Criminal intimacy : prison and the uneven history of modern American sexuality / Regina Kunzel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kunzel, Regina G., 1959-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Prisoners--Sexual behavior--United States.

Prisoners.

Prison violence--United States.

Prison violence.

Prisoners--Sexual behavior.

United States.

Rape--United States.

Rape.

Physical Description:

xi, 371 pages, 12 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Summary:

Sex is usually assumed to be a closely guarded secret of prison life. But it has long been the subject of intense scrutiny by both prison administrators and reformers-as well as a source of fascination and anxiety for the American public. Historically, sex behind bars has evoked radically different responses from professionals and the public alike. In Criminal Intimacy, Regina Kunzel tracks these varying interpretations and reveals their foundational influence on modern thinking about sexuality and identity. Historians have held the fusion of sexual desire and identity to be the defining marker of sexual modernity, but sex behind bars, often involving otherwise heterosexual prisoners, calls those assumptions into question. By exploring the sexual lives of prisoners and the sexual culture of prisons over the past two centuries-along with the impact of a range of issues, including race, class, and gender; sexual violence; prisoners' rights activism; and the HIV epidemic-Kunzel discovers a world whose surprising plurality and mutability reveals the fissures and fault lines beneath modern sexuality itself. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including physicians, psychiatrists, sociologists, correctional administrators, journalists, and prisoners themselves-as well as depictions of prison life in popular culture-Kunzel argues for the importance of the prison to the history of sexuality and for the centrality of ideas about sex and sexuality to the modern prison. In the process, she deepens and complicates our understanding of sexuality in America.

Contents:

"An architecture adapted to morals"

"Every prison has its perverts"

The problem of prison sex in the mid-twentieth century

"The deviants are the heterosexuals"

Rape, race, and the violent prison

"Lessons in being gay"

Epilogue.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 311-354) and index.

Lambda Literary Awards - LGBT Studies, Winner, 2009

Other Format:

Online version: Kunzel, Regina G., 1959- Criminal intimacy.

ISBN:

9780226462264

0226462269

9780226462271

0226462277

OCLC:

171151220

Online:

Contributor biographical information

Publisher description