Beyond Sexuality points contemporary sexual politics in a radically new direction. Combining a psychoanalytic emphasis on the unconscious with a deep respect for the historical variability of sexual identities, this original work of queer theory makes the case for viewing erotic desire as fundamentally impersonal. Tim Dean develops a reading of Jacques Lacan that—rather than straightening out this notoriously difficult French psychoanalyst—brings out the queer tensions and productive incoherencies in his account of desire. Dean shows how the Lacanian unconscious "deheterosexualizes" desire, and along the way he reveals how psychoanalytic thinkers as well as queer theorists have failed to exploit the full potential of this conception of desire. The book elaborates this by investigating social fantasies about homosexuality and AIDS, including gay men's own fantasies about sex and promiscuity, in an attempt to illuminate the challenges facing safe-sex education. Taking on many shibboleths in contemporary psychoanalysis and queer theory—and taking no prisoners—Beyond Sexuality offers an antidote to hagiographical strains in recent work on psychoanalysis, Foucault, and sexuality.

Radical alternatives to consent and trauma Arguing that we have become culturally obsessed with healing trauma, Sexuality Beyond Consent calls attention to what traumatized subjects do with their pain. The erotics of racism offers a paradigmatic example of how what is proximal to violation may become an unexpected site of flourishing. Central to the transformational possibilities of trauma is a queer form of consent, limit consent, that is not about guarding the self but about risking experience. Saketopoulou thereby shows why sexualities beyond consent may be worth risking-and how risk can solicit the future. Moving between clinical and cultural case studies, Saketopoulou takes up theatrical and cinematic works such as Slave Play and The Night Porter, to chart how trauma and sexuality join forces to surge through the aesthetic domain. Putting the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche in conversation with queer of color critique, performance studies, and philosophy, Sexuality Beyond Consent proposes that enduring the strange in ourselves, not to master trauma but to rub up against it, can open us up to encounters with opacity. The book concludes by theorizing currents of sadism that, when pursued ethically, can animate unique forms of interpersonal and social care.

The contemporary study of sexuality too often finds itself at an impasse, conceptualizing sexuality either psychologically or sociologically: sexologists and psychologists have tended to point to the biological origins of sexuality underpinned by hormones, drives and, most recently, genetics; in contrast, historians and sociologists point to the social field as the defining force that shapes the meanings given to sexuality and sexual experience. Confronting the limitations and challenges this impasse poses, Katherine Johnson argues for a psychosocial approach that rethinks the relationship between psychic and social realms in the field of sexuality, without reducing it to either. Weaving through an expanse of theoretical and empirical examples drawn from sociology, psychology, queer and cultural studies, she produces an innovative, transdisciplinary perspective on sexual identities, subjectivities and politics that makes an original contribution to key debates ranging from identity politics and gay marriage, to mental health ‘risks’ and queer youth suicide. Embracing ideas from developmental psychology, social constructionist sociology, social and critical psychology, psychoanalysis and queer theory, this original book will be necessary reading for students and scholars of sexuality across the social sciences.

Sexual citizenship has become a key concept in the social sciences. It describes the rights and responsibilities of citizens in sexual and intimate life, including debates over equal marriage and women's human rights, as well as shaping thinking about citizenship more generally. But what does it mean in a continually changing political landscape of gender and sexuality? In this timely intervention, Diane Richardson examines the normative underpinnings and varied critiques of sexual citizenship, asking what they mean for its future conceptual and empirical development, as well as for political activism. Clearly written, the book shows how the field of sexuality and citizenship connects to a range of important areas of debate including understandings of nationalism, identity, neoliberalism, equality, governmentality, individualization, colonialism, human rights, globalization and economic justice. Ultimately this book calls for a critical rethink of sexual citizenship. Illustrating her argument with examples drawn from across the globe, Richardson contends that this is essential if scholars want to understand the sexual politics that made the field of sexuality and citizenship studies what it is today, and to enable future analyses of the sexual inequalities that continue to mark the global order.

