A Hebrew “sodomite” tale from thirteenth-century Toledo: Jacob Ben El‘azar's story of Sapir, Shapir, and Birsha

The misogynic attitude to women in medieval Hebrew literature is well known by now. It has been studied, however, only in the learned literature of the time—legal documents, midrashim and commentaries, poetry, mystical treatises, and moral writings. All these were written documents put down by men and for men. Whether there is a way to hear the female voice in medieval Jewish culture, in which women did not write, is a question often asked, usually with a negative answer. Following studies in general folkloristics and feminist theory, I suggest that the female voice could be heard in the medium that was open to them—oral folk literature. As the major contributors to everyday life, women expressed themselves in various events, both intimate and more public, by telling stories and listening to them. In the early-sixteenth-century Ms. Jerusalem we find transcribed tales from a much earlier period (the thirteenth century) which express the ideas, feelings, and mentalities of broader strata of Jewish society, not just its male and learned members. Thirteen tales identifiable as 'women's tales' appear in this manuscript and are published and discussed here.

Preface 1 No-Woman's-Land: Medieval Hebrew Literature and Feminist Criticism 2 Gazing at the Gazelle: Woman in Male Love Lyric 3 Veils and Wiles: Poetry as Woman 4 Poor Soul, Pure Soul: The Soul as Woman 5 Domesticating the Enemy: Misogamy in a Jewish Marriage Debate 6 Among Men: Homotextuality in the Maqama 7 Clothes Reading: Cross-Dressing in the Maqama 8 Circumcised Cinderella: Jewish Gender Trouble Afterword Notes Acknowledgments Index

The wondrous fables of Ibn Sahula in Meshal haqadmoni, presented here in English for the first time, provide a most unusual introduction to the intellectual and social universe of the Sephardi Jewish world of thirteenth-century Spain. Ibn Sahula wrote his fables in rhymed prose, here rendered into English as rhymed couplets. They comprise a series of satirical debates between a cynic and a moralist, put into the mouths of animals; the moralist always triumphs. The debates, which touch on such subjects as time, the soul, the physical sciences and medicine, astronomy, and astrology, amply reflect human foibles, political compromise, and court intrigue. They are suffused throughout with traditional Jewish law and lore, a flavour reinforced by the profusion of biblical quotations reapplied. With parallel Hebrew and English texts, explanatory notes, indication of textual variants, and references for all the biblical and other allusions, this edition has much to offer to scholars in many areas: medieval Hebrew literature, medieval intellectual history, Sephardi studies, and the literature and folklore of Spain. Both the translation and the scholarly annotations reflect a deep understanding of Ibn Sahula's world, including the interrelationship of Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic speculative thought and the interplay between those languages.

This article proposes a new reading of the opening scene of Joseph Ben Meir Ibn Zabara’s twelfth century (at the latest: 1209) The Book of Delight. This reading derives from the hypothesis that this art of storytelling is based on a poetic principle of uncertainty, and is therefore associated with the various forms of the ambiguous and the ambivalent (the grotesque, the uncanny, the ironic, etc.). As I have argued elsewhere about other rhymed Hebrew stories, this approach is appropriate, in my view, to the character of some of the most fascinating rhymed stories produced in medieval Hebrew literature. In the present study I suggest yet another demonstration of the poetic benefit that can accrue from the adoption of this approach.

