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PODCAST

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

New Books Network

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

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All Episodes

44:05

Lauren D. Sawyer, "Growing Up Pure: White Girls,...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2026/01/22

Gaining mass popularity in the mid-1990s with the True Love Waits rally on the Washington Mall, purity culture began as an urge from evangelical conservatives for Christian adolescents to publicly commit to practicing abstinence until marriage. Throughout this decade and the next, millions of evangelical teenagers performed their commitment to sexual purity by signing pledges and wearing purity rings.Growing Up Pure: White Girls, Queer Teens, and the Racial Foundations of Purity Culture (NYU

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50:26

Juliane Maxwald, "Psychoanalytic Sex Therapy:...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2026/01/21

Today I spoke with Juliane Maxwald abut her new book Psychoanalytic Sex Therapy: Exploring the Unconscious Life of Sexuality (Taylor & Francis, 2025). Maxwald bridges psychoanalytic theory with contemporary sex therapy to demonstrate that sexual symptoms are rarely just about sex—they're embodied expressions of unconscious conflict, early attachment wounds, relational trauma, and unmet developmental needs. Through eleven richly detailed clinical cases—including Jon's shame-bound spanking

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50:18

Elwin Hofman et al. eds., "The Business of Pleasure:...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2026/01/17

Elwin Hofman joins Jana Byars to talk about the volume he edited with Magaly Rodríguez García & Pieter Vanhees, The Business of Pleasure: A History of Paid Sex in the Heart of Europe (Leuven UP, 2022). In 2022, the Belgian parliament made a landmark decision by approving the decriminalisation of sex work. This move positioned the small nation as the first country in Europe - and the second globally - to abandon the hypocrisy of tolerance. Yet this was not the first time paid sex in Belgium gained

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39:37

Everything Is Fine, I'll Just Work Harder:...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2026/01/16

In Everything Is Fine, I’ll Just Work Harder: Confessions of A Former Badass (Street Noise Books, 2025), Professor Cara Gormally draws us into the familiar academic world of chronic busyness. In panel after panel, Cara brings us into a life numbed by overwork. Then, as this graphic memoir shows us, during an ordinary early-morning run, Cara’s watch dings with a Facebook friend request. Their rapist wants to “friend” them.Cara always had a long to-do list; always had many projects; always was

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39:37

Everything Is Fine, I'll Just Work Harder:...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2026/01/15

In Everything Is Fine, I’ll Just Work Harder: Confessions of A Former Badass (Street Noise Books, 2025), Professor Cara Gormally draws us into the familiar academic world of chronic busyness. In panel after panel, Cara brings us into a life numbed by overwork. Then, as this graphic memoir shows us, during an ordinary early-morning run, Cara’s watch dings with a Facebook friend request. Their rapist wants to “friend” them. Cara always had a long to-do list; always had many projects; always was

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53:50

Sam Fullerton, "Sexual Politics in Revolutionary...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2026/01/15

Samuel Fullerton joins Jana Byars to talk about Sexual Politics in Revolutionary England (Manchester UP 2024) to celebrate its paperback release. It recounts a dramatic transformation in English sexual polemic that unfolded during the kingdom's mid-seventeenth-century civil wars. In early Stuart England, explicit sexual language was largely confined to manuscript and oral forms by the combined regulatory pressures of ecclesiastical press licensing and powerful cultural notions of civility and

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63:57

Zoë McGee, "Courting Disaster: Reading Between the...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2026/01/15

What do #MeToo and Jane Austen have in common? More than you might think. Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. Dr Zoë McGee reveals how Jane Austen, Frances Burney and their now-overlooked contemporaries used their stories to try to change society's mind about rape culture - and to reassure survivors they were not alone. Courting Disaster: Reading Between the Lines of the Regency Novel (Manchester UP, 2025) takes a timely

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40:09

Julia H. Meszaros, "Economies of Gender: Masculinity,...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2026/01/12

Economies of Gender: Masculinity, "Mail Order Brides," and Women's Labor (Rutgers University Press, 2025) by Dr. Julia Meszaros offers a provocative exploration of the international dating industry, challenging simplistic narratives of human trafficking and scams while shedding light on the economic dynamics of gender. Through twelve years of fieldwork, the book delves into the motivations and experiences of men who seek relationships abroad, driven by dissatisfaction with Western women who, they

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58:16

Heather Smith-Cannoy et al., "Sex Trafficking and...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2026/01/11

Human trafficking for the sex trade is a form of modern-day slavery that ensnares thousands of victims each year, disproportionately affecting women and girls. While the international community has developed an impressive edifice of human rights law, these laws are not equally recognized or enforced by all countries. Sex Trafficking and Human Rights demonstrates that state responsiveness to human trafficking is shaped by the political, social, cultural, and economic rights afforded to women in that

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30:20

Donna J. Drucker, "Fertility Technology" (MIT Press,...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2025/12/29

A concise overview of fertility technology—its history, practical applications, and ethical and social implications around the world. In the late 1850s, a physician in New York City used a syringe and glass tube to inject half a drop of sperm into a woman’s uterus, marking the first recorded instance of artificial insemination. From that day forward, doctors and scientists have turned to technology in ever more innovative ways to facilitate conception. Fertility Technology (MIT Press, 2023) surveys

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45:53

Hannah Frydman, "Between the Sheets: Sexuality,...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2025/12/16

Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France (Cornell UP, 2025) by Dr. Hannah Frydman reveals a space, hidden in plain sight in Third Republican Paris, where deviant sexualities and lives could be experimented with and financed, despite republican attempts at growing and norming the population through the heterosexual family. That space was the newspaper, which was not simply a tool of normalization and a site of "dominant discourse," as it

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41:26

Timothy Gitzen, "Unscripting the Present" (SUNY...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2025/12/09

Timothy Gitzen's Unscripting the Present (SUNY Press, 2025) interrogates contemporary sex panics in the United States, looking especially at popular culture texts to conceptualize queer youth survival strategies. Sex panics saturate contemporary discourse and politics in the United States. While such panics have a long history, they are now infused with rhetoric, logics, and methods of security that turn queer sexuality into an existential crisis. Queer youth bear the brunt of this crisis, with

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49:20

Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, "Hatred of Sex" (U...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2025/12/01

How well do we understand our relationship to sex? According to Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, authors of the new book Hatred of Sex (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), we tend to overlook the “unpleasurable pleasures” that are integral to sex. Sex undoes us, destabilizes us, takes us out of ourselves. Many of our 21st century cultural products—Queer Theory, traumatology, intersectional studies—secretly “hate” sex for these very reasons and build such hatred into their ideas. In our interview, Davis

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42:23

Jacob Bloomfield, "Drag: A British History" (U...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2025/11/29

Drag: A British History (University of California Press, 2023) is a groundbreaking study of the sustained popularity and changing forms of male drag performance in modern Britain. With this book, Jacob Bloomfield provides fresh perspectives on drag and recovers previously neglected episodes in the history of the art form. Despite its transgressive associations, drag has persisted as an intrinsic, and common, part of British popular culture--drag artists have consistently asserted themselves as some

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39:08

Margaret Grace Myers, "The Fight for Sex Ed: The...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2025/11/21

The US has some of the highest rates of STIs and teen pregnancies in the industrialized world. A comprehensive sex education curriculum—which teaches facts on contraception, prophylactics, consent, and STIs—has been available since the 90s. Yet the majority of states require that sex education stress abstinence, and 22 states do not require sex ed in public schools at all.In The Fight for Sex Ed: The Century-Long Battle Between Truth and Doctrine (Beacon Press, 2025), writer, advocate, and

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54:23

Jamieson Webster, "Disorganisation & Sex" (Divided...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2025/11/17

The first collection of essays from the author of the Life and Death of Psychoanalysis, Stay, Illusion! with Simon Critchley and Conversion Disorder, Disorganisation & Sex (Divided Publishing, 2022) is as much about our resistance to sexuality as it is about sex itself. Jamieson Webster continues to excite and disturb, turning to Lacan and the autotheoretical in her exploration of the deep roots of our libidinal ties and the ways in which we keep desire at bay in our efforts to lead tidier, more

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73:37

Páraic Kerrigan, "LGBTQ Visibility, Media and...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2025/11/16

“We know what we want, and one day, our prince will come,” says Toby, the bicycle-shorts-wearing, double ententre-making, unacknowledgely-gay neighbor in RTE’s Upwardly Mobile. Though the first queer characters in Irish entertainment television were tropes and stereotypes, they represented an important shift in LGBTQ visibility in Irish media. The road to early representations in entertainment media was a hard road paved by gay rights activists, AIDS stigma, and production teams looking for

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59:28

Rebecca L. Davis, "Fierce Desires: A New History of...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2025/11/03

One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year From an esteemed scholar, a richly textured, authoritative history of sex and sexuality in America—the first major account in three decades. Our era is one of sexual upheaval. Roe v. Wade was overturned in the summer of 2022, school systems across the country are banning books with LGBTQ+ themes, and the notion of a “tradwife” is gaining adherents on the right while

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41:24

Monica Liu, "Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2025/10/06

Commercial dating agencies that facilitate marriages across national borders comprise a $2.5 billion global industry. Ideas about the industry are rife with stereotypes-younger, more physically attractive brides from non-Western countries being paired with older Western men. These ideas are more myth than fact, Monica Liu finds in Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise (Stanford UP, 2022). Her study of China's email-order bride industry offers stories of Chinese women who

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37:29

Angela Jones and Barbara G. Brents, "Sex Work Today:...

New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work ·

2025/10/05

A cutting-edge volume on current trends in sex work, from sugar relationships and cyber brothels to financial domination, sex worker activism, and feminist pornSex is for sale in more ways than ever. It can be bought and sold online, in sex clubs, on the street, and around the world. As with many industries, discrimination, exploitation, and inequality persist in sex work. Yet it also offers autonomy, job satisfaction, and even pleasurable experiences for those involved. Sex Work Today: Erotic

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449 results

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