Sexuality In The United States Research Articles

The psychology of sexual and gender diversity in the 21st century: Social technologies and stories of authenticity.

The 21st century has seen shifts in social and scientific understandings of gender and sexuality in the United States. From the legitimization of same-sex marriage to the heightened visibility of transgender identities, nonbinary gender, and forms of intimate diversity such as asexuality, kink, and polyamory, core cultural and scientific assumptions about gender and sexuality have been challenged. This article situates these changes in the historical context of 21st century social technologies, which challenge traditional sources of authority about information and provide enhanced opportunities for individuals to experience authenticity in gender and sexuality. We frame authenticity as a master cultural narrative in the United States characterized by feeling a heightened sense of self-authorship and alignment between inner experience and embodiment of gender and sexuality. Five narratives now circulate in the United States, four of which support sexual and gender diversity: (a) gender as self-constructed; (b) sexuality as plural, playful, flexible, and fluid; (c) sexuality and monogamy as cultural compulsions; and (d) intersectionality as central to the experience of sexuality and gender. A fifth narrative seeking to legitimize hierarchies (e.g., patriarchy) is hostile to sexual and gender diversity but remains anchored in a metanarrative of authenticity and has benefitted equally from the affordances of social technologies. This historical moment provides researchers and practitioners with the opportunity to more intentionally ground their work in lived experience, challenge normative thinking about sexuality and gender, practice affirmation, center the phenomenon of diversity over discrete identity categories in an ever-exclusionary acronym (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and more identities [LGBTQ+]), and embrace fluid and nonlinear narratives of social change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The spectre of docking in circumcision debates

This articles considers the ongoing penile circumcision debates by focusing on the deployment of ‘docking,’ a sexual practice between men. Docking involves pulling one’s foreskin over the glans of another penis. In this article, I consider both “anti” and “pro” circumcision literature and the use of docking in the service of arguments about the procedure. I show that the use of docking can be traced to Daniel M. Harrison’s article “Rethinking Circumcision and Sexuality in the United States” published in Sexualities. Ultimately, I argue that while docking is interesting to consider, it remains something of spectre that haunts the debates more than it is an empirical concern. Consequently, I argue that further study is needed about docking in general, as well as in the particular context of circumcision debates.

Exploring erotic potential: mixed methods study on effects of a sexological bodywork retreat for people who identify as women

Within the field of sexuality in the United States, the use of hands-on work is controversial, although it is practiced internationally and has been researched in other countries. This mixed methods study explored effects of sexological bodywork within the context of Back to the BodyTM retreats for people who identify as women. Quantitative data were gathered from a survey of participants at past retreats (n = 48) and from pre and posttest surveys of participants before and after a retreat (n = 35). The survey of past participants found moderate to very positive changes across all constructs: 75% for arousal, sexual self-image, and sisterhood; 72% for body image; 71% for feelings about genitals and sexual assertiveness; and 66% for sexual satisfaction. Pre and posttest surveys revealed statistically significant increases in genital self-image, body image, sexual self-image, and sexual satisfaction; however, sexual assertiveness decreased. Qualitative analysis of open-ended survey responses and from 21 in-depth interviews revealed five major themes: feeling safe, connecting to self and others, feeling acceptance and permission, exploring arousal and pleasure, and transformative life changes. Sex and relationship therapists can use these findings to add to their own knowledge and to assist clients who may be interested in these modalities.

Bodies in Confinement: Negotiating Queer, Gender Nonconforming, and Transwomen’s Gender and Sexuality behind Bars

The criminal punishment system plays a critical role in the production of race, gender, and sexuality in the United States. The regulation of marginalized women’s bodies—transwomen, butches, and lesbians—in confinement reproduces cis-heteronormativity. Echoing the paternalistic claims of protection that have inspired “bathroom bills,” gender-segregated prison facilities have notoriously condemned transwomen prisoners to men’s prisons for the “safety” of women’s prisons, constructing cisgender women as “at risk” of sexual assault and transgender women as “risky”, overlooking the reality of transwomen as the most at risk of experiencing sexual violence in prisons. Prisons use legal and medical constructions of gender that pathologize transgender identity in order to legitimize health concerns; for example, the mutilation of the body in an effort to remove unwanted genitalia as evidence to warrant a diagnosis of gender identity disorder, or later gender dysphoria. This construction of transgender identity as a medical condition that warrants treatment forces prisoners to pathologize their gender identity in order to access adequate gender-affirming care. By exploring the writings of queer and trans prisoners, we can glean how heteronormativity structures gender and sexuality behind bars and discover how trans prisoners work to assemble knowledge, support, and resources toward survival.

