Hanne Blank. (2012). Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality. Beacon Press.

Hanne Blank. 2012. Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality. Beacon Press.

Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality. Beacon Press, 2012.

Hanne Blank. Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality. Beacon Press, 2012.

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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Blank, Hanne
   • bioText: Hanne Blank is a writer, historian, and public speaker whose work has been featured everywhere from Out to Penthouse. An independent scholar, she is the author of Virgin: The Untouched History and seven other books that explore the intersections of sexuality, gender, the body, and culture. She has been a visiting scholar at the Institute for Teaching and Research on Women, as well as an instructor, guest lecturer, and visiting speaker at colleges and universities, including Tufts, Brandeis, and Johns Hopkins.
   • name: Hanne Blank

publishDate

2012-01-31T00:00:00-05:00

isOwnedByCollections

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title

Straight

fullDescription

It's surprising that the term "heterosexuality" is less than 150 years old and that heterosexuality's history has never before been written, given how obsessed we are with it. In Straight, independent scholar Hanne Blank delves deep into the contemporary psyche as well as the historical record to chronicle the realm of heterosexual relations—a subject that is anything but straight and narrow. Consider how Catholic monasticism, the reading of novels, the abolition of slavery, leisure time, divorce, and constipation of the bowels have all at some time been labeled enemies of the heterosexual state. With an extensive historical scope and plenty of juicy details and examples, Straight provides a fascinating look at the vagaries, schisms, and contradictions of what has so often been perceived as an irreducible fact of nature.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Vanity Fair
   • content: "Fascinating."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Abigail Zuger, New York Times
   • content: "[An] amusing, readable synthesis . . . Blank darts from one intriguing, thought-provoking point to another. . . . [And she] offers the provocative solution that soon we will move on from our present fixation on the binary to a more fluid understanding."
3. • premium: False
   • source: EDGE Publications
   • content: "Using wit and wisdom, Blank substantiates her argument that love and passion are not defined by biology."
4. • premium: False
   • source: CHOICE
   • content: "A lively, accessible synthesis of decades of scholarship on the history and sociology of sexuality."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Lavender Magazine
   • content: "Wry, witty and thoroughly researched."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Library Journal
   • content: "Blank has produced a challenging, clear, and interesting study of how Western views of what it means to be 'straight' have changed over the past two centuries and continue to change."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Lambda Lit
   • content: "Blank's work reaches further and deeper into the history of heterosexuality...highly accessible."
8. • premium: False
   • source: New York Journal of Books
   • content: "Straight ...is accessible and engaging, often witty and penetrating in its insights."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Michelle Kehm, Bust
   • content: "Blank's tenacious research and insightful arguments make clear how malleable the attitudes of the world we live in really are."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Haaretz
    • content: "Blank writes with great erudition and humor, so that, even a skeptical (or anxious) reader will be hard-pressed not to find it enjoyable and thought provoking."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Lisa M. Diamond, author of Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire
    • content: "Hanne Blank has rendered a meticulously researched romp through the history of 'heterosexuality'--that pesky orthodoxy still looming over Western culture like smog. Her sweeping synthesis takes on everything from Freud to Larry Craig, expertly weaving this untold history with insight and a refreshing dose of irreverence."
12. • premium: False
    • source: Kirkus
    • content: "The author uses wisdom and wit to substantiate her contention that love and passion are not definable by biology."
13. • premium: False
    • source: Publishers Weekly
    • content: "From its thorough but brisk explorations of sexual orientation's intersections with sex, gender, and romance, this illuminating study examines our presuppositions and makes a powerful, provocative argument that heterosexuality--mazy, unscientific, and new--may be merely "a particular configuration of sex and power in a particular historical moment."
14. • premium: False
    • source: Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States
    • content: "With impeccable research and detail, Hanne Blank uncovers the fascinating, often hidden, history of heterosexuality. Straight is a marvelous cultural history that is as entertaining as it is profoundly enlightening and necessary for understanding the world in which we live."
15. • premium: False
    • source: Laura Kipnis, author of How To Become a Scandal and Against Love
    • content: "What would it mean to dispense with our current categories of sexual identity? Writing with grace and wit, Hanne Blank demonstrates that what sounds like a radical proposition is also historically inevitable. This is a book that really shakes up an assumption or two!"
16. • premium: False
    • source: Jonathan Ned Katz, author of The Invention of Heterosexuality and co-director OutHistory.org
    • content: "Challenging our culture's deeply entrenched, stubborn assumption of heterosexuality, Straight helps us to think newly and critically. Starting from her own experience, Hanne Blank creatively analyses the unexamined idea that heterosexuality is given, unchanging, ahistorical."
17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      September 26, 2011
      Framed by a discussion of her partner’s intersex condition, Blank (Virgin) explores the invention of heterosexuality as a term and norm. The concept of heterosexuality was created (along with homosexuality) in the 19th century by German researchers protesting the criminalization of same-sex relations. While the law remained unchanged, the taxonomy passed into popular use, and complemented by the theories of Krafft-Ebing and Freud, became “doxa,” what everyone knows (or believes they know). So while homosexuality has been extensively studied and debated, heterosexuality and “straight” genes have remained “amorphous and undefined” despite carrying the “monolithic aura of inevitability and authority.” A natural or biological basis for sexual orientation is commonly claimed, because it appears to be the case, even though none of the experiments performed to find a biological or genetic cause for homosexuality have yielded any evidence. From its thorough but brisk explorations of sexual orientation’s intersections with sex, gender, and romance, this illuminating study examines our presuppositions and makes a powerful, provocative argument that heterosexuality—mazy, unscientific, and new—may be merely “a particular configuration of sex and power in a particular historical moment.”

18. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      November 1, 2011
      Independent scholar Blank, a social historian who has written extensively on sexual subjects (Virgin: The Untouched History, 2007; Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex for People of Size and Those Who Love Them, 2000), turns her attention to changing attitudes toward mainstream sexual identity. She begins with the startling information that the term heterosexuality was invented as an identifying category in 1869. Until then, the term "sodomy" was used to describe proscribed sexual relationships outside of marriage—the presumption being that the purpose of a proper sexual relationship was procreation. In this chronicle of changing sexual mores, the author challenges the common preconception today that the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality is legitimate. Beginning on a personal note, Blank reveals the circumstances of her own long-term partnership with a person whose genetic structure is anomalous—his sex chromosome is XXY rather than XX or XY—something he only found out belatedly since to all appearance he was a typical male, albeit with an absence of facial hair. The author explores the various ways that our beliefs about biological sex and gender have varied historically and why, in her opinion, they are still confused. Patterns of appropriate behavior have changed radically from the 19th century, when lawyers typically shared a bed when they rode the circuit without any implication of impropriety. While women since then have increasingly gained equality politically and in the workplace, only very recently has that autonomy extended to the bedroom. Blank uses the case of erectile dysfunction to illustrate a hidden meaning of heterosexuality today: In "the model of pleasure that Viagra is marketed to serve…Viagra-fueled erections are intended for vaginal penetration…the only fully legitimate source of sexual pleasure for most of Western history." Moreover, homosexual "men who take the insertive role of sex with other men are likely to be perceived as more masculine and sexually respectable" than their passive counterpart. The author uses wisdom and wit to substantiate her contention that love and passion are not definable by biology.

      (COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

19. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      April 15, 2012
      

      In this slim volume, Blank (Virgin: The Untouched History) sets out to explore the changing views of marriage, heterosexuality, and conceptions of biological sex itself over the past 150 years, systematically exploring the history from scientific, philosophical, and sociological perspectives in an entertaining and intelligent style. She argues that although sexual contact between men and women has existed since time immemorial, the word and idea of heterosexuality as an identity is a relatively recent invention. Beginning with the sex research of Richard von Krafft-Ebing in the late 1800s and trickling down from the elite world of medicine and science to middle-class households by way of the writings of Sigmund Freud, heterosexuality as we know it emerged and adjusted in response to a number of sociocultural factors, such as urbanization and the invention of the birth control pill. VERDICT Adding to the expanding body of knowledge about the history and sociology of sexual identity, Blank has produced a challenging, clear, and interesting study of how Western views of what it means to be "straight" have changed over the past two centuries and continue to change. This will engage academic and casual readers alike who are interested in cultural history and sexuality studies.--Jennifer Stout, Cumberland Univ. Lib., Lebanon, TN

      Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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It's surprising that the term "heterosexuality" is less than 150 years old and that heterosexuality's history has never before been written, given how obsessed we are with it. In Straight, independent scholar Hanne Blank delves deep into the contemporary psyche as well as the historical record to chronicle the realm of heterosexual relations—a subject that is anything but straight and narrow. Consider how Catholic monasticism, the reading of novels, the abolition of slavery, leisure time, divorce, and constipation of the bowels have all at some time been labeled enemies of the heterosexual state. With an extensive historical scope and plenty of juicy details and examples, Straight provides a fascinating look at the vagaries, schisms, and contradictions of what has so often been perceived as an irreducible fact of nature.

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