Pleasure and desire have been important components of the vision for sexuality education for over 20 years. This book argues that there has been a lack of scrutiny over the political motivations that underpin research supportive of pleasure and desire within comprehensive sexuality education. In this volume, key researchers in the field consider how discourses related to pleasure and desire have been taken up internationally. They argue that sexuality education is clearly shaped by specific cultural and political contexts, and examine how these contexts have shaped the development of pleasure’s inclusion in such programs. Via such discussions, this volume incites a re-configuration of thought regarding sexuality education’s approach to pleasure and desire.

Pleasure and desire have been important components of the vision for sexuality education for over 20 years. This book argues that there has been a lack of scrutiny over the political motivations that underpin research supportive of pleasure and desire within comprehensive sexuality education. In this volume, key researchers in the field consider how discourses related to pleasure and desire have been taken up internationally. They argue that sexuality education is clearly shaped by specific cultural and political contexts, and examine how these contexts have shaped the development of pleasure’s inclusion in such programs. Via such discussions, this volume incites a re-configuration of thought regarding sexuality education’s approach to pleasure and desire.

Behind the Iron Curtain, the politics of sexuality and gender were, in many ways, more progressive than the West. While Polish citizens undoubtedly suffered under the oppressive totalitarianism of socialism, abortion was legal, clear laws protected victims of rape, and it was relatively easy to legally change one's gender. In Gender, Pleasure, and Violence, Agnieszka Kościańska reveals that sexologists—experts such as physicians, therapists, and educators—not only treated patients but also held sex education classes at school, published regular columns in the press, and authored highly popular sex manuals that sold millions of copies. Yet strict gender roles within the home meant that true equality was never fully within reach. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and archival work, Kościańska shares how professions like sexologists defined the notions of sexual pleasure and sexual violence under these sweeping cultural changes. By tracing the study of sexual human behavior as it was developed and professionalized in Poland since the 1960s, Gender, Pleasure, and Violence explores how the collapse of socialism brought both restrictions in gender rights and new opportunities.

This authoritative, state-of-the-art Handbook provides an authoritative overview of issues within sexuality education, coupled with ground-breaking discussion of emerging and unconventional insights in the field. With 32 contributions from 12 countries it definitively traces the landscape of issues, theories and practices in sexuality education globally. These rich and multidisciplinary essays are written by renowned critical sexualities studies experts and rising stars in this area and grouped under four main areas: Global Assemblages of Sexuality Education Sexualities Education in Schools Sexual Cultures, Entertainment Media and Communication Technologies Re-animating What Else Sexuality Education Research Can Do, Be and Become Importantly, this Handbook does not equate sexuality education with safer sex education nor understand this subject as confined to school based programmes. Instead, sexuality education is understood more broadly and to occur in spaces as diverse as community settings and entertainment media, and via communication technologies. It is an essential and comprehensive reference resource for academics, students and researchers of sexuality education that both demarcates the field and stimulates critical discussion of its edges. Chapter 2 is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

Against queer theory's long-suffering romance with mourning and melancholia and a national agenda that urges homosexuals to renounce pleasure if they want to be taken seriously, Acts of Gaiety seeks to reanimate notions of "gaiety" as a political value for LGBT activism by recovering earlier mirthful modes of political performance. The book mines the archives of lesbian-feminist activism of the 1960s–70s, highlighting the outrageous gaiety—including camp, kitsch, drag, guerrilla theater, zap actions, rallies, manifestos, pageants, and parades alongside "legitimate theater”-- at the center of the social and theatrical performances of the era. Juxtaposing figures such as Valerie Solanas and Jill Johnston with more recent performers and activists including Hothead Paisan, Bitch and Animal, and the Five Lesbian Brothers, Sara Warner shows how reclaiming this largely discarded and disavowed past elucidates possibilities for being and belonging. Acts of Gaiety explores the mutually informing histories of gayness as politics and as joie de vivre, along with the centrality of liveliness to queer performance and protest.

Riane Eisler shows us how history has consistently promoted the link between sex and violence—and how we can sever this link and move to a politics of partnership rather than domination in all our relations.

When we talk about sex—whether great, good, bad, or unlawful—we often turn to consent as both our erotic and moral savior. We ask questions like, What counts as sexual consent? How do we teach consent to impressionable youth, potential predators, and victims? How can we make consent sexy? What if these are all the wrong questions? What if our preoccupation with consent is hindering a safer and better sexual culture? By foregrounding sex on the social margins (bestial, necrophilic, cannibalistic, and other atypical practices), Screw Consent shows how a sexual politics focused on consent can often obscure, rather than clarify, what is wrong about wrongful sex. Joseph J. Fischel argues that the consent paradigm, while necessary for effective sexual assault law, diminishes and perverts our ideas about desire, pleasure, and injury. In addition to the criticisms against consent leveled by feminist theorists of earlier generations, Fischel elevates three more: consent is insufficient, inapposite, and riddled with scope contradictions for regulating and imagining sex. Fischel proposes instead that sexual justice turns more productively on concepts of sexual autonomy and access. Clever, witty, and adeptly researched, Screw Consent promises to change how we understand consent, sexuality, and law in the United States today.