Best of
Gender-And-Sexuality

2015

Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne


Wilda C. Gafney - 2015
    Using her own translations, Gafney offers a midrashic interpretation of the biblical text that is rooted in the African American preaching tradition to tell the stories of a variety of female characters, many of whom are often overlooked and nameless. Gafney employs a solid understanding of womanist and feminist approaches to biblical interpretation and the sociohistorical culture of the ancient Near East. This unique and imaginative work that is grounded in serious scholarship will expand conversations about feminist and womanist biblical interpretation.

The Plausibility Problem


Ed Shaw - 2015
    But is it realistic? Isn't it unrealistic and unfair to those who struggle with this issue? Doesn't it condemn them to loneliness, a lack of fulfilment and the loss of basic human satisfactions like sex and marriage? Is what the church teaches a plausible way of life?Ed Shaw experiences same-sex attraction, and yet he is committed to what the Bible says and what the church has always taught about marriage and sex. In this honest book, he shares his pain in dealing with these issues - but, at the same time, shows us that obedience to Jesus is ultimately the only way to experience life to the full.He shows that the Bible's teaching seems unreasonable not because of its difficulties, but because of missteps that the church has often taken in its understanding of the Christian life. We have been shaped by the world around us, and urgently need to re-examine the values that drive our discipleship. Only by doing this in the light of the Bible, can we make sense of its call on the lives of those who are attracted to their own sex.We have so often made Jesus' way sound like a bad deal. Only by reclaiming the reality of gospel discipleship, can we truly see and appreciate that life in Christ is the best way for any human life to be lived - whomever we are attracted to

Women and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Understanding Life Experiences from Early Childhood to Old Age


Sarah Hendrickx - 2015
    This book endorses my clinical experiences in working with females in the autism spectrum and validates the importance of diagnosis at any time in a person's life. Therefore I would highly recommend this book for all professionals involved in diagnosis and supporting girls and women in the autism spectrum. --from the foreword by Dr Judith Gould, Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Director of The Lorna Wing Centre for Autism.

The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America


Sarah Deer - 2015
    An epidemic is biological and blameless. Violence against Native women is historical and political, bounded by oppression and colonial violence. This book, like all of Sarah Deer’s work, is aimed at engaging the problem head-on—and ending it.The Beginning and End of Rape collects and expands the powerful writings in which Deer, who played a crucial role in the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act in 2013, has advocated for cultural and legal reforms to protect Native women from endemic sexual violence and abuse. Deer provides a clear historical overview of rape and sex trafficking in North America, paying particular attention to the gendered legacy of colonialism in tribal nations—a truth largely overlooked or minimized by Native and non-Native observers. She faces this legacy directly, articulating strategies for Native communities and tribal nations seeking redress. In a damning critique of federal law that has accommodated rape by destroying tribal legal systems, she describes how tribal self-determination efforts of the twenty-first century can be leveraged to eradicate violence against women. Her work bridges the gap between Indian law and feminist thinking by explaining how intersectional approaches are vital to addressing the rape of Native women.Grounded in historical, cultural, and legal realities, both Native and non-Native, these essays point to the possibility of actual and positive change in a world where Native women are systematically undervalued, left unprotected, and hurt. Deer draws on her extensive experiences in advocacy and activism to present specific, practical recommendations and plans of action for making the world safer for all.

Divine Sex: A Compelling Vision for Christian Relationships in a Hypersexualized Age


Jonathan Grant - 2015
    Online dating, social media, internet pornography, and the phenomenon of the smartphone generation have created an avalanche of change with far-reaching consequences for sexuality today. The church has struggled to address this new moral ecology because it has focused on clarity of belief rather than quality of formation. The real challenge for spiritual formation lies in addressing the underlying moral intuitions we carry subconsciously, which are shaped by the convictions of our age.In this book, a fresh new voice offers a persuasive Christian vision of sex and relationships, calling young adults to faithful discipleship in a hypersexualized world. Drawing from his pastoral experience with young people and from cutting-edge research across multiple disciplines, Jonathan Grant helps Christian leaders understand the cultural forces that make the church’s teaching on sex and relationships ineffective in the lives of today’s young adults. He also sets forth pastoral strategies for addressing the underlying fault lines in modern sexuality.

Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement


Devery S. Anderson - 2015
    It tells the story of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. His death and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement. Like no other event in modern history, the death of Emmett Till provoked people all over the United States to seek social change.For six decades the Till story has continued to haunt the South as the lingering injustice of Till's murder and the aftermath altered many lives. Fifty years after the murder, renewed interest in the case led the Justice Department to open an investigation into identifying and possibly prosecuting accomplices of the two men originally tried. Between 2004 and 2005, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted the first real probe into the killing and turned up important information that had been lost for decades.This book will stand as the definitive work on Emmett Till for years to come. Incorporating much new information, the book demonstrates how the Emmett Till murder exemplifies the Jim Crow South at its nadir. The author accessed a wealth of new evidence. Anderson has made a dozen trips to Mississippi and Chicago to conduct research and interview witnesses and reporters who covered the trial. In Emmett Till Anderson corrects the historical record and presents this critical saga in its entirety.

Spiritual Friendship: Finding Love in the Church as a Celibate Gay Christian


Wesley Hill - 2015
    Unlike the relationships we are born into, we choose our friends. It is also tenuous—we can end a friendship at any time. But should friendship be so free and unconstrained? Although our culture tends to pay more attention to romantic love, marriage, family, and other forms of community, friendship is a genuine love in its own right. This eloquent book reminds us that Scripture and tradition have a high view of friendship. Single Christians, particularly those who are gay and celibate, may find it is a form of love to which they are especially called.Writing with deep empathy and with fidelity to historic Christian teaching, Wesley Hill retrieves a rich understanding of friendship as a spiritual vocation and explains how the church can foster friendship as a basic component of Christian discipleship. He helps us reimagine friendship as a robust form of love that is worthy of honor and attention in communities of faith. This book sets forth a positive calling for celibate gay Christians and suggests practical ways for all Christians to cultivate stronger friendships.

SLUT: A Play and Guidebook for Combating Sexism and Sexual Violence


Katie Cappiello - 2015
    By turns heartbreaking and hilarious, SLUT captures the real lives of teens and young adults as they negotiate sex and the cruel scapegoating that still hobbles female sexuality and power. This groundbreaking play, written in collaboration with New York City high school students, and guidebook offers communities and individuals concrete tools to inspire change and stop slut. The guidebook includes production notes, a guide for talk-backs, and provocative essays by Leora Tanenbaum, Jennifer Baumgardner, Farah Tanis, Jamia Wilson, among others, providing the resources to inspire change within our communities and ourselves.

