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28 books match the query 'Sex crimes'

cover of Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions

Abusing Religion

Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions

Megan Goodwin

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Sex abuse happens in all communities, but American minority religions often face disproportionate allegations of sexual abuse. Why, in a country that consistently fails to acknowledge—much less address—the sexual abuse of women and children, do American religious outsiders so often face allegations of sexual misconduct?  Why does the American public presume to know “what’s really going on” in minority religious communities?  Why are sex abuse allegations such an effective way to discredit people on America’s religious margins? What makes Americans so willing, so eager to identify religion as the cause of sex abuse? Abusing Religion argues that sex abuse in minority religious communities is an American problem, not (merely) a religious one.
 
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cover of Age of Sex Crime

Age of Sex Crime

University of Wisconsin Press, 1987

The sexualized serial murder of women by men is the subject of this provocative book. Jane Caputi argues that the sensationalized murders by men such as Jack the Ripper, Son of Sam, Hillside Strangler, and the Yorkshire Ripper represent a contemporary genre of sexually political crimes. The awful deeds function as a form of patriarchal terrorism, "disappearing" women at a rate of some four thousand annually in the United States alone.
Caputi asks us not only to name the phenomenon of sexually political murder, but to recognize sex crime in all of its various interconnecting manifestations.
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cover of American Sexual Politics: Sex, Gender, and Race since the Civil War

American Sexual Politics

Sex, Gender, and Race since the Civil War

Edited by John C. Fout and Maura Shaw Tantillo

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Enacted by reformers, radicals, and reactionaries, the drama of American sexual politics since the Civil War is as diverse and unpredictable as the nation's citizenry. In this collection of sixteen essays, the shifting tensions between sexual reform and repression are seen in historical explorations of men's and women's sexuality, of the sexual-social dynamics of lesbians and gay men, of the violent repression of African-American sexuality. The broad range of methodological approaches and perspectives make this multidisciplinary anthology an exciting contribution to the history of sexuality.

Included are Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace on childhood and sexual identity under slavery; Martha Hodes on white women and Black men in the South; Kevin J. Mumford on male sexual impotence and Victorian Culture; Jesse F. Battan on language, authority, and sexual desire; Joan Smith Iversen on the antipolygamy controversy, 1880-1890; Angus McLaren on sex radicalism in the Canadian Pacific Northwest, 1890-1920; Pamela S. Haag on ideologies of love, modern romance, and women's sexual subjectivity; Ann duCille on the novels of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen; Robyn Wiegman on the anatomy of lynching; Sonya Michel on sexuality in postwar films; Carole Joffe on abortion before legalization; Roy Cain on disclosure and secrecy among gay men; Joshua Gamson on condoms; Lillian Faderman on the return of butch and femme; Katherine Cummings on teaching AIDS; and Arthur Flannigan-Saint-Aubin on "black gay male" discourse.

This diverse overview of American sexual politics will interest students and scholars of the history of sexuality, gender studies, women's studies, and gay studies.
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cover of An American Travesty: Legal Responses to Adolescent Sexual Offending

An American Travesty

Legal Responses to Adolescent Sexual Offending

Franklin E. Zimring

University of Chicago Press, 2004

An American Travesty is the first scholarly book in half a century to analyze the justice system’s response to sexual misconduct by children and adolescents in the United States. Writing with a refreshing dose of common sense, Franklin E. Zimring discusses our society's failure to consider the developmental status of adolescent sex offenders. Too often, he argues, the American legal system ignores age and developmental status when adjudicating young sexual offenders, in many cases responding as they would to an adult.

“An opinionated, articulate, and forceful critique of current politics and practices. . . . I would recommend this book for anyone interested in rethinking the fundamental questions of how our courts and systems should respond to these cases.”—Law and Politics Book Review

“One of the most important new books in the field of juvenile justice. . . . Zimring offers a thoughtful, research-based analysis of what went wrong with legal policy development.”—Barry Krisberg, President, National Council on Crime and Delinquency

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cover of Centering Student Activism: Feminist Rhetorical Interruptions of Sexual Assault Culture

Centering Student Activism

Feminist Rhetorical Interruptions of Sexual Assault Culture

Shari J. Stenberg

Utah State University Press, 2026

Centering Student Activism is a deep exploration of institutional responses to sexual assault. It addresses critical issues facing campuses today, examining how students navigate institutional dynamics and utilize the power of new and traditional rhetorical strategies to effect change. In doing so, it provides a profound understanding of the mechanisms by which coalitions can transform educational environments.

