This book offers a genealogy of the medicalisation of sexual appetite in Europe and the United States from the nineteenth to twenty-first century. Histories of sexuality have predominantly focused on the emergence of sexual identities and categories of desire. They have marginalised questions of excess and lack, the appearance of a libido that dwindles or intensifies, which became a pathological object in Europe by the nineteenth century. Through a genealogical approach that draws on the writings of Michel Foucault, A Genealogy of Appetite in the Sexual Sciences examines key ‘moments’ in the pathologisation of sexuality and demonstrates how medical techniques assumed critical roles in shaping modern understandings of the problem of appetite. It examines how techniques of the patient case history, elixirs and devices, measurement, diagnostic manuals and pharmaceuticals were central to the medicalisation of sexual appetite. Jacinthe Flore argues that these techniques are significant for understanding how a concern with ‘how much?’ has transformed medical knowledge of sexuality since the nineteenth century. The questions of ‘how much?’, ‘how often?’ and ‘how intense?’ thus require a genealogical investigation that pays attention to the emergence of medical techniques, the transformation of forms of knowledge and their effects on the problematisations of sexual appetite.

A Genealogy of Puberty Science explores the modern invention of puberty as a scientific object. Drawing on Foucault’s genealogical analytic, Pinto and Macleod trace the birth of puberty science in the early 1800s and follow its expansion and shifting discursive frameworks over the course of two centuries. Offering a critical inquiry into the epistemological and political roots of our present pubertal complex, this book breaks the almost complete silence concerning puberty in critical theories and research about childhood and adolescence. Most strikingly, the book highlights the failure ​of ongoing medical debates on early puberty to address young people’s sexual and reproductive embodiment and citizenships. A Genealogy of Puberty Science will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of child and adolescent ​health research, critical psychology, developmental psychology, health psychology, ​feminist and gender studies, ​medical history, science and technology studies, and sexualities and reproduction studies.

As one of the first book-length collections of critical essays on the topic of asexuality, Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives became a foundational text in the burgeoning field of asexuality studies. This revised and expanded ten-year anniversary edition both celebrates the book’s impact and features new scholarship at the vanguard of the field. While this edition includes some of the most-cited original chapters, it also features critical updates as well as new, innovative work by both up-and-coming and established scholars and activists from around the world. It brings in more global perspectives on asexualities, engages intersectionally with international formations of race and racialization, critiques global capital’s effects on identity and kinship, examines how digital worlds shape lived realities, considers posthuman becomings, experiments with the form of the manifesto, and imagines love and relation in ecologies that exceed and even supersede the human. This cutting-edge, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary book serves as a valuable resource for everyone—from those who are just beginning their critical exploration of asexualities to advanced researchers who seek to deepen their theoretical engagements with the field.

Death studies typically focus on the death of humans, overlooking the wider factors involved in social and natural processes around death. This edited volume provides an alternative focus for death studies by looking beyond human death, to reveal the complex interconnections among human and more than human creatures, entities and environments. Bringing together a diverse range of international scholars, the book sheds light on topics which have previously remained at the margins of contemporary death studies and death care cultures. Organised around three themes - Knowledge and Mediation, Care and Remembrance, and Agency and Power - this book pushes the boundaries of death studies to explore death and dying from beyond the perspective of a nature/culture binary.

This book elaborates and interrogates the idea of evil corporations from a diverse range of disciplines. There has long been awareness of systemic harms inflicted by corporations, but this awareness has rarely led to any effective legal means to prevent and/or respond adequately to them. Lawyers and legal theorists appear to be stuck asking the same questions, and giving the same ineffective answers. Part of the problem, this book maintains, is the relative lack of theoretical interrogation into the nature of corporations as responsible, moral agents. To break this stasis, this book draws upon philosophies of wickedness in order to ask whether or not corporations are, or can be, evil. With contributions from a range of different disciplines, including law, cultural theory, theology, and philosophy, it offers a novel account of how and why corporate wrongs are caused, whilst exploring the extent to which the legal system itself facilitates such wrongdoing. The book targets a broad international audience with research interests in corporate crime. This will be of particular interest to those within the legal discipline, including corporate law, criminal law, corporate crime and law and humanities scholars.

How can sociology explain the emergence of mental disorders in societies or individuals? This authoritative book makes a case for the renewal of the sociology of mental illness, proposing a reorganisation of this field around four areas: social stratification, stress, labelling and culture. Drawing on case studies from a range of global contexts, the book argues that current research focuses on identifying ‘social factors’, leaving the question of causality to psychiatry, while significant critical perspectives remain untapped. The result is an unprecedented resource that maps the current state of sociology of mental health, providing an invigorating manifesto for its future.

The discovery of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898 eventually led to a craze for radium products in the 1920s until their widespread use proved lethal for consumers, patients, and medical practitioners alike. Radium infiltrated American culture, Maria Rentetzi reveals, not only because of its potential to treat cancer but because it was transformed from a scientific object into a familiar, desirable commodity. She explores how Standard Chemical Company in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania—the first successful commercial producer of radium in the United States—aggressively promoted the benefits of radium therapy and its curative properties as part of a lucrative business strategy. Over-the-counter products, from fertilizers to paints and cosmetics to tonics and suppositories, inspired the same level of trust in consumers as a revolutionary pharmaceutical. The radium industry in the United States marketed commodities like Liquid Sunshine and Elixir of Youth at a time when using this new chemical element in the laboratory, in the hospital, in private clinics, and in commercial settings remained largely free of regulation. Rentetzi shows us how marketing campaigns targeted individually to men and women affected not only how they consumed these products of science but also how that science was understood and how it contributed to the formation of ideas about gender. Seduced by Radium ultimately reveals how innovative advertising techniques and seductive, state-of-the-art packaging made radium a routine part of American life, shaping scientific knowledge about it and the identities of those who consumed it.