Category: History of Sexuality

An Anniversary to Remember

Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin: “Un-German” and “Unnatural” Literature is Sorted Out for the Book-Burning Ceremony (undated photo, May 6-10, 1933). GHDI. © Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz

I wasn’t aware, until I heard it on NPR this morning, that today is the 90th anniversary of the famous Nazi book burnings. This date is worth taking a moment to consider in light of ongoing efforts to ban books from public libraries and schools today. Like in the past, one of the main targets is any book containing knowledge about people marginalized for their sexual orientation and gender identity. One of the first targets of the book burnings (completed, it is worth underlining, largely by students) was Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research, which advocated for sexual reform and cared for queer people between World War I and the Nazi takeover. Today, the targets are graphic novels and young adult literature about LGBTQ+ people. But it’s all the same thing.

It was with this in mind that I read this morning that Indiana legislators defunded Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute, using the very same slur that was often used by Nazis against queer people in the 1930s: that they preyed on young people. It is hard to understand how we arrived at this point. Marriage Equality, we were told, would assimilate queer people into American society and reduce homophobia. And yet! One can only agree with Sam Huneke is in the linked article that the pursuit of normalization has only served to reify the divide between normal and abnormal that is used by homophobes and fearmongers.

Book Announcement

It has been a long while since I’ve lasted posted, but I am excited to do so to announce my new book, an edited collection completed with Nina Kushner (Clark University), titled Histories of French Sexuality: Enlightenment to the Present. Chapters cover a wide range of thematic, temporal, and geographic ground all in the service of showing how centering sexuality might change our understanding of French history.

From the publisher:

Histories of French Sexuality contends that the history of sexuality is at a crossroads. Decades of scholarship have shown that sexuality is implicated in a wide range of topics, such as studies of reproduction, the body, sexual knowledge, gender identity, marriage, and sexual citizenship. These studies have broadened historical narratives and interpretations of areas such as urbanization, the family, work, class, empire, the military and war, and the nation. Yet while the field has evolved, not everyone has caught on, especially scholars of French history.

Covering the early eighteenth century through the present, the essays in Histories of French Sexuality show how attention to the history of sexuality deepens, changes, challenges, supports, or otherwise complicates the major narratives of French history. This volume makes a set of historical arguments about the nature of the past and a larger historiographical claim about the value and place of the field of the history of sexuality within the broader discipline of history. The topics include early empire-building, religion, the Enlightenment, feminism, socialism, formation of the modern self, medicine, urbanization, decolonization, the social world of postwar France, and the rise of modern and social media.

Order now using code 6AS23 for a 40% discount from University of Nebraska Press!

Archives and LGBTQ+ History

Exterior of the Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris. Personal Photograph.

I’m trying to decide exactly how I feel about an ongoing debate occurring in France over the institutionalization of LGBTQ+ history through the establishment of a community archive along the lines of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. The Bay Area Register has a helpful overview in English of the debate. Essentially, The Collectif Archives LGBTQI wants to establish an archive in Paris dedicated to LGBTQ+ History. Presented with their plan, however, the French government has demanded that the archive be put under the control of the state National Archives rather than the Collective. In response, the Collective has argued that the state should be involved in supporting the archive but, considering its history of oppression and erasure, cannot be trusted to document and preserve the history of LGBTQ+ people in France.

Continue reading “Archives and LGBTQ+ History”

Strangers on a Plane

[Warning: Discussion of sexual abuse in this post]

Do not talk to me on an airplane. When I sit down, normally with headphones already on, book in hand, I am not inviting a conversation with a stranger. And yet, my most recent trip (a short hour and change flight, thankfully) these standard strategies utterly failed in the face of an older woman who just needed to chat. I could tell, 20-minutes in, that I was not escaping this so I settled into a rhythm of “uh huhs” that I figured I could keep up for the rest of the flight. The worst that would happen, I assumed, was that I lost an hour while providing some company to a lady who, at most, lacked the self-awareness necessary to realize that I just wanted to finish my novel. But what a chat it became.

