Robert M. Buffington, Eithne Luibhéid, Donna J. Guy, eds. A Global History of Sexuality: The Modern Era. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. 296 pp. $27.95 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-118-52588-3; $99.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4051-2048-7; $34.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4051-2049-4.

Reviewed by Bryan Pitts (Duke University)
Published on H-Histsex (March, 2015)
Commissioned by Chiara Beccalossi (University of Lincoln)

Amid the current fascination with globalization, both within the academy and in broader public discourse, one need not search far to find global history university courses, including courses on the history of sexuality. But for the instructor with national or regional expertise, finding suitable readings from unfamiliar subfields or regions is a challenge. Moreover, most articles and monographs emphasize how global processes like colonialism, patriarchy, migration, or sex trafficking are reproduced or challenged locally, rather than the construction of the processes themselves. Robert M. Buffington, Eithne Luibhéid, and Donna J. Guy’s edited collection A Global History of Sexuality: The Modern Era takes a significant step toward solving this pedagogical conundrum.

Designed to be accessible to upper-division undergraduates, the book features chapters from scholars representing history (four), anthropology (two), East Asian studies, ethnic studies, sociology, and public health (one each). As the title suggests and Buffington’s introduction acknowledges, all the chapters are influenced by Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality: Volume I (1976), even as they seek to correct its fundamental flaw—the failure to explore how the classification and regulation of sexuality he explores in the West have buttressed, challenged, and fused with non-Western sexualities. Each essay draws on an impressive array of secondary sources and the authors’ own primary research to highlight how the discourses and practices of sexuality that most people take for granted are in fact expressions of global, socially constructed, and historically contingent patterns.

Following Buffington’s introduction, which offers a brief summary of the historiography of sexuality and explains the choice of the term “global” (as opposed to “world,” “transnational,” etc.), chapter 2, “Sexuality and the Nation-State,” by Sabine Frühstuck, uses case studies from Meiji Japan, the twentieth-century United States, and contemporary South Africa to explore the “various, fractured, and incomplete” ways in which modern nation-states have regulated sexuality “as the perceived locus of a ‘modern’ social order” (p. 50). Though the logic according to which these three cases studies was chosen is not clear and the cases could have been better tied to each other and to a broader argument, Frühstuck shows that although the specific ways in which sexuality is integrated into nation-building projects differ, anxieties about sexuality have continued to play a central role in how the nation and citizenship are imagined.

Chapter 3, by Mytheli Sreenivas, “Sexuality and Modern Imperialism,” elucidates the relationship between empire, race, and gender/sexuality. The chapter is heavily informed by Ann Stoler’s research (Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things [1995]), as it identifies three issues colonial powers faced: the intersection of ideas about race and sexuality, the regulation of interracial sexual contact, and imperial interventions in local sexualities. Yet by consulting a wide range of secondary sources, Sreenivas broadens the scope beyond Stoler’s work to explain how these concerns were manifested in similar ways in the French, German, British, Dutch, and US empires.

Similarly, the fourth chapter, “Sexuality and Disease,” by Laura McGough and Katherine Bliss, incorporates evidence from the United States, Latin America, Western Europe, Africa, and China to find the threads that connect modern states’ discourses about sexually transmitted diseases, particularly syphilis and HIV/AIDS. They argue that “stigma and discrimination [against those who have STDs] are enmeshed in wider relations of power and inequality; geopolitical inequalities between and within nations; and the complex interplay of race, ethnicity, gender, and class,” an argument that is undoubtedly true but perhaps also self-evident (p. 114).

Luibhéid’s chapter, “Sexuality and Migration,” addresses three questions: How does sexuality shape migration? How does sexuality shape the governance and incorporation of migrants? And how do migrants inhabit, conform to, or transform sexual norms? Although at times the essay reads more like a literature review, Luibhéid insightfully argues that a “relational model” of power, grounded in queer theory, demonstrates “how gender, race, class, culture, religion, and geopolitics, among other factors, shape sexual identities, experiences, and histories,” and can show us how “sexuality shapes and is reshaped by migration processes ... along routes that are far more circuitous than the trajectory of ‘from the west to the rest’” (p. 145).

Chapter 6, Buffington and Guy’s analysis of sex trafficking, is one of the strongest. The authors use case studies of trafficking from Nepal to India, the Philippines to South Korea, and Eastern Europe to Western Europe and the United States to demonstrate that contemporary public discourse about sex trafficking, which is largely based on moral panic, would benefit from a historically grounded analysis that both identifies the roots of trafficking in deep structural inequalities and acknowledges that transnational sex work is not universally or equally coercive.

In chapter 7, “Sexuality and Mass Media,” Hai Ren argues that “it is important and necessary to understand that media and sexuality change historically and across national boundaries” (p. 218). Although this argument perhaps is not surprising, Ren in fact shows—though he does not explicitly argue it—that “mediaspheres” of written, visual, Internet, and mobile media have successively multiplied not only the discourses people can have about sexuality but also the ways “producer-consumers” can participate in and shape those discourses. Still, the implication that the expansion of “mediaspheres” over the last century has suddenly democratized knowledge production may appear debatable to historians.

Finally, the outstanding eighth chapter, “Sexuality and the Contemporary World,” by Richard Parker, Jonathan Garcia, and Buffington, uses examples from the global South to illustrate the interplay of local and global concerns in sexual rights struggles for Afro-Brazilian women, sex workers (India), lesbians (Mexico), and gay Muslims (South Africa). They convincingly argue that universalized rights discourses originating in the global North are invested with new meanings elsewhere. These locally produced re-imaginings of sexual rights in turn reshape the global discourses that generated them.

Overall, if some chapters are more effective, it is because they focus on global processes or structures that they illustrate with local examples, using variation to refine their understanding of broader patterns. In contrast, the less successful essays emphasize specific and highly variable case studies that are less effectively tied to process and structure; in these cases, the argument is often reduced to an assertion that the relationship between sexuality and the topic of the chapter is complex, varied, and different everywhere. However, despite this shortcoming with some of the contributions, this volume will be an invaluable addition to courses on the history of sexuality that focus on the years since 1700.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-histsex.

Citation: Bryan Pitts. Review of Buffington, Robert M.; Luibhéid, Eithne; Guy, Donna J., eds., A Global History of Sexuality: The Modern Era. H-Histsex, H-Net Reviews. March, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42312

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