The Making of English Sexual Law

This book provides an intellectual history of how English criminal law has governed sex between men from the Middle Ages to the present.

Tracing a complex pattern of shifting legal techniques, from the medieval deployment of sin to contemporary risk management, the book provides a sustained juridical genealogy of the regulation of sex between men. At the centre of the book is the figure of what is referred to as the ‘out-law’: positioned at the boundary of legality, and whose exclusion defines the limits of belonging. And, challenging any simple narrative of progress in law’s relationship to male same-sex desire the book demonstrates how, even after decriminalisation its governance persists through doctrines of visibility, shame, and technocratic control. English law, the book concludes, has never simply repressed or liberated same-sex desire; rather it has continually reinvented techniques for governing it.

This book will appeal to scholars and students with relevant interests in the areas of legal history, gender studies and criminal law.