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Jonathan Ned Katz
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 The
Invention of Heterosexuality by Jonathan
Ned Katz, Gore
Vidal
Exploring the history of heterosexual and
homosexual concepts, a study examines the works of such
professionals as Freud and the influence of the church while
challenging current opinions about sexual identity.
"Original and path-breaking...wrenches
male-female sexual relations from myth and biology, charting the
birth and development of an idea and institution most of us take
totally for granted."—Carol S. Vance, Columbia Univ.
Excerpt:
"...reproductive necessity, distinctions
between the sexes, and eroticism among the sexes have been around
for a long time. But sexual reproduction, sex difference, and
sexual pleasure have been produced and combined in different
social systems in radically different ways. Not until a hundred
years ago, I'll argue, were those ways heterosexual.... An
official, dominant, different-sex erotic ideal--a heterosexual
ethic--is not ancient at all, but a modern invention. Our mystical
belief in an eternal heterosexuality--our heterosexual
hypothesis--is an idea distributed widely only in the last
three-quarters of the twentieth century."
"Krafft-Ebing's use of the word
"hetero-sexual" to mean a normal different-sex eroticism
marked in discourse a first historic shift away from the
centuries-old procreative norm. His use of the terms
"hetero-sexual" and "homo-sexual" helped to
make sex difference and Eros the basic distinguishing features of
a new linguistic, conceptual, and social ordering of desire. His
hetero-sexual and homo-sexual offered the modern world two
sex-differentiated eroticisms, one normal and good, one abnormal
and bad, a division that would come to dominate our
twentieth-century vision of the sexual universe..."
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Reviewed 22 June 1998 by Jenn Meece
Excerpt:
Have you ever wanted a historically-based
refutation to the statement "heterosexuality is completely
natural and has been around since the dawn of time"? While
Katz' book may not provide spell-bounding excitement which urges
you to plunge into the next chapter, it does offer a solid
argument, showing that "heterosexuality" has not
been validated by centuries of public acceptance...
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By Jonathan Ned Katz, pbs.org
In the twentieth century, creatures called
heterosexuals emerged from the dark shadows of the
nineteenth-century medical world to become common types
acknowledged in the bright light of the modern day.
Heterosexuality began this century defensively,
as the publicly unsanctioned private practice of the respectable
middle class, and as the publicly put-clown pleasure-affirming
practice of urban working-class youths, southern blacks, and
Greenwich Village bohemians. But by the end of the 1920s,
heterosexuality had triumphed as dominant, sanctified culture.' In
the first quarter of the twentieth century the heterosexual came
out, a public, self-affirming debut the homosexual would duplicate
near the century's end.
The discourse on heterosexuality had a
protracted coming out, not completed in American popular culture
until the 1920s. Only slowly was heterosexuality established as a
stable sign of normal sex. The association of heterosexuality with
perversion continued as well into the twentieth century. . . .
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By from Worker's
Liberty, October, 2000
Excerpt:
One person who is prepared to tackle the
heterosexual bull by the horns is Jonathan Ned Katz the author of The
Invention of Heterosexuality. Katz argues that heterosexuality
was actually invented in the late nineteenth century and has
continued to develop throughout the twentieth century. Linking the
nuclear family with the social dominance of heterosexuality is
dubious. Other societies pre-dating industrial capitalism had an
even greater stake in reproduction inside a stable family but
those societies where not homophobic.
Katz uses the example of New England settlers in
colonial America to illustrate this point.
In these formative years, the New England
organization of the sexes and their erotic activity was dominated
by a reproductive imperative. These fragile, undeveloped
agricultural economies were desperate to increase their numbers,
and their labor force. So the early mode of procreation was
structured to optimize the production of New Englanders...The
operative contrast in this society was between fruitfulness and
barrenness, not between different sex and same sex
eroticism...Individuals might lust consistently toward one sex or
another and be recognized, sometimes, as so lusting.
But this society did not give rise to a subject
defined essentially by an attraction to a same sex or an appetite
for a different sex.
The defining feature of Heterosexuality is the
idea that there are two types of sexual behaviour, normal and
abnormal. Indeed that there are two types of people on earth,
straight and gay. This idea has no basis in science. There is only
one species of human roaming the earth today. I don't believe that
Heterosexuality is about breeding. That "sex is only for
reproduction". It is the glorification of sex between men and
women, sex for sex's sake.
The big problem with both Marxist and
Postmodernist theories is that they view heterosexuality as both
automatically repressive and static. It is as if heterosexuality
was born fully formed, became the dominant ideology overnight,
remained unchanged throughout the 20th century and will be
overthrown, hopefully, in the 21st century...
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