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127 books match the query 'Sexual behavior' and 8 start with d

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Dangerous Ideas on Campus

Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK

Matthew C. Ehrlich

University of Illinois Press, 2021

In 1960, University of Illinois professor Leo Koch wrote a public letter condoning premarital sex. He was fired. Four years later, a professor named Revilo Oliver made white supremacist remarks and claimed there was a massive communist conspiracy. He kept his job.

Matthew Ehrlich revisits the Koch and Oliver cases to look at free speech, the legacy of the 1960s, and debates over sex and politics on campus. The different treatment of the two men marked a fundamental shift in the understanding of academic freedom. Their cases also embodied the stark divide over beliefs and values--a divide that remains today. Ehrlich delves into the issues behind these academic controversies and places the events in the context of a time rarely associated with dissent, but in fact a harbinger of the social and political upheavals to come.

An enlightening and entertaining history, Dangerous Ideas on Campus illuminates how the university became a battleground for debating America's hot-button issues.

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Dangerous Intimacies

Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel

Lisa L. Moore

Duke University Press, 1997

Refuting commonly held beliefs within women’s and lesbian history, feminist theory, and histories of the novel, Dangerous Intimacies challenges the idea that sex between women was unimaginable in British culture before the late nineteenth century. Lisa L. Moore argues that literary representations of female sexual agency—and in particular "sapphic" relationships between women—were central to eighteenth-century debates over English national identity. Moore shows how the novel’s representation of women’s "romantic friendships"—both platonic and sexual—were encoded within wider social concerns regarding race, nation, and colonialist ventures.
Moore demonstrates that intimacy between women was vividly imagined in the British eighteenth century as not only chaste and virtuous, but also insistently and inevitably sexual. She looks at instances of sapphism in such novels as Millenium Hall, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Belinda, and Emma and analyzes how the new literary form of the novel made the bourgeois heroine’s successful negotiation of female friendship central to the establishment of her virtue. Moore also examines representations of sapphism through the sweeping economic and political changes of the period and claims that middle-class readers’ identifications with the heroine’s virtue helped the novel’s bourgeois audience justify the violent bases of their new prosperity, including slavery, colonialism, and bloody national rivalry.
In revealing the struggle over sapphism at the heart of these novels of female friendship—and at the heart of England’s national identity—Moore shows how feminine sexual agency emerged as an important cultural force in post-Enlightenment England

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Decolonizing the Sodomite

Queer Tropes of Sexuality in Colonial Andean Culture

By Michael J. Horswell

University of Texas Press, 2006

Early Andean historiography reveals a subaltern history of indigenous gender and sexuality that saw masculinity and femininity not as essential absolutes. Third-gender ritualists, Ipas, mediated between the masculine and feminine spheres of culture in important ceremonies and were recorded in fragments of myths and transcribed oral accounts. Ritual performance by cross-dressed men symbolically created a third space of mediation that invoked the mythic androgyne of the pre-Hispanic Andes. The missionaries and civil authorities colonizing the Andes deemed these performances transgressive and sodomitical.

In this book, Michael J. Horswell examines alternative gender and sexuality in the colonial Andean world, and uses the concept of the third gender to reconsider some fundamental paradigms of Andean culture. By deconstructing what literary tropes of sexuality reveal about Andean pre-Hispanic and colonial indigenous culture, he provides an alternative history and interpretation of the much-maligned aboriginal subjects the Spanish often referred to as "sodomites." Horswell traces the origin of the dominant tropes of masculinist sexuality from canonical medieval texts to early modern Spanish secular and moralist literature produced in the context of material persecution of effeminates and sodomites in Spain. These values traveled to the Andes and were used as powerful rhetorical weapons in the struggle to justify the conquest of the Incas.

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Deserving Desire

Women's Stories of Sexual Evolution

Montemurro, Beth

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Women experience considerable changes in their bodies, lives, and identity between the ages of twenty and seventy, including marriage, motherhood, the dissolution of relationships, and menopause, all of which often impact sexuality. In Deserving Desire, Beth Montemurro takes a wide-ranging look at the evolution of women’s sexuality over time, with a specific focus on the development of sexual subjectivity—that is sexual confidence, agency, and a sense of entitlement to sexual desire.

