The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy

by Lancaster,Roger N.

• ISBN13: 9780415910057
• ISBN10: 0415910056
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-08-27
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The Gender/Sexuality Readeris a sophisticated survey of the best recent work on bodies and desires across cultures and through time. Foregrounding ethnographic studies and social history, this anthology brings together an unusually broad selection of essays across the disciplines--essays that link the typically segregated topics of desire, demography, and nationalism; bodily adornment and violence against women; colonialism, gender, race, and sexuality. The settings of these rich studies are diverse: the contemporary United States, haunted by spectres of race and sex; post-Maoist China, whose love affair with the commodity draws on images of white-skinned women; modern clinics and hospitals, where new medical technologies pose unprecedented dilemmas; sexual subcultures as diverse as the lesbian community of San Francisco and carnival worlds in Brazil; and historical periods ranging from classical antiquity to postmodern Egypt. The topics these essays treat are likewise diverse and engaging:eugenics in Singapore, the political and economic context of motherhood in Brazil, rape and the inner lives of black American women, sex/culture wars in the US, the precariousness of sexual identity--and its political implications--in Nicaragua, and media representations of Africa. These essays develop the insights of social constructionism, showing how gender, sexuality, and power are historically connected and practically intertwined. Taken together, they also extend the reach of this approach, concretely connecting gender/sexuality to class, race, and nation. Contributors make use of postmodernism's topical mobility and cultural studies' thematic range while--in the best of the social science tradition--never losing sight of biology, political economy, and history. The editors' introduction situates this ground-breaking, contemporary work in the rise of feminist, gay poststructuralist, and political-economic theories, and illuminates the changing political contestations at the heart ofembodied desire.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction Embodied Meanings, Carnal Practices	1	(12)
Micaela di Leonardo
Roger N. Lancaster
EMBODIMENTS OF HISTORY: LOCAL MEANINGS, GLOBAL ECONOMIES	13	(196)
Part One Moving Borders: Genders, Sexualities, Histories An introduction to the cultural history of gender/sexuality: body politics at the convergence of colonialism, race, and class	13	(58)
1 Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia	13	(24)
Ann Laura Stoler
2 Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body	37	(16)
Siobhan Somerville
3 White Lies, Black Myths Rape, Race, and the Black "Underclass"	53	(18)
Micaela di Leonardo
Part Two Modes of Reproduction: Kinship, Parenthood, States Is the family universal? Are mothers invariably nurturing? How kinship, technology, and politics construct pregnancy, parenting, and reproduction	71	(82)
4 Is There a Family? New Anthropological Views	71	(11)
Jane Collier
Michelle Z. Rosaldo
Sylvia Yanagisako
5 Lifeboat Ethics Mother Love and Child Death in Northeast Brazil	82	(7)
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
6 Population Delusion and Reality	89	(18)
Amartya Sen
7 State Fatherhood The Politics of Nationalism, Sexuality, and Race in Singapore	107	(15)
Geraldine Heng
Janadas Devan
8 Gender in the Post-Socialist Transition The Abortion Debate in Hungary	122	(12)
Susan Gal
9 Fetal Images The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction	134	(19)
Rosalind Pollack Petchesky
Part Three The Social Construction of Identities: Comparative Sexualities Sexual identities in the context of political economy, kinship systems, family structures, and historical change	153	(56)
10 Sex and Society A Research Note from Social History and Anthropology	153	(16)
Ellen Ross
Rayna Rapp
11 Capitalism and Gay Identity	169	(10)
John D'Emilio
12 Transformations of Homosexuality-Based Classifications	179	(15)
David F. Greenberg
13 Seed of the Nation Men's Sex and Potency in Mexico	194	(15)
Matthew C. Gutmann
MAKING MARKS AND DRAWING BOUNDARIES: CORPOREAL PRACTICES	209	(202)
Part Four: Bodies of Knowledge and the Politics of Representation How representations of various sorts--scientific, medical, media, and academic--are affected by, and in turn affect, body politics--and what this implies for how we live	209	(100)
14 Secrets of God, Nature, and Life	209	(10)
Evelyn Fox Keller
15 Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology	219	(25)
Thomas Laqueur
16 How to Build a Man	244	(5)
Anne Fausto-Sterling
17 Baboons with Briefcases vs. Langurs with Lipstick Feminism and Functionalism in Primate Studies	249	(16)
Susan Sperling
18 The Violence of Rhetoric On Representation and Gender	265	(14)
Teresa de Lauretis
19 From Nation to Family Containing African AIDS	279	(12)
Cindy Patton
20 The Color of Sex Postwar Photographic Histories of Race and Gender in National Geographic Magazine	291	(18)
Catherine A. Lutz
Jane L. Collins
Part Five Marks and Signs: The Social Skin Body marks, body meanings: arguments on female circumcision, Victorian clitoridectomy, and plastic surgery	309	(52)
21 Womb as Oasis The Symbolic Context of Pharaonic Circumcision in Rural Northern Sudan	309	(16)
Janice Boddy
22 Victorian Clitoridectomy Isaac Baker Brown and His Harmless Operative Procedure	325	(10)
Elizabeth A. Sheehan
23 "Material Girl" The Effacements of Postmodern Culture	335	(26)
Susan Bordo
Part Six Polyvalent Pleasures: Resistances, Reinscriptions, and Dispersals "Polymorphous perversity" and sexual agency in diverse settings, as public and personal history	361	(50)
24 The Carnivalization of the World	361	(17)
Richard Parker
25 Sisters and Queers The Decentering of Lesbian Feminism	378	(14)
Arlene Stein
26 "Playing with Fire" The Gendered Construction of Chicana/Mexicana Sexuality	392	(19)
Patricia Zavella
APPROPRIATIONS, CONTESTATIONS, AND ADAPTATIONS: TOWARD A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT	411
Part Seven Sex Wars, Culture Wars Violence Against Women and the Culture Wars	411	(62)
27 Violence, Sexuality, and Women's Lives	411	(23)
Lori L. Heise
28 Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance	434	(6)
Darlene Clark Hine
29 Negotiating Sex and Gender in the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography	440	(13)
Carole S. Vance
30 The Neo-Family-Values Campaign	453	(20)
Judith Stacey
Part Eight Travelling Theory: Transitional and Postcolonial Interlocutions Gender/sexuality in postcolonial and postrevolutionary situations; bodies across and between (rather than simply within) cultures and nations	473	(58)
31 The Consumption of Color and the Politics of White Skin in Post-Mao China	473	(14)
Louisa Schein
32 The Enterprise of Empire Race, Class, Gender, and Japanese National Identity	487	(15)
Jacalyn D. Harden
33 Movie Stars and Islamic Moralism in Egypt	502	(11)
Lila Abu-Lughod
34 Sex Acts and Sovereignty Race and Sexuality in the Construction of the Australian Nation	513	(18)
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Part Nine Re-Imagining Bodies How to think the body now. Performativity, "post-fordist" bodies in the age of AIDS, and subversive carnal practices in an unlikely place: Three topically distinct, methodologically juxtaposed yet uncannily consonant pieces on body, identity, and selfhood	531
35 Excerpt from "Introduction" to Bodies That Matter	531	(12)
Judith Butler
36 The End of the Body?	543	(16)
Emily Martin
37 Guto's Performance Notes on the Transvestism of Everyday Life	559
Roger N. Lancaster