Fordham University
Department of History
History 6662: Sexuality in America
Doron Ben-Atar
benatar@fordham.edu
This graduate colloquium will address selected topics in the history and historiography of
sexuality in America from the colonial era to the late 20th century. The readings focus on
the relationship between social, cultural and political changes and sexual norms and
behavior. Particular attention is paid to changing standards of sexual morality and their
effect upon the structure and organization of the American family and attitudes toward
physical intimacy over the past four centuries. The course will also consider sexuality as
a source of private and public identity, a component of social organization, an object of
scientific study, government and legal regulation, and the space of cultural and political
conflict. . Explicit sexual material is addressed in many of the assignments and will be
discussed in an open and direct manner in class. Tolerance of different views and of
explicit discussion of sexual contents is expected from all members of the class. If you
are uncomfortable participating in such a conversation this may not be the class for you.
Schedule of Meetings and Assignments:
May 26: Organizational Meeting and Close Reading
Assignment:
David M. Halperin, “Is There a History of Sexuality?” History and Theory 28
(1989), 257-74, (hand out in class.)
Judith Halberstam, “Gender,” in Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler eds.,
Keywords for American Cultural Studies, (NYU Press, 2007), (hand out in class).
David M. Halperin, “Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of
Sexuality,” Representations 63 (1998), 93-120, (hand out in class).
May 28: Colonial Encounters
Assignments:
Ramon Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage,
Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846, (Stanford University Press, 1991),
chapter 1 ®.
“Pueblo Responses to Gutierrez,”®.
Tracy Brown, “’Abominable Sin’ in Colonial New Mexico: Spanish and Pueblo
Perceptions of Same Sex Sexuality,” in Thomas A. Foster ed., Long Before Stonewall:
Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America (New York University Press, 2007),
51-77.
Ann Laura Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate
in Colonial Rule, (University of California Press, 2002), chapter 3.
Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002), chapter 5.
Recommended:
Kathleen M. Brown, “’Changed … into the Fashion of Man’: The Politics of
Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement,” in Catherine
Clinton and Michele Gillespie eds., The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South
(Oxford University Press, 1997), 39-56.
Sarah M. S. Pearsall, “’the late flagrant instance of depravity in my Family’: The
Story of an Anglo-Jamaican Cuckold,” in William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Series, 60
(July 2003), 549-82.
Recommended:
June 2: Colonial America
Assignments:
John Ruston Pagan, Anne Orthwood’s Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia
(Oxford University Press, 2003), entire.
Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America, Part I.
Recommended:
Anne G. Myles, “Border Crossings: The Queer Erotics of Quakerism in
Seventeenth Century New England,” in Foster, Before Stonewall, 114-43.
Elizabeth Reis, “Hermaphrodites and ‘Same-Sex’ Sex in Early America,” in
Foster, Before Stonewall, 144-63.
Thomas A. Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth Century Man: Massachusetts and the
History of Sexuality in America, (Boston, Beacon Press, 2006), chapters 1, 2, 5, 6, 7.
June 4: Transgression in the Age of Revolutions
Assignments:
Clare A. Lyons, Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender & Power
in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830 (University of North Carolina Press,
2006), chapters 1, 2, 4.
Richard D. Brown and Doron Ben-Atar, Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in
the Early Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) 4-end.
Recommended:
Mark E. Kann, “Sexual Desire, Crime, and Punishment in the Early Republic,” in
Foster, Before Stonewall, 279-302.
Sharon Block, Rape & Sexual Power in Early America (University of North
Carolina Press, 2006), chapters 4-6.
Ruth H. Bloch, “Changing Conceptions of Sexuality and Romance in EighteenthCentury America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 60 (January 2003), 13-42.
Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard D. Brown, The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler
(Harvard University Press, 2003), chapters 1-5.
Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (University of
California Press, 1993), chapters 4 & 5.
June 9: New York Sex Scandals in the Early Republic
Assignments:
Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a
Prostitute in Nineteenth Century New York (Knopf, 1998), chapters 1-5, 15-16.
Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and
Salvation in 19th-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1995), entire.
Karen Lystra, “’Lie Still and think of the Empire’: Sexuality in Victorian
Courtship and Marriage,” in Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in
Nineteenth-Century America, 56-87.
Recommended:
Carol Smith Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations
Between Women in Nineteenth Century America,” in Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H.
Pleck, A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women
(Simon and Schuster 1979), 311-42.
Nicolette Severson “’Devils Would Blush to Look’: Brothel Visits of the New
York Female Moral Reform Society, 1835 and 1836,” Journal of the History of Sexuality,
23 (May 2014), 226-246.
Nancy F. Cott, "Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual
Ideology," in Cott and Pleck, A Heritage of Her Own, 162-81.
Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the
Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1820 (Norton, 1992), chapters 3-6
Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789-1860
(University of Illinois Press, 1987), part IV.
Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the
Oneida Community (University of Illinois Press, 1984), chapters II-IV.
John B. Buescher, More Lurid Than Lucid: The Spiritualist Invention of the Word
Sexism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70 (September 2002), 561-92.
June 11: Race and Sex
Assignments:
Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men (Yale University Press, 1997), entire.
