Bauer's History

The common historiographical narrative (i.e., the history of the academic discipline of history) goes something like this for Sweden and other parts of northwestern Europe: Until the mid-19th century, historians did not fully grasp what a historical source was. Instead, myths and popular understandings were often entwined in the academic writing of history. In 1825, the German historian Leopold von Ranke published a book called Histories of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from 1494 to 1514 , which was groundbreaking due to its use of sources primarily derived from archives. This led to the establishment of history as a source-based science, where we use contemporary sources from the time we study to reconstruct the past. This does not mean that all sources are deemed "trustworthy" in themselves, but archival records are continuously scrutinized through source criticism. However, what this development has also led to is a notion of archives as neutral. From this perspective, hi...

In the previous entry, I discussed parts of Rebecca F. Plante's book Sexualities in Context . What this book actually did for me was to provide a brief overview—one that then echoed throughout the text—of how dominant the idea of heterosexuality is in both society and research. This did not come as a surprise to me, since these issues have been part of mainstream discussion since at least my undergraduate years. However, Plante’s argumentation made me reflect on certain problems in dealing with heterosexuality, given that it is such a persuasive norm that it renders itself invisible. Starting with a rather short introduction, Plante argues that the categories of “hetero-” and “homosexual” are not essential identites. Instead, they are cultural constructs that can be more precisely traced to the mid-19th century. If we were to travel back to ancient Greece and apply the same categories to their much-rumored sexual behaviors, they would not make a distinction between hetero- and hom...

Right now, I am in one of those wonderful stages of a project: the early phase in which everything (almost) seems possible. The project is a newspaper study on sexuality, and apart from some material and previous research, I can still choose quite freely among different methods and theories thanks to the way the funding is structured. As part of this stage, I am currently reading quite a lot — from older research on sexual politics in early 20th-century Sweden to Rebecca F. Plante’s semi-classical Sexualities in Context: A Social Perspective from 2015. all projects start with a blanc page This book might be a bit too simplistic to read as a researcher, as it feels mainly aimed at undergraduate students in sociology or gender studies. However, this kind of work is often quite good for gaining insight into perspectives you’re not primarily working with. Plante’s book is actually a very good introduction to the field of sexuality studies, as it offers different ways of thinking about sex...

As a scholar currently working with issues of sexualities of the past and sex in the early 20th century, I often get peculiar questions. Among the most frequently asked is whether society really dealt with sexuality "back then"—a temporality that most often refers to Victorian times or, in Sweden, the late 19th century. People are often shocked to hear that sexuality back then was, just like in contemporary times, the talk of the town. What many people are particularly surprised to learn is that there were actually discussions on sexual education as early as the 1890s in Sweden—or perhaps even earlier, depending on how we define sexual education. If we take our departure from the writings of historian of ideas Lena Lennerhed, sexual education or sexual enlightenment (in Swedish: sexualupplysning) is actually a very old phenomenon. If we believe that sexual education is about teaching people about the consequences and practices of sexuality from a matter-of-fact approach, we c...