How to do the History of Homosexuality - Hardcover

Halperin, David M

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226314472 ISBN 13: 9780226314471

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2002

Synopsis

Very Good, . x, 208 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.. . Includes bibliographical references and index.. . Very light wear on the top corner of dust wrapper, light staining on the front free end paper. Binding tight and square, contents clean and unmarked.

About this title

Review:

"In this subtle and provocative work, David M. Halperin carries his justly renowned scholarship about sexuality several steps further, articulating a view that balances a just appreciation of discontinuities with the recognition of connections across time and place. Refusing reductive characterizations, the sophisticated arguments in How to Do the History of Homosexuality emphasize heterogeneity and tension in the ancient world and our own, and the possibility of creative identification with the past." - Martha Nussbaum

Synopsis:

David M. Halperin is one of the most eminent thinkers in the world of gay and critical studies. In this new work, he revisits and refines the argument he set forth in "One Hundred Years of Homosexuality": the idea that both hetero- and homosexuality are not biologically determined but, instead, socially constructed. "How to Do the History of Homosexuality" builds on this seminal argument, answers its critics and makes greater allowances for continuities in the history of sexuality. Above all, Halperin offers a vigorous defence of the historicist approach, one that sets a premium on the description of other societies in all their specificity and otherness instead of forcing them to fit our own conceptions of what sexuality is or ought to be. Dealing with male homosexuality and lesbianism, this volume first recovers the radical design of Michel Foucault's approach to the history of sexuality. Halperin salvages Foucault's teachings from common misapprehensions and misreadings, then makes them newly available to historians as an impetus for innovation in the field.

Exploring the broader significance of historicizing desire, Halperin also questions the tendency among scholars to reduce sexuality to a mere series of classifications. Then, in a theoretical tour de force, he offers an altogether new strategy for approcaching the history of sexuality - one that rehabilitates the constructionist approach by readily acknowledging continuities across space and time. Controversial, impassioned and revelatory, "How to Do the History of Homosexuality" is a book that could only have been written by David M. Halperin. It should prove to be valuable reading for anyone interested in the history of sexuality.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0226314472
• ISBN 13: 9780226314471
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 216