Episodi

  • Lucas Wilson, "Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors' Stories of Conversion Therapy" (Jessica Kingsley, 2025)

    Lucas Wilson, "Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors' Stories of Conversion Therapy" (Jessica Kingsley, 2025)
    Jan 9 2025
    We are survivors. We were subjected to dehumanizing practices by people who sought our erasure. We believe telling our stories is both powerful and political. Shame Sex Attraction: Survivors' Stories of Conversion Therapy (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2025) is an edited collection that brings together the experiences of those who have been subjected to queer conversion therapy - it is an effort to expose conversion practices for what they are - pseudoscientific, bogus, ineffective, and wildly traumatic - and to recognise and listen to survivors. With contributions from Gregory Elsasser-Chavez, Chaim J. Levin, Lexie Bean, Syre Klenke, and many more from across the LGBTQ+ spectrum - this is an attempt to ensure that what happened within these pages cannot - and will not - happen to future generations. Lucas Wilson is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Toronto Mississauga and was formerly the Justice, Equity, and Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Calgary. He is the editor of Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors’ Stories of Conversion Therapy. He is also the author of At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Literature, which received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. His public-facing writing has appeared in The Advocate, Queerty, LGBTQ Nation, and Religion Dispatches, among other venues. He is currently working on two interrelated monograph projects that examine evangelical homophobia and transphobia in the U.S. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    58 min
  • Judith Giesberg, “Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality” (UNC Press, 2017)

    Judith Giesberg, “Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality” (UNC Press, 2017)
    Nov 13 2017
    Judith Giesberg, an expert on the history of women and gender during the Civil War, is professor and director of graduate studies in the history department at Villanova University and Editor of The Journal of the Civil War Era. Two of her previous books include Civil War Sisterhood: The United States Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (2000), which is about the understudied roles of women in relief efforts during the war, and “Army at Home”: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (2009), which concerns the experiences of working class women in the north. She is also the principal editor of Emilie Davis’s Civil War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia (2014). Her latest book, and the subject of our discussion, is Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of an American Morality (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Giesberg argues that the Civil War is the turning point for the influential rise of postwar anti-pornography laws and a genesis for the related network of anti-vice campaigns, which included laws against contraceptives and abortion, newly entrenched legal regulations of marriage, and ever broader social purity initiatives around sexuality. We discuss how crucial, and yet understudied, questions of sex and desire are to the Civil War era and how silence around them has affected the ways we talk about and regulate social relations today. Much of our conversation focuses on how a small group of men created new regulations around pornography, the constitution of which was always up for debate, to hold onto the political and social power that they felt to be threatened by men of a lower class or of a different race. Prominent among this group of regulators, and a leading face of the postwar anti-vice campaigns, was Anthony Comstock. After serving in a largely inactive regiment during the war, and feeling left out of the camaraderie generated by the sharing of pornography among his fellow soldiers, Comstock fashioned for himself a largely illusory legal fraternity of moral crusaders. For pornography was hardly the main issue for those who associated themselves with his cause. Geisberg writes and talks about how other men in power negotiated the place of newly freed slaves by tightening the regulatory role that marriage played in their “free” lives. Doctors jumped at the opportunity to regulate abortion and contraception as a way to further professionalize themselves after postwar advances in medicine. Both of these groups became part of an omnibus of social reform that affects the country to this day. As you will hear over the course of our conversation, the importance of Giesberg’s account is in showing the connections between these issues and how they come together in the Civil War. Sexual abuse was at the center of social systems, including slavery. But the legal articulations of sexual crimes after the war created more easily regulated vices that distracted attention aw... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 ora e 8 min
  • James Welker, "Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls' Comics Artists and Fans" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)

