New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

Viktoriya Kim, Nelia Balgoa, and Beverley Anne Yamamoto's book The Politics of International Marriage in Japan (Rutgers UP, 2021) provides an in-depth exploration and analysis of marriages between Japanese nationals and migrants from three broad ethnic/cultural groups - spouses from the former Soviet Union countries, the Philippines, and Western countries. It reveals how the marriage migrants navigate the intricacies and trajectories of their marriages with Japanese people while living in Japan. Seen from the lens of ‘gendered geographies of power’, the book explores how state-level politics and policies towards marriage, migration, and gender affect the personal power politics in operation within the relationships of these international couples. Overall, the book discusses how ethnic identity intersects with gender in the negotiation of spaces and power relations between and amongst couples; and the role states and structural inequalities play in these processes, resulting in a reconfiguration of our notions of what international marriages are and how powerful gender and the state are in understanding the power relations in these unions.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

Sanctified Sex: The Two-Thousand-Year Jewish Debate on Marital Intimacy (Jewish Publication Society, 2021) draws on two thousand years of rabbinic debates addressing competing aspirations for loving intimacy, passionate sexual union, and sanctity in marriage. What can Judaism contribute to our struggles to nurture love relationships? What halakhic precedents are relevant, and how are rulings changing?The rabbis, of course, seldom agree. Underlying their arguments are perennial debates: What kind of marital sex qualifies as ideal—sacred self-control of sexual desire or the holiness found in emotional and erotic intimacy? Is intercourse degrading in its physicality or the highest act of spiritual/mystical union? And should women or men (or both) wield ultimate say about what transpires in bed?Noam Sachs Zion guides us chronologically and steadily through fraught terrain: seminal biblical texts and their Talmudic interpretations; Talmud tales of three unusual rabbis and their marital bedrooms; medieval codifiers and mystical commentators; ultra-Orthodox rabbis clashing with one another over radically divergent ideals; and, finally, contemporary rabbis of varied denominations wrestling with modern transformations in erotic lifestyles and values.Invited into these sanctified and often sexually explicit discussions with our ancestors and contemporaries, we encounter innovative Jewish teachings on marital intimacy, ardent lovemaking techniques, and the art of couple communication vital for matrimonial success. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bogdan Popa’s De-Centering Queer Theory: Communist Sexuality in the Flow During and After the Cold War (Manchester University Press, 2021) seeks to reorient queer theory to a different conception of bodies and sexuality derived from Eastern European Marxism. The book articulates a contrast between the concept of the productive body, which draws its epistemology from Soviet and avant-garde theorists, and Cold War gender, which is defined as the social construction of the body. The first part of the book concentrates on the theoretical and visual production of Eastern European Marxism, which proposed an alternative version of sexuality to that of western liberalism. In doing so it offers a historical angle to understand the emergence not only of an alternative epistemology, but also of queer theory's vocabulary. The second part of the book provides a Marxist, anti-capitalist archive for queer studies, which often neglects to engage critically with its liberal and Cold War underpinnings.Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book Fantasy, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere: Male Bodies of Dis/Inhibition (Routledge, 2021), Jacob Johanssen takes us on a journey into the dark masculinist recesses of the internet. He analyses original data from online communities of Involuntary Celibate (Incel) men, women-denigrating “Men Going Their Own Way”, anti-porn crusading NoFap users and the manifestos of mass shooters. By making use of the work of Willhelm Reich, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Klaus Theweleit, he is able to construct a convincing and sinister portrait of this dis/inhibited online culture, in which intermingling fantasies of victimhood and destructive annihilation of the feminine Other create a seething mélange of hatred and misogyny. It is testament to the power of the psychoanalytically informed approach of gathering “identificatory knowledge” that Johanssen does not stop at painting a damning picture of these men, but tries to grasp the psychodynamics at play in their polarized and fragmented world views and identities. As unlikely as it seems, there is even a glimmer of hope at the end of the book. Johanssen applies Jessica Benjamin’s concept of recognition to the men discussed - a possible way out of the dead end of the obsessively intensified hate of the manosphere? We discuss this question and many more in the interview.Sebastian Thrul is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in training in Germany and Switzerland. He can be reached at sebastian.thrul@gmx.de. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since the turn of the millennium, American media, scientists, and environmental activists have insisted that the global population crisis is “back”—and that the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change is to ensure women’s universal access to contraception. Did the population problem ever disappear? What is bringing it back—and why now? In On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women's Rights in the Era of Climate Change (New York University Press, 2018), Jade S. Sasser explores how a small network of international development actors, including private donors, NGO program managers, scientists, and youth advocates, is bringing population back to the center of public environmental debate. While these narratives never disappeared, Sasser argues, histories of human rights abuses, racism, and a conservative backlash against abortion in the 1980s drove them underground—until now.Using interviews and case studies from a wide range of sites—from Silicon Valley foundation headquarters to youth advocacy trainings, the halls of Congress and an international climate change conference—Sasser demonstrates how population growth has been reframed as an urgent source of climate crisis and a unique opportunity to support women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. ­Although well-intentioned—promoting positive action, women’s empowerment, and moral accountability to a global community—these groups also perpetuate the same myths about the sexuality and lack