New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

Shameless Parenting: Everything You Need to Raise Shame-free Confident Kids & Heal Your Shame Too! (2021) is the 21st-century book parents have been asking for! It highlights the trickiest parts of each age (birth to 18) that tend to trigger shame and guides them on how-to provide emotionally for their children while helping them understand the shame that is emerging for them. Shame is what makes us reactive as parents. It is the hardest part of parenting. It is from our own places of shame that we over-react, repeating patterns from our parents that we might otherwise have resisted, and finding ourselves stuck, not knowing what to do. This book has your back! It allows you to feel prepared for each stage of your child’s emotional and sexual development before you get there, and it gives you everything you need before you are caught off guard, including sex ed when that time comes for your child. Now you can enjoy yourself, enjoy your child, heal your shame, and change the legacy. What a powerful gift to give yourself, your child, and your whole family! Dr. Tina is also the founder and medical director of the Northwest Institute on Intimacy which provides training and supervision for therapists, medical providers and clergy in sexual health and confronting sexual bias. Frequently featured on podcasts, TV, documentaries, articles and radio, including Spirituality & Health magazine, Tina travels the country as a keynote speaker for organizations, parents and professionals helping them become competent teaching shame-free relational and sexual health. She can be reached at TinaSchermerSellers.com, and followed on Instagram @DrTinaShameless. Meg Gambino is an artist and activist currently working as the Director of Outreach for an addiction recovery center. Her life mission is to creatively empower others by modeling reconciliation between communities of people and people on the margins. Find her work at reconfigureart.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Child Sexual Abuse Inquiries and the Catholic Church: Reassessing the Evidence (Firenze UP, 2021), Dr Miller analyses empirical findings, methodologies and conclusions of the three main national inquiries (Irish, US, Australian) into child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and Church responses. Contrasts are drawn with overall media reporting of the problem, such as when abuse peaked, and current safe-guarding and its effectiveness in curbing child sexual abuse. Topics discussed include changing societal norms, cases like Cardinal Pell, church and public attitudes. Virginia Miller (PhD) is a research fellow with the Centre for Public and Contextual Theology, Charles Sturt University, Canberra. Her research work includes church-focused policy research into sexual abuse of children, elder abuse, euthanasia, and religious freedom. Her other books include A King and a Fool? The Succession Narrative as a Satire (Brill) Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is image-based abuse? Why has it been on the rise in Asia, especially amid the Covid-19 pandemic? What has been done to tackle the issue? Raquel Carvalho, Asia Correspondent for the South China Morning Post, shares the story of how a group of journalists across some Asian newsrooms collaborated in a months-long investigation and uncover the stories inside the online groups spreading stolen sexual images of women and children, how the victims are struggling to have such content removed from online platforms, and how sextortion syndicates in Asia and Africa are raking in millions from targets around the world. In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, a visiting PhD Candidate at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, the Portuguese journalist currently based in Hong Kong tells about why the cases of women threatened with the release of their intimate photos or videos have increased in recent years, how this type of abuse tears the victims’ lives apart, and how ill-equipped authorities are struggling to deal with the cases. Advocates and survivors say too little is being done to stop the abuse. While the cases proliferated in countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, and South Korea, some women – and a few men – have decided to take action. The SCMP’s series of stories on image-based abuse is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute’s Asian Stories project, in collaboration with The Korea Times, Indonesia’s Tempo magazine, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, and Manila-based ABS-CBN. Most of Raquel Carvalho’s investigative and in-depth stories have been focused on human rights, cross-border security, illicit trade and corruption. She was previously the chief reporter at a Portuguese daily newspaper in Macau, where she moved to from Europe in 2008. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the Stockholm Centre for Global Asia at Stockholm University. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are two problems that are typically siloed in the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration: sexual and gender violence, on the one hand, and the state’s unjust, ineffective, and soul-destroying response to it on the other. Is it possible to confront the culture of abuse? Is it possible to hold harm-doers accountable without recourse to a criminal justice system that redoubles injuries, fails survivors, and retrenches the conditions that made such abuse possible? The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence (Verso, 2020), by Judith Levine and Erica Meiners (Verso Books, 2020), develops an intersectional feminist approach to ending sexual violence. It maps with considerable detail the unjust sex offender regime while highlighting the alternatives we urgently need. Judith Levine is a longtime journalist and author of countless articles and commentaries in popular media and the author of five books, including Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex, which won the LA Times Book Award. Erica Meiners is a professor of education and women's and gender studies at Northeastern Illinois University and the author of several books, most recently For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation (Routledge, 2019), Hannah McCann asks, “how can we consider femininity in a way that best attends to people’s experiences of, and attachment to, feminine styles?” McCann takes readers through popular and scholarly feminist commentary to understand, and critique, how embodied feminine styles are comprehended as effects of an oppressive system which also plays a significant role in upholding and perpetuating this system. Instead of positing that femininity is necessarily empowering or essentially good, McCann insists that femininity is neither inherently disempowering, nor it is necessarily bad. McCann contests the idea that those who appear, embody or perform femininity are not “cultural dupes labouring under false-consciousness” but are agentic in their own right as they navigate life and negotiate with power structures and navigate life and their own becoming in it. There is acknowledgement in the book about the messiness of gender and recognition of the fact that masculinity and femininity are rarely coherent and uniformly expressed or articulated. McCann uses the term “femininity” to illustrate “style of the body” or appearance, which is a “non-inevitable normative descriptor” that demands attention to more complexity than what is accrued to norms and descriptions. It considers how femininity as a “bodily property” has been conceived of in feminist discourse and how such conception figures in the lives of those who inhabit such styles and the identities that accompany them. It does not dismiss femininity as irrelevant, and does not reject its embodies styles, even as it does not place emphasis on representation as exclusively having the power to bring about political transformation. McCann enquires, “What can the body as feminine do? And What might utopian femininity” look like, while prefacing it with the statement that these questions can be asked instead of feminine embodiments being rendered intelligible only as oppressed. McCann explores queer femininity with attention to her conviction that “feminine styles and accoutrements deserve attention outside of evaluations of their presumed representational significance.” Dr. Hannah McCann is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research in critical femininity studies explores feminist discourse on femininity, queer femme LGBTQ+ communities, beauty culture, and queer fangirls. She has published in various journals including European Journal of Women’s Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Her monograph Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation was published with Routledge in 2018, and her co-authored textbook Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures with Red Globe Press in 2020. Sohini Chatterjee is PhD Student in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Western University. She works on queer cultural studies, trans and queer activism, and resistance movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) helps us to understand not only the history of the “sex wars” in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, but it also helps to guide our understanding of the contemporary #MeToo Movement and the complexity of critiques about sex positivity in historical and current contexts. Bracewell revisits the history of the sex wars in the United States, and the different critiques and layers that made those battles much more complex and nuanced than the simplistic two sided “cat fight” that is often cast as the only dimensions of those debates. Why We Lost The Sex Wars re-examines the history of the debates in the late 1970s about pornography that would come to divide feminism as a movement. This history, especially the way that the narrative became entrenched as this two-sided fight effectively erased the voices and positions of feminists of color and international feminists, who had other perspectives on sexual politics that were voiced at the time but were not integrated into the history of the sex wars. Bracewell’s discussion is a clear critique of the way that these other, more marginalized voices were written out of the sex wars debate. She reintegrates these perspectives and voices, building more dimensions to the debates around sex and feminism during the period that spans the so-called second and third waves of feminism. At the basis of Bracewell’s analysis is a framework grounded in the ideas of classical liberalism and this commitment to individual rights and autonomy. Bracewell asks “[h]ow did sexual-political possibilities not tethered to liberal notions of individual rights, civil liberties, due process, and personal privacy come to be as anathema to sex-positive progressives and feminists as they are to traditionalists and conservatives?” (Bracewell 4). This question also arises in context of the #MeToo Movement. In discussing the #MeToo movement—which is predicated on the concept that so many women (and some men) have experienced sexual harassment, inappropriate sexual advances, or rape, and that by disclosing that they too have this experience, others will come forward with their own experiences—Bracewell notes that this more contemporary movement about sexual autonomy and freedom does not always encompass everyone it necessarily should, explaining that many celebrities who have disclosed their experiences receive support for coming forward, but those harassed or assaulted who are not celebrities, those who have much more precarious jobs or positions, remain unnoticed and they may well suffer job loss or other detrimental consequences. Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era knits together the actual sex wars during the earlier years of the contemporary feminist movement and the more recent debates that have surrounded the #MeToo Movement, teasing out why these dialogues about sex are connected to each other and still quite relevant today. Eli Levitas-Goren assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Following tirailleurs sénégalais’ deployments in West Africa, Congo, Madagascar, North Africa, Syria-Lebanon, Vietnam, and Algeria from the 1880s to 1962, Militarizing Marriage West African Soldiers’ Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire (Ohio UP, 2021) historicizes how African servicemen advanced conjugal strategies with women at home and abroad. Sarah J. Zimmerman examines the evolution of women’s conjugal relationships with West African colonial soldiers to show how the sexuality, gender, and exploitation of women were fundamental to the violent colonial expansion and the everyday operation of colonial rule in modern French Empire. These conjugal behaviors became military marital traditions that normalized the intimate manifestation of colonial power in social reproduction across the empire. Soldiers’ cross-colonial and interracial households formed at the intersection of race and sexuality outside the colonizer/colonized binary. Militarizing Marriage uses contemporary feminist scholarship on militarism and violence to portray how the subjugation of women was indispensable to military conquest and colonial rule. Sarah J. Zimmerman is an associate professor in history at Western Washington University. Her research focuses on the experiences of women and the operation of gender in West Africa and French Empire. She has published articles in the International Journal of African Historical Studies and Les Temps modernes. Zimmerman is currently Vice President of the French Colonial Historical Society and will serve as President from 2022 to 2024. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Follow Mike on Twitter: @MichaelGVann . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As ongoing controversies over commercial sex attest, the relationship between capitalism and sexuality is deeply contentious. Economic and sexual practices are assumed to be not only separable but antithetical, hence why paid sex is so often criminalized and morally condemned. Yet, while sexuality is highly politicized in moral terms, it has largely been overlooked in the discipline devoted to the study of global capitalism, international political economy (IPE). Likewise, the prevailing field in sexuality studies, queer theory, has frequently sidelined questions of political economy. Nicola J. Smith's Capitalism's Sexual History (Oxford UP, 2020) calls for critical scholarship to challenge the dichotomy as it not only structures disciplinary debates but is part and parcel of capitalism itself. By exposing the historical mechanisms through which the economy/sexuality dichotomy has been constituted, the book opens up new space for critical inquiry into the intersections between sex, work, and economic and sexual injustice. Nicola Smith is senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham, and a political economist working on feminist and queer theory, neoliberalism and austerity, sex work and reproductive labour, and the history of the British body politic. Victoria Holt is a PhD student and a sex worker activist. Her research explores sex workers' experiences of domestic violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“We know what we want, and one day, our prince will come,” says Toby, the bicycle-shorts-wearing, double ententre-making, unacknowledgely-gay neighbor in RTE’s Upwardly Mobile. Though the first queer characters in Irish entertainment television were tropes and stereotypes, they represented an important shift in LGBTQ visibility in Irish media. The road to early representations in entertainment media was a hard road paved by gay rights activists, AIDS stigma, and production teams looking for sensationalism. In LGBTQ Visibility, Media, and Sexuality in Ireland, Páraic Kerrigan explores the dynamics of queer visibility and sexuality in Ireland through televised media between 1974 and 2008. Tune in for our chat about Gay Byrne and the Late Late Show, queer soap stars, the AIDS crisis and globalization of Ireland, and the LGBTQ rights tug-of-war that played out in turn-of-the-century television. Avrill Earls is the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast (a narrative history podcast, rather than interview-based), and an Assistant Professor of History at Mercyhurst University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the mid-1990s, experts predicted that India would face the world's biggest AIDS epidemic by 2000. Though a crisis at this scale never fully materialized, global public health institutions, donors, and the Indian state initiated a massive effort to prevent it. HIV prevention programs channeled billions of dollars toward those groups designated as at-risk—sex workers and men who have sex with men. At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Response (Stanford UP, 2021) captures this unique moment in which these criminalized and marginalized groups reinvented their "at-risk" categorization and became central players in the crisis response. The AIDS crisis created a contradictory, conditional, and temporary opening for sex-worker and LGBTIQ activists to renegotiate citizenship and to make demands on the state. Working across India and Kenya, Gowri Vijayakumar provides a fine-grained account of the political struggles at the heart of the Indian AIDS response. These range from everyday articulations of sexual identity in activist organizations in Bangalore to new approaches to HIV prevention in Nairobi, where prevention strategies first introduced in India are adapted and circulate, as in the global AIDS field more broadly. Vijayakumar illuminates how the politics of gender, sexuality, and nationalism shape global crisis response. In so doing, she considers the precarious potential for social change in and after a crisis. Gowri Vijayakumar is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sex abuse happens in all communities, but American minority religions often face disproportionate allegations of sexual abuse. Why, in a country that consistently fails to acknowledge—much less address—the sexual abuse of women and children, do American religious outsiders so often face allegations of sexual misconduct? Why does the American public presume to know “what’s really going on” in minority religious communities? Why are sex abuse allegations such an effective way to discredit people on America’s religious margins? What makes Americans so willing, so eager to identify religion as the cause of sex abuse? In Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions (Rutgers UP, 2020), Megan Goodwin argues that sex abuse in minority religious communities is an American problem, not (merely) a religious one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights (Routledge, 2021) demonstrates how late twentieth century postcolonial print cultures initiated a public discourse on sexual activism and contends that postcolonial feminist and queer archives offer alternative histories of sexual precarity, vulnerability, and resistance. The book's comparative focus on India, Jamaica, and South Africa extends the valences of postcolonial feminist and queer studies towards a historical examination of South-South interactions in the theory and praxis of sexual rights. Analyzing the circumstances of production and the contents of English-language and intermittently bilingual magazines and newsletters published between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, these sources offer a way to examine the convergences and divergences between postcolonial feminist, gay, and lesbian activism. It charts a set of concerns common to feminist, gay, and lesbian activist literature: retrogressive colonial-era legislation impacting the status of women and sexual minorities; a marked increase in sexual violence; piecemeal reproductive freedoms and sexual choice under neoliberalism; the emergence and management of the HIV/AIDS crisis; precariousness of lesbian and transgender concerns within feminist and LGBTQ+ movements; and Non-Governmental Organizations as major actors articulating sexual rights as human rights. This methodologically innovative work is based on archival historical research, analyses of national and international policy documents, close readings of activist publications, and conversations with activists and founding editors. This is an important intervention in the field of gender and sexuality studies and is the winner of the 2020 Feminist Futures, Subversive Histories prize in partnership with the NWSA. The book is key reading for scholars and students in gender, sexuality, comparative literature, and postcolonial studies. 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

