Customer Reviews

The Geography of Perversion: Male-To-Male Sexual Behavior Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750-1918

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Besides being an excellent exploration of how European scholars and visitors have defined and understood same-sex passions in other cultures, and how the framework for understanding same-sex passion has changed over the centuries, the book is also an excellent English language source for many obscure passages here-to-fore only available in German, French or Italian. Not for the casual reader, but for someone who has already down some reading on the subject, The Geography of Perversion is indispensible.

Rudi C. Bleys' Geography of Perversion covers the entire globe, two centuries and hundreds of original sources. It is a very thorough study concerning the examination of the way the West (whether travelers, colonizers, conquerors or anthropologists, and often a combination of these) viewed the peoples with which it came into contact. The examples ranged from Japan and China to the Americas to Africa and into the Middle East. It was fascinating to see how the perceptions changed over time, not because of changes in these countries but because of the needs of the West. The book is a very challenging read and is probably not suited for the casual reader of history or gay studies and it often had the feel of PhD thesis. It is an important work, though, that can be rewarding for the serious reader.

Scrupulously researched and elegantly argued with both clarity and impressive theoretical sophistication, this book may not make easy reading for the general public, but it is worth the effort. Bleys challenges many of the prevailing political, social, and academic commonplaces about male-to-male sexual behavior, and his evidence is for the most part irrefutable. The book calls for nothing less than a wholesale rethinking of notions such as "sexual identity" and the lays the groundwork for what would have to be a new politics of liberation.