Long Slow Burn: Sexuality and Social Science

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.