Histories of Sexuality in Australia from Federation to the Pill
Buch, Englisch, 340 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-4438-2736-2
Verlag: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Let’s Talk About Sex is an inclusive history, surveying multiple and interwoven forms of sexuality, desire, pleasure, regulation and resistance. It begins with the long Victorian period: the hidden desires of women and the “hydraulic” sexual needs of men, both in the cities and on the frontier. It moves across the decades, considering heterosexuality, homosexuality, lesbians and nascent ideas about queer and sexual difference. Lisa Featherstone highlights the tensions of the ages: venereal disease, homophobia, birth control, rape and child sexual assault. She analyses the ways non-normative sexuality was constructed as evil and perverse, but also how men and women responded to this pathologising of their desires.
Let’s Talk About Sex provides a fascinating account of sex, gender, age and race, across the formative years of Australian society.