David M. Halperin – författare

Although there is scarcely more than a mention of homosexuality in his scholarly writings, Michael Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984, has become a powerful source of both personal and political inspiration to an entire generation of gay activists? Offering a no-holds barred rebuke to recent criticism of Foucault by Camille Paglia, Richard Mohr, biographer James Miller, and others, Saint Foucault is an uncompromising and impassioned defence of the late French philosopher and historian. A sometimes scathing, sometimes moving exploration of truth and sexual politics, it shows Foucault as a galvanizing thinker who will continue to serve as a model for gay intellectuals and activists.

Ever since the 1969 Stonewall Riots, 'gay pride' has been the rallying cry of the gay rights movement and the political force behind the emergence of the field of gay and lesbian studies. But has something been lost, forgotten, or buried beneath the drive to transform homosexuality from a perversion to a proud social identity? Have the political requirements of gay pride repressed discussion of the more uncomfortable or undignified aspects of homosexuality? "Gay Shame" seeks to lift this unofficial ban on the investigation of homosexuality and shame by presenting critical work from the most vibrant frontier in contemporary queer studies.An esteemed list of contributors tackles a range of issues - questions of emotion, disreputable sexual histories, dissident gender identities, and embarrassing figures and moments in gay history - as they explore the possibility of reclaiming shame as a new, even productive, way to examine lesbian and gay culture. Accompanied by a collection of films, performance, and archival imagery on DVD, "Gay Shame" constitutes nothing less than a major redefinition and revitalization of the field.

David M. Halperin is one of the most eminent thinkers in the world of gay and critical studies. In this new work, he revisits and refines the argument he set forth in "One Hundred Years of Homosexuality": the idea that both hetero- and homosexuality are not biologically determined but, instead, socially constructed. "How to Do the History of Homosexuality" builds on this seminal argument, answers its critics and makes greater allowances for continuities in the history of sexuality. Above all, Halperin offers a vigorous defence of the historicist approach, one that sets a premium on the description of other societies in all their specificity and otherness instead of forcing them to fit our own conceptions of what sexuality is or ought to be. Dealing with male homosexuality and lesbianism, this volume first recovers the radical design of Michel Foucault's approach to the history of sexuality. Halperin salvages Foucault's teachings from common misapprehensions and misreadings, then makes them newly available to historians as an impetus for innovation in the field.Exploring the broader significance of historicizing desire, Halperin also questions the tendency among scholars to reduce sexuality to a mere series of classifications. Then, in a theoretical tour de force, he offers an altogether new strategy for approcaching the history of sexuality - one that rehabilitates the constructionist approach by readily acknowledging continuities across space and time. Controversial, impassioned and revelatory, "How to Do the History of Homosexuality" is a book that could only have been written by David M. Halperin. It should prove to be valuable reading for anyone interested in the history of sexuality.

In this long-awaited book, David M. Halperin revisits and refines the argument he put forward in his classic One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: that hetero- and homosexuality are not biologically constituted but are, instead, historically and culturally produced. How to Do the History of Homosexuality expands on this view, updates it, answers its critics, and makes greater allowance for continuities in the history of sexuality. Above all, Halperin offers a vigorous defense of the historicist approach to the construction of sexuality, an approach that sets a premium on the description of other societies in all their irreducible specificity and does not force them to fit our own conceptions of what sexuality is or ought to be.Dealing both with male homosexuality and with lesbianism, this study imparts to the history of sexuality a renewed sense of adventure and daring. It recovers the radical design of Michel Foucault's epochal work, salvaging Foucault's insights from common misapprehensions and making them newly available to historians, so that they can once again provide a powerful impetus for innovation in the field. Far from having exhausted Foucault's revolutionary ideas, Halperin maintains that we have yet to come to terms with their startling implications. Exploring the broader significance of historicizing desire, Halperin questions the tendency among scholars to reduce the history of sexuality to a mere history of sexual classifications instead of a history of human subjectivity itself. Finally, in a theoretical tour de force, Halperin offers an altogether new strategy for approaching the history of homosexuality—one that can accommodate both ruptures and continuities, both identity and difference in sexual experiences across time and space.Impassioned but judicious, controversial but deeply informed, How to Do the History of Homosexuality is a book rich in suggestive propositions as well as eye-opening details. It will prove to be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of sexuality.

Halperin's subject is the erotics of male culture in ancient Greece. Arguing that the modern concept of "homosexuality" is an inadequate tool for the interpretation of these features of sexual life in antiquity, Halperin offers an alternative account that accords greater prominence to the indigenous terms in which sexual experiences were constituted in the ancient Mediterranean world. Wittily and provocatively written, Halperin's meticulously drawn windows onto ancient sexuality give us a new meaning to the concept of "Greek love."

Bringing together forty-two groundbreaking essays--many of them already classics--The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader provides a much-needed introduction to the contemporary state of lesbian/gay studies, extensively illustrating the range, scope, diversity, appeal, and power of the work currently being done in the field. Featuring essays by such prominent scholars as Judith Butler, John D'Emilio, Kobena Mercer, Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader explores a multitude of sexual, ethnic, racial, and socio-economic experiences. Ranging across disciplines including history, literature, critical theory, cultural studies, African American studies, ethnic studies, sociology, anthropology, psychology, classics, and philosophy, this anthology traces the inscription of sexual meanings in all forms of cultural expression. Representing the best and most significant English language work in the field, The Lesbian and Gay StudiesReader addresses topics such as butch-fem roles, the cultural construction of gender, lesbian separatism, feminist theory, AIDS, safe-sex education, colonialism, S/M, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, children's books, black nationalism, popular films, Susan Sontag, the closet, homophobia, Freud, Sappho, the media, the hijras of India, Robert Mapplethorpe, and the politics of representation. It also contains an extensive bibliographical essay which will provide readers with an invaluable guide to further reading.Contributors: Henry Abelove, Tomas Almaguer, Ana Maria Alonso, Michele Barale, Judith Butler, Sue-Ellen Case, Danae Clark, Douglas Crimp, Teresa de Lauretis, John D'Emilio, Jonathan Dollimore, Lee Edelman, Marilyn Frye, Charlotte Furth, Marjorie Garber, Stuart Hall, David Halperin, Phillip Brian Harper, Gloria T. Hull, Maria Teresa Koreck, Audre Lorde, Biddy Martin, Deborah E. McDowell, Kobena Mercer, Richard Meyer, D. A. Miller, Serena Nanda, Esther Newton, Cindy Patton, Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, Joan W. Scott, Daniel L. Selden, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Barbara Smith, Catharine R. Stimpson, Sasha Torres, Martha Vicinus, Simon Watney, Harriet Whitehead, John J. Winkler, Monique Wittig, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano

“Provocatively argues that when it comes to defining what it means to be a homosexual man, sex is overrated…Culture matters more…[How To Be Gay] is never a bore.” —Dwight Garner, New York TimesNo one raises an eyebrow if you suggest that a guy who arranges his furniture just so, rolls his eyes in exaggerated disbelief, likes techno music or show tunes, and knows all of Bette Davis's best lines by heart might, just possibly, be gay. But if you assert that male homosexuality is a cultural practice, expressive of a unique subjectivity and a distinctive relation to mainstream society, people will immediately protest. Such an idea, they will say, is just a stereotype-ridiculously simplistic, politically irresponsible, and morally suspect. The world acknowledges gay male culture as a fact but denies it as a truth.David Halperin, a pioneer of LGBTQ studies, dares to suggest that gayness is a specific way of being that gay men must learn from one another in order to become who they are. Inspired by the notorious undergraduate course of the same title that Halperin taught at the University of Michigan, provoking cries of outrage from both the right-wing media and the gay press, How To Be Gay traces gay men's cultural difference to the social meaning of style.Far from being deterred by stereotypes, Halperin concludes that the genius of gay culture resides in some of its most despised features: its aestheticism, snobbery, melodrama, adoration of glamour, caricatures of women, and obsession with mothers. The insights, impertinence, and unfazed critical intelligence displayed by gay culture, Halperin argues, have much to offer the heterosexual mainstream.

A dream in which a man has sex with his mother may promise him political or commercial success--according to dream interpreters of late antiquity, who, unlike modern Western analysts, would not necessarily have drawn conclusions from the dream about the dreamer's sexual psychology. Evidence of such shifts in perspective is leading scholars to reconsider in a variety of creative ways the history of sexuality. In these fifteen original essays, eminent cultural historians and classicists not only discuss sex, but demonstrate how norms, practices, and even the very definitions of what counts as sexual activity have varied significantly over time. Ancient Greece offers abundant evidence for a radically different set of sexual standards and behaviors from ours. Sex in ancient Hellenic culture assumed a variety of social and political meanings, whereas the modern development of a sex-centered model of personality now leads us to view sex as the key to understanding the individual.Drawing on both the Anglo-American tradition of cultural anthropology and the French tradition of les sciences humaines, these essays explore the iconography, politics, ethics, poetry, and medical practices that made sex in ancient Greece not a paradise of liberation but an exotic locale hardly recognizable to visitors from the modern world. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume are Peter Brown, Anne Carson, Franoise Frontisi-Ducroux, Maud W. Gleason, Ann Ellis Hanson, Franois Lissarrague, Nicole Loraux, Maurice Olender, S.R.F. Price, James Redfield, Giulia Sissa, and Jean-Pierre Vernant.

A bold reconception of ancient Greek drama by one of the most brilliant and original classical scholars of his generationWhen John Winkler died in 1990, he left an unpublished manuscript containing a highly original interpretation of the development and meaning of ancient Greek drama. Rehearsals of Manhood makes this groundbreaking work available for the first time, presenting an entirely novel picture of Greek tragedy and a vivid portrait of the cultural poetics of Athenian manhood.Ancient Athens was a military conclave as well as an urban capital, and male citizens were expected to embody the ideal of the Athenian citizen-soldier. Winkler understands Attic drama as a secular manhood ritual, a collaborative aesthetic and civic enterprise focused on the initiation of boys into manhood and the training, testing, and representation of young male warriors. Past efforts to discover the origins and development of Greek tragedy have largely treated drama as a literary genre, isolating it from other Athenian social practices. Winkler returns Greek tragedy to its social context, showing how it was one among many forms of display and performance cultivated by elite males in ancient Greece.The final work of a celebrated classical scholar, Rehearsals of Manhood highlights the civic function of the dramatic festivals at classical Athens as occasions for the examination and representation of boys on the verge of manhood, and offers a fresh explanation of how dramatic performance fit into the social life and gender politics of the Athenian state.

A bold reconception of ancient Greek drama by one of the most brilliant and original classical scholars of his generationWhen John Winkler died in 1990, he left an unpublished manuscript containing a highly original interpretation of the development and meaning of ancient Greek drama. Rehearsals of Manhood makes this groundbreaking work available for the first time, presenting an entirely novel picture of Greek tragedy and a vivid portrait of the cultural poetics of Athenian manhood.Ancient Athens was a military conclave as well as an urban capital, and male citizens were expected to embody the ideal of the Athenian citizen-soldier. Winkler understands Attic drama as a secular manhood ritual, a collaborative aesthetic and civic enterprise focused on the initiation of boys into manhood and the training, testing, and representation of young male warriors. Past efforts to discover the origins and development of Greek tragedy have largely treated drama as a literary genre, isolating it from other Athenian social practices. Winkler returns Greek tragedy to its social context, showing how it was one among many forms of display and performance cultivated by elite males in ancient Greece.The final work of a celebrated classical scholar, Rehearsals of Manhood highlights the civic function of the dramatic festivals at classical Athens as occasions for the examination and representation of boys on the verge of manhood, and offers a fresh explanation of how dramatic performance fit into the social life and gender politics of the Athenian state.