‘Gay Enclaves Face Prospect of Being PassÉ': How Assimilation Affects the Spatial Expressions of Sexuality in the United States

AbstractJournalists, activists and academics alike predict that gay neighborhoods in the United States will disappear, yet many of their claims are unsubstantiated or overly determined by economic factors. This article examines 40 years of media accounts to identify the mechanisms that explain why these urban areas are changing. I begin with the observation that the rate of assimilation of sexual minorities into mainstream society has accelerated in today's so‐called ‘post‐gay' era. Assimilation expands the residential imagination of gays and lesbians beyond the boundaries of a specific neighborhood to the entire city itself. Furthermore, as sexual orientation recedes in centrality in everyday life, residents opine that few care if a person self‐identifies as gay or straight. These two respective mechanisms of expansion and cultural sameness bring existing economic wisdom into dialogue with a cultural and political perspective about how our shifting understandings of sexuality also affect the decisions we make about where to live and socialize.

Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature

Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature

Gentlemen's disagreement: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the sexual politics of smart men

What is the relationship between intelligence and sex? In recent decades, studies of the controversial histories of both intelligence testing and of human sexuality in the United States have been increasingly common—and hotly debated. But rarely have the intersections of these histories been examined. In Gentlemen’s Disagreement, Peter Hegarty enters this historical debate by recalling the debate between Lewis Terman—the intellect who championed the testing of intelligence— and pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and shows how intelligence and sexuality have interacted in American psychology. Through a fluent discussion of intellectually gifted onanists, unhappily married men, queer geniuses, lonely frontiersmen, religious ascetics, and the two scholars themselves, Hegarty traces the origins of Terman’s complaints about Kinsey’s work to show how the intelligence testing movement was much more concerned with sexuality than we might remember. And, drawing on Foucault, Hegarty reconciles these legendary figures by showing how intelligence and sexuality in early American psychology and sexology were intertwined then and remain so to this day. Chapters 1 A Gentlemen’s Disagreement? 2 Why the Gifted Boy Didn’t Masturbate 3 Less Than Ideal Husbands 4 Queer Individuals: Their Nature and Nurture 5 Gentlemen and Horse Traders 6 Ancient Ascetics and Modern Non-Americans 7 Frontier Living, by Figures Alone 8 Normalization Now

