Kunzel show how prison is used as an instrument that produces, distorts, and archives sexuality in ways the outside world can’t admit to directly.

What looks, on the surface, like a study of incarcerated life becomes a much broader excavation of how modern sexual categories—identity, deviance, consent, coercion—get exported to society.

She asks, instead of treating prisons as aberrations, look as them as laboratories. Relationships that are dismissed as situational or pathological are taken seriously as part of the historical record of sexuality itself. It exposes what we think of as stable sexual identity is actually contingent, enforced, or produced through institutional constraint.

It’s rigorous without being dead. You feel the archival work underneath it, but it doesn’t collapse into academic insulation. Hard and seriously thorough read.

2008 University of Chicago Press hardcover. Very solid—clean pages, dust jacket present with minor surface wear. No obvious damage from what’s visible.