    James Welker, "Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls' Comics Artists and Fans" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)
    Dec 28 2024
    Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan: Feminists, Lesbians, and Girls' Comics Artists and Fans (U Hawaii Press, 2024) examines three dynamic and overlapping communities of women and adolescent girls who challenged Japanese gender and sexual norms in the 1970s and 1980s. These spheres encompassed activists in the ūman ribu (women’s liberation) movement, members of the rezubian (lesbian) community, and artists and readers of queer shōjo manga (girls’ comics). Individually and collectively, they found the normative understanding of the category “women” untenable and worked to redefine and expand its meaning by transfiguring ideas, images, and practices selectively appropriated from the “West.” They did so, however, while remaining firmly fixed on the local. Thus, for many, this ostensibly Western focus was not a turn away from Japan but integral to their understanding of being a woman within Japan. Following broad historical overviews of the ūman ribu, rezubian, and queer shōjo manga spheres, the book takes a deeper look through the lenses of terminology, translation, and travel to offer a window onto how acts of transfiguration reshaped what it meant to be a woman in Japan. The work draws on a vast archive that encompasses early twentieth-century dictionaries, sexology texts, and literature; postwar women’s and men’s magazines and pornography; translated feminist and lesbian texts; comics and animation; and newsletters, fanzines, and other heretofore largely unexamined ephemera. The volume’s characterization of the era is also greatly enriched by interviews with more than sixty individuals. Transfiguring Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan demonstrates that the transfiguration of Western culture into something locally meaningful had tangible effects beyond newly (re)created texts, practices, images, and ideas within the ūman ribu, rezubian, and queer shōjo manga communities. The individuals and groups involved were themselves transformed. More broadly, their efforts forged new understandings of “women” in Japan, creating space for a greater number of public roles not bound to being a mother or a wife, as well as a greater diversity of gender and sexual expression that reached far beyond the Japanese border. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    56 min
  • Nathanael Homewood, "Seductive Spirits: Deliverance, Demons, and Sexual Worldmaking in Ghanaian Pentecostalism" (Stanford UP, 2024)

    Nathanael Homewood, "Seductive Spirits: Deliverance, Demons, and Sexual Worldmaking in Ghanaian Pentecostalism" (Stanford UP, 2024)
    Dec 15 2024
    In this fascinating interview, Nathanael J. Homewood discusses his new book,Seductive Spirits: Deliverance, Demons, and Sexual Worldmaking in Ghanaian Pentecostalism (Stanford University Press, 2024). Pentecostalism, Africa's fastest-growing form of Christianity, has long been preoccupied with the business of banishing demons from human bodies. Among Ghanaian Pentecostals, deliverance is primary among the embodied, experiential gifts—a loud, messy, and noisy experience that ends only when the possessed body falls to the ground silent and docile, the evil spirits rendered powerless in the face of the holy spirit-wielding-prophets. And nowhere is Ghanaian Pentecostal obsession with demons more pronounced than with sexual demons. Homewood examines the frequent and varied experiences of spirit possession and sex with demons that constitute a vital part of Pentecostal deliverance ministries, offering insight into these practices assembled from long-term ethnographic engagement with four churches in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Relying on the uniqueness of the Pentecostal sensorium, this book unravels how spirits and sexuality intimately combine to expand the definition of the body beyond its fleshy boundaries. Demons are a knowledge regime, one that shapes how Pentecostals think about, engage with, and construct the cosmos. Deliverance Pentecostals reiterate and tarry with the demonic, especially sexually, as a realm of invention whereby alternative ways of being, sensing, and having sex are dreamed, practiced, and performed. Ultimately, Homewood argues for a distinction between colonial demonization and decolonial demons, charting another path to understanding being, the body, and sexualities. Nathanael Homewood is the Associate Director of Religious Studies at the University of Minnesota. His areas of specialty are global Christianity, religion and sexuality, African religion, and Pentecostalism. He has earned a B.A. in Political Science at the University of Western Ontario, an M.Div in Global Christianity from Yale Divinity School, an M.A. and Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Rice University. Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and is an editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 ora e 5 min
  • Katya Motyl, "Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894–1934" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Katya Motyl, "Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894–1934" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    Dec 14 2024
    In Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894–1934 (University of Chicago Press, 2024) historian Dr. Katya Motyl explores the everyday acts of defiance that formed the basis for new, unconventional forms of womanhood in early twentieth-century Vienna. The figures Dr. Motyl brings back to life defied gender conformity, dressed in new ways, behaved brashly, and expressed themselves freely, overturning assumptions about what it meant to exist as a woman. Dr. Motyl delves into how these women inhabited and reshaped the urban landscape of Vienna, an increasingly modern, cosmopolitan city. Specifically, she focuses on the ways that easily overlooked quotidian practices such as loitering outside cafés and wandering through city streets helped create novel conceptions of gender. Exploring the emergence of a new womanhood, Embodied Histories presents a new account of how gender, the body, and the city merge with and transform each other, showing how our modes of being are radically intertwined with the spaces we inhabit. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    54 min
  • Rachel Hope Cleves, "Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex" (Polity, 2024)

