| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Jens Rydström. Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880–1950. (Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2003. Pp. xiv, 416. $20.00.

This book is a contribution to queer theory whose insights, according to Jens Rydström, should "influence the analysis of society also in a historical perspective" (p. 13). His foremost aim is to study "the gradual modernization of male same-sex sexuality" (p. 20). Using a welter of Swedish court cases and other source material from the period 1880–1950, Rydström seeks to pinpoint a change of perspective in Western society and thought "from a penetrative sodomy paradigm to a masturbatory paradigm of homosexuality" (p. 9). He take as his point of departure the official conflation of bestiality and same-sex intercourse as it appears in Swedish law and legal thinking in the late nineteenth century, exemplified by the Swedish Penal Code of 1864. The connection between bestiality and homosexuality was strong in Sweden, perhaps due to the fact that bestiality had been unusually common in the country for centuries, at least compared to neighboring countries. It led, among other things, to the concept that the passive party in a homosexual relation was exculpated (p. 17).

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