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
Results 1-5 of 40
... same”-sex relations questions the applicability of this hetero-homo model to Societies which did not recognize this polarity. If we have trouble imagining a world without heterosexuals or homosexuals, a historical perspective is useful ...
... sexes; heterosexuality is not the same as sex distinctions and gender differences; heterosexuality does not equal the eroticism of women and men. Heterosexuality, I argue, signifies one particular historical arrangement of the sexes and ...
... sex. We do not usually name and speak of the strong desire to dress in the clothes of one's own sex.” But why would ... same sex—the sex we think we are, the sex most of us desire to stay. But does not our feeling relatively comfortable ...
... same questions as women's, stimulated recently by the compensatory research push of feminists. Because most past ... sex, and the profound conviction of some of us that we feel like the sex we are—if we think about these emotions—are ...
... sexual implicitly signifies erotic normality. His twin term, homo-sexual, always signifies a same-sex desire, pathological because non-reproductive. Contrary to Kiernan's earlier attribution, Krafft-Ebing consistently uses hetero-sexual ...
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 |