Bad Attitude(s) on Trial is a critical analysis of pornography in the context of contemporary Canada. The notion that pornography both reflects sexual domination and 'victimizes' women has recently found expression in law in the landmark Canadian Supreme Court decision of R. v. Butler (1992). Many feminists embrace this new law as progressive, but in the post-Butler years, straight, mainstream pornography is still flourishing, while sexual representations that challenge conventional notions of sexuality, such as those centering on gay and lesbian sex and s/m sex, are the focus of censorship. It is the censorship of sexual others that the authors critique from a legal, cultural, gay, and philosophical standpoint. Lise Gotell examines the intervention of the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) in the Butler decision and provides an overview of socio-legal debates on pornography and censorship. Brenda Cossman examines the Butler decision itself and challenges the dominant reading of this case as a feminist victory. Becki Ross critically examines the expert testimony she delivered in defense of Bad Attitude, an American lesbian sex magazine seized by police from Glad Day Bookshop in Toronto in 1992. She details the difficulties she encountered in explicating and contextualizing the specificities, nuances, and complexities of lesbian s/m fantasy in a court of law. In the final chapter, Shannon Bell advances a conception of pornography that is not distinguishable from philosophy, using philosophy to make pornography. Bad Attitude(s) on Trial provides a new debate on pornography and feminism. It will be of particular interest to students of both women's, and gay and lesbian issues, but will also be relevant for scholars of law, political science, and philosophy, as well as for anyone interested in a different, provocative view of the Butler decision.

The Eight Technologies of Otherness is a bold and provocative re-thinking of identities, politics, philosophy, ethics, and cultural practices. In this groundbreaking text, old essentialism and binary divides collapse under the weight of a new and impatient necessity. Consider Sue Golding's eight technologies: curiosity, noise, cruelty, appetite, skin, nomadism, contamination, and dwelling. But why only eight technologies? And why these eight, in particular? Included are thirty-three artists, philosophers, filmmakers, writers, photographers, political militants, and 'pulp-theory' practitioners whose work (or life) has contributed to the re-thinking of 'otherness,' to which this book bears witness, throw out a few clues.

An in-depth portrait of Thailand’s billion-dollar sex industry Thailand is known internationally as a popular sex tourism destination. Yet, despite its size and reputation, remarkably little research has focused on the country’s sex industry over the past two decades. Based on original ethnographic data and other sources, Sex Tourism in Thailand is an expansive yet nuanced study of diverse sex markets and their moral economies. Ronald Weitzer shows that although some of the central pillars of Thailand’s sex industry remain unaltered over the past four decades, in other respects there has been a profound transformation. In the sector oriented toward foreign visitors, the number of sex businesses and independent operators has grown numerically and geographically; customers are increasingly diverse in race and nationality; paid sexual encounters are no longer confined to young Thai women and older white men; transgender women comprise a significant share of the workforce; and technological advances give participants more autonomy than ever before. Sex Tourism in Thailand explores these developments in conjunction with related structural and experiential dimensions in an illuminating account of sexual commerce in Southeast Asia.

This book examines transgendered people in their everyday lives and how they are erased in a variety of institutional and cultural settings. Additionally, difficulties in employment, health care, and identity papers are examined.

As neo-liberal globalization pushes us further toward global inequality, poverty, war and militarism diverse movements are arising to voice their concerns. These movements have in common a lack of credible alternatives and this book is a contribution to a more positive debate.

After the Second World War, Vancouver emerged as a hotbed of striptease talent. In Burlesque West,the first critical history of this notorious striptease scene, Becki Ross delves into the erotic entertainment industry at the northern end of the dancers' west coast tour - the North-South route from Los Angeles to Vancouver that provided rotating work for dancers and variety for club clientele. Drawing on extensive archival materials and fifty first-person accounts of former dancers, strip-club owners, booking agents, choreographers, and musicians, Ross reveals stories that are deeply flavoured with an era before "striptease fell from grace because the world stopped dreaming," in the words of ex-dancer Lindalee Tracey. Though jobs in this particular industry are often perceived as having little in common with other sorts of work, retired dancers' accounts resonate surprisingly with those of contemporary service workers, including perceptions of unionization and workplace benefits and hazards. Ross also traces the sanitization and subsequent integration of striptease style and neo-burlesque trends into mass culture, examining continuity and change to ultimately demonstrate that Vancouver's glitzy nightclub scene, often condemned as a quasi-legal strain of urban blight, in fact greased the economic engine of the post-war city. Provocative and challenging, Burlesque West combines the economic, the social, the sexual, and the personal, and is sure to intellectually tantalize.

Often depicted as deviant or pathological by public health researchers, psychoanalysts, and sexologists, male-with-male sex and sex work is, in fact, an increasingly mainstream pursuit. Based on a qualitative investigation of the practices involved in male-with-male—or m4m—Internet escorting, Touching Encounters is the first book to explicitly address how masculinity and sexuality shape male commercial sex in this era of Internet communications. By looking closely at the sex and work of male escorts, Kevin Walby tries to reconcile the two extremes of m4m sex—the stereotypical idea of a quick cash transaction and the tendency toward friendship and mutuality. In doing so, Walby draws on the work of Foucault to make visible the play of power in these physical and commercial relations between men. At once a revelation to the sociology of work and a much-needed critical engagement with queer theory, Touching Encounters responds to calls from across the social sciences to connect Foucault with sociologies of sex, sexuality, and intimacy. Walby does this and more, retying this sexual practice back to society at large.