Brave and fascinating, as well as important . . . . A scholarly and
comprehensive contribution to our growing knowledge of the history
of homosexuality.
--Jeffrey Weeks
Recent years have seen enormous attention devoted to the history
of sexuality in the Western world. But how has the West conceived
of non-western societies been influenced by these other traditions?
The Geography of Perversion and Desire is the first historical
study to demonstrate convincingly that the representation cultural
otherness, as found in European thought from the Enlightenment
through modern times, is closely interrelated with modern
constructions of homosexual identity. Travel reports and early
ethnographic accounts of cross-gender roles in the Americas,
Africa, and Asia corroborated the 18th century construction of the
sodomite identity. Similarly, the late 19th-century construction of
the third sex provoked much anthropological speculation on to
genetic versus societal nature of male-to-male sexual relations, a
precursor of current essentialist versus constructionist debates.
An invaluable contribution to the ongoing debates on cultural and
sexual otherness, this volume unravels how the categories of the
modern sodomite and later homosexual were inextricably intertwined
with essentialist definitions of racial identity. In encyclopedic
detail, Bleys traces how cross-cultural records were collected,
created, structured, manipulated, excerpted, reformulated, and
omitted in interaction with changing beliefs about male-to-male
sexuality. Focusing in such subjects as puritanism, sodomy, and
ethnicity in colonial North America; cross-gender behavior and
hermaphrodditism; the semiotics of genitalia; andthe parameters of
sexual science, The Geography of Perversion and Desire is a
breathtakingly thorough, cross cultural history of sexual
categories.
Drawing on travel reports and early ethnographic accounts, The
Geography of Perversion and Desire presents the first historical
study to demonstrate convincingly that the representation of
cultural otherness, as found in European thought from the
Enlightenment to modern times, is closely interrelated with modern
constructions of homosexual identity.
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