Hijras, one of India’s third gendered or trans populations, have been an enduring presence in the South Asian imagination—in myth, in ritual, and in everyday life, often associated in stigmatized forms with begging and sex work. In more recent years hijras have seen a degree of political emergence as a moral presence in Indian electoral politics, and with heightened vulnerability within global health terms as a high-risk population caught within the AIDS epidemic. Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India (Fordham UP, 2021) recounts two years living with a group of hijras in rural India. In this riveting ethnography, Vaibhav Saria reveals not just a group of stigmatized or marginalized others but a way of life composed of laughter, struggles, and desires that trouble how we read queerness, kinship, and the psyche. Against easy framings of hijras that render them marginalized, Saria shows how hijras makes the normative Indian family possible. The book also shows that particular practices of hijras, such as refusing to use condoms or comply with retroviral regimes, reflect not ignorance, irresponsibility, or illiteracy but rather a specific idiom of erotic asceticism arising in both Hindu and Islamic traditions. This idiom suffuses the densely intertwined registers of erotics, economics, and kinship that inform the everyday lives of hijras and offer a repertoire of self-fashioning beyond the secular horizons of public health or queer theory. Engrossingly written and full of keen insights, the book moves from the small pleasures of the everyday—laughter, flirting, teasing—to impossible longings, kinship, and economies of property and substance in order to give a fuller account of trans lives and of Indian society today. Hijras, Lovers, Brothers is the winner of the 2021 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. Shraddha Chatterjee is a doctoral candidate at York University, Toronto, and author of Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects (Routledge, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historian Eszter Varsa’s new book Protected Children, Regulated Mothers: Gender and the 'Gypsy Question' in State Care in Postwar Hungary, 1949–1956 (Central European UP, 2020) examines child protection in Stalinist Hungary as a part of twentieth-century East Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European history. Across the communist bloc, the prewar foster care system was increasingly replaced after 1945 by institutionalization in residential homes. This shift was often interpreted as a further attempt to establish totalitarian control. However, this study—based on hundreds of children's case files and interviews with institution leaders, teachers, and people formerly in state care—provides a new perspective. Rather than being merely a tool of political repression, state care in postwar Hungary was often shaped by the efforts of policy actors and educators to address the myriad of problems engendered by the social and economic transformations that emerged after World War II. This response built on, rather than broke with, earlier models of reform and reformatory education. Yet child protection went beyond safeguarding and educating children; it also focused on parents, particularly lone mothers, regulating not only their entrance to paid work but also their sexuality. In so doing, children's homes both reinforced and changed existing cultural and social patterns, whether about gendered division of work or the assimilation of minorities. Indeed, a major finding of the book is that state socialist child protection continued a centuries-long national project of seeking a “solution to the Gypsy question,” rooted in efforts to eliminate the perceived “workshyness” of Roma. Eszter Varsa is a post-doctoral researcher in the ERC project ZARAH: Women's Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Transnationally, From the Age of Empires to the Late 20th Century at Central European University, Vienna. Leslie Waters is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso and author of Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1948 (University of Rochester, 2020). Email her at [email protected] or tweet to @leslieh2Os. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Distributing Condoms and Hope: The Racialized Politics of Youth Sexual Health (U California Press, 2020) is a feminist ethnographic account of how youth sexual health programs in the racially and economically stratified city of “Millerston” reproduce harm in the marginalized communities they are meant to serve. Chris Barcelos makes space for the stories of young mothers, who often recognize the narrow ways that public health professionals respond to pregnancies. Barcelos’s findings show that teachers, social workers, and nurses ignore systemic issues of race, class, and gender and instead advocate for individual-level solutions such as distributing condoms and promoting "hope." Through a lens of reproductive justice, Distributing Condoms and Hope imagines a different approach to serving marginalized youth—a support system that neither uses their lives as a basis for disciplinary public policies nor romanticizes their struggles. In our interview, Chris Barcelos explains how they use the framework of a “teen pregnancy prevention industrial complex” to illuminate the webs of power that ultimately serve to perpetuate the systemic social inequities leading to teen pregnancy. They describe the concept of “messiness” as it applies to deviations from social normativity, and how such deviations “mess up” society’s ideas of what is right and normal. Distributing Condoms and Hope forthrightly engages with messiness. One hopes it will have a real-world impact – for, as Barcelos observes, “It is easy to critique social structures while nonetheless continuing on with your day-to-day work in ways that do not incorporate those critiques.” Rachel Pagones teaches preventive medicine and public health in the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego, and she is a licensed acupuncturist. Her book about acupuncture as a tool of medical, social, and political revolution in the United States will be published later this year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The rights of pregnant workers as well as (the lack of) paid maternity leave have increasingly become topics of a major policy debate in the United States. Yet, few discussions have focused on the U.S. military, where many of the latest policy changes focus on these very issues. Despite the armed forces' increases to maternity-related benefits, servicewomen continue to be stigmatized for being pregnant and taking advantage of maternity policies. In Militarized Maternity: Experiencing Pregnancy in the U.S. Armed Forces (U California Press, 2021) , Megan McFarlane analyzes military documents and conducts interviews with enlisted servicewomen and female officers. She finds a policy/culture disparity within the military that pregnant servicewomen themselves often co-construct, making the policy changes significantly less effective. McFarlane ends by offering suggestions for how these policy changes can have more impact and how they could potentially serve as an example for the broader societal debate. Dr. Megan McFarlane is an Assistant Professor at Marymount University. Her most recent research centers on women’s reproductive health care policies, with a particular focus on maternity (pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, and postpartum). Lee Pierce (they & she) is Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Communication at SUNY Geneseo and host of the podcast RhetoricLee Speaking. Connect with Lee on Twitter, Instagram, and Gmail @rhetoriclee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As soon as US media and politicians became aware of AIDS in the early 1980s, fingers were pointed not only at the gay community but also at other countries and migrant communities, particularly Haitians, as responsible for spreading the virus. Evangelical leaders, public health officials, and the Reagan administration quickly capitalized on widespread fear of the new disease to call for quarantines, immigration bans, and deportations, scapegoating and blaming HIV-positive migrants--even as the rest of the world regarded the US as the primary exporter of the virus. In The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (U Washington Press, 2021), Karma Chávez demonstrates how such calls proliferated and how failure to impose a quarantine for HIV-positive citizens morphed into the successful enactment of a complete ban on the regularization of HIV-positive migrants--which lasted more than twenty years. News reports, congressional records, and AIDS activist archives reveal how queer groups and migrant communities built fragile coalitions to fight against the alienation of themselves and others, asserting their capacity for resistance and resiliency. Building on existing histories of HIV/AIDS, public health, citizenship, and immigration, Chávez establishes how politicians and public health officials treated different communities with HIV/AIDS and highlights the work these communities did to resist alienation. You can get 30% off the cost of the book using the code WST30 when you are purchasing from the publishers University of Washington Press. 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

