Long Slow Burn: Sexuality and Social Science Kath Weston 9780415920445

Kath Weston's powerful collection of essays, Long, SlowBurn, 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.

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).

"...highly readable book...This is an exceptionally good read, even for the academically uninitiated and the theoretically wary." -- Lambda Book Report
"Appropriate for advanced undergraduates and graduate-level students, this is recommended for large academic libraries." -- Library Journal
"Every sentence of Long Slow Burn burns in effigy the sanitized vision of the social sciences that relegates sexuality to a realm beneath "legitimate" knowledge. The scholarly and polemical essays collected here challenge the histories, theories, and rhetorical modes that regulate disciplinary notions of "tradition"; at the same time, Kath Weston wages compelling arguments against the ahistorical and class-aversive tendencies of contemporary sexuality studies." -- Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago
"Wonderfully written, it is a work of consummate grace, critical acuity, persuasive power...it provokes us--profoundly, brilliantly--to think anew about the location of sexuality in the social sciences. And in the world at large." -- John Comaroff, University of Chicago