The author--a lesbian, sex radical, ex-hooker, feminist, leftist organizer, and award-winning filmmaker--presents over 20 years of her writings and five new essays, including "A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home". She looks at themes such as the relationship between activism and desire and how sexuality is tied to one's class identity. 41 photos.

Since 1981, AIDS has had an enormous impact upon the popular imagination. Few other diseases this century have been greeted with quite the same fear, loathing, and prejudice against those who develop it. The mass media, and in particular, the news media, have played a vital part in "making sense" of AIDS. This volume takes an interdisciplinary perspective, combining cultural studies, history of medicine, and contemporary social theory to examine AIDS reporting. There have been three major themes dominating coverage: the "gay-plague" dominant in the early 1980s, panic-stricken visions of the end of the world as AIDS was said to pose a threat to everyone, in the late 1980s; and a growing routinising of coverage in the 1990s. This book lays bare the sub-textual ideologies giving meaning to AIDS news reports, including anxieties about pollution and contagion, deviance, bodily control, the moral meanings of risk, the valorisation of drugs and medical science. Drawing together the work of cultural and politicaltheorists, sociologists and historians who have written about medicine, disease and the body, as well as that of theorists in Europe and the USA who have focused their attention specificaiiy on AIDS, this book explores the wide theoretical debate about the importance of language in the social construction of illness and disease. This text offers insights into the sociocultural context in which attitudes towards people with HIV or AIDS and people's perceptions of risk from HIV infection are developed and the responses of governments to the AIDS epidemic are formulated.

My pops had been telling me to settle down for years. He told me to find a woman who would stand by me no matter how tough things got, and would have my back through thick and thin. And the truth was, I was tired of empty sex. I was tired of one-night stands, and I was tired of screwing women just to toss them away and never speak to them again. I'd built myself an empire from nothing. I'd put blood, sweat and tears to get to where I was today, to be the owner of several huge businesses, including my multi-million dollar software company Indigo Limited. And now...I just wanted a woman to share that with. So when Sapphire Myers walked into my office telling me that she was the new Python developer, I couldn't help but to fall head over heels for her beauty. She was so fucking sexy and she didn't even realize it, but I could see the pain in her eyes. She looked tired, exhausted, broken... She looked like a mystery. A mystery that I wanted to solve. But I was battling with my own demons. I had some dirty secrets of my own, and a past that I wasn't proud of. I was part of a Mafia family. A family of organized crime. But God help me, even though I had my own skeletons in the closet... If I'd have known that Sapphire was going to betray me in the worst fucking possible way, I would have torched that bitch and left her to die the first time I ever laid eyes on her. I would have disposed of her without a second fucking thought, and then moved on with my life without looking back. It takes more than a pretty girl to bring me to my knees. The more I push, the more she pushes back. Sapphire is a challenge that I'm not used to, but she needs to learn a thing or two about loyalty. Because in my world, snakes and rats are buried six feet under. To teach them a lesson not to fuck with me. Because in the Mafia, we're bound by blood... And I won't hesitate to do the same thing to her for getting on the wrong side of me. I won't hesitate to give her the same treatment that countless people before her got. Somebody should have warned her that if you play with fire you'll get burned. Because at the end of the day... I didn't choose this life. This. Life. Chose. Me.

"A roguish hero trying to redeem his rakish ways meets his romantic match in [this] lushly sensual Regency historical romance" (Booklist). A gentleman and a very improper lady are bound together by a passion that crosses the line between upper class and underworld in Caroline Linden's daring new romance . . . Thanks to his wayward youth, David Reece, the youngest scion in a noble family, has been called one of the most scandalous rogues of the ton. What he wants to be called is trustworthy and a true gentleman. To prove he has reformed he's agreed to watch over his absent brother's estate. All is going swimmingly until highwaymen waylay his coach and steal his brother’s signet ring . . . After growing up a pickpocket, street orphan Vivian Beecham has reluctantly graduated to highway robbery. But her handsome victim is quick to turn the tables and take her prisoner. Though David has the pretty thief locked in a spare bedroom, he’s in no place to judge her youthful indiscretion. Instead she becomes a former rogue's greatest challenge: the object of a passionate seduction . . .

"In Dangerous Desire, Pamela E. Barnett explores the jarring, frequent juxtaposition of sexual freedom and rape in American literature of about the 1960s. Why were the social premises figured by sexual freedom in these texts consistently foreclosed by rape? Barnett argues that this literary phenomenon reflected tensions central to the historical moment. Through a cultural studies analysis of key texts including Soul on Ice, Against our Will, The Women's Room, The Women of Brewster Place, Meridian, and Deliverance, Barnett demonstrates how rape has been employed as a backlash against the very movements of "dangerous desire" that inspired these literary accounts - feminism, cicil rights, black nationalism, and gay liberation".--BOOKJACKET.

Drawing upon contemporary film and fiction, The Body's Perilous Pleasures is an investigation of the nature of the body and the manner in which it figures in transvestism, cyborgs and female desire, body piercing, AIDS and reincarnation.