Centering Student Activism features a national interview-based study of contemporary student activists who deploy rhetorical strategies and tactics—old and new, embodied and digital—with agility and awareness. They aim their strategies and tactics of “intersectional rhetorical feminism” to interrupt and transform a sedimented culture. The students’ activism highlights not only the harms experienced by survivors in the aftermath of their assaults but also how their efforts to communicate those harms are often stymied or silenced by official responses and practices. These student activists pair interruption with rhetorical transformation as they seek to create a survivor-centric culture. In so doing they spotlight the systemic roots of sexual violence and respond to sexual assault through intersectional, coalition-based work.

Through detailed analysis and compelling narratives, Shari J. Stenberg underscores the importance of community care and mutual support in advocacy efforts. Centering Student Activism is an essential work for navigating institutional dynamics, providing an important resource to students, educators, and administrators who seek to understand how universities silence survivors and how students create ways to speak back and transform institutional culture.

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cover of City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London

City of Dreadful Delight

Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London

Judith R. Walkowitz

University of Chicago Press, 1992

From tabloid exposes of child prostitution to the grisly tales of Jack the Ripper, narratives of sexual danger pulsated through Victorian London. Expertly blending social history and cultural criticism, Judith Walkowitz shows how these narratives reveal the complex dramas of power, politics, and sexuality that were being played out in late nineteenth-century Britain, and how they influenced the language of politics, journalism, and fiction.

Victorian London was a world where long-standing traditions of class and gender were challenged by a range of public spectacles, mass media scandals, new commercial spaces, and a proliferation of new sexual categories and identities. In the midst of this changing culture, women of many classes challenged the traditional privileges of elite males and
asserted their presence in the public domain.

An important catalyst in this conflict, argues Walkowitz, was W. T. Stead's widely read 1885 article about child prostitution. Capitalizing on the uproar caused by the piece and the volatile political climate of the time, women spoke of sexual danger, articulating their own grievances against men, inserting themselves into the public discussion of sex to an unprecedented extent, and gaining new entree to public spaces and journalistic practices. The ultimate manifestation of class anxiety and gender antagonism came in 1888 with the tabloid tales of Jack the Ripper. In between, there were quotidien stories of sexual possibility and urban adventure, and Walkowitz examines them all, showing how women were not simply figures in the imaginary landscape of male spectators, but also central actors in the stories of metropolotin life that reverberated in courtrooms, learned journals, drawing rooms, street corners, and in the letters columns of the daily press.

A model of cultural history, this ambitious book will stimulate and enlighten readers across a broad range of interests.
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cover of Everything I Never Wanted to Know

Everything I Never Wanted to Know

Christine Hume

The Ohio State University Press, 2023

“A dauntless and harrowing indictment of patriarchal violence.” —Publishers Weekly

In Everything I Never Wanted to Know, Christine Hume confronts the stigma and vulnerability of women’s bodies in the US. She explores bodily autonomy and sexual assault alongside the National Sex Offender Registry in order to invoke not solutions but a willingness to complicate our ideas of justice and defend every human’s right to be treated like a member of the community. Feminist autobiography threads into historical narrative and cultural criticism about the Victorian-era Frozen Charlotte doll; the Nylon Riots of the 1940s; the movie Halloween; Larry Nassar, who practiced in Hume’s home state of Michigan; and other material. In these reflections on sexuality, gender, criminality, and violence, Hume asks readers to reconsider what we have collectively normalized and how we are each complicit, writing through the darkness of what we don’t want to see, what we’d rather not believe, and what some of us have long tried to forget.
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cover of Faithful Deliberation: Rhetorical Invention, Evangelicalism, and #MeToo Reckonings

Faithful Deliberation

Rhetorical Invention, Evangelicalism, and #MeToo Reckonings

T J Geiger II

University of Alabama Press, 2022

Investigates the rhetorical practices used by contemporary evangelical Christian women to confront theological and cultural issues that stymie deliberation within their communities

While often perceived as an insular enclave with a high level of in-group agreement about political and social issues, predominantly white evangelicalism includes prominent voices urging deliberation about appropriate responses to sexual abuse, domestic violence, and the discourses surrounding these traumas. In Faithful Deliberation: Rhetorical Invention, Evangelicalism, and #MeToo Reckonings, T J Geiger II examines theologically reflective rhetorical invention that reconfigures trauma-minimizing commonplaces in order to facilitate community-internal deliberation.

