In this long-awaited book, David M. Halperin revisits and refines the argument he put forward in his classic One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: that hetero- and homosexuality are not biologically constituted but are, instead, historically and culturally produced. How to Do the History of Homosexuality expands on this view, updates it, answers its critics, and makes greater allowance for continuities in the history of sexuality. Above all, Halperin offers a vigorous defense of the historicist approach to the construction of sexuality, an approach that sets a premium on the description of other societies in all their irreducible specificity and does not force them to fit our own conceptions of what sexuality is or ought to be.
Dealing both with male homosexuality and with lesbianism, this study imparts to the history of sexuality a renewed sense of adventure and daring. It recovers the radical design of Michel Foucault's epochal work, salvaging Foucault's insights from common misapprehensions and making them newly available to historians, so that they can once again provide a powerful impetus for innovation in the field. Far from having exhausted Foucault's revolutionary ideas, Halperin maintains that we have yet to come to terms with their startling implications. Exploring the broader significance of historicizing desire, Halperin questions the tendency among scholars to reduce the history of sexuality to a mere history of sexual classifications instead of a history of human subjectivity itself. Finally, in a theoretical tour de force, Halperin offers an altogether new strategy for approaching the history of homosexuality—one that can accommodate both ruptures and continuities, both identity and difference in sexual experiences across time and space.
Impassioned but judicious, controversial but deeply informed, How to Do the History of Homosexuality is a book rich in suggestive propositions as well as eye-opening details. It will prove to be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of sexuality.
David M. Halperin is the W. H. Auden Collegiate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. He is the author or coeditor of a number of books, and the cofounder and coeditor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
Very few academics have so changed a discipline that they can claim to demonstrate how to get it right, but Halperin (W.H. Auden Collegiate Professor, English, Univ. of Michigan) is one such scholar. This new collection of revised, previously published essays is not a "how to" but a demonstration of practice. Halperin's One Hundred Years of Homosexuality was a landmark for its nuanced interpretation of ancient Greek homosexuality that went beyond social constructionist/essentialist dichotomies. Here he takes his theoretical explanations further by arguing, among other things, that there are "genealogies" of homosexuality that show continuities over time and space. These, he claims, are what need to be studied and explained, and he cites examples that cover a wide berth in European history and culture. The sections on this topic are the most accessible to a general readership. The last chapter and the appendix are both part of a larger debate on the viability of distinctions between types of homosexuality and whether there is any point to such a debate. The primary audience for this book will be academics, who will be amply rewarded by its insights. Recommended for academic libraries.
David S. Azzolina, Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib., Philadelphia
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
