Talk on the Wilde Side explains the role the popular press plays in producing and disseminating normative concepts of masculinity. Focusing on newspaper reports of the trials of Oscar Wilde, the book demonstrates how Wilde was presented as the iconic embodiment of a new type of sexual actor - the male homosexual. Acceptible norms of journalism, however, meant that the depiction of this new category was limited to that of the antithesis of normal masculinity.

Biological immunity as we know it does not exist until the late nineteenth century. Nor does the premise that organisms defend themselves at the cellular or molecular levels. For nearly two thousand years "immunity," a legal concept invented in ancient Rome, serves almost exclusively political and juridical ends. "Self-defense" also originates in a juridico-political context; it emerges in the mid-seventeenth century, during the English Civil War, when Thomas Hobbes defines it as the first "natural right." In the 1880s and 1890s, biomedicine fuses these two political precepts into one,...