This fascinating and wide-ranging analysis of gender and sexualities brings together the disparate literatures on demography, love and marriage, the body, homosexuality, lesbianism, and the regulation of sexuality. It makes available to both undergraduates and professionals these complex literatures in an accessible and readable form, and in the process changes our understanding of the nature of the origins and development of modern sexual roles and gender relations.

Preface and Acknowledgements
Introduction: Sex Before Discourse
The Public Cultures of Sex
'The Surest Way of Wooing': Marriage Courtship and Sexuality
The Body, Medicine and Sexual Difference
Subcultures and Sodomites, the Development of Homosexuality
Tribades, Cross-Dressers and Romantic Friendship
Sexual Fear and the Regulation of Society
Conclusions
Further Reading
Index.