Through a curated selection of scholarship, Adi Saleem demonstrates that representations of Muslim and Jewish sexuality are often racialized and gendered in parallel ways as non-Western, deviant, and dangerous within Euro-American modernity. Contributors reckon with the intertwined past and present of Islamophobia, antisemitism, racism, coloniality, misogyny, and homophobia through distinct and complementary perspectives. In the first of three sections, scholars investigate the construction and performance of multiple identities and the crossing of boundaries. Studies of scriptural texts and media discourse as they shape perceptions of Jewish and Muslim gender and sexual minorities follow, highlighting how these representations impact the lived experiences of queer Jews and Muslims. The final section examines the efforts of contemporary queer Jews and Muslims to organize and form communities to forge solidarity in the face of multiple forms of oppression and marginalization. In conversation with Islamic studies, Jewish studies, and queer theory, this collection explores the interrelated experiences and representations of Jewish and Muslim minorities in Europe while triangulating the Jewish-Muslim dyad with a third variable: queerness.

Through a curated selection of scholarship, Adi Saleem demonstrates that representations of Muslim and Jewish sexuality are often racialized and gendered in parallel ways as non-Western, deviant, and dangerous within Euro-American modernity. Contributors reckon with the intertwined past and present of Islamophobia, antisemitism, racism, coloniality, misogyny, and homophobia through distinct and complementary perspectives. In the first of three sections, scholars investigate the construction and performance of multiple identities and the crossing of boundaries. Studies of scriptural texts and media discourse as they shape perceptions of Jewish and Muslim gender and sexual minorities follow, highlighting how these representations impact the lived experiences of queer Jews and Muslims. The final section examines the efforts of contemporary queer Jews and Muslims to organize and form communities to forge solidarity in the face of multiple forms of oppression and marginalization. In conversation with Islamic studies, Jewish studies, and queer theory, this collection explores the interrelated experiences and representations of Jewish and Muslim minorities in Europe while triangulating the Jewish-Muslim dyad with a third variable: queerness.

The past fifty years are conventionally understood to have witnessed an uninterrupted expansion of sexual rights and liberties in the United States. This state-of-the-art collection tells a different story: while progress has been made in marriage equality, reproductive rights, access to birth control, and other areas, government and civil society are waging a war on stigmatized sex by means of law, surveillance, and social control. The contributors document the history and operation of sex offender registries and the criminalization of HIV, as well as highly punitive measures against sex work that do more to harm women than to combat human trafficking. They reveal that sex crimes are punished more harshly than other crimes, while new legal and administrative regulations drastically restrict who is permitted to have sex. By examining how the ever-intensifying war on sex affects both privileged and marginalized communities, the essays collected here show why sexual liberation is indispensable to social justice and human rights.  Contributors. Alexis Agathocleous, Elizabeth Bernstein, J. Wallace Borchert, Mary Anne Case, Owen Daniel-McCarter, Scott De Orio, David M. Halperin, Amber Hollibaugh, Trevor Hoppe, Hans Tao-Ming Huang, Regina Kunzel, Roger N. Lancaster, Judith Levine, Laura Mansnerus, Erica R. Meiners, R. Noll, Melissa Petro, Carol Queen, Penelope Saunders, Sean Strub, Maurice Tomlinson, Gregory Tomso

The past fifty years are conventionally understood to have witnessed an uninterrupted expansion of sexual rights and liberties in the United States. This state-of-the-art collection tells a different story: while progress has been made in marriage equality, reproductive rights, access to birth control, and other areas, government and civil society are waging a war on stigmatized sex by means of law, surveillance, and social control. The contributors document the history and operation of sex offender registries and the criminalization of HIV, as well as highly punitive measures against sex work that do more to harm women than to combat human trafficking. They reveal that sex crimes are punished more harshly than other crimes, while new legal and administrative regulations drastically restrict who is permitted to have sex. By examining how the ever-intensifying war on sex affects both privileged and marginalized communities, the essays collected here show why sexual liberation is indispensable to social justice and human rights.  Contributors. Alexis Agathocleous, Elizabeth Bernstein, J. Wallace Borchert, Mary Anne Case, Owen Daniel-McCarter, Scott De Orio, David M. Halperin, Amber Hollibaugh, Trevor Hoppe, Hans Tao-Ming Huang, Regina Kunzel, Roger N. Lancaster, Judith Levine, Laura Mansnerus, Erica R. Meiners, R. Noll, Melissa Petro, Carol Queen, Penelope Saunders, Sean Strub, Maurice Tomlinson, Gregory Tomso