Sinners and Citizens explores how sexual habits changed in Sweden during its development from an agrarian society into a modern welfare state. Jens Rydström examines the history of homosexuality and bestiality in that country to consider why these sexual practices have been so closely linked in virtually all Western societies. He limns sharply the distinctive experience of rural life, showing that to regularly witness farm animals stirred passions and sparked ideas, especially among young farmhands. Based on medical journals, psychiatric reports, and court records from the period, as well as testimonies from men in diaries, letters, and interviews, Sinners and Citizens reveals that bestiality was once a dreaded crime in Sweden. But in time, mention of the practice disappeared completely from legal and medical debates. This, Rydström contends, is because models of penetrative sodomy shifted from bestiality to homosexuality as Sweden transformed from a rural society into a more urban one. As the nation's economy and culture became less identified with the countryside, so too did its idea of deviant sexual behavior.

A thorough, cross-cultural history of sexual categories, focusing on such subjects as puritanism, sodomy, and ethnicity in colonial North America; cross-gender behavior and hermaphroditism; and the semiotics of genitalia. The author also demonstrates that representation of cultural "otherness," as found in European thought from the Enlightenment through modern times, is closely related to modern constructions of homosexual identity. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Sexual Revolutions explores the sexual revolution of the late twentieth century in several European countries and the USA by engaging with themes from sexual freedom and abortion to pornography and sexual variation. This work discusses the involvement of youth, feminism, left, liberalism, arts, science and religion in the process of sexual change.