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The history of heterosexuality in North America across four centuries
Heterosexuality is usually regarded as something inherently "natural"-but what is heterosexuality, and how has it taken shape across the centuries? By challenging ahistorical approaches to the heterosexual subject, Heterosexual Histories constructs a new framework for the history of heterosexuality, examining unexplored assumptions and insisting that not only sex but race, class, gender, age, and geography matter to its past. Each of the fourteen essays in this volume examines the history of heterosexuality from a different angle, seeking to study this topic in a way that recognizes plurality, divergence, and inequity.
Editors Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell have formed a collection that spans four centuries, addressing the many different racial groups, geographies, and subcultures of heterosexuality in North America. The essays range across disciplines with experts from various fields examining heterosexuality from unique perspectives: a historian shows how defining heterosexuality, sex, and desire were integral to the formation of British America and the process of colonization; a legal scholar examines the connections between race, sexual citizenship, and nonmarital motherhood; a gender studies expert analyzes the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and explores the intersections of heterosexuality with shame and second-wave feminism. Together, these essays explain how differently earlier Americans understood the varieties of gender and different-sex sexuality, how heterosexuality emerged as a dominant way of describing gender, and how openly many people acknowledged and addressed heterosexuality's fragility.
By contesting presumptions of heterosexuality's stability or consistency, Heterosexual Histories opens the historical record to interrogations of the raced, classed, and gendered varieties of heterosexuality and considers the implications of heterosexuality's multiplicities and changes. Providing both a sweeping historical survey and concentrated case studies, Heterosexual Histories is a crucial addition to the field of sexuality studies.
The history of heterosexuality in North America across four centuries
Heterosexuality is usually regarded as something inherently "natural"-but what is heterosexuality, and how has it taken shape across the centuries? By challenging ahistorical approaches to the heterosexual subject, Heterosexual Histories constructs a new framework for the history of heterosexuality, examining unexplored assumptions and insisting that not only sex but race, class, gender, age, and geography matter to its past. Each of the fourteen essays in this volume examines the history of heterosexuality from a different angle, seeking to study this topic in a way that recognizes plurality, divergence, and inequity.
Editors Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell have formed a collection that spans four centuries, addressing the many different racial groups, geographies, and subcultures of heterosexuality in North America. The essays range across disciplines with experts from various fields examining heterosexuality from unique perspectives: a historian shows how defining heterosexuality, sex, and desire were integral to the formation of British America and the process of colonization; a legal scholar examines the connections between race, sexual citizenship, and nonmarital motherhood; a gender studies expert analyzes the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and explores the intersections of heterosexuality with shame and second-wave feminism. Together, these essays explain how differently earlier Americans understood the varieties of gender and different-sex sexuality, how heterosexuality emerged as a dominant way of describing gender, and how openly many people acknowledged and addressed heterosexuality's fragility.
By contesting presumptions of heterosexuality's stability or consistency, Heterosexual Histories opens the historical record to interrogations of the raced, classed, and gendered varieties of heterosexuality and considers the implications of heterosexuality's multiplicities and changes. Providing both a sweeping historical survey and concentrated case studies, Heterosexual Histories is a crucial addition to the field of sexuality studies.
Rebecca L. Davis is the Miller Family Early Career
Professor of History at the University of Delaware. Her teaching
and research focus on the histories of gender, sexuality, and
religion in the modern United States. She is the author of More
Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss (2010). Davis
is currently at work on two books: Public Confessions: The
Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics and Sex in
America. She is also a producer of the Sexing History podcast and a
Research Associate for the Council on Contemporary Families.
Michele Mitchell is Associate Professor of History at New
York University and former North American editor of Gender &
History. She is the author of Righteous Propagation: African
Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction
(2004) and co-editor of Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality,
and African Diasporas (2004) and Gender, Imperialism and Global
Exchanges (2015). She also serves on the Editorial Board of the
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History.
"The publication of Heterosexual Histories is a landmark event, and
one that promises—I hope!—to invigorate the study of
heterosexuality, expanding the terrain and questions that scholars
have already explored as well as urgently pressing the histories of
heterosexuality in new directions."
*American Literary History*
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