Images of suffering male bodies permeate Western culture, from Francis Bacon's paintings and Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs to the battered heroes of action movies. Drawing on perspectives from a range of disciplines – including religious studies,...

With an interdisciplinary combination of philosophy, theology, and family law, "The Law of Love" explores the impact of secular conceptions of autonomy on sexuality and family. Drawing from the thought of Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, and th...

Over the course of a distinguished career, critic Leo Bersani has tackled a range of issues in his writing, and this collection gathers together some of his finest work. Beginning with one of the foundations of queer theory – his famous meditation on...

Despite Western culture's roots and much touted pride in its classical Greek and Roman legacy, the sexual freedoms of the ancient world have had no place in the official cultures of Western societies. As late as the 19th Century, homosexuality was th...

Mieke Bal has had a significant impact on every field she has touched, from Old Testament scholarship and narratology to critical methods and visual culture. This brilliant and controversial intellectual invariably performs a high-wire act at the poi...

A flamboyantly eclectic anthology that explodes the myths about the lines which divide us – the heterosexual from the homosexual, the normative from the "alternative", the phobic from the obsessive, the moral from the titillating, the academic from t...

From the perspective of developmental psychoanalysis, Jessica Benjamin, the author of "The Bonds of Love", makes the case for what she calls "gender heterodoxy" – a highly original view of the similarities and differences between the sexes. In the pr...

Combining literary criticism and feminist analysis, "Death and Dissymmetry" radically reinterprets not only the Book of Judges but also the tradition of its reception and understanding in the West. In Mieke Bal's account, Judges documents the Israeli...