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What are the archives of gay and lesbian leather histories, and how have contemporary artists mined these archives to create a queer politics of the present? This book sheds light on an area long ignored by traditional art history and LGBTQ studies, examining the legacies of the visual and material cultures of US leather communities. It discusses the work of contemporary artists such as Patrick Staff, Dean Sameshima, Monica Majoli, AK Burns and AL Steiner, and the artist collective Die Kränken, showing how archival histories and contemporary artistic projects might be applied in a broader analysis of LGBTQ culture and norms. Hanky codes, blurry photographs of Tom of Finland drawings, a pin sash weighted down with divergent histories – these become touchstones for writing leather histories.

Gayle Rubin’s now classic concept of the ‘charmed circle’ has been much used by scholars of sexuality to discuss the ways in which some types of sex are privileged over others. In this paper, I apply the concept of the charmed circle to a new topic—later life—in order both to add to theory about later life sex and to add an older-age lens to thinking about sex hierarchies. Traditional discursive resources around older people’s sexual activities, which treat older people’s sex as inherently beyond the charmed circle, now coexist with new imperatives for older people to remain sexually active as part of a wider project of ‘successful’ or ‘active’ ageing. Drawing on the now-substantial academic literature about later life sex, I discuss some of the ways in which redrawing the charmed circle to include some older people’s sex may paradoxically entail the use of technologies beyond the charmed circle of ‘good, normal, natural, blessed’ sex. Sex in later life also generates some noteworthy inversions in which types of sex are privileged and which treated as less desirable, in relation to marriage and procreation. Ageing may, furthermore, make available new possibilities to redefine what constitutes ‘good’ sex and to refuse compulsory sexuality altogether, without encountering stigma.

I have spent the greater part of my life coming to grips with the fact that I am unable to be monogamous, unable to restrain my heart from loving other people, unable to keep my desires under lock and key. Concepts like \"cheating\", \"betrayal\", and \"faithfulness to one and only one person\" continue to confuse and alienate me. I have always enjoyed different people for different reasons. As a woman who fiercely guards her freedom, I can't imagine being limited by a monogamous relationship where one person must try to fulfill all my needs and desires. (Wendy-O Matik 3)

In this paper, I review, analyze, and evaluate the myriad ways early canonical and more recent high-profile scholarship in the field of sexualities envision a liberatory sexual politics and the most fruitful modes of achieving it. Due to theorists’ diverging interpretations of the causes and forms of sexual oppression as well as their differing visions of liberated sexuality, I find that prescriptions for dismantling the “ethnosexual regime” (Nagel 2000) vary widely. The strategies suggested by scholars can be categorized into: 1) radical lesbian-feminist separatism, 2) identity politics, 3) the redeployment of gender, which encompasses trans and intersex bodies, gender play (e.g., butch-femme, drag, and shifting constructions of masculinity), and non-binary identities, 4) micro-level individual and interpersonal solutions, 5) changes in educational institutions, and 6) sexualities research itself. I conclude by making suggestions for sociologists who seek to further theorize and effect the subversion of normative systems of sexuality.

Sofer discusses the eclectronic opera, Apocalypse, by Alice Shield. She shows how Apocalypse addresses sexual censorship through music, text, and choreography to envision a world for which sex is not stigmatized but instead exists as a productive and inseparable aspect of culture and music.

This article considers how contemporary representations of child molesters in scholarly, political, and popular culture participate in projects that revolve around the recuperation of heteronormativity. I argue that these multimodal obsessions with child molestation displace the resilience of entrenched homophobic fears, prejudices, and dispositions, giving the lie to the commonplace that the political advance of same-sex marriage in the United States signals the apotheosis of gay rights. My analysis focuses on two representative popular and scholarly texts: the long-running television series Law and Order: SVU and a scholarly article about the Jerry Sandusky case published in jac. The former capitalizes on a combination of stranger and familiar child molester figures, reflecting a mix of popular sex panic mythology and social reality. The latter reenacts this combination, so the discourse about the Sandusky case becomes imbricated in the convergences between mythology and social reality that characterize the television show.

