ABSTRACT

The history of sexuality is marked by the tension between continuity and rupture. Sex links human beings across the ages and the basic mechanics of sex have not changed; however, ideas about sex, the meanings and beliefs attached to those activities that have spawned the populations of history, have been and continue to be amended. Sex is omnipresent in its results (people) and elusive in that sex acts are rare in the historical record except as the people produced by sexual activities. This gap leads to a second tension: between theory and empirical inquiry. On the one hand, in the 1970s, social historians and women’s historians extended the purview of study of sex to ordinary men and women. On the other hand, Michel Foucault’s theoretical intervention enabled serious study of sex and sexuality. 1 Since Foucault, the direction has mostly been from theory to practice, with studies excavating specific events, unearthing sexual subcultures or tracing sexual cultures to test theoretical claims.