A pioneering study which has become an established classic in its field, Sex, Politics and Society provides a lucid and comprehensive analysis of the transformations of British sexual life from 1800 to the present. These changes are firmly located in the wider context of British social, political and cultural life, from industrialization, urbanisation and the impact of Empire and colonisation, through the experience of economic disruption, World Wars, the establishment of the welfare state, changing patterns of gender and the emergence of new sexual identities. This book also charts the rise of both progressive and conservative social movements, including feminism, LGBT activism, and fundamentalist movements. It is a history where the past continues to live in the present, and where the present provides ever more complex, and often controversial patterns of sexual life, with sexual and gender issues at the heart of contemporary politics.
Now fully revised and updated, this edition examines key new developments including:
the impact of globalisation, and the digital revolution;
gender nonconformity and the rise of transgender consciousness;
shifting family and relational patterns, and new forms of intimacy;
changes in reproductive technology including the debates on IVF and surrogacy;
new discourses of equality and sexual rights for LGBT people;
the irresistible rise of same-sex marriage;
the weakening of the heterosexual/ homosexual binary divide and the development of new lines of concern and divisions in the politics of sexuality.
Combining rich empirical detail with innovative theoretical insights, Sex, Politics and Society remains at the cutting edge of the subject, and this fourth edition will inspire and provoke a whole new generation of readers in history, sociology, social policy and critical sexuality studies.
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgements
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
Psychology and sex delinquency
12. The state and sexuality
Welfare and citizenship
Reproducing the population
Towards the complementary 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
The ebbing tide
Second-wave feminism
The challenge of gay liberation
The new moralism
The Thatcherite experiment
The AIDS crisis
15. The changing landscape of sexuality and gender
Intimate pleasures
Doing families
A gender revolution?
16. Diversity, agency and citizenship
The changing world of LGBT people
Becoming ordinary
Multicultural Britain?
Live and let love
Index
