Sexual States

In Sexual States Jyoti Puri tracks the efforts to decriminalize homosexuality in India to show how the regulation of sexuality is fundamentally tied to the creation and enduring existence of the state. Since 2001 activists have attempted to rewrite Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which in addition to outlawing homosexual behavior is often used to prosecute a range of activities and groups that are considered perverse. Having interviewed activists and NGO workers throughout five metropolitan centers, investigated crime statistics and case law, visited various state institutions, and met with the police, Puri found that Section 377 is but one element of how homosexuality is regulated in India. This statute works alongside the large and complex system of laws, practices, policies, and discourses intended to mitigate sexuality's threat to the social order while upholding the state as inevitable, legitimate, and indispensable. By highlighting the various means through which the regulation of sexuality constitutes India's heterogeneous and fragmented "sexual state," Puri provides a conceptual framework to understand the links between sexuality and the state more broadly.

A ground-breaking psychoanalytic study on sexuality which maintains its originality today, forty-five years after its first publication. The book is a revision of psychoanalytic theory, starting with the work of Freud himself and including Melanie Klein's contributions on the early Oedipus Complex and the Depressive Position. But more than that, it is a metapsychological study of sexuality which provides a different perspective from more well-known ones that relate simply to a descriptive or behavioural point of view. In differentiating adult sexuality from infantile sexuality and polymorphism and perversion, taking unconscious phantasy and the notion of the primal scene as the pivotal point, Meltzer proposes a unified theoretical and clinical model which has proved of particular help in the field of the psychopathology of addictions and perversions.

Morse posits that the sexual revolution was deliberately created by elites of State and has led to widespread and profound unhappiness.

Reports the complete results of the United States' most comprehensive representative survey of sexual practices in the general adult population.

A ground-breaking psychoanalytic study on sexuality which maintains its originality today, forty-five years after its first publication. The book is a revision of psychoanalytic theory, starting with the work of Freud himself and including Melanie Klein's contributions on the early Oedipus Complex and the Depressive Position. But more than that, it is a metapsychological study of sexuality which provides a different perspective from more well-known ones that relate simply to a descriptive or behavioural point of view. In differentiating adult sexuality from infantile sexuality and polymorphism and perversion, taking unconscious phantasy and the notion of the primal scene as the pivotal point, Meltzer proposes a unified theoretical and clinical model which has proved of particular help in the field of the psychopathology of addictions and perversions.

Fourteen essays examine the unexpected relationships between government power and intimate life in the last 150 years of United States history. The last few decades have seen a surge of historical scholarship that analyzes state power and expands our understanding of governmental authority and the ways we experience it. At the same time, studies of the history of intimate life—marriage, sexuality, child-rearing, and family—also have blossomed. Yet these two literatures have not been considered together in a sustained way. This book, edited and introduced by three preeminent American historians, aims to close this gap, offering powerful analyses of the relationship between state power and intimate experience in the United States from the Civil War to the present. The fourteen essays that make up Intimate States argue that “intimate governance”—the binding of private daily experience to the apparatus of the state—should be central to our understanding of modern American history. Our personal experiences have been controlled and arranged by the state in ways we often don’t even see, the authors and editors argue; correspondingly, contemporary government has been profoundly shaped by its approaches and responses to the contours of intimate life, and its power has become so deeply embedded into daily social life that it is largely indistinguishable from society itself. Intimate States makes a persuasive case that the state is always with us, even in our most seemingly private moments.

A Haitian American woman survives a brutal kidnapping in this “commanding debut novel” from the New York Times–bestselling author of Bad Feminist (The New Yorker). Author and essayist Roxane Gay is celebrated for her incisive commentary on identity and culture, as well as for her bestselling nonfiction and short story collections. Now, with An Untamed State, she delivers a “breathtaking debut novel” (The Guardian, UK) of wealth in the face of crushing poverty, and the lawless anger produced by corrupt governments. Mireille Duval Jameson is living a fairy tale. The strong-willed youngest daughter of one of Haiti’s richest sons, she lives in the United States with her adoring husband and infant son, returning every summer to stay on her father’s Port-au-Prince estate. But the fairy tale ends when Mireille is kidnapped in broad daylight by a gang of heavily armed men, just outside the estate walls. Held captive by a man who calls himself The Commander, Mireille waits for her father to pay her ransom. As her father’s standoff with the kidnappers stretches out into days, Mireille must endure the torments of a man who despises everything she represents. An Untamed State is a “breathless, artful, disturbing and original” story of a willful woman attempting to find her way back to the person she once was, and of how redemption is found in the most unexpected of places (Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings).

No area of public policy and law has seen more change than lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and trans-gender rights, and none so greatly needs careful comparative analysis. Queer Inclusions, Continental Divisions explores the politics of sexual diversity in Canada and the United States by analyzing three contentious areas - relationship recognition, parenting, and schooling. It enters into long-standing debates over Canadian-American contrasts while paying close attention to regional differences. David Rayside's examination of change over time in the public recognition of sexual minorities is based on his long experience with the analysis of trends, as well as on a wide-ranging search of media, legal, and social science accounts of developments across Canada and the United States. Rayside points to a 'take off' pattern in Canadian policy change on relationship recognition and parenting, but not in schooling. At the same time, he explores the reasons for a 'pioneering' pattern in early gains by American LGBT activists, a surprising number of court wins by American lesbian and gay parents, and changes in American schooling that, while still modest, are more substantial than those instituted by the Canadian system. Queer Inclusions, Continental Divisions is a timely examination of controversial policy areas in North America and a reasoned judgment on the progress of lesbian and gay issues in our time.