New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

In Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), Dr. Ashley M. Williard demonstrates how problematics of gender played a central role in defining colonial others, male and female, at the moment when slavery was first introduced in the French-controlled Antilles. The book argues that seventeenth-century French Caribbean reconstructions of masculinity and femininity helped sustain and justify occupation, slavery, and nascent ideas of race. In the face of historical silences, Williard’s close readings of archival and narrative texts reveals the words, images, and perspectives that reflected and produced new ideas of human difference in this colonial context. Juridical, religious, and medical discourses expose the interdependence of multiple conditions—male and female, enslaved and free, Black and white, Indigenous and displaced, normative and disabled—in the islands claimed for the French Crown.R. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers across East and Southeast Asia have found themselves turning to Thai soap operas known as “Boys Love series” as a source of comfort and joy. Originally deriving from Japanese comic book culture, Boys Love, or BL, represents just one of many instances where the queer popular culture of Japan has transformed sexual culture in Southeast Asia through the development of new expressions of gender and sexuality.Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Thomas Baudinette shines the spotlight on the influence of Japanese queer popular across Southeast Asia, highlighting how, across the region, young consumers – most prominently from sexual minority communities – have been turning away from Western media to draw upon Japanese popular culture in the ongoing search for affirmative representation and tools to not only make sense of their minoritised sexualities, but to also advocate for their emancipation.About Tom Baudinette:Dr Thomas Baudinette is Senior Lecturer in Japanese and International Studies, Department of Media, Communication, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature at Macquarie University. Thomas’s scholarly research focuses upon the role of Asian popular culture in informing knowledge about gender and sexuality across East and Southeast Asia. His first book is Regimes of Desire: Young Gay Men, Media, and Masculinity in Tokyo (University of Michigan Press, 2021). His second book is Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen Vider uncovers how LGBTQ people reshaped domestic life in the postwar United States. From the Stonewall riots to the protests of ACT UP, histories of queer and trans politics have almost exclusively centered on public activism. In The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World War II (U Chicago Press, 2021), Vider turns the focus inward, showing that the intimacy of domestic space has been equally crucial to the history of postwar LGBTQ life.Beginning in the 1940s, LGBTQ activists looked increasingly to the home as a site of connection, care, and cultural inclusion. They struggled against the conventions of marriage, challenged the gendered codes of everyday labor, reimagined domestic architecture, and contested the racial and class boundaries of kinship and belonging. Retelling LGBTQ history from the inside out, Vider reveals the surprising ways that the home became, and remains, a charged space in battles for social and economic justice, making it clear that LGBTQ people not only realized new forms of community and culture for themselves—they remade the possibilities of home life for everyone.Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s Postscript uniquely engages abortion politics by addressing structural political issues (voter suppression, gerrymandering, dilutions of minority voting, obstacles to women registering their positions politically), inconsistencies in Justice Samuel Alito’s majority draft, the ascent of the medical profession, the intersection of race, gender, and religion, narratives of morality, the genesis of white evangelical opposition, myths created by popular culture and abortion stereotypes, and more. Dr. Lilly J. Goren (Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at Carroll University), Dr. Rebecca Kreitzer (Associate Professor of Public Policy and Adjunct Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Dr. Andrew R. Lewis (Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati), Dr. Candis Watts Smith (Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University and co-host of the Democracy Works Podcast) and Dr. Joshua C. Wilson (Professor of Political Science at the University of Denver).Some of the books and articles mentioned in the podcast: Diana Greene Foster, The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having – or Being Denied – an Abortion Rebecca Kreitzer’s amazing slide deck of abortion facts and recommended reading list. Rebecca Kreitzer and Candis Watts Smith in the Monkey Cage, “What Alito’s draft gets wrong about women and political power” Andrew Lewis, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics: How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars Ziad Munson, The Making of Pro-life Activists:How Social Movement Mobilization WorksJosh Wilson, Separate But Faithful: The Christian Right’s Radical Struggle to Transform Law & Legal Culture Mary Ziegler, Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mid-century America had a problem talking about sex. Dr. Mary Calderone first diagnosed this condition and, in 1964, led the uphill battle to de-stigmatize sex education. Supporters hailed her as the “grandmother of modern sex education” while her detractors painted her as an “aging libertine,” but both could agree that she was quickly shaping the way sex was discussed in the classroom.Part biography, part social history, The Transformation of American Sex Education: Mary Calderone and the Fight for Sexual Health (NYU Press, 2022) for the first time situates Dr. Mary Calderone at the center of decades of political, cultural, and religious conflict in the fight for comprehensive sex education. Ellen S. More examines Americans’ attempts to come to terms with the vexed subject of sex education in schools from the late 1940s to the early twenty-first century. Using Mary Calderone’s life and career as a touchstone, she traces the origins of modern sex education in the United States from the work of a group of reformers who coalesced around Calderone to create the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) in 1964, to the development and use of the competing approaches known as “abstinence-based” and “comprehensive” sex education from the 1980s into the twenty-first century.A fascinating and timely read, The Transformation of American Sex Education provides a substantial contribution to the history of one of America’s most intense and protracted culture wars, and the first account of the woman who fought those battles.Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"I don't care what people do in their bedroom, but do they need to flaunt it?" This sentiment is a common refrain in American culture and politics when talking about LGBTQ rights, and as Ohio State historian Dr. Clayton Howard argues, it's a sentence with a history. In The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac: The Politics of Sexual Privacy in Northern California (University of Pennsylvania, 2019), Howard traces the history of the idea of sexual privacy back to the era immediately after World War II, when the "Straight State" began more aggressively incentivizing and policing hetero- and homosexuality respectively. Through acts such as the GI Bill, housing became a central battleground in the Bay Area for determining what normative sex looked like. Soon, churches, schools, and the steps of city hall, all became fronts in a culture war that, as Howard argues, was not quite as black-and-white as scholars sometimes make it seem. Today, legislation such as Florida's so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill have their roots in debates over laws such as California's Briggs Initiative and indeed, stretch all the way back to San Francisco's mid-20th century life as a hub for military life in the Pacific. The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac is an in-depth look at how even the most private areas of an individual's life are often in fact very public indeed.Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Inquiries into marital patterns can serve as an effective lens to analyze social structures and material cultures not only on the question of sexuality, but also on the nature of a private citizen’s engagement with state and law. Through ethnographic research in courtrooms, community, and kinship spaces, Rama Srinivasan outlines the transformations in material culture and political economy that have led to renewed negotiations on the institution of marriage in North India, especially in legal spaces. Tracing organically evolving notions of sexual consent and legal subjectivity, Courting Desire: Litigating for Love in North India (Rutgers UP, 2020) underlines how non-normative decisions regarding marriage become possible in a region otherwise known for high instances of honor killings and rigid kinship structures. Aspirations for consensual relationships have led to a tentative attempt to forge relationships that are non-normative but grudgingly approved after state intervention. The book traces this nascent and under-explored trend in the North Indian landscape.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

By showing how a wide, and surprising, range of Caribbean writers have contributed to the crafting of a supple and inclusive erotic repertoire across the second half of the twentieth century, the readings in Creolized Sexualities: Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean (Rutgers University Press, 2021) aim to demonstrate that a recognition of creolized and pluralized sexualities already exists within the literary imagination. Professor Alison Donnell and I talk about her writing process and inspiration, the importance of place, and the ways this book might help us rethink the queer Caribbean. Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A camera obscura reflects the world back but dimmer and inverted. Similarly, science has long viewed woman through a warped lens, one focused narrowly on her capacity for reproduction. As a result, there exists a vast knowledge gap when it comes to what we know about half of the bodies on the planet.That is finally changing. Today, a new generation of researchers is turning its gaze to the organs traditionally bound up in baby-making—the uterus, ovaries, and vagina—and illuminating them as part of a dynamic, resilient, and ever-changing whole. Welcome to Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage (W.W. Norton, 2022), an odyssey into a woman’s body from a fresh perspective, ushering in a whole new cast of characters.In Boston, a pair of biologists are growing artificial ovaries to counter the cascading health effects of menopause. In Melbourne, a urologist remaps the clitoris to fill in crucial gaps in female sexual anatomy. Given unparalleled access to labs and the latest research, journalist Rachel E. Gross takes readers on a scientific journey to the center of a wonderous world where the uterus regrows itself, ovaries pump out fresh eggs, and the clitoris pulses beneath the surface like a shimmering pyramid of nerves.This paradigm shift is made possible by the growing understanding that sex and gender are not binary; we all share the same universal body plan and origin in the womb. That’s why insights into the vaginal microbiome, ovarian stem cells, and the biology of menstruation don’t mean only a better understanding of female bodies, but a better understanding of male, non-binary, transgender, and intersex bodies—in other words, all bodies.By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, and shocking, Vagina Obscura is a powerful testament to how the landscape of human knowledge can be rewritten to better serve everyone.Sine Yaganoglu: Having trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer, I switched to industry following my PhD at ETH Zurich and have been working in innovation management and diagnostics. Besides reading about science, innovation and entrepreneurship, I have become interested in the scientific and cultural aspects of parenting and motherhood since welcoming my first child. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bitch: On the Female of the Species (Basic Books, 2022) is a fierce, funny, and revolutionary look at the queens of the animal kingdom. Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: all her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser. Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones—dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted. In Bitch, Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male. This isn‘t your grandfather’s evolutionary biology. It’s more inclusive, truer to life, and, simply, more fun.Sine Yaganoglu trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices