'Sexual anarchy' - dire predictions, disasters, apocalypse - became the hallmark of the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The New Woman and the Odd Woman threatened male identity and self-esteem; teh emergence of feminism and homosexuality meant the redefining of masculinity and femininity. This is the terrain which Elaine Showalter explores with such consummate originality and wit. Looking at parallels between the ends of the 19th and 20th centuries and their representations in literature, art and film, she ranges over the trial of Oscar Wilde, the public furore over prostitution and syphilis, moral outrage over the breakdown of the family, abortion rights and AIDS. High and low culture - from male quest romances to contemporary male bonding movies (Heart of Darkness reworked into Apocalypse Now), Freud to Fatal Attraction - all are part of this scholarly and entertaining study of the fin de siecle.

"David Engelhardt is the right kind of iconoclast, whose writing fells forests of fashionable darkness. Good Kills is like a very sharp sword. Read it carefully." Eric Metaxas, #1 New York Times bestselling author and host of the nationally syndicated Eric Metaxas Radio Show "Good Kills is a brilliant exposé of profound and original thoughts related to the subject of God, justice, and order." Charlie Kirk, New York Times bestselling author and host of the nationally syndicated Charlie Kirk Show Is a sword the witch's tool? The use of negative force in our lives, churches, and culture has been relegated to the cultural movement toward positivity. We have been recently given a positive God who gives positive things to positive people, but that is a shallow understanding of our story. This shallow understanding of God and justice has produced insulin-riddled souls created by the syrupy cannons fired from the pulpits of our cultural critics. If it is true that negative force through the sword, pain, repentance, and even death, brings order and flourishing to the human heart-in the correct adjudication, then we must travel through the lands of death to lead us to life. This book explores biblical and cultural issues as related to justice, goodness, and the use of the dark elements of our world in order to find our way back to life.

Anarchism & Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power brings the rich traditions of anarchist thought and practice to contemporary questions about the politics of sexuality.

The Cockettes. Born in drug-fueled anarchy in a San Francisco commune in 1969, the elaborately costumed and gender-defying performance troupe influenced American underground culture for decades.

The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction explores the representation of Victorian womanhood in the work of some of today's most important British and North American novelists including A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter and Toni Morrison. By analysing these novels in the context of the scientific, religious and literary discourses that shaped Victorian ideas about gender, it contributes to an important inter-disciplinary debate. For while showing the power of these discourses to shape women's roles, the novels also suggest how individual women might challenge that power through their own lives.

Using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new kind of feminism, this “provocative and pleasurable romp through contemporary gender politics . . . is as fun as it is illuminating” (Ariel Levy, New Yorker) Why are so many women single, so many men resisting marriage, and so many gays and lesbians having babies? Gaga Feminism answers these questions while attempting to make sense of the tectonic cultural shifts that have transformed gender and sexual politics in the last few decades. This colorful landscape is populated by symbols and phenomena as varied as pregnant men, late-life lesbians, SpongeBob SquarePants, and queer families. So how do we understand the dissonance between these real experiences and the heteronormative narratives that dominate popular media? We can embrace the chaos! With equal parts edge and wit, J. Jack Halberstam reveals how these symbolic ruptures open a critical space to embrace new ways of conceptualizing sex, love, and marriage. Using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new era, Halberstam deftly unpacks what the pop superstar symbolizes, to whom and why. The result is a provocative manifesto of creative mayhem—a roadmap to sex and gender for the twenty-first century—that holds Lady Gaga as an exemplar of a new kind of feminism that privileges gender and sexual fluidity. Part handbook, part guidebook, and part sex manual, Gaga Feminism is the first book to take seriously the collapse of heterosexuality and find signposts in the wreckage to a new and different way of doing sex and gender.

Throughout most of the eighteenth century and particularly during the religious revivals of the Great Awakening, evangelical women in colonial New England participated vigorously in major church decisions, from electing pastors to disciplining backsliding members. After the Revolutionary War, however, women were excluded from political life, not only in their churches but in the new republic as well. Reconstructing the history of this change, Susan Juster shows how a common view of masculinity and femininity shaped both radical religion and revolutionary politics in America. Juster compares contemporary accounts of Baptist women and men who voice their conversion experiences, theological opinions, and proccupation with personal conflicts and pastoral controversies. At times, the ardent revivalist message of spiritual individualism appeared to sanction sexual anarchy. According to one contemporary, revival attempted "to make all things common, wives as well as goods." The place of women at the center of evangelical life in the mid-eighteenth century, Juster finds, reflected the extent to which evangelical religion itself was perceived as "feminine"—emotional, sensional, and ultimately marginal. In the 1760s, the Baptist order began to refashion its mission, and what had once been a community of saints—often indifferent to conventional moral or legal constraints—was transformed into a society of churchgoers with a concern for legitimacy. As the church was reconceptualized as a "household" ruled by "father" figures, "feminine" qualities came to define the very essence of sin. Juster observes that an image of benevolent patriarchy threatened by the specter of female power was a central motif of the wider political culture during the age of democratic revolutions.

Political philosophy is dominated by a myth, the myth of the necessity of the state. The state is considered necessary for the provision of many things, but primarily for peace and security. In this provocative book, Gerard Casey argues that social order can be spontaneously generated, that such spontaneous order is the norm in human society and that deviations from the ordered norms can be dealt with without recourse to the coercive power of the state. Casey presents a novel perspective on political philosophy, arguing against the conventional political philosophy pieties and defending a specific political position, which he identifies as 'libertarian anarchy'. The book includes a history of the concept of anarchy, an examination of the possibility of anarchic societies and an articulation of the nature of law and order within such societies. Casey presents his specific form of anarchy, undergirded by a theory of human action that prioritises liberty, as a philosophically and politically viable alternative to the standard positions in political theory.

“What this remarkable book does . . . is to remind us of that passion, that revolutionary fervor, that camaraderie, that persistence in the face of political defeat and personal despair so needed in our time as in theirs.” —Howard Zinn “Fascinating ...With marvelous clarity and depth, Candace Falk illuminates for us an Emma Goldman shaped by her time yet presaging in her life the situation and conflicts of women in our time.” —Tillie Olsen One of the most famous political activists of all time, Emma Goldman was also infamous for her radical anarchist views and her “scandalous” personal life. In public, Goldman was a firebrand, confidently agitating for labor reform, anarchism, birth control, and women’s independence. But behind closed doors she was more vulnerable, especially when it came to the love of her life. Love, Anarchy, & Emma Goldman is an account of Goldman’s legendary career as a political activist. But it is more than that—it is a biography that offers an intimate look at how Goldman’s passion for social reform dovetailed with her passion for one man: Chicago activist, hobo king, and red-light district gynecologist Ben Reitman. Candace Falk takes us into the heart of their tumultuous love affair, finding that even as Goldman lectured on free love, she confronted her own intense jealousy. As director of the Emma Goldman papers, Falk had access to over 40,000 writings by Goldman—including her private letters and notes—and she draws upon these archives to give us a rare insight into this brilliant, complex woman’s thoughts. The result is both a riveting love story and a primer on an exciting, explosive era in American politics and intellectual life.

Draws together the most important of Emma Goldman's many writings on 'The Sex Question. 'The Sex Question' emerged for Goldman in multiple contexts, and we find her addressing it in writing on subjects as varied as women's suffrage, 'free love', birth control, the 'New Woman', homosexuality, marriage, love and literature. It was at once a political question, an economic question, a question of morality and a question of social relations. This unites her most important essays and archival material in an attempt to recreate Goldman's great work on sex and feminism.