Through the energetic work of the reformer John Calvin, the small city-state of Geneva became the so-called Protestant Rome in the sixteenth century. Calvin created a morals court, the Consistory, which worked in conjunction with the city council to attack a wide range of ‘sins’, including illicit sexuality, defined as all sexual activity outside of marriage. In Calvin’s time, authorities pursued male and female fornicators (including fiancés) with the same rigour and on rare occasions sentenced adulterers to death. After Calvin’s death a double standard appeared in the treatment of adultery, most blatant in the fact that sexual relations between female servants and their married masters resulted in more severe penalties for the former than the latter. Same-sex relations were considered crimes against nature, but authorities adjudged those involving men much more severely than those involving women, probably based on a belief that sexual relations between male partners degraded them to the level of women. Although a few men were prosecuted for rape, religious and political authorities largely enhanced patriarchy; given the persistent numbers of people who were summoned, they clearly were also less successful in nurturing self-control among Genevans in their sex lives than in other areas of behaviour.

This chapter surveys the culture, knowledge, practice, and experience of sex in Chang’an (modern Xi’an), capital of Tang dynasty China, during the eighth and ninth centuries. It discusses courtesans and candidates, medical and religious texts, sex in literature, and ideals and practices of marriage. The era coincided with the height of the examination culture, whereby all government officials were expected to demonstrate high literacy skills and knowledge of Confucian classics. As the Tang administration increasingly relied on the civil service examinations to recruit high-ranking officials, so Chang’an became the site where examination candidates and graduates mingled with courtesans and flaunted their sensual pleasures. The changing religious landscape throughout China also reshaped how sex was understood and experienced in Chang’an in the Tang era: while Daoist sexologists continued to produce writings about the art of the bedchamber, Tantric Buddhist ideals of sexuality as a source of spiritual energy took root. Meanwhile Tang medical texts discussed sex extensively, providing a theoretical basis for treating symptoms related to intercourse and pregnancy and prescribing aphrodisiacs. The very first wave of erotica in Chinese history appeared. Aspects of Chang’an sexuality exerted a strong influence on sexuality in China for centuries to come.

In the Afro-Atlantic city of Lagos, Africans birthed sexualities in slavery and colonialism. Sex undergirded the politics of emancipation, imperial subjecthood, urbanization, and social differentiation. Africans navigated sexual politics as an afterlife of slavery, living a spectrum of gendered unfreedoms ranging from the persistence of slavery to reinventions of Atlantic slavery’s hierarchies under the guise of abolition. Where old slaving and neo-imperial African and European elites exploited African bodies for labour, sex, and power, discourses about the potency and danger of sexed bodies, including slaves, redeemed and adopted children, ‘wives’, soldiers, ‘prostitutes’, ‘delinquent youth’, domesticated and politically marginalized women, and ‘sexually perverse’ subjects, constituted the polysemic production of sexualities. Sexual politics drove British imperial compromises over abolition as well as colonialist conceptions of male bodies capable of wage labour, sports, and political leadership, as distinct from female bodies best suited for social and biological reproduction. Local resistance entailed age- and gender-distinctive conceptions of bodily autonomy to repudiate elite theft of bodily potency and escape the surveillance state. In Lagos the state policed Black youth mobility, criminalized ‘carnal knowledge against the order of nature’, and used military violence to restrain nonconformist sexuality because it asserted power through sex governance.

Human trafficking is a juridical concept invented in the nineteenth century that reappeared in the late twentieth century. The concept was created amid discussions about policing of national borders and reflected panics concerning the ideal of feminine purity, when women were seen in the discourse of the time as needing protection. In this chapter we will show how discourse in support of combating human trafficking for sexual exploitation has used ideas about gender and raciality to justify policies to contain migration. The twentieth century was marked by conquests of women”s rights, and white women are no longer seen as being in need of protection as were those of the nineteenth century. However, attributes that are both accusatory and victimizing still weigh on non-white women, especially when they are involved in sex work across national borders. In these terms, there is no space for women understood as victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation to be able to affirm their labour demands based on their own understandings about what constitutes sex work, violence, and exploitation.

and sex between women. The history of female homoerotic relations throughout time and in different places is widely varied, shaped by the societies and cultures in which women lived. How women act on their desires, what kinds of acts they engage in and with whom, what kinds of meanings they attribute to those desires and acts, how they think about the relationship between love and sexuality, whether they think of sexuality as having meaning for identities, whether they form communities with people with like desires—all of this differs across time and place. Yet there are discernible patterns, both in the ways that homoerotic relations have been conceived within persistently male-dominated social arrangements and in the forms of desire and intimacy experienced by women. A global historical view makes clear that emergence into public is not everywhere significant, that desire and love between women can flourish within heteronormative social arrangements, and that the emergence of a lesbian identity is a minor part of the whole story of female homoerotic relations.

This chapter presents an overview of key views on erotic desire and its management as well as common practices and norms in the Greek and Roman worlds from the seventh century BCE to the third century CE. No single canonical text or religious moral code existed that prescribed sexual relations. Instead, we rely on their rich textual and visual culture to reconstruct standards, attitudes, and practices. We know most about the sexuality of elite male citizens since most texts and visual objects were created by and for them. Gender and status were key components in any sexual relations, with the citizen male having the greatest access to partners: wives, sex labourers, other free men and boys, and enslaved people. Sexual virtue was expected of free citizen women and girls, but it may not have excluded sexual relations with other females, at least in the Greek world. The chapter surveys concepts of desire in literature (by genre) and sexual imagery in art (including male, female, and transgender bodies), and considers the everyday practices and experiences of sexuality for free, enslaved, elite, and non-elite. What emerges is a complex and even conflicting view of desire and sexual relations. Rather than a belief system, we more accurately talk about discourses of ancient sexualities.

Ancient Egyptian ideas about sex changed over time in close relation to changes in gender power relations. The comprehensive overview of textual and iconographic sources in this chapter indicates that discourses on sex did exist. Desirable bodies were either depicted or described in poetry. Pleasures could be sought in different sexscapes such as e.g., houses, gardens, streets, festivals, marshes and bathhouses. Festival sex had long history and was connected to the celebration of the return of the wondering Sun Eye goddess. She was pacified through consumption of alcohol and sexual intercourse. Sex-work is also attested, but its closer regulation through taxation does not predate Roman occupation. This is also the period when classical authors such as Strabo, formed the orientalist trope of sacred prostitution in Egyptian temples. However, contrary to this trope, sex is rarely depicted in state sponsored art and is found in media such as ostraca or rock art. Similarly, same-sex intercourse is attested throughout Egyptian history but rarely depicted. Passivity in intercourse between men was looked down upon. It even served as a metaphor to designate enemies of Egypt. Sexual violence was punishable but easily confused with adultery, putting women in precarious positions.

This chapter is a comprehensive history of sexually-explicit literature drawn from books banned and prosecuted in Asia and Europe, sixteenth to twentieth centuries. The prurient treatment of sexual violence and the lewd mockery of authority form part of this discourse, yet law and censorship denied its literary value, reduced all erotica to the most basic “obscenity” or mere “pornography” (literally, “whore-writing”), and sometimes put the author to death. (Paradoxically the cultures richest in sex-writing also suppressed it most fiercely.) Here is a more complex history, hybridizing multiple genres: manuals of sexual positions, courtesans” autobiography, satire against hypocrisy and repression, philosophies of mind, body, and desire – normally homoerotic, though in China and the West true knowledge of sexuality is represented as female, passed down by mistresses of the secret arts providing instructions for the wedding night (and beyond). The phallus was even gendered female. Libertinism continued to explore same-sex desire (especially in Italy and Japan), while its heteronormative branch dissociated sexuality from procreation, insisting that biological sex should be transformed into an art of aesthetic “transmutation”, urging women to pursue erotic pleasure as a supreme end in itself – centuries before contraception made this realistic. Feminocentric and masculinist perspectives intertwine.

This chapter discusses the contribution of anthropology to the understanding of the diversity of practices and attitudes towards sexualized bodies developed by different human cultures, beginning with the works of classical anthropologists, including E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Margaret Mead and Bronisław Malinowski. It discusses Marxist, feminist, and postmodern anthropology, and reflects on the influence of Michel Foucault, particularly his notion of the dispositif, the device of sexuality. The chapter argues that the device of sexuality—that is, that there is such a thing as “sexuality”—is modern and Western. The sexual life of the peoples studied by anthropologists is an inseparable part of their social order and its reproduction, and in no way constitutes a separate sphere of existence that can be studied as such, nor does it constitute the core of any identity, either personal or collective. The task of anthropology consists in restoring how these peoples deal with the sexual in their own social and cultural terms, respecting their radical otherness.

This chapter discusses social concepts, notions and assumptions that prevailed in the ancient Near East concerning human sexuality. Its introduction supplies chronological, geographical, and cultural definitions to explicate what is meant by the term ‘ancient Near East’, and expands on the sources of information used in the chapter, their contributions and limitations. The introduction also elaborates on the categories and aspects of human sexuality discussed in the chapter. Subsequently, the chapter is organized thematically. Each theme focuses on a specific category of sexuality, which is discussed according to the pertinent sources of information available to us, including legal, literary, cultic, and others. The categories surveyed in the chapter are: Sex and Reproduction, Sex and the Body, Gender Norms and Inequality, Sex and Marriage, Sex and Slavery, Sex and Politics, Sex and Religious and Cultic Practices, and Sex and Criminal Law. The chapter demonstrates how different textual genres reflect the role of sexuality in ancient Near Eastern societies: official law regulated sexual behaviour, literary texts echoed social norms, and cultic texts related to a variety of matters that involved human sexuality. The chapter highlights topics such as male privilege and gender inequality, social hierarchy, and cultural differentiation.