BOOK REVIEWS 253 audience that had little access to the wide array of templates from which they came” (199). Despite its many strengths, the book could have been even stronger with a slightly different editorial approach (though it can be assumed some of these decisions were the publisher’s). Endnotes would have been more helpful at the end of the book, rather than at the end of each chapter. In order to keep the book accessible for a wider audience, some terms could have been clarified for non-specialists when they first appear, such as the references to the Maimonidean controversy or the taifa kingdoms. Similarly, it might be difficult for non-specialists to recognize secondary sources written in Hebrew, because they appear in the footnotes and bibliography in translated English titles without mention that they are written in Hebrew. Overall, The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition provides a welcome foray into the world of Arabic, Hebrew, and Judeo-Arabic intellectual culture through the lens of a striking primary source. The book should be consulted not only in the field of medieval Iberian studies but also by scholars of medieval translation and multiculturalism. The translation of the will in the appendix is especially appreciated and I look forward to assigning it in upcoming courses on medieval Jewish culture. Caroline Gruenbaum Yale University Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church Richard Firth Green University of Philadelphia Press, 2016. xii + 304 pp. $59.95 cloth. $27.50 paperback. Richard Firth Green’s Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church offers a historicist discussion of medieval fairy beliefs in conversation with contemporary church teachings and literary treatments. The crux of Green’s revisionist study is his argument that belief in fairies was a rather widespread medieval phenomenon, in light of attempts by the church to discredit such beliefs, which he described as “tensions between clerical and the popular views of fairies” (62). Green includes a broad range of late medieval sources, focused on English, French and Italian texts, and his interdisciplinary approach brings together literary, historical and theological sources to argue that fairy lore is syncretized, Christianized and demonized, Religion & Literature 254 which he contends inversely affects medieval interpretations of demons and purgatory. Green also attempts to combat the Celtic bias that tends to “locate the source of all medieval fairy belief in Wales” (5), and he notes that “Fairies are to be found from Iceland to Sicily and from the Pyrenees to the Ruhr” (5), stressing how belief in fairies was ubiquitous in medieval Europe. Chapter one discusses popular belief in fairies during the Middle Ages, especially the late medieval period, and makes the argument for genuine belief in elves, sylvans, satyrs, hobs, goblins, changelings and other fairy creatures. Chapter two examines the various attempts by the medieval church to police vernacular belief in fairies, through both suppression and syncretism of fairy lore in order to Christianize this folk practice. Chapter three explores the particular syncretism between incubi and fairies, demonstrating the extensive borrowing and overlap between these once distinct categories. Chapter four investigates the relative rareness of changelings in medieval literature, considers the paradox of “Christ the changeling” and its relation to medieval anxiety around parentage and succession, and observes that changon “changeling” is barely attested until the later period and early modern era. Finally, chapter five charts the syncretism between purgatory and fairyland, arguing that these two spaces are linked as timeless realms of the undead and that the former may be a Christianized adaptation of the latter. Green finds focusing on specific terms, which might correspond to categories of fairies, less than helpful, as he considers all fairy creatures as part of a shared tradition. Green offers a much-discussed definition of fairies as “numinous, social, humanoid creatures who were widely believed to live at the fringes of the human lifeworld and interact intermittently with human beings” (4). Nevertheless, there is relatively comprehensive treatment of specifically incubi demons, and their syncretism with fairies, in addition to the concept of a changon “changeling” that Green notes is conspicuously absent from late medieval sources whence the modern concept developed. Despite Green’s initial...

The Impact of Sociosexualization and Sexual Identity Development on the Sexual Well-Being of Youth Formerly in the Foster Care System

This chapter analyzes the linguistic realities of diglossic Jews living in medieval Ashkenaz: speaking the vernacular of French or German but writing and reading almost exclusively in Hebrew. It argues that text-based references to the vernacular demonstrate that Jews engaged in French literary culture not just through oral channels but through direct reading of French manuscripts. These learned Jews could read the Roman alphabet and copied directly from the non-Jewish literary tradition of their surroundings. When they translate, they do so from the vernacular into a language usually reserved for devotional material. In medieval literature, the emergence of a vernacular literary culture allowed wider access to material for readers who did not know Latin. But in medieval Jewish culture, translations restricted the readership by restraining it to Hebrew, the “high” register language of the male elite. The chapter then looks at Mishle Shuʻalim (Fox Fables), Melekh Artus (King Arthur), Sefer ha-Maʻasim (Book of Tales), and Dukus Horant .

Histories of 20th century British religion and sexuality, and that work which connects the two, have, until recently, been structured by the secularisation thesis, the assumption that politically and culturally Christianity's influence has steadily declined in the modern era. In the history of sexuality, it is commonly assumed that from the end of the Victorian era religious categories of sexual activity were replaced by scientific categories of sexual identity. This paper examines recent developments in the history and sociology of religion around the idea of the postsecular. Analysing religious developments in secularised societies in terms of religious change rather than a teleology of decline is starting to raise new questions in the history of sexuality. Postsecular analyses in the history of sexuality help us to understand the ways in which religion has continued to influence and shape understandings of sexual desire and identity in the 20th century.

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ABSTRACT.This article argues that the world is in the midst of a long‐term transition from dominant minority to dominant majority ethnicity. Whereas minority domination was common in premodern societies, modernity (with its accent on democracy and popular sovereignty) has engendered a shift to dominant majority ethnicity. The article begins with conceptual clarifications. The second section provides a broad overview of the general patterns of ethnic dominance that derive from the logic of modern nationalism and democratisation. The third section discusses remnants of dominant minorities in the modern era and suggests that their survival hinges on peculiar historical and social circumstances coupled with resistance to democratisation. The fourth section shifts the focus to dominant majorities in the modern era and their relationship to national identities. The article ends with a discussion of the fortunes of dominant ethnicity in the West.

Since the mid-eighties, personality and mood have undergone vigorous surveillance and repair across new populations in the United States. While government and the psy-complexes 1 have always had a stake in promoting citizen health, it is unique that, today, State, industry, and non-governmental organisations recruit consumers to act upon their own mental health. And while citizen behaviours in public spaces have long been fodder for diagnosis, the scope of behaviours and the breadth of the surveyed population has expanded significantly over the past twenty years. How has the notion of behavioural illness been successfully spun to recruit new populations to behavioural diagnosis and repair? Why is it a reasonable proposition that our personalities might be sick, our moods ill? This essay investigates the cultural promotion of a 'script' that assumes sick moods are possible, encourages the self-assessment of risk and self-management of dysfunctional mood, and has thus helped to create a new, adjustable subject. Michel Foucault (1976, 1988) contended that in order for subjects to act upon their selves -- for example, assess themselves via the behavioural health script -- we must view the Self as a construction, a work in progress that is alterable and in need of alteration in order for psychiatric action to seem appropriate. This conception of the self constitutes an extreme theoretical shift from the early modern belief (of Rousseau or Kant) that a core soul inhabited and shaped being, or the moral self.2 Foucault (1976) insisted that subjects are 'not born but made' through formal and informal social discourses that construct knowledge of the 'normal' self. Throughout the 19th century and the modern era, as medical, juridical, and psychiatric institutions gained increasing cultural capital, the normal self became allegedly 'knowable' through science. In turn, the citizen became 'professionalised' (Funicello 1993) -- answerable to these constructed standards, or subject to what Foucault termed biopower. In order to avoid punishments wrested upon the 'deviant' such as being placed in asylum or criminalised, citizens capitulated to social norms, and thus helped the State to achieve social order. 3 While 'technologies of power' or domination determined the conduct of individuals in the premodern era, 'technologies of the self' became prominent in the modern era.4 (Foucault, 'Technologies of the Self') These, explained Foucault, permit individuals to act upon their 'bodies, souls, thoughts, conduct and ways of being' to transform them, to attain happiness, or perfection, among other things (18). Contemporary psychiatric discourses, for example, call upon citizens to transform via self-regulation, and thus lessened the State's disciplinary burden. Since the mid-twentieth century, biopsychiatry has been embraced nationally, and played a key role in propagating self-disciplining citizens. Biopsychiatric logic is viewed culturally as common sense due to a number of occurrences. The dominant media have enthusiastically celebrated so-called biotechnical successes, such as sheep cloning