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From Boudoir to Bookstore: Writing the History of Sexuality. A Review Article

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Peter Laipson
Peter Laipson
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Abstract

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Type
Gender, Generation, Sex
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , October 1992 , pp. 636 - 644
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1992

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References

1 I wish to thank Laura Aheam and Caroline Winterer for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

2 The first issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality was published in July 1990.

3 Padgug's classic essay, “Sexual Matters: On Conceptualizing Sexuality in History,” was originally published in 1979 in Radical History Review and is reprinted in Passion and Power, Peiss, Kathy, Simmons, Christina, and Padgug, Robert A., eds. (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1989).Google Scholar Halperin analyses sexuality in the title essay of his One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1990).Google Scholar

4 The notion, while influential, is not universally accepted. Most of the literature on the construction of sexual identity has focused on sexual deviance, especially homosexuality. argues, John Boswell, in Christianity, Homosexuality and Social Tolerance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)Google Scholar that the years 1050 to 1150 witnessed the growth of what he calls a “gay subculture” marked by such conventions as homoerotic love poetry, its own slang and aesthetics, exclusively homosexual institutions and elaborate, formally articulate responses to critics of homosexual love (pp. 243–69). Although he denies that he is an “essentialist”—he concurs that homosexuality is not “real” independent of specific social contexts—Boswell nevertheless maintains that, at least in the West, sexual object choice is a transhistorical category for taxonomizing sexual acts. See his essay, “Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, Duberman, Martin, Vicinus, Martha and Jr.Chauncey, George, eds. (New York: Meridian), 17–37.Google Scholar Among historians who believe that (homo)sexuality is a cultural construct, just when it was invented remains a hotly debated question. Jeffrey Weeks, for example, argues for the nineteenth century in Sex, Politics and Society (New York: Longman, Inc., 1981);Google ScholarTrumbach, Randolph, by contrast, for the eighteenth century in “London's Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Social History, 11:1977–78, 1–33,Google Scholar and “Gender and the Homosexual Role in Modern Western Culture: The 18th and 19th Centuries Compared,” in Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality, Altman, Dennis, ed. (London: GMP Publishers 1989), 149–71.Google Scholar A discussion of the assumptions and implications of essentialism and constructionism may be found in David Halperin's thoughtful exchange with Richard Schneider entitled, “ ‘Homosexuality’: A Cultural Construct,” the second chapter of One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. See also Vance, Carole S., “Social Construction Theory: Problems in the History of Sexuality,” in Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality, 13–35;Google ScholarRichardson, Diane, “The Dilemma of Essentiality in Homosexual Theory,” Journal of Homosexuality, 9:23 (Winter/Spring, 1983–1984), 79–91;Google ScholarPubMedWeeks, Jeffrey, Sex, Politics and Society; Edward Stein, Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy (New York: Garland Press, 1990).Google Scholar

5 Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, 11.

6 Halperin, “Homosexuality: A Cultural Construct,” 29.

7 Ibid., 36.

8 This is, as Halperin notes, a characterization of Greek sexual propriety, not reality. Indeed, in the third essay of the volume, “Two Views of Greek Love: Harald Patzer and Michel Foucault,” Halperin argues that, although Patzer is correct in objecting to the characterization of same-sex contacts in ancient Greece as “homosexuality,” it is equally untenable to ignore homoeroticism when assessing classical Greek sexual mores. In claiming—wrongly, Halperin maintains—that sexual activity was a modified version of a Cretan initiation ritual, Patzer “maintains heterosexual activity as the ordinary locus of eroticism … and thereby preserves it as the privileged and normative mode of human sexuality” (p. 61).

9 Halperin, “Homosexuality: A Cultural Construct,” 35.

10 Ibid., 97.

11 ' Ibid., 25. Hence his suggestion that, rather than tracing the history of homosexuality as if it were a thing, historians would “more profitably analyze how the significance of same-sex sexual contacts has been variously constructed over time by members of human living-groups” (p. 29, added emphasis is mine).

