Queer Sexuality

The category of the “normal” in sexual life is recent, contested, and far from neutral. These books approach that category from several directions — historical, medical, theological, philosophical, mythological, anarchist, and utopian — tracking how desire has been classified, condemned, pathologised, tolerated, and theorised across very different social worlds. The questions they raise are not only about sexuality: they are about how any society draws the line between the licit and the deviant, and who bears the cost of that line being drawn where it is.

By investigating the genealogy of sexual identity, this selection explores the shift from “acts” to “identities,” examining how the modern individual became a “sexed” subject defined by internal drives. These texts challenge the assumption of a linear progress from repression to liberation, suggesting instead that power operates through the very categorisation and naming of desire. Not all of them accept the analytic stance that genealogy requires: Evans’s Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture constructs a counter-history in which sexual dissidence is not a nineteenth-century invention but the survival of something pre-Christian and far older — a mythological argument whose historical claims are contested but whose political function is irreducible. Landstreicher pushes further still: where Foucault diagnoses the apparatus and Muñoz imagines escape into futurity, Landstreicher refuses both the diagnostic stance and the deferral — arguing that the refusal of imposed identity is not a politics to be organised but a practice to be lived now, without waiting for conditions that power will never willingly provide. From the rigid taxonomies of nineteenth-century psychiatry to the radical possibilities of queer futurity, anarchist self-possession, and faerie consciousness, the collection examines how the body serves as a site of both intense state regulation and profound personal resistance. How have shifting definitions of the “natural” been used to consolidate political power, police social boundaries, and envision alternative ways of being in the world?