Lauren Gutterman For most of us, envisioning Christmas in postwar America brings to mind tinsel-covered trees, girls and boys in matching pajamas, dads in Santa Claus beards, images drawn from old family photographs or the likes of It’s a Wonderful Life. Absent from these familial and familiar cultural memories are […]
Tag: homosexuality
Found in Translation: How Sexual Debates Developed Across the Modern World
Heike Bauer A new collection of essays I edited, Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World (Temple UP, 2015) shows that the emergence of modern sexuality was a global phenomenon. The book examines the contemporaneous emergence of sexual science in Europe, Asia, Peru, and the Middle […]
Histories of Sexualities in Central and Eastern Europe
Łukasz Szulc Historical studies of sexualities in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) remain scarce. Researchers from the region, as well as other parts of the world, however, are increasingly uncovering both the regional commonalities and local specificities of how diverse sexualities were lived, policed and represented in CEE, the area stretching from Austria […]
Dr. Spock and the History of Sexuality
Janet Golden Dr. Benjamin Spock (1903-1998) was a pediatrician and a political activist who published the bestselling book, Baby and Child Care, in 1946. In it, Spock encouraged mothers to trust their own judgment and to eschew overly strict parenting strategies. By the mid-1960s, Baby and Child Care was the top […]
Queers, Homosexuals, and Activists in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain?
Charles Upchurch What does a historian of sexuality do when confronted with something that looks compellingly modern, but decades before it was supposed to exist? Specifically, I mean evidence of identity and political activism built around a positive interpretation of same-sex desire in the 1820s. The evidence, although fragmentary and […]
‘Pray the gay away’: The Catholic Church, Sexology and Sexuality in Italy
Chiara Beccalossi From Ireland’s recent referendum in support of same-sex marriage to the Australian Prime Minister’s adamant refusal to offer a conscience vote on the same issue, countries around the world are once again talking about homosexuality. But for all the positive steps taken towards granting LGBTI citizens the same rights as […]
The Case of the Sultry Mountie, or, We Need to Talk about Cecil
Justin Bengry I never knew my great uncle Cecil Bengry. Affectionately known as Cic’, this bachelor uncle seems to have lived in the background of other people’s lives. Even the pictures of Cic’ in old age that I found among my own grandfather’s (his brother) papers are faded and overexposed, their […]
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