Surveys a decade of the attempt to reconstruct and understand the meaning and value of butch-femme relations for the contemporary lesbian, drawing on oral history, fiction, poetry, and fantasy. -- From the Amazon

" A Courtship After Marriage places sex and marriage at the heart of modernity's making. Hirsch's innovative study of marriage-making in transnational Mexican families offers a fascinating look at the opportunities cross-border migration provides for reconstructing gender and rediscovering pleasure. This ambitious, well-crafted book speaks to anthropologists, demographers, and public health specialists, while transcending the divides between them."—Susan Greenhalgh, author of Under the Medical Gaze: Facts and Fictions of Chronic Pain "Jennifer Hirsch is one of the new wave in demographic scholars that takes culture seriously. Her book is a model of engaged, policy-relevant scholarship that achieves its warrant through deep contextualization in the everyday experience of its subjects. Beautifully written, rigorously analyzed, and almost novelistic in its nuance and detail, this study of marriage, migration, and fertility puts the people back into demography and makes one of the most powerful contributions to policy-relevant social science that I have seen in a long time. A work of beauty, sensitivity, and scholarship that sets a new standard for all that follows."—Tom Fricke, author of Himalayan Households: Tamang Demography and Domestic Processes "In this engagingly written and keenly observed ethnography of Mexican marriages in Atlanta and in small Mexican towns, Jennifer Hirsch brings love, sex and romance to Mexican immigration scholarship, and presents a compelling case for the rise of companionate marriages and ideals of spousal intimacy. This book will appeal to anyone interested in gender studies, immigrant families and the social and cultural contexts of fertility."—Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of Domestica: Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence "A groundbreaking study. Gracefully written, yet at the same time rigorously argued, this book reminds us of the poetry and dignity that can be found in ordinary lives and of the dreams and aspirations that sustain human agency even in the face of severe social and economic constraints. This is a major contribution to our understanding of migration, gender, sexuality, and social change in contemporary life and a model for engaged social research at its very best."—Richard Parker, author of Bodies, Pleasures and Passions "Hirsch has written a superb, insightful, and original study of Mexican migrants and the challenges of marital devotion and separation they face across time and space. Exemplary in its detail and rigor, Courtship brings us into the lives of men and women in Georgia and Jalisco, shows us the risks they take to create modern forms of intimacy, and reconceptualizes how we should view sexualized companionship, procreation, and engendered pleasures. This book will become a gold standard ethnography in medical anthropology, public health, and transnational migration studies."—Matthew C. Gutmann, author of The Romance of Democracy: Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico "Hirsch’s engaging analysis of gender relations among immigrant Mexicans in Atlanta and in the Mexican community from which they come, shows how migration affects women's and men's roles, the place of sexuality in building marital intimacy, struggles over contraceptive use, and power relations in the couple. Using detailed ethnographic examples, she examines the trend toward companionate couplehood, and demonstrates both struggles and triumphs as young Mexicans and Mexican-Americans strive to create marriages that combine the strengths of traditional respect-based bonds with the advantages of new relationships built on trust."—L.A. Rebhun, author of The Heart Is Unknown Country: Love in the Changing Economy of Northeast Brazil

Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer on hysteria, J.A. Symonds and Havelock Ellis on sexuality, a novel by Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot (and Ezra Pound), even the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge: men making books together. Wayne Koestenbaum's startling interpretation of literary collaboration focuses on homosexual desire: men write together, he argues, in order either to express or to evade homosexual feelings. Their writing becomes a textual intercourse, the book at once a female body they can share and the child of their partnership. These man-made texts steal a generative power that women's bodies seem to represent. Seen as the site of a struggle between homosexual and homophobic energies, the texts Koestenbaum explores - works of psychoanalysis, sexology, fiction, and poetry - emerge as more complex, more revealing. They crystallize and refract the anxiety of male sexuality at the end of the last century, and open up a deeper understanding of connections today between the erotic and the literary. Drawing upon the work of feminist critics, Koestenbaum connects male collaboration and the exchange of women within patriarchy: he peers into both medical texts and imaginative literature, disturbing our ready acceptance of the co-authored work. This strong and unsettling book transforms our understanding of the creative process, providing a new sense of what both collaborative and solitary artistry mean.