It started innocuously enough. She told me about her life, her children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. She was a retired teacher and school superintendent and a pastor. She told me about beginning teaching at 19, barely older than her students, and some of the problems and difficulties that entailed. She worked for 42 years before retiring. Things took a turn, however, when she began tell me why she doesn’t substitute teach any longer. She told me about an incident when she had to call a young kindergartner’s parents after the child had swore at her (“bitch, don’t touch me,” she claimed she said). Obviously not a good look for a five-year old, though who knows if that’s what was actually said. In any case, my airline companion proceeds to explain that she called in the students parents and it turns out that it was two dads. The child, who the teacher assumed was a girl, turned out to be a boy wearing girls’ clothes.

Continue reading “Strangers on a Plane”

“Sex in the Archives”

As one of the most read articles published in French Historical Studies last year, my recent article, “Sex in the Archives: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and the Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris,” is free to read until the end of the January, 2018. Of course, I’m always happy to provide it to anyone who asks!

The Challenges of Being an LGBTQ Historian

Mary Louise Roberts recently published a short article describing some of the results of the recently completed American Historical Association LGBTQ Task Force Report. The article brings our attention to a number of issues facing both LGBTQ academics and academics who research LGBTQ issues (note that these two categories do not necessarily coincide). Roberts’s piece made me reflect a bit on my own experience as someone who inhabits both categories and has been lucky enough to have found himself a tenure-track position in a supportive department.

First, Roberts is right to emphasize the need for all universities to include relevant language protecting both sexual orientation and gender identity in their nondiscrimination policies. After a recent “religious freedom” law was passed in Mississippi, I was personally relieved when the president of USM reaffirmed our own non-discrimination policy. That said, universities also play a role in the broader community and have specific social missions; they should therefore actively promote the passage of legislation protecting their students and employees. It is not enough, in other words, for institutions to claim they do not discriminate when the actual law provides them with the opportunity to do so. In addition, universities are central players in local economies and they should fight the ability of businesses that rely on them for their very survival to discriminate against their students and employees.

Second, I think we tend to overestimate the impact of doing LGBTQ work on our success and failures on the job market. The examples Roberts provides of people feeling that their research on LGBTQ issues shaped their job market experience are largely anecdotal. So too, it is worth saying, are my own impressions, but I never felt that my specific research in the history of sexuality is what held me back in the four years I was on the market. Rather, I think it is more the case that people doing research in LGBTQ history or the history of sexuality run up against a much more general preference for “traditional” research interests within history departments. This preference reveals itself in many ways, sometimes in a desire for people doing particular kinds of history, sometimes for particular kinds of historians. This speaks to a broader traditionalism that has discriminatory effects on both the work that historians produce and the historians that get hired. Certainly, LGBTQ history has particular connotations and problems, but I see no reason to play oppression olympics with my friends and colleagues who have also struggled to find permanent employment. What we need is greater investment in the humanities and social sciences in order to enable departments to provide their students with a broad range of expertise, while also encouraging history departments to value new approaches and objects of study. I would argue, in fact, that these two issues are interdependent: the lack of resources is precisely what encourages departments to retrench and fear taking a chance on what they see as “new.”

But historians of sexuality also need to do more to showcase the importance of our research, even as we are often received with greater skepticism than is usually warranted. I hope to explore this issue more fully both here and in print, but put simply, I think that it is incumbent on historians of sexuality to begin moving beyond the kinds of identity-based histories we have become accustomed to completing. It was only, it seems to me, when many women’s historians moved to gender history that the field began being taken more seriously by the wider profession. This is not simply because this shift allowed for a wider range of inquiry, but because it also showed how gender is “a useful category of historical analysis.” We have to show that sexuality is as well. Doing so will gradually open space for departments to recognize that a specialist in sexuality is necessary to providing a well-rounded curriculum while also showcasing how the study of sexuality is actually necessary to understanding political, intellectual, and economic history (to name just three examples) as well.

