Genealogies of Identity examines issues of sex and sexuality across a range of critical and cultural perspectives. The volume considers historically specific discourses of sex and sexuality, their effect within public contexts such as the church and the workplace, and the link of those discourses to understandings of individual identity, citizenship, nation, and human rights. As well, the volume analyses representations of sexuality and desire in art, literature, theatre, and theory – representations that serve both to codify and to subvert social norms and aesthetic and theoretical traditions. Finally and more broadly, the volume attests to the critical importance of inter- and multidisciplinary approaches to understanding constructions of gender, sex, and sexuality. Genealogies of Identity consists of fifteen essays, versions of which were presented at the First Global Conference on Critical Issues in Sexuality, held in Salzburg, Austria, in October 2004.

Noted social scientist Eviatar Zerubavel casts a critical eye on how we trace our past-individually and collectively arguing that rather than simply find out who our ancestors are from genetics or history, we actually create the stories that make them our ancestors.

Preliminary Material --List of Figures --Preface /Margaret Sönser Breen --History, Sex, and Nation --Kertbeny's "Homosexuality" and the Language of Nationalism /Robert D. Tobin --Prostitution, Sexuality, and Gender Roles in Imperial Germany: Hamburg, A Case Study /Julia Bruggemann --Cultural Clash on Prostitution: Debates on Prostitution in Germany and Sweden in the 1990s /Susanne Dodillet --"Staying Bush" - The Influence of Place and Isolation in the Decision by Gay Men to Live in Rural Areas in Australia /Ed Green --Literature: Re-writing Desire --Whoring, Incest, Duplicity, or the "Self-Polluting" Erotics of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders /Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou --Catastrophic Sexualities in Howard Baker's Theatre of Transgression /Karoline Gritzner --Un-sacred Cows and Protean Beings: Suniti Namjoshi's Re-writing of Postcolonial Lesbian Bodies /Shalmalee Palekar --Desire-less-ness /Fiona Peters --Bodies: Representations of Gender Identities --Underneath the Clothes - Transvestites without Vests: A Consideration in Art /Barbara Wagner --Of Swords and Rings: Genital Representation as Defining Sexual Identity and Sexual Liberation in Some Old French Fabliaux and Lais /Tovi Bibring --Only with You - Maybe - If You Make Me Happy: A Genealogy of Serial Monogamy as Governance Self-Governance /Serena Petrella --Legality, Bureaucracy, Religion, and Sexuality --A Project for Sexual Rights: Sexuality, Power, and Human Rights /Alejandro Cervantes-Carson and Tracy Citeroni --International Law, Children's Rights, and Queer Youth /Valerie D. Lehr --Acting Like a Professional: Identity Dilemmas for Gay Men /Nick Rumens --How Big is Your God? Queer Christian Social Movements /Jodi O'Brien --Notes on Contributors.

How popular media cultivates genealogy but buries its cultural context

Genesis calls its readers into a vision of human community unconstrained by the categories that dominate modern thinking about identity. Genesis situates humanity within a network of nurture that encompasses the entire cosmos--only then introducing Israel not as a people, but as a promise. Genesis prioritizes a human identity that originates in the divine word and depends on ongoing relationship with God. Those called into this new mode of belonging must forsake the social definition that had structured their former life, trading it for an alternative that will only gradually take shape. In contrast to the rigidity that typifies modern notions, Genesis depicts identity as fundamentally fluid. Encounter with God leads to a new social self, not a "spiritual" self that operates only within parameters established in the body at birth. In Belonging in Genesis, Amanda Mbuvi highlights the ways narrative and the act of storytelling function to define and create a community. Building on the emphasis on family in Genesis, she focuses on the way family storytelling is a means of holding together the interpretation of the text and the constitution of the reading community. Explicitly engaging the way in which readers regard the biblical text as a point of reference for their own (collective) identities leads to an understanding of Genesis as inviting its readers into a radically transformative vision of their place in the world.

Feminist and critical race theorists alike have long acknowledged the "intersection" of gender and race difference; it is by now a truism that the ways we become boys and girls, men and women, cannot be disentangled from the ways we become white or Black men and women, Asian or Latino boys and girls. And yet, even as many have sought to attend to this intersection of difference, most critical treatments focus finally either on the production of gender or the production of race. Family Bonds proposes a new way to think about the categories of gender and race together. It first explicates and then puts to work Foucault's archaeological and genealogical methods to advance the main argument of the book: Gender is best understood primarily as a function of "disciplinary" power operating within the family, while race is primarily a function of a "regulatory" power acting upon the family. Each of the book's central chapters is an individual story, or history--the founding of Levittown, the definitive suburb after the Second World War (1950s and 60s); the development of the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder (1970s and 1980s); and the federal coordination of scientific research on violence (1980s and 1990s). Together they make up a larger story about the construction of race and gender in the U.S. in the second half of the twentieth century and demonstrate the centrality of the family in these constructions. Rather than a formal study of Foucault's own work, Family Bonds is an effort to produce genealogies of the sort that Foucault himself hoped his work would prompt.

In Geneologies of Religion, Talal Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied as a universal concept. The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation—from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign—is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often invokved to explain and justify the liberal politics and world view of modernity. And it leads to the view that "politicized religions" threaten both reason and liberty. Asad's essays explore and question all these assumptions. He argues that "religion" is a construction of European modernity, a construction that authorizes—for Westerners and non-Westerners alike—particular forms of "history making."