For decades, the history of sexuality has been a multidisciplinary project serving competing agendas. Lesbian, gay, and queer scholars have produced powerful narratives by tracing the homosexual or queer subject as continuous or discontinuous. Yet organizing historical work around categories of identity as normal or abnormal often obscures how sexual matters were known or talked about in the past. Set against the backdrop of women’s work experiences, friendships, and communities during World War I, Disturbing Practices draws on a substantial body of new archival material to expose the roadblocks still present in current practices and imagine new alternatives.

In this landmark book, Laura Doan clarifies the ethical value and political purpose of identity history—and indeed its very capacity to give rise to innovative practices borne of sustained exchange between queer studies and critical history. Disturbing Practices insists on taking seriously the imperative to step outside the logic of identity to address questions as yet unasked about the modern sexual past.

Laura Doan is professor of cultural history and sexuality studies at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture and editor of Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires, among other books.

— Matt Houlbrook, author of Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957

— Chris Waters, Williams College

— Sharon Marcus, author of Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

— Annamarie Jagose, author of Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence

— Anna Clark, author of Desire: A History of Sexuality in Europe

— Women's Review of Books

— Twentieth Century British History