Your Place or Mine?

A 21st Century Essay on Same Sex

Gilles Dauvé

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781629639581
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In a fascinating and radical critique of identity and class, Your Place or Mine? examines the modern invention of homosexuality as a social construct that emerged in the 19th century. Examining "fairies" in Victorian England, transmen in early 20th century Manhattan, sexual politics in Soviet Russia as well as Stonewall's attempt to combine gay self-defence with revolutionary critique. Dauvé turns his keen eye on contemporary political correctness in the United States, and the rise of reactionary discourse.

The utopian vision of Your Place or Mine? is vital to a just society: the invention of a world where one can be human without having to be classified by sexual practices or gender expressions. Where one need not find shelter in definition or assimilation. A refreshing reminder that we are not all the same, nor do we need to be.

CHAPTER 1 The Invention of “Sexuality”

“Sexuality has a history—though not a very long one.”

—David Halperin

A New Social Object

Both the word sexuality and the concept appeared in the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, achieving public recognition in 1905 with Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The realities delineated by this term (and others like “sadism” and “masochism,” interestingly both coined after novelists) had existed for a long time, but only at that point entered political management and public discourse as a specific object because of the need to stake out a domain of human activity that was becoming “an issue.”

In the eighteenth century, Diderot’s Encyclopaedia gave a classified inventory of sciences, trades, crafts, and arts, as if, Goethe said, we were visiting “a large factory.” To catalogue the whole of creation, the ascending industrial mercantile world needed to give specific names to everything, from human behavior to nature and machinery. This was the first society in which everyone was primarily defined by his place in the productive system. The bourgeoisie systematized knowledge and technique to enhance firms’ productivity, not just the wealth of a sovereign or a country. Parallel to economic science, assisted by sociology and psychology, a political economy of population was born, with demography as a particular field of knowledge. A system typified by productivity and standardization cannot do without defining norms.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw an abundance of manuals rich in details about sexual organs and intercourse, providing educators and mothers with moral and practical advice, even insisting on the clitoris as a focus of pleasure. But these books linked sexual activity with human reproduction; when they suggested how to achieve fulfilling coition, the purpose was to ensure the well-being of a stable family couple and successful procreation contributing to the social order. In contrast, “sexuality” later came on stage when sexual relations were thought of as possibly having another purpose beyond propagating the species, and they ceased to be regarded as merely “natural.” Unlike the traditional rural way of life, the industrial metropolis fostered celibacy, unmarried coupling, casual sex, and prostitution, which made sexual activity distinct from procreation increasingly visible. A society centered on production (of capital, of profit, of humans), particularly by locking woman into a productive role at home and in the workshop, had to understand and manage whatever does not fit in with production and, therefore, in sexual relations, whatever does not partake of reproduction.

The new social object called “sexuality” was necessary to encompass elements different from (and sometimes in conflict with) patriarchy, procreation, child care, education, heritage transmission, etc. It was composed out of parts borrowed from other mental frameworks: natural science, medicine, eroticism, etc. Family and sexuality overlap but do not coincide.

Later, with common access to contraception, the decoupling of sexual acts from reproduction was to go much further, but the evolution had started at least one century earlier. For this distinct sphere to exist, it needed the advent of wage labor, which set the productive time-space apart from the rest of social activities to an extent previously unimaginable. If everything has to be productive, not only does the value production moment in the factory have to be specified but also that which reproduces proletarians in the family—hence, an unprecedented sexual regulation.

There had been populations before, of course, and population administration: Luke says that Jesus was born in Bethlehem because his parents had to travel to their place of origin for a Roman census. But capitalism is the first mode of production to set up systematic institutions in order to facilitate the best possible reproduction of labor power via health care bodies, public (preventive medicine, municipal health centers, etc.) as well as private (bourgeois-financed and run). For famous alienist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, mental disease was “a disease of civilization.” (Maladies mentales, 1838) Later, in The Nationalisation of Health (1892), social reformer and sex studies explorer Havelock Ellis asserted that the state should be responsible for the health of its citizens. A nineteenth century committed to productive models could not fail to investigate whatever crossed the line; it had to interpret and manage whatever it set aside. As before, ethics and science walked hand in hand to define sexual concourse in relation to healthy procreation; the difference was that now they also had to take in account what stood outside the realm of “normality.” Setting the rule implied acknowledging, understanding, and impeding conduct that broke the rule.

Non-procreative sexuality as the flip side of the norm included prostitution, stigmatized yet accepted as the inevitable evil counterpart. Family reproduction with the wife, sex and pleasure with the prostitute, providing Dr. Jekyll could control Mr. Hyde. Law, science, and ideology illustrated the attraction/repulsion fed by this duality. Fin de siècle art is replete with images of masculine fiascos, of androgynous creatures, of misogynist decadents and threatening femmes fatales. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) expresses the fear of and fascination with nonreproductive sex: the vampire knows neither birth nor death.

Dissolution of Bonds

As is well known, the nineteenth-century bourgeois harnessed religious morals, family values, and submissive habits to enforce discipline in the mines and textile mills. Yet, at the same time, wage labor meant husband, wife, and children were working outside the home, thereby undermining the family as the basic economic unit for craft and trade. Meanwhile, in the case of the bourgeoisie, family ownership was being eroded by the progress of the joint-stock company.

The dissolute bourgeois evades marriage and secretly commits adultery; the merchant evades the institution of property by depriving others of property by speculation, bankruptcy, etc.; the young bourgeois makes himself independent of his own family, if he can in fact abolish the family as far as he is concerned. But marriage, property, the family … are the practical basis on which the bourgeoisie has erected its domination, and because in their bourgeois form they are the conditions which make the bourgeois a bourgeois.… So the family remains because it is made necessary by its connection with the mode of production, which exists independently of the will of bourgeois society. (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, German Ideology, 1846)

The question is: What family?

Marx’s contemporaries observed a dissolution of traditional ties. Some bemoaned the loss; others rejoiced over the coming of a beneficial “universalism.” Quoting Saint Paul— “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” Galatians, 3:28—Hegel heralded the dawn of an era when man would no longer be valued as Greek, Roman, or Jew or depend upon his birth status: he would have “an infinite value in himself as man.” Wage labor would potentially liberate the individual from the bonds of blood, origin, nature, soil… and biological sex.

As the capitalist mode of production tends to treat all human beings as productive factors, it benefits from the inequality of the sexes; yet it also must promote labor market fluidity and the interchangeability of individuals—be they man or woman, Christian or Muslim, white or a person of color, believer or atheist… hetero or homo.

The Sexologist and the Doodlebug

The ascending bourgeoisie negated neither sex nor the body; it organized them. Regulation increasingly took on the form of banning.

The words sexuality and sexualism go back to the nineteenth century, based on the much older sex, which most etymologists agree comes from the Latin sexus, to divide or cut, meaning that humans (at least a vast majority of them) are biologically either male or female. That is a partition— and conjunction—constitutive of human existence. The verb to sex appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, meaning to determine the sex of (as in a “chicken sexer”): “sexing” marks out a fundamental difference, a supposedly unbridgeable gap.

A definition separates one meaning from the neighboring meanings, so the classifier’s skill lies in his ability to reconnect what he has disconnected. A difficult task for dictionary editors but a strenuous exertion for sex analyzers. Medical science was busy correlating acts and biological data in a hundred different ways according to the chosen criterion, multiplying typologies and neologisms. Cutting up requires adequate glue. Krafft-Ebing, best-selling author of Psychopathia Sexualis, “with its special reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct” (the 1884 edition was followed by many others), and a leading authority on the subject popularized a string of wordings, one of which had to wait about a hundred years before enjoying widespread currency: pedophilia. The success of an expert or a school of thought can be measured first by the diffusion of its neologisms from the scientific community to the educated public, then into everyday speech—pedophile being currently shortened to pedo.

Science faced a major conundrum: Was man-man attraction to be explained as inborn, as degeneration, as a moral failure, as a personal/psychological crisis, or possibly as having sociological causes?

This puzzle launched a lengthy divisive debate among psychiatrists, as well as biologists and entomologists, to determine whether human “perversions” also occur in the animal kingdom: “pervert” signifying what does not directly benefit reproductive sex, as Richard von Krafft-Ebing made quite clear. In the second half of the nineteenth century, an amazing array of experiments were conducted to research onanism and male-male sex with rats, doodlebugs (melolontha vulgaris), and silkworm mulberries: Was their “pederasty” driven “by opportunity” or “by taste”? Was it “accidental or acquired”? If animals are familiar with same-sex relations, then it pertains to nature. On the contrary, if it derives from particular circumstances, for example, life in a confined environment (for men: boarding schools, barracks, prisons, etc.), it comes within the alienists’ remit to deal with it.

