Eva Illouz, "The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations" (Polity Press, 2021)
Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people's lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined for us; the feverish waiting for a ph...
23 Nov 202233min
On Sigmund Freud's "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality"
Sigmund Freud is probably best known as the founder of psychoanalysis. In his clinical practice, he established theories on how the human psyche develops and behaves, and his 1905 text Three Essays on...
18 Nov 202232min
Sophie Lewis, "Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation" (Verso, 2022)
What if family were not the only place you might hope to feel safe, loved, cared for and accepted? What if we could do better than the family? We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky...
18 Nov 202259min
Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, "Hatred of Sex" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
Hatred of Sex (U Nebraska Press, 2022) links Jacques Rancière’s political philosophy of the constitutive disorder of democracy with Jean Laplanche’s identification of a fundamental perturbation at th...
17 Nov 20221h 6min
Guido Ruggiero, "Love and Sex in the Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Today Jana Byars talks to her PhD advisor Guido Ruggiero about his latest monograph, Love and Sex in the Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 2021) over the meaning of lo...
16 Nov 202253min
Howard Chiang, "Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific" (Columbia UP, 2021)
As a broad category of identity, “transgender” has given life to a vibrant field of academic research since the 1990s. Yet the Western origins of the field have tended to limit its cross-cultural scop...
14 Nov 202258min
Peter Rehberg, "Hipster Porn: Queer Masculinities and Affective Sexualities in the Fanzine 'Butt'" (Routledge, 2022)
It’s easy to forget that the cultural archetypes that pass for queerness today have historical roots. Some of these roots are mere years away from today’s reality but they are nonetheless distinct and...
4 Nov 20221h 7min
Krystale E. Littlejohn, "Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics" (U California Press, 2021)
The average person concerned about becoming pregnant spends approximately thirty years trying to prevent conception. People largely do so alone using prescription birth control, a situation often take...
27 Okt 20221h 1min
