New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

The intersection between Spanish-bilingual education and sex education might not be immediately apparent. Yet, as Natalia Mehlman Petrzela shows in her new book, Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture (Oxford University Press, 2015), the meeting between these two paradigms of education firmly connects in California during the 1960s and 70s. Under the backdrop of California during an era of the sexual revolution, a dramatic influx of Latinos, and awakened protest movements, Dr. Petrzela, assistant professor at The New School, explores this historical landscape of education and society. From well-known political icons like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, to lesser-known figures such as Ernesto Galarza, and even details from regular people who lived the moment, Classroom Wars provides an in-depth and nuanced look into this interesting intersection in American educational history. Dr. Petrzela joins New Books in Education for the interview and you can follow her on Twitter at @nataliapetrzela or find her website at nataliapetrzela.com. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Donna J. Drucker is a guest professor at Darmstadt Technical University in Germany. Her book The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge (University of Pittsburg Press, 2014) is an in-depth and detailed study of Kinsey’s scientific approach. The book examines his career and method of gathering vast amounts of data, identifying patterns, and interpretation that was critical to his most influential works Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Beginning with Kinsey’s study of the animal world, Drucker examines how he transferred natural science methods to sex education in his Marriage Course at Indiana University, and ultimately to the massive study of human sexual behavior. He brought into the interdisciplinary science of sexology a thoroughly naturalist approach and believed that taxonomy – collecting, classifying and describing patterns, revealed truths about the natural world and worked against what he considered the prejudice of misclassification. Kinsey was committed to scientific objectivity, free of moral judgment he believed possible through unprejudiced observation, the recording of mass data sets, and the application of biometrics. Nevertheless, Kinsey sex research had significant implications for understanding sexual difference between men and women, sexual preference tied to economic class, and the consideration of normal sexual behavior against standing societal norms. Drucker’s work brings attention to the historical contingency of the social and technological process, which produces, encodes and relays information over time. Drucker’s close attention to method and the role of data gathering technology again raises the question regarding the role of science in value formation and recovers Kinsey’s contribution to scientific practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this interview with historian Edward Ross Dickinson we talk about sex. Well, actually we talk about the talk about sex. Since Michel Foucault’s epochal work History of Sexuality (1976) how moderns talked about sex has been a central concern of cultural and intellectual historians. Foucault linked a number of nineteenth-century phenomena, such as the growth of sexology as a discipline and the pathologization of homosexuality, to the formation of new sexual subjectivities and the emergence of biopolitical strategies of population management. Taking a cue from Foucault, some historians of modern Germany have interpreted the talk about sex and reproduction in the Kaiserreich as the foundational stage of a discourse about eugenics that would ultimately contribute to National Socialism and its racial state. In his book Sex, Freedom and Power in Imperial Germany 1880-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Dickinson challenges this view. He likens German sex talk to a barroom brawl that started at one table and spread across a crowded room. Sex was as a field of contestation, involving Christian moralists, sex reformers and sexologists, each tied to social and political interests. In this interview, we discuss the different anthropologies that undergirded the respective positions. Christian (and some Jewish) morality activists argued that sex had to be overcome through the moral virtue, while sex reformers and sexologists understood sex in a monist vein, as a natural drive and the engine of creative production and human biological and social evolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The spatial politics of brothels in late-British India are the subject of Stephen Legg‘s second book Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India, published by Duke University Press in 2014. The book explores the complexities of the brothel at the urban, national and imperial scales as campaigns (and campaigners) attempted to reform prostitution. Theoretically driven by a critical reading of Foucault, the book draws on rich archival material to explore the networks, naming and nature that these reforms addressed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Katherine Frank‘s book, Plays Well in Groups: A Journey Through the World of Group Sex (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), is a fascinating look at the taboo of group sex. Her robust research spans historical references to modern day accounts throughout cultures around the world. Dr. Frank used surveys, interviews, and ethnographic research to uncover why people participate in group sex, and what it means to them. Her work also looks at group sex in a violent setting, such as gang rape, and examines the social, political and power structures involved. Her work on group sex and the complex reaction to it, allow a behind the scenes look at a world that is often portrayed differently than it is actually experienced. Plays Well In Groups provides social, anthropological and historical detail about a world that is both feared and fantasized about. Frank’s work is bold and scary, but always engaging. It is an intriguing journey into the complexity of sex and the meaning that it holds for culture and society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua (Duke University Press, 2013), Cymene Howe offers an ethnography of activism. Woven into Nicaragua’s political history of revolution and U.S. intervention, the struggle for sexual rights there takes place on three stages: in intimate settings of lesbian discussion groups, in the public sphere marked by demonstrations, press conferences and celebrations, and in visual and print media. Howe’s informants (activists, advocates, students, educators, television actors, members of Nicaragua’s queer community) illustrate the transformations and continuities in the culture of sexuality in Nicaragua. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anyone who’s been paying attention to the flurry around the French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century (Le Capital au XXIe siecle) knows how a la mode the economy is at the moment. Contemporary ideas and debates about capital, debt, and austerity are only part of what makes Clare Crowston‘s Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Duke University Press, 2013) such an interesting read in 2014. In this detailed study of the varied economic, political, social, and cultural meanings and practices of “credit” from the seventeenth through the eighteenth century, Crowston draws our attention to mutually constitutive worlds and systems of circulation. At once a genealogy of credit; an economic, social, and cultural history of fashion; and an examination of the roles of gender and desire in Old Regime France, Credit, Fashion, Sex makes an important contribution to our understanding of the origins of the French Revolution while respecting the historical integrity of the period that came before. In addition to its conceptual and historiographical insights regarding credit and the complexities of Old Regime society, the book offers readers a fascinating and extensively-researched analysis of the everyday practices and systems of exchange that operated “behind the scenes” of more familiar stories. For example, the book illuminates the mythology and critiques surrounding Marie Antoinette, the queen who embodied like no one else the intersection between ideas about credit, fashion, and sexuality in the era before 1789. At the same time, Crowston gives us a glimpse of other figures and social actors who played vital roles in the society of the period: Rose Bertin, the queen’s dressmaker; the fashion merchants who made so much luxury and refinement possible, as well as all those wives not married to Louis XVI who traded on/in their husbands’ credit, participating in multiple economic and cultural systems of circulation and power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Denise Brennan‘s second book, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States (Duke University Press, 2014), examines how individuals who were trafficked into forced labor go about rebuilding their lives afterward. Through her ethnography of lived experience and her analysis of immigration policy, Brennan shows that trafficking and forced labor are common byproducts of our capitalist system that relies on cheap and unregulated labor. Migration patterns are gendered, and the persons whose experiences shape this book — Maria, Elsa, and many others — are mostly women in the caregiving and sex industries. Brennan argues that U.S. policy has used anti-trafficking policy to forward a separate agenda of ending prostitution and other sex work, thereby distorting protections for female and male trafficking victims in all labor industries, and drastically limiting the number of T visas allocated since 2000. The book is one of scholarly activism: as an anthropologist, Denise Brennan combines research and advocacy to improve the lives of victims and to modify the realities of trafficking and forced labor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sometimes it’s hard to imagine how certain types of violence can occur, and organized multi-perpetrator abuse certainly fits into this category. Ritual abuse, sadistic abuse and pedophilia rings are often things we see in episodes of “Law and Order,” without having to think of the reality of the victims that actually experience this type of cruelty. In Organised Sexual Abuse (Routledge, 2013), Michael Salter attempts to bring to light this often-hidden and seldom-believed type of crime. He describes his own experience being the caretaker of someone who was continuously abused and harassed well into adulthood, including his attempts to reach out to law enforcement and hospital workers, most of whom had trouble believing that this kind of abuse was actually taking place. Salter also talks about the connection between views of hypermasculinity and abuse, and the ways in which violence is often a “collective masculine performance.” Through in-depth qualitative research, Salter takes us, he proposes, into a horrifying journey of a reality that we cannot afford to ignore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many Muslim debates regarding women are solely situated in legal or political frameworks. For example, we often find this tendency in conversations about women’s leadership in the mosque or the politics of veiling. Sa’diyya Shaikh, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town, provides a unique approach to these discussions that puts feminist hermeneutics in dialogue with the thought of the prolific Muhyi al-Din ibn al-‘Arabi (1165-1240). In Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender and Sexuality (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) she explores contestations over embodiment and gender, spirituality and leadership, sexuality and power in order to rethink patriarchal epistemologies in contemporary Muslim discourses. She argues that contesting positions on gender in these debates are underpinned by certain assumptions about human nature, its gendering, and existence. Shaikh outlines the social and ritual consequences of spiritual (in)equality and initiates reflections on Islamic notions of the central category “human being.” Shaikh leads us through Ibn ‘Arabi’s dynamic anthropology, ontology, and cosmology and links abstract philosophical concepts with concrete daily relationships between men and women. In our conversation we discussed Islamic feminism, apophatic unsayings and hermeneutic of subversions, Ibn ‘Arabi’s interpersonal relationships with women, parallels between the macrocosm and microcosm, Muslim exegesis, notions of creation, interpretations of Adam and Eve, Jesus’ birth from the Virgin Mary, and masculine and feminine in Islam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How to research the history of sexual harassment in the office, when the term sexual harassment was only invented in 1975 and it was long tabou to even use the word sex in conversation? Using an array of rich sources — from Treasury Department archives to trial records, congressional investigation files to films and novels, popular weeklies and dailies to postcards, advertisements to confession magazines, private papers to employment advice guides — Julie Berebitsky takes the reader on a discovery of sexuality in the white collar-office from the Civil War to the present day. Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power and Desire (Yale University Press, 2012) analyzes sexual relations, non-consensual and consensual, among co-workers, arguing that the 19th-century ideal of the passionless woman gave way by World War One to an ideal of feminine attractiveness, one that was later transformed by Helen Gurley Brown in the 1960s into a professional strategy for its time. At the same time, feminist groups and the secretarial labor movement coalesced to fight back against decades of discrimination and sexual violence in the office against women workers. Berebitsky concludes her book with an analysis of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas case, which brought the issue of sexual harassment into the living rooms of Americans. This case, and the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton affair, demonstrate that there is both continuity and change in American attitudes towards sex at the office. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most countries, believing that married people form a kind of demographic and political bedrock, promote marriage (and, of course, child-having within wedlock). Nonetheless, many couples choose to live together before marriage and many choose not to get married at all. Their numbers are increasing all over the developed world at a remarkable rate. Co-habitation is now more than “shacking up”; it’s a common life-choice. In Not Just Roommates: Cohabitation after the Sexual Revolution (Chicago UP, 2012), Elizabeth H. Pleck examines the rise of cohabitation and asks whether cohabiters have not become second class citizens. She says they have and has some suggestions about how to give them the same opportunities those who married have. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What explains human behavior? It is standard to consider answers from the perspective of a dichotomy between nature and nurture, with most researchers today in agreement that it is both. For Helen Longino, Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, the “both” answer misses the fact that the nature/nurture divide is itself problematic. In her groundbreaking book, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality (University of Chicago Press) Longino looks closely at a variety of scientific approaches to the study of human aggression and sexuality to argue that there is no one right way to divide nature from nurture within the scientific approaches to the study of behavior, and that the nature/nurture dichotomy reinforces and reflects an undue emphasis on explanations that focus on the dispositions of individuals rather than those that look at patterns of frequency and distribution of behavior within populations. She reveals the distinct and incompatible ways these different approaches define the factors that explain behavior, how these different explanatory approaches are related, and how the bias towards particular types of explanation is reflected in the way the scientific findings are publicly disseminated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I have long been an admirer of Dan Healey‘s work. His research has opened the world of homosexual desire and the establishment of the gay community in revolutionary Russia and has made an important contribution our understanding of the history of homosexuality; Healey’s new book follows logically from his previous one. In Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), he takes us from the establishment of a gay identity and community to the new Russian state as it seeks to define its position vis a vis sexuality. With the Bolshevik revolution, revolutionaries decided to modernize Russian sexual science and beliefs. Russian sexual scientists were already in conversation with their Western European colleagues and sought to modernize and rationalize sexual relations between women and men. Policy makers introduced a number of reforms to aid in the process of modernization. They abolished the age of consent, for instance, and replaced it with an age of maturity. Bolsheviks also envisioned a modern role for science in the new Russian state – one that brought the psychiatrists into the justice system. These new sexual experts began to link sex crimes to mental disease, described and diagnosed sexual psychopathy, and they began a systematic investigation of the bodies of hermaphrodites. Bolshevik Sexual Forensics discusses these developments and their impact on sexual beliefs and the regulation of sexuality. Given the archival record, Healey does not attempt to predict how these changes influenced sexual experience. Court records, he notes, are largely silence on the impact that “modern visions” of sexuality had on young rape victims, for instance. Instead, Healey does what the records allow him to do: trace the changing role of sexual experts and sexual science of people of the young Russian nation tried to distance themselves from the old tsarist beliefs – yet lapsed over and over again into traditional notions of sexuality. Listen as Dan Healey tells us about his new book, Bolshevik Sexual Forensics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Trafficking Women’s Human Rights (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Julietta Hua analyzes how discourse on human trafficking creates the boundaries of victimhood and thereby restricts concepts of punishment, remedy, and citizenship. Analyzing legislation, public discourse, and interview materials, Dr. Hua traces how gender, nationality, and racial identities become inscribed into the concept of sex trafficking. The subject matter is heavy, but Dr. Hua presents a delightfully rigorous theoretical framework, careful interpretation of proffered data, and poignant illustrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With prose that is as elegant as the argument is clear, Amy Stanley‘s new book tells a social, cultural, and economic history of Tokugawa Japan through the prism of prostitution. Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2012 ) undermines our assumptions... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What would a Presidential campaign be without a good dose of reproductive politics? To be sure, many of us are surprised to see contraception, and not just abortion, called into question – but maybe that’s because the intensity of abortion politics has allowed us to forget just how recently the issue of contraception was as fraught as the issue of abortion. And in any case, recent tussles over teen access to over-the-counter emergency contraception might have reminded us that debates about contraception are hardly closed. In her new book The Morning After: A History of Emergency Contraception in the United States (Rutgers University Press, 2011), Heather Munro Prescott helps us to understand the politics of emergency contraception. Initially a side-product from research into infertility, hormonal contraceptives – both the “regular” and the “emergency” kind – became the subject of heated battles in the 1960s and 1970s. Feminist health care advocates protested that the medical establishment was pushing potentially unsafe medications on women who were not fully informed of side-effects. With conservatives’ attack on reproductive rights starting in the 1980s, however, feminist health care advocates and the medical profession became allies in the battle for continued access. This alliance bore results in the first decade of the twenty-first century, as the FDA reluctantly agreed to approve over-the-counter sales of emergency contraception (although not for minors). Heather Munro Prescott is a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University. If you care about reproductive rights, you’ll want to take a look at her book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I was in college in the 1980s, I liked to listen to Iggy Pop (aka James Newell Osterberg, Jr.). I was always mystified, however, by his song “Five Foot One,” with its odd and catchy refrain “I wish life could be/Swed-ish mag-a-zines!” What in the heck did that mean? I’d never seen a “Swed-ish mag-a-zine.” Thanks to Elizabeth Heineman‘s wonderful book Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse (University of Chicago Press, 2011), now I understand. You see, the last and perhaps most significant Swedish contribution (if that’s what it was) to Western Civilization was legalized hardcore porn. In the early 1970s the Swedes (and their porn-allies, the Danes) flooded European markets with the stuff. The Scandinavians were making a killing. As Lisa explains, the “Swedish Invasion” put the queen of the German erotica industry, Beate Uhse, in something of a bind – but