Our knowledge of Japanese sexuality from the tenth to the twelfth centuries is limited chiefly to the imperial court. Sexuality was constructed textually through key concepts from Chinese culture and the globally unprecedented rise of writing by women in Japanese. Emperors, princes, and high-ranking aristocratic men were often polygynous and marriage was not controlled by either law or religion. Virginity was rarely valued and there was no primogeniture. ‘Divorce’ and ‘remarriage’ were frequent. Incest taboos were limited, applying to full siblings and parents and their biological offspring. While most aristocratic women were to be seen only by their fathers, husbands, or sons among men, women and men serving at court might have multiple sexual partners and social hierarchy played a dominant role in men’s access to women’s bodies; legal prosecutions for rape were nil. There is evidence of pederasty both at court and in temple complexes by the late tenth and the early eleventh centuries, respectively. Non-pederastic homosexuality seems to have had a sudden efflorescence at the end of the period. Definitive evidence for female homosexuality does not appear until the thirteenth century, but probably existed earlier.

This chapter explores male homoerotic desire, whether idealised, romanticised, visualised or physically enacted. Male homoerotic practices and relations have sometimes been structured around notions of difference between two males who were thought to be respectively masculine and feminine, active and passive, free and slave, or older and younger. The last pairing was particularly important in classical European antiquity where it was, typically, regarded as compatible with heterosexual marriage and reproduction. This should alert us to the fact that many societies across the globe have not viewed male homoerotic relations according to the set of sexualised identities that emerged from nineteenth century western medical science, and which have since been contested by gay liberationists and queer activists. Western imperial practice has produced an abundance of evidence concerning the legal and religious regulation of ‘sodomy’. This invites comparison with records from other cultures which have often been, in their various ways, more positive in their attitudes to same-sex desire. The chapter, therefore, includes a consideration of globally diverse patterns of male homoerotic relations that acknowledges the complexity of cultural responses to same-sex desire.

The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw seismic political and social change in the Philippines. It was a period marked by a series of watershed events: Spain’s ignominious defeat and the loss of the colony in 1899 to the United States; a subsequent bloody war and brutal pacification campaign waged by the US resulting in Philippine defeat and American colonization, the effects of which would reshape local societies and endure well beyond the next half a century. Tracking across a wealth of disparate sources, including colonial missionary confessional manuals and etiquette handbooks, photographs, and popular culture, this chapter explores Manila’s dance halls, brothels, and opium dens, popular folksongs and ballads that celebrated female sexual allure or lamented the mundanity of married life. Who were considered the arbiters and experts of sexual behaviour and what forms were deemed the most dangerous to morality, health, and public order? In the process of examining prevailing anxieties over sexuality, the chapter foregrounds a plethora of erotic intimacies, sexual habits and appetites, pleasures, and practices, and how these were expressed and experienced in a city that bore the brunt of revolutionary upheavals.

The chapter provides an insight into the complex sexual milieu of Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the Rajabai Tower case as a key narrative, numerous facets of the city, such as cosmopolitanism, group identities, the link between forensics and sexual assault, racial profiling, and police corruption, are discussed. Also examined are the spatial controversies surrounding Bombay’s red-light neighbourhoods and links between spatiality and the identity of prostitutes. Pop culture’s role in shaping a sexual ethos, in Parsi theatre and later Bombay cinema, and particularly the unique position of performative androgyny, is reviewed. Further, the impact of contagious disease acts and the fluid definition of prostitution is studied. Finally, the role of eugenics is surveyed, and the extremely divisive and convoluted politics of the eugenics movement is analyzed.

Eighteenth-century Paris was the site of multiple sexual cultures ranging from permissive to conservative. All these sexual cultures operated within a set of prescriptive legal, religious, and moralistic discourses that prohibited sex outside of marriage while often supporting sexual pleasure within it. Many Parisians ignored these prescriptions, often with impunity. The police concerned themselves with public sex and intervened in private affairs only when asked to do so. Paris was home to a diverse permissive sexual culture. It was comprised of a portion of the financial, social, political, and intellectual elite, often identified as libertines, for whom sex outside marriage was both widespread and widely accepted. It also included men who had sex with each other as part of Paris’s extensive sodomitical subculture, though there is little evidence of a modern homosexual identity. Prostitution was endemic in Paris, encompassing numerous forms of transactional sex that translated into a sort of hierarchy, with women kept as mistresses by men of the elite at the top and those catering to marginal men at the bottom. We know least about the sex lives of other ordinary people, though evidence suggests many had sex outside of marriage and many cared deeply for their spouses.

