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This forum contribution explores the strengths and limits of Noam Yuran’s innovative call for a new political economy of sex and desire. It has three prongs. First, I discuss Yuran’s compelling focus on the curious durability of monogamy as an institution. Second, I examine his analysis of thinkers such as Mandeville and Weber. Finally, I turn to the question of love. I suggest that Yuran’s approach opens a pathway to a more loving and more realistic political economy of intimacy and familial love, one that I suggest is missing in much critical theory today, particularly in the rhetoric of family abolitionists.

Due to the wealth flowing from a large new liquefied natural gas extraction project, Hela Province has undergone immense socio-cultural changes. Many of these changes are well documented, but those pertaining to gender and sexuality have largely been overlooked. Our research used photovoice and interviews to examine how the local sexual economy has been affected by money flowing from the project. This methodology allowed the participants to creatively visualise and document their lived experience of the changes occurring. The research findings illustrate the complex and diverse ways in which one instance of resource extraction is impacting on people at the margins of large-scale developments and how this is shaping both gender relations and sexual relations.

Historically, academic literature on sex work has documented the changing debates, policies, and cultural discourse surrounding the sex industry, and their impact on the rights of sex workers worldwide. As sex work scholars look to the future of sex workers’ rights, however, we are also in a critical moment of self-reflection on how sex work scholarship engages with sex worker communities, produces knowledge surrounding sex work, and represents the lived experiences of sex workers’ rights, organizing, and activism. In this short Communication, proceedings from a recent sex work research symposium entitled, Sexual Economies, Politics, and Positionality in Sex Work Research are presented. Held at the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University, this symposium is a response to the need for sex work researchers, sex workers, and sex worker-led organizations to come together and critically examine the future of research on sex work and the politics of documenting sex workers’ rights.

This research paper discusses two groups of professional women who had a distinct place in the sexual economy of the period under review. By analyzing the actions and situations of prostitutes and the devadasis (literally meaning servants of God) in terms of a broader context of relationships, I consider the sexual-services and the entertainment provided by them as a meaningful labor, which got integrated at both the social and cultural levels. I have looked at how and to whom the prostitutes and the devadasis sold their labor, and how they related to other women, to men, and to various social systems. The study of these professionals shows different strands of Indian culture and one could state that the world of entertainment, to which these professions belonged, itself is a cultural reproduction of society. Specifically, it is my view that the prostitutes were sought after for their physical attraction, but elegance and élan were to an extent constitutive elements of their profession. In the case of devadasis who were the custodians of the arts of singing and dancing and whose dedicated status made them a symbol of social prestige, I would say that while the economic/professional benefits were considerable, they did not lack social honor either. The essay shows that the women who were part of this set-up, a set-up which thrived on the commercialization of women's reproductive labor, had those skills and expertise which eventually get appropriated by politico-economic structures. This gives a better insight into the politics of human relations. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Gift exchanges generate a broad range of meanings and associations: frequently they are symptomatically related to the early modern economic system in Europe. But in many texts, they complicate this correspondence by gesturing toward modes of exchange other than those based on modern notions of money and commodity exchange. And often, one can also note the gender inflections marking multiple, though often overlapping, trajectories of exchange. Thus, in its celebration of gifts, William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice signals, on the one hand, a mystification of mercantile surplus extraction with its attendant diffusion of capital. On the other hand, it shows how the economic system involving credit, interest, and profit is closely linked to the social and sexual economies of exchange. Belmont's gifts reach far and wide; the circles or cycles of exchange are both propelled and restrained by the calculations of economics and projections of desire.

Tang Xiuhui embodied the ambiguous sexual status of the Republican Lady. She had a courtesan’s ease in front of the camera, as is apparent in the juxtaposition between her photograph in figure 6.1 and the courtesan portrait in figure 6.2. She also crossed a number of sexually charged lines in her personal life. Her marital position straddled that of concubine and wife, and on more than one occasion she physically traversed the border into the courtesan quarters of Beijing. Her lived experience and photographic practices signal the culmination of the tension between good women and fallen women, which had been

The setting is a basement nightclub in Liverpool, England. A giant glitter ball throws down spasmodic motes of light across a litter-strewn dance floor. Prospective dancers search for partners as “The Look of Love” begins to play from the sound system Him:[shyly]You dancin’? Her:[guardedly]I’m dancin’. You askin’? Him:[just as shyly]I’m askin’. Courtship, as the opening credits to the popular British television sitcomThe Liver Birdsindicates, can be awkward. Broadly speaking, this difficulty is transhistorical and transcultural, as prevalent in twentieth-century America as in twenty-first-century Britain. For, ninety years ago, the young William Faulkner (1897–1962) experienced this common difficulty

I met Becky, a twenty-nine-year-old schoolteacher from Portland, Oregon, at the bus stop in Barra when I saw acaçador(hunter) flirting with her. A blond, blue-eyed American woman, she looked visibly annoyed and uninterested. When the Praça da Sé bus came, she sat next to me, so we started a conversation. On her third trip to Bahia, Becky was renting a two-bedroom apartment in Barra with eight other people for a weeklong capoeira event. Before she left Portland, some of Becky’s friends joked that she “would come back with a husband.” “People thought I would have a harem,” she

In recent years, feminist scholars and activists have demonstrated the ways that U.S. slavery functioned as a system of gender supremacy. It entailed the dominance of men over women as well as whites over blacks. Adding the gender lens has shed immense light on the ways that sex, law, and power operated in the racially supremacist enslaving South. In recent years, this literature has emphasized the ways that slavery’s sexual and racial subordination converged around the bodies of enslaved black women. My own contribution attempted to catalogue the legal rules that compelled black women into productive, reproductive, and sexual labor