The Invention of Heterosexuality - Softcover

Katz, Jonathan Ned

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226426017 ISBN 13: 9780226426013

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2007

Synopsis

“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

About this title

About the Author

 Jonathan Ned Katz is the author of many books, including Gay American History and Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.

From Booklist

Katz's thoughtful, scholarly book examines the words heterosexual and homosexual both of which are scarcely 100 years old--and presents heterosexuality as a historical social convention rather than as a natural, eternal given. In arguing that these categorical terms are historical and thus changeable, Katz reminds us that until very recently, sex was considered mostly functional, urgently needed for procreation in order to populate fledgling American settlements. He then scrutinizes Freud's influence as a sex theorist who changed the image of woman from her nineteenth-century idealization as the "angel in the house" to one in which lack of erotic response constituted mental illness. Moving beyond Freud, he takes us through the twentieth century, stressing the conservatism of the 1940s and 1950s before coming eventually to the churning 1990s, when a theatrical review titled Heterosexuals in Crisis summarizes the "general sense of a different-sex erotic emergency." Along the way, he cites such sex theorists as Kate Millett, Ti-Grace Atkinson, and Michel Foucault, weaving them into his controversial, readable discourse. Whitney Scott

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0226426017
• ISBN 13: 9780226426013
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 305