Browse

This book is a compilation of contemporary and previously unpublished scholarship on Black sexualities. The sixteen essays work to untangle the complex mechanisms of dominance and subordination as they are attached to political and socioeconomic forces, cultural productions, and academic lenses that assess sexuality as it intersects with race. Some of the essays trace the historical and contemporary markets for sexual labor and systems of erotic capital. Other essays illuminate how forces of commodification, exploitation, and appropriation, which render black sexualities both desirable and deviant, also provide the spaces, networks, and relationships that have allowed black people to revise, recuperate, and re-articulate their sexual identities, erotic capital, and gender and sexual expressions and relations. The collection focuses on three themes linked by the major theory of black sexual economy: sex labor and race play; drag and hypersexual performance; and the erotics of life and death.

Born into a poor Jewish family, folklorist Gershon Legman (1917-99) made an independent career for himself in the study of erotic literature and obscene folklore. The book is the first full biography of this major figure in twentieth-century folklore study. Drawing on unprecedented research in Legman’s papers, the author traces his working and personal life from the 1930s American landscape of underground publishing, through midcentury sex research, through to his recovery and publication, in the 1960 and 1970s, of suppressed and censored folklore texts. Gershon Legman expanded the study of folklore in a series of authoritative works on topics ranging from limericks, folk songs, and jokes to the history of erotica publishing. Legman’s work prefigured the history of sexuality and the body, while he used the language of folklore to create a romantic outsider’s vision of American culture freed from repression. The book places Legman in the censorship battles of his times, connecting him to other important thinkers on sex and to the expansion of folklore as an academic discipline in the twentieth century. As it weighs the effect of Legman’s long exile in France, the book describes the twentieth century’s narrowing intellectual space for marginal, contrarian thinkers.

Funk, this book exclaims, is a 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 this book uses funk in all its iterations as an innovation in black studies. The book 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, the book 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, the book 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, the book offers a needed examination of black sexual cultures, a discursive evolution of black ideas about eroticism, a critique of work society, a re-examination of love, and an articulation of the body in black movements.

Motherhood in the context of homeland security culture is a site of intense contestation—both a powerful form of currency and a target of unprecedented assault. In this book, I designate the term homeland maternity in order to theorize the relationship between motherhood and nation in US homeland security culture. While scholars of rhetoric, feminist, and cultural studies have explored homeland security culture and the politics of contemporary motherhood from critical perspectives, no study to date has considered how recent discourses of motherhood and nation are deeply enmeshed and, as this book argues, mutually constitutive. As reproductive bodies are represented as a threat to national security, either through supposed excess or deficiency, a culture of homeland maternity intensifies the requirements of motherhood as it works to discipline those who refuse to adhere. Homeland Maternity offers a way to understand how the policing of maternal bodies in contemporary US culture serves an overt but unexamined political function—namely, securing the nation in times of perceived vulnerability, and with profound implications for reproductive justice.

Centered on the musical experiences of homosexual men in St. Petersburg and Moscow, this ground-breaking study examines how post-Soviet popular music both informs and plays off of a corporeal understanding of Russian male homosexuality. Drawing upon ethnography, musical analysis, and phenomenological theory, the book offers an expert technical analysis of Russian rock, pop, and estrada music, dovetailing into an illuminating discussion of homosexual men's physical and bodily perceptions of music. The book outlines how Russian homophobia and gender systems interact, often inconsistently, with popular music. Performers sustain a delicate literal and physical dance with cultural expectations. It also outlines how popular music performers use song lyrics, drag, physical movements, images of women, sexualized male bodies, and other tools and tropes to implicitly or explicitly express sexual orientation through performance. Finally, the book uncovers how such performances help Russian gay men to create their own social spaces and selves, in meaningful relation to others with whom they share a “nontraditional orientation.”

For nearly a decade, Brazil has surpassed Thailand as the world's premier sex tourism destination. As the first full-length ethnography of sex tourism in Brazil, this pioneering study treats sex tourism as a complex and multidimensional phenomenon that involves a range of activities and erotic connections, from sex work to romantic transnational relationships. The book explores sex tourism in the Brazilian state of Bahia from the perspectives of foreign tourists, tourism industry workers, sex workers who engage in liaisons with foreigners, and Afro-Brazilian men and women who contend with foreigners' stereotypical assumptions about their licentiousness. The book argues that the cultural and sexual economies of tourism are inextricably linked in the Bahian capital city of Salvador. It shows how the Bahian state strategically exploits the touristic desire for exotic culture by appropriating an eroticized blackness and commodifying the Afro-Brazilian culture in order to sell Bahia to foreign travelers. The book combines historical, sociological, anthropological, cultural studies, and feminist perspectives to demonstrate how sexism, racism, and socioeconomic inequality interact in the context of tourism in Bahia.

This book investigates the ways in which contemporary queer fictions offer insight on environmental issues through their performance of a specifically queer understanding of nature, the nonhuman, and environmental degradation. By drawing upon queer theory and ecocriticism, this book examines how contemporary queer fictions extend their critique of “natural” categories of gender and sexuality to the nonhuman natural world, thus constructing a queer environmentalism. The book's thoughtful analyses of works such as Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues, Todd Haynes's Safe, and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain illustrate how homophobia, classism, racism, sexism, and xenophobia inform dominant views of the environment and help to justify its exploitation. Calling for a queer environmental ethics, the book delineates the discourses that have worked to prevent such an ethics and argues for a concept of queerness that is attuned to environmentalism's urgent futurity, and an environmentalism that is attuned to queer sensibilities.

Karl Ulrichs' studies of sexual diversity galvanized the burgeoning field of sexual science in the nineteenth century. But in the years since, his groundbreaking activism has overshadowed his scholarly achievements. Ulrichs publicly defied Prussian law to agitate for gay equality and marriage, and founded the world's first organization dedicated to the legal and social emancipation of homosexuals. This book returns Ulrichs to his place as the inventor of the science of sexual heterogeneity. The book's analysis situates sexual science in a context that includes politics, aesthetics, the languages of science, and the ethics of gender. Although he was the greatest nineteenth-century scholar of sexual heterogeneity, Ulrichs retained certain traditional conjectures about gender. This book recognizes these subtleties and employs the analytical concepts of modernist vita sexualis and traditional psychopathia sexualis to articulate philosophical and cultural differences among sexologists. This book uses a bedrock figure's scientific and political innovations to open new insights into the history of sexual science, legal systems, and Western amatory codes.