ABSTRACT
We are living in the midst of a long, unfinished but profound revolution that is transforming sexual and intimate life. Across the globe, but especially in the late modern (and capitalist) societies of the old ‘west’, there have been dramatic changes in family, marital and erotic behaviour, sexual identities, parenting patterns, relationships between men and women, men and men, women and women, adults and young people, and in laws, norms and values. Many of these changes have been, or are still, bitterly contested, but others have been rapidly assimilated. As a result, the true nature of the transformation is easily forgotten, and the complex histories that produced them can all too easily be obliterated. Without a sense of history, and an understanding of the ways we lived in the past, we have no benchmarks by which to measure the magnitude of change, no way of really understanding the present or preparing ourselves for the future (see Weeks 2007). That is why sexual history as it has developed since the 1970s is so important. The American historian, Vern Bullough (1976: 1-17), famously complained at the beginning of the 1970s that sex in history was a ‘virgin field’. Ken Plummer (1975) similarly noted that sociology had sorely neglected sexuality. The study of sexuality was marginal to the key academic disciplines, and threatened to marginalise those who ventured onto the landscape. It made you, in Plummer’s phrase, ‘morally suspect’ (Plummer 1975: 4). Much has changed. We now know a great deal about such topics as marriage and the family, prostitution and homosexuality, forms of legal and medical regulation, moral codes and religious traditions, masculinities and femininities, women’s bodies and health, illegitimacy and birth control, rape and sexual violence, the evolution of sexual identities and sexual practices, transgenderisms and heteronormativities, social networks and oppositional sexualities, and the impact of colonial and postcolonial regimes of power, domination and resistance (Phillips and Reay 2002; Weeks 2000). Historians have deployed sophisticated methods of family reconstitution and demographic history, have intensively searched for new, or interrogated old, documentary sources and made full use of oral and life history interviews to reconstruct the subjective or the tabooed experience. Encouraged by a vigorous grassroots’ history, fed by modern feminism and gay and lesbian politics and made urgent by the impact of the HIV crisis, there is now an impressive library of articles, pamphlets, books, films, videos and a mass of cyber-dialogue about all aspects of sexual history, as well as a well-honed critique in the form of queer theory (Weeks 2009). But having said this, we are still left with a dilemma: What is the magic element that defines some things as sexual and others not? The rejection of essentialist theo-
ries gave the sexual a fluidity that challenges as it stimulates intellectual curiosity. The history of sexuality is, as Robert Padgug (1979) suggested, a history of a subject in constant flux. But that, as it has turned out, has become the strength of sexual history. Its originality lies in a willingness by its practitioners to question the naturalness and inevitability of the sexual categories and assumptions we have inherited – including the category of the sexual itself. Gagnon and Simon talked in their pioneering study of Sexual Conduct in the early 1970s of the need that may have existed at some unspecified time in the past to invent an importance for sexuality (Gagnon and Simon 1973). Michel Foucault, clearly aware of such theorising, was more specific:
Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct.
