Roger N Lancaster
Roger Lancaster teaches anthropology and cultural studies at George Mason University, where he directs the Cultural Studies PhD Program, a stand-alone interdisciplinary doctoral program that draws on faculty from a dozen different departments and centers. He edited (with Micaela di Leonardo) The Gender/Sexuality Reader (Routledge, 1997) and is the author of Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (California, 1993), which won the C. Wright Mills Award and the Ruth Benedict Prize. His most recent book is The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture (California, 2003). His forthcoming book is Sex Panic and the Punitive State (California, 2010).
"The definitive rebuttal of evolutionary just-so stories about men, women, and the nature of desire...[A] spirited expose of the heterosexual fables that pervade popular culture." — Science For the People, on The Trouble with Nature
“Lancaster is a fluent, often funny, and ... good-natured writer. He divests constructivist theory and gender studies of their usual obtuse jargon and acknowledges the silliness of some ideological critiques of science.” — Wilson Quarterly, review of The Trouble with Nature
“An impressive collection of essays.... All of the essays are, in fact, fantastically provocative and they provide an insightful corrective to the excessive textualization of some postmodern analytics.” — NWSA Journal, review of The Gender/Sexuality Reader
"Life is Hard brings together two areas of enquiry which are seldom linked: intimacy and revolution. This is a study of a popular revolution ... based on the daily lives of the urban poor.... At the same time, it is a modern work of ethnography, incorporating the insights of Foucault and Derrida in posing some searching questions about sexuality, racism and gender identity in modern Latin American society." — Times Literary Supplement