Acts of Love and Lust

The past six decades have seen astonishing changes in the construction of sexuality as an apparatus of knowledge, and as a lived experience. Australia—like much of the West—has undergone a veritable sexual revolution in attitudes and behavior. From early sex therapy to gay marriage, the juggernaut of late modern sexuality has significantly remade Australian social and cultural life. This collection brings together the work of leading historians of sexuality, to consider sixty years of remarkable sexual and social change.Acts of Love and Lust explores the ways both heterosexuality and homosexuality were constructed—by the state, through sex education, in medicine, by the law, political activists, and in the hands of the media. Just as importantly, contributors consider the ways sexuality was experienced, not as a monolithic or imposed institution, but how it was explored and enjoyed by individual bodies across different times and spaces. The authors examine the pleasures and pains of living in sexual bodies, and explore the manifest ways that love and lust shaped Australia’s society and culture.