front cover of Webbed Connectivities
Webbed Connectivities
The Imperial Sociology of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
Vrushali Patil
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

Constructing a new approach for centering empire in productions of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference

One of the oldest, most persistent issues in gender and sexuality studies is the dominance of white, northern theorizing and its consequences for what we know about sex, gender, and sexuality. There is an ongoing neglect of the significance of histories of empire and coloniality, particularly in U.S. sociology, where the United States and its theoretical productions are routinely sanitized of such histories. In Webbed Connectivities, Vrushali Patil offers a global historical sociology that reembeds the United States within histories of empire, situating the emergence of northern and U.S.-based concepts and frameworks squarely within these histories.

Webbed Connectivities intercepts the political economy of knowledge production within the social sciences to argue for the work of centering the role of imperial hierarchies in knowledge production and circulation. Patil develops a new approach—webbed connectivities—which tracks imperial processes and impacts across borders, shifting from an emphasis on particular experiences and identities to the constitution and creation of the categories themselves.

A sociologist of feminist thought and gender and sexuality studies, Patil explores the theoretical spaces that spotlighting imperial hierarchies within knowledge production might open, including making productive and essential connections across sites of the global south and north.

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front cover of Women for Hire
Women for Hire
Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850
Alain Corbin
Harvard University Press, 1990
Dispelling the lurid stereotypes portrayed in fiction, Alain Corbin depicts prostitution in nineteenth-century France not as a vice, crime, or disease, but as a well-organized business. Corbin reveals how the brothel served the sex industry in the same way that the factory served manufacturing: it provided an institution for the efficient and profitable sale of services.
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