Reviews for Sexual freedom and venereal disease

The average rating for Sexual freedom and venereal disease based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-10-14 00:00:00 John Cahill This book (1993) is now nearly twenty years old and is mainly useful for historians of social trends: some things Evans talks about are still pressing issues in our culture today but the social formations undergirding the debate have shifted and, thus, some of what he talks about reads as remarkably out of date (for instance, he gives quite a bit of discussion to "cultural feminism" producing the dominant discourse on female sexuality, and gives Dworkin and Mackinnon a more significant place in feminist theory than they currently hold). This work does, however, show to good effect how Evans sees certain socioeconomic trends as influencing debates about sexualities in early 1990s-era Britain. I was somewhat disappointed, however, in his "materialist" philosophy in practice. While he quite rightly critiques Foucault's concepts of discursivity and power/knowledge as laid out by Foucault in _The History of Sexuality Volume I_ on the grounds that Foucault, for polemic reasons, overstates the dominance of discourse and the inability of agency within dominant discourses, Evans too readily conflates Foucault into "scripting" theory. He then uses "scripting" to discuss the central issues in his work while being rather light on the "material" side of the equation. Evans focuses too much on the power of consumption and the positive effects consumer markets have had on sexual "minorities," while ignoring sites of production and consumption: that is, while espousing Marxism, he too easily falls into the 1980s-1990s trap of reifying economic forces and their effects throughout the entire capitalist circuit so that he can focus on sites of consumption as foundations for "freedom" and "resistance" to dominant political discourses. Still, a good place to start a line of reasoning about sexualities in capitalism (Rosemary Hennessy does it a bit better about a decade later).

Review # 2 was written on 2012-08-11 00:00:00 Gerald Huston What to say about this book? On one hand, it was really interesting. I mean, sex and Elizabethan (broadly Tudor) England? That's fascinating! I thought that Hayes did a good job presenting things in an interesting fashion. I mean, it's an interesting topic on its own. Then, Hayes covered a lot of ground in under 200 pages. He went from concepts to homosexuality to cross dressing to clandestine romances in court. A lot of things, as you can see. Covering broad topics was what Hayes did well. However... I have no clue whether the information he presented was accurate. I didn't count how many citations he had per chapter, but in one of them that was the average length of the chapters, he only had thirteen. In most chapters, there's way more than thirteen for even a ten page stretch. He barely cited anything, man. That doesn't work for me. Some of what he wrote, I just wasn't sure if it was opinion or not. Then, when he did cite things, it didn't make a whole lot of sense. Why are you citing a question? Is it your question or one that was posed by another author? It just didn't work. At all. I've been taught: When in doubt, cite. Then, when you review things or have someone review it, then you go ahead and take down the citations. But, at first, just cite if you're not sure. Not only that, but Hayes grievously misused a term. Berdaches. I ranted about it very slightly in a status update, but I'm going to expand on it now. Berdache is a term that Americans, or Westerns in general, created to describe something they saw in Native American culture. Commonly, these people are known as Two Spirits, or are transgender. In Native American culture, they are revered as very spiritual. In one tribe, their creation story (sorry, can't remember the tribe or I would write which one; I want to say Navajo, but I can't remember) it all focused on Two Spirits bridging the dynamics between men and women. In their culture, transgenders created the world. Back to Hayes, though. Two Spirits are transgender, specifically more transsexual if I wanted to narrow it down to a better term. Hayes said they were cross dressers. That they couldn't fill the masculine, warrior role, so they were allowed to dress as women and do women's chores and such. That is absolutely fucking wrong. Not only is it wrong, but it's highly offensive to say that. If he misused that -- and very badly misused it at that -- what else did he misuse? Sorry, but I can't take a word he said seriously. I'd suggest you skip this and just go to the sources he used. They'd probably have more fact to it than this.