It was just a little innocent research. Ross has spent years lusting after shy romance writer Julia, but fears his rather strong sexual desires will be too much for her. When she falls into a depression and stops writing, Ross decides she needs a change. His suggestion? A new genre—erotica. And he plans to help her do some research.

"Erotic Resistance is an act of memory preservation regarding San Francisco's foundational role in the erotic entertainment and sex industries of the United States. It highlights the contributions of women of color, queer women, and trans women who were instrumental at key moments in the city's history concerning labor as well as the LGBT and sex workers' rights movements. In the 1960s, topless entertainment became legal in San Francisco for the first time in US history, although cross-dressing continued to be criminalized. In yet another first instance in US history, San Francisco activist-strippers, who were also artists, led successful class action lawsuits and efforts to unionize in the strip club industry in the 1990s. Using diverse methods, including ethnography, visual and performance analysis, and historiography, Erotic Resistance relates these phenomena through archival materials, artworks, and original interviews with women who performed in San Francisco's burlesque scene and strip club industry during these time periods"--

Erotic Cartographies uses maps drawn by Trinidadian same-sex-loving women to demonstrate how their gender performance, erotic autonomy, and space-making practices contest their invisibility and exclusion from discourses of belonging, and challenge colonial discourses and practices related to gender, knowledge, and power in Trinidadian society.

Sexuality is a complex and multifaceted domain – encompassing bodily, contextual and subjective experiences that resist ready categorisation. To claim the sexual as a viable research object therefore raises a number of important methodological questions: what is it possible to know about experiences, practices and perceptions of sex and sexualities? What approaches might help or hinder our efforts to probe such experiences? This collection explores the creative, personal and contextual parameters involved in researching sexuality, cutting across disciplinary boundaries and drawing on case studies from a variety of countries and contexts. Combining a wide range of expertise, its contributors address such key areas as pornography, sex work, intersectionality and LGBT perspectives. The contributors also share their own experiences of researching sexuality within contrasting disciplines, as well as interrogating how the sexual identities of researchers themselves can relate to, and inform, their work. The result is a unique and diverse collection that combines practical insights on field work with novel theoretical reflections.

A fresh and challenging re-evaluation of the interrelationship between sexual and gender behavior and aggression. Drawing on a series of previously unpublished controlled research studies on rapists, pedophiles, incest offenders, voyeurs, transsexuals, and homosexuals (among others), the book offers startling new findings- e.g., crossdressing and feminine gender identity in rapists believed to be ultra-masculine, aggressiveness in pedophiles believed to be shy and passive. This book brings a new perspective to understanding sexual anomalies and to the conceptual foundations on which clinical research and treatment of these behaviors rests.

Though his image is tarnished today by unrepentant anti-Semitism, Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was better known in the nineteenth century for his provocative musical eroticism. In this illuminating study of the composer and his works, Laurence Dreyfus shows how Wagner’s obsession with sexuality prefigured the composition of operas such as Tannhäuser, Die Walküre, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal. Daring to represent erotic stimulation, passionate ecstasy, and the torment of sexual desire, Wagner sparked intense reactions from figures like Baudelaire, Clara Schumann, Nietzsche, and Nordau, whose verbal tributes and censures disclose what was transmitted when music represented sex. Wagner himself saw the cultivation of an erotic high style as central to his art, especially after devising an anti-philosophical response to Schopenhauer’s “metaphysics of sexual love.” A reluctant eroticist, Wagner masked his personal compulsion to cross-dress in pink satin and drench himself in rose perfumes while simultaneously incorporating his silk fetish and love of floral scents into his librettos. His affection for dominant females and surprising regard for homosexual love likewise enable some striking portraits in his operas. In the end, Wagner’s achievement was to have fashioned an oeuvre which explored his sexual yearnings as much as it conveyed—as never before—how music could act on erotic impulse.

Erotic dance is one of the most contentious issues in feminist debates today and a source of fascination in media and popular cultural representations. Yet, why is it that we currently know so little about those who perform erotic dance for female customers, or the experiences of these spectators themselves? The result of a unique investigation within two of the UK’s leisure venues, Erotic Performance and Spectatorship seeks to rectify the aforementioned lack of insight. Through vivid ethnographies of a lesbian leisure venue and a male strip show, Pilcher’s research advances key debates about the gender and sexual politics of erotic dance, whilst simultaneously relating these to debates about the sex industry more widely. This book also subverts previous assumptions that only women perform erotic dance and only men spectate. Thus, this book stands out amongst other academic accounts, developing the debate beyond the established focus on erotic dance as either empowering or degrading. This new contribution to the study of erotic dance – which provides a fresh theoretical perspective combining queer and feminist theorising, in addition to rich empirical evidence – will appeal to academic researchers and both undergraduate and postgraduate students within the fields of sociology, gender studies, sexuality studies, gay & lesbian studies, feminism and other neighbouring disciplines. It will also be of interest to feminist and sex work activists, policy makers, and practitioners.