As a journalist, lawyer, and writer, I've been thinking and writing about state regulation of sexuality for 20 years. Political writing about sex can easily fall into orthodoxy; whether conservative or liberal, each side has its expected talking points. When I began investigating ways of thinking about public displays of sexuality in Park Cruising, I returned to the cache of sex-positive writing of the 1980s and 1990s. Some of it was invigorating, and some stale. So I sought out new writing about sex and sexuality, and I was richly rewarded. These books are just the tip of the iceberg; there's a feast of contemporary writing and thinking. So much to think through and explore!
I wrote...
Park Cruising: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path
After a cruising sting that caught more than 70 men in 2016, the LGBT community swung into action, organizing defences for those affected, and demanding accountability from the police, politicians, and the legal system itself. Why does the law only ever view sexual expression as a harm, a threat, a danger? What would the law look like, if it could account for pleasure and connection? Park Cruising ultimately reveals a world of empathy, care, and unexpected lessons about the value of this marginal practice.
I spent a lot of the last year pressing The Right to Sex into the hands of my smartest friends.
This book tackles some of the thorniest issues in sexual politics today, teasing out the seeming contradictions in feminist thought on campus sexual assault investigations, the Me Too movement, incels, and more. It’s compulsively readable; I was hooked from the first essay.
“Laser-cut writing and a stunning intellect. If only every writer made this much beautiful sense.” —Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women
“Amia Srinivasan is an unparalleled and extraordinary writer—no one X-rays an argument, a desire, a contradiction, a defense mechanism quite like her. In stripping the new politics of sex and power down to its fundamental and sometimes clashing principles, The Right to Sex is a bracing revivification of a crucial lineage in feminist writing: Srinivasan is daring, compassionate, and in relentless search of a new frame.” —Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion
adrienne maree brown taught me a lot about the lineage of sex-positive writing from the 1970s to today.
The book offered me a useful corrective to views of sexual politics which so often ignore and silence liberatory writing by Black women. This book reminded me that you cannot tell the story of sex-positive feminism without Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, or Fran White. But brown isn’t here to scold you – this book is a joyful read.
How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Author and editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls “pleasure activism,” a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, she challenges us to rethink the ground rules of activism. Her mindset-altering essays are interwoven with conversations and insights from other feminist thinkers, including Audre Lorde, Joan…
For me, this book begins with a pleasing reversal: that the tough-looking guys engaged in casual, rough, or extreme types of sexual expression are in fact displaying tenderness.
The book made me reexamine what I thought I knew about the emotions and relationships at work in gay “pig” subcultures. I found myself underlining passage after passage. In the last third of the book, Florêncio becomes a character in the scene he is describing, a risky move that pays off.
This book analyses contemporary gay "pig" masculinities, which have emerged alongside antiretroviral therapies, online porn, and new sexualised patterns of recreational drug use, examining how they trouble modern European understandings of the male body, their ethics, and their political underpinnings.
This is the first book to reflect on an increasingly visible new form of sexualised gay masculinity, and the first monograph to move debates on condomless sex amongst gay men beyond discourses of HIV and/or AIDS. It contributes to existing critical histories of sexuality, pornography and other sex media at a crucial juncture in the history of gay male sex…
Obviously, it’s a provocative thesis, but it’s one that has a long history in feminist and queer writing.
I was so happy to see this book reclaim the subject for the 21st century. Lewis is a careful thinker, and I appreciated that this book is not a polemic (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
I learned a lot about the history of family abolitionism, and I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to think deeply about the privatization of care—friends, colleagues, and yes, even members of my own family.
We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family.
Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. It could be otherwise: in this urgent, incisive polemic, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case for family abolition.
I was mesmerized by this book, and I read it in one great big gulp.
It tackles one of the most intractable questions that queer and trans people face: what to make of historical figures who lived their lives before they had the tidy identitarian categories we have now? I appreciate that Heyam is able to live with some of the inherent ambiguities of their project, and to some extent leaves the question open to further discussion and debate.
After I finished the book, the stories Heyam tells continued to rumble around in my head.
Agroundbreakingglobal history of gender nonconformity
Today’s narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people’s lives.
Before We Were Transilluminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present,whose experiencesof gender havedefiedbinary categories. Blendinghistorical analysiswith sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusivetrans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were…
I became fascinated with 16th-century and 17th-century Europe after reading Don Quixote many years ago. Since then, every novel or nonfiction book about that era has felt both ancient and contemporary. I’m always struck by how much our environment has changed—transportation, communication, housing, government—but also how little we as people have changed when it comes to ambition, love, grief, and greed. I doubled down my reading on that time period when I researched my novel, Dulcinea. Many people read in the eras of the Renaissance, World War II, or ancient Greece, so I’m hoping to introduce them to the Baroque Age.
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse to gossip. But when Dolça receives his deathbed note asking to see her, she races across Spain with the intention of unburdening herself of an old secret.
On the journey, she encounters bandits, the Inquisition, illness, and the choices she's made. At its heart, Dulcinea is about how we betray the people we love, what happens when we succumb to convention, and why we squander the few chances we get to change our lives.
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