In 2004, the first same-sex couple legally married in Quebec. How did homosexuality – an act that had for centuries been defined as abominable and criminal – come to be sanctioned by law?Judging Homosexuals finds answers in a comparative analysis of gay persecution in France and Quebec, places that share a common culture but have diverging legal traditions. In both settings, Patrice Corriveau explores how various groups – family and clergy, doctors and jurists – tried to manage people who were defined in turn as sinners, as criminals, as inverts, and as citizens to be protected by law.By bringing to light the various discourses that have over time supported the control and persecution of individual homoerotic behaviour in France and Quebec, this book makes the case that when it came to managing sexuality, the law helped construct the crime.
Patrice Corriveau is an associate professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa and a researcher with the Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory on the Rights of the Child and the Sexual and Gender Diversity: Vulnerability, Resilience. Käthe Roth has been a literary translator, working mainly in historical non-fiction, for more than twenty years. She lives and works in Saint-Lazare, Quebec.
Foreword / Barry AdamPrefaceIntroduction1 Ancient Greece to the Seventeenth Century: From Pederasty to Sodomy2 The Grande Ordonnance of 1670 to the British Conquest: The Sodomist and the Stake3 The British Conquest to the Late Nineteenth Century: From the Sodomist to the Invert, or From the Priest to the Physician4 The Late Nineteenth Century to the Sexual Revolution: From Invert to Homosexual5 The 1970s to the Present: From Prison to City HallConclusion: From One Sexual Perversion to Another?NotesReferencesIndex
Judging Homosexuals has a clear thesis and is logically organized. The translator has done an excellent job in making specialized academic discussion understandable in a second language. The book is highly readable and should prove to be of value to not only academics in a number of disciplines such as history, criminology and gender studies, but also undergraduates. - Greg Marquis, University of New Brunswick (Law and Politics Book Review)