Today on New Books in Gender Studies Jana Byars talks with Lindy McDougall, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia about her new book, The Perfect Vagina: Cosmetic Surgery in the Twenty-First Century, out this year, 2021, with Indiana University Press. In The Perfect Vagina, Lindy McDougall provides an ethnographic account of women who choose FGCS in Australia and the physicians who perform these procedures, both in Australia and globally, while also examining the environment in which surgeons and women come together. Physicians have a vested interest in establishing this surgery as valid medical intervention, despite majority medical opinion explicitly acknowledging that a wide range of genital variation is normal. McDougall offers a nuanced picture of why and how these procedures are performed and draws parallels between FGCS and anthropological discussions of female genital circumcision (cutting). Using the neologism biomagical, she argues that cosmetic surgery functions as both ritual and sacrifice due to its promise of transformation while simultaneously submitting the body to the risks and pain of surgery, thus exposing biomedicine as an increasingly cultural and commercial pursuit. The Perfect Vagina highlights the complexities involved with FGCS, its role in Western beauty culture, and the creation and control of body image in countries where self-care is valorized and medicine is increasingly harnessed for enhancement as well as health. 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 Faith in Freedom: Muslim Immigrant Women’s Experiences of Domestic Violence (Melbourne University Press, 2019), Nafiseh Ghafournia explores questions of domestic violence in the context of Muslim immigrant women in Australia. Aiming to correct existing accounts of Muslim women’s lives and experiences particularly as immigrants, the study uses an intersectional framework to deepen our understanding of the ways that immigrant Muslim women understand, experience, and respond to domestic violence. Among the themes that the book covers are the relationships between culture, religion, gender, and immigration status in the context of domestic violence; why and when, if at all, might women leave abusive relationships; the various kinds of domestic violence that immigrant Muslim women experience, including physical, psychological, financial, spiritual, sexual, in-laws, and immigration-related violence; services available to victims and survivors of abuse; and essential information for service providers and policy makers. The book will appeal to anyone interested in immigrant experiences, domestic violence from an intersectional perspective, Muslim women; and because of its practical value, it should also be read by service providers, policymakers, ESL educators, and others who interact with immigrants on a regular basis. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She is currently working on a book project on Muslim women's marriage to non-Muslims in Islam. Shehnaz runs a YouTube channel called What the Patriarchy?!, where she vlogs about feminism and Islam in an effort to dismantle the patriarchy and uproot it from Islam (ambitious, she knows). She can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The vibrant media landscape in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where kiosks overflow with magazines and colorful film posters line roadside walls, creates a sexually charged public sphere that has a long history of political protests. The 2014 “Kiss of Love” campaign garnered national attention, sparking controversy as images of activists kissing in public and dragged into police vans flooded the media. In Unruly Figures: Queerness, Sex Work, and the Politics of Sexuality in Kerala (University of Washington Press, 2019), Navaneetha Mokkil tracks the cultural practices through which sexual figures—particularly the sex worker and the lesbian—are produced in the public imagination. Her analysis includes representations of the prostitute figure in popular media, trajectories of queerness in Malayalam films, public discourse on lesbian sexuality, the autobiographical project of sex worker and activist Nalini Jameela, and the memorialization of murdered transgender activist Sweet Maria, showing how various marginalized figures stage their own fractured journeys of resistance in the post-1990s context of globalization. By bringing a substantial body of Malayalam-language literature and media texts on gender, sexuality, and social justice into conversation with current debates around sexuality studies and transnational feminism in Asian and Anglo-American academia, Mokkil reorients the debates on sexuality in India by considering the fraught trajectories of identity and rights. Shraddha Chatterjee is a doctoral candidate at York University, Toronto, and author of Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects (Routledge, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Sorting Sexualities: Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Stefan Vogler deftly unpacks the politics of the techno-legal classification of sexuality in the United States. His study focuses specifically on state classification practices around LGBTQ people seeking asylum in the United States and sexual offenders being evaluated for carceral placement--two situations where state actors must determine individuals' sexualities. Though these legal settings are diametrically opposed--one a punitive assessment, the other a protective one--they present the same question: how do we know someone's sexuality? In this rich ethnographic study, Vogler reveals how different legal arenas take dramatically different approaches to classifying sexuality and use those classifications to legitimate different forms of social control. By delving into the histories behind these diverging classification practices and analyzing their contemporary reverberations, Vogler shows how the science of sexuality is far more central to state power than we realize. 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

