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AbstractInstitutionalized homophobia in England has been intensified over the last decade, linked to concerns about "permissiveness" so prominent within the lower middle classes so courted by the modern Conservative party. However, anti-gay norms have long been embedded in working-class and middle-class cultures, more than in continental European and North American societies. Moralistic crusades against homosexuality have been common in England, and are still reinforced by the police, the courts and especially the tabloid press. Opposition has been roused within Labour party and Liberal/Liberal Democratic circles, but often reluctantly, and framed by a limited form of tolerance.

"This book takes an in-depth look at the ancient roots of homophobia, including its Pythagorean origins and its eventual spread throughout the Roman Empire and, consequently, the rest of the world"--Provided by publisher

Although sexual minorities in Africa continue to face harsh penalties for same-sex relationships, strong anti-homophobic resistance exists across the continent. This book systematically charts the emergence and effects of politicized homophobia in Malawi and shows how it has been used as a strategy by political elites to consolidate their moral and political authority, through punishing LGBT people and dividing social movements. Here, Ashley Currier pays particular attention to the impact of politicized homophobia on different social movements, specifically HIV/AIDS, human rights, LGBT rights, and women's rights movements. Her timely account intervenes in Afro-pessimist portrayals of the African continent as a hotbed of homophobia and unravels the tensions and contradictions underlying Western perceptions of Malawi. It shows that, in reality, many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people happily call Malawi home, in spite of heightened antigay vitriol that has generated unwanted visibility for them

For students in a Politics and Sex course, Pharr's very personal book engages students in critical analysis of their own lives and of their society.

For students in a Politics and Sex course, Pharr's very personal book engages students in critical analysis of their own lives and of their society.

Psychoanalysis is at once a system of thought, a toolkit for cultural diagnosis and criticism, and a therapeutic practice. In Dagmar Herzog's exciting new book Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes, psychoanalysis is among the most transformative intellectual events of the twentieth century and is itself transformed by that century's roiling forces, shaping and profoundly shaped by politics and culture. Foregrounding the historicity of psychoanalysis requires Herzog to wrest psychoanalysis from its own claims to historical transcendence. "While psychoanalysis is often taken to be ahistorical in its view of human nature," Herzog writes, "the opposite is the case" (2). After Freud's death, during the heyday of psychoanalysis in the 1940s and 1950s, through challenges to its authority in the 1960s and 1970s, to what Herzog calls its "second golden age" in the 1980s, the analytic frame offered by psychoanalysis (and the debates it generated) helped people grapple with the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War and offered novel ways of thinking about the most important questions of the postwar decades: about aggression, guilt, trauma, the capacity for violence, indeed about "the very nature of the human self and its motivations" (1).