sexuality

Softcover. Hanover NH, Wesleyan University Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 542 pages. Now, Voyager, Stella Dallas, Leaver Her to Heaven, Imitation of Life, Mildred Pierce, Gilda ...these are only a few of the hundreds of "women's films" that poured out of Hollywood during the thirties, forties, and fifties. The films were widely disparate in subject, sentiment, and technique, they nonetheless shared one dual to provide the audience (of women, primarily) with temporary liberation into a screen dream--of romance, sexuality, luxury, suffering, or even wickedness--and then send it home reminded of, reassured by, and resigned to the fact that no matter what else she might do, a woman's most important job was...to be a woman. Now, with boundless knowledge and infectious enthusiasm, Jeanine Basinger illuminates the various surprising and subversive ways in which women's films delivered their message. Basinger examines dozens of films, exploring the seemingly intractable contradictions at the convoluted heart of the woman's genre--among them, the dilemma of the strong and glamorous woman who cedes her power when she feels it threatening her personal happiness, and the self-abnegating woman whose selflessness is not always as "noble" as it appears. Basinger looks at the stars who played these women and helps us understand the qualities--the right off-screen personae, the right on-screen attitudes, the right faces--that made them personify the woman's film and equipped them to make believable drama or comedy out of the crackpot plots, the conflicting ideas, and the exaggerations of real behavior that characterize these movies.

Softcover. University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 228 pages, b&w illustrations. Art has the power to affect our thinking, changing not only the way we view and interact with the world but also how we create it. In Art in Mind, Ernst van Alphen probes this idea of art as a commanding force with the capacity to shape our intellect and intervene in our lives. Rather than interpreting art as merely a reflection of our social experience or a product of history, van Alphen here argues that art is a historical agent, or a cultural creator, that propels thought and experience forward.Examining a broad range of works, van Alphen--a renowned art historian and cultural theorist--demonstrates how art serves a socially constructive function by actually experimenting with the parameters of thought. Employing work from artists as diverse as Picasso, Watteau, Francis Bacon, Marlene Dumas, and Matthew Barney, he shows how art confronts its viewers with the "pain points" of cultural experience-genocide, sexuality, diaspora, and transcultural identity-and thereby transforms the ways in which human existence is conceived. Clean, like new.

Softcover. New York, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2003-10-27, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Like new in publishers shrink-wrap. Movie director John Waters has teamed up with acclaimed critic and curator Bruce Hainley to offer a unique, provocative adn personal interpretation of sex and sexuality today for this "exhibition in a book" (back cover). Includes 175 illustrations of which 147 are in color. Fine in white illustrated paper wrappers with red title to spine and front cover. Clean and bright. 207 pages.

Softcover. Oxford UK, Clarendon Press, 1st pbk, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 185 pages. The Rule of Augustine, the oldest monastic rule with Western origins, still provides inspiration for over 150 Christian communities. This account of Augustine's contributions to the monastic spirituality of the late Roman world and of his achievement as a monastic legislator fills a critical gap in Augustinian studies. Tracing Augustine's progress from a philosophical to a biblical spirituality and his development of a monastic ideal largely shaped by Greco-Roman philosophical and rhetorical influences, Lawless also discusses Augustine's renunciation of sexuality, property, and worldly ambition at his conversion as a foreshadowing of the future vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. In addition, he argues for the existence of a monastery at Thagaste from 388 to 391. This book includes new English translations of the Regulations for a Monastery, the Rule, and Letter 211. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Scala, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 208 pages. Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road was a touchstone for a generation and the centrepiece of the Beat movement in literature and art. This new book examines Kerouac's life and career, and accompanies a major exhibition at The New York Public Library to celebrate the 50th anniversary of On the Road's publication in 1957. Kerouac's achievement as both a literary and cultural figure is traced, including his innovations in narrative techniques and in character development. His counterculture vision is explored, showing his image as a seer and sage who wanted to save America from its obsession with consumerism, the inhibition of sexuality and other conventional bourgeois pieties. The author also explores Kerouac's relationships with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and other Beats, as well as the Beat movement in general. The book is heavily illustrated, with material from the extensive Kerouac literary archive owned by The New York Public Library, including typescript drafts of On the Road.