it also came at a moment of great opportunity. In the first two decades after World War II, the Luftwaffe pilot-turned erotica entrepreneur had built a sex empire legitimized by the idea that erotica helped married, heterosexual couples have more fulfilling relationships. After all, the bread and butter of the industry were condoms (for customers who could hardly afford babies, given wartime devastation) and basic how-to manuals (for customers suffered from dire sexual ignorance). And the demand was there: by the early 1960s, fully half of West German household had patronized a mail-order erotica firm. But by the end of that decade, pornography – both homegrown and imported – was the backbone of the industry. So what, exactly, was the social mission of the erotica industry in this brave new world? In the end, the market decided with more than a little help from liberalism: German men wanted porn and the West German courts and Parliament couldn’t think of a reason not to let them have it. And so it is that you can buy porn on every high street in Germany, often in a Beate Uhse Erotik-Shop (Warning: really NSFW). This is a terrifically interesting book. Read it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Don’t you find it a bit curious that there are literally thousands of pills that we in the developed world take on a daily basis, but only one of them is called “the Pill?” Actually, you probably don’t find it curious, because you know that the pill has had a massive impact on modern life. And why wouldn’t it? Thanks to the Pill, women alone–without the (unreliable) “cooperation” of their sexual partners–could control their own fertility. For the first time in human history. The first time. Think of the implications. No more worrying about missed periods. No more shotgun weddings. No more unwanted children. And a lot more and better sex to boot. What a boon! Or was it? The most interesting thing about Elaine Tyler May‘s pithy America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (Basic Books, 2010) is that she shows that the Pill really didn’t live up to expectations then and it hasn’t now. After all, the Pill is a form of contraception, and contraception has been available for a long time. By the mid-twentieth century, in fact, there were many highly effective forms of birth control available in much of the developed world. So in a sense the Pill wasn’t exactly new. But it was different, and that made the folks who promoted and developed it believe–or say they believed–that it was going to solve many of humanity’s problems, foremost among them over-population and the oppression of women. It’s arguable, however, that it had little direct impact on either. Worldwide population growth, though it has slowed, is still quite high. Women remain second-class citizens (and, more interestingly, second-class family members) over much of the planet. So what did the Pill do except raise expectations? Well, quite a lot, really. First, it gave women new power. They could control their fertility (not to mention periods) if they wanted to. That didn’t mean they had to, or even that all of them wanted to. But they could. If men were threatened by that fact, tough. They’d have to live with it (and in the developed world most of them have). Second, the Pill allowed women to put off childbearing until they had established careers, thus facilitating (though not causing) a massive increase in the number and percentage of women in the workforce. For many women, the Pill made an “either/or” proposition (either mother or career) into a “this and that” proposition (mother and worker). On this front, we’ve still a way to go, but the Pill moved us in the right direction. The Pill, however, wasn’t just about physical power over childbearing. It was also, as Elaine points out, a potent symbol of women’s empowerment. It wasn’t only what the Pill actually did (that, as we’ve said, wasn’t entirely new), it was what people believed it meant. And that, in a word, was liberation. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When did Americans begin to think of marriage as “work,” as in, “If you want your marriage to succeed, you have to work at it.” Kristin Celello answers this question (and a lot of others) in her timely and relevant new book Making Marriage Work. A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States (UNC Press, 2009). In the nineteenth century, she explains, it was hard to get a divorce, marriage was viewed as an irrevocable duty, and divorce rates were low (by modern standards, of course). But beginning in the later part of the century all those things began to change. It became easier to split up. You just went to Nevada and got a “Reno divorce.” People began to expect things like “fulfillment” from marriages. A “good provider” or “obedient companion” wasn’t enough. As a result, divorce rates in the United States began to rise. They continued to do so–excepting momentary declines–for the next 70 years. Thus was born the “crisis” of marriage in America.Happily, a new kind of therapist came to the rescue: the marriage counselor. Marriage experts first appeared in the 1930s and their numbers have grown with the divorce rate. Today marriage counseling is an American institution, just like mom and apple pie. If you want to know how that happened–and it’s a fascinating story well told by Kristin–you should read this book. It probably won’t save your marriage, but it will certainly enlighten and entertain you for a few hours. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices