Special Focus Archive

THE 1990s BEGAN with the publication of two landmark books: Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and Eve Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet. Together, they brought into being a new and controversial field called queer studies. As the decade progressed, it seemed that sexuality was omnipresent not only in life but even in the library. Books with titles like Queering the Pitchand Sodometriesbecame favorites of tenure committees and academy-bashers alike.

But was all this sex strictly in the head? At least some academics sought to link their often abstruse work with the streetwise political activities of groups like Queer Nation and the Women's Action Coalition. Meanwhile, the children of Foucault and Coca Cola peered behind the closed doors of the past and spied a range of unfamiliar sexual identities.

The Sex That Dare Not Speak Its Name by Emily Nussbaum
Thousands of babies are born each year with ambiguous genitals. An intersexual rights movement forces us to rethink our beliefs about men and women.

Pleasure Principles by Caleb Crain
Queer theorists have left the academy and taken to the streets. But can their Foucault-inspired notions survive outside the classroom?

A Female Deer? by Alex Ross
Looking for sex in the Sound of Music.

Pornutopia by M.G. Lord
How feminist scholars learned to love dirty pictures.

Pride & Prejudice by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl
What feminists have wrought: writing the self back into scholarship.

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