of virtue and control of women and the people of global south that have been debunked for decades. Unless the development community recognizes the pervasive repackaging of failed narratives, Sasser argues, true change and development progress will not be possible.On Infertile Ground presents a unique critique of international development that blends the study of feminism, environmentalism, and activism in a groundbreaking way. It will make any development professional take a second look at the ideals driving their work.Dr. Nicole Bourbonnais is an Associate Professor of International History and Politics and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores reproductive politics and practice from a transnational historical perspective. More info here. witter: @iheid_history and @GC_IHEID Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this Postscript, Susan Liebell and Lilly Goren review this morning’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Texas SB-8, the oral arguments in last week’s Mississippi abortion case, and the wider issues of the Court’s legitimacy, electoral backlash, ripple effects beyond abortion to marriage equality or protection of sexuality, the effect of a ruling on electoral politics, and the effectiveness of grassroots organizing. We are joined by 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) and Dr. Joshua C. Wilson (Professor of Political Science at the University of Denver).Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity––and the ultimate boundary transgression.Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity (Stanford UP, 2021), Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions.Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies and Eastern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Barbara Rosenwein talks about her new book Love: A History in Five Fantasies (Polity Press, 2021) today on the podcast.We make sense of love with fantasies, stories that shape feelings that are otherwise too overwhelming, incoherent, and wayward to be tamed. For love is a complex, bewildering, and ecstatic emotion covering a welter of different feelings and moral judgments.Drawing on poetry, fiction, letters, memoirs, and art, and with the aid of a rich array of illustrations, historian Barbara H. Rosenwein explores five of our most enduring fantasies of love: like-minded union, transcendent rapture, selfless giving, obsessive longing, and insatiable desire. Each has had a long and tangled history with lasting effects on how we in the West think about love today. Yet each leads to a different conclusion about what we should strive for in our relationships.If only we could peel back the layers of love and discover its “true” essence. But love doesn’t work like that; it is constructed on the shards of experience, story, and feeling, shared over time, intertwined with other fantasies. By understanding the history of how we have loved, Rosenwein argues, we may better navigate our own tumultuous experiences and perhaps write our own scripts.Barbara H. Rosenwein is internationally recognized for her work in the history of emotions, a field she helped to pioneer. Her books explore the many ways in which different groups have experienced, valued, and expressed emotions over time. There are no universal, “basic emotions,” but all of us have feelings shaped by (and shaping in turn) the “emotional communities” in which we live. Rosenwein has taught and lectured around the world, but her home is near Chicago, where she lives with her husband, Tom.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 The Work of Rape (Duke UP, 2021), Rana M. Jaleel argues that the redefinition of sexual violence within international law as a war crime, crime against humanity, and genocide owes a disturbing and unacknowledged debt to power and knowledge achieved from racial, imperial, and settler colonial domination. Prioritizing critiques of racial capitalism from women of color, Indigenous, queer, trans, and Global South perspectives, Jaleel reorients how violence is socially defined and distributed through legal definitions of rape. From Cold War conflicts in Latin America, the 1990s ethnic wars in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and the War on Terror to ongoing debates about sexual assault on college campuses, Jaleel considers how legal and social iterations of rape and the terms that define it—consent, force, coercion—are unstable indexes and abstractions of social difference that mediate racial and colonial positionalities. Jaleel traces how post-Cold War orders of global security and governance simultaneously transform the meaning of sexualized violence, extend US empire, and disavow legacies of enslavement, Indigenous dispossession, and racialized violence within the United States.Work of Rape is the recipient of Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award.Rana M. Jaleel is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of California, Davis, where she is also the Faculty Advisor for the Sexuality Studies Minor. Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, I interview Gila Ashtor, a practicing psychoanalyst and critical theorist, about her new book, Homo Psyche: On Queer Theory and Erotophobia (Fordham University Press, 2021). This book proceeds from the perplexing observation that for all of its political agita, rhetorical virtuosity, and intellectual restlessness, queer theory conforms to a model of erotic life that is psychologically conservative and narrow. Even after several decades of combative, dazzling, irreverent queer critical thought, the field remains far from grasping that sexuality’s radical potential lies in its being understood as “exogenous, intersubjective and intrusive” (Laplanche). In particular, and despite the pervasiveness and popularity of recent calls to deconstruct the ideological foundations of contemporary queer thought, no study has as yet considered or in any way investigated the singular role of psychology in shaping the field’s conceptual impasses and politico-ethical limitations.Through close readings of key thinkers in queer theoretical thought—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, and Jane Gallop—Homo Psyche introduces metapsychology as a new dimension of analysis vis-à-vis the theories of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, who insisted on “new foundations for psychoanalysis” that radically departed from existing Freudian and Lacanian models of the mind. Staging this intervention, Ashtor deepens current debates about the future of queer studies by demonstrating how the field’s systematic neglect of metapsychology as a necessary and independent realm of ideology ultimately enforces the complicity of queer studies with psychological conventions that are fundamentally erotophobic and therefore inimical to queer theory’s radical and ethical project.Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices