Helen Longino, “Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
What explains human behavior? It is standard to consider answers from the perspective of a dichotomy between nature and nurture, with most researchers today in agreement that it is both. For Helen Lon...
15 Maj 20131h 4min
Dan Healey, “Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939” (Northern Illinois UP, 2009)
I have long been an admirer of Dan Healey‘s work. His research has opened the world of homosexual desire and the establishment of the gay community in revolutionary Russia and has made an important co...
26 Nov 20121h 23min
Julietta Hua, “Trafficking Women’s Human Rights” (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
In Trafficking Women’s Human Rights (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Julietta Hua analyzes how discourse on human trafficking creates the boundaries of victimhood and thereby restricts concepts ...
13 Okt 201241min
Amy Stanley, “Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan” (University of California Press, 2012)
With prose that is as elegant as the argument is clear, Amy Stanley‘s new book tells a social, cultural, and economic history of Tokugawa Japan through the prism of prostitution. Selling Women: Prosti...
19 Sep 20121h 6min
Heather Munro Prescott, “The Morning After: A History of Emergency Contraception in the United States” (Rutgers UP, 2011)
What would a Presidential campaign be without a good dose of reproductive politics? To be sure, many of us are surprised to see contraception, and not just abortion, called into question – but maybe t...
16 Apr 201243min
Elizabeth Heineman, “Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
When I was in college in the 1980s, I liked to listen to Iggy Pop (aka James Newell Osterberg, Jr.). I was always mystified, however, by his song “Five Foot One,” with its odd and catchy refrain “I wi...
2 Sep 20111h 6min
Elaine Tyler May, “America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation” (Basic Books, 2010)
Don’t you find it a bit curious that there are literally thousands of pills that we in the developed world take on a daily basis, but only one of them is called “the Pill?” Actually, you probably don’...
4 Sep 201057min
Kristin Celello, “Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the 20th-Century U.S.” (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)
When did Americans begin to think of marriage as “work,” as in, “If you want your marriage to succeed, you have to work at it.” Kristin Celello answers this question (and a lot of others) in her timel...
27 Mars 20091h 3min
