Key Terms
History
A field of study and a method of interpreting the past using evidence.
Primary sources
Original, firsthand documents or artifacts from the time period being studied (letters, court records, newspapers, perso
Social construction
The theory that ideas — including sex, gender, and sexuality — emerge from society and change through social action; not
Essentialist
View that entities have fixed, necessary attributes — e.g., two fixed, God-given genders.
Norms
Collective representations of acceptable group conduct.
Colonial Europeans established two core norms
1. Marital reproduction as the purpose of sex.
Sodomy
Anal or oral sex.
Sex assignment
Identification of an infant's sex at birth.
Two-spirit people
Modern umbrella term used by some Indigenous North Americans for Native people fulfilling traditional third-gender or ge
Sodomites
People who engage in nonreproductive sex acts, especially anal or oral sex.
Romantic friendships
Very close, typically nonsexual relationships with physical closeness beyond contemporary Western norms; widely accepted
Boston marriages
Women who could support themselves sometimes lived together. Contemporaries rarely attributed sexuality to women's relat
Fairy
Late 1800s New York term for effeminate working-class men.
Queer (early usage)
Term applied to gender-normative men who loved men in late 1800s New York City subculture.
Sexology
Scientific study of human sexuality including interests, behaviors, and functions.