New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

Regine Jean-Charles’ Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Ohio State University Press, 2014) foregrounds black women as speaking subjects in narrating and protesting sexual violence. Jean-Charles emphasizes a transnational black feminist framework that makes a critical intervention in rape cultural criticism. She contends in this work that taking rape as a starting point to theorize colonial and postcolonial violence provides a more effective way to understand the gendered contours of violence. Drawing on a range of primary sources including novels, photographs and films from Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, Jean-Charles highlights the global implications of sexual violence and the importance of paying attention to its representation in order to rethink the very fundamental notions of human rights.Regine Michelle Jean-Charles is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College where she teaches classes on francophone literature, black feminisms, African film, and Haitian Studies.Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Narratives of Resistance in the Francophone World examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The influential yet controversial psychiatrist, Harry Stack Sullivan was pioneering in his treatment of schizophrenia however the way he lived privately did not always correspond to the theoretical ideas he espoused publicly. With meticulous research and access to clinical and historical records, historianNaoko Wake, examines the life and work of this pioneer of American Psychoanalysis from an unconventional perspective, quite different than the usual biographical approach. In this interview we discuss Sullivan’s sometimes contradictory life work, especially his time at Sheppard-Pratt Hospital, his private practice in New York, and his wider, global ambitions later in life.Private Practices: Harry Stack Sullivan, the Science of Homosexuality, and American Liberalism (Rutgers University Press, 2011), is compelling book and a welcome addition to the historical record of American Psychoanalysis.Find Chris Bandini on Twitter @cebandini Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Hookup” has become a buzzword, a misleading concept for students, parents and educators alike–one that confuses more than explains the nuances of this complex and pervasive trend. In American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus (W. W. Norton, 2017), Lisa Wade analyzes its cultural roots: the evolution of courtship, our unrealized feminist revolution, America’s new business model of higher education, and the increasingly tenuous economic futures faced by young people. The hookup came to dominate college campuses in this context, but the trouble extends beyond hooking up to the culture itself. It rewards students who endorse and embrace meaningless sex, while ostracizing those who don’t. And there is no escaping it. It permeates not just dorm rooms and frat houses, but dining halls, quads, Facebook and Instagram feeds, and even classrooms. It is now part of the quintessential college experience, necessary for forming and maintaining friendships, and it often determines social status, whether students opt in or out.By including students’ own perspectives and experiences through their college years and beyond, Wade presents a personal and compelling portrait of hookup culture, exploring how it affects a diverse range of students and what it says about the changing face of dating and sex in Tinder-era America. By the end of their senior year, even the most enthusiastic supporters of hookup culture wanted to feel more in hookups and to hurt or be hurt less, to abide by their own standards of attraction, and to opt out of a culture of sexual competition that leaves very few winners and too many losers. Wade challenges readers to envision new sexual cultures, ones that are more equal, more pleasurable, more respectful, kinder, and safer. Wade’s takeaway is for educators, parents, and students alike, asking not “How can we go back?” but “Where do we go from here?” College campuses have always been and should be a place of cultural revolution, and there’s no better place to re-imagine hookup culture and transform American culture in the process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Moving through the saunas of Rio de Janeiro, the Amazonian eco-resorts of Manaus, and the Afro-Brazilian heritage of Bahia, Tourist Attractions: Performing Race and Masculinity in Brazils Sexual Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2015) explores sex as an epistemology – a way of knowing. The ethnographic, theoretical and prosaic prowess of Assistant Professor Gregory Mitchell captures the individual experiences and identities of male sex workers and their transnational clients. Delving into the complex and refractive affective flows that attempt to make desire legible – across culture, race and sexuality – Tourist Attractions proposes that sex work be reframed as a form of performative labor. Exploring how affect and labour shape the performance of masculinity, Mitchell makes a robust contribution to ideas of queer kinship, authenticity and cultural memory. It follows that the conceptual depth of Tourist Attractions is also met by the contextual breadth of its subject matter – from the influence of political economic considerations, to the missionary agenda of gay rights rhetoric, to the metonymic role of the body in heritage tourism and ecotourism. The reader cannot but help become an enthralled audience member to the social choreography that Mitchell observes, navigating the culturally specific affects of individual sexual exchanges and cross-continental tourism.Taylor Fox-Smith is teaching gender studies at Macquarie University and researching the gender gap in political behaviour and psychology at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia. Having received a Bachelor of International and Global Studies with first class Honours in American Studies at the University of Sydney, Taylor was awarded the American Studies Best Thesis Award for her work titled The Lemonade Nexus. The thesis uses the theme of marital infidelity in Beyonce’s 2016 visual album Lemonade as a popular cultural narrative of institutional betrayal, and parallels it with police brutality in Baltimore city. It argues that the album provides an alternative model of political formation which can help to understand redemption in the wake of an urban uprising. Rewriting the traditional protest to politics narrative with an iterative nexus named after the album, Taylor’s research continues to straddle political science, gender studies and popular culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emerging in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic was not just a public health crisis. It was a moral crisis too, argues Anthony M. Petro in his new book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2015). Throughout the book, Petro describes the entanglements between the supposedly secular field of public health and the religious spheres of American Christianity during the long 1980s. After the Wrath of God, however, is not merely a book about the religious right or Protestant evangelical responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis. It is a broader exploration of the ways that a set of sexual ethics inspired by Christian doctrine encompassing abstinence and monogamy within heterosexual marriage came to become the national moral prescription against the epidemic as well as the religious and medical leaders who shaped that national sexuality and the AIDS activists who fought against it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

