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This article questions the historical awareness of the DSM-5 by investigating first the treatment of prostitution from the Victorian period to today as a means of medicalizing desire; and second, by looking at the category of hebephilia, where modern medicalizing classifications are criticized for ignoring ancient evidence. By this comparative method, the article shows how ignoring historical evidence allows the social and ideological elements in the work of defining psychological sexual diseases to remain concealed.

Reinventing Licentiousness navigates an overlooked history of representation during the transition from the Qing Empire to the Chinese Republic-a time when older, hierarchical notions of licentiousness were overlaid by a new, pornographic regime. Y. Yvon Wang draws on previously untapped archives-ranging from police archives and surveys to ephemeral texts and pictures-to argue that pornography in China represents a unique configuration of power and desire that both reflects and shapes historical processes. On the one hand, since the late imperial period, pornography has democratized pleasure in China and opened up new possibilities of imagining desire. On the other, ongoing controversies over its definition and control show how the regulatory ideas of premodern cultural politics and the popular products of early modern cultural markets have contoured the globalized world. Reinventing Licentiousness emphasizes the material factors, particularly at the grassroots level of consumption and trade, that governed \"proper\" sexual desire and led to ideological shifts around the definition of pornography. By linking the past to the present and beyond, Wang's social and intellectual history showcases circulated pornographic material as a motor for cultural change. The result is an astonishing foray into what historicizing pornography can mean for our understandings of desire, legitimacy, capitalism, and culture.

This volume investigates the state of same-sex relations in later medieval England, drawing on a remarkably rich array of primary sources from the period that include legal documents, artworks, theological treatises, and poetry. Tom Linkinen uses those sources to build a framework of medieval condemnations of same-sex intimacy and desire and then shows how same-sex sexuality reflected-and was inflected by-gender hierarchies, approaches to crime, and the conspicuous silence on the matter in the legal systems of the period.

Cruising the Library examines the ways in which library classifications have organized sexuality and sexual perversion. The author studies the Library of Congress Subject Headings and Classification, as well as the Library of Congress's Delta Collection, a restricted collection of obscenity until 1964.

Police in Paris arrested thousands of men for sodomy or similar acts in the eighteenth century. In the mid-1780s, they recorded depositions in which prisoners recounted their own sexual histories. These remarkable documents, curated and translated into English by Jeffrey Merrick, allow us to hear the voices of men who desired men and to explore complex questions about sources, patterns, and meanings in the history of sexuality. This volume centers on two cartons of paperwork from commissaire Charles Convers Desormeaux. Dated from 1785, the cartons contain 221 dossiers of men arrested for sodomy or similar acts in Paris. Merrick translates and annotates the police interviews from these dossiers, revealing how the police and those they arrested understood sex between men at the time. Merrick discusses the implications of what the men said (and what they did not say), how they said it, and in what contexts it was said. The best-known works of clergy and jurists, of enemies and advocates of Enlightenment, and of novelists and satirists from the eighteenth century tell us nothing at all about the lived experience of men who desired men. In these police dossiers, Merrick allows them to speak in their own words. This primary text brings together a wealth of important information that will appeal to scholars, students, and general readers interested in the history of sexuality, sodomy, and sexual policing.

Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin Americabrings together a broad community of scholars to explore the history of illicit and alternative sexualities in Latin America's colonial and early national periods. Together the essays examine how \"the unnatural\" came to inscribe certain sexual acts and desires as criminal and sinful, including acts officially deemed to be \"against nature\"-sodomy, bestiality, and masturbation-along with others that approximated the unnatural-hermaphroditism, incest, sex with the devil, solicitation in the confessional, erotic religious visions, and the desecration of holy images. In doing so, this anthology makes important and necessary contributions to the historiography of gender and sexuality. Amid the growing politicized interest in broader LGBTQ movements in Latin America, the essays also show how these legal codes endured to make their way into post-independence Latin America.

The study of aphrodisiacs is an overlooked area of global history which this article seeks to remedy by considering how such substances were commercially traded and how medical knowledge of them was exchanged globally between 1600 and 1920. We show that the concept of ‘aphrodisiacs’ as a new nominal category of pharmacological substances came to be valued and defined in early modern Latin, English, Dutch, Swiss, and French medical sources in relation to concepts transformed from their origin in both the ancient Mediterranean world and in medieval Islamicate medicine. We then consider how the general idea of aphrodisiacs became widely discredited in mid-nineteenth-century scientific medicine until after the First World War in France and in the US, alongside their commercial proliferation in the context of new colonial trade exchanges between Europe, the US, Southeast Asia, Africa, India, and South America. In both examples, we propose that global entanglements played a significant role in both the cohesion and the discreditation of the medical category of aphrodisiacs.

States of Liberation traces the paths of gay men in East and West Germany from the violent aftermath of the Second World War to the thundering nightclubs of present-day Berlin. Following a captivating cast of characters, from gay spies and Nazi scientists to queer politicians and secret police bureaucrats, States of Liberation tells the remarkable story of how the two German states persecuted gay men – and how those men slowly, over the course of decades, won new rights and created new opportunities for themselves in the heart of Cold War Europe. Relying on untapped archives in Germany and the United States as well as oral histories with witnesses and survivors, Huneke reveals that communist East Germany was in many ways far more progressive on queer issues than democratic West Germany.

The article historicizes social and state practices that Jasbir Puar dubbed “homonationalism.” It argues against simplistic applications of the term to the relations between “western” and “eastern” European countries. Instead, it appeals for a more profound contextualisation of every national case. Using 20th-century Poland as a case study, it demonstrates that both homophobia and homonationalism had antecedents and that both can be used as political strategies by nationalist actors that have not previously deployed them. It also seeks to decentre the narrative about homonationalism by averting attention from the state and focusing it on lived queer experiences in Poland. The term grassroots homonationalism is an attempt to bring such analytical attention to the agency of queer subjects and their communities. It aims to conceptualise their attitudes toward nationalist discourses and state practices (both homophobic and homonationalist) and expose ways in which non-normative sexualities and their history have been politically instrumentalised. It helps to analyse attitudes that some queers in Poland have adopted when facing the issue that Puar described as a “collusion of nationalism and queer subjects”.

This paper explores fertility management practices in state-socialist Poland and investigates post-war demographic change through the lenses of gender and modernization. Using personal narratives from oral histories and memoirs, we examine reproductive decision-making processes from the 1940s to the 1980s, focusing on motivations, norms, and the means employed to achieve desired family size. Our analysis reveals the ambiguous nature of both modernization and women's emancipation in regard to reproduction. We argue that acceptance of the two-child model and the need to effectively manage fertility increased in Poland through the second half of the twentieth century, but was highly dependent on levels of spousal communication and equality. Personal narratives demonstrate how social pressure shaped women's reproductive choices, and how at times these choices were considerably limited by male violence and domination. As our analysis shows, gender relations in marriage and the modernization of fertility management in state-socialist Poland were deeply interrelated.