What is Sexual History?

Jeffrey Weeks

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509508884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Until the 1970s the history of sexuality was a marginalized practice. Today it is a flourishing field, increasingly integrated into the mainstream and producing innovative insights into the ways in which societies shape and are shaped by sexual values, norms, identities and desires. In this book, Jeffrey Weeks, one of the leading international scholars in the subject, sets out clearly and concisely how sexual history has developed, and its implications for our understanding of the ways we live today.

The emergence of a new wave of feminism and lesbian and gay activism in the 1970s transformed the subject, heavily influenced by new trends in social and cultural history, radical sociological insights and the impact of Michel Foucault's work. The result was an increasing emphasis on the historical shaping of sexuality, and on the existence of many different sexual meanings and cultures on a global scale. With chapters on, amongst others, lesbian, gay and queer history, feminist sexual history, the mainstreaming of sexual history, and the globalization of sexual history, What is Sexual History? is an indispensable guide to these developments.

1
Framing Sexual History

Towards a Critical Sexual History

At the heart of a critical sexual history is the belief that sexuality is a fundamentally social, and therefore historical, structure. It challenges the traditional view that the erotic is a natural phenomenon to which society has to react. In its place historians have increasingly emphasized the ways in which what we have conventionally seen as a biological truth is shaped by culture into a complex unity of plural and diverse identities, subjectivities, beliefs, behaviour, ideologies and erotic practices. It is a historical not a natural unity.

Historians began to argue from the 1970s that sexuality was ‘socially constructed’. This modest idea, increasingly familiar to sociologists and social anthropologists of the time, proved explosive amongst historians. The tortured and often fevered debates that followed in the so-called ‘constructionist–essentialist’ controversy will be explored more fully in chapters 2 and 3. My point here is not to argue a case but to map a critical landscape. Social constructionism, like any other historical concept, had a birth, life and death, and then an afterlife, like an echo of the big bang. This new approach posed two mighty challenges which lingered long after the concept became ‘unfashionable’, at least in the slightly mechanistic sense suggested by the phrase. First, it questioned and problematized the very categories and concepts that had provided the basis for writing about sexuality since the late nineteenth century. Concepts such as homosexuality and heterosexuality, bisexuality, transvestism, perversion, masturbation and a host of sexual variations were shown to have distinctive histories. Ideas of masculinity and femininity as both antagonistic and complementary had specific conditions of emergence. Gender was a powerful but unstable category with shifting meanings. And above all, the master concept of sexuality itself was no longer seen as a fixed feature of thinking about the body and its possibilities and pleasures. It was a ‘historical invention’. Secondly, it followed that if these concepts and ideas had specific histories then it was impossible to believe in a single history of sexuality. There were many histories, each with its own genealogy, conditions of emergence, and effectivity; and indeed many sexualities. The concept of sexuality, as it was found in scientific texts and in common-sense usage, far from being a universal, was culturally specific, and the task of the historian was to tease out the specific meanings, to question the taken-for-granted, and to try to understand discontinuities as much as continuities. Such an approach was in one sense not really new. Historians generally had grown used to analysing the changing meanings of apparently fixed categories like class, nation, race or ethnicity. Why should gender and sexuality alone have the status of eternal verities?

Such challenges unsettled many, however, especially those committed to the identities they had so painfully forged, and were now being told by the more provocative historians were ‘fictions’, even if ‘necessary fictions’.¹ Many lesbian and gay activists were outraged at this apparent denial of their history, and many historians agreed, producing alternative interpretations based on the fixity and permanence across time of homosexual identities. A similar impulse can be found in feminist historiography based on the essential difference of men and women: was patriarchy an ahistorical reality, a particular organization of sexual possibilities, or too general to be useful? All that needs to be said at this stage is that historians influenced by constructionist ideas were just as committed to sexual justice as their colleagues, but did not believe that the road to this was through reifying minority identities or imagining transhistorical structures. More crucially, there was a recognition that the categories they were problematizing were not neutral descriptions. They had emerged and had effects in specific configurations and hierarchies of power, around religion, medicine, the psychological professions, the state, gender, racial or ethnic groups, and the like, which had given rise to intricate forms of domination, governance and regulation, or resistance, transgression, subversion and agency. Sexuality and power were inextricably linked, with the erotic as a critical vector for the operation of domination. But the forms of power, as of sexuality, took different shapes in different societies, and required sensitive understanding of cultural difference.

