New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work

In BDSM Practices in Poland: Barbed Wire Floggings, Rope Orgasms, and the Problem with Desire
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), cultural anthropologist and cultural
studies scholar Jay Szpilka analyzes the way that BDSM is practiced in
contemporary Poland. Based on extensive field research, she asks what
social, cultural, and political conditions are necessary for BDSM to be possible to practice
in the first place. Through a nuanced analysis of the way that
practitioners navigate conflicting understandings and politics of kink,
this book provides an alternative to Western-centric narratives of BDSM
communities and challenges a number of long-standing notions about the
status kink which circulate in sexuality and queer studies.

Jay Szpilka is a visiting fellow at Edinburgh Napier University and
an assistant professor at SWPS University in Poland. She is the author
of BDSM Practices in Contemporary Poland, and her work has been published in the Feminist Review, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Teksty Drugie, and the Australian Feminist Studies.

Atalia Israeli-Nevo is an anthropology PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Despite being one of the leading thinkers of the second wave feminist movement, today Shere Hite is little known, little written about, and, unsurprisingly, little read. Her groundbreaking book, The Hite Report, was the first feminist exploration of the link between sex and male power. It sold millions of copies when first published in 1976 and revolutionised the way people thought about marriage and the female orgasm. How, then, did it, and Hite, disappear from public consciousness?

In The Book that Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared: Shere Hite and The Hite Report (Melville House and New South, 2026), Australian historian Dr. Rosa Campbell combines original research and sharp cultural analysis to explore the complicated life and literary legacy of Shere Hite. Expanding on her ideas about sex – namely, that sex is sexist – the book explores Hite’s fraught childhood, struggles working in the porn industry, and eventual cancellation by the far-right Evangelical movement. All the while, Dr. Campbell holds Hite and The Hite Report to account for their own failings and absence of intersectionality.

In a post-#MeToo world, with the far-right on the march globally, Dr. Rosa Campbell’s examination of shifting ideological movements is essential to understanding the current feminist movement, as well as how conservative and reactionary efforts can silence even the most successful of women.

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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Understanding overlooked dimensions of the Cuban Revolution and its
impact on the global left in the 1960s and beyond. This volume, The Cuban Revolution and the New Left: Transnational Histories of Gender, Sexuality, and Family (University of Florida Press, 2026) reconsiders
revolutionary Cuba's global influence by shifting the focus from
high-level political leaders to perspectives traditionally sidelined,
offering new insights into how everyday lives, family dynamics, and
notions of gender and sexuality impacted revolutionary transformation.
Its expansive scope uncovers ties between Cuba and Latin America, the
United States, Africa, and Asia, examining the interplay of global
forces including new models of mass consumption, feminist and LGBTQ+
movements, and national liberation struggles. Chapters include analyses
of Chinese reinterpretations of a Cuban play, Angela Davis's influential
visits to the island, Cuba's complex relations with Black militants in
Angola, and a Mexican transgender and disability activist who reimagined
Che Guevara's legacy. They also present research on Cuba's solidarity
campaigns with Vietnam, foreign journalists who covered the revolution,
the role of consumption and fashion, and the lasting impact of the
revolution's refugee policies on exiled children and families from the
Southern Cone. Through its interdisciplinary sociocultural approach,
this volume challenges conventional top-down narratives by foregrounding
the interplay between grassroots actors and transnational affairs. It
is an essential resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested
in the multilayered stages of the Cuban Revolution and its continued
relationship with global politics and culture. A volume in the series Caribbean Crossroads: Race, Identity, and Freedom Struggles,
edited by Lillian Guerra, Devyn Spence Benson, April Mayes, and
Solsiree del Moral Publication of this work made possible by a
Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from
the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

Contributors: Tanya Harmer | Emily Snyder | Felipe CesarCamilo Caro
Romero | Ailynn Torres Santana | Robert Franco | MichelleChase |
Isabella Cosse | Siwei Wang | Ximena Espeche | Sarah J. Seidman | Rafael
Cesar | Alexis Baldacci

Michelle Chase is an associate professor of history at Pace University.

Isabella Cosse is a professor of history at Universidad Nacional de
San Martín and researcher at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones
Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)

Katie L. Coldiron is a librarian and doctoral candidate in history at Florida International University.
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Karl Whittington joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Queer Making: On Artists and Desire in Medieval Europe (Pennsylvania State University Press,
2025). What role does desire play in the making of art objects? Art
historians typically answer this question by referring to historical
evidence about an artist's sexual identity or to particular kinds of
imagery. But what about anonymous artists? Or works whose subject matter
is mainstream? We know little about the identities and personalities of
most premodern artists, but this should not hold us back from thinking
about their embodied experience. In this book, Karl Whittington contends
that we can "queer" the works of anonymous makers by thinking about
their embodied experiences creating art. Considering issues of touch,
pressure, and gesture across substances such as wood, stone, ivory, wax,
cloth, paint, and metal, Whittington argues for an erotics of artisanal
labor, in which the actions of hand, body, and breath interact in
intimate ways with materials. Whittington takes seriously the agency of
materials and technical processes, arguing that they necessarily placed
the bodies of artists and artisans into physical situations and
psychological states that can be read through the lens of desire.
Combining historical evidence with speculative description, this
evocative set of essays broadens our understanding of the motivations
and experiences of premodern artists. It will appeal to scholars and
students of art history, medieval studies, gender studies, queer
studies, and anthropology.
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Marriage rates have fallen dramatically since the 1970s. Yet far
from devaluing marriage, people still overwhelmingly describe marriage
as the highest commitment they can imagine. Most Americans say they want
to marry eventually, and couples who do marry have a lower chance of
divorce than at any time since the 1970s. Increasingly, though, people
tell pollsters they “have no idea” if they actually will end up married. And unlike in the past, young women are more uncertain than young men.

In For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage (Viking, 2026), Stephanie Coontz—author of the “rich, provocative, and entertaining” book Marriage, A History—unravels the roots of such paradoxical trends. Examining five critical periods of historical transformation, she reveals how shifting romantic ideals, gender expectations, sexual mores, and cultural myths have bequeathed us a welter of contradictory beliefs, dysfunctional habits, and emotional earworms that make it hard to adjust our family relationships to the social and economic challenges of twenty-first-century life.

Coontz
demonstrates that today’s widespread nostalgia for a seemingly more
stable past is an understandable reaction to heightened economic
insecurity and eroding social solidarities. But trying to reproduce a
largely imaginary golden age of marriage from the past simply locks us
into a restricted future.

Current public debates about marriage
are dominated by two diametrically opposed groups. One argues that
marriage is the only sure route to personal happiness and social
stability; the other, that marriage is inherently oppressive. Coontz
puts forward a radical middle ground, pointing to surprising new
research on the personal changes and the policy innovations that can
help people create successful relationships, in or out of marriage.
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