Title:
The gender/sexuality reader : culture, history, political economy
Author:
Lancaster, Roger N.
ISBN:
9780415910040
9780415910057
Publication Information:
New York : Routledge, 1997.
Physical Description:
574 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm
Contents:
Carnal knowledge and imperial power : gender, race, and morality in colonial Asia / Scientific racism and the invention of the homosexual body / White lies, black myths : rape, race, and the black "underclass" / Is there a family? : new anthropological views / Lifeboat ethics : mother love and child death in northeast Brazil / Population : delusion and reality / State fatherhood : the politics of nationalism, sexuality, and race in Singapore / Gender in the post-socialist transition : the abortion debate in Hungary / Fetal images : the power of visual culture in the politics of reproduction / Sex and society : a research note from social history and anthropology / Captialism and gay identity / Transformations of homosexuality-based classifications / Seed of the nation : men's sex and potency in Mexico / Secrets of God, nature and life / Orgasm, generation, and the politics of reproductive biology / How to build a man / Baboons with briefcases vs. langurs with lipstick : feminism and functionalism in primate studies / The violence of rhetoric : on representation and gender / From nation to family : containing African AIDS / The color of sex : postwar photographic histories of race and gender in National geographic magazine / Womb as oasis : the symbolic context of pharaonic circumcision in rural northern Sudan / Victorian clitoridectomy : Isaac Baker Brown and his harmless operative procedure / Material girl : the effacements of postmodern culture / The carnivalization of the world / Sisters and queers : the decentering of lesbian feminism / Playing with fire : the gendered construction of Chicana/Mexicana sexuality / Violence, sexuality, and women's lives / Rape and the inner lives of black women in the Middle West : preliminary thoughts on the culture of dissemblance / Negotiating sex and gender in the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography / The neo-family-values campaign / The consumption of color and the politics of white skin in post-Mao China / The enterprise of empire : race, class, gender, and Japanese national identity / Movie stars and Islamic moralism in Egypt / Sex acts and sovereignty : race and sexuality in the construction of the Australian nation / Excerpt from introduction to Bodies that matter / The end of the body? / Guto's performance : notes on the transvestism of everyday life
Abstract:
The Gender/Sexuality Reader is a sophisticated survey of the best recent work on bodies and desires across cultures and through time. Foregrounding ethnographic studies and social history, this anthology brings together an unusually broad selection of essays across the disciplines--essays that link the typically segregated topics of desire, demography, and nationalism; bodily adornment and violence against women; colonialism, gender, race, and sexuality. The settings of these rich studies are diverse: the contemporary United States, haunted by spectres of race and sex; post-Maoist China, whose love affair with the commodity draws on images of white-skinned women; modern clinics and hospitals, where new medical technologies pose unprecedented dilemmas; sexual subcultures as diverse as the lesbian community of San Francisco and carnival worlds in Brazil; and historical periods ranging from classical antiquity to postmodern Egypt. The topics these essays treat are likewise diverse and engaging: eugenics in Singapore, the political and economic context of motherhood in Brazil, rape and the inner lives of black American women, sex/culture wars in the US, the precariousness of sexual identity--and its political implications--in Nicaragua, and media representations of Africa. These essays develop the insights of social constructionism, showing how gender, sexuality, and power are historically connected and practically intertwined. Taken together, they also extend the reach of this approach, concretely connecting gender/sexuality to class, race, and nation. Contributors make use of postmodernism's topical mobility and cultural studies' thematic range while--in the best of the social science tradition--never losing sight of biology, political economy, and history. The editors' introduction situates this ground-breaking, contemporary work in the rise of feminist, gay poststructuralist, and political-economic theories, and illuminates the changing political contestations at the heart of embodied desire.
Subject Term:
Electronic Access:
Publisher description http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0647/96039187-d.html