A treatment of Montesquieu's Persian Letters, which argues that the novel is a philosophic critique of despotism in all its forms: domestic, political and religious. It shows that Montesquieu believed that the Enlightenment failed as a philosophy by not recognising man as an erotic being.

Byron: The Erotic Liberal explores the relationship between Byron's erotic life and his political commitments, placing his poetry in the context of the work of other aristocratic liberals such as Madame de Stael.

Whom, over the past two centuries, has society construed as sexual "victims"? Where and when did the notion of consent—so crucial for law and politics today—emerge? In this brilliantly insightful work, Pamela Susan Haag traces the evolution of public wisdom on some of society's most private and controversial matters. At once an investigation of social history, popular culture, legal doctrine, and political theory, her book shows how in contemporary America the history of sexual rights is inextricably intertwined with that of liberalism. Haag examines the nineteenth-century obsession with the perils of seduction and twentieth-century disputes over white slavery, arranged marriages, interracial relationships, and rape. The history of heterosexual modernity and identity must, she argues, be viewed as a crucial component of a much larger historical narrative—that of the ways in which individual freedom and citizenship have been continually redefined in American liberal culture. She illuminates the development of liberalism from its "classic" stage that ended after the post-Reconstruction era to a "modern" version that came to fruition with the judicial acceptance of the right to privacy. Finally, she shows how debates over the meaning of heterosexual consent and violence contributed to this transformation.

Ethicist Marvin Ellison compellingly argues that current crises in family, personal life, and sexuality are related to our culture's prevailing attitudes about human sexuality. He proposes a liberating Christian ethic of erotic justice that goes beyond the prevailing patriarchal paradigm.

Chapter 1 Introduction -- chapter 2 New Cosmologies: Mapping the Postcolonial Feminist Legal Project -- chapter Liberal internationalism and the capabilities approach -- chapter 3 Erotic Disruptions: Legal Narratives of Culture, Sex and Nation in India -- chapter Narratives of culture, sex, nation -- chapter The Bandit Queen -- chapter Homosexuality -- chapter 4 The Tragedy of Victimisation Rhetoric: Resurrecting the 'Native' Subject in International/Postcolonial Feminist Legal Politics -- chapter Cultural essentialism -- chapter 'Death by culture' -- chapter 5 The Other Side of Universality: Cross-Border Movements and the Transnational Migrant Subject -- chapter Colonial subjects and the meaning of 'universality' -- chapter The Other in the contemporary moment -- chapter (b) Equating migration with trafficking.

This book studies the literary and cinematic functions of the pornographic as a development from a poetics of obscenity. It focuses on the developments of French, British, and American artistic pornography since the eighteenth century. Discussing female literary figures including Hall, Wharton, Nin, "Reage," Jong, and Shulman; such men as Cleland, Sade, Beardsley, Lawrence, Joyce, and Miller; and film makers such as Brakhage, Jack Smith, Bruce Conner, Bertolucci, Oshima, and Wertmuller; Michelson analyzes both the use of aesthetic pornography and the philosophical, cultural, and legal implications of its use. He proposes that realizing the obscene --in the sense of speaking the unspeakable-- is the principle aesthetic function of pornography.