The history of heterosexuality in North America across four centuries

Heterosexuality is usually regarded as something inherently naturalbut what is heterosexuality, and how has it taken shape across the centuries? By challenging ahistorical approaches to the heterosexual subject,Heterosexual Histories constructs a new framework for the history of heterosexuality, examining unexplored assumptions and insisting that not only sex but race, class, gender, age, and geography matter to its past. Each of the fourteen essays in this volume examines the history of heterosexuality from a different angle, seeking to study this topic in a way that recognizes plurality, divergence, and inequity.

Editors Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell have formed a collection that spans four centuries, addressing the many different racial groups, geographies, and subcultures of heterosexuality in North America. The essays range across disciplines with experts from various fields examining heterosexuality from unique perspectives: a historian shows how defining heterosexuality, sex, and desire were integral to the formation of British America and the process of colonization; a legal scholar examines the connections between race, sexual citizenship, and nonmarital motherhood; a gender studies expert analyzes the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and explores the intersections of heterosexuality with shame and second-wave feminism. Together, these essays explain how differently earlier Americans understood the varieties of gender and different-sex sexuality, how heterosexuality emerged as a dominant way of describing gender, and how openly many people acknowledged and addressed heterosexualitys fragility.

By contesting presumptions of heterosexualitys stability or consistency,Heterosexual Histories opens the historical record to interrogations of the raced, classed, and gendered varieties of heterosexuality and considers the implications of heterosexualitys multiplicities and changes. Providing both a sweeping historical survey and concentrated case studies,Heterosexual Histories is a crucial addition to the field of sexuality studies.

Rebecca L. Davis is the Miller Family Early Career Professor of History at the University of Delaware. Her teaching and research focus on the histories of gender, sexuality, and religion in the modern United States. She is the author ofMore Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss (2010). Davis is currently at work on two books:Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics andSex in America. She is also a producer of theSexing History podcast and a Research Associate for the Council on Contemporary Families.

Michele Mitchell is Associate Professor of History at New York University and former North American editor ofGender& History. She is the author ofRighteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction(2004) and co-editor ofDialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality, and African Diasporas (2004) andGender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges (2015). She also serves on the Editorial Board of theOxford Research Encyclopedia of American History.