Historicising Gender and Sexuality

Gender and sexuality are inextricable components of the human experience that remain as complex today as throughout world history. Historicising Gender and Sexuality features a thought–provoking collection of essays that shed important new light on the historical intersections between gender and sexuality across time and space. Several of the authors conclude that the constructions, practices, and experiences of gender and sexuality are far more entangled and mutually constitutive than previous scholarship has suggested. A wide swath of topics in various historical contexts are explored – from sexual activities in sixteenth–century New Spain to contemporary Miami; from attitudes revealed in Chinese sexology to American nudist magazines; and from the experiences of free women of colour in the British Caribbean to ideas put forth by 20th–century Egyptian reformers. Essays demonstrate the particularities not just of specific formulations of gender and sexuality in different historical contexts, but of the very nature of the relationship between the categories themselves. Through a rich diversity of scholarship, the essays offer ample evidence that careful and contextualised analysis of the shifting relationship of gender and sexuality illuminates broader historical processes. This book offers revealing insights into the myriad ways in which gender and sexuality have crossed paths with broader relations of power in a wide range of locations and historical contexts.

Notes on Contributors vii

Introduction
KEVIN P. MURPHY and JENNIFER M. SPEAR 1

1 Imagining Cihuacoatl: Masculine Rituals, Nahua Goddesses and the Texts of the Tlacuilos
PETE SIGAL 12

2 Power and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen s Troubled Archive
MARISA J. FUENTES 38

3 Gender, Sexuality and the Formation of Racial Identities in the Eighteenth–Century Anglo–Caribbean World
BROOKE N. NEWMAN 59

4 Xing: The Discourse of Sex and Human Nature in Modern China
LEON ANTONIO ROCHA 77

5 Epistemic Modernity and the Emergence of Homosexuality in China
HOWARD CHIANG 103

6 Overcoming Simply Being : Straight Sex, Masculinity and Physical Culture in Modern Egypt
WILSON CHACKO JACOB 132

7 Monitoring and Medicalising Male Sexuality in Semi–Colonial Egypt
HANAN KHOLOUSSY 151

8 The Volatility of Sex: Intersexuality, Gender and Clinical Practice in the 1950s
SANDRA EDER 166

9 A Certain Amount of Prudishness : Nudist Magazines and the Liberalisation of American Obscenity Law, 1947 58
BRIAN HOFFMAN 182

10 Cold War Conflicts and Cheap Cabaret: Sexual Politics at the 1975 United Nations International Women s Year Conference
JOCELYN OLCOTT 207

11 Gender and Sexuality in Latina/o Miami: Documenting Latina Transsexual Activists
SUSANA PENà229

Index 247

Kevin P. Murphy is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform (2008), co–editor of Queer Twin Cities (2010), and co–editor of Queer Futures, a special issue of the Radical History Review (2008).

Jennifer M. Spear is Assistant Professor of History at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (2009).