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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... desire is embarrassing in a Jew. The hate fueling Epstein's essay also had a revelatory effect on me. I understood: My homosexual feelings made me and others objects of “prejudice”—subject to stigma as a group, like black people, like ...
... desire to dress in the clothes of the other sex. We do not usually name and speak of the strong desire to dress in the clothes of one's own sex.” But why would most of us feel intense anxiety at dressing publicly in the clothes of the ...
... desire possessing some of us to dress in the clothes of our own sex, and the profound conviction of some of us that we feel like the sex we are—if we think about these emotions—are quite as puzzling and complex as transvestism and ...
... desires. That perception, I believe, is wrong. The emotional quality, the aesthetic and ethical value, and the cultural and personal worth of any eros is independent of biology, and of its socially and individually constructed origins ...
... desire of men and women. But that reproductive ideal was beginning to be challenged, quietly but insistently, in practive and theory, by a new different-sex pleasure ethic. According to that radically new standard, the “sexual instinct ...
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 |