"How do gay and lesbian teachers grapple with their professional and sexual identities at work, given that these identities are constructed as mutually exclusive, even indeed as mutually opposed? Using rich interview and ethnographic materials from Texas and California, School's Out explores how teachers struggle to create a classroom persona that balances who they are and what's expected of them in a climate of pervasive homophobia. Catherine Connell takes readers into the private and professional lives of gay and lesbian educators, along the way developing the innovative concept of racialized homophobia, which thwarts challenges to sexual injustices in schools. She also uses her own experiences as one point of intersection with the ideas in this volume. Connell's exploration of the tension between the rhetoric of gay pride and the professional ethic of discretion insightfully connects and considers other complicating factors, from local law and politics to race and gender privilege. With a sense of ethnographic verve and an engaging authorial presence, School's Out is essential reading for specialists and students of queer studies, gender studies, and educational politics."--Provided by publisher.

In God's Own Party, Daniel K. Williams presents the first comprehensive history of the Christian Right, uncovering how evangelicals came to see the Republican Party as the vehicle through which they could reclaim America as a Christian nation.

An exemplary team of professionals provides a comprehensive look at sex education, the heated debate over federal controls, current research and practice, programs, politics, legislation, and cultural and religious issues related to sex and sexuality education. In the groundbreaking Sexuality Education: Past, Present, and Future, the history, practices, and politics of sexuality education are explained. Respected educators, counselors, and therapists marshal both research and educated opinion to offer insights into exactly what is meant by "sex education," what the various approaches are, what "age appropriate" lessons are supported by most professionals, and the impact of government policies. Noting that the need for sexuality education has expanded to adults, from new parents to senior citizens, this unique work also takes readers into classrooms and makes them privy to conversations representing everyone from elementary school students to nursing home residents. These comments reveal the range of unanswered questions about sex—questions that are important for psychological, as well as physical health. In addition, the contributors explore ongoing issues in sexuality education, such as how to present "culturally competent" lessons that include consideration of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. The experts also examine sexuality education in other countries, the challenges those countries face, and their victories over unplanned pregnancy and STDs in the global effort to preserve sexual health.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Schools and Religion provides the first truly global scan of contemporary issues and debates around the world regarding the relationship(s) between the state, schools and religion. Organized around specific contested issues - from whether or not mindfulness should be practised in schools, to appropriate and inappropriate religious attire in schools, to long-term battles about evolution, sexuality, and race, to public funding - Fraser-Pearce and Fraser carefully curate chapters by leading experts exploring these matters and others in a diverse range of national settings. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Schools and Religion offers a refreshingly new international perspective.

Raising Sexually Pure Kids: Sexual Abstinence, Conservative Christians and American Politics analyzes pro-abstinence discourses issued by the conservative Christian community and the G.W. Bush administration, to underline that abstinence is not a peripheral matter, but is a cultural and political issue of great significance in US society, especially in the past decade. This book seeks to bring to light how pro-abstinence discourses coalesce most of the core agendas of conservative Christians – like creationism, parental rights or the culture war - and enabled them and the Bush administration, to on the one hand, preserve traditional hierarchies and on the other hand, maintain the sense of threat necessary to the protection of the status quo and to the enduring commitment of the conservative Christian constituency.

Deaths from epidemic disease are rare in the developed world, yet in our technically and medically advanced society, an ever-present risk of disease has created an industry out of fear. As Philip Alcabes persuasively argues in Dread, our anxieties about epidemics often stray from the facts on the ground. In a fascinating exploration of the social and cultural history of epidemics, Alcabes delivers a different narrative of disease-one that requires that we reexamine our choice of enemies, and carefully consider the potential motivation of epidemic alarm-bells to further medical, moral, or political campaigns.

In the years after the Second World War, economic and social factors combined to produce an intense concern over the sexual development and behaviour of young people. In a context where heterosexuality and 'normality' were understood to be synonymous and assumed to be necessary for social and national stability, teenagers were the target of a range of materials and practices meant to turn young people into proper heterosexuals. In this study, Mary Louise Adams explores discourses about youth and their place in the production and reproduction of heterosexual norms. She examines debates over juvenile delinquency, indecent literature, and sex education to show not why heterosexuality became a peculiar obsession in English Canada following the Second World War as much as how it came to hold such sway. Drawing on feminist theory, cultural studies, and lesbian/gay studies, The Trouble with Normal is the first Canadian study of 'youth' as a sexual and moral category. Adams looks not only at sexual material aimed at teenagers but also at sexual discourses generally, for what they had to say about young people and for the ways in which 'youth,' as a concept, made those discourses work. She argues that postwar insecurities about young people narrowed the sexual possibilities of both young people and adults. While much of the recent history of sexuality examines sexuality 'from the margins,' The Trouble with Normal is firmly committed to examining the 'centre,' to unpacking normality itself. As the first book-length study of the history of sexuality in postwar Canada, it will make an important contribution to the growing international literature on sexual regulation.

Teenage girls and the new right -- Women and children? Sexual speech and sexual harm -- Explicit content: cultures of girlhood -- The third wave and the third way -- Medicine, education, and sexualization -- Epilogue: girlhood sexualities in the contemporary culture wars.

Teachers Go to Rehab examines the advice given to teachers from multiple critics both historically and recently. This book looks at the scope, cost, and impact of this advice to teachers, as well as the motives behind it. It poses precise questions about the groups that gave the advice. Who were they? What did they recommend? How did they estimate impact? How did they calculate costs? What aims did they profess? What aims did they conceal? Whom did they attract? Whom did they alienate? When did they succeed? When did they fail?

This handbook unifies access and opportunity, two key concepts of sociology of education, throughout its 25 chapters. It explores today’s populations rarely noticed, such as undocumented students, first generation college students, and LGBTQs; and emphasizing the intersectionality of gender, race, ethnicity and social class. Sociologists often center their work on the sources and consequences of inequality. This handbook, while reviewing many of these explanations, takes a different approach, concentrating instead on what needs to be accomplished to reduce inequality. A special section is devoted to new methodological work for studying social systems, including network analyses and school and teacher effects. Additionally, the book explores the changing landscape of higher education institutions, their respective populations, and how labor market opportunities are enhanced or impeded by differing postsecondary education pathways. Written by leading sociologists and rising stars in the field, each of the chapters is embedded in theory, but contemporary and futuristic in its implications. This Handbook serves as a blueprint for identifying new work for sociologists of education and other scholars and policymakers trying to understand many of the problems of inequality in education and what is needed to address them.