Fierce Desires: Variation, Conflict, and Pleasure in the History of America

In the United States today, we have government decrees that there are only two sexes, debates about “trad wives” and polyamory, and frequent references to the nation’s “puritan” past. But in her latest book—and in this talk—Professor Rebecca L. Davis argues that seventeenth-century Puritans are a weak precedent for how the history of sexuality has unfolded in the United States. Into the 1800s, the United States was far more welcoming of gender nonconformity and same-sex/queer desires than we might presume. Instead, a significant shift occurred in the late nineteenth century, when anti-obscenity and anti-immigration legislation vastly expanded the federal government’s investment in shaping sexual morality. The history that unfolds is far less about prudish puritans than shifting sexual values. Our contemporary conflicts over sex and gender highlight the power of this surprising history.

Rebecca L. Davis is the Miller Family Early Career Professor of History and an associate professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware. She is a historian of marriage, religion, sexuality, and politics in the United States. In addition to Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America, she is author of Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics and More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss, and the co-editor of Heterosexual Histories. She is also a podcast host and producer and writes the newsletter Carnal Knowledge, which explains the history behind today’s headlines about gender, sexuality, and American politics.

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