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Drawing on original research from medical texts, psychiatric case histories, pioneering statistical surveys, first-person accounts, legal cases, sensationalist journalism, and legislative debates, Jennifer Terry has written a nuanced and textured history of how the century-old obsession with homosexuality is deeply tied to changing American anxieties about social and sexual order in the modern age. Terry's overarching argument is compelling: that homosexuality served as a marker of the \"abnormal\" against which malleable, tenuous, and often contradictory concepts of the \"normal\" were defined. One of the few histories to take into consideration homosexuality in both women and men, Terry's work also stands out in its refusal to erase the agency of people classified as abnormal. She documents the myriad ways that gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorities have coauthored, resisted, and transformed the most powerful and authoritative modern truths about sex. Proposing this history as a \"useable past,\" An American Obsession is an indispensable contribution to the study of American cultural history.

Drawing on original research from medical texts, psychiatric case histories, pioneering statistical surveys, first-person accounts, legal cases, sensationalist journalism, and legislative debates, Jennifer Terry has written a nuanced and textured history of how the century-old obsession with homosexuality is deeply tied to changing American anxieties about social and sexual order in the modern age. Terry's overarching argument is compelling: that homosexuality served as a marker of the \"abnormal\" against which malleable, tenuous, and often contradictory concepts of the \"normal\" were defined. One of the few histories to take into consideration homosexuality in both women and men, Terry's work also stands out in its refusal to erase the agency of people classified as abnormal. She documents the myriad ways that gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorities have coauthored, resisted, and transformed the most powerful and authoritative modern truths about sex. Proposing this history as a \"useable past,\" An American Obsession is an indispensable contribution to the study of American cultural history.

This is the first scholarly study of Scotland's sexual coming-of-age in the post-war period, charting its political growth from a deeply moralistic policy framework towards a less judgmental, global and scientific context. On the way, Davidson and Davis lead us through the Scottish sexual landscape leading up to the global crisis of HIV/AIDS, analysing post-war state policy towards issues such as prostitution, abortion, homosexuality, gender roles, contraception, censorship, pornography and sexual health education.There are few resources for the student of Scotland's sexual history and its political and social context. This will be the first dedicated work to collate the findings of two important and respected scholars in Scottish Social History, publishing new research in an under-published area of 20th Century cultural history.

Alfred C. Kinsey's revolutionary studies of human sexual behavior are world-renowned. His meticulous methods of data collection, from comprehensive entomological assemblies to personal sex history interviews, raised the bar for empirical evidence to an entirely new level. InThe Classification of Sex,Donna J. Drucker presents an original analysis of Kinsey's scientific career in order to uncover the roots of his research methods. She describes how his enduring interest as an entomologist and biologist in the compilation and organization of mass data sets structured each of his classification projects. As Drucker shows, Kinsey's lifelong mission was to find scientific truth in numbers and through observation-and to record without prejudice in the spirit of a true taxonomist.Kinsey's doctoral work included extensive research of the gall wasp, where he gathered and recorded variations in over six million specimens. His classification and reclassification ofCynipsled to the speciation of the genus that remains today. During his graduate training, Kinsey developed a strong interest in evolution and the links between entomological and human behavior studies. In 1920, he joined Indiana University as a professor in zoology, and soon published an introductory text on biology, followed by a coauthored field guide to edible wild plants.In 1938, Kinsey began teaching a noncredit course on marriage, where he openly discussed sexual behavior and espoused equal opportunity for orgasmic satisfaction in marital relationships. Soon after, he began gathering case histories of sexual behavior. As a pioneer in the nascent field of sexology, Kinsey saw that the key to its cogency was grounded in observation combined with the collection and classification of mass data. To support the institutionalization of his work, he cofounded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in 1947. He and his staff eventually conducted over eighteen thousand personal interviews about sexual behavior, and in 1948 he publishedSexual Behavior in the Human Male,to be followed in 1953 bySexual Behavior in the Human Female.As Drucker's study shows, Kinsey's scientific rigor and his early use of data recording methods and observational studies were unparalleled in his field. Those practices shaped his entire career and produced a wellspring of new information, whether he was studying gall wasp wings, writing biology textbooks, tracing patterns of evolution, or developing a universal theory of human sexuality.

