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Desire: A History of European Sexuality, by Anna Clark; pp. ix + 282. London and New York: Routledge, 2008, £60.00, £17.99 paper, $100.00, $31.95 paper.
Anna Clark's Desire: A History of European Sexuality traces the changing ways sexuality has been understood, experienced, and regulated in European societies. Ranging from Ancient Greece to contemporary Sweden, it interweaves ambitious panorama with a keen eye for the telling vignette. In so doing, Clark builds upon an increasingly vibrant historiography in sexuality studies. Going where most historians would not dare, Desire collapses boundaries between national histories, focused chronologies, and narrow case studies-synthesizing, reflecting, and ultimately producing a groundbreaking intervention in the history of sexuality. It is a mark of Clark's scholarship that she integrates notoriously difficult theory into an absorbing narrative that will engage academics, undergraduates, and general readers.
Clark's central premise is simple: "sexual desire and behavior are constructed" (3). In early Christian thought desire was considered diabolical temptation; for Victorian scientists it represented a "biological urge to procreate and further evolution" (4). Desire thus provides a sustained meditation on the importance of historicizing sex. In discussing female same-sex intimacies, Clark (perhaps influenced by Laura Doan or Sharon Marcus) suggests that "rather than investigate the 'truth' of what these women actually did, it would be more productive to explore how people articulated their desire" (4). Clark repeatedly confronts the reader with the particular nature of their own sexual practices and subjectivities. Unlike other general histories of sexuality, Desire moves beyond comforting and congratulatory narratives of liberation. Considering the transformative interrelationship between state, market, and sexuality in the twentieth century, Clark concludes: "sexual desire cannot be liberated, because there is no 'authentic' natural desire to be freed; rather, sexual desire is now just constructed in different ways" (220).
There are two features of Desire worth stressing. First is Clark's insistence on understanding sexuality...