Customer Reviews

Homosexualities (Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The conclusion of this book synthesizes what the hundreds of details and citations have been about. Murray sees homosexuality around the world throughout recorded history asa being age-stratified, gender stratified and egalitarian. In addition, he wants to demonstrate that the social construction of these activities did not eliminate the desire of the pleasure of them, asa some researchers try to maintain.

The first two types of homosexualities predominate history. Some of these stratifications become sacralized in the society's religious foundations. The egalitarian type is more pertinent to the 20th century.

What Murray accomplishes in this book is a description of a wide variety of meaning in homosexual activity. There are different constructions throughout history and even within a particular society on the meaning, purpose and acceptance of certain acts.

This is a well-researched book. For the creative writer there is a mine of information from which to use the imagination. What is so important to understand is that 20th and 21st century criticism often assumes the terminologies more recently developed. Murray and others successfully demonstrate that one has to be more discrete in interpreting literature and art from ancient cultures.

What is fascinating is that throughout the world the same kind of age stratified or gender stratified acitivties have similar meanings. Each culture has particular meanings or levels of acceptance. But somehow humans have found meaning in what today many would call perversions or sickness. Who knows best?

This is a very recommendable and readable book, although it contains not so few mistakes, especially orthography/misspellings.

But, it sounds a little bit strange for us Japaneses the title "Homosexualities", since we didn't have such an odd term which meant both male/male love and female/female love,---- we had a different word which meant male/male love "nanshoku", and did male/female love "nyoshoku", and sapphic love "toichi-haichi"respectively. Of course we don't have religious or superstitional prejudice against both same-sex eroticism and different-sex one at all.

Stephen O. Murray
Homosexualities

(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000) 507 pages
(ISBN: 0-226-55194-6; hardcover)
(Library of Congress call number: HQ76.25.M89 2000)

A comprehensive survey of all forms of homosexuality
in every place on Earth and in all periods of history.
Homosexual relationships are organized into three categories:
1. Age-structured homosexualities
--in which the age-difference is an important element
in the sexual relationship, eg an older male with a younger male.
2. Gender-stratified homosexualities
--in which one sex-partner takes on some aspects of the other sex,
such as a man being somewhat like a female in dress,
behavior, hair, language, occupation.
This status as a quasi-woman is part of the sexual relationship.
3. Egalitarian homosexualities
--in which both sexual partners have the same sexual status.

The author has done a wonderful job of collecting information
from obscure sub-cultures of the ancient and modern world
that most of us have never heard of.
This demonstrates that homosexual relationships
are found almost everywhere.
But because this is a work of anthropology and sociology,
rather than psychology or sexology,
the author does not attempt to explain homosexuality at all.
We get almost no account of the interior experience of being homosexual.

This book will stand for many years as the most comprehensive collection
of facts about homosexuality in every culture on earth.
Many quotations and a few pictures illustrate
how homosexual relationships were conducted and understood
in the various places where same-sex relationships are found.

If you would like to discover other approaches,
search the Internet for the following bibliography:
"Best Books on Sexual Orientation".

James Leonard Park, author of
Imprinted Sexual Fantasies: A New Key for Sexology.