The Lily and the Horn


Catherynne M. Valente - 2015
    War is a dinner party.

Bad Kid


David Crabb - 2015
    They had no idea that a deeply confused fourteen-year-old boy was watching. Their dyed hair, fishnets, and eyeliner were his first evidence of another world—a place he desperately wanted to go. He just had no idea how to get there.Somehow David Crabb had convinced himself that every guy preferred French-braiding his girlfriend’s hair to making out, and that the funny feelings he got watching Silver Spoons and Growing Pains had nothing to do with Ricky Schroeder or Kirk Cameron. But discovering George Michael’s Faith confirmed for David what every bully already knew: he was gay. Surviving high school, with its gym classes, locker rooms, and naked, glistening senior guys, would require impossible feats of denial. What saved him was finding a group of outlandish friends who reveled in being outsiders. David found himself enmeshed with misfits: wearing black, cutting class, staying out all night, drinking, tripping, chain-smoking, idolizing The Smiths, Pet Shop Boys, and Joy Division—and learning lessons about life and love along the way.Richly detailed with 80s pop-culture, and including black and white photos throughout, Bad Kid is as laugh-out-loud funny as it is poignant. Crabb’s journey through adolescence captures the essence of every person’s struggle to understand his or her true self.

Double Teenage


Joni Murphy - 2015
    Starting from their shared love of theater, the girls move into a wider world that shimmers with intellectual and artistic possibility, but at the same time, is dense with threat. This unrelenting novel shines a spotlight on paradoxes of Western culture. It asks impossible questions about the media's obsession with sexual violence as it twins with a social unwillingness to look at real pain. It asks what it feels like to be a girl, simultaneously a being and a thing, feeling in a marketplace. Wherever they are whether in a dance club in El Paso or an art lecture in Vancouver these characters find themselves in a brutal landscape. This is a portrait of the recent past, seen through the cloudy lens of now, of friends struggling within self-destructive realities. Part bildungsroman, part performance, part passionate essay, part magic spell, what DOUBLE TEENAGE ultimately offers is a way to see through violence into an emotionally alive place beyond the myriad traps of girlhood.

¡Cuéntamelo!: Oral Histories by LGBT Latino Immigrants


Juliana Delgado Lopera - 2015
    ¡Cuéntamelo! began as a cover story for SF Weekly, and, eventually in 2014 with local grant support, Juliana Delgado Lopera was able to publish a limited first edition of 300. Aunt Lute is pleased to bring this title back into circulation. In addition to beautiful black and white drawings of the contributors by artist Laura Cerón Melo, this edition features a number of candid earlier photographs of several of the contributors, as well as a new introduction from Juliana. ¡Cuéntamelo! is “[a] stunning collection of bilingual oral histories and illustrations by LGBT Latinx immigrants who arrived in the U.S. during the 80s and 90s. Stories of repression in underground Havana in the 60s; coming out trans in Catholic Puerto Rico in the 80s; Scarface, female impersonators, Miami and the 'boat people'; San Francisco’s underground Latinx scene during the 90s and more.”¡Cuéntamelo! is bilingual. All stories in this book have both an English and Spanish version.

Woman on Fire: 9 Elements to Wake Up Your Erotic Energy, Personal Power, and Sexual Intelligence


Amy Jo Goddard - 2015
    The prevalence of low sexual desire ranges from 26.7% among premenopausal men to 52.4% among naturally menopausal women. That is an enormous segment of women who are frustrated about their lack of desire and wonder what's wrong. But in Woman on Fire, Amy Jo Goddard shows us that the more whole we are as sexual beings, the more fulfilled we are as human beings. In this accessible, prescriptive book, Amy Jo reveals her holistic, inside-out approach to developing Sexual Empowerment. Women from 20 to 70 come to her workshops with issues like these: "What am I missing?" "I don't like sex the way everyone else seems to." "How do I maintain desire after having kids?" "How do I build sexual confidence?" In answer, Amy Jo shows us how to master the 9 Elements of a Sexually Empowered Life and includes stories from the thousands of women she has worked with. She shows us how to get (back) in touch with desire, explore vulnerability and play, and push the boundaries of what we think is acceptable. We will not just have better sex, we will have more pleasure throughout life and more intimate relationships, whether we have many partners or one.

$pread: The Best of the Magazine that Illuminated the Sex Industry and Started a Media Revolution


Rachel Aimee - 2015
    This collection features enduring essays about sex work around the world, first-person stories that range from deeply traumatic to totally hilarious, analysis of media and culture, and fantastic illustrations and photos produced just for the magazine. The book also features the previously untold story of $pread and how it has built a wider audience in its posthumous years. What started as a community tool and trade magazine for the sex industry quickly emerged as the essential guide for people curious about sex work, for independent magazine enthusiasts, and for labor and civil rights activists.

The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory and Marxism at the Intersection


Holly Lewis - 2015
    But few thinkers have attempted to reconcile that knowledge—which is rooted in Marxism—with queer theory. The few who have, meanwhile, usually attempt to do so through issues of libidinal desire and sexual expression. In The Politics of Everybody, Holly Lewis argues powerfully that the emphasis on desire, though seemingly innocuous, is actually symptomatic of neoliberal habits of thought, and consequently, is responsible for a continued focus on the limited politics of identity. Instead, Lewis shows, we should look to the arena of body production, categorization, and exclusion; only through such a reorientation can we create a politics of liberation that is truly inclusive and grounded in lived experience.

The Gender Quest Workbook: A Guide for Teens and Young Adults Exploring Gender Identity


Rylan Jay Testa - 2015
    If you are a transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) teen, you may experience unique challenges with identity and interpersonal relationships. In addition to experiencing common teen challenges such as body changes and peer pressure, you may be wondering how to express your unique identity to others. The Gender Quest Workbook incorporates skills, exercises, and activities from evidence-based therapies—such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)—to help you address the broad range of struggles you may encounter related to gender identity, such as anxiety, isolation, fear, and even depression. Despite outdated beliefs, gender no longer implies being simply male or female, but rather a whole spectrum of possibilities. This fun, engaging workbook is designed specifically for teens like you who want to explore the concept of gender and gender identity and expression—whether you already identify as TGNC or are simply questioning your gender identity. The activities in this book will help you explore your identity internally, interpersonally, and culturally. And along the way, you’ll learn how to effectively express yourself and make informed decisions on how to navigate your gender with family, friends, classmates, and coworkers. The book also includes chapters on sex and dating, balancing multiple identities, and how to deal with stressful challenges when they arise.The Gender Quest Workbook also features a brief downloadable guide for clinicians that explains ways professionals can better serve gender-expansive youth. The guide will address ways to help youth working with gender identity build resilience against gender minority stress, among other topics.This book has been selected as an Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Self-Help Book Recommendation—an honor bestowed on outstanding self-help books that are consistent with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) principles and that incorporate scientifically tested strategies for overcoming mental health difficulties. Used alone or in conjunction with therapy, our books offer powerful tools readers can use to jump-start changes in their lives.

