How to Do the History of Homosexuality

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Demand for Historicism
Review: ...

Next to the devastatingly landmark work of George Chauncey at the University of Chicago and the recently race-conscious examinations of John D'Emilio at the University of IL at Chicago, Professor Halperin's books--and this sometimes incisively polemical yet well-substantiated new methodological contribition--stand as the most rigorous historical inquiries into the history of gay male sexuality today.

The previous negative review shows just how contentious the notion of "doing" "homosexual" history is. However, Halperin's innovations and arguments demand attention: he argues for archival excavations of sexualities (plural) and he does not take for granted the fact that one vision of "homosexuals" was the same in all world contexts.

Today, current and future generations would do well to fuse historical and anthropological methods--or a greater attention to cultural development and entanglements both synchronically and diachronically--than only to focus upon history in terms of monological, cause-effect-bound arguments. But Halperin's approach, essentially, works toward this interdisciplinarity.

Without a doubt, this book is excellent.

Rating:
Summary: A historicist examination of an often discarded topic.
Review: Here, Halperin demonstrates the creme de la creme of gay/lesbian studies by demonstrating his own evolution and refinement of his ideas by Eve Sedjwick ("Epistomology in the Closet"): it is a collectin of four articles that he has written since "Onehundred Years of Homosexuality." It also acts as a commentary on Foucault, which is wonderful! If you are in any discipline and need a "How to Do" on homosexuality in your academic field, then this book is for you! If this is all you need, then you could benefit from just reading the introduction and the fourth chapter "How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality" (104-137); I am in the field of biblical studies/religion and found it very useful. It is really a revolutinary and handy guide on the historiography of homosexuality, a must read for anyone who is concerned with talking intelligently about the subject of being gay.

Rating:
Summary: Nonsense
Review: There is a certain point where patience runs out.

After all, we have all heard the old chestnut, "Those who can't do, teach."

Evidently, the esteemed professor [of English, note you well] is not actually capable of writing a "History of Homosexuality" himself, with his own pen.

So what does he do? The English professor writes a book telling professional historians how to perform their task!

Mind-boggling! But of course, English professors (and other professors of literature) have been wandering very far afield, after trashing their own subject-matter (literature) with such foolish things as "deconstruction."

Stinky stuff indeed! :-0

Rating:
Summary: Nonsense
Review: There is a certain point where patience runs out.

After all, we have all heard the old chestnut, "Those who can't do, teach."

Evidently, the esteemed professor [of English, note you well] is not actually capable of writing a "History of Homosexuality" himself, with his own pen.

So what does he do? The English professor writes a book telling professional historians how to perform their task!

Mind-boggling! But of course, English professors (and other professors of literature) have been wandering very far afield, after trashing their own subject-matter (literature) with such foolish things as "deconstruction."

Stinky stuff indeed! :-0

Rating:
Summary: too many calls for "historicizing"
Review: This book developed, no doubt, out of the controversial course Professor Halperin offered not so very long ago entitled "How to Be Gay" as a graduate English seminar. As one might expect, the course trafficked in self-indulgent stereotypes and wallowed in its "campiness" at the precise time that it was supposed to be challenging the idea of rigid, fixed sexual identities. This book does the same thing, while also participating in the trendy and almost deafening "call to historicize" always and at all costs in our analyses of *any* cultural artifact or phenomenon. The reasons for these calls are theoretically to encourage a sensitivity to the particularity and specificity of individual/local experience. In practice, such calls are unthinking, unreflective echoing of an academic trend that unfairly dismisses the contributions that fields such as psychology, psychoanalysis, semiotics, linguistics, etc. can make to the study of art, literature, sexuality, gender, subjectivity, and politics. If Halperin had wanted to do a history of homosexuality (or of "A" homosexuality), he should have just done so and not gone on and on quoting theorists such as Foucault and telling us we must historicize simply because Foucault says we should and everyone is doing it. There have already been more than enough "calls" for such histories.