In many ways, divorce is a quintessentially personal decision—the choice to leave a marriage that causes harm or feels unfulfilling to the two people involved. But anyone who has gone through a divorce knows the additional public dimensions of breaking up, from intense shame and societal criticism to friends’ and relatives’ unsolicited advice. In Intimate Disconnections: Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Allison Alexy tells the fascinating story of the changing norms surrounding divorce in Japan in the early 2000s, when sudden demographic and social changes made it a newly visible and viable option. Not only will one of three Japanese marriages today end in divorce, but divorces are suddenly much more likely to be initiated by women who cite new standards for intimacy as their motivation. As people across Japan now consider divorcing their spouses, or work to avoid separation, they face complicated questions about the risks and possibilities marriage brings: How can couples be intimate without becoming suffocatingly close? How should they build loving relationships when older models are no longer feasible? What do you do, both legally and socially, when you just can’t take it anymore? Relating the intensely personal stories from people experiencing different stages of divorce, Alexy provides a rich ethnography of Japan while also speaking more broadly to contemporary visions of love and marriage during an era in which neoliberal values are prompting wide-ranging transformations in homes across the globe. This book is available open access. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every year, millions of women turn to law to help them escape intimate partner violence. The legal processes are complex and varied, often enmeshing women for many years. In Intimate Partner Violence and the Law, published by Oxford University Press in 2021, Professor Heather Douglas examines intimate partner violence, including nonphysical coercive control, and shows how women's interactions with the law and legal processes can support or exacerbate their experiences and their abilities to leave an abusive partner. Over a period of three years, Douglas conducted a series of interviews to understand how women engage with criminal, family, and civil courts. The women's stories show how abusers can use the law to further perpetuate abuse. Despite the heightened danger that leaving an abusive partner can represent, the book showcases the level of endurance, resilience and patience that it takes women when they seek protection through law for themselves and their children. Reading the first-hand experiences of women and the impact on them from their interactions with police, lawyers, judges, and child protective services is extremely moving and illuminating. The book is profoundly important in understanding the need for reform to protect women and their children from intimate partner violence. Douglas shows how the legal system operates in practice, and the gap in protection for women and their children as to how it should work. Professor Heather Douglas is a Professor of Law at the Melbourne Law School at The University of Melbourne and Honorary Professor at the School of Law at The University of Queensland. She has worked on the legal response to intimate partner violence for over twenty years, both as a practitioner and an academic. Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between 1885 and 1960, laws and policies designed to repress prostitution dramatically shaped London's commercial sex industry. J. Laite's book Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) examines how laws translated into street-level reality, explores how women who sold sex experienced criminalization, and charts the complex dimensions of the underground sexual economy in the modern metropolis. 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