Dazzled by Darkness: A Story of Art & Desire


Erica Miles - 2015
    'G' is a street-smart Latino apprentice who creates radical, in-your-face art work. When these two NY opposites meet, something clicks, and wheels begin to turn. In this unique novel about Mental illness, Art History, and Time-travel, readers will experience Life in the 1960s and Life during the Renaissance (and other Great Periods of Art History) like they never have before! The two main protagonists each escape into their own fantasies (hearing voices, on the part of schizophrenic Sara; imagined interactions with Dead Master Artists, on the part of "G"), both ending up in a Compulsive-Obsessional World of Art & Desire!

Vitality Issue 1 (Vitality #1)


Jaylee James - 2015
    A girl and her girlfriend face down the monsters that keep her village afraid. A little sea monster girl listens to her two grandfathers tell the story of how they found her. A woman fights to rescue her brothers from a sorceress - that she finds herself falling for.Welcome to Vitality!--- Vitality is a literary magazine publishing exciting, entertaining fiction featuring LGBTQ+ protagonists. What we hear people asking for, most often, is more stories featuring queer people – and not just serious, often difficult-to-read “issue” work dealing with the hard stresses of real life, but fun stories that happen to be about queer characters, and portray queerness in a positive way.In answer to this need, Vitality seeks to be an escape for the reader. A safe place full of wonder and awesome where the reader can see characters like themselves doing things like battling dragons, solving crimes, acting in a circus, or traveling the world. All genres and styles can be found in Vitality. The only limit is your imagination.

Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul


Tanisha C. Ford - 2015
    Whether using stiletto heels as weapons to protect against police attacks or incorporating African-themed designs into everyday wear, these fashion-forward women celebrated their identities and pushed for equality. In this thought-provoking book, Tanisha C. Ford explores how and why black women in places as far-flung as New York City, Atlanta, London, and Johannesburg incorporated style and beauty culture into their activism. Focusing on the emergence of the "soul style" movement represented in clothing, jewelry, hairstyles, and more Liberated Threads shows that black women's fashion choices became galvanizing symbols of gender and political liberation. Drawing from an eclectic archive, Ford offers a new way of studying how black style and Soul Power moved beyond national boundaries, sparking a global fashion phenomenon. Following celebrities, models, college students, and everyday women as they moved through fashion boutiques, beauty salons, and record stores, Ford narrates the fascinating intertwining histories of Black Freedom and fashion. "

Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (New Black Studies Series)


L.H. Stallings - 2015
    It is multisensory and multidimensional philosophy used in conjunction with the erotic, eroticism, and black erotica. It is the affect that shapes film, performance, sound, food, technology, drugs, energy, time, and the seeds of revolutionary ideas for black movements. But funk is also an experience to feel, to hear, to touch and taste, and in Funk the Erotic , L. H. Stallings uses funk in all its iterations as an innovation in black studies. Stallings uses funk to highlight the importance of the erotic and eroticism in Black cultural and political movements, debunking "the truth of sex" and its histories. Brandishing funk as a theoretical tool, Stallings argues that Western theories of the erotic fail as universally applicable terms or philosophies, and thus lack utility in discussions of black bodies, subjects, and culture. In considering the Victorian concept of freak in black funk, Stallings proposes that black artists across all media have fashioned a tradition that embraces the superfreak, sexual guerrilla, sexual magic, mama's porn, black trans narratives, and sex work in a post-human subject position. Their goal: to ensure survival and evolution in a world that exploits black bodies in capitalist endeavors, imperialism, and colonization. Revitalizing and wide-ranging, Funk the Erotic offers a needed examination of black sexual cultures, a discursive evolution of black ideas about eroticism, a critique of work society, a reexamination of love, and an articulation of the body in black movements.

Exploring Masculinities: Identity, Inequality, Continuity and Change


C.J. Pascoe - 2015
    It takes a conceptual approach by covering the wide range of scholarship being done on masculinities beyond the model of hegemonic masculinity. C.J. Pascoe and Tristan Bridges extend the boundaries of the field and provide a new framework for understanding masculinities studies. Rather than taking a topics-based approach to masculinity, Exploring Masculinities offers an innovative conceptual approach that enables students to study a given phenomenon from a variety of perspectives. It divides up the field in ways that provide accessible introductions to complex debates and key intra- and interdisciplinary distinctions. The book provides a portable set of conceptual tools on which scholars and students can rely to analyze masculinities in different contexts, time periods, and embodiments.

Our Bodies, Our Bikes


Elly Blue - 2015
    Through personal stories, how-to guidelines, and factual information, contributors explore the intersection of cycling and women's health, from bike fit to clothing, from periods to childbirth, from media representation to gender presentation and reproductive rights. Our diverse contributors demystify and elucidate women's issues in cycling in a practical, friendly, and down to earth manner.

Jane Eyre's Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine's Story


Jody Gentian Bower - 2015
    Yet while many have written about the "heroine's journey," most of those authors base their models of this journey on Joseph Campbell's model of the Heroic Quest story or on old myths and tales written down by men, not on the stories that women tell.In Jane Eyre's Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine's Story, cultural mythologist Jody Gentian Bower looks at novels by women--and some men--as well as biographies of women that tell the story of the Aletis, the wandering heroine. She finds a similar pattern in works spanning the centuries, from Lady Mary Wroth and William Shakespeare in the 1600s to Sue Monk Kidd, Suzanne Collins, and Philip Pullman in the current century, including works by Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Alice Walker, to name just a few. She also discusses myths and folk tales that follow the same pattern.Dr. Bower argues that the Aletis represents an archetypal character that has to date received surprisingly little scholarly recognition despite her central role in many of the greatest works of Western fiction. Using an engaging, down-to-earth writing style, Dr. Bower outlines the stages and cast of characters of the Aletis story with many examples from the literature. She discusses how the Aletis story differs from the hero's quest, how it has changed over the centuries as women gained more independence, and what heroines of novels and movies might be like in the future. She gives examples from the lives of real women and scatters stories that illustrate many of her points throughout the book. In the end, she concludes, authors of the Aletis story use their imagination to give us characters who serve as role models for how a woman can live a full and free life.

Hitler at Home


Despina Stratigakos - 2015
    This provocative book exposes the dictator’s preoccupation with his private persona, which was shaped by the aesthetic and ideological management of his domestic architecture. Hitler’s bachelor life stirred rumors, and the Nazi regime relied on the dictator’s three dwellings—the Old Chancellery in Berlin, his apartment in Munich, and the Berghof, his mountain home on the Obersalzberg—to foster the myth of the Führer as a morally upstanding and refined man. Author Despina Stratigakos also reveals the previously untold story of Hitler’s interior designer, Gerdy Troost, through newly discovered archival sources.   At the height of the Third Reich, media outlets around the world showcased Hitler’s homes to audiences eager for behind-the-scenes stories. After the war, fascination with Hitler’s domestic life continued as soldiers and journalists searched his dwellings for insights into his psychology. The book’s rich illustrations, many previously unpublished, offer readers a rare glimpse into the decisions involved in the making of Hitler’s homes and into the sheer power of the propaganda that influenced how the world saw him.

Videogames for Humans


Merritt Kopas - 2015
    Taken up by nontraditional game authors to describe distinctly nontraditional subjects—from struggles with depression, explorations of queer identity, and analyses of the world of modern sex and dating to visions of breeding crustacean horses in a dystopian future—the Twine movement to date has created space for those who have previously been voiceless within games culture to tell their own stories, as well as to invent new visions outside of traditional channels of commerce.Videogames for Humans, curated and introduced by Twine author and games theorist merritt kopas, puts Twine authors, literary writers, and games critics into conversation with one another’s work, reacting to, elaborating on, and being affected by the same. The result is an unprecedented kind of book about video games, one that will jump-start the discussions that will define the games culture of tomorrow.

Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism


Uriel Quesada - 2015
    This history exists nowhere else." (Marcia M. Gallo, Assistant Professor of History, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement)

An Act of Genocide: Colonialism and the Sterilization of Aboriginal Women


Karen Stote - 2015
    Though many people were targeted, the coercive sterilization of one group has gone largely unnoticed. An Act of Genocide unpacks long-buried archival evidence to begin documenting the forced sterilization of Aboriginal women in Canada. Grounding this evidence within the context of colonialism, the oppression of women and the denial of Indigenous sovereignty, Karen Stote argues that this coercive sterilization must be considered in relation to the larger goals of Indian policy — to gain access to Indigenous lands and resources while reducing the numbers of those to whom the federal government has obligations. Stote also contends that, in accordance with the original meaning of the term, this sterilization should be understood as an act of genocide, and she explores the ways Canada has managed to avoid this charge. This lucid, engaging book explicitly challenges Canadians to take up their responsibilities as treaty partners, to reconsider their history and to hold their government to account for its treatment of Indigenous peoples.

The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God


Sarah Coakley - 2015
    Professor Coakley is as familiar with the Bible and the Early Fathers as she is with the writings of Freud and Jung, and she draws heavily on Gregory of Nyssa's theology of desire in what she proposes. She points the way through the false modern alternatives of repression and libertinism, agape and eros, recovering a way in which desire can be freed from associations with promiscuity and disorder, and forging a new ascetical vision founded in the disciplines of prayer and attention.

Conscious Lesbian Dating & Love: A Roadmap to Finding the Right Partner and Creating the Relationship of Your Dreams (Conscious Lesbian Guides Book 1)


Ruth Schwartz - 2015
    You'll learn exactly why and how the conscious approach to dating and love will make all the difference for you, and also get a detailed roadmap to help you find and create the relationship you most want.Great relationships don’t happen by accident, luck or magic. Instead, they’re a direct result of the choices you make, and the actions you take. Drawing from neuroscience, psychology and spirituality, this book will help you take charge of your relationship destiny, no matter how many heartbreaks or disappointments you’ve had in the past. “Now that lesbians can legally marry, it’s time to learn how to have the best relationships we can,” say Drs. Ruth L. Schwartz and Michelle Murrain. “We know that happy, healthy, lasting lesbian love is possible for you, because we’ve taught and coached many other lesbians and queer women how to find and create it – and most importantly, because we live it ourselves, every day. This book will tell you how.”"We founded Conscious Girlfriend to help lesbians and queer women date wisely and love well. Our approach blends science, psychology and spirituality. Please sign up for our free mailings at www.consciousgirlfriend.com."

Intersex


Aaron Apps - 2015
    What happens when a child is born with ambiguous genitalia? What happens when a body is normalized? Intersex provides tangled and shifting answers to both of these questions as it questions our ideas of what is natural and normal about gender and personhood. In this hybrid-genre memoir, intersexed author Aaron Apps adopts and upends historical descriptors of hermaphroditic bodies such as 'freak of nature,' 'hybrid,' 'imposter,' 'sexual pervert,' and 'unfortunate monstrosity' in order to trace his own monstrous sex as it perversely intertwines with gender expectations and medical discourse. INTERSEX leaves the reader wondering: what does it mean to be human?"Aaron Apps' Intersex is all feral prominence: a physical archive of the 'strange knot.' Thus: necessarily vulnerable, brave and excessive. Like the best kind of memoir, Apps brings a reader close to an experience of life that is both 'unattainable' and attentive to 'what will emerge from things.' In doing so, he has written a book that bursts from its very frame."—Bhanu Kapil

Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran


John Kinder - 2015
    Months after the accident, outfitted with sleek new prosthetic legs, he jogged alongside President Bush for a photo op at the White House. The photograph served many functions, one of them being to revive faith in an American martial ideal—that war could be fought without permanent casualties, and that innovative technology could easily repair war’s damage. When Bagge was awarded his Purple Heart, however, military officials asked him to wear pants to the ceremony, saying that photos of the event should be “soft on the eyes.” Defiant, Bagge wore shorts. America has grappled with the questions posed by injured veterans since its founding, and with particular force since the early twentieth century: What are the nation’s obligations to those who fight in its name? And when does war’s legacy of disability outweigh the nation’s interests at home and abroad? In Paying with Their Bodies, John M. Kinder traces the complicated, intertwined histories of war and disability in modern America. Focusing in particular on the decades surrounding World War I, he argues that disabled veterans have long been at the center of two competing visions of American war: one that highlights the relative safety of US military intervention overseas; the other indelibly associating American war with injury, mutilation, and suffering. Kinder brings disabled veterans to the center of the American war story and shows that when we do so, the history of American war over the last century begins to look very different. War can no longer be seen as a discrete experience, easily left behind; rather, its human legacies are felt for decades. The first book to examine the history of American warfare through the lens of its troubled legacy of injury and disability, Paying with Their Bodies will force us to think anew about war and its painful costs.

