The Geography of Perversion: Male-To-Male Sexual Behavior Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750-1918

by Rudi C. Bleys

Recent years have seen enormous attention devoted to the history of sexuality in the Western world. But how has the West conceived of non-western societies been influenced by these other traditions? The Geography of Perversion and Desire is the first historical study to demonstrate convincingly that the representation cultural otherness, as found in European thought from the Enlightenment through modern times, is closely interrelated with modern constructions of homosexual identity. Travel reports and early ethnographic accounts of cross-gender roles in the Americas, Africa, and Asia corroborated the 18th century construction of the sodomite identity. Similarly, the late 19th-century construction of the third sex provoked much anthropological speculation on to genetic versus societal nature of male-to-male sexual relations, a precursor of current essentialist versus constructionist debates. An invaluable contribution to the ongoing debates on cultural and sexual otherness, this volume unravels how the categories of the modern sodomite and later homosexual were inextricably intertwined with essentialist definitions of racial identity. In encyclopedic detail, Bleys traces how cross-cultural records were collected, created, structured, manipulated, excerpted, reformulated, and omitted in interaction with changing beliefs about male-to-male sexuality. Focusing in such subjects as puritanism, sodomy, and ethnicity in colonial North America; cross-gender behavior and hermaphrodditism; the semiotics of genitalia; and the parameters of sexual science, The Geography of Perversion and Desire is a breathtakingly thorough, cross cultural history of sexual categories. Drawing on travel reports and early ethnographic accounts, The Geography of Perversion and Desire presents the first historical study to demonstrate convincingly that the representation of cultural otherness, as found in European thought from the Enlightenment to modern times, is closely interrelated with modern constructions of homosexual identity.

Genres: Theory, Sexuality

480 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1995

Reviews

[fausto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is probably the best introduction and compendium on the male-homosexual related ethnographic approaches from western Europe. The main thesis of the book is that colonialism is a key factor in order to understand the rise of the first homosexual rights movement in the Germany in the early 20th. Bleys analyzes the construction of the “primitive homosexual” body and social role. As the western ethnologies were dealing with the huge amount of cross-cultural male homosexual behavior, they were seeing the rise of a distinctive homosexual subculture inside their our countries (mostly in England, Holland and France, as have been studied by some scholars) since the early 18th.
Actually, Bleys considers that early colonialism by Spain, England, France, Holland and Portugal, and their reports of berdaches and travestites in America is a major influence in the development of a distinctive effeminate homosexual stereotype at that time.

The only reason I did not give the book the five stars is for Bley’s dismiss of feminist approaches to pederasty, sexology and male sexual behavior, while he acknowledges the importance of those approaches, he is constantly dismissing them as an important factor in the development of sexual discourses inside a patriarchal culture. If you are not interested in those feminists’ approaches, is easily a five-stars book. Actually, I think is a must read for every course on gay studies.