New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

In this fascinating interview, Nathanael J. Homewood discusses his new book,Seductive Spirits: Deliverance, Demons, and Sexual Worldmaking in Ghanaian Pentecostalism (Stanford University Press, 2024). Pentecostalism, Africa's fastest-growing form of Christianity, has long been preoccupied with the business of banishing demons from human bodies. Among Ghanaian Pentecostals, deliverance is primary among the embodied, experiential gifts—a loud, messy, and noisy experience that ends only when the possessed body falls to the ground silent and docile, the evil spirits rendered powerless in the face of the holy spirit-wielding-prophets. And nowhere is Ghanaian Pentecostal obsession with demons more pronounced than with sexual demons. Homewood examines the frequent and varied experiences of spirit possession and sex with demons that constitute a vital part of Pentecostal deliverance ministries, offering insight into these practices assembled from long-term ethnographic engagement with four churches in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Relying on the uniqueness of the Pentecostal sensorium, this book unravels how spirits and sexuality intimately combine to expand the definition of the body beyond its fleshy boundaries. Demons are a knowledge regime, one that shapes how Pentecostals think about, engage with, and construct the cosmos. Deliverance Pentecostals reiterate and tarry with the demonic, especially sexually, as a realm of invention whereby alternative ways of being, sensing, and having sex are dreamed, practiced, and performed. Ultimately, Homewood argues for a distinction between colonial demonization and decolonial demons, charting another path to understanding being, the body, and sexualities. Nathanael Homewood is the Associate Director of Religious Studies at the University of Minnesota. His areas of specialty are global Christianity, religion and sexuality, African religion, and Pentecostalism. He has earned a B.A. in Political Science at the University of Western Ontario, an M.Div in Global Christianity from Yale Divinity School, an M.A. and Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Rice University. Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and is an editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894–1934 (University of Chicago Press, 2024) historian Dr. Katya Motyl explores the everyday acts of defiance that formed the basis for new, unconventional forms of womanhood in early twentieth-century Vienna. The figures Dr. Motyl brings back to life defied gender conformity, dressed in new ways, behaved brashly, and expressed themselves freely, overturning assumptions about what it meant to exist as a woman. Dr. Motyl delves into how these women inhabited and reshaped the urban landscape of Vienna, an increasingly modern, cosmopolitan city. Specifically, she focuses on the ways that easily overlooked quotidian practices such as loitering outside cafés and wandering through city streets helped create novel conceptions of gender. Exploring the emergence of a new womanhood, Embodied Histories presents a new account of how gender, the body, and the city merge with and transform each other, showing how our modes of being are radically intertwined with the spaces we inhabit. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We take the edible trappings of flirtation for granted: chocolate covered strawberries and romance, oysters on the half shell and desire, the eggplant emoji and a suggestive wink. But why does it feel so natural for us to link food and sexual pleasure? In Lustful Appetites: an Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex (Polity, 2024), Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves explores the long association between indulging in good food and an appetite for naughty sex, from the development of the Parisian restaurant as a place for men to meet with prostitutes and mistresses, to the role of sexual outlaws like bohemians, new women, lesbians and gay men in creating epicurean culture in Britain and the United States. Taking readers on a gastronomic journey from Paris and London to New York, Chicago and San Francisco, Lustful Appetites reveals how this preoccupation changed the ways we eat and the ways we are intimate―while also creating stigmas that persist well into our own twenty-first century. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s no secret that superhero comics and their related media perpetuate a model of a straight, white, male hero at the expense of representing women and other minorities, but other narratives exist. Searching for Feminist Superheroes: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Sam Langsdale recognizes that female-led superhero comics, with diverse casts of characters and inclusive storytelling, exist on the margins of the mainstream superhero genre. But rather than focusing on these stories as marginalized, Dr. Langsdale’s work on heroes such as Spider-Woman, America Chavez, and Ironheart locates the margins as a site of innovation and productivity, which have enabled the creation of feminist superhero texts. Employing feminist and intersectional philosophies in an analysis of these comics, Dr. Langsdale suggests that feminist superheroes have the potential to contribute to a social imagination that is crucial in working toward a more just world. At a time when US popular culture continues to manifest as a battleground between oppressive and progressive social norms, Searching for Feminist Superheroes demonstrates that a fight for a better world is worthwhile. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since the French Revolution of 1789, the absence of laws banning interracial marriages has served to reinforce two myths about modern France--first, that it is a sexual democracy and second, it is a color-blind nation where all French citizens can freely marry whomever they wish regardless of their race. Caroline Séquin challenges the narrative of French exceptionalism by revealing the role of prostitution regulation in policing intimate relationships across racial and colonial boundaries in the century following the abolition of slavery. Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848-1950 (Cornell UP, 2024) traces the rise and fall of the "French model" of prostitution policing in the "contact zones" of port cities and garrison towns across France and in Dakar, Senegal, the main maritime entry point of French West Africa. Séquin describes how the regulation of prostitution covertly policed racial relations and contributed to the making of white French identity in an imperial nation-state that claimed to be race-blind. She also examines how sex industry workers exploited, reinforced, or transgressed the racial boundaries of colonial rule. Brothels served as "gatekeepers of whiteness" in two arenas. In colonial Senegal, white-only brothels helped deter French colonists from entering unions with African women and producing mixed-race children, thus consolidating white minority rule. In the metropole, brothels condoned interracial sex with white sex workers while dissuading colonial men from forming long-term attachments with white French women. Ultimately, brothels followed a similar racial logic that contributed to upholding white supremacy. Dr. Séquin earned a BA and MA in English and American Studies at Université Nancy 2, an MA in Women and Gender Studies at Université Paris 8, and her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. She has won a number of awards from a range of institutions including Best Paper Prize from the Council for European Studies’ Gender and Sexuality Research Network for the article “Marie Piquemal, the ‘Colonial Madam’: Brothel Prostitution, Migration, and the Making of Whiteness in Interwar Dakar”. But I want to call attention to her Edward T. Gargan Prize for the best graduate student paper presented on post-1800 history at the annual conference of the Western Society for French History. Since 2019 she has been an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Lafayette College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

More men than ever are refusing loving partnerships and commitment, and instead seeking out “situationships.” When these men deign to articulate what they are looking for in a steady partner, they’ll often rely on superficial norms of attractiveness rooted in whiteness and anti-Blackness. Connecting the past to the present, in The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance (Beacon Press, 2024) sociologist Dr. Sabrina Strings argues that following the Civil Rights movement and the integration of women during the Second Wave Feminist movement, men aimed to hold on to their power by withholding love and commitment, a basic tenet of white supremacy and male domination, that served to manipulate all women. From pornography to hip hop, women—especially Black and “insufficiently white” women—were presented as gold diggers, props for masturbation, and side-pieces. Using historical research, personal stories, and critical analysis, Dr. Strings argues that the result is fuccboism, the latest incarnation of toxic masculinity. This work shows that men are not innately “toxic.” Nor do they hate love, commitment, or sex. Instead, men across race have been working a new code to effectively deny loving partnerships to women who are not pliant, slim, and white as a new mode of male domination. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Women's virginity held tremendous significance in early Christianity and the Mediterranean world. Early Christian thinkers developed diverse definitions of virginity and understood its bodily aspects in surprising, often nonanatomical ways. Eventually Christians took part in a cross-cultural shift toward viewing virginity as something that could be perceived in women's sex organs. Treating virginity as anatomical brought both benefits and costs. By charting this change and situating it in the larger landscape of ancient thought, Virgin Territory: Configuring Female Virginity in Early Christianity (University of California Press, 2022) illuminates unrecognized differences among early Christian sources and historicizes problematic ideas about women's bodies that still persist today. New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review Julia Kelto Lillis is Assistant Professor of Early Church History at Union Theological Seminary Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Radical Acts: HIV/AIDS Activism in Late Twentieth-Century England (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), Dr George Severs draws on activist campaign literature and materials, broadcast media, and new oral history interviews to reconstruct the overlooked world of radical AIDS activism in England. This book provides one of the first detailed histories of the radical HIV/AIDS movement in England, following ACT UP's travels from New York to London via prominent queer intellectuals, and reconstructing the vibrant theatrical campaigns staged by ACT UP groups across England.  But Radical Acts also highlights expressions of activism that were far more common than demonstrations and marches. Manifestations of a political commitment to ameliorating the injustices facing people living with HIV permeated most aspects of everyday life. These forms of 'everyday activism' played out in workplaces, universities and church halls across England, as well as through networks that stretched across Europe and North America. This book breaks new ground by studying the radical alongside the everyday, presenting a diverse constellation of activist responses to the epidemic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The State's Sexuality: Prostitution and Postcolonial Nation Building in South Korea (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Park Jeong-Mi uncovers how the lives and work of women engaged in prostitution, long considered the most abased members of society, have been strategically intertwined with the lofty purpose of building South Korea's postcolonial nation-state. Through a complicated, contradictory patchwork of laws and regulations, which Dr. Park conceptualizes as a "toleration-regulation regime," the South Korean state did not merely exclude sex workers from ordinary citizenship; it also mobilized them for national security, national development, and the making of a gendered citizenry. In the process, the newly independent state was constructed, augmented, and consolidated. Sex workers often protested such draconian policies and sometimes utilized state apparatuses to get recognition as citizens. Based on expansive, meticulous archival research and sophisticated interpretation of historical records and women's voices, Dr. Park rewrites the dynamic history of South Korea from 1945 to the present through the lens of prostitution. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Freelance curator Joanne Rosenthal joins Jana Byars to talk about Sex: Jewish Positions (Hirmer, 2024) and its concomitant exhibition at the Jewish museums in Berlin and Amsterdam. This book is also available in German with the same publisher as Sex. Judisches Positionen. An exploration of sexuality in Judaism, from ultra-Orthodox to secular. Sensuous, bold, and topical, this volume studies the entire spectrum of Jewish attitudes to sexuality. In doing so it examines widely held and contradictory stereotypes, according to which Judaism encounters sexuality either in a highly positive manner or with exceptionally strict rules and restrictions. This significant volume takes up central aspects of sexuality in Judaism and provides a comprehensive insight on topics such as Rabbinic regulations and the history of sexuality in Judaism; how ultra-Orthodox women deal with the strict regulations relating to intimacy; sexuality in films and art; and the experience of a Jewish couple and sexual therapist. Accompanied by eighty images, this interdisciplinary overview informs and offers surprises. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices