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“Heterosexuality,” assumed to denote a universal sexual and cultural norm, has been largely exempt from critical scrutiny. In this boldly original work, Jonathan Ned Katz challenges the common notion that the distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality has been a timeless one. Building on the history of medical terminology, he reveals that as late as 1923, the term “heterosexuality” referred to a "morbid sexual passion," and that its current usage emerged to legitimate men and women having sex for pleasure. Drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud, James Baldwin, Betty Friedan, and Michel Foucault, The Invention of Heterosexuality considers the effects of heterosexuality’s recently forged primacy on both scientific literature and popular culture. “Lively and provocative.”—Carol Tavris, New York Times Book Review “A valuable primer . . . misses no significant twists in sexual politics.”—Gary Indiana, Village Voice Literary Supplement “One of the most important—if not outright subversive—works to emerge from gay and lesbian studies in years.”—Mark Thompson, The Advocate
Shows that expanding commercial ties between states pacifies some, but not necessarily all, political relationships.
This 2002 study examines the process of the disintegration of the Soviet state.
In Piecing Together the Peaces, Alexander K. Antony and William R. Thompson provide a novel explanation for how peace took hold in the international system and why state behavior drastically changed. According to the standard line of reasoning, states need only democratize, liberalize their trade, modernize their economic culture, or choose to forego territorial pursuits to reach peace with another state. A bold challenge to the conventional wisdom that dominates interstate peace research, Antony and Thompson make the case that industrialization provides the starting point from which we can begin to unpack the transformation in conflict propensities among certain states.
Physical features of ballots vary considerably across the US. This book shows how politicians use ballot design to influence voting.
This book examines current debates about how international human rights law regulates national authorities and international institutions during emergencies.
How does regional interdependence influence the prospects for conflict, integration, and democratization? Some researchers look at the international system at large and disregard the enormous regional variations. Others take the concept of sovereignty literally and treat each nation-state as fully independent. Kristian Skrede Gleditsch looks at disparate zones in the international system to see how conflict, integration, and democracy have clustered over time and space. He argues that the most interesting aspects of international politics are regional rather than fully global or exclusively national. Differences in the local context of interaction influence states' international behavior as ...
The Right and the Welfare State studies the welfare state policies of conservative and liberal governments. These parties have been assumed to be nothing but the welfare-sceptical flip-side of the Left, but the book presents a new theory arguing that the conventional wisdom is wrong. The policy goals of the Right - and the political means by which they pursue them - is a lot less straightforward than simply "pro" or "con" the welfare state. The book uses the distinction between labor market risks and life-course risks in order to explain why the Right's voters care much more about some social programs than about others and why, consequently, the policies of Right governments are much more diverse than is normally thought. The book also introduces the concepts of "marketization via layering" and "erode and attack" to help explain the peculiar approach to reforms adopted by Right governments. The book analyses data on public opinion and public policies from a large set of Western democracies and combines this with in-depth case studies of Australia, Denmark, and the UK.
Why and how has the Chinese central government so far managed to fend off the centrifugal forces under rising globalization that are predicted to undermine national-level political authority everywhere? When institutionally empowered by centralized governing political parties as in China, national politicians confronting the menace of economic openness will resort to exercising tighter political control over the subnational governments of the 'winner' regions in the global markets. Although its goal is to facilitate revenue extraction, redress domestic economic disparity, and prolong the rule of national leaders, regionally targeted central political control could engender mixed economic consequences. Sheng examines the political response of the Chinese central government, via the ruling Chinese Communist Party, to the territorial challenges of the country's embrace of the world markets, and the impact of the regionally selective exercise of political control on central fiscal extraction and provincial economic growth during the 1978–2005 period.