1st Edition

Sources and Methods in the History of Sexuality

Edited By Anna Clark, Elizabeth W. Williams Copyright 2025
230 Pages 8 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

230 Pages 8 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

230 Pages 8 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Sources and Methods in the History of Sexuality outlines some of the challenges of retracing sexual acts, identities, and desires in the past, and shows how historians have responded to these methodological challenges with ingenuity and creativity. The volume acknowledges that the history of sexuality poses particularly interesting challenges in relation to sources due the peculiar nature of... Read more

Chapter 1: Introduction: Sources and Methods in the History of Sexuality

Anna Clark and Elizabeth W. Williams

 

Part I: Contested Lineages

 

Chapter 2: Queer History/Queer Memory: The Case of Alan Turing

Laura Doan

 

Chapter 3: Queer Methods and Trans Historicism: The Case of Female Husbands

Jen Manion

 

Part II: Deceptive Discourses

 

Chapter 4: Methodological Pitfalls in the History of Pornography

Lisa Z. Sigel

 

Chapter 5: Ethnopornography as Methodology, Critique, and Play

Pete Sigal and Zeb Tortorici

 

Chapter 6: The Secret of Sex and the Uses of Ethnography for African History

Corrie Decker

 

Part III: Decoding Sources

 

Chapter 7: Reading between the Lines: Finding Queer Lives in Newspapers

George Robb

 

Chapter 8: Prying in the Secrets of Nature: Reading Aristotle’s Masterpiece

Mary E. Fissell

 

Chapter 9: An Enviable Life or Worse than Death?  Reconstructing Women’s Experience of Marriage and Sex in Classical Athens”

James Robson

 

Part IV: Reading against the State

 

Chapter 10: The Criminal Justice System Calendars of Prisoners: Undertaking Quantitative Analyses of Trends, Actions, and Agency in the Prosecution of Inter-male Sex in England, 1850-1970

J. G. M. Evans and K. G. Valente

 

Chapter 11: Sources and Methods in the History of Abortion

Cara Delay

 

Chapter 12: Archival Scraps, Collective Biography: Sex Workers and the Medieval Mediterranean

Susan McDonough

 

Part V: Secret Selves

 

Chapter 13: Diaries as a Source for the History of Sexuality: Samuel Pepys, Anne Lister and Roger Casement

Anna Clark

 

Chapter 14: Reading Queer History through the Private Album

James A. Kaser

 

Part VI: Creating Alternative Archives

 

Chapter 15: LGBTQ+ Archives and Public History Projects in Mexico, 1976 to Present

Víctor M. Macíaz-González

 

Chapter 16: Performance and Textuality: Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases Exhibition as Visual Archive

Elliot James

 

 

 

 

Biography

Anna Clark is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. Her recent books include Alternative Histories of the Self: A Cultural History of Sexuality and Secrets (2017) and Desire: A History of Sexuality in Europe (2008, second edition 2019). Her articles concern human rights and humanitarianism, Anne Lister and lesbian history, domestic violence, and imperialism.

 

Elizabeth W. Williams is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on histories of race, gender, and sexuality in Britain and the British Empire. Publications include Primitive Normativity: Race, Sexuality, and Temporality in Colonial Kenya (2024).