Governing Pleasures

How did concepts of sex and gender, race and class, home and empire develop in Victorian society? Lisa Z. Sigel charts the evolution of these ideas through the medium of pornography. Governing Pleasures details its production, distribution, and consumption in Great Britain between Waterloo and World War One. Rather than viewing pornography as a static phenomenon, Sigel examines how this medium changed over time to explore key questions: How did British society define pornography? Who had access to it? What did people make of its ideas? And how did these messages affect sexual and social dynamics? The author asserts that pornography offered people a way to make sense of sexuality and its relationship to the world during the transition of British society from an era of radical politics to one of consumer pleasures. Sigel vividly illustrates her arguments with literary and visual materials drawn from public and private collections. Book jacket.

This book addresses how sexual practices and identities are imagined and regulated through development discourses and within institutions of global governance. The underlying premise of this volume is that the global development industry plays a central role in constructing people’s sexual lives, access to citizenship, and struggles for livelihood. Despite the industry’s persistent insistence on viewing sexuality as basically outside the realm of economic modernization and anti-poverty programs, this volume brings to the fore heterosexual bias within macroeconomic and human rights development frameworks. The work fills an important gap in understanding how people’s intimate lives are governed through heteronormative policies which typically assume that the family is based on blood or property ties rather than on alternative forms of kinship. By placing heteronormativity at the center of analysis, this anthology thus provides a much-needed discussion about the development industry’s role in pathologizing sexual deviance yet also, more recently, in helping make visible a sexual rights agenda. Providing insights valuable to a range of disciplines, this book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Development Studies, Gender Studies, and International Relations. It will also be highly relevant to development practitioners and international human rights advocates. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780203868348, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Thanks to the publication of Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, George Groves was renowned as "the greatest nineteenth-century Plato scholar". In the reface to this book, the author says, he's chosen the characters of Plato and Socrates, as they are interesting and important characters in philosophy and history. The personality of Socrates has become legendary. Yet, the period of his greatest achievement coincided with work and life od other important philosophers. This book tells about important leaders of thought from the Socrates circles: Xenophon, Kriton, Protagoras, Parmenides, Menon and others. It may be used an as supplementary source for learning philosophy and for individual research on the history of philosophy. According to the author, this book is a sequel and supplement to his major opus "The History of Greece."

This innovative text's critical examination foregrounds the prime reason why so many people participate in or watch sport – pleasure. Although there has been a "turn" to emotions and affect within academia over the last two decades, it has been somewhat remiss that pleasure, as an integral aspect of human life, has not received greater attention from sociologists of sport, exercise and physical education. This book addresses this issue via an unabashed examination of sport and the moving body via a "pleasure lens." It provides new insights about the production of various identities, power relations and social issues, and the dialectical links between the socio-cultural and the body. Taking a wide-sweeping view of pleasure - dignified and debauched, distinguished and mundane – it examines topics as diverse as aging, health, fandom, running, extreme sports, biopolitics, consumerism, feminism, sex and sexuality. In drawing from diverse theoretical approaches and original empirical research, the text reveals the social and political significance of pleasure and provides a more rounded, dynamic and sensual account of sport.

Much has been written of the forbidden pleasures. But what of the "unforbidden" pleasures? Unforbidden Pleasures is the singular new book from Adam Phillips, the author of Missing Out, Going Sane, and On Balance. Here, with his signature insight and erudition, Phillips takes Oscar Wilde as a springboard for a deep dive into the meanings and importance of the unforbidden, from the fall of our "first parents," Adam and Eve, to the work of the great psychoanalytic thinkers. Forbidden pleasures, he argues, are the ones we tend to think about, yet when you look into it, it is probable that we get as much pleasure, if not more, from unforbidden pleasures than from those that are taboo. And we may have underestimated just how restricted our restrictiveness, in thrall to the forbidden and its rules, may make us. An ambitious book that speaks to the precariousness of modern life, Unforbidden Pleasures explores the philosophical, psychological, and social dynamics that govern human desire and shape our everyday reality.