Resting at the intersection of feminist rhetorical studies and religious rhetorics, this book contains four related theological-rhetorical case studies that consider how figures such as Beth Moore, Jen Hatmaker, Rachael Denhollander, Karen Swallow Prior, and others engaged in rhetorical invention. Each juxtaposes differing approaches to contending with rape, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and other traumas. Each case contrasts an approach based on appeals to highly circumscribed understandings of grace, purity, and other denomination-specific traditions and values with approaches rooted in those same traditions and values, but with an eye toward community transformation, healing through justice, and reinvigorated forms of forgiveness. Geiger skillfully argues that this faithful deliberation involves practices of thinking, reflecting, storytelling, and acting within a tightly bounded community that can foster change through a recommitment to core values.

These rhetorical practices exemplify the kind of inventive listening deliberative discourse requires, point to the sort of healing they may promote in response to trauma and trauma discourses, and occur within a range of genres including social media posts, blog entries, published interviews, victim impact statements, and petitions. This study of invention for evangelical-to-other-evangelical deliberative discourse contributes to rhetorical studies by demonstrating the civic and social possibilities of rhetoric within religious enclaves. By locating the case studies as recent moments in longer US public and evangelical histories of activism, deliberative practice, and politics, Faithful Deliberation brings into focus how enclaves and the dominant public sphere interact.
 

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cover of Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe

Forbidden History

The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe

Edited by John C. Fout

University of Chicago Press, 1992

How have society's values and attitudes toward sexuality and morality changed over the centuries? Why and how has the state sought to criminalize certain forms of sexual behavior and to control reproduction? How have churches tried to influence the state in its regulation of sexuality?

This anthology encompasses a broad range of essays on sexuality spanning European history from the fifteenth century to the present. The topics in this collection of fifteen essays have both historic importance and current relevance. All crucial issues in the regulation of sexuality are addressed, from incest to infanticide, from breast-feeding and women's sexuality to female prostitution, from pornography to reproductive politics, and from the first homosexual rights movement to AIDS.

Contributions from a diverse group of prominent scholars representing a variety of disciplines are included in this anthology. Essays by Randolph Trumbach on "Sex, Gender, and Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London"; Ruth Perry on "Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth Century England"; Theo van der Meer on "Female Same-Sex Offenders in Late Eighteenth Century Amsterdam"; Robin Ann Sheets on "Pornography, Fairy Tales, and Feminism: Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber'"; and James W. Jones on "Discourses on and of AIDS in West Germany, 1986-1990."

Offering the most up-to-date scholarship from a significant and growing field, this collection is essential for both students and faculty in social history, family history, women's and gender studies, gay studies, sociology and literature.
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cover of Gender Violence in Peace and War: States of Complicity

Gender Violence in Peace and War

States of Complicity

Sanford, Victoria

Rutgers University Press, 2016

Reports from war zones often note the obscene victimization of women, who are frequently raped, tortured, beaten, and pressed into sexual servitude. Yet this reign of terror against women not only occurs during exceptional moments of social collapse, but during peacetime too. As this powerful book argues, violence against women should be understood as a systemic problem—one for which the state must be held accountable. 
 
The twelve essays in Gender Violence in Peace and War present a continuum of cases where the state enables violence against women—from state-sponsored torture to lax prosecution of sexual assault. Some contributors uncover buried histories of state violence against women throughout the twentieth century, in locations as diverse as Ireland, Indonesia, and Guatemala. Others spotlight ongoing struggles to define the state’s role in preventing gendered violence, from domestic abuse policies in the Russian Federation to anti-trafficking laws in the United States. 
 
Bringing together cutting-edge research from political science, history, gender studies, anthropology, and legal studies, this collection offers a comparative analysis of how the state facilitates, legitimates, and perpetuates gender violence worldwide. The contributors also offer vital insights into how states might adequately protect women’s rights in peacetime, as well as how to intervene when a state declares war on its female citizens.  
 
