I just delivered a guest lecture/seminar to a class called “Body Politics.” It was essentially an introduction to the history of sexuality, Foucault, and early sexology with an eye towards the week’s reading by Joanne Meyerowitz from her fantastic book, How Sex Changed
Category: History of Sexuality
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:
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.
Lessons from the History of Sexuality
Timothy Burke at Swarthmore shows why the history of sexuality is relevant to understanding the flaws contemporary political discourse on gay marriage. He focuses on man of the hour Rick Santorum as a proxy for culturally conservative arguments, but it’s worthing noting that many gay marriage proponents make similarly ahistorical claims about the universality of monogamous marriage, sometimes reifying it into a type of biological need every person must indeed feel. For instance, Andrew Sullivan not only rhetorically eliminates any future for the marriageless, but associates the desire to join the institution with the onset of puberty:
As a child, when I thought of the future, all I could see was black. I wasn’t miserable or depressed. I was a cheerful boy, as happy playing with my posse of male friends in elementary school as I was when I would occasionally take a day by myself in the woodlands that surrounded the small town I grew up in. But when I thought of the distant future, of what I would do and be as a grown-up, there was a blank. I simply didn’t know how I would live, where I would live, who I could live with. I knew one thing only: I couldn’t be like my dad. For some reason, I knew somewhere deep down that I couldn’t have a marriage like my parents…
And when puberty struck and I realized I might be “one of them,” I turned inward. It was a strange feeling—both the exhilaration of sexual desire and the simultaneous, soul-splintering panic that I was going to have to live alone my whole life, lying or euphemizing, concocting some public veneer to hide a private shame.
For Sullivan, sexuality and marriage are intimately linked because one can only fully appreciate and accept the former so long as one has access to the latter. Such arguments in favor of gay marriage are just as one dimensional as those against it because they ascribe marriage to an essentialist urge that ignores the processes through which the institution developed as well as the social, political, and cultural pressures that made it seem so central and eternal in the first place.