The Social Life of Sexuality

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From the Publisher's Marketplace Announcement: 

Sociologist Angela Jones's Erotic Power, an exploration of how sexuality operates in society, arguing that our sex lives are never private; that sex plays an outsized role in the shaping of norms, communities, and politics; and that the pursuit of pleasure can liberate us from the vice grip of sexual stigma and broader forces of oppression, to Brandon Proia at Seal Press, by Margo Beth Fleming at Brockman.  

Sneak Peak:  

Humans have been thinking about fucking, talking about fucking, making porn about fucking, actually fucking, and telling others how they should or should not be fucking since the beginning of recorded history. Artifacts, from art to writing to fertility totems, dating back to when the first Homo sapiens evolved from their hominid predecessors some 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, all provide ample documentation. 

Our ancestors were just as obsessed with eroticism as we are today. However, we now live in a world with advanced economies, technologies, and systems of governance and surveillance, which makes contemporary sexuality complicated. As new advances introduce new opportunities for human connection and corporeal pleasures, erotic change also presents new dangers. This tension between what feminists call the pleasure/danger paradigm represents an ongoing conflict that individuals and societies remain demonstrably underprepared to deal with and continually mishandle. 

Even though sex seems to be everywhere, people lack the foundational knowledge they need to understand sexuality fully and have incomplete tools for navigating contemporary sexuality at both the individual and societal levels. So, I am here to augment the dominant physiological and psychological perspectives with something new, infusing much-needed sociological and feminist insights into our understanding of contemporary sexuality. 

Sex is never solitary and is just as much a social ritual as it is an individual quest for pleasure. Yet, so many books about sex and sexuality seem satisfied with letting people drown in the depths of their personal failings. There are so few attempts to reckon with the social systems that set the stage for all the sexual theatre in our lives.

Politicians who create policies governing sex globally far too often outright ignore the work my colleagues and I do. They cause much harm and repression with knee-jerk policies grounded more in emotions and fear of erotic change than empirical data from across scientific fields, which provide the information necessary for developing sound policies that foster sexual justice. 

To understand sexuality and its economic, political, and social roots, we must turn to Black feminism and feminist sociology and learn to see the world in new, dynamic, and multifaceted ways. Only by understanding sexuality more holistically can we all live our best sex lives and rethink how we, as global cultures, regulate and grapple with social issues related to sex in ways that acknowledge dangers but simultaneously prioritize bodily autonomy, social justice, sexual freedom, and pleasure. 

Drawing inspiration from key Black feminist sociological insights, I offer everyone a new, dynamic, and multifaceted way to understand sexuality and its economic, political, and social roots. I aim to complement, not replace, the dominant physiological and psychological perspectives. I want everyone to understand sexuality more holistically so that we can all live our best sex lives and rethink how we, as global cultures, regulate and grapple with social issues related to sex in ways that acknowledge dangers but simultaneously prioritize bodily autonomy, social justice, sexual freedom, and pleasure. 

My aspiration for the world developed theoretically throughout each chapter in this book involves cultivating an understanding of erotic power. On one hand, for individuals, this means the agency to make choices concerning our bodies, sex lives, and relationships free from social, political, and economic constraints. Simultaneously, I present erotic power as a theoretical framework, allowing for the analysis of how eroticism shapes social life and how the collective expression of erotic desires brings about change. The erotic serves as a crucial site for resistance, social change, political power, pleasure, and joy.