Regulating Sexuality

Regulating Sexuality: Legal Consciousness in Lesbian and Gay Lives explores the impact that recent seismic shifts in the legal landscape have had for lesbians and gay men. The last decade has been a time of extensive change in the legal regulation of lesbian and gay lives in Britain, Canada and the US. Almost every area where the law impacts on sexuality has been reformed or modified. These legal developments combine to create a new, uncharted terrain for lesbians and gay men. And, through an analysis of their attitudes, views and experiences, this book explores the effects of these developments. Drawing on, and developing, the concept of ‘legal consciousness’, Regulating Sexuality focuses on four different ‘texts’: qualitative responses to a large-scale online survey of lesbians’ and gay men’s views about the legal recognition of same sex relationships; published auto/biographical narratives about being and becoming a lesbian or gay parent; semi-structured, in-depth, interviews with lesbians and gay men about relationship recognition, parenting, discrimination and equality; and fictional utopian texts. In this study of the interaction between law and society in social justice movements, Rosie Harding interweaves insights from the new legal pluralism with legal consciousness studies to present a rich and nuanced exploration of the contemporary regulation of sexuality.

Regulating Sexuality: Legal Consciousness in Lesbian and Gay Lives explores the impact that recent seismic shifts in the legal landscape have had for lesbians and gay men. The last decade has been a time of extensive change in the legal regulation of lesbian and gay lives in Britain, Canada and the US. Almost every area where the law impacts on sexuality has been reformed or modified. These legal developments combine to create a new, uncharted terrain for lesbians and gay men. And, through an analysis of their attitudes, views and experiences, this book explores the effects of these developments. Drawing on, and developing, the concept of ‘legal consciousness’, Regulating Sexuality focuses on four different ‘texts’: qualitative responses to a large-scale online survey of lesbians’ and gay men’s views about the legal recognition of same sex relationships; published auto/biographical narratives about being and becoming a lesbian or gay parent; semi-structured, in-depth, interviews with lesbians and gay men about relationship recognition, parenting, discrimination and equality; and fictional utopian texts. In this study of the interaction between law and society in social justice movements, Rosie Harding interweaves insights from the new legal pluralism with legal consciousness studies to present a rich and nuanced exploration of the contemporary regulation of sexuality.

Does Canada need any more collections about legal regulation of sex and sexuality? Volumes exist dealing with sex work and pornographies. Certainly, volumes abound dealing with emerging sexualities in Canada and new sexual freedoms. This book seeks to do more than tell a story of broad generalities about the law. It forges the links between the history of law and modern iterations of judgments pertaining to that law. Hence the uncomfortable line between Victorian morality (often) and modern regulation, is thematically explored through the book. More modern iterations of sexual regulation in Canada are being deployed and, in this book, the authors explore the interplay between emerging digital technologies and legal regulation. Newer laws in Canada have been drafted to recognize that sexual expression can be a means of violence inherently, and thus an exploration of modern sexual digital expression and its emerging jurisprudence represent a new frontier in the regulation of sex and sexuality in Canada. We explore how legal regulation has responded to these new crimes.This collection is founded upon the editors? joint experiences in teaching in law and society programs in Canada. The authors have witnessed cobbled together curriculums which rely upon a potpourri of sources from law, criminology, criminal justice and law and society disciplines. There exists a growing interest from university students and legal scholars alike for a reader in the context of law reform and legal change in respect of sexual politics and movements in Canada, especially in the context of more modern iterations of crime and sexual politics. Furthermore, while this collection is intended to be educational in the main, it will foster broader discussions in the context of legal regulation of sex and sexuality in Canadian jurisprudence.?

Analyzing key examples of the sexual and familial regulation (through the law) of girls and women in twentieth-century Canada, this work explores the ways in which class, race, and gender shape the definition and punishment of criminality. It also examines the changing social and legal definitions of "normal" versus "criminal" sexual and family relationships, using case studies of incest, childhood sexual abuse, wife assault, prostitution, girls in conflict with the law, and Native women and the law.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"Sexuality, as we live it, is primarily a social creation and therefore it changes historically; sexual definition which we accept as "natural" - such as lesbian, gay, or heterosexual - emerge only through a specific social process linked to broader changes in class, gender, and State formation. This pioneering analysis uncovers the history of the Canadian lesbian and gay communities, and, by extension, the history of sexuality in general. Kinsman offers insights into the social forces that have organized and maintained gay oppression and pinpoints some potential allies of sexual liberation. He suggest moving towards very different criteria for organizing and regulating sexuality, desire, and pleasure. The Regulation of Desire concludes with suggestions as to how sexual politics and help transform progressive politics and contribute to broad social change."--Page [4] of cover.

On female sexual morality

"Joffe takes us from the most private aspects of sexuality into the arena of public policy and state regulation." --Carroll Smith-Rosenberg "The author convincingly argues that the Federal Government, the feminist movement and the New Right fail to adequately address the often wrenching conflicts faced daily by birth control and abortion workers. [These conflicts] have spurred many family planning workers to construct and implement a wholly unauthorized vision of family planning policy, one that melds pure ideology with the complicated truths of individuals' social and sexual lives.... [Joffe] makes a cogent and finely nuanced case for the wisdom-indeed, the necessity- of this vision." --Marian Sandmaier, New York Times Book Review "A psychosocial presentation at its best, the book probes and illuminates the workers' whole environment, documenting their need for status and engagement to offset meager pay and enervating routine and their need to balance sexual liberalism with concern for immature, vulnerable women. A valuable resource that clarifies human service programs as a whole." --Library Journal "A wonderfully alive and readable ethnographic study." --The Women's Review of Books