The Calendar of Loss


Dagmawi Woubshet - 2015
    What Woubshet dubs a "poetics of compounding loss" expresses what it was like for queer mourners to grapple with the death of lovers and friends in rapid succession while also coming to terms with the fact of their own imminent mortality. The time, consolation, and closure that allow the bereaved to get through loss were for the mourners in this book painfully thwarted, since with each passing friend, and with mounting numbers of the dead, they were provided with yet more evidence of the certain fatality of the virus inside them.Ultimately, the book argues, these disprized mourners turned to their sorrow as a necessary vehicle of survival, placing open grief at the center of art and protest, insisting that lives could be saved through the very speech acts precipitated by death. An innovative and moving study, The Calendar of Loss illuminates how AIDS mourning confounds and traverses how we have come to think about loss and grief, insisting that the bereaved can confront death in the face of shame and stigma in eloquent ways that also imply a fierce political sensibility and a longing for justice.

Uprooted: An Anthology on Gender and Illness


Megan Winkelman - 2015
    These moving narratives share personal, political, and even contradictory stories about what it is like to face disease. Proceeds from the ebook will go to printing and mailing the book to healthcare, art therapy, and medical education centers in the U.S. With this initiative, we hope to start conversations about gender and sexuality with patients and providers. To learn more about Uprooted visit us at www.uprootedanthology.com.

Blood and Visions: Womyn Reconciling with Being Female


Autotomous Womyn's Press - 2015
    With writing and artwork by 10 women who detransitioned from living as trans men (FTM), this anthology offers stories, analysis, and resources for women who struggle with disidentification from their female reality.

Love, Fear, and Health: How Our Attachments to Others Shape Health and Health Care


Robert Maunder - 2015
    Drawing on more than fifty years of combined experience as health care providers, teachers, and researchers, they explain in clear language how health care workers in all disciplines can use this knowledge to meet their patients' needs better and to improve their health.

After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion


Anthony M. Petro - 2015
    Petro brings ecumenical Protestants, Roman Catholics, biomedical officials, and ACT UP protestors into view alongside their evangelical compatriots and in doing so creates a richly polychromatic picture of American religion, sexuality, and moral debate in the wake of the AIDS epidemic." --Leigh Eric Schmidt, Edward C. Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor, Washington University in St. Louis "The AIDS crisis was not an epoch that we survived. It is a battle that we are still fighting. In this remarkable work of historical intervention Anthony Petro explores the extraordinary religious ferment that accompanied the emergence of AIDS in the United States. Petro shows that when Americans talk about AIDS they are rarely just talking about a scientific problem or a pharmaceutical solution. They are instead offering a sociology of suffering and a plan for spiritual warfare. After the Wrath of God is required reading for anyone interested in the way this powerful religious past will shape our political future."--Kathryn Lofton, Professor of Religious Studies, American Studies, History and Divinity; Chair, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Yale University "Anthony Petro's novel account of the role of American Christianity in the AIDS crisis moves beyond expected narratives of the rise of the right to encompass a diversity of religious responses across the 'long 1980s.' Illuminating and important." --Margot Canaday, Associate Professor of History, Princeton University

Priestess of Morphine: The Lost Writings of Marie-Madeleine in the Time of Nazis


Marie Madeleine - 2015
    Born Gertrud Günther, and starting at age 15 she wrote over 46 books until 1932 when Nazis condemned her work as degenerate. In 1943 she entered a sanatorium for morphine addiction where she died a mysterious death while under the care of Nazis doctors.Priestess of Morphine: The Lost Writings of Marie-Madeleine contains many of this fascinating woman's works, translated for the first time into English, and also contains Stephen J. Gertz's Foreword explaining why Marie-Madeleine has become a rediscovered heroine of lesbian and drug literature. Fascinating images from Marie-Madeleine's lost literature and career supplement this volume. Editor Ronald K. Siegel is known for his classics in drug literature, including Intoxication: Life in Pursuit of Artificial Paradise and Whispers: The Voices of Paranoia.

Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights


Heather Rachelle White - 2015
    White challenges the usual picture of perennial adversaries with a new narrative about America's religious and sexual past. White argues that today's antigay Christian traditions originated in the 1920s when a group of liberal Protestants began to incorporate psychiatry and psychotherapy into Christian teaching. A new therapeutic orthodoxy, influenced by modern medicine, celebrated heterosexuality as God-given and advocated a compassionate "cure" for homosexuality. White traces the unanticipated consequences as the therapeutic model, gaining popularity after World War II, spurred mainline church leaders to take a critical stance toward rampant antihomosexual discrimination. By the 1960s, a vanguard of clergy began to advocate for homosexual rights. White highlights the continued importance of this religious support to the consolidating gay and lesbian movement. However, the ultimate irony of the therapeutic orthodoxy's legacy was its adoption, beginning in the 1970s, by the Christian Right, which embraced it as an age-old tradition to which Americans should return. On a broader level, White challenges the assumed secularization narrative in LGBT progress by recovering the forgotten history of liberal Protestants' role on both sides of the debates over orthodoxy and sexual identity.

At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain


Philip Howell - 2015
    In At Home and Astray, Philip Howell focuses on Victorian Britain, and especially London, to show how the dog's changing place in society was the subject of intense debate and depended on a fascinating combination of forces even to come about.Despite a relationship with humans going back thousands of years, the dog only became fully domesticated and installed at the heart of the middle-class home in the nineteenth century. Dog breeding and showing proliferated at that time, and dog ownership increased considerably. At the same time, the dog was increasingly policed out of public space, the "stray" becoming the unloved counterpart of the household "pet." Howell shows how this redefinition of the dog's place illuminates our understanding of modernity and the city. He also explores the fascinating process whereby the dog's changing role was proposed, challenged, and confronted--and in the end conditionally accepted. With a supporting cast that includes Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Darwin, and subjects of inquiry ranging from vivisection and the policing of rabies to pet cemeteries, dog shelters, and the practice of walking the dog, At Home and Astray is a contribution not only to the history of animals but also to our understanding of the Victorian era and its legacies.

Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence Against Women


Michael A. Messner - 2015
    When feminist womenbegan to mobilize against rape and domestic violence, setting up shelters and rape crisis centers, a few men asked what they could do to help. They were directed upstream, and told to talk to the men with the goal of preventing future acts of violence.This is a book about men who took this charge seriously, committing themselves to working with boys and men to stop violence, and to change the definition of what it means to be a man. The book examines the experiences of three generational cohorts: a movement cohort of men who engaged withanti-violence work in the 1970s and early 1980s, during the height of the feminist anti-violence mobilizations; a bridge cohort who engaged with anti-violence work from the mid-1980s into the 1990s, as feminism receded as a mass movement and activists built sustainable organizations; a professionalcohort who engaged from the mid-1990s to the present, as anti-violence work has become embedded in community and campus organizations, non-profits, and the state. Across these different time periods, stories from life history interviews illuminate men's varying paths--including men of differentethnic and class backgrounds--into anti-violence work.Some Men explores the promise of men's violence prevention work with boys and men in schools, college sports, fraternities, and the U.S. military. It illuminates the strains and tensions of such work--including the reproduction of male privilege in feminist spheres--and explores how men and womennavigate these tensions.To learn more please visit somemen.org

The Intersectional Internet; Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online


Safiya Umoja Noble - 2015
    These inquiries include, among others, how representation to hardware, software, computer code, and infrastructures might be implicated in global economic, political, and social systems of control.Contributors argue that more research needs to explicitly trace the types of uneven power relations that exist in technological spaces. By looking at both the broader political and economic context and the many digital technology acculturation processes as they are differentiated intersectionally, a clearer picture emerges of how under-acknowledging culturally situated and gendered information technologies are impacting the possibility of participation with (or purposeful abstinence from) the Internet.This book is ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in Internet studies, library and information studies, communication, sociology, and psychology. It is also ideal for researchers with varying expertise and will help to advance theoretical and methodological approaches to Internet research.

Best Sex Writing 2015 : The Year's Most Challenging and Provocative Essays on the Subject of Sex


Jon Pressick - 2015
    Renowned blogger and sex columnist Jon Pressick has collected the year's most challenging and provocative nonfiction articles on the endlessly evocative subject. Best Sex Writing 2015 is a direct survey of the contemporary sexual landscape. These literate and lively essays explore the role sex plays in present-day society. People - including those beyond the sex community - are finally learning about and considering sex from unique angles.

One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium: LGBT Educators Speak Out About What's Gotten Better . . . and What Hasn't


Kevin Jennings - 2015
    This all-new edition brings together stories from across America—and around the world—resulting in a rich tapestry of varied experiences. From a teacher who feels he must remain closeted in the comparative safety of New York City public schools to teachers who are out in places as far afield as South Africa and China, the teachers and school administrators in One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium prove that LGBT educators are as diverse and complex as humanity itself. Voices largely absent from the first two editions—including transgender people, people of color, teachers working in rural districts, and educators from outside the United States—feature prominently in this new collection, providing a fuller and deeper understanding of the triumphs and challenges of being an LGBT teacher today.

Lincoln's Ethics


Thomas L. Carson - 2015
    Lincoln's Ethics addresses the question of whether Lincoln deserves his reputation as a moral exemplar. It discusses some of his morally controversial policies and presents the evidence for thinking he was morally virtuous in many important respects.

A Tale of Two Masks: A Transgender Psychopath’s Search for Realization and Restraint


Jessica B. Kelly - 2015
    It is a memoir of an introspective, transgender psychopath that offers hope for a demographic often written off as “broken.” It paints the condition in a way that is relatable by those who are antisocial and that is insightful for the “neurotypical.” In addition, it gives a rare voice - that of a transgender woman - to the subject of mental illness. A Tale of Two Masks challenges what it means to be male or female, and, more importantly, human.

Revolution within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952-1962


Michelle Chase - 2015
    However, the story of women's part in the struggle's success only now receives comprehensive consideration in Michelle Chase's history of women and gender politics in revolutionary Cuba. Restoring to history women's participation in the all-important urban insurrection, and resisting Fidel Castro's triumphant claim that women's emancipation was handed to them as a "revolution within the revolution," Chase's work demonstrates that women's activism and leadership was critical at every stage of the revolutionary process.Tracing changes in political attitudes alongside evolving gender ideologies in the years leading up to the revolution, Chase describes how insurrectionists mobilized familiar gendered notions, such as masculine honor and maternal sacrifice, in ways that strengthened the coalition against Fulgencio Batista. But, after 1959, the mobilization of women and the societal transformations that brought more women and young people into the political process opened the revolutionary platform to increasingly urgent demands for women's rights. In many cases, Chase shows, the revolutionary government was simply formalizing popular initiatives already in motion on the ground thanks to women with a more radical vision of their rights.

Love Not Given Lightly: Profiles from the Edge of Sex


Tina Horn - 2015
    In her vast experience in sexual undergrounds, Tina has befriended pro-dommes, porn stars, kinky fetishists, rent boys, and more. Instead of writing a sex worker memoir, she opted to tell the stories of the people she met along the way. Illuminating human issues of desire, gender, beauty, and ultimately friendship, the stories in this book will do no less than alter the way you think about modern sexuality in America.Tina Horn is a writer, educator, and interdisciplinary media-maker. She co-created, produced, and directed QueerPorn.Tv, which has won two Feminist Porn Awards and was nominated for an AVN. Her writing has appeared in several Cleis Press anthologies, including Best Sex Writing 2015. She has blogged for Vice, Nerve, and Fleshbot and published articles in the Believer, AORTA, Up and Coming, and Whore! magazines. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction rriting from Sarah Lawrence College. Originally from Northern California, Tina now lives in Manhattan.

Serial Killing: A Philosophical Anthology


Edia ConnoleAspasia Stephanou - 2015
    If there's a more intense sleep-killer compilation out there somewhere, it's concealing itself well. – Nick Land, author of Templexity: Disordered Loops through Shanghai Time (Urbanatomy, 2014)We simultaneously love and hate serial killers: we dread them, and yet we are fascinated by them. Both in reality, and in books and television shows, serial killers seem to stand at the very edge of what is possible, or of what is human. The essays in this volume push to the extremes of philosophy, and of art and literature, in order to speak to our uneasy relationship with what we both desire and abhor. – Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University, author of The Universe of Things (UMP, 2014)Serial Killing leaves behind the analysis of the serial killer as a romantic anti-hero, diagnostic category of psychopathology or sociological symptom to offer a collection of essays that infuses the conventional delusions of critical distance with the passionate, homicidal embrace of loving neighborliness. The theoretical, photographic and fictional essays in this volume take the serial killer as an object of both philosophical speculation and spiritual contemplation. In a brilliant cornucopia of styles and obsessions, serial killing becomes, among many other things: the touchstone of common in-humanity, a form of sacrifice and mystical rite, a leisure activity, a kind of bloody ikebana, a kaligraphic and auto-graphic mode of self-portraiture and flesh inscription, the meta-relational emanation of immanent suffering, a form of kleptomancy, an expression of neoliberal love, an ascetic practice of cosmic joy. It is properly mad. – Scott Wilson, Kingston University, author of Stop Making Sense (Karnac, 2015)One of the deepest and darkest truths in psychoanalysis is about the serial nature of the object. We pretend that it is unique, irreplaceable, singular, but it isn't, and it always exists as part of a multiple whose secret truth, to our real horror, is the emptiness or nothing at the center of this excess. In this fascinating collection of essays edited by Edia Connole and Gary Shipley we find out about this serial perversion of everyday life. – Jamieson Webster, Eugene Lang College, author of Stay! Illusion (Vintage, 2014)

