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.

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.

Sex Acts is not about "sex" per se, but rather about the sexual urge and how it affects our relationships with other people. God is mad -- he thinks four angels botched the job when they were earlier assigned to design the human race. In particular, God is not happy about how sexual relationships have evolved. But before the angels make recommendations on how to redesign man (and woman), they review what has happened to sex and romance on earth over the past 50 years or so. Interspersed with the "angel" scenes are "human" scenes that comment on or illustrate the conversation that has just taken place between the angels. These "earthly" scenes range in tone from satirical or funny to poignant or sad.The script contains no explicit sex or nudity, but it does contain adult language.

Andrea Dworkin, once called "Feminism's Malcolm X," has been worshipped, reviled, criticized, and analyzed-but never ignored. The power of her writing, the passion of her ideals, and the ferocity of her intellect have spurred the arguments and activism of two generations of feminists. Now the book that she's best known for-in which she provoked the argument that ultimately split apart the feminist movement-is being reissued for the young women and men of the twenty-first century. Intercourse enraged as many readers as it inspired when it was first published in 1987. In it, Dworkin argues that in a male supremacist society, sex between men and women constitutes a central part of women's subordination to men. (This argument was quickly-and falsely-simplified to "all sex is rape" in the public arena, adding fire to Dworkin's already radical persona.) In her introduction to this twentieth-anniversary edition of Intercourse, Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, discusses the circumstances of Dworkin's untimely death in the spring of 2005, and the enormous impact of her life and work. Dworkin's argument, she points out, is the stickiest question of feminism: Can a woman fight the power when he shares her bed?

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

Acts of Desire is a study of theatrical depictions of illicit female sexuality, from seduction and prostitution to bigamy and adultery, from the beginning of the nineteenth century through to the 1930s.

Rules about sexuality, written and unwritten, have existed in every culture as have disagreements over what is and isn't acceptable. Must morally permissible sex have only one function? Must it be heterosexual? Must it occur within the confines of the institution of marriage? Must it be accompanied by requisite emotions such as love and intimacy?