An Introduction

What is a History of Sexuality a History of?

When I began writing about the history of sexuality in the 1970s it was like venturing into an unexplored territory. It was sparsely populated. There were few prominent features, and no reliable maps. Hardly anyone visited.1 Today sexual history is flourishing: the territory is well cultivated, the population is highly vocal, and there are plentiful guides, with highly developed global links. It has made great strides from the margins to the mainstream. In this book I hope to show how this happened, and what its implications are for thinking about, and living, that complex historical phenomenon we know as sexuality.

For most of the twentieth century histories of sexuality were relatively rare, and were overwhelmingly shaped by the self-declared ‘scientific’ paradigms established at the end of the nineteenth century following the emergence of sexology as the ‘science of sex’. Pioneering sexologists were conscious of the historical significance of what they were setting out to do – nothing less than to put the study of sexuality on a scientific basis by understanding the laws of sexuality and their impact on individual and social life (see chapter 2). The aim was to contribute to the achievement of sexual justice through the application of reason and scientific knowledge – ‘Through Science to Justice’, as Magnus Hirschfeld, the German pioneer of sexology, sexual reform and homosexual rights, proclaimed as his watchword. In this task pioneering sexologists advocated an increasing historical understanding of sexuality, and especially of the truth of the sexual categorizations and sexual and gender types their writings and clinical practice had ‘discovered’. In turn, their sexual science became the taken-for-granted framework for would-be historians in succeeding generations, until at least the 1970s.

Despite these ambitions, early sexual historians remained marginal to the practice of history as a profession, rarely touching the mainstream let alone trespassing long in the wary groves of academe. When a new generation in the 1970s began challenging both the hegemony of sexology and the practice of history, in the name of alternative theories and knowledge, under the influence of new social movements and identities, they too at first experienced an academic coolness, especially in history departments. It is noticeable how many of the early writers on sexual history in the 1970s and 1980s were research students, junior faculty, independent scholars and activists in the women's or gay movements, far from the ivory towers of academic prestige.

Much has changed. Many of the pioneers have become senior professors. The subject is taught at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in most universities in the global North and increasing numbers in the global South. Publishers' lists groan with books on sexuality in general and histories of sexuality in particular. Mainstream and specialist journals pour out articles, in a scholarly production line. There are countless archives, physical and virtual; and websites, blogs, vlogs, listservs, online discussion groups and social network pages devoted to sexual history. There are national and international conferences, seminars, workshops and (often jet-setting) transnational communities of scholars. There is a creative grassroots history embodying the promise of pioneers in the 1970s to develop a new democratic history. Every year thousands of people in North America, Britain and Australasia attend events to celebrate LGBT History Month or equivalents. And there is a growing recognition of the global resonance of sexual history, with a new concern with transnational history and the construction of local, regional and national sexual histories in the global South (see chapter 6). Writing about sexuality has become a vital part of the historical endeavour, whilst also feeding into and being fertilized by a range of other disciplines, from sociology, social anthropology, literature, philosophy, politics, legal studies and cultural geography, to more recent hybrids such as cultural, postcolonial, gender, race/ethnic, LGBT and queer studies.

But in all this effort, amongst all the sound and fury, there is a nagging question: what is a history of sexuality actually a history of? Sexual history sometimes feels like a feverish activity without a clear or fixed referent. Sexual historians have been preoccupied with identities, and with non-identities, with homosexuality, queerness, paraphilias, perversion, transgression, subversion and resistance, as much as, sometimes more than, heterosexuality, respectability, the normative, the average, the ordinary. They engage with fertility, reproduction, birth control, abortion, but also with celibacy, masturbation, fantasy, erotica, pornography and purity. They cover transactional sex work as well as marriage (same-sex and other-sex), singleness as well as partnerships (couple and polyamorous), cohabitation and living apart, casual sex, abstinence and asexuality. Historians of sexuality explore the organization and cultures of families, traditional, extended, nuclear or chosen, as well as networks, friendships and subcultures, on the ground, in the mind or in cyberspace. They are concerned with the porous and ever-shifting boundaries of private and public life, secrets and lies and the closet, as well as public declarations and displays, and coming out. And they are concerned with sexual health and sexual ill-health: sexually transmitted infections, HIV/AIDS, ‘sexual addiction’ and the historic use of contraceptives or potency drugs.

The history of sexuality is inextricably intertwined with structures of power. You cannot really think sexuality without gender: masculinity, femininity, cisgender, transgender, intersex, hermaphrodite, bi-gender, all configuring sexual possibilities and meanings. Sexualities, and their histories, intersect with histories of race, class, age, religion, and with geographies, urban and rural spaces, and increasingly cyberspace. The history of the sexual needs a grasp of the languages that give sense to, order and discipline inchoate passions, but also has to deal with the emotions and affect that people are particularly sensitive and prone to: love and desire, hope and pride, pain and terror, shame and insult, triumph and humiliation, trauma, panic, sexism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, racial fear and horror of the Other, nationalism and fundamentalism. Emotions get locked into structures or assemblages which have their own histories, as fear of homosexuality is locked into heteronormative structures, or misogyny locked into gendered oppression. Historical sexualities are local, national, transnational, cosmopolitan, global. There are sexual cultures which have complex histories, histories of bodies and bodily reconstructions. There are histories of movements, campaigns – for and against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) rights, for and against reproductive rights, against sexual violence, the sex trade, to protect children, religious, socially conservative and fundamentalist groupings – and histories of NGOs, and governmental, cross-national and international organizations, all of which have their own trajectories, intricately intertwined with other sexual histories. There are patterns of domination, hierarchy, regulation, and multiple subjectivities and forms of agency – individual and collective. Which is why sexuality, and its history, are always necessarily political, even if the politics are often nicely obscured in the name of scholarly objectivity.

And a key to the new history from the 1970s: there are histories of ‘sexuality’ itself, not as the sum total of all of the above, but as a concept, a set of discourses, an embodiment of truths.

No single history, let alone one short book, can cover this vast and ever-growing continent of knowledge. I focus instead on the ways in which an emerging and developing sexual history has created the possibility of thinking of the erotic in new ways, putting sexual concepts, beliefs and practices into more carefully delineated historical contexts. My purpose is to demonstrate the significance of a critical sexual history which avoids the naturalism/essentialism/biological determinism which has bedevilled efforts to understand the sexual past and present, and opens the ways to an understanding of the history of sexuality as fundamentally social and human, that is fully historical. Through this we can, I suggest, encourage a creative and meaningful dialogue between past and present.

Narratives

Analysis of the past is mediated through our current preconceptions and perceptions, but the past also continues to live in the present. The present in all its complexity and confusions is deeply historical. We live and breathe a living history in our everyday lives, shadowed and shaded by meanings, categories, laws, structures, institutions, beliefs, prejudices, discriminations, phobias, oppressions, struggles, embodiments and memories that are part of the deep consciousness and unconscious of our cultures. We may accept these historic burdens, resist them, reject them, ignore them or try to transform them, but it is difficult to forget them entirely. We make our own histories, but rarely in circumstances of our own choosing. People may have freedom of will, but they are never entirely free agents.

Sexuality is particularly freighted by a living past because it is so intimately connected with our sense of who we are, where we came from and where we are positioned, by identities, gender and...