An introduction to the history of sexuality; to the history of homosexuality; to the notion of queer; to the Victorian and Edwardian periods; to the relation of the Edwardian and contemporary ideas of sexuality; to the themes of the book.

This chapter addresses the connections between queer theory and the history of sexuality. The chapter introduces the origins and development of queer theory as an approach that perceives sexuality and gender as constructed and rejects the notion of fixed and stable identities. The chapter addresses queer theory’s adaptation to different geographical locations and questions related to the translation of the term “queer” from one language to another. It continues with discussing the connections and tensions between queer theory and the history of sexuality, and addresses queer perspectives on the archive and the practice of oral history as topics on which the queer theoretical developments have particular relevance for historians. The chapter focuses on two aspects in queer theory, namely the continuities and ruptures in history as well as queer approaches to temporality. The chapter closes with a short reflection on the future possibilities of utilizing queer theory for studies on the history of sexuality. The chapter argues that while queer theory and contemporary research on the history of sexuality already converge in essential points, such as understanding sexuality as socially constructed and the distrust of ahistorical identities, the relationship between these two still holds unexplored opportunities for research.

Roman rhetoric, deployed as a legal and political tool and as a means of generating social capital, presupposes that the words of the speaker or writer initiate a dynamic, socially efficacious process of reception, and that that process is the real point of speaking or writing at all. Words shape audience reactions; and yet they can’t tightly and precisely control them. The text taken on its own proffers meaning in potentia only. It’s actualized in the reactions of its readers. But readers are multiple, never the reader. Communities of readers are always ad hoc and at best imperfectly coherent, and the consequent instabilities of reception open a space for the articulation of heterodox sexual identities. It is these less stable but potentially more productive aspects of preterition—and with them an expanded understanding of the device that goes beyond the textbook definition—that this book will consider, as they inform a select group of medieval texts whose readerships extended from late antiquity to the fourteenth century and beyond. Contemporary queer theory offers a useful framework through which to analyze these potentially subversive receptions of canonical texts.

This chapter offers a definition of the libertine novel as the erotic fiction of the Age the Enlightenment. Not only do libertine novels embody the intellectual audacity of the period through their transgressive and free-thinking characters; they also join efforts by scientists and philosophes to unveil the secret workings of the human machine whilst imagining a society fit for it. This chapter contends that this erotic and enlightened fiction represents a crucial element in the history of both literature and ideas, since it epitomises the moment when the Western world first stepped into modernity, challenging old ideals and idols, and redefining pleasure as any individual’s inalienable and natural right.

The introduction sets up the book as a dual biography: first, of the pathbreaking Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929), which illuminates the history of the burgeoning Indian nation in the early decades of the twentieth century and, second, of “age” as a category for measuring colonial subjects, upholding the rule of law, and governing intimate life in late colonial India. It locates the contributions of the book in the historiography of India, as well as the broader critical scholarship on postcolonial, sexuality, and childhood studies. It makes a case for historicizing age, beyond using it as a category of analysis. It describes the method of “reading sideways,” by cross-fertilizing postcolonial criticism and queer theory, to offer yet another way of writing histories of gender reform that go beyond historicist narratives of “transition” and accounts of success and failure.

Focusing on a pocket-size edition of Whitman’s poems from the early twentieth century provides an opportunity for thinking about what happens to poems we think we know well when they’re read in different published contexts. Building on the central insight from book historical studies about the inextricability of publication form and literary content, this chapter also engages aspects of the history of sexuality that likewise take shape through the practices of reading and writing. The Little Blue Book edition at this chapter’s heart juxtaposes Whitman’s poems with the writings of another figure in the long US history of sexual liberation: feminist and birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger. Reading Whitman alongside Sanger as the edition urges us to do uncovers unexpected intersections, and sometimes contradictions, at the sites of gender normativity, progressive political reform, and socialism, as well as the backlash against the progressive reforms to which Whitman and Sanger dedicated themselves.