Social pressureby Sarah Franklin inThe Times Higher Education Supplement, 2nd. June, 1989. "e;In the proliferation of popular and scholarly accounts of homosexuality . . . one might well have expected sociology to have played a leading role. Yet, in the years between the apex of deviance theory and the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, sociology has not been a leading player in a field largely defined instead by historians, anthropologists and literary critics."e;"e;In his formidable volume of unprecedented scope, exploring the phenomenon of homosexuality from kinship-based societies to the present, David Greenberg has attempted to redress this imbalance."e;
"e;Greenberg has attempted to situate the much-debated subject of homosexuality in a solidly sociological frame of reference."e;
"e;Why do some societies revere homosexuality as a source of special powers while others revile it as a source of pollution and degeneracy?"e;
"e;How is it, he wants to know, that some societies instutitionalize homosexual relationships alongside heterosexual ones, as among the Sambia people of Melanisia, so well documented by the work of Gilbert Herdt, whereas other societies medicalize and pathologize it, as in our own society, thus creating an entirely new category of person."e;
"e;Not surprisingly, the attempt to answer these vast and, ultimately, insoluble sociological problems, is more rewarding than the end result."e; "e; . . . the inevitable necessity of providing a phenomenolgy of homosexuality . . . provides an unprecedented wealth of evidence to substantiate the claims of those who view human sexual expression and identity as socially constructed rather than essential or innate."e;
"e;The 112 page bibliography is a testament both to the industriousness of Greenberg's scholarship and the wealth of material now available to researchers in this area."e;