College campus-based surveys of sexual assault in the United States have generated one of the most high-profile and contentious figures in the history of social science: the ‘1 in 5’ statistic. Referring to the number of women who have experienced either attempted or completed sexual assault since their time in college, ‘1 in 5’ has done significant work in making the prevalence of this experience legible to the public and to policy-makers. Here I examine how sexual assault surveys have participated (...) in structuring the ontology of date/acquaintance rape from the 1980s to today. I review the foundational work of feminist social scientists Diana Russell and Mary Koss, with particular attention to the methodological practices through which the concept of the ‘hidden’ or ‘unacknowledged’ rape victim emerged. I then examine a selection of early 21st-century sexual assault surveys and highlight the ongoing preoccupation with survey methodology in responses to their results. I argue that the survey itself has been a central actor in the ontological politics of sexual assault, and only by closely attending to its performativity can we understand the paradoxical persistence both of critical responses to the ‘1 in 5’ statistic and of its effective deployment in anti-violence policy. (shrink)

This essay investigates the tensions produced by the categorization of different forms of excessive desire under the singular model of addiction, and it challenges the increasing acceptance of addiction as an all-purpose explanation for unruly desires through a comparison of the different forms of disordered desire in sex addiction and alcoholism. Moreover, it argues for a broad understanding of addictive processes to undermine the normative and moralizing assumptions of addiction discourses. Refiguring addiction as a kind of intimacy is one way (...) of making sense of the intense relationships people can develop with substances and with activities. (shrink)

Here the distinguished philosopher Ian Hacking uses the MPD epidemic and its links with the contemporary concept of child abuse to scrutinize today's moral...

Walter Kendrick traces the relatively recent concept of pornography—the word was not coined until the late 18th century—which became a public issue once the printing press gave ordinary people access to the erotica of the Greeks and Romans, the art and literature of the French enlightenment, and the poems of the Earl of Rochester and John Cleland's _Fanny Hill_. From the secret museums to the pornography trials of _Madame Bovary_ and _Lady Chatterly's Lover_, to Mapplethorpe, cable TV, and the Internet, (...) Kendrick explores how conceptions of pornography relate to issues of freedom of expression and censorship. (shrink)

"The subject of this book is the gradual social transformation of deviance designations in American society from "badness" to "sickness." This has been the most profound change in the definition of deviance in the past two centuries. By examining the medicalization (and demedicalization) of deviance in American society, we may also investigate the general sociohistorical process of defining deviance. Thus this book has a dual focus: it is a historical and sociological inquiry into the changing definitions of deviance and an (...) analysis of the transformation from religious and criminal to medical designations and control of deviance." -- preface. (shrink)

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Arguing that efforts to ban pornography are ultimately doomed to failure, radical philosopher Alison Assiter takes issue with recent feminist analyses of pornography by Dworkin, Griffin and Kappeler. She demonstrates how close are the parallels between the radical feminist analysis and more conventional liberal perspectives, in their common stress on the primacy of the individual. By limiting the terms of the argument to those of patriarchy - as contemporary analysts have tended to do - we fail, she says, to grasp (...) the true nature of oppression. Any proposed solutions to the problem of pornography will only be partial and unattainable, until such time as we come to terms with the fact that banning pornography cannot obliterate the ills that pornography exemplifies. Only when those wider ills have been more fully identified and understood can we begin to eliminate oppression, exploitation and inequality in all their forms. (shrink)

continue to have armies, as I suspect we will for some time to come, then they, too, must be fully integrated, as well as our national guard, our state troopers, our local sheriffs' offices, our district attorneys' offices, our state prosecuting attorneys'  ...