{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02561837455830389, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.584302325581396, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 3, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (review)

and sexualities would enrich current scholarship and raise critical questions, as the Lyonses’ passing references to feminist and “gay” anthropologists and sociobiologists suggest. It is a shame that such an important and thorough historical text should fall short of reviewing and interrogating the work that today is most immediate in shaping our scholarly and public understandings of sex and sexuality both abroad and at home. Nevertheless, Irregular Connections remains a valuable text, and the authors leave us with several other important points to consider. They note that much of the literature on sexuality has focused on “homosexuality” in both non-Western and Western contexts and that more work needs to be done on “heterosexuality.” This discrepancy highlights the ways that anthropological studies may unreflexively reinforce ideas about “abnormal,” “deviant,” or “primitive” sexual “others” and erase the constructed nature of privileged and normative sexual practices. The Lyonses also stress that most research has focused on “male sexuality” cross-culturally and that “female sexuality” remains underinvestigated. While androcentrism continues to plague anthropology (and other disciplines), the past thirty-plus years of feminist scholarship have begun to rectify this imbalance. Being able to recognize new, critical work on female sexualities may require scholars like the Lyonses to question such homogenizing terms as “gay” anthropology that erase the important work of scholars who either identify as “lesbian” or “transgendered” or who intentionally seek to contribute to an ethnography of sexuality that explicitly marks itself in gendered and politicized ways. In summary, the Lyonses have provided us with a much-needed volume on the history of sexuality and the ways in which Western analysts have used non-Western cultural “others” to support their own ideologies of sex and power. Though the book is not without its shortcomings, its publication works toward legitimizing the academic study of sex and sexuality and challenging anthropologists and other scholars to think more self-consciously about representations of sexuality, historical and otherwise.