This chapter explores Sanhe gods’ hybridized masculinity across rural–urban and class boundaries. It also discusses their online and offline sexual discourses, desires, and involvement in paid sex.

This chapter uses contemporary Haitian fiction by feminist authors to explore the Haitian uses of the erotic. Emmelie Prophète’s Un ailleurs à soi (2018) and Kettly Mars’s Je suis vivant (2015) offer rich examples of how representations of same-sex desire map feminist geographies that foreground the relationship between the body, intimacy, and identity. I begin with a brief discussion of how representations of the erotic have evolved in Haitian literature, then continue with close readings of Prophète and Mars’s women-loving-women protagonists physical and verbal interactions. Guided by Caribbean feminist methodologies, I argue that these authors actively amplify the erotic as a source of freedom that can be powerfully ordinary and quietly mundane which is especially significant in the context of twenty-first-century literature.

A significant percentage of older adults remain sexually active. Studies have shown that sexual activity in older adults is associated with better cognitive and mental health and better sleep. Major neurocognitive disorders are a common cause of sexually inappropriate behavior. Despite the few studies discussing sexual aspects in MNCD, existing reports indicate that up to 25% of patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease have inappropriate sexual behavior, including increased sexual urge and hypersexuality. The ability of patients to consent to sexual relations may be underestimated by healthcare staff. Therefore, the issue of consent is an important point of discussion among staff members and each case should be assessed separately. Long-term care facilities should have policies in place that address the evaluation of a patient’s capacity to consent to sexual activity.

More women are surviving gynecological cancer with advancements in screening, diagnosis, and treatment. Survivorship care of gynecological cancer includes surveillance for recurrence of disease, monitoring for late effects of treatment, reducing the risk and early detection of other cancer, and assessment of psychosocial function. Even if the surveillance of gynecological cancer survivors has some common features, non-invasive and invasive breast, cervical, endometrial, and ovarian cancer will require an individualized therapeutic approach. Many survivors of gynecologic cancer will have long lasting effects on bone and sexual heath, so these areas should be addressed on a regular basis. In addition, it is important to use every encounter as an opportunity to assess the risk of other cancer and provide appropriate early detection. Survivorship care will also incorporate strategies to decrease the risk of other cancer through lifestyle modifications. Many female cancer survivors will have lifelong issues related to distress, body image, finance, and social support. Assessment of psychosocial issues and referral to appropriate services should be performed at every patient encounter.

Across centuries and continents, the Irish essay has captured impressions and insights triggered by socio-political transformations across the island, and the form’s malleability has allowed writers to puzzle out the contours of Irish identity, often highlighting its deliberate performativity. Shaped by the culture’s oral tradition, the Irish essay frequently imbricates with storytelling, theatrical performance, and public lectures, live events that underscore its performative qualities. Writers often gear their impressions and inquiries self-consciously to audiences real and imagined, assuming the essay plays a meaningful role in public dialogue. In the twenty-first century, personal and lyric essays focused on rapidly changing perceptions of bodies and sexuality exemplify this trait. This alertness to performance and audiences helps to explain the Irish essay’s ready adaptation to new forms, technologies, and platforms in pursuit of readers, listeners, and viewers at home and abroad.

Smith’s chapter focuses on the continued influence of the idea of Weimar Berlin in contemporary popular culture. The chapter takes as its starting point recent cultural expressions, such as the television series Babylon Berlin, focusing on previously unexplored aspects of how Weimar is depicted as a modern Babylon. Smith identifies two particularly salient aspects in these depictions: first, that the portrait of right-wing political cultures within Weimar are given more depth and nuance than are afforded center-left and left-wing ones; and, second, how the depiction of sex and violence leads us back to Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and its apocalyptic vision of Weimar, along with Anglo-American visions of Weimar that have particularly long staying power, in particular Christopher Isherwood’s depiction of 1930s Berlin and its iterations and adaptations on stage and screen. The chapter demonstrates the ways in which Weimar retains its grip on aspects of our contemporary popular culture and how the particular forms these cultural expressions take may tell us about the lessons drawn from Weimar.

This chapter argues that the New York School of Poets occupy a complex transitional moment in relation to both the history of sexuality and the history of poetry and modern art. Their work is governed by both the epistemology of the closet that shapes high modernism from earlier in the twentieth century and, looking forward to Stonewall and Gay Liberation, also presents utopian potentialities in its experimental forms of sociability.

Attending to the tropological imagination of Progressive Era U.S. immigration, this chapter maps what Michel Foucault calls “the organization of ‘erotic zones’ in the social body” to narrate a queer history of the social body itself. In so doing, the chapter animates a variety of period figurations of mass immigration—including racial indigestion and race suicide—to trace a new genealogy of the literary erotics of Asian, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, the ethnic groups that most threatened the whiteness of the social body. Reading across representations of immigration in the works of Henry James, Israel Zangwill, Charles Warren Stoddard, Yone Noguchi, Sui Sin Far, Jennie June, Emanuel Carnevali, and Emma Lazarus, this chapter shifts the history of sexuality from one located in individual bodies to theorize a sexuality of the population.

This chapter considers queer relations of identification and desire in nineteenth-century sentimental American literature, especially as they relate to the (re)production of the increasingly privatized, middle class, white, family. It considers how texts queer the substitutions of others for mothers (and fathers, and brothers, and sisters) in order to maintain and queer the normative family. The chapter moves from paradigmatic examples to ones that appear to revel in queer visions of identificatory erotics. It then draws upon queer of color critique to examine how white supremacy defines the human and/as normative gender and sexuality, such that Black and other people of color are placed as queer others in order to preserve a fantasy of white gender and sexual purity. This racialized version of queer as non-normative complicates any ideal of a solely celebratory or even neutral taxonomizing of identifications, desires, and their accompanying kinship structures.

