Erotic Welfare
Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic
Linda Singer(Author)
Routledge (Publisher)
Published on 14. January 1993
Book
Hardback
210 pages
978-0-415-90201-4 (ISBN)
Description
The emergence of AIDS in contemporary culture has not only produced a vast discourse about the disease but has provoked an anxious proliferation of sites of erotic danger. In "Erotic Welfare", Linda Singer argues that we are currently living in an "age of epidemic", fuelled by a "panic logic" in which the very discourses on various social problems proliferate according to a logic of contagion. It is not merely that AIDS has come into contemporary discourse as a contagious disease, but that contemporary discourse on sexuality has itself come to replicate the course of contagion. For Singer, the epidemic has become essential to the epistemic field within contemporary culture, so that teenage pregnancy, drug addiction, prostitution, are all figured as social diseases whose spread calls to be checked. Contagion has become a major figure in social relationships which appear only tangentially related to AIDS. Singer traces the effects of epidemic on the intensification and augmentation of regulatory mechanisms for the control of sexuality. She lays out the ways in which epidemic logic and heightened regulation affect women's efforts to secure reproductive freedom.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
Professional and scholarly
College/higher education
Illustrations
illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 241 mm
Width: 159 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
550 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-415-90201-4 (9780415902014)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Content
Part 1 Erotic welfare: sex and logic of late capitalism; disciplining pleasures; regulating women in the age of sexual epidemic; reproductive regulations; hospitalization and AIDS. Part 2 Selected writings: bodies, pleasures - powers; defusing the canon; true confessions; interpretation and retrieval - rereading Beauvoir; just say no - repression, anti-sex and the new film; feminism and postmodernism.