Invented Moralities: Sexual Values in an Age of Uncertainty

by Jeffrey Weeks

This is an important intervention in debates on the family and sexuality, exploring clashes over sexual values and contemporary sexual dilemmas such as AIDS.

Genres: LGBT, Nonfiction, Queer, Sexuality

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 1995

About the author

Jeffrey Weeks OBE (born 1945) is a gay activist and an historian and sociologist specialising in work on sexuality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey...


Librarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Neil H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked this up in my local (only) LGBT library as I noticed Mr Weeks has a couple of books. Fortunately this was a whopper. It's not instantly the easiest read and I chalk it down to my clear distractions but also because there was so much ground to cover. The cited works was mind boggling but necessary to cement the arguments for a diverse, tolerant, forward communicative strive for a sexually pluralistic environment. What Weeks did was not just on nationalistic grounds for respect and enlightenment of differences but a post modern pursuit for a less religiously moral knowledge but one which places an evolving ethics on our relations with our loved ones and those which we are a distantly placed on preludes of Care, Responsibility, Love and Respect. All these foregrounded by the Aids plague. 40 years on it has become a chronic disease to be managed and its a testament to scientists and our demand. But for those who lived, loved and died. It has given us homosexuals a burning difference to stand together, in solidarity despite our differences. We should and must never forget the ethical fortitude we have galvanised.

I enjoyed the book a lot although I was distressed by my incapacity to take it all in.

[John Treat · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I continue my belated catch-up with late-millennial reading, there is this: Jeffrey Weeks' INVENTED MORALITIES from 1995. It is an important a statement on our ethics in and after AIDS as any I have read, or imagined there could be. Nearly twenty-five years later, there are newer takes on gay men's moral (and otherwise) lives-- but not necessarily better ones. Weeks poses more questions than he answers, and that is his gift to us.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well done ethical text focusing on a morality of diversity and freedom structured by care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge of and for the other. Lots of good thought-provoking stuff about how ethics are socially constructed and, especially, how both the shift to sexual diversity and the AIDS crisis of recent decades have influenced our cultural self-understanding.