Is it time to take a break from feminism? In this pathbreaking book, Janet Halley reassesses the place of feminism in the law and politics of sexuality. She argues that sexuality involves deeply contested and clashing realities and interests, and that feminism helps us understand only some of them. To see crucial dimensions of sexuality that feminism does not reveal--the interests of gays and lesbians to be sure, but also those of men, and of constituencies and values beyond the realm of sex and gender--we might need to take a break from feminism. Halley also invites feminism to abandon its uncritical relationship to its own power. Feminists are, in many areas of social and political life, partners in governance. To govern responsibly, even on behalf of women, Halley urges, feminists should try taking a break from their own presuppositions. Halley offers a genealogy of various feminisms and of gay, queer, and trans theories as they split from each other in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. All these incommensurate theories, she argues, enrich thinking on the left not despite their break from each other but because of it. She concludes by examining legal cases to show how taking a break from feminism can change your very perceptions of what's at stake in a decision and liberate you to decide it anew.

This article examines how two American theorists, Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler, deploy geologic language during the 1990s moment when their feminist careers morphed into queer careers. I argue that the precise composition of this institutional shift – methodological, material, and epistemological – is both reflected and refracted in the figure of the rock. A symbol that connotes fixity in short time spans, but dynamism in long ones, the rock oscillates between facticity and dissolution, mirroring shifting notions of sex and gender in the 1990s. In her retrospective account of the emergence of queer theory, Rubin’s use of a fossil metaphor ushers the field toward a non-reproductive and non-procreative genealogy, illuminating a different temporal texture to such seemingly fixed structures as sex, gender, and sexuality. Butler’s inherited geologic language conceives of gender as the process of sedimentation that resists the biological determinism of identity-based feminist politics. Examining the rock provides crucial readings of Butler’s materiality, one that oscillates between fixed being and dynamic becoming, stability and change, surface signification and depth excavation.

Rogue narratives represent figures who are, on the one hand, economically and political dispossessed, and on the other, free from constrains of religious morality, social mores and the law. Social marginality allows these figures in texts like The English Rogue (1665), to transform their rootlessness into instantiations of political economy, especially the notion of a market which scripts and codes value onto contentless things through exchange and circulation. As a figure that has no private property to speak of, the rogue’s use of his own body in acts of consumption and exchange reveals a complex early-modern understanding of the links between the sex-gender economy and political economy.

This paper discusses the use of the Gothic genre in two 'lesbian' novels: Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1936) and Affinity by Sarah Waters (1999). The Gothic, I argue, is employed and manipulated in order to counter the repressive effects of 'lesbian panic', evident in much women's fiction (an idea posited by Patricia Smith in Lesbian Panic, 1997). I begin by constructing a framework for my argument from the disparate yet related scholarship of several theorists, including Terry Castle, Eve Sedgwick, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Gayle Rubin. My argument hinges on the claim that lesbianism threatens cultural order - based upon male homosocial relationships and the reciprocal exchange of women - in a similar way to incest. Therefore, lesbianism is subject to extreme repression, rendered shady and invisible in history and literature. Following this theoretical introduction, I argue that the Gothic genre - that twilight realm of unconscious fantasies and forbidden desires - can be used as a tool for subverting the repressive system that keeps lesbianism in its place, bringing its silence into articulation. Through the self-conscious use of Gothic tropes in Nightwood and Affinity, Djuna Barnes and Sarah Waters write the lesbian back into tangible existence, 'repossessing' the spectre of the lesbian towards their own emancipating ends. In particular, the incest taboo and the love triangle are twisted into new shapes in these novels, so that all that Western culture designates as 'abject' becomes eerily illuminated by the Gothic's unflinching perspective. Finally, I discuss the options available when concluding a lesbian novel and the effects of genre on narrative outcome: Is a happy ending possible in a realist lesbian novel? Could the Gothic genre hold the key to unravelling the silence of lesbian panic? My conclusion leaves discussion open to other perspectives, arguments, and, of course, to further scholarship. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]