Sexuality Repositioned

29 July 04

Sexuality Repositioned: Diversity and the Law, co-edited by Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon (School of Psychology), peers under the bedclothes to explore how our sexualities are being refashioned and respositioned. The book - launched last month at an event hosted at the House of Lords by Lord Faulkner of Worcester - "confronts religion, education, science, medicine and the law with interesting challenges", says Dr Brooks-Gordon.

"Whilst all these five disciplines appear as both heroes and villains in this book, the law provides the ultimate expression of a restructured codified social response to repositioned sexuality, and so it is the legal reactions that lie at the book's heart, as seen, for example, in the new Sexual Offences Act of 2003."

Contributions to the book cover this Act and its problems, same sex partnerships, treatment of sex offenders, sexuality in the work place, sexual abuse of minors, prostitution, pornography, the sexuality of the young, biomedical and legal approaches to sexual orientation and intersexuality, sexual activism and socio-legal repositioning, and historical and futuristic perspectives on sexuality.

Dr Brooks-Gordon adds: "Sexual diversity provides a particularly explosive trigger for both rabid disagreement and improbable bedfellowship. The fall-outs from the 1960s' sexual revolution, the 1970s' advances in assisted reproduction, the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, and the 1990s' paedophilia scandals have combined to thrust sexuality into the headlines in increasingly explicit and often lurid ways. We now have no excuse not to know what people of different ages, sizes, sexes and beliefs do in bed (or in all manner of other exotic places), whether alone, in pairs or in groups."

Published by Hart Publishing Oxford, the book evolved out of a series of papers given at a meeting of the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group in Pembroke College, Cambridge in the spring of 2003, and is a must for students of sexuality, social sciences, the law and medicine.

Co Editors:
Belinda-Brooks-Gordon, Lecturer in Psychology, Birkbeck
Loraine Gelsthorpe, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge Martin Johnson, Professor of Reproductive Sciences, University of Cambridge
Andrew Bainham, Reader in Family Law and Policy, University of Cambridge

Contact:
Catherine Doherty, Media and Publicity Officer
External Relations, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX
Tel 020 7631 6569
Fax 020 7631 6351
Email c.doherty@bbk.ac.uk

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