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Chapter 8: Sexuality
Links to Original Sources
1. Aristotle, Homosexuality in The Politics, Athens
Aristotle is not usually given as a major author on homosexuality. Nevertheless, his writings
show great familiarity with the subject, and with men with male lovers in particular. This
includes sections from The Politics that refer to same-sex relations, and provides links to other
ancient Greek works on same-sex relations.
www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/arist_pol.html
2. Selections from Chinese Homosexual Literature, 4th Century BCE–18th Century CE
Taken from Brett Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China.
www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/china-gaytexts.html
3. The Qu'ran and Homosexuality, 7th Century Arabia
Selections from the Qu’ran that are often understood as referring to same-sex relations.
www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/quran-homo.html
4. Thomas Aquinas on Sex, 13th Century Europe
Thomas Aquinas was the most important Western philosopher of the Middle Ages, and his
philosophical system was later declared the official philosophy of the Catholic Church. In a
series of works he addressed all the current issues of theology and philosophy. The selection here
addresses Aquinas’s discussion of sex and sexuality.
www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/aquinas-sex.html
5. Prostitution, Europe 16th–19th Centuries
This site includes sources on prostitution in Europe from the 16th to the 19th centuries, with an
excellent introduction to ways they can be used to help understand different societies’ attitudes
toward sexuality and women.
http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/essay/essay.php?c=resources&r=case
6. Sex and Race in Colonial Latin America, 18th Century
This site presents three marriage cases from 18th-century Latin America that involve the
intertwining of gender and and racial ideologies, with extensive contextualization.
http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/d/124/wwh.html
7. Age of Consent Laws, 19th–20th Centuries
Since the 19th century the age of consent – the age at which an individual is treated as capable of
consenting to sexual activity – has occupied a central place in debates over the nature of
childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and been drawn into campaigns against prostitution and
child marriage, colonialism, struggles to achieve gender and sexual equality, and the response to
teenage pregnancy. A series of sources relating to age of consent debates from several places
around the world.
http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/teaching-modules/230
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8. “Passing as a Man,” Early 20th Century United States
Murray Hall was an urban political boss of the early 20th century, a leader of New York City’s
notorious “Tammany Hall.” To all observers, Hall was a “man’s man,” but was actually a
woman (by the name of Mary Anderson) who “passed” as a man for more than a quarter century.
This is an article from the New York Times after Hall’s death (from breast cancer).
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5031
9. A Gay Childhood in the 1950s United States
Jim Justen grew up gay in Kenosha, Wisconsin during the 1950s, a time when homosexuality
was considered a criminal offense that was thought to sap the moral fiber of both the individual
and the nation. Gays were subjected to the same hysteria and persecution engendered by
anticommunism, and pressured to conform to mainstream cultural and gender norms. On this site
he recalls his childhood.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6941
10. Gay Liberation, New York 1969
A series of demonstrations and conversations immediately following the Stonewall riots of June
1969 gave birth to the modern gay liberation movement. This site includes some of the early
flyers, handed out on the street and at conferences. They both show an intense immediate
awareness of the historic turning point for gays and lesbians, and reveal real attempts to engage
in analysis as well as protest.
www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/1969docs.html
11. Advocates Call for an End to Anti-Gay Employment Discrimination, US 1994
In 1972, East Lansing, Michigan, became the first city to forbid discrimination in local
government hiring based on sexual orientation. Since then more than 175 localities and 13 states
have passed similar antidiscrimination legislation, but opponents have successfully campaigned
to stop or repeal such laws by arguing that they conferred “special rights” on gay men and
lesbians. In the following testimony to a U.S. Congressional subcommittee in 1994, five
advocates for federal legislation presented arguments and personal accounts to demonstrate the
need to establish, in the words of one of the witnesses, “the equal right to work in the US.”
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6463
12. South African Constitution, 1996
The South African Constitution was the first in the world that included sexual orientation among
the categories promised equal rights. That clause is Section 9(3).
www.servat.unibe.ch/law/icl/sf00000_.html
13. Hong Kong LGBT Conference, 1996
About 200 Chinese tongzhi (lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and all transgendered people) from
different regions gathered in Hong Kong and participated in the "1996 Chinese Tongzhi
Conference." They issued a manifesto stating that same-sex practices had long existed in China
and were not a Western import. A press release from the conference, including the text of the
manifesto.
http://sqzm14.ust.hk/hkgay/news/manifesto.html
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14. FIERCE, New York 2000
FIERCE is a youth-led, multiracial organization in New York launched in 2000 (the acronym
stands for Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment) to promote
the leadership of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer) youth of color.
www.fiercenyc.org/
15. United Nations Resolution 1820, 2008
In 2008, the UN passed resolution 1820, stating that “sexual violence, when used or
commissioned as a tactic of war in order to deliberately target civilians or as a part of a
widespread or systematic attack against civilian populations, can significantly exacerbate
situations of armed conflict and may impede the restoration of international peace.” In
recognizing that rape as a weapon of war is a matter of national and international security, the
UN thus placed gender and sexuality at the center of today’s most important issues. This site
contains the text of the resolution, and the many statements made about its passng, including
ones by then US Secretary of State, Condaleezza Rice, and UN Secretary-General, Ban KiMoon.
www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2008/sc9364.doc.htm
Further Reading
The books in this list are organized by the topics noted below, and then in alphabetical order by
author within each topic. Most of them have descriptions taken from the book jacket or from the
publisher’s website. These descriptions are written by the author or the publisher to sell the book
as well as to explain its contents. They thus do not necessarily represent my opinion of the book,
but I have included them here so that you can get an idea of a book's contents and approach and
thus better judge whether it would be useful for your purposes.
General Studies
Classical and Postclassical Eurasia (600 BCE–1500 CE)
Third Genders
The Early Modern and Colonial World: Sex and Race (1500–1900)
Modern Sexuality in the West (1750–1950)
The Globalized World (1900–2010)
General Studies
Abbott, Elizabeth. A History of Celibacy: Experiments through the Ages. New York: Scribner,
2000.
Celibacy is a worldwide practice that is often adopted, rarely discussed. Now, in Elizabeth
Abbott's fascinating and wide-ranging history, it is examined in all its various forms: shaping
religious lives, conditioning athletes and shamans, surfacing in classical poetry and camp
literature, resonating in the voices of castrati, and permeating ancient mythology. Found in every
society of the past, practiced by both the anonymous and the legendary (St. Catherine, Joan of
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Arc, Leonardo da Vinci, Elizabeth I, Gandhi), celibacy has as many stories as adherents, and
Abbott weaves them into a provocative, seamless tapestry that brings history alive.
Aldrich, Robert. Gay Life and Culture: A World History. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006.
Gay Life and Culture is the first ever comprehensive, global account of gay history. It is
spectacularly illustrated throughout and includes an extensive selection of images, many of
them only recently recovered. From Theocritus' verses to Queer as Folk, from the berdaches of
North America to the boywives of Aboriginal Australia, this extraordinarily wide-ranging book
illustrates both the commonality of love and lust, and the various ways in which such desires
have been constructed through the ages.
Aries, Philippe and André Bejin, eds. Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and
Present Times. London: Blackwell, 1985.
This is a wide-ranging collection of articles on "normal" and "abnormal" sexual practices in
western society, from the ancient world to the present day. The contributors - French, Italian and
English historians, sociologists and anthropologists - examine the complex origins of the western
model of marriage, the importance of the distinction between love within and love outside
marriage, the changing attitudes towards sexual practices between men and women, and the
relative dissolubility of marriage at different periods. The "homosexual" revolution has been at
least as far reaching in its effect on western convention and law as the "heterosexual" revolution
of the 1960s. The origins and implications of both these movements are examined in the book
from the perspective of past and present attitudes to femininity and masculinity.
Caplan, Pat, ed. The Cultural Construction of Sexuality. London: Tavistock, 1987.
The Cultural Construction of Sexuality illustrates the argument that sexuality is not a `thing in
itself', but a concept that can only be understood with reference to economic, political and social
factors.
Crompton, Louis. Homosexuality and Civilization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2003.
How have major civilizations of the last two millennia treated people who were attracted to their
own sex? In a narrative tour de force, Louis Crompton chronicles the lives and achievements of
homosexual men and women alongside a darker history of persecution, as he compares the
Christian West with the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, Arab Spain, imperial China, and
pre-Meiji Japan. Ancient Greek culture celebrated same-sex love in history, literature, and art,
making high claims for its moral influence. By contrast, Jewish religious leaders in the sixth
century B.C.E. branded male homosexuality as a capital offense and, later, blamed it for the
destruction of the biblical city of Sodom. When these two traditions collided in Christian Rome
during the late empire, the tragic repercussions were felt throughout Europe and the New World.
Louis Crompton traces Church-inspired mutilation, torture, and burning of "sodomites" in sixthcentury Byzantium, medieval France, Renaissance Italy, and in Spain under the Inquisition. But
Protestant authorities were equally committed to the execution of homosexuals in the
Netherlands, Calvin's Geneva, and Georgian England. The root cause was religious superstition,
abetted by political ambition and sheer greed. Yet from this cauldron of fears and desires,
homoerotic themes surfaced in the art of the Renaissance masters--Donatello, Leonardo,
Michelangelo, Sodoma, Cellini, and Caravaggio--often intertwined with Christian motifs.
Homosexuality also flourished in the court intrigues of Henry III of France, Queen Christina of
Sweden, James I and William III of England, Queen Anne, and Frederick the Great. Antihomosexual atrocities committed in the West contrast starkly with the more tolerant traditions of
pre-modern China and Japan, as revealed in poetry, fiction, and art and in the lives of emperors,
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shoguns, Buddhist priests, scholars, and actors. In the samurai tradition of Japan, Crompton
makes clear, the celebration of same-sex love rivaled that of ancient Greece. Sweeping in scope,
elegantly crafted, and lavishly illustrated, Homosexuality and Civilization is a stunning
exploration of a rich and terrible past.
Duberman, Martin, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey, Jr., eds. Hidden From History:
Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. London: Meridian, 1989.
Without peer, Hidden from History gathers together the works of the most exciting scholars in
the dynamic field of homosexual studies, making this a ground-breaking and provocative work
that reveals the history of gays and lesbians in different cultures and eras.
Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendships and Love between
Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: William Morrow, 1981.
A classic of its kind, this fascinating cultural history draws on everything from private
correspondence to pornography to explore five hundred years of friendship and love between
women. "Surpassing the Love of Men" throws a new light on shifting theories of female sexuality
and the changing status of women over the centuries.
Flandrin, Jean-Louis. Sex in the Western World: The Development of Attitudes and Behavior,
trans. Sue Collins. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood, 1991.
Laslett, Peter, et al., eds., Bastardy and its Comparative History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1980.
Studies in the history of illegitimacy and marital nonconformism in Britain, France, Germany,
Sweden, North America, Jamaica, and Japan.
Licata, Salvatore J. and Robert P. Peterson, eds. Historical Perspectives on Homosexuality. New
York: Haworth Press, 1981.
Fascinating reading on the plight of gay men and women through the ages. The contributors to
this compassionate book document how society has made life difficult and even dangerous for
homosexual people. Through narrative history as well as biography, these essays trace the legal,
social, and physical consequences of this oppression.
MacLachlan, Bonnie and Judith Fletcher, eds. Virginity Revisited: Configurations of the
Unpossessed Body. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto, 2007.
From Classical Antiquity to the present, virginity has been closely allied with power: as someone
who chooses a life of celibacy retains mastery over his or her body. Sexual potency withheld
becomes an energy-reservoir that can ensure independence and enhance self-esteem, but it
can also be harnessed by public institutions and redirected for the common good. This was the
founding principle of the Vestal Virgins of Rome and later in the monastic orders of the middle
ages. Mythical accounts of goddesses and heroines who possessed the ability to recover their
virginity after sexual experience demonstrate a belief that virginity is paradoxically connected
both with social autonomy and the ability to serve the human community. Virginity Revisited is a
collection of essays that examines virginity not as a physical reality but as a cultural artefact. By
situating the topic of virginity within a range of historical 'moments' and using a variety of
methodologies, Virginity Revisited illuminates how chastity provided a certain agency, autonomy,
and power to women. This is a study of the positive and negative features of sexual
renunciation, from ancient Greek divinities and mythical women, in Rome's Vestal Virgins, in the
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Christian martyrs and Mariology in the Medieval and early Modern period, and in Grace Marks,
the heroine of Margaret Atwood's novel Alias Grace.
McLaren, Angus. Impotence: A Cultural History. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. As anyone
who has watched television in recent years can attest, we live in the age of Viagra. From Bob
Dole to Mike Ditka to late-night comedians, our culture has been engaged in one long, frank,
and very public talk about impotence—and our newfound pharmaceutical solutions. But as
Angus McLaren shows us in Impotence, the first cultural history of the subject, the failure of
men to rise to the occasion has been a recurrent topic since the dawn of human culture.
Drawing on a dazzling range of sources from across centuries, McLaren demonstrates how male
sexuality was constructed around the idea of potency, from times past when it was essential for
the purpose of siring children, to today, when successful sex is viewed as a component of a
healthy emotional life. Along the way, Impotence enlightens and fascinates with tales of sexual
failure and its remedies—for example, had Ditka lived in ancient Mesopotamia, he might have
recited spells while eating roots and plants rather than pills—and explanations, which over the
years have included witchcraft, shell-shock, masturbation, feminism, and the Oedipal complex.
McLaren also explores the surprising political and social effects of impotence, from the
revolutionary unrest fueled by Louis XVI’s failure to consummate his marriage to the boost given
the fledgling American republic by George Washington’s failure to found a dynasty. Each age,
McLaren shows, turns impotence to its own purposes, using it to help define what is normal and
healthy for men, their relationships, and society. From marriage manuals to metrosexuals, from
Renaissance Italy to Hollywood movies, Impotence is a serious but highly entertaining
examination of a problem that humanity has simultaneously regarded as life’s greatest tragedy
and its greatest joke.
Schmidt, Robert A. and Barbara L. Voss, eds. Archaeologies of Sexuality. New York: Routledge,
2000.