Editors’ Note: Reproduction, Motherhood, and Sexuality

Editors’ NoteReproduction, Motherhood, and Sexuality Guisela Latorre and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu Perhaps one the greatest satisfactions that comes with the job of academic editor is the unique privilege of getting a glimpse—a sneak peek, if you will—of new intellectual directions happening in any given field. As we enter our second year at the helm of Frontiers, we have become increasingly aware of how fortunate we are to read and publish work that, in our humble opinions, represents the future of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Such an insight and foreknowledge has had a tremendous effect on our individual research and teaching endeavors, for Frontiers constantly compels us to renew, reload, and refresh our praxis as scholars and educators. While the scholarly and creative works published in this issue rigorously and thoughtfully engage prior research in our field, these also distinguish themselves for their originality and progressive intellectual vision. We are thus proud to include in this issue a focused section that extends and expands our knowledge on the theme of our latest special issue, namely reproductive justice and reproductive technologies (Frontiers 34, no. 3.) Though that special issue centered more on the social, historical, medical, and political implications of reproduction, the articles in this issue turn more firmly to the field of representation. Both “Misconceived Metaphors” and “Without a Conceivable Future,” written by Mary Thompson and Nicole Sparling respectively, concern themselves with the way women’s reproduction is politicized in literary and film representation. Caitlin E. C. Myers in her essay “Colonizing the (Reproductive) Future” turns to journalistic coverage of arts (assisted reproductive technologies) with the ultimate purpose of exploring how these representations serve the needs of neoliberal rather than feminist interests in our society. For her part Jennifer Denbow in “Sterilization as Cyborg Performance” explores medical discourse that represents the practice of voluntary sterilization as a threat to patriarchal imperatives that impose reproductive and maternal desire on women’s bodies. In different and unique ways all the articles in this focused section speak volumes about how biased discourses and fictionalized representations can have very real effects on reproductive rights. [End Page vii] Closely related to the politics of reproduction is the often-tangled relationship between discourses on motherhood and nation, concerns that also figure prominently in this issue. Feminist and gender scholars have often critiqued, and in some cased denounced, the naturalized relationship between nationalist and family tropes. The gendering and racialization of the maternal have also been at the center of much intellectual debate in our field. Emily Cheng makes important contributions to these scholarly incursions in “Pearl S. Buck’s ‘American Children’” by underscoring the role that famed novelist and “China specialist” in the 1930s, Pearl S. Buck, played in US/Asia relations through her work as a transnational adoption advocate. The image of benevolent and moral mother of the nation that Buck signified is also a symptom of larger conservative discourses on mothering. Because the concepts of both motherhood and reproduction are also closely related to ideas about sexuality, we felt it was pertinent to include scholarly work on the topic in this issue. For instance, Grey Osterud’s article “‘It’s Very Little I Know about the Facts of Life to This Day’” looks closely at the silencing and shaming that surrounded the sexual lives of rural women in turn-of-the-century New York State. Given existing taboos about sex, providing safe and nurturing spaces for the open discussion of nonnormative sexualities has been an important mission for feminist scholars and activists alike. The contributors to the Intimate Matters roundtable offered their commitment to that mission by celebrating and reflecting on the historic publication of Intimate Matters by John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, the first comprehensive book-length history of sexuality in the United States. The roundtable participants—Joanne Meyerowitz, Cynthia M. Blair, Margot Canaday, Thomas Foster, and Nayan Shah—evaluate the significance of Intimate Matters and also chart the exciting developments in sexuality history since its publication. The pioneering work of Intimate Matters is also mirrored by the role that artists have played in promoting crucial dialogues about sexuality. Chicano artist Joey Terrill, whose visually arresting...

African American Women's Sexuality

I would like to thank Joanne Meyerowitz for organizing and inviting me to participate in this roundtable and for giving me the opportunity to refl ect briefl y on the importance of John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s seminal work, Intimate Matters. Few works have infl uenced the development of a fi eld both in laying the groundwork for future scholarship and in shaping pedagogical practice as powerfully as Intimate Matters has done in the fi eld of the history of sexuality in the United States. It is hard to believe it has been twentyfi ve years since its initial publication— like many others I continue to use it in my history of sexuality courses and to turn to it as a touchstone in my ongoing eff orts to grapple with the sweep of America’s sexual past and present and the place of black sexuality and, in particular, the sexual lives of African American women within that history. I reached for this book early and oft en in my own work on black women’s sex work in turnofthecentury Chicago. Th e interpretive framework John and Estelle off er in Intimate Matters provided a backdrop against which the crucial role of black women’s sexual labor and the interracial and intraracial politics surrounding it became visible for me. It helped me to understand the central connection between black migration and sexual modernization in the early twentieth century. And it provided a lens through which to see and further probe the historical criminalization of black sexuality and the role that the regulation of black bodies played in defi ning citizenship in earlytwentiethcentury cities. Th e analytical frameworks that John and Estelle developed in Intimate Matters— the mapping of the transformation in the meaning of sexuality from its primary association with reproduction and the family to an association with individual sexual pleasure, the development of the concepts of civilized morality and sexual liberalism, and their steady focus on the ways that sexuality has simultaneously refl ected and served to maintain systems of class, gender, and racial oppressions within the United States— have provided the scaf-

Since Intimate Matters : Recent Developments in the History of Sexuality in the United States

Recent literature on the history of sexuality in America both confirms and complicates the interpretive framework set out in Intimate Matters twenty-five years ago. New studies reveal the ways reproduction has been highly structured by race and class. Attention to racial difference and race relations has moved from a dichotomous black and white model to multi-cultural explorations. Studies of marriage law, the construction of womanhood, the use of sexual violence, and other topics all demonstrate close connections between sexuality and racial hierarchy. Work on same-sex relations has moved beyond the largest cities and has found a variety of ways in which same-sex love has expressed itself and been understood. Increasing scholarly attention, finally, has focused on the role of the state in defining and policing the boundaries of normalcy.

Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History ed. by R. Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings (review)

Reviewed by: Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History ed. by R. Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings Leslie Woodcock Tentler Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History. Edited by R. Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings. [Cushwa Center for Studies in Catholicism in Twentieth-Century America, No. 7.] (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2012. Pp. v, 218. $69.95 clothbound, ISBN 978-0-8014-5140-9; $21.95 paperback, ISBN 978-0-8014-7820-8.) Back in the mid-1990s, the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism inaugurated a collaborative research project on American Catholics in the twentieth century. It had two principal goals, the first of which was to underwrite new research on various aspects of Catholic life in the relatively recent past. Success on this front has been impressive. The Cushwa project has to date resulted in at least ten monographs on subjects ranging from devotional life to the Catholic role in urban politics, and has helped to shape the research agenda of the rising scholarly generation. The project’s [End Page 809] second goal, which was the fuller integration of Catholics into the mainstream historical narrative of the American twentieth century, has by contrast been exceedingly slow to bear fruit. Catholics qua Catholics are still conspicuously absent from most accounts of the American past, whether we look to standard textbooks or to the scholarly monographs on which they are based. Even anti-Catholicism, perhaps the most powerful shaper of all when it comes to American national identity, is increasingly downplayed as other sources of social division have come to seem more important. Catholics in the American Century, the most recent volume to appear in the Cushwa twentieth-century series, addresses the problem of Catholic omission head-on. Five of its six essays are by prominent American historians who seek to reimagine their particular areas of expertise once the Catholic presence is taken seriously. Lizabeth Cohen, who, like her fellow essayists, confesses to past sins of omission in her own work, provides a knowledgeable overview of political history, broadly defined, since the reign of consensus scholarship in the 1950s. She then turns to her current research on the urban renewal crusades of the 1950s and 1960s, where Catholics have emerged as major players. Exploring the Catholic world of 1950s Boston, Cohen came to appreciate its transnational complexities; Catholic responses to urban renewal, she discovered, were shaped not just by developments at the local Chancery and in the parishes but also by developments in Rome. Historians of Catholicism, she has come to see, are well positioned to write history that is simultaneously transnational and attentive to local particulars—to function, in short, as models for the historical profession as a whole. Cohen’s essay is followed by equally thoughtful analyses of the 1960s (Thomas Sugrue), the historiography of gender and sexuality (R. Marie Griffith), and recent developments in the subfield of Chicano/Mexicano history (David Gutierrez). Sugrue, who rightly notes that few accounts of the turbulent 1960s make more than passing reference to religion, states a powerful case for incorporating Catholics into the political history of the decades since 1945, in which context the 1960s are best understood. Griffith points out that Catholics are largely missing from historical narratives of gender and sexuality in the United States, save for recurrent appearances as militant opponents of reform, and suggests some fruitful ways to open up the standard narrative. Gutierrez, too, comments on Catholic absence—rather surprisingly, given his subject—by explaining the origins of his subfield in the Chicano liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. Avowedly secularist scholars in more recent decades, he notes, have begun to appreciate the need to take religion and spiritual practices seriously in order to understand the experience of the poor and unlettered. Wilfrid McClay closes the volume with a nuanced analysis of “The Catholic Moment in American Social Thought,” which, despite its focus on recent decades, ranges knowledgeably over the full course of American intellectual history. In closing, a brief mention of the Robert Orsi essay that precedes those just described is appropriate. Orsi, widely known for his creative work on...

Religion as Cultural Power: The Role of Religion in Influencing Americans’ Symbolic Boundaries around Gender and Sexuality

AbstractIn this article, we describe recent research that explores the power of religion to influence understandings of gender and sexuality in the United States. We argue that sociologists of religion should draw from symbolic boundaries theory, a theoretical innovation in the sociology of culture. In particular, we discuss a rich body of research in the sociology of religion to show how Americans use religious tools to draw boundaries around ideal and stigmatized gender norms, family forms and sexual identification. We combine symbolic boundaries literature and this literature to show that religion is a source of cultural power that assigns meaning to, and draws boundaries around, certain cultural categories. We end by describing some productive directions for future research in this area.

White gazes, brown breasts: imperial feminism and disciplining desires and bodies in colonial encounters

This article examines the colonial encounters of gender, race and sexuality in the United States and the Philippines in the early 1900s. It traces the anxieties over US men's moral degeneracy and the representation of Filipinas as libidinal temptations, which mobilised US women's active participation in colonial biopolitics and governmentality. It contends that white women as imperial feminists asserted their principled crusade and superiority over white men and brown women by becoming bearers of racialised heteronormative traditions and feminine respectability and becoming barriers to inter‐racial sexual relations. White women focused on the white male domains of military and government and on the colonial education of brown women. Ultimately, the article supplements the Spivakian claim that “white men are saving brown women from brown men”, which has become the quintessential narrative of colonial justification and redemption, with “white women are saving white men and brown women from each other”. Drawing on government, newspaper and school documents, the article engages feminist discussions on the role of women in empire and education.

Piling Up, or Floating Away

PILING UP, OR FLOATING AWAY Vivian L. Huang The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy by David L. Eng. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Pp. 198. $84.95 cloth, $23 .95 paper.David L. Eng's latest book project urges readers to ask what it means to be accounted for. In the company of Eng's previous publications, including Racial Castration: Managing in Asian America (2001) and the anthology Loss: The Politics Mourning (2003), the latter coedited with David Kazanjian, The of Kinship curates a space in which the shared and perhaps disavowed investments of disciplines such as Asian American studies, psychoanalysis, diaspora studies, and queer theory meet in provocative tension. For Eng, psychic, historical, and political arrangements condition the affective terms of belonging. And so it is that The of Kinship lingers on the effects of a repressed national psyche with renewed concern for affective responsibility.Eng's book critiques the costly legacies of historical amnesia operative in the United States. The of Kinship engages with the remaining uses of the nation by reinvesting in the transnational foundations and buttresses of the United States as we know it. Moreover, what Eng argues so astutely is that how we know informs notions of self and nation. Eng reads queer migrant labor, transnational adoption, Japanese and Japanese American internment, and sexual regulation to demonstrate how reiterated acts of forgetting cannot fiilly negate or account for psyches resplendent with intensities of feeling. Eng argues that membership too often requires forgetting and disavowal, resulting in the affective and psychic haunting of the nation. Throughout The Feeling of Kinship, Eng demonstrates how holding on to one's losses is critical to an ethical historiography. In these terms, Eng's is an investigation into which and whose histories count, and which are neglected, lost by being made lost. Eng's prose, both sharp and patient, grounds his analysis in the political salience of everyday life. An early anecdote of students coming out to Eng as adoptees, for example, grounds Eng's pedagogical need to account for transnational adoption.Eng theorizes the national haunting of and racism as endemic to the racialization of intimacy, a phrase he uses to describe the purchase of bourgeois intimacy and privacy under the rubric of multiculturalism and color blindness. In the spirit of scholars like Jose Esteban Munoz and Jasbir K. Puar, Eng casts suspicion on the disappearing act of alongside the assimilation of gays and lesbians (11). Eng remarks upon the desirable enfolding of lesbian and gay individuals into a dominant United States and terms this phenomenon queer liberalism. Queer liberalism reinforces the neoliberal mythos that queer politics is the next leg of the freedom relay race, with sexual minorities picking up where racial minorities leave off. For Eng, to subscribe to such a telos is to risk denying the continued currency of and racism in the American political arena, not to mention the historical entanglements between and sexuality in the United States throughout time. Eng argues that, under queer liberalism, and racism appear only as always already disappearing. This spectrality of in public discourse renders and racism as obsolete concerns uncomplicatedly retired to the dustbin of history (11, 40). Instead, and racism are everywhere felt but no longer publicly grappled with. Eng proposes queer diaspora as a critical methodology and reading practice that challenges queer liberalism and the racialization of intimacy by shifting the frames of race (14). As Eng writes, the doing of queer diaspora allows an exploration of contemporary Asian movements and migrations in the global system not through a conventional focus on racial descent, filiation, and biological traceability, but through the lens of queerness, affiliation, and social contingency (13). …