What precisely resides in “sexuality” which warrants the popular discourse on sexuality as “part of our world freedom,” or something as an inspiring source for “our own creation” of “new forms of relationships” or “new forms of love” never before possible in human history? This popular treatment of sexual freedom has become so politically correct, in this day and age of ours, that it fast degenerates into a seductive ideology which has impoverished our understanding of sexuality by blinding us from its dark sides. Contrary to this intoxicating conventional wisdom, the dark sides of this seductive ideology have yet to be systematically understood and that its very creative freedom is neither possible nor desirable to the extent that its advocates would like us to believe. Of course, this is not to suggest that sexuality should not be about freedom nor creativity, or that the literature in sexual studies (and other related fields like gender studies, queer studies, and cultural studies, for example) should be ignored because of their scholarly nonsense. Needless to say, neither of these two extreme views is reasonable either. Instead, the purpose of this book is to provide an alternative (better) way to understand the nature of sexuality, in special relation to the sexual body and spirit, in conjunction with the mind—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). This seminal project, if successful, will fundamentally change the way that we think about the nature of sexuality, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.

The new edition of Sexuality displays the qualities which have made this book a key text for understanding human sexuality. Jeffrey Weeks blends deep empirical knowledge with theoretical sophistication and a sensitivity to the politics of sexuality. Framing and shaping the analysis is an acute understanding of the world-wide changes that are remaking sexuality and gender, dramatized by the globalization of sex and the rise and rise of cybersex. These changes have opened unprecedented opportunities for sexual interaction and sexual choice, but also posed new sexual dangers and anxiety. Debates about the regulation and control of sexuality, and the intersection of various dimensions of power and domination are contextualised by a sustained argument about the importance of agency in remaking sexual and intimate life, above all for women and for LGBTQ people. Particular attention is given to the debates about same-sex marriage which symbolize the transformations that have taken place. These controversies in turn feed into debates about intimate citizenship and human sexual rights in a rapidly changing world.

Hipster Porn examines models of gay hipster masculinity through the lens of the gay fanzine Butt. The book reconstructs an important chapter of recent gay and queer history in order to make sense of the cultural shifts of the last 20 years in the contemporary gay world. Butt exemplifies the changing nature of gay contemporary masculinity as it marked the beginning of a new era of queer fanzines such as They Shoot Homos Don't They?, Kink, Kaiserin, and Meat reflecting a specific cosmopolitan gay lifestyle in the West of the 2000s. The new forms of masculinity and sexuality demanded new ways of thinking about gender and desire. Hipster Porn takes the aesthetics of Butt to find a way of critiquing and rearticulating key concepts from gender, queer and affect theory, and delivers new accounts of subjectivity and sociality as they apply to queer media culture. This book is suitable for researchers in gender studies, queer and masculinity studies, cultural studies, media studies, and sociology.

This book examines sexuality in the past, and explores how it helps explain sexuality in the present. The subject of sexuality is often a controversial one, and exploring it through a world history perspective emphasizes the extent to which societies, including our own, are still reacting to historical change through contemporary sexual behaviors, values, and debates. The study uses a clear chronological structure to focus on major patterns and changes in sexuality—both sexual culture and sexual behaviors—in the main periods of world history, covering topics including: • The sexual implications of the transition from hunting and gathering economies to agricultural economies; • Sexuality in classical societies; • The postclassical period and the spread of the world religions; • Sex in an age of trade and colonies; • Changes in sexual behaviors and sexual attitudes between 1750 and 1950; • Sex in contemporary world history. This new edition examines these issues on a global scale, with attention to anthropological insights on sexuality and their relationship to history, the dynamics between sexuality and imperialism, sexuality in industrial society, and trends and conflicts surrounding views of sex and sexuality in the contemporary world.

