New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

This episode features Dr. Kong Pheng Pha discussing his recently published book, Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality (U Washington Press, 2025).Queering the Hmong Diaspora dismantles narratives that frame Hmong communities as sexual deviant and reveals how legal cases, media representations, and legislative efforts have constructed Hmong Americans as hyperheterosexual and ungovernable subjects. This critical examination of how Hmong Americans are positioned within racial, gendered, and sexual discourses of liberalism, further explores the lived experiences of queer Hmong Americans, whose existence and activism challenge mainstream and ethnonationalist constructions of subjectivity. Addressing Hmong American gender and sexual politics through feminist, queer, and social justice lenses, Pha offers a critical framework for understanding how race and sexuality intersect in shaping the lives of minoritized refugee communities in the United States and beyond. Kong Pang Pa is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator whose academic research, writing, and public scholarship explores the histories and politics of refugee migration, radical queer, feminist, and anti-racist social movements, activism, and community organizing, legacies of U.S. war and empire, minoritized student experiences in the modern university, and Asian American racial, gender, sexual, and queer formations, with particular attention on Hmong and Southeast Asian communities in the United States. Presently, he is an assistant professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Donna Doan Anderson is the Mellon research assistant professor in U.S. Law and Race at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gaining mass popularity in the mid-1990s with the True Love Waits rally on the Washington Mall, purity culture began as an urge from evangelical conservatives for Christian adolescents to publicly commit to practicing abstinence until marriage. Throughout this decade and the next, millions of evangelical teenagers performed their commitment to sexual purity by signing pledges and wearing purity rings. Growing Up Pure: White Girls, Queer Teens, and the Racial Foundations of Purity Culture (NYU Press, 2025) by Dr. Lauren D. Sawyer examines the shaping of purity culture in the United States, looking specifically at the experiences of white youth. It shows that white girls and white queer youth were vulnerable to the purity movement, but that they were also complicit in its white supremacist oppressive structure. It makes the case that purity culture follows in the footsteps of other purity movements in the United States, and is very much tied to centuries of anti-Black racism and xenophobia in US social history, seeing white youth as in need of protection, usually from a racialized, sexualized other.While other works have focused on the ways in which purity culture has victimized young people, Dr. Sawyer argues that their perceived status as victims lets them too easily off the hook. White youth have been afforded the privilege of participating in purity culture’s harmful behaviors without being called to account. Closely reading adolescents’ stories of growing up in purity culture, she uncovers youth as agents, participants, and beneficiaries of its white supremacist framing, even as they were still vulnerable to its harmful teachings. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I spoke with Juliane Maxwald abut her new book Psychoanalytic Sex Therapy: Exploring the Unconscious Life of Sexuality (Taylor & Francis, 2025). Maxwald bridges psychoanalytic theory with contemporary sex therapy to demonstrate that sexual symptoms are rarely just about sex—they're embodied expressions of unconscious conflict, early attachment wounds, relational trauma, and unmet developmental needs. Through eleven richly detailed clinical cases—including Jon's shame-bound spanking fantasies, Connie's trauma-releasing masturbation, Maurice's porn use masking performance anxiety, Joelle's compulsive sexual behavior, Brian's BDSM healing, and Anna and Darren's painful desire discrepancy—Maxwald shows how integrating psychodynamic insight with behavioral interventions, somatic awareness, and trauma-informed care creates transformative healing. The book argues that sexuality is a "portal to the unconscious," where repetition compulsion, dissociation, shame, and erotic transference play out in the body, and that therapeutic work requires not just fixing dysfunction but decoding symbolic meanings, tolerating ambiguity, attending to countertransference, and creating relational safety where clients can reclaim embodied agency, authentic desire, and the capacity for surrender—while acknowledging that sometimes, pragmatically, "a cigar is just a cigar" and simpler medical or behavioral solutions serve clients best. