The History of the History of Sexuality

Notes from my presentation for The Theory of History. 

Gabrielle d'Estrees and one of her sisters. C 1594. 

Hanging at the Lourve. Where I saw it. 

Image NMJoyce 2015.

When interrogating the history of sexuality, a definition of what sexuality actually might mean is seemingly described in arbitrary binaries of is/is not. For example, sexuality is not sex/it is a cultural production; it is not of the body/it is the appropriation of the body; it is a uniquely modern production/it is not a ‘difficult to grasp, furtive reality”. Speaking historiographically then, how can something that appears to have only been invented in the last century even be possessive of a history? One could be mistaken for thinking that the history of sexuality as a study started with Michel Foucault. Certainly, it feels like everyone writing about sexuality since the first instalment in Foucault’s seminal trilogy appeared in 1976, seems compelled to mention it. Even if only to make the point that everyone appears compelled to mention it.

This week I am not providing a précis of the set readings. It is true that I would enjoy deconstructing the deep comedy present in David Halperin’s Is There a History of Sexuality?  Who makes specific mention of  5th-century physicians called Soranus moralising about deviant sex acts, without a tongue planted firmly in their cheek? And I could interrogate British imperial masculinity in the colonies, or thrash out the privileging of a male heterosexual narrative of history. However I will in instead attempt to provide an introduction to the topic, cover some of its themes and using the readings, will briefly explore how the debates have progressed since Foucault erupted all over the clean sheets of the academy.

An old Greek plate I saw at the Bendigo Art Gallery,
this one time. Image NMJoyce 2015

Stephen Garton gives great history, which is to say he provides an excellent overview of the history of the history of sexuality in his imaginatively titled Histories of Sexuality. The MetaHistory according to Garton, as it were. And according to Garton, the Victorian-era physician William Acton saw the body as “a fixed reservoir of sexual energy” that once drained, could not be refilled. It is an apt description - if something is constant and unchanging then logically it holds no history to be interrogated. Sex as a biological act may not have a history but what we’ve recently come to understand as sexuality, does. Halperin, however, considers that it is not a particularly long one. I’m not firm on that and it seems to me that as the study grows, the jury is still out.

I mention Garton specifically because he gives the reader a clear impression of where the topic was at the beginning of the last century – which appears to be precisely nowhere. It seems that prior to the 1960s there was little in the way of a western approach to the history of sexuality. Garton describes a few rather stiff-sounding tomes produced in the 30s and 50s that might have appeared adventurous at the time but were ultimately unfulfilling, as they did little more than view the past as an exotic and strange place where morality changed, but sex did not. Sex as a history was instead “subsumed by historians within their wider concern with morality.” Sex, as it were, was better left to the sexologists and anthropologists. This is supported in the opening passages of the first edition of the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

First published in 1990, founding Editor John Fout sought to explain how the need for a journal covering such a topic had risen in the first place. The study had been dominated since the late 19^th century by scholars who had characterised themselves as sexologists, examining sexual behaviour strictly within a medical framework. By the 1960s and 1970s however, shifts in attitudes in anthropology and sexology lead to suggestions that sexual practices were culturally and historically specific. That is, not a fixed state in time or universal to human nature.

At this stage, I want to shift sideways and ask everyone to examine the dates of this week’s readings and the dates of the materials used to build the authors’ arguments. As you can see, Halperin’s Is there a History f Sexuality? was produced in 1989 and his bibliography draws mainly from titles produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Carolyn Dean’s Productive Hypothesis was written in 1994 and the bibliography references mostly the 1980s and 1990s. When we examine Claire Lowrie’s bibliography for White ‘Men’ and their Chinese ‘Boys’ however, we find that it includes material from every decade as far back as the 1860s. What might that tell us?

As a relatively new form of academia, there would not have been a great deal of material on the history of sexuality for Halperin to draw from. He and others of the time were quite literally writing the manuals themselves. By the 1990's, however, sexuality’s history was recognised and Foucault had become master and saint to be dissected and examined under Dean’s feminist microscope. Another decade and a new century on and Lowrie now has an entire school of work to draw from, including the recognition that not only can the archive provide evidence for the existence of sexuality in its own right but that sexuality itself plays a role in such concepts as empire and sovereignty. 

In the closing comments for “Is There a History of Sexuality” Halperin waxes lyrical over the poetics of desire and offers the pearl of wisdom that while love must be a free act, it is also inscribed within a larger circle of constraint. Dean goes on to demonstrate how that circle within which Halperin operates is one built on mostly male-heterosexual (and presumably white) systems. Which makes Halperin’s penultimate remark that “the task...of learning to trace the shifting and uncertain boundaries between the self and the world is a dizzying” one, all the more ironic. 

For it is those boundaries - recognised and stretched by Dean - that Lowrie steps over with her entirely intersectional interrogation of colonial masculinity and sexuality. Halperin foresaw that the discipline would significantly change and the Journal of The History of Sexuality mirrored his sentiments in its launch issue, that even by 1990 “it is far too early in the progression of this new area of scholarship to establish its parameters.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dean, Carolyn J., ‘The Productive Hypothesis: Foucault, Gender, and the History of Sexuality’ History and Theory , 33/No. 3 (1994), 271-296.

Garton, Stephen, Histories of Sexuality: Antiquity to Sexual Revolution (Florence. Taylor and Francis, 2013).

Halperin, David M., ‘Is There a History of Sexuality?, ‘History and Theory’, 28/3, (1989), 257-274.

Lowrie, Claire, ‘White ‘men’ and their Chinese ‘boys’’, History Australia, 10/1 (2013), 35-57.

Rout, John, ‘A Note from the Editor’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1/1 (1999), 1-2.