Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women's Experience of Modern War

by Laura L. Doan

For decades, the history of sexuality has been a multidisciplinary project serving competing agendas. Lesbian, gay, and queer scholars have produced powerful narratives by tracing the homosexual or queer subject as continuous or discontinuous. Yet organizing historical work around categories of identity as normal or abnormal often obscures how sexual matters were known or talked about in the past. Set against the backdrop of women’s work experiences, friendships, and communities during World War I, Disturbing Practices draws on a substantial body of new archival material to expose the roadblocks still present in current practices and imagine new alternatives.



In this landmark book, Laura Doan clarifies the ethical value and political purpose of identity history—and indeed its very capacity to give rise to innovative practices borne of sustained exchange between queer studies and critical history.  Disturbing Practices insists on taking seriously the imperative to step outside the logic of identity to address questions as yet unasked about the modern sexual past.

Genres: History, Gender, Nonfiction, Gender Studies

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Laura Doan is professor of cultural history and sexuality studies at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture and editor of Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires, among other books.

Reviews

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book. Doan concisely and meticulously provides an overview and critique of the field of gender and sexuality including discussions on works by Joan Scott, Sedgwick, Michel Foucault, and David Halperin. Not only does she follow up her critiques with a new theory she also spends the second section of her book utilizing that methodology to study women during the World War One Era - I wish she would have used other examples as well to demonstrate the versatility of the queer critical theory. Nonetheless a worthwhile read for those interested in the theoretical side of gender and sexuality.

[C. B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any historian of sexuality will get a lot out of reading this, and I certainly can't do its complexities justice here. It's incredibly sharp and thoughtful, and one couldn't help but have one's outlook changed by it. We need to think self-critically about what happens when we assign identities to people in the past. We need to reflect, too, on the impetus to assign in the first place. If we come to our sources from a different perspective, maybe our histories will yield more unexpected results. Still, like Justin Bengry in his review, I think Doan's queer critical history is perhaps more of an ideal to aim for than a goal to achieve. Much recommended!

[Christina Simmons · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very important effort to show how to escape the framework of modern sexuality when looking at the history of sexuality. It is convincing in demonstrating the uneven emergence of modern ways of understanding sexuality in terms of identity in early twentieth-century Britain and showing how different discourses, such as Victorian class-based moral perspectives, could co-exist with the modern one. But the writing is very turgid, filled with the worst examples of dense and unreadable theory language. Not that the theory is bad or unnecessary; it is the way it is written that is the problem. She needed Joseph Williams, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. But still a worthwhile book.