The regulation of intimate relationships has been a key battleground in the culture wars of the past three decades. In this bold and innovative book, Jean Cohen presents a new approach to regulating intimacy that promises to defuse the tensions that have long sparked conflict among legislators, jurists, activists, and scholars. Disputes have typically arisen over questions that apparently set the demands of personal autonomy, justice, and responsibility against each other. Can law stay out of the bedroom without shielding oppression and abuse? Can we protect the pursuit of personal happiness while requiring people to behave responsibly toward others? Can regulation acknowledge a variety of intimate relationships without privileging any? Must regulating intimacy involve a clash between privacy and equality? Cohen argues that these questions have been impossible to resolve because most legislators, activists, and scholars have drawn on an anachronistic conception of privacy, one founded on the idea that privacy involves secrecy and entails a sphere free from legal regulation. In response, Cohen draws on Habermas and other European thinkers to present a robust "constructivist" defense of privacy, one based on the idea that norms and rights are legally constructed. Cohen roots her arguments in debates over three particularly contentious issues: reproductive rights, sexual orientation, and sexual harassment. She shows how a new legal framework, "reflexive law," allows us to build on constructivist insights to approach these debates free from the liberal and welfarist paradigms that usually structure our legal thought. This new legal paradigm finally allows us to dissolve the tensions among autonomy, equality, and community that have beset us. A synthesis of feminist theory, political theory, constitutional jurisprudence, and cutting-edge research in the sociology of law, this powerful work will reshape not only legal and political debates, but how we think about the intimate relationships at the core of our own lives. .

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book asks why contemporary African American literature--particularly that produced by black women--is continually concerned with issues of respectability and propriety. The author argues that this preoccupation has its origins in recurrent ideologies about African American sexuality, and that it expresses a fundamental aspect of the racial self--an often unarticulated link between the intimate and the political in black culture. In a counterpoint to her paradigmatic reading of Nella Larsen’s Passing, her analysis of black women’s narratives--including Ann Petry’s The Street,Toni Morrison’s Sula and Paradise, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Gayl Jones’ Eva’s Man--offers a theory of black subjectivity. She describes middle-class attempts to rescue the black community from accusations of sexual and domestic deviance by embracing bourgeois respectability, and asserts that behind those efforts there is the ?doubled vulnerability? of the black intimate subject. Rather than reflecting a DuBoisian tension between race and nation, to Jenkins this vulnerability signifies for the African American an opposition between two poles of potential exposure : racial scrutiny and the proximity of human intimacy. Scholars of African American culture acknowledge that intimacy and sexuality are taboo subjects among African Americans precisely because black intimate character has been pathologized.

Crossing disciplinary lines, Moran looks in depth at interracial intimacy in America from colonial times to the present. She traces the evolution of bans on intermarriage and explains why blacks and Asians faced harsh penalties while Native Americans and Latinos did not. She provides fresh insight into how these laws served complex purposes, why they remained on the books for so long, and what led to their eventual demise. As Moran demonstrates, the United States Supreme Court could not declare statutes barring intermarriage unconstitutional until the civil rights movement, coupled with the sexual revolution, had transformed prevailing views about race, sex, and marriage.

The law has long been interested in marriage and conjugal cohabitation and in the range of public and private obligations that accrue from intimate living. This collection of classic articles explores that legal interest, while at the same time locating marriage and cohabitation within a range of intimate affiliations. It offers the perspectives of a number of international scholars on questions of how, if at all, our different ways of intimacy ought to be recognised and regulated by law.

Sanitized Sex analyzes the development of new forms of regulation concerning prostitution, venereal disease, and intimacy during the American occupation of Japan after the Second World War, focusing on the period between 1945 and 1952. It contributes to the cultural and social history of the occupation of Japan by investigating the intersections of ordering principles like race, class, gender, and sexuality. It also reveals how sex and its regulation were not marginal but key issues in postwar empire-building, U.S.-Japanese relations, and American and Japanese self-imagery. The regulation of sexual encounters between occupiers and occupied was closely linked to the disintegration of the Japanese empire and the rise of U.S. hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region during the Cold War era. Shedding new light on the configuration of postwar Japan, the process of decolonization, the postcolonial formation of the Asia-Pacific region, and the particularities of postwar U.S. imperialism, Sanitized Sex offers a reading of the intimacies of empires—defeated and victorious.

In exploring an array of intimacies between global migrants Nayan Shah illuminates a stunning, transient world of heterogeneous social relations—dignified, collaborative, and illicit. At the same time he demonstrates how the United States and Canada, in collusion with each other, actively sought to exclude and dispossess nonwhite races. Stranger Intimacy reveals the intersections between capitalism, the state's treatment of immigrants, sexual citizenship, and racism in the first half of the twentieth century.

Lyombe Eko carries out an historical and cultural survey of the regulation of visual depictions of explicit human sexual conduct from their earliest appearance on the clay tablets of the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in ancient Mesopotamia, to the tablet computers of Silicon Valley. The Regulation of Sex-Themed Visual Imagery analyzes the contemporary problem of the applicability of the human right of freedom of expression to explicit imagery in the face of societal interests in the regulation of representations of human sexuality. This book will be of interest to scholars, students, and broad audiences interested in comparative studies in pornography regulation, the history of pornography, the law of pornography and obscenity, and visual culture and history alike.

Within the so-called seduction community, the ability to meet and attract women is understood as a skill which heterosexual men can cultivate through practical training and personal development. Though it has been an object of media speculation – and frequent sensationalism – for over a decade, this cultural formation remains poorly understood. In the first book-length study of the industry, Rachel O’Neill takes us into the world of seduction seminars, training events, instructional guidebooks and video tutorials. Pushing past established understandings of ‘pickup artists’ as pathetic, pathological or perverse, she examines what makes seduction so compelling for those drawn to participate in this sphere. Seduction vividly portrays how the twin rationalities of neoliberalism and postfeminism are reorganising contemporary intimate life, as labour-intensive and profit-orientated modes of sociality consume other forms of being and relating. It is essential reading for students and scholars of gender, sexuality, sociology and cultural studies, as well as anyone who wants to understand the seduction industry’s overarching logics and internal workings.

Does Canada need any more collections about legal regulation of sex and sexuality? Volumes exist dealing with sex work and pornographies. Certainly, volumes abound dealing with emerging sexualities in Canada and new sexual freedoms. This book seeks to do more than tell a story of broad generalities about the law. It forges the links between the history of law and modern iterations of judgments pertaining to that law. Hence the uncomfortable line between Victorian morality (often) and modern regulation, is thematically explored through the book. More modern iterations of sexual regulation in Canada are being deployed and, in this book, the authors explore the interplay between emerging digital technologies and legal regulation. Newer laws in Canada have been drafted to recognize that sexual expression can be a means of violence inherently, and thus an exploration of modern sexual digital expression and its emerging jurisprudence represent a new frontier in the regulation of sex and sexuality in Canada. We explore how legal regulation has responded to these new crimes.This collection is founded upon the editors? joint experiences in teaching in law and society programs in Canada. The authors have witnessed cobbled together curriculums which rely upon a potpourri of sources from law, criminology, criminal justice and law and society disciplines. There exists a growing interest from university students and legal scholars alike for a reader in the context of law reform and legal change in respect of sexual politics and movements in Canada, especially in the context of more modern iterations of crime and sexual politics. Furthermore, while this collection is intended to be educational in the main, it will foster broader discussions in the context of legal regulation of sex and sexuality in Canadian jurisprudence.?