Book review: the invention of heterosexual culture

Heterosexuality is celebrated – in film and television, in pop songs and opera, in literature and on greeting cards – and at the same time it is taken for granted. It is the cultural and sexual norm by default. And yet, as Louis-Georges Tin shows in The Invention of Heterosexual Culture, in pre-modern Europe heterosexuality was perceived as an alternative culture. The practice of heterosexuality may have been standard, but the symbolic primacy of the heterosexual couple was not. Sarah Burton commends the author for his strong and methodologically original addition to the field of sexuality studies.