Pleasure and Duty
In: Contemporary European history, Band 22, Heft 2, S. 277-282
ISSN: 1469-2171
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.