ABSTRACT

Over the past twenty years, historians have overturned nearly everything we once took for granted about human sexuality. Gender, sexual orientation, "deviance," and even the biology of sex have been unmasked for what they are-historically specific, culturally contested, and above all, unstable constructions.

chapter |23 pages

Introduction

part 1|44 pages

Rethinking Sex

chapter |15 pages

Sexuality and History Revisited

chapter |27 pages

Forgetting Foucault

Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality

part 2|58 pages

Sexing the Body

chapter |19 pages

Bodies That Don't Matter

Heterosexuality before Heterosexuality in Gottfried's Tristan

chapter |15 pages

“Ut Cum Muliere”

A Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London

chapter |22 pages

Gender and Generation

Representing Reproduction in Early Modern England

part 3|56 pages

Controlling Sex

chapter |12 pages

Bodies and Minds

Sexuality and Renunciation in Early Christianity

chapter |17 pages

Sexuality in California's Franciscan Missions

Cultural Perceptions and Historical Realities

part 4|62 pages

Redefining Sex

chapter |19 pages

Sex for Thought

chapter |23 pages

Parasexuality and Glamour

The Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype

part 5|112 pages

Constructing Sex

chapter |22 pages

Richard von Krafft-Ebing's “Step-Children of Nature”

Psychiatry and the Making of Homosexual Identity

chapter |30 pages

Toward A “Value-Free” Science of Sex

The Kinsey Reports

part 6|61 pages

Punishing Sex

chapter |21 pages

Regulated Passions

The Invention of inhibited Sexual Desire and Sexual Addiction

chapter |11 pages

Hottentot 2000

Jennifer Lopez and Her Butt

part 7|34 pages

Unsettling Sex

chapter |13 pages

Leatherdyke Boys and Their Daddies

How to Have Sex without Women or Men

chapter |19 pages

The Game Girls of VNS Matrix

Challenging Gendered Identities in Cyberspace