    Rachel Hope Cleves, "Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex" (Polity, 2024)
    Dec 3 2024
    We take the edible trappings of flirtation for granted: chocolate covered strawberries and romance, oysters on the half shell and desire, the eggplant emoji and a suggestive wink. But why does it feel so natural for us to link food and sexual pleasure? In Lustful Appetites: an Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex (Polity, 2024), Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves explores the long association between indulging in good food and an appetite for naughty sex, from the development of the Parisian restaurant as a place for men to meet with prostitutes and mistresses, to the role of sexual outlaws like bohemians, new women, lesbians and gay men in creating epicurean culture in Britain and the United States. Taking readers on a gastronomic journey from Paris and London to New York, Chicago and San Francisco, Lustful Appetites reveals how this preoccupation changed the ways we eat and the ways we are intimate―while also creating stigmas that persist well into our own twenty-first century. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    52 min
  • Sam Langsdale, "Searching for Feminist Superheroes: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics" (U Texas Press, 2024)

    Sam Langsdale, "Searching for Feminist Superheroes: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics" (U Texas Press, 2024)
    Nov 30 2024
    It’s no secret that superhero comics and their related media perpetuate a model of a straight, white, male hero at the expense of representing women and other minorities, but other narratives exist. Searching for Feminist Superheroes: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Sam Langsdale recognizes that female-led superhero comics, with diverse casts of characters and inclusive storytelling, exist on the margins of the mainstream superhero genre. But rather than focusing on these stories as marginalized, Dr. Langsdale’s work on heroes such as Spider-Woman, America Chavez, and Ironheart locates the margins as a site of innovation and productivity, which have enabled the creation of feminist superhero texts. Employing feminist and intersectional philosophies in an analysis of these comics, Dr. Langsdale suggests that feminist superheroes have the potential to contribute to a social imagination that is crucial in working toward a more just world. At a time when US popular culture continues to manifest as a battleground between oppressive and progressive social norms, Searching for Feminist Superheroes demonstrates that a fight for a better world is worthwhile. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    57 min
  • Caroline Séquin, "Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848-1950" (Cornell UP, 2024)

    Caroline Séquin, "Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848-1950" (Cornell UP, 2024)
    Nov 29 2024
    Since the French Revolution of 1789, the absence of laws banning interracial marriages has served to reinforce two myths about modern France--first, that it is a sexual democracy and second, it is a color-blind nation where all French citizens can freely marry whomever they wish regardless of their race. Caroline Séquin challenges the narrative of French exceptionalism by revealing the role of prostitution regulation in policing intimate relationships across racial and colonial boundaries in the century following the abolition of slavery. Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848-1950 (Cornell UP, 2024) traces the rise and fall of the "French model" of prostitution policing in the "contact zones" of port cities and garrison towns across France and in Dakar, Senegal, the main maritime entry point of French West Africa. Séquin describes how the regulation of prostitution covertly policed racial relations and contributed to the making of white French identity in an imperial nation-state that claimed to be race-blind. She also examines how sex industry workers exploited, reinforced, or transgressed the racial boundaries of colonial rule. Brothels served as "gatekeepers of whiteness" in two arenas. In colonial Senegal, white-only brothels helped deter French colonists from entering unions with African women and producing mixed-race children, thus consolidating white minority rule. In the metropole, brothels condoned interracial sex with white sex workers while dissuading colonial men from forming long-term attachments with white French women. Ultimately, brothels followed a similar racial logic that contributed to upholding white supremacy. Dr. Séquin earned a BA and MA in English and American Studies at Université Nancy 2, an MA in Women and Gender Studies at Université Paris 8, and her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. She has won a number of awards from a range of institutions including Best Paper Prize from the Council for European Studies’ Gender and Sexuality Research Network for the article “Marie Piquemal, the ‘Colonial Madam’: Brothel Prostitution, Migration, and the Making of Whiteness in Interwar Dakar”. But I want to call attention to her Edward T. Gargan Prize for the best graduate student paper presented on post-1800 history at the annual conference of the Western Society for French History. Since 2019 she has been an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Lafayette College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 ora e 40 min