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When Alfred Kinsey's massive studiesSexual Behavior in the Human MaleandSexual Behavior in the Human Femaleappeared in 1948 and 1953, their detailed data spurred an unprecedented public discussion of the nation's sexual practices and ideologies. As they debated what behaviors were normal or average, abnormal or deviant, Cold War Americans also celebrated and scrutinized the state of their nation, relating apparent changes in sexuality to shifts in its political structure, economy, and people.American Sexual Characteremploys the studies and the myriad responses they evoked to examine national debates about sexuality, gender, and Americanness after World War II. Focusing on the mutual construction of postwar ideas about national identity and sexual life, this wide-ranging, shrewd, and lively analysis explores the many uses to which these sex surveys were put at a time of extreme anxiety about sexual behavior and its effects on the nation. Looking at real and perceived changes in masculinity, female sexuality, marriage, and homosexuality, Miriam G. Reumann develops the notion of \"American sexual character,\" sexual patterns and attitudes that were understood to be uniquely American and to reflect contemporary transformations in politics, social life, gender roles, and culture. She considers how apparent shifts in sexual behavior shaped the nation's workplaces, homes, and families, and how these might be linked to racial and class differences.

Hoffman reads Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes (1946), Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night (1935), Gladys Mitchell’s St Peter’s Finger (1938) and Laurels Are Poison (1942), Margery Allingham’s The Fashion in Shrouds (1938) and Christianna Brand’s Death in High Heels (1941) alongside one another in order to consider depictions of women in schools, universities and the workplace. Hoffman argues that these settings provide an opportunity to explore the tension between women’s expanding place in the public sphere and the pressure to remain in traditionally domestic roles. The chapter reveals that novels depicting educated and/or working women are often fraught with problematic conflict between an active, modern ideal of femininity and the domesticity that was still considered to be the ultimate feminine achievement.

This chapter draws upon the work of both critical-race theorists and feminist sociologists to analyze how the California Department of Health Services’ “Partnership for Responsible Parenting” disguises national and local concerns about changing racial demographics and non-traditional family structures within the rhetoric of the “teenage pregnancy” problem. The discourses that mark the maternal bodies of women of color as racialized, sexualized threats to moral and civic “responsibility,” “family values,” and “public health” achieve their distinctly racialized character and racializing function through their status as part of deviant sexuality, deficient motherhood, and national economic and social threat burden. The chapter also locates the visual print media components of state-authored teen pregnancy prevention initiatives within the same public “screening space” as other U.S. visual constructions of maternal bodies.

When miriam brooks sherman moved with her parents and two sisters into Edendale in 1931, they were at the leading edge of a Communist community that would soon take root in Edendale alongside the neighborhood artists. Isidor and Bessie Brooks had brought their three girls with them to Los Angeles from Albany, New York, in 1927. They had lived for four years in the vibrant, predominantly leftist Jewish community of Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, and the whole family had been caught up in the life of the Communist Party. Isidor, who had been a Party member since 1919,

The struggle to remove the stigma of sickness surrounding same-sex love has a long history. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its diagnostic classification of mental illness, but the groundwork for this pivotal decision was laid decades earlier. In this new study, Henry L. Minton looks back at the struggle of the American gay and lesbian activists who chose scientific research as a path for advancing homosexual rights. He traces the history of gay and lesbian emancipatory research from its early beginnings in the late nineteenth century to its role in challenging the illness model in the 1970s. By examining archival sources and unpublished manuscripts, Minton reveals the substantial accomplishments made by key researchers and relates their life stories. He also considers the contributions of mainstream sexologists such as Alfred C. Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker, who supported the cause of homosexual rights through the advancement of scientific knowledge. By uncovering this hidden chapter in the story of gay liberation, Departing from Deviance makes an important contribution to both the history of science and the history of sexuality.

In this paper, I analyze the stigma associated with involuntary childlessness and compare the perceptions and behavior of physically infertile women and physically fertile women who are involuntarily childless. I also consider information management strategies developed to offset this stigma. These strategies include selective concealment, therapeutic and preventive disclosure, medical disclaimers, deviance avowal, and a process of practiced deception. I conclude that, although physically infertile women feel more stigmatized, physically fertile women manage information more actively to protect their husbands from the stigma associated with sexual dysfunction. Theoretically, I suggest that these women self-label infertility as discreditable or stigmatizing apart from any formal or informal response.

Incest as a form of family violence appeared in 10 percent of case records of Boston child-protection agencies between 1880 and 1930. These were overwhelmingly (98 percent) cases of father-daughter incest, and they shared a common pattern: the family relations made the girl victims into second wives, taking over many of the roles and functions of mothers, including housework, child care, and sexual relations with their father. Despite their apparent obedience and acquiescence in their incestuous families, many of these girls actively sought escape from the family, loitering on the streets where a powerful neighborhood peer culture and their low self-esteem made them easily exploitable. This sex-delinquent behavior was a form of resistance to, even rebellion against, the canons of feminine acquiescence and domesticity which had allowed them to be victimized in the first place.

This paper examines deviant career mobility using data from interviews with 28 male prostitutes. These respondents identified three modes of operation in their world--street hustling, bar hustling, and escort prostitution--and ranked them according to level of income and safety from arrest. While some prostitutes developed relatively stable careers within a given rank, others developed ascending careers. Most of the respondents moved from street hustling to bar hustling, and a few ascended to escort prostitution. I analyze the interplay of objective and subjective contingencies that shapes these patterns of mobility, and I discuss the conditions that affect career mobility in various deviant worlds.