This chapter deconstructs the history of erotic art from prehistory to the twenty-first century. Instead of holding as self-evident the meanings of “art” and “eroticism,” it traces a history of how and why some forms of representation have been deemed erotic and the ambiguities of “art” versus “pornography.” Four related phenomena are used as anchors to explore erotic art’s long history: script, sustained long-distance contact, print, and the use of lenses and photography. These relate in turn to three important dimensions of world history: networks, or physical and informational connections between different regions of the world; technologies, mainly the means for creating and circulating visual representations but also including the pivotal technology of contraceptives; and ideologies, or how sex, eroticism, and art are defined and regarded. Contemporary conceptions of erotic art are in many ways directly traceable to key paradigm shifts in sexuality that originated in cultural, intellectual, and material interactions since the early modern period (approximately the sixteenth century). Like human history generally, the history of erotic art has been riven by hierarchies – including gendered ones usually privileging the perspectives of men – exploitation, and violence. But artistic representations of sex have also challenged long-defended hegemonies.

Sex in nineteenth-century Cairo played out on a stage of relentless change and adaptation. The city’s urban life witnessed a significant rise in population growth, transformations in family and household structures, the rise of an Egyptian nationalist elite, and the gradual demise of African and Circassian slavery. Because of the divergent approaches taken with this topic, this chapter focuses on the unequal power relations that shaped Cairene sex, using canonical texts and archival documents to tease out the connections between sex and family life, nationalism, slavery, the justice system, and sex work. Specifically emphasized are stories and narratives written by literate Egyptians and Europeans, and how their ideas of domesticity, freedom, and political authority operated in relation to sexual practices. In doing so an explanation of sex in nineteenth-century Cairo is put forward that highlights celebrated and forgotten sources, prioritizing key works that inform our current understandings of sex. The chapter discusses memoirs and political treatises written by prominent Egyptian nationalists, explores the rich possibilities raised by archival records and their differences from European traveller accounts, and concludes with what nineteenth-century sources can (and cannot) tell us about queer ideas of sex.

This chapter presents an overview of, and insight into, the sexual lives of the inhabitants of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. It examines both public attitudes and private behaviours by focusing on three key areas: marriage, prostitution, and male same-sex relationships. The discussion of marriage looks at the traditional ages at which men and girls traditionally wed, how marital partners were chosen, and the emotional and sexual life of married couples, as well as divorce, widow(er)hood, and remarriage. The section on prostitution considers the wide variety of sex workers operating in classical Athens, the conditions in which they worked, and the status they enjoyed. The discussion takes in streetwalkers and brothel workers whose services could be bought cheaply (pornai), trained musicians and dancers who provided entertainment at all-male drinking parties, and high-fee hetairai renowned for their looks, wit, and intelligence. The last section examines the practice of pederasty, a traditionally elite pursuit which saw adult men form relationships with pubescent boys. This discussion covers courtship and its power dynamics, the age of participants, and the ways in which pederasty is depicted in art, as well as shifting public attitudes towards pederasty throughout the classical era.

Material culture profoundly influences the ways we understand, experience and represent sexuality. This chapter examines cross-cultural material cultures of heterosexuality, homosexuality, domestic life, communal rituals, sex work and intimate relationships, among other examples. The history of sexuality and material culture is a long one, and to consider Roman brothels, Palauan men’s houses and Peruvian pottery is to recognise their significance in changing sexual mores. Objects, including buildings and artworks, can tell us about fundamentally diverse ways of understanding sexuality as an everyday practice and the subject of academic inquiry. The chapter also offers a discussion of the ephemera of movements for sexual rights in more recent times. These objects may be everyday items repurposed for queer life and politics, for example, or custom-made props for protest and organising. Museums have often paid little attention to the material culture of sexuality, hiding away incriminating exhibits, but new museological approaches to objects reveal the intricacies of intimate life, tell the story of previously marginalized forms of sexuality, and even resist established modes of power. Material culture, and the ways we address it, speak forcefully to the politics of sexuality.

