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The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality theorizes a historical etiological method as an alternative to the epistemological approaches that play such a vital role in the field-imaginary of sexuality studies. This historical etiological approach recovers a multiplicity of patterns, models, and categories of sexuality, recording their sites of production, tracing synchronic relations between sexual formations, and theorizing the contours of these sexualities by attending to the accounts of their origins. At its broadest, this project seeks not to rationalize what Eve Sedgwick calls “the unrationalized coexistence of different models” of sexuality, but to understand how their coexistence occurred. This book contends that historical etiology is a crucial tool — if not the crucial tool — for periodizing and narrativizing the invention of sexuality. It provides an account of the process by which the gender of object choice becomes the basis of classification and definition for sexuality and a description of the simultaneous speciation of what Michel Foucault calls “minor perverts” who fit “no order”: zoophiles, zooerasts, auto-monosexualists, and numberless more. These minor perverts bring into focus largely vestigial models of sexuality, making visible the formation of and competition between different models of sexuality and helping us to imagine it otherwise.

One of the twentieth century’s most controversial sexologists—or “fuckologists,” to use his own term—John Money was considered a trailblazing scientist and sexual libertarian by some, but damned by others as a fraud and a pervert. This is the first book to contextualize and interrogate Money’s writings and practices across his three key diagnostic concepts, “hermaphroditism,” “transsexualism,” and “paraphilia.” The book offers a multidisciplinary critique of the tensions and controversies that engendered and followed from Money’s work. He invented the concept of gender in the 1950s, yet fought its uptake by feminists. He backed surgical treatments for transsexuality, but argued that gender roles were set by reproductive capacity. He shaped the treatment of intersex, advocating experimental sex changes for children with ambiguous genitalia. He pioneered drug therapy for sex offenders, yet took an ambivalent stance towards pedophilia. In his most publicized case study, Money oversaw the reassignment of David Reimer as female following a circumcision accident in infancy. Heralded by many as proof that gender is pliable, the case was later discredited when Reimer revealed that he had lived as a male since his early teens. Bringing Money’s ideas into dialogue with both the theoretical humanities and the history of medicine, the book also addresses Money’s lesser-known work on topics such as animal behavior, cybernetics, brain development, and the philosophy of science.

In the aftermath of World War II, the closeness that many American servicemen experienced during the war was followed by a period of unprecedented scorn for men’s intimacy. The Mourning After describes and interprets this cruel irony. An outbreak of vicious homophobia was the most obvious manifestation of the scorn, but the postwar inhibition of male closeness also took its toll on friendships, the relationship between fathers and sons, and, indirectly, on men’s relationships with women. The Mourning After picks up where the author’s acclaimed Picturing Men left off, showing how everyday photographs of males together in the years after the war documented an increasing space between males, and a certain somberness found even among American boys. The book then considers literature as cultural evidence, examining the shift in how intimacy between males was received by readers of the work of John Horne Burns, a once-celebrated American novelist who was consigned to obscurity after his work’s setting shifted, from the war abroad to the postwar home front. Ibson then contrasts Burns’s fate with the postwar fortunes of Gore Vidal. In this sweeping reinterpretation of the postwar years, Ibson marshals diverse evidence-from popular culture, a notorious murder, psychiatry, child development advice, and memoirs of the children of World War II veterans, for instance-to make his case that a prolonged postwar mourning, along with pervasive guilt, occupied the very center of midcentury American masculinity, giving all too many American males a widespread sense of longing that continues into the present.

Sex Museums is the first book to comprehensively explore what happens when museums display sex. It demonstrates how museum debates about what sex is and how to manage it have been integral to defining the parameters of sexual normalcy and for silencing non-normative voices as they relate to gender, race, and sexuality. The book traces a genealogy of museum exhibitions to examine the influence of display on the history of sexuality and to explore four interrelated themes. First, it treats the museum context (of the nineteenth- through the twenty-first centuries) as a highly influential site in the construction of modern sexual subjectivity and the categories of “normalcy” and “perversity.” Second, it analyzes a group of present-day museums, called sex museums, as explicit spaces that combine pedagogy and public entertainment to redefine what “sex” means. Third, it examines the successes and failures of sex museums and describes the pleasures and dangers associated with exhibiting dissident sexualities. Fourth, it proposes the seemingly paradoxical assertion that all museums are already sex museums, even as a diverse array of sexualities have been historically marginalized from the museum’s visual field. Sex Museums therefore illuminates the heteronormativity (and in some instances, the homonormativity) of most museums and proposes alternative approaches for the future of public sexual display projects (what the author calls “queer praxis”). Thus, the book develops theoretical innovations in queer, gender, critical race, performance, and museum studies with practical applications for collection, curatorship, policy management, and visitor services in museums.

This book is a history of how and why, from Algeria’s independence from France in 1962 through the cultural and social upheaval of the 1970s, highly sexualized claims about “Arabs” were omnipresent in important public discussions in France, both those that dealt with sex and those that spoke of Arabs. The ongoing consequences of the Algerian war, the so-called sexual revolution, and the worldwide anticolonial movement of the mid-twentieth century contributed to the development of the fight for sexual liberation. Indeed, the French sexual revolution was distinguished from similar movements of the time by the fact that the attention given to Algerian sexuality made the political, as opposed to natural, nature of sexuality more apparent. The author uses historical accounts and primary sources such as news reports and propaganda throughout the book to demonstrate perceptions of Arab presence in French political development during the time. Ultimately, Shepard argues that the reason so many people in general spoke about sex and Arab men in the 1960s and 1970s was a foundational problem in French politics, which Algerian independence crystallized, and also that the sequence of political events during that time was inextricably intertwined with the claims of and discussions on Algerian sexuality.

This book is an interdisciplinary study that draws on critical race and gender studies, cultural theories, and U.S. jurisprudence in order to rethink the popular notion of crisis in black masculinity studies with a privileging of agency. The metaphor “When We Imagine Grace” is used to theorize how black men must imagine their lives, ambitions, and desires in contrast to the narrow representations of black men’s experiences in the mainstream media and both popular and academic discourses. Focusing on black men’s lives in two specific spaces—civic and domestic—the book analyzes how black men in history, literature, film, political arenas, and popular culture have either challenged or been challenged by social constructions of race, gender, class, and sexuality. This intersectional theory is used to explore the ways in which U.S. law has shaped and informed the social construction of the raced, gendered, classed, and sexed experiences of some black men; the epistemological frameworks that prompt some black men either to challenge or be challenged by the law; and the homogenous and pathological social constructions of black masculinity that the law has helped to perpetuate.