ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |27 pages

The Bubble, the Burn, and the Simmer

Introduction: locating sexuality in social science

chapter |28 pages

Get Thee to a Big City

Sexual imaginary and the great gay migration

chapter |26 pages

Forever Is a Long Time

Romancing the real in gay kinship ideologies

chapter |11 pages

Made to Order

Family formation and the rhetoric of choice

chapter |20 pages

Production As Means, Production As Metaphor

Women's struggle to enter the trades

chapter |28 pages

Sexuality, Class, and Conflict in a Lesbian Workplace

Coauthored with lisa b. rofel

chapter |4 pages

Theory, Theory, Who's Got the Theory?

Or, why i'm tired of that tired debate

chapter |23 pages

The Virtual Anthropologist