Social Considerations Related to Adolescent Girls’ Sexual Empowerment: A Response to Lamb and Peterson

We expand on Lamb and Peterson’s (2011) discussion of the influence of social forces on the development of girls’ sexual empowerment. A predominant message from a variety of media in the U.S. is that women are sexual objects controlled by men’s sexual desires. Media messages are bolstered by the sexist treatment of girls and women in everyday society, and by gendered social roles derived from the patriarchal structure of society. We present empirical evidence that societal representations of sexuality in the United States are gendered and promote male control over female sexuality. We review research linking exposure to these sexist messages with the development of self-objectification and attitudes and behaviors supportive of gender stereotyped sexual roles. While many studies are conducted with women rather than girls, researchers are beginning to study these issues in older girls, and some longitudinal data are available. We make suggestions for further research within an ecological framework that would allow the examination of messages from multiple sources within a developmental framework.

Queer Legal History: A Field Grows Up and Comes Out

This essay examines recent scholarship on the legal history of sexuality in the United States. It focuses on Margot Canaday's The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Modern America (2009) and Marc Stein's Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe (2010). It also reviews recent work on the history of marriage, including Sarah Barringer Gordon's The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (2010) and George Chauncey's Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality (2004), and the history of military law Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold‐War Court Martial (2005), by Elizabeth Lutes Hillman. The essay argues that this scholarship is significant because it offers a different view of sex and power than the one derived from the early writing of Michel Foucault. “Queer legal history” treats the liberalism of the 1960s‐1970s as sexually discriminatory as well as liberatory. It underlines the exclusions that were part of public policy under the federal G.I. Bill and the New Deal welfare state.

Men in the House: Race, Welfare, and the Regulation of Men's Sexuality in the United States, 1961-1972

in t h e l a t e 1960 s , M r s . K a t i e B . s h a w , the director of Aid to Dependent Children in Greene County, Alabama, reported that her clients “want our help in getting rid of the men who live off their welfare checks. . . . They really do. Many times i tell them, ‘You shouldn’t go with Mr. Jones or Mr. Washington because he’s no good,’ and they appreciate it.” Mrs. Shaw saw her clients as misguided but ultimately good and herself as their helper and benefactor. The real villains, in her eyes, were boyfriends like Mr. Jones and Mr. Washington, men who took advantage of women on welfare and of the welfare system itself. She was hardly alone in this opinion. in the same report, another Alabama county director, Nan C. Murphy, also accused men of living off their girlfriends’ welfare benefits. She explained that “these men who see our recipients just won’t work. The feds tell us the unemployment rate in my county is seventy-five percent. Now, you know, if a man wants to work, there’s a job for him.” Both social workers eventually admitted that the vast majority if not all of the intimate relationships social workers interfered with were those of black men and women. When pressed about her exclusive attention to the boyfriends of black women, Nan Murphy sounded a familiar refrain: “You’re from the North and can’t really understand our problem.”

The paradoxical portrayal of the risk of sexually transmitted infections and sexuality in US magazines Glamour and Cosmopolitan 2000–2007

This paper reports on an exploratory, qualitative content analysis of the portrayal of the risk of sexually transmitted infections or diseases (STIs or STDs) and sexuality in the United States (US) versions of the most popular women's magazines in the world, the English language magazines for young women Cosmopolitan (Cosmo) and Glamour from 2000–2007. The data studied here demonstrate contradictory messages. On the one hand, there is a frequent and powerful portrayal of STIs and STDs as ubiquitous, dangerous, and disgusting, and on the other, there are numerous stories promoting casual sex for women's pleasure. Biomedicine is positioned as the most appropriate system of knowledge for understanding and explaining sexuality and STIs/STDs. The substantive, theoretical, and practical consequences of this paradoxical and contradictory social construction of sexuality and the risk of STIs or STDs are discussed as the major contributions of this paper.

