Gay Studies - Premodern Traditions Of Same-sex Love In The West, Non-western Traditions, The Medicalized, Industrialized Nation-state
political sexual century practices
Gay studies in the early twenty-first century is a lively interdisciplinary field encompassing studies of literature, anthropology, sociology, psychology, the visual arts, indeed all fields in which nonheteronormative sexuality—and its institutionalized suppression—has become a point of politico-philosophical argument. It has two origins: a more recent starting point in twentieth-century liberal Western discourse, prompted by gay liberation and political and social movements on the one hand, and intellectual trends in literary theory and philosophy on the other, and the much older fact of same-sex love, a facet of human history that permeates and predates recorded civilization. Gay studies is today closely linked to notions of the democratic struggle for civil equality, because the sexual practices that are its focus have been the target of authoritarian forces as diverse as Judeo-Christianity, Puritanism, Neo-Confucianism, psychiatry, Nazism, Maoism, and McCarthyism, all of which have variously punished non-normative sexual practices to promote conformist, repressive political structures. In other times and places, however, while sexuality was always subject to societal pressures to conform, patterns of repression and acceptance varied considerably.
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Until recently, the image in the West of homosexual life in the succeeding centuries was grim. In the Middle Ages, sodomites were burned along with witches (the origin of the epithet "faggot"); in the Renaissance Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) was charged with espousing blasphemous (that is, homosexual) sentiments; and in 1644 the Puritans infamously banned all English theate…
Anthropologists have documented a wide range of attitudes toward sexuality in tribal and small-scale societies, which tend to be more egalitarian and to tolerate a far wider range of sexual behaviors, perhaps because where there are no significant forms of inherited wealth, sex can be more easily separated from procreation. Nevertheless, many small-scale societies developed elaborate forms of sexu…
The French Revolution's republican ideologies prompted much of Europe to reexamine its anachronistic, antigay worldview: The Napoleonic Code in 1810, Bavaria in 1813, and Spain in 1822 all legalized consensual homosexuality. With the rise of nineteenth-century industrialism, however, homosexuality was no longer only a sinful offense to God, but a social offense to an emerging bourgeois stat…
The contemporary gay-rights movement is usually traced to the riots that began on June 28, 1969, when patrons at Manhattan's Stonewall Inn refused to submit to the lewdness arrests gay men regularly endured at the time. There were, however, liberal precedents in Henry Gerber's short-lived Society for Human Rights (1924), the first gay-rights organization in the United States, and Com…
By the 1980s, gay studies came to a critical turning point. Its achievements were clear: A body of theory had emerged that legitimized nonreproductive sexualities, locating sexual desire in politically marginalized yet physically expressive bodies, and exploring how those bodies operated, or were operated upon, within repressive political climates. But if placing gay and lesbian bodies in oppositi…
Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge, 1993. Crompton, Louis. Homosexuality and Civilization. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univers…
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