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Underwear is the most intimate form of dress, and the type of underwear known as 'lingerie' is particularly invested with meanings of femininity, sexuality and pleasure. This article focuses on mass-market lingerie and is based on an ethnographic study of Ann Summers home shopping parties at which lingerie, sex toys and other 'personal' products are sold to women in the UK. The analysis draws on the work of Bourdieu and Skeggs to argue that the apparently 'private' world of lingerie is simultaneously part of the 'public' world of class distinction. The class connotations of mass-market lingerie are not simply aspirational, but are also used by working- and lower-middle-class women to distinguish themselves from 'posh' women who are thereby defined as pretentious, boring, snobbish or tasteless. The article concludes that the processes of choosing and buying lingerie involve identifications and dis-identifications of class, gender and sexuality, even though the garments themselves are rarely if ever worn in public.

This exciting collection of new work proposes a major paradigm shift in debates on sexuality: a shift away from discourse, identity and signification, to a radical new conception of bodily materialism. The field of Queer Theory has for too long been dominated by the work of Judith Butler and the focus on Performativity. The authors in this collection attempt to re-imagine Queer Theory through a critical engagement with the work of Deleuze and Guattari. The themes explored in the book are diverse and include: the revisiting of the term 'queer'; a rethinking of the sex-gender distinction as bein

During recent years in North America and Europe many feminists have become increasingly critical of responses to street prostitution that concentrate solely on punishing women who sell sex while ignoring their male clients. In order to address this gender imbalance some feminists have advocated the enforcement and/or strengthening of kerb crawling legislation and other schemes that target men who pay for sex. During 1998–9 one initiative, which aimed to target men who pay for sex in the UK, the Kerb Crawler Rehabilitation Programme (KCRP), was piloted in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Although the KCRP received considerable media coverage there has been relatively little critical debate among feminists about this approach to working with clients of sex workers. This article draws attention to some of the opposition to the Leeds KCRP.