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6 - Gender and sexuality

from Part One - Global matrices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

By
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Edited by
Jerry H. Bentley ,
Sanjay Subrahmanyam  and
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Jerry H. Bentley
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii, Manoa
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
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Summary

Gender is a very old conceptual category, but a relatively new framework for historical analysis. Sexuality is also a relatively new category of historical study, inspired in part by the gay liberation movement that began in the 1970s. This chapter focuses on three topics that each involved both gender and sexuality: migration, intermarriage and the cross-cultural blending that resulted from these; third- and transgenders; and religious transformations. The contacts between cultures before 1400 that changed gender structures had often been carried out through the transmission of ideas and construction of institutions by individuals or small groups of people. Laws regarding intermarriage were usually framed in gender-neutral language by lawmakers. Migration not only brought men and women from different groups together, but also introduced explorers, soldiers, settlers and officials to individuals who were understood in their own societies to be a third or fourth gender.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge World History , pp. 133 - 156
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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References

Further reading

“AHR Forum: Transnational Sexualities,” American Historical Review 114(5) (2009), 1250–354.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Foster, Thomas A. (ed.), Long before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America (New York University Press, 2007).Google Scholar
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Ward, Haruko Nawata, Women Religious Leaders in Japan's Christian Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).Google Scholar
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E., Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2010).Google Scholar
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E., Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edn. (Cambridge University Press, 2008).Google Scholar
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