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cover of Gender and Violence in Haiti: Women’s Path from Victims to Agents

Gender and Violence in Haiti

Women’s Path from Victims to Agents

Benedetta Faedi Duramy

Rutgers University Press, 2014

Women in Haiti are frequent victims of sexual violence and armed assault. Yet an astonishing proportion of these victims also act as perpetrators of violent crime, often as part of armed groups. Award-winning legal scholar Benedetta Faedi Duramy visited Haiti to discover what causes these women to act in such destructive ways and what might be done to stop this tragic cycle of violence.

Gender and Violence in Haiti is the product of more than a year of extensive firsthand observations and interviews with the women who have been caught up in the widespread violence plaguing Haiti. Drawing from the experiences of a diverse group of Haitian women, Faedi Duramy finds that both the victims and perpetrators of violence share a common sense of anger and desperation. Untangling the many factors that cause these women to commit violence, from self-defense to revenge, she identifies concrete measures that can lead them to feel vindicated and protected by their communities.

Faedi Duramy vividly conveys the horrifying conditions pervading Haiti, even before the 2010 earthquake. But Gender and Violence in Haiti also carries a message of hope—and shows what local authorities and international relief agencies can do to help the women of Haiti.
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cover of Gendered Resistance: Women, Slavery, and the Legacy of Margaret Garner

Gendered Resistance

Women, Slavery, and the Legacy of Margaret Garner

Edited by Mary E. Frederickson and Delores M. Walters

University of Illinois Press, 2013

Inspired by the searing story of Margaret Garner, the escaped slave who in 1856 slit her daughter's throat rather than have her forced back into slavery, the essays in this collection focus on historical and contemporary examples of slavery and women's resistance to oppression from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Each chapter uses Garner's example--the real-life narrative behind Toni Morrison's Beloved andthe opera Margaret Garner--as a thematic foundation for an interdisciplinary conversation about gendered resistance in locations including Brazil, Yemen, India, and the United States. 
 
Contributors are Nailah Randall Bellinger, Olivia Cousins, Mary E. Frederickson, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, Carolyn Mazloomi, Cathy McDaniels-Wilson, Catherine Roma, Huda Seif, S. Pearl Sharp, Raquel Luciana de Souza, Jolene Smith, Veta Tucker, Delores M. Walters, Diana Williams, and Kristine Yohe.

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cover of Hogg: A Novel

Hogg

A Novel

Samuel R. Delany

University of Alabama Press, 2004

A fearless descent into the darkest corners of human desire and violence.

First written thirty-five years ago and completed days before the Stonewall riots in New York, award-winning author Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg is one of America’s most famous “unpublishable” novels. It recounts three days in 1969 in the life of truck driver and rapist-for-hire, Franklin Hargus. Narrated by his young accomplice, Delaney’s novel portrays an exploration of erotic depravity, a capacious landscape of sexuality that transgresses social and erotic boundaries.

While testing readers’ tolerance, what transfigures the novel into a work of literature is Delany’s refusal, faced with moral anxieties and revulsion, to mutilate or disown his creation. Hogg’s characters wear recognizable human faces, possessing intense loyalty, perverse admiration, and a kind of integrity. Hargus fascinates. He is the embodiment of what society can turn people into, the decaying condition of the human soul.
 

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cover of In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence

In an Abusive State

How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence

Kristin Bumiller

Duke University Press, 2008

In an Abusive State puts forth a powerful argument: that the feminist campaign to stop sexual violence has entered into a problematic alliance with the neoliberal state. Kristin Bumiller chronicles the evolution of this alliance by examining the history of the anti-violence campaign, the production of cultural images about sexual violence, professional discourses on intimate violence, and the everyday lives of battered women. She also scrutinizes the rhetoric of high-profile rape trials and the expansion of feminist concerns about sexual violence into the international human-rights arena. In the process, Bumiller reveals how the feminist fight against sexual violence has been shaped over recent decades by dramatic shifts in welfare policies, incarceration rates, and the surveillance role of social-service bureaucracies.

Drawing on archival research, individual case studies, testimonies of rape victims, and interviews with battered women, Bumiller raises fundamental concerns about the construction of sexual violence as a social problem. She describes how placing the issue of sexual violence on the public agenda has polarized gender- and race-based interests. She contends that as the social welfare state has intensified regulation and control, the availability of services for battered women and rape victims has become increasingly linked to their status as victims and their ability to recognize their problems in medical and psychological terms. Bumiller suggests that to counteract these tendencies, sexual violence should primarily be addressed in the context of communities and in terms of its links to social disadvantage. In an Abusive State is an impassioned call for feminists to reflect on how the co-optation of their movement by the neoliberal state creates the potential to inadvertently harm impoverished women and support punitive and racially based crime control efforts.

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cover of Institutional Sexual Abuse in the #MeToo Era

Institutional Sexual Abuse in the #MeToo Era

Edited by Jason D. Spraitz and Kendra N. Bowen

Southern Illinois University Press, 2021

Examining the evolving reach of the #MeToo Movement


In this timely and important collection, editors Jason D. Spraitz and Kendra N. Bowen bring together the work of contributors in the fields of criminal justice and criminology, sociology, journalism, and communications. These chapters show #MeToo is not only a support network of victims’ voices and testimonies but also a revolutionary interrogation of policies, power imbalances, and ethical failures that resulted in decades-long cover-ups and institutions  structured to ensure continued abuse. This book reveals #MeToo as so much more than a hashtag.

Contributors discuss how #MeToo has altered the landscape of higher education; detail a political history of sexual abuse in the United States and the UK; discuss a recent grand jury report about religious institutions; and address the foster care and correctional systems. Hollywood instances are noted for their fear of retaliation among victims and continued accolades for alleged abusers. In sports, contributors examine the Jerry Sandusky scandal and the abuse by Larry Nassar. Advertising and journalism are scrutinized for covering the #MeToo disclosures while dealing with their own scandals. Finally, social media platforms are investigated for harassment and threats of violent victimization.

Drawing on the general framework of the #MeToo Movement, contributors look at complex and very different institutions—athletics, academia, religion, politics, justice, childcare, social media, and entertainment. Contributors include revelatory case studies to ensure we hear the victims’ voices; bring to light the complicity and negligence of social institutions; and advocate for systemic solutions to institutional sexual abuse, violence, and harassment.

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cover of Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe

Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe

James A. Brundage

University of Chicago Press, 1990

This monumental study of medieval law and sexual conduct explores the origin and develpment of the Christian church's sex law and the systems of belief upon which that law rested. Focusing on the Church's own legal system of canon law, James A. Brundage offers a comprehensive history of legal doctrines–covering the millennium from A.D. 500 to 1500–concerning a wide variety of sexual behavior, including marital sex, adultery, homosexuality, concubinage, prostitution, masturbation, and incest. His survey makes strikingly clear how the system of sexual control in a world we have half-forgotten has shaped the world in which we live today. The regulation of marriage and divorce as we know it today, together with the outlawing of bigamy and polygamy and the imposition of criminal sanctions on such activities as sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, and bestiality, are all based in large measure upon ideas and beliefs about sexual morality that became law in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages.

"Brundage's book is consistently learned, enormously useful, and frequently entertaining. It is the best we have on the relationships between theological norms, legal principles, and sexual practice."—Peter Iver Kaufman, Church History
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cover of Rape by the Numbers: Producing and Contesting Scientific Knowledge about Sexual Violence

Rape by the Numbers

Producing and Contesting Scientific Knowledge about Sexual Violence

Ethan Czuy Levine

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Science plays a substantial, though under-acknowledged, role in shaping popular understandings of rape. Statistical figures like “1 in 4 women have experienced completed or attempted rape” are central for raising awareness. Yet such scientific facts often become points of controversy, particularly as conservative scholars and public figures attempt to discredit feminist activists. Rape by the Numbers explores scientists’ approaches to studying rape over more than forty years in the United States and Canada. In addition to investigating how scientists come to know the scope, causes, and consequences of rape, this book delves into the politics of rape research. Scholars who study rape often face a range of social pressures and resource constraints, including some that are unique to feminized and politicized fields of inquiry. Collectively, these matters have far-reaching consequences. Scientific projects may determine who counts as a potential victim/survivor or aggressor in a range of contexts, shaping research agendas as well as state policy, anti-violence programming and services, and public perceptions. Social processes within the study of rape determine which knowledges count as credible science, and thus who may count as an expert in academic and public contexts.
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cover of Rape, Agency, and Carceral Solutions: From Criminal Justice to Social Justice

Rape, Agency, and Carceral Solutions

From Criminal Justice to Social Justice

Leland G. Spencer

University of Massachusetts Press, 2023

Winner of the 2023 National Communication Association's American Studies Division Outstanding Book Award


News media and popular culture in the United States have produced a conventional narrative of the outcomes of sexual abuse: someone perpetrates sexual violence, goes to trial, and is then punished with prison time. Survivors recede into the background, becoming minor characters in their own stories as intrepid prosecutors, police officers, and investigators gather evidence and build a case.

