History of human sexuality
The study of how sexual practices, identities, norms, and institutions have changed across societies and historical periods.
Sexuality: A historically and culturally shaped dimension of human life involving desire, behavior, identity, and relationships. The broad concept historians track as its meanings and boundaries change.
Marriage: A socially recognized union that establishes relationships and rights between spouses and often their families. Marriage has regulated legitimate sex, property, and reproduction in many societies.
Ancient Greek sexuality: Sexual customs and ideas in ancient Greek societies, which varied by city, status, and period. Greek sources reveal frameworks of desire unlike modern identity categories.
Heteronormativity: The assumption that heterosexuality is normal, universal, or the preferred basis for social life. It helps identify how institutions privileged heterosexual marriage across particular histories.
Birth control movement: A political and social movement advocating access to contraception and reproductive control. It made control over reproduction a public and political question.
Sexual identity: A person's understanding or social classification of their sexual orientation or sexuality. Its historical emergence differs from the assumption that identities are timeless.
Consanguinity: A relationship of descent or kinship by blood, especially as used to define prohibited unions. Rules about prohibited relatives shaped marriage choices and sexual boundaries.
Roman sexuality: Sexual practices and norms in ancient Rome, shaped by status, gender, citizenship, and household authority. Roman norms linked sexual conduct to hierarchy and civic status.
Queer theory: An interdisciplinary approach that questions fixed categories of sex, gender, and sexuality. It challenges histories that treat modern identities as universal or inevitable.
Gay liberation: A movement emerging in the late 1960s that sought social and political freedom for gay people. It transformed sexual identity into a basis for collective activism.