This book examines sexuality in the past, and explores how it helps explain sexuality in the present. The subject of sexuality is often a controversial one, and exploring it through a world history perspective emphasizes the extent to which societies, including our own, are still reacting to historical change through contemporary sexual behaviors, values, and debates. This new edition examines these issues on a global scale, with attention to anthropological insights on sexuality and their relationship to history, the dynamics between sexuality and imperialism, sexuality in industrial society, and trends and conflicts surrounding views of sex and sexuality in the contemporary world.

The period of reform, revolution, and reaction that characterized seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe also witnessed an intensified interest in lesbians. In scientific treatises and orientalist travelogues, in French court gossip and Dutch court records, in passionate verse, in the rising novel, and in cross-dressed flirtations on the English and Spanish stage, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and physicians were placing sapphic relations before the public eye. In The Sexuality of History, Susan S. Lanser shows how intimacies between women became harbingers of the modern, bringing the sapphic into the mainstream of some of the most significant events in Western Europe. Ideas about female same-sex relations became a focal point for intellectual and cultural contests between authority and liberty, power and difference, desire and duty, mobility and change, order and governance. Lanser explores the ways in which a historically specific interest in lesbians intersected with, and stimulated, systemic concerns that would seem to have little to do with sexuality. Departing from the prevailing trend of queer reading whereby scholars ferret out hidden content in “closeted” texts, Lanser situates overtly erotic representations within wider spheres of interest. The Sexuality of History shows that just as we can understand sexuality by studying the past, so too can we understand the past by studying sexuality.

Why we are so fascinated with sex and sexuality—from the preeminent philosopher of the 20th century. Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.

Sex has no history, but sexual science does. Starting in the late nineteenth century, scholars and activists all over the world suddenly began to insist that understandings of sex be based on science. As Japanese and Indian sexologists influenced their German, British and American counterparts, and vice versa, sexuality, modernity, and imaginings of exotified “Others” became intimately linked. The first anthology to provide a worldwide perspective on the birth and development of the field, A Global History of Sexual Science contends that actors outside of Europe—in Asia, Latin America, and Africa—became important interlocutors in debates on prostitution, birth control or transvestitism. Ideas circulated through intellectual exchange, travel, and internationally produced and disseminated publications. Twenty scholars tackle specific issues, including the female orgasm and the criminalization of male homosexuality, to demonstrate how concepts and ideas introduced by sexual scientists gained currency throughout the modern world.

"Humans have always had sex. But look through the keyhole of history and you will see they have not always had sex in the same manner, with the same kinds of people or with the same beliefs about whether what they are doing is right or desirable.” So writes Charlie McCann in this fascinating study of sex and sexuality through the ages. Beginning with the world of antiquity and ending with the present, she traces our changing attitudes to our bodies and what we do with them, conducting us on a tour which takes in the gymnasiums of ancient Greece, where men seduced boys, to the caves occupied by Christian ascetics, to the fashionable drawing rooms of Georgian London, where libertines hunted for women to prey on, and the clubs of Weimar Berlin, where lesbians debated the nature of their desire. Nowadays, in Europe and North America, the way we think about sexuality is a fundamental part of our identity. To a greater extent than ever, we are defined by our sexual preferences. Sexuality matters more than it ever has before. We need to understand it to understand ourselves.

A Global History of Sexuality provides a provocative, wide-ranging introduction to the history of sexuality from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Explores what sexuality has meant in the everyday lives of individuals over the last 200 years Organized around four major themes: the formation of sexual identity, the regulation of sexuality by societal norms, the regulation of sexuality by institutions, and the intersection of sexuality with globalization Examines the topic from a comparative, global perspective, with well-chosen case studies to illuminate the broader themes Includes interdisciplinary contributions from prominent historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and sexuality studies scholars Introduces important theoretical concepts in a clear, accessible way

Sexuality in modern western culture is central to identity but the tendency to define by sexuality does not apply to the premodern past. Before the 'invention' of sexuality, erotic acts and desires were comprehended as species of sin, expressions of idealised love, courtship, and marriage, or components of intimacies between men or women, not as outworkings of an innermost self. With a focus on c. 1100–c. 1800, this book explores the shifting meanings, languages, and practices of western sex. It is the first study to combine the medieval and early modern to rethink this time of sex before sexuality, where same-sex and opposite-sex desire and eroticism bore but faint traces of what moderns came to call heterosexuality, homosexuality, lesbianism, and pornography. This volume aims to contribute to contemporary historical theory through paying attention to the particularity of premodern sexual cultures. Phillips and Reay argue that students of premodern sex will be blocked in their understanding if they use terms and concepts applicable to sexuality since the late nineteenth century, and modern commentators will never know their subject without a deeper comprehension of sex's history.

Michel Foucault’s seminal The History of Sexuality (1976–1984) has since its publication provided a context for the emergence of critical historical studies of sexuality. This collection reassesses the state of the historiography on sexuality—a field in which the German case has been traditionally central. In many diverse ways, the Foucauldian intervention has governed the formation of questions in the field as well as the assumptions about how some of these questions should be answered. It can be argued, however, that some of these revolutionary insights have ossified into dogmas or truisms within the field. Yet, as these contributions meticulously reveal, those very truisms, when revisited with a fresh eye, can lead to new, unexpected insights into the history of sexuality, necessitating a return to and reinterpretation of Foucault’s richly complex work. This volume will be necessary reading for students of historical sexuality as well as for those readers in German history and German studies generally who have an interest in the history of sexuality.

A Primer for Teaching Women, Gender, and Sexuality in World History is a guide for college and high school teachers who are teaching women, gender, and sexuality in history for the first time, for experienced teachers who want to reinvigorate their courses, for those who are training future teachers to prepare their own syllabi, and for teachers who want to incorporate these issues into their world history classes. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks and Urmi Engineer Willoughby present possible course topics, themes, concepts, and approaches while offering practical advice on materials and strategies helpful for teaching courses from a global perspective in today's teaching environment for today's students. In their discussions of pedagogy, syllabus organization, fostering students' historical empathy, and connecting students with their community, Wiesner-Hanks and Willoughby draw readers into the process of strategically designing courses that will enable students to analyze gender and sexuality in history, whether their students are new to this process or hold powerful and personal commitments to the issues it raises.

Completely updated to include with new chapters, this is second edition is a fascinating exploration of what happens to established ideads about men and women, and their roles, when different cultural systems come into contact.