LaShawn Harris is an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University. Sex Workers, Psychics and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy, (University of Illinois Press, 2016) offers a colorful look at the lives of black urban women who worked and lived in the space between the legitimate and illegal economy. Her subjects are women not previously considered in histories of the working class: mothers, single ladies, churchwomen, hustlers, and partygoers who worked in the underground economy. Motivated by many factors, they sought economic autonomy, to provide for their families, or individual pleasure and fulfillment. The underground economy offered women a break from middle class respectability and opportunities to forge complex identities of self-sufficiency and an escape from the confines of New Negro womanhood. Working outside the wage system in illegal gaming, sex work or as supernatural consultants, they experienced the dangers and thrill of illicit trade, and challenged black progressive crusaders and promoters of racial uplift. As entrepreneurs and cultural produces, they reinforced and reconfigured the race, gender and class hierarchies of black urban life.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This interview is really a conversation between two friends, peers, and colleagues–two women who were pleased to find each other in the psychoanalytic world who keep track of each others’ development. I confess this as a form of journalistic disclosure, but, also, because of our connection, this interview traverses much more than the book she recently published, The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing, and Belonging in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2015).I ask Galit Atlas a slew of questions about key concepts in the book: what is she after using terms such as “enigmatic,” “pragmatic,” and “breaks in unity” among them. We wander through the Kristevan garden of bodily fluids and abjection and ponder Kristeva’s appeal to Persian analysts like herself and Gohar Homanyapour (interviewed on NBIP by Anna Fishzon). We think about essentialism and motherhood and try to explore why sexuality takes precedence over desire in America.Her book title shares itself with one of Salvador Dali’s most famous paintings, The Enigma of Desire, or My Mother, My Mother, My Mother, from 1929. Discoursing upon his creation, also in an interview, Dali had this to say: “Sometimes I spit with pleasure on my mother’s portrait, since one can perfectly well love one’s mother and still dream that one spits upon her . . . now go and try to make people understand that.” Atlas’ book takes up Dali’s demand for work (as well as Andre Green’s plea for the re-establishment of sexuality as central to psychoanalysis), emphasizing sexuality and its many emanations in the clinic as speaking a language of its own. A clinically rich book, Atlas’ work schools its readers in a new way of listening for that which is inchoate and ineffable and worth hearing. Her thinking takes us on a trip beyond the mother-infant dyad, stopping to drink at the house of Laplanche with a little Ruth Stein only to deposit us closer to the drives, opening the door to the land of the autoerotic.Tracy D. Morgan is the founding editor and host of NBIP, a psychoanalyst in practice in NYC trained also as an historian, she writes about many things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Susannah Drake, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College, investigates the representations of Jewish sexuality in early Christian writings. She argues that there was a close connection between accusations of Jews’ sexuality/carnality and their misguided textual interpretation. We can learn from this ancient case study about the ways in which the representation of a group as sexually heretical is used to justify the use of force against that group. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her fascinating new book Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Duke University Press, 2015), Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, explores shifting meanings of transsexuality in contemporary Iran. By brilliantly combining historical and ethnographic inquiry, Najmabadi highlights the complex ways in which biomedical, psychiatric, and Islamic jurisprudential discourses and institutions conjoin to generate particular notions of acceptable and unacceptable sexuality. Moreover, she also shows some of the paradoxical ways in which state regulation enables certain possibilities and spaces for nonheteronormative sexuality in Iran. In our conversation, we talked about problems of translation involved in using Western categories in Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Iranian context, the certification process for sex change applicants in Iran, shifting conceptualizations of transsexuality overtime, continuities and ruptures seen in nonheteronormative masculinities in Tehran before and after the 1979 revolution, and the category of the narrative self. This multilayered book is at once lyrically written and theoretically exhilarating. It will be of much interest to students of gender and sexuality, Islamic law, religion and science, and of contemporary Iranian society. It will also make a wonderful choice for graduate and upper lever undergraduate courses on the same subjects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s easy to conjure images of paradise when thinking of the Caribbean. The region is know for its lovely beaches, temperate weather, and gorgeous landscapes. For the people who live there, however, living in paradise means dealing with tourists, inequality, exploitation, and corruption. While many scholars have published critiques of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices