"Fierce Desires: Variation, Conflict, and Pleasure in the History of American Sexuality"

Rebecca L. Davis, University of Delaware

Belle McWiliams Lecture Series

In the United States today, we have government decrees that there are only two sexes, debates about “trad wives” and polyamory, and frequent references to the nation’s “puritan” past. But in her latest book—and in this talk—Professor Rebecca L. Davis argues that seventeenth-century Puritans are a weak precedent for how the history of sexuality has unfolded in the United States. Into the 1800s, the United States was far more welcoming of gender nonconformity and same-sex/queer desires than we might presume. Instead, a significant shift occurred in the late nineteenth century, when anti-obscenity and anti-immigration legislation vastly expanded the federal government’s investment in shaping sexual morality. The history that unfolds is far less about prudish puritans than shifting sexual values. Our contemporary conflicts over sex and gender highlight the power of this surprising history.

Rebecca L. Davis is a historian of sexuality, gender, race, and religion in the United States and the author or editor of four books. Her most recent book, Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America, was a one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year, a 2025 finalist for the Lambda Literary Lammy Award in LGBTQ+ nonfiction, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. A professor of History and a professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware, her work—spanning books, essays, and podcasts—aims to make the past newly relevant to contemporary debates about bodies, identity, and intimacy.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of History.

More details are available at Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities.