Reclaiming Sodom

"For centuries, the idea of 'sodomy' has been used to create a stigmatizing social visibility for those sexual activities not directly aimed at procreation within marriage. The documents and essays in Reclaiming Sodom survey institutions that have had an interest in perpetuating this view: the police, the state, the church, and the law. Jonathan Goldberg has brought together a wide range of work, from Biblical and legal material to essays on such subjects as the Founding Fathers' beliefs, the category of sodomy in 18th and 19th century England, anthropological accounts of the same-sex practices of non-Western people, and the racial geography of AIDS. Reclaiming Sodom explores alternatives to the force of the Sodomitic biblical narrative in Islamic, non-Western, and Western traditions, and discusses the ways in which sodomy calls into question normative definitions of sexuality and gender. The collection pursues the 'pleasures and dangers' of these alternatives, and takes on Proust's refusal to imagine a social movement founded on the 'stigma' of Sodom. Reclaiming Sodom makes a significant and controversial contribution to the literature on sexuality and gender, as well as the nature of sex in our culture."—Back cover.