Given such perplexities, it is perhaps not surprising that some recent historians of sexuality have stressed the ‘radical unknowability’ of a past where it is hazardous to assume we can know how people saw their erotic beings in other times.² This clearly poses questions about the viability of the whole historical enterprise: if we cannot really know the past, is it really worth trying to do sexual history? In practice, historians have emphasized the ways in which the very act of historical research and writing constructs forms of evidence to represent and illuminate the complex ways in which past and present are contingently intertwined: we construct our own sexual archives in the process of making history.³ From this perspective, sexual history is as much a history of representations of sexuality as an account of who did what to whom, where and when in other places at other times. This is a position I am sympathetic to, because it stresses the importance of attempting to tease out the meanings and effectivity of ideas, concepts and practices as they existed in specific cultures and historic periods rather than imposing modern (Western) interpretations on them. But that should not mean that any sort of coherent history is impossible. We can still give a structure and pattern to the past, as long as we accept that it is always provisional.

Theoretical Detours

As the late Stuart Hall reminded us, ‘Theory is always a detour on the way to something more important.’⁴ It sometimes feels that the history of sexuality is burdened with a surfeit of theory. Yet as the complexities of these issues show, we cannot escape theory, much as some might wish to. Whatever the risks, theoretical engagement has been central to the recent writings on sexual history. If sexual knowledge is itself constructed in different ways in different cultures, it is crucial to understand how forms of knowledge shape what we understand as the sexual in particular circumstances. A major reason why the introductory volume of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality became so central to the early elaboration of the new sexual history in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in the Anglophone world, is that his work seemed to offer theoretical insights into the ways in which sexual knowledge was created in defined historical circumstances. Sexuality is lived in particular organizations of meaning, discourses and narratives that shape the inchoate possibilities of the body.

This engagement with a particular theoretical orientation, itself complex and variegated, risks obscuring or marginalizing other major contributions to contemporary sexual theory: studies of urban sexual subcultures and of human sexual behaviour, post-Kinsey sociology and social psychology in the USA, the pioneering sociologies of homosexual roles and sexual stigma in Britain, histories of ‘formalization’ and ‘informalization’ in the ‘civilizing process’ from the Netherlands and Germany, and a host of theoretically sensitive feminist, and lesbian and gay, writers who in the decades since the 1970s have illuminated history as well as sexual theory.⁵

A striking feature of these intellectual developments has been their multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary nature. Pioneering feminist and lesbian and gay historians in the 1970s sought theoretical insights from sociology and social anthropology. Later, new preoccupations from within the unlikely quarter of cultural geography helped shape historical work – on the ‘geography of perversions’, the spatial organization of sexuality, the pleasures and dangers of city life, the urban/rural divide, the configuration of sexual cultures. Not surprisingly, spatial metaphors abound in sexual history: boundaries, borders, frontiers, closets, performance spaces, the global, cyberspace.

Most unexpected of all, perhaps, has been the influence of literary and related humanities studies. The most widely quoted critique of social constructionism in its early form came not from a historian wedded to essentialist thinking but from the poet and literary theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Another poet, Adrienne Rich, offered the early outline of a theory of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, which paved the way for later theories of ‘heteronormativity’.⁶ Few of the most influential contributors to queer theory from the 1990s had backgrounds as trained historians, even as they contributed to queer history: they came from the disciplines of philosophy, classics and above all literature.

This might explain the exotic range of ‘turns’ which have been claimed for sexual theory, and sexual history. A quick scan through assorted key texts reveals amongst others: a cultural turn, a linguistic turn, a psychoanalytical turn, a Foucauldian turn, a poststructuralist turn, a queer turn, an affective turn, a materialist turn, a historicist turn, a transnational turn, a posthumanist turn and a humanist turn, a Deleuzian turn, an ethical turn and an anti-social turn. At worse these point to a very ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• What is History? series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• An Introduction
• 1: Framing Sexual History
• 2: The Invention of Sexual History
• 3: Querying and Queering Same-Sex History
• 4: Gender, Sexuality and Power
• 5: Mainstreaming Sexual History
• 6: The Globalization of Sexual History
• 7: Memory, Community, Voice
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index
• End User License Agreement