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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... women's history—usually, heterosexual women were the assumed subjects. I recall the tremendous excitement I felt when the problems encountered and insights offered by those early, daring feminist historians of heterosexual women kept ...
... women, and sexual expression is allowed to follow feelings, the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality ... women's intense, eros-filled friendships, “The Female World of Love and Ritual.” To understand those intimacies, she ...
... women,” rather than the usual “sexual relations” and “women.” Her specifying of heterosexuality made it stand out newly as a problem. I commented: “The existence of such a particular thing as heterosexual history, along with homosexual ...
... women's history, but less often of men's. For men's story has failed to stir the same questions as women's, stimulated recently by the compensatory research push of feminists. Because most past history writing has focused on men's ...
... women. But that reproductive ideal was beginning to be challenged, quietly but insistently, in practive and theory ... women's erotic desire for each other, irrespective of its procreative potential. Those two, fundamentally opposed ...
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 |