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Addiction is a term recently extended to problem sexual behaviours. Proponents of pornography addiction (PA) argue that pornography is comparable to drugs in its impact on brain processes and behaviour, producing effects similar to substance abuse disorders. Critics, however, assert that PA lacks diagnostic validity, that supporting research is methodologically unsound, and that diagnosis obscures the social contexts and discursive practices in which sexual behaviours are embedded. This study investigates how self-identified pornography addicts describe their experiences and explores the implicit motives and meanings at play in this identity construction. Using a psychoanalytically informed discursive methodology, the authors analyzed interviews with 10 self-identified pornography addicts, focusing on the meaning of self-diagnosis, the process of self-labelling, and participants' psychological investment in diagnosis. Participants perceived an enslavement to desire as central to their addiction identities. Underlying this identity work were defences and conflicts about power, gender, sexuality, and perversion, as well as histories of disturbed attachment and deprivation by parental figures. The PA diagnosis counteracted feelings of shame and allowed participants to speak more freely about their difficulties. However, it also precluded more nuanced self-understandings and identity possibilities. The article concludes with a discussion of the mental health and psychotherapeutic implications of those presenting with self- diagnosed PA. KEYWORDS: Discursive methodology, pornography addiction, psychoanalysis, self-diagnosis, Addiction, most often associated with substance use disorders, has recently been applied to problem behaviours by both mental health professionals and laypeople alike. Since the inclusion of Gambling Addiction Disorder [...]

In the late 1930s, Dr. Robert Latou Dickinson enlisted three New York society women to create an annotated card index for the New York Academy of Medicine Library's sexuality collections. These bibliographers assigned each item a rating ('suitable for lay reader,' 'suitable for scientific reader,' or 'pornographic'). Dickinson lobbied for the establishment of a sex education library at the academy for medical practitioners and the public, using the annotated cards to make his case. He enlisted Alfred Kinsey to support the project. This article describes the library activism of two influential sexologists who believed sexual information should be available to a wider public. KEYWORDS: medical libraries, sexuality, access, Alfred Kinsey, Robert Latou Dickinson, IN 1918 MARIE STOPES, THE BRITISH BIRTH CONTROL advocate and campaigner for women's rights, published Married Love and Wise Parenthood. The books were instant bestsellers in Britain, devoured by readers [...]

Alison Bechdel's graphic memoirs--Fun Home, Are You My Mother? and The Secret of Superhuman Strength--explore the relationship between word and image, both in their form, as comics, and narratively, via Bechdel's musings on self- expression, sexuality, psychoanalysis, and exercise. On each of these sites, she is deeply concerned with the pervasive dichotomies of subject/object, self/other, and past/present. The fraught dichotomy between words and images forms the organizing force for how she writes and draws about all dichotomies, as she disrupts the hierarchy between word and image of Lacan's symbolic order without, as many feminists scholars have, deeming the symbolic order of language inherently patriarchal. Drawing from Julia Kristeva's theorizing of Lacan's symbolic order, Hillary Chute's comics theory, as well as W.J.T. Mitchell's work on the relationship between word and image, I analyze each book sequentially. In her memoirs, Bechdel disrupts the very distinction between word and image. When she recreates book passages and letters, these are not simply transcriptions, but drawings of physical pages, treating words as images. Chute and DeKoven's definition ofcomics focuses on it as a dual medium, but in Bechdel's memoirs, the relationship between word and image is not as stable as duality. It is a collaboration requiring constant renegotiation. Keywords: Fun Home / Are You My Mother? / The Secret to Superhuman Strength / comics / symbolic order, Both in form and narrative, Alison Bechdel's memoirs deal with the contentious relationship between word and image. Rather than each following on from the previous book in a chronological narrative, [...]

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 4: Confessions of the Flesh. Ed. Frederic Gros. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 2021. 416 pages. When Volumes 2 and 3 of [...]

What happens when sex is more about identity than pleasure, intimacy, or interaction? And what happens when culture warriors gang up on sexuality--and from several directions? And has this affected [...]

La 21 division is the folk religion of the Dominican Republic. As a folk religion, the practices, beliefs, and cosmologies of la 21 division are generally underexplored in the literature of Afro-diasporic religions. And, while great attention has been given to discussions of gender and sexuality in Haitian vodoun, Cuban Santeria, Trinidadian Shango, Brazilian Candomble, and Surinamese Winti, little to no conversation has taken place around concepts of gender and sexuality within la 21 division. In this article, I address this lacuna by presenting an ethno-theological engagement with concepts of Black genders and sexualities. I share the results of consultas with Lula, a servidora of la 21 division, and one of the espiritus she embodies, Wanga. In sharing my conversations with Lula/Wanga, I explore the grounds for deepening our understandings of Black genders and specifically lesbian sexualities in the African diaspora., Consultando a Lula, Una Negra Macha, Una Servidora I am in the Dominican countryside, visiting my friend and interlocutor, Lula. (1) It is a Thursday morning, and outside the altar [...]