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#history of sexuality
newhistorybooks · 5 months
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"In centring questions of fantasy as well as the paradoxes and ambivalences of erotic desire, and exploring the astonishingly myriad ways controversies over German militarism intersected with arguments about gender and sex, Schneider provides a wholly fresh take on the cultural context in which the first queer rights movement in the world was born. Ingenious original readings of novels by the mutually warring Mann brothers are a particular highlight."
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racefortheironthrone · 5 months
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Was there a culture of…momentary gayness among soldiers in navies since they spent so many months at sea?
The term of art is “situational sexual behavior” and yes, absolutely.
As Churchill put it, “the traditions of the British Navy are rum, sodomy, and the lash.” (The less polite 19th century version was “rum, bum, and bacca.”) The same phenomenon was also found in the merchant marine and among pirates, and it contributed to the interestingly different 18th/19th century conception of queer sexuality and sexual identities as it applied to sailors, as George Chauncey describes in the first chapter of Gay New York.
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Then again, it was also true that MLM were also attracted to a career at sea precisely because it allowed them a slight loophole to get around compulsory heterosexuality - in addition to the all-male working and social environment, sailors were given more leeway when it came to sex and relationships, and in the worst case scenario where your family insisted you still had to get married, because sailors’ wives generally stayed behind, you could get away with only rarely seeing your beard and relatively few questions about why you didn’t have any kids.
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nastasya--filippovna · 4 months
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My Man Foucault
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I love Noam Chomsky but if it's gonna be Chomsky vs Foucault, it's always my fav gay boi
Even though he rejected labels such as homosexuality bcs they result in negative consequences for those on whom these labels are attached.
But the fact that he said all this like what more than 40 years ago and yet its' so relevant today is both harrowingly scary and ironically beautiful at the same time.
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queering-ecology · 1 month
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History of Sexuality and Ecology: Un/Naturalizing the Queer
Scientia Sexualis is the modern discourse on sexuality that locates sexual desires and behaviors within the domain of science and medicine. The rise of this coincided with the rise of evolutionary thought as well as new sexological thoughts.
Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1978) is a heavily called upon resource to discuss the regulation of sexuality in modern times; “evolutionary thought is supported by modern understandings of sex as an internal and essential category and also by notions of natural sexuality from which nonreproductive sexualities are understood as deviant” (7). Foucault has argued that the category of ‘homosexual’ was created during this period, in which sex became to be understood not as a set of acts but a state of internal being (a question of one’s nature)—or the naturalizing of sexuality. Modern medical institutions moved from regulation of sexual acts to an organization and treatment of sexual identities (8). No longer is sexuality something that is done, but something that you are—and could be linked to some basic biological fault.
Some thinkers of the time offered up environmental causes for the sudden rise in homosexual degeneracy, and emasculation caused by industrialization and urbanization; homosexuality was a congenital disease and a threat to the evolution of the human species. “Competing physiognomic theories vied for prominence at the time, using what now appears to be utterly arbitrary selection of physical traits to form ‘groups’ of degenerates, whose physical peculiarities were taken as obvious indicators of their perversion”(9) wherein the cause could be caused by environmental or social decline/error. The editors, and other theorist have made the connection to scientific racism, wherein different ‘races’ were created as part of a colonial project (sex plays a role in both scientific racism and colonialism).
 Heterosexuality became understood as the natural state of being, associated as it is with reproduction. This of course means that scientists who witnessed same sex (potentially) erotic behaviors were often perplexed and struggled to fit it into the theory of sexual selection. Nonreproductive sex could be about establishing social relations, dominance, submission, reciprocity, competition and a struggle for survival, anything except pleasure and desire.   
“To many biologists and ethologists, the problems presented by nonreproductive sexual behavior have to do mainly with how it thwarts, disturbs, or, in the best light, merely supplements heterosexual reproduction” (154)(10).
Returning to the idea of same-sex behavior and dysfunctional sexual biology being considered an environmental concern, the idea is that if the ability of a species to survive is tied to reproductive fitness, then ‘healthy’ environments are those in which heterosexual activity is seen to be thriving. An example is where ecologists were convinced the widespread female homoerotic behavior among seagulls in a particular location was evidence of an environmental catastrophe (Silverstone 2000). But it turns out that the “world is full of lesbian gulls” (11).
“The assumption that gender dimorphic heterosexuality is the only natural sexual form is clearly not an appropriate benchmark for ecological research” (11).
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fcharmaille · 9 months
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My first peer-reviewed publication. In which I discuss the history of sexuality's biggest debate: Essentialism vs Constructionism. Specifically, I discuss what we are doing when we say people from the Middle Ages were "gay." I argue that, for French philosopher Michel Foucault, finding the gay in the Middle Ages means catching a glimpse of a different kind of sex -- relations unlike the ones we are trapped in today.
The article focuses on the relations between Foucault and American medieval historian John Boswell. Boswell, who wrote a transformative book about "Gay People in the Medieval Europe" is usually described as the all-time Essentialist. He thought men who loved men, no matter the era, were Gay. Whereas Foucault is usually described as the all-time Constructionist, the fiercest critic of modern identities like "homosexual."