Status, age and gender have long been accepted aspects of archaeological enquiry, yet it is only
recently that archaeologists have started seriously to consider the role of sex and sexuality in
their studies. Archaeologies of Sexuality is a timely and pioneering work. It presents a strong,
diverse body of scholarship which draws on locations as varied as medieval England, the ancient
Maya kingdoms, New Kingdom Egypt, prehistoric Europe, and convict-era Australia,
demonstrating the challenges and rewards of integrating the study of sex and sexuality within
archaeology.
Classical and Post-classical Eurasia (600 BCE–1500 CE)
Brown, Judith C. Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986.
The discovery of the fascinating and richly documented story of Sister Benedetta Carlini, Abbess
of the Convent of the Mother of God, by Judith C. Brown was an event of major historical
importance. Not only is the story revealed in Immodest Acts that of the rise and fall of a powerful
woman in a church community and a record of the life of a religious visionary, it is also the
earliest documentation of lesbianism in modern Western history.
Born of well-to-do parents, Benedetta Carlini entered the convent at the age of nine. At twentythree, she began to have visions of both a religious and erotic nature. Benedetta was elected
abbess due largely to these visions, but later aroused suspicions by claiming to have had
supernatural contacts with Christ. During the course of an investigation, church authorities not
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only found that she had faked her visions and stigmata, but uncovered evidence of a lesbian
affair with another nun, Bartolomeo. The story of the relationship between the two nuns and of
Benedetta's fall from an abbess to an outcast is revealed in surprisingly candid archival
documents and retold here with a fine sense of drama.
Brozyna, Martha, ed. Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages: A Medieval Source Documents
Reader. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company, 2005.
Perceptions about gender and sexuality have shaped the lives of men and women in every
known culture and in every period of history. To study these perceptions one must delve into the
underlying religious, social, philosophical and scientific influences. Understanding gender and
sexuality during the Middle Ages requires an examination of the ideas, laws and institutions of
the time—for example, the regulations of the Christian church, the anatomical studies of the
medieval medical community, the chronicles of the time and the social criticism found in
medieval literature. This reader brings such documents from throughout the medieval world into
one collection. Representing a diverse range of ethnic, geographic and religious backgrounds,
documents of the late Roman, Germanic, Anglo-Norman, Mediterranean, Byzantine, Slavic,
Jewish and Islamic identities are all included. The book’s chapters are organized according to
nine areas—religious foundations; Christian thought; chronicles; law; literature; biology, medicine
and science; witchcraft and heresy; Judaism; and Islam—allowing for comparative examination
of different societies and periods of the Middle Ages.
Bullough, Vern L. and James A. Brundage. Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. New York: Garland,
1996.
Like specialists in other fields in humanities and social sciences, medievalists have begun to
investigate and write about sex and related topics such as courtship, concubinage, divorce,
marriage, prostitution, and child rearing. The scholarship in this significant volume asserts that
sexual conduct formed a crucial role in the lives, thoughts, hopes and fears both of individuals
and of the institutions that they created in the middle ages. The absorbing subject of sexuality in
the Middle Ages is examined in 19 original articles written specifically for this Handbook by the
major authorities in their scholarly specialties. The study of medieval sexuality poses problems
for the researcher: indices in standard sources rarely refer to sexual topics, and standard
secondary sources often ignore the material or say little about it. Yet a vast amount of research
is available, and the information is accessible to the student who knows where to look and what
to look for.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human
Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
Caroline Walker Bynum examines diverse medieval texts to show how women were able to
appropriate dominant social symbols in ways that allowed for the emergence of their own
creative voices.
Cantarella, Eva. Bisexuality in the Ancient World, 2d ed. Translated by Cormac O. Cuilleanain.
New Haven: Yale University, 2002.
In this readable and thought-provoking history of bisexuality in the classical age, Eva Cantarella
draws on the full range of sources - from legal texts, inscriptions, and medical documents to
poetry and philosophical literature - to reconstruct and compare the bisexual cultures of Athens
and Rome. This new edition incorporates a new preface and an updated bibliography.
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Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualties and Communities Pre- and Postmodern. Duham:
Duke University Press, 1999.
Carolyn Dinshaw, a Chaucer scholar and cofounding editor of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian
Studies, reveals exceptional erudition and playful good sense in her study of the contradictory
medieval discourse on same-sex relations, with special attention to the 14th-century Lollard
reform movement in England. At the crossroads between medieval studies and cultural studies,
she both honors and argues with the groundbreaking historical projects of Michel Foucault, John
Boswell, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Homi K. Bhabha. In addition to looking into Chaucer's The
Cook's Tale, the Lollards' Twelve Conclusions, and other conventional fare, she flexes her
poststructural muscles in weird but lively excursions into Robert Gluck's 1994 novel Margery
Kempe and Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction. Ultimately, her aim is to suggest new ways of
analyzing medieval sexual discourse, with its "indeterminacies, contradictions, slippages," and of
making relations across time with those distant discourses, people, places, and things "in their
very indeterminateness."
Fradenburg, Louise and Carla Freccero, eds. Premodern Sexualities. New York: Routledge,
1996.
Premodern Sexualities offers rigorous new approaches to current problems in the historiography
of sexuality. From queer readings of early modern medical texts to transcribing and interrogating
premodern documents of sexual transgression, the contributors bring together current
theoretical discourses on sexuality while emphasizing problems in the historicist interpretation
of early textualizations of sexuality. Premodern Sexualities clarifies the contributions literary
studies can make--through its emphasis on reading strategies--to the historiography of sexuality.
Hubbard, Thomas. Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook. Berkeley: University of
California, 2003.
The most important primary texts on homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome are translated
into modern, explicit English and collected together for the first time in this comprehensive
sourcebook. Covering an extensive period--from the earliest Greek texts in the late seventh
century b.c.e. to Greco-Roman texts of the third and fourth centuries c.e.--the volume includes
well-known writings by Plato, Sappho, Aeschines, Catullus, and Juvenal, as well as less well
known but highly relevant and intriguing texts such as graffiti, comic fragments, magical papyri,
medical treatises, and selected artistic evidence. These fluently translated texts, together with
Thomas K. Hubbard's valuable introductions, clearly show that there was in fact no more
consensus about homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome than there is today.
The material is organized by period and by genre, allowing readers to consider chronological
developments in both Greece and Rome. Individual texts each are presented with a short
introduction contextualizing them by date and, where necessary, discussing their place within a
larger work. Chapter introductions discuss questions of genre and the ideological significance of
the texts, while Hubbard's general introduction to the volume addresses issues such as sexual
orientation in antiquity, moral judgments, class and ideology, and lesbianism. With its broad,
unexpurgated, and thoroughly informed presentation, this unique anthology gives an essential
perspective on homosexuality in classical antiquity.
Joyce, Rosemary A. Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender, and Archaeology. London:
Thames and Hudson, 2009.
Did the sexual identities and gender roles found in modern society exist hundreds of thousands
of years ago? Were age and other social distinctions as important then as now? And how can we
ever hope to know, when little evidence survives except for fragments of bone, pottery, and
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jewelry? Rosemary Joyce draws on a wealth of recent studies that reveal the history of sexual
identities to be a diverse and compelling one, offering profound challenges to modern
stereotypes and assumptions. 35 illustrations.
Karras, Ruth Mazo. Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others. New York: Routledge,
2005.
The topic of sexuality in medieval Europe is a hugely debated area that is becoming more and
more central to the study of the Middle Ages. This highly readable new study provides an
overview of the subject, demonstrating that medieval culture developed sexual identities that
were quite different from the identities we think of today. Using a wide collection of evidence
from the late Antique period up until the fifteenth century, this informative and intriguing volume
illustrates how sex in medieval times was understood, not as something that two people did
together, but as something that one person did to another. Consequently, gender roles and
identities were seen very differently from the ways our society defines them. Challenging the way
the Middle Ages have been treated in general histories of sexuality, the author shows how views
at the time were conflicted and complicated; there was no single medieval attitude towards
sexuality any more than there is one modern-day attitude. The well-known lusty priest and the
"repressed" penitent have their roles to play, but set here in a wider context these figures take
on fascinating new dimensions. Focusing on "normal" sexual activity as well as what was seen
as transgressive, the chaptersbring these classifications into focus, covering topics such as
chastity, sex within marriage, the role of the church, and non-reproductive activity.
Laurin, Joseph R. Homosexuality in Ancient Athens. Victoria: Trafford Publishing, 2005.
Homosexuality in Ancient Athens is dedicated to all readers who desire to know more about the
homosexual life style of the ancient Athenian men and women.
Lochrie, Karma, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schulz, eds. Constructing Medieval Sexuality.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
This collection brings together essays from various disciplinary perspectives to consider how the
Middle Ages defined, regulated, and represented sexual practices and desires. Considering
sexuality in relation to gender, the body, and identity, the essays explore medieval sexuality as a
historical construction produced by and embedded in the cultures and institutions of the period.
McCarthy, Conor, ed. Love, Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages: A Sourcebook. London:
Routledge, 2004.
Including many texts available for the first time in modern English translation, Conor McCarthy
brings together a wide array of writings as well as informative introductions and explanations, to
give a vivid impression of how love, sex and marriage were dealt with as central issues of
medieval life. With extracts from literary and theological works, medical and legal writings,
conduct books, chronicles and love letters, the writings range from well known texts such as the
Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales to less familiar sources such
as church legislation or court case proceedings. Love, Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages
contains a wide breadth of material showing the diverse and sometimes disparate approaches
to love, sex and marriage in medieval culture, brilliantly illustrating contemporary attitudes and
ideologies.
Rouselle, Aline. Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity. trans. Felicia Pheasant. London:
Basil Blackwell, 1988.
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Porneia means fornication, unchastity, desire for another's body. Drawing on Roman and Greek
works of science, medicine, gynaecology and law and on Christian and pagan religious texts,
Aline Rousselle discovers the intimate fears, passions, superstitions and ambitions of the people
of the Mediterranean world during the first four centuries AD. The first part of the book describes
Roman notions of male and female sexuality, including the extraordinary rituals of orgy,
castration and sacrifice associated with ancient rites of fertility and spirituality. The second part
is concerned with the impact of Christian ideas upon a settled pagan tradition. Abstinence, once
associated with the enhancement of fertility, becomes the key to salvation.
Salih, Sarah. Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: D.S.
Brewer, 2001.
Salisbury, Joyce E. Medieval Sexuality: A Research Guide. New York: Garland, 1990.
Annotated bibliographical entries cover works on history, religion, medicine, philosophy, and
literature in western Europe from about the third century A.D. through the end of the medieval
period. Languages covered include English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, and
Latin. The focus is on sexuality and sexual attitudes, not on the related topics of marriage and
family.
Soble, Alan. Sex from Plato to Paglia: A Philosophical Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Publishing Group, 2006.
More than 150 alphabetically arranged entries on topics, thinkers, religions, movements, and
concepts locate sexuality in its humanistic and social contexts.
van Gulik, Robert H. Sexual Life in Ancient China. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1961.
Verstraete, Beert C. and Vernon Provencal, eds. Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman
Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2005.
In ancient times, the Greek god Eros personified both heterosexual and homosexual attractions.
"Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in Classical Tradition of the West"
explores the homosexual side of the vanished civilizations of Greece and Rome, and the
resulting influence on the classical tradition of the West. Respected scholars clearly present
evidence that shows the extensive nature of homoeroticism and homosexuality in the classical
world. Iconography such as vase decoration and carved gemstones is presented in photographs.
Winkler, John J. The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient
Greece. New York: Routledge, 1990.
For centuries, classical scholars have intensely debated the "position of women" in classical
Athens. Did women have a vast but informal power, or were they little better than slaves? Using
methods developed from feminist anthropology, Winkler steps back from this narrowly framed
question and puts it in the larger context of how sex and gender in ancient Greece were
culturally constructed. His innovative approach uncovers the very real possibilities for female
autonomy that existed in Greek society.
Younger, John Grimes. Sex in the Ancient World from A-Z. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Including a fascinating range of topics from Catullus and Caligula to orgies and obscenity, and
from abstinence and incest to pederasty and prostitution, this is a dictionary on sex and
sexuality in antiquity.
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Third Genders
McLelland, Mark and Romit Dasgupta, eds. Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan.
New York: Routledge, 2005.
Based on extensive Japanese language materials and fieldwork, the authors examine how
various nonconformist individuals have questioned received notions about sex and gender.
From young women opposed to marriage, to heterosexual men who wish to be more involved in
family life, the essays investigate the variety and complexity of Japanese people's experiences
relating to traditional gender roles. In addition, the personal histories of feminist women, gay
men, lesbians and transgender individuals are considered as these groups increasingly work
together to challenge what it means to be a responsible citizen of modern Japan.
Meyerowitz, Joanne. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2002.
How Sex Changed is a fascinating social, cultural, and medical history of transsexuality in the
United States. Joanne Meyerowitz tells a powerful human story about people who had a deep
and unshakable desire to transform their bodily sex. In the last century when many challenged
the social categories and hierarchies of race, class, and gender, transsexuals questioned
biological sex itself, the category that seemed most fundamental and fixed of all. From early
twentieth-century sex experiments in Europe, to the saga of Christine Jorgensen, whose sexchange surgery made headlines in 1952, to today's growing transgender movement, Meyerowitz
gives us the first serious history of transsexuality. She focuses on the stories of transsexual men
and women themselves, as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, journalists,
lawyers, judges, feminists, and gay liberationists, as they debated the big questions of medical
ethics, nature versus nurture, self and society, and the scope of human rights. In this story of
transsexuality, Meyerowitz shows how new definitions of sex circulated in popular culture,
science, medicine, and the law, and she elucidates the tidal shifts in our social, moral, and
medical beliefs over the twentieth century, away from sex as an evident biological certainty and
toward an understanding of sex as something malleable and complex. How Sex Changed is an
intimate history that illuminates the very changes that shape our understanding of sex, gender,
and sexuality today.
Oram, Alison. Her Husband Was a Woman!: Women’s Gender-Crossing in Modern British
Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Tracking the changing representation of female gender-crossing in the press, this text breaks
new ground to reveal findings where both desire between women and cross-gender
identification are understood. Her Husband was a Woman exposes real-life case studies from
the British tabloids of women who successfully passed as men in everyday life, perhaps
marrying other women or fighting for their country. Oram revises assumptions about the history
of modern gender and sexual identities, especially lesbianism and transsexuality.
Reddy, Gayatri. With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India. Chicago: University
of Chicago, 2005.
With Respect to Sex is an intimate ethnography that offers a provocative account of sexual and
social difference in India. The subjects of this study are hijras or the "third sex" of India,
individuals who occupy a unique, liminal space between male and female, sacred and profane.
Hijras are men who sacrifice their genitalia to a goddess in return for the power to confer fertility
on newlyweds and newborn children, a ritual role they are respected for, at the same time as
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they are stigmatized for their ambiguous sexuality. By focusing on the hijra community, Reddy
sheds new light on Indian society and the intricate negotiations of identity across various
domains of everyday life. Further, by reframing hijra identity through the local economy of
respect, this ethnography highlights the complex relationships between local and global, sexual
and moral, economies.
Sinnott, Megan J. Toms and Dees: Transgender Identity and Female Same-Sex Relationships in
Thailand. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2004.
A vibrant, growing, and highly visible set of female identities has emerged in Thailand known as
tom and dee. A "tom" (from "tomboy") refers to a masculine woman who is sexually involved with
a feminine partner, or "dee" (from "lady"). The patterning of female same-sex relationships into
masculine and feminine pairs, coupled with the use of English-derived terms to refer to them, is
found throughout East And Southeast Asia. Have the forces of capitalism facilitated the
dissemination of Western-style gay and lesbian identities throughout the developing world as
some theories of transnationalism suggest? Is the emergence of toms and dees over the past
twenty-five years a sign that this has occurred in Thailand? Megan Sinnott engages these issues
by examining the local culture and historical context of female same-sex eroticism and female
masculinity in Thailand. Drawing on a broad spectrum of anthropological literature, Sinnott
situates Thai tom and dee subculture within the global trend of increasingly hybridized sexual
and gender identities.
Trumbach, Randolph. Sex and the Gender Revolution, Volume I: Heterosexuality and the Third
Gender in Enlightenment London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
A revolution in gender relations occurred in London around 1700, resulting in a sexual system
that endured in many aspects until the sexual revolution of the 1960s. For the first time in
European history, there emerged three genders: men, women, and a third gender of adult
effeminate sodomites, or homosexuals. This third gender had radical consequences for the
sexual lives of most men and women since it promoted an opposing ideal of exclusive
heterosexuality. In Sex and the Gender Revolution, Randolph Trumbach reconstructs the worlds
of eighteenth-century prostitution, illegitimacy, sexual violence, and adultery. In those worlds the
majority of men became heterosexuals by avoiding sodomy and sodomite behavior. As men
defined themselves more and more as heterosexuals, women generally experienced the new
male heterosexuality as its victims. But women--as prostitutes, seduced servants, remarrying
widows, and adulterous wives-- also pursued passion. The seamy sexual underworld of
extramarital behavior was central not only to the sexual lives of men and women, but to the very
existence of marriage, the family, domesticity, and romantic love. London emerges as not only a
geographical site but as an actor in its own right, mapping out domains where patriarchy,
heterosexuality, domesticity, and female resistance take vivid form in our imaginations and
senses.
The Early Modern and Colonial World: Sex and Race (1500–1900)
Berco, Cristian. Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy, and Society in Spain’s Golden
Age. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2007.
Despite the increasing popularity of queer scholarship, no major work in English thus far has
explored the evidence of male homosexual behaviour found in the inquisitorial court records of
early modern Spain. This absence seems all the more glaring considering the wealth of available
archival material. Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status aims to fill this gap by comprehensively
examining the Aragonese Inquisitions sodomy trials. Using court records, Cristian Berco
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provides an analysis of male sexuality and its connection to public social structures and
processes. His study illustrates how male homosexual behaviour existed within a widespread
gendered system that extolled the penetrative act as the masculine pursuit of an emasculated
passive partner. This sexual hierarchy based on masculinity constantly intersected in a
potentially subversive manner with notions of public hierarchy and posed a threat to local sexual
economies. Yet, Berco demonstrates how the views of private denouncers and magistrates in
the sodomy trials produced divergent sexual economies that rendered persecution unstable and
diffuse. By focusing on how hierarchies were created both within sexual relationships and in the
public eye, this investigation traces the significance of homosexual desire in the context of daily
social relations informed by status, ethnic, religious, and national differences.
Bleys, Rudi. The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behavior outside the West and
the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750-1918. New York: New York University Press, 1995.
Drawing on travel reports and early ethnographic accounts, The Geography of Perversion and
Desire presents the first historical study to demonstrate convincingly that the representation of
cultural otherness, as found in European thought from the Enlightenment to modern times, is
closely interrelated with modern constructions of homosexual identity.
Borris, Kenneth and George Rousseau, eds. The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern
Europe. New York: Routledge, 2008.
The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe investigates early modern scientific
accounts of same-sex desires and the shapes they assumed in everyday life. It explores the
significance of those representations and interpretations from around 1450 to 1750, long
before the term homosexuality was coined and accrued its current range of cultural meanings.
This collection establishes that efforts to produce scientific explanations for same-sex desires
and sexual behaviors are not a modern invention, but have long been characteristic of European
thought. The sciences of antiquity had posited various types of same-sexual affinities rooted in
singular natures. These concepts were renewed, elaborated, and reassessed from the late
medieval scientific revival to the early Enlightenment. The deviance of such persons was
interpreted as outwardly inscribed upon their bodies, documented in treatises and case studies.
It was attributed to diverse inborn causes such as distinctive anatomies or physiologies, and
embryological, astrological, or temperamental factors. This original book freshly illuminates
many of the questions that are current today about the nature of homosexual activity and
reveals how the early modern period and its scientific interpretations of same-sex relationships
are fundamental to understanding the conceptual development of contemporary sexuality.
Crawford, Katherine. European Sexualites, 1400-1800. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2007.
This is a major new survey of the social and cultural history of sexuality in early modern Europe.
Within a frame that includes the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and
the Enlightenment, it weaves together statistical findings, discussions of changing sexual
ideology, and evidence of belief structures regarding family, religion, science, crime, and
deviance. While broad in overall scope and coverage, the transformations are framed to
highlight the narrative of change over time within each domain. By emphasizing the
interrelationship between practices and ideological change - in family form, religious
organization, medical logic, legal structures, and notions of deviancy - Katherine Crawford's
accessible survey reveals how these changes produced the conditions in which our modern
notions of sexuality were developed.
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Finucci, Valeria and Kevin Brownlee, eds. Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction
in Literature and History from Antiquity through Early Modern Europe. Durham, NC: Duke
University, 2001.
This distinctive collection explores the construction of genealogies-in both the biological sense of
procreation and the metaphorical sense of heritage and cultural patrimony. Focusing specifically
on the discourses that inform such genealogies, Generation and Degeneration moves from
Greco-Roman times to the recent past to retrace generational fantasies and discords in a variety
of related contexts, from the medical to the theological, and from the literary to the
historical.The discourses on reproduction, biology, degeneration, legacy, and lineage that this
book broaches not only bring to the forefront concepts of sexual identity and gender politics but
also show how they were culturally constructed and reconstructed through the centuries by
medicine, philosophy, the visual arts, law, religion, and literature. Contributors reflect on topics
as varied as what makes men manly to who is Christ's father, from what kinds of erotic practices
went on among women in sixteenth-century seraglios to how men's haemorrhoids can be
variously labelled. They scrutinise stories of menstruating males and early writings on the
presumed inferiority of female bodily functions. Others investigate a psychomorphology of the
clitoris that challenges Freud's account of lesbianism as an infantile stage of sexual
development and such topics as the geographical origins of medicine and the materialisation of
genealogy in the presence of Renaissance theatrical ghosts.
Fissell, Mary Elizabeth. Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern
England. New York: Oxford University, 2004.
Making babies was a mysterious process in seventeenth-century England. Fissell uses popular
sources - songs, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, prayerbooks, popular medical manuals - to recover
how ordinary men and women understood the processes of reproduction. Because the human
body was so often used as a metaphor for social relations, the grand events of high politics such
as the English Civil War reshaped popular ideas about conception and pregnancy. This book is
the first account of ordinary people's ideas about reproduction, and offers a new way to
understand how common folk experienced the sweeping political changes that characterized
early modern England.
Foster, Thomas A., ed. Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America.
New York: New York University, 2007.
Long Before Stonewall seeks to uncover the many iterations of same-sex desire in colonial
America and the early Republic, as well as to expand the scope of how we define and recognize
homosocial behavior. Thomas A. Foster has assembled a path-breaking, interdisciplinary
collection of original and classic essays that explore topics ranging from homoerotic imagery of
black men to prison reform to the development of sexual orientations. This collection spans a
regional and temporal breadth that stretches from the colonial Southwest to Quaker
communities in New England. It also includes a challenge to commonly accepted
understandings of the Native American berdache. Throughout, connections of race, class,
status, and gender are emphasized, exposing the deep foundations on which modern sexual
political movements and identities are built.
Gerard, Kent and Gert Hekma, eds. The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance
and Enlightenment Europe. New York: Harrington Park Press, 1989.
Historians Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma make available--for the first time to an English-speaking
audience--the best, most recent work on the history of male homosexuality in Early Modern
Europe. The role of the male homosexual--during the pivotal era of 1400 to 1800--is thoroughly
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explored. A wide-ranging group of authors offers relevant and fascinating material on sexual
history and sexuality, in general, and on homosexuality and European history, in particular.
Gilbert, Ruth. Early Modern Hermaphrodites: Sex and Other Stories. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
From the 16th to the 18th Century, hermaphrodites were discussed and depicted in a range of
artistic, mythological, scientific, and erotic contexts. Early Modern Hermaphrodites looks at
some of those representations to explore the stories they tell about ambiguous sex and gender
in early modern England. Gilbert examines the often contradictory ways in which hermaphrodites
were represented as both spiritual ideals and sexual grotesques; as freaks, erotic objects, and
medical curiosities; and as literary metaphors and signs of social decay.
Godbeer, Richard. Sexual Revolution in Early America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University,
2002.
In 1695, John Miller, a clergyman traveling through New York, found it appalling that so many
couples lived together without ever being married and that no one viewed "ante-nuptial
fornication" as anything scandalous or sinful. Charles Woodmason, an Anglican minister in South
Carolina in 1766, described the region as a "stage of debauchery" in which polygamy was "very
common," "concubinage general," and "bastardy no disrepute." These depictions of colonial
North America's sexual culture sharply contradict the stereotype of Puritanical abstinence that
persists in the popular imagination. In Sexual Revolution in Early America, Richard Godbeer
boldly overturns conventional wisdom about the sexual values and customs of colonial
Americans. His eye-opening historical account spans two centuries and most of British North
America, from New England to the Caribbean, exploring the social, political, and legal dynamics
that shaped a diverse sexual culture. Drawing on exhaustive research into diaries, letters, and
other private papers, as well as legal records and official documents, Godbeer's absorbing
narrative uncovers a persistent struggle between the moral authorities and the widespread
expression of popular customs and individual urges. Godbeer begins with a discussion of the
complex attitude that the Puritans had toward sexuality. For example, although believing that
sex could be morally corrupting, they also considered it to be such an essential element of a
healthy marriage that they excommunicated those who denied "conjugal fellowship" to their
spouses. He next examines the ways in which race and class affected the debate about sexual
mores, from anxieties about Anglo-Indian sexual relations to the sense of sexual entitlement that
planters held over their African slaves. He concludes by detailing the fundamental shift in sexual
culture during the eighteenth century towards the acceptance of a more individualistic concept
of sexual desire and fulfillment. Today's moral critics, in their attempts to convince Americans of
the social and spiritual consequences of unregulated sexual behavior, often harken back to a
more innocent age; as this groundbreaking work makes clear, America's sexual culture has
always been rich, vibrant, and contentious.
Hambleton, Else L. Daughters of Eve: Pregnant Brides and Unwed Mothers in SeventeenthCentury Massachusetts. New York: Routledge, 2004.
This study examines cases of fornication, bastardy, and paternity cases brought before the
courts in Essex County, Massachusetts between 1640 and 1692. Prosecution and conviction
rates, sentencing patterns, and socio-economic data, as well as attitudes, were analyzed to
determine that women who bore illegitimate children were punished more severely than their
male partners, and regarded with contempt by the majority of women. Couples who married
following out-of-wedlock sex faced less opprobrium and were reintegrated into the community
following a series of humiliating shame rituals.
15
Hillman, David and Carla Mazzio. The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern
Europe. London: Routledge, 1997.
An examination of how the body--its organs, limbs, and viscera--were represented in the
literature and culture of early modern Europe. This provocative volume demonstrates, the
symbolism of body parts challenge our assumptions about "the body" as a fundamental
Renaissance image of self, society, and nation.
Lyons, Clare A. Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of
Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006.
Placing sexual culture at the center of power relations in Revolutionary-era Philadelphia, Clare
Lyons uncovers a world where runaway wives challenged their husbands' patriarchal rights and
where serial and casual sexual relationships were commonplace. Reading popular
representations of sex against actual behavior reveals the clash of meanings given to sex and
illuminates struggles to recast sexuality in order to eliminate its subversive potential.
Sexuality became the vehicle for exploring currents of liberty, freedom, and individualism in the
politics of everyday life among groups of early Americans typically excluded from formal systems
of governance--women, African Americans, and poor classes of whites. Men and women created
a vibrant urban pleasure culture, including the eroticization of print culture, as eighteenthcentury readers became fascinated with stories of bastardy, prostitution, seduction, and
adultery. In the post-Revolutionary reaction, white middle-class men asserted their authority by
creating a gender system that allowed them the liberty of their passions, constrained middleclass women with virtue, and projected licentiousness onto lower-class whites and African
Americans. Lyons's analysis shows how class and racial divisions fostered new constructions of
sexuality that served as a foundation for gender. This gendering of sexuality in the new nation
was integral to reconstituting social hierarchies and subordinating women and African
Americans in the wake of the Revolution.
Mitchison, Rosalind and Leah Leneman. Sexuality and Social Control: Scotland 1660-1780.
London: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
Strict codes of discipline in relation to all matters concerned with courtship, marriage and family
life were enforced by the parish courts in Scotland from 1660-1780 and the two authors have
studied the parish records kept at this time to provide an account of this and the general nature
of Scottish society. They show how, after the Revolution of 1688, Scotland was in effect a
theocracy and everyone's movements were controlled by a nationwide network of ministers,
elders and informers.
