Acts of Love and Lust: Sexuality in Australia from 1945-2010
The past six decades have seen astonishing changes in the construction of sexuality as an apparatus of knowledge, and as a lived experience. Australia—like much of the West—has undergone a veritable sexual revolution in attitudes and behavior. From early sex therapy to gay marriage, the juggernaut of late modern sexuality has significantly remade Australian social and cultural life. This collection brings together the work of leading historians of sexuality, to consider sixty years of remarkable sexual and social change.
Acts of Love and Lust explores the ways both heterosexuality and homosexuality were constructed—by the state, through sex education, in medicine, by the law, political activists, and in the hands of the media. Just as importantly, contributors consider the ways sexuality was experienced, not as a monolithic or imposed institution, but how it was explored and enjoyed by individual bodies across different times and spaces. The authors examine the pleasures and pains of living in sexual bodies, and explore the manifest ways that love and lust shaped Australia’s society and culture.
Lisa Featherstone is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She has published widely on the history of sexuality, including works on masculinity; female pleasure; and medical constructions of sexual bodies. Her work has appeared in journals including The Journal of the History of Sexuality; Women’s History Review; Australian Historical Studies; and Australian Feminist Studies. Her first monograph, Let’s Talk About Sex: Histories of Sexuality in Australia from Federation to the Pill (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011) has been very well received. Her latest project, co-authored with Amanda Kaladelfos, is on sexual crimes, with a particular focus on the 1950s.
Robert Reynolds is an Associate Professor in Modern History at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of From Camp to Queer: Remaking the Australian Homosexual (Melbourne University Press, 2002) and What Happened to Gay Life? (UNSW Press, 2007). With Joy Damousi he co-edited History on the Couch: Essays in History and Psychoanalysis (Melbourne University Press, 2003). He is currently the Associate Dean for Higher Degree Research in the Faculty of Arts, Macquarie University.
Rebecca Jennings is an ARC Future Fellow in the Department of Modern History at Macquarie University. Her research focuses on British and Australian lesbian history, and she is the author of Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A Lesbian History of Post-war Britain, 1945–71 (Manchester University Press, 2007) and A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Women since 1500 (Greenwood World Publishing, 2007). Her most recent book on lesbian culture and identity in mid-twentieth-century Sydney is forthcoming with Monash University Publishing in 2015. She is currently researching lesbian practices of intimacy in Britain and Australia since 1945.
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