Sex, Politics & Society, 3rd edition
The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800
By Jeffrey Weeks
December 2012
Pearson Education
Distributed by Trans-Atlantic Publications
ISBN: 9781408248300
445 pages
$57.50 Paper Original
Sex, Politics and Society is as much a history of changing patterns of family life, gender, domesticity and intimacy as of erotic life. It firmly places what had traditionally been seen as marginal (notably homosexuality) within the broad stream of sexualities.
J. Weeks strongly emphasises the historical construction of human sexualities and identities, and does so with reference to social context and social change – industrialization, urbanisation, imperialism, the rise of the Welfare state, the emergence of new social movements such as feminism and gay liberation, the development of new forms of social conservatism, and changing legal, medical and informal modes of sexual regulation. In Sex, Politics and Society J. Weeks continues to stress the significance of historical construction, an approach made popular by his previous edition.
Contents:
Acknowledgements
Publisher’s acknowledgements
Preface
1. Sexuality and the historian
Introduction
Histories of sexuality
Sexuality and power
Sexuality and the politics of history
The making of ‘modern’ sexuality
2. ‘That damned morality’: sex in Victorian ideology
Victorian sexuality: myths and meanings
Emergent patterns
The domestic ideology
Sex and class
3. The sacramental family: middle-class men, women and children
Masculinity and femininity
Birth control
Childhood
4. Sexuality and the labouring classes
Middle-class myths, working-class realities
Traditions, illegitimacy and proletarianisation
The patterns of family life
Respectability and its discontents
5. The public and the private: moral regulation in the Victorian period
Forms of moral regulation
Private morality, public vice
Reform or control?
6. The construction of homosexuality
Homosexuality: concepts and consequences
The sins of sodom
Moral, legal and medical regulation
Identities and ways of life
Intimate lives
7. The population question in the early twentieth century
Population politics
Maternalism
Eugenics
The influence of eugenics
8. The theorisation of sex
A new continent of knowledge
Sex, science and society
Havelock Ellis and sex research
The impact of Freud
9. Feminism and socialism
Sexual radicalism and its limits
Feminism and sexuality
The morals of socialism
10. Sex psychology and birth control
Sex psychology
International movements
Parenthood and birth control
11. Towards a conservative modernity
A ‘glorious unfolding’?
Domesticity and family life
Protecting purity p;
Psychology and sex delinquency
12. The state and sexuality
Welfare and citizenship
Reproducing the population
Towards the companionate marriage
‘Wolfenden’ and sexual liberalism
13. The permissive moment
The transition
‘Permissiveness’
Youth
Women
Ideologies
The political moment
The limits of permissiveness
14. Personal politics and moral conservatism &nbs
The ebbing tide
Second-wave feminism
The challenge of gay liberation
The new moralism
The Thatcherite experiment
The AIDS crisis
15. A new world?
The changing sexual landscape
Intimate pleasures
Doing families
A gender revolution?
Becoming ordinary: the changing world of LGBT people
Multicultural Britain?
Values, agency and citizenship
Index
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