Drawing on more than fifty interviews in both the US and the Netherlands, Wendy Chapkis captures the wide-ranging experiences of women performing erotic labor and offers a complex, multi-faceted depiction of sex work. Her expansive analytic perspective encompasses both a serious examination of international prostitution policy as well as hands-on accounts of contemporary commercial sexual practices. Scholarly, but never simply academic, this book is explicitly grounded in a concern for how competing political discourses work concretely in the world--to frame policy and define perceptions of AIDS, to mobilize women into opposing camps, to silence some agendas and to promote others.

This interdisciplinary work identifies a series of key issues in discourses on sexuality - essentialism versus construction, gender and sexuality, concepts of identity, Foucault's notion of discourse, and Butler's theory of gender performance.

Emphasizing the peculiar, the perverse, the clandestine and the scandalous, this volume opens up a critical discourse on sexuality and visual culture in early modern Italy. Contributors consider not just painted (conventional) representations of sexual activities and eroticized bodies, but also images from print media, drawings, sculpted objects and painted ceramic jars. In this way, the volume presents an entirely new picture of Renaissance sexuality, stripping away layers of misconceptions and manipulations to reveal an often-misunderstood world. 'Sex acts' is interpreted broadly, from the acting out, or performing, of one's (or another's) sex to sexual activity, including what might be considered, now or then, peculiar practices and preferences and a variety of possibly scandalous scenarios. While the contributors come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, this collection foregrounds the visual culture of early modern sexuality, from representations of sex and sexualized bodies to material objects associated with sexual activities. The picture presented here nuances our understanding of Renaissance sexuality as well as our own.

A book for married couples, from newlyweds to those married for fifty years or more, advice on how to maintain a healthy sex life.

Revisits and updates the centrality of the social construction of sexuality, especially in the age of Viagra, FSD (female sexual dysfunction) and the media saturation of sex. Leonore Tiefer is one of the foremost sexologists working in the United States today; she is a well-known and respected scholar who writes engagingly and humorously about a wide array of topics in sexuality to appeal to both students and general readers. Revised and updated with new pieces on the medicalization of sex, FSD (female sexual dysfunction) and the politics of sex, as well as classic pieces found in the original edition, such as "Am I Normal?: The Question of Sex."