Reframing Sex

This book is an exploration of both mainstream and independent media. Grounded in qualitative methods, this book explores three trans masculine run YouTube channels alongside the streaming productions: The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Orange is the New Black, and Transparent. Analyzing and contrasting these narratives illuminates how even the most progressive of pop culture productions fail to present multi-dimensional transgender narratives, thereby intensifying stigma and shame for those outside of the binary (male or female, man or woman, gay or straight). In contrast, trans masculine produced YouTube vlogs, such as those discussed in this book, can help audience members unlearn the ways in which the continuum of sex, gender, and sexual orientation has been simplified and obscured through corporate media. These vlogs thus exemplify the various ways in which independent media acts as an educational tool toward greater awareness, and perhaps empathy, of/for the self and others in regards to sexual identity.

In Bible, Gender, Sexuality James Brownson argues that Christians should reconsider whether or not the biblical strictures against same-sex relations as defined in the ancient world should apply to contemporary, committed same-sex relationships. Presenting two sides in the debate -- "traditionalist" and "revisionist" -- Brownson carefully analyzes each of the seven main texts that appear to address intimate same-sex relations. In the process, he explores key concepts that inform our understanding of the biblical texts, including patriarchy, complementarity, purity and impurity, honor and shame. Central to his argument is the need to uncover the moral logic behind the biblical text. Written in order to serve and inform the ongoing debate in many denominations over the questions of homosexuality, Brownson's in-depth study will prove a useful resource for Christians who want to form a considered opinion on this important issue.

This book is a legal and political intervention into a contemporary debate concerning the appropriateness of sexual offence prosecutions brought against young gender non-conforming people for so-called ‘gender identity fraud'. It comes down squarely against prosecution. To that end, it offers a series of principled objections based both on liberal principles, and arguments derived from queer and feminist theories. Thus prosecution will be challenged as criminal law overreach and as a spectacular example of legal inconsistency, but also as indicative of a failure to grasp the complexity of sexual desire and its disavowal. In particular, the book will think through the concepts of consent, harm and deception and their legal application to these specific forms of intimacy. In doing so, it will reveal how cisnormativity frames the legal interpretation of each and how this serves to preclude more marginal perspectives. Beyond law, the book takes up the ethical challenge of the non-disclosure of gender history. Rather than dwelling on this omission, it argues that we ought to focus on a cisgender demand to know as the proper object of ethical inquiry. Finally, and as an act of legal and ethical re-imagination, the book offers a queer counter-judgment to R v McNally, the only case involving a gender non-conforming defendant, so far, to have come before the Court of Appeal.

A Clinician’s Guide to Systemic Sex Therapy provides readers with an integrative and comprehensive theory in guiding their clinical practice. Pragmatically oriented, this text walks clinicians through diagnosis and treatment with resources such as tables, graphs, flow charts, and implementation strategies. The text does not rely on only visual elements, however. Acknowledging that information needs to be guided by a theory that can be translated into practice, the authors use the Intersystems approach to provide a comprehensive perspective in understanding and improving intimate and sexual relationships for clients. A Clinician’s Guide addresses and fills the lack of theoretical integration in the practice of couple and sex therapy and provides a relevant follow-up to the authors' extensive text, Systemic Sex Therapy (Routledge, 2008). This book is an essential roadmap for translating theory into practice and trains clinicians to give their clients the most thorough and valuable assistance possible.

In Reframing Bodies, Roger Hallas illuminates the capacities of film and video to bear witness to the cultural, political, and psychological imperatives of the AIDS crisis. He explains how queer films and videos made in response to the AIDS epidemics in North America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa challenge longstanding assumptions about both historical trauma and the politics of gay visibility. Drawing on a wide range of works, including activist tapes, found footage films, autobiographical videos, documentary portraits, museum installations, and even film musicals, Hallas reveals how such “queer AIDS media” simultaneously express both immediacy and historical consciousness. Queer AIDS media are neither mere ideological critiques of the dominant media representation of homosexuality and AIDS nor corrective attempts to produce “positive images” of people living with HIV/AIDS. Rather, they perform complex, mediated acts of bearing witness to the individual and collective trauma of AIDS. Challenging the entrenched media politics of who gets to speak, how, and to whom, Hallas offers a bold reconsideration of the intersubjective relations that connect filmmakers, subjects, and viewers. He explains how queer testimony reframes AIDS witnesses and their speech through its striking combination of direct address and aesthetic experimentation. In addition, Hallas engages recent historical changes and media transformations that have not only displaced queer AIDS media from activism to the archive, but also created new witnessing dynamics through the logics of the database and the remix. Reframing Bodies provides new insight into the work of Gregg Bordowitz, John Greyson, Derek Jarman, Matthias Müller, and Marlon Riggs, and offers critical consideration of important but often overlooked filmmakers, including Jim Hubbard, Jack Lewis, and Stuart Marshall.

The sexual revolution is unfinished. A sexual double standard between men and women still exists, and society continues to punish bad girls and reward good ones. Until we eliminate good-girl privilege and bad-girl stigma, women will not be fully free to embrace their sexuality. In Slut-Shaming, Whorephobia, and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution Meredith Ralston looks at the common denominators between the #MeToo movement, the myths of rape culture, and the pleasure gap between men and women to reveal the ways that sexually liberated women threaten the patriarchy. Weaving in history, pop culture, philosophy, interviews with sex workers, and personal anecdotes, Ralston shows how women cannot achieve sexual equality until the sexual double standard and good girl/bad girl binary are eliminated and women viewed by society as "whores" are destigmatized. Illustrating how women's sexuality is policed by both men and women, she argues that women must be allowed the same personal autonomy as men: the freedom to make sexual decisions for themselves, to obtain orgasm equality, and to insist on their own sexual pleasure. Dispelling the myth that all sex workers are victims and all clients are violent, Slut-Shaming, Whorephobia, and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution calls out Western society's hypocrisy about sex and shows how stigma and the marginalization of sex workers harms all women.

In Fantasies of Femininity, Jane Ussher focuses on unraveling the contradictory visions of feminine sexuality: the fact that representations of the definition of woman seethe with sexuality yet for centuries women have been condemned for exploring their own sexual desires. In her quest for the sources of feminine representation, Ussher interviewed dozens of women - as well as some men - and combed popular media - from Seventeen to Cosmopolitan and Dallas to Donahue - to identify what shapes women's symbolic images of sex and femininity. Ussher argues that women have effectively resisted and subverted these archetypal fantasies of femininity, and in the process of so doing, reframed the very boundaries of sex. In this way, she exposes as myth much of what we think we know about "woman" and about "sex."

Clinical Management of Sex Addiction’s newest edition updates many of the original chapters from 28 leaders in the field with new findings and treatment methods in the field of sex addiction. With a growing awareness of sex addiction as a problem, plus the advent of cybersex compulsion, professional clinicians are being confronted with sexual compulsion with little clinical or academic preparation. This is the first book distilling the experience of the leaders in this emerging field. It additionally provides new chapters on emerging areas of interest, including partner counseling, trauma and sexual addiction, and adolescent sex addiction. With a focus on special populations, the book creates a current and coherent reference for the therapist who faces quickly escalating new constellations of addictive sexual behavior. Readable, concise and filled with useful interventions, it is a key text for professionals new to the field and a classic reference for all clinicians who treat sex addiction.