Everyone wanted Madonna's 1992 album Erotica to be a scandal. In the midst of a culture war, conservatives wanted it to be proof of the decline of family values. The target of conservative loathing, gay men reeling from the AIDS epidemic wanted it to be a celebration of a sexual culture that had rapidly slipped away. And Madonna herself wanted to sell scandal, which is why she released Erotica in the same season as her erotic thriller Body of Evidence and her por...

In this expansive and provocative new work, Michael Dango theorizes how aesthetic style manages crisis—and why taking crisis seriously means taking aesthetics seriously. Detoxing, filtering, bingeing, and ghosting: these are four actions that have come to define how people deal with the stress of living in a world that seems in permanent crisis. As Dango argues, they can also be used to describe contemporary art and literature.Employing what he calls "promiscuous archives," Dango t...

Everyone wanted Madonna’s 1992 album Erotica to be a scandal. In the midst of a culture war, conservatives wanted it to be proof of the decline of family values. The target of conservative loathing, gay men reeling from the AIDS epidemic wanted it to be a celebration of a sexual culture that had rapidly slipped away. And Madonna herself wanted to sell scandal, which is why she released Erotica in the same season as her erotic thriller Body of Evidence and her pornographic coffee-table book...

Shows why the movement against sexual violence needs the humanities—now more than ever.New Rape Studies advances a new generation of writers who join a long genealogy of feminist thinkers in grounding their critiques of sexual violence in humanistic disciplines such as literary criticism, film studies, and art history. Aesthetic ways of knowing and cultural forms of intervention are increasingly urgent in a political landscape in which the common response ...

From Jezebel.com, the popular website for women, comes a must-read encyclopedic guide to pop culture, feminism, fashion, sex, and much more.Within months of Jezebel's May 2007 appearance on the new media scene, fans of the blog began referring to themselves as "Jezzies" in comment threads and organizing reader meet-ups in cities all over the world. By 2008, the devotion of the self-appointed Jezzies reached such a fever pitch that the New York Times ran a ...

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Our self-image as moral, well-behaved creatures is dogged by scepticism, relativism, hypocrisy, and nihilism, and by the fear that in a Godless world science has unmasked us as creatures fated by our genes to be selfish and tribalistic, or competitive and aggressive. Here, Simon Blackburn tackles the major moral questions surrounding birth, death, happiness, desire, and freedom, showing us how we should think about the meaning ...

NPR Best Books of 2017In this sweeping history of popular music in the United States, NPR's acclaimed music critic examines how popular music shapes fundamental American ideas and beliefs, allowing us to communicate difficult emotions and truths about our most fraught social issues, most notably sex and race.In Good Booty, Ann Powers explores how popular music became America's primary erotic art form. Powers takes us from nineteenth-century New Orl...

This is the first introductory textbook intended for transgender/trans studies at the undergraduate level. The book can also be used for related courses in LGBTQ, queer, and gender/feminist studies.It encompasses and connects global contexts, intersecting identities, historic and contemporary issues, literature, history, politics, art, and culture. Ardel Haefele-Thomas embraces the richness of intersecting identities—how race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, nation, religion,...

A cultural history of the customs, fashions, and figures of gay life in the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries-and how they have changed us for the better.How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization presents a broad yet incisive look at how an unusual "immigrant" group, homosexual men, has influenced mainstream American society and has, in many ways, become mainstream itself. From the way camp, irony, and the gay aesthetic have become part of our na...

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Emotions are complex mental states that resist reduction. They are visceral reactions but also beliefs about the world. They are spontaneous outbursts but also culturally learned performances. They are intimate and private and yet gain their substance and significance only from interpersonal and social frameworks. And just as our emotions in any given moment display this complex structure, so their history is plural ra...

The bestselling author of Sexual Personae and Sex, Art, and American Culture is back with a fiery new collection of essays on everything from art and celebrity to gay activism, Lorena Bobbitt to Bill and Hillary. These essays have never appeared in book form, and many will be appearing in print for the first time.

Antoinette Burton argues that gender history is hiding in plain sight, at work everywhere we look. This volume introduces the field of gender history--its origins, development, reception, recalibrations, and frictions. It offers a set of working definitions of gender as a descriptive category and as a category of historical analysis, tracing the emergence, usage, and applicability of these entwined subjects across a range of times and places since the 1970s. Inevitably po...