Passion and Power: Sexuality in History

Front Cover
Kathy Lee Peiss, Christina Simmons, Robert A. Padgug
Temple University Press, 1989 - History - 319 pages
Passion and Power brings together some of the most recent and innovative writings on the history of sexuality and explores the experiences, ideas, and conflicts that have shaped the emergence of modern sexual identities. Arguing that sexuality is not an unchanging biological reality or a universal natural force, the essays in this volume discuss sexuality as an integral part of the history of human experience. Articles on sexual assault, homosexuality, birth control, venereal disease, sexual repression, pornography, and the AIDS epidemic examine the ways that sexuality has become a core element of modern social identity in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States.It is only in recent years that historians have begun to examine the social construction of sexuality. This is the first anthology that addresses this issue from a radical historical perspective, examining sexuality as a field of contention in itself and as part of other struggles rooted in divisions of gender, class, and race. Author note: Kathy Peiss is Associate Professor of History and Women's Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-century New York (Temple). >P>Christina Simmons is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati-Raymond Walters College.

From inside the book

Contents

An Introduction
3
On Conceptualizing Sexuality in History
14
II
25
Sexual Assault
35
Historical Notes on WorkingClass
55
Sexual Meanings and Homosexual
70
The Changing Medical
87
The Heterodoxy Club
118
The Wages of Sin?
178
The Response to the Sexual Psychopath
199
The Politics of Sexuality in Cold
226
A Social Constructionist
241
IV
257
Feminisms in Conflict
277
Homosexuality and the Social Construction
293
Notes About the Contributors
317

The Black Community and the Birth Control Movement
138
Modern Sexuality and the Myth of Victorian Repression
157

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