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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... 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 lived, we ...
... number of books and articles had begun to touch on changing attitudes toward homosexuals in history, the existence of “Gay American history” was still in doubt. Even this gay militant historian found the phrase daunting. Near the end of ...
... number of scholars, encouraging further work on the subject from inside and outside academia.” In 1980 the prestigious University of Chicago Press published John Boswell's monumental Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality ...
... numbers of authors—indicates a strong tendency to such misleading retrospective projections. Padgug also specifically criticized the common notion that “sexual essences” define persons called the homosexual and the heterosexual. In ...
... number of these doctors also referred to the “heterosexual”—but as a pervert!” Only gradually, I noted, did the word heterosexual come to signify the assumed, different-sex erotic ideal we know today. Pursuing the making of ...
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 |