Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Halperin, David M.

Titel

Is There a History of Sexuality?

Ist Teil von

• History and theory :Studies in the philosophy of history, 1989-10, Vol.28 (3), p.257-274

Ort / Verlag

Malden, MA: Wesleyan University

Erscheinungsjahr

1989

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• An attempt is made to trace the divergence between ancient & modern undestandings of sexual experience, focusing on the paradigm of sexuality as autonomous -- a separate sphere of existence -- vs that of sexuality functioning as a principle of individuation in human natures. Classical Athenian culture & other more recent non-Western cultures experience sexuality as something public & social, not restricted to an individual body as its cause, but as an effect of the social body. The interpretation of sexual preferences for the persons of the same over those of the opposite sex in ancient Mediterranean societies, as exemplified in the Fourth Book of the De morbis chronicis (On Chronic Diseases), a mid-fifth-century Latin translation by Caelius Aurelianus of the Greek physician Soranus, shows no relationship between a person's sexual tastes & constitutive features of his/her personality. Chronic preferences for the same sex or for both sexes are interpreted as extensions of (in the case of men), or as deviations from (in the case of women), the proper phallocentric, productive sexual practices, & not as a set of differently structured sexual desires, as in modern Western interpretations. These sexual attitudes suggest that the modern Western views of sexuality obfuscate the division of the society into dominant & subordinate groups, & consequently neglect to divide society into objects & subjects of sexual desire (which is emphasized in Soranus's inquiry). Modern historical science should study the psychological processes whereby sexual desire & its poetics are constructed, mass-produced, & distributed. 50 References. A. Devic