Wiley InterScience : Literature Compasshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1002%2F%28FAKE%29117994384John Wiley & Sons, Incen© 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd2009-11-211741-41131741-4113http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1741-4113.2009.00668.xKatherine Binhammer2009-11-18T10:41:00Z10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00668.x© 2009 Blackwell Publishing LtdJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc.What is the history of sexuality a history of? This article provides an overview of scholarship in the field of 18th-century studies and the history of sexuality, paying particular attention to the exemplary case of female same sex desire in order to explore the hermeneutical problems faced by this area of study. Unlike, for example, the history of women which has its object of study defined within its title, the history of sexuality is, in many ways, a history without a proper object. Is it a history of sexual practices such as prostitution, homosexuality or adultery? Is it a history of sexual identities like the sodomite, the sadist or the virgin? This essay argues that it is a history of ideas and ideologies surrounding sexuality's discursive significance and reads how what we know about the past is grounded in our present cultural understandings of sexuality. Concentrating on the history of lesbianism and the emergence of a bourgeois discourse of heteronormativity in the 18th century, the article demonstrates how what we know about sex in the past is determined by who speaks, from where, and when.http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1741-4113.2009.00663.xScott Oldenburg2009-11-18T10:40:00Z10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00663.x© 2009 Blackwell Publishing LtdJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc.This article questions the orthodox reading of early English city comedies that such plays exhibit intense national or proto-national fervor, especially articulated in terms of anti-alien sentiment. A close examination of The Dutch Courtesan and Englishmen for My Money shows that English playgoers were keen to see their cosmopolitan city staged. Moreover, these plays suggest that when it came to European immigrants to England, status and wealth were far more important to the English than considerations of birthplace and ethnicity.