12 Laqueur, , Making Sex (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990), 8.Google Scholar

13 HA 3.20.522alg–22 cited in Laqueur, Making Sex, 36.

14 For analyses of more contemporary medical discourse, see Martin, Emily, The Woman in the Body (Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 1987), especially 27–67;Google ScholarJordanova, Ludmilla, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989);Google ScholarRusset, Cynthia, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

15 See Laqueur, Making Sex, 136–7.

16 Ibid., 115.

17 See Foucault, , The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970), 32, 55–7.Google Scholar Laqueur is less specific than Foucault, however, claiming that the classical episteme was still an assumption in nineteenth-century science (Laqueur, Making Sex, 282, n.7).

18 Nancy Cott introduced the term in her article “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790–1850,” Signs, 4 (1978), 220.Google Scholar

19 For two challenges to the notion of female passionlessness, see Carl Degler's “What Ought to Be and What Was: Women's Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review, 79 (12 1974), 1467–90,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Gay, Peter, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).Google Scholar Their arguments have been cogently critiqued by Seidman, Steven in “Sexual Attitudes of Victorian and Post-Victorian Women: Another Look at the Mosher Survey,” Journal of American Studies, 23 (04 1989), 68 – 72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in “The Power of Desire and the Danger of Pleasure: Victorian Sexuality Reconsidered,” Journal of Social History, 24 (Fall 1990), 47–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Lystra, Karen, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989),Google Scholar as well as , Peter N. and Stearns, Carole Z., “Victorian Sexuality: Can Historians Do It Better?” Journal of Social History, 18 (Summer 1985), 625–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Seidman, “Sexual Attitudes,” 25.

21 Ibid., 7, added emphasis is mine.

22 Grossman, Edith Searle, Westminster Review, 5 (11 1909), 502.Google Scholar See also Wolkoff, Regina, “The Ethics of Sex: Individuality and Social Order in Early Twentieth Century American Advice Literature” (Ph.D. disser., Department of History, University of Michigan, 1974).Google Scholar

23 See Simmons, Christina, “The Myth of Victorian Repression,” in Passion and Power, especially 140–55.Google Scholar

24 Simmons' essay is one of sixteen in Passion and Power. Arguments along similar lines include Jackson, Margaret, “ ‘Facts of Life’ or the Eroticization of Women's Oppression? Sexology and the Social Construction of Heterosexuality,” in The Cultural Construction of Sexuality, Caplan, Pat, ed. (London: Tavistock, 1987);Google Scholar Margaret Jackson, “Sexology and the Social Construction of Male Sexuality,” in Coveney, L., et al. , The Sexuality Papers; Male Sexuality and the Social Control of Women (London: Hutchison and Co., 1984), 69–84;Google ScholarSimmons, Christina, “Companionate Marriage and the Lesbian Threat,” Frontiers, 4 (Fall 1979), 54–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Mary Arnold, “The Life of a Citizen in the Hands of a Woman: Sexual Assault in New York City, 1790–1820,” 35–56.

26 Kathy Peiss, 'Charity Girls' and City Pleasures: Historical Notes on Working-Class Sexuality, 1880–1920,” 57–69.

27 Jesse Rodriguez, “The Black Community and Birth Control,” 138–56.

28 Estelle Freedman, “Uncontrolled Desires: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920– 1960,” 199–225.

29 John D'Emilio, “The Homosexual Menace: The Politics of Sexuality in Cold War America,” 226–40.

30 Weeks, “Movements of Affirmation: Sexual Meanings in Homosexual Identities,” in Passion and Power, 81.

31 Chauncey, “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality; The Changing Medical Conceptualization of Female ‘Deviance’,” 103. See also Chauncey's article, “Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era,” in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: Meridian, 1989), 294–317.Google Scholar

32 Padgug, “Sexual Matters: On Conceptualizing Sexuality in History,” 21.

33 Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1: 1 (07 1990), 1.Google Scholar