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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... 39 8 TOWARD A NEW PLEASURE SYSTENA Looking Forward | 67 AFTERVVORD BY LISA DUGGAN | 93 ACKNOWLEDGNAENTS | 97 NOTES 20| B|BLIOGRAPHY 247 |NDEX 283 PREFACE The Word “Heterosexuality” and the Institution in 2006 This Contents.
... pleasure to those who are forced to live with it; because I think there is no resolution for this pain in our lifetime, only, for the overwhelming majority of homosexuals, more pain and various degrees of exacerbating adjustment, 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 meeting of the Gay Activists Alliance's media committee we talked of ways to portray our new ...
... pleasures. To be sure, a reproductive necessity, distinctions between the sexes, and eroticism among the sexes have been around for a long time. But sexual reproduction, sex difference, and sexual pleasure have been produced and ...
Jonathan Ned Katz. pleasure-sex still represents to most of us a timeless, living truth. For that very reason the history of the sexual and hetero idea is a particularly startling and enlightening one to traCe. But destabilizing our ...
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 |