Mounsey, Chris, ed. Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early-Modern Culture. Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University, 2001.
Presenting Gender is a collection of essays that concerns writers or real people of the early
modern period who presented their protagonists or themselves as members of the opposite
biological sex. The collection demonstrates the variety of motives for such acts of gender
passing, and offers interpretations that shed some light on the probable intentions of the gender
passers.
Mowry, Melissa M. The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660-1714: Political Pornography and
Prostitution. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.
With this original study, Melissa Mowry makes a strong contribution to a provocative
interdisciplinary conversation about an important and influential sub genre: seventeenth-century
political pornography. This book further advances our understanding of pornography's
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importance in seventeenth-century England by extending its investigation beyond the realm of
cultural rhetoric into the realm of cultural practice. In addition to the satires which previous
scholars have discussed in this context, Mowry brings to light hitherto unexamined
pornographies as well as archival texts that reveal the ways in which the satires helped shape
the social policies endured by prostitutes and bawds. Her study includes substantial archival
evidence of prostitution from the Middlesex Sessions and the Bridewell Courtbooks. Mowry
argues that Stuart partisans cultivated representations of bawds and prostitutes because
polemicists saw the public sale of sex as republicanism's ideological apotheosis. Sex work,
partisans repeatedly asserted, inherently disrupted ancestral systems of property transfer and
distribution in favour of personal ownership, while the republican belief that all men owned the
labour of their body achieved a nightmarish incarnation in the prostitute's understanding that
the sexual favours she performed were labour. The prostitute's body thus emerged in the loyalist
imagination as the epitome of the democratic body politic. Carefully grounded in original
research, The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660-1714 is a cultural study with broad
implications for the way we understand the historical constructions and legal deployments of
women's sexuality.
Murray, Jacqueline and Konrad Eisenbichler, eds. Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the
Premodern West. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.
The history of sexuality is one of the newest and fastest-growing areas of scholarly and popular
interest. This collection of original essays looks at sexuality in the long stretch between the
twelfth and the early seventeenth centuries - a period that remains relatively unexplored, yet one
that has deeply informed contemporary ideas about sex.
The volume grew out of a conference at the University of Toronto on human sexuality in the
medieval and early modern world. Featuring works by world-renowned scholars, it presents a
broad cross-section of current research and a diversity of theoretical, methodological, and
disciplinary boundaries, including legal history, art history, textual analysis, codicological
analysis, and feminist theory. Some essays focus on the universal values of the Church, and
highlight the intellectual and religious homogeneity that characterized Europe for much of the
period. Others are more localized and look at a specific social and historical context. As a whole
the collection points to the ongoing tension between society's desire to control sexuality and
people's need to express it. Informed by contemporary trends in scholarship, including
feminism, gay studies, post-colonialism, and deconstruction, these essays introduce scholars to
some of the riches that are only now being unearthed in this young discipline.
Pflugfelder, Gregory M. Cartographies of Desire: Male-male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse,
1600-1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
In this sweeping study of the mapping and remapping of male-male sexuality over four centuries
of Japanese history, Gregory Pflugfelder explores the languages of medicine, law, and popular
culture from the seventeenth century through the American Occupation.
Pflugfelder opens with fascinating speculations about how an Edo translator might grapple with
a twentieth-century text on homosexuality, then turns to law, literature, newspaper articles,
medical tracts, and other sources to discover Japanese attitudes toward sexuality over the
centuries. During each of three major eras, he argues, one field dominated discourse on malemale sexual relations: popular culture in the Edo period (1600-1868), jurisprudence in the Meiji
period (1868-1912), and medicine in the twentieth century.
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Schwartz, Stuart, ed. Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the
Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
This volume brings together the work of twenty scholars who have tried to examine the nature of
the encounter between Europeans and the other peoples of the world from roughly 1450 to
1800, the Early Modern era. This volume is world-wide in scope but is unified by the central
underlying theme that implicit understandings influence every culture's ideas about itself and
others. These understandings, however, are changed by experience in a constantly shifting
process in which both sides participate, and that makes such encounters complex historical
events and moments of discovery.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial
Rule. Berkeley: University of California, 2002.
Why, Ann Laura Stoler asks, was the management of sexual arrangements and affective
attachments so critical to the making of colonial categories and to what distinguished ruler from
ruled? Contending that social classification is not a benign cultural act but a potent political one,
Stoler shows that matters of the intimate were absolutely central to imperial politics. It was, after
all, in the intimate sphere of home and servants that European children learned what they were
required to learn of place and race. Gender-specific sexual sanctions, too, were squarely at the
heart of imperial rule, and European supremacy was asserted in terms of national and racial
virility. Stoler looks discerningly at the way cultural competencies and sensibilities entered into
the construction of race in the colonial context and proposes that "cultural racism" in fact
predates its postmodern discovery. Her acute analysis of colonial Indonesian society in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries yields insights that translate to a global, comparative
perspective.
Stoler, Ann Laura, ed. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History.
Durham, NC: Duke University, 2006.
A milestone in U.S. historiography, Haunted by Empire brings postcolonial critiques to bear on
North American history and draws on that history to question the analytic conventions of
postcolonial studies. The contributors to this innovative collection examine the critical role of
domains of the intimate" in the consolidation of colonial power. They demonstrate how the
categories of difference underlying colonialism-the distinctions advanced as the justification for
the colonizer's rule of the colonized-were enacted and reinforced in intimate realms from the
bedroom to the classroom to the medical examining room. Together the essays focus attention
on the politics of comparison-on how colonizers differentiated one group or set of behaviours
from another-and on the circulation of knowledge and ideologies within and between imperial
projects. Ultimately, this collection forces a rethinking of what historians choose to compare and
of the epistemological grounds on which those choices are based. Haunted by Empire includes
Ann Laura Stoler's seminal essay Tense and Tender Ties" as well as her bold introduction to this
volume, which carves out the exciting new analytic and methodological ground animated by this
comparative venture. The contributors engage in a lively cross-disciplinary conversation, drawing
on history, anthropology, literature, philosophy, and public health. They address such topics as
the regulation of Hindu marriages and gay sexuality in the early-twentieth-century United States;
the framing of the multiple-choice intelligence tests; the deeply entangled histories of Asian,
African, and native peoples in the Americas; the racial categorizations used in the 1890 U.S.
census; and the politics of race and space in French colonial New Orleans. Linda Gordon,
Catherine Hall, and Nancy F. Cott each provide a concluding essay reflecting on the innovations
and implications of the arguments advanced in Haunted by Empire.
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Sommer, MatthewH. Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University, 2000.
This study of the regulation of sexuality in the Qing dynasty explores the social context for sexual
behavior criminalized by the state, showing how regulation shifted away from status to a new
regime of gender that mandated a uniform standard of sexual morality and criminal liability for
all people, regardless of their social status.
Toulalan, Sarah. Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in seventeenth-Century England. New
York: Oxford University, 2007.
Imagining Sex is a study of pornographic writing in seventeenth-century England. It explores a
wide variety of written material from the period to argue that, unlike today, pornography was not
a discrete genre, nor was it one that was usually subject at this time to suppression.
Pornographic writing was a widespread feature of a range of texts, including both popular
literature (ballads, news-sheets, court reports, small books, and pamphlets) as well as poetry,
drama and more specialised medical books. The book analyses representations of sex, sexuality
and eroticism in historical context to explore contemporary thinking about these issues, but also
about broader cultural concerns and shifts in attitudes. It questions both modern feminist and
psychoanalytical interpretations of pornography, arguing that these approaches are neither
appropriate nor helpful to an understanding of seventeenth-century material. Through
discussions of sex and reproduction, homosexuality, flagellation, voyeurism, and humour, the
book explores the nature of early modern sexual desire and arousal and explores their
relationship to contemporary understandings about how the body worked. Imagining Sex
presents a radically new interpretation of pornography in this period, arguing that concerns
about fertility were at the heart of representations of bodies and sex, so that images of pleasure
were entwined with ideas about conception and reproduction. It also shows that these texts
legitimized the (sexual) pleasure of the reader by highlighting the pleasure of looking and the
incitement to sexual action that it provided.
Traub, Valerie. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Traub analyzes the representation of female-female love and eroticism in early modern literature
and drama.
Turner, David M. Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex, and Civility in England, 1660-1740. New
York: Cambridge University, 2002.
A major survey of representations of adultery in later seventeenth and early eighteenth-century
England brings together a wide variety of literary and legal sources, it charts and explains shifts
in the understanding of marital infidelity. It examines, in particular, challenges to religious
perceptions of sexual sin and the development of a more rational understanding of the causes
and consequences of adultery.
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire,
Reforming Practice. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Young, Robert Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.
The language of contemporary cultural theory shows remarkable similarities to the patterns of
thought which characterized the Victorian's views of race. Far from being marked by a
separation from the racialized thinking of the past, Colonial Desire illustrates how we are
19
operating in complicity with historical ways of viewing "the other," both sexually and racially.
Colonial Desire is a controversial and bracing study of the history of Englishness and "culture."
Robert Young argues that the theories advanced today about post-colonialism and ethnicity are
disturbingly close to the colonial discourse of the nineteenth century. "Englishness," Young
argues, has been less fixed and stable than uncertain, fissured with difference and a desire for
otherness.
Ze’evi, Dror. Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 15001900. Berkeley: University of California, 2006.
This highly original book brings into focus the sexual discourses manifest in a wealth of littlestudied source material--medical texts, legal documents, religious literature, dream
interpretation manuals, shadow theater, and travelogues--in a nuanced, wide-ranging, and
powerfully analytic exploration of Ottoman sexual thought and practices from the heyday of the
Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. Following on the work
of Foucault, Gagnon, Laqueur, and others, the premise of the book is that people shape their
ideas of what is permissible, define boundaries of right and wrong, and imagine their sexual
worlds through the set of discourses available to them. Dror Ze'evi finds that while some of
these discourses were restrictive and others more permissive, all treated sex in its many
manifestations as a natural human pursuit. And, he further argues that all these discourses
were transformed and finally silenced in the last century, leaving very little to inform Middle
Eastern societies in sexual matters. With its innovative approach toward the history of sexuality
in the Middle East, Producing Desire sheds new light on the history of the Ottoman Empire, on
the history of sexuality and gender, and on the Islamic Middle East today.
Modern Sexuality in the West (1750–1950)
Clinton, Catherine and Nina Silber, eds. Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil
War. New York: Oxford University, 2006.
Over a decade ago, the publication of Divided Houses ushered in a new field of scholarship on
gender and the Civil War. Following in its wake, Battle Scars showcases insights from awardwinning historians as well as emerging scholars. This volume depicts the ways in which gender,
race, nationalism, religion, literary culture, sexual mores, and even epidemiology underwent
radical transformations from when Americans went to war in 1861 through Reconstruction.
Examining the interplay among such phenomena as racial stereotypes, sexual violence, trauma,
and notions of masculinity, Battle Scars represents the best new scholarship on men and
women in the North and South and highlights how lives were transformed by this era of
tumultuous change.
Clement, Elizabeth Alice. Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City,
1900-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006.
The intense urbanization and industrialization of America's largest city from the turn of the
twentieth century to World War II was accompanied by profound shifts in sexual morality, sexual
practices, and gender roles. Comparing prostitution and courtship with a new working-class
practice of heterosexual barter called "treating," Elizabeth Clement examines changes in sexual
morality and sexual and economic practices. Women "treated" when they exchanged sexual
favors for dinner and an evening's entertainment or, more tangibly, for stockings, shoes, and
other material goods. These "charity girls" created for themselves a moral space between
prostitution and courtship that preserved both sexual barter and respectability. Although
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treating, as a clearly articulated language and identity, began to disappear after the 1920s and
1930s, Clement argues that it still had significant, lasting effects on modern sexual norms. She
demonstrates how treating shaped courtship and dating practices, the prevalence and meaning
of premarital sex, and America's developing commercial sex industry. Even further, her study
illuminates the ways in which sexuality and morality interact and contribute to our understanding
of the broader social categories of race, gender, and class.
Donoghue, Emma. Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801. London:
Scarlet Press, 1993.
Where previous historians have concluded that a combination of censorship and ignorance
excluded lesbian experience from written history before our era, Emma Donoghue has decisively
proved otherwise. She dispels the myth that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century lesbian
culture was rarely registered in language and that lesbians of this period had no words with
which to describe themselves. Far from being invisible, the figure of the woman who felt passion
for women was a subject of confusion and contradiction: she could be put in a freak show as a
"hermaphrodite," revered as a "romantic friend," or jailed as a "female husband." By examining a
wealth of new medical, legal, and erotic source material, and rereading the classics of English
literature, Emma Donoghue has uncovered narratives of an astonishing range of lesbian and
bisexual identities in Britain between 1668 and 1801. Female pirates and spiritual mentors,
chambermaids and queens, poets and prostitutes, country idylls and whipping clubs all take
their place in her intriguing panorama of lesbian lives and loves.
Hall, Lesley A., ed. Outspoken Women: An Anthology of Women’s Writing on Sex, 1870-1969.
New York: Routledge, 2005.
A collection of writing by women on the subject of sex, which charts the period from the
supposedly prudish Victorian era to the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s. It includes writing
by women coming from a very wide variety of perspectives including social Darwinists,
sexologists, campaigners against the spread of VD, psychoanalysts, marriage counselors, as well
as women writing about their own lives and experiences.
Healey, Dan. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender
Dissent. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2001.
The first full-length study of same-sex love in any period of Russian or Soviet history,
Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia investigates the private worlds of sexual dissidents
during the pivotal decades before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Using records and
archives available to researchers only since the fall of Communism, Dan Healey revisits the rich
homosexual subcultures of St. Petersburg and Moscow, illustrating the ambiguous attitude of
the late Tsarist regime and revolutionary rulers toward gay men and lesbians. Homosexual
Desire in Revolutionary Russia reveals a world of ordinary Russians who lived extraordinary lives
and records the voices of a long-silenced minority.
