H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate, the wittiest, and the most moving we have. From Michelangelo’s “Love Misinterpreted” to Noël Coward’s “Mad About the Boy,” from May Swenson’s “Symmetrical Companion” to Muriel Rukeyser’s “Looking at Each Other,” these poems take on both desire and its higher power: love in all its tender or taunting variety.

    Khaled Abou El Fadl cites a series of injustices in Islamic society and ultimately proposes a return to the original ethics at the heart of the Muslim legal system.

    Rather than focus exclusively on pictures as they are embodied in various media such as painting, sculpture, or photography, he links pictures to our mental images and therefore our bodies. The body is understood as a living medium that produces, perceives, or remembers images that are different from the images we encounter through handmade or technical pictures. Refusing to reduce images to their material embodiment yet acknowledging the importance of the historical media in which images are manifested, An Anthropology of Images presents a challenging and provocative new account of what pictures are and how they function.The book demonstrates these ideas with a series of compelling case studies, ranging from Dante's picture theory to post-photography. One chapter explores the tension between image and medium in two media of the body, the coat of arms and the portrait painting. Another, central chapter looks at the relationship between image and death, tracing picture production, including the first use of the mask, to early funerary rituals in which pictures served to represent the missing bodies of the dead. Pictures were tools to re-embody the deceased, to make them present again, a fact that offers a surprising clue to the riddle of presence and absence in most pictures and that reveals a genealogy of pictures obscured by Platonic picture theory.

    We are all aware of their often extraordinary talent and manoeuvres on the city streets. This book is the first detailed study of the urban phenomenon of skateboarding. It looks at skateboarding history from the surf-beaches of California in the 1950s, through the purpose-built skateparks of the 1970s, to the street-skating of the present day and shows how skateboarders experience and understand the city through their sport. Dismissive of authority and convention, skateboarders suggest that the city is not just a place for working and shopping but a true pleasure-ground, a place where the human body, emotions and energy can be expressed to the full.The huge skateboarding subculture that revolves around graphically-designed clothes and boards, music, slang and moves provides a rich resource for exploring issues of gender, race, class, sexuality and the family. As the author demonstrates, street-style skateboarding, especially characteristic of recent decades, conducts a performative critique of architecture, the city and capitalism. Anyone interested in the history and sociology of sport, urban geography or architecture will find this book riveting.

    Using records and archives available to researchers only since the fall of Communism, Dan Healey revisits the rich homosexual subcultures of St. Petersburg and Moscow, illustrating the ambiguous attitude of the late Tsarist regime and revolutionary rulers toward gay men and lesbians. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia reveals a world of ordinary Russians who lived extraordinary lives and records the voices of a long-silenced minority.

    I can easily see it becoming a standard work on ancient female homoeroticism."--John S. Rundin, Assistant Professor of Classics, University of Texas at San AntonioWomen's and men's worlds were largely separate in ancient Mediterranean societies, and, in consequence, many women's deepest personal relationships were with other women. Yet relatively little scholarly or popular attention has focused on women's relationships in antiquity, in contrast to recent interest in the relationships between men in ancient Greece and Rome. The essays in this book seek to close this gap by exploring a wide variety of textual and archaeological evidence for women's homosocial and homoerotic relationships from prehistoric Greece to fifth-century CE Egypt.Drawing on developments in feminist theory, gay and lesbian studies, and queer theory, as well as traditional textual and art historical methods, the contributors to this volume examine representations of women's lives with other women, their friendships, and sexual subjectivity. They present new interpretations of the evidence offered by the literary works of Sappho, Ovid, and Lucian; Bronze Age frescoes and Greek vase painting, funerary reliefs, and other artistic representations; and Egyptian legal documents.

    It marks an innovative interdisciplinary approach to questions of embodiment and subjectivity′ - Disability and Society ′This is an elegantly written book which has, as its main aim, to rethink the idea of difference in the western imaginary through a consideration of two themes: monsters and how these have come to define, but potentially to deconstruct, normality; and the whole idea of vulnerability and the vulnerable and the extent to which such a state is one that all of us are constantly in danger of entering ... The theoretical and philosophical content - Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Irrigaray, Butler, Levinas, and Haraway in particular - together with the range of empirical examples used to illustrate the arguments, make the book an ideal one for third level undergraduates and for post-graduates, particularly those studying the sociology of embodiment, feminist theory, critical theory and cultural studies. Shildrick accomplishes the task of making difficult ideas comprehensible without reducing them to the simplistic′ - Sociology Written by one of the most distinguished commentators in the field, this book asks why we see some bodies as `monstrous′ or `vulnerable′ and examines what this tells us about ideas of bodily `normality′ and bodily perfection.Drawing on feminist theories of the body, biomedical discourse and historical data, Margrit Shildrick argues that the response to the monstrous body has always been ambivalent. In trying to organize it out of the discourses of normality, we point to the impossibility of realizing a fully developed, invulnerable self. She calls upon us to rethink the monstrous, not as an abnormal category, but as a condition of attractivenes, and demonstrates how this involves an exploration of relationships between bodies and embodied selves, and a revising of the phenomenology of the body.

    In this lively and literate study, the first book-length exploration of the artist, Alexander Nemerov presents a radical new reading of these paintings focusing on the uncanny quality of Raphaelle's still-life objects. Nemerov argues that the physical presence of these objects is not strictly their own but that of the artist's body. This imagery of embodiment, Nemerov argues, relates deeply to Raphaelle's own time. The Body of Raphaelle Peale focuses on not just Raphaelle's paintings but also the visual and intellectual culture of early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia, to which these works intimately relate. More broadly, the book presents a reading of romanticism in the American visual arts. Above all, it is an argument about selfhood in Raphaelle's era. Raphaelle's focus—in paintings both playful and morbid—was the pleasures and horrors of being a mere body, of being less than a self.Nemerov's primary source of evidence in this study is Raphaelle's art itself. After considering its theoretical and historical implications, he returns to the images, deftly guiding us to a fresh understanding of these remarkable paintings. Nemerov's formal analysis is infused with a sophisticated awareness of interdisciplinary issues, and he gracefully balances the formal, the theoretical, and the historical throughout his narrative. This beautifully illustrated study is sure to stimulate renewed appreciation of an exceptional American artist.

    Much has been written about how gays have been portrayed in the movies but no book -- until now -- has looked at their influence behind the screen. Whether out of or in the closet, gays and lesbians have from the very beginning played a significant role in shaping Hollywood. Gay actors were among the earliest matinee idols and gay directors have long been among the most popular and commercially successful filmmakers. In fact, gay set and costume designers created the very look of Hollywood.With this landmark book, Mann fills a void in the Hollywood history archives. Written in the tradition of Neal Gabler's An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood and based on hundreds of hours of interviews with survivors of this golden age, Behind the Screen is destined to become a classic of film literature.

    He applies this method to the history of sexuality, with important consequences for our understanding of desire, abnormality, and sexuality itself.In Davidson's view, it was the emergence of a science of sexuality that made it possible, even inevitable, for us to become preoccupied with our true sexuality. Historical epistemology attempts to reveal how this new form of experience that we call sexuality is linked to the emergence of new structures of knowledge, and especially to a new style of reasoning and the concepts employed within it. Thus Davidson shows how, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, a new psychiatric style of reasoning about diseases emerges that makes possible, among other things, statements about sexual perversion that quickly become commonplace in discussions of sexuality.Considering a wide range of examples, from Thomas Aquinas to Freud, Davidson develops the methodological lessons of Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault in order to analyze the history of our experience of normativity and its deviations.

    From Charles Darwin and nineteenth-century racism to black nationalism and the Nation of Islam, from Baptist women's groups to James Baldwin; E. Frances White takes on one institution after another as she re-centers the role of black women in the United States' intellectual heritage. White presents identity politics as a complex activity, with entangled branches of race and gender, of invisibility and voyeurism, of defiance and passivity and conformism.White's powerful introduction draws on oral narratives from her own family history to illuminate the nature of narrative, both what is said and what is left unsaid. She then sets the historical stage with a helpful history of the inception and development of black feminism and a critique of major black feminist writings. In the three chapters that follow, she addresses the obstacles black feminism has already surmounted and must continue to traverse. Confronting what White calls "the politics of respectability," these chapters move the reader from simplistic views of race and gender in the nineteenth century through black nationalism and the radical movements of the sixties, and their relationship to feminist thought, to the linkages between race, gender, and sexuality in the works of such giants as Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. No one who finishes Dark Continent of Our Bodies will look at race and gender in the same way again.

