News And Sexuality

This analysis of the ways in which sexual diversity is portrayed in the media is a practical teaching tool helping teachers and lecturers address this complex issue, providing additional resources, discussion questions, suggested assignments and a glossary of terms.

Critics often chastised the twentieth-century black press for focusing on sex and scandal rather than African American achievements. In Pleasure in the News, Kim Gallon takes an opposing stance—arguing that African American newspapers fostered black sexual expression, agency, and identity. Gallon discusses how journalists and editors created black sexual publics that offered everyday African Americans opportunities to discuss sexual topics that exposed class and gender tensions. While black churches and black schools often encouraged sexual restraint, the black press printed stories that complicated notions about respectability. Sensational coverage also expanded African American women’s sexual consciousness and demonstrated the tenuous position of female impersonators, black gay men, and black lesbians in early twentieth African American urban communities. Informative and empowering, Pleasure in the News redefines the significance of the black press in African American history and advancement while shedding light on the important cultural and social role that sexuality played in the power of the black press.

God has assumed a significant role in the sex lives of believers. It is God who decrees which types of sexual expression are permitted, and which forbidden. Through the Church, a patriarchal sexual landscape has been enacted to control sexual bodies which exerts its influence even in our secular culture. The Good News of the Body is a wide-ranging anthology on feminist sexual theology. Noting that Jesus, while being declared divine, took human form, the volume questions what happens when the flesh, rather than the Word, is placed at the center of theological reflection. What happens when women's bodies form the incarnational starting point for sexual politics and theology? Contributors, including Rosemary Ruether, Mary Hunt, and Melissa Raphael, examine such topics as the possibility of a Roman Catholic approach to sexuality bringing together the three aspects of Christian love of eros, philia, and agape; Jewish sexual and mystical teaching; the de-sexing of the disabled; erotic celibacy; human sexuality and the concept of the goddess; and the sometimes surprisingly similar conclusions about contraception reached by feminists and popes.

Conflict over homosexuality in Christian churches is only intensifying. We can do better. We have to do better. The stakes are too high to do otherwise. Conflicts are difficult and ugly, but the good news reaches even here. It is possible to have healthy conflict, to disagree and struggle together in ways that make us better and that make the church stronger. By looking deeply into the nature of religious conflict, we can cultivate practices and values that will mature our abilities as peacemakers, and strengthen our faith and our churches.

In recent years there has been a marked increase in both the volume and diversity of sexual imagery and talk on television, condemned by some as a ‘rising tide of filth’, celebrated by others as a ‘liberation’ from the regulations of the past. Television and Sexuality questions both these responses through an examination of television’s multiple channels and genres, and the wide range of sexual information and pleasures they provide. The book explores the way that sexual citizenship and sexual consumerism have been defined in the digital era to reveal the underlying assumptions held by the television industry about the tastes and sexual identities of its diverse audiences. It draws on the work of key thinkers in cultural and media studies, as well as feminist and queer theory, to interrogate the political and cultural significance of these developments. With topics including the regulation of taste and decency, sex scandals in the news, the biology of sex in science programmes, and gay, lesbian and postfeminist identities in ‘quality’ drama, this book is key reading for students in cultural and media studies and gender studies.

Addresses the pressing questions of how gender shapes the forms, practice, institutions and audiences of journalism, and explores the multiple interconnections between news, gender and power.

Chicago-based journalist Kamen (women's studies, Northwestern U.) argues that Monica Lewinsky's ambition and audacity are characteristic of a whole generation of women now in their 20s. She chronicles the sexual evolution of young women over the past decade. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR