ABSTRACT
In recent decades, a growing number of intellectual and cultural historians have published work which centers on sexuality and sexual questions, quite often in close dialogue with histories of gender. Recent work from certain French sociologists of sex offers one model of what can be gained, while earlier work by intellectual historians proposes some suggestive models for how to do such research. Historical analysis of sex acts can do other things than deepen our understanding of the history of sexuality, the history of sexual identities, or even of how people had and understood sex. Sex talk is a more capacious category of documents, written, aural, and/or visual, than pornography, which it however includes. The most influential scholarship that emerged in the 1970s on the sodomitical in the modern European past diagnosed a historical shift, a growing fixation over time on the need to govern or condemn penetrative anal sex.
