Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England Since 1830 / Edition 2

by Frank Mort

Overview

Dangerous Sexualities takes a look at how our ideas of health and disease are linked to moral and immoral notions of sex. Beginning in the 1830s, Frank Mort relates his social historical narratives to the sexual choices and possibilities facing us now.
This long-awaited second edition has been thoroughly updated to include new discussions of eugenics, race hygiene and social imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With a new and extended bibliography, introduction and illustrations, this second edition brings a classic into the 21st Century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415167345
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	01/20/2000
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Frank Mort is Professor of Cultural history and Director of the Ralph Samuel Centre for Metropolitan Cultural History at the University of East London.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Narratives of Sex Part One: Moral Environmentalism 1830-1860 1.Cholera 2.James Phillips Kay 3.Eighteenth-century Social Medicine and Philanthropy 4.Experts and Their Concepts 5.Science and Religion 6.Medico-moral Politics Implemented? 7.De-coding Morality: the Domain of the Sexual 8.Hygienics and Bourgeois Hegemony 9.Working-class Female Sexuality and Professional Masculinity 10.Hierarchies of Expertise: Female Philanthropy and the Gendered Politics of Reform 11.Conclusion Part Two: The Sanitary Principle in Dominance: medical hegemony and feminist response 1860-1880 1.Medical Hegemony and Social Policy 1850S1870 2.The Contagious Diseases Acts adn Mid-Victorian Social Reform 3.Female Sexuality 4.Male Desire 5.The Repeal Campaign and the Collapse of the edico-moral Alliance 6.Religion, Morality and Repeal Feminism 7.Women and Social Disciplining Part Three: From State Medicine to Criminal Law: purity, feminism and the state 1.Prologue 2.The Eclipse of State Medicine 3.Purity and Science 4.Purity and Populism 5.Speaking Out 6.Feminism and Social Purity 7.Ellice Hopkins 8.Purity, Feminism and the Reluctant State 9.Suffrage and Sexuality: 1908S1914 11.Mobilising a Language 12.Petitioning the State 13.The Libertarian Challenge 14.Conclusion Part Four: From Purity to Social Hygiene: early twentieth-century campaigns for sex education 1.The Dronfield Case: the Teacher and the Girls She Told 2.In Corpore Sano 3.Racial Health 4.Social and Moral Hygiene 5.Feminist Responses 6.Sex Education 7.The Construction of Sexual Difference: Advice to Girls 8.Masculinity 9. School Sex Hygiene Teaching: Competing Strategies 10.The State and Sex Hygiene 11.The Personal and the Political 12.Purity Politics in Decline 13.Conclusion Epilogue

Editorial Reviews

Reviewer: Ardel Thomas, PhD (Stanford University)
Description: This is a clear and complex addition to the growing number of books that take an interdisciplinary look at medicine, race, class, and sexuality within the complicated political and moral fabric of the 19th Century.
Purpose: In this second edition, the author has done a very thorough job of revisiting the original 1987 text and making numerous important and timely additions. Some of these include a much more in-depth look at feminist criticism and the progress in HIV/AIDS prevention and our attempt in the 1990s to move away from a social stereotyping of the gay man as the carrier of contagion. Finally, the author beautifully uses the late 20th-century lens of Queer Theory to re-examine 19th-century discourses about sexuality and perversion.
Audience: The audience is incredibly diverse, which is one of the main reasons this book is particularly important. For medical scholars, this book provides a necessary jumping-off point for an historical understanding of the ways that medicine has helped to create and dictate stereotypes and ideas about what is "normal" and what is "perverted." For Victorian scholars, regardless of a specific discipline, this book adds another piece to the multilayered puzzle of Victorian social values and moral debates. We gain a further understanding of a highly complicated diverse time period.
Features: An easy to use table of contents is featured, and the book is quite user-friendly. The illustrations add significantly and give readers a visual image of the ideas the author wants to convey about how "perversion" could be seen merely by looking at a person.
Assessment: This book is an outstanding and necessary additionto Victorian and medical scholarship. It would work wonderfully with Walkowitz's City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Women in Culture and Society) (University of Chicago Press, 1992). I intend to use this new book in my own courses on Victorian Sexuality and Gothic Horror.

Doody's Review Service

4 Stars! from Doody

This is a clear and complex addition to the growing number of books that take an interdisciplinary look at medicine, race, class, and sexuality within the complicated political and moral fabric of the 19th Century. In this second edition, the author has done a very thorough job of revisiting the original 1987 text and making numerous important and timely additions. Some of these include a much more in-depth look at feminist criticism and the progress in HIV/AIDS prevention and our attempt in the 1990s to move away from a social stereotyping of the gay man as the carrier of contagion. Finally, the author beautifully uses the late 20th-century lens of Queer Theory to re-examine 19th-century discourses about sexuality and perversion. The audience is incredibly diverse, which is one of the main reasons this book is particularly important. For medical scholars, this book provides a necessary jumping-off point for an historical understanding of the ways that medicine has helped to create and dictate stereotypes and ideas about what is ""normal"" and what is ""perverted."" For Victorian scholars, regardless of a specific discipline, this book adds another piece to the multilayered puzzle of Victorian social values and moral debates. We gain a further understanding of a highly complicated diverse time period. An easy to use table of contents is featured, and the book is quite user-friendly. The illustrations add significantly and give readers a visual image of the ideas the author wants to convey about how ""perversion"" could be seen merely by looking at a person. This book is an outstanding and necessary additionto Victorian and medical scholarship. It would work wonderfully with Walkowitz'sCity of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Women in Culture and Society) (University of Chicago Press, 1992). I intend to use this new book in my own courses on Victorian Sexuality and Gothic Horror.

Ardel Thomas