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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... ideal we know today. Pursuing the making of homosexuality over time, I had stumbled, unexpectedly, upon another primal scene, a previously unremarked seminal event, the occasion on which heterosexuality was conceived. In the early ...
... ideal—the ways that sex-love has been understood and valued.” And because, since the latenineteenth century, the heterosexual and homosexual have danced in close dialectical embrace, I touch as well on the homosexual's story. I also ...
... 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-quarters of the twentieth ...
... destabilized—this time, by feminists, then by gay and lesbian liberationists. I also focus on the influence of a number of men on the manufacture of the heterosexual idea and ideal. Because Karl Maria THE GENEA_OGY OF A SEX CONCEPT 17.
Jonathan Ned Katz. manufacture of the heterosexual idea and ideal. Because Karl Maria Kertbeny, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, and most other pioneering theorists of heterosexuality were men, it seems not unlikely that the ...
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 |