Higgs, David, ed. Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories Since 1600. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories Since 1600 offers a compelling history of gay space in seven
of the world's major cities from the early modern period to the present. Describing gay space as
an area with a significant gay/lesbian population, this collection of essays focuses on the
changing nature of queer experience in London, Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco,
Paris, Lisbon and Moscow. The contributors, leading scholars in gay history, span a rich variety
of disciplines and make extensive use of source material to examine the transition from the
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sexual furtiveness of centuries when male homosexual behavior was criminal, to the open
affirmation of gay identities in the 1990s. Original in its comparative approach to gay urban
history, Queer Sites reveals the differences between the American model of gay male life and
that of cities in other societies. By concentrating on the importance of the city and varied
meeting places such as parks, river walks, bathing places, the street, bars and even churches,
the book explores the extent to which gay space existed, the degree of social collectiveness felt
by those who used this space and their individual histories.
Hitchcock, Tim. English Sexualities, 1700-1800. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.
The eighteenth century witnessed the birth of the first recognisably modern sexual identities.
This book charts the development of those identities through the examination of pornography,
sexual practice, medical belief, social policy, and the cultures of homosexuality, lesbianism, and
heterosexually. It concludes that the century saw a sexual revolution in which sexual practice
itself changed. From a culture in which mutual masturbation and mutable sexual categories
were the norm, eighteenth-century England became a society increasingly concerned to foster
penetrative and procreative sexual behaviour. In the process, newly harsh divisions between
men and women were created and reinforced, and new models of both femininity and
masculinity were created. This book charts a series of complex interrelationships between
changes in language and practice, and suggests that men were increasingly encouraged to
invest their masculinity in an exclusive desire for the opposite sex, while women were pushed
towards a sexual identity in which motherhood came to dominate, and in which female lust was
denigrated or denied. At the same time, new homosexual and lesbian identities were likewise
created and denigrated.
Houlbrook, Matt. Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957.
Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005.
In August 1934, young Cyril L. wrote to his friend Billy about all the exciting men he had met, the
swinging nightclubs he had visited, and the vibrant new life he had forged for himself in the big
city. He wrote, "I have only been queer since I came to London about two years ago, before then I
knew nothing about it." London, for Cyril, meant boundless opportunities to explore his
newfound sexuality. But his freedom was limite: he was soon arrested, simply for being in a club
frequented by queer men.Cyril's story is Matt Houlbrook's point of entry into the queer worlds of
early twentieth-century London. Drawing on previously unknown sources, from police reports
and newspaper exposeacutes to personal letters, diaries, and the first queer guidebook ever
written, Houlbrook here explores the relationship between queer sexualities and modern urban
culture that we take for granted today. He revisits the diverse queer lives that took hold in
London's parks and streets; its restaurants, pubs, and dancehalls; and its Turkish bathhouses
and hotels—as well as attempts by municipal authorities to control and crack down on those
worlds. He also describes how London shaped the culture and politics of queer life—and how
London was in turn shaped by the lives of queer men. Ultimately, Houlbrook unveils the complex
ways in which men made sense of their desires and who they were. In so doing, he mounts a
sustained challenge to conventional understandings of the city as a place of sexual liberation
and a unified queer culture. A history remarkable in its complexity yet intimate in its portraiture,
Queer London is a landmark work that redefines queer urban life in England and beyond.
Hull, Isabel V. Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1996.
This long-awaited work reconstructs the ways in which the meanings and uses of sex changed
during that important moment of political and social configuration viewed as the birth of
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modernity. Isabel V. Hull analyzes the shift in the "sexual system" which occurred in Germanspeaking Central Europe when the absolutist state relinquished its monopoly on public life and
presided over the formation of an independent civil society. Hull defines a society's sexual
system as the patterned way in which sexual behavior is shaped and given meaning through
institutions. She shows that as the absolutist state encouraged an independent sphere of public
activity, it gave up its theoretically unlimited right to regulate sexual behavior and invested this
right in the active citizens of the new civil society. Among the questions posed by this political
and social transformation are, When does sexual behavior merit society's regulation? What
kinds of behaviors and groups prompt intervention? What interpretive framework does the
public apply to sexual behavior? Hull persuades us that a culture's sexual system can be
understood only in relation to the particularities of state, law, and society, and that when state
and society are examined through the sexual lens, much conventional wisdom is cast in doubt.
Maccubbin, Robert Purks, ed.‘Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the
Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
The essays in this volume address sexual phenomena in eighteenth-century Europe that were
for one reason or another outside the legal or sanctified systems of acceptability: most notably,
unwed heterosexual domesticity, masturbation, prostitution, libertinism, homosexuality, and
erotic literature. The contributors' essays make an important first step toward integrating
sexuality into our general understanding of eighteenth century culture.
Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2007.
Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems
celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous
pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged
rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships
described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender
outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture and their friendships and unions were
accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels
defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating
other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and
women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to
reform marriage law.
Matich, Olga. Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle. Madison:
University of Wisconsin, 2005.
The first generation of Russian modernists experienced a profound sense of anxiety. What made
them unique was their utopian prescription for overcoming the inevitability of decline and death.
They theorized their defiance of death by suggesting the immortalization of the body through the
power of erotic love. Matich suggests that same-sex desire underlay their most radical utopian
proposal of abolishing the traditional procreative family in favor of erotically induced abstinence.
She shows how a brilliant group of Russian writers—among them the late Tolstoy, Vladimir
Solov’ev, Zinaida Gippius, Alexander Blok, and Vasilii Razanov—addressed the pressing concerns
of a culture in transition, ranging from physical and psychological health, marriage, sexuality,
and gender to anti-Semitism and the meaning of history.
McBee, Randy D. Dance Hall Days: Intimacy and Leisure among Working-Class Immigrants in
the United States. New York: New York University, 2000.
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The rise of commercialized leisure coincided with the arrival of millions of immigrants to
America's cities. Conflict was inevitable as older generations attempted to preserve their
traditions, values, and ethnic identities, while the young sought out the cheap amusements and
sexual freedom which the urban landscape offered. At immigrant picnics, social clubs, and
urban dance halls, Randy McBee discovers distinct and highly contested gender lines, proving
that the battle between the ages was also one between the sexes. Free from their parents and
their strict rules governing sexual conduct, working women took advantage of their time in dance
halls to challenge conventional gender norms. They routinely passed certain men over for
dances, refused escorts home, and embraced the sensual and physical side of dance to further
accentuate their superior skills and ability on the dance floor. Most men felt threatened by
women's displays of empowerment and took steps to thwart the changes taking place.
Accustomed to street corners, poolrooms, saloons, and other all-male get-togethers, working
men tried to transform the dance hall into something that resembled these familiar hangouts.
McBee also finds that men frequently abandoned the commercial dance hall for their own clubs,
set up in the basements of tenement flats. In these hangouts, working men established rules
governing intimacy and leisure that allowed them to regulate the behavior of the women who
attended club events. The collective manner in which they behaved not only affected the
organization of commercial leisure but also men and women's struggles with and against one
another to define the meaning of leisure, sexuality, intimacy, and even masculinity.
Reis, Elizabeth, ed. American Sexual Histories. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001.
American Sexual Histories is a first-rate collection of fourteen articles investigating human
sexuality in America from the colonial period to the modern day. Arranged chronologically, each
chapter contains an introduction and one major article; plus supporting documents that
illustrate the time, place, and issues covered by the main article. Editor Elizabeth Reis provides a
general introduction, questions for study and discussion, and further reading lists that make this
an ideal collection for students studying the history of sexuality in America.
Somerville, Siobhan B. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in
American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University, 2000.
Queering the Color Line transforms previous understandings of how homosexuality was invented
as a category of identity in the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century. Analysing
a range of sources, including sexology texts, early cinema, and African American literature,
Siobhan B. Somerville argues that the emerging understanding of homosexuality depended on
the context of the black/white "colour line," the dominant system of racial distinction during this
period. This book thus critiques and revises tendencies to treat race and sexuality as unrelated
categories of analysis, showing instead that race has historically been central to the cultural
production of homosexuality. At about the same time that the 1896 Supreme Court Plessy v.
Ferguson decision hardened the racialised boundary between black and white, prominent trials
were drawing the public's attention to emerging categories of sexual identity. Somerville argues
that these concurrent developments were not merely parallel but in fact inextricably interrelated
and that the discourses of racial and sexual "deviance" were used to reinforce each other's
terms. She provides original readings of such texts as Havelock Ellis's late nineteenth-century
work on "sexual inversion," the 1914 film A Florida Enchantment, the novels of Pauline E.
Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, and Jean Toomer's
fiction and autobiographical writings, including Cane. Through her analyses of these texts and
her archival research, Somerville contributes to the growing body of scholarship that focuses on
discovering the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality.
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Taylor, Clare L. Women, Writing, and Fetishism, 1890-1950: Female Cross-Gendering. New York:
Oxford University, 2003.
Clare L. Taylor investigates the problematic question of female fetishism within modernist
women's writing, 1890-1950. Drawing on gender and psychoanalytic theory, she re-examines
the works of Sarah Grand, Radclyffe Hall, H.D., Djuna Barnes, and Anais Nin in the context of
clinical discourses of sexology and psychoanalysis to present an alternative theory of female
fetishism, challenging the perspective that denies the existence of the perversion in women.
Timm, Annette F. and Joshua A. Sanborn. Gender, Sex and the Shaping of Modern Europe: A
History from the French Revolution to the Present Day. New York: Berg, 2007.
Gender, Sex and the Shaping of Modern Europe explores the key transformations of sexual
identities and sexuality in Europe from the French Revolution to the present day. Crucially, its
focus is on gender, as it is impossible to understand masculinity or femininity in isolation. The
book is designed to introduce students to the major issues surrounding gender and sexuality in
modern European history. It is divided into five thematic chapters representing the critical
moments in gender history: The Age of Revolution and Enlightenment, Capitalism and the
Industrial Revolution, Imperialism/Colonialism, Total War in the Twentieth Century, and the Long
Sexual Revolution. The authors provide an overview of how gender roles were socially
constructed and how they influenced political and economic developments. Throughout, Gender,
Sex and the Shaping of Modern Europe presents complex narratives and introduces theoretical
perspectives in language accessible to students.
Tobin, Robert. Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania, 2000.
In eighteenth-century Germany, the aesthetician Friedrich Wilhelm Basileus Ramdohr could write
of the phenomenon of men who produce sexual desire in other men; Johann Joachim
Winckelmann could place admiration of male beauty at the center of his art criticism; and
admirers and detractors alike of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, felt constrained to
comment upon the ruler's obvious preference for men over women. In German cities of the
period, men identified as "warm brothers" wore broad pigtails powdered in the back, and
developed a particular discourse of friendship, classicism, Orientalism, and fashion. There is
much evidence, Robert Tobin contends, that something was happening in the semantic field
around male-male desire in late eighteenth-century Germany, and that certain signs were
coalescing around "a queer proto-identity". Today, we might consider a canonical author of the
period such as Jean Paul a homosexual; we would probably not so identify Goethe or Schiller.
But for Tobin, queer subtexts are found in the writings of all three and many others.
Warm Brothers analyzes classical German writers through the lens of queer theory. Beginning
with sodomitical subcultures in eighteenth-century Germany, it examines the traces of an
emergent homosexuality and shows the importance of the eighteenth century for the nineteenthcentury sexologists who were to provide the framework for modern conceptualizations of
sexuality. One of the first books to document male-male desire in eighteenth-century German
literature and culture, Warm Brothers offers a much-needed reappraisal of the classical canon
and the history of sexuality.
Weeks, Jeffrey. Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800. London:
Longmans, 1981.
This major work explores the transformation of attitudes to sexuality over the last 200 years. It
provides detailed discussions of class differences, the significance of family, the changing
experiences of childhood, changing concepts of female sexuality, the development of theories of
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homosexuality and the role of class. Since the first edition of this major work was published in
1981 Britain has experienced major social and political transformations, which have had a
significant impact on the regulation of sexuality. This book has been revised and a new chapter
examines the effects of AIDS and its relationship to the new 'moral agenda' that has emerged in
recent years.
The Globalized World (1950–2010)
Adams, Vincanne and Stacy Leigh Pigg, eds. Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and
Morality in Global Perspective. Durham, NC: Duke University, 2005.
“Sex in Development "examines how development projects around the world intended to
promote population management, disease prevention, and maternal and child health
intentionally and unintentionally shape ideas about what constitutes "normal" sexual practices
and identities. From sex education in Uganda to aids prevention in India to family planning in
Greece, various sites of development work related to sex, sexuality, and reproduction are
examined in the rich, ethnographically grounded essays in this volume. These essays
demonstrate that ideas related to morality are repeatedly enacted in ostensibly value-neutral
efforts to put into practice a "global" agenda reflecting the latest medical science. "Sex in
Development "combines the cultural analysis of sexuality, critiques of global development, and
science and technology studies. Whether considering the resistance encountered by
representatives of an American pharmaceutical company attempting to teach Russian doctors a
"value free" way to offer patients birth control or the tension between Tibetan Buddhist ideas of
fertility and the modernization schemes of the Chinese government, these essays show that
attempts to make sex a universal moral object to be managed and controlled leave a host of
moral ambiguities in their wake as they are engaged, resisted, and reinvented in different ways
throughout the world.
Altman, Dennis. Global Sex. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002.
Global Sex is the first major work to take on the globalization of sexuality, examining the ways in
which desire and pleasure—as well as ideas about gender, political power, and public health—
are framed, shaped, or commodified by a global economy in which more and more cultures
move into ever-closer contact.
Ballantyne, Tony and Antoinette Burton, eds. Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in
an Age of Global Empire. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2008.
Moving Subjects is the first of its kind to make a case not simply for the necessity of a spatial
analysis of imperial formations, but for the indispensability of an investigative approach that
links space and movement with the domain of the intimate. Through careful archival research
and a commitment to excavating the variety of "mobile intimacies" at the heart of imperial
power, its agents, and its interlocutors, contributors offer new evidence and approaches for
scholars engaged in capturing the historical nuances of imperial domination.
Baylies, Carolyn and Janet Bujra with the Gender and AIDS Group, eds. AIDS, Sexuality and
Gender in Africa: Collective Strategies and Struggles in Tanzania and Zambia. New York:
Routledge, 2000.
Drawing on first-hand accounts in a continent where about 70% of the world's HIV-positive
persons reside, these nine contributions explore the challenges that African women face in the
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AIDS epidemic as a particularly vulnerable group and their traditional source of strength as
members of community groups.
Beemyn, Brett ed. Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community
Histories. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Creating a Place For Ourselves is a groundbreaking collection of essays that examines gay life in
the United States before Stonewall and the gay liberation movement. Along with examining
areas with large gay communities such as New York, San Francisco and Fire Island, the
contributors also consider the thriving gay populations in cities like Detroit, Buffalo, Washington,
D.C., Birmingham and Flint, demonstrating that gay communities are truly everywhere. Creating
A Place For Ourselves contains rich oral history about lesbian, gay and bisexual life in preStonewall America: Allen Drexel considers the lives of gay men on Chicago's South Side through
the lens of "Finnie's Balls," an annual Halloween extravaganza in the 1950s which drew
thousands of spectators and participants, including many Black working-class gays. Roey Thorpe
explores the development of white lesbian life in Post-World War II Detroit, tracing the changing
nature and clientele of several of the city's lesbian bars; Marc Stein looks at how lesbian and gay
politics arose in Philadelphia, and how activists relied on languages of nationalism, patriotism
and citizenship to further their political aims; and Tim Retzloff examines how the manufacturing
plants of Flint, Michigan produced the very product that helped to establish a gay nightlife in the
1950s—the automobile. He argues that because of the city's geographic dispersal, the
automobile was necessary for transportation as well as served as an important space for samesex encounters. Using oral history and rich narrative voices, Creating a Place For Ourselves
brings to life the vibrant lesbian, gay and bisexual communities that existed all across America in
the days before Stonewall.
Bliss, Katherine Elaine. Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics
in Revolutionary Mexico City. University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2001.
To illuminate the complex cultural foundations of state formation in modern Mexico,
Compromised Positions explains how and why female prostitution became politicized in the
context of revolutionary social reform between 1910 and 1940. Focusing on the public debates
over legalized sexual commerce and the spread of sexually transmitted disease in the first half
of the twentieth century, Katherine Bliss argues that political change was compromised time
and again by reformers' own antiquated ideas about gender and class, by prostitutes' outrage
over official attempts to undermine their livelihood, and by clients' unwillingness to forgo visiting
brothels despite revolutionary campaigns to promote monogamy, sexual education, and
awareness of the health risks associated with sexual promiscuity. In the Mexican public's
imagination, the prostitute symbolized the corruption of the old regime even as her redemption
represented the new order's potential to dramatically alter gender relations through socialpolicy.
Using medical records, criminal case files, and letters from prostitutes and their patrons to
public officials, Compromised Positions reveals how the contradictory revolutionary imperatives
of individual freedom and public health dashed in the effort to eradicate prostitution and craft a
model of morality suitable for leading Mexico into the modern era.
Blount, Jackie M. Fit to Teach: Same-Sex Desire, Gender, and School Work in the Twentieth
Century. Albany: State University of New York, 2005.
Jackie M. Blount offers a history of school workers in the United States who have desired
persons of the same sex as well as those who have transgressed conventional gender bounds.
Despite recent impressive social and political gains for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
(LGBT) persons, schools remain a zone of great vulnerability for the larger LGBT movement. This
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thoroughly researched, vivid, and engaging book details the largely untold story of how this state
of affairs developed during the twentieth century. It also profiles some of the remarkable people
who have risked their careers by brilliantly organizing for LGBT rights, openly challenging
discriminatory laws and practices, and educating their communities about conditions for LGBT
school workers and students alike.
Boellstorff, Tom. A Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia. Durham:
Duke University, 2007.
In A Coincidence of Desires, Tom Boellstorff considers how interdisciplinary collaboration
between anthropology and queer studies might enrich both fields. For more than a decade he
has visited Indonesia, both as an anthropologist exploring gender and sexuality and as an
activist involved in HIV prevention work. Drawing on these experiences, he provides several indepth case studies, primarily concerning the lives of Indonesian men who term themselves gay
(an Indonesian-language word that overlaps with, but does not correspond exactly to, English
gay). These case studies put interdisciplinary research approaches into practice. They are
preceded and followed by theoretical meditations on the most productive forms that
collaborations between queer studies and anthropology might take. Boellstorff uses theories of
time to ask how a model of coincidence might open up new possibilities for cooperation
between the two disciplines. He also juxtaposes his own work with other scholars studies of
Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore to compare queer sexualities
across Southeast Asia. In doing so, he asks how comparison might be understood as a queer
project and how queerness might be understood as comparative. The case studies contained in
A Coincidence of Desires speak to questions about the relation of sexualities to nationalism,
religion, and globalization. They include an examination of zines published by gay Indonesians;
an analysis of bahasa gaya slang spoken by gay Indonesians that is increasingly appropriated in
Indonesian popular culture; and an exploration of the place of warias (roughly, male-to-female
transvestites) within Indonesian society. Boellstorff also considers the tension between Islam
and sexuality in gay Indonesians lives.
Brennan, Denise. What’s Love Got to Do with It?: Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the
Dominican Republic. Durham, NC: Duke University, 2004.
In locations around the world, sex tourism is a booming business. What's Love Got to Do with It?
is an in-depth examination of the motivations of workers, clients, and others connected to the
sex tourism business in Sosúa, a town located on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic.
Denise Brennan considers why Dominican and Haitian women move to Sosúa to pursue sex
work, and she describes how the sex tourists, primarily Europeans, come to Sosúa to buy sex
cheaply and live out racialized fantasies. For the sex workers, Brennan explains, the sex trade is
more than a means of survival - it is an advancement strategy that hinges on their successful
"performance" of love. Many of these women, she reveals, seek to turn a commercialized sexual
transaction into a long-term relationship that could lead to marriage, migration, and a way out of
poverty. Illuminating the complex world of Sosúa's sex business in rich detail, Brennan draws on
extensive interviews not only with sex workers and clients, but also with others who facilitate and
benefit from the sex trade. She weaves these voices into an analysis of Dominican economic
and migration histories to consider the opportunities-or lack thereof-available to poor Dominican
women. She shows how these women, local actors caught in a web of global economic relations,
try to take advantage of the foreign men who are in Sosua to take advantage of them. Through
her detailed study of the lives and working conditions of the women in Sosúa's sex trade,
Brennan raises important questions about women's power, control, and opportunities in a
globalized economy.
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Carlson, Cindy L., Robert L. Mazzola and Susan M. Bernardo, eds. Gender Reconstructions:
Pornography and Perversions in Literature and Culture. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2002.
Timely and politically pertinent, this collection of essays links the fields of women's studies and
cultural studies, examining women's desires and women as objects of desire. Working in diverse
disciplines and time periods, the contributors address the common theme of 'perversion' as a
cultural, often linguistic, construct. Analysing texts and images from medieval times to the
twentieth century, the volume affords the reader modernist and postmodernist perspectives on
the connected issues of erotics, pornography, and perversion.
Cestaro, Gary P., ed. Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Gary P. Cestaro's "Queer Italia" includes essays on Italian literature and film, medieval to
modern, and attempts to define a queer tradition in Italian culture. Contributors explore the
multiform dynamics of sexuality in Italian texts and aim not to promote the mistaken notion of a
single homosexuality through history; rather, they upset and undo the equally misguided
assumption of an omnipresent heterosexuality by uncovering the complexities of desire in texts
from all periods. Somewhat paradoxically, a kind of queer canon results. These essays open a
much-needed critical space in the Italian tradition wherein fixed definitions of sexual identity
collapse.
Chávez-Silverman, Susana and Librada Hernández, eds. Reading and Writing the Ambiente:
Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American, and Spanish Culture. Madison: University of
Wisconsin, 2000.
In this dynamic collection of essays, a range of today's leading literary scholars trace gay and
lesbian themes in Latin American, Hispanic, and U.S. Latino literary and cultural texts. Reading
and Writing the Ambiente is consciously ambitious and far-ranging, historically as well as
geographically. It includes discussions of texts from as early as the seventeenth century to
writings of the late twentieth century. Reading and Writing the Ambiente also underscores the
ways in which lesbian and gay self-representation in Hispanic texts differs from representations
in Anglo-American texts. The contributors demonstrate that -- unlike the emphasis on the
individual in Anglo-American sexual identity -- Latino, Spanish, and Latin American sexual identity
is produced in the surrounding culture and community, in the ambiente.
Chavkin, Wendy and Ellen Chesler, eds. Where Human Rights Begin: Health, Sexuality, and
Women in the New Millennium. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 2005.
More than a decade ago, three landmark world conferences placed the human rights of women
on the international agenda. The first, in Vienna, officially extended the definition of human
rights to include a woman's right to self-determination and equality. A year later, in Cairo, this
concept was elaborated to deal explicitly with issues of sexuality and procreation. Subsequently,
at a conference in Beijing, the international community committed to a wide range of practical
interventions to advance women's sexual, social, political, and economic rights. Despite these
accomplishments, however, we find ourselves today at an ever more difficult juncture in the
struggle to fully realize women's rights as human rights. Complications, such as terrorism and
the "war" against it, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the incursion of religious fundamentalism into
governments, and the U.S. government's retreat from the international agenda on sexual and
reproductive rights have raised questions about the direction of policy implementations and
have prevented progress from being straightforward. This timely collection brings together eight
wide-reaching and provocative essays that examine the practical and theoretical issues of
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reproductive heath policy and implementation. Contributors, including well-known scholars and
policy makers, assess the impact of policies that have been initiated and consider future
directions that governments must take in order to translate visionary ideas into actual
achievements.
Chenier, Elise. Strangers in Our Midst: Sexual Deviancy in Postwar Ontario. Toronto: University of
Toronto, 2008.
Contemporary efforts to treat sex offenders are rooted in the post-Second World War era in
which an unshakable faith in science convinced everyday English-Canadian parents that
pedophilia could be cured. Strangers in Our Midst explores the popularization of sexual deviancy
as a way of understanding sexual behaviour, the emergence of legislation in Canada directed at
sex offenders, and the evolution of treatment programs in Ontario. Popular discourses regarding
sexual deviancy, legislative action against sex criminals, and the implementation of treatment
programs for sex offenders have been widely attributed to a reactionary, conservative moral
panic over changing sex and gender roles after the Second World War. Elise Chenier challenges
this assumption, arguing that, in Canada, advocates of sex offender treatment were actually
liberal progressives. Drawing on previously unexamined sources, including medical reports,
government commissions, prison files, and interviews with key figures, Strangers in Our Midst
offers an original critical analysis of the rise of sexological thinking in Canada, and goes further
to show how what was conceived as a humane alternative to traditional punishment could be
put into practice in inhumane ways.
Constable, Nicole. Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and “Mail-Order”
Marriages. Berkeley: University of California, 2003.
By the year 2000 more than 350 Internet agencies were plying the email-order marriage trade,
and the business of matching up mostly Western men with women from Asia, Eastern Europe,
and Latin America had become an example of globalization writ large. This provocative work
opens a window onto the complex motivations and experiences of the people behind the
stereotypes and misconceptions that have exploded along with the practice of transnational
courtship and marriage. Combining extensive Internet ethnography and face-to-face fieldwork,
Romance on a Global Stage looks at the intimate realities of Filipinas, Chinese women, and U.S.
men corresponding in hopes of finding a suitable marriage partner. Through the experiences of
those engaged in pen pal relationships--their stories of love, romance, migration, and longdistance dating--this book conveys the richness and dignity of women's and men's choices
without reducing these correspondents to calculating opportunists or naive romantics. Attentive
to the structural, cultural, and personal factors that prompt women and men to seek marriage
partners abroad, Romance on a Global Stage questions the dichotomies so frequently drawn
between structure and agency, and between global and local levels of analysis.
Crimmins, Cathy. How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization: The True and Heroic Story of How
Gay Men Shaped the Modern World. New York: Penguin, 2005.
A cultural history of the customs, fashions, and figures of gay life in the twentieth and the early
twenty-first centuries-and how they have changed us for the better. "How the Homosexuals
Saved Civilization" presents a broad yet incisive look at how an unusual "immigrant" group,
homosexual men, has influenced mainstream American society and has, in many ways, become
mainstream itself. From the way camp, irony, and the gay aesthetic have become part of our
national sensibility to the undeniable effect the gay cognoscenti have had on media and the
arts, Cathy Crimmins examines how gay men have changed the concepts of community, family,
sex, and fashion.
30
Davidson, Julia O’Connell. Children in the Global Sex Trade. Malden, MA: Polity, 2005.
This compelling new book explores the complexities of the global child sex industry, but without
falling into cliché and melodrama. Julia O'Connell Davidson draws attention to the multitude of
ways in which children become implicated in the sex trade, and the devastating global political
and economic inequalities that underpin their involvement. She sensitively unpicks the
relationship between different aspects of the sexual exploitation of children, including
trafficking, prostitution and pornography, at the same time challenging popular conceptions of
childhood and sexuality.
Desmond, Jane C. Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities on and off the Stage. Madison:
University of Wisconsin, 2001.
What happens to the writing of dance history when issues of sexuality and sexual identity are
made central? What happens to queer theory, and to other theoretical constructs of gender and
sexuality, when a dancing body takes center stage? Dancing Desires asks these questions,
exploring the relationship between dancing bodies and sexual identity on the concert stage, in
nightclubs, in film, in the courts, and on the streets. From Nijinsky's balletic prowess to Charlie
Chaplin's lightfooted "Little Tramp", from lesbian go-go dancers to the swans of Swan Lake, from
the postmodern works of Bill T. Jones to the dangers of same-sex social dancing at Disneyland
and the ecstatic Mardi Gras dance parties of Sydney, Australia, this book tracks the
intersections of dance and human sexuality in the twentieth century as the definition of each
has shifted and expanded. The contributors come from a number of fields (literature, history,
theater, dance, film studies, legal studies, critical race studies) and employ methodologies
ranging from textual analysis and film theory to ethnography. By embracing dance, and bodily
movement more generally, as a crucial focus for investigation, together they initiate a new
agenda for tracking the historical kinesthetics of sexuality.
Ellis, Robert Richmond. They Dream Not of Angels But of Men: Homoeroticism, Gender, and
Race in Latin American Autobiography. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.
