ISSN 1749-8155

Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality and Women’s Experience of Modern
War, 1914-18 Printer-friendly version PDF version

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   Book:
   Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality and Women’s Experience of
   Modern War, 1914-18
   Laura Doan
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   University College London
   Citation:
   Mr Kevin Guyan, review of Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality and
   Women’s Experience of Modern War, 1914-18, (review no. 1622)
   https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1622
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   discipline’s most exciting work is emerging (for example, histories of
   emotions and histories of pain). Disturbing Practices’ endeavours to
   explore histories of sexuality, many of which are positioned on the
   cusp of comprehension, is testament of the need to dedicate effort to
   these tricky fields rather than simply discount them because of their
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   Taking on this challenge is Laura Doan, professor of cultural history
   and sexuality studies at the University of Manchester. Doan is an
   established figure in the field of gender, sex and sexuality histories,
   best known for her 2001 work Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a
   Modern English Lesbian Culture.(1) In her most recent work, Doan
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   Doan’s contribution to the field is of primary interest to those
   impassioned by the history of sexuality and the methodologies behind
   these practices. However, the book’s reach goes further and is
   undeniably of value to all historians engaged in thinking about how
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   to discover by looking at the past and challenging apriori assumptions
   that continue within the discipline. The book’s back cover states, ‘For
   decades, the history of sexuality has been a multidisciplinary project
   serving competing agendas’. These ‘competing agendas’ are foregrounded
   in Doan’s work, where she explores the uses (and abuses) of histories
   of sexuality while promoting her own critical account of the direction
   she feels the discipline should take.

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   Careful handling of these differences is one of Disturbing Practices’
   strengths. She acknowledges how these approaches have been popularised
   and the history of sexuality’s historiographical links to genealogical
   projects (in which the present serves as a starting point for a
   historical project). Though these projects can take many forms, from
   family histories to methods followed by Foucault, genealogies charting
   histories of sexuality, Doan claims, can never be conditioned to become
   critical histories, as their starting point will always remain as the
   ‘contemporary homosexual’ (p. 84).

   Addressing the problems present in previous approaches to histories of
   sexuality, Doan’s queer critical history works outside the framework of
   connections and disconnections, in which there is no intention to
   produce a past that is necessarily usable by the present (p. 61). Doan
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   community feelings, and instead seeks to expose structures of knowing
   including fashions of thinking that have now since disappeared, this
   enlightened approach to the history of sexuality is perhaps the
   necessary next step in attempts to write part of the past.

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   taxonomical dilemma is the revelation that in the early 20th century
   most people, beyond certain intellectual circles, did not ‘discuss’
   sexuality. The ‘love that dare not speak its name’ was not simply the
   effect of prudishness but instead indicative of concepts not in common,
   public discourse. Chapters four and five discuss Violet
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   of Doan’s undertaking. Written at the top of my notes was the question,
   ‘Does Disturbing Practices offer a new approach to histories of gender,
   sex and sexuality?’ The extent to which arguments put forward in the
   book are ‘new’ is perhaps debatable, yet where Doan excels is bringing
   together these strands of thought, explaining them succinctly and
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   Equally of interest is Doan’s call for queer studies to explore the
   ‘normal’ – why, she asks, has the focus of the history of sexuality
   generally been focussed upon bodies that performed actions and
   behaviours deemed unconventional at the time? This observation is
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   promote the use of queer history to study the ‘normal’.

   As a researcher working in the field of the history of sexuality, I
   have already found myself asking how Disturbing Practices informs my
   own work. Though my research is focussed on the actions and behaviours
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   Doan intended from the work, it is not a study of the First World War,
   nor is it an attack on what has come before it; instead Doan offers a
   clear and confident direction for how histories of sexuality could, and
   in her opinion should, develop.

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   it is a good thing there was a six-month period between his initial
   reading and writing his review, as my interest in disturbing how we
   currently go about historicizing sexuality entails rethinking what we
   have been doing and working out new historiographical methods. I
   recognize that, on first reading, the complex ideas I explore may prove