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Policing Sexuality: Sex, Society, and the State
Author(s): Julian C. H. Lee (Author)
- Publisher: Zed Books
- Publication Date: 8 Sept. 2011
- Language: English
- Print length: 200 pages
- ISBN-10: 1848138970
- ISBN-13: 9781848138971
Book Description
Policing Sexuality explores the regulation of sexual behaviour and identity by nation states, and questions how and why states have sought to influence and control the sexuality of its citizens.
Julian C. H. Lee presents both theoretical and ethnographic literature, distilling common themes and causes and presenting factors that contribute towards a state’s desire to control both the sexual behaviour and sexual identity of its citizens, such as the influence of colonialism, class, religion and national identity. Featuring five crucial case studies from India, Britain, the USA, Malaysia and Turkey, this fascinating comparative account challenges the coercive control state authority worldwide exert over the sexuality of its citizens.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Policing the body politic always entails sequestering the body sexual; the questions are only how and why, exactly where and when. This trans-regional examination of the different, and always self-contradictory, modalities of sexual state control and self-control is a treasure chest. Authors from Michel Foucault to Judith Butler would pawn one of their books to read this one: a combination of socio-cultural anatomies with humanist thinking. The anthropological wealth and comparative sociological imagination of this painstaking, yet amazingly easy-to-read book are scholarship at its best: accessible but never simplifying, liberating but never patronizing. –Gerd Baumann, University of Amsterdam, author of Contesting Culture (1996), The Multicultural Riddle (1999) and Grammars of Identity / Alterity: A Structural Approach (2005)
About the Author
Julian C. H. Lee is a Lecturer in the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University. He previously held an Economic and Social Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Kent. As well as numerous articles in journals and other publications, he is the author of Islamization and Activism in Malaysia (2010) and the editor of The Malaysian Way of Life (2010). He is also involved in organizations that advocate for sexuality rights and women’s rights in Malaysia.
