Tag: history of sexuality

Teaching The History of Sexuality in the Undergraduate Classroom

As I mention below, I’ve had the opportunity to talk and think about bit more about my teaching this academic year than is ordinary. I sometimes mention that I teach Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality to undergraduates without actually assigning The History of Sexuality, which is usually too difficult (but also too central) a text to treat as just another course reading. Now that I’ve shared my strategy and materials for doing so with a couple colleagues and friends, I thought I’d just put them here. As always, feel free to adapt and use with acknowledgment.

First, it’s worth noting that I have a very specific goal when I introduce Foucault: to help students understand sexuality as a social construction. I most recently used the lesson in my Gay and Lesbian History course, but I’ve also used it in advanced seminars that may have broader themes. But the goal remains focused on that single task, rather than a broader introduction to Foucault’s thought. Of course, getting at that central point requires some discussion of Foucault’s understanding of power (for instance), but his broader theoretical insights often fall out of the conversation. I’m not really trying to introduce Foucault, but rather a central idea by way of a key thinker in the field.

My strategy follows the goal. Rather than taking up the book as I whole, I choose four individual paragraphs that (step-by-step) take us through Foucault’s line of thought on that particular issue (if time, I also include a fifth, on “resistance” on the PowerPoint as well). Breaking apart the argument allows me to simplify the claim (overly simplify, perhaps): that Foucault wanted us to focus not on the ways that sexuality has been “repressed,” but rather how it was “produced.” I reduce this idea to a mantra that I repeat over and over: “production, not repression.” I emphasize the idea because of the ways we (not just students) can so often find ourselves sliding into analyses and interpretations that emphasize repression. When we see the police encountering men who sought sex with other men, for instance, we tend to move them into the boxes of oppressor and oppressed. That may be, in part, the case, but it doesn’t capture Foucault’s argument. (This is, it is worth emphasizing, how I get at some of Foucault’s notions of power without directly addressing it in class or bogging down our conversation).

The four chosen paragraphs (see the handout) emphasize four parts of the overall claim and proceed in order of the book (as well as, I believe, order of difficulty): The “Repressive Hypothesis,” the “Incitement to Discourse,” the “Multiplication of Perversions,” and the “Production of Sexuality.” After introducing Foucault’s basic biography and his contribution to the field (so to explain why we’re going to spend so much effort understanding him), I get students into groups with a single task: explain what one of these paragraphs mean. By removing the argument from the overall context of the book, students are able to better focus on the sentence-level argument being made, without worrying about not grasping the whole thing. That’s not to say that this is easy (it is definitely not). But it is easier to show students that they can break apart difficult texts, isolate the parts from the whole, and, only after understanding them on their own terms, bring them back together.

So, to take one example, the first paragraph lays out the “Repressive Hypothesis.” The paragraph lays out the idea that, beginning in the seventeenth century, the modern West laid out a series of “prohibitions” on how one could take about sex. The Victorian era in particular had an approach to sex could be defined by a single word: “Censorship” (17). For students who have encountered something of Victorian history, they get this on the basis of their vision of the period. For students without such a background, they get it on an intuitive level.

But then, we move to the next paragraph (which follows very closely in the book itself), which directly contradicts the point of the first. This paragraph usually requires more work. The language is more jargony (you have to be ready to define “discourse,” “power,” and other complexities) and the paragraph is constructed on the basis of rejecting the assumptions of the reader. Students need to learn how to read closely to catch the various signs of internal disagreement, of Foucault moving through the argument himself. Take the first sentence. The keyword “however” tells us that the prior point may not be correct. But then rather than telling the reader what he actually believes, Foucault introduces another statement that may be wrong (“I am thinking not so much of the probable increase in ‘illicit’ discourses…” [emphasis added]).  The final sentence, beginning with “But,” finally gets to the actual claim: That “an institutional incitement to speak” during the period contradicts the idea of “censorship” (lots of words to define here too). Lesson 1 then: Foucault believes that the “Repressive Hypothesis” is wrong and that in fact people were encouraged to speak about sex in “endlessly accumulated detail” (18). If students remember just that point, I am more successful than the first time I taught the book.

Breaking the book into simple(r) pieces and then breaking those pieces into smaller bits allows us to slowly scaffold a fuller understanding of the material. It took two class periods and change (so perhaps about 2.5-3 hours total) to go through all four paragraphs last time I did this. That length of time wouldn’t be necessary (or wouldn’t happen naturally) with a less talkative group, but the time is well worth it because of how well it builds a foundation to which we can constantly go back.

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.

History of Sexuality Lecture

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.  The powerpoint for the lecture can now be accessed for students and other interested parties.