Clinical Encounters in Sexuality makes an intervention into the fields of clinical psychoanalysis and sexuality studies, in an effort to think about a range of issues relating to sexuality from a clinical psychoanalytic perspective. The editors have chosen queer theory as an interlocutor for the clinical contributors, because it is at the forefront of theoretical considerations of sexuality, as well as being both reliant upon and suspicious of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice and discourse. The book brings together a number of psychoanalytic schools of thought and clinical approaches, which are sometimes at odds with one another and thus tend not to engage in dialogue about divisive theoretical concepts and matters of clinical technique. The volume also stages, for the first time, a sustained clinical psychoanalytic engagement with queer theory. The central questions we present to readers to think about are: What are the discourses of sexuality underpinning psychoanalysis, and how do they impact on clinical practice? In what ways does sexuality get played out for, and between, the psychoanalytic practitioner and the patient? How do social, cultural and historical attitudes towards sexuality impact on the transference and countertransference, consciously and unconsciously? Why is sexuality so prone to reification? TABLE OF CONTENTS // Introduction: Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory, by Noreen Giffney SECTION 1: QUEER THEORIES / Chapter 1 [Identity]: Precarious Sexualities: Queer Challenges to Psychoanalytic and Social Identity Categorisation, by Alice Kuzniar - Chapter 2 [Desire]: Are We Missing Something? Queer Desire, by Lara Farina - Chapter 3 [Pleasure]: Jouissance: The Gash of Bliss, by Kathryn Bond Stockton - Chapter 4 [Perversion]: Perversion and the Problem of Fluidity and Fixity, by Lisa Downing - Chapter 5 [Ethics]: Out of Line, On Hold: D.W. Winnicott's Queer Sensibilities, by Michael D. Snediker - Chapter 6 [Discourse]: Discourse and the History of Sexuality, by Will Stockton SECTION 2: PSYCHOANALYTIC RESPONSES / Chapter 7: On Not Thinking Straight: Comments on a Conceptual Marriage, by R.D. Hinshelwood - Chapter 8: Queer as a New Shelter from Castration, by Abe Geldhof and Paul Verhaeghe - Chapter 9: The Redress of Psychoanalysis, by Ann Murphy - Chapter 10: Queer Directions from Lacan, by Ian Parker - Chapter 11: Queer Theory Meets Jung, by Claudette Kulkarni - Chapter 12: Queer Troubles for Psychoanalysis, by Carol Owens - Chapter 13: Clinique, by Aranye Fradenburg - Chapter 14: From Tragic Fall to Programmatic Blueprint: 'Behold this is Oedipus ...' by Olga Cox Cameron - Chapter 15: Enigmatic Sexuality, by Katrine Zeuthen and Judy Gammelgaard - Chapter 16: The Transforming Nexus: Psychoanalysis, Social Theory and Queer Childhood, by Ken Corbett - Chapter 17: Clinical Encounters: The Queer New Times, by Rob Weatherill - Chapter 18: Undoing Psychoanalysis: Towards a Clinical and Conceptual Metistopia, by Dany Nobus - Chapter 19: 'You make me feel like a natural woman': Thoughts on a Case of Transsexual Identity Formation and Queer Theory, by Ami Kaplan - Chapter 20: Sexual Difference: From Symptom to Sinthome, by Patricia Gherovici SECTION 3: RESPONSES TO PSYCHOANALYTIC PRACTICES ENCOUNTERING QUEER THEORIES / Chapter 21: A Plague on Both Your Houses, by Stephen Frosh - Chapter 22: Something Amiss, by Jacqueline Rose - Chapter 23: Taking Shelter from Queer, by Tim Dean - Chapter 24: Courageous Drawings of Vigilant Ambiguities, by Noreen O'Connor - Chapter 25: Understanding Homophobia, by Mark J. Blechner - Chapter 26: Transgender and Psychoanalysis, by Susan Stryker - Chapter 27: The Psychoanalysis that Dare Not Speak Its Name, Ona Nierenberg ABOUT THE COVER / On the Not-Meanings of Karla Black's There Can Be No Arguments, by Medb Ruane AFTERWORD, by Eve Watson