Softcover. Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 184 pages, illustrated in color, essays and an interview with the photographer. From his provocative Cover Girl series featuring photographic portraits of himself on the covers of popular magazines, to his writings on sexuality and identity, the work of Nigerian-born Ike Ude explores a world of dualities: African/postnationalist, photographer/performance artist, artist/spectator, male/female, mainstream/marginal, seduction/narcissism, and fashion/art. As an artist from Nigeria working in New York City, connected to the world of fashion and celebrity, Ude gives the political aspects of performance and representation a new vitality, melding his own theatrical selves and multiple personae with his art.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 191 pages. Matthews Hamabata got off to an unpromising start when he first arrived in Japan to study influential business families. An unmarried, third-generation Japanese-American graduate student, he was there to learn about business executives in their roles as male principals and heads of households. In this engaging and personal narrative, we watch Hamabata in the first disappointing six months of his fieldwork as he attempts to map the boundaries of culture, class, and sexuality. "I became my own biggest fieldwork problem," he writes. "Was I inside or out? When I thought I was in, I was actually out, but when I acknowledged the fact that I was out, I was let in." He soon recognized the importance of marital and filial relations in transmitting power in the business world, and he began to direct his study to examining the social and emotional lives of all members of the Japanese ie (household) and the way they affect business activity and ownership. He takes us behind the scenes of the family enterprise to see how the multiple "layers of reality"-biological, social, religious, emotional, and symbolic-relate and cause dilemmas for ie members. (Names, locations, and other details have been altered for the sake of anonymity.) Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Library of America , 4th pr., 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 990 pages. James M. Cain's pioneering novel of murder and adultery along the California highway, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), shocked contemporaries with its laconic toughness and fierce sexuality. Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935) uses truncated rhythms and a unique narrative structure to turn its account of a Hollywood dance marathon into an unforgettable evocation of social chaos and personal desperation. In Thieves Like Us (1937), Edward Anderson vividly brings to life the dusty roads and back-country hideouts where a fugitive band of Oklahoma outlaws plays out its destiny. The Big Clock (1946), an ingenious novel of pursuit and evasion by the poet Kenneth Fearing, is set by contrast in the dense and neurotic inner world of a giant publishing corporation under the thumb of a warped and ultimately murderous chief executive. William Lindsay Gresham's controversial Nightmare Alley (1946), a ferocious psychological portrait of a charismatic carnival hustler, creates an unforgettable atmosphere of duplicity, corruption, and self-destruction. I Married a Dead Man (1948), a tale of switched identity set in the anxious suburbs, is perhaps the most striking novel of Cornell Woolrich, who found in the techniques of the gothic thriller the means to express an overpowering sense of personal doom. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Library of America , 4th pr., 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 990 pages. James M. Cain's pioneering novel of murder and adultery along the California highway, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), shocked contemporaries with its laconic toughness and fierce sexuality. Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935) uses truncated rhythms and a unique narrative structure to turn its account of a Hollywood dance marathon into an unforgettable evocation of social chaos and personal desperation. In Thieves Like Us (1937), Edward Anderson vividly brings to life the dusty roads and back-country hideouts where a fugitive band of Oklahoma outlaws plays out its destiny. The Big Clock (1946), an ingenious novel of pursuit and evasion by the poet Kenneth Fearing, is set by contrast in the dense and neurotic inner world of a giant publishing corporation under the thumb of a warped and ultimately murderous chief executive. William Lindsay Gresham's controversial Nightmare Alley (1946), a ferocious psychological portrait of a charismatic carnival hustler, creates an unforgettable atmosphere of duplicity, corruption, and self-destruction. I Married a Dead Man (1948), a tale of switched identity set in the anxious suburbs, is perhaps the most striking novel of Cornell Woolrich, who found in the techniques of the gothic thriller the means to express an overpowering sense of personal doom. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Hatje Cantz, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 240 pages. Swiss artist Daniele Buetti is notorious for his defaced photographs of supermodels, which feature scars, tattoos and disenchanted fragments of text. Buetti has been questioning the socially determined constructs of beauty and the commodification of sexuality and glamour since the 1980s. His altered photographs--large-scale C-prints on aluminum or light-boxes--have messages like "How much is my body worth?" and "What shall I hope for?" scrawled across them in electric colors. Buetti also often energetically scratches out or draws over portions of the image in a manner that recalls the destructive doodling of a truculent adolescent. Maybe You Can Be One of Us focuses on Buetti's recent drawings, videos, sculptures and installations. In these newer pieces, the fashion models give way to enigmatic illustrative symbols, such as two disembodied hands conjuring a puff of smoke. This publication accompanies an exhibition of new work at the Swiss Institute for Contemporary Art in New York.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 418 pages. The first book to show how the Civil War transformed gender roles and attitudes toward sexuality among Americans. This unique volume brings together a wide spectrum of critical viewpoints by newly emerging scholars as well as distinguished authors in the field to show how gender became a prism through which the political tensions of antebellum America were filtered and focused. Through the course of the book, many fascinating subjects are explored, from new "manly" responsibilities both black and white men had thrust upon them as soldiers, to women's roles in the guerrilla fighting, to the wartime dialogue on interracial sex. In addition, an incisive introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson helps place these various subjects within an overall historical context. Copyright page states first edition, but no price on dj says Book Club. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Duke University Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 352 pages, b/w illustrations throughout. Dust jacket unclipped, excellent. Black cover boards, gilt title on spine. Binding tight. Spine straight. In great shape. Claiming that our culture has yet to come to terms with the bungled legacy of Victorian sexuality, Kincaid examines how children and images of youth are idealized, fetishized, and eroticized in everyday culture.

Softcover. Princeton, NJ, Markus Weiner Publishers, 1st English Translation, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 327 pages. Softcover. B/w illustrations throughout. Decorated wrapper, excellent. Pages clean and bright. Binding good. Like new copy. This fascinating study of eunuchs guides readers as they travel through various lands and periods, familiarizing themselves with the duties and responsibilities, the unspeakable torments, and the passions and joys of these individuals.

Hardcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 474 pages. SIGNED BY ROUGHGARDEN and dated on the title page.In this innovative celebration of diversity and affirmation of individuality in animals and humans, Joan Roughgarden challenges accepted wisdom about gender identity and sexual orientation. A distinguished evolutionary biologist, Roughgarden takes on the medical establishment, the Bible, social science-and even Darwin himself. She leads the reader through a fascinating discussion of diversity in gender and sexuality among fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, including primates. Evolution's Rainbow explains how this diversity develops from the action of genes and hormones and how people come to differ from each other in all aspects of body and behavior. Roughgarden reconstructs primary science in light of feminist, gay, and transgender criticism and redefines our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality. Witty, playful, and daring, this book will revolutionize our understanding of sexuality. Previous owner's inscription on the front fly leaf. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Williamsburg VA, College of William & Mary, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 528 pages, b&w illustrations. The collected papers in this book describe human sexuality and gender among a small sample of societies on the island of Borneo. Expressions of human sexuality vary widely among the 200 autonymic societies, which range in population from a few hundred persons to three-quarters of a million. Some are quite open about the subject, others circumspect and discreet. The present work contains studies of eight societies, with references to others. It does not deal with Chinese and Malays, who with others will be the subjects of future monographs on the same topic. Clean copy.

Softcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 2nd pr., 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 194 pages. This book presents the first English translation of 4 important essays by the noted German philosopher dealing with love, sexuality and relations between men and women. Clean copy. Some fading to cover wrapper.

Softcover. England, UK, FAB Press, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 144 pages. Softcover. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgwear to wrappers. Graphic Thrills Volume Two proudly assembles another stunning selection of debauched and innuendo-packed theatrical film posters, with glorious unabashed sexuality dripping from every page. These joyous and colourful odes to sultry sin were designed to hang in the lobbies and front windows of the porno theaters and grindhouses of yesteryear.

Hardcover. NY, Henry Holt, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, unclipped. The moving story of the life of the woman behind A Raisin in the Sun, the most widely anthologized, read, and performed play of the American stage. Written when she was just twenty-eight, Lorraine Hansberry's landmark A Raisin in the Sun is listed by the National Theatre as one of the hundred most significant works of the twentieth century. Hansberry was the first Black woman to have a play performed on Broadway, and the first Black and youngest American playwright to win a New York Critics' Circle Award. Charles J. Shields's authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most admired playwrights examines the parts of Lorraine Hansberry's life that have escaped public knowledge: the influence of her upper-class background, her fight for peace and nuclear disarmament, the reason why she embraced Communism during the Cold War, and her dependence on her white husband-her best friend, critic, and promoter. Many of the identity issues about class, sexuality, and race that she struggled with are relevant and urgent today. This dramatic telling of a passionate life-a very American life through self-reinvention-uses previously unpublished interviews with close friends in politics and theater, privately held correspondence, and deep research to reconcile old mysteries and raise new questions about a life not fully described until now.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In 1942, a timid, inexperienced twenty-one-year-old Lord reports to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to enlist in the US Army. This title tells the story of this young man's exposure to the terrors, dislocations, and horrors of armed conflict. Along the way he comes to terms with his own sexuality, experiences the thrill of first love and the chill of disillusionment with his fellow man, Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Scala, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 224 pages. The diversity of New York City's people, cultures, religions, and backgrounds make it the indicator of American sexuality. It is black, white, gay, straight, rich, poor, rough, and tender all at once. From Margaret Sanger's dissemination of birth control to the Stonewall riot of 1969, New York City has repeatedly seen its sexual dynamics changed and American and international culture follow suit. Published to coincide with the much-anticipated opening of the Museum of Sex in New York, NYC Sex features conversations between major cultural figures and historians on sexual topics, including Grady T. Turner on "Sodom on the Hudson"; Martin Duberman and Joan Nestle on queers; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Xaviera Hollander, and Tracy Quan on whores; Karen Finley, Luc Sante, Gene Simmons, and Art Spiegelman on the underground; and Vanessa del Rio, Legs McNeil, and Annie Sprinkle on porn. And what's a book about sex without pictures? In between the steamy conversation, NYC Sex posts photographs by Mapplethorpe, Ferrato and Gatewood; 19th-century drawings and photographs; film stills; posters; magazine pin-ups; and images of sex symbols past and present. It's a treat the whole family can enjoy. NYC Sex is the official book of the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Sex, which will open in New York in September.