    Why was the great philosopher Spinoza expelled from his Portuguese-Jewish community in Amsterdam? Nadler's investigation of this simple question gives fascinating new perspectives on Spinoza's thought and the Jewish religious and philosophical tradition from which it arose.

    For the first time, in their own words, pioneers in the Los Angeles movement discuss the gay scene in Southern California and the development of a distinctly Asian American identity. Despite its size, until recently the gay Asian American community in Los Angeles was fragmented and marginalized. Gay Asian men separated into their own ethnic cliques and preferred whites as sexual partners. Eric C. Wat convincingly demonstrates that these patterns are legacies of both a racialized hierarchy of desire and racial exclusion from the mainstream gay community. Using a cultural studies lens to interpret the rich oral narratives he collected, Wat shows how a dominant sexual ideology can influence our desires and contradict our memories. He follows the development of 'specialty' bars that at once reinforced this dominant ideology and highlighted its contradictions. By documenting the founding of the first gay Asian organization in Southern California (Asian/Pacific Lesbians and Gays [A/PLG]), the author powerfully portrays the ways gay Asian men confronted these contradictions publicly and struggled to reconcile them as they fashioned a coherent identity and community based on both their race and sexuality. Wat's analysis returns gay Asian men to the center of their lives and celebrates the power of individuals working collectively to define their desires and to change what is unjust around them. As living history, their voices are valuable and overdue.

    Beginning with Lakoff and Johnson's seminal work in Metaphors We Live By, K�vecses outlines the development of the cognitive linguistic theory of metaphor by explaining key ideas on metaphor. He also explores primary metaphor, metaphor systems, the invariance principle, mental-imagery experiments, the many-space blending theory, and the role of image schemas in metaphorical thought. He examines the applicability of these ideas to numerous related fields.

    Yet although a wide range of relevant evidence survives from the ancient Near East, it has been exceptional for those studying women in the ancient world to stray outside the traditional bounds of Greece and Rome.Women of Babylon is a much-needed historical/art historical study that investigates the concepts of femininity which prevailed in Assyro-Babylonian society. Zainab Bahrani's detailed analysis of how the culture of ancient Mesopotamia defined sexuality and gender roles both in, and through, representation is enhanced by a rich selection of visual material extending from 6500 BC - 1891 AD. Professor Bahrani also investigates the ways in which women of the ancient Near East have been perceived in classical scholarship up to the nineteenth century.

    Phelan argues that homosexuals are seen as strangers, ambiguous figures who trouble the border between us and them.

    Contrary to those who isolate the individual photograph, treat albums as texts, or argue that photography has supplanted memory, she shows that the photographic album must be taken as a whole and interpreted as a visual and verbal performance that extends oral consciousness.Suspended Conversations brings to light a rich collection of photographic travelogues, memoirs, thematic collections, and family sagas compiled between 1860 and 1960 and held by the McCord Museum of Canadian History. Martha Langford not only provides a fascinating glimpse of a previous century's preoccupations and mores but brings photography into the great conversation about how we remember and how we send our stories into the future.

    The essays focus on pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial gay and lesbian life in India to provide a comprehensive look at a much neglected topic. The topics are wide-ranging, considering film, literature, popular culture, historical and religious texts, law and other aspects of life in India. Specifically, the essays cover such issues as Deepa Mehta's recent and controversial film, Fire, which focused on lesbian relationships in India; the Indian penal code which outlaws homosexual acts; a case of same-sex love and murder in colonial India; homophobic fiction and homoerotic advertising in current day India; and lesbian subtext in Hindu scripture. All of the essays are original to the collection. Queering India promises to change the way we understand India as well as gay and lesbian life and sexuality around the world.

