New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

Y. Yvon Wang draws on previously untapped archives--ranging from police archives and surveys to ephemeral texts and pictures--to argue that pornography in China represents a unique configuration of power and desire that both reflects and shapes historical processes. On the one hand, since the late imperial period, pornography has democratized pleasure in China and opened up new possibilities of im...

Apps have transformed dating from a mysterious adventure into a daily chore. Young, single, college-educated women are sick and tired of competing for a shrinking supply of guys. And marriage-material men, long expected to take the lead when it comes to asking women out, are suddenly balking at making the first move, fearing they'll come across as creepy or inappropriate. Society is changing, whic...

Twenty-first century media has increasingly turned to provocative sexual content to generate buzz and stand out within a glut of programming. New distribution technologies enable and amplify these provocations, and encourage the branding of media creators as "provocauteurs" known for challenging sexual conventions and representational norms. While such strategies may at times be no more than a pro...

Siobhán Hearne's Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford UP, 2021) examines the complex world of commercial sex in the late Russian Empire. From the 1840s until 1917, prostitution was legally tolerated across the Russian Empire under a system known as regulation. Medical police were in charge of compiling information about registered prostitutes and ensu...

Starting in the latter part of the 20th century, the law of sexual offenses, especially in the West, began to reflect a striking divergence. On the one hand, the law became significantly more punitive in its approach to sexual conduct that is nonconsensual, as evidenced by a major expansion in the definition of rape and sexual assault, and the creation of new offenses like sex trafficking, child g...

Sasha Roseneil, Professor of Interdisciplinary Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Studies and Dean of the Faculty of Social and Historical Studies at University College London joins today to talk about the new book The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm: Intimate Citizenship Regimes in a Changing Europe, out 2020 with UCL Press. The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm explores the ongoing strength and i...

This episode features three interviews with organizers and scholars concerned with Asian migrant sex work: SWAN Vancouver (Alison Clancey and Kelly Go), Dr. Lily Wong, and Dr. Yuri Doolan. On March 16, 2021, Robert Aaron Long targeted three Atlanta-area spas and massage parlors and killed eight people: Delania Ashley Yuan González, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Paul Andre Michels, Hyun Jung Grant, Soo...

Behind the Iron Curtain, the politics of sexuality and gender were, in many ways, more progressive than the West. While Polish citizens undoubtedly suffered under the oppressive totalitarianism of socialism, abortion was legal, clear laws protected victims of rape, and it was relatively easy to legally change one's gender. In Gender, Pleasure, and Violence: The Construction of Expert Knowledge of...

Today I talked to Carol J. Adams about two of her classic texts that have recently been republished. The first book we discuss, first published in 1990, is The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, a landmark text in the ongoing debates about animal rights. In the two decades since, the book has inspired controversy and heated debate. The Sexual Politics of Meat argues th...

When Camille Melissa emigrated to the UK from Australia via Paris and entered the sex industry in 2005, she always knew that photography would play a crucial role as she navigated the complex structures – both visible and invisible – of this misrepresented community. The rhetoric surrounding sex work is often frustratingly one-dimensional in mainstream media; those who enter the industry are someh...

This is not a comprehensive study of every sexual quirk, kink and ritual across all cultures throughout time, as that would entail writing an encyclopaedia. Rather, this is a drop in the ocean, a paddle in the shallow end of sex history, but I hope you will get pleasantly wet nonetheless. The act of sex has not changed since people first worked out what went where, but the ways in which society di...

Within queer, transgender, and Latinx and Chicanx cultural politics, brown transgender narratives are frequently silenced and erased. Brown trans subjects are treated as deceptive, unnatural, nonexistent, or impossible, their bodies, lives, and material circumstances represented through tropes and used as metaphors. Restoring personhood and agency to these subjects, Francisco J. Galarte advances “...

We are joined today by Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa in the writers’ heaven that is Iowa City, Iowa. She also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Gender, Women’s Studies, and Sexuality Studies at Iowa. She is here today to talk to us about her upcoming book: Me Too: The Impact of Rape Culture in the Media (P...

In Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century, (The Ohio State University Press, 2020), Alyson K. Spurgas, Ph. D. examines the “new science of female sexuality” from a critical, sociological perspective, considering how today’s feminist-identified sex researchers study and manage women with low desire. Diagnosing Desire investigates experimental sex research that m...

Today’s interview on New Books in History is with Dr. Marta Vicente, Professor of History at the University of Kansas to talk about her 2017 Cambridge University Press release, Debating Sex and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Spain. Eighteenth-century debates continue to set the terms of modern-day discussions on how ‘nature and nurture’ shape sex and gender. Current dialogs – from the tension betwee...

In Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020), Dr. Kim Gallon examines how Black newspaper editors and journalists created and fostered Black sexual publics during the 1920s and 1930s. She demonstrates that editors strategically elected to publish stories about marital scandals, divorces, homosexuality, and gender non-con...

In Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020), Roland Betancourt reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval thought and visual culture around matters of sexual and reproductive consent, bullying and slut-shaming, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, trans and nonbinary gender identities, and the depicti...

My guest today, author Mithu Sanyal, describes the topic of rape as a ‘cultural sore spot,’ one that requires yet eludes wide conversation. Her latest book, Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo (Verso, 2019), bravely starts this conversation. It covers the history of rape as well as of our divergent and misguided conceptions for it, and it addresses the topic’s intersection with matters of gender stereot...

Sarah Hines (Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Oklahoma) and James Cane-Carrasco (Associate Professor, Departments of History and International & Area Studies, University of Oklahoma) speak with Lessie Jo Frazier (Professor, Departments of Gender Studies and American Studies, Indiana University-Bloomington) about her new book,  Desired States: Sex, Gender, and Political Cul...

Tom Rastrelli is a survivor of clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse who then became a priest in the early days of the Catholic Church’s ongoing scandals. Confessions of a Gay Priest: A Memoir of Sex, Love, Abuse, and Scandal in the Catholic Seminary (University of Iowa Press, 2020) divulges the clandes­tine inner workings of the seminary, providing an intimate and unapologetic look into the psychosexua...

In Batman and The Joker: Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2020), Chris Richardson presents a cultural analysis of the ways gender, identity, and sexuality are negotiated in the rivalry of Batman and The Joker. Richardson's queer reading of the text provides new understandings of Batman and The Joker and the transformations of the Gotham Universe throughout its 80-year existence....

Ellen Lamont's new book The Mating Game: How Gender Still Shapes How We Date (University of California Press, 2020) offers an in-depth analysis of how gender shapes dating practices. Despite enormous changes in patterns of dating and courtship in twenty-first-century America, contemporary understandings of romance and intimacy remain firmly rooted in age-old assumptions of gender difference. These...

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @...

When Judith G. Coffin discovered a virtually unexplored treasure trove of letters to Simone de Beauvoir from Beauvoir's international readers, it inspired Coffin to explore the intimate bond between the famed author and her reading public. This correspondence, at the heart of Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir (Cornell UP, 2020), immerses us in the tumultuous decades from the late...

Sex, drugs, religion, and love are potent combinations in la zona, a regulated prostitution zone in the city of Reynosa, across the border from Hidalgo, Texas. During the years 2008 and 2009, a time of intense drug violence, Sarah Luna met and built relationships with two kinds of migrants, women who moved from rural Mexico to Reynosa to become sex workers and American missionaries who moved from...