Softcover. NY, Scala, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 224 pages. The diversity of New York City's people, cultures, religions, and backgrounds make it the indicator of American sexuality. It is black, white, gay, straight, rich, poor, rough, and tender all at once. From Margaret Sanger's dissemination of birth control to the Stonewall riot of 1969, New York City has repeatedly seen its sexual dynamics changed and American and international culture follow suit. Published to coincide with the much-anticipated opening of the Museum of Sex in New York, NYC Sex features conversations between major cultural figures and historians on sexual topics, including Grady T. Turner on "Sodom on the Hudson"; Martin Duberman and Joan Nestle on queers; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Xaviera Hollander, and Tracy Quan on whores; Karen Finley, Luc Sante, Gene Simmons, and Art Spiegelman on the underground; and Vanessa del Rio, Legs McNeil, and Annie Sprinkle on porn. And what's a book about sex without pictures? In between the steamy conversation, NYC Sex posts photographs by Mapplethorpe, Ferrato and Gatewood; 19th-century drawings and photographs; film stills; posters; magazine pin-ups; and images of sex symbols past and present. It's a treat the whole family can enjoy. NYC Sex is the official book of the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Sex, which will open in New York in September.

Hardcover. NY, Library Of America, 1st thus, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 832 pages. From the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award-winning author of Kindred, the Parable novels, and Bloodchild, here in its spellbinding entirety is Octavia E. Butlers epic of human survival and transformation. Conceived against a backdrop of Reagan-era nuclear brinksmanship, Liliths Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogya classic of Afrofuturist speculative fiction offers profound reflections on race, biology, colonialism, resistance, consent, sexuality, community, hybridity, technology, power, and the future of humankind.

Hardcover. Lexington KY, University Press of Kentucky, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 320 pages, in a bright unclipped dust jacket, b&w illustrations. Pola Negri (1897-1987) rose from an impoverished childhood in Warsaw, Poland, to become one of early Hollywood's greatest stars. After tuberculosis ended her career as a ballerina in 1912, she turned to acting and worked under legendary directors Max Reinhardt and Ernst Lubitsch in Germany. Negri preceded Lubitsch to Hollywood, where she quickly became a fan favorite thanks to her beauty, talent, and diva personality. Known for her alluring sexuality and biting artistic edge, she starred in more than sixty films and defined the image of the cinematic femme fatale. Author Mariusz Kotowski brings the screen siren's story to English-speaking audiences for the first time in this fascinating biography. At the height of her fame, Negri often portrayed exotic and mysterious temptresses, headlining in such successes as The Spanish Dancer (1923) and Forbidden Paradise (1924), before returning to Europe in the 1930s. The devastating effects of World War II soon drove her back to the United States, where she starred in Hi Diddle Diddle (1943) and pursued her vaudeville career before retiring from the entertainment industry. Kotowski also illuminates Negri's dramatic personal life, detailing her numerous love affairs-including her engagement to Charlie Chaplin and her romance with Rudolph Valentino-as well as her multiple marriages. This long-overdue biography not only paints a detailed portrait of one classic Hollywood's most intriguing stars and the film industry's original Jezebel, but also explores the link between Hollywood and European cinema during the interwar years.

Softcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 252 pages. Chow situates contemporary Chinese film within the broad context of Chinese history and culture, giving readers a glimpse of the unique shared identity that characterizes the current crop of outstanding filmmakers, such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou.