New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

The intersection between Spanish-bilingual education and sex education might not be immediately apparent. Yet, as Natalia Mehlman Petrzela shows in her new book, Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture (Oxford University Press, 2015), the meeting between these two paradigms of education firmly connects in California during the 1960s and 70s. Under the backdrop of California during an era of the sexual revolution, a dramatic influx of Latinos, and awakened protest movements, Dr. Petrzela, assistant professor at The New School, explores this historical landscape of education and society. From well-known political icons like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, to lesser-known figures such as Ernesto Galarza, and even details from regular people who lived the moment, Classroom Wars provides an in-depth and nuanced look into this interesting intersection in American educational history.Dr. Petrzela joins New Books in Education for the interview and you can follow her on Twitter at @nataliapetrzela or find her website at nataliapetrzela.com. For questions or comments on the podcast, you can also find the host on Twitter at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Donna J. Drucker is a guest professor at Darmstadt Technical University in Germany. Her book The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge (University of Pittsburg Press, 2014) is an in-depth and detailed study of Kinsey’s scientific approach. The book examines his career and method of gathering vast amounts of data, identifying patterns, and interpretation that was critical to his most influential works Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Beginning with Kinsey’s study of the animal world, Drucker examines how he transferred natural science methods to sex education in his Marriage Course at Indiana University, and ultimately to the massive study of human sexual behavior. He brought into the interdisciplinary science of sexology a thoroughly naturalist approach and believed that taxonomy – collecting, classifying and describing patterns, revealed truths about the natural world and worked against what he considered the prejudice of misclassification. Kinsey was committed to scientific objectivity, free of moral judgment he believed possible through unprejudiced observation, the recording of mass data sets, and the application of biometrics. Nevertheless, Kinsey sex research had significant implications for understanding sexual difference between men and women, sexual preference tied to economic class, and the consideration of normal sexual behavior against standing societal norms. Drucker’s work brings attention to the historical contingency of the social and technological process, which produces, encodes and relays information over time. Drucker’s close attention to method and the role of data gathering technology again raises the question regarding the role of science in value formation and recovers Kinsey’s contribution to scientific practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this interview with historian Edward Ross Dickinson we talk about sex. Well, actually we talk about the talk about sex. Since Michel Foucault’s epochal work History of Sexuality (1976) how moderns talked about sex has been a central concern of cultural and intellectual historians. Foucault linked a number of nineteenth-century phenomena, such as the growth of sexology as a discipline and the pathologization of homosexuality, to the formation of new sexual subjectivities and the emergence of biopolitical strategies of population management.Taking a cue from Foucault, some historians of modern Germany have interpreted the talk about sex and reproduction in the Kaiserreich as the foundational stage of a discourse about eugenics that would ultimately contribute to National Socialism and its racial state. In his book Sex, Freedom and Power in Imperial Germany 1880-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Dickinson challenges this view. He likens German sex talk to a barroom brawl that started at one table and spread across a crowded room. Sex was as a field of contestation, involving Christian moralists, sex reformers and sexologists, each tied to social and political interests. In this interview, we discuss the different anthropologies that undergirded the respective positions. Christian (and some Jewish) morality activists argued that sex had to be overcome through the moral virtue, while sex reformers and sexologists understood sex in a monist vein, as a natural drive and the engine of creative production and human biological and social evolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The spatial politics of brothels in late-British India are the subject of Stephen Legg‘s second book Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India, published by Duke University Press in 2014. The book explores the complexities of the brothel at the urban, national and imperial scales as campaigns (and campaigners) attempted to reform prostitution. Theoretically driven by a critical reading of Foucault, the book draws on rich archival material to explore the networks, naming and nature that these reforms addressed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Katherine Frank‘s book, Plays Well in Groups: A Journey Through the World of Group Sex (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), is a fascinating look at the taboo of group sex. Her robust research spans historical references to modern day accounts throughout cultures around the world. Dr. Frank used surveys, interviews, and ethnographic research to uncover why people participate in group sex, and what it means to them. Her work also looks at group sex in a violent setting, such as gang rape, and examines the social, political and power structures involved. Her work on group sex and the complex reaction to it, allow a behind the scenes look at a world that is often portrayed differently than it is actually experienced. Plays Well In Groups provides social, anthropological and historical detail about a world that is both feared and fantasized about. Frank’s work is bold and scary, but always engaging. It is an intriguing journey into the complexity of sex and the meaning that it holds for culture and society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua (Duke University Press, 2013), Cymene Howe offers an ethnography of activism. Woven into Nicaragua’s political history of revolution and U.S. intervention, the struggle for sexual rights there takes place on three stages: in intimate settings of lesbian discussion groups, in the public sphere marked by demonstrations, press conferences and celebrations, and in visual and print media. Howe’s informants (activists, advocates, students, educators, television actors, members of Nicaragua’s queer community) illustrate the transformations and continuities in the culture of sexuality in Nicaragua. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anyone who’s been paying attention to the flurry around the French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century (Le Capital au XXIe siecle) knows how a la mode the economy is at the moment. Contemporary ideas and debates about capital, debt, and austerity are only part of what makes Clare Crowston‘s Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Duke University Press, 2013) such an interesting read in 2014. In this detailed study of the varied economic, political, social, and cultural meanings and practices of “credit” from the seventeenth through the eighteenth century, Crowston draws our attention to mutually constitutive worlds and systems of circulation. At once a genealogy of credit; an economic, social, and cultural history of fashion; and an examination of the roles of gender and desire in Old Regime France, Credit, Fashion, Sex makes an important contribution to our understanding of the origins of the French Revolution while respecting the historical integrity of the period that came before.In addition to its conceptual and historiographical insights regarding credit and the complexities of Old Regime society, the book offers readers a fascinating and extensively-researched analysis of the everyday practices and systems of exchange that operated “behind the scenes” of more familiar stories. For example, the book illuminates the mythology and critiques surrounding Marie Antoinette, the queen who embodied like no one else the intersection between ideas about credit, fashion, and sexuality in the era before 1789. At the same time, Crowston gives us a glimpse of other figures and social actors who played vital roles in the society of the period: Rose Bertin, the queen’s dressmaker; the fashion merchants who made so much luxury and refinement possible, as well as all those wives not married to Louis XVI who traded on/in their husbands’ credit, participating in multiple economic and cultural systems of circulation and power.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Denise Brennan‘s second book, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States (Duke University Press, 2014), examines how individuals who were trafficked into forced labor go about rebuilding their lives afterward. Through her ethnography of lived experience and her analysis of immigration policy, Brennan shows that trafficking and forced labor are common byproducts of our capitalist system that relies on cheap and unregulated labor. Migration patterns are gendered, and the persons whose experiences shape this book — Maria, Elsa, and many others — are mostly women in the caregiving and sex industries. Brennan argues that U.S. policy has used anti-trafficking policy to forward a separate agenda of ending prostitution and other sex work, thereby distorting protections for female and male trafficking victims in all labor industries, and drastically limiting the number of T visas allocated since 2000. The book is one of scholarly activism: as an anthropologist, Denise Brennan combines research and advocacy to improve the lives of victims and to modify the realities of trafficking and forced labor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sometimes it’s hard to imagine how certain types of violence can occur, and organized multi-perpetrator abuse certainly fits into this category. Ritual abuse, sadistic abuse and pedophilia rings are often things we see in episodes of “Law and Order,” without having to think of the reality of the victims that actually experience this type of cruelty. In Organised Sexual Abuse (Routledge, 2013), Michael Salter attempts to bring to light this often-hidden and seldom-believed type of crime. He describes his own experience being the caretaker of someone who was continuously abused and harassed well into adulthood, including his attempts to reach out to law enforcement and hospital workers, most of whom had trouble believing that this kind of abuse was actually taking place. Salter also talks about the connection between views of hypermasculinity and abuse, and the ways in which violence is often a “collective masculine performance.” Through in-depth qualitative research, Salter takes us, he proposes, into a horrifying journey of a reality that we cannot afford to ignore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many Muslim debates regarding women are solely situated in legal or political frameworks. For example, we often find this tendency in conversations about women’s leadership in the mosque or the politics of veiling. Sa’diyya Shaikh, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town, provides a unique approach to these discussions that puts feminist hermeneutics in dialogue with the thought of the prolific Muhyi al-Din ibn al-‘Arabi (1165-1240). In Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender and Sexuality (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) she explores contestations over embodiment and gender, spirituality and leadership, sexuality and power in order to rethink patriarchal epistemologies in contemporary Muslim discourses. She argues that contesting positions on gender in these debates are underpinned by certain assumptions about human nature, its gendering, and existence. Shaikh outlines the social and ritual consequences of spiritual (in)equality and initiates reflections on Islamic notions of the central category “human being.” Shaikh leads us through Ibn ‘Arabi’s dynamic anthropology, ontology, and cosmology and links abstract philosophical concepts with concrete daily relationships between men and women. In our conversation we discussed Islamic feminism, apophatic unsayings and hermeneutic of subversions, Ibn ‘Arabi’s interpersonal relationships with women, parallels between the macrocosm and microcosm, Muslim exegesis, notions of creation, interpretations of Adam and Eve, Jesus’ birth from the Virgin Mary, and masculine and feminine in Islam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices