New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

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 publi...

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 exp...

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...

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 cont...

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...

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 opera...

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...

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 Mus...

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...

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 Ly...

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 und...

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, inc...

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 pionee...

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...

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 wi...

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...

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 g...

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 agai...

Nikki Lane's The Black Queer Work of Ratchet: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the (Anti)Politics of Respectability (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) enters as a corrective to the tendency to trivialize and (mis)appropriate African American language practices. The word ratchet has entered into a wider (whiter) American discourse the same way that many words in African American English have--through hip-hop a...

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India (University of Washington Press, 2021), Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform rep...

Drawing from his/her own experience as a trans performer, sex worker, and undocumented immigrant, Iván Monalisa Ojeda chronicles the lives of Latinx queer and trans immigrants in New York City. Whether she is struggling with addiction, clashing with law enforcement, or is being subjected to personal violence, each character choses her own path of defiance, often responding to her fate with with ir...

Bernadette Barton, Ph. D. exposes the double standard we attach to women’s sexuality in The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruining Our Society (NYU Press, 2021) Pictures of half-naked girls and women can easily be found on screens, billboards, and advertisement across the United States of America. There are pole-dancing courses that can be purchased by women who desire to stay fit...

Sadomasochism and the BDSM Community in the United States: Kinky People Unite (Routledge, 2021) chronicles the development of sadomasochistic sexuality and its communities in the United States from the post-war period to the present day. Having evolved from scattered networks of sadomasochists to a coherent body bound by shared principles of "safe, sane, consensual," activists worked to transform...

Since the historic #MeToo movement materialized in 2017, innumerable survivors of sexual assault and misconduct have broken their silence and called out their abusers publicly--from well-known celebrities to politicians and high-profile business leaders. Not surprisingly, conservatives quickly opposed this new movement, but the fact that "sex positive" progressives joined in the opposition was une...

Panoramic and provocative in its scope, John Geoffrey Scott and Christian Grov's The Routledge Handbook of Male Sex Work, Culture, and Society (Routledge, 2021) is the definitive guide to contemporary issues associated with male sex work and a must read for those who study masculinities, male sexuality, sexual health, and sexual cultures. This groundbreaking volume will have a powerful impact on o...