<i>An Insider's View of Sexual Science since Kinsey</i> (review)

Reviewed by: An Insider's View of Sexual Science since Kinsey Carolyn Herbst Lewis An Insider's View of Sexual Science since Kinsey. By Ira L. Reiss. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. Pp. 240. $83.00 (cloth); $28.95 (paper). In the fall of 1953, just a few weeks after the publication of Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Ira Reiss received his doctorate in sociology, accepted a job at Bowdoin College (Kinsey's alma mater), and started on a path that eventually brought him to the very top of the field of sexual science. Within a few years his research on American sexual attitudes and practices would be read not only by sociologists and other academics but also by the general public and federal policy makers. For more than half a century Reiss's beliefs about sexuality have shaped individual lives, academic programs, and national policy. In his memoir, An Insider's View of Sexual Science since Kinsey, Reiss allows readers a glimpse into the personal and professional experiences that shaped his own views on sexuality. Because Reiss was so often at the center of the emerging field of sexual science studies, this volume also offers an insider's view of the birth of a discipline. From university curriculum committees to the executive boards of national organizations to policy-steering committees, Reiss was a key player in the creation of the professional foundation of the scientific study of sexuality in the United States. Not surprisingly, the story of how sexual science claimed and maintained its status as a respectable and valuable field of inquiry as well as Reiss's role in this process is engaging, thought-provoking, and revealing. An Insider's View of Sexual Science since Kinsey reads like a series of parables organized to present messages about Reiss's personal and professional development as well as the frequent overlap between them. In chapter 1, "Know Your Author," Reiss begins in his childhood. The moments he chooses to illustrate what he considers to be important or pivotal moments in his youth, though, are not always explicitly sexual. For example, he begins with anti-Semitism in the 1930s schoolyard. From this he writes: "I learned that I had to defend myself—not many others were stepping forward to offer help" (2). Among the other episodes that Reiss identifies as crucial to his personal analytical framework are his adventures [End Page 590] frequenting Scranton's "cathouses" in high school, struggling with questions of sexual morality as an undergraduate, and a close call with the power politics governing academic freedom in the final moments of his graduate training. As a whole these short scenes create a larger vision of some of the values and experiences that Reiss brought to the table when he entered the field of sexual science. The subsequent fourteen chapters generally break down into short segments that detail important moments in Reiss's intellectual and professional development. He presents tales of federal censorship, shifts in the American Medical Association's stance on sexual health, and power struggles within the executive board of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. His story, like his research, is centered on the United States, which became the center of sexuality studies in the wake of the Nazi regime's destruction of research laboratories and libraries in the 1930s. But Reiss also explores how this country fits into a global sexual community. Reflecting his most recent research on the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the development of a global theory of sexuality, in chapter 10, "Building a Cross-Cultural Explanation of Sexuality," Reiss outlines his position that the great diversity in past and existing sexual desires, identities, and practices does not offer "proof that there are no universal patterns in sexuality" (129). Rather, Reiss argues that the common elements that emerge in various times and places serve as evidence of cross-cultural sexual customs. These elements include not only physical pleasure but also an "orgasmic disclosure ratio" that Reiss formulated to measure the relationship between the number of people who have seen a person orgasm and the level of intimacy that person attributes to sexual experiences. These and other...

Epistemology of the Jungle: Progressive-Era Sexuality and the Nature of the Beast

In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick argues that the discourse of sexuality shifted at the end of the nineteenth century from an emphasis on sexual acts to sexual identities. Sedgwick builds upon Foucault's famous declaration that the “species” of the homosexual was born at that moment. But Sedgwick and others working on histories of sexuality in the United States have elided what Lundblad identifies as the discourse of the jungle: Darwinist-Freudian constructions of “the human” and “the animal” that redefine various behaviors in relation to animal instincts. This discourse helps to explain why the discourse of sexuality shifted at the turn of the century, once heterosexuality was naturalized in the name of reproduction. Questions about human sexuality were soon framed within an evolutionary epistemology that was fundamentally new, but still in transition, at that time. After tracing the genealogy of the jungle through Darwin, Kipling, and Freud, Lundblad focuses on alternative constructions of the relationship between animality and sexuality that are revealed in Progressive-Era texts. These representations of “the beast” often seem to reinforce but actually resist the Darwinist-Freudian jungle, despite reigning critical interpretations by Sedgwick and others. Lundblad draws upon animality studies to reveal how Henry James's “The Beast in the Jungle,” as a foundational example, reads rather differently in light of sexual histories of the beast that are crucial but often overlooked in studies of U.S. literature and culture.