Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic

The emergence of AIDS in contemporary culture has not only produced a vast discourse on the disease but has provoked an anxious proliferation of sites of erotic danger. In Erotic Welfare , Linda Singer argues that we are currently living in an age of epidemic , fueled by a panic logic in which contemporary discourse on sexuality and on a variety of social problems - teenage pregnancy, prostitution, and drug addiction, have come to replicate the discourse of contagion. Singer traces the effects of epidemic on the growth of regulatory mechanisms for the control of sexuality, and explores the ways this development has affected women’s efforts to secure reproductive freedom; the construction of femininity within the media; and efforts to displace the hegemony of the nuclear family in the cultural imaginary. Her work forms a trenchant critique of sexuality in an age of discipline, where bodies and their pleasures have become dense sites of regulatory power.