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elwin Hofman joins Jana Byars to talk about the volume he edited with Magaly Rodríguez García & Pieter Vanhees, The Business of Pleasure: A History of Paid Sex in the Heart of Europe (Leuven UP, 2022). In 2022, the Belgian parliament made a landmark decision by approving the decriminalisation of sex work. This move positioned the small nation as the first country in Europe - and the second globally - to abandon the hypocrisy of tolerance. Yet this was not the first time paid sex in Belgium gained international notoriety. The bathhouses of the fifteenth-century 'frows of Flanders' were well-known throughout Europe. In the nineteenth century, Belgium faced international outrage as the alleged epicentre of white slavery. Although Belgians were then accused of forcing white women into prostitution, they were also free to include any suspect women in the prostitution registers of colonial Congo. Throughout the First and Second World Wars, both allied and German soldiers sought relief in Belgian brothels. The Business of Pleasure presents the compelling life stories of sex workers and their interactions with authorities, clients and pimps. Pushing beyond stereotypes, this history of commercial sex offers a nuanced understanding of the difficulties and opportunities associated with paid sex for women, men and trans persons past and present. Contributors: Elwin Hofman (Utrecht University), Magaly Rodríguez García (KU Leuven), Pieter Vanhees (former researcher KU Leuven), Jelle Haemers (KU Leuven), Amandine Lauro (Université libre de Bruxelles), Maarten Loopmans (KU Leuven), Ilias Loopmans (MA history student at University of Antwerp), Sonia Verstappen (former sex worker). English translation of 'Seks voor geld. Een geschiedenis van prostitutie in België', Elwin Hofman, Magaly Rodríguez García & Pieter Vanhees (red.), (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2022) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Everything Is Fine, I’ll Just Work Harder: Confessions of A Former Badass (Street Noise Books, 2025), Professor Cara Gormally draws us into the familiar academic world of chronic busyness. In panel after panel, Cara brings us into a life numbed by overwork. Then, as this graphic memoir shows us, during an ordinary early-morning run, Cara’s watch dings with a Facebook friend request. Their rapist wants to “friend” them. Cara always had a long to-do list; always had many projects; always was busy. But as their rapist continued to send friend requests and tried to reconnect with them, they began to lose their grip on their work, projects, and relationships. But then Cara connects with a therapist who guides them through a long but powerful process of healing. And Cara works to desensitize, reprocess, excavate and relive the old wounds in order to move past them and heal. This episode explores: Cara’s path to academia; how she discovered her love of science; how art and writing can help us heal; the work of going to therapy; what radical self-acceptance is; why overwork can be a sign of a trauma response; the risks and rewards of changing; and the importance of writing communities. This episode does not discuss sexual assault. Our guest is: Dr. Cara Gormally (they/them), who is a professor at Gallaudet University, in Washington, D.C. Their interdisciplinary research focuses on questions related to making science relevant and accessible to increase students' belonging in STEM. Their new book is Everything Is Fine, I’ll Just Work Harder: Confessions of a Former Badass. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Being Well in Academia How We Talk About Gender and Why It Matters Tw-Eats: A Little Book with Big Feelings Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection Parenting and Personal Life in Academia What is burnout and how do you recover from it? What Do You Want Out of Life? Make Your Art No Matter What Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You help support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Everything Is Fine, I’ll Just Work Harder: Confessions of A Former Badass (Street Noise Books, 2025), Professor Cara Gormally draws us into the familiar academic world of chronic busyness. In panel after panel, Cara brings us into a life numbed by overwork. Then, as this graphic memoir shows us, during an ordinary early-morning run, Cara’s watch dings with a Facebook friend request. Their rapist wants to “friend” them. Cara always had a long to-do list; always had many projects; always was busy. But as their rapist continued to send friend requests and tried to reconnect with them, they began to lose their grip on their work, projects, and relationships. But then Cara connects with a therapist who guides them through a long but powerful process of healing. And Cara works to desensitize, reprocess, excavate and relive the old wounds in order to move past them and heal. This episode explores: Cara’s path to academia; how she discovered her love of science; how art and writing can help us heal; the work of going to therapy; what radical self-acceptance is; why overwork can be a sign of a trauma response; the risks and rewards of changing; and the importance of writing communities. This episode does not discuss sexual assault. Our guest is: Dr. Cara Gormally (they/them), who is a professor at Gallaudet University, in Washington, D.C. Their interdisciplinary research focuses on questions related to making science relevant and accessible to increase students' belonging in STEM. Their new book is Everything Is Fine, I’ll Just Work Harder: Confessions of a Former Badass. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Being Well in Academia How We Talk About Gender and Why It Matters Tw-Eats: A Little Book with Big Feelings Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection Parenting and Personal Life in Academia What is burnout and how do you recover from it? What Do You Want Out of Life? Make Your Art No Matter What Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You help support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do #MeToo and Jane Austen have in common? More than you might think. Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. Dr Zoë McGee reveals how Jane Austen, Frances Burney and their now-overlooked contemporaries used their stories to try to change society's mind about rape culture - and to reassure survivors they were not alone. Courting Disaster: Reading Between the Lines of the Regency Novel (Manchester UP, 2025) takes a timely deep-dive into a series of classic novels, comparing them with both historic court records and current events to show that our arguments about consent are not a new phenomenon. With the wit and wryness of a courtship novel, McGee reads between the lines to unveil a quiet feminist movement that still resonates today. Because every novel about marriage is also a novel about consent. In an era that's clamouring for a return to the values of the past, Courting Disaster asks what that would really mean, and whether anyone actually liked it back then anyway. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Samuel Fullerton joins Jana Byars to talk about Sexual Politics in Revolutionary England (Manchester UP 2024) to celebrate its paperback release. It recounts a dramatic transformation in English sexual polemic that unfolded during the kingdom's mid-seventeenth-century civil wars. In early Stuart England, explicit sexual language was largely confined to manuscript and oral forms by the combined regulatory pressures of ecclesiastical press licensing and powerful cultural notions of civility and decorum. During the early 1640s, however, graphic sex-talk exploded into polemical print for the first time in English history. Over the next two decades, sexual politics evolved into a vital component of public discourse, as contemporaries utilized sexual satire to reframe the English Revolution as a battle between licentious Stuart tyrants and their lecherous puritan enemies. By the time that Charles II regained the throne in 1660, this book argues, sex was already a routine element of English political culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Economies of Gender: Masculinity, "Mail Order Brides," and Women's Labor (Rutgers University Press, 2025) by Dr. Julia Meszaros offers a provocative exploration of the international dating industry, challenging simplistic narratives of human trafficking and scams while shedding light on the economic dynamics of gender. Through twelve years of fieldwork, the book delves into the motivations and experiences of men who seek relationships abroad, driven by dissatisfaction with Western women who, they believe, no longer embody traditional femininity. By examining romantic tourism hotspots such as Ukraine, Colombia, and the Philippines, Economies of Gender reveals how these international settings serve as "intimate frontiers," where men seek to extract femininity capital and bolster their status. It illuminates the often-unseen economic underpinnings of relationships and questions how global gender dynamics shape desires, fantasies, and intimate markets. Through its compelling analysis, the book broadens the conversation on gender, power, and the commodification of intimacy in a globalized world. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Human trafficking for the sex trade is a form of modern-day slavery that ensnares thousands of victims each year, disproportionately affecting women and girls. While the international community has developed an impressive edifice of human rights law, these laws are not equally recognized or enforced by all countries. Sex Trafficking and Human Rights demonstrates that state responsiveness to human trafficking is shaped by the political, social, cultural, and economic rights afforded to women in that state. While combatting human trafficking is a multiscalar problem with a host of conflating variables, this book shows that a common theme in the effectiveness of state response is the degree to which women and girls are perceived as, and actually are, full citizens. By analyzing human trafficking cases in India, Thailand, Russia, Nigeria, and Brazil, they shed light on the factors that make some women and girls more susceptible to traffickers than others. Heather Smith-Cannoy (PhD, UC San Diego, 2007) is a Professor of Political Science/Social Justice and Human Rights at the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. She is currently serving as the Interim Director of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Her work explores when and under what conditions international law impacts the human rights of the most marginalized populations, focusing on both the opportunities and the challenges associated with this body of law. She has also focused on the role that international law can play in advancing the legal rights of sex trafficking victims. She has published 4 books and more than 15 articles and book chapters. Patricia C. Rodda is the Assistant Professor of Political Science at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin. She teaches international relations, comparative politics, international law, conflict and security and political theory. Her research often focuses on vulnerable populations and the challenges they face seeking human rights protections. She is currently working on a new book project that investigates the institutions and interests that facilitate or obstruct