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What is the role of the senses in how we understand the world? Cognitive sociology has long addressed the way we perceive or imagine boundaries in our ordinary lives, but this book pushes this question further still. How, it asks, did we come to blind ourselves to sex sameness? Drawing on more than sixty interviews with two decidedly different populations—the blind and the transgendered—it answers provocative questions about the relationships between sex differences, biology, and visual perception. Both groups speak from unique perspectives that magnify the social construction of dominant visual conceptions of sex, allowing the author to examine the visual construction of the sexed body and highlighting the processes of social perception underlying our everyday experience of male and female bodies. The result is a notable contribution to the sociologies of gender, culture, and cognition that will revolutionize the way we think about sex.

Drawing on an ethnography of lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) residents in Ithaca, New York; San Luis Obispo, California; Greenfield, Massachusetts; and Portland, Maine; How Places Make Us shows how LBQ migrants craft a unique sense of self that corresponds to their new homes. The book demonstrates that sexual identities are responsive to city ecology. Despite the fact that the LBQ residents of all four cities share many demographic and cultural traits, their approaches to sexual identity politics and to ties with other LBQ individuals and heterosexual residents vary markedly by where they live. Subtly distinct local ecologies shape what it feels like to be a sexual minority, including the degree to which one feels accepted, how many other LBQ individuals one encounters in daily life, and how often a city declares its embrace of difference. In short, city ecology shapes how one “does” LBQ in a specific place. Ultimately, the book reveals that there isn’t one general way of approaching sexual identity because humans are not only social, but fundamentally local creatures. Places make us much more than we might think.

The book draws on unique and original research on the experiences of women, men, transgender people, minors and third party agents working in the sex industry in a variety of settings and jobs in the European Union, the Balkans and North Africa. Mobile Orientations addresses a critical issue within the transformation of global societies: the relation between the increase in migration flows, the expansion of the sex industry and the emergence of new forms of agency and exploitation. Moral panics about migrant ‘sex slaves’ being exploited in the global sex industry obfuscate the reality that only a minority is actually trafficked. The original research evidence analysed in Mobile Orientations counters the scenario of hegemonic exploitation presented by such moral panics. It shows that by migrating and working in the global sex industry, young women and men find opportunities to counter the increased precariousness and exploitability they meet in neoliberal times. The book’s autoethnographic writing style expresses the main theoretical contribution Mobile Orientations aims to make: to provide a nuanced and emic analysis of the complex understandings of agency and exploitation of migrants working in the global sex industry. The discussion of the methodological and expressive opportunities (and challenges) offered by ethnography and participatory filmmaking is integral part of the argument made by Mobile Orientations, which ultimately challenges the criteria of scientific and documentary authenticity and the forms of social exclusion engendered by the convergence between sexual humanitarianism and neoliberalism.

Sorting Sexualities: Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification analyzes how legal and scientific institutions work together to reify and regulate sexual subjects in highly gendered and racialized ways. Using legal and discursive analysis, interviews with legal and scientific actors, and multi-sited ethnographic observations, it demonstrates that attempts to classify sexual “others” naturalize social differences along the lines of sexuality and simultaneously legitimate differential forms of social control and legal regulation. Through a comparative analysis of sexual orientation-based asylum claims and risk evaluations of sex offenders—two arenas where adjudicators must determine subjects’ sexualities—Sorting Sexualities shows how the state attempts to enroll non-state expert actors to help craft classificatory schemas that render sexual “others” legible to and thus manageable by the state. Drawing on different types of social science expertise results in divergent classification practices and, in turn, disparate definitions of sexual subjects. Through their contributions to the creation of “epistemic logics,” or hybridized ways of knowing that form in interstitial organizational spaces, experts may support state goals or, alternatively, push for social change. Sorting Sexualities ultimately reveals how different notions of identity, risk, and citizenship have come into being through contestations over legal and scientific knowledge-making, as well as how those knowledge-making practices become institutionalized and affect how we govern.

Underdogs traces the roots of queer theory in studies of social deviance conducted in the social sciences in the United States after World War II. Scholars in anthropology, sociology, and history have argued that the emergence of queer criticism in the humanities around 1990 built on a foundation of empirical research on sexual practices and sexual communities, as well as earlier claims for the constructed and contingent nature of social identity. This book extends these claims through a close examination of the afterlife of microanalytic, interactionist, and observational methods in the first wave of queer theory. With a focus on the work of Erving Goffman, and in particular his analysis of the operations of stigma in everyday life the book explores the influence of deviance studies on a queer vision of politics: coalitional, comparative, and based on a model of shared marginality. In borrowing its model of power from deviance studies while dropping its emphasis on empirical research in favor of attention to discourse, the book argues, queer studies failed to grapple adequately with its institutional entanglements or the ethics of studying social outsiders. By illuminating forgotten or suppressed lines of influence, Underdogs argues that acknowledging the inheritance of midcentury social science will help to address impasses regularly encountered in contemporary queer studies: false universalism, disconnection from political and lived praxis, and bad faith regarding its institutional and other forms of privilege.

The sexual exploitation of children by adults has a long, fraught history. Yet how cultures have reacted to it is shaped by a range of forces, beliefs, and norms, like any other social phenomenon. Changes in how Anglo-American culture has understood intergenerational sex can be seen with startling clarity in the life of British novelist and travel writer Norman Douglas (1868–1952), who was both a beloved and popular author, a friend of luminaries like Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, and D.H. Lawrence—as well as an unrepentant and uncloseted pederast. Rachel Hope Cleves’s careful study opens a window onto the social history of intergenerational sex in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, revealing how charisma, celebrity, and contemporary standards protected Douglas from punishment—until they didn’t. Unspeakable approaches Douglas as neither monster nor literary hero, but as a man who participated in an exploitative sexual subculture that was tolerated in ways we may find hard to understand. Using letters, diaries, memoirs, police records, novels, and photographs—including sources by the children Douglas encountered—Cleves identifies the cultural practices that structured pedophilic behaviors in England, Italy, and other places Douglas favored. The resulting biography delineates just how approaches to adult-child sex have changed over time, even as it offers insight into how society can confront today’s scandals, celebrity and otherwise.