This volume’s introduction traces the longstanding interdigitation between American literature and sexuality studies broadly imagined, mapping the inseparability between queer American literature and the history of sexuality. In so doing, it offers an institutional history of gay and lesbian studies, queer studies, and trans studies and grapples with the theoretical question of how to understand queer American literature. Examining the mutual imbrication of “queer,” “American,” and “literature,” it provides an overview of the volume’s theoretical investments, conceptual choices, and organization in order to introduce the reader to the volume as a whole.

This chapter adopts techniques from historical poetics to understand the queerness of American poetry before 1850. It suggests a set of techniques and methods as descriptive of queer historical poetics. It places poetry in its historical context to determine how queerness has changed across early American history. By examining poetry from Puritan New England, eighteenth-century American satires, verse of the American Revolution, and poetic collaborations from the early Republic, this chapter shows how poetry was understood to be queer in colonial American and the early republic. It suggests a relationship between queerness and formalism that looks for the ways queer sociabilities and ordinary queerness appeared in traditions of American poetry, and how these forms might challenge our idea of queer poetry as always intent on being radical, deviant, or innovative. Queer historical poetics restores sexuality to discussions of the formalist and poetic traditions of American poetry before 1850 while borrowing from queer studies the demand for relevancy.

“’Flung out of Space’: Class and Sexuality in American Literary History" explores the relationship between class and queer sexuality in American literary history, suggesting how neither of these histories can be understood without accounting for the other. Reading literary texts such as Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt and Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” alongside queer theory and LGBTQ history, Lecklider suggests how class structures queer literature throughout American history, particularly since the 19th century. Particularly emphasizing how labor structures desire, this chapter argues that working-class sexualities – and their intersections with race and gender – must be taken seriously in order to fully appreciate both the contributions of queer literature and the legibility of labor in American history.

Chapter 33 analyses the challenges to normative definitions of family, gender and love posed by Goethe’s works. In Goethe’s time, such norms were a crucial factor in what Michel Foucault has called the ‘mechanisms of power’. The chapter demonstrates that Goethe defied conventions through his depiction of desire: there are many examples of same-sex attraction in his work, and desire is often also portrayed as fluid, shifting and non-exclusive. Further, the chapter highlights the importance of adoptive relations, which Goethe presents as being of the same order of validity as biological connections.

Ancient Egyptian ideas about sex changed over time in close relation to changes in gender power relations. The comprehensive overview of textual and iconographic sources in this chapter indicates that discourses on sex did exist. Desirable bodies were either depicted or described in poetry. Pleasures could be sought in different sexscapes such as e.g., houses, gardens, streets, festivals, marshes and bathhouses. Festival sex had long history and was connected to the celebration of the return of the wondering Sun Eye goddess. She was pacified through consumption of alcohol and sexual intercourse. Sex-work is also attested, but its closer regulation through taxation does not predate Roman occupation. This is also the period when classical authors such as Strabo, formed the orientalist trope of sacred prostitution in Egyptian temples. However, contrary to this trope, sex is rarely depicted in state sponsored art and is found in media such as ostraca or rock art. Similarly, same-sex intercourse is attested throughout Egyptian history but rarely depicted. Passivity in intercourse between men was looked down upon. It even served as a metaphor to designate enemies of Egypt. Sexual violence was punishable but easily confused with adultery, putting women in precarious positions.

This chapter discusses the contribution of anthropology to the understanding of the diversity of practices and attitudes towards sexualized bodies developed by different human cultures, beginning with the works of classical anthropologists, including E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Margaret Mead and Bronisław Malinowski. It discusses Marxist, feminist, and postmodern anthropology, and reflects on the influence of Michel Foucault, particularly his notion of the dispositif, the device of sexuality. The chapter argues that the device of sexuality—that is, that there is such a thing as “sexuality”—is modern and Western. The sexual life of the peoples studied by anthropologists is an inseparable part of their social order and its reproduction, and in no way constitutes a separate sphere of existence that can be studied as such, nor does it constitute the core of any identity, either personal or collective. The task of anthropology consists in restoring how these peoples deal with the sexual in their own social and cultural terms, respecting their radical otherness.

This chapter explores Michel Foucault’s impact on the history of sexuality by emphasizing the disparate and evolving nature of his work and its often-controversial influence on the history of sexuality as a field. The essay begins by summarizing the arguments of the four volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, while recalling the project’s turbulent history. The first volume maintained that sexuality’s history in the West was characterized by an “incitement to discourse” (rather than repression) which sealed the “Faustian pact” between sexuality and the pursuit of truth, while also drawing sexuality into power relations. Yet Foucault’s interest in early Christian sexual practices led him to reorient his project towards an exploration of classical antiquity and the role played by sexuality in practices of subjectivity. The essay’s second part examines how historians of sexuality have drawn on Foucault’s insights, focusing on the divergences between historians influenced by Foucault’s first volume (dealing with knowledge and power) and those inspired by the latter volumes (prioritizing subjectivity). After examining Foucault’s impact on feminism and queer theory, the essay concludes by noting that many historians of sexuality have made productive use of Foucault’s work without concurring with his philosophical conclusions.