The Historical Animal


Susan NanceAndria Pooley-Ebert - 2015
    Only in the last few decades have scholars from a wide variety of disciplines attempted to document the lives of historical animals in ways that recognize their agency as sentient beings with complex intelligence. This collection advances the field further, inviting us to examine our recorded history through an animal-centric lens to discover how animals have altered the course of our collective past. The seventeen scholars gathered here present case studies from the Pacific Ocean, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, involving species ranging from gorillas and horses to salamanders and orcas. Together they seek out new methodologies, questions, and stories that challenge accepted historical assumptions and structures. Drawing upon environmental, social, and political history, the contributors employ research from such wide-ranging fields as philosophy and veterinary medicine, embracing a radical interdisciplinarity that is crucial to understanding our nonhuman past. Grounded in the knowledge that there has never been a purely human time in world history, this collection asks and answers an incredibly urgent question for historians and others interested in the nonhuman past: in an age of mass extinctions, mass animal captivity, and climate change, when we know much of what animals have done in the past, which of our activities will we want to change in the future?

THE Sex & Pleasure Book: Good Vibrations Guide to Great Sex For Everyone


Carol Queen - 2015
    Covering everything from sexual identity to relationships, sex through the lifespan to pregnancy and health issues, disability to sex and tech, and tons of information about sexual practices, positions, and of course toys!THE Sex & Pleasure Book: Good Vibrations Guide to Great Sex for Everyone draws on Good Vibrations’ 38-plus years of diverse and informative customer interactions, plus Staff Sexologist Dr. Carol Queen’s academic training and community experience, to deliver the most informative and empowering sex information book bar none. This book is for people of many identities, experience levels, and interests. Covering sexual changes across the lifespan, the identity spectrum, sexual anatomy, and of course sex toys and products, this ambitious compendium aims to inform and inspire sexual comfort and exploration! Co-Authored and Edited by Shar Rednour.

Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns


Valerie Traub - 2015
    Her answers offer interdisciplinary strategies for confronting the difficulties of making sexual knowledge.Based on the premise that producing sexual knowledge is difficult because sex itself is often inscrutable, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns leverages the notions of opacity and impasse to explore barriers to knowledge about sex in the past. Traub argues that the obstacles in making sexual history can illuminate the difficulty of knowing sexuality. She also argues that these impediments themselves can be adopted as a guiding principle of historiography: sex may be good to think with, not because it permits us access but because it doesn't.

Finding Masculinity: Female to Male Transition in Adulthood


Alexander Walker - 2015
    The stories within come from scientists, teachers, fathers, veterans, and artists who share how being visible as the masculine humans they identify as has developed, changed, and evolved their sense of masculinity.

Philip Sparrow Tells All: Lost Essays by Samuel Steward, Writer, Professor, Tattoo Artist


Jeremy Mulderig - 2015
    Perhaps his oddest authorial role was as a monthly contributor between 1944 and 1949 to the Illinois Dental Journal, an obscure trade publication for dentists, where writing as Philip Sparrow he produced a series of charming, richly allusive, and often quirky essays on a wildly eclectic assortment of topics. In Philip Sparrow Tells All, Jeremy Mulderig has collected thirty of these engaging but forgotten columns, prefacing them with revealing introductions that relate the essays to people and events in Steward’s life and to the intellectual and cultural contexts in which he wrote during the 1940s. In these essays we encounter such famous friends of Steward as Gertrude Stein, André Gide, and Thornton Wilder. We hear of his stint as a holiday sales clerk at Marshall Field’s (where he met and seduced fellow employee Rock Hudson), of his roles as an opera and ballet extra in hilariously shoddy costumes, of his hoarding tendencies, his disappointment with the drabness of men’s fashions, and his dread of turning forty. We go along with him to a bodybuilding competition and a pet cemetery, and together we wander the boulevards of Paris and the alleys of Algiers. Throughout, Mulderig’s entertaining annotations explain the essays’ wide-ranging allusions and also highlight their gay subtext, which constituted a kind of private game that Steward played with his mostly oblivious audience of Midwestern dentists. The first collection of any of Samuel Steward’s writings to be republished since his death in 1993, Philip Sparrow Tells All makes these lost essays available to a broad readership that Steward imagined but never actually enjoyed when he wrote them. In doing so, it takes a major step toward documenting his important place in twentieth-century gay literature and history.

Speak My Language, and Other Stories: An Anthology of Gay Fiction


Torsten Højer - 2015
    . . that addresses our innermost sexual and amatory selves. Gay stories offer us vindication, fellowship, validation and a sense of shared identity that we need now as much as ever,' writes Stephen Fry in the foreword to this anthology.In this exciting new collection of gay short stories, we hear from authors imagining, surmising, and revealing aspects of gay life from a multitude of perspectives, ages, eras, locations, cultures and political climates. Contributors range from those emerging into a life of writing to those who have enjoyed international mainstream success. Some, such as Felice Picano, were pioneers of not only gay writing but also gay liberation itself. Others are recipients of world-class awards, including Vestal McIntyre, whose Lake Overturn: A Novel was named Editor's Choice by the New York Times Book Review and Out magazine, and a Best Book of 2009 by the Washington Post. It also won the Grub Street National Book Prize and Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction. The premise for stories included in this anthology was very simple - other than the stipulation that a major component of the story be in some way concerned with gay life, there were no restrictions. The aim was to bring together fictional reflections of gay life from the minds of authors approaching 'gay' from very different angles.As a result, genres in this collection range from action to sci-fi, from thriller to fantasy. The stories are set in countries including Australia, Cuba, England, Greece, Italy, Kenya, Portugal, Russia, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, and the USA. The youngest contributor is in his twenties, the oldest in his eighties.Readers will find themselves immersed in an engaging set of stories remarkably different from one another, yet, as Stephen Fry notes, offering a surprising sense of shared identity.With stories by: Nick Alexander; Tim Ashley; James Robert Baker; Damian Barr; Neil Bartlett; Sebastian Beaumont; Scott Brown; Michael Carroll; Robert Cochrane; Alfred Corn; Neal Drinnan; Royston Ellis; Nigel Fairs; Hugh Fleetwood; Ronald Frame; Patrick Gale; Damon Galgut; John R. Gordon; Drew Gummerson; Matt Harris; Cliff James; Francis King; Joseph Lidster; David Llewellyn; Paul Magrs; Vestal McIntyre; Brent Meersman; Joseph Olshan; Diriye Osman; Tony Peake; Felice Picano; David Robilliard; Jerry Rosco; Jeffrey Round; Lawrence Schimel; Rupert Smith; Colin Spencer; Joshua Winning; Ian Young; and Richard Zimler.

