Reflecting on her previous work to uncover a “nascent lesbian subculture in Modern Britain,” Laura Doan was particularly vexed to realize, “I believed I knew more about female sexuality in the 1920s than the individuals I was researching” (xi). Surely, as historians, most of us are guilty of this level of confidence. We readily assert that our historical and theoretical training, immersion in the archives and literature of a period, and commitment to sympathetically understanding the past uniquely position us to disentangle its complexities. More skilled at doing so even than the historical actors we research, constrained by the myopia of the period in which they lived from discerning its manifold ambiguities, we are indeed proud of ourselves. And we historians of sexuality are perhaps still more self-assured, boldly recognizing in the often innocent ignorance of the past characters who anticipate or diverge from today's active gay and lesbian or queer communities and identities. Disturbing Practices undermines this confidence, advocating instead a new practice of history and exhorting us above all else to distance ourselves from present categories and to read the sexual past on its own terms, using its own terms.

Doan seeks to “disturb current practices in historicizing sexuality” (2) through a new method she terms “critical queer history,” which moves beyond identity as an organizational tool for understanding the past. It imagines alternative ways to historicize queer sexualities using “queerness-as-method” to revisit the archive and uncover the unfamiliar and unknown, rather than looking for past evidence of queer lives, “queerness-as-being.” According to Doan, queer critical history “acknowledg[es] at the outset the unknowability and indeterminacy of the sexual past.” It does not seek to provide a usable past but instead to “explain aspects of the sexual past that resist explanation in the context of identity history” (61). Rather than reading the past in relation to present politics and identities, Doan's approach is sensitive to historical actors' own self-presentation, understandings of self and other, biases, motivations, and positionalities through which they sought to organize their own world.

Disturbing Practices is organized into two parts. The first, “The Practice of Sexual History,” comprises two chapters that offer a historiographical exploration of academic history, queer studies, and the overlaps, conflicts, and tensions between the two. Despite their differences, Doan explains, both are invested in a genealogical project with origins in identity politics. The “ancestral genealogy” project under way in much gay and lesbian history seeks antecedents of contemporary identities in the past, while “queer genealogy's” conceptual framework, albeit emphasizing multiplicity and difference from our present, still holds firmly at its center a “sustained dialogue with current notions of deviance in relation to assumed norms” (79). As a result of their conflicts, however, the history of sexuality has remained disappointingly marginal to academic history: the queer genealogical project has not in fact successfully convinced most historians of the need to include sexuality as a category of historical analysis (62). The value to historians and queer studies scholars of queer critical history, then, is its innovative deployment of queerness to “look through” the archive to find what remains unknown, employing the category of sexuality “to pose questions rather than provide answers” (90).

The second section of the book, “Practicing Sexual History,” concretizes the methodological and conceptual project outlined in part 1 with three further chapters exploring the friendships, work, and experiences of British women during the First World War. Doan charts with careful analysis how women and observers understood acts, identities, and subjectivities, while also identifying critical moments of rupture that throw into stark contrast how understandings of past lives must be read on their own terms. The case of Violet Douglas-Pennant (chapter 4), at one time head of the Women's Royal Air Force, is particularly useful. In 1918 she lost her position having been accused of “doing something immoral” with other women. It was an act or behavior that came under scrutiny. But by 1931, as she continued to defend herself against these accusations, that act was now connected to an identity, “of being a Sapphist.” In this moment of rupture, when act and identity became linked, Doan finds “immense epistemological significance” (154–55). By the late 1920s or early 1930s, “sexual object choice” identified “an inner essence” of a “sapphist” in a way familiar to modern understandings of sexuality.

“Invert,” “sapphist,” and “lesbian,” Doan reminds us, are all historically specific terms indicating particular meanings inflected by understandings and experiences of class, gender, race, respectability, and other categories. Even the normal/deviant binary, a seemingly fundamental and timeless organizational category, is in fact a surprisingly recent conceptual development that must also be put into historical perspective. Understandings of queer as opposition to “normal” must consequently be reevaluated as well. “Queer faith in the power of normal” to organize understandings of sexuality, Doan concludes, “has effectively masked the incoherencies of a time when normal wasn't” (192). Interwar sexual knowledge in fact emerged as a “mishmash” of competing forces acting “unevenly, unpredictably, and erratically” (192). Historians must therefore be sensitive and open to these inconsistences and discontinuities in their practice to escape the incredible power that familiar identity categories have to influence us when examining the past.

I am excited by Doan's critical queer history, but I wonder whether it might not be an ideal to which we can aspire rather than a goal we will achieve. Doan's call to move beyond contemporary identity categories in our historicizing of sexuality, while seemingly commonsensical, might be as illusory as older calls for complete historical objectivity, something we now recognize as an impossible, even undesirable, goal. Disturbing Practices, however, is an important intervention into the history of sexuality that encourages us to critically reflect on our assumptions and practice, inspiring us to open up spaces in which to explore alternative understandings of past sexual identities.