Everybody’s History of Sexuality
Almost four decades ago, theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identified an epistemological tension between what she characterized as ‘minoritizing’ tendencies where conceptualizations of sexuality are concerned, and ‘universalizing’ ones. For historians of sexuality, this insight has been enabling in several ways, including helping to clarify the stakes in longstanding debates between those who are committed to historicizing the emergence of lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer consciousness, including transgender consciousness, and those who remain suspicious of identitarianism as such.