In a pioneering study of male homoeroticism and gay-male identity in Latin American
autobiographical writings, Robert Ellis draws upon a diverse group of writers who situate the
homoerotic in a variety of contexts, highlighting the ways in which not only male homoeroticism
but also male homoerotic practice and gay-male identity are affected by Latin American
conceptions of masculinity and femininity, race, and social class. The first book to take lifewritings as a primary means for exploring the lives of homoerotically inclined and gay Latin
American men, They Dream Not of Angels but of Men is also the first to look at the
interrelationship of homoeroticism, gender, and race in Latin America. Each chapter is an
intriguing study of a different way of reading the sexually oppressed within a wider social
context, including slavery, immigration, imperialism, fascism and communism, and AIDS. Ellis
breaks from traditional studies of gay men by showing how male homoeroticism can function as
an expression both of resistance and oppression, especially through the dynamics of Latin
American machismo. One of his important discoveries is that homosexuality in Latin America is
constructed differently and is therefore experienced and known differently than in North America
and Europe. Among the writers included are many whose voices were until recently silenced in
their own culture and in academic studies of the area; they range from the late colonial period to
twentieth-century Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru.
Epps, Bradley S., Keja Valens and Bill Johnson González, eds. Passing Lines: Sexuality and
Immgiration. Cambridge: Harvard University, 2005.
31
Passing Lines seeks to stimulate dialogue on the role of sexuality and sexual orientation in
immigration to the U.S. from Latin America and the Caribbean. The book looks at the
complexities, inconsistencies, and paradoxes of immigration from the point of view of both
academics and practitioners in the field. Passing Lines takes a close look at the debates that
surround eyewitness testimony, expertise, and advocacy regarding immigration and sexuality,
bringing together work by scholars, activists, and others from both sides of the border.
Esquibel, Catrióna Rueda. With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians. Austin:
University of Texas, 2006.
With the 1981 publication of the groundbreaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings
by Radical Women of Color, Cherriacutee Moraga and Gloria Anzalduacute;a ushered in an era
of Chicana lesbian writing. But while these two writers have achieved iconic status, observers of
the Chicana/o experience have been slow to perceive the existence of a whole community—
lesbian and straight, male as well as female—who write about the Chicana lesbian experience.
To create a first full map of that community, this book explores a wide range of plays, novels,
and short stories by Chicana/o authors that depict lesbian characters or lesbian desire.
Catrioacutena Rueda Esquibel starts from the premise that Chicana/o communities, theories,
and feminisms cannot be fully understood without taking account of the perspectives and
experiences of Chicana lesbians. To open up these perspectives, she engages in close readings
of works centered around the following themes: La Llorona, the Aztec Princess, Sor Juana
Ineacute;s de la Cruz, girlhood friendships, rural communities and history, and Chicana activism.
Her investigation broadens the community of Chicana lesbian writers well beyond Moraga and
Anzalduacute;a, while it also demonstrates that the histories of Chicana lesbians have had to be
written in works of fiction because these women have been marginalized and excluded in
canonical writings on Chicano life and experience.
Falola, Toyin and Matthew M. Heaton, eds. Endangered Bodies: Women, Children, and Health in
Africa. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2006.
"Endangered Bodies: Women, Children and Health in Africa" brings together perspectives on
issues related to child and maternal health from a variety of different angles. While diseases
such as HIV/AIDS, malaria and others continue to threaten the lives of women and children in
sub-Saharan Africa, there is more to combating these epidemics than eradicating the vectors
responsible for them. Social factors also play a major role in bringing awareness, legislation and
funding to bear on issues that affect the health of women and children. Therefore, the chapters
in this book discuss such social and legal issues as women’s abortion rights and practices in
Africa, the rights of HIV-infected children and AIDS orphans, and the prevalence of violence
against women with its associated health risks, among many others. Overall, "Endangered
Bodies" portrays the precarious circumstances under which women and children must battle for
equal access and treatment in inhospitable environs.
Frankfort-Nachmias, Chava and Erella Shadmi, eds. Sappho in the Holy Land: Lesbian Existence
and Dilemmas in Contemporary Israel. Albany: State University of New York, 2005.
This unique collection examines the experience of lesbians in Israel, providing insight into some
of the institutions that have helped shape that experience. The book analyzes and interprets
how culturally specific political, ideological, and social systems construct lesbian identities,
experiences, and dilemmas, and it also explores "how a specific society is seen, understood, and
interpreted from a lesbian perspective. Written by scholars, professionals, and grassroots
activists representing different sectors of the Israeli political spectrum, this book provides a
broad perspective of the lesbian experience in Israel.
32
French, William E., and Katherine Elaine Bliss, eds. Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin
America since Independence. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.
This innovative volume of original primary research integrates gender and sexuality into the
main currents of historical interpretation concerning Latin America. The book argues that gender
and sexuality--rather than simply supplementing existing explanations of political, social,
cultural, and economic phenomena--are central to understanding these processes. Focusing on
subjects as varied as murder, motherhood and the death penalty in early Republican Venezuela,
dueling in Uruguay, midwifery in Brazil, youth culture in Mexico, and revolution in Nicaragua,
contributors explore the many ways that gender and sexuality have been essential to the
operation of power in Latin America over the last two hundred years. Weaving in questions of
agency, identity, the body, and ethnicity, the authors challenge students as well as scholars to
reconsider our understanding of the past through the lenses of gender and sexuality.
Fuller, Sophie and Lloyd Whitesell, eds. Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity. Urbana:
University of Illinois, 2002.
Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity approaches modern sexuality by way of music.
Through the hidden or lost stories of composers, scholars, patrons, performers, audiences,
repertoires, venues, and specific works, this intriguing volume explores points of intersection
between music and queerness in Europe and the United States in the years 1870 to 1950--a
period when dramatic changes in musical expression and in the expression of individual sexual
identity played similar roles in washing away the certainties of the past. Pursuing the shadowy,
obscured tracks of queerness, contributors unravel connections among dissident identities and
concrete aspects of musical style, gestures, and personae. On one end of the spectrum are
intense, private connections and tantalizing details of musical expression: romantic
correspondence between Eugenie Schumann (a daughter of Clara and Robert) and the singer
Marie Fillunger; John Ireland's confessional letters to a close friend of an illicit passion for young
choristers; "closet formations" in the music of composers such as Maurice Ravel, Edward Elgar,
and Camille Saint-Sens. At the other extreme are public, often flamboyant intimations of
deviance and their repercussions: the craze for male impersonators in American vaudeville
between 1870 and 1930; the politics of appropriation implicit in showy transcriptions by
pianists such as Liberace; the increasingly homophobic reception accorded Tchaikovsky's music
in the early twentieth century. The authors also explore how traces of queerness can mark
communities, such as groups of German men who fashioned homosexual identities by way of
the cult of Wagner or women musicians who were assigned suspect or deviant status by virtue
of being jazz instrumentalists. Throughout these discussions, music provides the
accompaniment for confrontations between disparate conventions of social propriety and
diverse forms of sexual identity. These provocative essays open the consideration of music and
sexuality to an exciting new sense of inbetweenness, passage, and diversion.
Habib, Samar. Female Homosexuality in the Middle East: Histories and Representations. New
York: Routledge, 2007.
This book, the first full-length study of its kind, dares to probe the biggest taboo in contemporary
Arab culture with scholarly intent and integrity – female homosexuality. Habib argues that
female homosexuality has a long history in Arabic literature and scholarship, beginning in the
ninth century, and she traces the destruction of Medieval discourses on female homosexuality
and the replacement of these with a new religious orthodoxy that is no longer permissive of a
variety of sexual behaviours. Habib also engages with recent gay historiography in the West and
challenges institutionalized constructionist notions of sexuality.
33
Hayes, Jarrod. Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago, 2000.
Hennessy, Rosemary. Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. New York:
Routledge, 2000.
Holden, Philip and Richard R. Ruppel, eds. Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial
Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003.
An exploration of the intersection of colonialism and homosexuality in fiction and travel writing
from Robinson Crusoe to the present, this volume brings together two dynamic fields of
academic inquiry: colonial discourse analysis, which considers literary texts as expressions of
colonial power; and queer theory, which interrogates the representation, enforcement, and
subversions of sexualities in literature and culture. These writers reexamine the work of Kipling,
Conrad, Forster, Lessing, and others, ranging from male adventure stories to postcolonial
novels. This volume will provoke and inform readers concerned with gender and sexuality,
colonial history and literature, or with any of the works and authors revisited--and reexperienced-here.
Hubbs, Nadine. The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music,
and National Identity. Berkeley: University of California, 2004.
In this vibrant and pioneering book, Nadine Hubbs shows how a gifted group of Manhattanbased gay composers were pivotal in creating a distinctive "American sound" and in the process
served as architects of modern American identity. Focusing on a talented circle that included
Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, David
Diamond, and Ned Rorem, The Queer Composition of America's Sound homes in on the role of
these artists' self-identification--especially with tonal music, French culture, and homosexuality-in the creation of a musical idiom that even today signifies "America" in commercials, movies,
radio and television, and the concert hall.
Iikkaracan, Pinar, ed. Deconstructing Sexuality in the Middle East: Challenges and Discourses.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.
Exploring the contemporary dynamics of sexuality in the Middle East, this volume offers an indepth and unique insight into this much contested and debated issue. It focuses on the role of
sexuality in political and social struggles and the politization of sexuality and gender in the
region. Contributors illustrate the complexity of discourses, debates and issues, focusing in
particular on the situation in Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Turkey, and explain how
they cannot be reduced to a single underlying factor such as religion, or a simple binary
opposition between the religious right and feminists. Contributors include renowned
academicians, researchers, psychologists, historians, human rights and women's rights
advocates and political scientists, from different countries and backgrounds, offering a balanced
and contemporary perspective on this important issue, as well as the implication of these
debates in larger socio-political contexts.
Johansson, Thomas. The Transformation of Sexuality: Gender and Identity in Contemporary
Youth Culture. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.
How do contemporary young people construct their sexual identities? This book combines the
work of key authors such as Elias and Foucault with original and revealing empirical material
drawn from 1300 young people, and qualitative in-depth interviews with different sexual
34
subcultures. Looking beyond media images and popular prejudices the book illustrates how
young people of both genders, of different nationalities and of different group allegiances view
and relate to their own sexuality. How do contemporary young people construct their sexual
identities? Are young people sexually liberated, or is human sexuality increasingly controlled and
manipulated by commercial forces? Thomas Johansson explores the construction of sexual
identities by young people as part of a wider process of identity construction, combining the
work of key authors such as Elias and Foucault with original and revealing empirical material
drawn from an extensive survey of the views of 1300 sixteen to nineteen year olds, combined
with a number of qualitative in-depth interviews with different sexual subcultures. Topics
covered include fidelity and infidelity, love, homosexuality, pornography and beauty ideals.
Designed to look beyond media images and popular prejudices the book illustrates how young
people of both genders, of different nationalities and of different group allegiances view and
relate to their own sexuality.
Kaler, Amy. Running After Pills: Politics, Gender, and Contraception in Colonial Zimbabwe.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.
Kaler examines how "modern" contraceptive technologies, such as the pill and the Deop-Provera
injection, were embroiled in gender and generation conflicts, and in the national liberation
struggle, in Zimbabwe during the 1960s and 1970s. Based on extensive oral and archival
research, the book shows the ways in which fertility and control over reproduction within
marriage and the family influenced the development of the "imagined community" of the
nascent Zimbabwean nation. Kaler's book reveals the numerous intricate connections among
these different domains of social life. Her book also shows how ideas about gender influenced
the opposition of African nationalists to the new contraceptive technologies, and played a key
role in shaping the nationalists' visions for an independent Zimbabwe. On a more general level,
Kaler's book provides a major foundation for understanding the fertility revolution in southern
Africa, as manifested in smaller family sizes and widespread acceptance and use of
contraceptives. The enormity of change has hitherto been primarily the domain of statisticians
and demographers. By focusing on the very beginning of the contraceptive revolution in
Zimbabwe, Kaler gives demographic change a place in a social history that highlights the voices
and experiences of those who actually participated in this revolution.
Khalaf, Samir and John Gagnon, eds. Sexuality in the Arab World. London: Saqi, 2006.
Arab cultural discourse has been slow to respond to changing sexual behavior. The contributors
to this collection pick up the slack, ranging across such disciplines as literature, history,
sociology, and psychology. Is Damascus the "chastity capital" of the Middle East? How do gay
men cruise in Beirut? Are young women in Tunis pressured both to lose and gain weight? The
fresh, compelling research topics covered include masculinity and migration, colonialism and
sexual health, and fantasy and violence.
Langdridge, Darren and Meg Barker, eds. Safe, Sane, and Consensual: Contemporary
Perspectives on Sadomasochism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Psychological and medical perspectives on sadomasochism have historically been concerned
with understanding it as a form of psychopathology. In the past (but still often today) studies of
S/M have been concerned with extreme and most often non-consensual acts. However, more
recently there has been growing interest in exploring the meaning of S/M in non-pathological
ways. This book directly addresses this development, presenting some of the most recent
cutting edge work on S/M by leading international scholars who all seek to understand rather
than pathologise. This includes the latest thinking on theory and practice, academic-community
35
pieces, as well as the presentation of new empirical findings across the range of identities and
practices that constitute S/M.
Law, Lisa. Sex Work in Southeast Asia: The Place of Desire in a Time of AIDS. New York:
Routledge, 2000.
This cultural critique of HIV/AIDS prevention programmes targetting sex tourism industries in
Southeast Asia posits a new place for a speaking sex worker subject. It will be vital up-to-date
research for scholars in many disciplines.
Luibheid, Eithne and Lionel Cantu, Jr., eds. Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and
Border Crossings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005.
Emmigration from Latin America and Asia has influenced every aspect of social, political,
economic, and cultural life in the United States over the last quarter century. Within the vast
scholarship on this wave of immigration, however, little attention has been paid to queer
immigrants of color. Focusing particularly on migration from Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, and the
Philippines, Queer Migrations brings together scholars of immigration, citizenship, sexuality,
race, and ethnicity to provide analyses of the norms, institutions, and discourses that affect
queer immigrants of color, also providing ethnographic studies of how these newcomers have
transformed established immigrant communities in Miami, San Francisco, and New York.
Martin, Fran, Peter A. Jackson, Mark McLelland and Audrey Yue, eds. AsiaPacifiQueer:
Rethinking Genders and Sexualities. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2008.
