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Sexuality is arguably the most highly cherished marker delineating the boundaries between childhood and adulthood in anglophone societies. When the boundaries between childhood innocence (or innocent eroticism) and adult sexuality are blurred or overlap, oftentimes grave concerns foment into highly emotive sex panics. This is a book about a series of child sex and sexualization panics around a familiar set of social problems: the sexualization of children in the media and art; premarital teenage sexuality and sex education; child sexual abuse; homosexual pedophilia and intergenerational relationships; and teenage sexting. The Fear of Child Sexuality argues that popular panics over young people and sex are sometimes more about adult concerns with containing and regulating assertive youths and entrenching social norms of sexual development than they are about fears of potential abuse and harm of the vulnerable. It explores how emotional vocabularies of fear, anxiety, shame, and even contempt, not just frequently dominate discussions of youth sexuality, but are actively mobilized to preclude consideration of the competencies and potential capacities of many minors. The book uses historical and contemporary case studies to challenge some of the prevailing social, legal, and academic assumptions about youth sexuality, gender, power, and individual agency.

This book takes on the globalization of sexuality, examining the ways in which desire and pleasure—as well as ideas about gender, political power, and public health—are framed, shaped, or commodified by a global economy in which more and more cultures move into ever-closer contact.

The Hoarders argues that the mental illness of hoarding (Hoarding Disorder) is not an individual pathology. While abnormal psychology and social work use classification systems such as Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 (DSM-5) to legitimize the activity as a mental disorder, this book disputes these diagnoses. Examining how scientific research, the entertainment industry, the professional organizing industry, and others promote knowledge about hoarding, this book presents an extended cultural study of improper forms of collecting and unorthodox material culture in the modern United States. It also connects hoarding to social fears over urban disorder, proper housekeeping, and old age. To do so it offers four cultural biographies of things that established hoarding’s entry into DSM-5. These chapters each trace a different backstory of the disease. Collyer Brothers syndrome, Chapter 1 argues, advanced what experts refer to as chronic disorganization, a trait often considered a symptom of Hoarding Disorder. Chapter 2 reveals abnormal collecting to be a cornerstone of the DSM diagnostic. Chapter 3 does likewise for Messy House syndrome, Pack Rat syndrome, and fears over excessive clutter. Senile squalor syndrome, Chapter 4 details, established stereotypes of the elderly as aberrant hoarders. Together these accounts narrate how hoarding shifted from an eccentric engagement with ordinary things such as curios, clutter, keepsakes, and collectibles into a twenty-first century mental disease.

A Nation of Neighborhoods investigates what the concept of “neighborhood” came to mean to Americans who grappled with vast changes in their urban spaces from World War II to the Reagan era. Across these four decades, the neighborhood constantly reemerged into American social discourse as an imaginative site for fiercely contested models of civic and communal life. In an implicit challenge to the longstanding suburban ideal, urban activists, artists, politicians, writers, and everyday citizens continually harnessed the localist ideals of neighborhood and neighborliness as a way to make sense of, participate in, and occasionally resist the startling transformations overtaking the postwar U.S. city. Examining a succession of radically varying neighborhood visions, A Nation of Neighborhoods contends that the figure of the tight-knit city neighborhood has served as an arena for larger battles over the nature, limits, and contradictions of American democratic life. It asserts that the meaning of this seemingly transparent term is constructed in part through cultural texts, taking shape in forms ranging from films, exhibitions, and novels to political speeches and planning documents. And it demonstrates the ambiguities that arise from a politics of localism, suggesting that in the romantic language of neighborhood communalism the traditional distinctions between left, liberal, and right can blur or even crumble.

A foundational belief in America—that competitive success in education and career is a ticket to a good life—is not supported by research on happiness, but that research omits crucial considerations. This book investigates the relationship between success and happiness by leveraging a 46-year mixed-methods follow-up of a study of Harvard undergraduates from the 1960s (called the Harvard Student Study and unrelated to the Grant Study). It pioneers a qualitative and longitudinal approach to the study of happiness, drawing on unparalleled clinical life history interviews and survey data. The book reaches a similar finding to prior happiness research that success beyond meeting basic needs does not deliver happiness, but it goes much further by providing a developmental explanation of what does shapes happiness. Part 1 illustrates a spectrum of well-being visible in participant life histories and trajectories of stability and change over time. Part 2 presents the study’s key innovations in happiness research: a qualitative method for capturing well-being, two models explaining well-being, and a new paradigm linking worldview, well-being, and development. Part 3 significantly alters conventional accounts of adult life offered in human development, personality psychology, and happiness scholarship. The book generates a host of new tools for investigating happiness: an interview method, a procedure for assessing well-being in narrative, a method for displaying well-being in psychobiographical sketches, and constructs useful resources for further study. This book’s findings are supported by research on general samples and apply to varied demographic groups. Psychobiographical sketches illustrate each major concept and finding.

The subject of murder has always held a particular fascination for us. However, since at least the nineteenth century, we have seen the murderer as different from the ordinary citizen—a special individual, like an artist or a genius, who exists apart from the moral majority, a sovereign self who obeys only the destructive urge, sometimes even commanding cult followings. In contemporary culture, we continue to believe that there is something different and exceptional about killers, but is the murderer such a distinctive type? Are they degenerate beasts or supermen as they have been depicted on the page and the screen, or are murderers something else entirely? This book explores the ways in which the figure of the murderer has been made to signify a specific kind of social subject in Western modernity. Drawing on the work of Foucault in studies of the lives and crimes of killers in Europe and the United States, the book interrogates the meanings of media and texts produced about and by murderers. Upending the usual treatment of murderers as isolated figures or exceptional individuals, the book argues that they are ordinary people, reflections of our society at the intersections of gender, agency, desire, and violence.

This book addresses American culture's fixation on black visibility, exploring how blackness is persistently seen as a problem in public culture and even in black scholarship that challenges racist discourse. It reorients the problem of black visibility by turning attention to what it means to see blackness and to the performative codes that reinforce, resignify, and disrupt its meaning. Working across visual theory and performance studies, the book asks: How can the black body can be visualized as both familiar and disruptive? How might we investigate the black body as a troubling presence to the scopic regimes that define it as such? How is value assessed based on visible blackness? The book documents multiple forms of engagement with the visual, even as it meticulously underscores how the terms of engagement change in various performative contexts. Examining a range of practices from the documentary photography of Charles “Teenie” Harris to the “excess flesh” performances of black female artists and pop stars, to the media art of Fatimah Tuggar to the iconicity of Michael Jackson, it reveals and reconfigures the mechanics, codes, and metaphors of blackness in visual culture.