Kirjahaku

Few sociological subjects excite so much passion - and fantasies - as prostitution. Relying on a thirty year-long study of the French case, Lilian Mathieu offers an objective and comprehensive account of prostitution realities, first by analyzing the sex market as a social world with its own rules, hierarchies, and vulnerabilities, but also by stressing how prostitutes' practice and living conditions are framed and shaped by moral campaigns, public controversies, and state policies. By doing so, the book offers a new understanding of how the "deviant" and "normal" worlds interact and transform sexual norms. Prostitutes and Their Rescuers. Sociological dynamics and public controversies in French prostitution is now available in paperback for individual customers.

After a 35 year-long career on worldwide TV screens, Lieutenant Columbo has become one of the most famous fictional detectives. Lilian Mathieu shows that the Columbo series owes its success to its implicit but formidable political dimension, as each episode is structured as a class struggle between a rich, famous, cultured or powerful criminal and an apparently humble and blunderer police officer dressed in a crumpled raincoat and driving an antique car. Highlighting the contentious context that gave birth to the series in 1968, he shows that the sociology of culture offers intellectual tools to understand how a TV detective story can be appreciated as a joyful class revenge.

It is now time to stop revering May 68 as a political myth, but to consider it as it was, meaning as a social movement that unexpectedly turned into a tremendous political crisis, bringing French institutions near to collapse. Relying on original data, such as unprecedented archives and personal interviews with former sixty-eighters, the book brings new light on how the revolt was unleashed not only among Paris students but the whole French population, challenged all established hierarchies, shook culture and mores, deeply affected its participants’ life course, and contributed to a worldwide context of protest.