically, obsessed with sex? Why, in the words of Janet Jakobsen, are gender and sexuality such riveting public policy concerns the United States? In The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics (NYU Press, 2020), Jakobsen answers this question by breaking apart the standard narrative that religion is primarily responsible for the moral regulation of sexuality. Instead of viewing religion as the devil of the story, Jakobsen proposes taking a kaleidoscopic approach to better understand the dynamics of sexual politics. Using this approach, Jakobsen analyzes sex when it is the focus of the discussion and demonstrates how sex remains consequential even when it appears to be on the periphery. Jakobsen’s kaleidoscopic approach allows the reader to see the complex dynamics of sexual politics and challenges the assumption that religion is the basis for sexual values. Janet Jakobsen is Claire Tow Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Young women and men sought out each other’s company in the workshops, cabarets, and streets of Old Regime Lyon, and evidence of these relationships lingers in documents and material objects conserved in Lyon’s municipal and departmental archives. How did young workers spend time together? When would they initiate sexual relationships outside of marriage? What resources did they marshal to manage pregnancy and childbirth, and what kind of support might they expect from their neighbors, employers, and families? In paternity suits, young women provided direct answers to these questions, and left an incomparable archive testifying to their desires, hopes, loss, and often, grief resulting from “courtships gone awry.” Today I spoke with Julie Hardwick about her new book Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789 (Oxford UP, 2020). Hardwick is the John E. Green Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Hardwick’s previous books include Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economy of Everyday Life in Early Modern France (2009) and The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (1998). Jennifer J. Davis is Co-Editor, Journal of Women’s History and Associate Professor, University of Oklahoma. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. In Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton UP, 2020), Durba Mitra shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. Bringing together vast archival materials from diverse disciplines, Mitra reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women’s performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. Mitra demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women’s sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, Indian Sex Life overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality. Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

College students hook up and have sex. That is what many students expect to happen during their time at university—it is part of growing up and navigating the relationship scene on most American campuses today. But what do you do when you’re a student at an evangelical university? Students at these schools must negotiate a barrage of religiously imbued undercurrents that impact how they think about relationships, in addition to how they experience and evaluate them. As they work to form successful unions, students at evangelical colleges balance sacred ideologies of purity, holiness, and godliness, while also dealing with more mainstream notions of popularity, the online world, and the appeal of sexual intimacy. In From Single to Serious: Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses (Rutgers University Press), Dana M. Malone shines a light on friendship, dating, and, sexuality, in both the ideals and the practical experiences of heterosexual students at U. S. evangelical colleges. She examines the struggles they have in balancing their gendered and religious presentations of self, the expectations of their campus community, and their desire to find meaningful romantic relationships. Dana Malone is an independent scholar and consultant in the Philadelphia area. Dr. Christina Gessler in an independent scholar, with a background in American women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural American women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joan Riviere (1883-1962) is best known for her role in promoting the ideas of others. She came to prominence in the world of psychoanalysis as Freud’s favorite translator and Melanie Klein’s earliest and most loyal supporter. In her new book The Life and Work of Joan Riviere: Freud, Klein and Female Sexuality (Routledge, 2018), Marion Bower puts Joan Riviere herself, the woman and the psychoanalyst, in the spotlight. She shows how Riviere made use of the latest psychoanalytic ideas in a highly creative and original way, expressing herself with clarity and emotional depth in seminal works about the inner life of female sexuality and treatment impasses. She was able to draw from a lifetime of challenging and fruitful experiences. After a childhood rife with emotional neglect, she stepped into the rich ferment of the dying Victorian era and came in touch with major progressive forces of the time like the suffragettes and the Society for Psychical Research. As a dressmaker’s apprentice, she was among the first wave of women entering the work force. When the shifting soil of her childhood proved unstable, she entered analysis with Ernest Jones and, after becoming an analyst, with Freud himself. This personal connection proved fortuitous to the newly formed British Psychoanalytic Society, as it provided a solid anchor against the dividing drift between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Bower paints an intimate portrait of a woman with a stern and sometimes vitriolic public persona and a shy and fragile personality that was saved by her involvement in psychoanalysis. In her best moments she was able to bridge that gap in her psychoanalytic writing, revealing herself through her theoretical musings. Marion Bower has trained as a teacher, social worker and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She has worked for many years in the child mental health services, including the Tavistock Clinic, and has edited and co-edited four books on various applications of psychoanalysis. She is currently co-editing a book on sexual exploitation. Sebastian Thrul is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in training in Germany and Switzerland. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Hindu tradition has held conflicting views on womanhood from its earliest texts—holding women aloft as goddesses to be worshipped on the one hand and remaining deeply suspicious about women’s sexuality on the other. In Woman as Fire, Woman as Sage: Sexual Ideology in the Mahabharata (SUNY Press, 2008), Arti Dhand examines the religious premises upon which Hindu ideas of sexuality and women are constructed. The work focuses on the great Hindu epic, the Mahābhārata, a text that not only reflects the cogitations of a momentous period in Hindu history, but also was critical in shaping the future of Hinduism. Dhand proposes that the epic’s understanding of womanhood cannot be isolated from the broader religious questions that were debated at the time, and that the formation of a sexual ideology is one element in crafting a coherent religious framework for Hinduism. Today we speak with Arti Dhand on her teaching, her research on the Hindu epics and her exciting new podcast on the Mahābhārata! For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The sexual landscape has changed dramatically in the past few decades, with the meaning of gender and sexuality now being parsed within the realms of gender fluidity, nonheteronormative sexuality, BDSM, and polyamory. The sea change in sexual attitudes has also made room for the mainstreaming of internet pornography and the use of virtual reality for sexual pleasure – and the tech gurus have not even scratched the surface when it comes to mining the possibilities of alternative realities. In The New Sexual Landscape and Contemporary Psychoanalysis (Confer Books, 2020), Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco survey modern sex culture and suggests ways psychoanalysis can update its theories and practice to meet the novel needs of today’s generations; at the same time, paying special attention to technology, which is augmenting and expanding sexual and gender possibilities. The authors consider how sexuality and bonding in this brave new world are best suited to meet our psychoanalytic needs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Under dictatorship in Argentina, sex and sexuality were regulated to the point where sex education, explicit images, and even suggestive material were prohibited. With the return to democracy in 1983, Argentines experienced new freedoms, including sexual freedoms. The explosion of the availability and ubiquity of sexual material became known as the destape, and it uncovered sexuality in provocative ways. This was a mass-media phenomenon, but it went beyond this. In ¡Destape! Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictatorial Argentina (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), Natalia Milanesio shows that the destape was a profound transformation of the way Argentines talked, understood, and experienced sexuality, a change in manners, morals, and personal freedoms. Candela Marini is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Spanish at MSOE University. You can tweet her and suggest books at @MariniCandela Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Although it has largely been erased from the collective memory of American Christianity, the debate over eugenics was a major factor in the history of 20th-century religious movements, with many churches actively supporting the pseudoscience as a component of the Social Gospel. In Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion (University of California Press, 2020), Dr. Melissa J. Wilde, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, demonstrates that support for contraception among some of America’s most prominent religious groups was tied to white supremacist views of race, immigration, and manifest destiny. We discuss how birth control use and promotion was conceived as a religious duty, how Biblical exegesis was used in support of eugenics, how the fear of “race suicide” motivated predominantly White denominations to limit reproduction among marginalized people, how groups like the Catholics and the Orthodox Jews pushed back against the pro-eugenics tide, the hidden racist legacy of contemporary progressive churches, and the silence that continues to exist around the issue today. Diana Dukhanova received her PhD from Brown University, where she is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavic Studies, in 2018. Her work focuses on gender, religion, and sexuality in Russian religious culture. She is currently at work on her first monograph, Jesus of Bethlehem: Vasily V. Rozanov’s Russian Family Values. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paulo Drinot’s The Sexual Question: A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s-1950s (Cambridge University Press, 2020), studies the interplay of sexuality, society, and the state in Peru in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drinot analyzes the rules and norms that governed prostitution and venereal disease in this period, and tracks how regulation of prostitution was implemented in the early twentieth century, and then seemingly abandoned in the 1950s. Drinot’s story foregrounds the many agents that intervened in this process: prostitutes––or sex workers as we may call them today––but also government officials, physicians, journalists, feminists, among others. Set in a global and comparative framework, this book centers on Peru, a country that came “late” to the regulation of prostitution, and did so under arguments that combined concerns about public health and ideas about proper female and male sexuality. The Sexual Question goes beyond the history of prostitution for it also sheds light on broader processes such as the medicalization of society and the construction of the nation-state in Latin American societies. Race figures prominently in this story: throughout this period, the regulation of prostitution was accompanied by the racialization of disease, and the policing of certain groups deemed especially dangerous or in need of protection (Afro-Peruvians and indigenous groups for example). This is a timely book, not only for those listeners concerned with Latin American history, but also for those who are interested in sexuality, the state, race, and medical history more generally. A must for our listeners! Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

L. L. Wynn’s book Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Egypt: Navigating the Margins of Respectability (University of Texas Press, 2018) is an interrogation of urban life and gendered mobilities in Cairo, Egypt. She discusses categories of kinship, tourism, friendship, love, and sex through the lens of “respectability”; and in the process illustrates how “respectability” itself is an unstable category. Not only does it mean different things to different people, it is also something that people (men and women) don’t inherently possess and with which they must continuously grapple. Methodologically the book delineates the political stakes of writing about these categories in a space like Egypt, especially since the discourses of orientalism that frame these categories have had violent political implications. Wynn also critically positions herself within the text and constantly analyzes her own presence in the “field”. She visibly struggles with the category of “respectability” as it, inconsistently, applies to her. The book’s narrative style and care with which key characters and interlocutors are developed throughout, reiterate Wynn’s dedication to the political stakes of her text. From the antique store owners, workers and tour guides (called tourist hustlers) to belly dancers and university students the ethnography spans a variety of social groups and classes where themes of love, sex, and desire intertwine with the economy such that intimacy and circulation and exchange of money becomes closely tied. These affective and intimate economies become sites of speculating about “respectability” and judging people’s commitment to love. Money is exchanged and circulates just as words do in the form of gossip or the way people “talk” and the urbality of Cairo becomes unimaginable without thinking about love, sex, desire and violence, that co-exist in complex ways. L. L. Wynn is an associate professor and head of the Anthropology Department at Macquarie University. Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, I talk with Pernilla Myrne about her exciting and excellently researched book Female Sexuality in the Early Medieval Islamic World: Gender and Sex in Arabic Literature, published with I. B. Tauris in 2020. Pernilla Myrne is an Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and History at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, where she also earned her PhD in 2008. Her research interests include the representation of women in pre-modern Arabic literature, attitudes to sexuality in medieval Islam, and women as creative subjects. In today’s discussion, Myrne shares with us the origins of her book, some of its findings, and the process of collecting the many, many sources she used to make this book an essential resource of many a thing female sexuality, including pleasure, sexual comedy, and women’s bodies. Among Myrne’s impressive range of sources are medical, Islamic legal, literary, and entertainment sources. Contrary to popular and even scholarly expectations, medieval erotic literature emphasized female sexual satisfaction, including via teaching male readers how precisely to ensure that their female partner reaches an orgasm. Other specific themes we discuss in today’s interview include the Greek influences on Islamic writers writing about sex and sexuality, female desire, the two-seed theory, female orgasm, and lesbian love. The book would be welcome by anyone interested in gender and sexuality, medieval literature, and female representation in various genres, such as medical, erotic, and religio-legal literature. Shehnaz Haqqani is Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. Her primary research areas include Islam, gender, and questions of change and tradition in Islam. She also vlogs on YouTube; her videos focus on dismantling the patriarchy and are available at here.  