A rich examination of the history of trans medicine and current day practice Surfacing in the mid-twentieth century, yet shrouded in social stigma, transgender medicine is now a rapidly growing medical field. In Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender (NYU Press, 2021), stef shuster makes an important intervention in how we understand the development of this field and how it is being used to “treat” gender identity today. Drawing on interviews with medical providers as well as ethnographic and archival research, shuster examines how health professionals approach patients who seek gender-affirming care. From genital reconstructions to hormone injections, the practice of trans medicine charts new medical ground, compelling medical professionals to plan treatments without widescale clinical trials to back them up. Relying on cultural norms and gut instincts to inform their treatment plans, shuster shows how medical providers’ lack of clinical experience and scientific research undermines their ability to interact with patients, craft treatment plans, and make medical decisions. This situation defies how providers are trained to work with patients and creates uncertainty. As providers navigate the developing knowledge surrounding the medical care of trans folk, Trans Medicine offers a rare opportunity to understand how providers make decisions while facing challenges to their expertise and, in the process, have acquired authority not only over clinical outcomes, but over gender itself. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does understanding business help us understand sex? In The Business of Birth Control: Contraception and Commerce in Britain before the Sexual Revolution (Manchester UP, 2020), Claire Jones, a Senior Lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Kent, explores the intersection of commerce and medicine in the interwar period in Britain, as a way of rethinking both the history of contraception and the history of sex. The book uses new archival research, as well as perspectives from business history, to show changing attitudes and practices of people, clinics, and companies in the era before the contraceptive pill. Charting the rise of a new consumer culture, intertwined with company, technology, and medical history, the book is essential reading across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in sex! Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah’s second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing. Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century Black American and Latinx history centering trans and gender variant people’s politics and resistance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Drawing on her own experiences with late-onset disability and its impact on her sex life, along with her expertise as a cultural critic, Jane Gallop explores how disability and aging work to undermine one's sense of self. She challenges common conceptions that equate the decline of bodily potential and ability with a permanent and irretrievable loss, arguing that such a loss can be both temporary and positively transformative. With Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus (Duke UP, 2019), Gallop explores and celebrates how sexuality transforms and becomes more queer in the lives of the no longer young and the no longer able while at the same time demonstrating how disability can generate new forms of sexual fantasy and erotic possibility. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What makes a woman 'bad' is commonly linked to certain 'qualities' or behaviours seen as morally or socially corrosive, dirty and disgusting. Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies: Sex, Performance and Safe Femininity (Bloomsbury, 2020) explores the social, sexual and political significance of women who are labelled bad or dirty. Through case studies (including Empress Stah, RubberDoll or Doris La Trine), the book challenges the notion that sexual, slutty, bad, or dirty women are not worth listening to. Gemma Commane speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about her study of neo-burlesque, queer performances, and explicit entertainment as sites of power, possibility, and success. Gemma Commane is Lecturer in Media and Communications at the Birmingham School of Media, Birmingham City University. She is active in research in the fields of media and cultural studies, and gender and sexuality. Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Heterosexuality is in crisis. Reports of sexual harassment, misconduct, and rape saturate the news in the era of #MeToo. Straight men and women spend thousands of dollars every day on relationship coaches, seduction boot camps, and couple’s therapy in a search for happiness. In The Tragedy of Heterosexuality (NYU Press, 2020), Jane Ward smartly explores what, exactly, is wrong with heterosexuality in the twenty-first century, and what straight people can do to fix it for good. She shows how straight women, and to a lesser extent straight men, have tried to mend a fraught patriarchal system in which intimacy, sexual fulfillment, and mutual respect are expected to coexist alongside enduring forms of inequality, alienation, and violence in straight relationships. Ward also takes an intriguing look at the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry, which markets goods and services to help heterosexual couples without addressing the root of their problems. Ultimately, she encourages straight men and women to take a page out of queer culture, reminding them “about the human capacity to desire, fuck, and show respect at the same time.” Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are talking with Becca Andrews, a journalist at Mother Jones, where she writes about reproductive rights and gender. The story we discuss is “When Choice is 221 Miles Away: The Nightmare of Getting an Abortion in the South” and its follow up. Becca’s debut work of nonfiction, No Choice, based on her Mother Jones cover story about the past, present, and future of Roe v. Wade, will be published by in 2022. Andrews is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism and wrote for newspapers in her home state of Tennessee. Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Raven Bowen's Work, Money and Duality: Trading Sex As a Side-Hustle (Policy Press, 2021) is a rare and valuable exploration of work duality. It calls on practitioners, policymakers and researchers to recognise the experiences of sex workers and to address race, culture and sex work in the UK against the backdrop of Brexit. Based on extensive empirical work, it illustrates contemporary accounts of individuals who take extraordinary risks to hold jobs in both sex industries and non-sex work employment. Raven is the CEO of Ugly Mugs - check them out here. 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

If opposite-gender partnerships remain the societal ideal, then why are so many straight couples miserable? Author Jane Ward has been studying this question for some time and outlines her ideas about the tragic effects of heteronormativity in her new book, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality (New York University Press, 2020). In our interview, we discuss her compelling case for why queer people, and lesbian feminism in particular, have much relational wisdom to offer their heterosexual counterparts, and why only a deepening—rather than queering—of their sexuality can save them. Jane Ward is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of California, Riverside. Her prior books include Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men and Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations. 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

This collection of narrative essays by sex workers presents a crystal-clear rejoinder: there's never been a better time to fight for justice. Responding to the resurgence of the #MeToo movement in 2017, sex workers from across the industry--hookers and prostitutes, strippers and dancers, porn stars, cam models, Dommes and subs alike--complicate narratives of sexual harassment and violence, and expand conversations often limited to normative workplaces. Writing across topics such as homelessness, motherhood, and toxic masculinity, We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival (Feminist Press, 2021) gives voice to the fight for agency and accountability across sex industries. With contributions by leading voices in the movement such as Melissa Gira Grant, Ceyenne Doroshow, Audacia Ray, femi babylon, April Flores, and Yin Q, this anthology explores sex work as work, and sex workers as laboring subjects in need of respect--not rescue. A portion of this book's net proceeds will be donated to SWOP Behind Bars (SBB). 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