This interdisciplinary collection examines the shaping of local sexual cultures in the Asian Pacific
region in order to move beyond definitions and understandings of sexuality that rely on Western
assumptions. The diverse studies in AsiaPacifiQueer demonstrate convincingly that in the realm
of sexualities, globalization results in creative and cultural admixture rather than a unilateral
imposition of the western values and forms of sexual culture. These essays range across the
Pacific Rim and encompass a variety of forms of social, cultural, and personal expression,
examining sexuality through music, cinema, the media, shifts in popular rhetoric, comics and
magazines, and historical studies. By investigating complex processes of localization,
interregional borrowing, and hybridization, the contributors underscore the mutual
transformation of gender and sexuality in both Asian Pacific and Western cultures.
Massad, Joseph A. Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007.
Sexual desire has long played a key role in Western judgments about the value of Arab
civilization. In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance
of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open,
the supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as backward. Rather than focusing
exclusively on how these views developed in the West, in Desiring Arabs Joseph A. Massad
reveals the history of how Arabs represented their own sexual desires. To this aim, he assembles
a massive and diverse compendium of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present
in order to chart the changes in Arab sexual attitudes and their links to Arab notions of cultural
heritage and civilization. A work of impressive scope and erudition, Massad’s chronicle of both
the history and modern permutations of the debate over representations of sexual desires and
practices in the Arab world is a crucial addition to our understanding of a frequently
oversimplified and vilified culture.
Najmabadi, Afsaneh. Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual
Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Berkeley: University of California, 2005.
36
Drawing from a rich array of visual and literary material from nineteenth-century Iran, this
groundbreaking book rereads and rewrites the history of Iranian modernity through the lens of
gender and sexuality. Peeling away notions of a rigid pre-modern Islamic gender system,
Afsaneh Najmabadi provides a compelling demonstration of the centrality of gender and
sexuality to the shaping of modern culture and politics in Iran and of how changes in ideas about
gender and sexuality affected conceptions of beauty, love, homeland, marriage, education, and
citizenship. She concludes with a provocative discussion of Iranian feminism and its role in that
country's current culture wars. In addition to providing an important new perspective on Iranian
history, Najmabadi skillfully demonstrates how using gender as an analytic category can provide
insight into structures of hierarchy and power and thus into the organization of politics and
social life.
Padilla, Mark. Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican
Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007.
In recent years, the economy of the Caribbean has become almost completely dependent on
international tourism. And today one of the chief ways that foreign visitors there seek pleasure is
through prostitution. While much has been written on the female sex workers who service these
tourists, Caribbean Pleasure Industry shifts the focus onto the men. Drawing on his
groundbreaking ethnographic research in the Dominican Republic, Mark Padilla discovers a
complex world where the global political and economic impact of tourism has led to shifting
sexual identities, growing economic pressures, and new challenges for HIV prevention. In fluid
prose, Padilla analyzes men who have sex with male tourists, yet identify themselves as
“normal” heterosexual men and struggle to maintain this status within their relationships with
wives and girlfriends. Padilla’s exceptional ability to describe the experiences of these men will
interest anthropologists, but his examination of bisexuality and tourism as much-neglected
factors in the HIV/AIDS epidemic makes this book essential to anyone concerned with health
and sexuality in the Caribbean or beyond.
Quinlan, Susan Canty and Fernando Arenas, eds. Lusosex: Gender and Sexuality in the
Portuguese-Speaking World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2002.
Some of the most compelling theoretical debates in the humanities today center on
representations of sexuality. This volume is the first to focus on the topic -- in particular, the
connections between nationhood, sex, and gender -- in the Lusophone, or Portuguese-speaking,
world. Written by prominent scholars in Brazilian, Portuguese, and Lusophone African literary
and cultural studies, the essays range across multiple discourses and cultural expressions,
historical periods and theoretical approaches to offer a uniquely comprehensive perspective on
the issues of sex and sexuality in the literature and culture of the Portuguese-speaking world
that extends from Portugal to Brazil to Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique. Through the
critical lenses of gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and
postmodern theory, the authors consider the work of such influential literary figures as Clarice
Lispector and Silviano Santiago. An important aspect of the volume is the publication of a newly
discovered-and explicitly homoerotic -- poem by Fernando Pessoa, published here for the first
time in the original Portuguese and in English translation. Chapters take up questions of queer
performativity and activism, female subjectivity and erotic desire, the sexual customs of
indigenous versus European Brazilians, and the impact of popular music (as represented by
Caetano Veloso and others) on interpretations of gender and sexuality. Challenging static
notions of sexualities within the Portuguese-speaking world, these essays expand our
understanding of the multiplicity of differences and marginalized subjectivities that fall under
the intersections of sexuality, gender, and race.
37
Ramazanoglu, Caroline ed. Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions Between
Foucault and Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1993.
This book introduces key aspects of Foucault's work to feminists, in ways which are less
intimidating and abstracted than much of the existing literature in this area. It includes an
introduction to Foucault's terms, and fills a gap in the literature by clarifying the links between
the everyday realities of women's lives and Foucault's work on sexuality and power. The
contributors explore the implications of analysing power relations, sexuality or the body, without
also thinking about gender and other social divisions. They bring their expertise from their
different locations in social theory and philosophy to bear on the same core issues; the ways in
which Foucault provokes feminists into questioning their grasp of power relations, and the
implications of the absence of gender in his own work. They show that in spite of his lack of
interest in gender, Foucault does appear to have much to offer feminism. He proposes new ways
of understanding the control of women and especially the control of sexuality and bodies, but
they offer new ground in relating Foucault's challenge to feminism to feminisms challenge to
Foucault. Feminists are up against Foucault because he questions the key conclusions which
feminists have come to about the nature of gender relations, and men's possession of power.
This book is an appraisal of how seriously we need to take this challenge. The book is addressed
to followers of Foucault, who have so far paid scant attention to feminist concerns, and is of
interest to undergraduates in sociology, philosophy, cultural studies and women's studies.
Rumens, Nick and Alejandro Cervantes-Carson, eds. Sexual Politics of Desire and Belonging.
New York: Rodopi, 2007.
Designed for students, academics and the general reader alike, "Sexual Politics of Desire and
Belonging" provides theoretical and empirical insights into the linkages between sexualities and
forms of desire, and ways of belonging and relating to others in specific contexts and moments
in time. Opening with a substantial introduction by one of the editors, this collection of thirteen
essays is organised into three parts, each section making important contributions to
contemporary debates regarding the sexual politics of citizenship, marriage, friendship,
pornography, intimacies, eroticism and desire. As such, the essays introduce fresh perspectives
for thinking about how individuals construct senses of belonging and modes of relating to others
in their everyday lives, within the disciplinary frameworks of sociology, organisational analysis
and cultural studies. As well, the volume analyses representations of desire and eroticism in
British Pop Art, trauma and feminist fiction, polyamory self-help literature, Hollywood films, and
sociological and psychoanalytic theory. Analytical insights offered within these essays will do
much to stimulate debate about aspects of the socially and historically constituted relationship
between desire and sexuality. Because of the diverse approaches and conclusions it contains,
the volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in engaging with inter- and
multidisciplinary perspectives in order to understand the dynamics between constructions of
desire and belonging, and discourses of gender, sex and sexuality.
Schoen, Johanna. Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health
and Welfare. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2005.
In August 2003, North Carolina became the first U.S. state to offer restitution to victims of stateordered sterilizations carried out by its eugenics program between 1929 and 1975. The decision
was prompted by newspaper stories based on the research of Johanna Schoen, who was
granted unique access to summaries of 7,500 case histories and the papers of the North
Carolina Eugenics Board. In this book, Schoen situates the state's reproductive politics in a
national and global context. Widening her focus to include birth control, sterilization, and
38
abortion policies across the nation, she demonstrates how each method for limiting unwanted
pregnancies had the potential both to expand and to limit women's reproductive choices. Such
programs overwhelmingly targeted poor and nonwhite populations, yet they also extended a
measure of reproductive control to poor women that was previously out of reach. On an
international level, the United States has influenced reproductive health policies by, for example,
tying foreign aid to the recipients' compliance with U.S. notions about family planning. The
availability of U.S.-funded family planning aid has proved to be a double-edged sword, offering
unprecedented opportunities to poor women while subjecting foreign patients to medical
experimentation that would be considered unacceptable at home. Drawing on the voices of
health and science professionals, civic benefactors, and the women themselves, Schoen's study
allows deeper understandings of the modern welfare state and the lives of American women.
Srivastava, Sanjay, ed. Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes: Sexualities, Masculinities and Culture in
South Asia. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004.
In 13 papers from a July 1999 conference in Melbourne, social scientists from Australia, the US,
and India broaden the academic discussion about sexuality in India and Nepal beyond purely
male concerns. Their topics include blood, race, sex, and decline of intimacy in early British
India, theatrical transvestism in the Parsi, Gurarati, and Marathi theaters; a preliminary report on
emerging gay geographies in Bangalore; and the social shadow of AIDS and STD prevention in
Nepal.
Stevens, Hugh and Caroline Howlett, eds. Modernist Sexualities. New York: Manchester
University, 2000.
Leading critics from Britain, Canada, and the US examine modernism's imaginative rethinkings
of sex, gender, and sexuality. Original essays show how modernism intersects with the
suffragette movement, technological change and its effects on women and labor, the growth of
pseudo-scientific writings, and the burgeoning lesbian and gay movement. They show how
modernism upsets the fixities of gender and sexuality through its fascination with ambiguities,
marginality, and the crossing of borders. Sex reformers and sex changers, unsexed storytellers,
typewriters, femme and butch experimenters, suffragettes in wide-brimmed hats, musical and
dramatic pageants, adolescent delinquents, sunbathers, and dancing indigenes all play a role in
the heterodox and varied modernism revealed in these essays.
Stychin, Carl Franklin. Governing Sexuality: The Changing Politics of Citizenship and Law Reform.
Portland, OR: Hart, 2003.
Governing Sexuality explores issues of sexual citizenship and law reform in the United Kingdom
and Continental Europe today. Across western and eastern Europe, lesbians and gay men are
increasingly making claims for equal status, grounded in the language of rights and citizenship,
and using the language of international human rights and European law. This book uses same
sex sexualities as a prism through which to explore broader questions of legal and political
theory concerning democratic legitimacy; rights discourse; national sovereignty and identity;
citizenship; transnationalism; and globalisation. Case studies are widely drawn: from New
Labour's sexual politics in the UK to the decriminalisation of same-sex sexualities under
pressure from the EU in Romania; to new civil solidarity laws in France.
Stychin, Carl Franklin and Didi Herman, eds. Law and Sexuality: The Global Arena. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 2001.
Law and Sexuality brings together leading scholars from four continents to consider topics
ranging from Tasmanian sodomy laws to the South African constitution, from domestic
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partnership in Hawaii to London's urban geographies. Encompassing a broad spectrum of
perspectives, from literary analysis and postcolonial studies to feminist, queer, and critical race
theory, their analysis maps the current state of the global intersections between law and
sexuality and social change.
Thomas, Alfred. The Bohemian Body: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture. Madison:
University of Wisconsin, 2007.
The Bohemian Body examines the modernist forces within nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Europe that helped shape both Czech nationalism and artistic interaction among ethnic and
social groups—Czechs and Germans, men and women, gays and straights. By re-examining the
work of key Czech male and female writers and poets from the National Revival to the Velvet
Revolution, Alfred Thomas exposes the tendency of Czech literary criticism to separate the
political and the personal in modern Czech culture. He points instead to the complex interplay of
the political and the personal across ethnic, cultural, and intellectual lines and within the works
of such individual writers as Karel Hynek Mcha, Bozena Nemcov, and Rainer Maria Rilke,
resulting in the emergence and evolution of a protean modern identity. The product is a
seemingly paradoxical yet nuanced understanding of Czech culture (including literature, opera,
and film), long overlooked or misunderstood by Western scholars.
Whitaker, Brian. Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East. Berkeley:
University of California, 2006.
The distressing, archaic treatment of Middle Eastern homosexuals is addressed in
straightforward, documentary fashion. The persecution of homosexuals, described in Lebanese
as "shawaadh" ("perverts"), continues to thrive. Interviews with a variety of gay Arabs, Syrians
and Egyptians finds many depressed and lonely, with support and understanding as rare as
rainbow flags in Lebanon. Conflicted by an intense sense of family loyalty and an awareness of
the devastating, family-wide consequences of exposure, gay and lesbian Arabs often find suicide
to be their only salvation. Some manage to outsmart the system and emigrate while others
become ingeniously resourceful in manufacturing an outward appearance (marriage to a gay
partner of the opposite sex) that will appeal to conventional domestic expectations yet enable
them to cultivate covert homosexual affiliations. Coming out to family is often fruitless and
considered a "high-risk strategy," though often, Whitaker asserts, it is parents who will question
their children's sexuality, suggesting that it has become "time for marriage" and children: an
inevitable, obligatory stipulation in Arab households. But all is not lost as the author deftly
underscores cultural changes at play in places like Beirut, where members of gay-rights
organization Helem hand-stitched a multi-colored flag for a ten-person marching contingent
against the war in Iraq; where the gay dance club Acid flourishes; and where Dunkin' Donuts
remains a well-known (albeit controversial) gay hangout. Though Saudi Arabia is thought to be
the most militant against open sexuality, the author proffers quotes from Saudi gay youth to the
contrary. Many declare stories of gay persecution as being greatly exaggerated and point to the
Internet as the ultimate resource for same-sex liaisons (and entrapment). Most interestingly,
Whitaker takes into account the varied contradictions and evolutionary growth of Arab media,
literature, cinema, etc., juxtaposing harsh current-day restrictions with notions of emerging
freedoms. While directing readers toward the pinpoint of light at the end of the tunnel, Whitaker
clearly demarcates tradition and family honor as two powerhouses eternally keeping Middle
Eastern alternative lifestyles in the dark. Strong, condensed, world-weary portrait infused with
hope.
Williams, Christine L. and Arlene Stein, eds. Sexuality and Gender. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002.
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As society shapes the expression of sexual desire through cultural images and social
institutions, sociologists examine how sexual behavior shapes, and is shaped by, social norms.
Several of the most eminent and readable social theorists drive this important new line of
sociological thought. Gathered here are thirty-two of the best essays on the sociology of sex and
gender.
The essays included here reflect differences in race, gender, and class and demonstrate how
different social groups experience different sets of social norms. Topics include gender and sex
theory, identity, childhood and adolescent sexuality, the objectification of women, sexuality and
religion, leisure and recreation, politics and social change, and the possible future of sexual
relationships.
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