In an effort to modernize criminal and civil
investigations, early Bolsheviks gave forensic doctors-most of whom
had been trained under the tsarist regime-new authority over issues
of sexuality. ...Revolutionaries believed that forensic
medicine could provide scientific and objective solutions to sexual
disorder in the new society. Bolshevik Sexual Forensics
explores the institutional history of Russian and Soviet forensic
medicine and examines the effects of its authority when confronting
sexual disorder. Healey compares sex crime investigations from
Petrograd and Sverdlovsk in the 1920s to the numerous publications
by forensic doctors and psychiatrists of the prerevolutionary and
early Soviet periods to illustrate the role that these specialists
played. In addition, Healey presents a fascinating look at how
doctors diagnosed and treated hermaphroditism, showing how Soviet
physicians revolutionized the standard scientific view in these
cases by taking into account individual desire.
This study sheds light on unexplored radical and reactionary
forces that shaped the Bolshevik "sexual revolution" as lawmakers
defined new ways of seeing sexual crime and disorder. Forensic
doctors struggled to interpret the replacement of the age of
consent with a standard of "sexual maturity," a designation that
made female sexuality a collective "resource," not part of an
individual's personality. "Innocence," "experience," and virginity
played a major role in the expertise doctors furnished in rape and
abuse trials. Psychiatrists recoiled from the language of sexual
psychology in their investigations of sex criminals. Yet in the
clinic, Soviet physicians probed the desires of the two-sexed
citizen, whose psychology served as the basis for a distinctly
modern approach to the "erasure" of the hermaphrodite.
Healey concludes that the vision of men and women as equals
after a "sexual revolution" was undermined from the outset of the
Soviet experiment. Law and medicine failed to protect women and
girls from violence, and Soviet medicine's physiological and
biological model of sexual citizenship erased the vision of sexual
self-expression, especially for women. This groundbreaking study
will appeal to Soviet historians and those interested in gender
studies, sexuality, medicine, and forensics.
Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin Americabrings together a broad community of scholars to explore the history of illicit and alternative sexualities in Latin America's colonial and early ...national periods. Together the essays examine how "the unnatural" came to inscribe certain sexual acts and desires as criminal and sinful, including acts officially deemed to be "against nature"-sodomy, bestiality, and masturbation-along with others that approximated the unnatural-hermaphroditism, incest, sex with the devil, solicitation in the confessional, erotic religious visions, and the desecration of holy images. In doing so, this anthology makes important and necessary contributions to the historiography of gender and sexuality. Amid the growing politicized interest in broader LGBTQ movements in Latin America, the essays also show how these legal codes endured to make their way into post-independence Latin America.
The sexual state Davidson, Roger; Davis, Gayle
2012., 20120412, 2012, 2012-04-12, 20120101
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This is the first scholarly study of Scotland's sexual coming-of-age in the post-war period, charting its political growth from a deeply moralistic policy framework towards a less judgmental, global ...and scientific context. On the way, Davidson and Davis lead us through the Scottish sexual landscape leading up to the global crisis of HIV/AIDS, analysing post-war state policy towards issues such as prostitution, abortion, homosexuality, gender roles, contraception, censorship, pornography and sexual health education.There are few resources for the student of Scotland's sexual history and its political and social context. This will be the first dedicated work to collate the findings of two important and respected scholars in Scottish Social History, publishing new research in an under-published area of 20th Century cultural history.
Queer people may not have invented sex, but queers have long been pioneers in imagining new ways to have it. Yet their voices have been largely absent from the #MeToo conversation. What can queer ...people learn from the #MeToo conversation? And what can queer communities teach the rest of the world about ethical sex? This provocative book brings together academics, activists, artists, and sex workers to tackle challenging questions about sex, power, consent, and harm. While responding to the need for sex to be consensual and mutually pleasurable, these chapter authors resist the heteronormative assumptions, class norms, and racial privilege underlying much #MeToo discourse. The essays reveal the tools that queer communities themselves have developed to practice ethical sex—from the sex worker negotiating with her client to the gay man having anonymous sex in the back room. At the same time, they explore how queer communities might better prevent and respond to sexual violence without recourse to a police force that is frequently racist, homophobic, and transphobic.
Telling a queerer side of the #MeToo story, Unsafe Words dares to challenge dogmatic assumptions about sex and consent while developing tools and language to promote more ethical and more pleasurable sex for everyone.
In this innovative celebration of diversity and affirmation of individuality in animals and humans, Joan Roughgarden challenges accepted wisdom about gender identity and sexual orientation. A ...distinguished evolutionary biologist, Roughgarden takes on the medical establishment, the Bible, social science--and even Darwin himself. She leads the reader through a fascinating discussion of diversity in gender and sexuality among fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, including primates. Evolution's Rainbow explains how this diversity develops from the action of genes and hormones and how people come to differ from each other in all aspects of body and behavior. Roughgarden reconstructs primary science in light of feminist, gay, and transgender criticism and redefines our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality. Witty, playful, and daring, this book will revolutionize our understanding of sexuality. Roughgarden argues that principal elements of Darwinian sexual selection theory are false and suggests a new theory that emphasizes social inclusion and control of access to resources and mating opportunity. She disputes a range of scientific and medical concepts, including Wilson's genetic determinism of behavior, evolutionary psychology, the existence of a gay gene, the role of parenting in determining gender identity, and Dawkins's "selfish gene" as the driver of natural selection. She dares social science to respect the agency and rationality of diverse people; shows that many cultures across the world and throughout history accommodate people we label today as lesbian, gay, and transgendered; and calls on the Christian religion to acknowledge the Bible's many passages endorsing diversity in gender and sexuality. Evolution's Rainbow concludes with bold recommendations for improving education in biology, psychology, and medicine; for
democratizing genetic engineering and medical practice; and for building a public monument to affirm diversity as one of our nation's defining principles.
In 1991, Anita Hill's testimony during Clarence Thomas's Senate confirmation hearing brought the problem of sexual harassment to a public audience. Although widely believed by women, Hill was defamed ...by conservatives and Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The tainting of Hill and her testimony is part of a larger social history in which women find themselves caught up in a system that refuses to believe what they say. Hill's experience shows how a tainted witness is not who someone is, but what someone can become.
Why are women so often considered unreliable witnesses to their own experiences? How are women discredited in legal courts and in courts of public opinion? Why is women's testimony so often mired in controversies fueled by histories of slavery and colonialism? How do new feminist witnesses enter testimonial networks and disrupt doubt?Tainted Witnessexamines how gender, race, and doubt stick to women witnesses as their testimony circulates in search of an adequate witness. Judgment falls unequally upon women who bear witness, as well-known conflicts about testimonial authority in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries reveal. Women's testimonial accounts demonstrate both the symbolic potency of women's bodies and speech in the public sphere and the relative lack of institutional security and control to which they can lay claim. Each testimonial act follows in the wake of a long and invidious association of race and gender with lying that can be found to this day within legal courts and everyday practices of judgment, defining these locations as willfully unknowing and hostile to complex accounts of harm. Bringing together feminist, literary, and legal frameworks, Leigh Gilmore provides provocative readings of what happens when women's testimony is discredited. She demonstrates how testimony crosses jurisdictions, publics, and the unsteady line between truth and fiction in search of justice.
Undoing Gender constitutes Judith Butler's recent reflections on gender and sexuality, focusing on new kinship, psychoanalysis and the incest taboo, transgender, intersex, diagnostic categories, ...social violence, and the tasks of social transformation. In terms that draw from feminist and queer theory, Butler considers the norms that govern--and fail to govern--gender and sexuality as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble . In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival. And to "do" one's gender in certain ways sometimes implies "undoing" dominant notions of personhood. She writes about the "New Gender Politics" that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory.
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Among her books are Gender Trouble , Bodies That Matter , and Excitable Speech , all published by Routledge.
When black women were brought from Africa to the New World as slave laborers, their value was determined by their ability to work as well as their potential to bear children, who by law would become ...the enslaved property of the mother's master. InLaboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan examines for the first time how African women's labor in both senses became intertwined in the English colonies. Beginning with the ideological foundations of racial slavery in early modern Europe,Laboring Womentraverses the Atlantic, exploring the social and cultural lives of women in West Africa, slaveowners' expectations for reproductive labor, and women's lives as workers and mothers under colonial slavery. Challenging conventional wisdom, Morgan reveals how expectations regarding gender and reproduction were central to racial ideologies, the organization of slave labor, and the nature of slave community and resistance. Taking into consideration the heritage of Africans prior to enslavement and the cultural logic of values and practices recreated under the duress of slavery, she examines how women's gender identity was defined by their shared experiences as agricultural laborers and mothers, and shows how, given these distinctions, their situation differed considerably from that of enslaved men. Telling her story through the arc of African women's actual lives-from West Africa, to the experience of the Middle Passage, to life on the plantations-she offers a thoughtful look at the ways women's reproductive experience shaped their roles in communities and helped them resist some of the more egregious effects of slave life. Presenting a highly original, theoretically grounded view of reproduction and labor as the twin pillars of female exploitation in slavery,Laboring Womenis a distinctive contribution to the literature of slavery and the history of women.
Between 1800 and 1975, sexuality in the West was transformed. Hera Cook shows how the growing effectiveness of contraception gradually eroded the connection between sexuality and reproduction. The ...increasing control over fertility was crucial to the remaking of heterosexual physical sexual behaviour and had a massive impact on women's lives. Dr Cook charts how, why, and when attitudes towards sex changed from the repression of the nineteenth century to the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
This book investigates how varying practices of gender shaped people's lives and experiences across the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. Exploring how gender was linked with other ...socio-political characteristics such as wealth, status, age and life-stage, as well as with individual choices, in the very different world of classical antiquity is fascinating in its own right. But later perceptions of ancient literature and art have profoundly influenced the development of gendered ideologies and hierarchies in the West, and influenced the study of gender itself. Questioning how best to untangle and interpret difficult sources is a key aim. This book exploits a wide range of archaeological, material cultural, visual, spatial, demographic, epigraphical and literary evidence to consider households, families, life-cycles and the engendering of time, legal and political institutions, beliefs about bodies, sex and sexuality, gender and space, the economic implications of engendered practices, and gender in religion and magic.
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