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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... society's concept of, response to, and social ordering of sex between men. Whitman and Symonds labored to change their societies' Judeo-Christian focus on the act of “sodomy” into a focus on erotic feeling and affection between men ...
... society put me down—and for which, for so many years, I put myself down. Although I then casually identified myself as “a gay man,” in my mind I was affirming my feelings for men, not any gay “self.” In the early seventies, though I did ...
... society in which men do not oppress women, and sexual expression is allowed to follow feelings, the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality would disappear.” In 1971, in Dennis Altman's Homosexual Oppression and Liberation, that ...
... Societies which did not recognize this polarity. If we have trouble imagining a world without heterosexuals or homosexuals, a historical perspective is useful. The term “homosexual” was only invented in 1869 [the year's now been moved ...
... society, he said, “'Homosexuals and heterosexuals in the modern sense did not exist.” That phrasing allowed that heteros and homos in some ancient sense might have existed. He also questioned, ambiguously, the application of homo- and ...
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 |