Criminal Intimacy ─ Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality

Sex behind bars has long elicited intense scrutiny, fascination, and anxiety. In Criminal Intimacy. Regina Kunzel tracks these varying responses and reveals their foundational influence on modern thinking about sexuality and identity. By exploring the sexual lives of prisoners and the sexual culture of prisons over the past two centuries-along with the impact of a range of issues, including race, class, and gender; sexual violence; prisoners' rights activism; and HIV/AIDS-Kunzel discovers a world whose surprising plurality and mutability reveals the fissures and fault lines beneath modern sexuality itself.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, including physicians, psychiatrists, sociologists, correctional administrators, journalists, and prisoners themselves-as well as depictions of prison life in popular culture-Kunzel argues for the importance of the prison to the history of sexuality and for the centrality of ideas about sex and sexuality to the modern prison. in the process, she deepens and complicates our understanding of sexuality in America.

"Kunzel has written a pathbreaking study of prison sexual culture from the origins of the penitentiary to the AIDS crisis... This is one of the most significant books on the history of American sexuality in recent years."

Winner of the American Historical Association's John Boswell Prize, the Modern Language Association's Alan Bray Memorial Book Award, the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality's Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough Award, and the Lambda Literary Award More

Regina Kunzel is professor of history and gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota, where she is the Paul R. Frenzel Land Grant Chair in Liberal Arts. She is the author of Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945.