Category: Research

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!

Calling the Police

1892 Letter from B. Rousseau to the Paris Police
B. Rousseau to Commissaire de Police, August 29, 1892, “Bois de boulogne. Dossier général,” JC 82, formerly BM2 42, Archives de la Préfecture de Police.

About a week ago, just as the protests and uprisings against police brutality began in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a woman named Amy Cooper called the police after being asked to put her dog on a leash by a Black birdwatcher named Christian Cooper (no relation) in Central Park. Prior to calling, Amy Cooper warned that she was “going to tell them [the police] there’s an African American man threatening my life.” As many others have noted, in doing so, Cooper deployed her white privilege to threaten the possibility of state violence in ways that resonated with the long history of white women pointing fingers at Black men who were then subjected to extrajudicial violence. The most famous case, of course, was the lynching of Emmett Till who was murdered in 1955 after a white woman named Carolyn Bryant claimed that he had whistled at her. Bryant recanted in 2017.

I started thinking about this moment again as I continue to work through Josephine Butler’s Government by Police (1879). Butler connects the growth of police power in both Continental Europe and in the United Kingdom to the growth of moral policing, especially around the development of regulated prostitution. For Butler, then, the police posed both a general danger to liberal society and a particular danger to women. Butler’s feminism — at first — was thus organized around protecting women from the police, not calling on them in women’s defense.

Continue reading “Calling the Police”

Some New Stuff

I had a couple items appear over the winter holidays. First, I reviewed Jeffrey Merrick’s Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France, an invaluable source collection for those interested in the history of sexuality in eighteenth century France:

Merrick’s contribution is unique in its ambition. Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in EighteenthCentury France forms one part of a broader reconceptualization of eighteenth-century sexual lives that explicitly invites readers to “track down, dig up, root out, and take in as much as we can about the operations and regulation of sexual desire and networks in eighteenth-century France and to locate the patterns and insights we extract from the sources in the context of the society that produced them and of larger issues in the history of sexuality” (p. 2). The give-and-take between Merrick, the documents, and readers thus produce new understandings of what the history of sexuality could mean to professional historians and students. As both a research intervention and a teaching tool, Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades accomplishes a rare feat. It simultaneously showcases the process and the results of archival research. It does so, however, without foreclosing the ways its readers will respond to and interpret the history it reveals.

Read the whole thing here.

Second, I was interviewed by Beth Mauldin of the New Books in History Podcast about Public City/Public Sex. I hate hearing my own voice, but I think it came out pretty well! Enjoy!

Book Publicity

I’ve been lucky to have been invited to talk about my recently published book in a few forums (Amazon link).

First, I was interviewed for 19 Cents, the blog of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association.

I also discussed the book with Notches, a blog devoted to the History of Sexuality.

You can check out an excerpt of Public City/Public Sex in Lapham’s Quarterly.

Pre-Order my Book!

I am very pleased to announce that my book Public City/Public Sex: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, is now available for pre-order! You can buy it on Amazon, but you can get 20% off the paperback by ordering directly from Temple University Press with code T20P.

Presentation at TCU

I gave a talk last week at the Art Gallery at Texas Christian University on the “queer gaze” in late nineteenth-century Paris. I arrived at an argument about the police’s relationship to that gaze that I didn’t necessarily expect. Here’s Part 1:

And Part 2:

“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!

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↩

Images of Urban Space via Gallica

Although Google Books continues to improve as a research source, I continue to believe that the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s digital library, Gallica, is easier to search and use for those interested in French language sources.  The two most recent posts on the Gallica blog piqued my interest.  First up is a list of the fifty most-downloaded documents.  The list includes a number of notable names, but is otherwise most surprising for its eclecticism.  The second post introduces readers to a newly digitized collection of images documenting Paris of the second half of the nineteenth century.  I’ve only gone through a few pages of them, but they are too most notable for their very banality.  Here’s one example, not chosen at random:

34 quai de l
34 quai de l’hotel de Ville : [dessin] / JA Chauvet [Jules-Adolphe Chauvet]
Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France

I came across this particular image by searching within the collection for the “Quai de l’hôtel de ville,” a street as the name implies that progresses along the river and forms one border of the Place de l’hôtel de ville.  This specific street has stuck with me since my archival research because it was one of the few locations noted by the police has being the site of bars and cafés catering to men who sought sex with other men during the 1880s and 1890s.  There is little in the image itself to suggest male-male eroticism, unless we stretch ourselves a bit and imagine that the two figures to the left are pressing together — certainly not an impossibility, however unlikely.

But I do get a bit of pleasure knowing that this kind of ordinary socializing was precisely what one would most likely have encountered had you entered one of the cafés whose clientele consisted of men who sought sex with other men.  The police frequently noted how the men who went to these locations utilized various techniques — playing cards was mentioned a couple times — to deflect away any accusation that their intensions were anything other than honest male sociability.  In other words, although there is nothing explicitly in the image to suggest that the men it depicts were anything but upstanding citizens, there’s also nothing to suggest that they necessarily were.  Some would perhaps argue that I’m seeking out ambiguity where there isn’t any.  I would respond by arguing that to understand the urban spaces of the late nineteenth century as anything but ambiguous is to fundamentally misconstrue the meaning of the transforming city.

Integrating IPad PDF Annotation with Zotero

Although I continue to advocate storing pretty much everything in Evernote — alongside efficient tagging and organization — I still really wanted to find a way to integrate annotating PDFs directly into my favored citation manager, Zotero. I’m hoping that I’ve hit on a solution.

1) I use the Zotero extension Zotfile to organize and rename attachments to Zotero entries into a folder on my desktop. The attachments are therefore links to local files, not files stored in the Zotero servers.

2) That folder is synced to the cloud — and my office PC — using SugarSync.

3) I open and annotate the PDF using GoodReader, which will then automatically sync the annotations with the files linked to the Zotero entry.

I had been using ZotFile’s “send to tablet” function, alongside iAnnotatePDF’s Aji Reader Service to push files back and forth from my tablet to my PC and then to both Zotero and the cloud.  This new method avoids a number of problems that method entailed.  First, everything is done without having to download individual files via the web or selecting individual files to sync and instead is done automatically. This ensures that I always have access to the files without worrying about finding the most recent version.  It also means that I don’t have to be on my home network to update my files.  Second, the files remain on my desktop in addition to the cloud and are automatically organized.  Third, I avoid quickly exceeding Zotero’s limited free storage space.

I still also e-mail the annotated files to Evernote, since I also want to have all my notes in one place. But until Zotero includes a more robust note taking system, an integrated PDF viewer and/or an iPad app, this method seems to be the best way I’ve found to link annotated articles directly to their metadata.