Detailed stories of the ninety-five women in this study explore how they become more comfortable with their bodies, when most begin to enjoy sex, feel confident and positive about engaging in it, and how they become sexual subjects in control of their bodies. Deserving Desire explores the complex multi-stage process in which sexual subjectivity evolves over a woman’s lifetime. As girls, they learn about sex and how those around them—parents, peers, religion and media—regard sex. Physical and emotional transitions such as having a baby or ending a relationship further affect women’s sexual confidence and desire. Montemurro emphasizes that sexual subjectivity is about feeling in control of sexual decision making and acting purposefully and confidently.

Though adolescent sexuality has been a major focus of sociological research, few studies have examined, as Montemurro does here, the development of sexuality through women’s lives and the events that change the way women feel about themselves, their bodies, and their relationships.

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Desiring Arabs

Joseph A. Massad

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Sexual desire has long played a key role in Western judgments about the value of Arab civilization. In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open, the supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as backward. Rather than focusing exclusively on how these views developed in the West, in Desiring Arabs Joseph A. Massad reveals the history of how Arabs represented their own sexual desires. To this aim, he assembles a massive and diverse compendium of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present in order to chart the changes in Arab sexual attitudes and their links to Arab notions of cultural heritage and civilization.

A work of impressive scope and erudition, Massad’s chronicle of both the history and modern permutations of the debate over representations of sexual desires and practices in the Arab world is a crucial addition to our understanding of a frequently oversimplified and vilified culture.

“A pioneering work on a very timely yet frustratingly neglected topic. . . . I know of no other study that can even begin to compare with the detail and scope of [this] work.”—Khaled El-Rouayheb, Middle East Report

“In Desiring Arabs, [Edward] Said’s disciple Joseph A. Massad corroborates his mentor’s thesis that orientalist writing was racist and dehumanizing. . . . [Massad] brilliantly goes on to trace the legacy of this racist, internalized, orientalist discourse up to the present.”—Financial Times

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Diagnosing Desire

Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century

Alyson K. Spurgas

The Ohio State University Press, 2020

Winner, 2021 Cultural Studies Association First Book Prize

In Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century, Alyson K. Spurgas examines the “new science of female sexuality” from a critical, sociological perspective, considering how today’s feminist-identified sex researchers study and manage women with low desire. Diagnosing Desire investigates experimental sex research that measures the disconnect between subjective and genital female arousal, contemporary psychiatric diagnoses for low female desire, new models for understanding women’s sexual response, and cutting-edge treatments for low desire in women—including from the realms of mindfulness and alternative healing.

Spurgas makes the case that, together, all of these technologies create a “feminized responsive desire framework” for understanding women’s sexuality, and that this, in fact, produces women’s sexuality as a complex problem to be solved. The biggest problem, Spurgas argues, is that gendered and sexualized trauma—including as it is produced within technoscientific medicine itself—is too often ignored in contemporary renderings. Through incisive textual analysis and in-depth qualitative research based on interviews with women with low desire, Spurgas argues for a more radical and communal form of care for feminized—and traumatized—populations, in opposition to biopolitical mandates to individualize and neoliberalize forms of self-care. Ultimately, this is a book not just about a specific diagnosis or dysfunction but about the material-discursive regimes that produce and regulate femininity.

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Disobedience, Slander, Seduction, and Assault

Women and Men in Cajamarca, Peru, 1862-1900

By Tanja Christiansen

University of Texas Press, 2004

Though the law and courts of nineteenth-century Peru were institutions created by and for the ruling elite, women of all classes used the system to negotiate the complexities of property rights, childrearing, and marriage, and often to defend their very definitions of honor. Drawing on the trial transcripts of Cajamarca, a northern Peruvian province, from more than a century ago, this book shares eye-opening details about life among this community, in which reputation could determine a woman's chances of survival.

Exploring the processes of courtship, seduction, and familial duties revealed in these court records, historian Tanja Christiansen has unearthed a compelling panorama that includes marital strife, slander, disobedience, street brawls, and spousal abuse alongside documents that give evidence of affection and devotion. Her research also yields much new information about the protocols for conflict and cooperation among nineteenth-century Peruvian women from all social strata, and the prevalence of informal unions in an economy driven in large part by migratory male labor. Reviving a little-known aspect of Latin American history, Christiansen's book simultaneously brings to light an important microcosm of women's history during the nineteenth century.

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