the adoption of women’s rights in Muslim-majority states. Charles “Tony” Smith is a Professor in Political Science and Law at the University of California-Irvine (PhD UCSD 2004; JD UF 1987). His research concerns how institutions and the strategic interactions of political actors relate to the contestation over rights, law, and democracy. He has authored or co-authored eight books including Sex Trafficking and Human Rights: The Status of Women and State Responses (Georgetown University Press 2022) and The Politics of Perverts: The Political Attitudes and Actions of Non-Traditional Sexual Minorities (NYU Press 2024) and published over 40 articles and chapters. He is currently the Editor in Chief of Political Research Quarterly. Lamis Abdelaaty is an associate professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at labdelaa@syr.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A concise overview of fertility technology—its history, practical applications, and ethical and social implications around the world. In the late 1850s, a physician in New York City used a syringe and glass tube to inject half a drop of sperm into a woman’s uterus, marking the first recorded instance of artificial insemination. From that day forward, doctors and scientists have turned to technology in ever more innovative ways to facilitate conception. Fertility Technology (MIT Press, 2023) surveys this history in all its medical, practical, and ethical complexity, and offers a look at state-of-the-art fertility technology in various social and political contexts around the world. Donna J. Drucker’s concise and eminently readable account introduces the five principal types of fertility technologies used in human reproduction—artificial insemination; ovulation timing; sperm, egg, and embryo freezing; in vitro fertilization; and IVF in uterine transplants—discussing the development, manufacture, dispersion, and use of each. Geographically, it focuses on countries where innovations have emerged and countries where these technologies most profoundly affect individuals and population policies. Drucker’s wide-ranging perspective reveals how these technologies, used for birth control as well as conception in many cases, have been critical in shaping the moral, practical, and political meaning of human life, kinship, and family in different nations and cultures since the mid-nineteenth century. Donna J. Drucker is Assistant Director of Scholarship and Research Development at the Columbia University School of Nursing. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France (Cornell UP, 2025) by Dr. Hannah Frydman reveals a space, hidden in plain sight in Third Republican Paris, where deviant sexualities and lives could be experimented with and financed, despite republican attempts at growing and norming the population through the heterosexual family. That space was the newspaper, which was not simply a tool of normalization and a site of "dominant discourse," as it has frequently been imagined. Reading between the lines, Dr. Frydman shows how, through the Belle Époque classifieds, the newspaper became a tool for living lives otherwise as information flowed from it not just vertically but also laterally, facilitating person-to-person communication. The sexual relationships, exchanges, and services enabled by this communication were far from utopian: Surviving and thriving outside of social norms often required exploiting others. Yet by attending to the lives and livelihoods enabled by the classifieds, ethical or otherwise, Between the Sheets demonstrates that, thanks to new innovations in media technologies, queer and nonnormative lives in this period were lived in the center as well as on the margins. It was this centrality, however, that inspired efforts to place new (moral) controls on mass cultural forms and technologies. After World War I, in an interwar moment often characterized as one of sexual liberation, the press's queerness was subjected to ever-increasing surveillance and control, with repercussions for press freedom writ large. These repercussions echo into our age of social media, with its promise of unfettered connection, which inspires repressive legislation to keep sexuality (and with it, freedom) in its crosshairs. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Timothy Gitzen's Unscripting the Present (SUNY Press, 2025) interrogates contemporary sex panics in the United States, looking especially at popular culture texts to conceptualize queer youth survival strategies. Sex panics saturate contemporary discourse and politics in the United States. While such panics have a long history, they are now infused with rhetoric, logics, and methods of security that turn queer sexuality into an existential crisis. Queer youth bear the brunt of this crisis, with their presumed innocence always in danger of being lost. Unscripting the Present interweaves analysis of laws and lawsuits, news media, sociological studies, and popular culture both to understand contemporary sex panics and to highlight how queer youth find ways to survive in the here and now. Developing a novel technique of "unscripting," Gitzen focuses our attention on those impromptu moments when things go awry in representations of queer youth-moments that disrupt securitization's social "scripts." Foregoing well-worn promises of things getting better, texts such as Netflix's "Sex Education", the film "Love, Simon", and the multimodal show "Skam" upend