A History of Antisemitism in Canada


Ira Robinson - 2015
    It acquaints readers with the ambiguities inherent in the historical relationship between Jews and Christians and shows these ambiguities in play in the unfolding relationship between Jews and Canadians of other religions and ethnicities. It examines present relationships in light of history and considers particularly the influence of antisemitism on the social, religious, and political history of the Canadian Jewish community.?A History of Antisemitism in Canada" builds on the foundation of numerous studies on antisemitism in general and on antisemitism in Canada in particular, as well as on the growing body of scholarship in Canadian Jewish studies. It attempts to understand the impact of antisemitism on Canada as a whole and is the first comprehensive account of antisemitism and its effect on the Jewish community of Canada. The book will be valuable to students and scholars not only of Canadian Jewish studies and Canadian ethnic studies but of Canadian history.

Superdome (Shadeshifter Chronicles, #1)


Casca Kelly Green - 2015
    After pushing Rosie too far, Mind Melter’s enemies prepare to strike back and take everything away from him.Ellis Straylight is many things: soldier, shadowmancer, oldest sibling. In the chaotic world of the Dome, Ellis will learn how identity can destroy you and trust can put you back together.‏In a place of false suns, alter egos, and rampant inequality, what does it mean to be a hero, and what will it take to survive?Find out in Superdome: Volume 1 of The Shadeshifter Chronicles, a series featuring diverse characters, including MOGAI and neuroatypical characters central to the main narrative.

Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899-1913


Victor Román Mendoza - 2015
    imperial incursions into the Philippines enabled the growth of unprecedented social and sexual intimacies between native Philippine and U.S. subjects. The real and imagined intimacies—whether expressed through friendship, love, or eroticism—threatened U.S. gender and sexuality norms. To codify U.S. heteronormative behavior, the colonial government prohibited anything loosely defined as perverse, which along with popular representations of Filipinos, regulated colonial subjects and depicted them as sexually available, diseased, and degenerate. Mendoza analyzes laws, military records, the writing of Philippine students in the United States, and popular representations of Philippine colonial subjects to show how their lives, bodies, and desires became the very battleground for the consolidation of repressive legal, economic, and political institutions and practices of the U.S. colonial state. By highlighting the importance of racial and gendered violence in maintaining control at home and abroad, Mendoza demonstrates that studies of U.S. sexuality must take into account the reach and impact of U.S. imperialism.

Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America


April Haynes - 2015
    Riotous Flesh explores women’s leadership of those movements, with a specific focus on their rhetorical, social, and political effects, showing how a desire to transform the politics of sex created unexpected alliances between groups that otherwise had very different goals. As April R. Haynes shows, the crusade against female masturbation was rooted in a generally shared agreement on some major points: that girls and women were as susceptible to masturbation as boys and men; that “self-abuse” was rooted in a lack of sexual information; and that sex education could empower women and girls to master their own bodies. Yet the groups who made this education their goal ranged widely, from “ultra” utopians and nascent feminists to black abolitionists. Riotous Flesh explains how and why diverse women came together to popularize, then institutionalize, the condemnation of masturbation, well before the advent of sexology or the professionalization of medicine.

Unshaven: Modern Women, Natural Bodies


Nikki Silver - 2015
    These empowered women pose in gorgeous outdoor California settings, baring for the vision of photographer Nikki Silver. Herself a hairy woman, Silver captures the free spirits and all-natural confidence of these amateur models. Her photos are erotic and feminist, revealing and defiant, and entirely unlike any nude portraits of women you have ever seen.An original essay from journalist and sexuality educator Tina Horn accentuates these provocative images. With humor, personal anecdotes, and elegant analysis, Horn's writing explores the many political and social implications of unshaven women. This insight is supplemented by thoughtful words on feminine body hair from the models themselves.Whether they are defying gender norms, rejecting consumer conformity, or developing a new kind of counter-culture body modification, the women of Unshaven may be the twenty-first century's post-modern heroines.Nikki Silver is a self-taught hairy pornography producer and model. Living a life of radical naturalism and free expression in both sexuality and art, she produces media that gives a voyeur's view into her world. A resident of Oakland, she is a feisty New York Jew who now refuses to leave the redwoods of California.

Sex Yourself: The Woman's Guide to Mastering Masturbation and Achieving Powerful Orgasms


Carlyle Jansen - 2015
    But isn't the same true for masturbation? Just like a familiar sexual relationship, where you fall into a pattern using the same moves and positions, masturbation can become routine and frankly boring. Just because you're only getting yourself off doesn't mean you don't deserve an exciting, satisfying experience.Sex Yourself teaches women how to reach orgasm and how to have better orgasms by themselves. Learn how the amazing experiences you have alone can be re-created with a partner, helping to enhance your sexual relationships. Try new techniques and accessories to have mind-blowing sex in brand new ways.Sex educator Carlyle Jansen provides a modern look at masturbation, self-love, and orgasm that features fun yet informative full-color illustrations throughout.

Liquid City


Andi C. Buchanan - 2015
    It's a dirty, dangerous game but one which affords them the independence they always longed for. But the offer of a lucrative contract persuades Casp to break with their established routine and journey into the unexplored parts of the tunnel network, deep underground. Accompanied by an ill-tempered cephalopod and the scientist daughter of their wealthy sponsor, Casp embarks on an increasingly dangerous journey. But they quickly find that success will mean an end to the livelihoods of the tunnel folk who have become their family, destroying the community which has relied on the tunnels for generations. Casp has little hope of saving the tunnelling industry, but they are persuaded to take to the tunnels one last time. Because some believe that humans weren’t the first to inhabit this isolated planet, and what they find will shift the balance of power in Liquid City forever.