    For many, girls represented the true essence of childhood or bygone times of innocence; but for middle-class men, especially writers, the interest ran much deeper. In Men in Wonderland, Catherine Robson explores the ways in which various nineteenth-century British male authors constructed girlhood, and analyzes the nature of their investment in the figure of the girl. In so doing, she reveals the link between the idealization of little girls and a widespread fantasy of male development--a myth suggesting that men become masculine only after an initial feminine stage, lived out in the protective environment of the nursery. Little girls, argues Robson, thus offer an adult male the best opportunity to reconnect with his own lost self.Tracing the beginnings of this myth in the writings of Romantics Wordsworth and De Quincey, Robson identifies the consolidation of this paradigm in numerous Victorian artifacts, ranging from literary works by Dickens and Barrett Browning, to paintings by Frith and Millais, to reports of the Royal Commission on Children's Employment. She analyzes Ruskin and Carroll's "high noon" of girl worship and investigates the destruction of the fantasy in the closing decades of the century, when social concerns about the working girl sexualized the image of young females.Men in Wonderland contributes to a growing interest in the nineteenth century's construction of childhood, sexuality, and masculinity, and illuminates their complex interconnections with a startlingly different light. Not only does it complicate the narratives of pedophilic desire that are generally used to explain figures like Ruskin and Carroll, but it offers a new understanding of the Victorian era's obsession with loss, its rampant sentimentality, and its intense valorization of the little girl at the expense of mature femininity.

    It begins with the assumptions that there is more to virginity than sexual inexperience, and that virginity may be considered as a gendered identity, a role which is performed rather than biologically determined. The author explores versions of virginity as they appear in medieval saints' lives, in the institutional chastity of nuns, and as shown in the book of Margery Kempe, showing how it can be active, contested, vulnerable but also recoverable.SARAH SALIH teaches in the Department of English at King's College London.

    In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its diagnostic classification of mental illness, but the groundwork for this pivotal decision was laid decades earlier. In this new study, Henry L. Minton looks back at the struggle of the American gay and lesbian activists who chose scientific research as a path for advancing homosexual rights. He traces the history of gay and lesbian emancipatory research from its early beginnings in the late nineteenth century to its role in challenging the illness model in the 1970s. By examining archival sources and unpublished manuscripts, Minton reveals the substantial accomplishments made by key researchers and relates their life stories. He also considers the contributions of mainstream sexologists such as Alfred C. Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker, who supported the cause of homosexual rights through the advancement of scientific knowledge. By uncovering this hidden chapter in the story of gay liberation, Departing from Deviance makes an important contribution to both the history of science and the history of sexuality.

    Finally, here's a unique guidebook that offers practical advice on honoring your sexuality throughout every stage of motherhood. Honest, humorous, and reassuring, The Mother's Guide to Sex delivers comprehensive information about sex and parenting, including recommendations from medical experts, sex experts, and the best experts of all -- hundreds of other mothers, whose candid anecdotes and suggestions will support, encourage, and inspire you to explore your maternal sexuality. As they sound off about the ebb and flow of desire, conflicting feelings about how their bodies have changed, the challenges they face in renegotiating their relationship with their sexuality, and more, you'll realize that you're not alone in your yearning to combine motherhood and a good sex life. You'll learn:* how motherhood makes you a better lover* how to enjoy healthy, safe sex during pregnancy and the postpartum period* what factors affect your sex drive, why so many mothers lose desire, and ways to reclaim it* how your sex life can survive despite limited time, energy, and privacy* why single moms are entitled to great sex, and how to get it* ten good reasons to talk to your kids about sex, and what to say* how to model positive sexual behavior for your kids* where to find the best resources on sex and parenting

    These authors of these stories used fairy tales to explain their own lives, to teach children, to examine history, and to critique society and the status quo. Powerful and conflicted females are queens, girls on quests, mothers, daughters, magical wisewomen, and midwives to the fairies; they love, hate, murder, save children, fight tyranny, overcome cannibals, and rescue the working poor.Jeannine Blackwell's introduction places the tales in their historical, social, and critical context, and Shawn C. Jarvis's afterword presents a thematic analysis of the texts and approaches to reading them in conjunction with other European and American tales.