New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

Hotels represent nations, hosting visiting monarchs, politicians, and diplomats. Hotels underpin global networks of travel and communication, on which national and international prosperity have increasingly depended since the end of the First World War. Yet hotels are also places where people can be anonymous; where murderers and thieves mix with adulterers and con artists; and where prejudice finds expression in who is refused access, and in the forms of 'service' provided by staff in the lowest-paid roles. The Secret Life of the Hotel: Sex, Crime and Protest in British Guesthouses Since 1918 (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Professor Eloise Moss is the first book to uncover how hotels entrenched inequality, prejudice, and exploitation in Britain's tourist sector, and in wider society and culture, during the 20th century.Professor Moss delves into hotel murders, swindles, and scandals, including the history of Agatha Christie's disappearance in 1926, the 'Margate Hotel Murder', and the divorce of Wallis Simpson in 1936 so she could marry King Edward VIII. Professor Moss's exploration of the hotel also shines a light on the fight against the colour bar, the formation of the British civil rights movement, and the visit to London of Martin Luther King Jr.The Secret Life of the Hotel uniquely tells the story of Britain's relationship with the world during the 20th century through the prism of its hotels, showing how their infrastructure and 'welcome' had profound consequences for women, people of colour, LGBTQ+ citizens, and people with disabilities.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Anarchist theory includes the belief in freedom for all - that no one person, nor group of people, should have power over any others; that individuals can best decide how to live (and love). In this presentation Elaine Leeder will discuss eight Jewish women who identified as anarchists, active during the 1920s to 1950s. Through analysis of in-depth interviews Leeder explores the complete sexual freedom that these women sought at a time when conventionality and conformity was the norm. These women attempted to create equality in the public and private spheres, some living communally and raising their children in progressive schools. They also sought to maintain complete equality of the sexes through economic independence and maintaining non-conformist sexual relationships. This talk will place a particular focus on the way that ethnicity played a role in these women’s identities, emphasizing their atheism, while still maintaining Jewish values and traditions.

This lecture originally took place on June 10, 2021.
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Max Morris's Not Sex Work: Queer Intimacy, Post-identity, and Incidental Encounters in the Digital Era (Routledge, 2025) brings together feminist theory, media studies, and queer research methodologies to offer new, compelling insight the relationships between money, digital platforms, and sex.

Through longstanding engagement with gay, queer, and bisexual men who do not describe themselves as sex workers and who exchange sex or sexual services for money through digital platforms, Morris highlights how ‘incidental sex work’ problematizes commonly-held assumptions of both work and intimacy. By starting from the position of unsettling what sex work might be, Morris holds space for ambivalences about labour, risk, and sex itself—destabilizing binaries found within both research and policy work.

Not Sex Work's attention to how economics and intimacy shapes identity offers important analyses of not only what we might understand sex work to be, but also how digital platforms shape and reshape understandings of gender and sexuality.

Max Morris is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Sociology at Oxford Brookes University. Using creative and feminist methodologies, their research focuses on gender, sexuality, HIV, digital platforms, and sex work.

Rine Vieth is an FRQ Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Laval. They are currently studying how anti-gender mobilization shapes migration policy, particularly in regards to asylum determinations in the UK and Canada.
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Explosive sexual scandals, bitter domestic conflicts, and dramatic changes in fortune. Sex, marriage, and family life were matters of enormous consequence in the highly complex societies that formed across the early modern Dutch overseas empire. This was not only true for the colonial authorities that administered settlements on behalf of the Dutch East and West India Companies (VOC and WIC), but also for the people of various backgrounds and statuses that inhabited these places. Focusing primarily on the eighteenth century, this book explores how these disparate and unequally empowered groups contested the norms that governed intimate life in Dutch colonial outposts from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.

Sophie Rose, Ph.D. (2023), is a post-doctoral researcher at Leiden University.

This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.
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This episode features a conversation with Dr. Katie Batza on their recently published book, AIDS in the Heartland: How Unlikely Coalitions Created a Blueprint for LGBTQ Politics. Published by the University of North Carolina Press, AIDS in the Heartland demonstrates the unique collaborations of crop duster pilots, church van drivers, nuns, tribal leaders, and synagogue ladies in places such as decommissioned convents, backyard barbecues, high school gyms, and city parks that fostered loud, radical queer politics and homonormative strategies alike. As a result, Batza contends with the respectability of the heart of the nation and how it prevails as core values in national LBGTQ political strategies today.

Histories of AIDS in the United States typically regard San Francisco and New York to be the epicenters of the crisis. The Midwest, if considered at all, appears as a footnote to the social, medical, and political struggles of coastal queer communities and communities of color. But the US heartland cultivated its own distinct strategies for survival that became the surprising and lasting blueprint for LGBTQ politics today. Though AIDS cases were relatively low compared to the coasts, the conservative political and religious landscape, lack of medical infrastructure, and diffuse gay communities brought Midwesterners together in unexpected ways. Unearthing this complex story, health activism expert Katie Batza masterfully illustrates the diversity, resilience, innovation, and influence of the Midwest’s responses to the AIDS epidemic.

Katie Batza is chair of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Kansas and the author of Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s. Their research explores the intersection of sexuality, health, and politics in the late 20th-century United States.

Donna Doan Anderson is a research assistant professor in History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Maile Aihua Young is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Bioethics and Health Humanities at the University of Texas-Medical Branch.
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