About the book, the Cambridge World History of Sexualities, edited by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks and Mathew Kuefler, published by Cambridge University Press.
Sexuality—the range of acts related to erotic desire, romance, and reproduction, and the meanings attached to them—lies at the centre of human existence. This has been as true throughout human history as it is today.
The women’s and gay liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s inspired the first professional historians of sexuality.
From the customs of marriage and family life to rules about inheritance and status, from the pronouncements of philosophers and religious leaders to the lived daily experience of persons across society, from the global impact of commercialized sex to local patterns and regulations on sexual diversity—sexuality touches all areas of life.
Sexuality in Historical Writing
Historians have included discussions of sexuality and its impact on human history in their writings since antiquity. They often used sexual customs or actions to highlight differences between their own culture and others, praise or censure those they were writing about, or provide the moral guidance that was so often a part of history.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, advocates of rights for women and sexual minorities sought to uncover the historical roots of oppression and to find exceptions to patriarchal and homophobic traditions.
Anthropologists and social theorists also linked the varied sexual customs of modern peoples with patterns derived from the past. In the first half of the twentieth century, social historians focused on marriage and kinship in their examinations of the lives of ordinary people, and a few even concentrated explicitly on sexual issues.
The women’s and gay liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s inspired the first professional historians of sexuality. Many of them specialized in the modern histories of Europe and the United States, and they theorized mainly from the modern Western experience. This is beginning to change: the field has expanded to incorporate premodern histories and histories in all regions of the world, becoming increasingly transhistorical and global.
World and global history have encouraged broad cross-cultural comparisons and the study of longue durée trends, developments now also seen in the history of sexuality. Historians can now move beyond concentrated specializations in one time and place to create a more comprehensive image of sexuality throughout human history, which is what the Cambridge World History of Sexualities is designed to do.
The Cambridge Histories
The Cambridge Histories have long presented authoritative multi-volume overviews of historical topics, with chapters written by varied specialists. The first of these, the Cambridge Modern History, published between 1902 and 1912 in fourteen volumes, served as the model for those that followed, which included the seven-volume Cambridge Medieval History (1911-1936), the twelve-volume Cambridge Ancient History (1924-1939), and the thirteen-volume New Cambridge Modern History (1957-1979).
Cambridge University Press described the Cambridge Modern History as “a comprehensive history of the world,” although in both versions only a handful of chapters out of several hundred concerned individuals, groups, or polities outside of Europe and North America. This was not surprising in 1912, but the fact that in 1979 Europe would still be understood as “the world” and as the source of all that was modern highlights the power and longevity of the perspective we have since come to call “Eurocentric.”
Cambridge University Press began to address the lack of other parts of world in the Cambridge Histories with multi-volume works on a wider range of countries and regions, beginning with the six-volume Cambridge History of India (1922-1937). More recently, the press has added more specialized multi-volume works on religions, events, themes, and genres. A few of these were explicitly “world” histories, such as the Cambridge World History of Food (2000) and the Cambridge World History of Slavery (2011).
In 2015, the press published an actual general world history, titled just that: The Cambridge World History. This was only seven volumes, so in no way “comprehensive,” but it did cover much of the globe as well as all human history, that is, not simply that since the development of written records. (Full disclosure: Merry was the editor-in-chief of this, and the co-editor of two of its volumes.)
Conceptualization
The editors at Cambridge University Press decided in 2018 that the time had come to add a history of sexuality to the series, as this was now an established, respected, popular, and growing subfield. They initially proposed one to three volumes, so again, not comprehensive. We agreed to edit it.
Both of us are historians of premodern eras. We recognize that “sexuality” is a modern word, and that some historians choose to avoid it when discussing earlier periods, arguing that is anachronistic, as premodern sex was generally understood as related to marriage and domestic life, or religion and morality, rather than as an independent category. Investigations of the past are always informed by more recent understandings and concerns, however, and using modern concepts can often provide great insights.
We also recognize that “sexuality” is a Western invention and may not accurately reflect the cultural diversity even of modern societies across the globe. Yet we did not wish to draw too firm a line between the systems of sexual knowledge in modern European and European-influenced societies and those of other human traditions. For example, we rejected the sharp distinction that the French historian of sexuality and philosopher Michel Foucault drew between scientia sexualis (sexual science) in the West and ars erotica (erotic arts) in the rest of the world.
Thus we followed the editors of the central journal in the field, who chose the title Journal of the History of Sexuality when it began publication in 1990, but have included articles that span geographic and temporal boundaries. Our first decision was to choose the plural “Sexualities” in the title to signal the enormous diversity on all matters relating to sex across time and space.
We quickly agreed we wanted chapters at varying geographic and chronological scales, providing depth of coverage along with breadth of vision. We wanted some that covered a single topic across thousands of years of human history and ranged across world regions, some that focused on a single intellectual and cultural tradition across many centuries, and others that examined only one location in a particular period. And, as premodernists, we were eager to explore the notion of “modern” sexuality and the issues surrounding sexuality that emerged only or differently in the modern period. So we needed chapters on those.
Ultimately we ended up proposing four volumes, with 90 chapters: 1. General Overviews, which also included historiographical essays about research trends and key figures in the field; 2. Systems of Thought and Belief, focusing on the world’s regions and cultural and intellectual traditions, ancient to modern; 3. Sites of Knowledge and Practice, targeting specific times and places with generous historical records to more closely investigate the lived experience of individuals and groups; 4. Modern Sexualities, examining the intersections of sexuality and the forces, ideas, and events that have shaped the modern world.
Challenges
For the Cambridge Histories and similar collections, moving from a book proposal to a book means finding authors who are both able and willing to write the chapters you have in mind. This is a global history, and it was important to us that the contributors work in varied scholarly disciplines, albeit within a historical perspective, be as geographically diverse as possible, and also range in gender and sexual identity and in age.
We developed lists for every chapter: some lists had only one person, the only one we knew who could possibly write the chapter, and some had many, as the topic or place had been studied by a number of scholars. We began inviting authors in January 2020 and were pleased at how quickly we were able to get a good number of “yeses” from the scholars who were first or second on our lists.
And then things fell apart.
In March 2020, as you may recall, no one was thinking much about their writing schedules. We stopped inviting authors for a while. By June, what the pandemic might mean was clearer, and we tentatively sent out a few more invitations. Alison Downham Moore, who had originally said no to writing the chapter on Freud, asked if we’d found an author yet, as the conferences she thought she would be preparing papers for had all been cancelled, and she wasn’t going anywhere for a while from the University of Western Sydney. We hadn’t, and she wrote it. Other authors had a similar response: I might as well, as I’m stuck at home.
The ninety-two authors live and work in more than twenty different countries.
The pandemic created more problems than solutions, however. Some authors had to withdraw on short notice, sometimes too late in the process to replace them. We lost the chapters on slavery, Indigenous Australian sexualities, LGBTQ+ rights and activism in the modern world, and sex in film, television, and digital media. We each wrote a chapter ourselves that we were not expecting to and ghost-wrote sections of a few others to keep the project on track. We encouraged some to bring in co-authors to help them complete their chapters.
Challenges were not all pandemic related. We asked most authors to include cross-cultural and cross-temporal comparisons, no matter the topic. This came fairly easily to some, but asking authors to write about times and places they were unfamiliar with made others uncomfortable, and in a few chapters we had to provide the comparative material ourselves. We had to remind authors they were writing for a global interdisciplinary audience who might know little about the topic of their chapter. Thus every name needed a brief identifier, even those everyone “should” know.
Other challenges resulted from the differing perspectives of the scholars on the topics included. We recommended using “sex” when referring to behaviours and “sexuality” when discussing ideologies attached to sexual practices. But many scholars preferred to use only “sex,” to highlight the distinction between historical acts and modern interpretations of them, and some wanted to use only “sexuality,” to emphasize the unescapable presence of these modern interpretations in our understandings of the past.
Likewise, we suggested LGBTQ+ as a convenient shorthand for a variety of gender and sexual identities. Yet, as all are aware, modern labels are only awkwardly used for historical individuals, and we cannot be sure what meanings historical persons attached to their sexual activities. So some of the same individuals appear as “she” in Leila Rupp’s chapter on desire, love and sex between women and as “they” in Jen Manion’s chapter on trans and gender variant sexualities in history.
Political Issues
Contemporary politics created other challenges, as sexuality has only become more fraught in the years since we began the project. Some authors had to add sections during the editing process—both Adrian Thatcher and Darshi Thoradeniya added the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade to their respective chapters on Christianity and reproductive rights. We worried that Ting Guo, who wrote the chapter on twentieth-century Shanghai, might suffer consequences for some of the things she included, as she teaches in Hong Kong.
Another author took a position with a human-rights agency but asked that we leave this out of her author bio. We know the books might be prohibited in certain countries or banned from libraries as dangerous to younger readers, not the normal response to Cambridge Histories. All of this led us to dedicate the book “to those around the world who faced or still face persecution because of their perceived or actual sex, gender, sexuality, and/or gender identity.”
Political developments had the greatest impact on both the chapter content and the author’s life for Andrea Pető, who wrote the final chapter in the collection, “Sexuality Under Attack Now.” She updated the opening and closing paragraph with every draft, as there was always some new hate-filled and regressive law, speech, or website. (The final version begins with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech in February 2022 announcing the start of the war against Ukraine and referring to his country as a protector of “traditional values,” part of what Pető describes as a deliberately constructed “new Cold War” on sexual rights.)
Pető is a professor at Central European University, so as she was writing the chapter she was also relocating from Budapest to Vienna, after the restrictive measures of Viktor Orbán’s government led CEU to move most of its operations to Vienna. Thus Pető was living what she was writing about.
Ultimately the volumes were slightly different than we had envisioned, but they met most of our objectives. The ninety-two authors live and work in more than twenty different countries, and their backgrounds and education represent probably twice that number. Their voices are those of distinguished senior scholars, mid-career researchers, and up-and-coming scholars, thus those who have shaped the field’s history and those who will shape it long into the future.
In addition to professional historians, some contributors are trained and teach in anthropology, archaeology, cultural studies, social sciences, languages and literatures, religious studies, theology, philosophy, area studies, communications, education, women’s studies, and gender studies. The history of sexuality has always been a diverse and interdisciplinary field, and we hope that this project captures this reality, as well as the reality of the times we live in.
