Genders and Sexualities in History

This open access book is an innovative history of community health practitioners’ responses to the seemingly intractable problem of men (and on rare occasions, women) sexually abusing children within the private family home. It is situated within a social history of the development of British community-based health professions in the last decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on archival research and newly gathered in-depth oral history interviews, the monograph argues that expectations placed upon community-based doctors, nurses and mental health staff since the 1980s in relation to predicting and preventing the sexual abuse of children by men they know are incongruous. Beneath a surface acquiescence to the need to protect children from such abuse or to intervene early lie cultural, social and structural barriers that prevent its fulfilment. The book is a first in specifically interrogating the recent history of the role of community health practitioners within the modern 'child protection workforce', and contributes to growing scholarship on the history of emotions in the medical professions.

This book reorients our understanding of the history of modern male homosexuality by focusing on Europe's 'internal Other': Italy. Spanning from the tail-end of the Grand Tour to the mid-fascist years, it argues that Italy was a time/space in which competing epistemologies of homosexuality confronted one another – precisely what characterizes 'modern' male same-sex love and attraction. Turning our understanding of the history of male homosexuality on its head, it proposes that Italy was not primitive, pre-modern, or under-developed but modern in a way that Europe and the US were not. It also highlights the frequently overlooked role working-class men and boys played in the so-called invention of modern male homosexuality. The new scientific epistemologies of sexuality; a pan-European Hellenic revival; a tradition of fostering male same-sex intimacies that cut across age, class, and nationality; Italy's lack of anti-sodomy legislation and specific place in the capitalist world system, including the late entry of bourgeois women into its public sphere; changing understandings of sexuality and gender that resulted from industrialization -- all combined to produce a same-sex sex tourism industry that juxtaposed competing understandings of male same-sex love. These epistemologies were inflected in complex and contradictory ways by issues of gender, class, ethnicity, locality, age and race, such differences not simply 'intersecting' but being constituted alongside one another – particularly given Italy’s ambiguous racial identity, somewhere 'between' the binaries of black and white. Adopting a queer Marxist approach that focuses on both capitalism's long durée and its combined and uneven development, rather than center a history of modern homosexuality on the white bourgeois men who visited Italy, this book seeks to glimpse the lives of their Italian lovers. To this end, it adopts an interdisciplinary approach that examines a wide archive including not only works of literature by privileged white bourgeois traveling gentlemen but also Italian sexology; same-sex sex scandals and their treatment in the Italian press; anthropological work on Italian homosexualities; travel diaries; and police records.