This chapter provides a thematic overview of commercial sex across time and space. Each section seeks to identify continuities and shifts in the way people debated, policed, and practiced commercial sex. While the analysis focuses primarily on the modern period, the chapter starts in antiquity to discuss the gendered and hierarchical notions that different societies and groups have used to refer to the ‘flesh trade’. A second section deals with the regimes and actors that have sought to control, repress, regulate, or decriminalise/normalise the sale of sex at the local, national, and international levels. Where possible, the voices of women and men who traded physical sex for money or other benefits are included in the analysis. The bottom-up approach is further developed in sections three and four, which focus on the structure and working conditions of the sex trade and profile the sellers of sex, intermediaries, and clients. A concluding section reflects on stigma, an issue that seems to have remained constant in the long history of (female) prostitution, and on coercion and consent, concepts that can be regarded as typically modern.

This chapter discusses the teachings of the rabbinic sages in Late Antiquity who worked in fundamental ways with the biblical traditions transmitted to and by them. The Hebrew Bible, whose precise shape was still under discussion in the first century CE, provided the rabbinic sages with ancient normative and legal traditions that they reinterpreted and expanded. The large archive of rabbinic traditions provides us with a tremendous wealth of representations of sexual practices, desires, and discourses, often in tension with each other, that reverberate throughout Jewish history. It further provides a framework and language for contemporary Jewish discourses of sexuality, including newly emerging identities, individual and communal, specifically for Jewish LGBTQ+ people. Three topics out of many possible have been selected for this chapter: obligations of marriage, reproduction, and same-sex and queer sexualities. They represent three topics of perennial debate in Jewish traditions around the world. For each, rabbinic texts and especially the Talmud have played a pre-eminent role in shaping the debates over the centuries.

Florence in the fifteenth century was in transition from the medieval to the modern world, and sexual attitudes and practices were very much in flux. The most distinctive feature of Florentine sexuality was the city’s international reputation as a hotbed of ‘sodomy’. Traditional structures of marriage and the family coexisted with a widespread culture of male homoeroticism. Female prostitution was sanctioned by the state, in the hope that it would reduce both male homoeroticism and adulterous relations. At the same time the new ideal of romantic love was spreading to all social classes, bringing changes to the ways people thought about marital and intimate relations. This chapter focuses both on the idealization of male homoeroticism in humanist culture and on the repression of male homosexual activity by the Office of the Night, the judicial branch that policed sodomy. It contrasts the celebration of physical beauty in Florentine visual arts with the preaching of the Dominican reformer Savonarola, who harshly condemned worldly luxuries. Savonarola’s public execution by burning in 1498 provides an ironic contrast to his own bonfires of the vanities, in which luxury goods were burned, but it also mirrors the public burning that was the traditional punishment for sodomy.

This chapter discusses why sexuality has become the site of a new “Cold War” and what are its new elements. Now, a fully-fledged illiberal program is offering an alternative to liberal cultural, social, and political politics. The new political actors fighting for redefining sexuality are capturing states using democratic or quasi-democratic methods to introduce new forms of governance as alternatives to liberal values. The chapter analyses the roots of and actors in these attacks. The example of Russia shows how the recent and ongoing war against Ukraine has changed previous assumptions and made alliances and allegiances very clear. The soft power of Putin”s Russia has been instrumental in the fight for “traditional values” as an inexpensive and effective political tool to undermine liberal values and the European Union. This matters not only because Russia has created an alternative, illiberal political order to liberal human rights over the past decade, but also because it has become an international actor, financing local and international NGOs to disrupt and undermine liberal states” values and activities around the world. The chapter closes with discussing how the appropriation of liberal values combined with emptying their meanings to legitimize a new war of Russia shows that we are really facing a turning point in our history.