First published in 1983 Which Way is Up presents a selection of Bob Connell’s writings on three key issues of modern social analysis- sex and gender, class and power, and culture. The essays range from psychoanalysis and contemporary feminism to the role theory, from the analysis of class and culture to the debate about intellectuals and the ‘new class’. In critically reviewing contemporary thought on these issues, the author has developed a perspective centred on the analysis of social practice. Easy to read, often witty, the essays represent an attempt to shift social theory into the real world of the late twentieth century, to go beyond the limits of orthodox sociology and radical dogmas, to think through theoretical questions without losing touch with practical politics. This is a must read for students and scholars of sociology.

First published in 1986, Sex, Class and Culture is a collection of Marxist feminist essays that develops an original critical theory and applies it to literature, the visual arts, and mass media. Lillian Robinson was the first American critic to suggest the essential connections among sex, class, and race as forces that shape works of art and the critical response to them. In applying her theory to particular texts, she considers topics from the Renaissance epic to the Regency romance, from Jane Austen to contemporary feminist poets, and from factory workers’ memoirs to TV images of career women and housewives. The essays are insightful because Robinson clearly knows this wide assortment of texts, cares about their significance, and writes about them with wit. They are irreverent, because she asserts the feminist critic’s permanent responsibility to ask "So What?" and they are controversial because she constantly addresses that question to our most powerful and respectable institutions – social and literary. This book will be of interest to students of literature, history, gender studies and sexuality studies.

Why is it so hard to talk about sex and sexuality? In this crisp and compelling book, Amin Ghaziani provides a pithy introduction to the field of sexuality studies through a distinctively cultural lens. Rather than focusing on sex acts, which make us feel flustered and blind us to a bigger picture, Ghaziani crafts a conversation about sex cultures that zooms in on the diverse contexts that give meaning to our sexual pursuits and practices. Unlike sex, which is a biological expression, the word 'sexuality' highlights how the materiality of the body acquires cultural meaning as it encounters other bodies, institutions, regulations, symbols, societal norms, values, and worldviews. Think of it this way: sex + culture = sexuality. Sex Cultures offers an introduction to sexuality unlike any other. Its case-study and debate-driven approach, animated by examples from across the globe and across disciplines, upends stubborn assumptions that pit sex against society. The elegance of the arguments makes this book a pleasurable read for beginners and experts alike.

This volume provides a means of foregrounding new questions, methods, and theories which can be applied to digital media, platforms, and infrastructures. These inquiries include, among others, how representation to hardware, software, computer code, and infrastructures might be implicated in global economic, political, and social systems of control.

"A must-read for any student—present or former—stuck in hookup culture’s pressure to put out." —Ana Valens, Bitch Offering invaluable insights for students, parents, and educators, Lisa Wade analyzes the mixed messages of hookup culture on today’s college campuses within the history of sexuality, the evolution of higher education, and the unfinished feminist revolution. She draws on broad, original, insightful research to explore a challenging emotional landscape, full of opportunities for self-definition but also the risks of isolation, unequal pleasure, competition for status, and sexual violence. Accessible and open-minded, compassionate and honest, American Hookup explains where we are and how we got here, asking, “Where do we go from here?”

This book, first published in 1989, is an analysis of what changed in 1789 with the French Revolution and what contemporary life owes to the event. It was not simply a series of events with worldwide repercussions, but also represented the foundation of the middle-class domination of social, cultural and political space, which survives today and is the site of major crises of public culture. One such site is the body. In spite of its prominence in consumer culture as an object of adornment and beautification, the human body retains none of its historic dignity and authority. The argument of this book is that the French Revolution played a crucial part in this diminution of the body. It traces revolutionary models of behaviour around the body and public life, and explains how such myths as the division between public and private, male and female worlds, and such masculine values as ‘objectivity’ were an integral part of the new public world created by the revolutionary middle class.