Sex and the Citizen is a multidisciplinary collection of essays that draws on current anxieties about "legitimate" sexual identities and practices across the Caribbean to explore both the impact of globalization and the legacy of the region's history of sexual exploitation during colonialism, slavery, and indentureship. Speaking from within but also challenging the assumptions of feminism, literary and cultural studies, and queer studies, this volume questions prevailing oppositions between the backward, homophobic nation-state and the laid-back, service-with-a-smile paradise or between giving in ignominiously to the autocratic demands of the global north and equating postcolonial sovereignty with a "wholesome" heterosexual citizenry. The contributors use parliamentary legislation, novels, film, and other texts to examine Martinique's relationship to France; the diasporic relationships between the Dominican Republic and New York City, between India and Trinidad, and between Mexico's capital city and its Caribbean coast; "indigenous" names for sexual practices and desires in Suriname and the Eastern Caribbean; and other topics. This volume will appeal to readers interested in how sex has become an important register for considerations of citizenship, personal and political autonomy, and identity in the Caribbean and the global south. ContributorsVanessa Agard-Jones * Odile Cazenave * Michelle Cliff * Susan Dayal * Alison Donnell * Donette Francis * Carmen Gillespie* Rosamond S. King * Antonia MacDonald-Smythe * Tejaswini Niranjana * Evelyn O'Callaghan * Tracy Robinson * Patricia Saunders * Yasmin Tambiah * Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley * Rinaldo Walcott * M. S. Worrell

How did marriage come to be seen as the foundation and guarantee of social stability in Third Republic France? In Sexing the Citizen, Judith Surkis shows how masculine sexuality became central to the making of a republican social order. Marriage, Surkis argues, affirmed the citizen's masculinity, while also containing and controlling his desires. This ideal offered a specific response to the problems—individualism, democratization, and rapid technological and social change—associated with France's modernity. This rich, wide-ranging cultural and intellectual history provides important new insights into how concerns about sexuality shaped the Third Republic's pedagogical projects. Educators, political reformers, novelists, academics, and medical professionals enshrined marriage as the key to eliminating the risks of social and sexual deviance posed by men-especially adolescents, bachelors, bureaucrats, soldiers, and colonial subjects. Debates on education reform and venereal disease reveal how seriously the social policies of the Third Republic took the need to control the unstable aspects of male sexuality. Surkis's compelling analyses of republican moral philosophy and Emile Durkheim's sociology illustrate the cultural weight of these concerns and provide an original account of modern French thinking about society. More broadly, Sexing the Citizen illuminates how sexual norms continue to shape the meaning of citizenship.

Sexual citizenship has become a key concept in the social sciences. It describes the rights and responsibilities of citizens in sexual and intimate life, including debates over equal marriage and women's human rights, as well as shaping thinking about citizenship more generally. But what does it mean in a continually changing political landscape of gender and sexuality? In this timely intervention, Diane Richardson examines the normative underpinnings and varied critiques of sexual citizenship, asking what they mean for its future conceptual and empirical development, as well as for political activism. Clearly written, the book shows how the field of sexuality and citizenship connects to a range of important areas of debate including understandings of nationalism, identity, neoliberalism, equality, governmentality, individualization, colonialism, human rights, globalization and economic justice. Ultimately this book calls for a critical rethink of sexual citizenship. Illustrating her argument with examples drawn from across the globe, Richardson contends that this is essential if scholars want to understand the sexual politics that made the field of sexuality and citizenship studies what it is today, and to enable future analyses of the sexual inequalities that continue to mark the global order.

Drawing on literature, the law, and popular media--and "taking her (counter)cue from that celebrated sitcom of American life, 'The Reagan Years'" (Homi K. Bhabha)--Berlant presents a stunning and major statement about the nation and its citizens in an age of mass mediation. Her intriguing narratives and gallery of images will challenge readers to rethink what it means to be an American and seek salvation in its promise. 57 photos.

Why is it so hard to talk about sex and sexuality? In this crisp and compelling book, Amin Ghaziani provides a pithy introduction to the field of sexuality studies through a distinctively cultural lens. Rather than focusing on sex acts, which make us feel flustered and blind us to a bigger picture, Ghaziani crafts a conversation about sex cultures that zooms in on the diverse contexts that give meaning to our sexual pursuits and practices. Unlike sex, which is a biological expression, the word 'sexuality' highlights how the materiality of the body acquires cultural meaning as it encounters other bodies, institutions, regulations, symbols, societal norms, values, and worldviews. Think of it this way: sex + culture = sexuality. Sex Cultures offers an introduction to sexuality unlike any other. Its case-study and debate-driven approach, animated by examples from across the globe and across disciplines, upends stubborn assumptions that pit sex against society. The elegance of the arguments makes this book a pleasurable read for beginners and experts alike.

Analyzing the nuances of identity formation in rural Andean culture, Andrew Canessa draws on two decades of ethnographic research in a remote indigenous community in Bolivia's highlands.

The notion of citizenship, with its balancing of rights and responsibilities, has become a dominant way of articulating sexual politics today. In The Sexual Citizen, David Bell and Jon Binnie critically explore the notion of sexual citizenship as a way to think through the ever-changing political, legal, social and cultural landscapes of sexuality. The book examines sexual citizenship in a number of key sites of contemporary sexual politics (the market, marriage, the military, the city, the family) and focuses on a number of key theoretical debates on sexuality in relation to consumption, space and globalization. Critiquing existing theories of sexuality and citizenship, and drawing on a wide range of theoretical perspectives, The Sexual Citizen addresses both the promises and limitations of using the discourses of citizenship in the context of contemporary sexual politics. The Sexual Citizen will be of interest to students and academics in lesbian and gay studies, politics, legal studies, sociology, cultural studies and geography