Sexualities in American Culture

In connection with recent postmodernist and poststructuralist analyses of gender constructions, sexuality has come to the forefront of discussions dealing with identity conceptions and definitions of culture as such. This volume sets out to explore the centrality of sexuality to cultural concerns. At the same time, this centrality also involves the necessity of a linkage of sexuality to other aspects of identity, e.g. race, class, and gender. Many of the essays investigate the sexualizing and/or gendering of ethnicity, an interrelation in which fascination and stigmatization are often intertwined. Not surprisingly, the latter liability of marginalized sexualities to stigmatization also figures in the exploration of the conflict between homosexuality and Western "love codes". An intriguing aspect of the volume is thus the fact that although the essays investigate a vast array of often dissimilar concerns, they open up an interdisciplinary dialogue which maps out the full scope of tensions in which sexuality is located in American contemporary culture. von Hornung, Alfred