New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

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

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

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 (panchasi@sfu.ca). 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 centuryPamela 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