Pleasure and Duty

Three obvious, superficially simple but actually intensely complex questions embodied in the title immediately confront the reader of Dagmar Herzog's important new book. First, what do we mean by the ‘sexuality’ that constitutes the subject matter? Second, what is demarcated by the Europe that...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Contemporary European history 2013-05, Vol.22 (2), p.277-282
Main Author: WEEKS, JEFFREY
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
19th century
20th century
Civil unions
Energy
European history
Forum: Dagmar Herzog's Sexuality in Europe
Literary criticism
Morality
Scores
Sexuality
Space and Time
Turn of the century
Twentieth Century
Citations: Items that this one cites
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Summary:Three obvious, superficially simple but actually intensely complex questions embodied in the title immediately confront the reader of Dagmar Herzog's important new book. First, what do we mean by the ‘sexuality’ that constitutes the subject matter? Second, what is demarcated by the Europe that provides the geo-political boundaries of this study? Third, does the ‘twentieth century’ provide a useful temporal unity for the narrative and analysis that is at the heart of the book? Such questions are not mere scholarly nit-picking or academic point scoring, but a tribute to the problematising of the body in space and time that has been a hallmark of the deconstructive and reconstructive energy of recent scholarship on the sexual, and that is now making a welcome entry into mainstream history.
ISSN:0960-7773
1469-2171
DOI:10.1017/S096077731300009X