Linda LeMoncheck introduces a new way of thinking and talking about women's sexual pleasures, preferences, and desires. Using the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy, she discusses methods for mediating the tensions among apparently irreconcilable feminist perspectives on women's sexuality and shows how a feminist epistemology and ethic can advance the dialogue in women's sexuality across a broad political spectrum. She argues that in order to capture the diversity and complexity of women's sexual experience, women's sexuality must be examined from two (...) equally compelling perspectives: that of women's sexual oppression under conditions of individual and institutional male dominance; and that of women's sexual liberation, both in terms of each woman's pursuit of sexual agency and self-definition, and in terms of women's sexual liberation as a class. Loose Women, Lecherous Men sheds crucial new light on such much-debated topics as promiscuity, adultery, sexual deviance, prostitution, pornography, sexual harassment, and sexual violence against women. Her book supports a dialogue that encourages both women and men to take up a feminist perspective in exploring the meaning and value of sexuality in their lives. (shrink)

An analytic investigation of Antioch's "Sexual Offense Policy.".

An ambitious and highly engaging history of ideas, Feminism and Its Discontents brings together far-flung intellectual tendencies rarely seen in intimate ...

Drawing on more than fifty interviews in both the US and the Netherlands, Wendy Chapkis captures the wide-ranging experiences of women performing erotic labor and offers a complex, multi-faceted depiction of sex work. Her expansive analytic perspective encompasses both a serious examination of international prostitution policy as well as hands-on accounts of contemporary commercial sexual practices. Scholarly, but never simply academic, this book is explicitly grounded in a concern for how competing political discourses work concretely in the world--to frame policy (...) and define perceptions of AIDS, to mobilize women into opposing camps, to silence some agendas and to promote others. (shrink)

"At last! A critical look at feminist schisms that doesn't trash either side. Chancer's analysis of the sexuality vs. sexism splits is excellent and also makes for wonderful reading. I particularly liked her ideas for a 'third wave' in feminism."—Judith Lorber, CUNY Graduate Center "Reconcilable Differences brings crucial new perspectives to long-standing problems. Chancer's insights enrich our understandings of gender inequality and the policies necessary to address them."—Deborah Rhode, Stanford Law School "In this postmodern world of fractured subjectivity and incommensurabilities, (...) Lynn Chancer boldly argues for the possibility of feminist unity amidst and through our oft-noted differences. A book of rare intelligence and broad applicability, Chancer confronts the thorny debates that have kept feminists fighting each other and unable to reconcile around even the narrowest of agendas. She argues for the vitality of these debates (around sex, around the culture of beauty and, most tempestuously, around pornography) at the same time she pushes them to new places and draws out both new dilemmas and new resolutions for the late-twentieth century feminist. Clearly the work of a creative and complex mind, Chancer's book is destined to become a *must read* for feminists of all persuasions."—Suzanna Danuta Walters, author of Material Girls: making sense of feminist cultural theory. (shrink)

At the core of Presenting the Past is the dramatic and troubling case of a woman who during the course of her analysis began to recall scenes of her own ...

Men and women have always bargained for sex. In Hard Bargains, philosopher-lawyer Linda Hirshman and legal historian Jane Larson provide the first complete analysis of power in heterosexual relationships, combining an eye-opening legal history of sexual regualtion with thought-provoking predictions of what the future might bring.