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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... early 1990s, I had to guess where I was likely to find published references to the “heterosexual.” But in the eleven years since Invention was published, we've witnessed the spectacular advance of electronic database indexing, and the ...
... early twentieth century, I explain, the word “heterosexual” and the associated idea were appropriated by medical professionals to newly and publicly legitimate the previously existing, non-reproductive, different-sex pleasure acts of ...
... early 1970s numbers of homosexuals began an exuberant move out of our old secret lives. Forging a new, open way of living our lusts and loves, we passed from one historical ordering of homosexuality to another. Observing the change we'd ...
... early 1960s I marched for peace in Vietnam, and applauded (from the sidelines) the black civil rights struggle and, later, the rise of the black power movement. But in the late 1960s, hearing occasional reports of demonstrations by ...
... early seventies, though I did not use these terms, I began to embrace a politics of feeling and pleasure, not of identity.” My participation in the gay movement soon led to my first imagining such a thing as homosexual history. At a ...
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 |