What makes the textual image of a woman with a penis so compelling, malleable, and persistent? Although the figure of the phallic woman is in no sense unique to our age, Every Inch a Woman takes note of a proliferation of phallic feminine figures in disparate North American and European texts from the end of the nineteenth century onward. This multiplication, which continues today, admits of a corresponding multiplicity of motives. The phallic woman can be a ribald joke, a fantastical impossibility, a masculine usurper, an ultimately unthreatening sexual style, an interrogation into...

Honorable Mention for the Canadian Women's Studies Association Book Prize

Sexing the Teacher is a provocative study of public and professional responses to female teacher sex scandals in Canada, the United States and Britain. Sheila Cavanagh examines the moral and professional panic over sexual transgressions in the educational milieu by analyzing several sensationalized legal cases, including Mary Kay Letourneau, Amy Gehring, and Heather Ingram.

Deploying queer theory, psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, and feminist film theory, Cavanagh analyses deep-seated anxieties...

In 2004, the first same-sex couple legally married in Quebec. How did homosexuality - an act that had for centuries been defined as abominable and criminal - come to be sanctioned by law?

Judging Homosexuals finds answers in a comparative analysis of gay persecution in France and Quebec, places that share a common culture but have diverging legal traditions. In both settings, Patrice Corriveau explores how various groups - family and clergy, doctors and jurists - tried to manage people who were defined in turn as sinners, as criminals, as inverts, and as citizens to be...

After the Great War, British men and women grappled with their ignorance about sexuality and desire. Seeking advice and information from doctors, magazines, and each other, they wrote tens of thousands of letters about themselves as sexual subjects. In these letters, they disclosed their uncertainties, their behaviors, and the role of sexuality in their lives. Their fascinating narratives tell how people sought to unleash their imaginations and fashion new identities.

Making Modern Love shows how readers embraced popular mediaOCoself-help books, fetish magazines, and advice columnsOCoas...

For decades, Singapore's gay activists have sought equality and justice in a state where law is used to stifle basic civil and political liberties. In her groundbreaking book, "Mobilizing Gay Singapore," Lynette Chua asks, what does a social movement look like in an authoritarian state? She takes an expansive view of the gay movement to examine its emergence, development, strategies, and tactics, as well as the roles of law and rights in social processes.

Chua tells this important story using in-depth interviews with gay activists, observations of the movement's activities-including...

Biographers, journalists, and satirists have long used the subject of sex to define the masculine character and political authority of America's Founding Fathers. Tracing these commentaries on the Revolutionary Era's major political figures in "Sex and the Founding Fathers," Thomas Foster shows how continual attempts to reveal the true character of these men instead exposes much more about Americans and American culture than about the Founders themselves.

"Sex and the Founding Fathers "examines the remarkable and varied assessments of the intimate lives of George Washington, Thomas...

Despite being dubbed "the world's oldest profession," prostitution has rarely been viewed as a legitimate form of labor. Instead, it is often criminalized, sensationalized, and polemicized. In Selling Sex, Emily van der Meulen, Elya Durisin, and Victoria Love present a more nuanced view of the sex industry. They bring together a vast collection of voices - including feminists, researchers, advocates, and sex workers of every stripe - to challenge dominant narratives surrounding sex work. Presenting a variety of perspectives on such diverse topics as social stigma, police violence,...

A controversial figure, innovative scholar, and ardent advocate for sexual liberation, sexologist John Money opened a new field of research in sexual science and gave currency to medical ideas about human sexuality. This book offers, for the first time, a balanced and probing textual analysis of this pioneering scholar's writing to assess Money's profound impact on the debates and research on sexuality and gender that dominated the last half of the twentieth century. The author recovers Money's brilliance and insight from simplistic dismissals of his work due to his involvement in the...