This chapter begins with a discussion of the terminology and conceptual frameworks that are useful for contextualizing pre-modern Chinese sources about sex and sexuality. It then surveys several well-studied institutions and practices, including sex manuals, concubinage, female chastity, illicit sex, and literary representations of homoeroticism. The second half of the chapter reflects on three phenomena in works on the history of sexuality in pre-modern China, namely retrospective sexology, the censorship hypothesis, and the assumption of sex as a given. The author argues that while historians now no longer characterize sex culture in ancient China as either ‘liberated’ or ‘repressed’, as old sexologists did, we still tend to assume that the history of sexuality should primarily be about sexual practice and behaviour, despite the acknowledged lack of sources. The lack of sources, in turn, is often assumed to be the result of political and ideological censorship. More attention is needed to questioning scholars’ definition of the very subject matter, sex. The chapter concludes with a short review of scholarly approaches to comparing China with other cultures and a proposal of the ways in which a comparative history of sexuality can be productive.

The archives of modern European colonialism are preoccupied with sex. Desire, with its contexts and consequences, presented colonial authorities with opportunities and motive for the exercise of power. Yet the gamut of sexual practices they sought to regulate bore a tenuous relationship to the messy intimacies of lived experience. Those worlds of desire, repugnance, accommodation, and resistance remain beyond our reach. Historians have employed various methodologies to tackle the complexities and silences of the colonial archive. Some have striven to find dissenting, variant or “hidden” voices within bureaucratic records. Some have sought traces of fantasy, desire, and subjective experience in personal writings or works of creative imagination. Some have shown how the fashioning of the archive itself is implicated in the production of both desire and desiring subjects. Arguing that we learn most about colonial sexuality when we allow for multiple possibilities, this chapter presents and describes some of the more influential lenses historians have brought to bear upon their elusive subject: those of erotics, regulation, intimacy, mobility, and violence. While these do not exhaust the possibilities of understanding colonial sexuality, when taken together they reveal how entwined was the emergence of modern sexual mores with colonialism”s history.

This historiographical chapter discusses how the rise of LGBTQ+ history has shifted understandings of how all gender and sexual identities are formed and contested. It begins with a discussion of the activist origins of the field of LGBTQ+ history in the 1970s, and then moves on to discuss the centrals debates that animated early scholarship in the 1980s. The chapter then moves to the rise of queer theory in the 1990s, and analyzes how that innovation reshaped the field by introducing concepts such as heteronormativity. The 1990s also witnessed the rise of scholarship on colonialism and sexuality, which in turn impacted the field of LGBTQ+ history, which up to that point had been very focused on the Global North. Thus, the third section of the chapter discusses how, since 2000, the field of LGBTQ+ history has increasingly been global in scope, with increased attention to political economies, transnational flows, and state formation. In conclusion, the chapter discusses the rise of trans histories, and how these histories have pushed LGBTQ+ historians to think about gender in new and innovative ways.

This chapter highlights issues around sexuality and migration. It examines more closely one particular type of migration, with a comparative analysis of migrations from southern Italy, China, and western India to the Americas, Africa, and South Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the women who were left behind by this migration. Traditional research on historical migrations has provided male-centred perspectives regarding motives, settlement, identity, and citizenship. Recent studies have sought to alter these perspectives by shifting women”s narratives from the margins to the centre in the context of agency, sexuality, and masculinity. Thus this chapter problematizes the sexual economy not only of the “women left behind” in the migration process but also that of their spouses and partners. It reveals how gender shapes migration and how migration defines gender relations. It alludes to attitudes and perceptions about gender and sexuality in a diverse geopolitical context, how the intersectionality of sex and emotions frames mobility behaviour and challenges sexual norms. It thus shifts the nexus between gender, sexuality, and migration to the centre of historical analysis rather than situating it at the margins.

This chapter traces the inflection of various religio-cultural traditions and customs of erotic love and sex and ordering of sexual acts in sixteenth-century Istanbul as defined by literary and documentary sources. With its diverse population and as the seat of the Ottoman dynasty, Istanbul was one of the most crowded and diverse cities of the sixteenth century. It witnessed the formation of an elite class that distinguished itself from the majority of the urban population through ideological othering strategies and the establishment of law codes to order and rule the diverse communities in the city. Literary works that focused on the city and documents, including law codes and court records, reflect conflicting views on sexual relations: while chaste love among members of the elite was idealized in romances and sexual acts were criticized in satirical works, documents reflected the ways sexual acts and desires were regulated, controlled, and punished.

