Kirsten Leng – författare

Pleasure, Play, and Politics is the first book to examine the roles humor played in U.S. feminism during the late twentieth century. Based on extensive archival research, it brings to light the stunning, moving, and frankly hilarious ways feminists have used satire, irony, and spectacle as they worked to build a better world. The story it tells includes activism and music, political mobilization and cartooning, stand-up comedy and demands for change.Kirsten Leng explores the ways culture and politics feed one another and shows how humor contributed to movement-building by changing hearts and minds, creating and maintaining a sense of community beyond a single issue, and sustaining activists over the long haul. The fascinating individuals, groups, and objects examined here—including the sex workers’ rights group COYOTE, the Guerrilla Girls, Florynce Kennedy, and the Lesbian Avengers—don’t just provide entertaining anecdotes or unsettle lazy assumptions that feminists are perennially dour and censorious: they offer a lesson or two for contemporary feminists and social justice activists. Taken together, they remind us that laughter can move us, that humor and anger can coexist, and that play and pleasure have a place in struggle.

Pleasure, Play, and Politics is the first book to examine the roles humor played in U.S. feminism during the late twentieth century. Based on extensive archival research, it brings to light the stunning, moving, and frankly hilarious ways feminists have used satire, irony, and spectacle as they worked to build a better world. The story it tells includes activism and music, political mobilization and cartooning, stand-up comedy and demands for change.Kirsten Leng explores the ways culture and politics feed one another and shows how humor contributed to movement-building by changing hearts and minds, creating and maintaining a sense of community beyond a single issue, and sustaining activists over the long haul. The fascinating individuals, groups, and objects examined here – including the sex workers’ rights group COYOTE, the Guerrilla Girls, Florynce Kennedy, and the Lesbian Avengers – don’t just provide entertaining anecdotes or unsettle lazy assumptions that feminists are perennially dour and censorious: they offer a lesson or two for contemporary feminists and social justice activists. Taken together, they remind us that laughter can move us, that humor and anger can coexist, and that play and pleasure have a place in struggle.

In Sexual Politics and Feminist Science, Kirsten Leng restores the work of female sexologists to the forefront of the history of sexology. While male researchers who led the practice of early-twentieth-century sexology viewed women and their sexuality as objects to be studied, not as collaborators in scientific investigation, Leng pinpoints nine German and Austrian "women sexologists" and "female sexual theorists" to reveal how sex, gender, and sexuality influenced the field of sexology itself. Leng's book makes it plain that women not only played active roles in the creation of sexual scientific knowledge but also made significant and influential interventions in the field. Sexual Politics and Feminist Science provides readers with an opportunity to rediscover and engage with the work of these pioneers.Leng highlights sexology's empowering potential for women, but also contends that in its intersection with eugenics, the narrative is not wholly celebratory. By detailing gendered efforts to understand and theorize sex through science, she reveals the cognitive biases and sociological prejudices that ultimately circumscribed the transformative potential of their ideas. Ultimately, Sexual Politics and Feminist Science helps readers to understand these women's ideas in all their complexity in order to appreciate their unique place in the history of sexology.