Indeed, when Boswell's book on "Gay People in the Middle Ages" came out, some readers criticised Boswell for his unrestrained use of the term "gay," and they used Foucault's philosophy as an anti-Essentialist point of reference.
By analysing the later volumes of Foucault's final masterpiece, The History of Sexuality, along with interviews he gave while writing it, I find that Foucault distinguished between "being homosexual" and "being gay." For Foucault, while "homosexual" is a narrow identity inherited from Victorian sexology, "gay" refers to the formation of new sexual relations, a transformative kind of a sexual experience.
And here comes the plot twist: Foucault developed this idea of "gay" while reading... John Boswell! Foucault even wrote a fan letter to Boswell to thank him for his work (Boswell himself wrote a very positive review of The History of Sexuality's later volumes). For Foucault, finding the "gay" in the Middle Ages means experiencing history in a different way, feeling sex otherwise.
The article is François·e Charmaille, "Queer Strategies of Gay History: Boswell's 'Weapons', Foucault's Expérience", Diacritics, 48.4 (2020), 102-121.
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lilithsaintcrow · 21 days
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“Accordingly, the glass-blowing island of Murano was known not just for its famous chandeliers, candlesticks, glasses, and other pretty objects—but also as a dildo factory.“
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lav3ndrcrussh444 · 1 year
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1. Different from the Others (1919) & Foucault's The History of Sexuality.
Creation of Queer Repression
The German silent film, Different from Others (1919), is one of the first films to depict homosexuality. The story follows a violinist who falls in love with one of his students, creating a conflict out of the societal issue of sexuality of these two men. Seen as ‘deviant’ and ‘immoral’ by the outside world. Although the Violist, Paul is a man of wealth and status he is subject to harassment and blackmail, his ‘abnormal’ sexuality outcasts him and degrades him as lesser than straight characters. To understand the abjectification of gayness/queerness in our Western society, we look to Foucault’s History of Sexuality. In his writings, explains that the practice of the repression of sexuality started in the 17th century to promote capitalistic essentialization of human behavior, specifically sexuality. Foucalt argues that there is a need to organize and quantify productivity under capitalism to yield results. A part the stands out to me, is when Foucult explains the need to turn people into a population, thus human activity like sex into reproduction that fulfills a need in society/the workforce. And so any kind of sexual activity that does not produce children, any gay/queer relationship, as abnormal and deviant. This connection and of queerness and deviancy propelled by Freud why his theories are largely held to high regard to support that homophobic way of thinking. Films like Different from Others(1919) are surprising to see how long homophobia has prevailed in our Western culture. Just as surprising to learn through The History of Sexuaity, as to why the separation and distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality. How these concepts are part much larger conversations than sexuality, but engulf an integral facet of capitalism that raises and glorifies one way of being by intentionally marginalizing and endangering the other.
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ethicopoliticolit · 5 months
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There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks and perceive differently than one sees is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. [Para.] People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself need only go on behind the scenes; that they are, at best, part of those labors of preparation that efface themselves when they have had their effects. But what, then, is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if not the critical labor of thought upon itself? And if it does not consist, in place of legitimating what one already knows, in undertaking to know how, and up to what limit, it would be possible to think differently?
—Michel Foucault, quoted in James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993)
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redshift-13 · 1 year
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Social history gets recorded only when those knowledgable about it are both alive and able to remember it.  It helps, like writer Scotty Bowers, to have a prodigious memory.  And if you’re writing about famous people, it helps to meet them where (nearly) everyone, royal or commoner, star or not, frolics in the same place: sex.  Or, in one specific physical locale, an area behind a gas station in Los Angeles that existed as a hookup spot for quickies and a meeting place for longer term lovers and paramours, which is where Scotty Bowers made a name for himself, not as a pimp, but as what you might call an organizer of encounters.
This doc. is a fascinating glimpse into a specific social history of sex defined by a connection to film industry celebs, various locales around Los Angeles, and underground LGBT lives - innumerable people intersecting through the years, with Bowers being an eye that saw many secrets and sometimes participated in them.  He seems to have been discreet when he needed to be, only later revealing truths that many who were close to the action knew at the time, but due to fears over reputation and career kept under wraps.
There are plenty of gossipy anecdotes here, but to think that this is all to the story is a hopelessly superficial take.  You see Bowers relating anecdotes of the sexual escapades of famous people at a party - he was probably the center of attention for this reason - but to dismiss these as the salacious froth of celebrity is to miss the point of how sexual history is not somehow extraneous to history but one of its motors, its continuous underlying reality, the cum, spit, flesh, blood, memory, pain and pleasure of human lives through time, the balancing acts on fulcrums of circumstance and relationships.
The more documentaries I see, the more I think about an impossible Total Documentary, a film that’s captured everything through time and which you could spend a lifetime watching.  Each documentary to me seems to faintly gesture in the direction of this all-seeing master film archive, whose stories you can only imagine being told, but the ones that are construct a sky of scattered stars.  Since, if all was exposed, all thrown in front of us like the sun, somehow that would seem less real than the small number of pieces we have available to us.  We are both created by these stories and make them.
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reading foucault's "the history of sexuality vol 1" rn and him talking about sexual perversion and taboos has me like ahaha wow yeah that's crazyyyyy *eyes dart shiftily to the side*
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fantabulosabasket · 2 years
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Three postcards produced by the Australian Queer Archives (formerly Australian Gay and Lesbian Archives, though always fully inclusive in practice), where I volunteer. My write-up below is paraphrased from the text on the reverse.
The first shows Aboriginal South Sea Islander man Malcolm Cole dressed as Captain Cook for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade of 1988. Text on back notes that this was a camp response to Bicentennial celebrations, in which Cole and friends created the first official First Nations float. It was a ‘ship’, pulled the length of the parade by white ‘convict’ men. Malcolm was a dancer, founding member of the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre and a HIV/AIDS activist. More about Cole, including footage of him at Mardi Gras, can be found at the Blak History Month website (which is also a great repository of Aboriginal history in general).
The second postcard shows Lyn Cooper, wearing her ‘I Am a Lesbian’ shirt at the International Women’s Day celebrations in Adelaide, 1974. Cooper was a photographer and member of both the Women’s and Gay Liberation movements in Australia, specifically Adelaide. Her image remains popular and commonly posted in pride images and celebrations of lesbian visibility.
The third postcard shows the bushrangers Andrew Scott (Captain Moonlite- spelling intentional) and James Nesbitt, who met in Pentridge Prison (where, as an aside, Nesbitt repeatedly got in trouble for caring for Scott by bringing him things). They lived together after their release, before commencing their bushranging career across the colonial border in New South Wales. Famously, Nesbitt was killed in a police shoot-out, where the depth of Scott’s emotional response- he was reported to have kissed him as he lay dying in his arms- was remarked on even in the newspapers, without mockery. Scott wore a lock of Nesbitt’s hair as a ring, which he passed on to Nesbitt’s mother prior to his own hanging, writing to her as her ‘other son’. While the courts refused Scott’s request to be buried with Nesbitt, admirers later disinterred Scott and moved his remains to the same location as Nesbitt’s, finally fulfilling the request.
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medievalistsnet · 3 months
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newhistorybooks · 2 years
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"In seven compelling essays, the author narrates Japan’s modern history through its gendered and sexualized figures: imperial soldiers and salarymen, good wives and wise mothers, New Women and Modern Girls, comfort women and prostitutes, sexologists and queers, artists and video gamers. Frühstück combines great erudition with effervescent storytelling."
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Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook
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I'm sure this page probably gets floated about from time to time but in case you did not know about it, Rictor Norton's compiled a whole treasure trove of primary sources having to do with queer sexuality across the 18th century in England. Now, I don't always agree with all of Norton's conclusions about things but I absolutely respect the work that went into making all of this readily accessible, and for that I tip my hat to him. He's also got a similar page for a fat stack of primary resources on 19th century queer sexuality in England.
Among the things that really stand out in these reports is how casual dudes are about cruising and public sex even in the 18th century, and also how many of them argue in their defense that what they're doing is "only natural". Even with the threat of death looming, a lot of guys simply did not expect that anyone would go through the trouble of actually charging them with a crime, and they also held their own ideas about the moral valence of the homosexual sex acts they participated in.
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fcharmaille · 9 months
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In this article, I analyse the nonbinary system of sex difference in a 12th-century medical text, Hildegard of Bingen's Cause et Cure. While studies of intersex in medieval science usually focus on what medieval sources call "hermaphrodites," Hildegard describes types of bodies that she does not call "hermaphrodites," but that are intersex nonetheless. Fallen human bodies are, according to Hildegard, not divided into two sexes, but instead exhibit a diverse array of sex characteristics and gender expressions. Because Hildegard does not make this distinction between "sex characteristics" and "gender expression," her writing illustrates that medieval medicine did not differenciate between "sex" and "gender," but could recognise a nonbinary spectrum of human anatomy and behaviour.
This article is open access so it's free to read, print, frame, distribute, tattoo, etc.
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archival-dodger · 1 year
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My upcoming thesis readings: Intimacy, Violence and Activism: Gay and Lesbian Perspectives on Australasian History and Society eds. Graham Willett and Yorick Smaal; Australia’s Homosexual Histories, Gay and Lesbian Perspectives V eds. David L. Phillips and Graham Willett; Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870-1920 by Martin Crotty.
As with a lot of works on histories of sexuality and gender dating from the early 2000s to the 2010s, these works reflect both the more expansive use of the term ‘homosexual’ (in which trans subjects are encompassed by the term, albeit through dubious assumptions about the relationship between trans people and sexuality) and the relative absence of trans historians in academia*, leading to some spectacularly unnuanced approaches to reading historical gender(s).
*In the Australian context, this has been a complete absence until extremely recently.
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