L'histoire contemporaine des sexualités en France

Abstract

Since the history of sexuality today is rather fashionable, it is probably time to look at the record. There are three historiographical origins of this growing field : social history, women's history and history of homosexuality. The relatively limited number of areas that are the most dealt with are prostitution, the couple, romantic education, pornography, rape and homosexuality. The relative marginalization of the scholars is brought up and several recurrent problems are pointed out : the difficulty of dealing with sexuality directly, the lack of epistemological thinking and the complexity of the relations between scientific knowledge and activism.