Though sexually transmitted diseases have existed for thousands of years, from the late twentieth century AIDS became an enduring pandemic, mapping onto and exacerbating pre-existing inequalities. It must be historically contextualized within the global spread of older STDs such as syphilis and gonorrhoea, as a result of colonialism and imperialism. From its earliest identification among gay and bisexual men in the United States in the 1980s, AIDS-related stigma and discrimination acted as barriers to effective HIV prevention. In Africa women”s experiences of gender oppression, including through the criminalization of sex work, rendered them susceptible to HIV infection. The racial oppression of Black people, Indigenous people, and people of colour placed them at special risk of HIV. The pandemic also occasioned fundamental, adverse social changes, including AIDS orphans. It is against this backdrop that AIDS activism emerged. Activists have campaigned for sex-positive prevention education, adequate funding, and greater political will to develop treatments. The history of AIDS is deserving of study for the way in which it conceptualizes how structural oppression and human rights violations shape sexual and reproductive health, and how gender- and sexuality-oppressed groups can challenge human rights violations and advance global health justice.

Shanghai is often seen as the exemplar of Chinese cosmopolitan modernity, including gender and sexual progressiveness under Western influence. This chapter argues that Shanghai’s cosmopolitanism is also rooted in migration, activism, and state policies. The early reforms of patrilineage coincided with influxes of migrants and refugees, who constituted the majority of Shanghai’s urban population. As the hotspot for China’s industrialization, women’s economic empowerment and social activism occurred almost simultaneously. The semi-colonial status of Shanghai before 1949 that protected groups such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in extra-territorialities also made possible the survival of sexual minorities. These historical and social conditions created an urban environment that has made negotiations of the most intimate aspects of human life both possible and difficult. Shanghai as the pioneer of gender equality and sexual modernity in China must be viewed through those intimate negotiations, in which people transform the definitions of freedom, belonging, and modernity.

By the early eighteenth century Edo (present-day Tokyo) was one of the largest cities in the world. Sex and erotic allure could be found in many guises in this commercialized urban setting, both in the city’s streets and in print. This chapter sets out to argue that sex assumed a multiplicity of meanings in this context that ranged from pleasure and procreation to potential pathology. To this purpose, it begins by tracing various discourses surrounding the three phenomena that have arguably received the most sustained attention in research to date, namely the sex trade, male same-sex desire, and the erotically explicit materials known as ‘spring pictures’ (Japanese shunga 春画/ shunpon 春本). The final sections aim to move beyond the standard narrative of the Edo period’s flourishing erotic culture by focusing on the female reproductive body, as well as medical and health discourses, thus aspiring to unsettle the paradigmatic character of this (male) pleasure-centred mode of sex and repudiate the monolithic view of early modern Japanese sexuality as unregulated.

Canon law rules of marriage became the legal means for policing forbidden sex in Iceland during the Middle Ages. These rules were adapted to various needs: enforcing morality, encouraging adherence to Christian sexual norms, and managing inheritance practices and property rights. This chapter explores sex in Iceland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by focusing on legal regulation, the archbishops’ and bishops’ statutes, and selected court cases. In all the Nordic countries the regulation of sexuality was highly influenced by canon law, but a study of sex in Iceland needs to be understood in relation to the special character of the society. It was highly literate, because of Christianity, but decentralized, with no towns and a distant royal administration. There had never been a strong executive authority in Iceland, and its absence seems to have encouraged widespread interest in documenting personal disputes and property rights. This makes Iceland special. Written documents and historical writing were mostly kept at the farms of leading families, for use in disputes over property rights in the local courts. This differs from more urbanized societies elsewhere in Europe.

As seemingly cognate sub-genres of history, the history of sexuality and women’s history have a complicated relationship. Both tell 1970s origins stories from global north liberation movements, despite the scholarly scrutiny of sexuality and women in earlier historical periods. Core journals and publications reveal these sub-fields’ distinctive, sometimes incommensurate development trajectories. Perhaps due to their recent advent, presentism is clear in both, with the corollary of a marked post-1800 skew of most research and publications. Women’s history tracks women, in all their subdivisions, of necessity with focus upon sexualities in many registers, while seeking address of race, indigeneity, ethnicity, and international and global foci. Alternatively, the history of sexuality prioritizes sexual minorities and erotic alterities, welcoming studies of identities, expression, and representation. Key themes are transgressive resistance against repression and heteronormativity, entailing special concentration on same-sex history. Women figure within these themes, while innovative feminists are influential historians of sexuality. Nonetheless, women’s history and feminist analysis of sexualities have no default standing for the history of sexuality. In short, intellectual, methodological, and political properties prove less reciprocal than might be presumed. These exciting areas of history should evolve, to illuminate crucial topics for both, for instance reproduction. As both pursue aims to incorporate all historical periods and regions, their interconnections may become stronger.

Class has been crucial both to how individuals have experienced their desires and to how those desires have been interpreted, categorized, and articulated. This chapter offers an overview of the intersectional relationship between class and sexuality and demonstrates that the nuances of class difference and division, across continents and within regions of the same country, could drastically alter the lived experience of sexual desire. Class influenced notions of private and public spaces and the impact these had on sexual activity. Class differences mixed with racial differences also determined ideas of sexual respectability or sexual danger, both on an individual level with the erotic appeal of class differences and on a group level in eugenics. Class divisions have also been significant in shaping how the history of sexuality has been written, since it has shaped the nature of archival sources. The example of English author Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) demonstrates these themes.

Two differing ideas characterized the city of Toronto throughout the twentieth century. The first, Toronto the Good, represented the aspirations of religious leaders, reformers, politicians, and police officers to create a city modelled after Christian morality. Sexuality was meant to be expressed in the confines of the private, monogamous, heteronormative family home. Sex was for procreation, not pleasure. Contrary to Toronto the Good was a second idea, Toronto the Gay, a 1950s tabloid reference to the variety of spaces available for sexual exploration and desire. Sex work, queer sex, interracial marriage, divorce, birth control, and abortion endured despite intense enforcement of sexual morality. This chapter explores the tensions between the idealism of Toronto the Good and the sexual opportunities of Toronto the Gay.

This chapter attempts to explore global trajectories of birth control, family planning, and reproductive health and rights discourses in the modern world by comparing experiences of countries in the Global South with the Global North. Women all over the world have long had some control over their reproductive bodies. “Planning” became a very crucial concept within the global development discourse put forward during the post Second World War. One of the main resources that needed to be planned was population, thus “family planning” emerged as a novel form of population control. This ideology was supported by philanthropic institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and by international conferences on population and development. Sri Lanka was a colony of the Western powers for four centuries (1505-1948), then a development “model” for South Asia in the 1970s, then the site of a civil war (1983-2009). Sri Lanka offers a more inclusive conceptual framework to understand how policy decisions taken in the Global North fails to have the same impact in the Global South. This chapter shows how policies must adapt to the local realities of the Global South irrespective of ratifying global population and development conventions.

This chapter explores London as a site of sexual pleasure and danger in the nineteenth century, a period during which as an imperial centre it became the world’s largest city. Focused on the complex sexual landscape of this urban environment, it examines sexual activity in both private and public spaces including homes, theatres, public houses, pleasure gardens, royal parks, and toilets, paying particularly attention to the ways in which social class determined the personal experiences of sexuality in the Victorian era. Many of these acts were frequently monitored and policed and could result not only in moral censure but also in arrest, imprisonment, or public humiliation in places such as divorce courts. Most likely to run afoul of the law were those in the British metropolis who transgressed gender and sexual boundaries by working as prostitutes, cross-dressing, or engaging in intimate acts with members of their own sex. The sexual history of nineteenth-century London also involved the proliferation of a thriving and diversified trade in pornographic texts and images, ranging from erotic novels to photographic postcards. Central to this chapter are considerations of the ways in which sex and sexuality figured in economic life, urban geographic configurations, and various forms of self-fashioning.