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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... dominant working notion, even of historically oriented researchers. In 1988, for example, under the clock-stopping hand of this essentialism, the author of a huge, scholarly history of “the social construction of homosexuality” refers ...
... of persons, activities, and feelings into heterosexual and homosexual. Even Kinsey's famous continuum of sexual activities and feelings maintains the now dominant and traditional hetero-homo THE GENEALOGY OF A SEX CONCEPT 9.
Jonathan Ned Katz. activities and feelings maintains the now dominant and traditional hetero-homo division. Research into past “same”-sex relations questions the applicability of this hetero-homo model to Societies which did not ...
... dominant, different-sex erotic ideal—a heterosexual ethic—is not ancient at all, but a modern invention. Our mystical belief in an eternal heterosexuality—our heterosexual hypothesis—is an idea distributed widely only in the last three ...
... ordering of whiteness, its uses and abuses. That dominant racial category and power structure continues to be privileged, normalized, naturalized, and forgotten, like heterosexuality.” We talk of THE GENEALOGY OF A SEX CONCEPT 15.
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 |