Daniel A. Cohen, “Social Injustice, Sexual Violence, Spiritual Transcendence:
Constructions of Interracial Rape in Early American Crime Literature, 1767-1817,” The
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 56, No. 3 (Jul., 1999), pp. 481-526.
Laura F. Edwards, “The Politics of Marriage and Households in North Carolina
during Reconstruction” Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil
Rights (Princeton University Press, 2000): 7-27.
Recommended:
Edward E. Baptist, “’Cuffy’, ‘Fancy Maids’, and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Rape,
Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States,” American
Historical Review 106 (December 2001), 1619-50.
Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race and Resistance in Colonial North
Carolina (Cornell University Press, 2001), 131-94.
Paul Finkelman, “Crimes of Love, Misdemeanors of Passion: The Regulation of
Race and Sex in the Colonial South,” in Clinton and Gillespie, The Devil’s Lane 124-38.
David M. Friedman, A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis (Free
Press, 2001), chapters I-III.
Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black-White Relations in the American South
since Emancipation (Oxford University Press, 1986), chapters III and IV.
June 16: Comstock’s America
Assignment:
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and
Suppression in Nineteenth Century America (Knopf 2002), part IV.
Andrea Tone, Devices & Desires: A History of Contraceptive in America (Hill
and Wang, 2001), chapters 3-6.
Leslie Reagan, “’About to Meet her Maker’: Women, Doctors, Dying
Declarations, and the State’s Investigation of Abortion, Chicago, 1867-1940,” The
Journal of American History, 77 (1991), 1240-1264.
Recommended:
Carol Groneman, Nymphomania: A History (Norton, 2000), 1-34.
Ann Douglas Wood, “’The Fashionable Disease’: Women’s Complaints and Their
Treatment in Nineteenth Century America,” in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 14
(Summer 1973), 25-52.
Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (University
of North Carolina Press, 1991), chapters 3-7.
Linda R. Hirshman and Jane E. Larson, Hard Bargains: The Politics of Sex
(Oxford University Press, 1998), chapters 4-7.
Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud: Volume I, Education of
the Senses (Norton, 1984), chapter 5.
June 18: Gay History
Assignments:
David Halperin, “How to do the History of Male Homosexuality,” GLQ (2000),
87-123.
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the
Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Harper Collins, 1994), Part I.
Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy & Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of
Gold: the History of the Lesbian Community (Penguin Books, 1993), chapters 1-3.
Brett Beemyn, “The Silence is Broken: A History of the First Lesbian, Gay, and
Bisexual College Student Groups,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 12, (April 2003):
205-223.
John D’Emilio, “Stonewall: Myth and Meaning,” in The World Turned: Essays on
Gay History, Politics, and Culture, 146–53.
Recommended:
David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and
Lesbians in the Federal Government (University of Chicago Press, 2004), entire.
Martin Meeker, “Behind the Mask of Respectability: Reconsidering the
Mattachine Society and Male Homophile Practice, 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of the
History of Sexuality 10 (January 2001), 78-116.
Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of
a New Century (Henry Holt, 2000), part IV.
John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and
the Challenge of Modernity (Hill and Wang, 2001), chapter 3.
June 23: Sexual Revolution
Assignments:
Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Harvard University Press, 1999) entire.
Carrie Pitzulo, Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy,
Film: “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice.”
Recommended:
Beth L. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century
America (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), entire.
James R. Paterson, The Century of Sex: Playboy’s History of the Sexual
Revolution, 1900-1999 (Grove Press, 1999), chapters 4-6.
David Allyn, Make Love, Not War, (Boston, Little Brown and Company, 2000),
chapters 1-6, 8, 11, 15, 17, 18.
Helen Gurley Brown: Sex and the Single Girl (Barricade Books, 2003 [originally
published 1963), chapters 1-4, 11-13.
Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self Governing Structure
(Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1945), chapter VII.
Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Love Making (Simon and
Schuster 1972) 100-222.
June 25: Pornography
Assignments:
Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in
America (Grove Press, 1996), chapters 1 and 5.
Linda Williams, “Porn Studies: Profilgating Pornographies On/Scene: An
Introduction,” in Linda Williams, Porn Studies (Duke University Press, 2004), 1-23.
Minette Hillyer, “Sex in the Suburban: Porn, Home Movies, and the Live Action
Performance of Love in Pam and Tommy Lee: Hardcore and Uncensored,” in Williams,
Porn Studies 50-76.
Heather Butler, “What Do You Call a Lesbian with Long Fingers? The
Development of Lesbian and Dyke Pornography,” in Williams Porn Studies, 167-97.
Andrea Friedman, “Sissies and Sadists: Anti-Pornography Campaigns in Cold
War America,” Gender and History 15 (August 2003), 2001-227.
Recommended:
Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible
(University of California Press, 1989), 93-279.
Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex
(University of Minnesota Press, 2002), Part I.
Catherine Mackinon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law
(Harvard University Press, 1987), 127-162
Susan Faludi, “The Money Shot,”®.
Film: Making Deep Throat
Linda Williams, “Porn Studies: Profilgating Pornographies On/Scene: An
Introduction,” in Linda Williams, Porn Studies (Duke University Press, 2004), 1-23.
Dian Hanson, The History of Girly Magazines (Taschen 2006)