Long Slow Burn: Sexuality and Social Science - Hardcover

Weston, Kath

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415920434 ISBN 13: 9780415920438

Publisher: Routledge, 1998

Synopsis

Kath Weston's powerful collection of essays, Long, Slow Burn, challenges the preconception that queer studies is the brainchild of the humanities and argues that social science has been talking about sex all along. To deny this one would have to overlook Kinsey's pioneering sex research in the 1950s, or the psychiatrist Evelyn Hooker's pathbreaking study of homosexuality, but also in the "sex talk" that lies at the heart of classic debates on kinship, inequality, cognition, and other foundational topics in the social sciences. What is different now, Weston claims, is the way sexuality has been isolated from other contemporary issues. Not content with its ghettoization as a contained subfield, Weston refuses to draw an artificial line around sexuality.

About this title

Review:

The "Gay '90s" of the 20th century have been nothing if not, well, gay. For the first time, gays and lesbians have witnessed consistent positive representation of their lives in film, on television, in literature, and in politics. Gay culture has even extended itself to the oft-impenetrable ivory tower, where academics have been conceiving a new branch of the humanities: gay and lesbian studies. As anthropologist Kath Weston notes in Long Slow Burn, the social sciences are just now catching up to the discipline and "getting hip to queer consideration." As even non-gay academics begin to examine literature, film, and the arts with an eye for queer sensibilities, Weston convincingly argues that gay and lesbian studies are here to stay.

The essays that comprise Long Slow Burn were written at various points throughout the '90s, when queer theory emerged as a viable academic discipline. A self-proclaimed "native ethnographer," Weston explores the trends in gay and lesbian migration from rural areas to big cities--particularly "Meccas" like San Francisco and New York City's Greenwich Village--and passionately searches for more creative, less elitist approaches to queer theory.

At turns thought-provoking and introspective, Long Slow Burn is certain to secure a place for gay and lesbian studies that can extend beyond the arts and sciences. --Kera Bolonik

About the Author:

Kath Weston is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University West. She is the author of Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (1991) and Render Me, Gender Me: Lesbians Talk Sex, Class, Color, Nation, Studmuffins... (1996).

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0415920434
• ISBN 13: 9780415920438
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224