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Rethinking Sexuality
This thoughtful and accessible book provides a critical examination of the central debates attached to conceptualizing sexuality as a site of knowledge and politics. These are explored in chapters on the meaning of heterosexuality, sexual citizenship and the associated notions of sexual rights and obligations, queer theory and its relationship with feminisms, both `new′ and `old′. Also included is discussion of responses to the HIV//AIDS epidemic and the implications for understandings of gender and sexuality.
- GenresSexuality
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
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April 8, 2009
Cannot recommend enough this exploration of feminism over the last century. Her discussions of the flip in focus from sexual acts to sexual identities and now back to sexual acts gave me a philosophical undergirding for what I was doing with howtomakeloveto.com, which focuses on acts and never asks what you consider yourself or forces you to encounter your identity in the way it's been talked about for so long.
My note on that part:
Final section on the role of he HIV crisis on sexual discourse. Main interesting part here was the transition back to a focus from sexual identity to sexual conduct or behavior, which was the focus of all the old laws outlawing certain behaviors.
p137 "By the late 1980's, it was evident that there had been a shift in HIV/AIDS health education policy away from talking about risk groups to emphasizing risk behaviors."
Academia and society hasn't really caught up to this public health necessity, but the nose of the boat will ultimately turn.
Earlier on, there's a wonderful discussion of the queer critique of heterosexuality--or the idea that it is this monolithic practice, so normative and ordinary that it doesn't need to be studied.
Another part that I loved documented the various fights among lesbians over sexual conduct: what was the right way to have sex, what was the wrong way.
Finally, there was the discussion of justifying gayness. There's the push to say it's genetic, but then that's kind of an apology, on the order of, "I'd be straight if I could but I can't help myself." So then choice is ennobled. My favorite explanation for lesbianism (which the last time I read anything on the topic, had no identified genetic / biological basis) was that every one of us is born to a woman and shares his or her first physically loving relationship with a woman. Therefore everyone, men and women alike, are capable of physically loving a woman.
Everyone is a lesbian. There's something I can get behind.
My note on that part:
Final section on the role of he HIV crisis on sexual discourse. Main interesting part here was the transition back to a focus from sexual identity to sexual conduct or behavior, which was the focus of all the old laws outlawing certain behaviors.
p137 "By the late 1980's, it was evident that there had been a shift in HIV/AIDS health education policy away from talking about risk groups to emphasizing risk behaviors."
Academia and society hasn't really caught up to this public health necessity, but the nose of the boat will ultimately turn.
Earlier on, there's a wonderful discussion of the queer critique of heterosexuality--or the idea that it is this monolithic practice, so normative and ordinary that it doesn't need to be studied.
Another part that I loved documented the various fights among lesbians over sexual conduct: what was the right way to have sex, what was the wrong way.
Finally, there was the discussion of justifying gayness. There's the push to say it's genetic, but then that's kind of an apology, on the order of, "I'd be straight if I could but I can't help myself." So then choice is ennobled. My favorite explanation for lesbianism (which the last time I read anything on the topic, had no identified genetic / biological basis) was that every one of us is born to a woman and shares his or her first physically loving relationship with a woman. Therefore everyone, men and women alike, are capable of physically loving a woman.
Everyone is a lesbian. There's something I can get behind.
Displaying 1 of 1 review