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4 - The History of Sexuality and LGBTQ+ History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2024

By
Emily Skidmore
Edited by
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks  and
Mathew Kuefler
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Mathew Kuefler
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
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Summary

This historiographical chapter discusses how the rise of LGBTQ+ history has shifted understandings of how all gender and sexual identities are formed and contested. It begins with a discussion of the activist origins of the field of LGBTQ+ history in the 1970s, and then moves on to discuss the centrals debates that animated early scholarship in the 1980s. The chapter then moves to the rise of queer theory in the 1990s, and analyzes how that innovation reshaped the field by introducing concepts such as heteronormativity. The 1990s also witnessed the rise of scholarship on colonialism and sexuality, which in turn impacted the field of LGBTQ+ history, which up to that point had been very focused on the Global North. Thus, the third section of the chapter discusses how, since 2000, the field of LGBTQ+ history has increasingly been global in scope, with increased attention to political economies, transnational flows, and state formation. In conclusion, the chapter discusses the rise of trans histories, and how these histories have pushed LGBTQ+ historians to think about gender in new and innovative ways.

Keywords

gay historylesbian historytrans historyLGBTQ+ historyMichel Foucaultsexology
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge World History of Sexualities , pp. 68 - 88
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Beachy, Robert. Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity. New York: Vintage, 2015.Google Scholar
Capó, Julio, Jr. Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994.Google Scholar
DeVun, Leah. The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.Google Scholar
Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendships and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: William Morrow, 1981.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. 1978; New York: Vintage, 1990.Google Scholar
Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Griffiths, Craig. The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation: Male Homosexuality in 1970s West Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York: W. W. Norton, 2020.Google Scholar
Hobson, Emily. Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Houlbrook, Matt. Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Katz, Jonathan Ned. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1976.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Madeline Lapovsky, and Davis, Madeline. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: A History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.Google Scholar
Kuefler, Mathew, ed. The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Marhoefer, Laurie. Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Manion, Jen. Female Husbands: A Trans History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Mumford, Kevin. Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rifkin, Mark. When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sang, Tze-Lan. The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Snorton, C. Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Tallie, T. J. Queering Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vanita, Ruth. Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society. New York: Routledge, 2001.Google Scholar

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