and the development of better drugs to treat Schizophrenia. Hype has also surrounded newer drugs to treat depression (i.e. Prozac) and anxiety (i.e. Paxil), as well as the 'cosmetic' use of antidepressants to allegedly improve personality.5 Citizens, then, are enlisted to trust in psychiatric science to repair mood dysfunction, but also to reveal the 'true' self, occluded by biologically impaired mood. Suggesting that biopsychiatry's 'knowledge' of the human brain has revealed the human condition and can repair sick selves, these discourses have helped to launch the behavioural health script into the national psyche. The successful marketing of the script was also achieved by the diagnostic philosophy encouraged by revisions of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual or Mental Disorders(the DSM; these renovations increased the number of affective (mood) and personality diagnoses and broadened diagnostic criteria. The new DSMs 6 institutionalised the pathologisation of common personality and mood distresses as biological or genetic disorders. The texts constitute 'knowledge' of normal personality and behaviour, and press consumers toward biotechnical tools to repair the defunct self. Ian Hacking (1995) suggests that new moral concepts emerge when old ones acquire new connotations, thereby affecting our sense of who we are. The once moral self, known through introspection, is thus transformed via biopsychiatry into a self that is constructed in accordance with scientific 'knowledge'. The State and various private industries have a stake in promoting this Sick Self script. Promoting Diagnosis of the Sick Self Employing the DSM's broad criteria, research by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), contends that a significant percentage of the population is behaviourally ill. The most recent Surgeon General report on Mental Health (from 1999) which also employed broad criteria, argues that a striking 50 million Americans are afflicted with a mental illness each year, most of which were non-major disorders affecting behaviour, personality and mood.7 Additionally, studies suggest that behavioural illness results in lost work days and increases demand for health services, thus constituting a severe financial burden to the State. Such studies consequently provide the State with ample reason to promote behavioural illness. In predicting an epidemic in behavioural illness and a huge increase in mental health service needs, the State has constructed health policy in accordance with the behavioural sickness script. Health policy embraces DSM diagnostic tools that sweep in a wide population by diagnosing risk as illness and links diagnosis with biotechnical recovery methods. Because criteria for these disorders have expanded and diagnoses have become more vague, however, over-diagnosis of the population has become common . 8 Depression, for example, is broadly defined to include moods ranging from the blues to suicidal ideation. Yet, the Sick Self script is ubiquitously embraced by NGO, industry, and State discourses, calling for consumer self-scrutiny and strongly promoting psychopharmaceuticals. These activities has been most successful; to wit: personality disorders were among the most common diagnoses of the 80's, and depression, which was a rare disorder thirty-five years ago, became the most common mental illness in the late 90's (Healy). Consumer Health Groups & Industry Promotions Health institutions and drug industries promote mood illness and market drug remedies as a means of profit maximisation. Broad spectrum diagnoses are, by definition, easy to sell to a wide population and create a vast market for recovery products. Pharmaceutical and insurance companies (each multibillion dollar industries), an expanding variety of self-help industries, consumer health web sites, and an array of psy-complex workers all have a stake in promoting the broad diagnosis of mood and behavioural disorders. 9 In so doing, consumer groups and the health and pharmaceutical industries not only encourage self-discipline (aligning themselves with State productivity goals), but create a vast, ongoing market for recovery products. Promoting Illness and Recovery So strong is the linkage between illness and recovery that pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly sells Prozac by promoting the broad notion of depression, rather than the drug itself. It does so through depression brochures (advertised on TV) and a web page that discusses depression symptoms and offers a depression quiz, instead of product information. Likewise, Psych Central, a typical informational health site, provides consumers standard DSM depression definitions and information (from the biopsychiatric-driven American Psychiatric Association (APA) or the NIMH, and liberal behavioural illness quizzes that typically over-diagnose consumers. 10The Psych Central site also lists a broad range of depression symptoms, while its FAQ link promotes the self-management of mood ailments. For example, the site directs those who believe that they are depressed and want help to contact a physician, obtain a diagnosis, and initiate antidepressant treatment. Such web sites, viewed as a whole, appear to deliver certified knowledge that a 'normal' mood exists, that mood disorders are common, and that abiding citizens should diagnosis and treat their mood ailment. Another essential component of the behavioural script is the suggestion that the modern self's mood is interminably sick. Because common mood distresses are fodder for diagnosis, the self is always at risk of illness, and requires vigilant self-scrutiny. The self is never a finished product. Moreover, mood sickness is insidious and quickly spirals from risk to full-blown disorder. 11 As such, behavioural illness requires on-going self-assessment. Finally, because mood sickness threatens social productivity and State financial solvency, a moral overtone is added to the mix -- good citizens are encouraged to treat their mood dysfunctions promptly, for the common good. The script thus constructs citizenship as a motive for behavioural self-scrutiny; as such, it can naturally recommend that individuals, rather than experts, take charge of the surveillance process. The recommendation of self-determined illness is also a sales feature of the script, appealing to the American ethic of individualism -- even, paradoxically, as the script proposes that science best directs us to our selves. Self-Managed Recovery Health institutions and industries that deploy this script recommend not only self-diagnosis, but also self-managed treatment as the ideal treatment. Health information web sites, for exa

War is only a branch of political activity. Karl von Clausewitz Pathology is no more than a branch, a result, a complement of physiology, or rather, physiology embraces the study of vital actions at all stages of the existence of living things. Jean Begin The art of war is like that of medicine, murderous and conjectural. Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire Michel Foucault is well known as a theorist of Less established is his engagement with the theory of and war. His interest in these concepts became apparent only toward the end of his career. discipline and Punish, for example, partially examines the emergence of the art of military tactics in the eighteenth century, largely within French military-strategic thought. (1) His final work, The History of Sexuality, sees him attempt to develop a theory of the relation between war and power as well as the concept of a strategy of power. Close to death, Foucault declared, If God grants me life, after madness, illness, crime, sexuality, the last thing that I would like to study would be the problem of war and the institution of war in what one could call the military dimension of society. (2) These intentions were apparent also in the breadth of questions raised in Foucault's 1975-1976 course lectures at the College de France. At that point, Foucault posed the question of whether warfare is the general model of all social relations. What is the relationship, he asked, between the discourses of war and and the organization of modern power? This article acts as a response to both of those questions. As Paul Rabinow has argued, pursuing these lines of inquiry allows us to address some important questions in relation to the genesis of modern military-strategic thought. Why, for instance, modern military strategic theory formed along the lines that it did. Why, in particular, Carl von Clausewitz thought about in the seminal terms that he did as a conjunction between war and politics. (3) The naming of Clausewitz in this context is crucial. In his essay Governmentality, Foucault identifies a relationship between the emergence of Clausewitz's theory of and the shift in the organization of power that occurred in the early modern era. (4) For Foucault, the importance of Clausewitz's theory of extended far beyond the domain of the practice of war and statecraft. The conjunctive relation of war to politics, by which Clausewitz defines the art of strategy, was significant for Foucault in its representation of the basic principle upon which the strategic model of power operates within modern societies. That is to say, as far as Foucault was concerned, Clausewitz's theory did not apply primarily to war or practices of states in relation to other states. Its primary significance was its outline of the principle upon which a new form of political power had emerged, that which he sometimes called governmentality. Thus, it applied primarily to the ways in which the relations between states and populations changed with the birth of the modern era. Outlining the importance of that relation is largely the task addressed by this article. Surprisingly, contemporary strategic theorists have largely ignored the interest of Foucault in Clausewitz's work. That is because the concept of still tends to be defined within the domain of strategic studies as a form of instrumental rationality by which the relationship between means and ends is calculated to advance the interests of states and other actors. Obviously, Foucault's work is not amenable to the planning, waging, or winning of wars. He does provide, however, one of the most acute and influential studies of the workings and execution of strategic power of the late modern era. That said, he has tended to attract the attention of scholars concerned with providing a critical analytic of power, rather than with refining its strategic efficacy. …

Reviewed by: Love, Marriage, and Family in the Middle Ages: A Reader and: Love, Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages: A Sourcebook Mathew Kuefler Love, Marriage, and Family in the Middle Ages: A Reader. Edited by Jacqueline Murray . [Readings in Medieval Civilizations and Cultures, 7.] (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview. 2001. Pp. xiv, 524. $29.95 paperback.) Love, Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages: A Sourcebook. Edited by Conor McCarthy . (New York: Routledge. 2004. Pp. xii, 292. $24.95 paperback.) Two sourcebooks with very similar titles have appeared in the last few years. The first is part of a Broadview Press series of thematic medieval sourcebooks. The second is part of Routledge's growing number of history sourcebooks. Both Murray's and McCarthy's additions to these lists would be useful in medieval history courses on the related subjects, or in more general courses on the [End Page 743] history of sexuality. Nonetheless, the two books approach their subjects in curiously different ways. Murray's book is organized thematically. She begins with a chapter on "Foundations and Influences," providing examples of the biblical, Roman, and Germanic antecedents to the Middle Ages. Her next chapter, "Love and Its Dangers," notes the various medieval debates about the emotion. The third chapter, "Marriage and the Church," reviews theological writings and ecclesiastical regulations, followed by a fourth, "Marriage Ceremonies, Rituals, and Customs," that includes liturgies and legends specifically on weddings. Her fifth and sixth chapters, "Husbands and Wives" and "Marriage and Family," relate the vicissitudes of that relationship, as ideals and realities, respectively. The seventh, "Childbirth," compares religious and medical writings on that subject, and the eighth, "Parents and Children," continues with ideals and realities of the lives of children. The ninth and last chapter, "Beyond Christendom," samples Jewish and Muslim writings from medieval Europe, as an explicit contrast with what has come before. Within each chapter, sources are organized chronologically. McCarthy's book is also organized both thematically (as parts) and chronologically (as chapters). He begins with "Ecclesiastical Sources," including chapters on "The Church Fathers," "Anglo-Saxon England," "Theology and Canon Law," and "Canon Law and Actual Practice." His part two, "Legal Sources," contains chapters on Anglo-Saxon and Norman law. The title of part three, "Letters, Chronicles, Biography, Conduct Books," indicates its various chapters, although "Saints' Lives and Female Religious Writings" takes the place of biography. Part four, "Literary Sources," divides its chapters according to Old English, Latin, Old French, and Middle English literatures. Part five, finally, "Medical Sources," consists of two chapters, one on women's health and the other on love. Two things should be immediately apparent. First is that Murray has organized her book according to topics, while McCarthy has used genres to structure his book. The advantages and disadvantages of both approaches are clear. Murray's groupings allow her to bring together and contrast ecclesiastical and medical authorities on childbirth, for example, noting their different concerns. McCarthy's organization, in contrast, allows him to show the changing interests and emphases of patristic, early medieval, and canonists' writings on sex and marriage. The second major difference between the two is their geographical range. Murray's book includes sources from Iceland to Egypt, while McCarthy's restricts his to writings from England or that circulated there, although he admits that he adds some outside examples "to illustrate an aspect of medieval life for which I know of no English source" (p. 23), such as the record of a hermaphrodite from Colmar and glosses on the Viaticum of Constantine the African on lovesickness. The advantages of Murray's decision over that of McCarthy's will be clear to readers from outside of England. She writes: "During the Middle Ages, western Europe was a remarkably homogeneous culture. Despite regional [End Page 744] identities, a myriad of jurisdictions, shifting boundaries, and internal political tensions, Europe nevertheless was Christendom, united by religion and distinct from non-Christians" (p. 469). McCarthy's decision is a bit more difficult to defend. He writes: "There is no such place as 'medieval England,' politically or geographically speaking.... Nor is there any such place as 'medieval England' linguistically speaking" (p. 23). Yet he offers no compelling reason to counterbalance...

