A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett's analysis targets four revered authors—D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet—and builds a damning profile of literature's patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett's work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.

In the first half of the twentieth century, white elites who dominated Virginia politics sought to increase state control over African Americans and lower-class whites, whom they saw as oversexed and lacking sexual self-restraint. In order to reaffirm the existing political and social order, white politicians legalized eugenic sterilization, increased state efforts to control venereal disease and prostitution, cracked down on interracial marriage, and enacted statewide movie censorship. Providing a detailed picture of the interaction of sexuality, politics, and public policy, Pippa Holloway explores how these measures were passed and enforced. The white elites who sought to expand government's role in regulating sexual behavior had, like most southerners, a tradition of favoring small government, so to justify these new policies, they couched their argument in economic terms: a modern, progressive government could provide optimum conditions for business growth by maintaining a stable social order and a healthy, docile workforce. Holloway's analysis demonstrates that the cultural context that characterized certain populations as sexually dangerous worked in tandem with the political context that denied them the right to vote. This perspective on sexual regulation and the state in Virginia offers further insight into why white elite rule mattered in the development of southern governments.

The 1990s witnessed a flurry of legislative initiatives—most notably, “Megan’s Law”—designed to control a population of sex offenders (child abusers) widely reviled as sick, evil, and incurable. In Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control, Diana Rickard provides the reader with an in-depth view of six such men, exploring how they manage to cope with their highly stigmatized role as social outcasts. The six men discussed in the book are typical convicted sex offenders—neither serial pedophiles nor individuals convicted of the type of brutal act that looms large in public perceptions about sex crimes. Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control explores how these individuals, who have been cast as social pariahs, construct their sense of self. How does being labeled in this way and controlled by measures such as Megan’s Law affect one’s identity and sense of social being? Unlike traditional criminological and psychological studies of this population, this book frames their experiences in concepts of both deviance and identity, asking how men so highly stigmatized cope with the most extreme form of social marginality. Placing their stories within the context of the current culture of mass incarceration and zero-tolerance, Rickard provides a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between public policy and lived experience, as well as an understanding of the social challenges faced by this population, whose re-integration into society is far from simple or assured. Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control makes a significant contribution to our understanding of sex offenders, offering a unique window into how individuals make meaning out of their experiences and present a viable—not monstrous—social self to themselves and others.

Frances Heidensohn is an important criminological thinker whose books are interesting, innovative and much appreciated by students. In her latest volume she takes a fresh look at gender and social control, taking account of the new sociologies of risk and globalisation.

In this richly detailed and imaginatively researched study, Victoria Bynum investigates "unruly" women in central North Carolina before and during the Civil War. Analyzing the complex and interrelated impact of gender, race, class, and region on the lives of black and white women, she shows how their diverse experiences and behavior reflected and influenced the changing social order and political economy of the state and region. Her work expands our knowledge of black and white women by studying them outside the plantation setting. Bynum searched local and state court records, public documents, and manuscript collections to locate and document the lives of these otherwise ordinary, obscure women. Some appeared in court as abused, sometimes abusive, wives, as victims and sometimes perpetrators of violent assaults, or as participants in ilicit, interracial relationships. During the Civil War, women freqently were cited for theft, trespassing, or rioting, usually in an effort to gain goods made scarce by war. Some women were charged with harboring evaders or deserters of the Confederacy, an act that reflected their conviction that the Confederacy was destroying them. These politically powerless unruly women threatened to disrupt the underlying social structure of the Old South, which depended on the services and cooperation of all women. Bynum examines the effects of women's social and sexual behavior on the dominant society and shows the ways in which power flowed between private and public spheres. Whether wives or unmarried, enslaved or free, women were active agents of the society's ordering and dissolution.

This new introduction to the sociology of gender and sexuality provides fresh insight into our rapidly changing attitudes towards sex and our understanding of masculine and feminine identities, relating the study of gender and sexuality to recent research and theory, and wider social concerns throughout the world.

This book theorizes the idea of gender itself as an apparatus of power developed to reproduce life and labor. From its invention in 1950s psychiatry to its appropriation by feminism, demography and public policy, the book examines how gender has been deployed to optimize production and reproduction over the past sixty years.