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123 books match the query 'Human Sexuality' and 5 start with l

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Lawful Repair

Danish Sheikh

Duke University Press, 2027

In Lawful Repair, Danish Sheikh asks what happens when queer people, confronted by a law that criminalizes their intimate lives, work creatively within its own forms to enact the law they need in the here and now. Drawing on queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's account of reparative reading and on the work of legal humanists Patricia Williams, Robert Cover, and James Boyd White, Sheikh examines the work of dissenters against Section 377, India’s colonial-era sodomy law. Through playful and generative experiments with contracts, affidavits, and rewritten judgments, these dissenters turn the law’s constraints into resources for hopeful legal futures. Combining memoir, critical theory, and theater, Sheikh interweaves practices of dissent with his own lived experience of repair work, showing how queer people extract sustenance from a culture whose avowed desire has often been to harm them. Sheikh demonstrates that law remains too vital a resource to cede and that the creative forces of queer dissent can keep law's imaginative possibilities alive.

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Libidinal Currents

Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism

Joseph Allen Boone

University of Chicago Press, 1997

From Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner and Doris Lessing, modern fiction surges with libidinal currents. The most powerful of these fictions are not merely about sex; rather, they attempt to incorporate the workings of eros into their narrative forms. In doing so, Joseph Allen Boone argues, these modern fictions of sexuality create a politics and poetics of the perverse with the power to transform how we think about and read modernism.

Challenging overarching theories of the novel by carefully mapping the historical contexts that have influenced modern experimental narratives, Boone constructs a model for interpreting sexuality that reaches from Freud's theory of the libidinal instincts to Foucault's theory of sexual discourse. The most ambitious study yet written on the links between literary modernity and the psychology of sex, Boone's Libidinal Currents will be a landmark book in the study of modernist fiction, gay studies/queer theory, feminist criticism, and studies in sexuality and gender.

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Love Apocalypse

New Intimacies and the Decline of Marriage and Fertility

Alex J. Nelson

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Marriage and fertility rates are falling around the world, upending social security planning and threatening economic growth. In Love Apocalypse, anthropologists present their insights into this society-altering demographic shift, drawing on their research into the ways love, romantic relationships, and family are being transformed by cultural, social, and economic forces. Each case study in this volume examines a unique cultural context from either Asia (China, South Korea, Japan, India), Europe (Germany, Lithuania), or Latin America (Cuba, Peru), grounded in years of ethnographic research into how communities’ experiences and perceptions of love, marriage, and family are changing in response to economic precarity, shifting gender relations, status competition, and diversifying cultural norms. It is increasingly clear that marriage and two-parent nuclear families will not be the universal norm of the twenty-first century even if this arrangement was largely idealized a mere generation ago. However, this does not mean the end of love, intimacy, or family but rather its transformation and the emergence of new intimate relationships and adaptations to the challenges and opportunities of life in the twenty-first century.

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Love and Globalization

Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World

Mark B. Padilla

Vanderbilt University Press, 2007

Discussions of globalization usually focus on political, economic, and technological transformations, but fail to recognize how we experience these processes in our daily lives, including our most intimate acts and practices. In this volume, anthropologists and sociologists draw on long-term ethnographic research on love, gender, and sexuality in a broad range of regions to discuss how global forces shape marriage, commercial sex, the political economy of intimacy, and lesbian and gay expressions of companionship.

The richly-textured ethnographies provoke a series of questions about emerging vocabularies for friendship and romance; the adoption of cultural forms from faraway places; the emergence of new desires, pleasures, and emotions that circulate as commodities in the global marketplace; and the ways economic processes shape public and private expressions of sexual intimacy.

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