Finally, Roberts reports on the unique frustrations of those who present differently or stand as the sole LGBTQ person in a department or even university. As a member of a department with significant lesbian and gay representation, I have not been as affected by this issue as my colleagues elsewhere (in fact, I am more unique for being Jewish than I am for being gay). That said, the two issues situate the struggles of LGBTQ folk in relation to the broader need for increasing the diversity of the professoriate and reshaping the culture of academia, which is more conservative than people on the outside tend to realize. I was particularly struck by the respondents who recognized the particular service roles that minority scholars end up playing, a phenomena that has been talked about in other contexts. The growing movement for social change in campuses around the country should be a source of empowerment for LGBTQ academics even as it is a call for us to engage in the broader range of issues affecting minorities in the professoriate. The AHA Task Force was hopefully a first step toward institutionalizing historians’ role in that process; as historians it is our responsibility to not only analyze change, but to enact it as well.

Historicism and Erasure

I’ve recently come across a couple of blog posts on the problems of “erasure” in modern queer historiography, focusing particularly on that of lesbians and transgender individuals. In the first, Rachel Hope Cleves describes the recent “Gay American History @ 40” conference in celebration of Jonathan Ned Katz’s Gay American History (1976), with an emphasis on an apparently quite fraught debate on lesbian identity, both historically and politically. In the second, Cheryl Morgan responds by emphasizing how the very debates over lesbianism can — sometimes purposefully — erase the historical existence of trans identity in turn. While some lesbian activists fear the elimination of their historical identity in the wake of trans, some trans activists argue that radical feminists and lesbians are trying to undo their own. This debate is obviously longstanding and I wasn’t driven to write a brief post by intervening in it. Rather, I found both responses to be good for thinking about my own approach to the historicization of sexuality and the ways in which I think it necessary to take the complexities of these debates and apply them to supposedly more “stable” or “dominant” subjects, in particular the study of male same-sex sexual activity in the past.

In her post, Cleves describes an “aggressive form of historicism directed by academics at the category of lesbians” that has not, she implies, really been applied to male homosexuality. If we have constantly and consistently asked whether women who lived with other women in the past were “actually” lesbians, we have have not seemed to have much trouble assuming the sexual nature of men who shared their bed with other men. While Cleves may be right to point out that these questions were initially raised as a way of “dismiss[ing]…the importance of women’s lives, lesbians’ lives, and trans lives too,” I think that rather than rejecting them, we should apply them to precisely those subjects of history we think we already know. What if, in other words, evidence of male same-sex sexual activity was not, ipso facto, evidence of male homosexuality or even its precursors? It is precisely historical work on women’s sexual relationships that has prodded my own critical approach to the existence of male homosexuality in the recent past (for example, Sharon Marcus’s Between Women and Laura Doan’s Disturbing Practices). In some ways this claim seems obvious in the wake of the debates over social construction, but it seems to me that it is not taken as seriously by scholars of men’s sexual relations as it should be. The “aggressive form of historicism” levied at lesbians should, in other words, be also directed at gay men.

This approach contrasts with Morgan’s call to recognize the existence of trans identity in the past. Both Morgan and Cleves recognize the ongoing desire of marginal sexual subjects to have a recognizable history and as Morgan points out “there is massive of evidence of people having cross-gender and third-gender identities in history, and even of medical intervention.” That evidence, however, does not by itself mean that trans identity itself existed prior to the twentieth century. Transgender identity itself is not a singular thing, but just as with other gender and sexual configurations — including heterosexuality and cis-identity (itself a creation in some measure of the emergence of trans) — relies on a specific social and cultural relationship attributable not just to modern science and medicine, but to broader discourses about the body, the individual, and desire. In any case, I would argue that the kind of historicization that some see as erasing certain forms of identity actually acknowledges a past that acknowledges the complexities of sexual identity. Perhaps there is no transhistorical trans subject to look for in the past (just as there is no lesbian or gay male one either), but there is a trans history, comprised of the multiple forms of cross-gender identification that existed in the past, ones that intersected uneasily as well with other kinds of sexual dissidence, such as same-sex sexual desire.

Resisting the stability of the sexual past, therefore, seems necessary to achieve the “opening [of] the past” that Cleves calls for at the end of her piece. Questioning rather than assuming the existence of our own identities in the past highlights other kinds of relationships that may have existed. The very kind of historicization deemed suspect in this debate may be precisely the tool we need to revitalize the connections that cross contemporary identity categories. In other words, breaking down contemporary modes of being or refusing to approach the past only to confirm those identities, may be precisely what is necessary to showcase the connections we have lost in the wake of modern sexual politics that always seems so ready to put us back into self-contained boxes.

The History of Sexuality in Video Games

I’m looking forward to when academic discourse begins to catch up with ongoing discussions online regarding representations of gender and sexuality in video games and other geeky ephemera. Today in the genre is a short history of sex in video games by Cara Ellison in Vice. I think it focuses a bit too much on the explicitly sexual and thus misses some examples that aren’t meant to be titillating. The most obvious is Atlus’s Catherine, which explores desire and infidelity in the context of — because why not — a puzzle game. But otherwise, it’s a fun read that also gives some nice nods to the way the medium has grown and matured over the past few decades.

Brief Review: Anne-Marie Sohn, Du premier baiser à l’alcôve: La sexualité des Français au quotidien (1850-1950)

SohnAnne Marie Sohn’s Du premier baiser a l’alcove (1996) argues that the movement towards sexual liberation began in the century prior to the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s.1 Explicitly contrasting her study against those that have focused on expert discourses on sexuality — a trend that she blames on the work of Michel Foucault — Sohn attempts to recuperate the sexual lives of “ordinary people.” Through an analysis of a dazzling amount of judicial records drawn from all over France, Sohn describes the sexual mores, practices, beliefs, and fears of both elite and popular classes.

However, the shear breadth of the material leads to two problems, one historical and the other theoretical. First, the evidence is presented without a great deal of context. While there are exceptions where Sohn effectively signposts moments of historical change, more often we are left wondering when exactly these various beliefs and practices went into and out of vogue. Second, the sheer volume of material leads her to a form of analysis through description. Rather than questioning the source material, she treats it largely as a transparent window onto historical truth.

The book therefore remains extraordinarily useful for researchers such as myself because of its documentation and narrative sweep. But it ultimately reifies the “repressive hypothesis” not simply through its argument that the Third Republic saw “a moral rupture which paves the way towards sexual liberation” [une rupture éthique qui ouvre la voie à la liberté sexuelle], but also through its unwillingness to complicate and situate its sources.2 Foucault’s lesson was not simply to pay attention to discourse, but to recognize the ways in which the “reality” that Sohn seeks to recover does not exist outside it.

1. Sohn, Anne-Marie. Du premier baiser à l’alcôve: La sexualité des Français au quotidien (1850-1950). Paris: Aubier, 1996↩

2. Ibid, 307↩

Marriage Equality and Queer Politics

In the context of recent oral arguments before the Supreme Court, students taking “Sex and the City” discussed the marriage equality in the context of a course that addresses some of the more radical implications of queer politics and practice.  Claire Potter at the New School provides some thoughts on that subject that students may find intriguing.  Here’s her conclusion:

The radical queer critique of marriage emerges from this history: under current conditions, gay and lesbian people who marry signal a commitment to things as they are, not as they could be. But this does not have to be the case: just as marriage should not require the marginalization of the unmarried, movements for economic justice do not have to occur in a world where no one at all marries. Marriage is not a radical act, and ought not to be spoken of as one — but radical people sometimes marry. Regardless of what the court decides, the agenda must be to continue the critique of marriage as an institution, scrutinize the improper power relations that marriage nurtures. But asking millions of people, rich and poor, to accept a set of discriminatory and humiliating legal exclusions until the revolution comes, laws that hurt them economically and repeatedly articulate them as second class citizens, does not necessarily move a social justice agenda forward either.