Leland G. Spencer explains how the stories we tell about sexual assault serve to reinforce rape culture, privileging criminal punishment over social justice and community-based responses to sexual violence. Examining a broad range of popular media, including news coverage of the Brock Turner case, Naomi Iizuka’s popular play Good Kids, the television program Criminal Minds, and the book turned television show 13 Reasons Why, Spencer demonstrates how these representations shore up the carceral state, perpetuate rape myths, blame victims, and excuse those who harm. While increased discussion about sexual violence represents feminist progress, these narratives assume that policing and prosecution are the only means of achieving justice, sidelining other potential avenues for confronting perpetrators and supporting victims.

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cover of Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649-1699

Sex in Middlesex

Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649-1699

Roger Thompson

University of Massachusetts Press, 1986

Drawing on an extraordinary wealth of court records from Middlesex County of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay, Sex in Middlesex offers a richly revisionist account of social and moral life in seventeenth-century New England. Social historian Roger Thompson brings to life the forgotten men and women of colonial Massachusetts to challenge some of the most entrenched assumptions about Puritan society. Examining cases of fornication, adultery, breach of promise, premarital pregnancy, and sexual deviance recorded between 1649 and 1699, Thompson argues that the Puritan social system was far less rigid, and the relations between the sexes far less coercively regulated, than the dominant historiographical tradition, shaped by scholars such as Perry Miller and Lawrence Stone, has suggested.

Rather than a community defined by patriarchal tyranny and punitive moral control, Thompson discovers in the Middlesex records a society characterized by a striking degree of tolerance, mutual regard, and practical common sense, animated by a genuinely popular Puritan piety. The goal of the courts was not punishment and exclusion, but confession, reform, and the reintegration of offenders into the community. Structured with methodological rigor and written with narrative verve, Sex in Middlesex is at once a work of quantitative social history and a gallery of vivid individual portraits.

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cover of Sex, Power, and Slavery

Sex, Power, and Slavery

Gwyn Campbell

Ohio University Press, 2014

Sexual exploitation was and is a critical feature of enslavement. Across many different societies, slaves were considered to own neither their bodies nor their children, even if many struggled to resist. At the same time, paradoxes abound: for example, in some societies to bear the children of a master was a potential route to manumission for some women. Sex, Power, and Slavery is the first history of slavery and bondage to take sexuality seriously.

Twenty-six authors from diverse scholarly backgrounds look at the vexed, traumatic intersections of the histories of slavery and of sexuality. They argue that such intersections mattered profoundly and, indeed, that slavery cannot be understood without adequate attention to sexuality. Sex, Power, and Slavery brings into conversation historians of the slave trade, art historians, and scholars of childhood and contemporary sex trafficking. The book merges work on the Atlantic world and the Indian Ocean world and enables rich comparisons and parallels between these diverse areas.

Contributors: David Brion Davis, Martin Klein, Richard Hellie, Abdul Sheriff, Griet Vankeerberghen, E. Ann McDougall, Matthew S. Hopper, Marie Rodet, George La Rue, Ulrike Schmieder, Tara Iniss, Mariana Candido, James Francis Warren, Johanna Ransmeier, Roseline Uyanga with Marie-Luise Ermisch, Francesca Ann Louise Mitchell, Shigeru Sato, Gabeba Baderoon, Charmaine Nelson, Ana Lucia Araujo, Brian Lewis, Ronaldo Vainfas, Salah Trabelsi, Joost Coté, Sandra Evers, and Subho Basu

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cover of Shaming the Constitution: The Detrimental Results of Sexual Violent Predator Legislation

Shaming the Constitution

The Detrimental Results of Sexual Violent Predator Legislation

Michael L. Perlin

Temple University Press, 2017

Convicted sexually violent predators are more vilified, more subject to media misrepresentation, and more likely to be denied basic human rights than any other population. Shaming the Constitution authors Michael Perlin and Heather Cucolo question the intentions of sex offender laws, offering new approaches to this most complex (and controversial) area of law and social policy.

