Within the Hmong American community, mothers and aunts of teenagers use bangles, lace and traditional handwork techniques to create dazzling displays reflecting the gender and ethnicity of their sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, as they participate in an annual courtship ritual. This book examines these events to show how dress is used to transform gender construction and create positive images of African American and Hmong American youth. Coming-of-age rituals serve as arenas of cultural revision and change. For each of these communities, the choice of dress represents cultural affirmation. This author shows that within the homogenizing context of American society, dress serves as a site for the continual renegotiation of identity - gendered, ethnic and otherwise.

Historicising Gender and Sexuality features a diverse collection of essays that shed new light on the historical intersections between gender and sexuality across time and space. - Demonstrates both the particularities of specific formulations of gender and sexuality and the nature of the relationship between the categories themselves - Presents evidence that careful and contextualised analysis of the shifting relationship of gender and sexuality illuminates broader historical processes

The essays in this volume address sexual phenomena in eighteenth-century Europe that were for one reason or another outside the legal or sanctified systems of acceptability: most notably, unwed heterosexual domesticity, masturbation, prostitution, libertinism, homosexuality, and erotic literature. The contributors' essays make an important first step toward integrating sexuality into our general understanding of eighteenth century culture. Contributors: Roy Porter; Jean-Marie Goulemot with Odile Wagner and Arthur Greenspan, translators; John R. Gillis; Theodore Tarczylo with James Coke and Michael Murray, translators; Vern L. Bullough; James G. Turner; Jean-Pierre Guicciardi with Michael Murray, translator; David Coward; Randolph Trumbach; Michel Delon, with Nelly Stephane, translator; G. S. Rousseau; Arend H. Huussen, Jr.; Michael Rey with Robert A. Day and Robert Welch, translators; Peter Sabor; Paul-Gabriel Bouce Robert J. Ellrich; Robert L. Dawson; Armando Marchi with James Cook and David Marsh, translators.

A narrative on the lesser-known sexual values and customs of colonial Americans repudiates conventional Puritanical stereotypes to profile the social, political, and legal dynamics that shaped two hundred years of sexual diversity, discussing Puritan attitudes toward sex, the influence of race and class, and a shift in sexual culture during the eighteenth century.

A Los Angeles Times columnist recounts her eighteen-month undercover stint as a man, a time during which she underwent considerable personal risks as she worked a sales job, joined a bowling league, frequented sex clubs, dated, and encountered firsthand the rigid codes and rituals of masculinity. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 150,000 first printing.

Describes the legal challenge to the Colorado anti-gay civil rights initiative

Transgender studies is the latest area of academic inquiry to grow out of the exciting nexus of queer theory, feminist studies, and the history of sexuality. Because transpeople challenge our most fundamental assumptions about the relationship between bodies, desire, and identity, the field is both fascinating and contentious. The Transgender Studies Reader puts between two covers fifty influential texts with new introductions by the editors that, taken together, document the evolution of transgender studies in the English-speaking world. By bringing together the voices and experience of transgender individuals, doctors, psychologists and academically-based theorists, this volume will be a foundational text for the transgender community, transgender studies, and related queer theory.

Examines the relationships between women and men, drawing on examples from the natural world, arguing for the natural superiority of women.

Tells the story of a man, whose botched circumcision as a baby and subsequent surgical alteration to a female, was mistakenly used as an argument for the success of such procedures