She can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Jana Byars talks to Josh Cerretti, Associate Professor of History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Western Washington University about his new book, Abuses of the Erotic: Militarizing Sexuality in the Post-Cold War United States  (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). In Cerretti’s own words, “In Abuses of the Erotic, I argue that the connections between sexuality and militarism apparent in the wake of September 11, 2001, are best understood in reference to the decade that immediately preceded that day. The first decade following the Cold War became the last decade before the War on Terror in large measure through changes in the relationship between sexuality and militarism. That is, I argue that a project of militarizing sexuality succeeded in the 1990s United States, and, furthermore, the mass mobilizations of state violence collectively known as the “War on Terror” could not have happened without sexualities having been militarized.” Our theory-heavy conversation covers the militarizing of sexual violence, conceptions of domestic space and protection, and homonormativity and gender performance. This is a fun and far-ranging conversation about a compelling and challenging read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laura A. Dean (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Millikin University and director of the Human Trafficking Research Lab) has spent many years investigating the urgent human rights issue of human trafficking in Eurasia. In her 2020 monograph Diffusing Human Trafficking Policy in Eurasia (Policy Press, 2020), Dr. Dean analyzes the development and effectiveness of anti-trafficking policies and institutions in Latvia, Russia, and Ukraine, explores challenges to crafting and enforcing policies and aiding victims, and evaluates best practices based on country-to-country comparison. We discuss common misconceptions about human trafficking, the impact of institutionalized gender inequalities on efforts to combat labor and sexual exploitation, the mixed results of United States and Western European involvement, the challenges of controversial fieldwork as an American scholar in Eurasia, and the book’s key takeaways for policy makers and activists. Dr. Dean also introduces the Human Trafficking Policy Index - her new, innovative tool for measuring the scope of human trafficking policy. Diana Dukhanova is Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. Her work focuses on religion and sexuality in Russian cultural history, and she is currently working on a monograph about Russian religious philosopher Vasily Rozanov. Diana tweets about contemporary events in the Russian religious landscape at https://twitter.com/RussRLGNWatch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Taylor Petrey is an Associate Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College and the Editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. His latest book is Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). In it, Petrey documents and theorizes about Latter-day Saint teachings on gender, sexual difference, and marriage in the period since World War II. He specifically notes how in this era, Mormonism has been conflicted between ontologies of gender essentialism and gender fluidity, illustrating a broader tension in the history of modern sexuality itself. A path-breaking work of religion and gender and sexuality, Tabernacles of Clay sets the agenda for a new generation of scholars interested in the recent Latter-day Saint past. Chris Babits is an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He researches the intersecting histories of medicine, religion, and gender and sexuality and is currently working on his book about the history of conversion therapy in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most books about American music ask how it sounded, who wrote it, or who performed it. In his new book, Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 (Norton, 2019), Dale Cockrell asks a different question: where is American music? His answer is in the brothels, dance halls, concert saloons, and cabarets of nineteenth-century New York City. Cockrell tells a story of popular music created and enjoyed within a sexualized and commercial environment that featured robust and constant exchange between black and white people during slavery times and the deepening segregation of Reconstruction-era America. Weaving together material from police reports and governmental investigations, Cockrell has found a rich source of information about the life of working-class people in urban America, and in the process has uncovered a network of musicians and spaces that nurtured American popular culture. These places of unbridled behavior were sometimes sites of degradation including for the prostitutes forced by circumstance (or worse) into sex work, but also sometimes places of joy as the working class escaping from a life of hard labor and little pay, and places of safety for gay people whose lives were criminalized outside the dives where they could gather together. The book is geared for a general audience, but rests on a bed of solid scholarship and innovative research. Dale Cockrell is Professor Emeritus of Musicology at Vanderbilt University. A scholar of American popular culture, he is known for his work on minstrelsy and The Pa’s Fiddle Project, an education outreach program centered around the music found in the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. In 2016, Cockrell received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of American Music. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India (Duke UP, 2016), Jyoti Puri tracks the efforts to decriminalize homosexuality in India to show how the regulation of sexuality is fundamentally tied to the creation and enduring existence of the state. Since 2001 activists have attempted to rewrite Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which in addition to outlawing homosexual behavior is often used to prosecute a range of activities and groups that are considered perverse. Having interviewed activists and NGO workers throughout five metropolitan centers, investigated crime statistics and case law, visited various state institutions, and met with the police, Puri found that Section 377 is but one element of how homosexuality is regulated in India. Through a cleverly conceptualized multi-sited ethnography and rigorous historical analysis, Puri masterfully shows how the hypervisibility of Section 377 has consequences for the ways in which sexuality, and the regulation of sexuality, is imagined and reproduced in rationalities of governance.This statute works alongside the large and complex system of laws, practices, policies, and discourses intended to mitigate sexuality's threat to the social order while upholding the state as inevitable, legitimate, and indispensable. By highlighting the various means through which the regulation of sexuality constitutes India's heterogeneous and fragmented "sexual state," Puri provides a conceptual framework to understand the links between sexuality and the state more broadly. That it does so in the context of a postcolonial state like India makes the conceptual framework even more vibrant and provocative. This book is an invaluable contribution to the existing literature that delves into the paradoxes and possibilities of law, biopolitics, and state power and authority in everyday life. Sneha Annavarapu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The fear of campus sexual assault has become an inextricable part of the college experience. Research has shown that by the time they graduate, as many as one in three women and almost one in six men will have been sexually assaulted. But why is sexual assault such a common feature of college life? And what can be done to prevent it? Drawing on the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT) at Columbia University, the most comprehensive study of sexual assault on a campus to date, Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan present an entirely new framework that emphasizes sexual assault’s social roots—transcending current debates about consent, predators in a “hunting ground,” and the dangers of hooking up. Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus (Norton, 2020) is based on years of research interviewing and observing college life—with students of different races, genders, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Hirsch and Khan’s landmark study reveals the social ecosystem that makes sexual assault so predictable, explaining how physical spaces, alcohol, peer groups, and cultural norms influence young people’s experiences and interpretations of both sex and sexual assault. Through the powerful concepts of “sexual projects,” “sexual citizenship,” and “sexual geographies,” the authors offer a new and widely-accessible language for understanding the forces that shape young people’s sexual relationships. Empathetic, insightful, and far-ranging, Sexual Citizens transforms our understanding of sexual assault and offers a roadmap for how to address it. In this interview, Dr. Hirsch, Dr. Khan, and I discuss three concepts that are central to their argument regarding the prevalence and prevention of sexual assault: Sexual projects, sexual citizens, and sexual geographies. Hirsch and Khan argue that sexual assault is connected to features of the university setting (e.g., alcohol, Greek life), race, class, and gender, and (mis)understandings of sex and consent. Additionally, the authors go on to discuss their research methods and how schools, parents, administrators, and other members of the campus community can take active steps to address and prevent sexual assault on college campuses. I highly recommend this book for both a general audience and those with a scholarly interest in sexual violence and/or elite educational institutions. Sexual Citizens would be a great book for undergraduate or graduate courses related to gender, gender-based violence, sexual assault, and organizations. Jennifer S. Hirsch is a professor of sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, and codirects SHIFT, the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation, at Columbia University. Shamus Khan is a professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he is the chair of the department. He writes on culture, inequality, gender, and elites. He was a co-Principal Investigator of SHIFT, a multi-year study of sexual health and sexual violence at Columbia University. Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), Megan Burke considers the relationship of sexual violence to lived time by reexamining and building upon the work of Simone de Beauvoir, and in conversation with Judith Butler, María Lugones, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and many others. Through developing a feminist phenomenology of time, Burke allows us to consider how racialized colonial sexual domination structures feminine subjectivity. By focusing our attention on temporality, Burke deepens our understanding of how the past haunts the present, giving rise to sexual domination, as well as how we can actualize latent possibilities to lay those ghosts to rest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Departing from the bold and compelling claim that we cannot fully understand the histories of decolonization and the so-called “sexual revolution” apart from one another, Todd Shepard’s Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979 (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is a complex analysis of the lasting impact of the Algerian Revolution through the cultural politics of sex, gender, and power in France. Shepard tracks the figure of the “Arab” man from Algerian independence to the Iranian Revolution. Just as the “Arab” man’s pathologized sexuality played a key role in discussions of French defeat in Algeria as a “failure” of French masculinity on the political “Right,” so too did he become a “heroic” figure for the post-decolonization “Left.” From gay liberation to feminism, debates about sexual norms, prostitution, and rape, the “Arab” man appeared again and again in forms that replayed and riffed off of the sexual orientalism of the colonial period. Drawing attention to the ways the “erotics of Algerian difference” shaped the terrain of what could and couldn’t be thought in terms of sex post-1962, the book highlights the ideas and work of a number of authors from North Africa and elsewhere, voices that have been written out of histories that understand the sexual revolution as a strictly trans-Atlantic phenomenon. The “vanilla” narratives that have resulted have left out sites such as North Africa, failing to see the role of anti-colonialism in the history of the sexual revolution. At the same time, conventional histories have also regularly refused to deal with sex itself, eliding the significance of discussions of sex acts (like sodomy) as sites of politics and power. As Shepard shows, the Arab man and the legacies of the Algerian Revolution were all over the field of “sex talk” in France through the 1960s and 70s. During this period, then, the war did not vanish from view as other histories have suggested. And the end of this era that was linked to the Iranian Revolution brought a shoring up of Western notions of sexual liberation in response to the oppression and violence (of women and homosexuals in particular) deemed inherent to Arab/Muslim societies. A book that brings together an impressive research corpus with killer historical and political analysis, Sex, France, and Arab Men will captivate readers interested in the (global) history of sex, as well as anyone seeking to better understand the cultural and political landscape of post-decolonization France. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email ([email protected]).   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry (NYU Press, 2020), Dr. Angela Jones engages readers in a five-year mixed-methods study she conducted on the erotic webcam industry where she tells a pornographic story about the multibillion-dollar online sex industry that is colloquially known as “camming.” Through camming, millions of people from all over the globe have found decent wages, friendship, intimacy, community, empowerment, and pleasure. This interview is full of stories from a diverse sample of cam models from all over the world whom Jones interviewed and observed as part of her five-year mixed-methods study. Cam models, like all sex workers, must grapple with exploitation, discrimination, harassment, and stigmatization. Using an intersectional lens, Jones was attentive to how the overlapping systems of neoliberal capitalism, White supremacy, patriarchy, cissexism, heterosexism, and ableism shape all cam models’ experiences in camming as a new global sex industry. This thorough examination of the camming industry provides a unique vantage point from which to understand and theorize around gender, sexuality, race, and labor in a time when workers globally face increasing economic precariousness and worsened forms of alienation, and desperately desire to recapture pleasure in work. Despite the serious issues cam models face, Jones’s focus on pleasure will help people better understand the motivations for engaging in online sex work, as well as the complex social interactions between cam models and customers. In Camming, Jones pioneers an entirely new subfield in sociology—the sociology of pleasure. The sociology of pleasure can provide new insights into the motivation for social behavior and assist sociologists in analyzing social interactions in everyday life. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. He researches place and the process of place making as it presents in everyday social interactions. You can find more about him on his website, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new books, Would I Have Sexted Back in the 80s?: A Modern Guide to Parenting Digital Teens, Derived from Lessons of the Past (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), Allison Ochs combines experiences from her childhood with her research and expertise on teens and teen culture to write about experiences of teens and parents in navigating smartphones and increasing access to digital spaces. Ochs work examines social media, bullying, porn, gaming, sexting, and media usage, addressing some of the major questions and concerns of parents today. Ochs combines her stories of the past, talking about how being a teenager has in some ways changed, but in others continues to be a difficult space to navigate and fit in. Would I Have Sexted Back in the 80s? gives suggestions on how to approach teens about emotional issues that all teens experience with the additional to the availability and usage of digital devices. Her works encourages readers to think about how they talk with teens learning to navigate the digital world. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Psychic Bisexuality: A British-French Dialogue (Routledge, 2018), edited by Rosine Jozef Perelberg, clarifies and develops the Freudian conception according to which sexual identity is not reduced to the anatomical difference between the sexes, but is constructed as a psychic bisexuality that is inherent to all human beings. The book takes the Freudian project into new grounds of clinical practice and theoretical formulations and contributes to a profound psychoanalytic understanding of sexuality. The object of pychoanalysis is psychosexuality, which is not, in the final analysis, determined by having a male or a female body, but by the unconscious phantasies that are reached après coup through tracing the nuanced interplay of identifications as they are projected, enacted and experienced in the transference and the countertransference in the analytic encounter. Drawing on British and French Freudian and post-Freudian traditions, the book explores questions of love, transference and countertransference, sexual identity and gender to set out the latest clinical understanding of bisexuality, and includes chapters from influential French analysts available in English for the first time. Psychic Bisexuality: A British-French Dialogue will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as gender studies scholars. Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist with a private practice in Los Angeles. He is candidate at The Psychoanalytic Center of California. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his provocative new book, Public City/Public Sex: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Temple University Press, 2019), Dr. Andrew Israel Ross maps out the intersection between histories of sexualities and the urban history of Paris in the 1800s. He examines how the regulation of public sex created new ways of understanding the relationship between individuals and the spaces they inhabited. In this interview, he discusses the policing of prostitution through government-sanctioned brothels, efforts to regulate male same-sex sexual activity at the city’s public urinals, Haussmannization and the creation of new sites for public sex, and the emergence of new sexual identities in the Third Republic. Beth Mauldin is an Associate Professor of French at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Her research interests include French cultural studies, film, and the social and cultural history of Paris. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jana Byars talks with Elizabeth Bernstein, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College about her newest book, Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking and the Politics of Freedom (University of Chicago, 2018). This book provides an overview of feminist discourse on sex trafficking from its earliest incarnations, through its present form, noting the ongoing, and occasionally uneasy partnership between radical feminists and evangelical Christians. This lively discussion, the author explains the capitalist, neo-liberal, often religious groups spearheading the global anti-trafficking movement. We talk about “carceral feminism,” reality tourism, and the corporations who make money through the women they “save.” Bernstein’s book, in her own words, reveals, “the complex intertwining of gender and sexuality with state and metastate interests.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nora Jaffary’s Reproduction and its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905 (University of North Carolina Press. 2016), tracks how medical ideas, practices, and policies surrounding reproduction changed between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries in Mexico. Perhaps the most important change analyzed in the book, and discussed extensively in the interview, is the increased interest of the state in controlling childbirth and contraception. Whereas the colonial state was mostly interested in controlling reproduction primarily of Spanish women of the elite, in the republican era—specially in the late nineteenth century—the state expanded its scope in order to reach broader and more popular sectors of women. Abortion and infanticide, treated jointly in the book for people did not draw a distinction between them, came under the purview of communities and the state. We learn that family members, lovers and neighbors started denouncing women more frequently, and that criminal trials rose. According to Jaffary such change is explained by the emergence of a discourse of sexual honor and virtue that became imperative for a wider sector of women, one that linked reproduction and the creation of a healthy citizenry to the construction of the national state. However, and in spite of the state’s claim in controlling reproduction, this is not a story of an all-powerful state that defined the life and choices of women, nor is this a history of the march of modern medicine (whether that is a good thing or a bad one) in which the state endorsed learned medicine and banished midwives and popular practitioners. As we will learn, this is a much more convoluted story; in spite of the growing interest of the state in reproduction, cases of abortion and infanticide were widely tolerated as were popular healing practitioners, and criminal trials rarely ended in conviction. Judges treated women cautiously and with justice. Moreover, as Jaffary convincingly demonstrates, this unknown history of childbirth and contraception reveals a world of medical pluralism and medical mestizaje—concepts that refer to the somewhat peaceful co-existence, or even collaboration, between a wide range of medical practitioners. In this wonderful book, Jaffary invites us to think about Latin American history in its own terms, to question histories that posit a lineal or teleological progress, and to see that the past, as much as the present, builds its own concepts and ideas that shape how the body is seen, lived, and experienced. Lisette Varon-Carvajal is a graduate student in history at Rutger’s University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this