New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

The Limits of Sexuality Education: Love, Sex, and Adolescent Masculinities in Urban India (Routledge, 2024) explores different strands of thinking about sexuality education in contemporary urban India. It interrogates the limits of sexuality education as we know it today by rethinking adolescent masculinities in middle-class urban India.This book contributes to the wide gap in theorising sexuality education and adolescent masculinities in urban India. It presents an adolescent perspective on sexuality education, looks at adolescent love from the school teachers’ perspective, and tries to understand a teacher’s negotiations with student romance. It unravels the sexual and romantic lives of adolescents and examines the circulation of sexual knowledge and sources of information on sex that adolescent boys in India have access to. This book uncovers the limits of sexuality education by examining State, feminist, Christian, and sexological materials on sexuality education in Mumbai and Delhi. Based on detailed research and narratives from teachers, young men, and women, the book explores adolescent male romance and its affective registers, adolescent male sexual knowledge, and the regulation of romance in school spaces.This book will be of interest to students and researchers of education, sexuality and gender studies, masculinity studies, and sex education as well as those interested in education policy, education politics, educational research, and inclusion and special education. Located at the intersection of sexuality studies, education, masculinity studies, and cultural studies, it will also appeal to those working in sexuality education in urban India within the complex web of the middle classes, consumerism, post-feminism, romance, adolescent masculinities, and cinema.Rituparna Patgiri has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gender Revolution: How Electoral Politics and #MeToo are Reshaping Everyday Life (Routledge, 2023) by Dr. Pamela Aronson and Matthew R. Fleming carefully examines the profound transformations happening in both public and private arenas of gender relations. It also draws critical attention to the simultaneous and potent challenges that have risen in response.The authors look to large-scale phenomena in this contemporary study and address how electoral politics and the #MeToo movement are reshaping everyday life. This gender revolution has led to a culture in which women, and increasing numbers of men, refuse to accept traditional gender norms and gender inequalities. People of all genders no longer tolerate abuses of power in politics or in their interpersonal relationships. Despite vigorous resistance, women are seizing power and refusing to back down, in ways both large and small. The authors note on the one hand that people of all genders in support of these transformations are voting for progressive candidates, engaging on social media, and making their interpersonal relationships more equal. On the other hand, they document considerable backlash and contestation, as some people are resisting these changes and creating adversarial gender divisions. Probing across these issues, the book develops an analysis of gendered social and cultural change that reveals how movement ideas diffuse into broader culture.Gender Revolution presents a vibrant and essential study for a moment marked by significant changes to attitudes, beliefs, and views surrounding gender and gender relations and will appeal to readers interested in the scholarly study of gender, society, politics, media, law, and culture.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael John Cusick argues that our addictions and disordered sexual desires are really a misdirected effort to reach God and live in connection with Him. How can this be? The crude simulation is but at poor substitute for the real thing, for the Truth. Yet in this fallen world, sinners repeatedly fall into the snares. “I do not understand my own actions,”—Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans—"For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” But like the prodigal son in the pigpen, we cannot but lift our eyes from the mud and think about the loving Father waiting for us at home.Michael John Cusick, author, counselor, host of the wonderful podcast, Restoring the Soul, talks about what he has learned about addiction, disorder, mercy, and freedom, in his book Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle and also on this episode of Almost Good Catholics. Michael John Cusick’s website. Restoring the Soul intensive counseling ministry. Restoring the Soul podcast, and on Apple. Related Almost Good Catholics episodes: Heather King on Almost Good Catholics, episode 4: Divine Intoxication: A Discussion about Grace, Sainthood, and Women in the Church Mako Fujimura on Almost Good Catholics, episode 14: The Silence of God: The Meaning of Our Suffering and Redemption Brant Hansen on Almost Good Catholics, episode 75: The Men We Need: What Men Are Supposed to Be Doing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Weimar Republic is well-known for its gay rights movement and recent scholarship has demonstrated some of its contradictory elements. In his recent book entitled The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Javier Samper Vendrell writes the first study to focus on the League for Human Rights and its leader, Friedrich Radszuweit. It uses his position at the center of the Weimar-era gay rights movement to tease out the diverging political strategies and contradictory tactics that distinguished the movement. By examining news articles and opinion pieces, as well as literary texts and photographs in the League’s numerous pulp magazines for homosexuals, Vendrell reconstructs forgotten aspects of the history of same-sex desire and subjectivity. While recognizing the possibilities of liberal rights for sexual freedom during the Weimar Republic, the League’s "respectability politics" failed in part because Radszuweit’s own publications contributed to the idea that homosexual men were considered a threat to youth, doing little to change the views of the many people who believed in homosexual seduction – a homophobic trope that endured well into the twentieth century.Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. It was recently awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fiercely intelligent, fantastically transgressive, Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex (PM Press, 2023) is an intimate portrait of the lives of sex workers. A polyphonic story of triumph, survival, and solidarity, this collection showcases the vastly different experiences and interests of those who have traded sex, among them a brothel worker in Australia, First Nation survivors of the Canadian child welfare system, and an Afro Latina single parent raising a radicalized child. Packed with first-person essays, interviews, poetry, drawings, mixed media collage, and photographs Working It honors the complexity of lived experience. Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hardboiled, these dazzling pieces will go straight to the heart.Matilda Bickers is an artist and writer originally from Boston’s South End. Her experience in sex work, which she entered at age eighteen, has enabled her to focus on art and activism and the vital intersection of the two. She has performed her written work at the Radar Reading Series in San Francisco, and with Sister Spit in Portland, OR. Witnessing the experiences of other people faced with only terrible options in a world uninterested in their success or even survival, Bickers has worked to create spaces to amplify and showcase their creative work, from Working It, a quarterly zine of sex worker art and writing, to the annual Portland Sex Worker Art Show. Bickers is currently writing and illustrating Aspiration Risk, a graphic novel about her ongoing attempt to leave the sex trades for a career in healthcare, and the painful parallels between the two industries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whether you are a commuter weighing options of taking the bus vs walking to get you to work on time or a military general leading troops into war, risk is something we deal with every day. Even the most cautious of us can’t opt out—the question is always which risks to take to maximize our results. But how do we know which path is correct? Enter Allison Schrager. Schrager is not a typical economist. Like others, she has spent her career assessing risk, but instead of crunching numbers or sitting at a desk, she chose to venture out. Now, she travels to unexpected places to uncover how financial principles can be used to navigate hazards and prevent danger. In her new book An Economist Walks Into A Brothel And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk (Portfolio, 2019), Schrager puts together a five-pronged approach for understanding and assessing risk. First, she helps define what risk and reward mean for individuals. Then, taking into account irrationality and uncertainty, Schrager helps readers master their domains and ultimately get the biggest bang for what she calls the “risk buck.” While there are certain factors that cannot be predicted, An Economist Walks Into A Brothelmarries financial economics with real life examples to provide a road map, offer concrete advice, and maximize payoff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Nature's Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (Duke UP, 2021), Andil Gosine engages with questions of humanism, queer theory, and animality to examine and revise understandings of queer desire in the Caribbean. Surveying colonial law, visual art practices, and contemporary activism, Gosine shows how the very concept of homosexuality in the Caribbean (and in the Americas more broadly) has been overdetermined by a colonially influenced human/animal divide. Gosine refutes this presupposed binary and embraces animality through a series of case studies: a homoerotic game called puhngah, the institution of gender-based dress codes in Guyana, and efforts toward the decriminalization of sodomy in Trinidad and Tobago—including the work of famed activist Colin Robinson, paintings of human animality by Guadeloupean artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary, and Gosine's own artistic practice. In so doing, he troubles the ways in which individual and collective anxieties about “wild natures” have shaped the existence of Caribbean people while calling for a reassessment of what political liberation might look like. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Julie Peakman investigates the sex lives of women from 1680 to 1830, the period known as the long eighteenth century. It uncovers the various experiences of women, whether mistresses, adulteresses or those involved in the sex trade. From renowned courtesans to downtrodden streetwalkers, Julie Peakman examines the multifaceted lives of these women within brothels, on stage and even behind bars.Based on new research into court transcripts, asylum records, magazines, pamphlets, satires, songs, theatre plays and erotica, we learn of the gruesome treatment of women who were sexually active outside of marriage. Dr. Peakman looks at sex from women’s points of view, undercutting the traditional image of the bawdy eighteenth century to expose a more sordid side, of women left distressed, ostracised and vilified for their sexual behaviour.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the future, we’ll all be having sex with robots… won’t we?Roboticists say they’re a distracting science fiction, yet endless books, films and articles are written on the subject. Campaigns are even mounted against them. So why are sex robots such a hot topic?Electric Dreams: Sex Robots and Failed Promises of Capitalism (404 Ink, 2024) by Heather Parry picks apart the forces that posit sex robots as either the solution to our problems or a real threat to human safety, and looks at what’s being pushed aside for us to obsess about something that will never happen.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive (T&T Clark, 2024), Elyse Ambrose looks to an archive of blackqueerness as an authoritative source for religious ethical reflection. This approach counters the disintegrative norms of anti-black and anti-body traditionalism in Christian sexual ethics, even those that strive to be liberative. It builds upon a tradition of black queer and LGBTQ+-centered critique at the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and religion through exploring the moral imagination of sexual and gender non-conformist communities in 1920's Harlem (their rent parties, blues environments, and Hamilton Lodge Ball); ethics and theology blackqueering the disciplines; and contemporary oral histories (including photographs of the subjects by the scholar-artist) of those doing ethics in their blackqueerness. These serve as integrative sites that signal blackqueer ethical counter-patterns of communal belonging, individual and collective becoming, goodness, embodied spirit/inspirited bodies, and shared thriving. Emphases on both personal and social right-relatedness mark a shift from Christian sexual ethics based on rules, toward a communal relations-based transreligious ethics of sexuality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices