Synopses & Reviews
Masturbation, vampires, cannibalism, bareback pornography, menstruation, sex education, and more. These issues provoke the moral panics of sexuality, the often unspoken and politically charged targets for accusations of deviance and threats to the existing social order. A provocative and path-breaking book, this interdisciplinary edited collection showcases the range of historical and contemporary crises we too often suppress. From closeted gay Republicans and vagina dentata imagery, to cyber pinkwashing and sex surrogates for the disabled, these cuttingedge essays draw from established and emerging scholars and span over three centuries of sexual panics. Provocative, surprising, engaging, and even shocking, this collection pulls together strange bedfellows and unlikely allies in the fight against the hypocritical, reductive, and dismissive voices promoting unnecessary panic. If you're panicking, you're not thinking.
Review
"With the blended ink of scholarly brilliance, activist wisdom, and biting humor, the writers in this volume accomplish a remarkable doubled analytic: they carry their critical lens under the covers of the moral panics of sexuality, targeting the erectile dysfunction of the Right wing and the conservative agenda more broadly, daring to theorize strategic diversionary motives and trace the multiple ideological tremors the morning after. At the same time, however, they refuse to neglect and attend intimately to the embodied crises of and sustained violence against women, queer, of color, marginalized, and figured/disfigured bodies, tossed to the political side of the road like a used condom." - Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Women's Studies and Urban Education, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA
Synopsis
A provocative feminist analysis of the moral panics of sexuality, this interdisciplinary edited collection showcases the range of historical and contemporary crises we too often suppress, including vagina dentata, vampires, cannibalism, age appropriateness, breast cancer, menstrual panics, and sex education.
About the Author
Breanne Fahs is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University, USA. She has published Performing Sex (2011) and dozens of articles on women's sexuality, critical embodiment, radical feminism, and political activism while also working as a clinical psychologist specializing in sexuality, trauma, and gender identity.Mary L. Dudy received her Ph.D. from University of California, Santa Barbara, and has taught at Arizona State University, USA. She works on English Renaissance drama, poetry, and has written a book titled Golden Age Spanish on the Jacobean Stage: John Fletcher's Reading and Writing of Cervantes and Co.
Sarah Stage received her Ph.D. from Yale University, USA, and is Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University, USA. Her books include Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women's Medicine (1979) and Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession (1997).
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction; Breanne Fahs, Mary L. Dudy and Sarah Stage
PART I: FEMALE DESIRE
1. Do I Have Something in my Teeth? Vagina Dentata and its Manifestations Within Popular Culture; Michelle Ashley Gohr
2. Vampires, Border Crossing, and Panic in Sheridan Le Fanu's 'Carmilla'; Ellen Stockstill
PART II: CREATING NORMS
3. Bodies That Are Always Out of Line: A Closer Look at 'Age Appropriate Sexuality'; Sara I. McClelland and L. E. Hunter
4. Raising Bloody Hell: Inciting Menstrual Panics Through Campus and Community Activism; Breanne Fahs
5. Scary Sex: The Moral Discourse of Glee; Sarah Flett Prior
PART III: COLONIAL EROTICS
6. Eating it Out: Human Consumption and Sexual Deviance in Nineteenth Century Travel Writing; Ayaan Agane
7. Cyber Pinkwashing: Gay Rights Under Occupation; Rachael Byrne
PART IV: TACTICAL PANICS
8. What 'Good' Girls Do: Katharine Bement Davis and the Moral Panic of the first U.S. Sexual Survey; Sarah Stage
9. Gay Republican in the American Culture War: Wisconsin Congressman Steve Gunderson, 1989-1996; Jordan O'Connell
PART V: CRITICAL PANICS
10. Time to Panic! Disability Justice, Sex Surrogacy, and Sexual Freedom; Brooke Willock
11. No to the Flow: Rejecting Feminine Norms and the Reproductive Imperative Through Hormonal Menstrual Suppression; Bianca Jarvis
12. Cumming to Terms: Bareback Pornography, Homonormativity, and Queer Survival in the Time of HIV/AIDS; Michael McNamara
Afterword: Insisting on 'both/and': Artifacts of Excavating the Moral Panics of Sexuality; Deborah Tolman
Endnotes
Index