installment of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Benjamin Kahan, Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at LSU, about his newest work, The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Despite countless dropped calls, Jana and Benjamin have a delightful conversation about what Eve Sedgwick called “the great paradigm shift,” in which all sexual deviancy fell out of discussion to make way for the homo-hetero binary. The conversation covers major changes in the cultural discourse around sexual identity, but still makes time for conversation about sexual magicians and wanderlust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men (University of Georgia Press, 2019) 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. Adam McNeil is a PhD Student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (Dey St. Books, HarperCollins, 2017), Ann Powers explores the rich and, at times, unexpected intersections of love, sex, race, gender, sexuality, and American popular music. This heavily-researched book features colorful stories about sex, eroticism, and American music, while engaging source material in the realms of African American and American history, black feminist and womanist theory, American dance, and more. Good Booty begins in the 19th century in New Orleans’ Congo Square, and it ends with a discussion of Britney Spears and Beyoncé as cyborg and avatar, respectively. In other chapters, Powers engages early 20th-century American music and dance, eroticism in gospel music, sexuality and teen-girl rock and roll fandom, rock groupie culture, popular music in the early years of the AIDS crisis, and more. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. Her book, Fade to Black: Blues Music and the Art of Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is under contract with the University of Massachusetts Press. She is also a music journalist who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Focusing on six major Supreme Court cases during the 1960s and 1970s, Marc Stein's book Sexual Injustice (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) examines the generally liberal rulings on birth control, abortion, interracial marriage, and obscenity in Griswold, Eisenstadt, Roe, Loving, and Fanny Hill alongside a profoundly conservative ruling on homosexuality in Boutilier. In the same era in which the Court recognized special marital, reproductive, and heterosexual rights and privileges, it also upheld an immigration statute that classified homosexuals as "psychopathic personalities." Stein shows how a diverse set of influential journalists, judges, and scholars translated the Court's language about marital and reproductive rights into bold statements about sexual freedom and equality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The increasing presence of interracial relationships is often read as an antidote to racism or as an indicator of the decreasing significance of race. In her book, Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race (NYU Press, 2019), Chinyere K. Osuji examines how interracial couples push against, navigate, and often maintain racial boundaries. In-depth interviews with black-white couples in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Los Angeles demonstrate how couples negotiate racial difference with their spouses, within their families, and during public encounters. This comparative study of interracial couples in Brazil and in the United States shows just how race can be constructed differently, while racial hierarchies persist. This book would be of interest to those in fields such as racial and ethnic studies, family and kinship studies, gender studies, and Latin American studies. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on race, blackness, and visual representation in Brazil. She is on Twitter @ReighanGillam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), Greta LaFleur invites readers to consider a different body. The book effectively historicizes categories that are often take for granted (sex, race, vice, habit), and shows us not only their temporal contingency, but by inviting the reader to delve into the strangeness of early modern ontologies and epistemologies. Prof. LaFleur ultimately crafts a space of possibility for different futures as well. These are futures of greater intersectional solidarity in which we are invited to think about the collective, and move past the dominance of the individual, the subjective and modern biopoliticized body. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her innovative and revealing study of midcentury American sex and culture, Bad Girls: Young Women, Sex, and Rebellion before the Sixties (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Amanda Littauer traces the origins of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. She argues that sexual liberation was much more than a reaction to 1950s repression because it largely involved the mainstreaming of a counterculture already on the rise among girls and young women decades earlier. From World War II–era "victory girls" to teen lesbians in the 1940s and 1950s, these nonconforming women and girls navigated and resisted intense social and interpersonal pressures to fit existing mores, using the upheavals of the era to pursue new sexual freedoms. Building on a new generation of research on postwar society, Littauer tells the history of diverse young women who stood at the center of major cultural change and helped transform a society bound by conservative sexual morality into one more open to individualism, plurality, and pleasure in modern sexual life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices