The Invention of Heterosexuality“Heterosexuality,” assumed to denote a universal sexual and cultural norm, has been largely exempt from critical scrutiny. In this boldly original work, Jonathan Ned Katz challenges the common notion that the distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality has been a timeless one. Building on the history of medical terminology, he reveals that as late as 1923, the term “heterosexuality” referred to a "morbid sexual passion," and that its current usage emerged to legitimate men and women having sex for pleasure. Drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud, James Baldwin, Betty Friedan, and Michel Foucault, The Invention of Heterosexuality considers the effects of heterosexuality’s recently forged primacy on both scientific literature and popular culture. “Lively and provocative.”—Carol Tavris, New York Times Book Review “A valuable primer . . . misses no significant twists in sexual politics.”—Gary Indiana, Village Voice Literary Supplement “One of the most important—if not outright subversive—works to emerge from gay and lesbian studies in years.”—Mark Thompson, The Advocate |
From inside the book
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... Krafft-Ebing and the Mind Doctors | 9 3 BEFORE HETEROSEXUALITY Looking Backward 33 4 MAKING THE HETEROSEXUAL MYSTIQUE Sigmund Freud's Seminal Conceptions 57 5 THE HETEROSEXUAL CONAES OUT From Doctor Discourse to the Mass Media 83 6 ...
... Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, and most other pioneering theorists of heterosexuality were men, it seems not unlikely that the particular social standpoint of that gender profoundly influenced their—and our— ideas about heterosexuality. I ...
Jonathan Ned Katz. 2. THE DEBUT OF THE HETEROSEXUAL Richard von Krafft-Ebing and the Mind Doctors In the United States, in the 1890s, the “sexual instinct” was generally identified as a procreative desire of men and women. But that ...
... Krafft-Ebing of Vienna. These heterosexuals were associated with a mental condition, "psychical hermaphroditism.” This syndrome assumed that feelings had a biological sex. Heterosexuals experienced so-called male erotic attraction to ...
... KRAFFT-EBING'S PSYCHOPATHA SEXUALIS The new term hetero-sexual next appeared early in 1893, in the first U.S. ... Krafft-Ebing, “Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of Vienna.” This book would appear in numerous later ...
Contents
1 | |
19 | |
3 Before Heterosexuality
| 33 |
4 Making the Heterosexual Mystique
| 57 |
5 The Heterosexual Comes Out
| 83 |
6 Questioning the Heterosexual Mystique
| 113 |
7 The Lesbian Menace Strikes Back
| 139 |
8 Toward a New Pleasure System
| 167 |
Afterword
| 193 |
Acknowledgements
| 197 |
Notes
| 201 |
Bibliography
| 247 |
Index
| 283 |