Bizarre as it may appear to the modern eye (it is always easy to make fun of yesterday’s most blatant scientific misconceptions), there was no aberration in a debate that involved a power struggle. When the “nurture” thesis prevailed over the “nature” thesis, to use twentieth-century vocabulary, it gave preeminence to doctors and (re)educators. Contemporary science almost unanimously declared same-sex relations to be a deviation from “normal” attraction between the two sexes, effectively going the wrong way, which accounts for the long lifespan of the word invert. The homosexual’s pathology was to suffer from a contradiction between his anatomy and his desire, and psychiatry’s job was to reconcile the two. As a result, medicine and justice would join forces, doctors regularly being called into court as expert witnesses.

Civilized Morals and Nervous Illness

Contrary to common misbelief, sexual desire and activity are not incompatible with productive labor: “sexuality” was created as a category to help make it productive (of children, but of more than that). The capitalist mode of production is not hostile to pleasure, as long as pleasure proves profitable.

In the nineteenth-century, people gradually came to live with the idea that same-sex love was not a sin, simply a disease, like tuberculosis, albeit possibly a criminal one, which TB was not. Though it was no longer perceived of as blasphemous and devilish, as a violation of God’s command, it still disrupted man’s law, threatened public order, and called for diffuse and indirect control, which implied naming and classifying and, indeed, involved a lot more than social medicine. Let’s just mention the “invention” of sport, for example, this truly modern phenomenon, a concentrate of capitalist fundamentals, which manages at the same time to discipline the body, to measure efforts and achievements, to benchmark competing individuals, and to promote team spirit, while developing hero worship and, let’s not forget, nationalist passion.

Though it claims to be accountable to nothing but itself, psychoanalysis fit into this set-up. Sigmund Freud’s continuing prominence for over a century has less to do with the intrinsic value of his most famous concepts (the Oedipus complex, particularly) than with his ability to systematize a permanent state of crisis, summed up in his 1908 text, tellingly titled Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness. Until then, moralists invoked supposedly unalterable principles. Freud’s novelty was to assume that the individual, instead of trying to obey eternal moral standards, could find his own way to psychological balance—under proper psychiatric guidance, of course. The family had previously been a model but was now regarded as a nexus of contradictions to untangle. Childhood had once been a learning phase, when the elders taught you what to do, but was now a moment of risk, when your mother and father could equally do you good or hurt you—probably both. Previously, one had to respect traditions; now one was asked to do whatever would make him or her part of society with as little harm done as possible. Sexual morality became secular, requiring a shift from Law to laws.

The moment the paterfamilias started to be questioned was also the point at which he became a theoretical object. The central father figure was no longer taken for granted, and the bourgeois family pattern came to be seen as just as much a problem as a solution, and more pathogenic than healthy. The Freudian system provided “Western civilization” with a means to interpret the crisis of the family and the transformation of the relations between sexes. “Id, ego, superego,” what a comforting threesome… surrealist (and gay) René Crevel said Freud had done away with the “normal man” only to reduce human complexity to an “abstract mannequin,” and Karl Kraus aptly described psychoanalysis as that mental illness that regards itself as therapy.

Concerning same-sex love, Freud thought that in early childhood everyone is bisexual and evolves to be attracted to the other sex, except the homosexual who (usually after a distressing experience) interrupts what should have been normal development. Everybody develops through stages; unfortunately, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prelude: We’wha in Washington
• Chapter 1. The Invention of “Sexuality”
• Chapter 2. The Invention of “Homosexuality”
• Chapter 3. What Is “A Man”? Of Fairies and Men in New York
• Chapter 4. Sexual Engineering in Moscow
• Chapter 5. Sexual Reform in Berlin
• Chapter 6. Butch/Fem, or the Rise and Decline of the Woman Worker Image
• Chapter 7. “To Be What We Do Not Know Yet”: Stonewall and Aftermath
• Chapter 8. Impossible Identity
• Chapter 9. Gender and Genre: The Paradox of Gay Culture?
• Chapter 10. Being Gay or Lesbian in the Workplace
• Chapter 11. Queer, or the Identity That Negates Identities
• Chapter 12. Gay-Friendly, with Limits
• Chapter 13. Meanwhile, in The Rest of the World…
• Chapter 14. New Moral (Dis)Order
• Postlude: Polysex
• Interview with Gilles Dauvé
• Note on the Book
• Further Reading
• Bibliography
• About the Author