THREE FUNDAMENTAL IMPULSES HAVE NOURISHED the field of the history of sexuality in modern Europe over the last thirty years. The original and most powerful of these was, in a sense, archaeological: the effort to excavate the material and imaginative universe of a past moment and reconstruct how human beings in a particular time and location experienced and made sense of sexual matters. The second major impulse, which began to gather force in the mid-1990s even as the archaeological impulse continued apace, could perhaps best be called integrationist (in the most positive sense of that word). This impulse took as axiomatic that there was no major phenomenon in modern European history that could not be more fully and deeply understood if attention to the history of sexuality was brought to bear on the study, from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution to industrialization and European imperialism in Africa and Asia, to tsarism and Nazism, to post-World War II "Americanization" and the aftermath of communism. The third impulse has developed even more recently, as the density of information and conceptual insights accumulated over the years by the archaeologists and integrationists is finally making it possible for scholars to pursue projects that are comparativist. Having studied an ever wider array of national cultures-from the initial core of British and French and then also German and Swiss history to the histories of Italy, the Soviet Union, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, and Ireland, along with occasional, albeit still tentative, forays into Belgium, -historians of sexuality now find it feasible to use cross-cultural comparisons and connections within Europe, including transnational flows of individuals, ideas, and movements, as a tool for challenging facile presumptions about causation and for thinking through more clearly than before the combinations of factors that determine changes in sexual cultures.The archaeological impulse was unquestionably inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, and it often remained deliberately agnostic about the causes of change. Nonetheless, the archaeologists were all the more profoundly historical for precisely that reason. They began from the idea that one purpose of history was to denaturalize the present, that sexuality itself had a history, and that all prior assumptions about I thank the anonymous readers for the AHR , audiences at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania (with special thanks to George Chauncey, Joanne Meyerowitz, Kathleen Brown, and Benjamin Nathans), as well as the following, who brought their critical expertise and sharp eyes to bear:
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In Cold War Freud Dagmar Herzog uncovers the astonishing array of concepts of human selfhood which circulated across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. Against the backdrop of Nazism and the Holocaust, the sexual revolution, feminism, gay rights, and anticolonial and antiwar activism, she charts the heated battles which raged over Freud's legacy. From the postwar US to Europe and Latin America, she reveals how competing theories of desire, anxiety, aggression, guilt, trauma and pleasure emerged and were then transformed to serve both conservative and subversive ends in a fundamental rethinking of the very nature of the human self and its motivations. Her findings shed new light on psychoanalysis' enduring contribution to the enigma of the relationship between nature and culture, and the ways in which social contexts enter into and shape the innermost recesses of individual psyches.
This original book brings a fascinating and accessible new account of the tumultuous history of sexuality in Europe from the waning of Victorianism to the collapse of Communism and the rise of European Islam. Although the twentieth century is often called 'the century of sex' and seen as an era of increasing liberalization, Dagmar Herzog instead emphasizes the complexities and contradictions in sexual desires and behaviours, the ambivalences surrounding sexual freedom, and the difficulties encountered in securing sexual rights. Incorporating the most recent scholarship on a broad range of conceptual problems and national contexts, the book investigates the shifting fortunes of marriage and prostitution, contraception and abortion, queer and straight existence. It analyzes sexual violence in war and peace, the promotion of sexual satisfaction in fascist and democratic societies, the role of eugenics and disability, the politicization and commercialization of sex, and processes of secularization and religious renewal.
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