The People's Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America (Reaktion Books, 2020) is a beautifully written and groundbreaking historical study of homemade, handmade and amateur pornographic artifacts. Covering everything from erotic scrimshaw to amateur videos on the web, Lisa Sigel offers a fascinating account of what ordinary people thought about sexuality and desire. This hidden chapter of American sexual history is not only a much-needed counterbalance to ahistorical arguments which dominate pornography today, it’s also a reminder of humanity’s prodigious tendency to create and communicate sexual desires. At times, the images and objects presented in this book might appear shocking, crude, grotesque, problematic, confrontational, unrestrained, unruly; but in the end they are deeply human. Zachary Lowell holds an MA in global studies from Humboldts Universtität zu Berlin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between the decriminalization of contraception in 1969 and the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, a landmark decade in the struggle for women's rights, public discourse about birth control and family planning was transformed. At the same time, a transnational conversation about the "population bomb" that threatened global famine caused by overpopulation embraced birth control technologies for a different set of reasons, revisiting controversial ideas about eugenics, heredity, and degeneration. In Challenging Choices: Canada's Population Control in the 1970s (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020), Erika Dyck and Maureen Lux argue that reproductive politics in 1970s Canada were shaped by competing ideologies on global population control, poverty, personal autonomy, race, and gender. For some Canadians the 1970s did not bring about an era of reproductive liberty but instead reinforced traditional power dynamics and paternalistic structures of authority. Dyck and Lux present case studies of four groups of Canadians who were routinely excluded from progressive, reformist discourse: Indigenous women and their communities, those with intellectual and physical disabilities, teenage girls, and men. In different ways, each faced new levels of government regulation, scrutiny, or state intervention as they negotiated their reproductive health, rights, and responsibilities in the so-called era of sexual liberation. While acknowledging the reproductive rights gains that were made in the 1970s, the authors argue that the legal changes affected Canadians differently depending on age, social position, gender, health status, and cultural background. Illustrating the many ways to plan a modern family, these case studies reveal how the relative merits of life and choice were pitted against each other to create a new moral landscape for evaluating classic questions about population control. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Doctors of the World, also known as Médecins du Monde, is an international network of more than 400 programmes across 80 different countries, providing emergency and long term medical care to the world's most vulnerable people. Whether it's urgent response in the Ukraine, mental healthcare to refugees in Calais, or strengthening the health systems in west Africa, DOTW respond based on the needs of the people they work with. In the UK, Doctors of the World run clinic and advocacy programmes in London that provide medical care, information and practical support to people often excluded from wider society such as destitute migrants, sex workers and people with no fixed abode. Their recent report Left out in the Cold: The extreme unmet health and service needs of street sex workers in East London before and during the Covid-19 pandemic highlights the devastating challenges that street sex workers have in accessing essential healthcare services, resulting in poor health outcomes. Rachel Stuart, one of the report's researchers and authors, spent 18 months speaking to women in Newham, East London, and she talks about the senseless violence and avoidable health issues faced by the women sex working there. Victoria Holt is a PhD student at the University of Roehampton researching sex workers' experiences of domestic violence. I'm co-convenor for the British Sociological Association's Violence Against Women and Girls study group, and a board member for the Sex Work Research Hub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Deviant Opera: Sex, Power, and Perversion on Stage (University of California Press, 2020), Axel Englund examines an increasingly common trope in opera direction: the use of imagery associated with the kink and BDSM communities. This imagery underscores the themes of sexuality and domination that run through the opera repertory, and it also calls attention to the essential artificiality of operatic performance: opera, after all, is another form of role play. Some stagings have also used BDSM imagery to subvert problematic gender portrayals in classic opera, or even to call out the power imbalances offstage in the world of contemporary opera, which has recently been rocked by revelations of abuse at the highest level. Englund's book will be interesting to opera fans, kinksters, and anyone interested in contemporary efforts to breathe life into classic works of theatre. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930 (Cornell UP, 2019) traces the intersection of colonialism, law, land expropriation, sex, gender, and family during the century after the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. Seeking to assimilate Algerian land while differentiating Algerian Muslims from European settlers, colonial authorities developed a system that confined Muslim law to family matters while subjecting Algerian property to French Civil law. Securing and extending French sovereignty over Algeria, this system deprived Algerian Muslims of full citizenship rights while reinforcing French colonial authority. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a rigorous and provocative critical "history of the present" that illuminates the persistence of the "Muslim question" in contemporary France. In chapters focused on polygamy, repudiation, and child marriage, the book traces the ways that the French fantasies of the family, including the sexualization of Muslim women and a preoccupation with the sexual "excesses" of Muslim men, found expression in legislation that segregated the legal control of property from the regulation of bodies, beliefs, and personhood. A fascinating genealogy that understands colonial law and the problem of difference within a broader cultural field, the book is an impressive, compelling analysis with striking resonances for a Franco-Algerian present still shaped by the legacies of the colonial past. 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. 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

Francine Tremblay's book Organizing for Sex Workers’ Rights in Montréal: Resistance and Advocacy (Lexington Books, 2020) is based on a case study about Stella, l’amie de Maimie a Montréal sex workers' rights organization, founded by and for sex workers. It explores how a group of ostracized female-identified sex workers transformed themselves into a collective to promote the health and well-being of women working in the sex industry. Weighed down by the old and tenacious whore symbol, the sex workers at Stella had to find a way to navigate the criminality of sex work and sex workers, in order to do advocacy and support work, and create safer spaces for sex workers to engage in such advocacy. This book focuses on sex workers, but the advocacy challenges and strategies it outlines can also apply to the lives of other marginalized groups who are often ignored, pitied, or reviled, but who are seldom seen as fully human. Listeners may also be interested in this article by Tromblay and a report for The Doctors of The World. 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

Lydia Harvey was meant to disappear. She was young and working class; she'd walked the streets, worked in brothels, and had no money of her own. In 1910, politicians, pimps, policemen and moral reformers saw her as just one of many 'girls who disappeared'. But when she took the stand to give testimony at the trial of her traffickers, she ensured she'd never be forgotten. In The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A True Story of Sex, Crime and the Meaning of Justice (Profile Books, 2021), historian Julia Laite traces Lydia's extraordinary life from her home in New Zealand to the streets of Buenos Aires and safe houses of London. She also reveals the lives of international traffickers Antonio Carvelli and his mysterious wife Marie, the policemen who tracked them down, the journalists who stoked the scandal, and Eilidh MacDougall, who made it her life's mission to help women who'd been abused and disbelieved. Together, they tell an immersive story of crime, travel and sexual exploitation, of lives long overlooked and forgotten by history, and of a world transforming into the 20th century Pamela Fuentes is an Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Pace University-NYC campus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean to “upend a norm,” which is the translation of the title of Sergio Rigoletto’s recent study “Upended norms: essays on gender and sexuality in Italian cinema and television.” Rigoletto focuses on Italian audiovisual texts from the mid-20th century until today, asking questions about how these media helped mark the boundaries of social norms in Italy as well as chart the threats to those boundaries made by sexually active women, foreigners, drag queens, homosexuals and other queer subjects. How these threats move from the background (Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, 1960) to centerstage, in films like Ferzan Ozpetek’s The Ignorant Fairies (2001) and Luca Guadagnino’s Call me by Your Name (2017). What do these movements tell us about gendered subjects in Italian mainstream and popular media? What do they reveal about norms? These are some of the themes that Rigoletto’s (University of Oregon) Le norme traviate studies. Ellen Nerenberg is a founding editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/Italy. Recent scholarly essays focus on serial television in Italy, the UK, and North America; masculinities in Italian cinema and media studies; and student filmmakers. Her current book project is La nazione Winx: coltivare la futura consumista/Winx Nation: Grooming the Future Female Consumer, a collaboration with Nicoletta Marini-Maio (forthcoming, Rubbettino Editore, 2021). She is President of the American Association for Italian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Divine, Demonic, and Disordered: Women Without Men in Song Dynasty China (University of Washington Press, 2021), Cheng Hsiao-wen’s monograph looks at the women who are not married or otherwise in relationships with men. Through a wide range of sources, including medical treatises, texts about religious cultivation, hagiographies, tales, and anecdotes, Cheng explores how “manless women” were understood in the Song dynasty. The book’s three sections—focusing on medicals texts, stories of enchantment, and celibate religious women, respectively—consider the meaning of womanhood and the treatment of female bodies when they were not figured as “wives” or “mothers.” But Cheng’s work goes further, using women on the margins to challenge us to think about what we know and how we know it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aggressors in Blue: Exposing Police Sexual Misconduct (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) presents a powerful and thorough investigation into police deviance and sexual misconduct in the US. Drawing on news reports, official government press releases and academic research sources, Tom Barker examines a wide array of cases including sexual harassment, sexual abuse, child molestation and police killings, including those of prisoners behind bars. Substantiated with additional cases from the UK, Russia and beyond, analysis is also conducted of the experiences of the victims of those crimes. Aggressors in Blue argues that this misconduct has its roots in the nature of the law enforcement occupation, and outlines the typical conditions which enables police sexual abuse to take place. This is a bold new investigation which speaks to students and academics in criminal justice, criminology and social justice in particular, as well as to scholars, social justice advocates, law enforcement professionals, policy-makers and academics in other related disciplines. 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

