Trade Books
In Erotic Exchanges, Nina Kushner reveals the complex world of elite prostitution in eighteenth-century Paris by focusing on the professional mistresses who dominated it. In this demimonde, these dames entretenues exchanged sex, company, and sometimes even love for being "kept." Most of these women entered the profession unwillingly, either because they were desperate and could find no other means of support or because they were sold by family members to brothels or to particular men. A small but significant percentage of kept women, however, came from a theater subculture that actively supported elite prostitution. Kushner shows that in its business conventions, its moral codes, and even its sexual practices, the demimonde was an integral part of contemporary Parisian culture.Kushner's primary sources include thousands of folio pages of dossiers and other documents generated by the Paris police as they tracked the lives and careers of professional mistresses, reporting in meticulous, often lascivious, detail what these women and their clients did. Rather than reduce the history of sex work to the history of its regulation, Kushner interprets these materials in a way that unlocks these women's own experiences. Kushner analyzes prostitution as a form of work, examines the contracts that governed relationships among patrons, mistresses, and madams, and explores the roles played by money, gifts, and, on occasion, love in making and breaking the bonds between women and men. This vivid and engaging book explores elite prostitution not only as a form of labor and as a kind of business but also as a chapter in the history of emotions, marriage, and the family.
Spin or fact? Theater or reality? A biting, original political satire that challenges audiences of any political affiliation, THE EXTREMISTS is a labyrinth of wordplay and mind games in which a television talk-show host and his guest, author of a book about terrorism, get lost in their own doublespeak ... or are they really double-agents, subversively reprogramming our sound-byte-saturated minds? "It's Samuel Beckett meets Larry King in this new play by CJ Hopkins. When an expert on terrorism appears on a T V talk show, the conversation becomes a perverse satirical rant on the increasing alienation of the individual in the modern world ... A dark satire that playfully mocks the essential absurdity of the talking-head culture ... taking on big issues like the loss of individualism and the looming apocalypse ... smartly written ..." -Atlanta Journal Constitution "The audience never tunes out while watching THE EXTREMISTS ... At first we sit back and laugh at the doublespeak as CJ Hopkins's media satire takes potshots at some easy targets. By the end, we find ourselves squirming as if we're the ones in the hot seat, mentally justifying our own choices and behaviors ... After a stealthy first half, the production confronts the viewers like it's a merciless Jon Stewart and we're a hapless Jim Cramer ... The play doesn't just target conservatives, but implies that the entire political process is a corrupt means for national and global dominance." -Creative Loafing (Atlanta) "The word 'insane' is one of the most frequently heard words on the stage ... It describes the evening very well ... THE EXTREMISTS begins as harmless media satire, a conversation in which the host and the invited expert toss empty phrases back and forth ... Hopkins builds a construct of ideas out of their rhetoric, until everything revolves around one thing: What is the truth for the good guys, and what is it for the bad guys? ... What is the reality? ... Intellectual theater in the truest sense." -Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin) "A gripping satire, which spills into sinister weirdness." -Die Tageszeitung (Berlin)
When gay couples become parents, they face a host of questions and issues that their straight counterparts may never have to consider. How important is it for each partner to have a biological tie to their child? How will they become parents: will they pursue surrogacy, or will they adopt? Will both partners legally be able to adopt their child? Will they have to hide their relationship to speed up the adoption process? Will one partner be the primary breadwinner? And how will their lives change, now that the presence of a child has made their relationship visible to the rest of the world?
In Gay Dads: Transitions to Adoptive Fatherhood, Abbie E. Goldberg examines the ways in which gay fathers approach and negotiate parenthood when they adopt. Drawing on empirical data from her in-depth interviews with 70 gay men, Goldberg analyzes how gay dads interact with competing ideals of fatherhood and masculinity, alternately pioneering and accommodating heteronormative "parenthood culture." The first study of gay men's transitions to fatherhood, this work will appeal to a wide range of readers, from those in the social sciences to social work to legal studies, as well as to gay-adoptive parent families themselves.
1. Archipelago of Regrets by Worcester Chamber Music Society 2. Elegy by Worcester Chamber Music Society 3. Escaping the Delta by C-Squared 4. Same River Twice by Radius Ensemble 5. Subtending the Right Angle by Radius Ensemble CD only
For a time, Richter argues, nineteenth-century Americans imagined the public realm as a chaotic and dangerous place full of potential, where various groups came together, collided, and influenced one another, for better or worse. The example of the American railroad reveals how, by the beginning of the twentieth century, this image was replaced by one of a domesticated public realm--a public space in which both women and men increasingly strove to make themselves "at home."
Through efforts that ranged from the homey touches of railroad car decor to advertising images celebrating female travelers and legal cases sanctioning gender-segregated spaces, travelers and railroad companies transformed the railroad from a place of risk and almost unlimited social mixing into one in which white men and women alleviated the stress of unpleasant social contact. Making themselves "at home" aboard the trains, white men and women domesticated the railroad for themselves and paved the way for a racially segregated and class-stratified public space that freed women from the home yet still preserved the railroad as a masculine domain.
Judith Wagner DeCew provides a solid philosophical foundation for legal discussions of privacy by articulating and unifying diverse arguments on the right to privacy and on how it should be guaranteed in various contemporary contexts. Philosophers and legal theorists tend either to define privacy narrowly or to abandon privacy as conceptually incoherent, she claims. In order to assess how far privacy should extend, and determine how the wide range of specific cases can be reconciled, DeCew surveys the history of the notion of privacy as it first evolved in American tort law and constitutional law and then analyzes current characterizations. In different contexts, privacy has been defined on the basis of information, autonomy, property, and intimacy. DeCew's broader claim is that privacy has fundamental value because it allows us to create ourselves as individuals, offering us freedom from judgment, scrutiny, and the pressure to conform. Feminist theorists often view privacy as a tool for shielding abuses. DeCew responds to this feminist critique of privacy, as well as addressing the issues of abortion and of gay and lesbian sexuality in the context of specific landmark legal cases. In discussions of Roe v. Wade, Bowers v. Hardwick, and the Hart/Devlin debates on decriminalization of homosexuality and prostitution, DeCew applies her broad theory to sexual and reproductive privacy, anti-sodomy laws, and the legislation and enforcement of morals. She finally discusses the intersection of privacy with public safety concerns, such as drug testing, and in light of new communication technologies, such as caller ID.