The authors assert that sex offender laws and policies are unconstitutional and counter-productive. The legislation largely fails to add to public safety—even ruining lives for what are, in some cases, trivial infractions. Shaming the Constitution draws on law, behavioral sciences, and other disciplines to show that many of the “solutions” to penalizing sexually violent predators are “wrong,” as they create the most repressive and useless laws.

In addition to tracing the history of sex offender laws, the authors address the case of Jesse Timmendequas, whose crime begat “Megan’s Law;” the media’s role in creating a “moral panic;” recidivism statistics and treatments, as well as international human rights laws. Ultimately, they call attention to the flaws in the system so we can find solutions that contribute to public safety in ways that do not mock Constitutional principles.

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cover of Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain

Sins against Nature

Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain

Zeb Tortorici

Duke University Press, 2018

In Sins against Nature Zeb Tortorici explores the prosecution of sex acts in colonial New Spain (present-day Mexico, Guatemala, the US Southwest, and the Philippines) to examine the multiple ways bodies and desires come to be textually recorded and archived. Drawing on the records from over three hundred criminal and Inquisition cases between 1530 and 1821, Tortorici shows how the secular and ecclesiastical courts deployed the term contra natura—against nature—to try those accused of sodomy, bestiality, masturbation, erotic religious visions, priestly solicitation of sex during confession, and other forms of "unnatural" sex. Archival traces of the visceral reactions of witnesses, the accused, colonial authorities, notaries, translators, and others in these records demonstrate the primacy of affect and its importance to the Spanish documentation and regulation of these sins against nature. In foregrounding the logic that dictated which crimes were recorded and how they are mediated through the colonial archive, Tortorici recasts Iberian Atlantic history through the prism of the unnatural while showing how archives destabilize the bodies, desires, and social categories on which the history of sexuality is based.
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cover of Sodomy's Solicitations: A Right to Queerness

Sodomy's Solicitations

A Right to Queerness

Joseph J. Fischel

Temple University Press, 2025

Joseph Fischel’s provocative book, Sodomy’s Solicitations, builds out a politics of sexual justice that challenges state sex exceptionalism. By tracing several twenty-first century contestations around Louisiana anti-sodomy laws, Fischel examines patterns and practices of sexual injustice that are too easily eclipsed by our collective focus on marginalized identities.
 
The political stories narrated in Sodomy’s Solicitations are undoubtedly stories of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, but they are also stories of other political problems—and political possibilities. Fischel indicts U.S. sex offender regulatory regimes as state-sponsored sexual violence; offers a qualified defense for sexual expression in public; and argues that animal sexual abuse laws, with their exemptions for industrial agricultural practices, authorize the suffering they were enacted to deter. He also makes the case that laws criminalizing the exchange of sex for money are unconstitutional, and proposes that the best way to protect trans and queer children might just be to enfranchise them.

Sodomy’s Solicitations champions a right to queerness across rather than within identity formations—a right to relatively unpoliced gender, sexual, and intimate pluralism.

In the series Sexuality Studies
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cover of The Work of Rape

The Work of Rape

Rana M. Jaleel

Duke University Press, 2021

In The Work of Rape Rana M. Jaleel argues that the redefinition of sexual violence within international law as a war crime, crime against humanity, and genocide owes a disturbing and unacknowledged debt to power and knowledge achieved from racial, imperial, and settler colonial domination. Prioritizing critiques of racial capitalism from women of color, Indigenous, queer, trans, and Global South perspectives, Jaleel reorients how violence is socially defined and distributed through legal definitions of rape. From Cold War conflicts in Latin America, the 1990s ethnic wars in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and the War on Terror to ongoing debates about sexual assault on college campuses, Jaleel considers how legal and social iterations of rape and the terms that define it—consent, force, coercion—are unstable indexes and abstractions of social difference that mediate racial and colonial positionalities. Jaleel traces how post-Cold War orders of global security and governance simultaneously transform the meaning of sexualized violence, extend US empire, and disavow legacies of enslavement, Indigenous dispossession, and racialized violence within the United States.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
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cover of Unsafe Words: Queering Consent in the #MeToo Era

