Histories of Sexuality: Antiquity to Sexual Revolution

This book surveys the ways sex and sexuality have been made the subjects of history. It critically analyses some of the key histories of the last forty years; from the early efforts of historians like Steven Marcus to work out a model for sexual history, through to the extraordinary impact of French philosopher Michel Foucault. It explores the vigorous debates about essentialism and social constructionism in the 1980s and early 1990s and the emergence of contemporary debates about historicism, queer theory, embodiment, gender and cultural history shaping the now vast and diverse historical scholarship on sex and sexuality. 'Histories of Sexuality' also focuses on a number of key debates about the history of sex and sexuality in Britain, Europe and America. It explores such areas as pederasty and cultures of male passivity in ancient Greece and Rome, the impact of early Christianity and ideals of renunciation on the sexual cultures of late antiquity and the existence of homosexual cultures in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. It also examines some of the debates about the 'invention' of homosexuality and heterosexuality in eighteenth century Europe and America, shifting conceptions of the body and gender, and how cultures controlled sexuality and kept the birth rate steady until the industrial revolution. Histories of Sexuality explores the controversies about whether the 'Victorian era' was an age of sexual repression, how women challenged the sexual cultures of Victorian America and Europe, the ways sex shaped class, nationalism and imperialism, and the emergence of sexual sciences that attempted to define areas of sexual pathology.