Introduction

Abstract

The essays in this collection explore both new perspectives on the histories of bodies and sexualities and issues that are already the subject of major historiographical debate.1 These include shifts in understandings about the sexed body (from one sex to two sexes) sparked by Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, as well as new research into more recently emerging areas of study and debate in the field of ‘nonnormative’ sexualities, or ‘perversions’.2 One of the main aims of this volume is to emphasize the historical distinctiveness of ideas about bodies, sex and desires at the same time as demonstrating the notable continuities that have existed over time: as has been well noted, ‘Only by placing bodies in their (discursive and historical) contexts can they be understood.’3 Ideas such as Laqueur’s positing of a shift from an early modern conceptualization of the body as one that emphasized commensurability to a modern understanding that is characterized by difference, also highlight the tendency to look for ‘turning points’ in history when significant changes in attitudes and thinking about bodies and sexualities can be identified as having taken place.4 One of the most hotly debated questions then becomes about the timing of such changes: was the key period for this alteration in understanding about the body the eighteenth century, or did earlier periods actually share similar ideas? Laura Gowing has noted perceptions of the body encompassing both sameness and difference in the seventeenth century and Michael Stolberg has sketched out ‘a broad movement toward a much more explicit sexual dimorphism that encompassed skeletal and sexual anatomy alike’ in the sixteenth century, to conclude that ‘the shift toward explicit, anatomically based sexual dimorphism took place some two hundred years earlier than his [Laqueur’s] account suggests’.5