Unsafe Words

Queering Consent in the #MeToo Era

Shantel Gabrieal Buggs

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Queer people may not have invented sex, but queers have long been pioneers in imagining new ways to have it. Yet their voices have been largely absent from the #MeToo conversation. What can queer people learn from the #MeToo conversation? And what can queer communities teach the rest of the world about ethical sex? This provocative book brings together academics, activists, artists, and sex workers to tackle challenging questions about sex, power, consent, and harm. While responding to the need for sex to be consensual and mutually pleasurable, these chapter authors resist the heteronormative assumptions, class norms, and racial privilege underlying much #MeToo discourse. The essays reveal the tools that queer communities themselves have developed to practice ethical sex—from the sex worker negotiating with her client to the gay man having anonymous sex in the back room. At the same time, they explore how queer communities might better prevent and respond to sexual violence without recourse to a police force that is frequently racist, homophobic, and transphobic. 
 
Telling a queerer side of the #MeToo story, Unsafe Words dares to challenge dogmatic assumptions about sex and consent while developing tools and language to promote more ethical and more pleasurable sex for everyone.
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cover of Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860-1914

Violent Sensations

Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860-1914

Scott Spector

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Vienna and Berlin were centers of scientific knowledge, accompanied by a sense of triumphalism and confidence in progress. Yet they were also sites of fascination with urban decay, often focused on sexual and criminal deviants and the tales of violence surrounding them. Sensational media reports fed the prurient public’s hunger for stories from the criminal underworld: sadism, sexual murder, serial killings, accusations of Jewish ritual child murder—as well as male and female homosexuality.

In Violent Sensations, Scott Spector explores how the protagonists of these stories—people at society’s margins—were given new identities defined by the groundbreaking sciences of psychiatry, sexology, and criminology, and how this expert knowledge was then transmitted to an eager public by journalists covering court cases and police investigations. The book analyzes these sexual and criminal subjects on three levels: first, the expertise of scientists, doctors, lawyers, and scholars; second, the sensationalism of newspaper scandal and pulp fiction; and, third, the subjective ways that the figures themselves came to understand who they were. Throughout, Spector answers important questions about how fantasies of extreme depravity and bestiality figure into the central European self-image of cities as centers of progressive civilization, as well as the ways in which the sciences of social control emerged alongside the burgeoning emancipation of women and homosexuals.
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cover of West of Sex: Making Mexican America, 1900-1930

West of Sex

Making Mexican America, 1900-1930

Pablo Mitchell

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Sex can be an oppressive force, a tool to shame, divide, and control a population. But it can also be a force for change, for the legal and physical challenge of inequity and injustice. In West of Sex, Pablo Mitchell uses court transcripts and criminal cases to provide the first coherent picture of Mexican-American sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century, and a truly revelatory look at sexual identity in the borderlands.

As Mexicans faced a rising tide of racial intolerance in the American West, some found cracks in the legal system that enabled them to assert their rights as full citizens, despite institutional hostility. In these chapters, Mitchell offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of ethnicity and power in the United States, placing ordinary Mexican women and men at the center of the story of American sex, colonialism, and belonging.

Other chapters discuss topics like prostitution, same-sex intimacy, sexual violence, interracial romance, and marriage with an impressive level of detail and complexity. Written in vivid and accessible prose, West of Sex offers readers a new vision of sex and race in American history.

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cover of When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence

When Time Warps

The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence

Megan Burke

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

An inquiry into the phenomenology of “woman” based in the relationship between lived time and sexual violence

 
Feminist phenomenologists have long understood a woman’s life as inhibited, confined, and constrained by sexual violence. In this important inquiry, author Megan Burke both builds and expands on this legacy by examining the production of normative womanhood through racist tropes and colonial domination. Ultimately, Burke charts a new feminist phenomenology based in the relationship between lived time and sexual violence.

By focusing on time instead of space, When Time Warps places sexualized racism at the center of the way “woman” is lived. Burke transports questions of time and gender outside the realm of the historical, making provocative new insights into how gendered individuals live time, and how their temporal existence is changed through particular experiences.

Providing a potent reexamination of the theory of Simone de Beauvoir—while also bringing to the fore important women of color theorists and engaging in the temporal aspects of #MeToo—When Time Warps makes a necessary, lasting contribution to our understanding of gender, race, and sexual violence.

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