Silencing (Homo)Sexualities in School ... A Very Bad Idea

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality. Benjamin Kahan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. xiv+242.Dustin FriedmanDustin FriedmanAmerican University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn this brief but ambitious book, Benjamin Kahan gives readers a slow-motion history of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick named the “Great Paradigm Shift,” when a world of a “thousand aberrant sexualities” (to use Foucault’s phrase) transformed into one where everyone gets sorted into the homosexual/heterosexual binary.1 He describes his method as a “historical etiology” that looks back to dubious narratives of sexual causality to tell the story of modern erotic subjectivity’s emergence. Kahan’s point is that the “minor perverts” of his title did not simply disappear all at once, as Sedgwick’s mocking phrase implies. Instead, he draws on a diverse archive of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexological and literary texts to demonstrate that various sexual etiologies had surprisingly long afterlives, and that an understanding of sexual identity as congenital, interior to the psyche, and defined by the gender of the desired object has had a stunningly briefer moment of cultural dominance than typically assumed.Kahan’s discussion is organized into an introduction that explains his etiological methodology and situates it among competing historical approaches, five short chapters each addressing a different etiology, and a remarkable final chapter reframing his thesis as a sort of Unified Field Theory for the history of the sexuality. Chapter 1 focuses on situational homosexuality in two contemporaneous lesbian-themed plays, the largely forgotten Winter Bound (1929) by Thomas Dickinson and Lillian Hellman’s much more famous The Children’s Hour (1934). While the notion that sexual practices can be affected by one’s external circumstances—snowed-in at a farmhouse, attending a girls’ school—might seem to challenge the homo/hetero binary, Kahan argues that situational homosexuality actually “help[s] solidify sexual identity” by defining such acts as aberrations that do not affect one’s true identity, now understood to be an unchanging psychological quality that is not necessarily affected by one’s physical activities (35). The second chapter discusses another form of externally determined sexuality that he calls “anthropologis sexualis,” the notion that sexual behavior is influenced by climate. He analyzes the feverish homoeroticism of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) in relation to contemporary sexological texts to discuss how anthropologis sexualis marks a transition from the permeable body of humoral theory, which is radically open to its environment, to the self-contained and stable body of modern germ theory. This change facilitated the transition from a universalizing notion of sexual perversity (anyone could be spurred to indulge in aberrant sexual practices, given their location on the globe) to the minoritizing notion of identity (external circumstances have no bearing on one’s internal sexual self).In his third chapter, Kahan looks at the unlikely trio of Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein’s Gothic novel The Mysteries of New Orleans (1854–55), the Victorian bestseller Trilby (1894), and the American novelist Paschal Beverly Randolph’s nineteenth-century writings on “sex magic.” He uses these texts to discuss “magia sexualis,” the belief that magical acts such as “occultism, sorcery, supernaturalism, and witchcraft” can conjure sexual acts into being. By positing that the sexual motive was both outside the self, caused by magic, and inside the self, as the result of the magical act, magia sexualis aided the cultural transition from a premodern understanding of sex as part of the external “deployment of alliance (marriage, kinship, inheritance)” to the modern understanding of sex as the psychologically internal “deployment of sexuality (sensations, pleasures, and impressions)” (69). Chapter 4 is notable for its extended focus on one work, Sherwood Anderson’s short-story collection Winesburg, Ohio (1919), as it addressed the sexual implications of the Fordist transformation of the American economy. Anderson’s narratives of small-town life registered anxieties that the system of mass production would standardize sexual object choices in the process of regulating the private lives of workers for maximum productivity and efficiency, thereby flattening the irregularities of desire that thrived in local enclaves. “Weak etiologies” (or “etiolated etiologies”) are the subject of chapter 5, by which Kahan means theories of causality that resist the “clear ordering of cause and effect” embraced by many sexologists that produced the modern notion that “congenital desire leads to sexual object choice” (102). By contrast, weak etiologies of sexuality offer “coexisting possibilities” rather than “truth claims,” occupying the “paradoxical space between choice and compulsion, between voluntarity and involuntarity, and between active and unconscious action” often used to describe substance addiction (101–2)—a parallelism he draws out through readings of two narratives of alcoholism, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947) and Charles R. Jackson’s The Lost Weekend (1944).The final chapter is a tour de force that proficiently synthesizes over three decades of work in the history of sexuality and demonstrates how Kahan’s etiological approach resolves unrationalized contradictions in the field, specifically those regarding the historical location of the Great Paradigm Shift and modern sexual identity’s intersections with race, social class, and gender. These ambitions are supported by immense erudition and scholarly chops. In his account, “the ingredients of homosexuality” all exist by the early modern period—the era some scholars have identified as the origin of modern sexuality—but don’t get “baked together” until notions of congenital sexual identity are formulated at the turn of the twentieth century, the era more commonly identified as the start of our contemporary sexual regime (124). The rise of congenitality, he argues, is also the moment when sexual identity becomes disarticulated from other identity categories. Perhaps the most striking conclusion he proffers is that models of acquired sexuality persisted much longer into the twentieth century than previously suspected. According to Kahan, the homo/hetero binary was indisputably dominant only from the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century and is now in the process of transforming into the fissiparous understandings of sexual and gender identity that are beginning to take hold today.Other than the introduction and conclusion, Kahan writes short chapters that move quickly and fluidly among theoretical reflections, historical contextualization, and literary close readings, allowing him to make startling and illuminating juxtapositions between texts. He combines this argumentative swiftness with a deep and varied archive of materials that lend richness and nuance to his discussions. This is indicated by his extensive and discursive footnotes, which take up nearly sixty-five pages. Perhaps more than in other academic studies, these footnotes are worth a read on their own, indicating the vast amount of material he has synthesized and typified in the highly readable and efficient main discussion. Kahan’s prose style is quite strong: he combines long, complex sentences with shorter, colloquial statements that balance conceptual sophistication with clarity of expression. One qualm I had with this volume, though, was the uncertain role literary history plays in his methodology. In a section of the introduction titled “Sexological Modernism,” Kahan states that the blurry boundary that existed between sexological and literary writing at the turn of the twentieth century means that “we should understand modernist literary works as ‘vernacular sexology’ that dispute, amend, shape, contribute to, and work through more institutionalized modes of sexology” (20). While one of the study’s strengths is its historical and national diversity, it is often not clear how the writings he discusses fit into, challenge, or inspire a reassessment of the modernist paradigm. Indeed, references to modernism are made only in passing after the introduction, as literary texts are discussed largely in relation to sexological models of etiology rather than in specifically literary contexts. While this is not precisely a problem, given that Kahan frames his project as a contribution to the histories of sexuality and science rather than literary studies per se, I was still left wondering how modernist aesthetics might have affected the development of sexual etiologies and vice versa. Consequently, this volume will likely appeal more to those working in sexuality studies rather than students of modernism more generally.With that said, this volume is vital to anyone who works on the history of sexuality and/or queer studies. The new paradigm Kahan gives us for understanding the relevance of supposedly superannuated sexual etiologies opens up an exciting new archive for scholars to explore. The last chapter alone should be required reading for anyone seeking to make sense of the competing historical frameworks that have been offered for the genealogy of “our” sexual identity categories, and its bold rewriting of twentieth-century sexuality should have an immediate effect on research and teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. This is a necessary, field-changing book that should be read by anyone interested in sexuality in any academic field or historical period. Notes 1. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 44; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 44. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 117, Number 2November 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/705695HistoryPublished online August 20, 2019 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.