Toward Stonewall (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | Nicholas C. Edsall | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

As recently as the 1970s, gay and lesbian history was arelatively unexplored field for serious scholars. The past quarter century, however, has seen enormous growth in gay and lesbian studies. The literature is nowvoluminous; it is also widely scattered and not always easily accessible. In TowardStonewall, Nicholas Edsall provides a much-needed synthesis, drawing upon bothscholarly and popular writings to chart the development of homosexual subcultures inthe modern era and the uneasy place they have occupied in Western society.

Edsall's survey begins three hundred years ago innorthwestern Europe, when homosexual subcultures recognizably similar to those ofour own era began to emerge, and it follows their surprisingly diverse paths throughthe Enlightenment to the early nineteenth century. The book then turns to theVictorian era, tracing the development of articulate and self-aware homosexualsubcultures. With a greater sense of identity and organization came new forms ofresistance: this was the age that saw the persecution of Oscar Wilde, among others, as well as the medical establishment's labeling of homosexuality as a sign ofdegeneracy.

The book's final section locates thefoundations of present-day gay sub-cultures in a succession of twentieth-centuryscenes and events -- in pre-Nazi Germany, in the lesbian world of interwar Paris, inthe law reforms of 1960s England -- culminating in the emergence of popularmovements in the postwar United States.

Ratherthan examining these groups in isolation, the book considers them in their socialcontexts and as comparable to other subordinate groups and minority movements. Inthe process, Toward Stonewall illuminates not only the subcultures that are itsprimary subject but the larger societies from which they emerged.