the anxious hyperfocus on what's to come in favor of a hopeful present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How well do we understand our relationship to sex? According to Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, authors of the new book Hatred of Sex (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), we tend to overlook the “unpleasurable pleasures” that are integral to sex. Sex undoes us, destabilizes us, takes us out of ourselves. Many of our 21st century cultural products—Queer Theory, traumatology, intersectional studies—secretly “hate” sex for these very reasons and build such hatred into their ideas. In our interview, Davis and Dean explain why a full understanding and experience of sex require our reckoning with these truths, and they offer conceptual tools for undertaking such a reckoning. This interview is a must-listen for anyone curious about the unspoken dimensions of sex. Oliver Davis is a professor of French studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Jacques Rancière and editor of Rancière Now. Tim Dean is James M. Benson Professor in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking and Beyond Sexuality. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge) and has published on issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual abuse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Drag: A British History (University of California Press, 2023) is a groundbreaking study of the sustained popularity and changing forms of male drag performance in modern Britain. With this book, Jacob Bloomfield provides fresh perspectives on drag and recovers previously neglected episodes in the history of the art form. Despite its transgressive associations, drag has persisted as an intrinsic, and common, part of British popular culture--drag artists have consistently asserted themselves as some of the most renowned and significant entertainers of their day. As Bloomfield demonstrates, drag was also at the center of public discussions around gender and sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Victorian sex scandals to the "permissive society" of the 1960s. This compelling new history demythologizes drag, stressing its ordinariness while affirming its important place in British cultural heritage. Jacob Bloomfield is a Zukunftskolleg Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Konstanz and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Kent. His research is situated primarily in the fields of cultural history, the history of sexuality, and gender history. Jacob is the author of Drag: A British History (2023). His second monograph will be about the historical reception to, and cultural impact of, musician Little Richard. Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 1970s, the invention of the home pregnancy test changed what it means to be pregnant. For the first time, women could use a technology in the privacy of their own homes that gave them a yes or no answer. That answer had the power to change the course of their reproductive lives, and it chipped away at a paternalistic culture that gave gynecologists-the majority of whom were men-control over information about women's bodies. However, while science so often promises clear-cut answers, the reality of pregnancy is often much messier. Pregnancy Test (Bloomsbury, 2023) explores how the pregnancy test has not always lived up to the fantasy that more information equals more knowledge. Karen Weingarten examines the history and cultural representation of the pregnancy test to show how this object radically changed sex and pregnancy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The US has some of the highest rates of STIs and teen pregnancies in the industrialized world. A comprehensive sex education curriculum—which teaches facts on contraception, prophylactics, consent, and STIs—has been available since the 90s. Yet the majority of states require that sex education stress abstinence, and 22 states do not require sex ed in public schools at all. In The Fight for Sex Ed: The Century-Long Battle Between Truth and Doctrine (Beacon Press, 2025), writer, advocate, and historian Margaret Grace Myers shows us how we got here. While the earliest calls for sex ed came from a coalition of religious leaders and doctors at the turn of the century who sought to control the prevalence of STIs, the advent of antibiotics and modern condoms meant that abstinence was no longer good public health policy. The religious right, however, continued to frame it as such, using its impressive machinery to replace scientific facts with conservative Christian values. Because sex ed is not mandated at the federal level, these battles have played out locally throughout the decades: through rigged school boards, administrative oustings, court cases, unjust firings, scare tactics, and threats. Myers also shows how the religious right has worked to narrow the discourse around sex ed, often dictating the terms of debate almost entirely. What we teach young people has serious ramifications for reproductive justice, LGBTQ+ rights, gender equality, and public health. Sex education lies at the intersection of these hugely important cultural forces, yet it has been largely invisible. This book illuminates its potential—and its power. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The first collection of essays from the author of the Life and Death of Psychoanalysis, Stay, Illusion! with Simon Critchley and Conversion Disorder, Disorganisation & Sex (Divided Publishing, 2022) is as much about our resistance to sexuality as it is about sex itself. Jamieson Webster continues to excite and disturb, turning to Lacan and the autotheoretical in her exploration of the deep roots of our libidinal ties and the ways in which we keep desire at bay in our efforts to lead tidier, more coherent lives. Part theory, part manifesto and part testimony, Webster calls for us as analysts to reinvent ourselves with our patients, as patients to take part in the poetry of our symptoms, and as institutions to create the conditions for something radical to happen in the transmission of psychoanalysis. While many in theory have turned toward the soma and the exterior, Webster has not given up on psychic interiority, her writing an attempt to avoid the trap of idealizing one while diminishing the other, or getting stuck in the reversal. We can wish for the new while remaining skeptical of the march of progress, and we can speak from the discourse of the patient while remaining connected to the discourse of the analyst. We can take risks even as we face loss, and seek pleasure even though there’s no common satisfaction. Cassandra B. Seltman is a writer, psychoanalyst, and researcher in New York City. cassandraseltman@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“We know what we want, and one day, our prince will come,” says Toby, the bicycle-shorts-wearing, double ententre-making, unacknowledgely-gay neighbor in RTE’s Upwardly Mobile. Though the first queer characters in Irish entertainment television were tropes and stereotypes, they represented an important shift in LGBTQ visibility in Irish media. The road to early representations in entertainment media was a hard road paved by gay rights activists, AIDS stigma, and production teams looking for sensationalism. In LGBTQ Visibility, Media, and Sexuality in Ireland, Páraic Kerrigan explores the dynamics of queer visibility and sexuality in Ireland through televised media between 1974 and 2008. Tune in for our chat about Gay Byrne and the Late Late Show, queer soap stars, the AIDS crisis and globalization of Ireland, and the LGBTQ rights tug-of-war that played out in turn-of-the-century television. Avrill Earls is the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast (a narrative history podcast, rather than interview-based), and an Assistant Professor of History at Mercyhurst University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year From an esteemed scholar, a richly textured, authoritative history of sex and sexuality in America—the first major account in three decades. Our era is one of sexual upheaval. Roe v. Wade was overturned in the summer of 2022, school systems across the country are banning books with LGBTQ+ themes, and the notion of a “tradwife” is gaining adherents on the right while polyamory wins converts on the left. It may seem as though debates over sex are more intense than ever, but as acclaimed historian Rebecca L. Davis demonstrates in Fierce Desires, we should not be too surprised, because Americans have been arguing over which kinds of sex are “acceptable”—and which are not—since before the founding itself.  From the public floggings of fornicators in early New England to passionate same-sex love affairs in the 1800s and the crackdown on abortion providers in the 1870s, and from the movements for sexual liberation to the recent restrictions on access to gender affirming care, Davis presents a sweeping, engrossing, illuminating four-hundred-year account of this nation’s sexual past. Drawing on a wealth of sources, including legal records, erotica, and eighteenth-century romance novels, she recasts important episodes—Anthony Comstock’s crusade against smut among them—and, at the same time, unearths stories of little-remembered pioneers and iconoclasts, such as an indentured servant in colonial Virginia named Thomas/Thomasine Hall, Gay Liberation Front cofounder Kiyoshi Kuromiya, and postwar female pleasure activist Betty Dodson.  At the heart of the book is Davis’s argument that the concept of sexual identity is relatively novel, first appearing in the nineteenth century. Over the centuries, Americans have shifted from understanding sexual behaviors as reflections of personal preferences or values, such as those rooted in faith or culture, to defining sexuality as an essential part of what makes a person who they are. And at every step, legislators, police, activists, and bureaucrats attempted to regulate new sexual behaviors, transforming government in the process. The most comprehensive account of America’s sexual past since John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s 1988 classic, Intimate Matters, Davis’s magisterial work seeks to help us understand the turmoil of the present. It demonstrates how fiercely we have always valued our desires, and how far we are willing to go to defend them. Rebecca L. Davis is professor of History and of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware where she held the Miller Family Endowed Early Career Professorship. She is the author of several books including Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics and More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss and is one of the co-founders and co-hosts of the podcast This is Probably a Weird Question about bodies, sexuality, health and history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices