Abstract
It seems necessary, after spending three chapters discussing the psychoanalytic contribution to the study of sexuality, that we now turn to a more sociological and historical view. For if psychoanalysis has been probably the most important theory of sexuality in the twentieth century, its drawbacks are palpable. I have already described some of them: the pervasive masculinism; the biological bias; the conservatism of psychoanalytic institutions; and above all, the trans-historical tendency to reify certain categories of sexual relations, for example the Oedipus complex.
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Notes
David Halperin, ‘Is there a history of sexuality?’, in H. Abelove, M.A. Barale and D.M. Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 416–31.
Alexandra Kollontai, ‘Sexual relations and the class struggle’, Selected Writings (London: Alison & Busby, 1977), pp. 237–49.
Leon Trotsky, Women and the Family (New York: Pathfinder, 1973), p. 53.
Maurice Florence, ‘Foucault, Michel, 1926-’, in Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), p. 314.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 29 and 154.
James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (London: Flamingo, 1994), p. 67.
R. Barthes, ‘Myth today’, in Mythologies (London: Vintage, 1993), pp. 109–59.
Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 70.
Carole S. Vance, ‘Negotiating sex and gender in the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography’, in L. Segal and M. Mcintosh (eds), Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate (London: Virago, 1992), p. 41.
Cate Haste, Rules of Desire: Sex in Britain: World War I to the Present (London: Pimlico, 1992), pp. 178–82.
See J. Weeks, ‘Uses and abuses of Michel Foucault’, in Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity (London: Rivers Oram, 1991), pp. 157–69.
Thomas Laqueur, The Making of Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 31.
See Celia Kitzinger, ‘Problematizing pleasure: Radical feminist decon-structions of sexuality and power’, in H.L. Radtke and H.J. Stam (eds), Power/Gender: Social Relations in Theory and Practice (London: Sage, 1994), pp. 194–209.
I.M. Lewis, Social Anthropology in Perspective: The Relevance of Social Anthropology (CUP, 1985), p. 238.
See Linda Williams’ discussion of pornography: Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (London: Pandora, 1991).
Caroline Ramazanoglu, Feminism and the Contradictions of Oppression (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 138–70.
These issues are discussed in Don Milligan, Sex-Life: A Critical Commentary on the History of Sexuality (London: Pluto, 1993).
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© 1997 Roger Horrocks
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Horrocks, R. (1997). Sexuality as a Modern Concept. In: Campling, J. (eds) An Introduction to the Study of Sexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390140_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390140_6
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