Founded by Alfred C. Kinsey in 1947, the Kinsey Institute has been a leading organization in developing an understanding of human sexuality. In this new book with over 65 images of Kinsey and the Institute's collections, Judith A. Allen and the coauthors look at the work Kinsey started over 70 years ago and how the Institute has continued to make an impact on understanding on our culture. Covering the early years of the Institute through the \"Sexual Revolution,\" into the AIDS pandemic of the Reagan era, and on into the \"internet hook-up\" culture of today, the book illuminates the Institute's work and its importance to society.

Placing sexual culture at the center of power relations in Revolutionary-era Philadelphia, Clare A. Lyons uncovers a world where runaway wives challenged their husbands' patriarchal rights and where serial and casual sexual relationships were commonplace. By reading popular representations of sex against actual behavior, Lyons reveals the clash of meanings given to sex and illuminates struggles to recast sexuality in order to eliminate its subversive potential. Sexuality became the vehicle for exploring currents of liberty, freedom, and individualism in the politics of everyday life among groups of early Americans typically excluded from formal systems of governance--women, African Americans, and poor classes of whites. Lyons shows that men and women created a vibrant urban pleasure culture, including the eroticization of print culture, as eighteenth-century readers became fascinated with stories of bastardy, prostitution, seduction, and adultery. In the post-Revolutionary reaction, white middle-class men asserted their authority, Lyons argues, by creating a gender system that simultaneously allowed them the liberty of their passions, constrained middle-class women with virtue, and projected licentiousness onto lower-class whites and African Americans. Lyons's analysis shows how class and racial divisions fostered new constructions of sexuality that served as a foundation for gender. This gendering of sexuality in the new nation was integral to reconstituting social hierarchies and subordinating women and African Americans in the wake of the Revolution.

This book analyzes the National Police Gazette, the racy New York City tabloid that gained an audience among men and boys of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Looking at how images of sex, crime, and sports reflected and shaped masculinities during this watershed era, this book amounts to a story of what it meant to be an American man at the beginning of the American Century.

In Smitten , Rodney Hessinger examines how the Second Great Awakening disrupted gender norms across a breadth of denominations. The displacement and internal migration of Americans created ripe conditions for religious competition in the North. Hessinger argues that during this time of religious ferment, religious seekers could, in turn, play the missionary or the convert. The dynamic of religious rivalry inexorably led toward sexual and gender disruption. Contending within an increasingly democratic religious marketplace, preachers had to court converts in order to flourish. They won followers through charismatic allure and making concessions to the desires of the people. Opening their own hearts to new religious impulses, some religious visionaries offered up radical dispensations-including new visions of how God wanted them to reorder sex and gender relations in society. A wide array of churches, including Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, Shakers, Catholics, and Perfectionists, joined the fray. Religious contention and innovation ultimately produced backlash. Charges of seduction and gender trouble ignited fights within, among, and against churches. Religious opponents insisted that the newly converted were smitten with preachers, rather than choosing churches based on reason and scripture. Such criticisms coalesced into a broader pan-Protestant rejection of religious enthusiasm. Smitten reveals the sexual disruptions and subsequent domestication of religion during the Second Great Awakening.

\"Gender diversity exists in every culture and geographic context. It is to be celebrated, not pathologised\", says Sari Reisner, lead author of a paper in The Lancet's first Series on transgender health. Reisner's work is helping to advance this agenda. Based in Boston, USA, he enjoys a varied career as Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital, with a secondary appointment at the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health, and as Affiliated Research Scientist at The Fenway Institute at Fenway Health.

One evening, while watching the news, Roger N. Lancaster was startled by a report that a friend, a gay male school teacher, had been arrested for a sexually based crime. The resulting hysteria threatened to ruin the life of an innocent man. In this passionate and provocative book, Lancaster blends astute analysis, robust polemic, ethnography, and personal narrative to delve into the complicated relationship between sexuality and punishment in our society. Drawing on classical social science, critical legal studies, and queer theory, he tracks the rise of a modern suburban culture of fear and develops new insights into the punitive logic that has put down deep roots in everyday American life.