This chapter explores those transformations in intimate lives that have been collectively shorthanded with the term “sexual revolution.” Whether thought of as a gradually evolving process spanning the 1950s to the 1990s or rather understood as referring to the briefer era of heightened incitement and excitement around sex that reached its heyday in the 1960s-1970s, the story of sexual developments in the second half of the twentieth century has long been written in a linear, teleological fashion. Scholars emphasize the rise of reproductive freedom, women”s equality, rights for sexual minorities, and a more general attitude of sex-positivism. However, by reconceiving the story of the sexual revolution as a global one, inextricable from tectonic geopolitical shifts in both East-West and North-South relations – from the Cold War to decolonization and development projects and obsession with the purported dangers of “overpopulation” in the global South, and from the eventual collapse of Communism to the rise of a neoliberal economic order – this chapter challenges the “liberalization paradigm” and instead explores the sexual revolution as a multi-form, multi-sited, but also profoundly ambivalent process, met with recurrent backlashes as well as marred by its own intrinsic complexities.

The difficult issue of getting beyond averages when it comes to describing the effects of treatment is addressed. Are women essentially different from men in the way that treatment affects them? If so, how should trials be run to address this? The field of bioequivalence trials is described. These are used to show that generic drugs may safely be used instead of brand name innovator formulations. A claim that bioequivalance is different for women than for men is shown to be false.

The originality and impact of Sexual Perversity in Chicago by David Mamet and its influence on the Chicago theater scene is the focus of this chap-ter, showing how the language and subject matter of the play almost single-handily overturned Chicago theater in the 1970s. Previously a try-out town for productions headed to Broadway, or a stop for touring plays, Mamet and a cohort of young directors and actors initiated a series of experimental theaters off-Loop (out of downtown), providing a breeding ground for new plays that inverted traditional formats. Emerging out of a tradition of minor but experimental theater groups like the early Little Theatre, this new form of theater soon took shape with the Compass Players, the Organic Theater, Second City, Body Politic, and Steppenwolf. Theater took on new methods of presentation and subject matter with Mamet leading the way. With its frank talk about sex and relationships, Sexual Perversity in Chicago set the tone for new dramatic experiences, offending some but, more importantly, finding newer and younger audiences eager for unique theatrical experiences representing contemporary urban life.

Mailer is famous for his tumultuous relationship with the Second Wave Feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. This arguably reached a peak during the 1971 Town hall panel (later dubbed “Town Bloody Hall” by Germaine Greer), during which Mailer – the sole male panelist – became the target of the audience’s ire, a perceived representative of the patriarchal society against which they were fighting. The chapter addresses the context for and implications of Mailer’s engagement with the Feminist movement.

This chapter surveys Atwood’s three short fiction collections published since 2000 – The Tent, Moral Disorder, and Stone Mattress: Nine Tales – and is a sequel to the chapter “Margaret Atwood’s Short Stories and Shorter Fictions” presented in the original Companion. Arranged in three parts, one on each collection with detailed analyses of examples, the chapter explores generic questions raised in these highly varied collections of short fiction, together with Atwood’s thematic and stylistic range. The Tent features a dazzling mix of prose subgenres: fables, dialogues, essay-fictions, rewritings of myth, and prose poetry, which are analyzed in “No More Photos” and “Our Cat Enters Heaven,” while Moral Disorder, Atwood’s first short story cycle, shows how her storytelling comes closest to the short story proper. Stone Mattress introduces a new variant with its “tales,” moving beyond the boundaries of social realism into genre fiction as Atwood plays with those conventions, combining a strong interest in plot with social and ethical critique.

This chapter, which considers selected Atwood texts over fifty years, focuses on sexual politics in her representations of women’s attempts to define and reclaim possession of their own bodies and identities. Within a framework that includes feminist theorists Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Joan Riviere, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Bordo, and Wendy Harcourt, the chapter considers the psychological and sociopolitical implications of body denigration. Signaling Atwood’s enduring motif of the disappearing female body without free will, from the early “mud poem” (1974), the chapter explores varieties of women’s self-obliteration and bodily reclamation in The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle, Gilead’s patriarchal domination over female bodies in The Handmaid’s Tale, women’s often ineffectual resistance to bodily objectification in Cat’s Eye and The Blind Assassin, and disturbing futuristic speculations on the possibility of complete possession of female bodies in Oryx and Crake and The Heart Goes Last through biotechnology and robotics.