This chapter explores Michel Foucault’s impact on the history of sexuality by emphasizing the disparate and evolving nature of his work and its often-controversial influence on the history of sexuality as a field. The essay begins by summarizing the arguments of the four volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, while recalling the project’s turbulent history. The first volume maintained that sexuality’s history in the West was characterized by an “incitement to discourse” (rather than repression) which sealed the “Faustian pact” between sexuality and the pursuit of truth, while also drawing sexuality into power relations. Yet Foucault’s interest in early Christian sexual practices led him to reorient his project towards an exploration of classical antiquity and the role played by sexuality in practices of subjectivity. The essay’s second part examines how historians of sexuality have drawn on Foucault’s insights, focusing on the divergences between historians influenced by Foucault’s first volume (dealing with knowledge and power) and those inspired by the latter volumes (prioritizing subjectivity). After examining Foucault’s impact on feminism and queer theory, the essay concludes by noting that many historians of sexuality have made productive use of Foucault’s work without concurring with his philosophical conclusions.

Fervent expressions of erotic desire, the beauty and terror of passionate arousal, are here uncovered in religious texts, creation myths, ‘arts of love’, poetry and fiction across four millenia and twenty-four cultures. The chapter starts with an example known throughout the world: the Hebrew love poem preserved as The Song of Songs or Song of Solomon, translated into many languages including German, Chinese and Yoruba, emulated by Oscar Wilde and Toni Morrison. It argues that the Song and related literature are significant for the frank celebration of mutuality and orgasm, and the psychological understanding of cruelty and loss, rather than for their supposed spiritual meanings. These central themes are traced back to the most ancient narratives of primal copulation (including the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh) and forward to intensely sexual episodes in Milton, Goethe, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and women authors from Mediaeval mystics up to the present. A closely related literary genre turns love-making into an art form, cultivated for its own sake: examples come from ancient Egypt and Rome, the Indian Kama Sutra, the Arabic Perfumed Garden, the Modi of Aretino in Renaissance Italy, and French, Chinese and Japanese novels of sexual instruction and adventure.

The history of sexuality has existed as long as the writing of history. Only in the nineteenth century, however, did the topic shift from moralism and begin to challenge male, heterosexual, and cisgender hegemonies as natural human conditions. Pioneers in women’s history and the histories of sexual and gender minorities detailed past oppressions while offering historical examples of alternative models for human gender and sexual roles. Throughout the twentieth century and since, historians of sexuality have drawn from varied academic discourses—feminist, sociological, anthropological, linguistic, psychological, geographical, queer and trans—to explore the sexual past from diverse perspectives. The women’s and gay liberation movements also prompted increased explorations of history, both to understand the roots of inequality and discrimination and to uncover exceptions to these rules. And from a decidedly modern and Western focus and an obvious emphasis on white, upper- or middle-class, able-bodied, and adult subjects, historians of sexuality have increasingly searched for answers to questions about why things are the way they are in the histories of premodern and worldwide societies and in the lives of persons of colour, working-class individuals, those with disabilities, and the young and the old.

This chapter focusses on sexuality in South Asia. The first section traces representations from the prehistoric to early historic as depicted in material remains, in Vedic Brahmanical thought systems, and in the Dharmasastras and the Epic-Pura?a traditions. These emphasize reproduction and heteronormative sex between married couples as a sacral, ritual act. They also reveal a preoccupation with the body and the need to control desires. Sexual abstinence was encouraged in ascetic and monastic sects in Brahmanical, Buddhist, Jain, and other sects. The second section focusses on the kama (sensual pleasure) tradition by exploring the texts outlining the rules for the erotic. Sensual love was also the primary aesthetic experience of Sanskrit literature, particularly kavyas, and was oriented towards masculinist desire in an urban landscape. Prakrit and Tamil love poetry, discussed here, vocalize feminine sensuality in a rural setting. The evolution of devotional spirituality (bhakti) transformed the erotic tradition. Tantric systems have been viewed as a parallel trend, concerned with materiality and giving center space to ritualized intercourse. Visual art continued to depict sexual themes derived from literature. The chapter ends with an overview of attitudes towards sexuality in the Mughal court and the colonial period.

During the two World Wars sexuality was fundamental to how both conflicts were planned, conducted, and experienced. The sexual body was an ever-present target of military policy as a potential polluter of the race, a danger to colonial order, sexual mores, or gender hierarchy; it was an object of intervention and mutilation, even annihilation. Nonetheless, war also offered opportunities for new, hitherto illicit sexual encounters. Individuals experienced sexuality in two opposing ways: as a source of immense suffering but also of erotic excitement and love. Changes in sexual attitudes, regulation, and practices must be understood through the filters of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, and regional variations. Between 1918 and the `sexual revolution” of the 1960s a profound shift in sexual mores and attitudes took place in all bellicose nations. The millions of deaths on the battlefields, the suffering at home, the unprecedented mass movement within and between countries had sufficiently ruptured the social fabric to unleash a wide-spread liberalisation of sexuality. The steeply declining birthrate was the most dramatic expression of changing ideals. Yet, liberalisation was at best ambivalent as many traditional attitudes and regulations resurfaced and women and queer people struggled to fit back into a state-sanctioned `normal” life.