Preliminary Material --List of Figures --Preface /Margaret Sönser Breen --History, Sex, and Nation --Kertbeny's "Homosexuality" and the Language of Nationalism /Robert D. Tobin --Prostitution, Sexuality, and Gender Roles in Imperial Germany: Hamburg, A Case Study /Julia Bruggemann --Cultural Clash on Prostitution: Debates on Prostitution in Germany and Sweden in the 1990s /Susanne Dodillet --"Staying Bush" - The Influence of Place and Isolation in the Decision by Gay Men to Live in Rural Areas in Australia /Ed Green --Literature: Re-writing Desire --Whoring, Incest, Duplicity, or the "Self-Polluting" Erotics of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders /Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou --Catastrophic Sexualities in Howard Baker's Theatre of Transgression /Karoline Gritzner --Un-sacred Cows and Protean Beings: Suniti Namjoshi's Re-writing of Postcolonial Lesbian Bodies /Shalmalee Palekar --Desire-less-ness /Fiona Peters --Bodies: Representations of Gender Identities --Underneath the Clothes - Transvestites without Vests: A Consideration in Art /Barbara Wagner --Of Swords and Rings: Genital Representation as Defining Sexual Identity and Sexual Liberation in Some Old French Fabliaux and Lais /Tovi Bibring --Only with You - Maybe - If You Make Me Happy: A Genealogy of Serial Monogamy as Governance Self-Governance /Serena Petrella --Legality, Bureaucracy, Religion, and Sexuality --A Project for Sexual Rights: Sexuality, Power, and Human Rights /Alejandro Cervantes-Carson and Tracy Citeroni --International Law, Children's Rights, and Queer Youth /Valerie D. Lehr --Acting Like a Professional: Identity Dilemmas for Gay Men /Nick Rumens --How Big is Your God? Queer Christian Social Movements /Jodi O'Brien --Notes on Contributors.

Genealogies of Identity examines issues of sex and sexuality across a range of critical and cultural perspectives. The volume considers historically specific discourses of sex and sexuality, their effect within public contexts such as the church and the workplace, and the link of those discourses to understandings of individual identity, citizenship, nation, and human rights. As well, the volume analyses representations of sexuality and desire in art, literature, theatre, and theory – representations that serve both to codify and to subvert social norms and aesthetic and theoretical traditions. Finally and more broadly, the volume attests to the critical importance of inter- and multidisciplinary approaches to understanding constructions of gender, sex, and sexuality. Genealogies of Identity consists of fifteen essays, versions of which were presented at the First Global Conference on Critical Issues in Sexuality, held in Salzburg, Austria, in October 2004.

Noted social scientist Eviatar Zerubavel casts a critical eye on how we trace our past-individually and collectively arguing that rather than simply find out who our ancestors are from genetics or history, we actually create the stories that make them our ancestors.

How popular media cultivates genealogy but buries its cultural context

"I teach the kings of their ancestors so that the lives of the ancients might serve them as an example, for the world is old but the future springs from the past." Mamadou Kouyate "Sundiata", An Epic of Old Mali, a.d. 1217-1257 Two major questions of the ages are: Who am I? and Where am I going? From the moment the first African slaves were dragged onto these shores, these questions have become increasingly harder for African-Americans to answer. To find the answers, you first must discover where you have been, you must go back to your family tree--but you must dig through rocky layers of lost information, of slavery--to find your roots. During the Great Migration in the 1940s, when African-Americans fled the strangling hands of Jim Crow for the relative freedoms of the North, many tossed away or buried the painful memories of their past. As we approach the new millennium, African-Americans are reaching back to uncover where we have been, to help us determine where we are going. Finding a Place Called Homeis a comprehensive guide to finding your African-American roots and tracing your family tree. Written in a clear, conversational, and accessible style, this book shows you, step-by-step, how to find out who your family was and where they came from. Beginning with your immediate family, Dr. Dee Parmer Woodtor gives you all the necessary tools to dig up your past: how to interview family members; how to research your past using census reports, slave schedules, property deeds, and courthouse records; and how to find these records. Using the Internet for genealogical research is also discussed in this timely and necessary book. Finding a Place Called Home helps you find your family tree, and helps place it in the context of the garden of African-American people. As you learn how to find your own history, you learn the history of all Africans in the Americas, including the Caribbean, and how to benefit from a new understanding of your family's history, and your people's. Finding a Place Called Home also discusses the growing family reunion movement and other ways to clebrate newly discovered family history. Tomorrow will always lie ahead of us if we don't forget yesterday. Finding a Place Called Home shows how to retrieve yesterday to free you for all of your tomorrows. Finding a Place Called Home: An African-American Guide to Genealogy and Historical Identitytakes us back, step-by-step, including: Methods of searching and interpreting records, such as marriage, birth, and death certificates, census reports, slave schedules, church records, and Freedmen's Bureau information. Interviewing and taking inventory of family members Using the Internet for genealogical purposes Information on tracing Caribbean ancestry

In Geneologies of Religion, Talal Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied as a universal concept. The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation—from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign—is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often invokved to explain and justify the liberal politics and world view of modernity. And it leads to the view that "politicized religions" threaten both reason and liberty. Asad's essays explore and question all these assumptions. He argues that "religion" is a construction of European modernity, a construction that authorizes—for Westerners and non-Westerners alike—particular forms of "history making."

This Companion provides a guide to queer inquiry in literary and cultural studies. The essays represent new and emerging areas, including transgender studies, indigenous studies, disability studies, queer of color critique, performance studies, and studies of digital culture. Rather than being organized around a set of literary texts defined by a particular theme, literary movement, or demographic, this volume foregrounds a queer critical approach that moves across a wide array of literary traditions, genres, historical periods, national contexts, and media. This book traces the intellectual and political emergence of queer studies, addresses relevant critical debates in the field, provides an overview of queer approaches to genres, and explains how queer approaches have transformed understandings of key concepts in multiple fields.