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 |
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... gender difference of that first lady and initial gentleman. Heterosexuality, we imagine, is essential, unchanging ahistorical. That hypothesis is our ordinary, unexamined starting point when we think about heterosexuality—if we think ...
... gender differences; heterosexuality does not equal the eroticism of women and men. Heterosexuality, I argue, signifies one particular historical arrangement of the sexes and their pleasures. To be sure, a reproductive necessity ...
... gender profoundly influenced their—and our— ideas about heterosexuality. I therefore raise the issue of how these male doctors' (and, later, female feminists') theories of heterosexuality affected their different ideas of female and of ...
... gender benders, rebels from proper masculinity and femininity. In contrast, his heterosexuals deviated explicitly from gender, erotic, and procreative norms. In their American debut, the abnormality of heterosexuals appeared to be ...
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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 |