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Three obvious, superficially simple but actually intensely complex questions embodied in the title immediately confront the reader of Dagmar Herzog's important new book. First, what do we mean by the 'sexuality' that constitutes the subject matter? Second, what is demarcated by the Europe that provides the geo-political boundaries of this study? Third, does the 'twentieth century' provide a useful temporal unity for the narrative and analysis that is at the heart of the book? Such questions are not mere scholarly nit-picking or academic point scoring, but a tribute to the problematising of the body in space and time that has been a hallmark of the deconstructive and reconstructive energy of recent scholarship on the sexual, and that is now making a welcome entry into mainstream history.

El artículo aborda las discusiones sobre la sanción de la Ley de Unión Civil (Civil Partnership Act) en el Reino Unido durante 2004, que legisla el reconocimiento de las uniones entre personas del mismo sexo. Propone una historización de los argumentos teóricos y políticos de organizaciones LGBT y otros sectores de la sociedad británica desde la década de 1960 respecto de criminalización y reconocimiento. Asímismo, analiza el vínculo entre estas discusiones y los debates parlamentarios para dar cuenta de la modalidad de liberalismo que predominó en la estrategia del gobierno. Finalmente, atiende a los debates en la teoría LGBT y queer sobre la noción de heteronormatividad, matrimonio y sus dimensiones éticas y políticas para los modos de resistencia. ; This article considers the debates opened up by the passing of the Civil Partnership Act in the United Kingdom during 2004, which legally recognised same-sex relationships. It ofers a historization and an analysis of the political and theoretical arguments produced by LGBT organisations as well as other sectors of British society since the 1960s around criminalization and recognition. Furthermore, it analyses the relationship between these discussions and Parliamentary debates within the framework of liberalism, in order to understand the specific strategy used by the Labour government in the 2000s and the type of liberalism that prevailed in their strategy. Finally, it considers the debates on marriage and heteronormativity in their ethical and political dimensions regarding queer resistance.

The question of what men are and what they want has become central to public debates and private concerns but we cannot understand what is happening if we see it as a problem for men alone. It needs to be considered as part of a long process in which masculinity and femininity, sexual normality and abnormality, and the nature of intimate life are being profoundly shaken. The emergence of a crisis discourse around masculinity has served to obscure the different conditions under which men live their lives, and to exaggerate in turn the radical dichotomy of men and women. Binary divisions along gender and sexual lines can be seen as an historical fiction which conceals a much more confused mixture of fears, anxieties and desires about what being a man means. The dramatic social and cultural changes that we are now witnessing provide conditions for reinventing the relations of gender and sexuality.