How to do the history of homosexuality.

Freeman, Chris

by David Halperin University of Chicago Press. 200 pp., $30.

Halperin's title may sound like hubris, and some of the book may seem defensive as the author takes on many of his critics from the last ten years, but Halperin's carefully argued and intricately constructed book provides an intellectual synthesis of much of the recent work on the history of (homo)sexuality. The new book is a useful supplement to Halperin's seminal One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990) and an incisive attempt to move the study of sexuality forward. Much of it is informed by Halperin's expertise on Michel Foucault (also on display in his 1995 book Saint Foucault). Chapter 1, "Forgetting Foucault," reminds readers of the subtlety of Foucault's genealogical approach to sexuality, which Halperin contends has been diluted to the point of bearing little resemblance to its original articulation: "Foucault's continuing prestige, and the almost ritualistic invocation of his name by academic practitioners of cultural theory, has had the effect of reducing the operative range of his thought to a small set of received ideas, slogans, and bits of jargon that have now become so commonplace and so familiar as to make a more direct engagement with Foucault's texts entirely dispensable." While some of this book may seem overly academic or too focused on Greco-Roman history and culture, most of it is accessible, especially a chapter that attempts to define "homosexuality" as distinct from earlier forms of same-sex intimacy: "Homosexuality is part of a new system of sexuality, which functions as a means of personal individuation: it assigns to each individual a sexual orientation and a sexual identity. As such, homosexuality introduces a novel element into social organization, into the social articulation of human difference, into the social production of desire, and ultimately into the social construction of the self." In this authoritative study, Halperin demonstrates with wit and erudition how to do--and how not to do--the history of homosexuality.