Making the Human Gesture: History, Sexuality and Social Justice

Abstract

The History Workshop movement grew out of the same social, cultural and political context in the early 1970s as second-wave feminism and the lesbian and gay movement. It's not surprising that they shared key assumptions, about the importance of ‘history from below’, new forms of agency, and political commitment. The new history of sexuality, including lesbian and gay history, was born at that moment. Since then the history of sexuality has grown enormously in volume and status. Sexuality is now rightly seen as an essential category of analysis, without which huge tracts of our history become meaningless. At the same time the focus of radical sexual history has become mistier, and the categories that once seemed so fixed - the meanings, for example, of heterosexuality and homosexuality - have blurred under the forensic eye of contemporary historians. What is the value of sexual history today? In the Raphael Samuel Memorial lecture 2009, Jeffrey Weeks traces the history of sexual history, an intellectual journey that is both personal and collective, then relates it to wider questions about the meanings of social justice in a globalized and conflicted world.