We know more about men who sought and had sex with men in eighteenth-century Paris than in any other city at the time. Police records provide information about thousands of sodomites who were arrested and thousands more who were not. Michel Rey explored the sodomitical culture of the capital in five articles, based on one set of sources, published from 1982 to 1994. No one has completed his pioneering work in the archives and challenged his anachronistic conclusions about identity, community, and effeminacy. Jeffrey Merrick's book Sodomy in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge Scholars, 2020), the first on the subject based on extensive research in all of the relevant series of police records, explores patterns and changes in the lives of men who desired men and in the surveillance and punishment of same-sex relations across the century. The book examines what the extant sources do and do not tell us about the heads, hearts, and hands of men detained or mentioned by the police. To that end, it includes a generous selection of documents that allow us to hear voices from the archives, including many that require us to rethink what we thought we knew about the subculture. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Vanessa Carlisle about her new book Take Me with You (Running Wild, 2021). Kindred Powell's youth is marked by a secret that her white mother and Black father kept from her. After her father Carl's unjust incarceration and her mother's death from illness, Kindred moves from Los Angeles to New York in a desperate search for peace. There, she finds her girlfriend Nautica, a career in sex work, and a kinky boy toy named Griffin. But when Carl goes missing from LA's Skid Row, Kindred must drop everything to find him. Keep an eye out for the special edition of the South Atlantic Quarterly edited by Heather Berg and Featuring more of Vanessa's work. 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

Social media has become the front-and-center arena for feminist activism. Responding to and enacting the political potential of pain inflicted in acts of sexual harassment, violence, and abuse, Asian American and Asian Canadian feminist icons such as rupi kaur, Margaret Cho, and Mia Matsumiya have turned to social media to share their stories with the world. But how does such activism reconcile with the platforms on which it is being cultivated, when its radical messaging is at total odds with the neoliberal logic governing social media? Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism, and the Neoliberal Selfie (NYU Press, 2021) troubles this phenomenon by articulating a "neoliberal self(ie) gaze" through which these feminist activists see and storify the self on social media as "good" neoliberal subjects who are appealing, inspiring, and entertaining. This book offers a fresh perspective on feminist activism by demonstrating how the problematic neoliberal logic governing digital spaces like Instagram and Twitter limits the possibilities of how one might use social media for feminist activism. 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

Providing one of the first comprehensive, cross-cultural examinations of the dynamic market for sexual services, this book presents an evidence-based look at the multiple factors related to purchasing patterns and demand among clients who have used the internet. The data is drawn from two large surveys of sex workers' clients in the US and UK. The book presents descriptive baseline data on client engagement with online platforms, demographics and patterns of frequency in different markets, information on smaller niche markets and client reactions to exploitation, safety and changes in the law. Teela Sanders, Barbara G. Brents and Chris Wakefield's book Paying for Sex in a Digital Age: US and UK Perspectives (Routledge, 2020) makes clear that a variety of situational as well as individual factors affect the willingness and ability to purchase sexual services. The view that emerges shatters the stereotypes and generalistions on which much policy is based and demonstrates the complexities surrounding who pays for sex and the contours of sexual consumption in consumer culture. 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

Today I talked to Dilara Yarbrough about her article "Nothing About Us Without Us: Reading Protests against Oppressive Knowledge Production as Guidelines for Solidarity Research," published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (2019). Dilara Yarbrough is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice Studies at San Francisco State University. Dilara’s research focuses on how different types of governmental responses to poverty perpetuate or interrupt racial, gender and economic inequalities. Her book manuscript Abolitionist Care describes how poverty relief services provided by and for sex workers and transgender women of colour incorporate radical harm reduction and grassroots organizing to disrupt carceral logics. In this podcast, Dilara discusses anti-oppressive approaches to the production and dissemination of knowledge, including Participatory Action and Solidarity. 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

Dr Katie Cruz contributed a chapter titled "The Work of Sex Work: Prostitution, Unfreedom and Criminality at Work" to the book Criminality at Work (Oxford UP, 2020). In this podcast, Dr Cruz talks about her research around stripping and labour rights. She discusses the case of Nowack vs Chandler Bars when a woman working as a stripper in a London strip club was successful in pursuing her case against the club. She discusses her other work including her research among sex workers in Jamaica. Kate's blog posts are available here. Cruz's other works in include: --Cruz, K., & Brown, W. (2016). "Feminism, law, and neoliberalism: An interview and discussion with Wendy Brown." Feminist Legal Studies, 24(1), 69-89. --Cruz, K. (2018). "Beyond Liberalism: Marxist feminism, migrant sex work, and labour unfreedom." Feminist Legal Studies, 26(1), 65-92. --Hardy, K., & Cruz, K. (2019). "Affective organizing: Collectivizing informal sex workers in an intimate union." American behavioural scientist, 63(2), 244-261. --Cruz, K., Davidson, J. O. C., & Taylor, J. S. (2019). "Tourism and sexual violence and exploitation in Jamaica: contesting the ‘trafficking and modern slavery frame." Journal of the British Academy, 7(s1), 191-216. 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