How to Do the History of Homosexuality [Hardcover]

David M. Halperin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 15, 2002

In this long-awaited book, David M. Halperin revisits and refines the argument he put forward in his classic One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: that hetero- and homosexuality are not biologically constituted but are, instead, historically and culturally produced. How to Do the History of Homosexuality expands on this view, updates it, answers its critics, and makes greater allowance for continuities in the history of sexuality. Above all, Halperin offers a vigorous defense of the historicist approach to the construction of sexuality, an approach that sets a premium on the description of other societies in all their irreducible specificity and does not force them to fit our own conceptions of what sexuality is or ought to be.

Dealing both with male homosexuality and with lesbianism, this study imparts to the history of sexuality a renewed sense of adventure and daring. It recovers the radical design of Michel Foucault's epochal work, salvaging Foucault's insights from common misapprehensions and making them newly available to historians, so that they can once again provide a powerful impetus for innovation in the field. Far from having exhausted Foucault's revolutionary ideas, Halperin maintains that we have yet to come to terms with their startling implications. Exploring the broader significance of historicizing desire, Halperin questions the tendency among scholars to reduce the history of sexuality to a mere history of sexual classifications instead of a history of human subjectivity itself. Finally, in a theoretical tour de force, Halperin offers an altogether new strategy for approaching the history of homosexuality—one that can accommodate both ruptures and continuities, both identity and difference in sexual experiences across time and space.

Impassioned but judicious, controversial but deeply informed, How to Do the History of Homosexuality is a book rich in suggestive propositions as well as eye-opening details. It will prove to be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of sexuality.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Very few academics have so changed a discipline that they can claim to demonstrate how to get it right, but Halperin (W.H. Auden Collegiate Professor, English, Univ. of Michigan) is one such scholar. This new collection of revised, previously published essays is not a "how to" but a demonstration of practice. Halperin's One Hundred Years of Homosexuality was a landmark for its nuanced interpretation of ancient Greek homosexuality that went beyond social constructionist/essentialist dichotomies. Here he takes his theoretical explanations further by arguing, among other things, that there are "genealogies" of homosexuality that show continuities over time and space. These, he claims, are what need to be studied and explained, and he cites examples that cover a wide berth in European history and culture. The sections on this topic are the most accessible to a general readership. The last chapter and the appendix are both part of a larger debate on the viability of distinctions between types of homosexuality and whether there is any point to such a debate. The primary audience for this book will be academics, who will be amply rewarded by its insights. Recommended for academic libraries.
David S. Azzolina, Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib., Philadelphia
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"In this subtle and provocative work, David M. Halperin carries his justly renowned scholarship about sexuality several steps further, articulating a view that balances a just appreciation of discontinuities with the recognition of connections across time and place. Refusing reductive characterizations, the sophisticated arguments in How to Do the History of Homosexuality emphasize heterogeneity and tension in the ancient world and our own, and the possibility of creative identification with the past." - Martha Nussbaum

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 216 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (November 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226314472
• ISBN-13: 978-0226314471
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #743,072 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #90 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Nonfiction > Sexuality

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Demand for Historicism, November 8, 2003

By A Customer

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This review is from: How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Hardcover)

...

Next to the devastatingly landmark work of George Chauncey at the University of Chicago and the recently race-conscious examinations of John D'Emilio at the University of IL at Chicago, Professor Halperin's books--and this sometimes incisively polemical yet well-substantiated new methodological contribition--stand as the most rigorous historical inquiries into the history of gay male sexuality today.

The previous negative review shows just how contentious the notion of "doing" "homosexual" history is. However, Halperin's innovations and arguments demand attention: he argues for archival excavations of sexualities (plural) and he does not take for granted the fact that one vision of "homosexuals" was the same in all world contexts.

Today, current and future generations would do well to fuse historical and anthropological methods--or a greater attention to cultural development and entanglements both synchronically and diachronically--than only to focus upon history in terms of monological, cause-effect-bound arguments. But Halperin's approach, essentially, works toward this interdisciplinarity.

Without a doubt, this book is excellent.

4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Challenging Proposal, October 10, 2005

By 

E. Garcia (Hialeah, Florida USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Paperback)

There seems to be some confusion regarding who David Halperin is and what he has written. Indeed, some seem unaware that he has written other books, at all. Halperin's Ph.D. is in Classics, as in all things ancient Greek and Roman, not English or Queer Theory. He has been a Classics professor in a Department of Classics. I once had a Classics professor who had been his advisee as either an undergraduate or graduate student, I don't recall which. He gravitated to Queer Theory only sometime thereafter. He has written a book largely about the history of male-male sex in antiquity, _One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays in Greek Love_, which is both well-known and standard reading in the field, in which he largely follows Kenneth Dover. As far as I know, and I am surmising from what I have read, he now teaches in an English department only because: (a) he has become somewhat disenchanted with sexual-identity politics in Classics departments, (b) he is now much more interested in Queer Theory, though he continues to address antiquity in the occasionally plublished essay, some of which have also become standard in the field, (c) many Queer Theorists have gravitated to English departments, and, (d) as a Classics Ph.D., he is well qualified to teach ancient literature.

Though I choose not to adopt Halperin's suggestions in this book in their entirety, I do see a very great deal worth either adopting or rigorously considering in this book. I particularly enjoy his treatment of the controversies and shady dealings surrounding Bernadette Brooten and Amy Richlin.

6 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another step forward for Gay/Lesbian Studies, September 9, 2004

By 

Robby (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Paperback)

Halperin in this new book has adopted Eva Sedjweck's criticism of his early work, "One Hundred Years of Homosexuality." Halperin has now abandoned his prior simplification of constructionism. Halperin's main aim in this work is to give a historical grounding to the insight of Sedjweck's "Epistemology of the Closet." It aims at providing a schema that explains the relation between the category of our modern homosexuality and those of the ancient world. For Halperin, there are four ancient categores: effeminacy, sodomy, freindship, and inversion. By foucing attention on these categories, Halperin shows the irreducibility of each one to the other by arguing that a term like homosexuality is not capable of explaining every instance of male-to-male encounters and that a transhistorical notion of homosexuality will ultimately fail to account for the varied expressions of same-sex acts before our era.

Forget the negative reviews, this is a superb work of both ingenuity and keenness.